By Anastasia Alexander
Many years ago my parents were engaged in a nasty divorce after twenty-six years of marriage. My mother was struggling, suffering from heartache and disillusionment. She had given my father her whole heart and didn’t know how to go on from the split. I want to encourage her that there was life after divorce and things would be better.
My father was a powerful, influential man in the community, who had a quirky fear of Friday the Thirteenth. Every time Friday the Thirteenth came around, crazy events would happen to him from flat tires, floods in his office and cabin, to missing appointment books, etc. We used to joke as a family that when Friday the Thirteenth arrived, we’d book flight tickets to get as far away from Dad and his bad luck. I still won’t be anywhere near him on that day just in case!
Also, my parents had a cabin in Island Park, Idaho that they would drag me to when I was a teenager, and I was missing the peace I harvested from that place. Mix all those elements, and a story started brewing about Friday the Thirteenth with the romantic backdrop of Yellowstone Park. Throw in a single professor who stumbles across a rugged cowboy …
When the story was first submitted, my publisher was extremely conservative. They rejected the manuscript saying superstition was a form of witchcraft. Years later, I had a small publisher approach me for work so I dusted off the manuscript. I had just gone through a rough divorce myself and had just started dating this really rugged self-assured man who was a complete softy underneath. As I read my manuscript, twelve years after I wrote it, the description of the love interest sounded very familiar. I read passages of the text to my then boyfriend. He said, “Hey, that sounds like me!”
It did, from Jackson’s pleasure at laughing at others mispronounced words, to his love of nature, his quirk of opening bags with scissors, his love of wearing a cowboy hat, and his deeply sexy loving brown eyes. I had created a character who reflects my now husband.
At the time of writing the book, I was in what I thought was a happy marriage to my first. Little did I know the turmoil that would occur, the shift of life circumstances, nor that I would eventually attract my own Jackson into my life. My only regret is I didn’t make Jackson richer in the story.
Anastasia Alexander is the author of the new book The Superstitious Romance.
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