Tote Bags 'n' Blogs: wish fulfillment

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Call it coincidence – by Kandy Shepherd

Coincidence? Wish fulfillment? Who knows—but fictional incidents I create for my novels have a habit of actually happening in my own life!

DREAM HOUSE COME TRUE

In my contemporary romance, Something About Joe, my heroine Allison Bradley lives in a charming little terrace house (row house) in McMahons Point, a harborside suburb of Sydney, Australia, ten minutes from the city center where she works.

At the time I wrote the story, I lived in an outer suburb, considerably more than ten minutes from where I worked. In fact, to get into the city for my “day job”, I had to get up at the crack of dawn (I’m an “owl” and loathe getting up early) and dress my daughter while she was still asleep to get her to daycare and me to the office on time.

I wove my yearning for a closer-to-town home into the story, living it vicariously through the house I created for Allison. Who would have imagined some years later we would find a decrepit, uninhabitable little house in McMahons Point, spend several years renovating it, and move in.

A house something like the one I created for Allison in SOMETHING ABOUT JOE

Yes, it was every bit as convenient to live there for me as it was for Alison.

No, a hot handsome hunk of a babysitter like my hero Joe Martin never came knocking on my door!

(If there are any more dream houses going to come true for me, there’s the most perfect house in Sausalito, California, I created for my hero in Home Is Where the Bark Is… )

HARBORSIDE PLAYGROUND

In Something About Joe, two pivotal scenes take place in a small harborside park in McMahon’s Point. There’s a park bench there and in my mind’s eye, I can see my fictional characters Joe and Allison sitting there together.

The view of Sydney Harbour Joe and Allison see from the park

Long after the book was written I found myself spending happy hours right near that bench teaching my daughter to jump rope (or skipping rope as it’s called in Australia) with magnificent Sydney Harbour as our backdrop and backyard substitute. I could never have imagined that!

MORE NIGHTMARE THAN DREAM

Spoiler alert! There’s a scene in Something About Joe where Allison’s eighteen-month old son Mitchell suffers a febrile convulsion and ends up in the emergency room at the local hospital.

I thoroughly researched the symptoms and the hospital procedure. Lucky I did, because several years after writing the scene with Mitchell, a high fever triggered a terrifying series of convulsions in my daughter (long after the age my research told me was usual) and I knew exactly what to do. I also got all the details of what happens at the hospital right, though to tell you the truth I wasn't thinking about my story when I was there with my daughter! (She was fine, with no after effects at all, thank heaven.)

No febrile convulsions for this happy baby!

Has anything quite unexpectedly come true for you? Something you dreamed about, longed for, read in a book or saw in a movie, heard about from someone else?

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