Answer: Nothing to Regret was the result of a dream. My grandmother passed away in July of 1999, and the weekend of her funeral, I had a dream that I was an American GI flying over to Japan during World War II. It was a little strange, especially considering that in my dream I was a man, but what was even stranger was how clear and detailed the dream was. I realized it would make a great jumping-off point for a book. I hit the Internet, did some research, and one thing led to another.

Strength to Endure came to me during Relief Society one day. The teacher was telling the story of a man who was on one of the death marches out of a concentration camp, and as they passed through a village, someone came up to him and slipped a potato into his pocket. Like the bolt of lightning, the entire plot for the book popped into my head.

Season of Sacrifice is the true story of my great-great-grandfather who engineered the passage through the Hole in the Rock in southern Utah, and I’ve been blessed to have his life history in my possession. With the aid of other family history volumes and the research done by others and placed on the Internet, I was able to piece together the story, which practically wrote itself. To date, this is the most emotionally satisfying book I’ve written.

Agent in Old Lace went through many metamorphoses to become what it is today. The idea originally came from a news story about a group of hikers who were lost in the woods. Because they had a compass, they were able to find their way to help. I got to thinking – what if you were lost in the woods but you had no idea where you were? How would you find help if you didn’t know where help might be found? These thoughts spiraled into the basic idea for my book, but it’s so different from that original seedling, it’s almost unrecognizable as the same thing.

As to my upcoming books, The Secret Sisters Mysteries was the result of a late night conversation with my husband. We were tired and both feeling loopy, and I don’t know how we got on the subject but I told him I thought it would be fun to write a book about some little old ladies who turned into spies. One thing led to another, we had a huge fit of giggles, and the series was born.

Answer: My first two novels are set during World War II. During this time, whole families were being torn apart and it was very rare for a family to make it through the war intact. I feel it would be very unrealistic to present a story where everyone was still alive at the end. It’s fiction, but even I can’t push it that far!

Answer: At the time the child came into being, Ken, the main character, was not yet a member of the Church. He had been taught to wait to have intimate relations until he was in love, and that’s what he did. He used the knowledge he had at the time to the best of his ability, and when he found the gospel and learned that his actions had been wrong, he was truly repentant.

The child is central to the story. She is the catalyst that brings Ken around and gives him a focus and a direction. Her existence is necessary to the book.

When I sign copies of this book, I write, “The power of the Atonement is real.” To me, this is the main message of the book. The Atonement is there to heal us from sin and pain, to ease the hurt of the things we have been called upon to suffer. Without sin and suffering, there would be no need for the Atonement. Ken’s situation illustrates how the perfect love of the Savior can take an imperfect person and redeem them.

Answer: I take any little minute I can throughout the day, but I do the bulk of it at night, after the kids are in bed. We’re a busy family with four children, and I home school, so I have to carve out the time. But I think that’s true for anything we find of worth in our lives—we carve it out and we give it a place in our lives. “Finding time to write” is a myth. It must be scheduled and sought after, or it will never happen.

Answer: Every book has been different. A historical fiction piece takes me longer than a contemporary piece, because of the research involved. The quickest historical was Season of Sacrifice, which was eighty hours of research and eighty hours of writing. My Secret Sisters Series has been working up pretty quickly because they’re shorter than my others, coming in around 50,000 words, which take me about six weeks to rough draft and then the polishing time on top of that. So it’s hard to quantify. I can say, though, that when I’m on a roll, I can type 1,500 words in 45 minutes. That’s not bad!

Answer: Each book represents who I was at the time I wrote it, so it’s hard for me to choose. Nothing to Regret it like the oldest child—you know, the one we make all the mistakes on. Season of Sacrifice has the most historical importance to me because it’s not just about Utah history; it’s about my family. The Secret Sisters has been the most fun to write. The other books are no less important to me. No, I can’t decide which child I love the best. They’re equal, but different.