I read constantly, whether I’m actively writing a story or not, and I’ve come to the point where I realize that my current “to read” list is long enough to last the rest of my life. Reading is my first love, and I can’t stay away from it for any prolonged period of time. I do tend to compartmentalize the facets of my life—when I’m writing, I give it all my focus. But every night, I find time to curl up with a book.
Can you describe your writing process? Do you outline first, or dive right in? Do you have a routine? Do you let anyone read early drafts, or do you keep the story private until it’s finished?
As I was writing The Fragile World, I had a rough outline of the book in my head—although not on paper. In general, each day I have more or less an idea of what I want to accomplish with a particular scene, so I start from there. One of the interesting things that happens as you write a story is that the characters almost become real people—they say unexpected things and make surprising decisions, and that might change a key scene or the overall direction of the story. Sometimes these little detours make all the difference, so it’s crucial to listen to that instinct.
Until I reach a point where I feel comfortable sharing the story, I tend to keep my writing to myself. When there’s something (like a sticky plot point) I’m trying to wrap my mind around, I’ll talk it through with a trusted friend—a sort of writer’s therapy session. I do have a small group of readers I can count on for honest feedback when I’m ready to share, and I’m immensely grateful to them.
What was your greatest challenge in writing The Fragile World? What about your greatest pleasure?
I split my time between writing and teaching college-level composition, so it’s always a challenge to stay on top of each discipline. But I’ve found that these parts of my life are complementary; writing is my solitary escape, and teaching gets me out of my head and allows me to interact with others. I’ve found that when I’m working on a longer manuscript, I have to take pleasure in the small victories—the scenes that come together well, the breakthroughs in character or plot that suddenly open up in my mind. But the ultimate gratification comes from connecting and sharing with other writers, whether professionals or beginners.
In The Fragile World, Olivia is working through a number of fears—some realistic, and others very unlikely to happen. Were you able to relate to any of her fears?
I’ve had many fears in my lifetime, but most of them, like a fear of the dark, I’ve basically outgrown. The one fear that persists is claustrophobia; no matter the situation, I am very aware of the amount of space around me. On a trip to Barcelona, my husband (who is afraid of heights) and I ill-advisedly climbed the very narrow, winding steps to a spire atop La Sagrada Família. We laugh about it now, because that’s all we can do. But neither of us was laughing at the time.
“A heart-stopping series of events drives The Fragile World. The result is a gripping read, but one that delivers, by the book’s end, a beautiful reminder of the resilience of love.”
—Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls
If you loved The Fragile World, don’t miss The Mourning Hours, also by acclaimed author Paula Treick DeBoard.
Available now in ebook format.
Connect with us on Harlequin.com/rivetingreads for more thought-provoking stories from both new and bestselling authors.
“A twisty, roller coaster ride of a debut. Fans of Gone Girl will embrace this equally evocative tale of a missing woman, shattered family and the lies we tell not just to each other, but especially to ourselves.”
—Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fear Nothing
If you’re looking for an addictively suspenseful and tautly written thriller, be sure to catch The Good Girl, a compulsive debut by Mary Kubica, where you’ll find that even in the perfect family, nothing is as it seems…
Available in ebook. Order your copy today!
Connect with us on Harlequin.com/rivetingreads for more thought-provoking stories from both new and bestselling authors.
Deeply Moving
Thought Provoking
Powerful Storytelling
If you’re looking for more addictively compelling and emotional reads, be sure to catch these outstanding titles, only from MIRA Books:
The Returned by Jason Mott
The Wonder of All Things by Jason Mott
The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
Madame Picasso by Anne Girard
Little Mercies by Heather Gudenkauf
Blackbird by Averil Dean
The Last Breath by Kimberly Belle
The Fragile World by Paula Treick DeBoard
Where Earth Meets Water by Pia Padukone
The Oleander Sisters by Elaine Hussey
Empire Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan
Order your copies today!
Connect with us for more thought-provoking stories from both new and bestselling authors
one
1994–1995
Everything you needed to know, Dad said, you could learn on a farm. He was talking about things my mind, shaped by Bible stories and the adventures of Dick and Jane, could barely comprehend—the value of hard work, self-sufficiency, the life cycle of all things. Well, the life cycle—I did understand that. Things were always being born on farms, and always dying. And as for how they came to be in the first place, that was no great mystery. “They’re mating,” Dad would explain when I worried over a bull that seemed to be attacking a helpless heifer. “It’s natural,” he said, when the pigs went at it, when the white tom from Mel Wegner’s farm visited and we ended up with litters of white kittens.
Nature wasn’t just ladybugs and fireflies—it was dirt and decay and, sometimes, death. To grow up on a farm was to know the smell of manure, to understand that the gawky calves that suckled my fingers would eventually be someone’s dinner. It was to witness the occasional birth of a half-formed calf, missing eyes or ears, like some alien-headed baby. We couldn’t drive into town without seeing the strange, bloodied remains of animals—cats, opossums and the occasional skunk who had risked it all for one final crossing. By the time we got Kennel, our retriever-collie mix, we’d had three golden Labs, each more loyal than the last, until they ran away during thunderstorms or wandered into the path of an oncoming semi headed down Rural Route 4. When Dad had spotted him at the county shelter, Kennel had a torn ear, a limp in his back left leg and ribs you could spot from a hundred yards away—the marks of an abusive owner.
Even humans couldn’t avoid their fates. Sipping lemonade from a paper cup after the Sunday-morning service, I weaved between adult conversations, catching little snatches as I went. A tractor had tipped over, trapping the farmer underneath. Cows kicked, and workers were hurt. Pregnant women, miles from any hospital, went into early labor. Machines were always backfiring, shirtsleeves getting caught in their mechanisms. This was to say nothing of lightning strikes, icy roads and snowdrifts, or flash floods and heat waves. This was to say nothing of all the things that could go wrong inside a person.
So we were used to death in our stoic, farm-bred way. It was part of the natural order of things: something was born, lived its life and died—and then something else replaced it. I knew without anyone telling me that it was this way with people, too.
Take my family, for example—the Hammarstroms. My great-great-grandpa had settled our land and passed on the dairy to his son, who passed it to Grandpa, who passed it on to Dad, who would pass it on to Johnny. Dad and Mom had gotten married and had Johnny right after Dad graduated from high school, leaving Mom to get her degree later on, after Emilie and I were born. I’d always thought it was extremely cool that our parents were so much younger than everyone else’s parents, until Emilie spelled out for me that it was something of a scandal. Anyway, when Johnny had been born, Grandpa and Grandma had moved to the in-law house next door, w
here Dad and Mom would someday move, when it was time for Johnny and his wife to inherit the big house. This was simply the expected order of things, as natural as the corn being sown, thinned, watered, fertilized and harvested. Everything that was born would die one day. I knew this, because death was all around me.
There was Grandma, for one. I was too young to have any concrete memories of her death, although I’d pieced together the facts from whispered conversations. She’d been standing in her kitchen, peeling apple after apple, when it happened. A pulmonary embolism, whatever that was. A freak thing. I couldn’t walk into Grandpa’s kitchen without thinking: Was it here? Was this the spot? But life had gone on without her. Grandpa stood at that sink every morning, drinking a cup of coffee and staring out the window.
The first funeral I remember attending was for our neighbor Karl Warczak, who’d collapsed in his manure pit, overwhelmed by the fumes. An ambulance had rushed past on Rural Route 4, and Dad and Mom had followed—Mom because she had just completed her training as a nurse, Dad because he and Karl Warczak had worked together over the years, helping with each other’s animals, planting, harvesting, tinkering with stubborn machinery. By the time they’d pulled in behind the ambulance, Dad had said later, it had already been too late—sometimes, he’d explained, the oxygen just got sucked out of those pits.
Mom had lain out my clothes the night before the funeral—a hand-me-down navy wool jumper that seemed to itch its way right through my turtleneck, thick white tights and a pair of too-big Mary Janes with a tissue wadded into the toes. She’d always been optimistic that I would grow into things soon. During the service I’d sat sandwiched between Mom and Emilie, willing myself not to look directly at the coffin. The whole ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust thing made me feel a little sick to my stomach once I really thought about it, and so did Mom’s whisper that the funeral home had done “such a good job” with Mr. Warczak. It was incredible that he was really dead, that he had been here one minute and was gone the next, that he would never again pat me on the head with his dirt-encrusted fingers. There had been such a solemn strangeness to the whole affair, with the organ music and the fussy bouquets of flowers, the men in their dark suits and the women in navy dresses, their nude panty hose swishing importantly against their long slips.
“It is not for us to question God’s perfect timing,” Pastor Ziegler had intoned from the pulpit, but I remember thinking that the timing wasn’t so great—not if you were Mr. Warczak, who thought he could fix the problem with the manure pump and then head inside for lunch, and not for his son, Jerry, who had been about to graduate from Lincoln High School and head off to a veterinary training program. The rumor had been that Mrs. Warczak’s cancer was back, too, and this time it was inoperable. “That boy’s going to need our help,” Dad had told us when we were back in the car, riding with the windows open. “It’s a damn shame.”
“Why did it happen?” I’d asked from my perch on top of a stack of old phone books in the backseat. I could just see out the window from that height—the miles of plowed and planted and fenced land that I would know blindfolded. “Why did he die?”
“It was an accident. Just a tragic accident,” Mom had said, blotting her eyes with a wad of tissue. She’d been up all morning, helping in the church kitchen with the ham-and-cheese sandwiches that were somehow a salve for grief. When we’d parked in our driveway, she’d gathered up a handful of soggy tissues and shut the door behind her.
“Oh, pumpkin,” Dad had said as he sighed when I’d lingered in the backseat, arms folded across my jumper, waiting for a better answer. He’d promised to head over to the Warczaks’ house later, to help Jerry out. “It’s just how things go. It’s the way things are.” He’d reached over, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze in his no-nonsense, farmer-knows-best way.
Somehow, despite all the years that passed, I never forgot this conversation, the way Dad’s eyes had glanced directly into mine, the way his mustache had ridden gently on top of his lips as he’d delivered the message. He couldn’t have known the tragedies that were even then growing in our soil, waiting to come to harvest.
All he could do was tell me to prepare myself, to buck up, to be ready—because the way the world worked, you never could see what was coming.
ISBN-13: 9781460330494
The Fragile World
Copyright © 2014 by Paula Treick DeBoard
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
The Fragile World Page 35