My guest today is Beth Westcott. Beth pursues her writing career from central New York State, where she lives in semi-retirement with her husband, Frank. She enjoys being a grandmother, walking, gardening, sewing, and music, along with reading and writing.

I like the concept of unintended destinations. I actually can relate to this a lot. Here’s what Beth has to say:

Have you ever planned a trip, set your GPS, and arrived at an unintended destination?

When I became a writer, I didn’t intend to write an Inspirational romance novel. There were plenty of other romance books out there for fans of romance.

I planned to write for children. My first, unsuccessful attempts at writing for publication were stories for children, including articles on historical people: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, King Hendrick of the Mohawks, and a few others. I learned fascinating things about these people as I did the research. I toyed with the idea of writing historical fiction. As a grandmother, I feed my passion for children’s stories by creating books for my grandchildren for their birthdays. This becomes a greater challenge each year as my grandchildren become older and the stories longer, but I feel it’s my legacy to them. One of these stories, “Sadie and the Princess,” is included in Heartwarming Horse Stories, published on Amazon.

I enjoyed combining Scripture and music with narration to create holiday programs (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter) to share with my church family, to give them opportunity to participate in worship services. A church program publisher accepted several of these, including a one-act play, for publication.

The idea of writing a romance novel of 50,000 plus words came as a personal challenge to see if I could hold together characters, setting, and plot for more than 5,000 words. It didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took years. I may have had “a book inside me,” but it took a while to learn the craft of writing and to produce a manuscript considered worthy of publication. I’m still learning.

When you spend a lot of time developing characters like Kate, Jack, and Blythe in Meadow Song, you come to know them personally and become attached to them, even though they are fictitious. Meadow Song is my first published novel. I plan to write a sequel. I want to know what happens to the characters.

I have three other romance novels I’m preparing for submission, and a novel for preteens.

You can see Beth’s website at https://www.bethewestcott.com