WEDNESDAY: THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES!

Okay, maybe there are, and maybe there aren’t. But some things happen that seem to go way beyond coincidence. I’ve seen it more than once in my writing. Here’s a good example.

Return to Rainbow Ridge, my first novel, is set in a fictitious central California town, Rainbow Ridge. There is no town with that name, not that I know of. As one of the characters in the story says, it “sounds like a made-up name out of some romance novel.” Right on both counts! But I digress.

The heroine at one time in my writing had another first name. But I recalled soon after I began writing it that there is someone in my church family with the same name. I have a policy of not using names of anyone I know or have known or am immediately related to, just to avoid any unintended confusion or inferences.

I checked my list of popular girls’ names from the decade she was supposedly born (yes, I do have such a list I found on the Internet) and came up with a new name, Melody. I wanted to used a name that started with “Mel” since that was the character’s nickname. And I like the sound of it, an important quality in names. (More on the naming of people and places later).

After I had already made the change, it hit me. The hero is a film music composer by education and experience. Duh—can there be a more fitting name for a composer’s significant other than Melody? Perfect! I swear, I had not thought of the connection when I picked it.

Maybe it was my subconscious mind, or just coincidence. Or maybe it was some other force at work, leading me where I needed to go with the story. Hmmm.

Here’s another example, even more amazing. Even though I don’t usually refer to real specific places or business in my stories, sometimes they are inspired by real places. For this same novel, Return to Rainbow Ridge, I used a real bed and breakfast inn as inspiration for the Rainbow Ridge Bed & Breakfast Inn that the heroine owns and operates. That gives me a real world foundation for the operation, layout, street location, etc.

Okay, here’s the creepy part. I had picked the real inn for inspiration, and I decided to include a project in the story to have the inn registered as a state historic landmark. I looked into the back ground of the real inn I had found. Let me mention here that I had also already decided that the hero’s father had been the town pharmacist, owner of Everly’s Drug Store before his premature death due to cancer decades earlier. The drug store had been started sometime in the distant past, long before the Everly family got involved.

Back to the real inn used for inspiration. It turns out the house where the real-world inn is located was built by two brothers from Europe who immigrated to California to start a new life. And guess what they both did for a living? Can you guess? They were both pharmacists. So the real-world inspirational inn mirrors the story situation in ways I never would have guessed. Very creepy—and very, very cool!

I don’t believe in coincidences. Maybe they do occur, but I choose to believe there is more to it than that. Something else is at work. I see it every day. And, apparently, I write about it. Here’s hoping the magic, whatever the cause, continues to work.