In mid-December 2012, the name Schooner Moore flashed across my consciousness, totally out of the blue. My first thought was Schooner Moore, what a weird name! I’ll bet there’s no one out there named Schooner. Thirty minutes later, the line, “Schooner Moore did not like turning forty-three, not at all,” popped into my head. That became the opening line of my first book, Searching for Moore, which I began writing the very next morning.
In the 2012-2013 timeframe, most contemporary romance novels, especially in the Indie world, were about 20-somethings. Being the mom of a 20-something at the time, I just couldn’t write about 20-year-olds. I wondered if romance readers would be interested in reading a second-chance romance about 40-somethings. Was there even a market for that? Was that too old for a romance novel?
I didn’t know.
All I knew was that the tale yearning to come out of me was the story of Schooner Moore and Mia Silver, a kind of a modern-day Hubbell and Katie. Meeting on the first day of college orientation and forming an unlikely friendship. WASP-y Schooner, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed California golden-boy jock, and Mia Silver, the free-spirited Jewish wild child who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, would form a friendship that would grow into the love that neither one of them would ever get over — no matter the years, or miles, that separated them. This is a love story that has spurred my readers, even thirteen years later, to beg me to write more Schooner and Mia.
By far, of all the couples I have written, Schooner and Mia are the runaway reader favorite, and I find myself asking the question, as it is Jewish American Heritage Month, if I were to be writing Searching for Moore today, and introducing the world to Schooner and Mia, would I be more concerned and reticent about writing Mia due to her religious beliefs, her culture, and her Jewish American Heritage than about her age? Would I worry that today might not be the right time or place to introduce the world to Mia Silver?
I don’t know the answer to those questions.
All I know is that 2026 is a very different time from 2013. It is my hope that this is still a world where I can write amazing characters, women who are true to themselves such as Mia, and that they continue to be loved by readers for their intelligence, humor, heart, tenacity, courage, and kick-ass attitude — for being a heroine who is a force to be reckoned with — the very same attributes that attracted readers to Mia Silver in 2013 and that she would also be admired for, and not dismissed, criticized, or rejected for her remaining authentic to her religious beliefs and to her heritage.
