What We Really Write About--by T.K. Thorne

T.K. Thorne

      

        Writer, humanist,
           dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
           and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

  

       

Hi ya'll!

 

With my first two words as a new member of the Stiletto Gang, I have given away that I am a Southern girl. Okay, I am . . . um . . . a bit past the dictionary definition of “girl,” but where I’m from, we are still girls no matter our age.

I never thought I’d be a member of a Stiletto Gang, as I never met a pair of high heels I didn’t run from, but here I am. There is much in my life I never thought I would be or do, such as becoming a police officer after graduating college. Actually, it was an accident (that lasted over two decades), but that is a post for another day. Today, I am introducing myself.

So here are some “fun facts” about me:

• I’m a 4th degree black belt in the martial art of Aikido.


• At age 8, I won a ribbon for being stubborn.


• I dove the Great Blue Hole in Belize, the largest sea hole in the world.


• As a rookie police officer, I had to devise a different way to hold a gun because my hands were too small.

• 
I once had an M-16 rifle pointed at me while researching a book.


• Frogs make me smile.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to have adventures. I blame my Granny for inspiring that desire. She read Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to me long before I could read them for myself. For many years I decided the biggest adventure ev-er would be to meet aliens (the kind from outer space). Every night I checked out the back window to see if the spaceship had arrived to pick me up. I guess that is why, after life had twisted my path a few times, I picked up a gun and badge.

As you can imagine, being a police officer provided plenty of adventures and enriched my writing. I never met aliens, but I did encounter lots of strange people. Another way to say that—my experiences exposed me to a side of humanity I would never have otherwise encountered and deepened my understanding of human nature. And that, I truly believe, regardless of the genre, is the real essence of what we all write about—what it means to be human.

 

T.K. has written two award-winning historical novels, NOAH'S WIFE and ANGELS AT THE GATE, filling in the untold backstories of extraordinary unnamed women—the wives of Noah and Lot—in two of the world’s most famous sagas. The New York Post’s “Books You Should Be Reading” list featured her first non-fiction book, LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE, which details the investigators’ behind-the-scenes stories of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case. Her next project is HOUSE OF ROSE, the first novel of a trilogy in the paranormal-crime genre. She loves traveling and speaking about her books and life lessons. T.K. writes at her mountaintop home near Birmingham, Alabama, often with two dogs and a cat vying for her lap. She blogs about “What Moves Me” on her website, TKThorne.com. Join her private newsletter email list and receive two free short stories at “TK’s Korner.”

 

P.S. After the holidays, my normal day to post will be the 4th Friday of each month. See y'all then!