Honey From the Lion – The Genesis

There are a few different versions of how the story of Honey From the Lion came about. I’m sure there are actual notes buried in my house somewhere…but to the truest of my recollections, this is how it happened.

I’d just finished writing Heroes for Ghosts in early 2018 (the book came out in June 2018), and was coming down off the high of having finished my first time travel romance. Mind you, I struggled with the romance in Heroes because I struggle with romance…not in a general sort of way, as I understand the concept well enough, but in a specific way, as has to do with how to tell a romance story. 

As many of my readers know, I get sucked into the research pretty hard, and though that’s a lot of fun for me, it also takes a bit of time – and consumes my mind – and kind of takes over the romance. 

So when I was thinking of an idea for story #2, I craftily decided I would write about the one MC going back into an era that I already knew about and had already absorbed into my DNA. That meant picking a time between 1846 and around 1900. This is based on my extensive reading and research in that era, the Victorian era, which I love for a variety of reasons. 

Boldly, I picked the year 1891 for the MC to travel back to. Why was it a bold thing to do? Because there’s nothing remotely romantic about 1891. It’s not like the Regency era with the dramatic outfits, and it’s not the Civil War era with the war and the hoop skirts and all of that. It’s no longer the Wild West. 1891 sits on the edge of the last of the west, and nothing is happening. 

Except, when I researched (of course!), I found out that the Massacre at Wounded Knee had happened only the year before, in 1890. So I tucked that away for later.

What then happened was a month of girding my loins as I thought about this story. (March 2018) After my struggles with Heroes (and its complex plot and WWI details), I determined that I wanted to write exactly the story I wanted to write. I didn’t have a lot of readers at the time, so I had nothing to lose by risking it all. I think the current hot trend (at the time) was billionaire romances, but I wasn’t interested in doing one of those, so I asked my heart what it wanted to write. 

I wanted to write an old fashioned love story, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to linger over descriptions of sunsets and chores, I wanted cozy nights in front of a flickering fireplace, I wanted strong coffee in the mornings, and I wanted to write about a simpler time – I wanted to write what was in my soul.

From there, the idea grew that I wanted to write a story about two men struggling through the winter and surviving it together. I was also very inspired by the Little House on the Prairie series.

I have a thing about chores, and the old-fashioned sound of the word makes me feel comfortable and safe. The Wiki article has this to say about chores: The Little House series also describes other farm work duties and events, such as the birth of a calf, and the availability of milk and cheese and gardening, field work, and hunting and gathering. Everyday housework is described in detail. When Pa goes into the woods to hunt, he usually comes home with a deer and smokes the meat for the coming winter. One day he notices a bee tree and returns from hunting early to get the wash tub and milk pail to collect the honey. When Pa returns in the winter evenings, Laura and Mary beg him to play his fiddle, as he is too tired from farm work to play during the summertime.

Having decided I would write the old fashioned love story of my heart, the next conundrum to solve was how would the MC go back in time?

In Heroes, Stanley goes back in forth in time on the whims of fate, but it seemed that the bad weather also played a hand in it – at least in retrospect. What if, I wondered, bad weather sent the MC back in time? What if (I further wondered) inclement weather is the force behind ALL of my time traveling heroes? (So…to digress, Zach is sent back in time by a bad rainstorm, Maxton is sent back in time by a bad dust storm, Jake is actually sent back in time by a magical portal in a room in a hotel, but the weather is very bad once he gets there, and so on.)

Then I looked up the weather in October, and realized that the Orionids Meteor shower happens at around that time, so…I tucked that away for later. 

Having decided that weather and/or event takes my MC back in time, I had to figure out where he’d be when this happened. 

I would love to be able to say that I consciously decided that sending the MC to a dude ranch would set him up for living in 1891, but I can’t say that. It’s just a lucky thing that happened to the story because the MC is already wanting, in a way, to go back in time. He’s taking a break from his job (software, I decided, since I was in the software industry at the time) to experience a more simplified existence. He’s going to the dude ranch for the specific reason of leaving his own life behind, even if only for a little while. Thus, when he goes back to 1891 – he’s already halfway adjusted to that time. But, again, this was not a conscious decision on my part, just a serendipitous one. 

I picked the name for my time traveling MC: Laurie Quinn. Laurie is short for Lawrence, and Quinn had a nice old fashioned ring to it. I picked the name Laurie because I wanted an old fashioned boy’s name – and in Little Women, Jo March makes friends with the boy next door, and his name is Laurie (Theodore “Laurie” Laurence.) So, you see, this MC is already set up to be an old fashioned boy, he just doesn’t know it yet. 

Then to the other MC. He is based on Pa Ingalls, and that’s a fact. I have a thing about Pa Ingalls. He’s the father figure throughout the books, he’s strong, and stern, but kind. He’s consistent and fair and honest, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. What’s not to love? It’s taken me a good long while to admit this obsession, but I figured it is time. To me, he’s all suspenders, rough beard, and sex appeal.

I decided that this MC would look like John Winchester (the Dad in Supernatural) and that, while I was writing, I would just refer to him as John. Then I later decided that the name John was such a perfect fit, so I kept it, and am now admitting all of this to you.

I had no idea what Laurie looked like at this point – and have since learned that knowing this vital piece of information is quite useful to the writing process! What Laurie looked like developed out of the story of the Fox Lost in the Snow, actually, which meant that I later went back and put in what color his eyes were – though his hair was always that deep auburn. 

Now to the point of writing. The first chapter of the book involves a lot of details about dude ranches, which I did not know and then, yes, had to stop and research. So I did…and I left out a lot about dude ranches because the point of the story wasn’t the dude ranch but the little cabin where John lives. (The name of the dude ranch comes directly from my imaginary town of Farthing – and I say imaginary, because at the location of Farthing, WY, there is merely a railroad crossing and nothing more.)

The idea about John’s cabin came from two sources. The first was a real cabin in a real place – the McDonald’s Homestead near Iron Mountain….(This is the prototype for the photograph of the remains of “Old Joe’s cabin” that Maddie has hanging up in her office above the display case.)

…and the Surveyor’s Cabin in On the Shores of Silver Lake. The Surveyor’s Cabin was where the Ignalls Family stayed during the winter of 1879. Their job was to a) eat all the food in the pantry, b) for Laura and Carrie to slide across the ice of Silver Lake to visit a pair of Buffalo Wolves on the far shore and c) for Pa to make sure the house survived the winter. (What a treasure trove On the Shores of Silver Lake is!)

As for Iron Mountain, after I figured out that the meteor shower would be part of the mechanism for Laurie traveling through time, I thought about magnets and iron and entered “Iron Mountain” into Google. What I got was the paper shredding security company, and a geological formation just outside of Farthing, Wyoming. Thusly, the location for my story was selected.

“South of Chugwater on the old Iron Mountain Road lies the small town of Farthing, one time known as Iron Mountain. Farthing received its name from Charles T. Farthing (1877-1962) who settled in the area about 1904 and who donated the land for the railroad station. Farthing was not, however, the first settler in the area.”

Already I’m down the Research Rabbit Hole and I’ve not written one word yet!

But with all this in mind, I started writing around mid-March 2018 from Laurie’s POV. He arrives at the dude ranch, hoping to have a good time and expecting he’ll be terribly, terribly disappointed. 

From there, I wrote the story, and was very pleased to come up with Bill Wainwright, who owns and runs the ranch. He’s such a refreshing character for me, because he pulls no punches and tells it like he sees it. He’s all about 5’ 6” tall, physically, but he acts like he’s ten feet tall and covered with hair. I love Bill.

Bill also tells a very good story, and when I wrote the story of Oooooooold Joe and his Little Red fox friend, I had no idea, no idea at all, how this would play into how the story turned out. Ask any writer and they can tell you a similar story about writing a scene, and how they added a beaded belt or whatever, without any idea what it might mean later on in the tale. So, yeah, the ghost story about Old Joe started out as just a story Bill would tell around the campfire to set the mood for all the dudes visiting the dude ranch.

I did think, at one point, that I’d write all of Laurie’s scenes and then go back and write John’s scenes…but then it occurred to me, pretty early on, that the story would be more interesting if we did not know John’s thoughts. So while it’s pretty popular for mm romances to have two POVs, I held back, trusting that readers would understand what was going on with John from his reactions to Laurie. And you do, so thank you for that. 

Even so, I too, wondered what John was thinking, and had a plan to write a sequel. I’m writing that sequel now, but I think I should have written it then and there, right after finishing Honey. 

As for the title, years ago I came across the phrase “honey from the lion” from a poem I saw (or an article about the poem) called Honey From the Lion by Leah Bodine Drake, which was published in 1974 in a collection called A Celebration of Cats. 

I wrote the phrase down at least 15 years ago on a 3 x 5 index card and stuck it on my fridge, looking at it often, and wondering what I was going to do with it.

The lovely, esoteric (to me) quote turned out to be something from the Christian bible (Judges 14:9), and is later referenced in Judges 14:18, with the idea being that there was something precious and valuable about taking something sweet from something strong and powerful.

I wrote about Laurie, and his sunshine personality.

I wrote about John, who was the grumpy one with the heart of butter. 

And I made them do chores together and fall in love. What could be better?

I have a Pintrest board, if you’re keen to see all the images I collected while writing Honey From the Lion. There you will find pictures of cozy cabins and winter nights, beaded belts and rugged high prairie landscapes, meteor showers and telegraph machines, red woolen underwear and cattle drives, and, of course, Laurie and John.

When I write a book, I like to have a theme song attached to the writing process, so I can turn to it for inspiration. The song for this book is called Sons and Daughters. It is particularly slow and a little thoughtful, and describes how the two people want to be when they are with each other and, more related to Honey From the Lion, they talk about the chores they have and who will do them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eru8DlHoOFM