Two years later I landed a job anchoring the news in San Antonio and immediately started my research. I was immediately intrigued, partly because of the time period-I’ve always been fascinated by the 19th century-and I had two thoughts: “Why was this paper interested in a story that happened sixty years earlier in a tiny town three hours away?” and “How did he get away with it?” At that moment, I knew my novel and I had found each other.Īt the time I was working as a television news reporter and anchor in Charleston, South Carolina, but I made a vow to research the story when I moved back to Texas. At the town’s historical museum, there was a full-page article on display about Diamond Bessie and Abe Rothschild, published by a Dallas newspaper in the 1930s. When my husband and I were dating, we went to his hometown in East Texas to meet his parents, and while we were in Marshall, Charlie suggested we drive over to Jefferson. I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to say.

I studied journalism in college because I knew I needed to make a living at something and I enjoyed writing, but I’d always wanted to be a novelist. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s magnificent book, Big Magic: Creative Writing Beyond Fear, she writes about how the creative process is “both magical and magic,” that ideas are swirling all around us searching for a human partner to notice them and get to work creating.

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