Author Interview – Leigh Bale (part one) How It All Began

When I got older, I wrote some short stories. I’ve always been a romantic. I believe in happily ever after because I think that’s the way life should be. I feel things very deeply (most writers do), so I hate seeing sad news on the TV and I hate receiving sad news in my own life, although I’ve had my share.

My father helped foster my love of writing. He’s a retired forest ranger and used to drag us kids with him when he went to look at camp grounds or check mountain streams and meadows. Mom would pack a picnic lunch and we’d ride along bumpy, dusty roads. We saw some of the most beautiful country in the world. People now pay thousands of dollars to see what I always had right in my own back yard. I remember Dad pointing at the beautiful plateaus and mountains and saying, “Can’t you just see the buffalo coming over that ridge? Can you picture the band of Indians riding after them? And the settlers down below in the valley, building their cabins?”

Because of Dad, I could see these events in my mind’s eye. I could feel the wind on my face and smell the dust and hear the grunts of the buffalo and horses. (No doubt my father is to blame for all the westerns I’ve written over the years.)

Both of my parents are voracious readers and highly educated. They fostered an environment where us kids could talk about all kinds of history and how it affected our lives. We also have a strong family affiliation, with walls of framed photographs of relatives and copious amounts of genealogy sheets. Over the years, we’ve collected personal histories of many deceased family members dating back to the Viking era. I even wrote a Viking novel about my thirty-eighth great-grandfather who happened to be an earl in ancient Norway and the father of Rollo, the 1st Duke of Normandy (tongue in cheek, of course). History fascinates me and it’s no surprise that history happens to be my college major.

I started actively writing when my husband was attending law school. We were poor students and only had one car. My husband would drop me off at my work in the morning and then he went up to school. In the evening, he would pick me up and take me home before he had to go to his night job. During the lunch hours at my work, I got bored. I started closing up the office and eating my brown bag lunch while I typed my first book on a typewriter. (Back then, we didn’t have a PC computer sitting on our desks.)

I had no outline, and no idea where I was going with my story. But I finished it! And that gave me the incentive to write another book, and then another. I may never publish those other books I wrote, but I remember attending a writing conference several years ago where a New York Times author said it took her thirteen completed novels before she sold her first book. She said that those books were the price she had to pay in order to reach the level of expertise she needed in order to be marketable. She pointed out that many people publish after writing only two or three books, but that it is rare for a newly published author to sell their first book. Most published writers have at least one book hidden under their bed, which they will never try to publish.