Reluctant Date's setting Unveiled ...by Sheila Claydon

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This is a blog I never expected to write and I wish I didn't have to!

About 12 years ago I enjoyed a truly memorable holiday with my husband and another couple who have been our friends for more than 40 years. Although we have been lucky enough to visit many countries across the world, often being hosted by locals who have helped us to properly engage with the peoples and their culture, this particular holiday remains one of the very best.

We arrived late in a hire car and, due to a lack of street lights, found navigating the small town a bit of a challenge. This continued when we finally located our motel and the carpark turned out be a dusty area strewn with shingle and ankle-turning rocks. The building was on stilts so there were stairs to tackle before we reached the very small elevator and squashed in with our suitcases.  Climbing them would have been almost as daunting as our journey if it hadn't been for the occasional light set into the planking. What had we let ourselves in for?

We had booked an apartment for 4 but at first glance wondered if we'd got it wrong. As one of our party had a knee problem she decided not to climb the exceedingly narrow spiral staircase unless she had to, so my husband and I said we would investigate. At the top of the staircase we were confronted by a large double bed that almost exactly fitted the room, and what appeared to be a large cupboard. When we opened it we realised we were in fact on an upstairs 'balcony' or mezzanine, which would give us a great view of our friends who would be sleeping below on a bed settee that had to be made up every night.

We were still laughing when we opened the doors to the downstairs balcony, and there it was. The Gulf of Mexico right outside. Moonlight illuminated a calm sea and there was nothing but silence. We had never experienced anything quite like it and could hardly wait for what the following day had to offer.

The next morning we woke to sun shining through the skylight in the upstairs bedroom while seagulls squawked as they spied on us through the glass. Hurrying down the very decidedly hazardous stairs and onto the balcony we were greeted by a pod of dolphins leaping across the sunlit Gulf on their way to breakfast. Needless to say we ate our own breakfast and every subsequent breakfast on that balcony after that, revelling in how close we were to nature as large numbers of horseshoe crabs gathered on the sandy beach below us while brown pelicans clustered like a group of old men on some broken wooden spars and sandpipers picked a delicate path along the shore. We discovered many other birds later, cormorants and osprey, buffleheads and white pelicans to name just a few, but it was the dolphins that transfixed us. They came every day at the same time, morning and evening, so breakfast and an evening drink on the balcony swiftly became mandatory! 

This place, which cast a magical spell on us from the start, is in fact a small island city (700 inhabitants) off the northwest coast of Florida. You will have read about it recently when Hurricane Idalia engulfed it in a nearly 7-foot storm surge, inundating the lowest parts of the island and destroying or severely damaging many homes and businesses. 

It is Cedar key.

Cedar Key, despite its size and the quaintness of some of its aspects, is a place of so much history from the Civil War onwards. Once a busy port, it now describes itself as a walkable island paradise. It is tiny, with a total area of 2.1square miles, most of which is water. It is part of the Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge, a group of small islands with nature trails and rich birdlife. The devastation caused by Idalia's 7 foot storm surge and 200 km winds is heartbreaking. I don't know if our holiday motel has survived. It might be the one that was washed into the Gulf. What I do know is that 90% of Cedar key's downtown was underwater following the storm surge, docks and piers were knocked out and many homes destroyed. Now the water has subsided and the bridge, which is the only road in and out, is passable again, the mammoth task of clearing the debris, mud and sand is underway, to say nothing of restoring the power, water and sewerage.  

Our holiday there was so perfect that while we often talked about returning we always worried that it wouldn't be the same the second time around, so we never did go, and now there is no Cedar Key to return to. I just hope that the community will be able to rebuild the same as they did after other hurricanes in 1896 and in 1950. They have also survived storm surges and according to one of its residents, that's what some people were expecting this time, a tropical storm they could sit out drinking wine and playing cards, the same as they have done before. Sadly Idalia had other ideas. I just hope that at some time in the future Cedar Key will again be the wonderful place it once was and that its community will thrive again.

Why did I have to write about this? Well many of my books are set in places I have visited but, apart from the cities, I always anonymise them, so the only indication that Reluctant Date is set in Cedar Key is the dolphins leaping in the background on the book cover. In my story it is called Dolphin Key and, with apologies to the owners, I've upgraded the apartment we stayed in just a little. Much else is authentic though and if you read my book you will quickly understand why I found the whole place so entrancing. The counter setting towards the beginning of the book is the northwest coast of England, the two juxtaposed together. Both are coastal communities, both are nature reserves, but they are so very different, and then, of course, there is the romance. 

I could write a great deal more about Cedar Key, from our visit to the nearby and equally magical Suwanee River to our daily trip to the best ice cream parlour ever, and how, instead of using our car, we had  to hire a golf cart to travel locally. I could tell you that the airport is a grass strip with Ospreys nesting on the top of the surrounding trees and that a sunset voyage on a flat bottomed boats is an unforgettable experience, but as so much of this is part of my story you can read it for yourself. If you want to experience Cedar Key's true magic then follow Claire and Daniel's romance in Reluctant Date. 

Thanks to the Internet I will be able to follow the rebuilding of Cedar Key. In the meantime I will never forget what was a truly magical holiday and below is a small extract from Reluctant Date that I hope explains it. It is when Daniel takes Claire to see the white pelicans on her first morning in Dolphin Key....

    They didn't say very much for a while after that. Daniel was too busy guiding the dinghy round the pier and out into the bay, and Claire was too busy absorbing everything that came into view. Only when she laughed out loud at the sight of at least twenty brown pelicans perched every which way on a derelict wooden structure that had collapsed into the sea, did Daniel speak.

    "Its the local doss house," he told her with a grin. "Once upon a time it was part of an old landing stage but most of it disintegrated years ago. These guys took this bit over a few years back and now it's one of the iconic images of Dolphin Key. You'll see it everywhere. On postcards, books, posters...even on letterheads."

    "I can see why. It's just so funny, and yet picturesque at the same time," Claire turned her head as he steered the dinghy away from the pelicans and their dilapidated roost.

    "The white pelicans are a bit different," he told her, opening up the throttle in a noisy burst as they sped across the bay."Much more stately; they are almost aristocracy compared to their common cousins."

    But Claire had stopped listening to him. Instead she was looking over his shoulder, her eyes wide with disbelief. He turned his head to follow her gaze and was just in time to see a pod of dolphins flip into the air before arcing back into the sea.

    "Hunting for breakfast," he said. "Same as the white pelicans will be. Everyone eats early around here."

    After looking in vain for another sighting, Claire brought her gaze reluctantly back to the boat. Daniel smiled at her. "You first time?"

    She nodded.

    "It gets everyone the same way. Soon you'll be used to it though. There are so many of them around here that before long you will start to recognise individual dolphins because they swim in a particular place at a regular time each day."

    Claire stared at him."Are you serious? This just gets more and more like fantasy land!"

    He grinned at her. "You'd better believe it. Was I right that you will love living here?"

    "Maybe."

My Hobby Is People Watching...by Sheila Claydon

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Three very different books with three very different heroines, and written over a period of several years. Why is this interesting? Well I've just read an interesting blog by one of my fellow BWL writers, Roseanne Dowell, where she talks about creating characters. In it she says that characters are all around us from elderly relatives to friends and loved ones, or from just observing people in restaurants, or at the airport, or anywhere else where we can watch the world go by.

It got me thinking about how I create the very different characters that inhabit my books and I realised that each one is made up of a mix of people I have either met or read about. Take Mel in Double Fault for example. Hardworking, determined, prepared to do almost anything to protect her children, she is very much like someone I know. Emotionally, however, she is very different. She has shut herself off from love because she never wants to be hurt again.  I've taken that from an entirely different person. Then there are the opposing characters of her twin children, one ebullient and one much more reserved and shy. I love writing about children because although they all have very different characters, there is a universality about them from cuteness to tantrums that tugs at the heartstrings. 

There is also a universality about all my heroines. Every one of them is feisty and determined, Arabella in Miss Locatelli particularly so as she battles to save her family business. And in Cabin Fever, Ellie faces up to her own work challenge with an obstinacy that borders on the impossible...until she pulls it off of course! 

And then there are the heroes, all of whom have problems and idiosyncrasies of their own, the same as my heroines, because none of them are close to being perfect. After all, who is in real life?

Something else apart from Roseanne's blog has has triggered this introspection about creating characters, however. It's what has been happening in my own life in the past few weeks. I live right opposite a nature reserve. It's an idyllic spot comprising miles of woodland, sand dunes and wild beach. For much of the year it is relatively quiet and much enjoyed by local residents. Unfortunately, thanks to social media and TV,  it has now been discovered by the wider world.  I use the word unfortunately, not because local residents don't want to share our lovely beach and countryside, but because the nature reserve and the village don't have the necessary infrastructure to cope. There isn't enough parking. Toilet facilities are minimal. The routes down to the beach are almost inaccessible for families with small children in strollers as it's a long haul up and over the sand dunes carrying picnics and blankets. When someone has travelled 2 hours in a car for a day out, however, such difficulties are not going to deter them. Consequently, on a sunny day there are cars everywhere. They are parked across resident's private driveways, on grass verges and pavements, on corners, and across double yellow lines and, worst of all, when these very frustrated tourists drive around in search of that elusive/non-existent parking space they cause such terrible traffic congestion on narrow roads that residents are confined to their homes, unable to get out. In recent months an elderly woman was knocked down, an emergency vehicle was unable to reach a house where a man had had a heart attack, and nurses and carers haven't been able to get to their elderly and/or chronically ill patients. 

So how does all of this feed into the characterisation of the people who inhabit my books. Well for a start I have a front seat view of how people behave in what is often very stressful situation, and how they resolve their individual problems. This includes the reaction of residents as well as the day trippers. And now, because the whole situation is becoming untenable, a group of householders have come together to petition both the local council and the organisation that runs the nature reserve. We are asking for better traffic controls in residential areas and more parking and toilet facilities much closer to the beach. To do this we have had to knock on doors to invite people to sign our petition, and although I can't speak for my fellow petitioners, what fun it has been for a writer. 

At last I've had a legitimate reason to ring doorbells and engage strangers in conversation, and the old adage is perfectly true, everyone does have a story and it takes very little encouragement to get them to share it. Being interested is enough. I have learned about family histories, the successes or otherwise of children, details of local business people, ditto local villains (that surprised me!) plus, most fascinatingly, the hidden history of the village where I have lived for so long. How, for example, many years ago, the field opposite my house used to flood sufficiently in the winter for the locals to ice-skate on it. Now it doesn't flood at all. Is that a small window into local climate change? Also how, in the summer, the same field used to host the village fair, an event that has now moved much closer to the village centre. 

I've also been able to peep into houses, either from the doorstep or through a window as I approached the door, and seen how very differently people live. There are the pristine, beautifully curated homes with floral displays and shining floors. There are the homes bursting with children where trainers and boots are scattered across the porch and toys litter the hall. There are dogs of every shape and size, and everyone of them aware that, as a dog owner, I probably have dog treats in my pocket. Then there are the very elderly who, because of the exigencies of Coronavirus, rarely have visitors. These were some of the most interesting because their memories of local events go back a long, long way. And in almost every case  they were pragmatic about their situation and determined to make the best of it. So all in all my experience of watching and engaging with people has been very interesting indeed. I now have plenty of material for many more books. All I need is the time to write them!