Patti Diener / Author

  Writing a synopsis that you pitch to an agent can be very daunting! Talk about rewrites! I must have written my pitch a ton of times then while standing in line to pitch it, I changed everything I was going to say! The worst part is if you ask me now what I actually said, my mind is blank because I was so damn nervous. Before I share the true synopsis though, I want to share with you a conversation I had with my dear friend over breakfast yesterday, in Kelseyville, California.

“So tell me about your book!”

“I guess if I had to explain the reason I made it a romance is because I felt we needed a happy ending around here. The fire, we all know was catastrophic! But my characters, Gabriel and Sarah, are to the Valley Fire, what Jack and Rose were to the Titanic. A love story,” I said.

“Oh, my Gosh Patti! That’s what you should have said to the agent! I completely get it now!”

So in hindsight, I guess I should have used that analogy. However, the fun part is the agent that was most interested said it sounded like a Nicholas Sparks book or movie. This made me happy because I’m a huge fan of his and yes, that is exactly how I envisioned it. Very Nicholas Sparks meets Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts.

So here goes:

When Gabriel Hart came to Lake County, California, after the Valley Fire burned more than a 1,000 homes, all he had in mind was to help rebuild the community.  After the loss of his own fiancée three years earlier, love was the furthest thing on his mind. But when his job put him up in a local hotel, he saw the most enchanting woman with green eyes.

Helping the fire victims to clean up their home sites on Cobb Mountain, Gabriel runs into this intriguing woman once again. She was helping a friend sift through the rubble of her burned home site. Maybe it was fate that brought them together.

In this story of catastrophic loss, community support, and renewed hope, two damaged souls try to mend their hearts while assisting those who lost virtually everything in the fire.

I will also tell you that I began the pitch with a word count and genre, which is about 80K words and a romance novel. They require that kind of info when they meet you.

Well, as I have said before in my previous post, you may comment and leave info about your experiences if you’d like to contribute to the book, or if you’d rather stay private, please email me at punkandude@gmail.com and in the subject matter write YOUR BLOG. I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Hope you all have a blessed Sunday and do something relaxing.

 

Hello, I’m Patti (Patricia) Diener.

I have always written as a creative outlet, but in the aftermath of Lake County’s Valley Fire, in September of 2015, I was not only compelled to write about it, but it was really all I could think of. With more than 1,000 homes lost and over 10,000 people in our community evacuated, the separation of families, and lost pets……. It was a kind of Armageddon that veteran firefighters called one of the most devastating California has ever seen.

What stood out to me as the most amazing thing though, was the undeniable compassion of humanity. Strangers helping one another in ways that you never see on the evening news. Stories that I heard and scenes that I witnessed, after such a catastrophic event, were not only uplifting, but inspirational. It gave me renewed faith in people.

So armed with stories, I set out to write a book of hope. A romance, I thought, of two people who were impacted very differently by this unspeakable atrocity. A man named Gabriel Hart, and a woman named Sarah McKinney, who’s lives would intertwine in the happenstance of their meeting after the fire.

But then I had an idea. The people that Gabe meets, (in the book), all have their stories of the fire. Their stories are of what happened to them during the fire, during their displacement for weeks, and their stories of how they are still trying to move forward and heal. These are real stories of real people!

My mission was to pay a tribute to the people of my community, with giving them a story with a happy ending. A story of love, camaraderie, and hope, is the best way I know to shed light in the darkness of such tragedy.

It was my hope, and great honor, to share anyone’s story in this book either as a character in it, or anonymously portrayed. There was, and still is, much healing that needs to happen. I know from other life experiences with great loss, sometimes just being heard and telling your story can be therapeutic. I hope I was able to help in some way by saying, you are not alone. I pray each person who experienced loss from this inferno, and any subsequent fires since then, has found not only a new beginning, but most importantly, peace.

Lake County is a special community and if I have anything to say about it, we will be on the map now, not because of the fires we’ve had around here, but because of the wonderful people who pulled together to rise out of the ashes and persevere. We are stronger together.