Drawing from Life by Paty Jager

Driving the swather cutting hay

I received my rights back to a contemporary western novella that was in a box set. The idea for the story came as I was cutting hay and listening to music on my MP3. A song came on and a phrase stuck in my head. I liked the phrase for a title of a book and stopped in the field to write it down in my book I carry with me while driving farm equipment.

When I was asked to contribute to the box set the phrase came back to me and I wanted to make the story reflect the phrase.

I thought of my granddaughter struggling to read because she has dyslexia. And how I'd once pushed her when I thought she was being rebellious when she acted like she couldn't remember the simple words in the story she was to read for practice. Her form of dyslexia can't decipher the small words. She does better with the big words. I started digging into the disorder and discovered there are many different forms. My son-in-law sees up and down lines of letters instead of across. He has to use a bookmark to keep his eyes following the right direction to read.

That's when I decided to come up with a heroine who had dyslexia and was never helped as a child. She was in the foster care system and because of her tendency to run away was never really and never in one school long enough to be diagnosed as anything other than didn't try and was uncooperative.

She's on her own, working at a horse stable, and surviving, even though she can't read.

Along comes a man, a veterinarian, someone who has had years of schooling and he takes and interest in her. And that is the premise of Catch the Rain.  The phrase is used in the book as the heroine explains to the hero, how it is for her to try and read.

The other fun part with this story was asking my daughter, the vet tech, questions about a bovine c-section. She, of course, gave me way more information than I needed, but it made for a great scene in the book to show how well the hero and heroine worked together.  

Catch the Rain

Running from her past, Kitty Baxter catches a glimpse of her future—if she’s brave enough to believe in herself and the kind-hearted stranger who claims she deserves love. 

Focused on setting up his new veterinarian practice, Zach MacDonald becomes sidetracked by a karaoke singing beauty with a secret. He sees what others do not and becomes determined to make Kitty see that anyone can learn to catch the rain.

 

universal buy link:

https://www.books2read.com/u/4NROdN  

Paty Jager is the award-winning author of the Shandra Higheagle Mystery series. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. Paty and her husband raise alfalfa hay in rural eastern Oregon. Riding horses and battling rattlesnakes, she not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.



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