Spoilers ahead, as usual. If you haven’t read the book yet, you might want to wait to read this post until you do.
When I first outlined A Shot at Gold, I knew I wanted to write an age-gap book about archery, but that was about it. I outline in bullets and keep things pretty open for myself, so an outline might say, “Madison is at college and saying goodbye to friends, about to start her archery camp thingy.” And yes, it would have said ‘thingy.’ Then, I fill it in as I write the chapter. Since Madison was about to turn 23, and Elodie was ten years older, I knew that was a pretty big difference generally, in regards to maturity and life experience.
At first, I had no plans to handle that in any way, but when I realized that Elodie had gone through the loss of a father figure, it hit me: Madison could have gone through a loss, too. So, I came up with the idea of Wiley and the loss of a first love, which would be traumatic and life-altering and would mature Madison much faster than any other person her age who might be attending that archery program.
That loss-experience connection was then something I could use and reference throughout the book, and as I was writing it, I really loved that part of the story, including the second cell phone that Madison keeps just because she wants to continue to send Wiley messages. It gave me something I could use to demonstrate that Madison was finally able to move on when she lost it and knew she was ready for Elodie.
A Shot at Gold
Sports Series Book #2
Genre: Lesbian Romance
Release Date: July 16th, 2020
Formats: Kindle, Paperback
Length: 62,080 words
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