Time for another “story behind my stories.” This month, I’ll address what inspired my modern relationship drama, The Caretaker. This novel was quite a departure from the other things I’ve written, which, given my eclectic tastes, is really saying something.

Let’s start with a bit about this novel: Professional ballerina Sarah Gordon loses her leg in a car wreck and is forced to reinvent herself overnight. At the same time, she must rewrite the rules of her marriage because her husband, Joe, is trying to ensure nothing bad ever happens to her again. Even at the cost of her autonomy. The title refers to both of them—he’s taking care of her, and she’s taking his care—but Sarah is going to have to learn the delicate relationship dance between need and independence.

In terms of writing chronology, this novel followed the two historical novels I’d written, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno and Hardscrabble Road. It was originally published in 2014 and then, thanks to the fine folks at SFK Press, resurrected in February 2019. Not your usual Valentine’s Day story, but for those with a dark, gothic sensibility, it works as a sort of love child of Nora Roberts and Tim Burton.

Why did I move from historical fiction to a tale of modern relationships?

For one, I’d grown weary of my characters having to relieve themselves in outhouses and ditches. More generally, I wanted a setting and time I knew well so I could spend my time writing instead of researching.

In addition, a story my wife told me kept intruding into my thoughts. Early in our courtship, while discussing books and authors, she mentioned her father once had interacted with Alex Haley at an airport baggage carousel. I commented to her that I had never met any famous people—had never even seen one up close—and she told me the following: her years in ballet included a stint at Auburn University, where she danced with Bo Jackson (of football/baseball stardom and Nike “Bo Knows” ad fame). Jackson was taking ballet classes to improve his footwork and balance on the gridiron. He won the Heisman Trophy thereafter, so it must’ve worked.

Ballet not only requires world-class athletic performance, it demands a tremendous memory, because every part of the body must be held or moved a specific way, moment by moment, over the course of 90 minutes to two hours—and all in time to the music. While my wife didn’t perceive her memory was reliable enough for the professional level, some of her peers did pursue livelihoods in ballet. Unfortunately, their careers all ended identically: with an injury.

The lucky ones, while nursing a series of small breaks, tears, and sprains, heeded the voice in their mind that warned them to figure out what they wanted to do after they could no longer perform onstage. The unfortunate ones were at the top of their game when they suffered a sudden, catastrophic injury that meant they would never dance again, and they had made no preparations for what they would do with the rest of their lives.

Reinventing oneself is a theme I often explore in my novels—circumstances take a drastic turn and the protagonists must create a new life and new identity—so this idea of a dancer having to start over as someone else appealed to me. Add in a husband who is burdened by guilt and thinks love means doing things for his spouse instead of with her (a lesson I had to learn early in my marriage) and The Caretaker started to take shape.

I chose to set the story in the current era, in picturesque Aiken, South Carolina, where my wife and I lived during the first seven years of our marriage. After getting a lot of great details from my wife about ballet, I was ready to start writing!

Here’s the funny part: the decisions I then made about the plot forced me to do a ton of research first. See, it wasn’t dramatic enough to merely have Sarah suffer a career-ending injury (my first notion)—to amp up the trauma she was dealing with, I decided she needed to lose a limb. And I wanted to keep her doing creative, physical things that would be fun to describe, so I determined she would reinvent herself as a painter and sculptor. Because I’m not an amputee nor am I a painter or sculptor, I found myself interviewing and reading about prosthetists (makers of artificial limbs), amputees, and visual artists. Instead of writing.

Why couldn’t I just write my story and leave blanks where I needed to do some research about these topics? Other authors might have a different perception but, for me, everything affects everything. Losing a limb is going to affect, at least initially, every aspect of oneself. Striving to trade one form of artistry for another will have profound effects as well. Until I grasped those things and could imagine the world in these new ways, any writing I did would be superficial.

Perhaps you’re wondering why I don’t just write what I know and not burden myself with so much research. Good question. I suspect the real answer is that I’m a masochist. What I tell myself, though, is that I don’t know very much, so I need to write what I can find out.

And once I finally became comfortable telling the story of Sarah and Joe and their evolving relationship dance, did I decide to stick with this genre? Of course not—that would make too much sense. Naturally, I wrote the mystery Aftermath next.