There’s one question I hear all the time. “Where Do
You Get Your Ideas?” or “When or how or why did you become a
writer?” Here’s the real scoop.
I always wanted to be a writer but first I was a dreamer
and a reader. My taste tended toward great adventures and romance: War and
Peace, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Gone With The Wind, and mysteries with Nancy Drew, or the dashing heroes spun by Frank Yerby and Sidney Sheldon. I yearned to escape
into those worlds. Every night when I went to bed, I dreamed up a story to be
continued the next night. There would be previews first, a taste of what was to
come.
I read books on writing, attended university classes, and workshops. One suggestion repeated over and over was
to write what you know. Great. I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t happy with my
life and I didn’t want to grow up to be normal like my almost invisible parents and their friends. I didn’t want what other kids seem to want: school, jobs, marriage,
kids. That wasn’t for me. Since I was going to be a writer, I must experience
adventure and romance so I could write about them and understand life.
That’s how I met my six husbands. That’s how I got to
ride on the back of a motorcycle and participate in a documentary with the Hell’s
Angels. It’s why I chose a bus ride to Canada to see a motorcycle race instead
of staying in college. It’s why I became a go-go dancer to support myself and
my daughter.
Okay, to explain, I have to go back to the beginning.
I was born in 1942 in North Dakota at the home of my maternal grandparents. My
mother was staying at her childhood home until my father got out of the service. He was stationed on an army base in Tennessee. My maternal grandmother
was a force of nature not unlike a tornado. She turned their home into a
boarding house to supplement the income my grandfather made as a mason. Her
word was law and no one dared to go against her. My mother rebelled. I don’t
know the circumstances of why we left, I was just a baby, but she took me and
hitchhiked from North Dakota to Los Angeles and to the home of my father’s
parents. She endured terrible hardships on the way.
I never knew my mother very well but I’m sure I got my
rebellious streak from her. I do remember the Quonset hut the army provided where
we lived when my father came home. Unfortunately, my mother got sick with
cancer and we spent the last year of her life at my paternal grandparents’
home. I still remember the morning she died. I always went with both
grandparents to the Lutheran church on Sundays. This Sunday only my grandfather
took me. Even though I was only five, I knew already what I’d find when we got
home. Soon afterward, my father left on business to San Francisco. When he returned
three years later, he brought me a new mother.
Some of my happiest childhood memories were the years
I spent with my paternal grandparents. Both were good, sturdy, Norwegians. My
grandfather was born in Norway and wrote a book about his adventures as a
fisherman in the fjords. My grandmother was always either cooking, sewing, crocheting, or knitting. I remember sitting with her in the sewing room listening
to The Shadow or The Green Horner on the radio while she sewed my clothes.
I had one friend in the neighborhood my age. Vida's beautiful chestnut hair fell past her shoulders in corkscrew curls. Next
to her I felt like an awkward colt. Her mother had also died young and she
lived with her grandmother. Her
father had remarried, but Vida refused to go live with them.
My father chose my new mother because her mother had
died young and she had hated her stepmother. So my father thought she would
understand me. But I never got the chance to know her or like her before she
was forced on me as “my mother.” My father thought he’d fixed our family and we
would live happily ever after. We all knew that wouldn’t happen.
I dreamed of living on the Left Bank of Paris and
attending the Sorbonne. I would travel through Europe on a motorcycle with a
typewriter in the sidecar and earn my living as a writer, like Gertrude Stein
and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald.
Sadly, I never got to Europe. Spent six months in
Mexico, though. Almost got to Canada.
I did want to go to college. My aim was for a small
liberal arts college. My parents vetoed that idea right away. Too close to Camp
Pendleton. My parents picked a Lutheran college in Tacoma, Washington where
there were relatives to watch over me and I could stay with an aunt.
I met my first husband when I was selling Christmas
cards door to door through Junior Achievement. I was seventeen. Mark was 27, working
on his motorcycle with his bohemian, poetry writer, motorcycle rider, friends, and he bought a box
of Xmas cards from me even though he was Jewish.
I was in love. He was the
exact opposite of my parents. They were horrified and refused to let me see him.
I ran away two weeks before my eighteenth birthday when I was supposed to be
going to Washington for college. Mark hid me out with the leader of the Hell’s
Angels. They only agreed because he could fix their bikes when they broke down.
They kept me in a back room, where no one was allowed in, and told Mark that I couldn’t stay long. They were naturally nervous and didn’t want to get caught with an underage runaway. I didn’t want them in trouble so I
went home and told my parents I was ready to go to college. My stepmother took
me shopping and bought me a new college wardrobe.
I never did go to that Lutheran college after all. I arrived to stay with a cousin who would be attending same college. A
week before classes were to start, Mark told me he had a race in Canada. I told my aunt that I had to leave to see him race, but then I'd be back and be a good girl and
attend college. Please don’t tell my father. I got on a bus, got as far as
Seattle and got cold feet. I got back to my aunt’s house and as I feared she
had called my father. Sorry for me, my bags were packed, tuition refunded, and
I was put on a bus back to Los Angeles and given a room at the YWCA.
I married Mark on the way to a motorcycle race when I
was nineteen. I went to all his races, which were run on the same race tracks as the car races, which made it twice as exciting. Some time later he was invited to participate in a documentary with the Hell’s Angels. I rode on the back of Mark's Vincent Black Shadow. Mark had the required chain around his waist to ward off aggressive truck drivers.
I left Mark one year later and my father arranged to get the marriage annulled. Shortly afterward, when I turned twenty-one, I met
Husband No. 2.
Johnny was fifty and looked like Kurt Douglas or Burt
Lancaster. He was the character out of the Frank Yerby and Sidney Shelton
books. He was exciting and different. He’d been a hard hat diver and
demolitions expert and freelanced for the oil companies. He knew movie stars, was friends with John Wayne, and even
got to be an extra on one of his films, Red River. He’d been around the world
many times. One time in France, an Arab once shot at him six times and missed. Johnny was
half-Apache and could drink like no other I’ve seen and still walk straight. I
met him in a Santa Monica bar. He was recuperating from a fall off a three story
building and had fractured both feet.
I move in with him and rubbed his feet and
nursed him for three years until he could walk without a limp. We lived in
Mexico for six months, New York City for a summer, several cities in Florida,
then New Jersey. We changed our name a few times also. That’s when I figured
out that his ex-wife’s Sicilian brother was in the Mafia, and was hunting him.
He delivered our daughter in a car while we were
living in in the Florida Keys. We were too far from a hospital. My little girl was six
months old when we left Johnny and moved to Philadelphia.
I supported my daughter by working as a medical
secretary, a waitress, and a go-go dancer. The Flawed Dance became the fictionalized version of those years in the late sixties. In fiction I could be the heroine who fought the bad guys, infiltrated the mob and saved a couple of lives. Writing was therapeutic and helped me to understand those times in hindsight.
I met Husband No. 3, a bartender who
gave me my wonderful son. After a rocky five years with that husband, I took my
son and we left and moved back to California.
Husband No. 4 was a Hawaiian chef who took me to
Hawaii where I met his wonderful family and later gave birth to my beautiful
youngest daughter. No. 4 wasn’t so
wonderful. He stabbed a leader in the Mexican Mafia and we had to run for our lives and hide
for a while.
Two husbands followed after I moved to Texas. One was
for convenience. The other went to prison for killing a guy in a bar fight. I decided no more
marriages. I had my fill of adventure and romance. From then on, I would just
write about them.
So you think that after all these experiences I would have all the material I needed to write. I had enough characters running through my head to turn any of them into whoever I wanted them to be.
Now I watch my children and grandchildren make the
same kind of mistakes and I know I can’t help them. I know they wouldn't listen to me as I wouldn't listen to my parents. But at the same time I
learn from them. They introduced me to troubled teens,
runaways, parents struggling with their children, and making painful decisions.
From them and for them I write my Niki Alexander mystery series. Niki is an
ex-cop turned counselor for a teen shelter. She is the champion of the
runaways, the throwaways, the ones looking for a different life, seeking adventure
and excitement. She knows the dangers they face and she is there for them.
In the first book, Less Dead, Niki has to find an abandoned teenager, who might have witnessed a murder, before the murderer finds her. Lost Witness deals with a lost little boy caught in the center of a drug ring involving two brothers and the border between Texas and Mexico. Both books are available as e-books, print, and audio, and can be found on Amazon, iTunes and Audible.
The third book in the Niki Alexander series is A Matter of Revenge and is due to be released in September from Black Opal Books. This time Niki is faced with two pre-teen, runaway streets kids who have taken on as their mission to destroy a dangerous pedophile ring. More to come as the launch date approaches.
Love to read your comments.
http://lauraelvebak.com
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