Friends, I’m delighted to welcome back to the blog longtime friend and bestselling author Paula Scott. Today we’re chatting about her most recent release, Leaving Lonesome, a novel set in California during the Vietnam War era. This book has been a long time in coming, and I’m delighted to have the chance to introduce it to you.

Welcome back, Paula! You’ve said that Leaving Lonesome was twenty-five years in the making. What took you so long, and what finally carried you over the finish line?

I started writing Leaving Lonesome on New Year’s Day 1995 with my young daughters playing at my feet. The girls were two and four and took up a lot of my energy, but there was a story inside of me that needed to come out. I was dealing with my beloved uncle’s suicide, along with trying not to worry about my husband flying helicopters for the Army. Leaving Lonesome won a contest, which landed me a New York literary agent, who had me rewrite the story. In the midst of this, I found myself pregnant again, while I was also working for a daily newspaper writing feature stories. I ended up on bedrest with that pregnancy and had to quit my newspaper job for a while.

Ultimately, Lonesome didn’t sell to New York publishers and the Hollywood movie option my agent got me expired without a movie being made. I wrote two more novels, but my literary agent wasn’t happy with these stories. The years blurred by. Keeping up with my little ones with my husband often away flying missions was exhausting. I was also experiencing a spiritual awakening. I decided to leave my literary agent and newspaper job in an attempt to save my marriage. I knew I needed to be a better wife and a better mom, and I couldn’t do that and write novels, too.

So I quit writing for years and had four more babies, which made my husband, Scott, happy. I grew happier too. Scott began going to church with me and the children and our growing faith was so life-changing. Scott left the military, and we became stone-fruit farmers. Finally, when the youngest of our seven children started kindergarten, I began to seriously write again. After a publishing handful of novels on Amazon, I wanted to resurrect Leaving Lonesome because this story is so near and dear to my heart. It took me six months to rewrite Lonesome, and now here we are.  

You wrote Leaving Lonesome partly as a gift to your father-in-law. Tell us a bit about that.

My father-in-law, Retired Colonel Rick Fields, once told me how he won his battlefield commission as a 19-year-old door gunner in Vietnam. His story was fascinating. At the time, I wrote feature stories for newspapers and often interviewed amazing people like Colonel Fields. I so wanted to write my father-in-law’s incredible story but wasn’t sure how to do that. Some of his experiences in Vietnam found their way into Leaving Lonesome. Of course, they were fictionalized. But last fall when I got serious about putting Lonesome into readers’ hands, I sat down with Colonel Fields and asked him if I could put more of what he really experienced in Vietnam into the story. In the book, there is now a little monkey eating Kool-Aid that my character John Reno cuts out of a mosquito net. That is Colonel Fields’s experience, along with the helicopter crash and subsequent rescue of Colonel Kane on the battlefield. We did not use the colonel’s real name, even though he is no longer living. In the battle scene, Colonel Fields is the door gunner SSG Kelly. Unlike in the book, there was no pilot like John Reno helping him on the battlefield, and he saved Colonel Kane by himself.   

By my count, you’ve published five books in the last several years, including last year’s spiritual memoir Farming Grace, which I loved. Leaving Lonesome is your sixth published book. You’re also the mom of seven—four of which are still at home—and a real-life farm girl. How on earth do you manage to be so prolific?

My first novel came out in 2016. My goal was to produce two books a year, but I soon realized that was too hard on my family and on me, so now my goal is a book a year. Several of these novels, I wrote from scratch. Some of them I had already written and had only to rewrite them. I haven’t watched TV in years, and I’m amazed at how much extra time I have. I get up early in the morning and write or do author work for the first several hours of my day. So early mornings and evenings are my time to produce my books. Our four youngest boys still at home are not up early in the morning. Now they all play football, and my husband has become a high school football coach, so for much of the year, Scott and the boys are at football practice in the afternoons and early evenings. I just have to get my boys fed when they get home, and then I go back to writing until I’m too tired to write anymore.

One of the things I love about all of your books is your courage in telling life like it is—facing life’s terrific brokenness while celebrating its beauty. Your stories are raw, but there’s always— always—redemption. What redeeming message do you hope readers take away from Leaving Lonesome?

I hope readers experience the redeeming power of forgiveness. This is the theme of the story, forgiveness. My beloved uncle spent his final hours with me before he went home and hung himself one summer afternoon when I was twenty-three years old. I was so hurt and angry over this. Writing Leaving Lonesome helped me heal from that tragedy. I needed to learn to not only forgive my uncle but to forgive myself. I didn’t see his suicide coming. For several years I wondered a thousand agonizing times what I could have said, what I could have done to keep my favorite uncle from taking his life. After I finished that first draft of Lonesome, I didn’t wonder anymore. I laid my pain to rest in the pages of that story. In a way, I was leaving my own lonesome behind in that novel. I hope readers also experience the power of forgiveness while reading the story.   

From a publishing perspective, Leaving Lonesome, like all of your books, falls into that tricky spot that refuses to fit neatly in either the Christian publishing space or mainstream. Your books tend to be viewed as too gritty for the traditional Christian market (though that’s changing, thank goodness), and too spiritual for the mainstream. As an author, why do you continue to choose to write into this “in-betweenness”?

This in-betweenness is where I’ve landed again and again. I’ve tried to make my writing fit into a traditional market both secular (in my early years) and Christian (later in life), but I’m a by-the-seat-of-my-pants writer and the stories write themselves. This used to scare me. Where are these raw stories coming from? I wondered. But after working with an amazing author coach, Alice Crider, for several years, I have discovered I write out of my wounds, and wounds are messy. I’m finally okay with my mess. My books aren’t for everyone. Real life, real redemption is where I’ve landed, and it’s a soft place to fall.

Thank you, Paula! It’s been a joy.

About the author:

Paula Scott is a bestselling author with a background in journalism. She is also a farmer. A fifth-generation Californian, her great-great-grandmother came to California in a covered wagon and married a farmer. Paula’s family has been farming ever since in the Sacramento Valley. Paula works on her family’s farm in the summertime and writes during the winter months. Connect with her at paulascott.com.

About the book:

A family torn apart by war. A love affair that reaches to the sky. And a secret with the power to redeem or destroy them…

Sutter County, California 1972

John Reno returns from Vietnam a disgraced army helicopter pilot wracked by guilt and grief. Homeless and alone he makes his way from one crop-dusting job to the next until he reaches the woman who can grant him redemption or ensure his damnation.

Swampy Callohan is a young widow barely holding on to her crop-dusting company. She flies her trusty old Stearmans from dawn until dusk, desperate to make it in a man’s world of faster, more efficient ag cat planes, but time, technology, and a family on the brink threaten to destroy her.

When John Reno—the best pilot she’s ever seen— arrives one fateful afternoon, she believes Callohan Dusters can be saved. And maybe her heart will be reborn as well. Reno becomes her saving grace until the day she discovers he harbors a secret that just might shatter her whole world.

Buy the book here.

Thanks to the author for providing me a free copy. All opinions are mine.

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