As a voracious lifelong reader (except for the few years before my older brother taught me to read a year or two prior to when I started first grade), I’ve read just about every kind of fiction there is. Classics, literary, science fiction, historical, horror, suspense, military, westerns, on and on. But I admit it: I never read a romance novel in my life. That’s why it was so strange to me when my novel Miss Rosalie And The Primrose Fool was published in the romance category.

To me, it is clearly Americana Fiction. But since the term is completely unknown in the publishing world – even though almost every novel on the general fiction shelves these would fit in such a category – and since it didn’t fit neatly into any other classification, it went into the romance category by default simply because one aspect of it is the fifteen-year relationship between Rosalie Leonard Dolan and Deke Sadler, of no middle name.

It’s set in the tiny ranching village of Melrose, New Mexico, and much of its plot points are based on my memories of the place and its people from when I lived there for a year as a child. The enduring romance between Miss Rosalie and Deke, though, is more like the long relationship between my Aunt Patsy and the man she finally married a few years before she passed away (a gentleman who was considered as much a part of the Chance clan as anyone who had officially married into it).

Miss Rosalie is about many things – sorrow, joy, hardship, uncontrolled nature, daily life, early tragic death, the relentless passage of time – in a place where change has always come slow.

Oh yeah, and there’s some implied sex, too.

But . . . romance?

Naw. The romance is secondary to the glorious American experience the people of Primrose share on the vast high plains of New Mexico, and that’s why it’s one of my favorite projects.