Author Responses, Part Three

Our next author, Lenora Worth (her 2010 release, Hometown Princess is shown above) was full of great answers about housekeeping. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single
housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?

I'd invent some kind of machine that could wash, fold and put away
clothes. I seem to always be behind on the laundry.
Maybe a machine where you put them in and they go through the whole
process on a conveyor belt--start to finish!

Mindy's note: It exists--or nearly so. In a future blog post, I'll tell about a behind-the-scenes tour of a cruise ship that my husband and I took last fall. In the laundry room, we watched in awe as a worker put sheets and towels from the washer onto a conveyor belt, which brought them through a single machine that dried, pressed, and folded them!

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess? How does that factor into the story as a whole?

Sometimes, I'll have one character who is extremely neat and pit that
character against a slob. Or I'll show my character cleaning the house
while fretting about something or just dumping everything into a corner
so she can go for a long walk and talk to God. I think it's important
to show such traits to round out the character and give the reader a
sense of that character's quirks and reality.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?

In a book I just finished, the heroine is a life coach who "trains"
people to organize their homes. I put her up against a retired NFL
football player who's having a mid-life crisis and has allowed clutter
in both his home and in his head. It was fun, but it was also a tough
book to write because his emotional clutter really was causing him to
hoard things in order to built a wall around himself.

Great answers. Thanks, Lenora!