Romancing the Story: Writing Romance, Storytelling, and Book Structure

Ep 51 - How Rural Settings Shape Stories with E.F. Dodd

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"The city is a beautiful backdrop for (character's) to live their lives in. Whereas in a small town, it's really part of the story."

Romance author E.F. Dodd holds a special place in her heart for rural settings and even set her latest book, A Higher Standard, in a small North Carolina town. We chat how specific settings influence your story and tone of a book. Plus, there's discussion on how to avoid the stereotypes of small-town settings and making a romance worthy of a smooth city slicker and a fiery country girl falling for each other.

E.F.'s Books:
https://amzn.to/3MNqvHJ

Connect with E.F.:
https://www.efdoddwrites.com/
Instagram: @e.f.dodd
Facebook:  @efdoddwrites

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Time Stamps

[00:02:25] Indie romance author EF Dodd.
[00:04:20] Writing two books at once.
[00:09:38] Rural North Carolina.
[00:13:55] Equine rescue as unique cause.
[00:16:02] Realistic rural setting.
[00:19:58] Importance of female friendships.
[00:22:14] Importance of community in small towns.
[00:26:47] Small town community dynamics.
[00:30:56] Romance in rural settings.
[00:33:34] Preserving historic buildings.
[00:37:13] Love and Business.

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Transcript: Ep 51 - How Rural Settings Shape Stories with E.F. Dodd

00:00 Sarah Gamez - Hello, Romantics! I'm Sarah Gamez, author, romance lover, and host. You're listening to Romancing the Story, a podcast centered around writing, reading, and story structure, all with a twist of romance. We're at episode 51, and on today's episode, I chat with romance author EF Dodd about rule settings and how they influence a story. Plus, we talk about how to make the most of a rule setting for romance or any story, the challenges it presents, and the inspiration for some of the rule staples in EF's latest book. If you're interested, links to connect with EF, her books, and other mentions will be listed in the description. I do use some Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy through the link, it helps the podcast and is always appreciated. Want to learn to write book blurbs that sizzle with sexual tension, pulse with passion, and seduce your readers in seconds flat? Introducing the Spicy Blurb Playbook, the ultimate guide to writing super steamy back covers that have readers begging to buy your books. In this self-paced, comprehensive, and author-friendly course, professional book blurb writer Jesse Cunniffe reveals the spicy strategies that get readers hot under the collar from the get-go. The Spicy Blurb Playbook will give you the real deal on writing blurbs in the first and dual first-person POV. A simple method for pinpointing what makes your characters vibe and how to convey their unique spark in just a few words. How to describe drool-worthy hotties that practically appear right before your readers' eyes, and lusty literary techniques that are magic for romance blurbs. Quick start blurb templates, and so much more. Course access is lifetime, so head to SpicyBlurbPlaybook.com and use the code ROMANCETHESTORY for 10% off. With that said, let's jump right in. Welcome indie romance author EF Dodd.

02:28 E.F. Dodd - Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

02:30 Sarah Gamez - And in case listeners don't know, can you tell them a little bit about yourself and your writing?

02:36 E.F. Dodd - Sure. I am an indie romance author. I started my own imprint, Sugar Beaver Books, which is what releases all of my books. Right now, my latest book, A Higher Standard, just came out on May 16th. It's the first book in a series, and my other two books, Risky Restoration and Earning It, are part of a separate series. I have another book coming out this fall, and then plans for future releases, fingers crossed if everything goes according to plan. Most of what I write is contemporary. I have a second, I have a quote unquote real job. The research that is required for historical romantic fiction, that's a lot more than I'm willing to bite off at this point. So we'll stick with contemporary for right now.

03:29 Sarah Gamez - I love that you mentioned that this is part of a series, A Higher Standard, which just released because you had so many awesome, cute little quirky characters in there. It just reminded me so much of like a feel-good rom-com that I just like, I really want to follow more of these characters.

03:49 E.F. Dodd - Well, hopefully that'll happen. Fingers crossed. Well, and the release in fall that you're looking at, is that part of this series? That one is actually part of the first series. So the first series that I wrote, I call it Not Looking for Love. That's Risky Restoration is where it starts, and then Earning It is the second book. And that series involves three female friends, Kez, Ray, and V. So Kez was the first book, Ray was the second book, and then V will be the third book. So her book will come out, assuming I get it to my copy editor in time, her book should come out around October.

04:29 Sarah Gamez - Oh, nice. So were you writing both of the books at the same time? Oh my gosh, you are a brave woman. You are so much braver than I am.

04:40 E.F. Dodd - I feel like I just like get, you know, to cross the streams too much. It's hard. This is the first time that I've had two books come out in one year, because with Risky, I started it essentially, it was an idea that I had kind of floating around in the back of my mind. And then COVID happened. And I, you know, I had kind of dabbled here and there, written a few pages, paragraphs, whatever. And I thought, you know what, why not? You know, if this, if there's a time to put, put your little warm fingers on that keyboard and crank this out, this is probably a good one. So I did that. And then, you know, finished it up. And the flow on that one was pretty good. And so I had basically the start of the second book right after I finished that book. And so earning it came pretty quickly right after that. And then the higher standard came about really because I wasn't sure what direction to go with the third book in the Not Looking for Love series with V's book. And so I did the responsible thing and said, well, I just won't worry about that. I'll write something else. So that's what started a higher standard. But then, so I started writing these once I was working through developmental edits of a higher standard. And it is complicated. I understand fully why a lot of authors say I'm one book a year and that's it. Because writing one while developmentally editing another, and then, you know, trying to keep all that straight and this world is over here and this is over there. It's a complicated thing. I don't know that I'll make, I don't want to call it a mistake, but I don't know that I'll bite off that much again. Yeah. Writing one book a year is already a task, much less. It really is. Like I say, I completely understand why people only do one a year. It just doesn't. Because it's a lot and I didn't know anything about any of that process when I first started. I just thought, well, you know, you write it and then it comes out.

06:53 Sarah Gamez - But obviously, you know, that's not the case. Well, and while you were writing a higher standard, did you go into it thinking or maybe in the midst of writing it, think that, oh, I'm going to make this a series?

07:02 E.F. Dodd - I wasn't sure when I started it. I honestly thought it would be a standalone. But then as I got further into it, because I am not a person who outlines all of their book, I think it's great if you can do that. I applaud you. You have much better control than I do. I usually will start with an idea and kind of sketch it out. This is this is kind of what I want it to look like a very basic. A lot of times it's not even written down anywhere except on the notes in my iPhone. And it's just super basic, a few sentences. And then I take that and just start writing. That's the process that works for me. I can't if I outline it, I find myself getting too in-depth in the outline and I'm basically writing the book anyway. So with a higher standard, it came about because we adopted an English Bulldog from a local rescue in August of twenty-one. And we had had bulldogs before, but we had we had never gotten one that was a rescue. I had grown up with going to the Humane Society and getting a dog or strays that would wander up. And so we did that. And I had no idea really the effort and work that is required of all these volunteers for these different animal rescues. And it's true volunteer work. You know, they don't get paid anything like they exist solely on donations and people willing to just donate their time, their houses to for these dogs to stay in, to foster until they get adopted. And some of these dogs have some pretty significant health issues and they fund that and they pay for it. And so I thought, you know, if there was ever anything where there was a book, it's something like this because there's just so much there to write about. And it's just the people that you meet through rescue are really interesting folks and they're just good people. And so I thought, you know, that would be a really good setting for a romance. And so that's kind of where it started with me.

09:31 Sarah Gamez - Well, and I love that you bring that up because in your latest release, The Higher Standard, it does take place in rural North Carolina. And you very much have the opposites attract with like the businessman and the horse rancher who like buttheads, but they can't deny those intense feelings. So like you wrote books, that book in a very clever way. I love how you utilize and interwove the setting as part of the plot as well. When you were writing that setting, like that was where is it always going to be the method that I'm going to interweave this as part of the plot? When you said, I like the bulldog, and I'm going to use this as fodder for my next romance.

10:09 E.F. Dodd - Well, the setting and I this is obviously or I shouldn't say obviously, this is not my own thought. Someone in a writing class said this and I can't remember who it was, but it's basically, you know, the setting in a lot of books is like another character because it plays such an important role in the story. And for me, where I live in North Carolina, it is it is rural. You know, I lived in Charlotte for many years and then I moved out into a more rural area. But the urban sprawl is headed this way. And Charlotte, I think, especially during Covid, was one of the fastest growing places in the nation. And so that was I wanted to capture some of that, you know, on the one hand, it's absolutely great to be five minutes from three Harris Teeters. On the other hand, you know, you're losing a lot of the character of a place if it just becomes subdivision after subdivision and, you know, you're just clear-cutting wide swaths of land for development. And so I wanted to, you know, make that kind of be a theme in the book, too, because it is important to preserve these rural areas. And I'm not against progress, but I also don't want everything to just be a postage stamp of something else. And so I tried to make Mimosa be a unique place that maintains some of its character. And it was important to me that Gideon as the big shot developer, that was a challenge for me because in this day and age, a real estate developer is very rarely the hero of any story. They are the the evil villain that comes to town. And so I wanted to make sure that he wasn't somebody that needed to change who he was. I mean, he was the same guy. He just changed his plan. And to me, that was more realistic than something you might get in. And I love a Hallmark movie just as much as the next person. But it's, you know, it's not like he was walking away from his Peloton life. He was still the same guy. He just realized that there were better opportunities to pursue in Mimosa instead of the plan he originally had, which was start from the ground up. There were roots there that he could use to build into, you know, to grow into something else. 

12:42 Sarah Gamez - I'm so glad you said that, because that's exactly where my mind went immediately, was the Hallmark movie. I was just like, it's Hallmark, but like meets sweet home Alabama, where it's you very much love these characters and they're still good. Like you see inside of him, he's not like, like you said, greedy. The hero is not like greedy or he's not trying to ruin anything. He's just doing his job and he's still very much the same person inside. Like he just allows that to be more prominent, right, throughout the book. Yeah, that was kind of my goal for it. Yeah. And the protagonist, who Everest kind of brings that out in him, you know. Oh, and she feisty too. I do love her. I'm not going to lie. 

13:30 E.F. Dodd - She was fun to write. She was really fun to write. I enjoyed that. And, you know, I grew up with horses. My parents still have eight at this point and they're in their late seventies. So, you know, horses have always been a pretty big part. Of my life and they're just and that was the reason. That I did an equine rescue instead of. Something with, you know, dogs or smaller animals, because. Cats and dogs get a lot of attention, you know, Sarah McLaughlin, that song, you can't hear it without thinking of some desperate animal in dire need of your help. But what a lot of people don't understand, because you don't see a stray horse, you know, you'll see a stray dog or stray cat. So, you know that that's an issue. But until some of these hoarding cases make the news or every year around the Kentucky Derby, people start talking about all of the mistreatment of horses in horse racing. But it's just kind of little blips of. Well, this is happening and then it just kind of disappears. And so, unfortunately, it's a real issue. Because it's a huge animal. It's a huge responsibility. It's a huge commitment. And it's a huge expense if you take care of them the way they need to be. And so that was why I wanted to make sure it was something that maybe wasn't in the forefront of people's minds, as I say, like cats and dogs. You know, the horse rescue really drives home that, you know, there's other animals out there. There's lots of farm animals out there that need help, too. It's not just the cute little puppy on the TV.

15:14 Sarah Gamez - Well, and when you frame it like that; in my mind, I was thinking that it kind of brought out more of the rural setting when I think of horses, because my friends grew up. I actually grew up kind of in a smaller town, too. And some of my friends lived out towards more towards a country. So they had horses. I live near, you know, Fort Worth, Texas. So the rodeo is a big deal. So I guess, yeah, I have family members who have horses and stuff like that. And I know what a big commitment. And sometimes how forgotten they can be, because I know, like you said, race horses, too. Like there's a racetrack not too far from in this area. It's one of those things that kind of drove home that rural setting. It reminded me a lot of my friends and how they were so good with horses. And they kind of lived out in that nice kind of quiet country area.

16:02 E.F. Dodd - And I think the rural setting is I don't want to say it's hard to do, but it's harder to do it. So it doesn't look like a caricature, if that makes sense; so that it feels like this could be a real place. And these people are real. And it's not just, you know, a bunch of people shuffling around and overalls getting in their pickup trucks. Really, what I tried to do in this book was to make it seem like a real place with, you know, real people. And they weren't just stereotypes. They were, you know, people that you would find in any small town.

16:35 Sarah Gamez - You incorporated so many cool, interesting details and what life in the country kind of would look like. And especially when talking about the horses, kind of like you mentioned. Because I knew some of the terminology mentioned. I don't know a whole lot about horses, but I remember my friends talking about them. I remember meeting the horses quite a bit. So I never rode one. I cannot say I shared that, but I did get to pet them. I got to help take care of them sometimes when we went out to their place. But like readers get to experience the radical differences through the lens of Gideon. Like you said, kind of this bigger big city protagonist, someone who's from the like Boston, who may not know what it's like to, you know, ride a horse as we see in the introduction (of the book).

17:20 E.F. Dodd - Yeah. It really is kind of a shock to you because I have good friends that are from the city and they, you know, from New York or Boston or whatever. And and the way I grew up is so foreign to them. I mean, I might as well have been on some other planet. And it's, you know, like there's a scene in the book where Everest is replacing the blades on a lawnmower. And there's people, some of the friends of mine that have read it or that, you know, have looked at looked at some of these scenes. Some of the guys said, well, I didn't even know that was a thing. Because they've never had to do it. You know, some of my good friends who are from up north. They didn't live in a house. They live in an apartment. So they didn't have, you know, their dad didn't mow the lawn. Their dad didn't have a lot more. They didn't have any of this stuff. And so, yeah, it was kind of what I wanted to use was to emphasize the differences through scenery rather than, you know, just saying city guy, country girl.

18:24 Sarah Gamez - Right. And like you said, I think it was such an important and great aspect that you added all these quirky kind of really lovable characters, you know, as kind of like the supporting cast, because I feel like that really kept the momentum. I feel like sometimes in a rural setting, you have to be careful because they can get a little boring or mundane. But you really kept that momentum between like taking care of, like you said, the equine rescue and all these wonderful supporting characters that you added into the book. That's why I'm so excited. You said it was a series.

18:59 E.F. Dodd - Yeah, I think for me, sometimes writing some of these side characters is almost as much fun as writing for the main characters because you have a little bit more freedom with those folks. You know, I mean, they're not the focus of the story. They can be a little bit zanier or they can have a little bit of a stronger of opinion or, you know, what have you. And they just really add, I think, layers to a story because in I think the difference between romance now and romance, say, I don't know, 20 years ago, at least in the books that that I remember reading, you didn't have these like the female main character wouldn't have a big group of friends. She would be kind of, you know, on an island to herself. And then she would just assimilate into the male main characters life. You know, he might have friends; she's just this kind of island onto herself. And I think it's important in a romance. Well, really, from my perspective, in any book that you write, I think female friendships are really the foundation of a lot of really good books. And the relationship between the women and their friends is equally as important, obviously for different reasons, but equally as important between, you know, as the relationship she develops with the main male character, with the love interest. And I think a lot of people have seen that even more now since Covid; the importance of having that connection, the importance of having that friend group and finding ways to just stay connected with those people is just as important as staying connected to your romantic partner.

20:42 Sarah Gamez - And, now that you mentioned that reminds me so much of an episode I did about Cozy Mystery, because you did the same thing that I think of when I think of my small town. Me and my husband both grew up in small towns, is that you kind of built your own community. And especially in this book, which was really, I think, what I saw in it as far as when I was reading it, because it just reminded me like, I know someone like that. I do know someone from my town from like that. And you built this wonderful little community where they were so interconnected. And that's what I saw a lot growing up. It was you knew a lot of your neighbors. You knew a lot of the people around town that you saw all the time. My aunt did very much because she was a real estate agent. So she knew like everybody in town. And it felt very much like that, like is very tight knit community and like something that was maybe a little more foreign to someone in the big city, but like very much part of what I consider a staple of the rural setting.

21:51 E.F. Dodd - Yeah. Mm hmm. I mean, the town I grew up in, my high school, I went to school with the same class of people from first grade all the way through senior year. I mean, we had a few people come in, you know, that move and then things like that. But I mean, for the most part, you saw the same people growing up every day, day in, day out. And you would see them at the grocery store or you would see them at the two or three restaurants that you got; these places like the coffee shop in A Higher Standard, they really are kind of the hub of the community. You know, you go in there to get your news, you go in there to make sure Mr. So-and-so is feeling OK or Mrs. Such-and-such doesn't need any help with X, Y or Z. And I think it's important to have that community center because that helps keep the town alive.

22:46 Sarah Gamez - Very much so. And did you face any writing challenges when it came to creating kind of the rural setting and this little type of community when you were working on A Higher Standard?

22:57 E.F. Dodd - Well, I think the hardest thing for me was to make Gideon assimilate more into that community; because when I watch some of these Hallmark romcoms or Hallmark Christmas movies, the guy from New York all of a sudden decides that he's going to live in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota, just because it's so cute and has a such-and-such festival. It lacks a little credulity. You know, it's a cute movie. It's a cute concept. But there needs to be more of a foundation laid for why they would move. And you can't, in reality, base a decision like that solely on your relationship with one other person. There has to be something else in that community that makes you want to go there. And so that was the challenge for me was to make Mimosa a place that Gideon would want to go. So it couldn't be too isolated. It had to be for him to really want to be there. It needed to have at least proximity to another larger city. And so, you know, I tried to make sure that came through, because it's not like he's moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere. He still has opportunities. He's still within, you know, an hour's drive of a major airport. He's still within an hour's drive of great restaurants and things like that. So that was what I had to layer in and was one of the more difficult parts of it, was to make sure that Mimosa was a believable landing spot for him. And he wasn't just throwing it up in the air and saying, I love her, I'm moving there, regardless of where it is.

24:45 Sarah Gamez - That's a very good point; because, if the romance had fizzled out like what else could tie that protagonist to that?

24:56 E.F. Dodd - Yeah, why would you be there? You know and the side characters. I mean, not only did Gideon have to buy into his decision, but his business partners also had to as well. And I don't want to give too much away. But there's parts in the book where they have to weigh in on certain decisions he's making. It's not like he can just say; well, this is happening. I mean, he has two partners that he works with and they have to agree to certain choices. And you want that friendship group to be strong, too; that was a fun thing I got to kind of play with in this book was the male friendship side of it. So it's not just Everest and her girlfriends in Mimosa; Gideon has his close friends back up in Boston that he's been good friends with since college. And so you had to weave the dynamic; they're not just happy for him because he's found this girl that he loves. They're happy for him because he's making a change in his life that's actually going to be truly beneficial. And it's not going to hurt the company that they've all worked to build. And everything comes up roses, which is obviously why it's fiction. But it helps it be more believable. If everybody in the story can buy into the justifications for what they're doing.

26:22 Sarah Gamez - And you also you created these great connections between all these characters. And you kind of created your own distinct tone throughout the book, you know, mentioning like how Everest had her girlfriends, but Gideon had his business partners, who was also friends with, and all those connections throughout the community. Do you think the role setting influenced your book's tone?

26:47 E.F. Dodd - I think so, because I think it was easier, at least for me; I think it's easier to develop a sense of community in a small-town book than it is for a book set in the city. I think you can develop a good friendship group. Set in the city. And I think that they can have their favorite haunts and they can have things that they like about it and they can love living there. But the community is much more about the people than the place. I think when you're basing something in a city, the city is this beautiful backdrop for them to live their lives in. Whereas with a small town, it's really part of the story. You know because there's more people. It makes more sense for the characters to have closer relationships with more people in a small town than it does in a big city. Because if you go to the grocery store in the big city, well, the person at the checkout line is probably going to be different every time. Or you might go to six different grocery stores instead of the one or two that that are available to you. And so I think the small town setting really helps you really makes it easier to develop a sense of community than in the city. And I think the other thing of it is that in this, at least in my experience, a book that's set in a larger city, you have your work friends, you have your social friends, you have your people that go to the same gym. It's very distinct groupings. And a lot of times they don't really intersect. But in a small town, well, all those people are the same people because it's small. You don't have these different segments of the population that you come into contact with. You just come into contact with the population of the small town.

28:55 Sarah Gamez - That was something I was about to mention, too, because since we moved out of our small towns, both me and my husband, to a bigger metropolis; we're very segmented. And who our friends are, the work friends, the gym friends, the church friends. But those are like all the friends you have in small towns. And then usually I come across their path, every time I go back into my our small town; my mom still lives there. So if we ever go back, I always see someone I grew up with. But in the grocery store, and I'm always sitting there usually catching up with them.

29:33 E.F. Dodd - I mean, that happens any time I go home, because my parents still live in my hometown, too. And any time I go home, I'll see somebody that I know from when I was going to church there when I was little, when I was in school; I'll see somebody that I know. Or somebody's mom will say, “Oh, so and so wants to make sure that I said hello or such and such.” Or I'll see, you know, my old high school algebra teacher or something, you know. And you just don't really have that in a larger metropolis.

30:10 Sarah Gamez - No, even when I tell certain friends, “OK, I'm going to this big event in the city.” I'll be surprised if I do see them, unless we are like distinctly say, “OK, I'm here. Let's meet up” or something like that. But I'm always running into somebody usually when I go back home. So you present some pretty high stakes for both protagonists to win over the potential love interest. There are some (stakes) like the land itself is kind of that part of the plot. We mentioned that you keep readers invested in the characters connections throughout. How did he use the rural settings tone to contribute to the romance as opposed to detract from it?

30:56 E.F. Dodd - Well, I think for Everest, it was she wanted to get in to understand that this part, this land, this town, this was pretty much part of her DNA. I mean, she wasn't going to leave it. And I think the hardest thing for her was she knew that and she never wavered from that. And so that presented a conflict on her part because she felt “well, how can I ask him to do something I know I can't do”? You know, I'm not going to move. I can't move there. My business is not portable. Not just going to ship all these horses up to someplace right outside of Boston. And I think her attachment to her hometown was a good external conflict for the book to kind of keep things invested as to her own inner turmoil. You know, I really like this guy. I'd like to see where things can go. But where can they really go? Because I live here. He lives there, and I'm obviously not going there. And for Gideon, I think it was just it helped that the setting really opened his eyes to a different lifestyle and one that he could have. But he didn't have to completely give up his old life and find something completely new. He just had to sort of adapt his way of thinking about what he wanted to accomplish down there. And I think, again, the rural setting was key to that, because a lot of what you see in some of the smaller towns and more rural areas is you have these downtowns that were built in, you know, 1886 or 1910 or what have you. And it's not just all new construction. It's buildings with character. And that setting helped to open up Gideon's mindset as to what he was looking to do in Mimosa. And he saw this really cool architecture and these old buildings and the possibility to bring them back to life instead of going out and finding 100 acres of vacant land and just building brand new things.

33:22 Sarah Gamez - I will say that was one of the things that really endeared me to Gideon was the fact that he thought of ways to spruce these buildings, existing buildings, up as opposed to like tear them down and build something else. Because there's so much character to some of those old buildings. Were those influenced by the town you grew up?

33:38 E.F. Dodd - My hometown has an historic downtown. And there are houses, they do an historic homes tour. It's called the October tour. And there's houses there that date from like the late 1700s. And the entire community is pretty invested in maintaining those places and making sure the historic aspects of those are preserved. And then in the downtown, it's I mean, there are new buildings, quote unquote. But as far as, you know, our main street, I mean, it's a historic main street. And, you know, there's rules and regulations about what you can and can't do. And pretty much everything down there is a rehabbed old building.

34:32 Sarah Gamez - That's good. At least they're trying to preserve them. In my husband's old town, there was - it was probably almost 100 years old – a cute little like old house that was like two, three stories. They just don't build them like that anymore. And it was kind of abandoned. And it was just the dream to move in and make it a bed and breakfast. That was my dream, but then it burned down because of an electrical fire. But it was just such a bummer. That's such a beautiful house like that just needed a little going under.

35:05 E.F. Dodd - And there's a development close to us where there was a house that it used to be all owned by the same family. And the house had been there for probably since about 1820, 1830. And instead of tearing it down, the developer just built the development around it. And so there's like a roughly seven or eight acre parcel in the center of this development that has this historic home and it has the outbuildings out there. And so I like it when that happens; when people realize that you shouldn't just bulldoze over history and act like it never happened. Because a lot of the when they take the time to rehab these old buildings; they don't make them like that anymore. 

35:56 Sarah Gamez - I know, I love one of the historic downtowns near me. It's actually in a much bigger area now to college town, but it used to be a very old town. There’s a 1920s opera house. But they turned it into a used bookstore, but they pretty much kept the whole thing, the structure intact. And it's just so fun going in there because they have so many coverts and little nooks and crannies, like just random little closets with books in them. It's fascinating. It really is. So when writing A Higher Standard, we've talked so much about the rural setting. Did you end up choosing the rural setting first or did you kind of have the plot in mind first when you kind of approached the book?

36:45 E.F. Dodd - I think for me, it kind of went hand in hand because I knew I wanted to have this developer comes to town aspect of it. And in order to make that play, I knew it had to be in a rural area because it just wouldn't have it wouldn't be the same story if he were somewhere in a city looking to build something new. I mean, it would just be totally different. Some of me thought about You've Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner where Fox Books comes in and builds that huge mega store and then she has to close her quaint little store. And I thought a lot about that and kind of the opposites attract thing. The thing that I don't like about You've Got Mail is that he puts her out of business and they're still like, “I love you”. It's just kind of like, do you though? Sorry, we're not going to be a thing. That's a no, that's not how that works.

37:48 Sarah Gamez - And of course, I have one of the most important questions you mentioned a lot of this book kind of was spurred on by this idea of rescuing a little bulldog, right? Do you have pictures of him on your Instagram? Because I think I spotted him,

38:08 E.F. Dodd – Yes. Beef. He's very prominent on my Instagram.

38:12 Sarah Gamez - Well, that's good to know, because I love seeing pictures of doggies on socials.

38:17 E.F. Dodd - He's actually in the room right now. If you hear snoring, that's not me. That's him.

38:24 Sarah Gamez - Oh, that's a bulldog for you, right? Where can listeners find your books and how can they connect with you?

38:32 E.F. Dodd - Well, all of my books are available on Kindle Unlimited. If you're looking for paperbacks, you can buy them on Amazon. My website is www.EFDoddwrites.com. And then on Instagram, it's E dot F dot D O D D. And it's the same on Facebook, and I have a Facebook author page. And if you Google it, if you just look up EF Dodd author, that'll pop up. I'm on Instagram a lot more than Facebook because Instagram makes more sense to me. So, yes, that's where you can find me. My books, like I say, are available. Amazon's your best bet because they'll get it to you the quickest. And it's on Kindle Unlimited.

39:21 Sarah Gamez - Thanks so much to EF for joining the show. Be sure to follow me on social media at Romance the Story. That way you can keep up with the new and prior guests as well as episodes to come. And if you're enjoying the content, please follow, share, or leave a review. It greatly helps the podcast. Book recommendations for this episode, A Higher Standard by EF Dodd and Risky Restoration by EF Dodd. As always, stay safe, be well, and keep writing. Bye.