I’ve taken countless novel-writing courses, focused on learning the craft and writing the story. As part of that process, I started a second contemporary novel set in Arizona’s Verde Valley. And intrigued by the late 1890’s and the stalwart women of that time, I began writing a historical novel set in Jerome, an Arizona copper mining camp.

In the meantime, I had several hundred articles and short stories for adults and children published in fifty-plus newspapers and magazines. In 1998, my first two children’s books were published, and 26 more since then.

I was working on the historical set in Jerome when an editor who had seen the opening pages of that novel gave me an opportunity to write the Sinclair Sisters’ stories set in a Colorado Gold Mining Camp in the late 1890s. Like Kat Sinclair, the main character in Book One, I am one of four sisters and knew I’d have a lot of fun writing about the complex sister relationships. I love Colorado. And, of course, I had already done a lot of research on mining camps in the 1890s. I knew the opportunity was God’s answer to my prayers; His provision for my dream to become a published novelist.

MONA HODGSON is the author of Two Brides Too Many (May 2010) and Too Rich for a Bride (October 2010, available exclusively at Walmart), the first two books in the Sinclair Sisters of Cripple Creek Series (WaterBrook Multnomah). Her writing credits also include 28 children’s books, Real Girls of the Bible: A Devotional, Bedtime in the Southwest, and four Princess Twins books.