I am thrilled to welcome Miralee Ferrell back to Buzzing About Books! Miralee loves interacting with readers and wants to answer your questions. She is graciously offering one book from her Love Blossoms in Oregon series, winner’s choice. To enter, simply ask Miralee a question in the comments below and stop by later to read her answer.
Miralee and her husband, Allen, live on eleven acres in the beautiful Columbia River Gorge in southern Washington State, where they love to garden, play with their dogs, take walks, and go sailing. She is also able to combine two other passions—horseback riding and spending time with her grown children—since her married daughter lives nearby, and they often ride together on the wooded trails near their home. During early 2013 the family welcomed a baby granddaughter, and Miralee is totally in love with being a grandmother to baby Kate.
Ironically, Miralee, now the author of nine novels and a contributor in four compilations, never had a burning desire to write—at least more than her own memoirs for her children. So she was shocked when God called her to start writing after she turned fifty. To Miralee, writing is a ministry that she hopes will impact hearts, and she anticipates how God will use each of her books to bless and change lives.
An avid reader, Miralee has a large collection of first edition Zane Grey books that she started collecting as a young teen. Her love for his storytelling ability inspired her desire to write fiction set in the Old West. “But I started writing historical fiction without even meaning to,” Miralee says, laughing. She’d always planned on writing contemporary women’s fiction, but God had other ideas. After signing her first contract for the novel Love Find You in Last Chance, California, she decided to research the town and area. To her dismay, she discovered the town no longer existed and hadn’t since the 1960s. Though it had been a booming town in the late 1880s, it had pretty much died out in the 1930s. So her editor suggested switching to a historical version, and Miralee agreed, although she’d never even considered that era.
It didn’t take long to discover she had a natural flair for that time period, having read and watched so many Western stories while growing up. From that point on she was hooked. Her 1880s stories continue to grow in acclaim each year. Her novel Love Finds You in Sundance, WY, won the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Fiction, and Universal Studios requested a copy of her debut novel, The Other Daughter, for a potential family movie.
Aside from writing and her outdoor activities, Miralee has lived a varied life. She and her husband have been deeply involved in building two of their own homes over the years, as well as doing a full remodel on a one-hundred-year-old Craftsman style home they owned and loved for four years. They also owned a saw mill at the time and were able to provide much of the interior wood products. Miralee has done everything from driving a fork lift, to stoking the huge, 120 year-old-boiler, and off-bearing lumber, to running a small planer and staking boards in the dry kiln.
Besides their horse friends, Miralee and her husband have owned cats, dogs (a six-pound, long-haired Chihuahua named Lacey was often curled up on her lap as she wrote this book), rabbits, and yes, even two cougars, Spunky and Sierra, rescued from breeders who didn’t have the ability or means to care for them properly.
Miralee and Allen have lived in Alaska and the San Juan Islands for just under a year each, where she became actively involved in women’s ministry. Later, she took a counseling course and earned her accreditation with the American Association of Christian Counselors, as well as being a licensed minister (not a pastor) through her denomination.
Miralee also speaks at women’s groups, libraries, historical societies, and churches about her writing journey.
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When her father’s debts, brought on by heavy drinking, threaten Leah Carlson’s family ranch, she fights to save it. When handsome banker Steven Harding must decline her loan request, he determines to do what he can to help. Just as he arrives to serve as a much-needed ranch hand, Leah’s family secrets—and the pain of her past—come to a head. They could destroy everything she’s fought for. And they could keep her from ever opening her heart again.
Deborah Summers has waited five years and prayed for Curt Warren to return to Goldendale, Washington, passing up another marriage proposal by believing in her first love. When tragedy finally brings him home, will a rift with his father drive him away too quickly?
GIVEAWAY!
To enter to win your choice of one Love Blossoms in Oregon book, please ask Miralee a question in the comments below. Then, enter the Rafflecopter. Be sure to stop back by and read Miralee’s answers! This giveaways is open to US residents only and ends Saturday, November 22 at 11:59 CST.
Tags: Ask the Author, Baker City, Blowing on Dandelions, Christian fiction, Dreaming on Daisies, Giveaway, Historical Fiction, Historical romance, Love Blossoms in Oregon series, Miralee Ferrell, Oregon, Wishing on Buttercups
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