Robyn Braemer Writes

Everything is bigger in Texas, right? I made the big move to Texas a few months ago. I haven’t really seen any cowboys or much cowboy hat and cowboy boot wearing people. Granted, Houston is a big urban metropolis but I thought I would see some stereotypical Texans. Maybe once I venture out to cowboy country, once I figure out where that is. I thought I would experience a bigger culture shock than I actually have. I spent time living in South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, and even a brief stint in Wyoming. When I moved to Oregon from Minnesota many years ago it was a big culture shock. The Willamette Valley in Oregon was very different than rural Minnesota. The biggest shock in moving to Oregon all those years ago was that it was not like in the movies or television shows. Oregon is the West Coast, right? But it was not like how the West Coast was portrayed on the screen at all. In many ways it felt like I had stepped back in time instead of journeying to the e...

I have kept a journal for most of my adult life. Journal is adult for diary. Yes, I kept a diary when I was a kid. Some days the diary entries were a single sentence or even a few words but when moving to the adult version of baring my soul to myself, whole pages could be filled up each day. I started out writing in beautiful leather bound accounting ledgers but those are impossible to find any more so ended up going with the easy to access spiral bound notebook the past few years. Easier to toss in the garbage when reviewing their content down the road. I like to write. I’m talking the physical handwriting with a smooth ballpoint pen and paper. I started out writing all my novels by hand. Eventually I saw the wisdom in skipping the hand-written stage and sitting down at the laptop to directly write out the draft and then go back in and edit (or as I like to call editing, filling in the gaps and cutting the riff-raff) since it saves so much time. Writing everything out by ha...

Reincarnation has always fascinated me. I don’t know what to think about it, honestly. So many cultures and religions view reincarnation as a real thing. Even the Christian Bible addresses reincarnation. Where did the idea originate? I wonder when and where the concept first occurred to someone. It had to come from somewhere, right? Maybe from the two year old toddler in Greece speaking fluent French? Or the child who remembered a past life with such clarity that adults in his/her life recognized the related stories as fact? I suppose back then there were a lot less people in the world so a reincarnated soul might make it back in the same neighborhood? Which brings us to another logic tangent, if we’re reincarnated and there are so many more people in the world now, where are all those souls coming from? Following that tangent, there were a lot more animals in the world, so are we sometimes living lives of humans and sometimes as animals? That would explain some of the “an...

My inspiration for Shades of Right was based on a true, actual event that happened during the Civil War with the Minnesota 9th Regiment. I was watching a documentary and the man being interviewed mentioned an incident where 38 Minnesota 9th Regiment men were court-martialed for aiding a slave and his family in Missouri. They did not even know the man who approached them for help in panicked desperation. The incident was a small foot note in history and it intrigued me, being a native Minnesotan. First, my interest was piqued because though I had grown up in Minnesota I had not given a lot of thought to Minnesota's role during the Civil War. The Civil War had happened down south and had never seemed relevant to the northern state of Minnesota. Second, my curiosity was engaged because I could not help but wonder at the bravery of a slave in the 1800s approaching a complete stranger wearing a blue uniform. A blue uniform was no guarantee that he would not be punished or even ...