Robyn Braemer Writes

I’ve lived in several states in the U.S. I know people who have spent their entire lives in the same town they were born in. I have never even lived in the town that I was born in. I was just there to be born. My dad had restless energy. I guess he was looking for his place in life and it took him some time and miles to find that place. He lived on the west coast and the east coast but mostly in the Midwest. In his later years he must have found what he was looking for because he lived in the same place for over twenty years. My sister inherited his restless energy but she still has not found that spot she is looking for. I did not even put her current addresses in my address book because her address changed so often. Once she lived in the same town for six years   and lived at five different addresses in that five years. Normally she switches towns, not just addresses within the same town. Then, at last, she bought a house in a town where she had lived for six whol...

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 ...

Sales and marketing are not always an author’s strongest trait. As authors we focus on the writing, creating worlds and characters to tell a story. With the ever changing world of book publishing, these days authors have to fill many roles, walk in many shoes, including sales and marketing if we have any hope of our books being seen and making sales. Sales and marketing is not my strongest trait. In fact, it’s my weakest trait. I believe in the books I write but trying to sell them to the public is difficult. I would like to blame it on my Minnesota upbringing—you know, the nicest state in the Union—but it might not be just that. It just isn’t easy to do what I feel is pushing myself on others. I publish a book and I feel invisible. It gets buried in the pile of millions of books. Even a week or two after the publish date when I search out my book on Amazon it’s difficult to find. I tell myself, well, I write to write, the passion is in the writing. The truth is, without sale...

We are defined by our priorities. That’s especially true of characters in a novel. Often it is a current priority that becomes the focus of the storyline. Or sometimes it’s a long term priority that finally gets it chance to take center stage. I often think of how our priorities define us. They are like fingerprints, arranged, correlated, sized, and pushed to the forefront when limitations are imposed upon us. We don’t always even realize our greatest priorities until we lose options and what remains our driving force is clear. For some family is our priority. A lot of people like to think that family is always a priority but stop and think about the last time you’ve called your mom or saw your brother who lives half a country away. Somehow family lost priority to the daily grind of living. Our children are definitely our priority when they are young yet even they can somehow take a backseat to job, travel, or recreational time. Is your priority to pay those monthly bills ...