I knew an architect years ago who designed stunning homes. One day, looking at some of his blueprints, I noticed some scribbles and the words Growy Stuff. "Growy stuff?" I asked him. "Yeah, you know... trees and flowers, that stuff. Around the house." I cracked up. Clearly the house meant more to him than what surrounded it. But in literature, what surrounds your characters is as much a character in itself as they are. A good writer creates a sense of "place" by giving a book a setting imbued with lots of personality. That often includes the stuff of nature. My current story is set in Colorado, tucked somewhere between the wide open plains and the Rocky Mountains. Look east and you'll see flat plains with yucca and sagebrush, cedar windbreaks, and deciduous trees planted by early settlers; look west and the land starts to roll, with stands of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, the towering front range in the distance. It's wild and ...

When I heard Flora was the topic for April, I didn’t think of my backyard. Instead, I thought of era-appropriate names for the women characters who populate the setting I write about—the late 1800s U.S. Flora sounds so “old-fashioned.” Surely there was a blooming of Floras, Florences, Roses, Violets, Daisys, and all those floral-type names during this era? Faced with that question, I did what I usually do when musing on the unknown: I went a-researching and geeked out a bit… My first stop was the Social Security Administration, which has a great site for researching popular baby names for any decade going back to 1880. I pulled up the ranking of names for babies born in the 1880s in the U.S. here . And then, I made a little chart of all the flower names I could identify, plus the ranking for "Inez," the name of my Silver Rush series protagonist:  Most popular name for baby girls? Mary. Out of 1,399,571 female births, 91,668 little ones were Marys. (Ida came in at ...