Keeping Settings and Secondary Characters Fresh by Nan Reinhardt

One thing I’ve discovered as I’ve been writing my River’s Edge series of books is that readers fall in love with settings and secondary characters as much as they do the main characters. They anxiously await the next story because it means another trip to a place we all want to live or at least visit. Series are a special kind of escape for readers and writers. For me, as author, the warmth of Mac’s Riverside Diner, the fun of the Four Irish Brothers Winery, a cruise through the colorful fabrics at the Seams Pieceful quilt store, pastries from Paula’s Bread & Butter Bakery, or a stroll along the River Walk are just a few of the good reasons to keep telling stories there.

But it’s not enough to use the same setting, the stories have to evolve naturally from it and the town must evolve with it. So new places must crop up in your old setting. Disasters that affect everyone in the town will inevitably become part of a story, as will the restoration of old familiar landmarks, like Aidan Flaherty restoring the River Queen riverboat in Christmas with You or Gerry Ross turning the old cotton mill into a boutique hotel in Meant to Be. Changes mean the setting becomes a developing character itself.

With each new book, readers find new places in River’s Edge to visit—Sudbury’s Nursery and Garden Center takes center stage in my newest novel, Make It Real, where we meet Kara Sudbury, just home from living in England for six years and her grandparents, Ginny and Hunter Sudbury. In the next book in the series, Made for Mistletoe, which releases October 24, Dot and Mary Higgins and their quilt store, Seams Pieceful are in the spotlight as secondary characters.

These secondary characters may never have their own book, but like the setting, they do have their own stories. Readers love to follow townsfolks to see just what’s going to happen next to background characters. In Book 1 of the Four Irish Brothers Winery series, we meet two secondary players, Carly Hayes, Sam’s uptight, high-society mom and Mac Mackenzie, a flannel-wearing Cordon Bleu chef who owns the diner in River’s Edge. An unlikely pair for sure, but by the end of Book 2, Carly and Mac are an item, and although they may never get their own book, their story progresses, and we watch their romance blossom as the main characters’ stories are told. They’re together, running the diner, and still madly in love in Make It Real—book 12 that happens in River’s Edge.

It’s important to introduce new secondary characters to interact with the old ones so the town and its stories don’t become stale, but putting old background folks into new situations is also a fun way to bring interest to your familiar setting and your stories. In my second River’s Edge series, The Lange Brothers, I tell the stories of three brothers who are all first responders. Each brother has his own book, yet woven throughout the three books is their mother’s love story with hotelier Gerry Ross, whom we met back in Book 2 of The Four Irish Brothers Winery series. So Gerry and Jane become a seasoned romance in River’s Edge, adding just a touch more fun to that little town on the banks of the Ohio. See how that works?

Each time we enlarge a secondary character’s story, we are inviting our readers further into our setting and our series, welcoming them into our fantasy world, where life may not always be perfect, but where a happily-ever-after is always guaranteed. 

Out now from Nan Reinhardt!

Make It Real, book 2 in the Walkers of River’s Edge series:

They were only faking it….

A landscape designer for his family’s construction firm, Joe Walker, is nearing completion on one of the most important projects of his career—gardens for spec homes that if they wow, Walker Construction will survive. When a freak accident sidelines him with a broken leg, the firm hires a competitor. Her ideas are radically different, but his stalker ex arrives to play nurse, and Joe needs more than gardening help.

After six-years working in English manor gardens, horticulturist Kara Sudbury returns to River’s Edge to help in her grandparents’ struggling garden center. She’s thrilled when Jackson Walker hires her to execute his injured cousin’s designs. Ignoring Joe is difficult because he’s as sexy now as he was in high school and even more stubborn. But when Joe asks Kara to play the role of girlfriend, they strike a deal that will help Joe handle his tenacious ex and put Sudbury’s Nursery back in the black. Kara’s up for the subterfuge…for a price, but then the pretense feels real, and Kara is reminded that every rose has its thorns.

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Excerpt:

The gun went off, the woman screeched, and Joe let out a loud oof, then a groan of pain. He released the gun and lay still, his head, face, neck, and bare chest stinging from the blackberry nettles and his left leg feeling very weird. Scout barked and ran up to him, licking Joe’s cheek and panting dog breath all over him.

“Did you shoot yourself?” The woman was there, too, stepping carefully through the brush until she was about a foot from him, her smooth, tanned legs only inches from his head. “Oh my God!” When he opened one eye and looked up at her, her face, which was vaguely familiar, had turned from angry to ashen and horrified. “Your leg!”

The sting of the blackberry thorns had somehow kept him from noticing what was now agonizing pain in his left shin. He started to turn over, but she stooped down and put a dirty gloved hand on his shoulder. “No, don’t move.”

“My face,” he managed, but it was hard to even speak because of the brambles sticking him everywhere, and shit! Was that poison ivy under his cheek? Inanely, his mind went to a couplet, his cousin Jack had taught him and Cam and Eli years ago—leaves of three, let it be; leaves of five, let it thrive. His glasses were gone, and his eye was blurry, but yep, that was three leaves. No. No. No. “I gotta . . . gotta get up,” he mumbled. “Poison ivy.”

The woman held him in place. “That’s the least of your problems. Your leg is really messed up.”

He lifted his head and shoved up with his arms, bringing his upper body out of the brambles, but dropped right back down again as pain shot through his left leg, leaving him nearly breathless. He attempted to peer over his shoulder, but all he could see was his own butt in the slipping-down sleeping shorts. When he tried to move the leg, pain, more excruciating than before, shot through him.

“Stop moving, will you? Your leg is stuck on a branch sticking out of this log and I can see”—she looked down his body at his lower extremities and her pallor grew even grayer—“oh crap, I can see a bone sticking out of your shin.” She plopped down next to him, heedless of the poisonous plants covering the ground, and pulled her phone out of her shorts pocket. “I’m calling 911.”

“You just sat in poison ivy,” he ground out, lifting his head again and biting the inside of his cheek to keep from adding idiot. He was pretty sure he owed her one. But on the other hand, he also needed some help here.

“It doesn’t bother me. I never get it.” She raked her fingers through her hair as she spoke to emergency services, relating what she believed happened, making him sound like a colossal dumbass as she speculated to the dispatcher that she thought he might have shot himself.

“I didn’t shoot myself,” he said as loudly as he could, given he’d dropped his face back on the ground because even the slightest movement sent red-hot fire through his leg and up into his thigh.

“Yeah, he says he’s not shot, but his leg . . . man, it’s pretty awful. Not bleeding too badly, but there’s a sharp piece of a stick stuck in his calf and his shin’s broken for sure”—she gulped—“I can see the bone. No, no, I won’t touch it. God, no!” She looked down at him. “What’s your address?”

He moaned, his mind a blank.

“It’s on Fourth Street behind Sudbury’s Nursery. Maybe the 2900 block?” she said into her phone.

“It’s 2917,” Joe managed.

“It’s 2917,” she repeated for the dispatcher, paused to listen, then asked, “What’s your name?”

“Joe Walker.” That came out stronger, but the effort exhausted him.

“Oh, crap! Joey? Joey Walker?” She bent her head to peer down at him, and her eyes, which were an unusual golden-brown color, were huge.

Nan Reinhardt is a USA Today bestselling author of sweet, small-town romantic fiction for Tule Publishing. Her day job is working as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, however, writing is Nan’s first and most enduring passion. She can’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t writing—she wrote her first romance novel at the age of ten and is still writing, but now from the viewpoint of a wiser, slightly rumpled, woman in her prime. Nan lives in the Midwest with her husband of 51 years, where they split their time between a house in the city and a cottage on a lake. Talk to Nan at: nan@nanreinhardt.com.