Author D. L.  Blanchard was living in Northern Arizona, working as a public relation specialist for a major utility company when she married and had to move to the southern part of the state because of her husband’s job.  While living there she missed the culture and color of northern Arizona so much she decided to write a novel that could take her back to the area of the world she loved so much.

“When I first wanted to write the novel, I had no idea where to start, until one day I was watching one of my favorite classic black and white movies – Alfred Hitchock’s ‘Rebecca’.”  The movie is a story about a young, naive woman who meets an older, wealthy man in Monte Carlo and falls in love. They immediately marry and move  to his large estate in England, and her life seems picture-perfect until the story of his dead first wife begins to surface.

“I decided to use ‘Rebecca’ as inspiration for the novel, immersing myself as I wrote it in the beauty, drama and rich culture of northern Arizona that I missed so much. I wanted to use the setting of the southwest as the foundation for the story, with the characters and drama’s rising up out of it.”

While living in northern Arizona, Blanchard worked on the ski patrol while hiking in her spare time into remote canyons to study Native American petroglyphs and pictographs. She wrote a paper title “Shaman’s and Master Artists: Understanding the Parallels in Rock Art”  which was published in 1997 in the American Rockart Research Association’s publication “American Indian Rock Art – Volume 23”. Wanting to gain more credibility in writing to help get the novel published, she wrote several articles for local magazines and newspapers, as well as a national artists publication, Southwest Art Magazine. 

Having made a twelve year career of her design talent as a web/print graphic designer, Dawn has finally decided to self-publish the novel so she could offer it to the public, hoping they could appreciate and love the same things she still finds mesmerizing about the southwest and all it’s layered dimensions.