Will the REAL Jake Morgan please stand up...

I promised three-parts to my hero blog’s. So here you have it… #3. Yesterday, you read about “my” character, Jake Morgan. A character that I crafted myself, spent days thinking about, hours writing and re-writing, and well... perfecting. When I was through, he was what I wanted.

There is an interesting story that goes along with that crafting of my character. Like many writers I do what I can to create a character in my mind, I mold and shape their personality, even the way they look. While I was working on Jake, I had a vision of who he was and what he looked like. A clear vision like no other character I have worked with before. I searched through magazines trying to find a man that looked even just a little bit like the man that I saw so clearly in my brain.

More than a year had passed and I was still searching through those magazines, yet I found nothing. Until one day at the grocery store. I happened to pick up one of my favorite magazines and thumb through it, trying to decide if I wanted to buy it. I thought I was going to have a stroke when I opened the cover of the magazine. Right there staring back at me was Jake Morgan. What the heck was he doing in there when I had been searching so long for him? Hiding between the pages of a magazine apparently.

My heart raced as I quickly put the magazine into the cart. I could hardly believe Jake Morgan was between those pages. This man I had been living with in my mind for so long, finally I had his picture! As soon as I got home, I tore the picture from the cover and put him in the front of the binder that held all of my info on Morgan Ranch. I felt like everything was complete.

A few weeks after I made the discovery, I happened to be on myspace. I was new to the site and searching for writer friends to connect with. When fate stepped in and I happened to stumble across Jake Morgan again, this time it was his myspace page. Interestingly enough, his name wasn’t really Jake Morgan, he called himself Joshua Smith. What did I do you asked? What any other normal person would do. I messaged him on myspace and begged him to be my friend. Well sort of… I did really message him, but I told him that I was working on a book and that I had seen his picture in the COWBOYS & INDIANS magazine and using his image as a hero in my book. He responded by accepting my friendship and asking me to give him a call. So I did. We’ve kept in contact since and he was even nice enough to let me interview him. So here you go… “MY” Jake Morgan who calls himself… Joshua Smith.


Joshua, tell me a little bit about what you do…

- “Goodness, there is quite a bit to that question. I would first and foremost, I would say I am a horseman, I truly have been blessed with a gift to understand animals. I have worked on and managed equine facility’s for the past ten year’s which comes with a lot of different jobs rolled into one, which would include; feeding and nutrition values of feed, stall management, pasture management, carpentry, welding, fencing, haying, irrigation, plumbing, and electrical. Not to mention working with horses that have people problems, giving riding lessons, starting horses, and training horses. I was raised working a commercial cattle outfit, so I know being around horses and cattle have been the greater part of my life. So, at most equine facility’s I have had to take care of cattle, too.”

What was your reaction when you heard that your picture inspired me to make “you” a character in a romance novel?

-“I was a red as anything has ever made me! I blushed, my heart raced, I thought to myself… she’s got to have the wrong guy, when you found me on Myspace! I think it was about two years after the photo shoot for Stetson so every now and again someone might recognize me, but not very often. Mostly just friends would call and tell me they saw me here or there; NFR, Horse Congress, magazine’s, in a store somewhere… but I could never have even begun to think about that!! I had never even read a romance novel… Louis L’Amor is about the only fiction novel’s I’ve read!”

Having read most of Morgan Ranch, do you feel that you have any similarities to the character your photo inspired, Jake Morgan?

-“I would have to say in reading Morgan Ranch, I found myself picturing the ranch setting with other ranches I have worked or visited. Thinking about a father I had lost half-a-lifetime ago (if he left me a ranch), what feelings would I have in Jake’s shoes… and the more I read, the more I saw many similarities!”

If yes, what would the similarities be?

-“First off, my father and I never saw eye to eye. He and my mother where divorced very early on in my life and had a very strained relationship and he never made the effort to try to understand me. He came to one of baseball games growing up… I played all the way through a Jr. College. He was never into ranching like I am, I had to learn from my uncle…my stand in father! So, the conflict with my father, although not exactly like Jake’s… I really understand.

Secondly, Jake was not in his father’s life when his father past and they were not even speaking. I can understand that all to well! My father called me when I was fourteen and told me to tell my older sister (who he adopted at 4 yrs old) to not expect to see or hear from him again in the most matter of fact tone and hung up the phone on me. He did called me again when I was seventeen and wanted to talk, so being the mature kid I was… I hung up, twice! He passed away twenty some days later from Leukemia. After calling my mother at work and her rushing home to get me to go see him, we had a very short and strained relationship. I had many years of drinking too much, partin’ to hard, and heaps of women... like Jake from that absence in my life. I just need to find that one gal for me!

You have been on television, been an extra in a movie, as well as the Stetson model, and now a rancher. Out of everything that you’ve done what has been the most satisfying and why?

-“Well, thank you for taking notice of the some of my most recent accomplishments! Being on the T.V. was great… but, forgotten quickly if your show is not in re-runs. I have been in several movies… but if you’re not the star, you’re just in the background. I really liked being the spokes model for Stetson… during the shoot they didn’t want me to smile… and I like to laugh a lot! They wanted me to just stare into the distance, so I thought of all those days I spent out to sea in the Navy… just being lost in the loneliness of the oceans! I have ranched with my family as far back as I can remember and have had some of the closest, fun, hard working times I can remember… and that is what has made me who I am today! I really think that I have found who I am by being around horses, I can’t make them do one thing if it is not their idea to do it. I have had to learn from horses to be able to teach horses! I had the desire to be around them, not for horse to be around me… and that is why I can say the most satisfying thing I’ve done is to live on ranches and start horses!!

Thank you Micole,
Joshua



Life is crazy sometimes. I think it was fate that we connected the strange way that we did. Without the Internet it would have never happened. I am so happy that we have become friends. Joshua is a great guy and he has been so kind to let me interview him as well as borrow his pictures for the work on my book and my blog. The picture I am including today, (at the top of the blog) is the one I want to be the cover of my book if it is ever published! I just love it. Thank you, Joshua.



Thank you all for reading. see you on Tuesday, when I have Loucinda McGary visiting.





Hugs





Micole

All This Talk About Hero's...

After all of this talk about hero’s I’ve decided to make this a three-part blog. Yesterday’s re-run blog of WHAT MAKES A HERO HUNKY being the first of the three.

With all of this talk about heroes I thought I would bring one of my favorites out of the closet. His name is Jake Morgan. Many of you who have gotten a peek at my manuscript, Morgan Ranch have been introduced to him. In fact, if you stopped by my blog yesterday for the hunky hero bit, you caught a glimpse of him. That picture that I posted at the top of the blog is “my” Jake Morgan. Just in case you missed it, I decided to include another picture of him. (see picture at the top of the blog)

In my interviews, I ask many of my guest authors to pick a favorite character of theirs that they have created. Most reply exactly the same. “It would be like trying to pick a favorite child. I just can’t do it.” I understand. I really do, and maybe because I only have one finished manuscript at the moment and I am not published, it is a little easier for me to pick. Out of all of the characters that run through my head on a daily basis, Jake Morgan is my favorite.

He is a very complex hero. A man that was so closed off to me and to the rest of the characters in Morgan Ranch. It wasn’t until I got close to finishing the book that I realized how well I really knew him. I knew what he wanted, and what he was all about. I don’t even think he knew until the end of the book that all he really wanted was to settle down with Cody on Morgan Ranch and start a family. He spent so much of his time trying to get away from the ranch, from his past, and from his father’s ghost that it caught up with him. He spent so much of his time trying to prove to himself that Cody was not the woman for him even though his body deceived him every time she was around. It wasn’t until he almost lost everything that it hit him like a ton of bricks. He was a tortured soul, but only by himself. And he left a trail of bleeding hearts wherever he went. Mine especially!

He was a character that I spent many hours a day dreaming about, because of course he was my vision of loveliness. But he also had all of the qualities that I described in yesterdays post. He was old fashioned and up with the times. But most of all, he loved his lady, more than life itself, and when he figured it out, it brought him to his knee’s. By the end of the book, he would’ve done anything she asked.

I think that’s all any of us want in the end.... someone to love us so much they would do anything of them that we ask.

The next installment will include an interview with the real Jake Morgan! Thanks for stopping in.

See you tomorrow.

Hugs

Micole

What makes a hero hunky repost...

What makes a hero hunky?

This blog originally posted October of 2010, but I am bringing it back, because I thought it would be fun to do a segment on Hero's. I am in the process of reworking my first manuscript and loved my hero in that book. I was finished with the book before I started blogging, so I never really got the opportunity to let all of you drool over him. So enjoy the blog again and come back tomorrow for the second installment of a three-part blog mini series! ;-)

Hero’s come in all shapes and sizes. Thanks be to God for that! The best thing about being a writer is that I can shape and form my characters into what I want out of them. For example… I love a tall (6’5”), rough and rugged, hard-working, hard-to-tame, cowboy. The more stubborn the man the better I like him. I want a man who thinks he knows what he wants until he meets his heroine and then he falls to his knee’s (in a not so noticeable way to the heroine) in love with her. He fight’s his feelings but in the end he is tamed by his lady.

Call me primitive. Hey, maybe I am. That’s what I like. I am all about that Alpha male. You know… the one beating his chest. Ha ha. Maybe that’s going a little too far. But I still want the man to be the one in charge (or at least think he is)(wink). Now a days when writing a book, we are told that our heroine has to be strong, able to take care of herself. And yes I do agree with that to a certain extent. But let’s be real. How many of you ladies still want a car door opened for you or the door of a building? A man to take your hand, or pull out a chair for you? How about paying for dinner? What the hell is this going Dutch crap all about? Or the woman paying for the meal? I’m not sure where that came in?

Hero’s are usually defined as someone who serves and protects us everyday, someone who rescues kittens from a tree, people from a burning building or fights for his life and our freedom in a war. Hero’s are roll models to all of us. They are who we hope our children will take lessons from. They are such amazing people. But not everyone can be pulling someone from a burning building or fighting for our country. God Bless all of our everyday hero’s.

There are also the hero’s that teach us things about ourselves. The one’s that take care of us and show us how to love ourselves and that we can be loved—the prince that rides in on his white horse to save the day. A hero can be so many things. He is something and someone different to each individual.

And what makes a hero attractive can be so much more than just their hunkiness, ie. tall, dark, handsome, Mr. Muscles, dark hair, blond hair, wavy or straight hair, blue eyes brown eyes, eyes dark as coal, dimples, bronzed skin and well even that all famous cowboy hat. All of those things are just an extra incentive. (wink)

So this is what I want to know. What makes your hero hunky? Think about this and leave me a comment.

I am looking forward to hearing from all of you. Make sure to come back tomorrow when we talk more about hunk hero's, namely mine!Thanks for stopping by Micole Writes Romance.

Hugs

Micole