The Key to Circus-Mom Highway by Allyson Rice

Some random bits of Allyson trivia:

1. She’s been skydiving, paragliding, bungee jumping, ziplining through a rainforest, and scuba diving with stingrays;
2. she has an extensive PEZ dispenser collection;
3. she played Connor Walsh on As the World Turns for seven years;
4. she’s been in the Oval Office at the White House after hours;
5. she’s related to the Hatfields of the infamous Hatfield/McCoy feud; and
6. her comedic rap music video “Fine, I’ll Write My Own Damn Song” won numerous awards in the film festival circuit. 

Also available from Allyson is her line of women’s coloring books (The Color of Joy, Dancing with Life, and Wonderland), and The Creative Prosperity PlayDeck, an inspirational card deck about unlocking and utilizing your creative energy in the world. They’re available on www.Allyson-Wonderland.com.

She’s currently at work on her second novel and her fourth women’s coloring book.

Also, anyone who signs up for Allyson’s periodic author newsletter on her website will be entered in a drawing to have a character in her next novel named after them, and a free book will be given away in each newsletter to a subscriber!

Interview

How did you do research for your book?

Well, the great thing about living in The Age of the Internet is that there’s so much information at our fingertips, instantaneously. So that’s where my research begins: Google. Like when I was looking for words and phrases used by someone with a Cajun dialect for one short scene in my book. I had to use many different search phrases until what I needed came up, but I eventually stumbled upon an old message thread from a few years back where people who grew up in the Deep South in Cajun country were reminiscing about their favorite sayings from their childhood. It was perfect! There’s no way I would’ve found that before the internet without traveling there ask asking people in person.

Another thing I first researched online dealt with medications used for someone with PTSD/anxiety/sleep issues. When I asked some friends to be beta readers of an early draft, one of the friends I asked was a nurse. She said, “I think the combination of meds you used for Jack is an older combination. Let me ask a friend of mine who’s a doctor at the VA, and I’ll get back to you.” She got an updated combination of meds from him that were the most commonly used at that time, and I updated them in the story. (Which is a good lesson about the information on the internet. Even if it was accurate at the time of the writing, it might not still be accurate when you find it. So double-check!)

So, for this particular book, I employed several kinds of research. I started by researching things virtually, I spoke with people who had access to info I needed, and then I visited places in person. I lived in a few locations in the South when I was growing up, but because this was a road trip, there were a lot of places I hadn’t been to yet. I chose locations I found virtually based on what would work for the story and for the timing of the events in the book. Then I went there in person

That was my next question! Being a road trip, your book is set in many locations. I was wondering if you had been to all of them.

When I started writing the book, a few of the places in the story I had been to in person. Specifically, the sisters are based in the Chicago area, and I had lived in that area during the four years that I was attending Northwestern University. So I had been to Chicago, Evanston, Glenview, etc. But once I had the sisters traveling through the Deep South, most of the locations I chose as stops along the way were unfamiliar (with the exception of New Orleans, which I had visited about 25+ years earlier).

I chose most of the locations after studying maps because travel times needed to be precise based on events that play out over a tight one-week timeframe. But I knew I then needed to travel the route myself, in person, to make sure that the locations I chose based on virtual research actually worked. I also wanted to travel the route so that I could add sensory details to the story, because the more you can incorporate sights and smells and sounds and local foods, etc, the more vivid you’ll make the story for your readers.

I did the trip in two parts, the first leg being the loop of towns in southern Louisiana that I did with my adult son. I finalized the town in Louisiana for their first stop after that trip with him, and a few towns were added into the flashbacks about the protagonists’ deceased mom. There were also small details, like the windchime we saw at a diner made of aluminum beer bottles and metal pipes, and the old Bozo the Clown gumball machine, and the almost-daily afternoon rain in the area, that got added into the book after our trip. And because I LOVE southern food, a LOT of what we ate made it into the book (and onto my hips!)

The second part of the road trip I did about six months later with my mom. Traveling from opposite coasts, we met up in the Memphis airport, rented a car, and headed down to Oxford, MS. Oxford isn’t in the book, but we had lived there when I was young and my dad was teaching at the Law School at Ole Miss. We had some old family friends still living there that we wanted to visit. Then we set out on the actual route through Alabama and Georgia, ending in Savannah.

Did anything in your book change after you made that second trip?

Most of the towns I had chosen along the way all worked perfectly (which was a relief), but the location of the deceased mom’s final home changed. I knew I had wanted to it be on one of Savannah’s coastal islands, but the one I thought I was going to use (Tybee Island) is not the one I settled on. After spending a couple of days exploring all of them and taking photos for reference, I changed her final home to a different island. The name of the one I changed it to is honestly the perfect name for the ending of the book–Isle of Hope. I can’t remember why I hadn’t chosen that one in the first place…

Oh, and I also added a stop that wasn’t in the earlier draft. Plains, GA makes a brief appearance in the story now. It hadn’t connected with me when I was looking at maps, not until we were actually driving through it and I realized it was President Jimmy Carter’s hometown. My mom and I stopped for some peanut butter ice cream there, so I added a short scene where my protagonists do that too. It created a perfect moment for two of the characters to speak privately about something that had happened the previous night.

You mentioned attending Northwestern University. Did you study Creative Writing there?

No, I didn’t. My degree from N.U. is a Bachelor of Science in Communication. Theatre was my major, but because it’s a strong Liberal Arts education, we had to study a wide variety of subjects outside of our major, which I appreciated. I think it’s important for your education to be well-rounded, not just one narrow area. The more you’re exposed to in life, the more depth you bring to whatever it is that you do. (Not that going to college is the only way to gain a well-rounded education.)

Anyway, so writing wasn’t in my original life plan. I spent decades as an actress on stage and on television until I felt burnt out and wasn’t enjoying “show biz life” anymore. I left the entertainment industry for a number of years while I ran personal growth retreats around the country – yoga&meditation retreats, women’s retreats, creativity retreats, etc. I eventually found my way back to the entertainment industry, but not as an actress this time around. I began writing on the side, first writing spec scripts and then this novel. I was also working as a Creative Development exec and then a Producer with a new streaming network which sidelined the novel for a couple of years as that workload increased. I finished the novel during the early part of the pandemic when the streaming network folded and that other work vanished. Now that it’s finally out there in the world, I’m working on my second novel, and a screenplay.

So I didn’t start out on a writing path, but all roads have lead me here, to writing. I think I’ll stay a while. 😊

It sounds like your career path has changed many times during your life. Is there anything in your life that you’d do differently in hindsight? Are there alternate choices you would’ve made?

Part of the whole “hindsight is 20/20” involves being able to see how all of the difficult, uncomfortable times I’ve experienced, and mistakes I might have made, are what brought me to the point where I am at this moment in time. If I changed one decision to avoid something unpleasant, who’s to say that other choice wouldn’t have created something even more unpleasant? Honestly, we all go through what we go through to learn what we need to learn, even if we can’t see The Bigger Picture in the immediate moment.

When I left acting, the career I had spent my entire life since the age of 12 working in, part of me wondered if I had wasted all those years. Should I have done something else? But even in what seemed to me like a 180-degree pivot, I found there were many skills from my previous career that I brought into my teaching. And when I left that after a decade of running programs around the country, I brought all of my experiences from both worlds into my next move. So I realized very clearly that no life experience is wasted unless you choose to label it as “wasted” (because then you lose the ability to see The Bigger Picture). So I love all the different roads my various careers have taken me down. And I experience great delight when I’m able to incorporate things from my past into my present in a surprising way. And I’m grateful for all of the challenges I’ve lived through because now I know that I can get to the other side of them. They’ve helped me learn about myself and others, they’ve helped to open my heart more and to facilitate more compassion. And they’ve taught me about forgiveness, for both myself and others (because those go hand in hand). Actually, that’s a big theme in my novel.

You see that?? Now with the writing it’s ALL coming into play! 😉

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