The Importance of Setting & Imagery for Stone Angels

The setting of IN THE ARMS OF STONE ANGELS is a fictitious town in Oklahoma. I picked the name Shawano after I saw that the word in Euchee meant snake or snake pit, which seemed fitting symbolism for this book. There is a Shawano, WI and Shawnee, OK, but this place was made up by me because I wanted the freedom to fictionally portray the undercurrent of bigotry that I needed to tell this story.

I lived in the Oklahoma City area and LOVED it. The people there are very warm and friendly, which is another reason why I had to make up a fantasy small town. If I had written this about a real town in OK, I would never have written this story so dark.

But I did have a specific town in mind when I pictured Shawano and took photos of this place to have in my mind while I wrote the book. I wanted to share some of these images with you and include writing excerpts for those locales.

The real town I had in mind was a charming beautiful & very real place of Guthrie, OK. I LOVE this town. The downtown square is small town Americana at its best and it's even more spectacular at Christmas time when the whole place lights up and people dress up like a Dickens novel.

But there were images not so great either. Rundown businesses, graphiti and sad houses are also there. I took these shots (& more) of Guthrie on a research trip.



On this street is the Pollard theatre that is rumored to be haunted. I really wanted to ghost hunt there one night, but never got the chance. I love this old theatre and watched great Christmas plays there.

These types of houses are in Guthrie, a very quaint place indeed. I imagined Brenna's grandmother living here in a house just like these charmers.

Excerpt from In the Arms of Stone Angels

By the time Mom and I got to Grams’s it was almost too dark to see, but the old Victorian home was easy to spot at the end of the street. It was the biggest house on the block and not quite how I remembered it. In the past few years, Grams had let the place go. The yard and flower beds were overgrown with weeds and the house needed painting. Brick steps that led to the front door needed repair, the wraparound porch railing could use paint, and the bay windows and gabled roof looked scary at night without lights on. The place was real creepy and reminded me of a slasher movie.



Very cool. I could totally shoot a video here.
“If it’s bad, we’ll find a motel until we can do a little cleaning.” She pretended to be cheery. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”


“In North Carolina. I forgot to pack it.” I crossed my arms and slumped against the car.


“Stay put. I’ll need your help with the groceries if we stay tonight,” Mom yelled over her shoulder as she headed toward the front door.


I heaved a sigh and stared up at the old Victorian after my mom left me alone on the driveway. I wasn’t afraid of the dark since cemeteries were my thing, but living in small town suburbia scared the crap out of me.

Maybe the stone angel near Heather's grave looked like this, with its chipped nose, almost looking scary.

Excerpt from In the Arms of Stone Angels

I put my ear to the ground and listened to the sounds of the cemetery in the dark. I heard the crickets in the grass and the breeze through the pine trees as I stared up at the stone angel on the next grave. Heather didn’t have her own guardian angel, but she was in good company. She had one close by.

And in the bluish haze of the moonlight, I saw that the angel’s nose was chipped and dark streaks lined her face like tears. But the angel’s eyes looked so real, I could imagine them opening and seeing me. And her spread arms and faint smile made me feel safe as the graveyard stillness closed in.


Until the night air sent me a message that I wasn't alone.


A wave of electricity swept over me, causing the hair on my arms and the back of my neck to stand on end. And static pops swirled around and through me. I knew what it meant and I turned, peering through the dark.


A door had opened to the other side. I’d felt it before.


And a gust of cold blew through my hair and made me squint. Movement near the stone angel grabbed my attention. Fingers crept out from behind the angel’s shoulder—a slow and deliberate move like the silent stealth of a tarantula—and a small hand slid down the stone arm.


Sometimes the dead had a weird sense of what was funny.


Heather Madsen peered out from behind the statue—more timid and frail than I remembered her—and dressed in the clothes she had been buried in. Her mother’s choice. Heather wouldn’t have been caught dead in that dress. So I knew her coming had to be important. In life Heather had never smiled at me, but tonight she did for the first time. And it made her look sad.


The dead never speak. I don’t know why. So I didn’t expect that to change with Heather. For whatever reason the drop-dead gorgeous brunette with fierce green eyes had come, she’d let me know in her own sweet time. Without a word, I waved a hand to say “Hi” and stretched out on the grass over her grave.


I knew I wouldn’t sleep, but I hoped that Heather would rest easier knowing she wasn’t alone…even if she only had me.

And the image below is of Libby, the girl who inspired my character. I found her on ModelMayhem, but when I went back to contact her, to see if my publisher could use her for the cover, she was no longer listed. The way she dressed in this photo inspired everything about Brenna, right down to her spirit to be different. I loved the vulnerability behind those big sunglasses too. Libby, where are you? I miss you.

Excerpt from In the Arms of Stone Angels

I wasn’t your average Abercrombie girl. I didn’t wear advertising brand names on my body.

It was a life choice. A religion.


I got my clothes from Dumpster diving and Goodwill, anything I could stitch together that would make my own statement. Today I wore a torn jean jacket over a sundress with leggings that I’d cut holes into. I had a plaid scarf draped around my neck with a cap pulled down on my head. My “screw you” toes were socked away in unlaced army boots and I hid behind a huge pair of dark aviator sunglasses, a signature accessory and only one in a weird collection I carried with me. I liked the anonymity of me seeing out when no one saw in.


The overall impact was that I looked like an aspiring bag lady. A girl’s got to have goals.


In short, I didn’t give a shit about fitting in with the masses and it showed. I’d given up the idea of fitting in long ago. The herd mentality wasn’t for me and since I made things up as I went, people staring came with the territory.

Below is the REAL Cry Baby Creek Truss. It's rumored to be haunted. I used my research as a backdrop to create a story around this creepy setting, the perfect place for a murder.

Excerpt from In the Arms of Stone Angels

I wish I had remembered the part about not telling secrets when I came across my friend White Bird under the bridge at Cry Baby Creek. A woman’s spirit cries for her dead baby and haunts that old rusted steel and wood plank footbridge. I’d seen her plenty of times, I swear to God. She never talked to me. The dead never do. She only cried and clutched the limp body of her baby to her chest.

Back then I didn’t fully understand how fragile the barrier was between my world and another existence where the dead grieved over their babies forever. I had no idea that a change was coming. Someone would alter how I saw the thin veil between my reality and the vast world beyond it.


That someone was my friend, White Bird.


When I saw him crying in the shadows of that dry creek bed, like the ghost of that woman, the sight of him sent chills over my skin. I should have paid attention to what my body was telling me back then—to stay away and leave him alone—but I didn’t.

I hope you enjoyed the extras and my trip down memory lane. Brenna & White Bird will always be in my mind and hold a special place in my heart. No one forgets writing their first YA.

Brenna Speaks

Interviewers have asked me about themes and what’s my message for teen readers. My tendency is to listen to my character and figure this out later, more of a self-awareness thing that reflects on what’s important to me. I want to experience my characters and their world organically—and not force any underlying “message.”

My character, Brenna Nash, is a piece of work. I often felt like I wasn’t writing about her as much as she was telling me her story and I was only her scribe. I loved being inside her head. Below are a few lines that stood out in my mind, but there are so many others that readers have sent me—lines that touched them. And wow, do I love hearing from readers. Reach me on my website CONTACT page.

Excerpts from “In the Arms of Stone Angels”

• Derek got in my face, close enough for me to smell his bad breath and get a zoom on his zits. One on his chin was ripe. The dude seriously needed to harvest.

• Why is it that the people who love us most can hurt us so bad? I had a terrible feeling about coming here. It didn’t feel right. I really wanted my mother to see that. I wanted her to realize she’d been wrong and to stop me before I went inside. I wanted her to foresee the future and warn me. But that didn’t happen.

• Apparently, honesty was now a real showstopper in Chloe’s world. She clammed up and wrung her hands like I’d asked her to scoop cat shit with her bare fingers.

• I wanted to say that I was sorry, but not for the obvious. I was sorry that I had turned out to be such a big disappointment. Sorry that I couldn’t make things better. Sorry that everything I touched turned to crap. Seeing Mom cry had torn me up until she finally said, “What happened to your hair? Did you do that?” At that moment, I hated Britney Spears.

• I didn’t care what someone like Jade DeLuca thought. She was a total waste of perfectly good skin. And three pounds of brain matter was about two pounds too much for what she used it for. I didn’t respect her, so why would I care what she thought of me?

People sometimes ask me what advice I would give to my teen readers. I never had kids so I’ve never been accused of being a “good example” for anyone. That’s actually a very scary thought. In my adult books as well as my teen books, I tend to write about themes that are important to me—things I want to explore for myself—sometimes I’m not even aware I’m doing this. But if there is any advice from me, it’s up to the reader to find it in my words and my characters’ voices. I never want to be preachy about anything. Teen readers are smart enough to get their own meaning out of books.

For Brenna, she has experienced something horrific that no kid should have to see in a lifetime. It changed her forever. To make matters worse, she faces it alone, confronting practically the whole town. The bigotry portrayed in my book was meant to be ugly because it is. Being part Hispanic myself, I was like White Bird, straddling a line between cultures that wasn’t always easy. I didn’t always know where I fit in. And I’ve seen and heard things that slice like a knife. But being different doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

The beauty in Brenna was her willingness to accept herself eventually for who she is—embracing her weirdness as being unique and special—and realizing that those who are most critical of her are people she doesn’t respect anyway. Any advice I would give would come from Brenna. She’s who I still hope to become.

The Real White Bird

In the Arms of Stone Angels centers on the plight of a troubled teen girl and one very special American Indian boy. He’s in the foster care system in Oklahoma. Without a family of his own, he is in search of roots where he can truly belong. And for him, those roots would lie in the tribe he thought he belonged to. For many tribes, like the Cherokee that I researched recently, belonging to a clan is determined through the mother’s lineage. If a boy’s father is Cherokee, but his mother is not, then the ties to that clan are severed from the official tribe roster. That was hard for me to understand, so I made it hard for my characters, Isaac “White Bird” Henry and Brenna Nash, to understand too. For different reasons, both these characters feel like outsiders and that feeling strengthens the bond they have for each other.

A friend of mine, Susan Johnson, who works in the Sapulpa, Oklahoma library and oversees the American Indian cultural section, helped me research my book. The day I called to talk about the boy in my story, she listened to my thoughts on this character (who at that point did not have a name). And when I described him, she immediately said, “I know this boy.”

My story has several underlying themes, but a few dominant ones involve the dark side of bigotry, being an outsider, and wanting to belong. Often authors write about things to exorcise their own demons and perhaps I am no exception. I had told Susan that since I was part Hispanic, I had struggled with my ethnicity as a kid until I was forced to decide where I stood. And that day came in elementary school, 8th grade. At that time, I had sandy blond hair with green eyes. Except for my last name, no one knew I was Hispanic. And with the prejudice I had seen firsthand, my heritage was a hard thing to claim until the day I was forced to take sides.

One day a friend of mine (who had blond hair and blue eyes with skin as pink as a baby’s butt) was badgering a dark-skinned Hispanic girl who was really shy and small. The Hispanic girl didn’t speak English well, but I had always liked her. My time of sitting on the fence about being Hispanic had come to an end. I couldn’t stand seeing the bigotry and the mean spirited attitude of my white friend, so I got in the middle of it all and stopped her in the school yard. I told her that I was Hispanic and if she had an attitude about that, she could take it up with me instead. And with my fist balled up, I was ready to deck her and she knew it. She looked at me with wide eyes and stammered, completely taken off guard. But I remember that day being important to me. It was the day I acknowledged that being Hispanic was who I was. And that I was proud of it—and proud of the stand I took against a bully, too.

So when I thought about the boy character in my book, I wanted him to be of mixed race where he straddles the line between cultures and doesn’t fit in anywhere. And after Susan Johnson said, “I know this boy,” she told me about her friend, Whitebird. Because of his age and to respect his privacy, I won’t share his last name, but I immediately loved his first name. It was symbolic of the underlying innocence I wanted my character to have. And the spiritual aspects of the color white and the symbolic connection to a dove had meaning for me, too.

Susan told me that the real Whitebird was smart and as adaptable as a chameleon, looking for a place to fit in and belong. He was someone she admired and just plain liked. And although he was struggling to find an identity of his own as a young man, his American Indian roots were very important to him. Even as I was writing the book – In the Arms of Stone Angels – Whitebird had been moved from one foster home to another, making it harder for Susan to see him, but they stayed in touch online.

After I wrote the book and let Susan read it (before it was sold to Harlequin Teen for an April 2011 release date), she heard Whitebird’s voice in her head as she read the pages and she said certain scenes really became vivid for her because she pictured him in her mind. Of course my book is a work of fiction. I completely made up this story. (Even the Oklahoma town of Shawano isn’t real, but in another post, I will share more about why I chose to do this and what the word, Shawano, means in the Euchee language.) But I want to clarify that the real Whitebird is an outgoing guy and he’s never spent time in a mental hospital. I only borrowed his name, with his gracious permission. And through Susan Johnson, I got a glimpse into him that only a friend could share.

Today, after ten years in the foster care system, the real Whitebird is out now and living on his own. He has his own place, supports himself and is completely flying solo. And because of his outgoing nature, he’s got friends who support him like a family. Although I might have wished that he had grown up with a more traditional family and had things easier, Whitebird is the person he is because of everything that he has gone through, good and bad. He’s someone I have a lot of respect for. And I hope that the admiration and good wishes I have for his spirit shows in my book.

The Countdown Begins...

I can’t believe January 2011 is nearly gone. I’m busy writing my second young adult book for Harlequin Teen – On a Dark Wing. And I completely am in love with this book, so I can hardly wait for you to read it. But in the mean time, the countdown for the release of In the Arms of Stone Angels (Mar 22, 2011) has begun. Since that’s right around the corner, I hope you’ll pre-buy now.

If you’re a reviewer and know about NetGalley.com, In the Arms of Stone Angels is available now. Signing up for NetGalley is FREE. And if you want to know more about how to get your advance review copy, go their FAQ page.

Here’s a summary of In the Arms of Stone Angels:

"In the arms of stone angels I am not afraid"
–Brenna Nash

Two years ago I did a terrible thing. I accused my best friend of being a killer after seeing him kneeling over a girl’s body. That moment and that outcast boy still haunt me. Now my mom is forcing me back to Oklahoma and I can’t get White Bird out of my mind. But when I find out he’s not in juvie—that he’s in a mental hospital, locked in his tormented brain at the worst moment of his life—I can’t turn my back on him again.

No one wants me to see him. My mom doesn’t trust me. The town sheriff still thinks I was involved in the murder. And the other kids who knew the dead girl are after me. I’m as trapped as White Bird. And when I touch him, I get sucked into his living hell, a vision quest of horrifying demons and illusions of that night. Everything about him scares me now, but I have to do something. This time I can’t be a coward. This time I have to be his friend.

Even if I get lost, too...

I have more on the book, including excerpts and early reviews and a book trailer, on my YA website. This book was a labor of love to write. And I hope you enjoy it.

Counting down to release day, I will post articles on the many inspirations behind this book. For instance:

• Did you know that the Euchee name of the main boy character, White Bird, comes from a real boy? Find out the real story.

• Stone Angels is set in a town called Shawano, Oklahoma. I’ll share why I chose to make this town up and what the word “Shawano” means in the Euchee language.

• White Bird longs to be part of the Euchee Tribe. And I’ll share more about this Native American community and why they inspired me to write about them.

• One face inspired the book. When I found the face of Brenna Nash online, I had to create a whole book about her. And after the novel was written, her picture was taken down and I lost her. Can you help me locate the real girl who inspired the character of Brenna Nash? Could she be someone you know?

• Brenna suspects that her “gift” to see the dead comes from her estranged father—a man her mother doesn’t talk much about and Brenna has never met. The seed is planted in Stone Angels for Brenna to learn more about him. Want to know more?

Inspirations Behind Brenna & White Bird

When I begin any book, I love to find character images that will inspire me. On days when I'm writing my new character, I have a print of their faces, or bodies, or clothes, etc. on my computer. Or I listen to music that reminds me of them. But when I saw Libby on modelmayhem.com, she completely inspired me to create Brenna Nash, my 16-year old main character in my YA book - In the Arms of Stone Angels (Harlequin Teen, Apr 2011). Her clothes in the photo really gave me a sense of Brenna too. And I love the vulnerable little girl behind those big sunglasses.

After I went back to modelmayhem to locate Libby, she had pulled her portfolio. This photo is all I have of her. I really miss her and wonder where she is, but my best wishes go out to her.

So here's the image that inspired Brenna. I hope when you read Stone Angels, you'll see Libby too. Let me know what you think?

And as for Isaac "White Bird" Henry, I always pictured him as the adorable actor Teddy Geiger who starred in "The Rocker." Teddy has incredible eyes and an expressive face. Don't you think? Can't you picture Brenna seeing him for the first time in the woods when the two of them are alone on the day they first meet when she's twelve? He's real dream material.