Now and Forevermore Arabella follows a pre-teenage girl in the foster care system who discovers she was kidnapped and returns to her real family. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I just got an idea one day of wondering what would happen if a car thief realized there was a toddler in the back of car that he hastily stole. That’s quite an unexpected “bonus” to receive! What the heck would he do with that child? So I created a story where the parents momentarily leave a toddler in their parked car, due to the mother having a medical emergency, and then when the dad rushes back to get the little girl, the car and the child are both gone. It takes nine years before they find her because the thief and his accomplices ultimately abandons her out of state, dumping her in a mall. She’s mislabeled as a “foundling” and put into foster care.

What were some topics that were important for you to explore in this book and share with your child and teen readers?

I myself was caught up in a bizarre situation, as a child, where a sociopathic teacher at one of the schools I attended had a personal grudge against my mother – and proceeded to harass me for two solid years to try to get back at her. That sick teacher was later also found to have been a perpetual drug abuser, and furthermore, later there was even an allegation of her, shall we say, inappropriateness with a little boy, so I’m serious when I say she was “sociopathic” – she most definitely was a one-woman walking maniacal horror story. None of that is in this book, but it is what I thought of as I wrote it. I wanted to create a story for children and teens showing that sometimes they can find themselves pawns, all caught up in situations that are the making of totally unscrupulous adults, and which are totally not their doing or their fault. There are several reprehensible adult characters involved in Arabella’s story of being stolen with a car and then “hidden” in the foster care system, and it’s entirely a situation beyond the little girl’s control, yet there she is, having to live with the consequences of it. However, most bad situations don’t last forever, and I wanted to show that to my child readers. As a matter of fact, whenever I write a story, whether it’s for children or adults, I’m always keeping one line in mind, and that’s, “What a difference a day can make!”

What were some goals you set for yourself as a writer in this book?

I wanted to show how a child in such a chaotic situation feels from the inside out, when her world has been upended, again and again, in this instance by being sent to one foster home after another. Arabella tries, initially, to fly under the radar wherever she goes, and not get noticed, so that she isn’t sent away from a foster home yet again or so that nothing else upsetting will happen to her. She’s rather jaded about people already and she’s only twelve. Later on, when she’s about to be reunited with her wonderful family that have longed to find her for years, she’s still initially cautious of them, but they’re terrific. Then once she’s back in their embrace, she starts to come out of her self-imposed shell. She finds out her real name, her actual family, and best of all, her voice.

When will book 2 be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?

I have a habit of working on more than one book at a time, kind of freestyle, and the Arabella sequel is one of the ones I’m still in the process of creating at the moment. I’m not sure when it will be available yet, but probably some time later this year. Arabella has quite a past to overcome and, with her family, she has a much more pleasant present to enjoy, too. I’m putting another mystery in this book for Arabella, her friends and little sister to help solve, and bringing in a hard-to-figure-out character or two from her past, as well. She lives on an island in Florida, so I can put more of the location into this one, including a mysterious boat with a surprising cargo, since the first book was more about solving what had happened to Arabella that caused her to have such a past. Florida was more incidental in the first one but it’s going to be a big part of this one. It’s going to be so much fun to write that I’m smiling already as I think about it!

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/05/28/caught-up-in-a-bizarre-situation/