CB:  Who is your favorite character in “What She Left for Me?”

Tracie:  You get attached to all of your characters. Who can’t love Aunt Patsy? She’s just fun and zany and she’s the comic relief that is desperately needed. Here’s a woman who’s born the truth in grace and often times that’s what happens. We have people sitting in the pews out there who are bearing the truth in grace. That’s a special thing. I believe a true special gift from the Lord, when you know it’s not the right time to speak and you hold your tongue.

CB:  What new projects are on your horizon?

Tracie:  First, lets talk about the nonfiction briefly. I have a nonfiction project that comes out next Spring that has been co-written with Allison Bottke (“God Allows U-Turns Lady”) and with a dear friend Dianne O’Brian. It’s kind of funny the way God put us together. I kept having people in my writing groups and in my church who would come to me. Inevitably the basis behind some of the problems we were discussing and enduring were the lies that we had bought into over the years. Lies like, I can do it all, I don’t need God … we would never say that … that would be sacrilegious. But our actions were sometimes saying that.

Lies like, it’s a choice, and lies like I if I’m bored, I don’t have to stay in a marriage. Just different things that the world definitely promoted as did the church as well. The more I do, the more God loves me. The thing came down to a discussion with Dianne and me.

We were talking about how critical this issue was and I thought that God wanted us to put together a book related to the topic. Dianne was not published at that time. She wasn’t writing, but she was very interested. Her heart was solid on the problems that were created out of these lies and as a pastor’s wife she’d seen a lifetime of hurt related to these issues. Next I began to pray about the project and when I ended up at a conference in Colorado where Allison was speaking, I sat down and listened to her testimony and I knew she was the missing link. She was the piece we needed to complete this project. I talked with her and she said this was something that was on her heart for years … even had this little outline. All three of us got together and started working on this project and that comes out in March 2006 and it’s called, “I Can’t Do It All.”

Around the same time I have a new fiction series debuting, "The Alaskan Quest" series. It’s a loosely followed up series to the "Yukon Quest" series. Many people asked me questions wanting to know about a particular set of characters. So I thought it would be fun to pick up the story about 15 years later and set it in Alaska and have a wonderful series to show what happened to those people and give a little flavor to what happened in the early 1900s.