Читать книгу It Started with a Crush... - Melissa McClone, Melissa Mcclone - Страница 3

Dear Reader,

For the past eight years my fall and spring Dedication weekends have been full of soccer games. All three of my children have played and my husband has coached recreational teams for years.

Soccer isn’t something I grew up with. I attended my first game in 1984, but wasn’t really sure what was going on. Friends kept telling me how big soccer—they called it football—was outside the US, but I never realized how big until 26th June 1994, when I attended a match between Colombia and Switzerland at Stanford Stadium. Not even the two Super Bowls I’d gone to came close to matching the excitement and passion of these soccer fans.

Ever since then I’ve wanted to write a romance with soccer as the background, but it wasn’t until my son started playing competitive soccer for an Oregon club in spring 2010 that the story ideas started flowing. After speaking with one of my son’s coaches, who also played for the Portland Timbers, a professional soccer player named Ryland James came to life.

Having access to people who can help with research adds realism to a story. I was fortunate in the soccer assistance I received, but when it came to my heroine, Lucy, who’d had a liver transplant as a teen, I wasn’t sure where to turn for help.

A friend had been a living donor for her daughter’s successful liver transplant in 2007, but I happened to mention my work-in-progress to another mom during our kids’ swimming practice. Turned out she was a two-time liver and kidney transplant recipient. Talking with her helped me understand and fill in Lucy’s backstory of her having liver failure. It also made me understand the importance of organ donation and the lives being saved by transplants.

To all those who have signed up to be donors: thank you!

Melissa