♪♪ ♪♪ My name is Nicole Baart and I'm a novelist.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl.

I was born with a birth defect and ended up in the hospital a lot when I was young, I had lots of surgeries, and it was just really traumatic.

And truly the only thing that got me through is my parents would pick up a big bag of books from the library and I would sit on my dad's lap or my mom, whoever was with me and they would just kind of tent a blanket around me and read and it was escape and comfort and just a way to deal with what was happening.

So I learned really early on that books could take me to a different place.

And it didn't take me very long to realize that I wanted to write them too.

♪♪ So, welcome to Beaverdale Books.

Thank you, Jan.

Thank you, Alice, for hosting.

Tonight I am super pleased to be introducing best-selling author Nicole Baart and her 10th, yes I said 10th, novel, Everything We Didn't Say, a family drama that follows a mother who must confront the dark, life changing summer of the infamous Murphy murders in order to reclaim the daughter she left behind.

Nicole Baart: I realized that what was on my nightstand, what I was reading and enjoying were mysteries.

And so I was a little intimidated to write in that genre, it is really hard and takes just a lot of work to hold all of those things together, the red herrings and the foreshadowing and you have to have twists and it all needs to make sense at the end.

And it just was really, it was really intimidating.

So I started putting elements of mystery into my books and in the last couple I have just really gone for domestic suspense, mystery, thriller and have really enjoyed it.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: All of my books are rooted in the Midwest.

This is where I grew up and it is where I live now.

I think that writing novels based in this area gives me the opportunity to really explore characters and the way that they interact with each other and the way that, both sides of the coin, things that are really beautiful about the area and things that are a little bit harder.

And I love wrestling with that, I love looking at the way that this affects communities and the way that it affects my individual characters.

I think it is just an especially rich place to set the mystery.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: What's so neat about Everything We Didn't Say is it is almost the book that wasn't.

I started it over three years ago.

I thought I had a fantastic idea, handed it into my agent and she really quickly emailed me back and said, oh honey, this is not done.

It's a great first draft, it's a good beginning, but it needs to be rewritten.

So I rewrote it a second time and turned it into my agent again.

And she very promptly called me back and said oh honey, good job, nice second try.

So I started over again and wrote the book a third time.

And finally that is when it worked.

But I also went back to my roots.

So, when I started writing books for publication I would always go buy a five-pack of legal pads and my favorite pens and sit down in a room and write it longhand.

And I wrote my first nine books longhand.

And I tried to type this book twice and it didn't work.

And it wasn't until I sat down with a pen and paper and kind of started all over again, went back to my roots and wrote it out that it started to make sense and the book came to be.

Nicole Baart: I did it from the very beginning.

I find that I'm not creative that way.

It silences my inner critic.

So, instead of typing a word and then having the opportunity to delete, delete, delete, delete, I just keep going.

And you can't erase it.

I'm writing with pen, so if there's something I don't like I might run a line through it.

But more often than not when I go back to that I realize that there was something in there that I might want to keep, it's actually pretty good.

So it allows me to just keep going, to silence my inner critic and I think that it completely accesses a different part of my brain.

I don't know why.

But I'm far more just creative and the words flow better when I write longhand.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: I have five kids ranging in age from 11 to 19.

My husband is the Dean of Chapel and Chief of Staff at a university in our area.

We have biological children, we have adopted children.

And yeah, it has just been a really big part of our lives weaving our family together from lots of different places.

My husband is Canadian, I'm American, so we are all just a mish-mash of citizenships, we're from all sorts of different places.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: After the adoption of our second son, we were in Ethiopia for three weeks, my husband and I and our new son, and we stayed in a missionary guest house across the hall from a gentleman that we became really good friends with.

So we were there for about three weeks and in that time we just developed a relationship that we didn't want to end.

So when we took off and he went home to Liberia and we went home to the United States, we stayed in contact.

Liberia had just come out of the civil, its second civil war and they really needed help.

So our friends' brother had taken in 35 war orphans and was trying to provide for them and didn't really know how.

So we started with a child sponsorship program for those 35 kids and in the, boy it's been 15 years now, in the years in between it has turned into a commercial farm, 20 some churches, 6 schools, 3 children's homes that serve over 150 kids.

We do community redevelopment projects and just wherever God leads us.

♪♪ She asked if you think you're going to move on from mysteries into a different genre.

♪♪ Nicole Baart: So, I'm kind of an odd person or an odd author in that I have way more ideas than I will probably ever be able to publish.

I would love to write fantasy.

Nicole Baart: I still pinch myself every day.

I have wanted to do this my whole life and just never imagined that it would happen and it did.

And when I was a little girl my dad used to introduce me to people by saying, this is my daughter Nicole, she's going to be a published author someday.

And it embarrassed me so much, especially when I was in my teens, he did it when I was in my teens.

I found it really embarrassing.

And yet at the same time there was never a point in my life where somebody told me, you can't do that, or you're from a small town in Iowa, this isn't going to happen for you, just give that up and do something else.

And it gave me the confidence and the encouragement that I needed to seize that opportunity when it came.

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