One of the joys of being an author is in the inventing of fictional worlds in real places. When I started thinking about this story this is what went through my head:
Nicole’s journey took her into the mountains of Montana on the winter solstice.
“What If?” I mused, a young man wanted to break out on his own and move to a place where he knew no one and just started his life over? I know! He answers an ad in a magazine and a few months later he’s living in the boondocks of Montana or Idaho or some other remote western state.
Oh yeah, he also needs to have a tie in to The Darling of Delta Rho Chi, since it needs to be part of series. Sam Paxton is the obvious choice. A young man living in the shadow of his older half-sister, Riley, who we met in book one.
Next, I needed a heroine; a heroine suffering from a calamitous event … who has a very good reason to drive all the way from the Gamma Alpha Beta house at the University of Washington to the boondocks of, er, someplace. Let’s call her Nicole.
Nicole’s intended journey that fateful December day from Ellensburg to Big Mountain. She ends up stranded at the red ‘X.’
Out came the maps. Being that the story is set in December and during Christmas break, Nicole needed a hometown someplace in Washington. I picked Ellensburg. It’s a nice town and one I was familiar with, having grown up in nearby Yakima. From there she could travel eastward to the mystery destination. What about Sun Valley, Idaho? I soon learned it was over 500 miles and 8 plus hours of travel from the heroine’s hometown. Plus, I knew Nicole’s parents would NEVER agree to that trip.
I Googled ski resorts in Montana and up popped quite a few. Red Lodge was 716 miles east of Ellensburg and Big Sky was 604. Whitefish, at 425 miles, seemed just far enough to make it difficult for Nicole to get home but still had the elements needed to make it work.
When I was 12 years old I became obsessed with designing the layout of houses. I used graph paper and would spend hours drawing them. This is my rough layout of the fictional Malloy’s Lakeside Lodge.
As the story took shape, more research was needed. Like knowing the specific weather on specific days. What was the layout of the lodge? Where could that lodge be located? What was the floor plan of Nicole’s family home?
All those details are, to me, part of the fun of story creation and I hope that you, my readers, will enjoy being immersed in the fictional world of Sam, Nicole, Dusty, and Beej! – Barbara DeVore
The actual place which inspired the fictional Gamma Alpha Beta Sorority
The Sigma Kappa sorority house at the University of Washington is on the National Historic Site.
The Sigma Kappa sorority house at the University of Washington is an enchanted place. The grandeur begins outside the front of the house with its classy brick façade and a stunning mix of Victorian and Tudor architecture. Truly notable is the three-story high round turret.
Once inside, the turret does not disappoint with its centerpiece being a wide and sweeping circular staircase which invites all eyes upward towards a magnificent crystal chandelier.
For a starry-eyed child, that staircase invited you into a place of fantasy and daydreams; up the stairs one would climb and promenade down them as if a princess, creating stories in one’s head.
Photo of the staircase as found on Pinterest
My first visit to this magical place was likely in the early summer of 1963. My grandmother, Alma DeVore, had taken a job as the housemother and, with the students gone for the summer, invited my family to come visit her at her new job.
I have no idea how many days we stayed, or if we even slept at the house. My older by two years sister says we stayed nearby at our uncle’s house. I was five at the time and I remember little about the visit to Seattle and the Woodland Park Zoo and more about the Sigma Kappa house.
There was a skybridge which connected the formal living areas to the dining hall and kitchen. In the basement were all sorts of mysterious rooms including one painted bright purple which we were told was the chapter room. Around every nook there was another cranny.
The author captured on a grainy video from 16 mm home movies 1963
Hallways were lined with closed doors to, undoubtedly, the private rooms of the members. At the very top level was a long sleeping porch with parallel rows of bunk beds where all the members slept. There was a back staircase leading to new and interesting spaces. It was the ultimate place to play hide and seek as you could scurry up one set of stairs and down another and through different corridors.
Through photos and documents which she had kept – and are now in my genealogy collection – I’ve determined that my grandmother must have arrived as the housemother beginning in January of 1963.
In 1946, the opportunities for women to earn a living were limited. On September 17th of that year she found herself a widow. Here she was, 46 years old, and with – at most – a high school education; she had no marketable skills beyond having raised three children: my uncle Lyle, my dad, Vince, and their younger sister, Arlene; and managing her own household.
Fortunately for her, she lived in Walla Walla, Washington at the time and was hired as the housemother for the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity.
My grandmother with the TKE fraternity members at Whitman College in late 1962 at her Farewell party.
The TKE years were good ones for her from what I’ve been told. She enjoyed the young men who were members and there was a camaraderie with the other housemothers. I can’t say for sure why, exactly, she left Whitman and took the job at the Sigma Kappa house except that it brought her closer to my Uncle Lyle and his family who moved to the Ravenna neighborhood in Seattle in the mid-1950’s. Although my parents lived in Walla Walla after both graduating from Whitman and by oldest brother having been born there, my family had left the community shortly after his birth as my dad had been transferred to Moscow, Idaho with his job at National Cash Register.
Cook Anna Blomgren in the Sigma Kappa kitchen 1965
Valentine’s Day ‘Gay 90’s’ shared dance with the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority February 1966
The only other time I know for sure we visited her there is in March 1965. That winter, in Yakima, Washington, where I grew up, the entire town is abuzz. Competing in the State AA Basketball playoffs were our crosstown rivals: D.D. Eisenhower (Ike) and A.C. Davis high schools.
The University of Washington was, I suspect, the best possible choice to be closer to one of her children and family and be able to support herself.
My dad, who had left National Cash Register 1961, returned to college to get a degree in Education, now taught Washington State History to ninth graders. He loved teaching and was invested, particularly, in the local sports community. At the end of the Region 4 semi-final round on March 13th, Ike lost to Davis who was now poised to play at the Seattle Center Coliseum the next Friday.
Although neither of my brothers went with us – my oldest brother attended Ike and would not have anything to do with Davis – my Dad was undeterred and my sister and me – now ages 9 and 7 – were loaded in the 1960 pink Dodge station wagon, and drove with our parents to Seattle on Friday, March 19th.
While I don’t recall a lot of the details, I do know that it was the UW’s Spring break, so the house was empty of sorority girls. And I got to live out every fantasy I had about that house. I was in heaven.
My older sister (left) and me on the Sigma Kappa sleeping porch March 19, 1965.
That evening, while our parents went to the basketball games, my sister and I stayed with our grandmother and even got to sleep on the sleeping porch!
Davis won and would be in the championship game the next evening! Once again, we hung out with grandma while my parents went to the game, my dad thrilled when Davis beat Roosevelt 66-49 for the 1965 AA state basketball championship.
Sometime late that evening, our parents arrived back at the Sigma Kappa House, and put my sister and me to ‘bed’ in the back of the Dodge station wagon. We traveled home that way, snuggled in sleeping bags with our heads on pillows that let us look up at the sky while we drove through the dark mid-March night.
My last memory of that trip is of looking up at the snow falling that night on Snoqualmie Pass, swirling in mesmerizing chaos, with the thick flakes illuminated by car headlights shining through the window behind our heads.
Not the DeVore family car, but ours WAS this same pink color and, apparently, those children also rode without seat belts in the back of the wagon.
My grandmother, born March 15, 1900, seems to have retired at the end of the 1966 academic year. Some 15 years earlier she had bought a house in Spokane. She had it converted to a duplex which she rented out for all those years when she was a housemother! In going through her papers, it was apparent that, despite not having a college degree, she was a determined woman who did not wallow in her grief, but pulled on her work boots to insure her own future. She retired to Spokane and lived in the left half of the duplex, renting the right half out until her much too early death in January 1970.
I have never gone back to the Sigma Kappa house. I think if I did it would seem smaller and less grand than my memories. Instead, it has morphed into the Gamma Alpha Beta sorority, as much a ‘character’ in ‘The Darling of Delta Rho Chi’ as Elise, Riley, Jack, and Virginia.
There’s a bit of a thrill to do a search on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble and see one’s novel available for presale… it’s a dream a long time in the making! For more information and the links to both click here: https://barbaradevore.com/the-darling-of-delta-rho-chi/.
The first order of hardcover books!
November 25, 2024
The long awaited day has arrived! My shipment of hardcover books. One step closer to the launch party.
December 1, 2024
Hosted my Book Launch Party yesterday! Great success. Thank you to all who attended and shared in the celebration. Thank you to all who have purchased books and have left me reviews. My heart swells!
I absolutely adored this two-for-one father/daughter book. It’s the story of Elise and her sorority troubles, as well as her father Jack finding his way to new love and dreams coming true for both. The characters are well developed, and I became invested in what happened to them. I fully appreciated the place and period accurate references to people and places I remember from living in the state. I felt the author nailed the social mores and values of the time period written about. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.”
January 27, 2025
First of all – thank you to EVERYONE who has ordered The Darling of Delta Rho Chi. I had no idea what this journey would look like. It’s been everything I hoped it would be and more. I’m especially appreciative of the conversations with friends who have sought me out to share with me their impressions of the novel.
A couple of favorite verbal comments:
“It’s kinda spicy. I never expected that from you.”
“I stayed up until 2 a.m. finishing it. I never do that.”
“When is the next book coming out?”
And then there was this, the comment which truly floored me:
“Your writing reads a lot like Jodi Picoult.”
For those unfamiliar with Jodi Picoult, I think she is one of the best fiction writers I’ve ever read: carefully crafted characters, compelling story lines, crisp and clean scene setting and descriptions. To be included in the same sentence is humbling, flattering, and brought a lump to my throat.
Heartfelt thanks to all who took the time to leave a review, send me a message, or seek me out to tell me what you thought. Here are three recent reviews on Amazon:
327 Tuesday Newsday Articles and 2 published novels
January 9th
The author’s collection of dictionaries. The Webster’s New World Dictionary, third from the left, was often used for playing ‘Dictionary.’
A Tuesday Newsday Classic
Back in the early 1980’s I was introduced to a game my hubby and his family loved to play. There was no game board or markers to move around. Instead it required a dictionary, a piece of paper for each player, and a pen. They called the game Dictionary.
A search of the internet reveals, from the Infallible Wikipedia, that the genre is more commonly known by another name: Fictionary. In the years since being introduced to this delightful pastime there have been actual games developed and sold. As noted by the Infallible Wikipedia:
“The board games Balderdash, Dictionary Dabble, Flummoxed, and Weird Wordz are based on Fictionary. In one round of the board game Derivation, players describe or fabricate a word’s etymology; players who provide a correct etymology receive one point for doing so, but their entries are then removed from play, and they lose their chance to receive multiple points by drawing multiple votes from other players. Similarly, in the board game Wise and Otherwise, the Picker randomly chooses a quotation and reads the beginning, and other players try to create realistic endings to the quotation.”
It’s amazing what interesting words one can find when perusing a dictionary.
While these games have been successful, I rather like how we played it: Get a group of people together (the more the better) and then pick one person each round who looks through the dictionary until they find a sufficiently obscure word. They then announce the word to the group and each person has to come up with a definition for that word. The chooser writes down the REAL definition.
Once everyone has written his or her definition, the papers are passed to the person who picked the word and they read each entry aloud, being sure to hide the papers from others. Each participant then decides which might be the real meaning of the word. Those who guess correctly get one point. The chooser gets one point for every incorrect guess.
Now, I’m sure you are wondering what this has to do with the title of this week’s Tuesday Newsday, Coddiwomple. Up until the hubby and I were driving home from Yakima on New Year’s Day this year I had never heard of Coddiwomple. But it immediately made me think of playing Dictionary and probably the most favorite word I ever found and used which is ‘gardyloo.’
The hubby had read an article on the term Coddiwomple and shared it with me. What I learned, from author and philosopher David Marlowe – who coined the term – is this:
I was immediately struck by the rhythm of the word and how it seems to fit its definition. Of course the purpose of the word is to help people stop and contemplate what, exactly, they are each trying to accomplish in life.
It was on this date in 2017 when I wrote my first Tuesday Newsday article. At that time I had no idea where I was going with it; only that, via a very decidedly Coddiwomple experience, I had been nudged to take the path of starting a website for ‘someday.’
That ‘someday’ was aimed for that moment, in the murky future, when I would have a book published and be able to share it on my website.
And thus began a Coddiwomple journey toward a vague destination. My first Tuesday Newsday was all about one of my favorite musical artists, Jim Croce.
Of course I screwed it up a bit on that first go round – being unfamiliar with WordPress and how it all worked – and accidently posted it on Wednesday, January 10th instead of that Tuesday, January 9th. So I ended up with TWO articles about Jim Croce a year apart, with the other one on January 11th the following year. (here’s the link to both which I combined into one for ONLY January 10th): https://barbaradevore.com/2017/01/10/jim-croce/)
But that was okay because, well, Jim Croce. One of his best songs… and so bittersweet.
What I did know after that first post is that in addition to the fiction stories which invade my brain and compel me to write, I had a whole lot of personal stories which came pouring forth.
Some have been funny, some philosophical; they range from recounting early childhood memories to recent impactful events. They cover music, TV, movies, nature, history, geeky musings, and cultural references. War and politics are never included.
But what do any of these ramblings have to do with traveling purposefully toward a vague destination?
For me, no matter what think I chose to do, it is the desire to fully embrace each experience in life. New opportunities frequently present themselves and, as someone who probably has undiagnosed ADHD, I am often distracted by such shiny objects.
Yet, as I have matured, I’ve come to understand a universal truth: our most precious commodity is TIME. I’ve become quite protective of my time. And the one thing in life which is elemental to who I am and where I want to spend my time is writing. It’s been that way since I first put a piece of chalk to a chalkboard desk I received as a Christmas present at age three when my family still lived in Clarkston, Washington.
The author, age 3, with her chalk board. Captured with a cell phone camera from the home movies my dad took.
So now I begin year nine of my blog in basically the same way as I did in 2017, traveling in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination. Coddiwomple.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to go write Nicole out of the entanglement in which she finds herself. Who will she choose: Nathan, Sam, or ???. And how will her parents react? I’m not sure she has quite embraced Coddiwomple but then again she’s only 21 and has a lifetime ahead of her.
Sneak preview of just a bit of the cover art for ‘Rivals’!
Well, that was LAST year’s dilemma. Since then, Nicole and company made their appearance with the publication of “The Rebel of Delta Rho Chi” on September 16, 2025. Now I’m thick in the lives of Kara, Brooke, Jason, and Erik who, as early twenty college students, are challenged to figure out the eternal question, “Who am I and what am I doing here?” I think they’ll get there but currently things are a bit messy in “The Rivals of Delta Rho Chi.” Look for their story this summer.
Finally, for those who have read all the way to the bottom, here’s your reward. Gardyloo is, according to Dictionary.com, “a cry formerly used in Scotland to warn pedestrians when slops were about to be thrown from an upstairs window.” Oh those crazy Scots. You’re welcome. Of course if you looked closely at the photos, you already knew the definition.
barbaradevore.com 