It’s pretty safe to say that non-romance readers think everything in a romance story comes straight from fantasy land. There are even romance readers who think that. There are also people who think if it’s in a book then the person who wrote it has to have lived it.

Not so.

Some of us work to make up every aspect of our stories. Some of us have stories come to us, fully formed like a movie we’ve seen. Some of us work off things that inspire us. It only takes one small nugget to kick off an entire story.

That’s how it happened for me when I began thinking about Her Miracle Man. A joke inspired a title – The 12 Dates of Christmas. That title inspired the framework of the story – 12 dates at Christmas time. The real question became what would happen on those dates. Planning that was where the real adventure began, and it became more real than I could have imagined.

In my mind, I invented a hero who had been a doctor before moving into hospital management and then came to run the place. He knew staff, patients and family members by name. The hospital had a reputation for being one of the best in the country for all things kid related. They were connected to Ronald McDonald House, or something like it.

During a visit to Indiana, I visited Riley Hospital for Children where the Chief Medical Officer had once been a doctor. The staff called him by his first name. He knew theirs, the patients and the families. Riley is also connected to Ronald McDonald House.

The parallel between my hero and the real life CMO was eerily real. The stories of the patients involved could easily belong to real people. The characters and the romance were absolutely made up, but with all the reality in the story, they felt as real as anyone I’ve known in life.

What stories have you read that have felt completely real? Or, do you fall into the camp of

Nikki can be found online at her website, Twitter and Facebook.