Order History
Premium Membership & Rewards
Help Center / FAQ
The Author of Last Chance Llama Ranch on Writing, Resilience, and Reinvention
Hilary Fields’ rollicking new novel, Last Chance Llama Ranch, is the story of Merry Manning, an Olympic hopeful who is forced to completely change careers after a life-altering accident. Told with a fresh and shockingly funny voice, it is filled with endearing characters and set in a very unsual locale. Fields, no stranger to enormous life changes herself, shares her story of a writing career filled with stops and starts, triumphs, and hard lessons.
There are times in life when you get chloroformed, kidnapped, and wake up (metaphorically) miles from where you started, with no idea what the heck happened or what to do next. Your best-laid plans couldn’t care less how you laid them, and life’s give-a-crap store is all out of poop.
But as my book jacket says, “when life gives you llamas…”
Ships in 1-2 days.
Last Chance Llama Ranch is the answer to that “dot, dot, dot… what next?” that happens when your world implodes. I chose to write a book about a woman who’s had the wind knocked out of her, who believed life was going to go one way, but quite literally has the ground snatched out from under her skis. (Merry, my protagonist, was an Olympic skier before she gets a job writing the travel blog “Don’t Do What I Did,” and winds up on a remote llama ranch dodging llama spit and up to her ears in adventures unlike any she’s had before.) With no hope of ever regaining her former life, she has to punt.
I guess you could say I did the same in my own life.
I started writing my first novel (a historical romance called The Maiden’s Revenge) when I was just sixteen. I finished and sold it to a major publishing house within months after graduating college. My editor even said I was on track to become the next Johanna Lindsey. (Ha, I should be so lucky—or so talented.) I was in my early twenties and a real-live romance novelist! I was going to conventions in corsets and snapping pics with long-haired, hot-as-hell cover models. I was doing what I’d wanted to do with my life since I was eight years old. Everything seemed swashbuckly…until it wasn’t.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Yeah, I’d published three historical romances to good reviews. But my writing ambitions changed, the markets changed, and life got in the way. I made a few mistakes, and before I knew it, I’d blown the chance of a lifetime. And it was thirteen years between the publication of my third novel, Heart of a Lion, and my fourth, Bliss.
My failure was a bitter pill to swallow. The thing was, I refused to let go of my dream. Unlike my heroine Merry, I was fortunate enough to be able to get back into my original field, but it took over a decade of clawing, scraping, and writing my heart out (and dealing with a ton of rejection) before I got to the place where I’d been when I’d been too young to even appreciate how hard a thing it is to get published.
For me, there’s no magic formula to reinventing yourself. There’s perseverance. There’s desperation. And there’s knowing what you’re good at. The lesson I’ve taken away is, you have to be dogged, resilient, and willing to get egg (or llama loogies) on your face to succeed. That’s what writing—and of course life—is all about.
Last Chance Llama Ranch is in stores now.