Where Do You Call Home? by Inara Scott

When I’m forced out of my hobbit hole of introversion and end up at a party, I often get the question, “Where are you from?”

I answer Buffalo because that’s where I was born, and where I lived until I went away to college. After college I headed as far away as I could—my travels took me to North Carolina, Maryland, Colorado, and eventually Oregon.

When I got to Oregon I finally felt like I had found my home.  

Don’t get me wrong, Buffalo was a perfectly nice place to grow up. It simply didn’t fit me. Problem one: I don’t like the cold. You may have heard that sometimes it snows in Buffalo. And when it snows, it snows a lot.

Problem two: I really like mountains and mist and big fir trees, and all sorts of other things that we have in Oregon that I didn’t even know I loved until I moved here.

I came to Oregon to attend law school, and once I got here, I really never contemplated moving. My soul feels right here. Like I stumbled into the place I was meant to call home.

That’s why I always feel like the question we should be asking at parties is, “Where do you call home?” When you ask this question, people have to stop and think. Where do I call home? Is it the place where I live? Where I was born? Where I visited ten years ago and have always wanted to go back to?

In my new book Heartbreaker, my heroine Tess moved around a lot as a kid, but always came back to her grandmother’s house in the Bay Area, outside San Francisco. That house, which represented love and stability and safety, would always be her home. For her, home wasn’t about the city, the scenery or the weather. It was about the house and the people inside it.

My hero, Mason, grew up outside Sacramento, in Yuba City. Mason’s hometown is part of the rural Central Valley of California and can be hot in the summer and wet in the winter. (Random trivia: According to Wikipedia, Yuba City is also home to the smallest mountain range in the world.) Mason loves the place he grew up. He still carries a key chain from his high school, and has huge pictures of dusty fields on the walls of his penthouse in San Francisco. When he thinks about home, he remembers farm stands and cool nights and stars.

So what about you? Where do you call home? Is it the place you were born, or some other place you found along the way? Is it the house or the landscape, or the people you’re with? Any random trivia you want to share about the place you call home?

One lucky commenter will win an adorable Bad Angels notepad, pictured below!

Mistakes? She’s made a few…

Dropped out of high school? Check. Ran away with loser boyfriend at age sixteen? Check. Fell for every line from every guy? Sadly, check. But now, Tess Paplion has started over. Juggling multiple part-time jobs while finishing her college degree, she’s not letting anything get in her way. Especially not a sexy angel investor with “one-night disaster” written all over him.

Mason Coleman just inherited a 200-pound invalid Mastiff—and an intriguing, unusual, and thoroughly infuriating dog nanny who turns his life upside down the moment she steps through his front door. No matter how she makes him feel Mason doesn’t do commitment—so what happens when he falls for her? And worse, what happens when she wants nothing to do with him?

Inara wrote her first book when she was fifteen–a romance called “A Wild and Stormy Passion” that featured swordplay, a pirate heroine, and plenty of naughty bits (all of which came entirely from her imagination). Since then, she’s written romances of the category, contemporary, and fantasy varieties. Her books are sinfully sensual and deeply emotional. Inara reserve the right to enjoy country music, puppies, and love-at-first sight. When she’s not writing, she enjoys to spending time wandering around in the woods and has been known to occasionally dress up her little white dog in princess costumes.

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