I've had a rough year. I know I'm not alone in that, and I'm not asking for pity here, but it needs to be acknowledged. It's been a really tough year. The normal one-thing-and-then-another rhythm of stuff that irks people now and again all happened at once for me this year. And there was more: unimaginably busy schedules with impossible demands, loss of staff to injury, loss of relatives to death, loss of family pets to old age, illness and even an oncoming car. Medical crises in loved ones, and losses there, too. And a couple close calls of my own, both of them arising during trips into remote back country. In late spring, I cracked my head open so severely that I can still trace the softball-shaped rent in my skull and I bear a scar across my forehead from the wound. That one happened ninety miles from the nearest hospital, so we did a field triage and some butterfly sutures, and I lived.

When I was writing WILD SORROW, I marveled at the tenacity, the strength, and the toughness that Jamaica showed as that story unfolded. She suffered an ongoing lack of the normal amenities we all take for granted (like electricity and running water), plus she got beat up, knocked down, smashed into, and broken up. And she just kept going. Even when people around her advised her to slow down, lie down, stop, rest. And I was amazed at the strength I found in her as I wrote. She had grit I didn't even know about, and I like to think I'm the one who created her! I grew to admire Jamaica on a much deeper level than I ever had before. Slowly, over the year I was working on WILD SORROW, Jamaica became my hero. Not just my sleuth. Not just someone I cared about. She became a role model for persistence and bravery in the face of difficult odds. I wanted to be more like her in almost every way.

And then this autumn, without meaning to—that is to say without planning to "camp out" or any of those rugged, outdoorsy things we do that seem fun and exciting—I ended up enduring a lot of the same hardships as my hero did in the book I wrote over two years ago. Just like Jamaica, I went without running water for what seemed like an eternity. The boiler went out and the snows and cold came early, so that meant a wood fire had to be kept constantly burning in the cabin woodstove, or if I had to leave, it meant returning to near-freezing temperatures, pets, and plants. The weather went straight from a rainy, cold, Irish summer to a bitter, white winter and never passed go. A constant snow pack has clung to the ground for two months now, not normal for autumn here.

On Halloween, in the White Mountains of Arizona, back off the grid nearly fifty miles from anywhere, I was brought to my knees by jacking pain that doubled me over and wrung up whatever was inside of me that could be torn loose and expelled. As one doctor put it, "You were vomiting like an animal." Indeed I was. And vomiting blood. The nearest hospital was an hour away over treacherous roads, but my fearless friend, Betsy, got me there. The specialists scratched their heads and ordered more tests, until finally a vascular surgeon read the CT scan and asked for another with a dye injection for contrast. It was he who noted the stranding of infection around my spleen, causing it to enlarge and become inflamed. But no one knows how or why it happened, or what might be done to prevent it happening again. Thus, my spleen came sharply to my attention for the first time in my life and remained in the forefront of my thoughts and feelings for some time.

After a brief recuperative time, I returned home to Colorado and the snows and bitter cold, the broken water line (and thus, no running water), the ailing (if relatively new) boiler, the wood-ravenous woodstove and the daily sponge baths in a scant bowl of water heated with my tea kettle. The weather delayed needed repairs, the pain in my side subsided, re-emerged, and then subsided again, my belly remaining tender for weeks. And a rash of other household systems breakdowns erupted until I started telling people we had the equivalent of the mechanical H1-N1 virus at our place.

It seemed like the day would never come when the water would run through the pipes again and the boiler would fire as backup so I could leave the house safely and return to it reasonably warm. I dreamed of hot showers, of clean laundry, of flushing the toilet at will. One day, Lee Ann, my publicist and friend, said, "You're just like Jamaica in WILD SORROW." And I realized that it was true!

From then on, I started asking myself, "What would Jamaica do?" When my side ached and I felt the pain coming back, I remembered Jamaica holding her broken ribs as she limped to the bathroom, determined to keep her commitment to help the Pueblo women deliver their Christmas baskets. When I couldn't keep food down, I remembered her sipping applesauce and soup out of the good side of her smashed mouth, knowing it would nourish her back to health. And when I wanted to feel self-pity because I hadn't had a hot shower in well more than a week, I remembered Jamaica digging a trench for a latrine near the woods in the cold of winter. And I figured I could hang on a little while longer. Maybe just one more day.

And the days stacked together until one of them was full of the sounds of the backhoe digging in the meadow to replace the broken water line. The boiler manages to run after a complete tune-up and a minor investment of funds. And my swollen spleen feels less tender to the touch and more like it's going to make it. And me along with it.

Suddenly, the worst of the crises seems to have passed and I can stop and take a breath. But, like Jamaica, I look around and note the changes. There have been losses that couldn't be mended. Nothing to do but cowgirl up. That's what Jamaica would do.