Local author signs copies of debut novel

FERNDALE – Author Gretchen Stone didn't intend for her first novel "Kaleidoscope" to take on a serious tone.
"It evolved from a short story that I was doing about the women in my own personal book club," says Stone, 62. The book, which began as a tongue-in-cheek story, turned into quite a project for Stone, one that required "tons" of research of life in Detroit in the 50s and the Vietnam War.
"There's enough fantasy to make it fun to read and there's enough truth there to make it believable," she says.
"Kaleidoscope" blossomed out of Stone's desire to scope the possibilities for women. "It is the first of a series about a group of friends who have diverse careers and backgrounds, who always manage to get into some sort of trouble," she says.
The women relish travel and romance. "They are a lot like me, I guess," she says. "Only much more adventurous."
After two years of writing, the book's central theme is about "what happens when women make choices, how one little thing can change your life," she says.
While the premise of two women, one Christian and the other Jewish, falling in love isn't based on Stone's life, some of the childhood details, like making tents with chairs and sitting on the back fence making wishes, are.
"These are not average [women] because average is boring," she says. "This is who you would perhaps be if you turned the kaleidoscope just to make a little difference in your life. These women are larger than life, but they're people we could be."
Stone, who lives in Detroit, is now 90 percent finished with her next book, which involves a woman in Baghdad during the Iraqi War. She says people who want to write don't always realize how much time and dedication goes into it. "I put a lot of hours in," she says. But now that she's retired from her job as a designer and builder of global data networks at Ford Motor Co., she has time.
"I didn't focus on writing as a career until about three years ago, when my long-winning streak with jobs and women came to a screeching halt at the same time," she says.
One of Stone's favorite quotations is from George Bernard Shaw: "If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."
That's how she feels about writing. "I plan to write a novel a year for the rest of my life," she says.