She recalled, "I wasn't afraid anymore because I wasn't going to sleep all alone. I had Heidi with me. I
was Heidi." The author also read the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books to occupy her time before going to sleep. Eventually, she said, "when I went to bed at night, I'd sort of rearrange the stories in my mind and make up my own."
Buffie was not always a writer; at first she was a painter. She did not begin to write until long after her marriage in 1967 to James Macfarlane, a high school art teacher. In 1971 she gave birth to a daughter, Christine Anne. When Christine became a teenager, the author began to remember her own childhood. Buffie stated, "I began to think about myself at 12 and how similar and different my daughter and I were. And I began to think about my father." It was at this point that Buffie began to write. At first she kept a journal in which she recorded her memories of the log cabin at Long Pine Lake, and of her father's death. Then Buffie began to read some of her daughter's books. "I became a secret YA reader...," as she put it, "and I was well and truly hooked." After she realized that she enjoyed writing more than painting, Buffie finally began working on her first novel.
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