The story of “Missing Mothers” has been in Charron Plumer’s head for a long time.

The Fox Island resident is now a first-time author after she turned a narrative that had been repeating in her mind for years into a self-published novel. She had some help from her daughter, Deshna Ubeda, who became her co-author.

“I’ve always been interested in writing and have wanted to write this particular story for years,” said Plumer, a public health nurse for Pierce County.

She developed the story of “Missing Mothers” partly from her own experiences, and she told her daughter a few years ago that she was finally ready to start writing. Ubeda, excited, went home and started to type her own thoughts on the story, and a collaboration was born.

“We became attracted to certain characters and started telling their story,” Plumer said of the writing process. “We just put all the threads together later on. Now when she reads the book, she’ll say, ‘Did I write that, or did you write that?’”

The novel examines the close relationship between a mother and a daughter similar to Plumer’s and Ubeda’s. The daughter, newly married and with a small child, feels somewhat trapped by her domestic circumstances and flees to Costa Rica, where she goes missing. The mother travels to Central America to prod local authorities to start an investigation into her daughter’s disappearance, and she confronts her feelings about being abandoned by her own mother as a child.

“I think most first-time authors write about sort-of personal experiences,” Plumer said.

The novel’s story mirrors some events from her own childhood, when her parents divorced and her mother, after she lost a custody battle, disappeared from her life for more than a decade. The idea of a story about vanishing has lingered with her ever since.

“I was trying to tell a story about how people go missing in our lives – sometimes on purpose, sometimes they’re taken away from you, and sometimes they’re sort of gone even though they’re present,” Plumer said.

Many of the novel’s supporting characters also deal with different types of disappearances in their lives. The decision to set the story in Costa Rica also comes from the authors’ lives. Plumer first took her family to visit the country many years ago, when she needed to learn Spanish for her job and found a month-long program in Costa Rica. Ubeda returned to the country on a trip after she graduated from college, and, throughout the years, the two have made their way back several times.

Plumer and Ubeda went to Costa Rica a few years ago specifically to do research for “Missing Mothers.” They visited Puerto Viejo, where much of the story takes place, and they asked police officers, journalists, bartenders, hotel employees and others to describe what would happen if a disappearance similar to the novel’s actually took place. It was important, Plumer said, to capture the story’s setting correctly.

“It has a wildness about it,” Plumer said of the country, which has a large American ex-patriate community. “There’s that whole element of people who go there and just drop out. It has an otherness, an alternative to how we live our lives.”

Finding time to write can be difficult for Plumer, who works full-time and usually can only grab a few moments on weekends. She said she’s been encouraged by the local response to “Missing Mothers.”

“I gained confidence in the fact that everyone who’s read the book has really liked it,” she said.

Last week, Plumer signed copies of the book for friends and well-wishers at Gig Harbor’s Full Moon Art Gallery, and she’s also visited local book clubs.

She said that, because she isn’t trying to make a living off her books, a positive reaction is the best reward she can get. And she’s working on a second novel, also set in Costa Rica, and it features some of the same characters. But this time, the story will not be based as closely on parts of her life, as she feels she can allow her characters to expand.

“They’re free from me now,” Plumer said.