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Sara Voorhees said that writing her first novel was not as challenging as others might imagine it would be.

Not that it was easy, mind you. It took her two years.

But Voorhees, a nationally syndicated film critic who has reviewed thousands of movies and interviewed scores of celebrities, had a leg up on other first-time novelists. She already knew how to tell a story.

"I'm a big believer in stories, which is why I love movies and plays," Voorhees, 61, said during a recent phone interview from her home in Corrales. "The stories we tell ourselves help us understand who we are.

"The same is true in writing a story about Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep. So I've had a lot of experience telling stories."

She said that in writing her novel, "The Lumiere Affair," she tried to imagine she knew the story of Natalie Conway, her main character, and just had to write it down.

"Natalie is partly me when I was younger and partly my daughter, who is 30 now," Voorhees said. "When I started the novel, I knew what happened at the end. I knew where Natalie was going, but I didn't know how she was going to get there.

"Toward the end, I would get up at 5 a.m. and get right out to the guesthouse, where I did my writing, because I couldn't wait to see what would happen next. It was great fun."

The publishers describe "The Lumiere Affair" as as novel of Cannes, which it is. But Voorhees said it is also a mystery novel.

It's about Natalie, a Los Angeles film critic and celebrity journalist who gets an assignment to cover the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Natalie hopes the assignment will revive her flagging career. But she is apprehensive about returning to France, where she spent her early childhood and where her mother died in a strange incident.

Going back to France means stirring up painful memories and dealing with unanswered questions. For example, what connection did Natalie's mother have with an impetuous French director?

The novel's title has dual references. Lumiere means light in French, and lightning plays a role in the novel's plot. But it also refers to the Lumiere brothers, who were pioneers in the French film industry.

Both France and movies play major roles in Voorhees' life.

She grew up in Denver and attended the University of Colorado, where she majored in French and French culture and minored in film. She studied in France her senior year.

She moved to New Mexico in 1972 when her physician husband, Dayton, went to work with the Indian Health Service in Crownpoint. In 1974 they moved to Corrales and have lived there since.

Her career as a movie reviewer stems from a play she wrote. The play, "Let the Flowers Fall," a mystery, was produced at the University of New Mexico and led to an invitation to review plays for KOB-TV. By 1981, she was reviewing movies for the TV station.

She was The Tribune's movie reviewer from 1990 to 2000, and as a syndicated critic she has written more than 4,000 movie reviews for TV and print, and she has interviewed most major figures in the Hollywood movie scene.

"Meryl Streep is my No. 1 favorite," she said. "I would drop anything to go see her on the screen. But she has all the qualities of the kind of person you'd want to talk to if you ran into her at the post office."

Voorhees has covered the Cannes Film Festival five times.

She said the overall feeling that comes out of Cannes is one of exhaustion.

"As a journalist, you are there to work, and it feels like there are millions of movies to see," she said. "At any time, day or night, there are movies. It's like sitting at a table filled with all the things you want to eat but being too full to eat."

Voorhees said her years on the movie beat gave her an up-close look at how obsessed Americans are with celebrities.

"It's what makes us tolerate Britney Spears' shaved head on TV 24 hours a day while the real news about Iraq crawls along the bottom of the screen as if it were the weather," she said. "When I realized I was part of the machine that was turning us into that, it was a real shock."

Voorhees said she wanted to write a novel that showed what happens behind the curtain of celebrity culture we see on TV.

"And I couldn't think of a place more celebrity studded than Cannes," she said.

Voorhees is five chapters into the writing of her second novel.

So is it set in Hollywood, at the Sundance or Venice film festivals?

"Anything, I ever write is going to be influenced by movies," Voorhees said. "But movies are not an integral part of this novel as they were in the first."

She just wants it to be a good story.