Between the Rivers is now an e-book!

Wow! It feels good to be published again! No, I don't have a new book out, but I do have Between the Rivers, my first book, digitized and waiting for you to download onto your Kindle, Nook, or whatever apparatus you have available to read an electronic book! It is ever so easy to publish an e-book if you've had it in mind from the beginning, but when your book was published the old way, and that publisher is no longer in business, it is NOT so easy. First, you have to have the book scanned, digitized and converted to e-pub, or some other acceptable software. McNaughton and Gunn, my first printer was extremely helpful. I approached them when I ran out of books and wanted a short run of Between the Rivers. After they satisfied my POD (print on demand) order, they agreed to convert the file to e-pub software, a requirement to meet the e-publisher needs. Amazon.com takes it a step further, but generally speaking, you just need to have someone do a conversion. Over the years, many of you have asked for a large print copy, and more recently, some of you have wanted to know when my books will be available as e-books. So there you have it!

Click to order a Kindle eBook version Just $7.99

Click to order a NOOK eBook version Just $7.99

Order a copy and have it downloaded immediately to enjoy all the joys of electronic publishing. Thank you!

More later!

Burned Out

Since I'm a writer, you may think this is going to be about writer's block, or a long unproductive spell. Not so. In my first novel, Between the Rivers, I wrote about being "burned out." As the author, I stood beside my protagonist and imagined the horror she and her family felt as they stood huddled in the shelter of the trees, their eyes wide and unbelieving as they watched the house sputter and cough up great clouds of black smoke...ashes raining down on the canopy of ancient trees, covering their moss-bearded limbs with a peppery dust. Last week, when I heard the news that our good friends in Hendersonville had lost their home in the middle of the afternoon when lightning struck their garage, once again, I could only imagine the horror. Fire had raced through the attic and soon destroyed the whole house. In the early part of the last century, especially in rural areas, it was not that unusual to be "burned out," but today we are so careful--for one thing, we don't use kerosene to start our fires. Many of us don't even use real wood logs. But what can stop that act or freak of nature that directs a bolt of lightening into a mountain home, or sends a tornado skipping across south Raleigh today anymore than it could a hundred years ago. It is hard to accept a freak act of nature, we want to put the blame on something or someone, but only a writer can do that with surety. But such sad news should give us pause. It has me. I look around at my carelessness, things I value scattered about with abandon. If I suddenly lost it all, would I wake up in the night and remember the little things--that little doll from my childhood that always sat on the shelf above my computer? Or my dad's Brownie camera, or my pictures. How would I ever replace all of those pictures! We take so much for granted--that our things will always be here. That we will always be here to care for and about them.

Motoring Through Wharton Country

I'd almost forgotten the joy of "motoring", an old-fashioned word suggesting a carefree drive--in this case, across Edith Wharton country. My husband and I were driving his Mercedes-Benz, but it might as well have been Henry Montgomery's 1925 yellow Buick touring car. You'll remember Henry's car from my novel Bandeaux Creek. We had not completely avoided the interstates and turnpikes driving up from North Carolina, but once we arrived at the Berkshires, we took the swervy-curvy roads and motored first to Blantyre in Lennox, Massachusettes. Blantyre is a beautiful country house hotel, one of the Berkshire "cottages" built in 1902 during the Gilded Age by a wealthy entrepreneur to resemble his wife's ancestral home in Scotland. But what really made the trip for this writer was visiting Edith Wharton's home The Mount nearby and seeing first-hand where one of the twentieth century's greatest women writers lived and worked. Interestingly, one of my characters in Bandeaux Creek was based on Wharton. Unless you are familiar with Wharton's biography, you may not recognize her. Wharton was a divorcee at a time when divorce was still frowned upon. In my novel, Henry Montgomery, Maggie Lorena's editor, asks his friend Evelyn Armstrong (Wharton's counterpart) to review Maggie's manuscript for her work in progress. Armstrong's (Wharton's) critique is not favorable. You see, I had gone to great lengths to research women writers of the era, and discovered this possible link; i.e. that Maggie might identify with Wharton and think of divorce as an option by which she could stay in Boston permanently. If you've read Bandeaux Creek, you know that does not happen.

It was exhilerating to be in Wharton's home for other reasons. She was an architect, giving great attention to the design of her garden, her home and its furnishings. I don't think she was formally trained, but she spent much of her life studying architecture, traveling in Italy and France, and hobnobbing with the best architects of the time. In her home, every room was as much a part of the outside as the inside. Her views while working on her masterpieces were simply incredible. As a homemaker, gardener and writer, to a certain extent, I could identify. My bedtime reading on this leg of our trip was Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

From Lennox, we "motored" over to the Hudson River Valley to tour Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's homes in Hyde Park, New York. In researching my third novel, A Chosen Few, I read several Roosevelt biographies. I was intrigued because Penderlea was a the first New Deal Homestead resettlement community, and Eleanor Roosevelt had visited there on June 11, 1937. We were in her cottage, "Val-kill" on the Roosevelt estate exactly 74 years later. It was a thrill for me because I admire her as a First Lady, humanitarian, and as a writer. If you'd like to read an interesting perspective on Franklin and Eleanor during the war years, I highly recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time. The book is available in audio and made for enjoyable listening on our journey.

More later!