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Okay, so we released Wise Woman, the final book of our Appalachian Journey series, in e-book on the 29th of January December (sorry, got ahead of myself), and in 3 days it’s already made it onto three bestseller lists on Amazon. Needless to say, we are thrilled and, of course, want to thank all of our wonderful readers–the absolute best readers in the world!
When it released, Christy and I breathed a mutual sigh of relief. I swear I could hear her “Whew!” echoing with mine all around the Blue Ridge mountains. It’s finished!. No more agonizing over which family stories to include or how much history/Cherokee folklore/herbal medicine to balance the stories. And most important, no more self-imposed December deadlines! Those things are killers! Not gonna do that to ourselves never, ever, EVER again …
… and then Christy, her husband Steve, and granddaughter Gabi traveled over the mountains to spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with me and my husband. We went Bear-footin’ on Main Street in beautiful downtown Hendersonville. That’s Gabi to the left posing with the hated Yankee bear (sorry Meghann, it broke my heart too!). Then we had a wonderful dinner and did a little shopping at Dancing Bear Toys and Mast General Store. A peaceful, relaxing New Year’s Eve which is just what Christy and I needed.
Then this morning we went to breakfast and decided to go to Chimney Rock/Bat Cave/Lake Lure to play tourist and do a little sightseeing and more shopping.
Chimney Rock is where they filmed the waterfall scene in The Last of the Mohicans. That’s the waterfall on the left. Even on a dull, dreary day in winter the Blue Ridge is filled with beautiful scenery.
Bat Cave is a tiny little town nestled in between Chimney Rock and Lake Lure. No pictures of Bat cave but we did buy sweat shirts. As for Lake Lure, it’s where they filmed the movie Dirty Dancing. That’s the bridge over the Broad River in Lake Lure on the left. It’s a beautiful little town and they have a Dirty Dancing Festival in the summer. Today, New Year’s Day, they were having the Polar Plunge where all the
idiots brave souls jump into the lake. Brrr!
So anyway, while we were eating/shopping/sightseeing/taking pictures, Christy and I were talking about the feedback we’ve gotten on Wise Woman from readers who have already read it. Specifically, how almost all of them said they loved the book, they were sad to see the series come to an end.
And we realized that we agree with them: while we are extremely thrilled to be through, we’ll miss working together, researching and plotting a story and then writing it down to share with our readers so …
… we decided we’re not finished yet. We have the bare bones of a new series centered around the legend–not sure if that’s the right word since it has been witnessed by people. Perhaps mystery works better–of the Brown Mountain Lights in Burke County, North Carolina (for more info, click on the name.) This is a phenomenom we’ve heard about for years and even had one of our readers call it to our attention too. We even talked about putting it into Wise Woman but it got lost in the shuffle somehow.
Also, a couple of months ago, we had another reader mention that we should write a series about the Walker Sisters from Sevier County, Tennessee. We did some quick research and while it’s interesting, we found there were already several books written about them so we nixed the idea and didn’t think anymore about it. But now with this new series we thought we could incorporate characters similar to the Walker Sisters with the mystery of the Brown Mountain lights. That way we could stick with our favored Appalachian Mountains and the mountain people we’ve come to know and love.
(Sorry, I can’t remember the names of either reader. They’ve fallen into one of the many holes in my MS addled brain–that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!–but if you’re one of them please let us know so we can acknowledge your contribution!)
And there you have it, our big news for this new year of 2016 is we’re writing another series. Funny how our relief and resolve only lasted a couple of days. No title yet and we can’t promise we’ll have the first book out in a year like we did with the last three of the Appalachian Journey series-it took us 3 years to research the first book in that one–but stay tuned. We’ll be posting about the development of the new series and on our progress soon.
Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all our cherished readers and everyone else! We hope it’s one filled with love, happiness and peace for all of you!
Christy and I have been a little busy and when that happens this blog is always the first to suffer. Not sure why that is, but we apologize and hope our readers don’t give up on us. All comments have now been approved and replies posted. Sorry for the wait!
Okay, we have some news about Beloved Woman but first we’d like to thank everyone for their patience. We are working on Beloved Woman (in between book festivals!) and as we wrote this phase of Aunt Bessie’s life the focus of the story changed quite a bit so…while the title remains the same, we’ll be changing the cover (again!) and–here comes the sitting down part–there will be a fourth book in the series. No title yet but we plan to use the cover for Beloved Woman because the fourth book will deal with what we thought the theme for Beloved Woman would be. Does that make sense? Probably not, my mind is a little frazzled right now! We’ll do our best to explain why we made the change when Beloved Woman is released later this year but until then we’re not talking because we don’t won’t to give away any spoilers.
So, without further ado…
Oh, boy, I really hated putting that red X over one of my favorite pictures but it had to be done and I assure you, no pictures or characters were harmed in the process–they were only moved forward in time and saved for the fourth, and probably final (but we’re not making any promises!), book in the Appalachian Journey series.
As soon as we have the new cover we’ll post it here and on our Facebook page. Now, I’m going to try to erase that picture from my mind and get back to writing…
Chapter 2 begins with the dead body of Mr. Fore still on the kitchen table, waiting for Papa to take it to Marshall. (Side note: Does a dead body actually wait?)
Fact: Papa did shoot a man and bring his dead body home, placing it on the kitchen table.
Fiction: Mr. Fore’s name. We couldn’t find out who the man was that Papa actually shot at the train station, running down the tracks.
Fact: Papa took prisoners and dead bodies of prisoners to Marshall, the county seat, in a horse-drawn wagon.
Later, Aunt Belle comes to visit and tries to convince Mama that Papa has cursed the house by bringing a dead man home and encourages her to have Miss Cordy cleanse the house.
Fact: Aunt Belle is an actual person, Lucinda’s sister Elizabeth, three years younger, who married a Candler. Candler, NC is named for this family.
Ficton(?): Aunt Belle’s personality. We had no one to talk to to ascertain the type of person Aunt Belle was. I think Cyndi did a great job developing her persona and describing the way she dressed.
(Cyndi here, we found this picture in the little photo album Aunt Bessie gave to Daddy before she died. There’s no indicaiton on the picture of who it is but Daddy says he’s pretty sure it’s Aunt Belle. She sure looks enough like the pictures we have of Aunt Bessie to be her sister.)
Fact: Green, Bessie’s little brother, was named for the blacksmith who took Papa in as a striker during the Civil War when Papa was a boy and his mother and sister were forced to go to a women’s home in Greenville, SC after losing the family farm.
Fact: The description of houses in this chapter built by Papa were taken from written descriptions by Bessie.
Fact: Miss Cordy was an actual person.
Fiction(?): We gave Miss Cordy a mystical quality although we do not know if she actually had that ability. From the stories Daddy tells us, she was a sweet, gentle soul with a big heart. One of the saddest true stories is Miss Cordy and her pet hen.
Fiction: The Melungeon boogie-man.
Fact: Parents did try to instill fear in their children by threatening them with the Melungeon boogie-man if they didn’t behave. We wanted to introduce at this point the prejudice at that time against the Melungeons.
“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” – Miss Maudie to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
That’s one of my favorite quotes from my favorite book and movie. In the movie, Atticus is the one to speak it to Scout, Jem, and Walter Cunningham, but in the book, it’s Miss Maudie speaking to Scout. Of course, it really comes from Harper Lee’s talent and heart and that quote describes her book perfectly…which is exactly what Christy and I tried to do when we started the book about our great aunt’s life in the mountains of North Carolina.
We’d heard stories all our life, both from our dad and from great aunt Bessie when she was still alive, about a life that to us was nothing short of amazing. The stories are many and varied, but in a nutshell, Aunt Bessie lived life her way. Christy and I encouraged our dad to write them down, but he says he’s an artist–he paints–not a writer so we knew it would be up to us, the writers in our family. Those stories are too precious to let them die.
When we decided to write the book–and hopefully do justice to the stories and our great aunt’s life–we of course thought of Ms. Lee’s masterpiece and the old southern saying that she used for her title, ’tis a sin to kill a mockingbird. That adage describes her book to perfection and so, emulating our favorite author, we started searching for just the right saying for our book. When we found it, we knew it right away.
“A whistling woman and a crowing hen never come to a very good end.”
It means to be who and what you’re meant to be. That saying not not only gave us the title of the book, Whistling Woman, it also fit the main character and gave a hint of what the book was about.
Many thanks to Harper Lee for writing what we both consider the quintessential book and for giving us the idea to go looking for a quote that would describe our book as perfectly as hers describes To Kill a Mockingbird.