You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Stone Mountain’ tag.
To all our readers who have been waiting so patiently for the next book in our Appalachian Journey series…
Moonfixer just went live on Kindle! Yay! For the time being, it will only be available on Kindle but the print edition is in the works as is the audio edition. It will also be available on Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple, etc., in a couple of months–or sooner depending on when we get the formatting worked out. We’ll post here when each version goes live so stay tuned!
We want to thank each and everyone of you for your patience and for making 2013 such a joyful and memorable year for us! We wish all of you a very merry Christmas and a safe and healthy 2014!
I’m going to start this post with an apology to all of you who have commented on one or another blog post…and been soundly ignored. It isn’t that Christy and I don’t appreciate your comments, it’s just that we…okay, more me than Christy, had every intention of responding to your comments but my brain kept shoving them aside and leading me in other directions. Research, writing, promoting, doing interviews for the Dames of Dialogue blog, formatting a book for a friend to put on Kindle, and countless other things have all gotten in the way of my good intentions where this blog is concerned. And yes, I know my priorities are wrong, wrong, wrong!
So, I apologize. I really didn’t mean to ignore you but I did and I’ll do my best not to let it happen again!
Okay, now for the news part of this post: Whistling Woman has been nominated for a Best of the Independent E-book Award in two categories; Best Literary Fiction and Best General Fiction (Mainstream Fiction). We don’t have a clue who nominated us, and I guess it really doesn’t matter, but we are thrilled that someone (or two someones) read Whistling Woman and liked it enough to nominate it for an award.
So, a big thank you to whoever nominated us and an even bigger thank you to all the readers who’ve taken the time to let us know how you liked the book on Amazon, on this blog, on our personal websites, or by sending us an email at cctillery@yahoo.com!
I know many authors have said it before and at the risk of repeating every one of them, Christy and I are grateful to all of you. Seriously, we’d love to meet each and every one of you and maybe take you out to dinner or lunch at our favorite little diner in Hot Springs, or at the very least give you a big hug. Since we can’t do that we’ll have to settle for saying again, thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU TO THE BEST READERS IN THE WORLD! We appreciate your lovely comments and more than that, your support and interest in Aunt Bessie’s story. I’m sure she and Uncle Fletch are smiling down from heaven on all of you.
And last but not least, Christy and I will be in Hot Springs on June 15th for the Bluff Mountain Festival. If any of you are in the area, we’d love to meet you–and maybe we’ll have time for dinner at the Smoky Mountain Diner! We’ll at least treat you to a glass of their outstanding iced tea. Also, we’re making plans to go to Old Fort/Black Mountain at the end of this month or early next month to do the fun part of the research for Moonfixer which, of course, means a visit to Aunt Bessie’s and Uncle Fletch’s graves and the site where their house once stood. It will be a homecoming of sorts for us since we spent quite a bit of time there as children but we haven’t been back in years. I’m sure the childhood memories will be flowing…just looking at one of Daddy’s paintings of her house is enough to bring them back for me!
you.
the world hasn’t ended which means I need to finish my Christmas shopping! Not that I thought it really would end but still, you never know, do you? And the day isn’t over yet so I think I’ll wait till tomorrow.
Anyway, with all the dire predictons about the end of the world, I spent the last couple of days doing something I enjoyed instead of cleaning house or shopping for Christmas presents: I’ve been researching and believe me, that is something I never thought I’d hear myself say…er, see myself type. I used to hate research so much that I avoided it if at all possible. I mean to the point that it impacted the type of books I wrote. Why write historical with all that nasty research when you can write paranormal and make all that stuff up?
But that changed when Christy and I started doing the research on Whistling Woman. I’m pretty sure it’s because we were researching people who we knew or people who, like that butterfly in the rain forest, may’ve only gently flapped their wing and it sent a ripple through our lives by way of our ancestors. People like our great-grandfather, John Warren Daniels, one of the main characters in Whistling Woman. Isn’t he a handsome devil? Whistling Woman was a four year labor of love and most of those four years were given over to research. We knew we had to get the background and historical facts right and so we buckled down with our computers or traveled to Hot Springs, Marshall, and various other points in Madison County and talked to a lot of people who were all very helpful.And now, we’re getting ready to do it all over again with Moonfixer, the second book in the Appalachian Journey series. Only this time, we’ll be traveling to the Broad River section of North Carolina and though we’ll still be walking in the footsteps of our ancestors, we’ll also be walking in places we’ve been before; Black Mountain, Old Fort, Stone Mountain, the graveyard at Stone Mountain Missionary Baptist Church (click the link for a wonderful picture of the church from the Majdan Family History page) where many of our characters are buried.
Strangely enough, I find myself looking forward to it–which is how I ended up spending what could’ve been the last two days of my life doing research. Who would’ve ever thought I’d enjoy every minute of it?