Keowee Valley at the Library

Happy Friday, all!

I’m writing this as my daughter watches “Super Why” on PBS Kids. School was cancelled (which means her preschool was cancelled, too) because supposedly we’re going to get a bunch of sleet and ice today–a dangerous wintry mix on mountain roads.

I’ve become disillusioned about winter weather in Western North Carolina, especially over the past couple of years. Since we moved to the mountains in 2005, we’ve had solid winters with great snow (and as a native South Carolinian, snow is magic to me). But the past couple of years–and, it looks like, this year too–have seen nothing but warm, creepy winters where flowers bloom in February. I’m convinced it’s why everyone’s getting the flu.

I’ve taken to posting photos of winters past on my Facebook page. Like a sad, virtual winter. I’m hoping this will shame Old Man Winter into appearing.

Alright, enough of that. Back to the topic at hand: my upcoming presentation of Keowee Valley!

Barring icy roads, I’m headed to Aiken, South Carolina tomorrow to give a presentation of Keowee Valley at the Aiken County Library. I’ll be talking about my background, the inspiration for the novel, and touching on the history and culture of the Cherokee and frontier settlers in those wild and dangerous years leading up to the opening of the American Revolution. I’m really looking forward to getting a look at the town of Aiken, a place I’ve never been that claims quite an interesting history. The library serves the counties of Aiken, Bamberg, Barnwell, and Edgefield, all of which are fairly steeped in Antebellum history.

I love doing library events!

First, being in a library feels like being home to me. When I was a kid, my mom took me to the library all the time, and I can still remember the tall stacks, the ramp up to the second level, the magic, not-quite-musty smell of books, and the promise of adventure to be had at the touch of my fingertips. And librarians have always had a special place in my heart: the librarian at the high school where my mother taught used to send Mom home with boxes of old books just for me.

Since I’ve been promoting and sharing Keowee Valley with readers and history-lovers, I’ve had a great time at libraries. The audience is always interested and friendly, unafraid to ask questions and curious about anything having to do with the novel–the characters, the history, the landscape. Granted, I’m comfortable in front of a crowd anyway, something I feel lucky about, as many writers aren’t. But library patrons make it easy.

So if you’re in the Aiken area, I hope you’ll stop by the Aiken County Library tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 26 at 3:00 p.m.).

If not, I hope you have a warm and relaxing weekend before you!

 

Images from Keowee Valley

Lee Falls, in the Sumter National Forest

My final (I hope) edits for Keowee Valley have been sent back to my editor, who's in the process of going through the novel for small errors and discrepancies. Then it goes to the copyeditor, and then on to the publisher, and then back to me. This summer, I'll be collaborating (though the publisher, of course, has the final say) on cover art. It's a fascinating process, and I continue to be thrilled by it. I can't imagine that this--seeing my novel come to life--would ever get old.

Since Keowee Valley is such a place-based novel, and in my heart I am very much a Southern writer (and we're obsessed with place) I thought I'd add another page to my website, dealing with images from the novel. Here, I've included photos of places and things important to the story. And while the places in the photos may not look exactly as they did 244 years ago, I hope it'll give readers a sense of the journey my protagonist, Quinn, took--into a gorgeous, dangerous, and wild new land.

The setting of Keowee Valley certainly inspired the story. Though the novel moves from colonial Charleston, South Carolina, into the South and North Carolina mountain frontier, and into the deepest reaches of the Cherokee country (present-day Tennessee) and back, the main setting of the novel is a place I dearly love: Oconee County, South Carolina. Today, this part of the Upcountry of South Carolina is dotted with recreational lakes, which were incredibly gorgeous and biodiversely rich river valleys and natural gorges flooded in the mid-twentieth century.

It's a land I've been fascinated with since I was a small child, filled with Cherokee place names, rushing rivers and creeks, unusual plants and animals, and those haunting blue mountains--and I always wondered about the powerful and mysterious people who claimed it as home, long before I ever got there. So, in many ways, that's where the story started.

I hope the images add something special to the "About the Book" page of my author web site. And I hope you enjoy them!