Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Along a Storied Trail”
I’ve wanted to share this post with you for a while – ever since January when I got my local newspaper and read a story about a house burning down in our county. Sadly, the family lost everything. But when they went back to sift through the burned remains of their home, amazingly enough they found five Bibles unscathed by …
“The Book Woman is coming!” One of the things I really liked when I was researching for my book, Along a Storied Trail, was how I kept coming across stories of how much the mountain people loved the packhorse librarians they called the book women. For many of them the packhorse libraries were their first experience with libraries since their communities didn’t …
“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” ~C.S.Lewis One of my favorite secondary characters in Along a Storied Trail is definitely Perdita Sweet or Aunt Perdy as most of the mountain people in the story called her even if as she said, she wasn’t an aunt to any of them. She was as prickly as a cockleburr and seemed to enjoy …
Just because you know my name doesn’t mean you know my story. That is a slightly enhanced version of a quote attributed to Jonathan Anthony Burkett. “You know my name, not my story.” Sometimes that’s where I am when writing a new story. Names are important to me as I try to get to know my characters. I have a …
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. ~The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951) There’s truth in that first sentence of Graham Greene’s novel. A writer does have to pick that moment to let her characters come to life and …
“School times end but the memories last forever.” – Unknown I got this message from Nancy about my book, Along a Storied Trail. “Your best book yet!! Keep them coming. I went to a country school in WI in the 1940’s. All 8 grades; walked or rode bike to school. Small stove to heat the one room. One teacher …
“Help me to continue writing through those black moments of discouragement when I feel that nothing I write is good or worthwhile or will ever be read by anyone.” (an excerpt from A Writer’s Prayer by H. Joseph Chadwick) From the time I got hold of my first notebook and pen, I wanted to be a writer. All those lines …
One of the most fun and sometimes hardest things about getting a book finished to send out to readers is picking the right title. A title can pull you into a story and make you look closer at this or that book. I’ve had titles that jumped out at me from a bookstore shelf and just almost demanded I pick …
A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader’s progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for bookmarks are paper, metals like silver and brass, silk, wood, cord (sewing), and plastic. Some books may have …
I used to want covers that represented the book’s contents very closely and were also pretty. Many folks automatically believe that this is what makes a good cover. But I’ve changed my mind about this. While the cover should not lie (by implication or outright), its job is simply to say: ‘Pick me up!’ to someone who might like the …