"It Can't Rain All the Time"
Book Announcement with a Daughter, Two Bikes, and Some Rides In It
True As True Can Be, my eighth book and first middle grade novel, has recently been published and is available for about 12 bucks here, or, better yet for locals in or around Roanoke, you can support Book No Further (storefront on the Downtown Market) and get a signed copy there.
Connected to the book is the photo below, taken of my oldest child on her eighteenth birthday ride in late April of 2016. Sophie and I rode eighteen miles (plus a few) on the Parkway up around Floyd. It was lovely. We even found a morel mushroom growing out of the BRP rain gutter.
Until she was about 12 (the age now of her sister and brother, twins), I wrote Sophie a story as a gift for Christmas.
One Christmas, maybe about 2008, after I gave her one of the stories, the characters in it (9 yr old Lucinda Mae and her friend Jean and others in their lives) kept bugging me.
These characters wouldn’t quit. Their adventures within the fictional, 1979, Upstate South Carolina community needed more attention.
So the story grew over that January into a novel, a mess of a draft of one, and I mostly put it aside to scribble on other projects and to deal with other matters, like my job and stuff.
Years later, I started to spend time with that story again, with the characters Lucinda Mae and her pal Jean and others in their lives. It was a good thing.
It was good because there were some very not good things happening then with my family and my relationship with my oldest daughter, and I suddenly had a lot of time, and spending some of it with Lucinda Mae and Jean helped.
Another good thing: I found a publisher, Dede Cummings at Green Writers Press in Vermont, and an editor there, Rose Alexandre-Leech, who believe in and help make and shape good things.
True as True Can Be is not my daughter’s story and it’s not mine, but it’s a story with our spores in it, a story to take readers for a ride, a ride with love, suspense, magic, good woods and waters, the kind of story that might reach beyond the pages, if for a little while.
All the cyclists, the cool ones, and the nerdy ones like me, are gifting copies to their favorite young readers or reading it aloud to their favorite youngsters (and/or the annoying ones to shut them up), so don’t be left behind! Okay, I’m joking, but each purchase does support small presses, a local writer/rider, and Out of True. Here’s the book description:
Upstate South Carolina, 1979, late December. The decade is rapidly nearing its end as the holidays approach, and down along Painter Creek in the shadow of a mountain by the same name, nine-year-old Lucinda Mae, with the help of her best friend Jean, doesn’t have any trouble finding things to do. But Lucinda Mae is having trouble at school. Her teacher at Laurel Fork Elementary, Miss Cartmill, seems to be wasting away like she’s ill. Lucinda Mae and Jean have fear and respect for Miss Cartmill, and they’re worried about her. But Miss Cartmill keeps calling Lucinda Mae “saucy.” The girl’s a good student and works hard, but she doesn’t know what saucy means. Is saucy a good thing or a bad thing to be? Is Miss Cartmill in trouble? If so, can they help her?
As the events of this story unfold, Lucinda Mae grows closer to what saucy means, closer indeed to her friend Jean, her family, her community, the people, places, history, and critters, as well as to Miss Cartmill and herself. It all starts on the last day of school before winter break when Lucinda Mae shares with her class at school a photograph that her grandmother, Mimi, took years before of a one-eyed lady in a red dress standing on top of Painter Mountain. The one-eyed lady is covered with sweat, and her reindeer are grazing nearby, but instead, she hitches a wild turkey, a red fox, an osprey, a whitetail deer, a brook trout, and a panther to pull her carriage. What? The next day, by chance, Lucinda Mae and Jean go poking around Old Man Speed’s rundown place up the creek, where they make a discovery about the man and their teacher, Miss Cartmill, which sets into motion an adventure by turns suspenseful, magical, meditative, and redemptive.
