The Blog

Mark your calendar. Surface and Shadow—the finished, real novel—will hit sales sites on September 1. That’s only 11 weeks away! I’m so excited. Readers will be able to buy it at the Pen-L Publishing website, Amazon.com, and Barnesandnoble.com. Or order it through your local bookstore. And you can preorder on the Pen-L website starting August 1.

I’m also excited to show the cover for Surface and Shadow here on my website. I think Kelsey Rice at Pen-L Publishing did a great job capturing the feel of a small-town Main Street on a late afternoon in summer. You can sense the heat radiating up through shadows on the pavement while people move toward home or an evening job or maybe somewhere they shouldn’t be. As the sun goes down, the energy of the daylight hours bleeds into the magic of the night. It’s the perfect metaphor for the unsettled mix of longings driving characters in the novel.

After Kelsey designed the cover, my web designer, Eliza Whitney, adapted the evocative art to convey the feel of Surface and Shadow on my website. I love what Eliza did with excerpts from the novel in the revolving banner at the top of the home page. Moonshine, stubbornness, and obsession all play a part in Lydia Colton’s quest for independence and justice.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case I think the cover art and the website art are the perfect complements to the words inside the book. A novel should be an experience, and we experience the world with many senses. I hope you’ll all come join me in the world of Tanner, North Carolina—the world of Surface and Shadow.