Some of My Favorite Things

First, I want to wish everyone a happy and safe 4th of July weekend. Our family has started traveling most years to Orange Beach on July 4, planning to arrive in time for the fireworks there. Usually traffic on July 4 from Tennessee to the beach is not bad. Since the 4th this year fall on Saturday, things could be different. I also hear this may be one of the heaviest holiday travel schedules in a long time. We'll see. Have fun and be safe, whatever you do.

“I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an ordinary life. I think all life is extraordinary,” the gifted author, Hilma Wolitzer (now 96 years old), once told an interviewer.

I love this view, especially as I prepare to launch my next book, Girl from Bell City Bottom.

I was telling a friend about the book a few years ago as I started writing it. She asked, “What’s the hook? The inciting incident in her life?”

I did not know how to answer. There was no “one thing” I could identify at the moment. Nonetheless, I believe her life and her story are captivating. I hope you will too.

One book that comes to my mind is A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) by Gene Stratton-Porter, a classic coming-of-age novel set in Indiana's Limberlost Swamp. I remember the book not as much for its plot as for how much my favorite aunt, Lou Ann Coleman, loved the book. I think it reminded her of her own life growing up in Lynn Grove, Kentucky, and is also similar to that of my protagonist, Effie Shultz, growing up in the Bell City bottom.

I want to share two other favorites with you today: a prayer and a review of my first novel, The Ticket, which I stumbled upon recently on Amazon.

I came across this prayer in a stave church in Norway last year:
Lord, make me an instrument for your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is division – unity.
Where there error – truth.
Where there is injury – pardon.
Where there is doubt – faith.
Where there is despair – hope.
Where there is darkness – light.
Where there is sadness – joy.
 
Oh, divine master,
Grant that I must not so much seek to be consoled as to console.
To be understood – as to understand.
To be loved – as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
 Francis of Assisi

From an Amazon reader on The Ticket by Debra Coleman Jeter:
Taking its place in the long line of heart-wrenching, ugly and beautiful Southern novels, this book can be compared to Donna Tartt’s Little Friend. There is the exquisite language, rich with both the old-fashioned elegance and harsh grittiness; a narrative that reflects the whole of the American experience in all of its glory and squalor, an intimate story of a special girl who has to face terrible odds, quite literally. I loved it and will recommend it to any reader of Women’s Fiction or fine literary fiction.

Thank you, Amazon reader; I’m humbled by those words.
https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Debra-Coleman-Jeter-ebook/dp/B0BZB6F11J