I’m thrilled that my novel, Traces, a retelling of the Daniel Boone saga from the women’s point of view, will be published in the fall of 2022 by Fireside Industries, the fiction imprint of the University Press of Kentucky.
The Boone Blog will point out the ways in which Traces blends fact and fiction, give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the years of research that went into writing the novel, and explore why I made the decisions I did regarding what to put in and what to leave out.
Writers often liken the process of writing a book to an iceberg — what winds up in the book is just a small fraction of what remains unseen, below the surface. This is definitely true for Traces; there are so many fascinating things that didn’t make their way into the book. It’s possible that some scenes that were left on the cutting room floor will get resurrected here, or I may linger on passages in the book and take a deeper dive into the research that supports what’s on the page. I’m eager to introduce readers to some of the fascinating people I’ve met during this journey, and share the many locations referred to in the book where one can still walk in the Boone women’s footsteps.
When I was in college, I loved working on the stage crew for the campus theatre. I was fascinated by the way plays were slowly put together and then sometimes taken apart and rebuilt as the director imagined and reimagined the production an audience would ultimately see.
This blog is for folks, like myself, who are curious about what lies beneath the surface of a book.