A Place for a Book to Call Home

The morel mushrooms were in hiding, but the weather was beautiful and the small town characters were afoot, so it was a great trip! I interviewed sheriffs from two counties and a small town mayor, visited with an Amish woman newly transplanted and homesick for her family in Minnesota, and found out that a tree can not only be dead, it can be "too dead." (This distinction is going to make it into the book, so I'll save the explanation for now.)

I've visited this place many times, and now it's crept into my book. It's always been a place of bits and pieces, almost all of them full of beauty, spread out over miles of land loved by hunters and farmers and people who are small town born and bred. While it's not undiscovered, it is out of the way enough, isolated enough, and underpopulated enough to slip under the radar.

I want the setting to be a character in the book, so I came to visit in hopes of pulling all those bits and pieces together and making it whole . . . solid . . . formidable. I want the setting to be a force, and this place has the chops to pull it off.

I can't wait for you two to meet . . .