A Positive Move

I'm in a new place now, New Paltz, New York, a sweet little town with a major university, four distinct seasons, a vibrant population, one grown daughter and two teenaged grandsons. I retired in reverse--leaving Fairhope for fair hope and another shot at a different future.

You may have been following my progress, you may not. I moved from Fairhope in 2007 to Hoboken, New Jersey, which I loved, and five years later am getting to know a different neck of the woods. My daughter actually lives in Kingston, and my grandsons are almost ready to fly the coop (the oldest is a freshman at SUNY Albany). I, on the other hand, am still in the process of finding fair hope and finding myself--writing books and blogs and learning to do better what I do best and doing my best to guess exactly what that is and why I'm doing it.

I finished That Was Tomorrow about a year ago, published it in electronic format, and now am in the process of having it published as a paperback. The story is set in 1921 in a Fairhope, Alabama, that doesn't exist anymore--a utopian colony created to prove the theory of single tax, peopled with idealists and visionaries of many stripes, including the important personage Marietta Johnson, who is a key figure in my story.

It's a story of a schoolteacher, a rather liberated young woman of her day, who moves to Fairhope to prepare for a career by working with the renowned educator. She takes her life into her own hands and women in the early days of feminism (and long before it was called that) were just beginning to do. She has a radical plan for her life, which doesn't include marriage--and she's willing to move into the adventure that was Fairhope of that time to experience life, romance, and self-fulfillment on her terms. I hope I capture the setting, the atmosphere, and the optimism of that time as I populate the novel with real and fictional characters who once lived there.

I've revamped my website in an attempt to draw traffic, billing myself as an Alabama writer of some note (in fact, you might think this writer to be the second coming of Harper Lee). I hope I'll be forgiven the overstatement as the constant use of the phrase "Alabama writer" along with "Alabama book" was seen by my web designer as a way to optimize my search engine traffic. And That Was Tomorrow is without doubt an Alabama book by an Alabama author, however non-traditional and unexpected they may both be.

Look for my website here. Look for me in Fairhope sometime in early summer, to sign books and meet you--some as old friends, and some for the first time. I shall update the blog on the website at least twice a week, often weaving the phrases "Alabama book" and "Alabama writer" into the text, but saying something as profound as I can in spite of that.