Oh the labor of love. That is how I feel right now – like I should be in labor and in love with the baby. Alas he still isn’t here.
Katherine Scott Crawford knows how I feel, but rather with her debut novel. She actually has a 3 year old little girl to help remind her of her long path from agent to release. No her daughter isn’t the subject of the book or the reason the book was written. She was conceived and born all in the time it took for her book to hit the market!
Katherine has been kind enough to share her fun fact on her path to publication. Stick with it to the end and find out how to support and where you can buy her novel Keowee Valley! This weekend there is a special promotion on Amazon. Her book is on sale for $1.99!!
The floor, or blog, is all yours! ***********
My road to the publication of Keowee Valley was at times smooth and sweet, and at others rocky and rough. Above all, it was long.
It took me about two years to both research and write Keowee Valley. I spent about 6 to 8 months on research alone, because I’m a history dork and I wanted to the get the period (the 1760s) and the people (colonial South Carolinians, frontier settlers, the Cherokee Indians) right. After querying literary agents, I got a few offers of representation pretty quickly. I thought, “Alright! This will be a piece of cake!”
Not exactly: it took my agent three years to find a publisher. Then, there were another 16 months of editing, copyediting, and the whole publication process. During that time I had some great things happen, like winning writing fellowships and giving birth to my daughter, now 3 years old. But there were also dark moments when I wondered if anyone was actually going to read the novel I’d put so much of my heart, soul, and time into. The whole process, from the time I started writing the novel to the time it was published in September 2012, took about 7 years! But in the end, in spite of all those years of wishing and wondering—and with a few more eye wrinkles—it was most definitely worth the wait.
Katherine Scott Crawford was born and raised in the blue hills of the South Carolina Upcountry, the history and setting of which inspired Keowee Valley. Winner of a North Carolina Arts Award, she is a former newspaper reporter and outdoor educator, a college English teacher, and an avid hiker. She lives with her family in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she tries to resist the siren call of her passport as she works on her next novel. Visit her website at www.katherinescottcrawford.com for more information, or to connect with her via Facebook and at her blog, The Writing Scott.
Prologue
My story begins before the fall, in that Indian summer time when the hills are tipped with oncoming gold, and the light hangs just above the trees, dotting the Blue Ridge with gilded freckles. The mornings and the evenings are cool, but it is the mornings I remember most: waking before the men, wrapping a shawl around my shoulders and slipping out through the fields, the dry grass crunching beneath my boots. Drifting down from Tomassee Knob the mist would spread over the Keowee Valley in a great, rivering pool of gray, the sun rising in the east flecking the horses’ breath—suspended in the air before their nostrils—with slivers of shine. It was then the whole world was quiet, no crows eating my corn, the peacefulness not even broken by the bay of some wolf on the ridge, calling to the still-lit moon in the western sky. The whole world was silent then, and the Blue Ridge breathed beneath the deep purple earth. I thought I could feel it, a great heart beating in the wilderness.
He came to me in the morning. I had crossed the north fields and made my way to the creek at the edge of the forest to check on the last of the Solomon’s Seals I’d watched cling to the embankment in the final days of summer. Ferns reaching the height of my elbows billowed out from the ground, spreading for what looked like miles. The smell of sap emanated from fallen pines where woodpeckers searched for tiny bugs and snakes lay still in the cool undergrowth. Every once in a while a squirrel or rabbit leapt from its camouflaged hiding place, skirting the path I walked.
Coals from a recent fire smoldered black in a pile a few yards from a bend in the creek, and I looked up and farther into the woods, wondering if a Cherokee scout or perhaps a trapper had decided to take his rest on our land. But the woods were eerily still, and not a bird sang nor cricket chirped. There was no movement except for the creek itself, bubbling up against a tiny dam made by runaway branches, cane and weeds. My eyes came to rest
across the creek on shadows at the bottom of an enormous oak. Suddenly, the shadows shifted, and the shape of a man stepped forward, seeming to emerge seamlessly from the trunk, his feet making no sound in the leaves.
The breath caught in a knot in my throat, and I placed a hand there, the other fumbling in my skirts for the lady’s flintlock I’d been given. He walked closer, still without sound, and stood watching me from the edge of the creek bed. I pulled the pistol from its hold, pointing it unsteadily at the stranger.
“Come no closer,” I ordered, the words tumbling awkwardly off my tongue and echoing softly in the small dip of valley.
He raised his head, eyes emerging from beneath the brim of a battered fa
rmer’s hat. Across that creek they looked as green to me as moss growing on boulders in the water. His hair was long, the fawn color of a well-worn leather saddle, and the ends were tipped with the same pale blond that streaked through the rest, like he’d dipped his head in white paint. He looked like a white man turned savage, with his moccasin-laced boots and dirty, fringed deerskin shirt, a beaded strap crossing his chest, holding a hatchet and musket on his back. He did not speak, just looked at me from under that hat, shadows cast high on his cheekbones and the solid line of his jaw. The creek gurgling and my breathing were the only sounds. Soon, I knew, the settlement would awake, and the animals would need to be fed, the horses let to pasture.
Surely someone would notice I was missing.
It was the first time he had come to me, but it would not be the last. And though my story ends with him, he did not cause it to begin. I did that, on a midsummer day in the year of our Lord 1768, in the twenty-fifth year of my youth.
Chapter 1
I was an unlikely adventurer, at least by all appearances. I knew what the people of Charlestown saw when they looked at me: a wealthy woman clad in the new fashions, small of stature but possessed of an unruly mane of yellow hair that made me seem taller—a bluestocking with a well-worn volume forever in hand, one who looked out at the world from a pair of disconcertingly direct blue eyes. The ladies, especially, would whisper “orphan,” and allow that the early demise of my parents could be reason enough for a man such as my grandfather to keep me a spinster at age twenty-five. The gentlemen viewed my person with vague calculation, surely wondering just how much—as the sole granddaughter of Campbell MacFadden, Esquire, heir by marriage to a profitable rice plantation—I was worth. And so when the trapper arrived in the hour before dawn, smelling of wood smoke and the sweat of a hard ride, I was ready: ready to abandon Charlestown and my life there, to shutter permanently those judging, prying eyes.
It was the banging on the door that woke me, more than the shouting. On the peninsula, banging on doors in the wee hours nearly always meant one of two things: a slave uprising, or a fire. On Tradd Street alone there had been three devastating fires the past year, conflagrations that destroyed entire blocks, and I threw off the covers and rounded my bed in moments, pulling a stout case from beneath my desk and dumping the contents of my drawers—papers, pamphlets, quills, stoppered inkpot—as quickly as I could. I heard Grandfather’s footfall on the stairs outside my bedroom door, his step bounding and spry.
Where to Buy-
I’m excited to announce that Keowee Valley will be on sale for only $1.99 at the Amazon Kindle Store, this Friday, March 22 through 7 p.m. Monday, March 25th! If you’ve got reader-friends or family looking for a new read, I hope you’ll share the news.
Other avenues for purchase are below.
“Buy the Book” Keowee Valley is available both in paperback and as an eBook.
Folks can follow me via the following social media outlets:
Jenny Bent, from
If you follow aspiring authors and even published authors, a common theme on a lot of posts is that the road to publication is brutal, tiring, tedious, and a mystery. Not knowing if your hard work will ever pay off can be the most strenuous of all the challenges.
michelle ziegler 