The launch of
The Hawley Book of the Dead is one short week away! The Odyssey Bookshop in lovely South Hadley, Massachusetts, where I also work as a part time bookseller, will be hosting my launch party. There will be food and drink: cakes from La Fiorentina with a Ouija board design, and Tea Trekker's own blend for my character, Jolon. Sushi from Iya, and wraps from Johnny's, also. My husband George says all I can think of is the food, but that's not so.
I'm finally getting excited, am beginning to really comprehend that my book is now a real book, which actual people will be (are!) reading. I've seen the book itself, I've seen the starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly and Booklist, and the by and large very kind reviews on Goodreads and Amazon Vine. I'm beginning to have interviews and essays in places like the Huffington Post.
And it's beginning to be not my book now, but a book of its own, out in the world. How it got to be that way is what I'll be talking about here. It's been quite a ride, and I'd love to tell you about it. So more anon!
I used to ride my horse there. And walk my dogs. It seemed incredibly magical, with its old stone walls, and those ancient foundations. Ancient, at least, for New England. 
So, the title came to me first. The Hawley Book of the Dead. It haunted me, just the title, for a few years, all the time I was writing another book and a half (also set in my half-real, half-fictional version of the hilltowns of western Mass, and still in the drawer). Then, while I was riding in the forest one day, I got a vivid image of a woman riding frantically through the forest, searching for her missing daughters. And that is how The Hawley Book of the Dead was born. 