Lucy Doll and I had decided to cook a breakfast for each
other. Saturday morning the 14th, I cooked steel-cut oats with dried cherries and
blueberries, allspice, flax seeds, and walnuts. Usually I add some pure maple
syrup. We tried brown sugar instead. Excellent.

At the Town Center, I caught most of Charles Price's
presentation on his Revolutionary War novel, Nor the Battle to the Strong.
Previously, he's set his novels in the Civil War. He admitted liking the
Revolutionary War era for its more laid-back morals. Contrasting Georgian
morals to Victorian, he said, "Everything was unbuttoned" and got a
laugh from the audience. This is a point I reiterate with readers. We're too
eager to apply Victorian standards to people of all periods. During the
Revolutionary War, people didn't carry the baggage of repression that they did at the
time of the Civil War.

My reading at 10:00 a.m. was held across the street from
Town Center in the Design Gallery, a charming arts and crafts gallery
that also sells upscale kitchen supplies and accessories and decadent
chocolates. I'd met the shop's owner at Dotty's party the night before. She
provided chocolates for authors in the lounge and during Happy Hour. After my
reading was over, I got to select a chocolate as a gift. Twist my arm a little,
gee.

I caught most of Peggy Poe Stern's presentation "Story
Chucking and Searching for Ghosts." (Seems I was forever sneaking in late
for other authors' presentations because attendees, many of them relocated
Floridians, wanted to talk with me in between sessions and get my autograph.
And yes, my stacks of books on the Malaprops table continued to shrink.) Peggy,
an Appalachian folklorist, tells great ghost stories. "Story chucking"
happens when the storyteller invites listeners to contribute their own stories.
My "chucked" story was about encountering a ghost, Henry Kinard, at Kinard House, a Victorian-era B&B in Ninety Six, South Carolina. Henry, the
former owner, was a polite spirit, and I gave him an acknowledgment in Paper
Woman. Even so, he was quite enough of a sensation, and I'd rather not
encounter any more ghosts, thank you.

Following Peggy's presentation, all authors from the morning
session had an "official" booksigning. I signed a pile of books and
schmoozed with more transplanted Floridians. By then, I was almost nostalgic
for Florida. I say almost because the Florida of my childhood exists now
only in my heart, and Florida remains in the bull's-eye for powerful, deadly hurricanes.

During lunch, I realized I'd hustled around
so much that I'd forgotten to take pictures, so here are two from the authors'
lounge. In this one, I'm in between John Ehle and Charles Price.

And here I am between Rosemary Harris (John
Ehle's wife) and Justice Troy Wayne Poteete. This Rosemary Harris is the
actress, not the mystery author. She told me a funny story about being in a
pharmacy with the author Rosemary Harris, both of them awaiting prescriptions,
and when their name was called, they met each other for the first time. If your
"spidey-sense" is tingling, you're recognizing Miss Harris from her
role as Peter Parker's Aunt May in the Spiderman movies.

Justice Poteete had worn a cool Cherokee
turban on Friday, and I'm sorry I didn't snap a picture of him then. This
picture of Sequoyah, who created the Cherokee alphabet, shows the type of
turban he wore.

My presentation right after lunch, "Community, Camp
Followers, and Combatants in the American War of Independence and the Civil
War," provided another opportunity to contrast Georgians with Victorians.
Between the two wars, the gender mix of civilians who followed an army changed
to heavily favor men. Women were on the battlefield for both wars. But in the
Revolutionary War, they were dressed as women, while in the Civil War, they
were predominantly disguised as male soldiers.

The final two sessions I attended were panels. Vicki Lane
moderated "Beyond the Mystery: Addressing Problems in the Beloved
Community While Telling a Cracking Good Story and Finding Out Whodunit."
Used to be that mystery, as genre fiction, was considered frivolous reading.
These days, many mystery authors write to a theme of social consciousness. I
haven't read any of the authors' books on that panel and will soon remedy that,
but North Carolina mystery author Margaret Maron deals well with social issues in her
Deborah Knott series.

Sarah Addison Allen moderated a panel on Southern
women writers with Pamela Duncan and Catherine Landis. They discussed the
influence of region, food, and family on their writing; what books impressed
them as children; the hardest and easiest aspects of writing; and the
importance of setup, structure, and knowledge of characters, regardless of whether you're a
"plotter" or a "pantser." The humorous tone of the
panelists belied the gravity of content in their responses.

I went to another official
booksigning and came very close to selling out. Only a couple copies each of my
books remained. Malaprops would take those back to Asheville, for in-store
stock.

Excellent meatless lasagna at the banquet that night. I sat
with Lucy, Chris Swager, Vicki Lane, and several readers. (We like readers!)
After dinner, Fred Chappell and Britt Kaufmann read their beautiful
poems composed to address the theme of "The Beloved Community."

More thanks to: the Design Gallery, the Carolina
Mountains Literary Festival committee, Peggy Poe Stern, Vicki Lane, Rose
Senehi, Sallie Bissell, Sarah Addison Allen, Pamela Duncan, Catherine Landis,
Fred Chappell, and Britt Kaufmann.