Weather permitting, I will be going back to Scranton, Pa., next Saturday (2/6) for an Open House at the New Age bookstore Possibilities. Apparently they hold this event for all their authors every year on Super Bowl weekend. Maybe the assumption is that people who like New Age stuff and like to read aren’t into football? Anyway, I expect to be there 1-5 p.m. Possibilites has been carrying DANU’S CHILDREN for a couple of months now, and I will be bringing up more copies to sell and sign.
The location is especially appropriate because my experiences visiting my mother’s relatives in Wilkes-Barre and going to college in Scranton inspired me to write DC. I always had a sense that people in that Lackawanna Valley region lived kind of in their own world. The coal boom and subsequent bust really left a mark on the place geographically and psychologically. At the time I attended college up there, Scranton was very blighted and many storefronts and other buildings downtown were empty. Meanwile, slag heaps left over from the mining days would smoke and burn in the night (spontaneous combustion of the gases), giving off sulphurous fumes…now and then a 7-11 would sink into the ground due to mine subsidence…and my friends from town would tell me about a huge Catholic church that once slid several feet downhill until the parishoners “miraculously” stopped it with a novena. Since I already had an interest in writing paranormal thrillers, I stored all that material away for future use!
On the other hand, living as I now do in a slightly more rural part of New Jersey, I also wanted to write something about the wonder and power of nature, and the need to respect the natural world…or else! I thought northeastern Pa. would be the perfect place to set a man-versus-nature story. And in this case (spoiler alert) nature wins!
