Blog Archives
Gelding Rock
K. E. Thompson’s Gelding Rock, the second novel in the Stewart’s Camp series, is an ambitious work of historical and contemporary fiction built around buried crimes, damaged people, and the uneasy relationship between guilt and redemption. The novel moves primarily between 1997 and 2010, with earlier episodes reaching back into the history of Stewart’s Camp and the nearly abandoned community of Gelding Rock. At its center is the improbable relationship between Adelyn O’Malley, an elderly woman who has lived alone for years, and Hartford Daniels, a predatory and deeply troubled man who arrives at her home after becoming stranded during a storm. Thirteen years later, young friends Jacob Moses and Ruthie begin uncovering the physical remains and secrets left by an earlier mudslide, while retired detective Harold Capps revives his interest in Hartford’s long-unsolved disappearance. These strands gradually converge into a story in which the excavation of old objects becomes inseparable from the excavation of memory.
The novel’s greatest strength is its treatment of character, particularly Adelyn and Hartford. Thompson gives neither of them a simple moral identity. Adelyn is vulnerable, funny, traumatized, lonely, nurturing, and capable of alarming decisions. Hartford enters the novel with a clear awareness of his own cruelty, yet years of isolation, physical suffering, work, and companionship alter the way he understands himself and other people. His development is deliberately uncomfortable because the book never requires the reader to erase what he has done in order to recognize what he later becomes. Adelyn’s history provides a parallel examination of how violence can remain active in a person decades after the event itself. Near the end, the narrator observes of her past, “It wasn’t so easy to escape one’s self.” That sentence captures much of the novel’s psychological argument: time can change a life profoundly, but it doesn’t automatically dissolve memory, responsibility, or injury.
Thompson balances this darker material with an unusually broad ensemble and a distinctive vein of humor. Jacob Moses and Ruthie give the 2010 sections curiosity and momentum as their amateur investigation moves from artifacts in the mud to family history, hidden documents, and finally Gelding Rock itself. Their friendship also provides an emotional counterweight to the adult characters, whose relationships have often been shaped by secrecy, regret, and avoidance. The book’s shifts in viewpoint allow the same events to acquire different meanings depending on who is watching, and its references to Crime and Punishment reinforce its interest in confession, punishment, conscience, and the burden of concealed wrongdoing. The historical material involving Harriet Stewart deepens that inquiry further. Her attempt to protect the young Adelyn becomes another morally complicated act whose consequences reach across generations, connecting the novel’s mystery structure to its larger questions about whether violence can ever be cleanly divided into victims, perpetrators, protectors, and bystanders.
What makes Gelding Rock especially affecting for me is that its mysteries serve a story about human connection. The resolution of Hartford’s disappearance matters, as do the buried histories of Stewart’s Camp, but the book’s emotional culmination belongs to Adelyn, Ruthie, and Hartford as the past and present finally occupy the same room. Ruthie’s willingness to become, for a dying woman, the long-lost Harriet she needs is one of the novel’s most moving developments. In Adelyn’s final consciousness comes the simple realization, “And if she was loved, everything was alright.” The novel earns that sentiment by placing it beside decades of fear, shame, violence, loneliness, and compromised choices. Gelding Rock is therefore both a mystery and a character-driven meditation on conscience, trauma, forgiveness, and the forms of grace people sometimes extend to one another. Thompson’s combination of dark subject matter, eccentric humor, historical layering, and compassionate characterization gives the novel a strong identity and an ending that brings its many timelines together with considerable emotional force.
Pages: 298 | ASIN : B0GLKBSHYM
Shared Experiences
The Arbiters follows a group of teenage friends who discover a development project is threatening their favorite wilderness area, and they are determined to find a way to save it. Why did you want to combine a coming-of-age story with an environmental conflict?
I think it is important for young people to care about the planet and their local environment. Anyone, including a young person, can make their voice heard in various ways when it comes to injustices against nature or otherwise. I remember development near my home during my childhood and the sense of loss I felt. Through my stories, I want to inspire people to take action.
Friendship is just as important to the story as the environmental conflict. What did you want to capture about teenage friendships during this stage of life?
Some of my greatest friendships were forged during my childhood and teen years. Shared experiences created and tightened those bonds. We had incredible, unforgettable outdoor adventures together. I’m sure the friendships of many people have a similar genesis. I want to celebrate and showcase the joy, sometimes bittersweet, of those connections.
The novel shows different ways of making a difference, including research, writing, art, observation, and direct action. Was it important to show that activism doesn’t have to look the same for everyone?
Yes. We all have different personalities and strengths. Each talent can be harnessed in ways big and small. Everyone can contribute. You may not realize the difference you make, but it all adds up to good.
Is The Arbiters intended as a standalone story, or do you see possibilities for following Reily and his friends into the next stages of their lives?
The Arbiters was written as a prequel to my earlier novel, The Restorers. In that book, my main character, Reily, and his friend, Wil, are in their 40s. I enjoyed going back in time and writing the coming-of-age tale, imagining what Reily was like as a 15-16 year-old with his nascent environmental convictions. I’m currently writing the third book in the trilogy, which takes us to the present day and features some of the same treasured characters.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Together they fight back with their own form of frontier justice and realize new things about themselves in the process. Ben Kabumba lets his feet, and inquisitiveness, do the talking. Wil Wisnoski plays defense–with and without a pen. Eddie Knisely improves his jaded world through watercolors, while Reily yearns for the neighborhood dream girl and wet and wild extracurricular pursuits.
In this coming of age story, an adventuresome coed crew, and enterprising dog, discover love, acceptance, and the importance of making a difference. Words and research matter, along with proper reconnaissance, covert deeds, and a fed-up bureaucrat named Billy Tilghman. Armed with knowledge and a little bit of serendipity, they disrupt–if not, disassemble–the devious plans of a bumbling developer, and protect their sacred lands. Stirring environmental passions, spiritual connections, and a dose of 1970’s nostalgia, The Arbiters has readers cheering for a knotty tree and falling for the charms of a few timely snakes . . . of one kind or another.
The Origins of Lawton Passage
Lawton Passage follows a man from his childhood in small-town Tennessee through the joys and hardships of adolescence, college, and adulthood, and through grief, and back to his hometown. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 1990 my Mom got it into her head to write her autobiography after spending a week with my Dad at a Lawrence Welk Resort out in San Diego. After many years of working through her stories, she had a partial draft readied, and declared to her four kids (with me being the youngest), “Each of you need to write your own stories.”
That’s when I began writing what I entitled “The Wavettes” which I shared with my siblings and my parents. The first one covered our strategies to get my parents to stop smoking. Another one was a collection of memories of all our pets that we lost to the highway. A third recounted my exploits in learning how to drive, and the fourth one talked about my early impressions about religion. My dad wouldn’t say whether or not he liked that one, he just said he didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt that as a kind of disapproval that I indicated that I should be all in about religion around my Dad.
What was really nice about the Wavettes period in the development of Lawton Passage was that these were stories that my parents got to see before they passed away. The sixth and final Wavette was a kind of therapy piece for myself after being with my dad during the last week of his life. It was in that story that I recounted how my cousin told me the night before my dad’s service that his parents used to get into the biggest fights every season whenever the annual Christmas newsletter arrived. “You can’t write that!” Mom told me on the phone after she read the story.
That was the day I discovered the prominence of the annual Christmas newsletter in our family, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell any interesting truths, if they happened to be inconvenient.
Looking back, was Liam’s emotional journey always clear to you, or did it emerge gradually as you wrote?
When I began I just thought it would be Liam’s stories all told with a bit of humor. Except for the very last one (which is not in Lawton Passage), the Wavettes tended to be funny, light-hearted, and tongue-in-cheek. Once I reached the period where I would write about junior and senior high school, the tone had to deepen to stay real because tragedy began to enter the environment. I felt this keenly when my childhood friend passed away at the age of 46, but it would take another ten years before I began writing it down because these were stories that I had kept from my parents. I waited until my Dad was gone and my Mom was under the cloud of Alzheimers before setting pen to paper on that segment.
The journey further deepened in 2021 when Liam returned to Lawton to attend the funeral of his cousin during the time of Covid. So many had been lost, so it became a reflection of not only the loss of friends and family, but also the loss of home. It wasn’t really until I had written it all down, and edited the book again and again and again and … well, you get the picture … that I realized that the end of the book was all about getting closure. Closure with the bridge incident, closure with leaving home, closure with being right with Dad and closure with being right with Mom.
The Christmas newsletters provide a fascinating frame for the novel. What inspired you to use them as a storytelling device?
Most of the stories had already been written before I ever thought of using the Christmas newsletters. I realized they had a special prominence on that day when Mom had said “You can’t write that.” Then I discovered a bound set of newsletters from Dad in a stack of papers in the entertainment center in 2021. It was a couple of months before my siblings and I were scheduled to meet on my birthday at my parent’s gravesite to bury their ashes.
We’d already spent most of our sadness regarding our loss of each of them during their first services years prior. The burial of their joint ashes took on more of a tone of celebratory closure. So I found choice excerpts from Dad’s newsletters about each of us kids, and told a funny story that contrasted with the innocent image that Dad portrayed in the newsletters. I read those over their ashes so we could all share a good laugh the day they were buried. Those excerpts found their way into Chapter 51 of Lawton Passage —- “Wind-Up.”
As I began dividing up my work on Lawton Passage as individual short stories to be released as Lyle’s Weekly Reader, I thought it would be cool to put a fitting excerpt from my Dad’s newsletters to begin each of those stories that depicted a period before junior high school. For junior high school and beyond, I did not initially use excerpts from the Christmas newsletter. Instead I began those stories with excerpted stanzas from rock and roll songs which were current during that day. However, when I learned that I could run into royalties issues, I dropped that idea and used excerpts from the Christmas newsletter all the way through.
Are there more stories from Vale Hollow or Liam’s world that you hope to tell?
The initial draft of Lawton Passage ran approximately 80 pages longer with a section called “Embarkation.” I felt the inclusion of that section would make Lawton Passage too long and would push publication of the book into 2027. The story involves my final days with my dad in hospice. To extend the content to make it a fuller book, I am exploring taking material from three interviews I videotaped with my dad about his life before I was born.
Another story option I am considering would be a fantasy, which would involve time travel between the current day and 1976 in Lawton, Tennessee. It would draw on high school characters introduced in Lawton Passage and intersperse them with a modern-day cadre of armchair philosophers and a wealthy entrepreneur. Together they would travel back in time to stop the murder by a chicken farmer of his wife with a wooden coat hanger.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook
Tim Duning’s Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and ’70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship—always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
Saving Moses
Steve A. Twitty’s Saving Moses is a coming-of-age adventure built around one unforgettable summer in 1961. The novel follows Milty Marshal and his three friends, Mark, Davy, and Floyd, as they roam the woods, canals, and abandoned dumping grounds surrounding their South Florida mill town. What begins with bike rides, a tree house, neighborhood pranks, and clashes with local bullies grows into a plan to protect Moses, a huge alligator the boys discover in Black Creek Canal. The story is framed by the older Milton returning to the remains of Dillardtown with his daughter and grandchildren, finally ready to explain the event he’s carried for decades. The author describes the book as fiction based on actual events in South Miami, which gives the boys’ world a lived-in quality even when the adventure becomes larger than life.
The book’s greatest strength is its detailed sense of place. Twitty fills Dillardtown with terrazzo-floored company houses, backyard swimming pools, rattling model trains, comic books, bicycles, banyan trees, coral rock, afternoon storms, and the constant presence of the sugar mill. These details do more than establish the early 1960s. They show how completely the boys belong to their surroundings. The wilderness isn’t just scenery to them. It’s their private country, with its own landmarks, rules, hideouts, dangers, and legends. Twitty also spends time inside each boy’s home, so their behavior makes emotional sense. Milty’s nervousness comes from living with a bitter, gambling father. Floyd’s need to prove himself is tied to insecurity and a lingering disability. Mark’s confidence and Davy’s inventive curiosity grow out of more supportive households. Even Randy, the neighborhood bully, is given a painful family history that helps explain his anger.
Readers who enjoy Stephen King’s The Body, better known through the film Stand by Me, will recognize a similar mix of friendship, danger, humor, and adult hindsight. Both stories follow boys whose casual summer expedition leads them into experiences they aren’t emotionally prepared to handle. Twitty, like King, understands how childhood friendships can be affectionate and cruel in the same conversation. The boys tease one another, compete for status, make reckless promises, and then risk themselves when a friend is genuinely threatened. Saving Moses has a sunnier, more adventure-driven rhythm for much of its length, with plans involving alligator food, scavenged raft materials, stolen paddles, and homemade engineering. That playful energy makes the later violence land harder because the reader has spent so much time sharing the boys’ excitement.
Saving Moses is a story about the way children assign themselves adult responsibilities before they understand adult consequences. The boys believe they can tame danger through loyalty, ingenuity, and a good plan, whether they’re confronting a bully or attempting to save an alligator. When their adventure ends in tragedy, Milton turns one terrible moment into a lifelong judgment of his own character. The present-day chapters give the novel its emotional purpose, as his friends help him understand that memory has preserved his guilt more faithfully than it preserved the truth. Twitty’s storytelling is direct, visual, and often shaped like a screenplay, with plenty of action and sharply staged scenes. The result is an earnest, bittersweet novel about friendship, responsibility, and the stories people must finally tell before they can forgive the children they used to be. I recommend Saving Moses to readers who like heartfelt coming-of-age stories about friendship, difficult choices, childhood adventures, and the lasting impact of the memories we carry.
Pages: 254 | ASIN : B0B218STTK
Destiny, Love, Hope
A Flower from Keanu follows a guarded small-town florist whose chance at renewal and love is threatened by family wounds, development pressures, and secrets buried deep within their community. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve lived in many small towns throughout my life (and throughout the world), and the dynamics are the same: unplanned, explosive growth that changes the fabric of the community, the politics of power-shifts with new money coming in, and how changes can benefit and/or break the community itself. I wanted to use that as a backdrop to Cassandra’s personal struggles, not only as a business owner, but as a woman who does not want to become a victim of her own angst, and works very hard to overcome those obstacles.
Why did you choose a flower shop as the place where Cassandra rebuilds her life?
Because flowers and plants really show the elements of life: beauty, brittleness, resilience, the clipping off of unwanted baggage, the loving, and the constant renewal. Life, death, and life, in an unending circle.
How did you balance the warmth of the romance with the suspense, conflict, and buried secrets of Hidden Glen?
Actually, it came easy because I only wanted the suspense to touch elements of her business, the town, and bits of her personal life. The romance was the focus, always. However, I did have to be careful, though, not to overwhelm the reader with too much town drama.
What does the rare Christmas flower symbolize for Cassandra and Keanu?
Symbolizes destiny, love, hope (despite the odds), and beauty renewed. That miracles, although rare, can happen.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
The town of Hidden Glen has many secrets, but none more mysterious than the Christmas flower, which blooms rarely.
Legend recounts that when the blossoms unfold to release their fragrance, fortune shifts for those whom the scent caresses.
Cassandra Finlay, owner of The Smiling Peony, has had a seven-year ordeal of caring for a mother whose dementia has taken a terrible toll. Now, after her mother’s death, she fights a constant battle not to implode from the emotional upheaval. And in this small town, Cassandra’s hopes for healing and normal are running out of fuel.
Ken Rivers, a.k.a. Keanu Rivers by birth, returns to his childhood home with big plans, hoping to kick-start, not a revision, but a complete overhaul of his past life. And thanks to his reputation as chef and owner of a famous restaurant in New York City, opening a restaurant, B&B, catering, and intimate banquet hall in his newly acquired Drummond Estate property in Hidden Glen, is the next logical step to his career ambitions.
Then Fate reconnects Cassandra and Keanu, after years apart. Can magic happen? Or will the unexpected turmoil affecting her, and their small town, break them apart?
Complex Relationships
The Sawmillers Daughter follows a woman from her childhood in a Depression-era timber settlement through marriage, motherhood, bereavement, and the creation of a sawmilling legacy. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have family that has been generational Sawmillers, the setting of the Eastern Dorrigo Plateau is a real location and once was a thriving community, and that’s where I drew my inspiration for my story. I also listened to people’s stories about what life was like back in the day in those locations, so I guess the history of the place also inspired me.
Maggie’s relationship with her mother, Dotty, is one of the novel’s most emotionally complex threads. Was it important to you that readers understand Dotty without necessarily forgiving her?
Absolutely, I believe that with all complex relationships, it might be easy to forgive, but it’s important to never forget, but it was also important to me that Maggie’s life wasn’t defined by her mother or their relationship and that she could forge her own path without that determent.
The novel moves across several decades at a brisk pace. What challenges did you face in balancing the sweep of history with the intimate moments of Maggie’s personal life?
I guess, like everyone’s life, the older you get, the faster life goes as we get so busy with work, children, family life, that it passes by so quickly. I also wanted to be able to show significant historical events that create a timeline, but also life milestones that become significant in a person’s life. For example, I can still remember the day Princess Diana died, I remember where I was and what I was doing, and to me, even that is a historical event.
If Maggie could meet the young girl she was at the beginning of the novel, what do you think she would tell her?
Never give up on your dreams and to always believe in yourself, and that she is stronger than she thinks.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
As the Great Depression and World War shaped her world, Mags transformed ambition into action, mastering the Canadian saw and dreaming of building her own timber enterprise. Along the way, she confronted bitter rivalries, devastating losses, and family secrets that threatened everything she had worked for.
The Sawmillers Daughter is a sweeping saga of grit, loyalty, and determination. It tells the story of a woman who carved a place for herself in a man’s world, built a lasting legacy in Australia’s timber industry, and ensured that her family—and their mill—would endure for generations to come.
The Sawmillers Daughter
The Sawmillers Daughter, by Sarah Smith, is an Australian historical novel that follows Margaret “Maggie” McClement from her childhood in a Depression-era timber settlement through marriage, motherhood, bereavement, and the creation of a sawmilling legacy. Raised by a cold, volatile mother and a taciturn but devoted father, Maggie learns early to depend upon her own nerve and ingenuity. Her fascination with the timber trade eventually becomes more than an inheritance: it is the means by which she builds a life with James Dorkins, survives personal losses, and establishes a family enterprise capable of outliving them both.
I found Maggie most convincing when she was at work. Her affinity for saws, logs, machinery, and the rough choreography of the mill gives the novel its particular grain. Smith doesn’t treat the timber industry as picturesque scenery; she presents it as dangerous, communal, economically precarious, and deeply entwined with identity. The historical sweep, from the Great Depression and World War II to mechanization, railway closures, and changing forestry practices, also gives the story heft. The chronology moves briskly over major events, but that directness suits Maggie’s practical temperament. She’s not inclined to embroider her suffering, and the bluntness of her narration often makes it land harder.
The most affecting element for me was Maggie’s complicated reckoning with her mother. Dotty’s cruelty leaves welts that success cannot entirely erase, yet the novel resists turning her into a simple monster. Later revelations expose damage, thwarted ambition, and remorse without demanding that Maggie grant easy absolution. I appreciated that moral abrasion. The tender counterweights – Maggie’s bond with Old Natty, her father’s quiet faith in her, and James’s steadfast partnership – keep the book from becoming unremittingly bleak. Their affection is expressed less through declarations than through labor, loyalty, and the ordinary act of staying, which gives the relationships a sturdy, unvarnished warmth.
This Australian historical fiction and multigenerational family saga will appeal to readers interested in women’s fiction, rural history, family legacies, and stories about determined women entering male-dominated industries. Its broad historical canvas and knotty family relationships may remind readers of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, though Smith trades pastoral grandeur for the resinous, clamorous world of the sawmill. The Sawmillers Daughter is a rugged story of inheritance and self-invention, proving that a life shaped by hardship need not remain defined by it.
Pages: 156 | ASIN : B0GX38ST4T
Natural Chaos
Mixed Messages follows Lana Miller and Liam Livingston as one combustible night grows into a cross-city romance shaped by desire, fear, family loyalty, and the courage it takes to stop mistranslating love. Which came first for you as a writer: the spark between them or the emotional wounds they needed to confront?
The spark came first. Both Liam and Lana are in my two previous books, but not completely fleshed out. I knew from Cutting Losses (book 2) that Liam, who is the cousin to Josh, the MMC of that book, is outrageous and flamboyant, with an active dating/sex life. In Cutting Losses, he first sees Lana at the bar, and I thought they would be an interesting pairing because she is very career-focused and not interested in dating at all. The chapter I wrote for them in that book was so hot that I knew they needed their own book. It was when I started developing Mixed Messages that I began to wonder why Lana was straitlaced and why Liam was the opposite. The question for me with my characters is always “WHY?” Why are they making their decisions? Why are they acting a certain way, etc.
The chapter-opening texts give the novel a modern, fizzy rhythm. What inspired you to use messages as part of the story’s structure?
Since Lana and Liam live in separate areas of the country, they needed a way to communicate, and I know from experience how easy it is to miscommunicate when texting. People read a text from their point of view, not the POV of the sender, so I liked the idea of that natural chaos being involved in their romance. Plus, texting makes it modern, yet writing is also a very romantic form of courtship, no matter the form.
Lana is intelligent, ambitious, guarded, and deeply shaped by insecurity and betrayal. What was the most challenging part of writing her emotional journey?
Acknowledging Lana’s pain but also not letting her be bogged down by it. I didn’t want her to be jaded; I wanted her to be still somewhat naive and vulnerable, and that’s what Liam sees in her and takes care not to hurt. Having her private life be almost non-existent while her professional life is booming was tricky also because I didn’t want her to be boring.
Liam has a charming exterior but carries real hurt around being underestimated. How did you balance his warmth and humor with that more wounded side?
It’s easy being the class clown when everyone needs a laugh, but it’s difficult having people take you seriously, then. I wanted to show that on the outside, Liam may seem like nothing bothers him, but I made sure to make him deeper than most people suspect. Writing for him was so impactful because he hides his pain so well until he doesn’t, and it was this sensitivity that made it easy to imagine that once he invests himself in someone, he is completely devoted.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When two strangers collide in a crowded New York City bar, Lana Miller and Liam Livingston ignite a spark neither of them expects—and neither can forget. Their chemistry is instant and electric, but by morning, they part ways still knowing nothing real about each other…except that something between them felt undeniably right.
Brilliant but cautious, Lana has been burned by love twice—once by someone who should have protected her, and again by someone she trusted too easily. Now a dedicated doctor, she shines in her career but drifts through life feeling unseen, uncertain where she truly belongs. Liam, on the other hand, has always hidden behind charm and two-month flings, deflecting expectations and masking the quiet ache of never being taken seriously. Beneath his easygoing exterior is a man longing for a place—and a person—who feels like home.
Neither knows that their lives are already intertwined through the people they care about most. And when fate brings them face-to-face again, they must decide whether the connection they shared was a moment of magic…or the beginning of something real.
A heartfelt, magnetic story of found family, irresistible chemistry, emotional healing, and love that refuses to let go.
