Great News!

The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks will be available in about two weeks. It’s been a long time in the making. Thought you might like to hear how it came about. I’ll keep it short. Promise.

About ten years ago, the idea for this book grew out of the historical columns I’d written over the past for the Washington County Observer. I’d done a little book called Wandering in the Shadows of Time with some of the interviews and personal essays. It was published in 1994 and has been successful. So I thought, Why wouldn’t people like to read about all the places I’d visited, the people I’d met, the stories they’d told me, many of which never made it to the columns? The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. The lost communities needed their stories told before their history faded into the shadows of the past.

With no particular publisher in mind, I began to put such a book together. Alas, when I began to market the idea, I couldn’t find a single publisher who wanted it. Too regional; not enough interest to make it worthwhile; nobody wants Ozark stories today.

So, reluctantly, I put the project aside, that is it went into one of the storage boxes in my office.
There it languished until my book, Fly With the Mourning Dove was honored as a finalist in the WILLA Literary awards in 2008. It just so happened that sitting in the audience when I accepted the award was Mark Stepp, publisher/owner of Old American Publishing in Houston,
Texas. I pitched the idea to him later that same day and he was delighted. So, see, you never know. It’s a good idea to remain prepared for the day someone will be receptive to a pet project.

So I came home from Texas and went to work. There was updating to do, new interviews and visits to more sites to fill in the spaces. We wanted a big book with lots of photos. For about a year I wrote and traveled the four counties of the Boston Mountains I had chosen for the book — no way could I include the entire Boston Mountains — until I had enough stories and photos. The
book was finished just about a year after I’d pitched it to Mark. That was back around the end of October. And here we are, a finished product and I think we’re both rather proud of the results.

I found some wonderful stories I never expected. Like the night the stars fell. This event held a special significance in remote and rugged Madison County. It seemed no one could explain the name of a small town called Aurora. But research revealed it was named the same year the stars fell. Aurora means a luminous phenomenon of light. That led me to believe it was named
because of that long ago night when folks, frightened by the falling stars dressed up in their best to await the second coming. Every hour from dusk till dawn over 30,000 meteors shot across the night sky. It had to be the end of the world. It wasn’t, and that same year the settlement of Aurora was born. Much more to this story. Read the book.

This is only one example of the delightful tales I ran across that morphed into new stories of long ago events. Many of them have never been published in my columns, some have never been published anywhere, so even my most attentive readers will find new tales to enjoy, along with some they may recognize.

If you want to visit with me in person, go to http://www.veldabrotherton.com to find where I’ll
be this spring and summer. I’d love to see you and talk about Boston Mountain history. If you just can’t wait, there are links to buy my books on the website. The publisher’s website is http://www.oldampub.com and my book will be featured there as soon as it’s released.

Now on to the second bit of good news. That same fall, on my way to Texas to accept the WILLA finalist award, I was approached by the acquisitions editor of Goldminds Publishing out of Springfield, Missouri, Steven Anderson Law. He’s having success with cookbooks that tell stories along with the recipes, especially Ozark in nature. It seems that at long last the Ozarks are
attracting the attention of publishers and readers. He wondered if I might write him a cookbook with recipes from the Boston Mountains of Arkansas.

Now, I’ve been around a long time, and I learned many years ago to never say no to an acquisitions editor. So I said, sure, I could do that. It just so happens that I have my mother’s recipe collection of over 80 years, some as old as 1889, and she always kept good records on
where they came from. Though we’d moved around a lot, I knew I could manage to find the required 150 authentic Boston Mountain recipes with little effort.

Well, it turned out that writing a cookbook is not an easy thing to do. All those half-cups and quarter-teaspoons and c versus C versus cup. I was all over the place while copying them, so then I had to go back and hope to get consistent. Wasn’t easy. I had the help of a great gal by the name of Becky McCall, who agreed to read the ms and see if she could help me out with that
consistency. She did, then I re-read, fixed some last minute stuff and began working on my stories. There I knew what I was doing, and they went well. Steve also wanted old time sayings, remedies, anything that fit the subject matter, so I worked a while gathering them.

So, it turned out that last year I managed to write two books based in the same place, but about as different as alligators and parakeets. Needless to say, I’ll probably never do that again. Now that they are finished comes the hard part, at least for me. And that’s promoting the books so that folks out there can find them and hopefully buy a few copies. It’s nice to be paid for all that effort, yet sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, as writers can attest. Still, we keep on writing.

Arkansas Meals and Memories: Lift Your Eyes to the Mountains — the subtitle being a play on Psalm 21 with help from a dear friend, Linda Apple — is already on Amazon available to pre-order. Here’s the link: http://www.tinyurl.com/ya7c8ne if you just can’t wait till you see me somewhere to get your copy. I’ll have both books with me at all appearances after April 15.

My schedule is posted on my website, on Facebook on my fan page http://www.groups.to/veldatrips and on my blog http://veldabrotherton.blogspot.com

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. I'll see some of you at my April 10 Workshop at Ozark Folkways, and some of you other places like OWFI and Arkansas Writers Conference in Little Rock where I'm speaking on Finding Your Voice on Friday evening. Or perhaps you'll make it to one of the many book signings on my schedule. Check it out.