A Writer's Confession

The other day someone asked me which one of my novels I liked the best.  Good grief, that’s like asking a parent which one of their children they like the most. The politically correct answer, of course, is that I like them all equally. But I’d be lying if I said that. And since my novels aren’t really children and don’t have emotions, I can give you an honest answer: my favorite is A Lone Palm Stands.

Maybe it’s because I lived with that book for three years, creating the story, refining the story, refining the refining, and tweaking it. Then I tweaked it some more. Many people don’t realize this, but the original A Lone Palm Stands was twice the length of the published version. Twice. Nearly 1000 pages long! One of the hardest things I had to do was eliminating all those pages. But it was also the best thing I could do for the story.

But I have to admit that it was a labor of love. Giving A.J. her voice allowed me to go back in time to 1989 and remember what it was like in the days before and after Hurricane Hugo. The world seemed more innocent then, and in many ways it was. 9-11 had not happened yet. Cell phones were still a novelty and not all that reliable. A 19” TV was considered to be a wide-screen television. And music—Lord, how different that was! Madonna and Milli Vanilli were topping the charts. The world just seemed more fun and carefree.

That is, until Hugo came along.

For Charlestonians and others that call the South Carolina coast their home, Hugo changed everything. In the blink of its powerful eye, the storm turned our world upside down and left us with a devastated landscape. Homes were destroyed. People were killed. All seemed lost.

But then we remembered who we were—the descendents of a proud, independent breed of people who had seen it all:  a war that had pitted brother against brother, earthquakes , fires, and storms that were even more ferocious than Hugo. With our heritage in mind, we pulled together and proudly declared, “Come hell or high water, we will survive.” And by golly, survive we did.

We rebuilt our city by the sea, determined to make the Lowcountry a better place than it was before. And we succeeded. Today Charleston and her sea islands stand proud and beautiful, a testament to the resiliency and determination of those who faced the morning after Hugo with tears in their eyes, wondering why their little slice of heaven had become the scene of an unimaginable nightmare.

I say all this because I hope that A Lone Palm Stands captures the way our innocence was abruptly ended by Hugo, and the way that experiencing the storm and its aftermath made us all stronger than we were before. I hope that it also demonstrates, through the symbolic use of Sara, that good things can from the bad, and that we should never lose hope.

That’s why I love A Lone Palm Stands the most. But please don’t let Saving Sara and Savannah Grace find out. They might get jealous and plan evil things against their big sister :)