The Novel Has Begun….

New post up on my other blog…

I’ve been playing with writing a novel and here is a very rough draft of part of the first chapter….

Click the link if you want to read more:

I was living in a dying town.  It was official.  I had seen the story listing the “official” government lists of dying cities and my town was on the list.  It was in the Washington Post, so it must be true.

The funny thing was, I had come back here to get away from the dying.

But both death and time do have a way of catching up with you.

I wondered how the town would react if I reprinted the story in our local newspaper.  They would probably just ignore it.  Or some of our stalwart citizens would angrily condemn it in angry letters to the editor.  Either way, it was probably best to just ignore it.  That’s what people generally did with bad news from outside here in Southside  Virginia.

It had always been an insular, closed off little town, but it was even more so now.  The cotton mills were gone and tobacco was now widely thought to be worse than opium.  But, people couldn’t let go of the past.  People here were still fighting the Civil War and referring to it as the “War of Northern Aggression” on the local blogs and on Facebook pages.

It was not a good place to be young, smart or interested in new thoughts and things outside of the town or a good place to live if you asked too many questions or challenged the status quo.  Never had  been.

Those were the thoughts I was having as I sat on the old glider of my Grandmother’s house in the mill village and nursed a Virginia Gentleman and water.  Things always stayed the same here.  Or people tried like hell to make them do so.

That’s why I was so surprised to see a new Volvo come down the hill and pull in behind my Lexus in the gravel drive way beside the house.  I didn’t often have visitors.  However, I was only slightly surprised to see Peyton Chandler McManus get out of the Volvo and walk up to the porch.  She had been gone for years, but I had heard she was back in town.

More:  The Novel Has Begun…. | My Southern Gothic Life.