Author: janetsm

In November 2025, I published Traveling Through History: A Collection of Historical Short Stories. In the fall of 2025, I published a devotional book: I Need The Light! 26 Weekly Devotionals to Help You Through Winter AND I Need The Light! Companion Journal and Diary. I write North Carolina local history and Southern American colonial historical fiction. I enjoy doing extensive research as well as the writing that research supports. My stories and novels-in-progress are about the common people. I'm the author of Harrisburg, Did You Know? Cabarrus History, Books 1 and 2 and a vintage postcard book titled The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Losing The Ability To Be Lost

This blog post by Elan Mudrow made me look at something in a new way. With all the technology, we are perhaps approaching a time when it will be impossible to get lost. I say “perhaps” because my faith is not in electronics. I know too many people who have horror stories to tell after relying on GPS. I’ve been in the car with some of them when things went haywire and no amount of, “But I’ve been there before and this isn’t where it is!” could convince them that GPS was steering us in the wrong direction. At some point, one must stop and say, “This doesn’t feel right. I need to turn back.”

This blog post prompted me to think about the joys of taking a wrong turn and then figuring out all by myself where I went wrong. Sometimes taking a wrong turn will lead you to a waterfall you didn’t know existed. Sometimes a wrong turn will give you a glimpse of wildlife. Sometimes a wrong turn will lead you to a story idea for a short story or a novel.

I love maps and globes. I always have. Discovering that geography was something to be studied in the fourth grade opened up a whole new world (literally!) to me. Will today’s children even know what a map is? Will they be able to read it if they ever see one? If they take a wrong turn, will they be able to find their way?

With the literal interpretation out of the way, let’s think of it in the metaphorical sense. What things in life serve as signposts for you? You weren’t born with an owner’s manual or a map to your life’s journey, but wasn’t that what made your life unique and challenging? I don’t know anyone who hasn’t taken some wrong turns in life. Sometimes it’s a good choice to “take the road less traveled.” Sometimes you find yourself going down the wrong path in life, and it’s time to stop and say, “This doesn’t feel right. I need to turn back.”

Someday I might have a car with GPS, but you can be sure I’ll never leave home without a map. It’s wise to always have a back up plan.

Janet

Diane Chamberlain Author Event

Hearing a published author speak is one of my favorite things to do. I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Diane Chamberlain yesterday afternoon at the Ashe County Public Library in West Jefferson, North Carolina. Her appearance was part of the annual Ashe County Arts Council’s On the Same Page Book Festival.

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View of downtown West Jefferson, NC from the Ashe County Public Library in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

In her opening remarks, Ms. Chamberlain said that her books are “part suspense, part mystery, and 100% family drama.” She quoted a Japanese fan who wrote, “You make me believe life is beautiful even if it is full of pain and rage.”

As is the case with most authors, Ms. Chamberlain’s publishing journey was tough. She said that a writer needs three things in order to get published:  “talent, perseverance, and luck.” She started writing her first novel in 1981, but it was not published until 1989. She kept writing and finally got lucky in 2008. Her book, The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes, was chosen as the Target Book Club Book one month which meant it was prominently displayed in every Target store.

Also in 1981, the wife of a United Kingdom publisher visited Ms. Chamberlain’s publisher in the U.S. and requested a book to read on her flight back to England. The book she was handed was the CeeCee Wilkes book. After reading it on her way home, she told her husband that he had to publish it in the U.K. She has been published in the U.S. and the U.K. ever since.

Each of Ms. Chamberlain’s books is different. She enjoys finding the perfect setting for each of her novels and draws from her own life experiences, including her education and first career in the field of psychology. I found it interesting that she occasionally asks her fans on the Diane Chamberlain Readers Facebook page to suggest names for characters or locations. She related an amusing story about how for a while she got ideas for male characters by going on an online dating site.

I’ll save some of Ms. Chamberlain’s comments about her 2015 novel, Pretending to Dance, for my blog post in a couple of weeks after Rocky River Readers Book Club meets to discuss the book.

Until my next blog post, I hope you have a good book to read — perhaps one of Diane Chamberlain’s best-selling novels.

Janet

Disclaimer: I attended this event and wrote this blog post on my own volition and received no compensation for endorsing Diane Chamberlain’s books.

How To Write a Compelling Title For Your Book

I thought it was appropriate for me to reblog Matthew Wright’s blog post about choosing the name for a book just several days after my blog about the importance of a book’s first line(s).

A Novel’s First Line

One of the challenges a writer faces is how to “hook” readers. The opening lines of a novel cannot ensure the book’s success, but they can ensure its failure. Most readers will not read a book if the opening paragraphs don’t grab their attention. The first line of a novel is very important.

I keep a list of novels’ first lines in my writer’s notebook. The opening sentence I’m sharing with you today is from that list.

“I’m a good liar.” — Pretending to Dance, by Diane Chamberlain.

What’s the first line of a novel that you recall?

Janet

10 Things I Learned about Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Although the name of my vintage postcard book is The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, one of the chapters is about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Qualla Boundary. One of my blog posts in August was about the Eastern Band Cherokee Indians. Their land is the Qualla Boundary.

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The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison on a shelf at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC in August, 2016.

 

In today’s post I want to share 10 things I learned about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as I did the research to write my vintage postcard book.

1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is located in Swain and Haywood Counties in North Carolina and Blount, Sevier, and Cocks Counties in Tennessee.

2. A gap is a low point in an Appalachian Mountain ridge. Gaps are called notches or passes in other parts of the United States.

3. A new gap in the Smoky Mountains was discovered in 1872 more than a mile from Indian Gap. The newfound gap was aptly named Newfound Gap.

4. Although Clingmans Dome is the highest peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park at an elevation of 6,643 feet, Mount LeConte is the tallest mountain from base to summit in the Great Smoky Mountains. Mount LeConte’s elevation is 6,593 feet, and it rises 5,301 feet from its base to its peak.

5. When a grassroots effort to raise $10 million to save the Great Smokies from logging came up short, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated the $5 million needed.

6. President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $1.5 million in federal funds to purchase the last of the land wanted for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

7. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1940.

8. It is illegal to willfully get within 150 feet of a black bear in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

9. Newfound Gap Road (US-441) tunnels under itself at one place, forming a helix.

10. Much of the forest in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been ravaged by the balsam woolly adelgid, an insect imported from Europe.

Want to know more about the Great Smoky Mountains? Look for my vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. It can be purchased online from Amazon or at some wonderful independent bookstores. If your favorite bookstore does not have the book, please ask them to order it from Arcadia Publishing and The History Press. It is also available for e-readers.

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The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison, (center of photo) as displayed at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC.

I was delighted a couple of weeks ago to find my book still prominently displayed at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, North Carolina. This fabulous bookstore is located in the Grove Arcade Building, an iconic 269,000-square-foot downtown Asheville destination built in 1929. An image of a matte-finish postcard of the building is included in my book.

I hope you’re always reading a good book.

Until my next blog in a few days,

Janet

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Why Comparing Yourself to Other Writers Doesn’t Make Sense

This is my first attempt to reblog someone else’s blog post. This young blogger shows a lot of wisdom in this piece. If you are a struggling writer like I am, you might benefit from reading Meg Dowell’s words.

What I read in August

It was great to get back on track with reading after a couple of months of not being able to read due to shingles in my right eye. I was fortunate in August to read the four books I’ll write about below.

When I got shingles in May, I had read the first half of Most Wanted, by Lisa Scottoline. It is a popular book, so it took several weeks for me to get it from the public library after I was able to read. Most Wanted is a suspenseful novel about a couple who used the services of a sperm bank and then the wife fears that their donor is a serial killer.

The Bookseller, by Cynthia Swanson was not what I expected, but it turned out to be a page-turner after all. I was drawn to the novel by its title; however, the fact that the protagonist is a bookseller is not an integral part of the story. I was also prompted to check out the book because it is Ms. Swanson’s debut novel. The book’s premise is that Kitty Miller’s life blurs between her reality and the life she lives in her dreams. The deeper into the book one gets, the less clear it is which life is real and which one is only in her dreams. I was impressed with the author’s ability to move back and forth between the two story lines, and I look forward to her future books.

I had not planned to read two Lisa Scottoline books in August, but I rose to the top of the public library waitlist for her latest novel, Damaged. This is in Ms. Scottoline’s Rosato and DiNunzio law firm series. Once again, Mary DiNunzio gets herself in a tangled mess when she agrees to represent a 10-year-old special needs child who is not being adequately served by the school he attends. Like any good novel, just when you think things can’t get any worse — they do.

I read a nonfiction book in August whose characters will remain with me forever. Robert Weintraub’s No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII is the amazing story of a pointer named Judy and a British soldier named Frank Williams. Man and dog were held as prisoners by the Japanese during World War II. Judy seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled her to react in uncanny ways not only to move through the war with Mr. Williams but also to save the lives of Allied soldiers on more than one occasion. This true story escaped my knowledge until this summer. I’m glad it was displayed in such a way in an independent bookstore that it caught my eye. I’m a richer person for having read this book.

I wish for you a good book to read and, if you are a writer, productive hours of writing.

Janet

Writing Plan of Action Update

My “Writing Plan of Action – Revised June 15, 2015” sort of fell through the cracks. In fact, I soon forgot all about it! In my own defense, we remodeled our kitchen last summer. If you’ve ever lived through a kitchen remodeling project, you will remember how all-consuming that is.

Refresher on June 2015 Plan

Something reminded me on Monday that I had a writing plan. I was shocked to read that my last revision to it was made more than 14 months ago. In a nutshell, here is that old plan: Schedule book signings/author events; blog every five days or so; look for writing contests to enter or magazine articles to write; edit my historical novel manuscript (The Spanish Coin) one day every week; and start in earnest to find a literary agent.

I have failed on all counts.

Progress made on novel manuscript

I recently got back to work on The Spanish Coin after a strange year with many distractions.

Sometimes I think I read too many “How To” books about writing and don’t spend enough time writing. For instance, I read a recommendation that my characters’ thoughts should be italicized. After going back through the first 15 chapters doing that, I read a more convincing recommendation that thoughts should be blended into a novel through characters’ voices. The reasoning was that italics pull the reader out of the story. I went back through chapters 1 through 15 and converted the italicized thoughts into a more blended format. Then, I converted thoughts in chapters 16 through 20 from “she thought/he thought” to a blended format. I hope I got it right!

My Writing Plan of Action – Revised August 25, 2016

  • Hire a professional to evaluate my The Spanish Coin manuscript;
  • Edit manuscript in light of that evaluation;
  • Continue to blog every Friday;
  • Get back to work on a sequel to The Spanish Coin (tentatively titled The Banjo); and
  • Seek representation by a literary agent or self-publish.

Let’s hope I am more successful following my new plan than I was my old one!

Janet

 

 

 

 

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Writing The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina was educational for me and I hope it is for its readers. Today my blog post is a list of 10 things I learned about The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians as I did the research for that vintage postcard book.

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My book on the shelf at Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC.
  1. The legal name for the Cherokee people in North Carolina is The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
  2. Because “Native American” can refer to anyone born in America, The North American Indian Women’s Association recommends using the term American Indians.
  3. The Great Smoky Mountains lay in the middle of the Cherokee Indians’ territory in the mid-1600s when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto arrived.
  4. In the 1820s, a Cherokee by the name of Sequoyah invented the Cherokee syllabary, making the Cherokee one of the first American Indian tribes to have a written language.
  5. Cherokee women have always had much power within the tribe, owning property, and administering justice.
  6. Descendants of the Cherokee Indians who hid out in the mountains to avoid the 1838 forced march to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears lived on a land trust called the Qualla Boundary.
  7. The land the US government gives to an American Indian tribe is a reservation. The Cherokee do not live on a reservation. The Qualla Boundary is 57,000 acres of land purchased by the Cherokee Indians in the 1800s and held in trust by the US government.
  8. A papoose is a type of bag or apparatus for carrying a child. It is offensive to the Cherokee for others to call one of their infants a papoose.
  9. The Cherokee Indians never lived in tipis. They have always lived in houses.
  10. Cherokee Indians have played a ball game called ani-tsagi or anetso for hundreds of years.

Want to know more? Look for my vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in your local bookstore or online. It was published by Arcadia Publishing in 2014.

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You can help me get the word out about Janet’s Writing Blog by telling your friends about it and by sharing it on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. According to WordPress, my blog has been seen by people in 10 countries!

Until my next blog post, I hope you have a good book to read. If you are a writer, I hope you have productive and rewarding writing time.

Janet

Online sites for writers

Today’s post is about a half dozen websites for writers that I discovered this week. I do not endorse any of the websites. I’m merely sharing the sites with those of you who are writers and, in some cases, commenting on my first impressions of the sites.

Online-Utility.org

Online-Utility.org is a free online tool. It measures readability and calculates the grade level at which one could read your text with ease. It also instantaneously lists every sentence in your text that “it” suggests you “rewrite to improve readability.” I was stunned at the number of sentences this tool listed that needed my attention in the first 100 pages of my novel manuscript; however, the website description admits that “In general, these tests penalize writers for polysyllabic words and long, complex sentences.” After quickly perusing the Online-Utility.org list of my sentences that needed attention, I concluded that the great majority of my words had more than one syllable and I am guilty of writing a complex sentence on occasion. I am attempting to write fiction for adults. I concluded that this free online tool better serves someone who is writing for young children or new readers of the English language.

thewritingpractice.com

I also happened upon thewritingpractice. The site has articles about the craft of writing. I will definitely visit that website again.

Writers’ Village University

Another website is that of Writer’s Village University. This site offers college-level classes for its members. I have found few reviews of this site on objective websites but many posts from people asking if anyone has used it. The Writer’s Village University website lists numerous glowing remarks from students, but I find it suspect that there is not one single mediocre or negative review. The writing groups aspect of the website might be its best member benefit. The sites lacks sufficient course descriptions for me to join with confidence. I welcome feedback from any current or former members of the website.

inkandquills.com and The Spanish Coin

As energy allows, I continue to edit my historical novel manuscript I’m calling The Spanish Coin. I was up to chapter 16 of 20 putting my characters’ thoughts in italics when a couple of days ago I read Kaitlin Hillerich’s article titled “How to Write Your Character’s Thoughts” on inkandquills.com. Ms. Hillerich says putting thoughts in italics or using speech tags creates “a barrier between the character and the reader.” She sees thoughts in italics as an interruption by the writer. Ms. Hillerich recommends that the writer lets the character convey his or his thoughts with their own voice. In other words, you can stay in third person point of view but write so it seems like the character is the narrator. This approach makes sense to me, so I will start once more on the first page of my novel’s manuscript, remove the thoughts in italics, and try to accomplish what Ms. Hillerich recommends. I hope my next step after that will be getting a professional to critique my 95,852-word manuscript. If I keep reading “how to write” articles and blogs, I’ll never get The Spanish Coin published. I think I sub-consciously procrastinate because I dread getting umpteen rejection letters from literary agents.

jamigold.com

One website leads to another when I get online. I often start out on Pinterest.com and find many websites about writing. I do not read paranormal fiction, but I recently discovered the jamigold.com website about paranormal writing. I was pleasantly surprised to find a plethora of helpful blog posts there for any writer. Some posts are about self-publishing. There is a new blog series about planning your newsletter. There are posts about how to keep readers and types of extra content you might want to consider including on your website.

Janice Hardy’s Fiction University

The Jami Gold website led me to blog.janicehardy.com — Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. The site contains more than 1,000 articles about writing. Whew! I don’t know where to begin.

No wonder I haven’t finished editing my novel. I spend too much time reading about writing and not enough time writing. And did I mention I’m a procrastinator?

Feel free to tweet about my blog, pin my posts on one of your Pinterest boards, and tell your friends to visit my blog and my website, janetmorrisonbooks.com. Until my next post, I wish you a good book to read and productive writing time for those of you who are writers.