It all began with a conversation my best friend Patt and I had one spring day several years ago as we sat under a huge tree in Chanticleer Gardens in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I told her that I had an idea for a new novel. I couldn’t say if it came to me in a dream or I just dreamed it up, but I warned Patt that this plot concept was out of the box. Although my Annie Crow Knoll Trilogy was very much grounded in reality, Patt met my creative thought process with enthusiasm, as she always has since we were college roommates back in the mid-1970s.
I asked her to consider an elderly woman dying but instead of going to the light, she ends up in the body of a young woman giving birth. I love relationship triangles as revealed with Annie/Drew/Packard in the Annie Crow Knoll books. This triangle would be the woman, her elderly husband, and the young man who appears to be the father of the baby she is birthing. When Patt was enthralled with the concept, I began to believe that it could work. I felt encouraged, made some notes for later reference, and concentrated on finishing and launching Annie Crow Knoll: Moonrise, the last book in the Annie Crow Knoll Trilogy.
The day after the Moonrise launch party, I got out my notes and began writing Soul Dancing. I had no idea where I was going, which is actually good for me, but I wrote. One of my favorite writing tasks is coming up with character names. The protagonist is ninety years old, so she needed an old-fashioned name. Shirlene popped into my head, but I had to make sure it was okay with my cousin-in-law Shirlene. She loved the idea of having a character named after her. I like alliteration, so her ninety three-year-old husband became Stan. Shirlene’s best friend is black, and it seemed her parents might name her after Harriet Tubman with the nickname of Hattie. Cameron fit the young man, who preferred Cam or Mike, using a shorten version of his last name Michaels. The young mother-to-be, who gives up the baby and her body to Shirlene, had a rough life with addiction and dead-end romances. A happy, sunny name wasn’t going to fit her, but Rain seemed perfect.
After writing quite a bit of a first draft, Cat and Mouse Press approached me about writing a collection of short stories set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. They loved the Annie Crow Knoll Trilogy, which is set there, and thought I was the person for the job. I put Soul Dancing on hold and took a year to write Eastern Shore Shorts. When I returned to Soul Dancing, I felt a little lost. Luckily the South Jersey Writers’ Group was holding a novel outlining workshop. I usually feel that outlines hamper my creativity, but I needed help so I attended. That’s where I learned I could use a mind-map outline format. Armed with a large piece of easel paper and various colored markers, my creative juices were once again flowing. I mapped out characters and connections and themes and events all over the large sheet of paper. During this process, I discovered that Cameron has a brother who is the biological father of the baby.
Now, I must go back to my friend Patt, whose father passed away in 2022. Patt and her dad, Charles (Chal), had an extraordinary relationship. One that I admired. Patt and Chal inspired more than one story idea for me. Like the time, several years after her mother passed, Patt set her father up on a date with her new neighbor Barbara. Chal was resistant, but Patt was insistent that he and this amazing eighty-year-old woman would be a match. Chal decided to march over to Barbara’s house and introduce himself and warn her about his daughter’s meddling before the day of their “date.” Chal and Barbara both experienced WWII, loved swing music, and shared a lot in common. They became close companions during the years before Chal’s death. I stole all this for my short story “Antiques” in Eastern Shore Shorts.
Then it dawned on me. Chal was about the same age as my character Stan, and he had been a fighter pilot for the USA. What if his WWII story was Stan’s story? Chal agreed to let me interview him about his service in the Army Air Corps flying twenty-six bombing, strafing, aerial combat missions over Belgium, Holland, and Germany in his P47 Thunderbolt. I spent a fascinating few hours listening to him. Although I loved my best friend’s father for over forty years, I felt even closer to him after that talk. Chal was happy to let me use his story for Stan. He even shared some stories about falling in love with Patt’s mom during the war, and I borrowed some of that for the history of Stan and Shirlene’s early relationship. Sadly, Chal passed away before Soul Dancing was to be published. I’ve dedicated the novel in his memory.
I learned that although my story idea was unique and the readers need to suspend their beliefs, in the long run, I’m still writing about families, second chances, and forgiveness. I hope you’ll enjoy everything that Shirlene, Stan, Cameron, and others have to offer in Soul Dancing.
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