Book Feature
Bingham Wade lives a solitary life. He leaves his mountain cabin rarely, mostly to do private contract work finding lost children. Cynical and lonely, bound by regret to the past, a photo of a lost girl with curly red hair forces him to his porch in the middle of the night, where he searches the internet for a woman he lost twenty years ago.
Claire Caviness is married and owns an art gallery in Savannah. When she returns to NC for a funeral, things begin to happen: she inherits money, buys a big handsome horse, reconnects with her father, and suddenly, things she lost in the past return to her.
Signs That Might Be Omens, book two in the Claire Quartet, is a story of love, loss, and illumination.
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Genre – Literary Fiction / Romance
Rating – R
Website http://www.billiehinton.com/
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Guest Post
Writing to me is …
by Billie Hinton
An archaeological dig. I usually begin with either a title or a short scene that has come to mind at some point. I jot these down in a black Moleskine notebook I keep for just this purpose. I’m not sure I’ll ever get all these novels written! But the Moleskine is like a book of maps and I go to it when it’s time to start a new book.
The main character is always, at the beginning, embedded in the title or the scene, and I think of those pieces of the story, those first visible pieces, as the part that is showing – much like an iceberg sticks up above the surface of the ocean, or a shiny piece of rock sticks up from the earth. The writing process is me carefully digging out the rest of the story, layer by layer. I’ve said before that I think of it as me with brushes and fine picks, gently picking the story out from everything around it.
Since I do not write from outlines, it actually does feel like a process of discovery, an uncovering of something that is already there but simply needs to be excavated.
With the novel Signs That Might Be Omens, I already had the main characters from the previous connected novel. With this one, those characters just didn’t stop when the previous novel ended! And one character in particular, Bingham Wade, made it clear that he had a lot to say. Every time I sat down with my laptop he took over, and I let him tell me his story.
Which brings me to what else writing is for me – entertainment, for one thing, but also it is me making sense of the world. I’m sure that when this free flow of words comes forth, it is my unconscious mind working things out, much like we do in dreams. As a psychotherapist who helps clients find ways to look at this process in their own lives, I’ve realized over the years that my writing serves that purpose for me. When I don’t write, I feel a pressure building inside my head – too many stories! – writing relieves it.
The fun part, and the mysterious part, is the magic that seems to happen once I get into a story. I start seeing characters that look like the characters in my novels. Strange things happen. One time I was editing a scene in Signs that took place in a motel. I was in my writing garret with the door closed and the phone started ringing. I was working, so didn’t go out to answer it, but it kept ringing, over and over again. When I finally broke down and went out to answer it, the caller ID showed the name of the motel I’d been writing about.
I had no connection to that motel, there was no reason they would be calling. When I called back to see why they’d called, it turned out the call had come from a room, not from the front desk. A room that had no one checked in to it! Who was calling? Was it Bingham calling to tell me something about the scene I’d been editing? I have no idea, but it sure illustrated for me the power of the story, and the energy that happens when I commit to the excavation.
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