Welcome to my blog Upstate Girl, (a.k.a Follow Your Bliss Part II), I am an independently published author. This blog is all about writing and the stuff that inspires me to write, the joys and obstacles that come along with the writer's life, and my fascination with the psychology of people and what makes them tick...the human condition, as is...and my love for words, playing with them and making sense of them...and I throw in a few photos from my acre of the world just to make things pretty...sometimes there are things I have no words for, only pictures will do.

*Copyright notice* All photos, writing, and artwork are mine (
© Laura J. Wellner), unless otherwise noted, please be a peach, if you'd like to use my work for a project or you just love it and must have it, message me and we'll work out the details...it's simple...JUST ASK, please.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

The book cover

(Click image for a closer look)

Here it is...the cover for my little novel Dusty Waters...I've been reading the whole thing through cover to cover this weekend, and just finished reading a couple of hours ago, and then went immediately into the garden to do a little bit of work cleaning up the left over hollyhock and sunflower stalks...it's been a gorgeous day...now I'm very tired, my body humming and my head buzzing...I lay down on the porch floor and sunned myself with my little dog-friend, listened to the birds squabble at the feeder, and a little mole squeaking and rummaging around under the dead leaves in the flower bed...it just felt so good to have the sunshine on my face!

What an odd little book I have written! I love it just as much as I did when I first finished it...I've been away from it long enough to have forgotten a little bit...there are times where it's quite funny, Dusty has a fun-loving grasp of the absurd things in life...yet she's serious about the things that matter, I call it a compassionate rage. It's a ghost story, there are lots of ghosts in it...but there are things that are scarier than ghosts in the world, much scarier...people are sometimes scarier than ghosts.

I was asked more than once last week...how long did it take me to write this book...well, I started it in 1999...which is sort of true, because I started most of my manuscripts around that time because for some reason I hit a sweet spot and everything came at me all at once, and I just made up my mind to finally do something about them...it just took a very long time to write everything down! The stories found in Dusty Waters are really much older than that...I started thinking about this stuff in the 1970's when I was flailing around in those awkward phases of growing up. I loved telling stories, I would claim that they were true (cross my heart and hope to die true) and I told them like I believed every word...but I was often accused of being a liar and I would be indignant...

Funny isn't it?

Well, fun stuff...ghost stories...

I need to sit down with my Fred and go over the things that I want to change...and then...well, then it'll be ready for public consumption...I'll keep you posted!

The photos used in the design are mine...the house used to stand at the old Fox Sister's homestead in Hydesville, New York, it's gone now, burned down some time ago...I took the pictures of the place sometime in the mid to late 1980's...it's where the Spiritualist movement began, the girls (Kate and Margaret) allegedly heard rappings in their parents house and devised a "code" to talk to the dead, and held seances. It was just one of those things that set my imagination on fire way back when I was young and impressionable...

So much...at time too much...for now, all I can say is "Wow."

As soon as we're done tinkering, and I approve the next proof...I'll make it for sale...

2 comments:

Pat said...

I first heard of the Fox Sisters back in the 70's. It was so strange to see the name and remember the situation. I saw it at a spiritualist's house. She had a plaque in her room. I don't know if she heard knocks or what. She did claim to have gone out for sodas with Ronald Reagan when the were both very young. Other than that, I can't say if she saw ghosts. I liked the story of your post and the photo is terrific!

Anonymous said...

Fantastic, Laura! It looks great!