[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome internationally award winning author Kimberly Brock to discuss her latest novel, The Fabled Earth, which released October 1st. Welcome, Kimberly.
[00:00:22] Kimberly: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to finally meet you.
[00:00:27] Jane: Same. So I’m going to do a quick bio on you and then I have a bunch of questions, probably too many. Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and The River Witch. She’s the founder of the Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops, including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center.
She lives near Atlanta, which we were just talking about, with her husband and three children. Again, welcome, thanks for coming on.
[00:00:54] Kimberly: Thank you for having me. All my grown children, I have one still in high school, and then two that are college graduates. All back home. Everybody’s here living in this house.
And my husband works from home and I work from home. And it’s man, we are packed.
[00:01:11] Jane: Linda Loigman is a mutual friend who I adore and I loved her blurb on the back of your book. It says, I’ve never read a novel where the author’s love of storytelling shines through more brightly than this one. So talk about the premise of this beautiful new novel and how you came up with it.
[00:01:31] Kimberly: I am, I’m a really slow writer.
We were just talking about this a minute ago. And I don’t have a stack of ideas. For my next book for my next project. I’m always just obsessed with the thing that I’m writing about
[00:01:47] Jane: and
[00:01:47] Kimberly: then I’m collecting like little stuff that I like, not necessarily stories, but a photograph or a stone or a shell or some, things that interests me.
And I might see an idea, an article that catches my eye or a little tidbit from history that. Oh, why don’t I know that? Usually it’s a question of, why don’t I know that? I should know that. And then at some point they start to stick together and form a story. And that’s how this happened for me. And it started with setting.
Because I got married in the backyard in 1996, grew up on a farm. We had a big old house that was 100 years old and an oak tree that was 100 years old and had a wedding dress that was 100 years old. There were about 25 people in folding chairs and it was very quiet on a Sunday morning, summer morning, and over, like within a couple of hours.
Hardly anybody knew about it. I loved it. It was very intimate. Three months later, we heard with everybody else. In the world, that J. A. F. K. Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married in a secret wedding on Cumberland Island. And I thought, oh, we’re just like the Kennedys! We got married in this little secret wedding!
And the idea that, we’re nothing like the Kennedys, and I had never had really any interest in the Kennedys necessarily, and all of that wealth, but our stories connected us. So 25 years later, it’s my wedding anniversary. And my husband’s looking for somewhere to go. And he says, I have gotten us a reservation at the Grayfield Inn on Cumberland Island.
And we went and we stayed on Cumberland. And when we pulled up alongside the island, it’s quiet. You can only get there by ferry. And I always wanted to go and I was just almost shaking. I was so excited and the trees, what live oaks look like and all the moss, but it was super quiet. We were the only people on that ferry.
When we pulled up to the dock, it occurred to me that it would have been the Kennedy couple’s 25th wedding anniversary too. Wow. And they had died in that plane crash and all my hair stood up and like the hair on my arms. And I thought, you know what? I’ve been looking for my setting. And I had been saying for a long time, I wanted to write about ghost stories.
And the two things came together for me there. The idea that our stories connect us was the element of folklore. So all of those little. Things that I had been collecting came together around the idea for this story, and that’s where it began.
[00:04:31] Jane: Amazing. I had no I knew vaguely of Cumberland Island only basically because the Kennedys, I’m from Boston, so we’re Kennedy obsessed up here a little bit.
And so I, I did a deep dive after reading the book because I’m, because now I want to go there and I love that the setting of Cumberland Island is, I love when settings are so rich, they’re almost like another character in the story.
[00:04:55] Kimberly: I didn’t even have to work at it. It’s such a strange and mythical feeling place.
It feels very outside of time trying to write about myth and folklore. That background of that wealth that was fading from the Gilded Age. They just, they were perfect. To be, that chorus in the background, the old gods on the mountain but they’re on the island. And then I could set my more modern timeline against that.
And that was the historical event that I knew about that took place with one of the biggest mansion that they built. The main house they built on Cumberland. And it burned in an arson in 1959. So that’s why I chose that year to set the story in because nobody was ever charged with that crime and I got to speculate a little bit about that.
So that’s where the fiction, the historical fiction, all those little bells and whistles went off. I was like, Oh, what can I do with that?
[00:05:54] Jane: Yeah. Oh, I love that. So talk about your research for this book. Cause that’s an. That’s an event. This is dual narrative. It takes place in the 30s, 32 and 59 and so and talk about the research, I didn’t know the Carnegie’s had homes there and they actually had more than one, including the one you mentioned that just burned down. So
[00:06:15] Kimberly: exactly. So let me give you, the basics here. So the novel takes place, like you said, in a dual timeline. And the main story that’s happening is in 1959.
And I wanted to culminate with this huge fire. It was a huge spectacle of a fire that people came from miles. You could see it on the mainland for a long ways. The Carnegie family bought property on Cumberland in 1880s. And the property that they bought was actually the first Dungeness mansion was a revolutionary British home.
And that’s what they bought. They knocked that structure down and bought, or they built a whole new big Victorian home. And this was Thomas Carnegie and his wife Lucy. Thomas is Andrew’s brother. So see, it already feels like a Southern story, right? I’m like, why did these people come with all of their money from the North?
And this is the place, this wild, undeveloped Southern island. It seems like such a strange choice. It’s so far flung and not very comfortable. And everything had to be brought by boat. Everything. Thomas died before that house was even finished. And Lucy continued to build until it was this extravagant place, and then she built mansions for her nine children.
So there were more homes, right? And Grayfield Inn is one of the houses that’s still standing. It became an inn in the 60s. It was for one of her children. And Plum Orchard was another big, huge home there. It’s a big, white, monstrous house. It features in the novel. And all of them are crumbling or gone, except for Grayfield.
Dungeness burned. But it is a national park now. So you can go and visit and see the ruins for Dungeness and tour Plum Orchard and stay at Greatfield if you want to drop a mortgage payment, right? So my research was First of all, I, we had made the trip. We were only there for a couple of nights, but it makes an impression, and I came home and I read and I read. I read lots of books that had been written about Cumberland. But the Carnegie family also is just vast. Nine kids just there with her and so I was trying to was just piling up around me what I was reading and what I was finding online and things that people remembered and then I was also reading about the time periods because I wanted to get enough right about 1959.
It’s not the 60s yet. Things are starting to cook, for social change and I’m in a coastal Georgia town. So that was You know, detail oriented things that I was looking for about segregation and just women’s rights and how my characters would be living at that time. I have three main characters who are women in this novel and they each have a point of view and the chapters alternate.
So it’s jumping heads between these three girls. at different stages in a woman’s life in 1959. That was a lot of little details. So I was looking at music
[00:09:37] Jane: and art
[00:09:38] Kimberly: and how do they keep house and what’s showing at the movie theater and all those things on top of the background for 1932 and the event that takes place there and this connection to folklore and regional folklore that would have been present there.
Folklore for one of the characters who has a grandfather from Appalachia. And then how those stories connect across time. And oceans and families and communities really interested me, so I was also looking at how some stories had traveled. And there is a mention of a German myth in the book about a Lorelei that is a sea siren.
I was finding all these little tidbits, again, I think, is how I research. And when I tell people I write historical fiction, I laugh because It’s accidental. I’m really a storyteller that accidentally writes historical fiction because of the time periods I end up in. My research is a scatterbrained attempt to get it right.
[00:10:47] Jane: Do you enjoy it? Do you like the research? I
[00:10:49] Kimberly: love it. And I, I have to like, people ask me, how do you choose what goes into the book? Because there’s so much that doesn’t ever go into the book. You pile this stuff up around you and you fall in love with all of it, but you can’t put it all in the book.
So I think what I do is I have a question. And in this book, it was about ghost stories. I was, you mentioned the Pat Conroy Center. And I was teaching a workshop there a few years ago, and I said to everybody, I think all stories are ghost stories. And I thought, oh my gosh, I’m so smart. That sounds so smart.
What does that even mean? I don’t know! And, but I thought, do I believe that? I really think I do. But why? And so that’s the question in this book. What do I really mean by that? All stories being ghost stories. And I think, I look at the question that I’m giving to each of my characters in one way or another.
And then the pieces of research or history and details about that time period that I can tuck in that helps answer that question.
[00:11:57] Jane: Excellent.
[00:11:58] Kimberly: I feel most like the reader has been dropped down into that. I’m going to be in that room in that year at that time to think about that question. Those are the things I tuck in.
[00:12:11] Jane: Very cool. Was there anything in your research that surprised you, came out of nowhere, like that you’re like, Oh, I have to put this in?
[00:12:19] Kimberly: That’s the crazy. I had so many people ask me that question, and I cannot come up with a single thing.
[00:12:24] Jane: Oh, I understand that.
[00:12:26] Kimberly: Everything was outrageous, like all of the stories about the Carnegie’s and, You want to be respectful.
And, but these are people who had a whole lot of money, no rules on an island, what happens, right? So there’s all these really strange, kooky stories about them that sound like I would have made them up. And so I don’t think I was surprised by that. I grew up in the eighties. I watched a lot of Dallas on TV.
But I was delighted by it, and then I had to be careful with what I chose to tuck in as the truth and maybe hide as a little fiction.
So that was fun. The, and then there’s the sad parts, the things that I was dealing with that had to do with, Race, or right to read, or women’s rights, or lack thereof, lack of choice.
I, those things were hard to tackle, and are always so hard for me to write. Historical fiction, because I know I’m not an authority. I know that I’m a woman who grew up a little girl in the 80s in North Georgia. What do I know? I’m having to imagine so much, and hoping that I’m getting it right. And hoping that at least it sparks a conversation.
[00:13:49] Jane: Absolutely. And that actually is a good lead in for my next question, because I want to talk about your three distinct, really distinct female characters that are center the story, starting with Cleo Woodbine, who’s this reclusive artist in residence. Her story spans both timelines Frances Flood and Audrey Howell are two younger women who come to the Cumberland Island area in 59, and they’re Lost and lonely, like looking for something.
One of them is definitely looking for something. So how did you develop, why these three main characters? How did you develop them? Sorry, your book’s falling.
[00:14:25] Kimberly: Oh, don’t do that.
[00:14:27] Jane: I know.
[00:14:28] Kimberly: So I started with Cleo in 1959. But I wonder if you’ll say the same thing. I never liked my main characters when I first start writing them because they’re not what I want them to be by the end of the book and I’m very frustrated with them all the way through.
But for her in particular, I had a really hard time getting in her head. Most of my characters, I feel like when I’m writing them, I’m looking in a mirror and they’re talking to me. It’s me talking to me as the character, right? It’s this weird subconscious thing that you play with.
But with her, she’s a recluse and she just did not want anything to do with me.
I felt like I was looking at the back of her head the
[00:15:14] Jane: whole
[00:15:14] Kimberly: time I was trying to write her in 1959. And so I knew there was this story of what had happened to her in 1932, and when I started writing her from that timeline, I began to know her better. As a younger woman, I could get closer to her and then understand her and write the 1959 parts with more ease, maybe?
Nothing about Cleo was easy. And then Frances Flood, she’s a, she’s that girl. I always have a girl in my book that’s saying, who was my mama? What is her story? There are always some character in my book who’s trying to figure out who mama was. I don’t know what my issue is, but that’s it. And then Audrey Howell is a little bit my mom because she’s in 1959, she’s 19, 20 years old, right out of high school and already married.
Kaboom, you’re married. No other thing to do. And then she’s widowed within only a few months. And still a little girl. She doesn’t know how to be a woman first, a bride next, a widow, even, how do I do that? It all happened too fast.
I had a good time. It was like they did for Cleo what putting her in 1932 did for me with Cleo.
They see one another in this book and I enjoyed that in different stages of life. Here’s somebody to see you for yourself.
[00:16:45] Jane: Okay. Yeah, that’s a really good way of putting it. That makes sense in context of the story. I want to read this from your author’s note. The fabled earth is really just a fable about an island with a history that’s very real.
And so the tone, your writing, your voice, your writing style, It’s really lyrical. It’s really like beautiful and with elements of haunted ghost stories and hints of magical realism. And was that always the type of story you plan to write with this book or did that kind of evolve in the process?
[00:17:17] Kimberly: It was absolutely the story I planned to write.
[00:17:20] Jane: Okay. Oh, wow.
[00:17:21] Kimberly: This one, it was. I think I’m always writing about that, though. I don’t think it’s specific to this book so much. All three of my, these first novels have been set on the coast, and I’m always writing a little bit about Ghosts. And I think that, that is me answering that question specifically in this book.
Are all stories ghost stories? Yes, I think so. And I was very much thinking about the haunted History of this place, this very ancient island
[00:17:58] Jane: that,
[00:17:59] Kimberly: Long, complicated, bloody history and battle place that it’s been and also been home to so many different or people who want it to be home so badly.
We all want home. That’s all we want. And then I was thinking about what is a ghost story? And I think the South is a big haunted house. It’s full of ghosts and full of ghost stories, and some of them are mine. My childhood, I remember our library in town. When I was a little girl, we went there a lot because we didn’t have air conditioning.
And the library had air conditioning. My mother loved to read. And it was this big old brick home with big white columns, it was beautiful, but you, and it had a staircase, like this gorgeous staircase, but you could not go upstairs. And I was very little, and I pitched a fit one time because I really wanted to prowl around upstairs and see what was up there.
And my mom marched me back out on the sidewalk, and I remember her telling me that she could remember coming to the library, and there were people then that could not come inside the library. And I was lucky to be there. And that was the first I learned about segregation. Oh, wow.
[00:19:10] Jane: Yeah.
[00:19:11] Kimberly: And then the same with our local theater, our historic theater in town.
I wanted to sit in the balcony, and it was closed off. And my grandmother told me about remembering who used to sit in the balcony. And I was lucky that I could sit on the main floor. And the, that feeling of how is that possible? First of all, like the first time you realize that this was even a thing in the world.
And then you’re looking at the people that you love the most and they’re telling you about this like it was normal.
[00:19:41] Jane: Yeah.
[00:19:42] Kimberly: And so I, those are the stories that haunt me.
Those are my ghost stories. And I wanted to talk about those kinds of things, but I wanted to put them into a story that felt like you feel when you’re being told a ghost story.
People are very open to the impossible when they’re listening to a ghost story, the possibilities.
[00:20:08] Jane: Yeah.
[00:20:11] Kimberly: You can be a little horrified and also struck, wonder struck, when you’re listening to a ghost story. And that’s how I wanted this novel to be.
[00:20:22] Jane: Fascinating. Someone, there’s some, there’s lots of questions tonight, but I haven’t, I have to finish mine first, but I wanted to ask.
Don’t hold down.
[00:20:31] Kimberly: I know,
[00:20:31] Jane: but hold on do you, but a few people have asked, do you, have you ever had a haunted experience, a ghost, have you ever seen a ghost?
[00:20:41] Kimberly: Yes.
[00:20:42] Jane: You have.
[00:20:43] Kimberly: Yes. I haven’t seen a ghost. I could, I may be telling a little fib here in this house that we’re living in now. My husband and I both have separately experienced something that then we told one another about.
And that’s not as unusual for me as it is for him. But it’s nothing that really is It’s not frightening. Neither of us are worried about it. We’re just aware of it. That’s what’s odd about it to me is yeah, but when I was a little girl, I was a premature baby. I was nine weeks early and I was a twin.
And the day after we were born, she died.
[00:21:22] Jane: Oh
[00:21:22] Kimberly: wow. My mom divorced and remarried by the time I was two. He adopted me. And I was about three years old and he’s very practical. This guy is super analytical. My dad is, there’s nothing woo about my dad, but he still tells the story. He woke up in the middle of the night and I was standing beside his side of the bed in my nightgown and he said, Kim, what are you doing out of bed?
Go get back in the bed. And he followed me across to my bedroom across the hall and flipped the light on, put me back to bed. And I was not there. I was at my grandparent’s house a mile down the road where I was every Friday night. Oh, wow. No. And he said, and when he tells that story, we’re not scared by that.
It’s a sense that she was just checking in to have a look at him to see how he was doing. And so that, that idea, that presence is always with me.
[00:22:17] Jane: And I
[00:22:17] Kimberly: think that’s. Part of why I write the kinds of stories that I do.
[00:22:22] Jane: Yeah, wow. I got chills when you told that. That’s unbelievable. So I have some writing questions and then I will take questions from the audience.
These are questions I always ask. Did you, I want to talk about perspective. Did you always plan on writing this as a dual timeline with three perspectives?
[00:22:40] Kimberly: No, I did not. I thought that I was going to be writing it just from Cleo’s perspective in 1959 in Francis Flood. That was going to be it. I was trying so hard not to write a dual timeline again.
But I think I always will. And you know why? I figured this out. It’s because in the South, when we tell a story, Always, we never just tell a straight line. Here’s where we start at the beginning and you tell the whole story through. You get a little ways into it and then you say, but mama’s sister.
And how, and you got to reflect back to something and talk about something that happened in the past to affect what’s happening now. It’s just do it. And I think that’s just how my brain has grown up learning to tell a story that I’ve got to reflect or reflect on the past. And I actually, I think it’s why I set this book where I said it, I like that idea of the.
Of the dividings that the place in the Salt Creek there off of Cumberland where the tide runs both ways.
[00:23:55] Jane: You
[00:23:55] Kimberly: reflect on the past, you can dream about the future, even though you exist in a fixed point in time. And I just think that’s how stories work. It’s gotta all be going together. And I, once I wrote Cleo, and 1932 perspective.
I don’t know where Audrey came from, but then I had three people on my hands in two timelines, so that’s what happened.
[00:24:23] Jane: And so I want to talk about process because it seems you do it so well. So how do you write? Do you write, do you plot it out? Are you, do you write by the seat of your pants?
Are your pants are a plotter?
[00:24:34] Kimberly: I am an oldest child. I was a teacher. So I am super type A and I really want there to be a plan, but I have found that I am miserable if I try and write from a plan. So I will typically have some kind of plan. I have figured out that this is the way that I do it. I write my way into it.
With I’d write longhand a lot when I first started and I’ll fill up legal pads And it all just goes in the trash eventually most of it, but I’ll find the voice I’ll find this that first scene that person will start talking to me and when that happens It’s like something clicks and I know what the story is gonna be about not necessarily the plot more like the theme
Maybe And I will know how it needs to end.
So I write the end scene. And it, I’ll draft it. It doesn’t necessarily all stay the same details, but for the most part that I know what that is.
[00:25:41] Jane: Then
[00:25:42] Kimberly: I jump back to the front and I write the first. I know where it starts then. And I have events that I know need to take place to get me to that end. But I can’t know it all or I get bored.
And I’m driven by curiosity. I wonder how often that is the answer from historical fiction writers. I’m driven by curiosity. So if I’m not curious about what’s going to happen, I get bored and it’s lifeless on the page. But I can write from the start to the next tent pole. And if I get lost or stuck, I’ll write the tent pole and then reverse engineer it and then go to the next one and do it that way.
But if I know too much about what’s in between. Then, I don’t care anymore.
[00:26:28] Jane: I think a lot of people have that process though, where it’s not, they don’t fill in all the blanks, but they have markers along the way, right? And
[00:26:37] Kimberly: then, loads of revisions, I love revising, like I’ll revise like at least three times before my agent even sees it.
And then she likes to revise. So we do lots together before my editor sees it,
[00:26:49] Jane: but
[00:26:50] Kimberly: I can’t, and I hate it. That’s the truth. I hate it. I wish I knew it all up front so that I could feel. Secure and just follow a path and because that’s what I want it to be and it’s just not it makes me insane Don’t talk to me while I’m drafting the book.
I am not sweet.
[00:27:08] Jane: I am the same way I think the more I talk to authors about this though it’s like for me the first getting that first draft down. It’s like blood from a stone. It’s so hard
[00:27:22] Kimberly: Like then I’m like A pig in mud when I’m revising. I love it.
[00:27:26] Jane: Exactly.
[00:27:26] Kimberly: That’s, yeah, same.
[00:27:28] Jane: Was there one book that you read growing up? You said you went to the library a lot. Was there one book that you adored and made you want to become a writer?
[00:27:37] Kimberly: Gosh, I have never actually answered that question.
I’m terrible at favorites. Like the question, what’s your favorite color? Yeah. I’ll take an hour to answer that. But I will tell you I loved being read to as a child and I loved anything that had a mystery to it like I love Nancy Drew books. I loved my grandmother read stories to me and I can remember her reading The Little Match Girl.
So things that had a little bit of a sad. Angle to them, melancholy things always attracted me. I loved Little Women when I was young. But it was not one single book. All I did was read. I remember being in eighth grade and I had read everything out of the library. And my librarian at school started sneaking in Victoria Holt books for me.
Oh, nice. I was reading Victoria Holt books in the eighth grade. I don’t have a specific one book. I need to actually think about that to have a
[00:28:37] Jane: better experience, Tom. That’s still a good answer though. I, so I, you publish three novels now and you teach writing workshops. What’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors about writing and getting published?
There
[00:28:51] Kimberly: is a difference between being a writer and being an author. And the only difference is business. So you’re already a writer. I think everybody is a writer. Everybody is a storyteller. And if you can write because you enjoy the writing that’s healthy. If you’re writing to publish it’s not. You’re, I think my joy when I publish lasts about five minutes. Before I’m anxious about the next thing, just like you’re anxious about wanting to publish right now.
And it is a joy to walk into Barnes Noble and see your book there and they don’t know you’re a daddy. And they, you haven’t done them a favor. It’s just actually, that’s like a miracle. But it’s a miracle that lasts for about five minutes. The joy of the work has to be the thing you’re doing it for.
And then you have to also understand That you can fool yourself and think that you can quit, but you can’t.
If it’s how you think about the world and how you process your life, it’s something you’re always going to be doing. So you have to find joy in the fact that’s who you are. That’s the creature that you are and just enjoy being a storyteller.
[00:30:11] Jane: That’s great advice. Speaking of, so what are you working on right now?
[00:30:17] Kimberly: I’m working, I, this is the first book that I have ever started and actually talked about like right from the get go. Usually I’m really not talking about it at all, but I’ve been talking about this one for some reason. It’s called The Winter Bees.
And it’s about two Spinster sisters. I’m setting it in Asheville, North Carolina, which we actually turned in the proposal on the day that Helene hit. And I was just devastated and we love Asheville. I go there all the time. So I have two Spinster sisters. In 1926, they attend a party at the Biltmore House, and if you’ve ever been to the Biltmore, they have a room in the basement that has all these murals, and they’re actually gypsy themed from a party that they had on a New Year’s Eve in Cornelia, Biltmore, is who threw this party.
So I had the sisters attend the party one night, and the next morning, the oldest sister is supposed to marry a boy that they are both in love with. And he leaves her at the altar and both the sisters know what happened to him. And then for the next three decades, they live in their family manse and refuse to speak to one another.
[00:31:33] Jane: Oh, wow.
[00:31:34] Kimberly: So in 1964, they are having to sell the house and they are leaving and they open the door to the new owner and guess who it is. And he has not aged a day.
[00:31:48] Jane: Oh, amazing.
[00:31:49] Kimberly: Yeah, so there’s a little mystery, a little magic to this one. And some sisters who have a dark secret. It’s gonna be fun. I’m excited.
Oh,
[00:31:57] Jane: definitely. And what’s that slated for? Do you know yet, or you’re not? I
[00:32:01] Kimberly: don’t know yet. I’m waiting. Cross your fingers. Everybody say a little prayer. Maybe I’ll get it. An offer here soon. We’re waiting. You’re back from my editor. They’re excited about it. So
[00:32:12] Jane: that’s awesome. Yeah. And then how best I’m going to take questions from the audience.
If you have any, put them in the chat or the Q and a how best can, how can readers best keep in touch with you? And you said you do them with book clubs. I should also mention you have. A book club kit on your website and questions there and questions in the back of the book as well.
[00:32:32] Kimberly: So yeah, I’ll zoom with book clubs.
I love doing this. It’s the best part. It’s like you had this dream and somebody cares to listen to it. You try and tell your husband when you have a good dream and they don’t. Book clubs, that’s what it’s like. It’s Oh, somebody who finally cares to hear the dream. So I can be found on Facebook and Instagram.
And then I have a website. And like you said, there’s a book club kit and playlist. There’s recipes.
[00:33:02] Jane: Oh yeah.
[00:33:03] Kimberly: And yeah, my website.
[00:33:06] Jane: Excellent. Okay, so questions from the audience, and this is actually one I had off to the side. Was it always called The Fabled Earth? Or was that kind of evolved? How’d you come up with the
[00:33:17] Kimberly: title?
I didn’t have much of a title for this book while I was writing it. I kept changing it over and over again. For my last book, for The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, I did not title that book. I was part of the process, but it was an editorial process that pulled that title together. For this one, we started out that way, but they couldn’t come up with a good title, and I landed on this one on my own.
This is it. I knew that I wanted it to have the elements of, the idea of fables and folklore, right? And I like the word fabled. And then, but I also want it to be very grounded because I feel like it is the, it’s very real. The Cleo Woodbine especially, she’s got some dirt under her fingernails and I wanted that to be in the title.
[00:34:06] Jane: Yeah, no, it’s perfect. And the cover is beautiful. Steve, do you have much of a say in that? The color, I love the color palette on the back, even. I know,
[00:34:15] Kimberly: isn’t it pretty? Yeah, it’s very. The last book, I had loads of back and forth, for Lost Book of Eleanor Dare. For this one, It came almost exactly like you see it now in the first time around, but the house on the front was a thing.
I punched up the colors some, I asked them to punch up the colors some, but the house itself looked like really stark, like a Stephen King novel. And I was afraid everybody would be like, Oh, it looks like a heart. So then it came back really too sweet. It looked like your granny lived there with the little flower baskets and things.
I was like, no, Cleo’s not your granny. And you want your reader to have some, I don’t want them to feel betrayed when they look at the cover. I want them to get what they think they’re going to get. But I was really happy that it wasn’t a beach. It doesn’t look like, some beach book, a beach read.
It’s a marsh. And that’s what it should feel like. Yes.
[00:35:13] Jane: Yeah, a little more atmospheric, I think. I love these
[00:35:16] Kimberly: vines. Yeah,
[00:35:17] Jane: love the vines. Let me see, any other questions? People really want to go to Cumberland Island now.
[00:35:24] Kimberly: I know! Listen, when I wrote it, I was like, everybody’s going to want to go to Cumberland Island, and then I thought, oh no!
[00:35:31] Jane: No!
[00:35:32] Kimberly: Leave it alone!
[00:35:33] Jane: I also loved, I should mention, in the kit on your website you have some photos from Cumberland Island as well. And there’s wild horses like walking through the ruins of one of the mansions. And that was amazing.
[00:35:47] Kimberly: I know I, I should put some more photos up there. That is, those photos came from my 25th.
Trip my trip for my 25th wedding anniversary. So like I wasn’t thinking about photos I was gonna share with the world when we took photos there, so I don’t have like good photos of me I look like garbage like on it’s wet and you’re hot So there’s no good photos of me. I need to pick through them though and find a few more to share of the place.
[00:36:17] Jane: Oh, another question. What did you have a favorite character that you, in this story that to write about? Did you have one that you really enjoyed writing about? Because there’s a lot of characters. I should mention, we talked about three. There’s a like big cast
[00:36:30] Kimberly: of characters in this book. I was very scared about that.
But it’s a, Book about a town. It’s, it’s a cast of characters. So if people go in prepared for that, you might want to make a list. I was in love with whoever’s head I was in, of the three main characters, for sure, while I was writing it. Now that the book is said and done, the person that I think about the most is Joanna Burton.
The girl that Cleo meets the night of the tragedy in 1932, that she’s involved in that, and that summer. And I, you don’t know a whole lot about her. You know that she is a foil for Cleo in 1932. You know that she’s Frances Flood’s mother and has kept other people’s children all her life in her house and doesn’t have a great relationship with her daughter.
[00:37:21] Jane: She’s
[00:37:22] Kimberly: a girl in an iridescent green bathing suit in 1932 that turns the whole world upside down for Cleo. And she’s beautiful and wonderful. And then she’s different in Francis’s life. And so I think about that sometimes. Who was she? How did she get from point A to point B? To point B, I know what sent her back to Asheville.
I wrote that, but I don’t know all that in between. So I think about her a lot.
[00:37:49] Jane: Yeah. Do you ever think about writing like a spinoff book from this or are your other two novels or is that like a, have you ever thought about
[00:37:57] Kimberly: that? I think all of my books are spinoffs because all the characters are me.
[00:38:04] Jane: Yeah.
[00:38:04] Kimberly: So like I put them in a situation. And I give them the question that I have, and I, it plays out, and I see what they’re going to do with it, and by the time I get to the end of the book, it’s as much as I can imagine for them, and what they will do with that question. Does it mean that I don’t give them a whole new suit, and turn them into someone else in the next book?
With a new question to see what they’re going to do there. In a way, I think I’m cheating with this question and the way I think about it, but I think I’m always writing the sequel. I’m still working through whatever those things are behind the scenes for myself.
[00:38:44] Jane: That makes sense. It does. It was so lovely to finally meet you.
As I said before we came on, we have so many mutual friends and this was delightful. Thank you for taking time. Good luck with the launch. This came out October 1st, The Fabled Earth, and if there’s book clubs out there, remember Kimberly Zooms with book clubs. I do, and
[00:39:02] Kimberly: I’m still on tour doing some dates, oh good. Look at that. Yep. And I guess the paperback will come out in, I believe July. Oh, the other round of things at that point. I hope to go more places.
[00:39:16] Jane: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I am off until after in December, we have Amy Runyon, Marjan Kamali, and me.
I’m going to have a holiday episode talking about my new book that’s coming out in July. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you again, Kim. And thank you, everyone. Have a great night. Thank
[00:39:34] Kimberly: you, Jane. Good night.
[00:39:36] Jane: Good night.
