Happy fall, friends! I hope you are enjoying these cooler temps! I am so excited to celebrate a decade of writing and a decade of knowing all of you with the Chapters Tour! Each month, we’ll announce a book (or two!) of the month and read along together. In my newsletter each week, I’ll be sharing the book of the month’s origin story, favorite quotes, favorite reviews, and throwbacks from special moments from each release. For all the details, check out the Chapters Tour page on my website!
Here is a recap of our first book: Feels Like Falling
Week One: Origin Story of Feels Like Falling
Is that me signing books in rubber gloves? Why, yes it is! And I had only removed my mask for that picture. FEELS LIKE FALLING released in April 2020, and every book I signed, I signed in a mask and gloves to make sure we all stayed safe! My already bad handwriting was even worse…
FEELS LIKE FALLING was a fun book for me to write, and I love that it came out when it did. It felt like the perfect timing for one of my lighter books to release during such a heavy time. And the idea came to me in an unusual way…
We were all packed up, the car loaded down, to head to Salisbury, where I grew up, for Christmas with three-year-old Will ready for nap time in his carseat. All we had to do was stop by to pick up the photo books I had had made for all our family members. When I arrived, in a bit of a hurry, to get them, the woman behind the counter said, “Do you have the signed release for the professional photos in here?”
They had been taken by a talented friend (Looking at you, Lindsay Corrigan!) who had, indeed, signed a release for me when she dropped them off. I explained this to the woman, who informed me that she couldn’t give me the books without the release.
The idea of driving fifteen minutes and over two bridges back home, adding thirty more minutes to our car trip, and little Will missing his nap and being cranky for five hours on the road were too much for me to take. So I did the natural thing: I explained to her that whole series of events that would have to transpire. Then I begged–and promised to bring her the release the next week so that she could have it in her file.
She relented, I took my books, and over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we went.
But the second I got in the car, I thought, “What if she got fired because she did what I asked? How awful would that be? And what would I do to make it up to her?”
I did, indeed, take the release back the week after Christmas. The woman did not get fired. (Thank goodness!) But the premise for Feels Like Falling was born. I love Gray and Diana’s unlikely friendship, the ways in which they become exactly what the other needs, and how they teach each other. If you haven’t read this one yet and you decide to read along, I hope you love Gray and Diana too!
Week Two: Feels Like Falling favorite lines from the book!
If you’re reading Feels Like FALLing 🍁 along with me this month, I wanted to share some of my most favorite quotes from this book! The first and second have always stuck with me, but I had forgotten the third and fourth! The beauty of revisiting your old work, I guess 😍
Week Three: Favorite Flashbacks from Feels Like Falling
Of all my book tours, Feels Like Falling was certainly the most, um, unique–mostly in that I never left my house! Not once! Feels Like Falling released in April 2020, so I don’t need to tell you what was going on in the world. Now, the world of Zoom and virtual events and, yes, Friends & Fiction, seem so ordinary. But at the time, we were all scrambling and panicking trying to figure out how to salvage book tour! Check out some of my favorite moments below!
So much of going live on social media was brand new, so my friends at TriWorks helped me every step of the way! We filmed a ton of video on green screen and then they put me wherever I wanted! Can you see where I am in this video? THE BILTMORE ESTATE LIBRARY!! I say that in all caps because talk about foreshadowing!! I didn’t know yet that I was going to be writing about that library in The Wedding Veil. So cool.
If not… I didn’t either! I had several really fun TV spots scheduled for interviews about Feels Like Falling that were, obviously, cancelled. Fortunately, we could do most of them by Zoom, but, at that time, that was just considered a little boring and the stations wanted “B-Roll” to intersperse into the interviews. I had no idea what that was, but, fortunately, TriWorks did. So we spent a lot of time on the waterfront filming silly little videos like these that allowed me to keep my TV spots!
