Karen White, The Lost Hours – Author Guest Post…4.06.09

Today’s guest post is from Karen White, author of The Lost Hours.  Thanks to Karen and Pump Up Your Books Promotion Book Tours for the opportunity to share with you all more about her and The Lost Hours.  Be on the look out for my review later this week.

AUTHOR BIO…

They had her at hello. From her first moments in Charleston and Savannah, and on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, novelist Karen While was in love. Was it the history, the architecture, the sound of the sea, the light, the traditions, the people, the lore? Check all of the above. Add Karen’s storytelling talent, her endless curiosity about relationships and emotions, and her sensitivity to the rhythms of the south, and it seems inevitable that this mix of passions would find its way into her work.

Known for award winning novels such as Learning to Breathe, the recently announced Southern Independent Bookseller Association’s 2009 Book of the Year Award nomination for The House on Tradd Street, and for the highly praised The Memory of Water, Karen has already shared the coastal Lowcountry and Charleston with readers. Spanning eighty years, Karen’s new book, THE LOST HOURS, now takes them to Savannah and its environs. There a shared scrapbook and a necklace of charms unleash buried memories, opening the door to the secret lives of three women, their experiences, and the friendships that remain entwined even beyond the grave, and whose grandchildren are determined to solve the mysteries of their past.

Karen, so often inspired in her writing by architecture and history, has set much of THE LOST HOURS at Asphodel Meadows, a home and property inspired by the English Regency styled house at Hermitage Plantation along the Savannah River, and at her protagonist’s “Savannah gray brick” home in Monterey Square, one of the twenty-one squares that still exist in the city.

Italian and French by ancestry, a southerner and a storyteller by birth, Karen has lived in many different places. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she has also lived in Texas, New Jersey, Louisiana, Georgia, Venezuela and England, where she attended the American School in London. She returned to the states for college and graduated from New Orleans’ Tulane University. Hailing from a family with roots firmly set in Mississippi (the Delta and Biloxi), Karen notes that “searching for home brings me to the south again and again.”

Always, Karen credits her maternal grandmother Grace Bianca, to whom she’s dedicated THE LOST HOURS, with inspiring and teaching her through the stories she shared for so many years. Karen also notes the amount of time she spent listening as adults visited in her grandmother’s Mississippi kitchen, telling stories and gossiping while she played under the table. She says it started her on the road to telling her own tales. The deal was sealed in the seventh grade when she skipped school and read Gone With The Wind. She knew—just knew—she was destined to grow up to be either Scarlet O’Hara or a writer.

Karen’s work has appeared on the South East Independent Booksellers best sellers list. Her novel The Memory of Water, was WXIA-TV’s Atlanta & Company Book Club Selection. Her work has been reviewed in Southern Living, Atlanta Magazine and by Fresh Fiction, among many others, and has been adopted by numerous independent booksellers for book club recommendations and as featured titles in their stores. This past year her 2007 novel Learning to Breathe received several honors, notably the National Readers’ Choice Award.

In addition to THE LOST HOURS, Karen White’s books include The House on Tradd Street, The Memory of Water, Learning to Breathe, Pieces of the Heart and The Color of Light. She lives in the Atlanta metro area with her family where she is putting the finishing touches on her next novel The Girl on Legare Street.

You can visit Karen White’s website at www.karen-white.com.

ABOUT THE BOOK…

Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper’s dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather’s death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn’t exist—or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace—and a newspaper article from 1929 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace’s charms tell the story of three friends during the 1920s— each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

KAREN WHITE’S GUEST POST…

I visit with a lot of book clubs and one of the most frequently asked questions they ask is for me to describe a typical day. When I finish laughing hysterically, I try to explain that there’s no such thing in my life as ‘typical.’ I spent about 70 hours a week either writing or doing writing-related activities—blogging, website updates, newsletter, answering fan mail, doing pre-release publicity etc. I’m also the mother of two teenagers who somehow seem to need me more now than they ever have, own a Velcro dog who is very needy (he’s pressed against my side as I type) and a husband who travels 2-3 nights every week for his job. There’s simply no room for ‘typical’!

That’s not to say that I just let things happen willy-nilly—never a good idea when one is trying to complete books with a contractual deadline! I’m incredibly organized (friends and family have referred to me—never within slapping distance—as ‘anal-retentive’) and my Palm Pilot Centro is my best friend. I’m really good at saving time: I do laundry only once a week, grocery shop once a week, use a meal delivery service and employ a housecleaner every other week. I pay bills on Mondays and run all my errands on Wednesday.

To you Type-B folks, you’re probably shaking your heads and wondering if I need a referral for a good psychiatrist. But when you’re juggling so many things—including writing two novels in one year—it’s the only way to get everything done and remain sane.

Back to the typical day thing—just because there isn’t such a thing in my life doesn’t mean that I don’t start off with a plan. On Thursday mornings (laundry day) my kids know to bring their laundry baskets to the laundry room and I know I’m going to home pretty much all day. And because of that, I know I’ll be able to accomplish my writing goal for that day and I’ll even try to squeeze in a couple more pages to make up for the days in the week where my son had a soccer game two hours away that I went to watch, or for the evening I spent visiting with a book club.

It’s all a bit of give and take, but it’s part of my life. Writing isn’t something I do—it’s who I am. Like being a wife or mother. They all bring big responsibilities and it’s my job to live up to them. Even if it means mainlining caffeine when I’m on deadline because I can’t put the rest of my life on hold to concentrate on just writing.

My tenth novel, The Lost Hours, comes out on April 7^th. For those of you who think that being a writer means locking oneself in a room to achieve complete peace and silence, you’d be amazed to know that I wrote a lot of that book in my car while waiting in a carpool line or at the horse barn where my daughter takes riding lessons. I think being a writer means being able to write when you have to and not just when you want to. It means not believing in the self-indulgence of writer’s block. It means adjusting your day to accommodate your need to get words down on paper.

Leaving that ivory tower has its advantages, too. It was while working on a previous book while at the horse barn that I first came up with the idea of setting The Lost Hours on a horse farm. As I watched my daughter and her trainer, I realized how brilliant the whole idea was because right in front of me I had two great research sources, one of whom (my daughter) could be grilled while sitting next to me in the car as I drove her to school each morning. See what I mean by how good I am at saving time?

The book I’m about to start, tentatively titled The Last First Time, is being set in Folly Beach, South Carolina. I’ve never been there, but have been reading books about the history of the island. I just booked a beach house there for a week this summer for my entire family—so I can squeeze in research while enjoying a family vacation. I’ll be subtle about my ulterior motives for vacationing in Folly Beach, but I’ll grin and bear the hard work. Hey, it’s a tough life, but somebody’s got to live it!