Karen White - Author Guest Post

I am thrilled, beyond words, to welcome Karen White, author of The Lost Hours, to Cafe of Dreams today!! I first discovered Karen during the tour for The House of Tradd Street. Once I read that I was totally hooked! When Dorothy, mentioned that Karen was touring again with The Lost Hours, I was bouncing with excitement and joy - then I preceded to BEG her to let me host on this one also, lol! Needless to say, here I am!!!

For today's stop, Karen has written a wonderful guest post that I am delighted to post for her! I found it to be a very interesting and enjoyable take on her writing process. Enjoy!

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I’m frequently asked where I get the ideas for my stories and it never fails to stump me. Usually, a book is the culmination of experiences, thoughts, dreams, and conversations that have taken place over a long period of time. The beginning of a book might come to me clearly, or a particular scene or character, but rarely do I have a story idea come from a single source.

The story ‘spark’—what I term the illuminating idea behind a book—usually comes to me out of the blue while I’m working on another book. I don’t find this distracting at all. In fact, I’ve found it to be reassuring. It’s always nice to know that the well isn’t dry and that there’s some kind of jumping-off point whenever my current work-in-progress is complete. It’s sort of like being at the end of a vacation and having already made plans for the next one.

For my April 2009 release, The Lost Hours the spark came to me when I heard in my subconscious the voice of a young girl telling me about a box she and her grandfather had buried in the backyard of their Savannah house when she was twelve. For about four months, while I was finishing up the book I’d been working on, I asked myself, "What’s in the box?" And, "Who’s the girl?" All stories start with a question, and it was exciting to realize that I had two of them waiting to be answered in my next book.

Despite being a writer, when the spark hits me I don’t write it down. The ideas and feelings it generates within me are sort of like the ingredients in a soup. I have to throw them in a pot—my subconscious—and let them simmer and stew and grow into something rich and textured. I’ve found that if I write down my initial idea, it stops growing. It remains puny and undernourished and eventually fades away.

It’s not until I’ve let enough time elapse since the original story spark that I’m ready to sit down with pencil and paper—the ONLY time in the entire writing process that I will actually write anything by hand (and yes, it has to be pencil)—and start scratching out the synopsis. By then, the story spark has developed into something that resonates with me, becoming a story I feel compelled to tell.

I find it interesting that I tend to be a monogamous writer. Yes, I’ve been married to the same guy for over twenty years, but that’s not what I meant. What I meant is that once a story spark hits me, we’re an item. We’re together for the long haul. I watch and nourish that little spark until it is a full-fledged manuscript before sending it off to my editor like a mom sending her baby to college (an analogy I will be experiencing personally in about a year).

And when that happens, I reach back into my simmering pot and pull out that new baby spark that’s been stewing for a while and start all over again. I can only hope that there’s a comparable response to sending my daughter off to college besides having another baby. Unlike producing books, producing children is a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Maybe I’ll get another dog.

K. White

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About The Lost Hours:

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.

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About Karen White:

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 http://www.karen-white.com/

Win Prizes!

THE LOST HOURS VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR '09 will officially begin on April 1 and end on April 30. You can visit Karen's blog stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in April to find out more about this talented author!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author or a $50 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors' blog stops. More prizes will be announced as they become available.