Pinehaven Lore — Part I

There are pieces of Pinehaven that exist in real life.

Not the town itself, exactly. You won’t find Pinehaven on a map or stumble across Willow Creek on a weekend road trip.

But if you look closely enough at the books, you’ll find pieces of the real world tucked inside them.

Including right on the covers.

The tree from Following the Stars

The photograph on the cover of Following the Stars wasn’t taken on a trip or chosen from a collection of stock photography.

I took it standing in my own front yard.

The crepe myrtle reaching into that star-filled sky is the same tree that sits in the corner of my yard—the one I see when I leave for work in the morning, pull into the driveway in the evening, or happen to look outside at exactly the right moment.

I took the original photograph after a storm, when the sky had become one of those strange, beautiful mixtures of color that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and look up.

At the time, it was just a picture I loved.

Eventually, it became Pinehaven.

And I think there’s something fitting about that.

Following the Stars is, in so many ways, a story about searching for something extraordinary while standing in the middle of an ordinary life.

Apparently its cover was doing the same thing.

Then came Under a Different Sky

The photograph for Under a Different Sky came from somewhere even older.

My parents live out in the country, surrounded by the kind of trees that made the world feel enormous when I was little.

I've loved the view from their front yard for as long as I can remember.

So one day, I laid flat on my back in the middle of the yard, pointed my camera toward the sky, and took the photograph that would eventually become the cover of Under a Different Sky.

That's really it.

No elaborate photoshoot.

No exotic location.

Just me lying in my parents' grass, looking up at a view I've been looking at since childhood.

And somehow, that feels even more appropriate for Lucy's second story.

The title Under a Different Sky carries so much meaning within the novel—change, perspective, risk, the strange experience of realizing that your life can look different without becoming unrecognizable.

But the sky on the cover belongs to a place that has been familiar to me for most of my life.

I love that contradiction.

Something different.

Something familiar.

Both true at once.

Which leaves one sky unfinished...

There is one more Pinehaven novel.

Even in the Dark.

And unlike its older sisters, it doesn't have its final photograph yet. Honestly, I’ve only written a handful of pages so far, having been so busy working the release of the first two books.

After realizing that the first two covers accidentally became a collection of places that belong to my real life, I'm not sure I can finish the trilogy with a random image.

Now it feels like the third photograph needs a story, too.

I know what Even in the Dark means.

I know the emotional atmosphere I want the cover to carry.

Light fighting its way through darkness.

Grief without hopelessness.

The smallest evidence that something beautiful can survive even when the world around it has gone dim.

But I haven't found the photograph yet.

Maybe it already exists somewhere in my life and I just haven't noticed it.

Maybe I haven't taken it yet.

So I'm opening this one up to you.

What should I look for?

A single streetlight glowing in the dark?

Light spilling through trees?

A familiar place transformed by nighttime?

Something else entirely?

I don't necessarily need someone to design the third cover for me.

I think I need someone to help me recognize the moment when I see it.

Because apparently that's become part of the Pinehaven lore, too:

The covers aren't places I went looking for.

They're places I already belonged to.

And now I need one more.