Pinehaven Lore — Part II

There are crumbs of my personal reality sprinkled throughout the Following the Stars trilogy.

Some are instantly recognizable to the people who know me.

Others are Easter eggs meant almost entirely for me.

Several of the characters were loosely inspired by people in my real life.

Some more loosely than others.

Let’s start with Lucy.

Lucy was inspired by a much younger version of myself—the girl who spent years navigating complicated and painful relationships while somehow remaining naïve, curious, fantastically forgiving, and wildly optimistic to a fault.

She isn’t me, though.

I’d venture to say she’s funnier, more stubborn, and considerably more talented when it comes to both her judgment and her art.

She also puts up with far less than I really did.

In some ways, Lucy became the version of myself I wish I had known how to be back then.

And no, I’ve never actually befriended a pair of twins.

I was just having fun with that plot.

But then there’s Wes.

Weston Dean Mattox Cavanaugh.

Twin brother of Summer. Childhood friend of Lucy. Owner of an unnecessarily long name.

And a man who eats cereal out of mixing bowls.

That one has a story.

My husband and I have known each other for fifteen years. We were friends for twelve of them before we ever became a couple.

Years ago, when we were still just friends, we shared a small apartment that somehow became the unofficial gathering place for everyone we knew. Friends came over. Family came over. Someone was almost always there.

One day, I came home and found him sitting on the couch watching Friends reruns and eating cereal—

out of my coffee pot.

Not a mug.

The actual coffee pot.

He really loved cereal, and apparently a normal bowl could not contain his ambition.

Over the years, I watched that man eat cereal out of just about anything in our kitchen except something specifically manufactured for eating cereal.

So when Wes Cavanaugh needed one of those oddly specific habits that makes a fictional person feel real, I knew exactly where to look.

The four names weren’t entirely an invention, either.

My husband has four names.

And if you reverse his initials, you get Wes’s.

That might be my favorite kind of Easter egg—the kind nobody would ever know was there unless I told them.

And that's where the resemblance mostly ends.

Wes isn't my husband any more than Lucy is me.

Their histories are different. Their families are different. Their choices belong to them. Pinehaven belongs to them.

But sometimes I borrow the pieces that make people feel human.

A ridiculous cereal habit.

A way someone talks.

A friendship dynamic.

A joke I've remembered for fifteen years.

The tiny details are often the things I steal most shamelessly.

And then there’s Summer.

Summer is a little harder to explain.

She wasn't created from one person so much as from a feeling I know very well: the kind of friendship where somebody has known you long enough to remember versions of you that don't exist anymore.

The person who can tell you're lying when you say you're fine.

The person who gets to say the thing nobody else could get away with saying.

The person who has accumulated enough history with you that sometimes a look can carry an entire conversation.

There are pieces of friendships I've known inside Summer and Lucy.

But somewhere along the way, Summer became entirely herself.

That's one of my favorite things about writing fiction.

You can begin with something true and watch it become something you've never actually lived.

Even Pinehaven itself is built that way.

Pinehaven isn't a real town.

But pieces of it are.

The feelings are.

The landscapes are.

The kinds of places where people gather, the roads they drive, the porches they sit on, the restaurants where important conversations happen over completely ordinary meals—all of those things come from somewhere.

And sometimes the connection between my real world and Pinehaven is sitting right on the front of the book.

The photograph on the cover of Following the Stars is my own front yard.

That crepe myrtle sits in the corner of it, meant to represent the oak tree in the story.

Fun Fact: my husband actually carved our initials into that crepe myrtle, and I never miss a chance to squint at it until I can see them.

The cover of Under a Different Sky came from another piece of home.

I took that photograph lying flat on my back in the middle of my parents' front yard, pointing my camera toward a view I've loved since childhood.

They live in the country, surrounded by gorgeous trees, and I've spent years looking up through them.

Now Lucy does, too.

I didn't intentionally set out to make the covers pieces of my own geography.

It just happened.

But now that two of them are, I don't think I can let the third one be anything else.

Which brings me to Even in the Dark.

I know what the final Pinehaven novel needs to feel like.

I know the story it has to tell.

I know I want its cover to carry some version of the same thing the title does:

light fighting through darkness.

What I don't know yet is where I'm going to find it.

The first cover came from my front yard.

The second came from my parents'.

So now I'm paying a little more attention to the places around me, waiting for something ordinary to become the final piece of Pinehaven.

And I'm open to ideas.

If you've read Following the Stars—or you're waiting for Under a Different Sky—what image comes to mind when you hear the words:

Even in the Dark?

Maybe one of you will see it before I do.

Until then, I'll keep looking.

After all, that's kind of how this whole thing started.

Looking up. ✨