I have a new book coming out April first, titled THE RED MILL BOOKSTORE. It’s my sixth book in the Mountain Home series… a new group of stand-alone novels set around the mountain areas near my home in Tennessee. These follow my earlier Smoky Mountain series of twelve books. Past Mountain Home books have taken readers to the small community of Happy Valley near the Foothills Parkway, to the Glades near Gatlinburg, to historic Dandridge, to Cherokee, and to the charm of Waynesville. THE RED MILL BOOKSTORE takes readers to Townsend, Tennessee, where I set two earlier books before, but this time with new characters and new places, as well as old familiar ones, and adding scenes around Walland, Rocky Branch, Maryville, and even a trip to Gatlinburg.
The idea for this book began when J.L. and I were driving through the Townsend area after a hike in the nearby Smoky Mountains. We stopped at a local drive-in on the highway that we love, called the Burger Master, to get a dip cone as a treat. As we left and drove up the main highway afterward, I noticed for the first time a mill dam spreading all the way across the Little River. I was already familiar with the Peery’s Mill dam closer to Maryville, but for some reason I’d never noticed this smaller one. Where there’s a mill dam, there was usually a mill at one time as mill dams were created to divert a swift stream of water into the mill to power it. My curiosity was up now, and J.L. and I stopped to walk closer to look at the spill of water cascading over the dam in a long waterfall. It didn’t take my active imagination long to imagine that a scenic old mill might have sat right across the river at one time long ago.
I’d already been wanting to set another book in the Townsend-Walland area, and J.L. and I had driven around both areas a few times exploring and looking for places to set a new book. After learning that few people seemed to even know the history of the mill dam in Townsend, I decided it would be fun to create a story around this site with a fictitious historic mill I decided to name the Red Mill. Over the weeks to come, around my other work, a new story linked to this mill began to develop in my imagination. My main characters I named Ella Quinn and Jesse Helton after finding photos that “felt” to me how they looked in my heart and mind. I like the characters in my books to look more like real and regular people rather than movie-star types. I decided Jesse would be a local boy with family in the area, but that Ella would come here for a stay at her Quinn grandparents, who owned and operated the Red Mill and lived on the land beside it. Early questions were: What had brought Ella to Townsend at this time? Where had she been? What had been going on in her life? And for Jesse: What might have brought him back home if he’d left earlier? To put a touch of fun in the story, I decided Ella and Jesse had known each other as kids, playing together when she came for visits at her grandparents. And now, of course, they’d both grown up and changed, with problems that needed to be worked out.
Ella, I decided, would have come from Boston, Massachusetts, where she worked at a lovely downtown bookstore called the Chestnut Street Bookstore, owned by a gracious woman named Adelynn Lake, who had become like a mother to her. Adelynn’s death, the closing of the store, and Ella’s grandmother falling and breaking her arm would bring Ella back to Townsend for a time to help out and to try to figure out what to do next with her life. Family problems would have brought Jesse home after college, not revealed at once in the book but unfolding as the story progresses, adding to the unsolved mystery going on in my story.
Around edits and publication of other books and ongoing signing events, J.L. and I took many fun trips over the months to the Townsend and Walland areas near the Smoky Mountains, visiting shops, restaurants, walking and exploring the biking and hiking trails, and driving down backroads to become familiar with the overall area that would be in my book. As my ideas grew, I scribbled notes on local maps, picked up brochures, and began to further develop the plots and adventures that would be in this new story. As my storyline and plot progressed, I decided to call this new novel THE RED MILL BOOKSTORE, and to create a local bookstore in the vacant historic store that stood right across from the old mill. The fact that Townsend doesn’t have a bookstore, that the local library closed in past and that my favorite Hastings Bookstore nearby in Maryville had closed, too, made me want to create a local place, if only in story, for book lovers and book signings.
Secondary characters soon began to develop in my planning to enrich the story. I became especially fond of Jesse’s grandparents Naomi and Hershel Quinn, of Ella’s father Palmer Quinn in the Air Force, of her mother who’d died, her friends in Boston, and of the new friends she made in Townsend while visiting. It was a joy creating the historic property of the Red Mill, it story and land along the river, the Quinns’ home, and all the relatives and friends of their family.
I did a lot of research to create a grist mill accurately for this book, visiting several old mills around the East Tennessee area and learning the history of grist mills and how they operate. Mills were linked into the entire fabric of the East Tennessee area, and I enjoyed talking to a lot of “old timers” and those who had grown up in the area to learn more about Townsend and Walland’s past. I took the tour of the Old Mill in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and was blessed that Emmett Denney gave my tour that day. He’d grown up in the Pigeon Forge area and had started working at the Old Mill at only sixteen, walking to work from his home nearby. He was a wealth of information and helped me to develop my Red Mill to be historically accurate.
For Jesse’s family I created a local repair store, one of those wonderful small-town shops that can fix most anything electrical, old and new. It was his family’s long-time business, and Jesse had grown up between working at the business in Townsend and on the family farm in Walland. I think you’ll love Jesse’s warm-hearted family, Ima Jean and Vernon Helton and his grandfather Leonard Helton, and visiting their business and big farm in Walland in the Rocky Grove area. A lot of businesses, restaurants, places and local attractions find their way into this new story that you can really see and visit yourself when in the Walland and Townsend area someday.
Jesse and Ella both loved the outdoors, hiking, biking, and tubing on the Little River, walking the trails and side roads around Townsend and around the Helton farm in Walland. J.L. and I hiked a lot of trails around the nearby Smokies that might find a place into the story … enjoying the Schoolhouse Gap Trail off Laurel Creek Road and re-hiking the Middle Prong Trail, another favorite not far from Townsend. We also walked long sections of the Townsend bike trail that runs from one end of town to the other, and we enjoyed discovering several new places we hadn’t known about before. I had the additional pleasure of bringing back old businesses and characters from my past Townsend books, TELL ME ABOUT ORCHARD HOLLOW and DOWN BY THE RIVER, into this new story. I seldom put “real” people I know into my books, but in this book I made an exception, also bringing in lots of crafter friends to be vendors at Mill Day, and letting “real” locals I know make cameo appearances in their shops and businesses.
When all the research and planning was done and the book was outlined in plot and action, I created and put up my Collage Board, showing an array of pictures of the characters and places in my book. I love glancing up at all the pictures on my board, which I prop behind my computer, while I work. They make me feel I’m right among them all, can hear and see them. I especially liked Dr. Merrill Cunningham I created for this story and his wife, Gail, and the idea of the small-town doctor who still knows his patients well, and it was fun to create Ronnie and Rachel Green, and their bluegrass singing group Green River. Pets found a place in the story, too with Quinn’s corgi Pepper Jack, his name inspired from one of my fan’s daughter’s little dog, and with the Mill Cats.
I hope you’ll enjoy all the characters and the story in THE RED MILL BOOKSTORE. The book is already available for pre-order and you can order it through your favorite local bookstore or online retailer. If you would like personally signed copies, you can order the book through our online bookstore after the publication date of April 1st … or even better, if you live near our East Tennessee or North Carolina area of the world, plan to come to one of our book signing events. You will find these listed on my Author’s Website on the Appearances page at: www.linstepp.com/appearances/. Our spring events can also be found in my new March Newsletter, just posted at: https://linstepp.com/media-2/ … My monthly Blog and Newsletter are put on my Website at about the first of every month, always free for my readers, fans, and friends with no need to subscribe to an email list. … I hope you’ll love my latest Mountain Home book THE RED MILL BOOKSTORE
….See you here next month….LIN
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Note: All photos my own, from royalty free sites, or used only as a part of my author repurposed storyboards shown only for educational and illustrative purposes, acc to the Fair Use Copyright law, Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
My new book THE LIGHT CONTINUES, the fourth book in the Lighthouse Sisters series, publishes on April 1st, 2025. It is already up for pre-order in print and before the end of February will be up in eBook also. You can read about this book and each book in this series on my website under “Books” at The Lighthouse Sisters Series. In this blog post I thought I’d tell you a little about how this four-book series came to be, and a little about each book, in case you haven’t started reading this new South Carolina coastal series yet. You have time now to read all three of the first titles before the new, final book THE LIGHT CONTINUES publishes in April.
Winter is a marvelous time to think of the beach, when the weather in my home state of Tennessee grows cold, gray, dreary, and snowy. Some years ago, after a visit to our favorite beach at Edisto Island, South Carolina, I had the idea to create a trilogy of books set at Edisto. Since by that point I had written multitudes of books set around the Smoky Mountains near where I live and had built a big fan base of readers who loved them, it was a shift in my writing focus to consider writing a book set at the beach and to consider writing books in a series when my books previously had all been stand-alone novels, each book set in a different place around the mountains with different characters and with a new, unconnected story each time.
After visiting a couple of lighthouses around the South Carolina coast while vacationing and later reading about the history of lighthouses, I began to wonder what it might have been like to grow up on a lighthouse island, which is called a Light Station. Many of the large, old light-keeper’s homes built by coastal lighthouses have now been made into bed and breakfasts, welcoming guests and giving tours of the nearby lighthouse. As that idea started to grow in my mind, I began to envision four sisters growing up on a lighthouse island, the old inn and lighthouse in their family for several generations. This idea for a second series of stories I decided to call The Lighthouse Sisters and I was soon building the new books in my imagination and mind.
Now the research and planning began. To me series books are harder than stand-alone books because the story of each has to thread into the others and they all have to tie together in their plots and conflicts. The facts, people, places, and timelines must be consistent from one book to the next, and hints for books to come have to be subtly laid from book to book, leading to the final one in the series. I decided to set this series of books on the north end of Edisto Island. The Edisto Trilogy books had been set on the well-developed south end of the island at Edisto Beach, but the lighthouse books needed a more remote setting and the book needed an island separated from the mainland.
I soon discovered that an island piece of the Botany Bay area, usually labeled on maps as Botany Bay Island, had broken away from Edisto’s mainland after a hurricane in the fifties and was now in a conservatorship and scantily populated. I tracked down people linked to the island and soon had my okay to set a book there and to use the island fictitiously for a novel. To avoid confusion for the book series, I renamed the island Watch Island, a name it had been called earlier in its history, and I named the Lighthouse after the Deveaux Bank, a bird sanctuary island a mile out in the sea beyond it. Soon the Deveaux Inn and the Deveaux Lighthouse on the hill above it and the Deveaux family who lived there, running the inn and tours, and taking care of the lighthouse and island began to become “real” people to me.
Over time I developed my main characters and side characters, my setting, homes, businesses and the general plots for each book. As the characters and places came to life in my mind I found pictures to match how I saw my “book people” and “book places” and soon created a collage bulletin board to prop beside my computer desk… so I could see all the photos as I worked for inspiration. My primary characters were the four sisters and Ella Deveaux, their mother and owner of the Deveaux Inn and Light Station owner, who had lost her husband in the last year. As the story begins, the oldest daughter Burke is still living at home, helping her mother run their inn and business, and giving tours of the lighthouse as her father had done before. Her sister Lila had come home after their father’s death, and she was helping, too, especially in running the lighthouse gift shop. As the first book moves along, focusing on Burke’s life, who has, by necessity, taken on many of her father’s roles, you come to know the family, the island, and the coastal area around Edisto. As Easter nears in the story, another sister, Gwen, who had been living in Arkansas with her husband and children, shows up unexpectedly, her marriage in trouble. As the family continues not to hear from Celeste, the third sister, a well-known country singer, who lives in Nashville, Gwen and Burke head to Nashville, concerned. They find Celeste, only recently home from hospital, after being beaten and abused by her husband, so they load her up to bring her home for rest and recovery.
Here you’ll see scenes from LIGHT THE WAY, the first book in The Lighthouse Sisters Series and scenes from around the island that are a part of this story. If you have not read this first novel in the series, here is a brief synopsis: … Life had grown hard for Burke Deveaux at the family inn and lighthouse since her father died. She missed his warmth and still expected to see him walking into a room, his big laugh booming. Burke and her mother were gradually adjusting to the change, and Lila had come home this winter to help, but the workload was heavy. With spring coming and tourism picking up in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Burke welcomed Hal Jenkins’ request for his son Waylon to work for them. Waylon, retiring early from the Navy, knew the island and the lighthouse, having grown up nearby. Burke also knew Waylon well since they’d grown up together. He’d always been older, and she wondered how he’d see her now. … Waylon had been away from Edisto Island for over twelve years now, traveling around the world in the military, but he was glad to be home again. He hated learning Lloyd Deveaux was gone, the warm-hearted Lighthouse Keeper he’d followed around as a boy. But he liked the idea of coming to stay at the lodge at Watch Island to help the Deveaux family with the inn, lighthouse, and nearly five-hundred acres of land the Lighthouse Station occupied. He knew Burke had picked up many of her father’s old tasks and he looked forward to seeing her again. He had long kept feelings he held for her clamped down but one look at Burke brought them all surging back, giving him a new problem to handle, knowing he’d be working closely with Burke at the lighthouse.
I won’t tell more as my books are full of rich story, problems, joys, and conflicts that will make you feel you’re right there at the Deveaux Inn and Lighthouse with all the characters. Gwen’s story is told in the second book, LIGHTEN MY HEART, and you will really see Gwen’s pain over the betrayal in her life and suffer with her and the children as they try to find their way, leaving their home in Arkansas and all they know. Gwen is a teacher and as she makes the decision to stay in the area and to find a teaching job and make a new life, she decides, early in the story, to accept a job at a school in Port Royal, a charming, historic community right below Beaufort. She finds a townhouse to rent near her new school, and then, with shock, runs into her husband, Alex Trescott, in Beaufort. Apparently, with the Arkansas restaurant where he worked closing, he’d come home to work again in his family’s restaurant, Trescott’s, in downtown Beaufort. It’s a memorable scene! I think readers will enjoy visiting in Beaufort and Port Royal where many scenes in this book are set … and struggling through Gwen and Alex’s problems of separation. Old characters from the first book thread through this story plus many new side characters and conflicts, making it an engaging and fun read, with the children’s stories mixed in.
The third book is Celeste’s story, LIGHT IN THE DARK, the third of the Deveaux sisters and a well-known country music singer. Her first husband died unexpectedly and she unwisely got involved with another singer, who she soon learns is riddled with emotional problems, giving him a true Jekyll and Hyde personality. She has to find her way to recovery after being beaten and hospitalized and then decide how to handle the situations in her life and move on with her career. You’ll enjoy Celeste’s story, touching into the big entertainment world. You’ll also love all the scenes in downtown Charleston that are a part of this book and the many warm and interesting characters you’ll meet on Celeste’s journey, like Reid Beckett, who remembers Celeste from earlier years. I had a wonderful time as a writer visiting all over Charleston while working on this book… and I liked that Gwen’s and Celeste’s stories take my readers to new places they can visit when in the South Carolina Lowcountry area.
The final book, THE LIGHT CONTINUES, that publishes April 1st, is Lila Deveaux’s story. It is set mostly on Watch Island, at the Light Station, but takes in a broader scope than just the lighthouse island alone, reaching out to give the reader a look at all of Edisto Island as a whole and of plantation life at one of the beautiful old antebellum homes I fictitiously created and named Indigo Plantation. The plantation now belongs to Edward Calhoun, who is forced to come home to try to deal with what he will do about being the new owner of the plantation after his father’s death. Readers soon learn the problems Edward faced at home earlier, and also watch him eager to renew his old friendship with Lila Deveaux. Lila, however, is reluctant to move forward in a relationship with Edward, seeing and knowing his problems and indecision, and dealing with the changes in her own life as well. She has only recently left a community of Episcopal sisters she’d entered after college, believing she wanted to spend her life serving God there. A solace for her has been her art, which she is developing and growing into a solid career, and her family and the inn. Wanting not to miss God again in her decisions, she is cautious about her relationship with Edward. How both find their way to a new life and understandings about past hurts and pains is a sweet part of this story. I think you will richly enjoy this last book about the Deveaux family and the beauty of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
In the photo here, you’ll see me reading one of the Lighthouse Sisters books on my last visit to the island on the screened porch in the lovely vacation house where my husband J.L. and I stayed. J.L. and I have visited Edisto almost every year since the 1980s, enjoying the quiet island, the beautiful beach, Edisto’s bike trails, quaint shops, restaurants, and places of interest, all which will come to life for you while reading these books. Just as we often took side trips to spend the day exploring and enjoying nearby Beaufort, Port Royal, Hunting Island, and Charleston, so will you.
I wish you happy reading and a lovely escape from the winter cold as you enjoy these books for the first time, or perhaps for a second time—and as you hopefully look forward to the final book in this Lighthouse Sister Series, THE LIGHT CONTINUES, soon to publish April 1st.
Lin Stepp 