In addition to novels … Lin writes regional guidebooks with her husband J.L. The first, The Afternoon Hiker,  is a hiking guide to 110 Smoky Mountain trails they enjoyed, including directions, trail descriptions, and photos with every trail. The next three are state park guidebooks. J.L. and Lin visited and explored every park written about, giving clear directions of how to get to each and what to do and see when you get there. They also loaded each of their parks guidebooks with over 700 color photos. So far they have visited all the parks in Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina, with these guidebooks now published and waiting for you to enjoy:  Discovering Tennessee State Parks, Exploring South Carolina State Parks, and the latest Visiting North Carolina State Parks.

Here’s the story of how Lin got into creating regional guidebooks:

In the early 2000s, J.L. and I  discovered the joy of hiking in the Smoky Mountains near our home. We’d always visited the mountains, walked on some of the trails with our kids, picnicked on a mountain rock, and waded in the streams … but now with the children grown and gone, we had time to really explore the trails more. Our hikes in the Smokies soon led to our first guidebook The Afternoon Hiker of 110 day hikes in the Smokies with color illustrations throughout.  During a long shutdown of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we moved on to explore Tennessee state parks and decided to create another guidebook Discovering Tennessee State Parks, loaded with park descriptions of all the TN parks and color photo illustrations. It’s popularity led us to branch out into South Carolina next, where we’d visited on vacations and where my Edisto novels were set. We had a blast traveling to all the South Carolina parks and created our third guidebook Exploring South Carolina State Parks. With urging and persuasion from our readers, we next visited all the parks in the state of North Carolina, from the coast to the mountains, to create our fourth guidebook Visiting North Carolina State Parks. We’re having so much fun now on our adventures, that another book will probably be in the works soon!

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