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Sunday, June 24, 2007 |
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Jacquelyn Cook has 11th
book published To Jacquelyn Cook, a nationally acclaimed local author, her writing career has reached a new phase and her new epic will be a longer historical novel contracted with BelleBooks for publication, which will be available in February. “The first 20 years of my writing were spent in journalism writing for magazines and newspapers; then there was 20 years of Christian romance/short stories. Now I am writing longer fictional/historical novels,” she said explaining her next novel “Lit With The Sun.”
According to the author, her book is true in its entirety, being treated as fiction and written like a novel. There are three love stories within the book. But the stories are driven by other purposes than just the strict guidelines of boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl back. According to Cook there is more depth created from the historical influences of the era. The story begins in Europe and then moves to Macon, where the couple builds the famous Johnston-Felton Hay House. “I was fortunate to meet Ann Felton and her husband George Felton, who grew up in the house. They encouraged me to write the book and entrusted me with family letters and journals his great-grandmother, Anne Tracy, kept on her three-year honeymoon in Europe with her railroad baron husband William Butler-Johnston. “Lit With The Sun” is a part of a line from one of Georgia Poet Laureate Sidney Lanier’s poems. Lanier is also a character in the novel. “This novel has in it the history of Macon, and I have been told it has a southern sense of place,” Cook said explaining the title as a line in Lanier’s poem which may have summed up the accomplishments of his life and what God intended for him to do. “I guess that expresses it for him and me, too,” she said. Cook said her passion for writing novels centered around the Civil War stems from her father telling her stories when she was a child. “He told me a story of a Yankee soldier who came up into the yard and a little girl’s goose hissed at him and he kicked it to death. This is in one of my novels. Then, there was a story about a little black boy who was taken by the Yankees to wait on them. The little boy ran away from them and ran back home. When the Yankees returned to his home to find him, his family hid him between the feather mattresses and made the bed up, and the Yankee soldiers were unable to find him there. This incident was in one of my novels also,” she said explaining from where her inspiration and creativity are generated. “Lit With The Sun” is Cook’s 11th book, which will become available in February for $16.95. Other of her titles include “Magnolias,” a five-book collection; “Image In the Looking Glass”; and three local histories. She has sold 500,000 copies nationwide. Cook’s next writing in the works is titled “The Greenwood Legacy,” a novel about the Greenwood Plantation in Thomasville. For more information, visit www.jacquelyncook.com |
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“‘Lit With
The Sun’ tells a true story behind one of the South’s most famous
ante-bellum estates, the Hay House in Macon,” said Cook.