Pretty Place

I don’t consider this blog a travelogue, but I have written on several occasions about various sources I have utilized to inspire my fiction, and locations are chief among them.  Last weekend I was fortunate to attend a wedding at the Pretty Place Chapel near Cleveland, South Carolina.  I had not Google’d it beforehand and therefore was amazed, in the best way possible, when we arrived at the venue.  The wedding was incredibly beautiful as well, really a lovely ceremony, but I still can’t get over the chapel.  It was built literally on the edge of a cliff, high above a valley below.  One of those “On a clear day you can see forever” deals.  There is something undoubtedly spiritual and soul-stirring about an open-air house of worship placed within the clouds.  It is a memory I will carry with me for a long time.  Anyway, even before seeing the chapel I thought it might make a good setting for a novel, and I still feel that way.  I just have to synthesize some of my ideas into something cohesive.  Personal stress plus the inevitable worries that come with publishing have led to a prolonged writer’s block, although I haven’t started a new novel and thus the block only exists in the metaphorical sense.

Dorothy:  “You have to have written to have writer’s block.  Otherwise we all have it!”