"There's not a whole lot of magic left anymore, is there? The witches are melted, Cinderella's dead, and the Wolves are endangered. The fey left." ★ "Not all of them," Tilly said with a smile.
★★★
"ABC's 'ONCE UPON A TIME' me...
To My Mama and Papa - who still tell the best stories.
Howdy! My name is Leigh Heasley. The Seam Sorceress is a story that has been sitting on my heart for a while now, and I'm excited to share it with you.
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Mabry's Mill - South of Floyd, VA. By Lyricmac, found on Wikipedia.
I grew up in the Appalachian mountains, in a community so small that it's only recently started to be listed on maps, and you can bet there's no Google Streetview. It has a population of 50 people—75 if you include cows.
Growing up, I was dissatisfied by how my culture was portrayed in the stories I read and the television I watched. Normally, we were lumped in with the American south, but the few times we were actually distinguished as a separate region, we were painted largely as ignorant and inbred; a punchline to jokes made by people who thought they knew better.
It is many years later but these portrayals still haunt me into adulthood. I have been treated differently and underestimated because of where I come from and how I speak, often by people who praise themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness, sometimes in the same breath. I don't hate these people, nor do I blame them. They were raised on the same stories I was. The stereotypes are all they know.
Appalachia is a strange and beautiful place, filled with ghosts and magic and I want to share it with you, to create one more story out there where we are more than one-note stock characters in someone else's morality play.
The Seam Sorceress is a young adult fantasy written with an Appalachian flavor, but I think anyone who has lived "in the boonies" will be able to relate. That said, the dialogue will occasionally be written with incorrect grammar and you may find some odd turns-of-phrase you're not used to. These are part of the Appalachian dialect and are intentional, so just keep that in mind before you unleash your inner editor.
Criticisms, of course, are welcome as this is very much a rough draft.
Thank you so much for reading my story! If you like it, could you vote on the chapters, leave a comment, or share it with a friend? While I won a 2017 Watty for my sci-fi action/romance Kairos, this is fairly new territory for me and a pretty odd subject, so I can use all the support I can get.
