S5 EP241 | Julie Gerstenblatt and the Secrets Aboard the Stargazer

Hello, My Happy People,

What happens when an author who has spent years writing contemporary fiction is told the story she really needs to write is historical? For Julie Gerstenblatt, it led straight to Nantucket, an island she has known since childhood, and eventually to her latest novel, The Stargazer of Nantucket. 

Julie and I had a lot of fun talking about what really goes into historical fiction, including the research rabbit holes that can swallow hours of your life and the unexpected amount of math involved when your characters need to get somewhere on an historically accurate schedule. We also talked about the point when an author has to stop chasing every fascinating detail and remember there is still a story to tell.  

Of course, we get into The Stargazer of Nantucket, Julie’s seafaring adventure about a determined young woman who refuses to accept that her place is safely back on shore. But there is much more waiting aboard the Stargazer than Winnie expects. Our conversation takes us through the real history that helped inspire the novel, women who pushed against the boundaries of their time, some fascinating Nantucket locations, and even a historical legend Julie had to decide how to handle in her fiction. And because this is Book Banter, we also somehow ended up discussing whether being born in the 1900s officially makes us historical.  

Once you’ve listened to today’s episode, don’t forget to check out the BTS blog for more from my interview with Julie Gerstenblatt at BurckhardtBooks.com/blog.

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Transcript

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Dianne Burckhardt 0:01

You're listening to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart, your Book Talk podcast. Join me every Wednesday for real conversations with authors and publishing insiders, where you get to connect with the humans behind the books you love. Let's get on with our show today. Well, hello, my happy people. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd, and I am finally back from vacation and ready to get back to work. So let's get right to it. Today's guest spent years writing contemporary novels and finding agents who believed in her work, but getting those manuscripts into the hands of publishers proved to be a different story. Then one suggestion from her agent sent her career in an entirely different direction. With a doctorate in education, years of experience teaching everyone from middle school to graduate school, a deep love of research and a longtime connection to Nantucket, this author discovered that historical fiction might be exactly where she was meant to be. That change ultimately led to a successful debut historical novel and an entirely new direction for her writing career. We're going to hear all about it and how she made that transition, the research that goes into bringing history to life, and what happened when she discovered that writing historical fiction occasionally requires a surprising amount of math. And as always, don't forget to stick around until the very end because I'll be telling you about who's coming up next week. And I have plenty to tell you about the fantastic vacation I just had in Scotland. And yes, it does involve books. But all of that can wait until after this interview. So without any further blather from me, please welcome to Bookbanter with Diane Burkhart, historical fiction author, Julie Gerstenblatt. Oh please tell all of our listeners who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Hi, I'm Julie Gerstenblatt, and I am the author of two historical novels set around Nantucket. The Daughters of Nantucket is the first, and The Stargazer of Nantucket is the second, and it came out recently.

Dianne Burckhardt 2:11

Your first novel, The Daughters of Nantucket, received tremendous recognition. What inspired you to go for historical fiction like this?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Thank you. Yeah, it was a surprise to me, and I think my publisher too, that it did catch on and do as well as it did. The reason I wrote it, I was writing contemporary novels for years and having some success in finding agents, but then not getting the manuscripts sold to editors who said things like Julie's writing is really nice or great or I love this part of that, you know, story, but feeling that the contemporary story wasn't doing anything new in the market and would be hard to break out with. So my second agent suggested, after she didn't sell a contemporary novel of mine, suggested that I work on another contemporary. And after a hundred pages of that, she said no to that, and then said, I think you should write that historical you mentioned. And I was like, I was joking. I I read historical, but I don't really write it. And she said, Yeah, but it's set around Nantucket, and I know Nantucket really well. I've been going since the 70s with my family, and I have a doctorate in education, which means I did research for 10 years. So if I put together my love of story and character and the specific place of Nantucket with my love of research, it actually made a lot of sense when I sat with it and thought about it. It's the only historical fiction that felt like something I could do without much sense of history. I took one history course in college. I learned most of my history through historical fiction. And I do like to visit museums, but I didn't really feel I had to convince myself that I could do it. And so I read a book about the history of the island by Nat Filbrick called A Way Off Shore, and just got very interested in the fire, which is about two paragraphs in his book. So I went out looking for other material and found a self-published history of Nantucket's Great Fire of 1846. And by the time I finished that, I just my heart was beating fast. I felt there there was something about this fire occurring in my favorite place on earth and a story I didn't know and I thought a lot of people didn't know that made me feel courageous enough to attack it.

Dianne Burckhardt 4:48

You know, and it's really interesting that you said that you weren't much into history, but you love research. And I think that really goes hand in hand with people who like to write historical fiction. Because I know for me, I'm one of those nerds that when I was in college and they said you're going to have to write a 30-page research paper with annotation, I'm like, yes. And all of the other students would be groaning. And that was the first thing that I wrote was historical fiction. I I think it's just one of those things that you love to dig into history. You may not like to study history in like a class, right? But you like to dig into it on your own and find your own things. It's like digging up treasures.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

For me, it is that, but it was also suddenly gave me a plot. A true event from history could be the backbone of my story. And I really lacked direction in that way before. I had been writing novels about like a woman in her 30s who, but what, you know, in a contemporary story, you have to make up, you know, so she has an issue at work, she has an issue with her friends, there's a problem uh with her home life and her husband or her mother. But it didn't feel important enough in a way, and I couldn't make them, you know, raise the stakes. And a great fire um where 300 structures are, you know, affected in a tiny town 30 miles off to sea, there were stakes. And there was a there was um an importance that because I was a new author, the history gave me the platform, so to speak.

Dianne Burckhardt 6:24

Okay, now I have a question that's gonna be like really weird.

unknown 6:27

Okay.

Dianne Burckhardt 6:28

This has to do with like another historical fiction author that I spoke with. Uh he and I were comparing that we found out that we were doing way more math than we ever imagined when we were doing historical fiction, because we were having to figure out things like if they were on a train, how long would it actually take them to get from point A to point B at that time with the way that the trains moved? Did you ever have any of that whenever you were writing your historical fiction?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

So not in Daughters, in Stargazer, which is set on a clipper ship that goes out from Nantucket in 1851. So it's five years after the Great Fire. So you get to visit the people and see the town rebuilt, and then you go off with a new cast of characters. So it goes from Nantucket around Cape Horn on to San Francisco at the height of the gold rush and on to China where calamity ensues. So that is a journey, not like a timetable on a bus or train, but yes, I had to sort of figure out where they would be on any given day. So I could say July 1st, 1851, you know, off the coast of Bermuda, you know. So what I did for that was relied on a true event. So a true, in the same way that I used the Great Fire in Daughters, I used a true clipper ship and its first voyage. So Flying Cloud left East Boston on June 1st or 2nd, 1851. I make my boat, the Stargazer, the exact same, like leave Nantucket Harbor on that exact same day, and I followed the same trajectory. So I know where they were on day six, and I just put my boat there on day six. And so it was like 4,000 nautical miles from blah, blah, blah. You know, I didn't want to bog myself down too much with the particulars of that. So I just, it's like taking, you know, that the, you know, a cella from Washington, D.C. to Boston stops wherever. Like if you have that timetable available, use it.

Dianne Burckhardt 8:29

I just I find these kinds of things fascinating because whenever you think about writing historical fiction, you don't think you're going to have to be doing algebra to figure out how far a horse can travel in winter.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Right. No, definitely not. And I did have an expert sailor. She's a professor of maritime literature and a Melville scholar at UConn. And she's a sailor who works at Mystic Seaport. And she read the nautical sections of my novel, and she did say things like, I think they'd be going faster. Like 12 knots doesn't seem like enough. Or, you know, fixing some of that. But I just I needed it to feel as realistic as possible without worrying too much or getting too like lost in that kind of stuff for me, for my readers.

Dianne Burckhardt 9:15

Those kind of details though are absolutely fascinating because it adds so much accuracy to everything. And it's just amazing that you would go to those links to make sure that you were giving a good authentic story.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah. I I think uh it was it was great that she was available and that I could use some other resources like that. And then at some point you just have to like let it go and be like, this story has to serve, you know, it has to entertain first and foremost, and then inform. And I, you know, feel like I was doing a good job doing both. And eventually she stopped returning my emails like by the third draft. I was like, but but what about this little thing? And she was, you know, which was just sort of my cue to like let it go.

Dianne Burckhardt 10:04

Do you do you find it hard sometimes to balance historical accuracy with your storytelling?

SPEAKER_01 10:10

I try to read a lot beforehand and immerse myself in the world and the time period. So for daughters, I read around Quakerism and suffrage and abolition and women, wives at home while, you know, sailing while men were uh wailing. And then I could kind of I had to like let it go to write. And then I do find myself though, date there will be days when I'm like, did they have indoor plumbing or did they have street lamps that were gaslit or this or that? And then you do lose an hour or two here and there, and sometimes have to write like TK, like I will figure that out later and leave a little gap. I try not to do that. I find that frustrating. I try to fill in everything as I go, but I don't want to slow down the writing. So, and then I keep like there's one or two books that are very useful or helpful to me when writing each of the books. I've just kind of the others are on the floor. I've read them and I've sort of absorbed what I need and forgotten about them, and hope that, you know, I don't really have to return to them too much.

Dianne Burckhardt 11:21

Yeah, I'm not even sure how much time I spent researching whether or not it was even possible or plausible for them to have carbonated water in a saloon in the old west.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's like me with fireworks, like Chinese fireworks. So I know that's an ancient Chinese art, but I was like, okay, did they have fireworks in 1846 on Nantucket? You know, and they did, but like looking up those kinds of things or finding out what, yeah, keeping the world real um and authentic.

Dianne Burckhardt 11:55

I think one of the biggest pitfalls for most historical fiction authors is you can fall into a total rabbit hole of research. You just keep finding cool things about that time period and you just keep going and you're like, wait a minute, I need to pull back and write the story. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

Exactly. And I think I've been noticing pushback from readers who only read contemporary and will not read historical. And I think it is this worry that they're going to be reading a history lesson or that they're going, they're back in class, like what you were saying about like you don't have to take a test on it, or it's not like reading it in um a textbook where you have to memorize the war of 1812 and who the players were. And so I find it interesting that there is this fear of it, or like, you know, that this is a story, and this is actually a great way to escape one's reality is to go into the past and read about people who dealt with terrible things at terrible times that either show us ourselves or move us so far away from ourselves that we can see the world more clearly and just get lost in the story.

Dianne Burckhardt 13:05

Oh, yeah. And that's one of the things that I love about historical fiction is you are getting a great story with a kind of a passive education.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yes. I agree. I agree.

Dianne Burckhardt 13:16

Now, you did mention that you have a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, and you taught in middle school through graduate studies. How do you think that experience helped you with your novels?

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Yeah, I taught middle school English for many years. I taught half of a year of high school because my husband had moved to a different state, and we ended up following him in the middle, like at the end of the year. I sort of made it through half of the year before we had to move. And I taught college-level writing, composition, and rhetoric, and graduate students who were becoming teachers and were getting certified and took courses at night. They were doing student teaching during the day and taking their classes at night. And I so I've taught really all levels. I would say actually, what I've come to understand is that I'm a really good public speaker because of my teaching. I don't know that it affected my writing. I think the time, you know, I was a debut at 52. I think having life experience and teaching kids how to write kept me writing as well over the years, but it really is about how I talk to a group of people and my I'm not afraid. Some, you know, a lot of people hate public speaking. I love a room full of readers. There's nothing I like more. And I think 20 years in front of middle schoolers and graduate students gave me the confidence to speak clearly about my work and to do a kind of teaching that is alive and vibrant and interesting, and is talking about storytelling in a certain kind of way, in the same way I used to do in the classroom.

Dianne Burckhardt 15:01

And that's a very useful skill because, with so many things now for promotion, being podcasts and interviews and you know, YouTube and TikTok, you need to be able to have those public speaking skills.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yes. Writing is much more front-facing and forward-facing than it used to be. And there's a weird balance because there are people who enjoy the writing but don't love the showmanship, as it were, um, and don't want to book, you know, big groups or or feel nervous when they speak. I think I like the balance. I'm I'm uh I practice yoga, I like meditation, I need the quiet, I need months on end when I'm writing in a very strict routine in my pajamas, where the world kind of falls away so that I can create those stories. But then I also look forward to putting on a dress and going to talk about it and like laughing and mingling with people and connecting with readers.

Dianne Burckhardt 16:02

So now seems like the perfect time for you to go ahead and give us the synopsis of the Stargazer of Nantucket.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Sure. So the Stargazer of Nantucket is a nautical adventure. It's a coming-of-age tale about Winnie Starbuck, whose parents are a famous captain and merchant husband and wife team. They have lived on Nantucket for 20 years and they have been part of the China trade, meaning they go to Asia for tea as well as all the goodies, silks, spices, rugs, beautiful furniture, china plates, porcelain, and they bring it back to America and Europe for great profit. They are about to go out on their final voyage, Nell and Peter Starbuck, the husband, captain, and the merchant wife, and they forbid their 18-year-old daughter Winnie from coming along, saying that they want to keep her at home. You know, it's safer as their only child for her to stay on land and they will be reunited in a year and live happily ever after on Nantucket together. Now, Winnie does not remember that when she was four, turning five years old, she did go to sea with her parents, and something terrible and tragic happened, which you will read about in the prologue. And so you know why Winnie's parents really don't want her to come with them and forbid her from going to sea. But Winnie, as a strong-willed, stubborn, spunky 18-year-old, is not going to listen to her parents, feels it's her birthright to go, and so she stows away on the Stargazer with her parents for the adventure of a lifetime.

Dianne Burckhardt 17:44

Now, your novel not only explores like women at sea and family secrets and adventure, but also just how women are actually fighting to claim their own place in a male-dominated world, especially at this time period. What was it that was important about that message for you?

SPEAKER_01 18:01

So I learned that women on Nantucket, when I was doing research for daughters of Nantucket, I learned that women really were a little bit ahead of their time, a lot ahead of their time there because of their Quaker upbringing. They were educated as well as boys. They were told to stand and speak in class and in church. And then they also were left in charge of so much with men out at sea for whaling. Women ran stores, kept the home, but their sphere was not just the home. It was also public, it was also professional in terms of having stores and being able to control finances, given a power of attorney that was unheard of for decades still until much later on the mainland of America, where they could change wills, go into banks, take out money in their husband's name because they didn't know when and if their husbands would return. So I knew that those kinds of women would come from a place like Nantucket. And I was interested in women who would push the boundaries on things like being a merchant at sea and engaging in a male world on a ship. And that's where Nell and Winnie came from.

Dianne Burckhardt 19:16

Now seems like the perfect time to do our five quick questions that never turn out to be quick. But I'm just too stubborn to stop doing this bit. Are you ready? Yes. Since you write and read historical fiction, these are going to be a lot of historical fiction kind of questions.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Okay.

Dianne Burckhardt 19:34

Question one. If you could sail on any historical vessel, which would it be?

SPEAKER_01 19:41

It would be Flying Cloud, which my Stargazer is based on. I would have loved to have seen it. It no longer exists. In fact, there are no more ships from that era. The only one is in a dry dock in London that has been retained and it was an older ship. So to go back in time on Flying Cloud would be incredible.

Dianne Burckhardt 20:06

Question two.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So what's funny, my next book is set in 1989 and 2024 on Nantucket. So although it's considered historical, 89 is really is on the verge of contemporary. So that would be kind of hard to say, although I was there in the summer of 89 on Nantucket and have always wanted to write about that summer. But I'm gonna say I would love to have to meet Mariah Mitchell, who is a main character in my first novel and is a true figure from history and did live on Nantucket in the 1840s, 30s, 40s, 50s. She's America's first professional female astronomer and America's first professional female librarian. And that would be really, really great.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:04

And I have to say, whenever you mention that books from the 80s are considered historical fiction, that gave me chest pains.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

I know. I know. But I guess I just think of a pre-cell phone, pre-computer era, maybe, and then it's makes a little more sense.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:20

Whenever I think about I was born in the 60s. Okay, yeah. It's like, yeah, that makes that makes me feel just twice as old as I thought before.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Don't yeah, just just think of it as exper life experience and a rich lifetime.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:37

It's kind of that same feeling I get whenever somebody goes, Oh, you were born in the 1900s. Like, stop it. Oh no. I don't know if anybody's ever said that to me. And I was born in 1970.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

So yeah, I get you.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:51

Question three. What museum or historic site has inspired your writing the most?

SPEAKER_01 22:01

I would want to say probably the Nantucket Whaling Museum, but I really love Hadwin House, which is it's a historic property that you can also visit if you get a ticket to the museum. It's on the upper main street, and it shows what living in a house at the time would have been like, but it also has the Nantucket Basket, Lightchip Basket Museum on the second floor, and I love those baskets. And I have a basket from the 1980s, and the designer is in the museum. But across the street are the three bricks, which were built by Joseph Starbuck for his three sons. So those are also important to me because I put my Starbucks in East Brick, one of them. And down the street, there was another house that I got to go into for the House and Garden tour a few years ago on Nantucket. And I saw the wallpaper of the harbor at Canton. And I used that in Stargazer for my home with the Starbucks. So all of those together within walking distance from one another on Nantucket.

Dianne Burckhardt 23:08

That sounds amazing. I would love to see that just from your description.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Yeah. I love getting into a house and garden tour anytime I can. And I didn't know that day was going to inspire me that much, but I was able to see both Eastbrick and this blue Victorian that really stands out. It is not like any other home on the island. And it it's later than my books, but I was able to, you know, find inspiration there anyway.

Dianne Burckhardt 23:35

That's like I remember we went to Salem, Massachusetts one time for Halloween, and we took a tour of some of the houses there. And it was so cool seeing those old, I don't even remember what the style was that this one was, but they had like secret stairways that were hidden like behind fireplaces that would go up to hidden rooms. I mean, it was amazing. I loved seeing that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Yeah, same. And actually, that makes me think of the Peabody Essex Museum, which really probably for the stargazer of Nantucket was the most important museum I went to, and that's in Salem, Massachusetts. And it's incredible. From the paintings to an entire room of Chinese lacquerware and other chinoiserie that is just like I you can sit, they have a big couch in there. You could just sit and stare at this beautiful Chinese exports from the time.

Dianne Burckhardt 24:25

That would be amazing. Yeah. Question four Is there a historical myth that you wish people would stop believing?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

I actually had to come up against this. There's a there's a myth that Mariah Mitchell saved the Methodist church from being blown up during Nantucket's Great Fire because they would use gunpowder to create fire breaks by getting rid of a structure so that the fire couldn't catch on to a house if the house had been blown up and was no longer there. So the thought at the in the middle of this fire was let's blow up the Methodist church. And apparently Mariah Mitchell stood between the building and the fireman and was like, no, no, don't do it. I refuse to let you do it. And I was like, I gotta deal with this. Am I gonna lean into this story that's never been proven? You know, am I gonna add fuel to the fire, so to speak, or am I gonna disclaim it and tell it a different way? And so I found a fun way to sort of make her be there and point something out that may have led them to not blow up the church, but not do that standing in the way. Exactly. Yeah.

Dianne Burckhardt 25:39

That like Superman pose, your hands on the hips. It's like, no, you shall not pass. Yes. Yeah. Now for question five, we are asking everyone the same question, and we're creating a list to go in our year-in book buying guide at the end of the year to help people with their holiday shopping. So this year, the question is what book to movie adaptation do you think is the best that you have seen so far?

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Hmm. I have to think about that. I really do I find that it's hard to say that, you know, that a book to movie adaptation is really great. But my son went to film school and he likes to read, but he wants something that has action. And we started to think of books that had then been turned into movies because it also would serve him as a storyteller to think about the script that would be written after the book, you know. So we so he read Da Vinci Code, and then he now he's finished, he just finished The Firm, and now after that he's reading The Godfather. And honestly, I thought The Godfather, I read the book and then watched the movie, and I thought it was a really great adaptation. I would say any of those from the 80s have been incredible. They kept to the spirit. I would also say like The Summer I turned pretty. And the reason for that, I believe, is because Jenny Hahn was so involved as executive producer and writer. And I think that makes a difference in translating one's book to screen.

Dianne Burckhardt 27:13

Oh, yeah. Whenever you actually had the person who had the vision in the first place, I think that helps. Yeah. So now what is next for you?

SPEAKER_01 27:24

So next is this third book about Nantucket. When I I got the book deal for the star gazer of Nantucket with a third book attached. So it was a two-book deal. And my agent was like, isn't that great? And I said, it is, as long as I can write what I want to write, which is more contemporary, as I mentioned. And so in the contract with Harper Collins, it is now called Nantucket number three. And they gave me the go-ahead to write this more contemporary novel. It is what I call my summer sisters. It is about best friends from college who spend a summer on Nantucket. If you may recall, Summer Sisters is set on the vineyard. So this is my Nantucket Summer Sisters. One friend betrays the other, deeply hurts her, and a boy gets in the way as well. So it is a love triangle, and it is a story about friendship, love, loss, and growing up there. 21 when the book is set in 89. And then in 2024, she's 55, 56, going back to see if she can write the wrongs of that time.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:32

Do you know if they have any idea about publication date?

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Yes, it's on the Harper calendar for May of 2028. So I um I've written 100 pages, I have a 17-page outline, and it's due early next year.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:47

That sounds amazing. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

Yeah, it's gonna deal with all of these the love, that feeling when you first fall in love and that feeling of a friend who you think is your best, you know, and the world was smaller then in terms of no Instagram and life really was lived in person. And the breakups are in person, and the fights are so real. And I just kind of I'm nostalgic also for a time on Nantucket when things were a little simpler, so I can compare the then and the now of both life and life on that island.

Dianne Burckhardt 29:26

Yeah, sometimes I kind of miss that time when you weren't so completely connected to the entire world, every minute of your day. Yeah, yeah, same. So now remind everybody who you are and where they can find your books.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Sure, I'm Julie Gerstenblatt, and you can find my two novels, Daughters of Nantucket and The Stargazer of Nantucket, wherever books are sold, online and in independent bookstores, which I love, and I work at one.

Dianne Burckhardt 29:56

So nice. And of course, all of your information as well as clickable links will be in the description of today's podcast so that everyone can find you and your work very easily. And you will be part of our year-end book buying guide that comes out in November. Thank you so much for doing this with me. This has been absolutely fantastic. Diane, thank you so much. So there you have it, folks. That was my interview with the amazing historical fiction author Julie Gerstenblatt. I think one of my favorite things about this conversation was hearing just how far historical fiction can send an author down a research rabbit hole. I know it happens to me a lot. When you're figuring out exactly where a clippership would have been on a particular day in 1851, or whether there were fireworks in Nantucket in 1846, there really is no such thing as a simple question when you start researching a historical fiction novel. But that's also part of what I personally love about this genre. You can get completely wrapped up in a great story and come out the other side having learned so much about a time period without ever feeling like you've taken a history class. Now, before I tell you about what went on while we were in Scotland, I have to tell you about who is coming up next week because longtime listeners might recognize his name. Back on August 15, episode 234, I interviewed author Amy Pence, and during that conversation, she talked about a wonderful author who mentored her early in her writing career, Robert Gualtney. We even got a little preview of his work when she shared her thoughts on his latest novel, Sing Down the Moon. Well, the wait is finally over because next week Robert Gualtney himself is joining me on the podcast, and we'll get to hear his story in his own words and find out a whole lot more about this author and his books. So you definitely want to come back for that one because it was a really good conversation. Now I promised some vacation news, and oh my gosh, this was one of the best vacations of my life. As you know, I took a few weeks off from the podcast magazine, from everything, and most of that time was spent on a fantastic trip to Scotland. We visited Edinburgh, Pitlochry, and Inverness, and I hope I said all those correctly. And while I love the entire trip, I have to say Pitlochri absolutely stole my heart. It is this wonderful little town filled with incredibly friendly people, dogs were everywhere, there were quaint little bookshops, so many coffee shops, beautiful scenery, and some of the best places to just sit and relax and watch the world go by. And the food was amazing. It was so much of our kind of place that Pedro and I actually discussed the idea of retiring there. If we can make it work, it just might happen one day. And I can absolutely picture myself spending retirement sitting in one of those little cafes, drinking coffee and writing books. It would be the closest thing to heaven on earth I can think of. Now, over the next few weeks, I'm going to mention a few of the shops we found and the cafes too, because we all know writers and readers tend to run on coffee or tea, and we love a cozy place to enjoy our books. So for today, I want to quickly mention three places that we went to in Pitlockery. The first is the coffee break. It's this coffee shop that is just bright and cheerful and has an amazing selection of drinks and food, and they have a selection for carnivores like my husband, vegetarians like me, and so many great things for people who are gluten-free. This was the first place we stopped when we got off the train, and we were trying to figure out how to get us and our luggage to our hotel that was up on top of a hill along a very windy road, and with me still walking with a cane and us trying to haul all of our suitcases, it was a challenge. But the coffee break was the perfect place for us to stop first and shore up before we tried for that walk, hauling our bags and just trying to get to our hotel. The one thing that I should mention next is that we really owe a great debt of gratitude to two of the wonderful residents who live in this town. Rowan and June. We sincerely thank you. These two wonderful people saw us struggling on our hike to the hotel and stopped and gave us and our luggage a lift. June even stayed back on the side of the road so that everything would fit easily into the car. You two are fabulous people, and we sincerely thank you for your thoughtfulness. We cannot thank you enough. Another place that I want to mention is, of course, a bookstore. It's called All About the Books. This wonderful little secondhand shop had an amazing selection, and Pedro and I easily found things we both wanted. We didn't even go deep into the shop. If we had, I suspect we would have had to buy an extra suitcase to get everything home. So if you're in town and you're looking for things to read, we both highly recommend all about the books. You really have to go check it out. Now, last but definitely not least, I have to mention Hetty's Tea Shop. Oh my god, it is such a good thing that we only found this place on our last day there because their tea and desserts were so amazing. We would have lived in that shop while we were in town and not seen everything that we did. Pedro is a cheesecake aficionado. He has tried numerous kinds of cheesecake in several countries around the world, and according to him, heavy strawberry cheesecake that he had was the very best cheesecake he has ever eaten. And considering how many cheesecakes I've made for him over our 13 years of marriage, I tried very hard not to take this too heart. But honestly, after taking one bite of his cheesecake, I had to agree with him. It was amazing. Everything that we had there was fantastic. And not only is the food and the drinks just fabulous, they have some incredible artwork in the shop, and it needs to be seen. You can even buy pieces by their resident artist Bev, who is also known in art circles as Daughter of the Stag. Be sure to stop in, say hi to Claire and her wonderful staff. Everybody there will be sure to make you very welcome. And you are going to have a wonderful afternoon filled with fantastic teas and coffees and delicious food. So if you ever find yourself in Belockery, Scotland, be sure to check these places out. And we have more to mention because there were so many great places there. But those will be coming up in the next few weeks. So be sure to keep checking back. Now I freely admit that I did not do a lick of writing while I was in Scotland. It was a complete break from everything, and I sincerely needed it. But since I've been home, I have been making up for lost time. I hope to have our first paranormal romance on pre-sale here in a few weeks to be able to drop on Halloween. The Langston Watch Hotel, book one of our new paranormal romance series, Haunted Hearts, will be published under the name DS Stevens. And right now it is two-thirds of the way finished, and I have been getting down about a chapter a night. It has been amazing. So be sure to go sign up for our newsletter at Burkhartbooks.com slash subscribe so you can keep up on when this book becomes available very soon. Now between Scotland, getting back to writing and getting back here behind the microphone, there has been plenty going on with Burkhart Books and Bookbench Productions. And don't forget we've got the Frankfurter Book Mesa coming up here in just two weeks. I come back from vacation and I have to just dive right in hard to work. It's crazy how much I have going on. So don't forget to follow along because so much is coming up very soon, and I'm going to be sharing it with all of you. Okay, that is way more than enough for today. So you know what that means. It's that time. It's time for you all to go forth and be really, really happy. So many things are coming very soon. Thank you for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart on your favorite podcast streaming service. Because if you love books like we do, you do not want to miss a single episode of this podcast.