This Bitter Earth. Appalachian gothic Appalachian noir After thirty years behind bars, Bud Fields steps back into the holler he once called home and finds it abandoned, overgrown, and haunted by the ghosts of his past. The roads are the same, but the people aren't. His childhood house is collapsing into the weeds. His father is long gone. And the mother who once fought for him with every breath is now a stranger shaped by grief, loneliness, and time. Bud came home searching for redemption. What he finds instead is a community frayed by hard times, loss, and the quiet ache of people who learned to live without him. As he reconnects with his family, confronts the wreckage of his past, and attempts to rebuild a life from nothing, Bud must face the truth he's avoided for decades: some wounds don't heal just because a sentence ends. Set against the rugged beauty and harsh realities of rural West Virginia, This Bitter Earth is a powerful story of return, forgiveness, and the fragile hope that family — broken, scattered, or remade — might still be worth saving. With lyrical prose and unflinching honesty, J. E. Dyer delivers an Appalachian epic about the weight of regret, the price of memories, and the courage it takes to begin again.

If you have a finished manuscript...or if you're at least halfway...you're in the right place. Inside this Guild, we focus on the full publishing process: - Creation (writing) - Development (editing) - Production (turning the manuscript into an interior and exterior) - Distribution (where it’s available) - Promotion (how it gets into readers' hands) That’s what we’re here to work through—practically. Please introduce yourself! Share: 1. What you’re currently working on 2. Where you are in the process: writing, editing, production, publishing, marketing 3. What you feel you need the most help with right now

Hello, I'm Skip Schenker, Gigi's grandfather. Hi @Lara Helmling, I'm grateful for your YouTube videos and for creating this community. You are an amazing giver! Before you read the next paragraph, please look at the book cover below and provide your honest feedback following reading the summary below. My granddaughter Gigi inspired me to write my first two books. "The Living House", cover below, is a 30+ year journey helping home buyers buy fixer uppers with government renovation loans which are underutilized in the real estate industry. I argue that a home and a human body are very similar. Both have an envelope that protects us from outside forces, a home's framing is our skeleton, HVAC is our respiratory system, plumbing is our digestive and urinary systems, etc. Both have systems with timeclocks running down and both require maintaince to extend its lifespan. A home is the canvas where you are the creative artist transforming a space unique to you and the quality and beauty of your home has a direct emotional and psychological impact on the humans living there. There is an educational component showing how a renovation loan is the financial vehicle to help facilitate the transformation. The book is finished and in the process of getting formatted. I'm curious, does the cover convey a message and would you buy it based solely on the cover? If not, how would you change it? Thanks in advance for your input. Skip