Welcome to the part of the
Meadowsphere that doesn't make it onto the page
I've been telling stories my whole life - technically since fourth grade, when I wrote what I can only describe as a groundbreaking love story featuring Polly Proton and Edward Electron. I won the contest. Polly and Edward deserved it. The romance writer in me has been unstoppable ever since.
Somewhere between avid blogger and published author, between animal lover and accidental farmer, between the writing room and the screen porch and the passenger seat of a car somewhere on a North Carolina highway, the Meadowsphere happened. It turns out that when you write longhand, the story goes wherever you go. I've drafted chapters at the pool, in waiting rooms, and more than once at an unreasonable hour in the dark. The dedicated writing room is lovely. I use it occasionally.
This is the behind the scenes: the covers, the music, the origin story of a small Kentucky town that exists entirely because I needed it to. I'm glad you're here for it.
— TJ
How it Started
Every author has a moment. Mine was 2019, when I finally stopped saying "someday" and started writing.
They say write what you know, so I did. Book one is set in a fire station, not because it was a convenient setting, but because I grew up in a fire department family. My dad was a fire chief. I know what that world looks, sounds, and feels like from the inside. It felt like the right place to start.
What I didn't plan was Jack Cooke.
Jack was supposed to be a peripheral character. A face in the background, maybe a line or two of dialogue. Instead, he walked into the story and refused to leave. Somewhere in the process of figuring out who he was, Collingswood, Kentucky came into existence, along with his brothers, their stories, and everything that's become the Meadowsphere.
I always knew I'd write series books. One of my biggest frustrations as a reader is finishing a book and not being done with the characters. I built the kind of world I wanted to live in as a reader, and then I just never left.
JACK COOKE
The Roads Collection
The cover for The Perilous Road to Happiness was decided early, and it's more personal than most readers realize, rendered from a photograph of the road to my own house. It felt right for a first book.
The Roads Collection series icon came next, an adaptation of a photograph taken during a helicopter tour in Canada. It became the visual anchor for the entire collection.
The Precarious Road to Starting Anew has another personal connection; that snowy road is actually my driveway during an unusual North Carolina snowstorm. We don't get many of those, which made it all the more fitting.
For The Sordid Road to Rhapsody and The Treacherous Road to Rescue, I turned to free image sites and found exactly what I was looking for: images that matched the location, tone, and pictures I already had in my head.
The Cookes of Collingswood
The series icon came first. I was building a town, and a street sign pointing toward Collingswood with the population on it just fit. Everything else followed from there.
As The Cookes of Collingswood series took shape, so did my understanding of how to write it. I've learned that every book has a spine which is that central storyline that drives the timeline and gives all the other storylines something to anchor to. In a book like The Promise of Harper's Mill, that means 20 or more storylines of all shapes and sizes, each one finding its place relative to that spine.
The covers for The Cookes of Collingswood books are being re-released with new artwork, and those new covers are driven entirely by the spine of each book. What you see on the cover is the heartbeat of the story inside.