Author: Jeff Hampton

The Aransas Morning Book Blog Tour is winding down with a review today and another one tomorrow. It’s been interesting watching the ebb and flow of information and responses over these nine days, and I’ve enjoyed making new connections and getting a better feel for the depth and breadth of the Lone Star Literary Life.

Today’s review is from Momma On The Rocks, who provides some good insight into the cast of characters in Aransas Morning — strangers whose lives become intertwined in unexpected ways. She captures the essence of the story in these words:

“Aransas Morning is a lovely story about community, and how family isn’t always the one you are born into. In fact, sometimes the least likely people end up being the ones who mean the most to us, in all their messy, infuriating, complicated selves.”

And then she seems to feel what many people feel at the end of the book, but then they turn the last page and make a discovery:

“I was sad to see this book end, as I wanted to know what happened next in the lives of these people I had become so invested in. While this book worked wonderfully as a stand alone, I was tickled to learn that a sequel will be following, so I don’t quite have to let go of all these wonderful characters.”

Yes, a sequel is well under way and in fact was almost finished when real life came blowing in and shook things up a little bit. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow, but for now check out the full review of Aransas Morning at Momma On The Rocks and scroll down at that site to sign up for the giveaway if you haven’t already.

See you tomorrow!

Day 8 of the Aransas Morning Book Blog Tour provides a scrapbook of photos from Port Aransas:

Aransas Morning Scrapbook

These photos are just a few from a large group I took during a visit in January 2013. I kept them in front of me during much of the writing of Aransas Morning to help set the mood and keep me focused. While the story is set in a real town and some of the locations are real, others are not.

Sam’s trailer park is based on the very real On The Beach RV Park located on Access Road 1A near the beach about two miles south of the town center. Dave’s hotel is on the same road at Highway 361 and is where I stayed when I first met the man who became Sam. (See Chapter Break Blog for the inside story on that,) And the ferry to the island is absolutely real; it’s the only way to get to Port Aransas unless you circle around to Corpus Christi.

Other locations such as Shelly’s Dream Bean Coffee Shop and Allie’s bungalow are fictional but placed in approximate locations on a real map.

Of course, much has changed in Port Aransas since August 26 when Hurricane Harvey made a direct hit with wind speeds of 130 miles per hour. The storm is not covered in Aransas Morning but it will be a key factor in the sequel, Aransas Evening, to be published later this year.

Meanwhile, the people of Port Aransas and the surrounding area are working hard to recover, and we’re trying to help a little by donating proceeds from book sales to those efforts. Learn more about that — and how and where to buy a book — at Aransas Morning.

 

 

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.

For an hour on Friday I carried planks of beech flooring from the back of my SUV into the garage and up the tall attic stairs. I added the planks to the stack of flooring already there. We don’t need it now, and we may never need it, but we have it if we ever do. Continue reading “Treasures”