Last Friday I was over at The Debs talking about the dedication in my first book, Restoring Harmony (I like saying “first” book as if you might get it confused with my “second” book that my agent just sold – the one that’s not even completely written yet! Haha!).

Anyway, there’s another sort of “hidden” dedication in the book too, and today is the day to tell you about it. My main character, Molly, comes from a farm and while I think the line got cut from the final book, at one time she said, “My grandparents were farmers, my parents are farmers, and my brothers and sister and I will end up being farmers.” and this is something she’s proud of.

I wanted to create a concrete way for the reader to know what the date is in the book, and so I came up with the idea of Molly carrying her father’s farmer’s almanac with her and each time the date changes (not each chapter), I head it with words of wisdom from this almanac. In publishing, there’s a little thing called “Rights” which means that you can’t just use pieces of wisdom from existing almanacs without paying for it. Publishers are not that excited about authors who ask them to do this, so they in turn tell you that you can pay for the rights, or you can make something up. I chose the latter.

I created a totally fictional almanac called Uncle Ralph’s Farmer’s Almanac. Throughout the book, there are little snippets of advice from Uncle Ralph. Those I did not make up. Those are sayings I heard in the South when we lived there, or that I took directly from our friend Ralph, a sixth generation farmer in Tennessee.

Over two years ago, Ralph was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease). Last Friday afternoon, he passed on. He never saw his name in my book, but he has two lovely daughters and I hope that some day, they will see the tribute I paid to their father – a great friend, a wonderful man, and a farmer.

You will be missed, Farmer Ralph.