Kathy L. Salt's Blog

I can’t believe it, but it’s here. We are still alive! Available in all the regular places, both as kindle and as a physical copy.

“The sun was already setting when Charlie went outside. She gritted her teeth and put her hands in the rose bushes. The thorns cut her arms in a zig zag pattern. She could have gone inside and gotten something with long sleeves, but she didn’t.

She grabbed them by the roots and pulled with everything she had.

Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she had been so close to another human being.
Spread against another from foot to face. Lotte’s flushed face near hers.

Fuck. One of the thorns had created a deeper cut just under her elbow. She grabbed the
plastic bag with her free hand and put the gray, dead remnants of a rose bush in there. She looked
at the cut; a little stream of blood was following gravity and dripped on the ground.
Had Lotte seen Charlie throw a quick glance at her lips?

Charlie wiped her arm on the top of her jeans. She would get a band-aid later. She wanted
to get these bushes gone now. Everything dead in the garden had to go now.
Charlie didn’t think she could stand it any longer. She put both her hands on the next
bush and pulled. This one wouldn’t budge, so she grabbed her shovel. She put it on the root of
the rose, pushed down and put her foot on it.

She couldn’t believe she had ignored Lotte for the rest of the day. Avoiding eye contact.
Giving her the cold shoulder. I did it because otherwise she would have known. Charlie didn’t
want Lotte to know the strange feelings she was having.

She got the rose bush out of the ground with a groan and wrestled it into the plastic bag.
She would need to get more plastic bags. None of the rosebushes could be saved, that much was
clear now.

Sweat ran down her back, but it wasn’t enough. Charlie needed to do more. She needed
to do more to purge the image of Lotte’s sweet smile from behind her eyelids.
Thump.
Lotte’s eyes.
Drag.
Lotte’s hands and shoulders and arms.
Push.
Lotte sitting in her kitchen, drinking lemonade. Them talking.
Pull.
Charlie falling on top of Lotte. Charlie’s heart pumping so hard that Lotte probably felt it.
Cut.
Their mouths close.
Shear.
Lotte’s softness underneath her. Their breaths mingling.

“Ah!” Charlie pulled the last rose bush from the earth with such force, she fell
backwards, landing with a thump on her butt. In front of her stood seven empty holes. She had
cleared all the rose bushes.

Her butt hurt after hitting the ground, but she took no notice of that. Her chest was
heaving, her heart was pounding, and her T-shirt was sticky with sweat. She needed a shower.
Badly. Her hands were shaking. The thought of spending some time in the shower, under a hot

water stream while she was this fired up … She closed the plastic bags and gathered them in both
hands, then she hurried inside.”

This is an excerpt from my upcoming novel, “Another Charlotte” which will be out on January 23rd.

Chloe (right) and Eloise (left) are coworkers to Charlie and Lotte. Chloe is Leslie Garrison’s second art teacher whereas Eloise is the only music teacher. They have been best friends their entire life and where you find one, the other one is not far away. Maybe they could be more than friends, there is a joke at Leslie Garrison’s that they are “workwives”. Chloe is also the main character in the sequel that I’m writing this year.

Lotte is the second Charlotte in “Another Charlotte”. In her twenties, she is just out of adulthood. Artistic, wild and once-upon-a-time brave, Lotte has just moved to Saltbridge Hollow from Canada. She is fresh out of teaching school and her first proper job is at Leslie Garrison as an art teacher. There she meets Charlie, Abigail, Chloe, Eloise and many others. Just under the happy exterior, secrets and childhood trauma lurks. WIll she heal?

Character portrait from my novel “Another Charlotte” that comes out on January 23rd.

Meet Charlie Decker, one of the Charlottes in “Another Charlotte”, that is coming out on the 23rd of January. She is as local as one can be, her maiden name is Garrison but she has gone by her late husband’s name since she took it.

Charlie is a single mom of two boys, Nathaniel who is 19 and Benjamin who is 13. She was a divorcee but after her ex-husband died, she kind of feels a widower too. Her sons inherited her former mother-in-law’s house, a huge run-down house that is as old as the town itself.

But Charlie isn’t only a mom. She is a 47 year old wood work teacher, having taught at Leslie Garrison’s Boarding school her whole life. She likes her job. She likes her life. She just isn’t in control of it. She is lonely and it’s as if she is waiting for something. She just doesn’t know what yet.

The first character portrait! Keep an eye out for the other ones, coming shortly to this blog.

Saltbridge Hollow is a small mining town on the east coast in North Carolina, USA. It is, as you probably know, most famous for it’s Garrison Salt. It was founded in the 1800s when James Garrison found a set of caves that contained evaporite rocks. He established the first salt mine in the united States. After moving his entire family there, including aunts and uncles and cousins, the little town grew around them. Salt, while profitable, wasn’t the great employer that James had hoped. Hence, Saltbridge Hollow has remained quite small.

It’s a picturesque, old wooden houses in Scandinavian style, mixed with brick buildings from the 60s. It has a supermarket, some resturants and one main school, the Leslie Garrison Boarding School. When the school was opened by James Garrison himself, the hope was to create a boarding school for children in the need of fresh air. Children who hopefully would grow up and stay in Saltbridge Hollow. It only remained so for the first 50 years, after that the locals started taking over. Even though the school still has some children on board today, it’s now mainly a regular school even though the name has stuck.

The town has a doctor’s office, but if you want a dentist you have to go to St Eveline, which isn’t that far by bus or car. Saltbridge Hollow also has some stores for clothing and toys, but if you want a shopping experience, you need to go to the mall in St Eveline also.

What Saltbridge Hollow has is beautiful nature, and loads of it. Tourists haven’t discovered it yet which means your trip will be relatively undisturbed. Forests, beaches, beach promenade and quaint streets with cobble stones.

Welcome to Saltbridge Hollow, we are ready for you!

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Saltbridge Hollow is a fictional town set in the USA, it’s where my next novel “Another Charlotte” takes place. Another Charlotte by Kathy L Salt will be out on the 23rd of January.

On the 23rd of January, Another charlotte will be out. It’s a story very close to my heart. My beta reader said it’s one of the best I’ve ever written, it’s the first I will have published since I became a mom, it’s the first I will publish without my dad ever reading. It’s beautiful and bittersweet. Look out for more posts about this wonderful novel over the coming month.

Oh and, before I forget, Happy New Year!

Look at my header on this blog. There is a person walking there with a dog. That person is my dad. If you follow me on Instagram you know he died on the 11/2 in the year 2022 when I was barely two months post partum. To say that it was an emotional trauma is an understatement. Add the wars around the world, the economy crashing, impending doom and all that, I haven’t really felt like writing. I tried occasionally, as one does when you’re an authos. And yes, I did pick up my computer on Novemeber 2022 as per the last post on this blog. It didn’t lead anywhere. For most of 2022 and 2023 I wrote nothing.

Which is why I’m so happy to announce that I am not dead. Not as a woman, not as a human and certainly not as an author. It’s now only January of 2024 and I sent the novel “Charlotte Times Two” to my beta readers late last night. By the time I sent it in, I was even proud of it. It’s good, in the end it was something I’m proud of.

You might also notice that I’ve added a new page under my header called Saltbridge Hollow. It’s connected to “Charlotte Times Two”, but more on that at a later time. I’m carefully optimistic that I will finish another book this year and I’ve already outlined it. For the first time in a long time I’m excited about the future.

I’m back, baby!

I didn’t pick up my laptop yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the week before that. Or the month before that. On the 4th of May I took a positive pregnancy test. Anybody who has been following my blog knows I have tried to get pregnant for years and it’s been a hard journey. As soon as I sat there with the positive pregnancy test, everything else went out the window. Nothing else mattered.

I was suspended from work in mid-September (they’re suspending pregnant workers in Sweden because of risks with Covid for people who can’t work from home or who have risky jobs). For the first weeks I was just enjoying being home. Preparing. Resting. I joined a pregnancy swimming group. Took walks. Finished playing God of War and started a new legacy run on Sims 4. And then…

This morning I was on Instagram and I saw a post on NaNoWriMo and then I started thinking… Back in my regular Tumblr days, when I was a student, before I had published anything, NaNoWriMo was huge. And I usually tried to participate, writing long fanfictions about Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Then I grew up, started working and became a published author. And I never participated in NaNoWriMo again.

It’s November in a few days. I’m not really prepared for NaNoWriMo, not with the sequel for Bittersweet and Sparrow that needs a lot of preparations but I took up my laptop and I’m in full author mode. So that is my big update, I’m trying to do NaNoWriMo, not through the site but independently and tracking my possible progress on Instagram. I’m however seven months pregnant so no promises, both baby and body are fickle and some days I feel crap. But I’m so glad to have the creative juices flowing again.

I talked to my sister-in-law who is a writer with a Tumblr but who had no idea what NaNoWriMo even is. She is six years younger than me, so I feel like there is a generational gap between us when it comes to Tumblr culture. However, I couldn’t believe that she doesn’t know what it is… at all.

How about you guys? You who are reading this, are you doing NaNoWriMo? Do you know what it is?

Pick up your copy here.