On Sunday, I’ll board a plane for Doha. That’s two days left of this thick Appalachian summer–the floral air, the bats tracing dusk with their wings, the laughter of friends drifting through the heat. Two days left with my children, scattered on their early-adult adventures, and my Boston Terrier, Barney, who will stay behind with my middle daughter. Two days left with the skeleton of my house, and the view of the mountains. While I’m so looking forward to reuniting with my husband– seeing new friends, making dinner, sharing stories from our days–I’m feeling a bit lost. I’m leaving behind all of the things I’ve been writing about in one form or another as I conjure my Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles series, the first of which (or witch, if you prefer) will be ​debuting in a few short weeks​.

I’m always haunted by the places I leave. When I returned to the US after four years in Prague, Cold War thrillers spilled out of me–stories set in those shadowed streets I thought I’d left behind. When I moved to Virginia to raise my family, I wrote hundreds of personal essays about growing up in an immigrant household in Chicago, exploring my roots in Central and Eastern Europe.

And now, after crossing the world once again–to the Middle East, of all places–I’ve found myself writing about Appalachian Virginia. Its yellow porch lights and moonshine nights. Its accents as thick as its floral perfumes of honeysuckle and lilac. It’s colonial splendor and mountain poverty living side by side, neither pretending the other doesn’t exist. Outside the region, people expect nothing but the toothless hillbillies depicted in movies and television shows, but there are all kinds of people here. And there’s a lot of generational wealth in Appalachia, too. High culture and perochialism mingle, often within the same person, on the same main street. The high and mighty here look down their noses at the coastal elites. They see their lives as better, richer, more community oriented and historically literate. They might be right.

I often wonder what I’ll write about when I leave Doha. I’ve already written three books set in the desert, both its ancient silences and its modern restlessness. Maybe my ​Breath series​ was precognition–a whisper of the stories waiting for me there before I even set foot on the concrete now covering the sandy shores of the Persian Gulf.

Wherever I go, I seem to live in two places at once: the ground beneath my feet and the ghost of the ground I left behind. One world bleeds into the other, a slow seep of memory and dream. The desert’s heat-shimmering horizons blur into the mist-heavy hollows of the Blue Ridge.

My real life keeps tresspassing into my fictional ones, carrying its scents and shadows, shaping the haunted landscapes and troubled characters that follow me from book to book. A crumbling minaret will turn into a watchtower in some medeival village of my imagining; the dust devils skittering across a Qatari road will become spirits wandering an abandoned Appalachian churchyard. The boundaries are thin.

Pre-order Night of the Moon Witch here. Then sit back and enjoy the view.