What is The Royal Jade?

What's happening to The Orange Peel and the Kent Creek Chronicles

Expecting to see Dancing at The Orange Peel and the Kent Creek Chronicles here? Well, dear readers, the messiness has begun! Changes are happening and I’m so excited!

We rarely (if ever) anticipate how our creativity will unfold. It’s never linear and rarely logical. I never could have predicted even six months ago that I was going to:

1. completely redesign my website and my Substack publication,

2. retitle my novel (WHAT?!),

3. rename the collection of stories that includes the novel and more, and even more importantly,

4. settle deeply into the true spirit, style, and personality of my writing practice.

I know, that’s a lot. Here’s the short of it, and then some longer backstory if you care to know.

TL;DR

My 1960s historical novel Dancing at The Orange Peel is getting a new title: Dancing at The Royal Jade. The novel is still part of a larger collection of stories which, until now, has been called the Kent Creek Chronicles. The new name for the collection is the Beaucatcher Chronicles.

Assuring these vital changes are reflected properly throughout my work will take time and look messy. The first step is an overhauled website. The second step is a transition of my Substack publication from Gina’s Quill to Beaucatcher Chronicles.

The website redo has given me the opportunity to explore and discover the “atmosphere” of my writing. That will launch in August 2026. Both will give my fiction the focus it is demanding right now!

I’ll still write about the creative process and offer services for writers but on a more selective basis.

Now, The Backstory – If You Want It

As a “returning” student at Florida State University several decades ago, I wrote a handful of short stories, including “For What Nate Did,” which is set in the fictional town of Kent Creek, North Carolina. That short story mushroomed into the novel that I grappled with off and on (mostly off) for the next…too long a time! I settled on a working title of Dancing at The Orange Peel because the nightclub in the novel is very loosely based on the real Orange Peel club in my hometown of Asheville, NC. (Maybe I’ll write some time about how I arrived at that first title, too.)

As I worked on the novel and got to know my characters, their flaws and woes, many other stories that take place in Kent Creek revealed themselves to me. This gave birth to the idea of a connected “collection”—the novel, plus short stories and novellas—called the Kent Creek Chronicles.

Two years ago, I finally got to a place where I could focus on my writing, and finishing the novel is my first major project. My Substack publication Gina’s Quill became the home for the novel’s rough draft, a place where I could “write in public” by publishing chapters as I draft them. It was intended to serve as an accountability challenge for myself. And that’s worked. I’ve shared more than 25 chapters on Substack so far.

But the process became far more than writing accountability. Working through the chapters has caused me to think deeply about the themes and ‘feel’ I want for my stories, what I want my writing practice to be, and further, what I want my writing life to look like. I never expected all that and it’s still unfolding.

What’s In a Name?

As I’ve pondered my various writing projects, I realized there are a number of issues with the two names.

First, The Orange Peel… It’s a real music club in Asheville, NC, where I grew up. I’d hoped to get permission to use the name and even had a conversation with one of the owners in the early 2000s toward that end. But much time has passed and things have changed, including the ownership of the place. Now, quite simply, I don’t want to deal with the legalities involved in attempting to acquire permission from the company who owns it now, and I would never risk potential trademark infringement by using it without permission.

The idea of renaming the novel was, at first, disorienting. Besides simply growing accustomed to it, I liked the Asheville connection it implied since Kent Creek is partly inspired by my childhood hometown. So I had to sit with that a while. Once I was finally okay with letting it go, I had to decide on a new title. More on that outcome below.

Second is the collection name: Kent Creek Chronicles. There’s nice alliteration to it and Kent Creek is the name of my fictional town, after all. But it’s never felt quite right to me. Additionally, I have other stories to write that include real people and are set in real-world Asheville and other Western North Carolina towns. None of those would fit under the “umbrella” name of Kent Creek Chronicles.

My intent for this group of stories, long and short, has always been to have them seen as a connected collection. An appropriate name can help with that, but I want even more.

I want a name with obvious connections to my homeland.

I want the name to be a shibboleth, marking the stories as undeniably a part of Western North Carolina and its people—a name that will generally make sense to everyone but is so intimately connected to the area that readers familiar with the Asheville area will immediately recognize it—creating a secret handshake of sorts between me and readers.

The Exploration

Once I unpacked why the collection name was so important to me, I slid that desire into my subconscious to marinate. Several months later, my dad asked me why I chose to call the town Kent Creek and that’s when I deliberately began my investigation of possible new names for the collection.

My Pop and I explored place names, people’s names, all sorts of terms and phrases that referenced or related to Western North Carolina. It took a while, and in the end, the right one had been, literally, towering in front of me all along.

Beaucatcher Chronicles provides exactly the type of shibboleth I was searching for. IYKYK, but I promise to tell the whole Beaucatcher story in another post. (A minor but real bonus is that the alliteration that Kent Creek Chronicles had is preserved by the hard C sound in ‘catcher’ and chronicles. Word-nerds understand!)

Just prior to all my cogitating about the collection name, the words “Retracing Asheville” had come to me unbidden (as sometimes the best ideas will do). By fictionalizing Asheville in my Kent Creek stories and bringing real people and places of the past to life on the page I am, in effect, ‘retracing’ the town’s history. But those two words—Retracing Asheville—felt like more than just my internalization of these creative endeavors.

Research has always been so fun to me, and I love to share the many, many interesting things I uncover while working on stories. I’ve done that in various haphazard ways over time, but Retracing Asheville—as a section both on my Substack publication and my website—gives me a defined repository for all the research related to my Beaucatcher Chronicles stories. And, perhaps, Retracing Asheville will someday blossom into a YouTube channel as well (fingers crossed).

The Mashup

Now, back to the novel. Using “The Orange Peel” in the title provided a 1960s juke joint vibe and a connection to Asheville. I want to retain those aspects, so another deep dive ensued. Exploring possibilities led to more conversations with my dad and took me into The Orange Peel’s history.

I learned that the club had previously, but briefly, been called The Country Palace and before that, it was known as The Jade Club from 1965 to 1969. (My novel begins in 1968.) One of the bands that regularly played at The Jade Club was The Royal Primes. Learning this, my mind immediately blended these into “The Royal Jade” and suddenly, I had a new name for Nate’s club and a new novel title: Dancing at The Royal Jade.

Let’s Begin!

The creative process sometimes feels magical, miraculous. But in retrospect, all the pieces that have come together to bring me to this place make perfect sense. I’m glad it’s happening now before I get further with the novel revisions and writing the other stories. Creativity is messy, too, and that’s where I am now as I ensure all the changes properly ripple through my work.

Thank you for your patience and for being along for this ride!

Samplings

Here some of the graphics you’ll begin seeing as I update Substack to match up with all these new ideas.