Return to Cooter Crossing is my novel for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNo). Below is a brief working synopsis. For those that are southern impaired, a cooter is a term for water turtles that like to bask on logs in rivers.
Aidan hasn’t had a good year. His lover and supervisor dumped him for a younger guy leaving him without a job or a home. He decides it is time to return home to Cooter Crossing, a small village in the backwater swamps of Florida’s west coast. It has been ten years and he’s not sure what to expect. What he finds is a sister that is pregnant and unwed, his high school lover is now the town drunk with a mobile home full of kids, dirty dealing by a County Commissioner, a deputy sheriff that has romantic intentions and murder.
Learn something everyday…didn’t realize cooter was a turtle. The word never made it up Indiana way as I recall…
Cooter is actually from one of the African (ie Slave) languages that influenced the southern dialect.