From the Hoorahs, Some Good Advice for CLOG!

Hoorahs' Lynn Logan

Had a meeting at lunch today with Amanda Wareing and Phil Lour of the Hoorah Cloggers in Blacksburg, an attempt by me to find out where the passion for square dancing comes from and how it manifests. My nearly-finished novel CLOG! is needing a little something that only square dancers of long standing can provide and I think Amanda and Phil are godsends.

(That's Amanda's sister Lynn Logan to the right, in a pose that is getting some consideration for the cover of the book.)

One of the more important revelations, coming from both of them, is that I'm on the right track with the authenticity of the square dance sequences in the book and that my feel for it is right. They had some excellent suggestions about technical aspects of some of what I was discussing during dance scenes and preparations for competitions and they'll be in the finished product.

Phil showed me a YouTube video of one of their performances and it stopped me cold because it was so close to the climactic scene in the book. Really spooky. Phil is front right in the video. I don't think Amanda's dancing. Here it is 

The Hoorah Cloggers have been around for probably 40 years and their approach to square dancing is different from the smooth dancing that my book follows, but their flashy, affecting clogging approach has helped me create some definitions and alter a couple of scenes to better represent what might really have happened.

I love this kind of research and Amanda and Phil invited me to a dance Sunday night in Blacksburg, which I fully expect to attend. They're making the book better and I like that.