Many plan to write a novel upon retirement but few achieve that goal. Donald Buchanan, however, retired in 2016 from a 31-year career as a corporate real estate manager and set about writing his novel the next day.
The plot for “Counting Souls” had essentially been percolating since Mr. Buchanan was a child growing up visiting grandparents in Cherokee County, North Carolina, when he learned that some of his relatives were counted as part of the 1830 census in Macon County, North Carolina. The novel focuses on a lawyer-farmer who is hired as a federal census taker for an area of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina where Cherokee people, settlers, plantation owners, and enslaved people lived.
