I was lucky enough to snap up a seat by Wells Tower, whose book Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is getting a lot of attention, at the luncheon supporting the Orange County Literacy Council today.

I was not lucky enough to get a lot of conversation out of Tower,Wells Tower and Katharine Walton at The Carolina Inn. the writer who lives and grew up in Chapel Hill. He was distracted and kept scribbling notes on a tiny piece of paper he periodically grabbed out of his jacket pocket. He confessed he hadn’t prepared to speak, and was trying to figure that out.

Perhaps he shed further light on how his brain works when he got up behind the podium, the first writer of five to do so at the third annual Writers for Readers Book and Author Luncheon, held this afternoon The Carolina Inn.

“I think writing fiction is kind of disgusting,” he said. “You have a jewelers loop on everyone around you …. trying to figure out their motives. I feel my eye getting colder the deeper I get.” However, he said, “there is no greater power than telegraphing the scope of someone’s life. There’s something powerful about having a beating heart between the covers of a book.”

Wow. Kind of gives you the tingles, right?

Charlaine Harris.Now for the real truth bombs during the author talks, dropped by Charlaine Harris, the author of the books that inspired the True Blood series. 

Harris said she had been a conventional mystery writer for many years before she started writing the series that inspired True Blood, books that bloomed as she was turning 50.

“The Sookie Stackhouse books, well, you know, were a product of menopause. I’ll just write a book with everything I like. …. [And], I’m going to write an explicit sex scene before I forget.”

Harris said she sometimes sees early screenings of the HBO series, and was particularly shocked by the opening credits, which are filled with graphic scenes of sex, religion and death. “I called my husband, and I said, ‘Honey, we’ll have to move.’ It was so…. I thought, well, this offends just about everyone I know. But it’s genius too.”

The luncheon benefits The Orange County Literacy Council, which helps adults learn how to read.

Want to see more pictures of who was there? Click here.