History, Real Life, and Faith
Many years ago, a family member won tickets to the opening games of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. My mother, who was visiting at the time, told me about this surprise and added an interesting twist. “He doesn’t want to go,” she said. “The seats are good ones–$300 a piece. But he thinks it will be too much…
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How much thought have you given to a corset? It’s challenging to write an historical novel if you’re not sure what the clothes are like. How many of us have read Gone with the Wind and wondered if Scarlett really could have an 18 inch waist and still breathe? The answer is probably not. Recent Civil War events in both…
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Confronting personal demons in real life. Thanks books!
I’m finishing up a novella that takes place in 1867 Texas (An Inconvenient Gamble) and then I’m returning to my novel about Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan and his wife Mattie Ready. Since this is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, it’s a great time to revisit the history, particularly with the ready access of so much research. But this…
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“I saw a photo once,” my 91-year-old grandmother said, “of three girls in an oval frame. They had red tinted hair and were very pretty. That’s the only picture of Permelia I ever saw.” My great-grandmother, Permelia Hanks Dunn Duval is a cypher. Born shortly after the Civil War to a 58-year-old CSA colonel and his second, exhausted, wife, she moved through…
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As we walked through the graveyard dusk of a late July some 17 years ago, the dead came alive to me. There as the sun lowered to the horizon and the birds settled to bed, Uncle Ernest told stories at grave after grave. I was writing the story of my grandmother’s life that year and this visit was to fill in the…
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