I’m writing another book about the emigrants to Oregon in 1847 who traveled in the wagon company I created for Lead Me Home. The protagonists in Lead Me Home came from Boston, Massachusetts, and Arrow Rock, Missouri. And the doctor and his wife were from Illinois. The wagon company was […]
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Why Were the Pioneers’ Wagon Wheels So Large?
I have researched how and where the emigrants traveled along the Oregon Trail for ten years, and I’m still learning. Recently, I learned from an article in The Wall Street Journal about why the wheel is round. The article contained the sentence: “The difficulty of moving a wheeled object increases […]
Continue readingGuest Post on A Writer of History
Last Thursday I had a guest post over on A Writer of History, which is an excellent blog on historical fiction written by M.K. Tod. I wrote about how I chose the time and place for my novels, Lead Me Home and Now I’m Found. A Writer of History has […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson
My last review of a haunting book for 2016 is of The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson. Ms. Simonson is the author of one of my favorite books of the last decade, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, published in 2010. Her second novel, The Summer Before the War, is good, […]
Continue readingHistory by Non-Historians: First-Hand Accounts by Gold Rush Prospectors
Writers of historical fiction look for first-hand accounts of the time to give their stories depth and verisimilitude. I wrote an earlier post about a book purportedly by a Gold Rush prospector, California: Four Months Among the Gold-Finders in California; Being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: The Lake House, by Kate Morton
The Lake House was another book I read this past year that played with my sense of time and intrigued me from both a writer’s and a reader’s perspective. The story in this novel takes place in three different time periods—in 2003 London detective Sadie Sparrow investigates a cold case […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly
It’s hard not to be haunted by any book about the Nazi death camps. Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly, tells the story of World War II from the perspective of three women—Kasia Kusmerick, a Polish teenager who becomes a political prisoner in Ravensbrück because she helps the Polish resistance, […]
Continue readingHaunting Book: A Murder in Time, by Julie McElwain
I’ve made a tradition of writing about “haunting books” on this blog each October, though last year I combined my list into a single post. This year, I’m going to try to write about a book that haunts me (stays with me after I’ve read it) each Monday through the […]
Continue readingThe Vagaries of Mail Service During the Early California Gold Rush
One of the issues I have dealt with in my novel about the California Gold Rush is long-distance communications in the West between 1848 and 1850. I have characters living in Oregon, others in California, and they have relatives in Missouri and Massachusetts. The only way people could communicate over […]
Continue readingGambling with Gold: Vice in San Francisco in 1849
As I continue to research and edit my work-in-progress about the early years of the California Gold Rush, I recently found some interesting first-person accounts in A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850, edited by William Benemann (1999). Some of the more fascinating information […]
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