Red Sails in the Sunset
No, I can’t see Russia from my house in Sonoma County, but I might’ve had a glimpse a couple hundred years ago. With Tsar Putin gobbling up the Crimea and eyeing the rest of the Ukraine, I started thinking about how things might have been if the Russkies still had a foothold here in California. That unsettling notion prompted me to make a trip up the coast to explore their vanished colony and contemplate what might have been. In 1725, Peter the Great took time out from building his new capital city, St. Petersburg, to try colonizing the Pacific territories of North America before Spain beat him to it. He made little headway, but his lust for expansion was continued by Catherine the Great who, sixty years later, had herself a tiny settlement in Alaska. The...
Read MoreSite Seeing
Most writing requires research, and historical fiction is especially demanding because it means scouring libraries, the internet, old letters, journals and diaries and, on occasion, visiting cemeteries and even ghost towns. It’s often an exhausting process, but the reward is inspiration for plot, characterization and location, the exhilaration of visiting places where the story will play out and immersion into the same milieu as my characters. Not only does “walking the walk” help create both protagonists and antagonists; it can also steer the plot in unexpected -and challenging- directions. This was certainly the case with my latest book Communion of Sinners. Inspired by Life in a California Mission, the 1786 journal of Jean Françoise de la Perousé, it’s...
Read MoreRequiem for a Queen
They said she sinned by ambition and was doomed from the outset, tethered to a world facing apocalypse. She listened to nothing save the siren song of destiny, a stone-and-iron fantasy that became the jewel in the crown of Louisiana plantation houses. No one had seen her likes before, nor would they see them again. She was Belle Grove, the fabulous queen of sugar king John Andrews, and she was born of a genteel rivalry to build bigger and better than anyone in the antebellum South. Her competitor, Nottaway (see Game of Thrones), was the work of John Hamden Randolph, another incredibly rich planter a short distance upriver. From sheer size alone, there was never any doubt that Belle Grove would take the sweepstakes as Andrews erected a palace to please a pharaoh....
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