This post is for anyone who loves languarge--readers and writers alike. It’s also for anyone who’s jumped from the frying pan into the fire. This past year, I decided to stretch my wings with a completely new project. In addition to writing the proverbial “book of my heart” aka BOMH, I started working with a critique partner. I’ve written fourteen books for Harlequin Historical and Love Inspired Historical, but I’ve always worked alone.
I thought I was an experienced writer.
I thought I knew how to plot a story.
I thought I had a good ear for language.
Oh. My. Goodness. When I finished the first draft of the BOMH, I shared a chapter with my best friend, an award winning author who really knows her stuff. She had a few ideas. Actually, more than a few. Every one of those ideas--from word choice to plot shifts--proved to be valuable.
I didn’t realize it, but I’d fallen into a rut. Mentally I had incorporated every writing rule I’ve ever read, and that obedience had limited my voice. As we worked on that first chapter, I realized that my sentences lacked variety, and my diction wasn’t as precise as I thought. Adverbs? Nope. G.O.N.E.. But there were places were an adverb would have been stunningly useful. Use a semi-colon? Maybe, but aren’t they considered distracting? Not always. Sometimes they’re the perfect link between two ideas. (I used one somewhere in the blog. Can you find it?)
My CP and I have a lot of fun when we do a phone edit. She’s big on strong verbs. So am I, but my writing style is simpler. We had a good time playing with synonyms for “to walk.” This verb is particularly synonym-challenged. How many ways can you describe a person walking? Here’s where my mind went in a moment of hair-pulling insanity:
Annoyed, he walked to the sliding glass door and looked out.
Annoyed, he scampered to the sliding glass door and looked out.
Annoyed, he marched to the sliding glass door...
Annoyed, he did the cha-cha to the sliding glass door . . .
Annoyed, he sidled to the sliding glass door …
Annoyed, he crawled to the sliding glass door …
Annoyed, he bunny-hopped to the sliding glass door …
Annoyed, he kicked like a Rockette to the sliding glass door …
Annoyed, he said, “Forget it! I’m not getting off the couch!
My hero told me in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to walk, he’d walk. No way would he march, pace, amble, shamble, shuffle, waddle, toddle or kick like a Rockette. He did consent to stride, but only after I convinced him I hadn’t used that word in the past two chapters. At least he got off the couch! Now on to that happy ending . . .
Brides of the West is currently available at Amazon
I couldn't pick just one. Everyone was so great to come by today and help me celebrate my re-release of Fire Eyes I just couldn't pick one winner. So I picked TWO! And they are....
PATRICIA and HILDIE!
If you two ladies would e-mail me at
fabkat_edit@yahoo.com and give me your contact info, I will send you your choice of an e-copy of FIRE EYES or (if you are willing to wait a few days and live in the good ol' U.S. of A. ) a print copy--your choice.
Thanks so much to everyone who came by today and commented. I appreciate all the support!
Cheryl
Three years ago this month, my debut western historical romance,
FIRE EYES, was published by The Wild Rose Press. I was thrilled! Finally, my dream had come true, with the help of a wonderful editor and publishing company.
When I got my first box of books, I sat and gazed at the covers—just like any first time author would. My husband teased me about “rubbing off the paint”—but I was so proud of them, and justifiably so. A lot of very hard work had gone into that story, not just
from my perspective, but also from many other people. My editor at The Wild Rose Press, Helen Andrew, was wonderful. She really explained in detail why certain things couldn’t stand and had to go or be changed.
But part of what ‘had to go’ was important to the story, in my mind. Still, there were company guidelines to be followed, and neither of us could do anything about that. So we worked together to find a way to take out the parts that made it more “western” than “romance” and still came out with a fine story.
However, this spring, I
asked for my rights back for
FIRE EYES and got them, and submitted the story to another small publisher who has an imprint for westerns and western romances. I was able to re-edit the book and add in much of what I’d had to take out or rewrite in the first version, and it was released yesterday with a brand new Jimmy Thomas cowboy cover and lots of renewed interest.
The e-book version is available now at Amazon, Lulu, Monkeybars and many other e-book retailers, and will become available soon at Barnes and Noble, Sony and Apple.
Here are the links for Smashwords and Amazon:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/162817
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Eyes-ebook/dp/B0083JYET8
The print version will become available within the week, and again, I’m very happy
about breathing new life into this wonderful story. Once I am able to order my
print copies, I’m sure I’ll sit on the floor and ‘rub the paint off’ again. And
I’ll be grateful that I’ve had two chances to get my story out there—another
thrill, a second time around!
I'LL BE GIVING AWAY A COPY OF FIRE EYES TODAY! JUST LEAVE A COMMENT TO BE ENTERED IN THE DRAWING, ALONG WITH YOUR CONTACT INFO.
EXCERPT FROM FIRE EYES:
“You waitin’ on a…invitation?” A faint smile touched his battered mouth. “I’m fresh out.”
Jessica reached for the tin star. Her fingers closed around the uneven edges of it. No. She couldn’t wait any longer. “What’s your name?” Her voice came out jagged, like the metal she touched.
His bruised eyes slitted as he studied her a moment. “Turner. Kaedon Turner.”
Jessica sighed. “Well, Kaedon Turner, you’ve probably been a lot better places in your life than this. Take a deep breath, and try not to move.”
He gave a wry chuckle, letting his eyes drift completely closed. “Do it fast. I’ll be okay.”
She nodded, even though she knew he couldn’t see her. “Ready?”
“Go ahead.”
Even knowing what was coming, his voice sounded smoother than hers, she thought. She wrapped her hand tightly around the metal and pulled up fast, as he’d asked.
As the metal slid through his flesh, Kaed’s left hand moved convulsively, his fingers gripping the quilt. He was unable to hold back the soft hint of an agonized groan as he turned away from her. He swore as the thick steel pin cleared his skin, freeing the chambray shirt and cotton undershirt beneath it, blood spraying as his teeth closed solidly over his bottom lip.
Jessica lifted the material away, biting back her own curse as she surveyed the damage they’d done to him. His chest was a mass of purple bruises, uneven gashes, and burns. Her stomach turned over. She was not squeamish. But this—
It was just like what they’d done to Billy, before they’d killed him. Billy, the last man the Choctaws had dumped on her porch. Billy Monroe, the man she’d come to loathe during their one brief year of marriage.
She took a washrag from the nightstand and wet it in the nearby basin. Wordlessly, she placed her cool palm against Kaedon Turner’s stubbled, bruised cheek, turning his head toward her so she could clean his face and neck.
She knew instinctively he was the kind of man who would never stand for this if it wasn’t necessary. The kind of man who was unaccustomed to a woman’s comforting caress. The kind of man who would never complain, no matter how badly wounded he was.
“Fallon.” His voice was rough.
Jessica stopped her movements and watched him. “What about him?”
His brows drew together, as if he were trying to formulate what he wanted to say. “Is he…dead?”
What should she tell him?
The truth.
“I—don’t know.”
“Damn it.”
“You were losing a lot of blood out there,” Jessica said, determined to turn his thoughts from Fallon to the present. She ran the wet cloth lightly across the long split in his right cheek.
His breathing was controlled, even. “I took a bullet.” He said it quietly, almost conversationally.
Jessica stopped moving. “Where?”
Howdy!
WHITE EAGLE'S TOUCH -- one of my best selling books -- is currently being released newly in ebook format. And since it's one of my favorites, I thought I'd tell you a little of the background that went in to the making of that book.
I love this cover by the way. WHITE EAGLE'S TOUCH starts with my love of a rather spoiled, head-strong heroine -- one who is really quite soft-hearted, but for reasons explained in the book, she harbors opinions that are far from flattering. In the story, the heroine, Katrina, is blond-haired, stubborn, almost out of funds and demanding her inheritance in order that she might marry into royalty. She has also grown up without ever knowing her parents -- who perished out West -- or her uncle, who holds the purse-strings to her inheritance.
In other words, she has some reason to be spoiled, because she's grown up without love -- with a succession of nannies.
There are problems -- mainly that her uncle will not release her funds until she comes West and parades her fiance for his approval. I must admit that it really is a lot to ask of a young woman who has known only the comforts of New York City
-- still it was rather fun to play with her outrage.
Of coure her uncle doesn't show up at the scheduled rendevous -- he sends his friend -- who is almost like a son to him -- White Eagle -- to bring her to him.
Of course the story goes on from there -- spoiled, rich-girl meets handsome, yet determined young Indian warrior.
Now, the truth of the matter is that the character of Katrina was patterned after my daughter, Trina, who is definitely not blond. Not that Trina is spoiled, but at the writing of this story, Trina was a teenager -- about nineteen, I believe -- and she definitely had her likes and dislikes. Off to the side here is a picture of Trina with her daughter and my granddaughter, Lila. But patterning the heroine after my daughter really gave me a deeper understanding of my character, Katrina's, personality -- it also helped me to love this character, even when she is at her wit's end.
In writing this book, I often had pictures of clothing and what the heroine might have looked like at that time. Off to the left here is a picture of that period's clothing.
I love this clothing, I must admit and sometimes wish we could go back to an age where women looked so very feminine. Now this picture to the left really -- in my mind -- has the look of my heroine at this time.
A little bored, a little spoiled, always well dressed and trying to do the right thing -- although in the West, my heroine's efforts are sometimes clumsy and humorous -- as she tries to "fit in."
As for the hero, another one of my loves -- I've always loved the hero, who brooks no argument, yet who is kind and generous -- and who is waiting patiently for the heroine to come to her senses.
There is one scene in this book that I particularly like. It was a scene where the hero, along with his friend concoct a scheme to send Katrina's fiance packing.
At the writing of this book, I had just the previous year, married my husband, Paul. When I married Paul, however, I also discovered that he was extremely close to his brother, Bob -- this picture to the right isof Bob and Paul -- Paul is the one sitting down. But his particular scene was about these two fellows and what they would do if they were there to rid themselves of this very unwanted person, and send him packing for home.
Interestingly, that "friend" of White Eagle is Night Thunder who has a book of his own -- next in this series.
To end I thought I'd show you a picture of the original cover for WHITE EAGLE'S TOUCH.
The reason I have to show you is that this cover is also one of my most favorite covers.
Well, that's all for today. I'm on the road and so might not be able to respond to every post, but I will be picking one blogger out to send a free book to.
So come on in and leave a comment.
Thanks to everyone for all the wonderful comments today. I threw all the names into a hat (Well, into my random number generator anyway) and
THE WINNER IS
VALRI !!!
Congratualtions Valri. Contact me via my website so I can get your mailing info and I'll get copy of A Baby Between Them right out to you!
And remember, any of you who would like to pre-order a copy can do so
HERE
Hi! Winnie Griggs here.
(pssst - look for giveaway info at the bottom of this post)
I was thumbing through one of those 'infamous women of the old west' type books the other day and came across a listing for a woman named Pearl Hart. The heading of
First Female Captured Stagecoach Robber caught my eye. And the more I read about this woman, the more fascinated I became with her story. I did some additional research and found a number of different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of her life. I’ll stitch together my favorites here.
While there is very little know about her early life, we do know that she was born Pearl Taylor in 1871 and lived the early part of her life in Ontario, Canada. She was one of several children born into an upper middle-class, church going family. At age sixteen she was sent to a boarding school, but she had an adventurous spirit that couldn’t be contained. That, combined with her attractiveness and wit made her quite popular with the men of her acquaintance.
While at school Pearl became infatuated with a young man named Hart and eloped at about age 17. Hart has variously been described as a rake, a drunk and a gambler. Far from this being the romantic adventure Pearl had hoped for, it turned out Hart was also abusive. She left him and then returned to him several times and it is reported they had two children together. During their last reconciliation, the couple worked odd jobs the Chicago World’s Fair. There Pearl saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and developed a fascination for the cowboy life that would stay with her her entire life. She also visited the Women’s Pavilion where she heard speeches by prominent women’s activists such as Julia Ward Howe.
Finally leaving Hart for good, Pearl placed the children in the care of her mother and took up with a man named Dan Bandman, a gambler and dance-hall musician. The two eventually moved to Colorado.
Later, when Dan left to fight in the Spanish-American War, Pearl moved to Globe Arizona, a mining town. There are various reports that she may have worked as a cook, a singer, a laundress and/or opened a tent brothel. It is also said that she developed a fondness for cigar and liquor at this time. Pearl described her life at this time in these words: "I was only twenty-two years old. I was good-looking, desperate, discouraged, and ready for anything that might come. I do not care to dwell on this period of my life. It is sufficient to say that I went from one city to another..."
Whatever her employment, Pearl’s finances hit bottom when the mine closed. Trying to find a way to earn money, she took up with a man named Joe Boot and together they tried to work an old mine claim he owned. But by 1899 the pair found themselves short on cash and decided to rob a stage, though it appears neither had done anything like this before. One account claims they took this desperate measure because Pearl had gotten word that her mother was ill and needed money, though there is little to substantiate this claim.
Pearl cut her hair and dressed up like a man. Both armed with revolvers, they stopped a stage running between Florence and Globe at the Cane Springs Canyon watering point. They collected $421 from the three passengers on board. Pearl then reportedly took pity on them and gave them back each $1.00 so they could buy a meal at the next stop.
But their lack of experience did them in. They did a poor job of covering their tracks and within six days the law had caught up with them. One account states that they were sleeping when the posses caught up with them and that while Joe surrendered quickly but Pearl tried, unsuccessfully, to fight her way out.
Joe and Pearl were locked in the local jail. But the notoriety and attention Pearl received as a female bandit, coupled with the lack of proper facilities, caused the sheriff to throw up his hands and send her to the jail in Tucson. Pearl’s notoriety grew, and she did all she could to fuel it. Her story about her reason for the robbery (her ailing mother) gained her sympathy, and her avowal that she "would never consent to be tried under a law she or her sex had no voice in making, or to which a woman had no power under the law to give her consent" gained her a whole new level of attention.
Never one to give up on her options, within a matter of days Pearl had charmed some of the men at the Tucson prison and managed to escape. Unfortunately for her, a New Mexico lawman recognized her and sent her back to the Tucson prison.
Joe Boot was eventually sentenced to 30 years in jail and Pearl to five. Pearl was given the dubious honor of being the first woman incarcerated into the Yuma Territorial Prison. But neither Pearl nor Joe served their full terms. Joe, apparently due to a show of good behavior, was given trustee status. He walked off while working outside the gates less than two years into his term and was never heard from again.
Pearl, on the other hand, gained her freedom legitimately, well, sort of. The warden of the jail where Pearl was imprisoned like all the attention she was attracting from the public and the media. He provided her with a roomy 8 x10 cell as well as a small yard which gave her a space to entertain reporters, photographers and other guests. Pearl, who was the only female incarcerated in the facility, was not above using her wiles to play guards and trustees off of each other to improve her situation.
In December of 1902, Pearl received a pardon from the governor and was released free and clear. The official reason for the pardon remains unclear, but it was given on condition that she leave the Arizona territory. Pearl herself claimed that she had been invited to play the lead in a play her sister had penned based on her life and this had played into her release. However, a later rumor emerged that she had became pregnant. The governor, wanting to spare the Arizona Territory the embarrassment of explaining how this could possibly have happened while she was imprisoned, pardoned her and set her free. While there is no proof that Pearl ever bore a third child, this doesn’t mean the wily woman didn’t use this as a ploy to secure her freedom.
There are varying accounts of what happened to Pearl after she was released. Some say she parlayed her notoriety into a show business career, billing herself as “The Arizona Bandit.” One account says she traveled for a while with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. A less colorful theory is that she married a rancher named Calvin Bywater and settled down into a quite but happier life. If that last is true, then perhaps Pearl got her “happily ever after” after all. Folks who knew Mrs. Bywater described her as “soft spoken, kind, and a good citizen in all respects.” Mrs. Calvin Bywater lived well into her 80s.
As I said earlier, there are a number of different accounts of Pearl’s life and this is only one of them. Her exploits have been featured in theater, film and pulp fiction. There was even a musical called The Legend Of Pearl Hart. And while we may never know the full true story of her life, there is no doubt that she lived it on her own terms.
And, as promised I'm doing a giveaway today. In honor of my upcoming June release,
A Baby Between Them, I'm giving away an advanced copy to one person who leaves a comment today. Here's a little about this book:
For two months, Nora Murphy has cared for the abandoned infant she found on their Boston-bound ship. Settled now in Faith Glen, Nora tells herself she’s happy. She has little Grace, and a good job as housekeeper to Sheriff Cameron Long. She doesn’t need anything more - not the big family she always wanted, or Cam’s love...
A traumatic childhood closed Cam off to any dreams of family life. Yet somehow his lovely housekeeper and her child have opened his heart again. When the unthinkable occurs, it will take all their faith to reach a new future together.
Now avaiable for pre-order
HERE
WHAT OUR PROSE AND CAVALRY CHARGES SHOULD HAVE IN COMMON
One of the most important things in writing words that sell, and one of the hardest things for most writers to understand until they’ve been hammering away at the craft for years, is how to make those words move.
I mean MOVE like a cavalry charge at the end of a John Ford oater.
Like a bullet fired through the maw of Colt Lightning .44.
Like an Apache arrow slung from a gut-an’-ash bow to plunge into a cavalry’s soldier’s blue-clad chest with a hard, snapping
crunch!, sending blood geysering out the poor lad’s back to paint the rock wall of the escarpment behind him.
All right, enough pulpy examples. You get the idea.
Let me amend that first paragraph. Some writers, no matter how long they’ve been writing, never understand how to make their prose gallop. To make it
sell.
Almost always as I wander the bays at my favorite bookstores or peruse the “Sneak Peek” pages on Amazon, looking for a yarn that’s sure to grab me by the throat and not let go till I’ve read the last page--oh, god, how
rare is that!--I find prose that slumps on the page like roadkill, like a wet sheet blown off a clothesline.
Twisted and slack and pale as death...
There are several causes for this amateur’s misstep, but let’s skip the causes and go to a few tricks for solving the problem--methods I’ve learned throughout my life and from writing around seventy western novels and continuing to sell and acquire new contracts and new readers.
I’ll touch on three.
First, make your prose look pretty on the page. This sounds sophomoric, and it is. Something as seemingly insignificant as a how those little black marks are clumped on the page makes a big difference to a reader’s eye whether they’re aware of it or not. Those marks make a rhythm in the eye just as the sounds they create in your head form a rhythm in your ear.
Frankly, big, heavy clumps of text are just plain ugly. Sort of like having a big, brick wall you have to climb at the end of your morning run.
As a rule of thumb, I try to make my paragraphs between one and seven sentences long. That keeps the final printed page from looking too black. And I vary the lengths so that I seldom get two portly paragraphs together. Same for one or two-sentence paragraphs, though this is less important than staggering the thick ones.
Look at this essay for instance. This is how the pages of your pubbed novel should appear when printed.
Another of the myriad ways you can make your prose sing and dance is to make it specific and colorful. It should be as vivid in the reader’s mind as a scene from their favorite movie.
This is a tough one. This is the trick that separates the weanling pups from the alpha wolves. It’s a very hard one to teach, and it really can’t be taught to someone who isn’t armed with a vivid imagination.
Think DETAIL. And not just any ole detail, but the detail that propels that old saloon in your western novel off the page and seers it into the reader’s retina. Okay, it’s low-slung and it’s made of adobe brick and there are two hitchracks out front. That’s still every other saloon I’ve ever seen in books and T.V., even with a drunk cowboy passed out on the porch.
Let’s add a black-and-white collie dog with a burr-matted tail lapping up the spilled beer on the worn pine puncheons beside the cowboy. The saloon’s missing one of its batwings and the remaining one, wearing a chipped and faded coat of red paint, has two bullet holes in it.
A clay water pot, an
ojo, hangs from the porch rafters, left of the batwings, jostling under the weight of the magpie perched on its rim, drinking.
You
see? With details--with nouns and verbs as well as adjectives--we’ve pumped that old saloon back to life. The scene’s vivid, the prose
moves.
Yet another way to make your sentences wriggle around like snakes in your readers’ hands is to write in a conversational tone. The best way to do this is to read it out loud to yourself. If it reads clear and easy, if it flows like a good ale over the tongue, you’ve got it.
If it’s stilted and halting, and you have too many four-dollar words and you’re not using contractions, get back to work.
This is much harder than you’d think. It takes time and practice and patience and, most of all, confidence in your ability to do it. Eventually, after enough words have flowed over the dam of your mind, they’ll wear the dam away and you’ll be writing so fast and furiously--having so damn much fun!--that you’ll be blowing out one keyboard after another!
Oblige me the mixed metaphor...
Here’s my last tip. And it’s the most important one. When you sit down to write, you should be breathing fire. Your fingers and toes should be tingling and you should be chuckling to yourself like a moron.
If you’re dragging around the house, avoiding your work room and lamenting that today you’ve got to get Carmody and Crystal in the bunkhouse together alone in spite of the horrible things they said to each other the night before, and they have to interact in a way that tells the reader they’re hot for each other though they themselves don’t realize it yet--forget it.
If you write with that attitude, whose going to enjoy reading it?
Take that seemingly static scene by the horns and imagine doing something so unexpected and creative with it that it puts lead in your pencil and makes your ears burn with anticipation. Maybe you could have the two characters yack for a while and then, out of the blue, something inexplicable overcomes Crystal and, to her surprise as much as to Carmody’s, she throws herself into his arms!
And before the reader has time to get bored with the dull conversation, Crystal and Carmody are making love while a rainstorm hammers the ole bunkhouse roof.
Or if that’s too much of a cliché...I don’t know...send Crystal into a rage. She picks up a skinning knife and tries to stab Carmody. Or maybe she
does stab Carmody!
The idea is to mix your ideas up, paw them around like a cat with a mouse until you come up with something that has you breathing fire and making your prose chew up the sod like a thousand galloping horses at the end of a John Ford oater.
Since his first novel,
Once A Marshal, was published in 1998,
Peter Brandvold has written over seventy fast-action western novels under his own name and his penname,
Frank Leslie. Check out his website:
www.peterbrandvold.com. Become a follower of his blog at: peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.
Mountain Man Logan St. John knew his town was no place for a woman.
Especially one who scrubs his buckskins; turns a bunch of rough miners into
choirboys, and hangs curtains in the saloon!
I’m pleased to announce that one of my previously out-of-print books is now available. To get your Kindle or iPad copy click the cover.
A Long Way Home takes place in a California mining town in 1850 and it’s always been one of my favorites. Libby Summerfield is a new widow with a baby on the way and is desperately trying to get back home to Boston. Unfortunately, she’s stuck in Deadman’s Gulch, the roughest, toughest town in gold country. The book won many awards during its initial run and was awarded a hero K.I.S.S. award from RT.
I thought you might be interested in some of the fun facts about the Gold Rush I discovered while researching the book (hey, I gotta do something with all these notes):
-
Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. Sutter wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if word got out. His fears were valid: As soon as the rush began, his workers left in search of gold and squatters invaded his land and stole his crops and cattle.
-
Getting to California was no easy task. Forty-niners faced hardships and even death traveling to the gold fields. It took as long as eight months to sail around South America. Some chose the alternative 
route which meant sailing to the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama. They would then have to travel through the jungle to the Pacific and catch a ship bound for San Francisco. Shipwrecks and typhoid fever were among the hazards travelers faced.
-
Gold was worth $20.67 an ounce (that would be around $535 in today's market). That sounds like a lot given the times until you consider the cost of living. During the gold rush years eggs cost three dollars each (yes each!). Water could cost up to a hundred dollars per glass! And pills were ten dollars each without advice.
-
In 1852, more than eighty-one million dollars worth of gold was taken from the Mother Lode. Yields dropped after that, as gold became more difficult to mine. Some miners got rich, but most returned home with less than what they started with.
-
The old gold mining town now called Placerville was once named Hangtown for obvious reasons.
-
The world’s second largest gold nugget—and California’s largest—weighed in at a hefty 160 pounds. It was found in Carson Hill in Calaveras County in 1854
-
In 1848, San Franciso’s population was a mere 1000. Two years later it had exploded to 25,000. People lived in tents, shanties and ship cabins.
-
The gold rush had a very negative effect on California Indians who were pushed off their land, attacked or enslaved as “diggers.” Some claim that an estimated100,000 Indians lost their lives between 1848-1868.
-
Forget about the old miner with the long beard. Four-fifths of the forty-niners were youths between eighteen and thirty-five.
-
According to the 1850 census, only two percent of the residents in mining counties were women. Females were either good or bad. The first "good" woman to arrive in the mining town of Columbia, CA was greeted with a brass band parade. Women had their pick of men. One woman buried her husband one day and married the chief mourner the next.
Speaking of gold, have you seen how much it's going for lately? I recently took a bunch of broken gold chains into the jewelry store and came away with enough money to purchase a couple of glasses of water at 1850 prices. I'm about ready to try my hand at panning. What about you?
To order the book everyone's talking about (okay, maybe not everyone) click on cover:
The winner of a copy of
is
Liz Riggs
Liz, I'll contact you to get your mailing address
But if you don't hear from me, don't let me get away with fumbling this.
Contact me at mary@maryconnealy.com and DEMAND YOUR BOOK.
And thank you all for hanging around at
Petticoats & Pistols.
And if you want the book
