A New Year: A New Series Begins

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I am SO CLOSE to having a cover for book #3! In fact, I’ve seen it. But I don’t have permission to use it yet! Boo!

Book #1 Forged in Love is coming in February. Late in the month. 

The backdrop of the Wyoming Sunrise series is that Wyoming was the first state in the Union to give women the right to vote. They also gave women and people of color, that is to say Native Americans the right to vote.

Black people–no scratch that–black MEN–had already been given suffrage. Suffrage is a lot more than voting. It’s about property rights, inheritance rights, the right to run for office, serve on a jury, lots of stuff. I wrote more about that HERE. 

Okay, after typing this long, I’ve decided I will share the third cover KEEPING IN MIND that it might change.

No, darn it, I’d better not. TEMPTATION IS GNAWING AT ME!

I decided to be a good girl. Grrrrrr……..

My next post will be AFTER permission so hang in there.

Forged in Love is about a woman blacksmith who has a band of vicious stagecoach robbers trying to kill her.

To find out about blacksmiths, especially historical blacksmiths, I spent a day at a nearby Living History Museum set in a restored frontier fort, Fort Atkinson.

I will tell you this…as a person who sometimes needs odd, tiny details for the setting of my books, and a person who is a natural prairie dog who prefers to spend her time in her own hole…occasionally popping my head up, then ducking away when someone comes too close…I know that talking to experts on specific details in a book is just always fun. They LOVE it.

Really? You want to know more about historical laundry?

Yes, please, tell me more about bluing. And did they have to build their own washboards?

Tears of Joy ensue from said living history reenactor. Followed by allllllllllllllllllllllll they know.

Interspersed with me saying, repeat that again? Slow down. I’m trying to get this all down.

More tears of Joy!

It’s fun.

I guess not that many people have follow up questions to the historical blacksmith ‘cuz I talked to him FOREVER and he was just great. I’ve had similar experiences with Lewis and Clark reenactors, gunsmiths, tinsmiths, a cooper (wooden buckets, butter churns, washtubs, etc), a farrier (horse shoeing and blacksmithing are NOT the same job)…there are others. I talked to a guy in charge of a Western Trails museum about the Oregon Trail. A Trails and Rails museum about railroads. And the thing is, the questions are small. Weird little details I didn’t know. 

I—a person who spends a LOT of time in historical reading and research, had weird little questions. And these experts LOVE ANSWERING THEM. 

It’s a symbiotic relationship. 

And yet Mary the prairie dog, drags her heels about doing these things. Why????

Anyway, Blacksmithing. My heroine is a woman blacksmith. Trained at her widowed father’s knee. Her father the town blacksmith/cooper/farrier/wheelwright–it’s a small town. Many people did things for themselves, they didn’t take their horse to the farrier, they shoed their own horse. There wasn’t enough work to keep a lot of people busy.

So she’s learned all these skills from a father who didn’t think it was right, at the same time he needed the help and she insisted, and he didn’t like her being home alone….and now he’s dead.

The whole town is conflicted. A woman shouldn’t be a blacksmith. On the other hand, can you fix my wheel? I need nails. My hinge broke.

So necessity gives Mariah a rather begrudging acceptance. And in the meantime she’s falling in love with the guy running the town diner, who was trained as a chef in New York City and now slings the very BEST hash in the west. Everyone thinks he’s weird for calling Beef Stew, Beef Bourguignon (man, try spelling THAT word three times fast). I’m trying to play against type. Blacksmith heroine, cook hero. But honestly in the west a lot of diners were run by men. Still, it was fun.

And also, in the stagecoach holdup that killed her father and brother, she survived, left for dead by a gang of outlaws that don’t leave witnesses and now someone’s trying to kill her.

And somehow Clint, who’s loved her from afar for a long time, and was working up the nerve to approach her very tough and intimidating father to ask if he can court her (or ask her if he could ever find her alone…he was going to do it!!!) finds himself in the kill zone between the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen and a gang of cutthroats.

And so the fun begins. Forged in Love. Coming in February.

 

27 thoughts on “A New Year: A New Series Begins”

  3. Oh, Mary, this sounds great.
    I’m a prairie dog too, but I’m always glad AFTER I talk to live people for my research. It’s just opening the conversations…
    I’m not overly surprised that you have a woman blacksmith and a male diner cook. That’s kind of what the West was about, yes? Shedding preconceived notions, because sometimes everybody had to do everything.
    It is always good to hear from you.
    Kathy Bailey

  5. Oh, I can’t wait Mary. I’ve been a longtime reader and fan. Sounds like a read I won’t be able to put down.
    Btw, my 13 and 15 year old sons have been learning a little about blacksmithing. We re-enacted when I was growing up and my dad has been teaching them. My husband actually gave them coal for Christmas. They were thrilled.

  6. I LOVE going to historical sites. My parents were older when they married (mom was a widow at 37 and dad was a bachelor at 40) so they took us to lots of historical sites on vacation. I’d much prefer that to amusement parks. I take my girls to more historical sites than amusement parks too.

  7. Huge congrats, Mary!! This looks soooooo good! Wow. And that cover is to die for! She looks very determined to not let anything stand in her way. I hope they don’t change it.

  9. Hi and Congratulations! Your book sounds very intriguing , I love your book cover! Have a great day and a great rest of the week. Thank you for sharing about all this.

  12. Mary, your new book & cover are Awesome!!! Can’t wait to read it. Love that women can do the unexpected jobs that men say they can’t do!!!!! Our frontier women were tough.

  13. We also tend to interrogate reenactors and those who work at museums. In many cases reenactors are supposed to stay in character and time period. My bad but the questions sometimes pulled them out of what they were supposed to be doing. I have volunteered at a few historical events and it is hard not to step out of character to answer questions. It is so interesting to discover how deep some of these people have researched their characters and the historical era. I look forward to reading this series.

  14. Mary – I’m so excited about this series! And these covers . . . I think they are some of the best you’ve ever had, and that’s saying something. I love them! As soon as I learned you were writing a female blacksmith, I was in. Ha! In fact, I already pre-ordered from Baker Book House. Looking forward to next month. 🙂

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