Mary Connealy

Author of Romantic Comedy...with Cowboys including the bestselling Kincaid Brides Series https://petticoatsandpistols.com/sweepstakesrules

Here Comes the Judge–and a giveaway!

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The original inspiration for this book series appears in book #2 of The Wyoming Sunrise Series.

A woman justice of the peace.

I read a biography of Esther Hobart Morris, the first woman justice of the peace in America…possibly in the world.

Such a fun read. It’s full of the struggle for women’s suffrage and Esther was a champion of that cause.

Very soon, just days after women were given the right to vote in Wyoming, the current justice of the peace in South Pass City, Wyoming, when told he’d have to swear in women on a jury, quit. He didn’t just quit, he stole the record book containing precious legal records in South Pass City. It was never recovered.

When he quit, Esther was appointed to his old job. He just threw such a fit, the old Judge that is, that Esther could have arrested him.

But she didn’t. She said, “We’ll just start this new era with a fresh book and forget the past.”

So I decided my pretty little seamstress, a good friend of the heroine in book #1 Forged in Love, should be the second justice of the peace. (or anyway, real early on).

Nell Armstrong just wants to sew pretty dresses. She likes to put ribbons and lace and ruffles on flowery dresses.

Mary Connealy

The only trouble is, there aren’t that many women in Wyoming and those there are, make their own clothes. So she made the mistake of making a pair of chaps for one cowboy (she had to take an old pair of his and learn to copy it, he even brought her in a nice piece of leather). And now the orders flood in and there is no escape. She’s got a booming business and is making a lot of money and she hates it.

 

She is also the widow of a lawman. So when the DeadEye Gang leaves several dead men at the sight of a stagecoach hold-up near her home for Pine Valley, Wyoming, she helps investigate. She asks the sheriff insightful questions. She knows the law and she insists they check the bodies which have been brought to town.

When the old justice of the peace announces plans to move to Nebraska, she gets offered the job.

Newcomer to the area Brandon Nolte and his three daughters are in desperate need of dresses. Brand can’t sew and his daughters refuse to come to town wearing their ramshackle trousers and boots. Nell is thrilled to help, but Brand had no cash money for such frivolity as dresses.

And then there’s another stagecoach holdup and Nell finds herself in the crossfire of the dangerous gang.

Leave a comment…how about how desperately YOU want it to be SPRING!!! To get your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Forged in Love.

The Laws of Attraction

Book #2 Wyoming Sunrise Series

If widowed town seamstress Nell Armstrong has to make one more pair of boring chaps for the cowboys in her tiny Wyoming town, she might lose her mind. So meeting Brand Nolte, a widower father struggling to raise three girls, seems like her dream come true. Brand has no idea how to dress the girls, and Nell finally has a chance to both create beautiful dresses and teach the girls to sew.

But Nell is much more than a seamstress, and the unique legal and investigative skills and knowledge she picked up alongside her late lawman husband soon become critical when a wounded stagecoach-robbery survivor is brought to town. As danger closes in from all sides, Nell and Brand must discover why there seems to be a bull’s-eye on their backs.

Fan favorite Mary Connealy invites you back to 19th-century Wyoming for this adventuresome Western romance, complete with a budding romance, witty banter, and an absorbing mystery.

Click to pre-order from Baker Book House

Click to pre-order from Amazon

 

Forged in Love Giveaway!

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I’m doing a giveaway for
Forged in Love
Book #1 of the Wyoming Sunrise Series releasing February 28
When sparks begin to fly, can a friendship cast in iron be shaped into something more?
After surviving a brutal stagecoach robbery, Mariah Stover attempts to rebuild her life as she takes over her father’s blacksmith business, but the townspeople meet her work with disdain. She is drawn to the new diner owner as he faces similar trials in the town. When danger descends upon them, will they survive to build a life forged in love?
Find the book cover: http://cdn.bakerpublishinggroup.com/…/9780764241130.jpg…
Find the excerpt: http://cdn.bakerpublishinggroup.com/…/Excerpts…
Get 30% Off + Free Shipping at Baker Book House: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/465104
Facebook: Mary Connealy
Instagram: @maryconnealy
BookBub: Mary Connealy
It’s finally here! After a year of googling Women’s Suffrage and all related topics to bring Forged in Love to life!!! It hits the shelves next week!!!
My tough wild west blacksmith begins banging iron and falling in love on February 28th
She’s against type more than most any other character I’ve created, second in line, that comes to mind is a western painter from Wrangler in Petticoats. A guy painting in the old west, now that was a weird one.
I’m doing a giveaway. Leave a comment about how it suits you to read about characters are out of the ordinary.
Do you like damsels in distress…although honest, Mariah’s in danger so in a sense, tough as she is, she’s in some distress.
Do you like heroes that protect a weaker woman?
What are your favorite kind of heroes and heroines?
I’ll draw a name from the comments to win a copy of Forged in Love

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.

 

Merry Christmas and…the New Year is full of books!

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The Wyoming Sunrise series kicks off in February with Forged in Love

TI was inspired to write The Wyoming Sunrise Series when I found out Wyoming was the first state (then a territory) in the Union to give women the right to vote.

Wyoming.

Doesn’t that seem odd?

Then I found out it wasn’t just the right to vote…all sorts of other rights were given to women by women’s suffrage. The right of women to run for elected office. Or be appointed to office. The right to serve on a jury. (They took that away after two years, trails were just too awful for sweet little women to watch!) And I found the first woman justice of the peace in America was from Wyoming. Esther Hobart Morris.

This inspired me to have one of my heroines be the second justice of the peace in the United States.

As I researched this book, reading about all that went on in Wyoming was fascinating. They became a territory in 1868…with women voting. I read somewhere that initially they didn’t have enough people in this large state unless they included women in their citizen count. Not sure if that’s accurate based on other things I read. It sounds like men genuinely (but not unanimously) supported the right to vote for woman.

Because of this suffrage nonsense (insert sarcasm) they weren’t allowed statehood for 30 years. Why? When other states were getting granted statehood in only a few years? Because the United States refused to let them in unless they took the vote away from women.

And Wyoming adamantly refused to strip that vote from women. I also read that Utah gave women the right to vote but, when they applied for statehood, they were told, not if women can vote. So Utah stripped women of the right to votes.

So, year after year Wyoming was denied statehood. When they finally got it, the women maintained their right to vote because Wyoming just would not budge. The whole history of it was great reading.

But the part I loved was, when the word was out that THIS YEAR it was going to pass there was a riot in Washington D.C. PROTESTS against. One representative from Wyoming kept shouting the words from a telegram he’d received from the Wyoming legislature: “We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.” 

Whoever it was who was shouting it, ended up having to climb a wall somewhere to escape the mob but even as he climbed he kept yelling, over and over again, “We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.”

That story makes me smile.

Anyway, fun research for this new series. I’m hoping to get it all into the pages of the new books.

When sparks begin to fly, can a friendship cast in iron be shaped into something more?

Forged in Love

coming February 2023

Mariah Stover is left for dead and with no memory when the Deadeye Gang robs the stagecoach she’s riding in, killing both her father and brother. As she takes over her father’s blacksmith shop and tries to move forward, she soon finds herself in jeopardy and wondering–does someone know she witnessed the robbery and is still alive?

Handsome and polished Clint Roberts escaped to western Wyoming, leaving his painful memories behind. Hoping for a fresh start, he opens a diner where he creates fine dishes, but is met with harsh resistance from the townsfolk, who prefer to stick to their old ways.

Clint and Mariah are drawn together by the trials they face in town, and Clint is determined to protect Mariah at all costs when danger descends upon her home. As threats pursue them from every side, will they survive to build a life forged in love?

Click to Pre-Order

 

 

 

 

The Laws of Attraction

Coming June 2023

If widowed town seamstress Nell Armstrong has to make one more pair of boring chaps for the cowboys in her tiny Wyoming town, she might lose her mind. So meeting Brand Nolte, a widower father struggling to raise three girls, seems like her dream come true. Brand has no idea how to dress the girls, and Nell finally has a chance to both create beautiful dresses and teach the girls to sew.

But Nell is much more than a seamstress, and the unique legal and investigative skills and knowledge she picked up alongside her late lawman husband soon become critical when a wounded stagecoach-robbery survivor is brought to town. As danger closes in from all sides, Nell and Brand must discover why there seems to be a bull’s-eye on their backs.

Click to Pre-order

 

 

 

 

And because it’s Christmas time I’m including a recipe. This is a Connealy family FAVORITE.

It’s like scalloped corn combined with Mac & Cheese. 

Because my sister-in-law Mardelle brought it every year to every holiday, we’ve named it Mardelle Corn

Mardelle Corn

1 can whole corn-drained

1 can creamed corn

1 cup salad macaroni (the type isn’t important)

1 cup cubed Velveeta

1 stick butter cut up

Mix together, pour into 8 x 8 buttered casserole dish. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour, stirring halfway through.

I actually self-published a book of Family Favorite Recipes.

Leave a comment to get your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Faster than Fast Food.

And Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!

 

National Frontiers Trail Museum

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My Day at the

National Frontier Trails Museum

This picture shows the trains vs the trails in 1880

First let me say that the Santa Fe Trail information was fascinating.

I went to the museum, in Independence, Missouri, to find out about the Oregon Trail.

But the Santa Fe Trail was so unexpected that I could fill a blog post with that.

I’m setting a book, partially, on a wagon train.

Different setting for me, and I’m a little nervous about making it interesting.

But I’ve got to get these folks from Chicago to the wild west somehow, so a wagon train it is.

As I wrote, I would have said I know tons about the Oregon Trail, the American frontier and wagon trains.

Turns out I didn’t.

So a trip to Independence was born.

I ended up talking to a museum guy for a long time and he really knew everything. Very interesting guy, Travis Boley.

Then after I quizzed him for a long time, I wandered for longer still.

The Oregon Trail was first passed by fur traders on foot or horseback as early as 1811. Less than ten years after Lewis and Clark.

The trail became passable by a wagon, such as the one above, in 1836. From the most heavily traveled years, 1846-1869 it’s estimated that 400,,000 people took that trail west, including those who turned onto the California Trail. The trail declined after the Transcontinental Railway opened in 1869. Train travel was faster, cheaper and safer than wagon train travel. But these wagon trains continued in a much reduced number until 1890.

Ignore my smiling face and look in the back of that wagon, Now imagine your home. All the stuff you own. Those wagons are TINY. And you had to fit everything you owned into them.

 

As a Nebraskan, I particularly enjoyed information that concerned Nebraska.

This is info about Scottsbluff, a town in Nebraska but an actual bluff, too. Huh, never gave that much thought. But duh.

Chimney Rock is also a Nebraska landmark.

For me, when I get out of a museum, I find I’ve taken more pictures of SIGNS than artifacts. I love to read about the objects and find snapping pictures of signs helps me to remember what I saw.

I LOVED this list of all you have to carry on the wagon train.

Some interesting points: Despite what looks like a high cost, many of the things you have to bring, like oxen or mules, the wagon, the supplies, the clothes, the guns, are things you already have. And also, when you get to your destination, those things you only needed for the trip, like a team of oxen, can be sold for a good price. Yes, you need to scrape the money together to go, but once you sell it all in the high frontier market, the trip becomes mostly free.

I liked the idea of ‘jumping off points.’

Travis said the Missouri River kept getting more and more navigable (that’s a word, right?) by steamboats. As the boats kept getting farther and farther upstream, the pioneers could ride the boat farther. The jumping off points went from St. Louis to Independence, Missouri. To St Joseph, Missouri then Omaha.

Wagon train riders had to haul practical things. It was expected that someone on the train, perhaps many people, would haul their own forge. the tools were practical.

There was no room for fussy fabric or glass dishes. They needed axes and pots and wheels and parts for a broken wagon. Many more frivolous things hauled along, ended up being left behind on the trail.

I highly enjoyed my trip to the National Frontiers Trail Museum and be on the lookout for a story in my future with a wagon train. Hopefully written with a lot of good information in it.

http://www.maryconnealy.com

 

 

Something to be Thankful For

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I’m part of a Black Friday in October Sale!

Friday October 21-through-28

I put my book, Thankful for the Cowboy on sale a few days early so you can get a copy for 99 cents right now.

I also realized I’d never made this novella into a print book. So if anyone prefers print, go grab a copy, it’s on sale, too, the lowest price Kindle would allow.

 

Tom MacKinnon rides up driving a wagon with a second wagon trailing him. He and his sister builds windmills.

They’ll ask for very little money and, in exchange Lauren Drummond, newly widowed mother of four nearly grown sons, will help them learn to survive in the Sandhills of Nebraska. What to grow, what to hunt, how to build a sod house.

Tom’s windmills will save her ranch during a terrible drought.

Lauren needs three windmills before the oncoming winter freezes her few remaining, extremely shallow, ponds, or her growing herd of cattle is going to die of thirst.

She eagerly agrees to teach him the ways of the Sandhills. She’s not ready to think of another man. But Tom changes her mind. His little sister and one of her sons find love together before Tom and Lauren do.

Click to buy on Amazon