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Thursday, October 21, 2010

A CHANGE OF VENUE

In my last post I mentioned that in writing Blood Offerings and Season of Terror, my fiction/nonfiction pairing about the murderous Espinosas of Civil War-era Colorado, I was feeling a strong tug westward and hoped to find a way to relocate to that fascinating and beautiful region, which is the original home of my wife Ruth.

In the time since, however, that goal has seemed to go glimmering thanks to the stubbornly bad economy. Consequently I've reconsidered my options and have come to the conclusion I should just stay put here in Western North Carolina for the foreseeable future and turn my energies back to a project I abandoned two years ago--a sequel to my Revolutionary War novel Nor the Battle to the Strong.

Back in 2008 I stopped working on this project--a book which I call The Sunshine of Better Fortune--because my fancy was captured by the sinister Espinosas. Now that they're out of my system, I'm eager to find out what happens to my 18th-century lovers, James Johnson and Agnes Baker, and to my favorite Revolutionary General, Nathaniel Greene, as well as to numerous other characters new and old who will, I hope, tell readers the fascinating untold story of how America's freedom was ultimately won, not at Yorktown in 1781 as the school books would have us believe but around Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia as late as 1783. I've resumed work on the sequel, which ran 200-odd pages when I quit on it two years back--and so far I'm feeling pretty good about the direction the writing is taking.

I'm doing this while shopping the Espinosa manuscripts around, so in case you're wondering, I still haven't given up on my Colorado serial killers.

By the way, I have to thank my publicist Britt Kaufmann for updating my website which, as those of you who may have checked it in the last year or so know, I have allowed to languish pretty much unattended. I pledge to do better in the future.

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