An Old Familiar Place

I'm at the finish line with Rachel, After the Darkness . It is all with the publisher, and I am now at their mercy for a beautiful book block and cover. I can hardly wait. It's always fun to watch this part of the process unfold and to see the splendid handiwork of the design team. I do love my publisher! Here's a little excerpt from the story. I hope it will make you thirst for more! By Far the Greatest Rachel glanced toward the door where she had left the dress on the wood hanger her mother had packed in the side of the big box. She knew I would have no way of hanging it, thought Rachel. Madeleine Beauregard does think of everything. Rachel touched it again, lost in the feel of luxurious fabric, the fragrance of store-bought finery. Her head was spinning from the sudden eruption of a thousand possibilities. In an anxious moment, she removed the skirt from the hanger and slipped it to her slender waist, then the jacket, fastening the long row of covered butt...

Healing Holly Springs is a beautiful little town South of Memphis where Grant winter quartered in November and December of 1862. He brought his lovely wife, Julia, and his son those weeks he spent in North Mississippi, though they did not stay in the same house. Grant had work to do, but he missed them and took some risks with their safety to have them near him, in fact just a few houses down from him on Salem Street . His love of family brought out the human side of a man who, from a military perspective, was ruthless and heartless. JOAB features the Union General that was most hated by the South, probably as much as the North hated our Robert E. Lee. But that was the hard cold facts of War. Those who gave the orders to kill and destroy were the recipients of the height of hatred, and that was true for both sides. One thing was certain, Grant always picked the loveliest of the South's antebellum homes as his headquarters. In Holly Springs, Oxford, Vicksburg, Natchez—it was o...