Many apologies for the long lapse in communications, but I've been diligently working on The Pretenders. I'd hoped to finish in time to enter it into the 2018 RITA contest, but since the contest opens next week and The Pretenders is about fifty or so pages short of being published, it looks like a no-go for the RITA contest this time around. That being said, my expectation to publish The Pretenders in late 2018 has now moved to January 2019. I hate to push it back a month, but I'd rather do that and put out my best writing instead of rush and risk releasing material that isn't up to par.

But wait! As a bit of a consolation prize to those readers out there patiently waiting on my newest release, I'm going to post the prologue as part of this blog entry. Hooray! So read on and I hope you enjoy! I'll also post the prologue over on the individual book page for The Pretenders.

​Prologue: “Girl Meets Boy”
Chicago, Illinois
March 1865
 
“Don’t be scared,” Ivy crooned. “I won’t hurt you.”

Her softly spoken assurance lured the ball of matted white fur another cautious inch closer. She could almost touch it now. Maintaining the patient crouch she’d held for the past six minutes, Ivy Porter cheerfully patted her knees again, this latest invitation finally inspiring the bashful puppy to scuttle within reach.

“That’s it. Oh, yes, that’s an awfully good pup.”

A victorious smile spread across the eight-year-old’s face the moment her fingers sank into the greasy fur. The scruffy animal hesitantly wagged its tail, inspiring Ivy’s soft touch to develop into hardier strokes and pats, with the occasional joyous nuzzle a foregone conclusion. The unpleasant odors of urine and rancid meat filled her nostrils every time she burrowed her face into its coat for a cuddle, but the little girl didn’t care. The spindly tail picked up speed, and it wasn’t long before the rump it was attached to was shaking back and forth with remarkable enthusiasm.

She now had something to love.

“Hey!” An outraged voice punctured the joyous moment. “That there’s my dog! Take your thieving hands off him!”

The startled puppy twisted and scampered away. Its clumsy gait ended at the far end of the alleyway where an equally grubby boy anxiously shifted from foot to foot. Had they recently rolled around together in the same pile of stinky trash? He scooped the animal possessively into his thin arms and sharply ordered, “Get your own dog and leave mine alone!” That said, he dashed away, a warning glare over one shoulder his parting shot.

Ivy watched the boy and his dog disappear through the broken window of a dilapidated factory. The tips of her fingers still tingled with the warm, coarse feel of the puppy’s fur. It did no good to pine for things that could never be, or so Grammy had always said; her hand quickly squeezed into a small fist to squash the glorious sensation.

“I’m sorry, but it’s just you and me again, Sarah,” she said somberly, reaching into the pocket of her grimy pinafore and withdrawing a stuffed cotton doll. Sarah’s crosswheel button eyes stared back vacantly, the stitched mouth remained fixed in its perpetual smile.

How Ivy envied Sarah and her perpetual smile.

“Tut-tut, don’t cry.” She stroked the yarn hair in comfort. A rat scurried past, causing her to gasp and shrink back. She’d awakened last night screaming, one of the city’s plentiful rodents gnawing on her leg just like she used to gnaw on Grammy’s fried chicken drumsticks. “Big girls don’t cry, and we’re both big girls now.” Glancing apprehensively up and down the deserted alleyway, she hugged Sarah to her thin chest. “We’re gonna be fine. You’ll see.”

Straightening, Ivy took a tentative step toward the street, but she couldn’t prevent a wistful glance over her shoulder. She’d liked that dog. It was a shame it had to belong to someone else.

Her shoulders slumped miserably as she neared the noisy, congested thoroughfare. She dreaded walking among all those people again. They bumped into her as if she didn’t exist, and some of them yelled at her whenever she stumbled and dared clutch at their clothes to keep from falling. They said she was dirty, that her nose ran, and they were always slapping and shoving to make her go away. Once, a man had offered to help her, but he’d lied and tried to put his hand up her dress. No one was nice to her, and she no longer recognized what neighborhood she was in. Wherever she was, most of the people who lived here smelled like the grog shops her daddy used to visit when she’d still had a daddy. They liked to shoot their guns a lot too, like they were having fun and thought they were firecrackers. Yesterday, she’d seen a man lying dead by a lamppost with a bullet hole in his chest, so maybe not everyone shooting was having fun.

Get your own dog and leave mine alone!

Ivy’s pace slowed, and somehow the bony shoulders beneath her tattered calico dress found the gumption to straighten themselves. She didn’t want to find her own dog. She wanted that dog.

​I received my inspiration for the chapter in Watermark where the steamboat explodes and ultimately sinks by reading the fantastic nonfiction book, The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster by Jerry O. Potter. Now, if you’re like me, you probably immediately equate the luxury liner Titanic as the most recognizable and thereby the deadliest maritime disaster, but you’d be wrong. Over 1800 men died on the Sultana—nearly 300 more than did die on the Titanic. The Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River in April 1865, and hardly anyone but the most scholarly of history buffs knows anything about it. And why is that? Because it happened in the same month as the end of the American Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination. Sadly, it got lost in the headlines.
 
Sort of brings a lump to your throat to think about all those forgotten dead.
 
Like a lot of events in history, truth is stranger than fiction. The Sultana was overcrowded with Union soldiers newly released from their miserable internments at Cahaba and Andersonville prisons. The war was over, and they were going home to their families, but one too many temporary patches on a boiler engine resulted in an explosion that killed hundreds and sent hundreds more into the Mississippi River to drown.
 
The book is gripping and full of personal accounts that will chill your blood and make your heart pound with fear. It’s a survival story, but it’s also a sad testament to human greed and incompetence. The last several pages consist of a somber passenger manifest with asterisks denoting who lived and who died.

The fear that was retold by the Sultana survivors helped me imagine what it might be like for Juno in a similar situation. Although she wasn’t on the steamboat that explodes in Watermark, she’s close enough to get thrown into the Mississippi from the percussion blast. To be swept along downriver while watching the steamboat break apart and burn had to have been terrifying, but even worse, I would imagine, would be having to fight for your life as panicked survivors tried climbing on top of you. Juno experiences something similar, and one can only imagine how desperate such a situation would be.

If you like survival stories, history, and the civil war, The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster by Jerry O. Potter, is still available on Amazon by clicking here.

​Hello again, folks! Well, as far as my new job is concerned, I’m no insurance prodigy. I work in an eye surgery center, and all my misconceptions that I’m a fairly intelligent person have flown out the window in the ten weeks that I’ve been employed there. I have zero talent for insurance calculations and even less for CPT and diagnosis coding. Woe-is-me.
 
As for news on the writing forefront, now that I’m employed again (gainfully, if not competently) I finally scraped up the extra funds and entered Watermark in a couple of RWA chapter contests. I’m pretty excited about that! A little extra exposure is always a good thing in an industry that is always acquiring new authors every day. I’ll keep you updated as soon as I hear anything! I believe the finalists will be announced in late summer/early fall.
 
As for The Pretenders, I’ve finally been able to find the time to jump back in to my writing, so I have high hopes that it will be released later this year! Again, I’ll be sure to pass along any significant updates as soon as I have them.

I realize I've been uncharacteristically absent on my blog for the past several weeks, but I finally got a new job after nearly nine months being unemployed! It's been a huge adjustment, and I've had zero time for my writing. My hope is that things will smooth out in a few more weeks and I'll have more leisure time to maintain my blog and work on The Pretenders, my third book which is currently in-progress.

Again, sorry for the lack of updates on my website, but fingers crossed that I'll get back to some normalcy soon enough. Thanks for your patience and check back again in a month or so!

The poor cat died in the box again.
 
Alas, such is the way with contests. Competition is stiff, and the chances to break out from the crowd are slim. Like last year, I may rally and enter Watermark in some individual RWA chapter contests, but that decision must wait for now since, ahem, I’m still unemployed after being laid-off last year (my day job was social work). Luckily, there’s chapter contests that are offered throughout the year, so there’s still an opportunity to become gainfully employed and afford to enter an additional contest or two this year. Although I did enter Watermark in the Carolyn Reader’s Choice Award as well, and finalists will be announced in early April, so who knows? As I always say, chin up, buttercup! Nobody likes a crybaby.
 
Now, as for the RITA finalists this year, here’s the list! I was so pleased to see several self-published books made the cut this year! I’ve already gone through and picked some books out that I’m eager to start reading, so don’t miss your opportunity to do the same. The RITA finalists are a great way to find new authors that might soon become some of your favorites. Enjoy!

It’s true that some parts of writing are effortless. Sometimes, a scene almost writes itself, and the little creative muses are working their magic overtime. Other times, the muses are nowhere to be seen, or worse, they’re laughing and giving you the bird.
 
For those who haven’t read Watermark yet, spoiler alerts ahead! For those who have, Corbin Sweeney, the myopic river pirate who is interrogated by Malcolm early in the book, was actually killed by Malcolm in the first draft. And yet, no matter how many times I rewrote the scene, there was no way I could pull off Corbin’s execution without Malcolm coming across as, er, well, a little bananas. Sure, he had excellent justification for executing him—he’d been sanctioned by the townspeople of Cassville to do so, and the story takes place in a time where lawmen were few and far between in that area of the country--but none of those rationalizations translated onto the page. The scene simply came across as too gruesome; as a result, my lovely hero came across as a tad homicidal. Yikes.
 
Thus began a research quest for deaths related to near-drownings, and hooray! The creative muses sat up and cheered. There’s a rare complication with secondary drownings which involves water entering the lungs and causing a condition called pulmonary edema. Secondary drownings mainly affect children, though, and can take up to 24 hours to fully manifest, but further research revealed that pulmonary edema can result from other conditions besides secondary drowning—pneumonia, heart failure, and as a major complication of trauma victims, to name a few.
​
According to emedicinehealth, “Non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema is less common and occurs because of damage to the lung tissue and subsequent inflammation of lung tissue. This can cause the tissue that lines the structures of the lung to swell and leak fluid into the alveoli and the surrounding lung tissue. Again, this increases the distance necessary for oxygen to travel to reach the bloodstream.” Symptoms are excessive sweating, shortness of breath, wheezing, and pink, foamy sputum.

Sound familiar? And so the details of Corbin Sweeney’s death fell into place. Although our main characters were never privy to the particulars, Corbin ultimately perished from a massive pulmonary edema triggered by a blunt-force chest injury that occurred during the fight on the keelboat. Mission accomplished! My rewrite allowed my hero to avoid appearing a tad homicidal, and I had fun looking up various morbid conditions that can lead to a speedy death. Win-win! Ah, the joys of writing…

While researching Watermark, there were several resources I mined in order to learn about what life would have been like living on the Mississippi River. One of my favorite and undeniably one of the most prolific resources I came across was a website called, “Steamboat Times, A Pictorial History of the Mississippi Steamboating Era.” I don’t believe the site has been updated for several years, but the site itself is still alive and well in that eternal ether called the internet.
 
I came across “Steamboat Times” early in my research and was amazed at the architect’s thoroughness. In terms of design, the website is easily navigable with pages broken down into specific vessels: keelboats, flatboats, rafts, steamboats, and so on. It’s also visually rich; as the website title says, it’s a pictorial history and not simply dry facts. There’s a remarkable compilation of daguerreotypes, drawings, watercolors, wood engravings, and maps that depict every vessel imaginable. In addition, the site is a wealth of information on dimensions, steamboat races, the life of boatmen, living conditions, and the dangers they faced on the river. Firsthand accounts of the era are depicted in letters, diary entries, and even court cases.
 
If you have any interest in what it was like to work and live on the river during the 19th century, or even if you just want to see an example of what Malcolm’s flatboat would have looked like, visit “Steamboat Times, A Pictorial History of the Mississippi Steamboating Era” by clicking here.

I’m happy to announce that award-winning author Regan Walker has reviewed Watermark on her historical romance blog! Click here to read the review.