- Books, Contest, gratitude, marketing, News, novel, Orphan Train, Sibylline Press, The Bereaved, writing
Goodreads Giveaway throughout August!
The Bereaved comes out in August, and the launch party is days away. I wanted to share some fun stuff with you. For one, there’s a Goodreads Giveaway going now through the end of the month. (Click the link there to enter.) No charge to enter, of course. Don’t be silly. Of course I want you to win a copy! Then there’s The Bereaved book trailer. I’m working on posting it to the site here; it goes live on Friday on social media. Which, by the way, for me now is mostly Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, although I am definitely on TikTok, and I have a toe in the water…
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Excitement Builds…
It has been a long winter and spring, and we are finally in the home stretch before The Bereaved arrives at bookstores and Kindles everywhere. Excited? YES. Happy? Thrilled! Nervous? Not really. Tired? Energized! Big plans? Yes! I loved this “Eye” artwork and was so happy when Sibylline’s art director chose to use it on the cover. I’m leaving the cover image large so you can see the details, and I’ll tell you more about it. Take a look at how it turned out: The theme is Victorian mourning, and the Eye artwork centers the book cover. The background is a flocked Victorian wallpaper. It was more golden in an…
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Merry Land
We owned property in Virginia and we owned property in Maryland, and unfree people were part of that chattel property at the time. There is very little left of the actual plantations in the state of Maryland, but surprisingly, there is a fairly large influence left behind. Our Bailey, Upshaw and Hillary ancestors lived in Maryland in the 1700s and claimed land plats that were very large in comparison to the quarter sections of land in the Southern states. We visited the Largo and Marlboro areas in Maryland to find traces of the former Largo, Meadows, and Beall’s Pleasure, and found essentially nothing like avenues of trees, brick houses or…
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Thoughts on Remembering
We have been in Virginia for some days now, heading first to Accomack County, and thence to Chincoteague, where we had two days of beach, birds, and a boat. I posted a few videos and counted birds. Seeing the bald eagles made my day, and more views of cardinals, Carolina wrens and chickadees, and the black vulture, plus seabirds, added to my pleasure. We had meant to go to Williamsburg and see the homes and buildings but we ended up going to the Jamestown archaeological site instead, which was less about reproducing the past and more about revealing it. Let’s just say I didn’t realize they had resorted to cannibalism.…
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Chesapeake! and Ghosts
“On your left, hidden almost totally by the trees, is Warwick, whose oldest section is believed to date back to the 17th century. In 1749, the house’s mistress, Rachel Revell Upshur, was bitten by a rabid fox and developed rabies. Her servants smothered her in her feather bed to end her suffering. There are tales of ghostly visitations by Rachel, and when it rains, it is said, her blood still appears on the doorstep of Warwick, left there when she was carried into the house after the fox attack.” — Washington Post, March 31, 1989 So we went here yesterday. It was a little off the beaten path but worth…
