Please welcome Allison Merritt to the blog today to tell us a little more about her new release.
I've written about a lot of places--in my steampunk romance
series, the characters sometimes start out in one place and end up somewhere
entirely different. And in The Convict and the Cattleman, I went around the world,
setting that novel in Australia.
So what lured me into writing a novel set close to home?
I've entertained the idea for a while, played with a couple
of ideas, then abandoned them in favor of other projects. Right before
Christmas in 2012, my husband and I were visiting Wilson's Creek National
Battlefield for the annual luminary celebration--they "light" candles
for the 2,359 casualties of the battle. The candles are really battery powered,
stuck in sacks weighed down with sand to make a luminary that guides you along
the 5-mile-ish tour road. The nighttime drive includes a tour of the Ray House,
a historical home that served as a hospital for the wounded and dying. I'd been
in the house before, but never at night when the only lights are candles, lamps on desks or bureaus and the fireplaces.
I posted the photographs on my blog and you can visit this
link
to see them for yourself. It was eerie and beautiful at the same time, and made
me think about how hard life was in the 19th century.
