Blog Name Change

 
This blog's name is changing because my upcoming novel is the first of my four books not to focus on the American Civil War. (It does, however, have one character who starts a couple of conversations about Ulysses S. Grant -- because I am apparently incapable of writing a book without mentioning the man.)

The book on the left is my only previous novel, set in 1885, and published in 2018 by Square Circle Press of Schenectady which did a good job with it. Unfortunately, that small press will be going out of business this year, so order now to get your copy. I had a heads-up something like this was coming when I contacted them last year regarding my new book, and that was one of the things pushing me toward self-publishing.

The other book pictured is a novel I just read by Jim Kunstler, who lives not far from me in upstate New York. It's an entertaining, sort-of historical novel set in 1963, just after the JFK assassination, and one of the characters is the author J.D. Salinger. My soon-to-be-published, sort-of historical but also detective story is set in 1975 in the same general area as Kunstler's. It has a major character who is about as famous as Salinger, a writer, social-religious activist, and pacifist. That last attribute seems timely these days, when the most pressing questions are not about old wars but the threat of new ones, around the world and here in the United States, where avoiding civil warfare seems like an urgent priority.

Which doesn't mean I'll stop writing about the 1860s here. But not everyone in America then joined up for the duration. Sam Clemens headed west for Nevada and California, while Martin Henry Freeman voyaged east to Liberia.