I have a philosophy of writing that is simple: if it’s fiction, call it fiction; if it really happened, call it history. Don’t confuse the two. … More History by Any Other Facts Is Fiction
Antebellum hairstyles most often were long, but there were women who cut their hair short and there always was a reason why. … More Yes, They Sometimes Wore Their Hair Short
Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut summed up the law thus: “There is no slave, after all, like a wife.” To write accurate historical fiction, the female characters must live with the ugly truth that women had virtually no rights in the antebellum South. Whatever romanticized historical fiction may say, Rhett Butler can’t compare with knowing “all men are created equal” means men and women have equal protection under the law. … More One Reason They Didn’t Smile
The Civil War? The War Between the States? The War of Northern Aggression? The War of the Rebellion? Even the very names have ardent proponents. The War is enough said. … More What to call The War that killed 750,000 Americans
The only reason a man registers a cattle brand is to differentiate his stock from other people’s. And that fact is what led me to a new angle on a story that’s been told more times than a house has nails. It’s not easy to entice people to read a story they’ve heard before. The … More A new look for a well-known tale
Tramping from Civil War battlefields to the pastures of the historic Waggoner Ranch, I wore out my boots to get the story right. … More Worn out in the pursuit of authenticity
You might say I started my career in fiction in the fourth grade, when I wrote serial novels that I passed around to the girls in my class. These novels, self-illustrated in pencil, coincidentally featured characters with the same names as the heroines in Little Women, my favorite book at the time. I learned the … More Welcome to the continuing story
