Last week during the free days arranged by Elk Lake Publishing Inc. on Amazon, readers picked up 1,445 copies of The Lady Fugitive, the first book in my Peaches and Dreams series.
Readers are interested in the sequel, Peach Blossom Rancher, which isn't free but it's worth every cent of the $3.95 cost.
Often other authors ask where I did my research on that book. The Lady Fugitive is based on my maternal grandparents on things I heard they did and experienced, but it's not a true historical. I knew about some major points in their lives, but when information is handed down from
In contrast, the sub-plot of Peach Blossom Rancher grew out of my experience covering the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, a former asylum, on my beat as a reporter for The Pueblo Chieftain.
Yet it's still fiction. The characters never lived. Yet some of the factual information about how people were diagnosed as being imbeciles in the early 1900s, where the story is set, comes from data supplied to me by that mental hospital.
The main plot occurs on a peach/horse ranch, with which I am familiar because I worked in that setting in my teens and I worked in a packing shed. Yet research came in on how to bring a neglected orchard back to its former glory. I needed more information on horses, too.
Mental illness comes in when the woman the rancher hopes to marry decides to help one of her father's law associates take an asylum to court because of misdiagnoses.
But then, as with all plots, complications happen. John Lincoln Parks, the rancher, stumbles over a body in his barn and he's jailed for murder, a neighbor rancher thinks she's in love with John, the woman John wants to marry decides to go back to practicing law. Throw in a big sow and a bunch of little pigs, overcrowded rabbit hutches, a kid who is a bundle of laughs, and two wonderful black servants who inspire, love, and encourage John and the whole family.
Will John be able to restore the ranch? Will those wrongfully diagnosed as insane be released? Will he find a wife?
Get Peach Blossom Rancher.
No comments:
Post a Comment