Finished:
Civil War Novel, Untitled
The Ides of March Have Nothing on April
A relic from the Civil War. A prophecy yet unfullfilled. A family heirloom gone missing. And the girl bound to them all by her birth.
Riley Dunn is more than the "black sheep" of the family, she's the entire "flock". Dragged down to New Orleans kicking and screaming by her mother, Riley is forced to endure the extravagant funeral and dividing of the estate of her dearly departed grandmother. And that includes cleaning. Coming across a worn, old diary in a hope chest in the attic of the family plantation, she finds herself drawn to the story of the young woman written within. As the diary leads her further and further into the madness of the War Between the States, Riley soon becomes engulfed in the search of a precious family heirloom. But the heirloom has more than just sentimental value linked to it- it has Riley's own fate linked as well. For the girl it belonged to possessed a traitorous secret and suffered a devestating fate. A fate Riley will experience if she fails. The clock is ticking, and April 13th isn't that far away.
After all, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
*
In Progress:
The Sound of Sickness
"Sickness has returned.
Cover your ears and hold your breath.
Breathing in could result in death."
Alexi Michaels has been surrounded by Tuberculosis his entire life. With his mother, he plays docent at the Waverly Hills Sanitorium to tourists in Hawaiian shirts and flip flops, telling them the history of this sad and disturbing chapter in Kentucky's history.
That same evening, while taking a private night tour of the decaying building, Alexi meets Marit, a fourteen-year-old girl who resides at the sanitorium while she slowly dies of TB.She's watched and waited for Alexi to arrive, spending decades within Waverly's rotting walls, a spiritual shell of the girl she once was.
Over time, Alexi begins to win Marit's trust, and using a series of family photographs, Marit tells him her unfortunate story. She knows all the secrets and stories of the hospital, including those of her unlucky family members- both hospital resident and worker.
But Marit has a secret. A secret that sent her to an early grave. A secret she's willing to share with Alexi if he gives her something in return.
Something that, to Marit- like every other patient at Waverly Hills- is worth more than its weight in gold.
*
The Romantic Egotists
"I grew up among the great artists of Paris- Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley; Ezra Pound and William Faulkner, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice Toklas, and of course my parents, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald."
It is with these very words, that Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald takes us back to those long ago nights in Paris; when the world was still recovering from the destruction of the Great War, when Russia was trying to reassemble the shattered pieces of itself after the bloody fall of the Romanov dynasty and Germany was allowing a man called Hitler to start taking control.
In Paris, the wave of painters, writers, dancers and playwrights crashes upon its shores like the Allies upon the European coast. Sex, drugs and alcohol run the streets of grand ol' Paris, corrupting the mind and setting in motion the wheels of rebellion. It is here, in Paris, at 27 Rue de Fluerus, that a group of expatriate Americans meet and begin turning out some of the greatest literature, art and dance of the twentieth century.
The child of the couple forever known as the "Romantic Egotists"- the real beautiful and damned- Scottie tries hard to come into her own during those muggy Paris nights, despite the constant push and pull of her mother's erratic behavior and her father's egotistic criticisms. Here, among the stink of smoke and smell of alcohol, surrounded by lust, love and sex, young Scottie sips her first taste of jealousy, and discovers the cost of being famous. Into this world, Frances Fitzgerald is thrust, a silent witness to the trials, tribulations, darkness and light of a generation defined as forever "Lost."
*
In the Shadow of the Guillotine
A cry for royal blood. A young girl swept up in the fire of revolution. France's forgotten heroine. Charlotte Corday.
While the reign of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette crumbles, and the peasants cry for revolution, young Charlotte Corday gets carried away by the romanticism of it all. At the premature age of twenty-five, Charlotte discovers the complications of love, starvation and fear invoked by the Reign of Terror.
Soon, Charlotte gets pulled into a plot to murder Jean-Paul Marat, the very man responsible for the revolt against the royals. With the threat of civil war looming in the nearness of France's uncertain future, Charlotte accepts an unlikely task- commit murder, and become a savior to France. More importantly, murder the man responsible for the Reign of Terror.
However, with her one simple action, Charlotte soon finds herself facing the sharp blade of the guillotine, not the last of its vicitims. And with the cut of the blade, she fades into history, one of France's many forgotten- a girl who "killed one man to save 100,000."
*
The Dark Side of Wonderland
"How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
When ten-year-old Alice Liddell meets Charles Dodgson, she has no way of understanding the hold she has over the man. A writer who spends the majority of his life secluded from others, Dodgson begins his beloved children's classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with her in mind as the title character.
As Alice grows into a striking young woman, she pulls further and further away from Dodgson, who tries desperately to keep his hold on the little girl who inspired him to write Wonderland. Once again reunited when she turns fifteen, the two begin a torrid affair- one as complex, spine-tingling and curious as the Wonderland that Alice finds herself falling into. But Dodgson, now known to the literary world as Lewis Carroll, exerts a hold over the young Liddell girl that goes far beyond innocent love.
Over the course of their affair- and into the years after- Alice discovers it was more than just innocent interest in her that Carroll possessed. A need to control, a need to possess her- in more than just name- took hold of the writer, and soon, Alice discovers that Carroll has given in to the madness of Wonderland- the very madness he created for her.
*
Companion, Cherished
"Slavery is an abomination and must be loudly proclaimed as such. But I own that neither I nor any man has any yet immediate solution to the problem..... For if Congress has a power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free. That remains to be seen..."
- Thomas Jefferson
Brooding. Quiet. Talented. Radical.
Thomas Jefferson, our third president, the redheaded Virginian who built Monticello was first and foremost, a father. When Patsy Jefferson turns seventeen in the fall of 1789, her father, then Minister to France, has buried both his wife and a child. She finds hereself as head of the household, stepping in to take her mother's place as caregiver. As France begins its own revolution towards freedom from the monarchy, Patsy watches her beloved father take on the weight of the world.
When they finally return to America, Jefferson and the Adamses'- John and Abigail- friendship only grows stronger. Over the course of the next several years, the friendship between Jefferson and Adams hits many high and low roads- including a fraying that destroys it completely.
But when Abigail dies, Patsy sees her chance to get the two men talking again, and pushes her father to write back to John. Over their long correspondence, Patsy reads aloud the letters Jefferson kept so close to his heart. And when he dies in 1826, Patsy must now find a way to move on without her beloved father.
