Another Visit from My Granddaughter
My daughter and granddaughter visited us again over Memorial Day weekend. The baby is now almost 16 months old and about to move to the toddler room at her day care center. She can do so many things! When I last saw her in early February, she was just a year old and barely walking. […]
Use of Gold as Currency and the Coinage Act of 1873
I submitted a rough draft of a scene to my critique group last week about the transportation of gold dust from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1873. My intent was to use that gold dust as something that could be stolen. My writing partners and I got into a discussion about the weight of the […]
A Visit To the Johnson County (Kansas) Museum
Not long ago, my husband and I decided we needed a break in our routine, so we took a day to go to the Johnson County Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. My husband had wanted to see the 1950s all-electric house that is part of the museum for a long time, and we finally made […]
I Miss My Photographs
I wrote last month about organizing my photographs so I could have them digitized. Late in April, I took them to a woman whose business is to digitize photographs and other mementos. I had boxes and boxes of snapshots, formal portraits, certificates, and other memorabilia. I left everything with her. And now I miss them […]
A Link to My Newsletter
On the first day of every month, I send out a newsletter to subscribers. Like this blog, it describes my life and writing and books I’ve read for family, friends and readers. Because this post is scheduled on the same day as my newsletter, I am using the opportunity to send out a link to […]
People’s Movement Between Locations in the West
One thing that surprises me as I research the settlement of the American West is how much some pioneers moved around in the new territory. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised because many of these people—particularly the men—were intrepid explorers or filled with wanderlust. Daniel Boone is one famous example. He was born in Pennsylvania, […]
Marketing Tools I Should Use More Often
It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers cannot spend all their time writing. Sometimes, they must market the writing they produce. For many writers, this is an uncomfortable task. They prefer writing to marketing. And there are many people who tell them that their most important task is to produce a good book that […]
National Siblings Day
April 10 is National Siblings Day. Although I have written many posts about siblings—my siblings, my mother and her brother, my father and his sister, and my own children as siblings—I have never posted specifically about National Siblings Day. National Siblings Day is a day to celebrate one’s siblings. It was established in 1995, so […]
Tossing Treasures
I’ve been through a first round of sorting most of my old photographs now, and I’ve thrown out a lot of them. The remainder are mostly grouped by year. I am thankful for my daughter’s efforts in the late 1990s to sort the photos we had then, and I am thankful that at some point […]
The Northern Pacific Railroad
The importance of rail development in the West is one of the plot lines in my current work-in-progress. Recently, I’ve been researching the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was the third transcontinental railroad completed in the U.S.. The Northern Pacific line wasn’t finished until 1883—almost a generation after 1860, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific […]