Sorry I have been off line for such a long time. These days I’m getting questions about when my next book will be out. Well, hard to give you a date. I have written the first third, but as you know I work full time, and though I mean to write when I get home my brain is pretty tired. I can give you some teasers though. The main character in my second book is Fianna. We met her as a child in Chicago in ‘Longing for Home’. My second book starts when Fianna is 13 and still in Chicago. Yes, you will see Seamus and Irena again, from Fianna’s eyes.
In Longing for Home I explored my personal heritage by looking at Irish Americans and Slovenian Americans and I had a great time telling a story. I really wanted to think about what life might have been like for my great grandparents. In the next book (no title yet) I’m spending time exploring my professional heritage. I’ve been a nurse for more than 25 years. There is so much to be said about what it is like to be a nurse. I’m going to tell it with fiction because it is more fun and because then the reader can step into the character and ‘live’ the life of a nurse. Fianna is a nurse in World War I. I’m becoming fascinated with WWI and with how nurses worked then. The techniques of caring for people are of course much different. However, the challenges of caring for people are the same. How will Fianna take care of herself as she confronts devastating injuries? How will she feel like she has done enough when many of her patients die? How does she humanize the soldiers even as she is overwhelmed by the number of people who need her care? I don’t know the answers yet. I look forward to discovering them and to really getting to know Fianna.
My own experiences inform my writing, but the story is about so much more than me. I’ll keep it historically accurate and I’ll continue to make the characters the primary focus. When you get down to it, what makes history so interesting isn’t the facts and figures and the dates, but the people who inhabit the history. I want to know what they did and honor the work that provided the basis for the work that I do now. It should be interesting. I’ll be better at checking in here and letting you know what I’m discovering on the way.
I seriously can not wait!