Book Two Is Released!
April 1st, 2025
Today is the release day for Book Two 1848-1891 of my biographical historical novel series A Woman of Marked Character - The Imagined Portrait of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix 1812-1891. Because I "follow" me on my Amazon author page, I got the notice of my novel being released and happily clicked on the link! When I saw "Temporarily Out of Stock" on the paperback format, I thought it was an evil April Fool's joke! In checking behind the scenes, it would appear that pre-sales have been so popular that they are currently out of stock, but two more orders are on the way. Hold tight, they'll get to you! (The Kindle e-book is for sale.) Both my books are always in stock and available at BookBaby Bookshop, an independent online book store. Enjoy the read!
April 19th:
Here's my interview in Kirkus Reviews magazine for their April 15th Indie Issue. I'm excited to be profiled in that issue for my novels, A Woman of Marked Character.
The setting for Book Two 1848-1891 of my biographical/historical novel series is Galveston, Texas, and across the Bay at Smith’s Point, where Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix lived during those years.
Contemporary road map showing Galveston Island with circles for Richmond, Wallisville, and Smith's Point.
Sarah begins a new life as a divorced woman in the booming port city of Galveston in 1848 with its wealth, epidemics, and hurricanes. A new friend, the seamstress Trinidad St. Claire, enters her world and lives in the upstairs half of the home Sarah has built. Their friendship will continue through the Civil War, shown through Trinidad's Diary, "A Requiem for My City."
Here is my Author’s Note from Book Two 1848-1891:
The magic of which I wrote in my Author's Note for Book One continued into my research and writing of Book Two. My silent promise to Sarah Ridge to write her story is now complete with the final scene of this novel.
The live oak tree at Sarah's grave under which I stood on January 8, 1991, takes on a role as a stationary character; I've honored it with a symbolic rendering in the medallion on the front cover.
Other characters jumped from the pages of Sarah's letters, family memoirs, newspapers, legal documents, and court records, of which I found many. Some of the stories I discounted or used as jumping-off places, but sometimes the specifics were so real I left them as I found them or included text verbatim, such as George Paschal's answers to Sarah's divorce Interrogatories and her passionate letter to General Magruder—and the story of the rustlers near the end of the book.
For others, I wove facts with storylines I created. Here you meet Trinidad St. Claire, a name listed in the 1850 Galveston census, a 45-year-old white woman residing at Sarah's house on Avenue H. I searched internet sources and old newspapers, even ships' manifests back to the 1830s to find that unusual name, but no record. So I created the unique woman who is Sarah's friend and whose diary "A Requiem for My City" chronicles Galveston's Civil War years.
Only one photograph remains of Sarah during her Texas life. However, in the 1865 scene when the family photograph is taken, I wrote in two more camera sittings, plus her daughter Agnes' portrait. Although at this point you don't have a background story with which to view their time in the Galveston studio, I encourage you to turn to the Part Two Illustrations section and peer into Sarah's face in the family photograph—and her Van Buren portrait years earlier in Part One Illustrations—to imagine her as you read and as she ages in this book from age 36 to 79. Or is it 70? She teases us with her age, as you will see in the story.
I endeavored to write with even strokes the horror and brutality of the Civil War years between the Rebels and the Yankees. As Sarah says in Chapter 1 of Book One, "Who, then is the arbiter of wrong? To the multitudinous evils; brutality, murder, grievous crimes? Again, principles are set by one party's belief to which the other party adheres or chooses to refute."
But wrong is wrong and slavery is wrong. In Sarah's story I've imagined how she evolved, and with only a bit of actual documentation about her former slave, Stephen, I strove to show her enslaved servants in a fictional but believable light.
From building a home and creating a rewarding life in antebellum Galveston as a divorced woman to pioneer life on an isolated cattle ranch with a new husband, Sarah's journey continues.
Come with me now as the steamboat pulls up to the wharf in Galveston Harbor in June 1848 and enjoy the final story of The Imagined Portrait of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix.