Cover for A CHRISTMAS PROMISE

It has been a busy week due to my novel, FAMILY SECRETS published by Fire Star Press, being released and available for sale yesterday and preparing for the online release party to be held this Saturday, November 1st. But, I have another story being published I need to announce. Who can not like that kind of busy?

I wish to share the beautiful cover for my short story (15,000 words, not quite a novella, but just right for the busy holiday season coming up) titled A Christmas Promise. It is scheduled to be released on November 6th by Prairie Rose Publications.

There are some tidbits about this story:

After twenty years in the cavalry, a sergeant at Fort Laramie plans to muster out of the Army in order to go into ranching--and start a family. A new widow, grateful to have work as a housekeeper, struggles to provide Christmas gifts for her two children. An eleven year-old boy, still fiercely loyal to the dead father who neglected him while alive,endeavors to learn how to grow to be a man. A younger sister is starved for the attention and affection only a father can give. This heartwarming tale of a bleak Christmas set in 1873 Wyoming tells of the gift of second chances and a promise for a brighter future.

Release Day! FAMILY SECRETS is published

Today I am happy to announce that my novel, Family Secrets, is published. It is now available from the following vendors:

1. Amazon for Kindle.

2. Amazon as a print book.

3. Barnes & Noble for Nook.

4. Smashwords, in which the book can be downloaded to your computer or tablet in several formats.

The following is the novel description:

Jennie Graves Howell has a secret, including being thought of as a loyal wife to her husband serving in Afghanistan, a husband who has demanded a divorce.

Jennie’s family do not want her to delve into the past. Grandpa Mike refuses to talk about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the aftermath. He wants the biggest mistake he ever made to remain hidden in the past, including family members Jennie never heard about until hints of their existence begin to seep through the cracks of secrecy.

Her new friends at the Golden Oaks Family Ties club are willing to teach Jennie the skills she needs to unlock her family’s secrets, but is she willing and emotionally strong enough to learn what her family has kept hidden?

The following excerpt tells how Jennie starts her journey of discovery into revealing her family's secrets:

            Jennie chatted with Garrett and her parents through the meal. She waited towards the end to execute her plan, but she knew she better catch her parents before they left the table if she wanted some answers about the family. When she judged it to be just the right moment, she fished the paper with her questions from her jeans pocket. Keeping her tone light and casual, she asked her first question regarding the full, legal names of her grandparents?

            Christy glared at Jennie, a frown creasing her face. “What brought this on?”

          “Oh, I was sharing a table in the library with our neighbor, Mrs. Moore, and we started talking about what she does for a living. I told her I knew your full names, but I also realized that I’m not sure of the first and middle names of my grandparents. So, she helped me put together a list so I could learn more about my family.”

            “What kind of information about the family?” Christy demanded sharply.

            Jennie hesitated as she picked up on the concern in her mother’s voice. She looked up to see her mother’s expression hard and forbidding as a high stone wall. Jennie realized she needed to reassure her of her intentions.

         "You know, like the full, legal names of my grandparents, for starters,” I said. “Grandpa, Grandma, Granddad and Nana are okay when I’m around them, but I know that’s not what is on their birth certificates.”

            Jennie waited, but neither of her parents spoke. In the silence, broken only by Garrett making airplane noises as he swooped his fork over his plate, Jennie noticed that her father was not looking at her. He was intently watching her mother. Something was going on, but Jennie could not guess what it might be.

            “I guess that would be okay,” Jennie’s mom finally said.

            Jennie’s dad was the next to speak. “My father’s full name is John Kevin and the last name is Graves, of course. My mother’s name is Amy Renate Walding.”

            Then Christy told Jennie her parents’ full names, pausing as Jennie carefully recorded them.

         "Okay, I know all their birthdays, but I’m not sure of the years,” Jennie continued. She recorded the birth years of her four grandparents.

            “Okay, where were they all born?” she asked next.

            “Why do you need all this information? What else is on that list of yours, anyway?” Christy demanded.

            Jennie’s senses went on full alert. Her mother was definitely frowning, her voice hostile, her jaw clenched and her body rigid. Jennie looked at her father. His eyes were darting back and forth between her and her mother. At that point, she realized she was somehow touching on a sensitive subject for her mother. What could it possibly be?

            “Just the usual genealogy questions, I guess,” Jennie said. “Names of everyone in the family. Date and place of birth for everyone. Date and place of marriage….”

            “I don’t see any reason for you to be digging into all this,” Her mom cut her off. “This is all in the past. Our family is who we are now, and that is what counts.”

            Jennie felt completely confused as she stared at her mother. Had someone in the family done something wrong that everyone was trying to keep quiet? Jennie did not know what was behind her mother’s reluctance, but she knew she better proceed carefully if she was going to get any more information.

            “Mom, my grandparents are important to me. I just want to find out a little more about them. But, maybe I should just wait and ask them.”

            “No, Jennie, forget it,” Christy ordered her. “I do not want you to ask your grandparents a lot of personal questions like that. I don’t want you saying anything that may hurt someone’s feelings.”

            Jennie blinked, feeling befuddled.

         "I have no intentions of saying anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings,” Jennie said carefully. “I love my grandparents. I would never want to make them unhappy.”

            “I think that is enough for tonight,” Rob cut in kindly. “I know you would never knowingly say or do anything to hurt your family, but some things may be best left alone.”

            “Okay. Sure,” Jennie stammered. Even her father was in on whatever they were trying to keep from her. “But this is the first time I ever suspected we may have some deep, dark secrets in our family.”

            Jennie was sorry as soon as she said it.

            “That’s enough!” her father spoke sharply.

          “There aren’t any deep, dark secrets in our family,” Christy spoke quietly, as she rubbed the sides of her face with both hands. “It’s just….”

          The three all looked at each other in the silence that followed. Even Garrett stopped his playing and looked around the table in confusion.

            Jennie silently folded her paper and put it back into her pocket.

            “I’m sorry, Mom.”

The online release party which will be held on Facebook and this blog is scheduled for Saturday, November 1st. The details are on the blog post before this one, which you can access by clicking HERE. Please join me for more information and a chance to win some prizes.

Also, check out my FAMILY SECRETS Pinterest board. You can access it in the upper right-hand corner of this blog. The pictures will give you more details about the book.

Happy reading and enjoy!

Amazon Kindle & Print          Barnes & Noble Nook          Smashwords

                                               Zina Abbott Books Website

FAMILY SECRETS Release Party

A lot is happening now that Family Secrets is available for pre-order on both Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.

On October 28th, Family Secrets will be released by my publisher, Fire Star Press, an imprint of Prairie Rose Publications. It will be available on Amazon Kindle, Nook, Smashwords and as a trade paperback from Amazon.

I am in the process of updating my Amazon's Author page to show me as Robyn Echols writing as Zina Abbott. I am also updating my Zina Abbott Books website which can be found at zinaabbott.homestead.com. I already have my Pinterest board for the novel which you can access from this blog. Now that the time is getting closer, I will be adding more pins to give you more hints about the book.


                   RELEASE PARTY

For those of you on Facebook, I have announced a Family Secrets release party on Saturday, November 1st, which will be held both there and on this blog. The Facebook portion will be an interactive sharing of images, recipes, buy links and, hopefully, feedback and comments from those who attend. If you have not already done so, please search for my Family Secrets page, "Like" it, and come to the party.

The names of all who comment on the Family Secrets Facebook page during the hours of the party will be thrown into Buck's cowboy hat. [In keeping with the Vietnam War theme which makes up a portion of this novel, I should say his steel pot (helmet). However, he left that behind when he got out of the Army. So, we'll use his cowboy hat.] I will pick one winner to be announced the last 5-10 minutes of the party. The winner will receive one digital copy of the novel from the vender of their choice.

For those of you not familiar with Smashwords, it has several file types available for download to your computer. They include epub (used on Nook), mobi (used on Kindle) and several other document formats. From there, you can read it on your computer or upload most of them to your e-reader, tablet or smartphone.

The hours for the portion of the party held on Facebook will be as follows:

Pacific Time Zone:        10:00am-12 noon
Mountain Time Zone:    11:00am-1:00pm
Central Time Zone:        12 noon-2:00pm
Eastern Time Zone:        1:00pm-3:00pm

In case you are wondering what these pictures to the right are, They go with the Zina Abbott Books blog portion of my release party.

The Zina Abbott Books blog portion will be held on Saturday, November 1st from 1:00am to 11:59pm Pacific Time Zone. I hope you will all stop by, read what I post for that day, and leave a comment.

On Monday, November 3rd, I will take all the names of those who comment on my Facebook page between 10:00am PDT and 11:59pm PDT on November 1st AND the names of those who leave a comment on this blog between 1:00am and 11:59pm PDT on November 1st and put those names in Buck's cowboy hat for a drawing. The prizes I'm offering for  this portion are:

1.  One "any way you read" book bag as pictured. (It should be obvious, but for legal-eagle reasons, I need to clarify that the e-readers and cell phone shown in these images are not included.] Since Family Secrets is part of my Golden Oaks series, I chose a fabric design using gilded oak leaves on a rusty red background. The large pocket holds a large reader or most tablets and the shorter pockets hold a small reader and/or a cell phone. The outside of the pockets are padded and I did a rough outline stitch around part of the design. 

2.  I will give away either a digital copy from the vendor of your choice or an autographed copy of the book in trade paperback format. (You will need to wait a couple of weeks for the print version.)

The following is a quick overview of Family Secrets:

In many ways, Family Secrets is three stories in one.

Even though Jennie is married to a soldier deployed to Afghanistan, and the novel includes scenes from the year Jennie's Grandpa Mike fought in the Vietnam War, Family Secrets is not a war story.

With the exception of one, the chapters dealing with the Vietnam War and the return to the SEATAC airport are loosely based on Buck's (my husband) experiences during his year in Vietnam. It is his pins and patches that are depicted on the red storyboard on the bottom of the novel cover.

Family Secrets is not a traditional Thanksgiving Day story, although Thanksgiving plays a big role in this novel. Not only do we learn of Mike's Thanksgiving experience in Vietnam, but, thanks to Jennie's prodding, over forty years after his return, he shares the reason it is important to him to celebrate this particular holiday surrounded by his family each year.

Family Secrets is about three generations of a family, their secrets, how they resolve their individual challenges and draw closer together.

FAMILY SECRETS Cover Reveal

Here it is - the cover for my novel, Family Secrets, being published by Fire Star Press. This is the first book in the Golden Oaks series.

Buck really likes it. He likes the yellow and black lettering (the current color scheme for the Army) and images of his badges and patches on the bottom band. Since several of his Vietnam War experiences are portrayed in this story, he is excited about it being published.

This is not a war story, although within the book there are scenes set in the Vietnam War.

This is not a Thanksgiving Day story, although many of the scenes in the book take place on Thanksgiving.

This story is about three generations of a family, their secrets and how they work to resolve the difficulties in their lives.

Release is scheduled for the last week in October. Stay in touch!

Fort Laramie, Southern Midlands & Cain't

Today my research has been focused on ferreting out those small details I want to make my short story, "A Christmas Promise," believable. First, although I visited Fort Laramie last summer, I spent hours reading and perusing site maps to figure out where my character, Annie Murdock, may have lived when she was a laundress at the fort. Also, I found out where the non-commissioned officers lived.

The earlier 1867 map of the fort does not detail where either the married soldiers or the laundresses lived. The only structure across the footbridge was a hotel.

This map of the fort, made in 1888, 15 years after the setting of my story, shows the married men's quarters to be directly across the footbridge.

My character, Annie Murdock, was married to a soldier most of the time she was at the fort, so it would make sense that she lived in the area set aside for families of married soldiers. She might have been living in a tent or more temporary structure in the early 1870s, which is why it may not have shown on earlier the map.

Map from the Fort Laramie National Historic Archives

The map put together by the National Historical Archives shows laundress quarters across the footbridge, but does not indicate the time period. There was also another laundress location, now also in ruins, up next to the quarters for the non-commissioned officers and the sutler. However, since she was married with two children, I figure she would have lived in location 29 on this map.






My second area of details I worked on today was dialect. Annie and her late husband came from western Kentucky, the region where it was truly brother against brother during the time of the Civil War. Annie's late husband, Daniel Murdock, fought for the Union while her brother and father fought for the Confederacy. This was not the Appalachia region which has its own distinct dialect, a favorite of historical novelist. It falls into the Southern Midlands dialect group. What an adventure ferreting out exactly what speech patterns and words belong to that dialect!

When I wrote this story, deciding I just needed to write it and go back to check the dialect later, I incorporated a lot of words and speech patterns my husband uses. He was raised by family who came from the "old country" of western Arkansas and Northern Texas to California during the dust bowl era. One word he pronounces quite distinctively is "cain't." I used it in my story.

Well, folks, that word is coming out of my manuscript. From what I have been able to discover, "cain't" is a Southern word, not a Southern Midlands word. I'll save it for a story with redneck characters.

Pinterest Board for Family Secrets

I love Pinterest. I don't get on it too often, though. The reason? It never ends.

This morning I arose early (early for me) and signed on to my Pinterest account for Zina Abbott Books. Five hours later, I had to force myself to shut it down.

While there, I did add some pictures to my board for my novel titled Family Secrets scheduled to be published sometime this year. I have more to add in the future, but, for now, Except for this first image which is mine, I have pinned pictures from other pinners. Not all pins pertain specifically to the experiences or Army regiment and company of my Vietnam soldier, Mike Carpenter. But, they are great for giving a feel for the country of Vietnam and what the soldiers were forced to deal with while there.

The LIFE magazine cover gives you an idea of a landing zone (LZ) like the kind Mike and his crew cut out of the jungle

 The board includes some pictures of war protestors. They played a role in his novel, also.

The Vietnam portion of the novel is set in 1967-68. Mike was there during the Tet Offensive. I searched for pictures of that battle.  The last photo on this blog post is from February 1968, the month after Tet.

These are just a sample of the images already on this board. Please sign up to follow the Family Secrets board on the Zina Abbott Books Pinterest account.

http://www.pinterest.com/ZinaAbbott/family-secrets/

I would be thrilled if you would sign up for all my Zina Abbott boards on Pinterest. I have other novels in the works. I am collecting images that will help inspire, provide visual detail and set of tone for each of my novels. Here is the link:

 http://www.pinterest.com/ZinaAbbott/

Enjoy!  Robyn Echols writing historical novels as Zina Abbott.

Divide and Conquer--Or, Pulling a Jeffrey Archer

Where cattle were loaded onto the railway near Abilene Kansas 1870s.

I have been working on my historical western romance, Abilene Gamble, that I began writing in February. The stress was building up inside me because, at the rate the novel was developing, it promised to be a behemoth. Yesterday, I logged in 3,750 words. By the time the ten o'clock news came on, I found myself muttering about my word total being up to a little over 75,000 words and we haven't even started the trial yet. Buck glanced my way wearing an expression that told me he thought I was losing it.

Kansas Pacific Railway right-of-way

The first half of the novel is set in Abilene, Kansas in the summer of 1871, the height of the cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail to that city. From there, the herds were sold and loaded on the Kansas Pacific Railway for shipment back east.

The second half of the novel is set in Indianapolis, Indiana, the home city of my heroine, Stella Schoenfeld, and the home state of my hero, Harry Bradford, a graduate of Indiana Law in Bloomington, Indiana.

Old Post Office and Courthouse building in Indianapolis in use in the 1870s.

Last night as I concluded my muttering, I closed down my computer, finished reading one book and then read another short book. I looked at the clock. It was past 2:00a.m. Then the inspiration hit. I knew what I needed to do:  

Split my novel into two books.

I wrote a Facebook post with my idea before I went to bed and slept on it. Today, I am of the same opinion. I separated the chapters and reformatted them. I will need to add a little to Abilene Gamble, but it appears that novel will end up being about 61,500 to 62,000 words in length. My second book, which I have named Indiana Judgment, is already sitting at close to 14,000 words. I still have the courtroom scenes to write, but I'm no longer stressed about it.

Why would I split my book and risk leaving my readers hanging a little at the end of Abilene Gamble? I realized two things when I made my decision:

1. My target audience tends to like shorter novels...something that can be leisurely read in an evening or two. A 62,000 word novel fits that bill. One over 100,000 words does not.

2. The old bottom line consideration...My target audience is more likely to pay $2.99 a book each for the two novels containing about 60,000 words. They will tend to balk at paying twice that for the same number of words in one volume.

I have been reading the Jeffrey Archer Clifton Chronicles series and I am anxiously awaiting the next book. Mr. Archer ends each book by coming to a kind of a stopping point, but leaving the reader hanging big-time. I thought the third book would be the final-final that would end my anxious waiting. But, no! Another cliff-hanger ending. No, I'm not a big-name author like Mr. Archer who probably pulls in a writing income of six or seven figures. But, I figure if he can do it, so can I. All I need to do is convince a publisher to go along with the idea.

With me splitting off Abilene Gamble, it will only take a little adjustment to a few chapters and writing a closing. Then it will be ready for editing and seeking a publisher. At least with Indiana Judgment well on its way to being written, those who like the first book shouldn't have to wait long for the second one.