Silk: Caroline's Story, My Debut Novel

'Caroline Corbett is ready for the 20^th century, excited to find work and meet new people, but she gets more than expected when a rough-hewn farmer and a small-town doctor both engage her affections. She must choose between the two, but in doing so she fails to consider the girl Jessie, a young sociopath riddled with jealousy. Before long astonishing and horrifying events are set into motion.'

I am both looking forward to and dreading the release of my debut novel, Silk: Caroline's Story on October 14th, 2021. It feels rather like the kids leaving home for the big, wide world--I'm relieved not to have to clean up after them anymore, but they're my babies! I wrote Silk the fastest of all my novels--and then proceeded to spend the greatest amount of time on it, revising, proofing, revising, adding, deleting, editing, and then revising some more in an endless cycle. I wanted to at least share the above blurb with you all here, as I haven't done nearly as much blogging about the novel or this process as I thought I would--though, in truth, I actually did share the initial writing process on a blog of yesteryear. I had been wrestling with some mysteries in my genealogical research, trying to piece together what might have happened. Initially I stuck with exact dates and tried to stay true to known facts--but by the time the novel was done, I realized I'd miscalculated. Some of the dates were off. Not that this was a huge deal, when main characters were already entirely made up. The story is mostly fiction, inspired from here, there, and everywhere--but it was initially inspired by the confusing web of my family tree.

 The whole trilogy is, in fact, based on genealogical research as its very base inspiration. It's so romanticized and fictionalized, however, as to be fairly unrecognizable (adding stories to get from point A to point B, just as much of historical fiction does). I originally wrote it with the real names of my ancestors and relatives, but most of those have since been changed.  Caroline's given name remained the same, however.  I did keep that much.