I've been in bed, sick with the flu, for 6 days straight now. Six Freaking Days!  Who's got time for that?  If I'd been in bed, writing for 6 days that would have been fun-- I'm currently working on the second Petronella book, set up at Flathead Lake in Northwest Montana & there' water dragons and Pegasuses in it. But NOOOOOO, instead I've got the darn flu, with the sore throat and head ache and chills and fever and . . .you get the idea. I've re-read all the Harry Potter books but the last (which I'll read tomorrow) and watched three seasons of Once Upon a Time (damn you Evil Queen!).  
     So, what's my point?  Fair question. I was checking Amazon for Season 5 of Once Upon a Time and, as always happens when I log into Amazon, my author page came up. And today that page gave me a surprise. I've got another book coming out. Who knew?  
    Well, I did. I guess. I told you, I've been pretty sick This is a novel I wrote for the Mentoris Project via Barbara Foundation Publishing. The project's founder, an Italian-American, was sick and tired of Italians and Italian Americans always being represented in Television and movies as thugs and mafia dudes. So he created this foundation and publishing company to promote books of notable Italian-Americans. Which is pretty cool when you consider that Italian Americans, like MANY other immigrant groups, have long been discriminated against (make your own leap to current events NOW). If you're interested, the web site for the project, with all its books and authors (incluce Me!) is: https://www.mentorisproject.org/author-bios-1/​
    So I got to write about Louis Palma di Cesnola, a guy I'd NEVER heard of when I agreed to write him. Turns out he was pretty cool.In his teens he fought in the First War of Italian Independence, in his twenties he fought in the Crimean War and in his thirties he fought in the American Civil War, where he was a Colonel in the cavalry. Horses and swords dudes! Midway through the war he was captured and spent ten months in the Libby Prison, a now infamous Confederate prison in Richmond. The guy ended up the first director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is also a pretty cool deal. It was a fun book to write and the best thing about it was that the publishing company liked it so much they offered me another book deal. This summer I'll be writing about Angela Bambace, a union organizer that made a huge difference in textile worker's lives in the mid-20th century. 
   You can see the Cesnola cover at Amazon, or at my the home page of my web page. If you buy the book and read it I'd appreciate it if you left a review.  Getting Reviews turn out to be the hardest thing about writing.
    Thanks for reading this. I appreciate your time. And if you've had the flu . . . isn't it awful?  Egad! 

I’m not gonna lie. I was going to lie, but I decided not to. I had this whole elaborate story about how I was too busy writing and working to be blogging or sending updates to my email list. And I have been busy, but who has’t, right? But we make time for the things that matter, even when we’ve got too many balls in the air. We drop the stuff we don’t want to do.  So that’s what I did. Let the spankings commence. 
            To be fair, I wrote and edited so much the last 6 months that I have the second Kate Warne novel out (See that pretty cover at the top of this column?), the third one nearly ready to go. I also met my third deadline for a 3 volume encyclopedia (something I’m working on with my friend Rosanne Welch), a novel in a new series ready for publication in December (it’s got unicorns and vampires!) and yet another novel, something I wrote on spec for a new press, out late this year or early next year. So that’s a lot of words. And then summer ended and I had to go back to school, at both my full-time and part-time jobs and there’s a lot of papers to grade. And I had an editing process to retool and refine.
            Fine. That’s all true. But here’s the other thing—the true thing. I sold a bunch of you a book that was a hot mess. My first version of The Lincoln Special was riddled with typos and stupid little editing mistakes. I felt (and feel) really bad, though I know I should be patient with myself. I’m learning a lot. Learning to write the books was easy. Learning to publish them was harder, but not impossible. I learned that my editing process was not good enough. Sooo, I’ve retooled my process in a number of ways and then took the first versions (print and ebook) of The Lincoln Special down and remounted a cleaner version. But that doesn’t help those of you who bought the bad version.  The new book is cleaner, but I still feel bad. So I’ve been avoiding the marketing side of my business. Pretty mature, huh.
            So here’s my deal with you. Sign up for my email list (and if you already have, good for you) and have a drawing for 5 free copies of The Great Show ONE WEEK FROM TODAY. I’ll send the 5 winners an email and ask for a mailing address. All my print books come with access to a free electronic version of the same book, so if you like to read in a kindle (like me) you can do that too. Then, if you think that book deserves it you can leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
Peg
PS: Two days ago I learned my co-editor Rosanne Welch and I won a Best Book Award from the American Book Fest for our American Women in History encyclopedia. It’s only my second book award so it was weirdly exciting. The encyclopedia is WAY too expensive for mere mortals to buy but you can go see it at my web  page (peglamphier.com) or at Amazon.
 

It's probably possible to write a series with female protagonist and not have a hot male lead. Possible, but why?  No hot male lead, no sexual tension, no romance, no kissing (and other stuff). My Kate Warne series has George Washington Hazzard and I love him almost as much as Kate does. 
   Still, he's a troublesome character. Or he was when I first began to write him. It was with Hazzard that I first confronted the pesky question of historical accuracy. Every historical novelist faces this question. How much do you use from the 'real past' and how much do you make up? Take my Hazzard. He's based on a real person, but my Hazzard is different from the real one in some ways, but not all.  So there's a Real Hazzard (RH) and a Fictional Hazzard (FH). RH, for example, married in 1857, but my Hazzard had to be single. RH might have been a scoundrel, but my RH had to be a super good guy (I had my fill of 'bad boys' in my 20s and I'm Totally over it). Also, I'm not entirely sure what RH looked like. I found the picture at the top of this post online and I thought, "hey, there's a handsome devil." So I use that image when I write Hazzard.Most mid-nineteenth century men don't look all that hot to us--it's the muttonchops, beards, weird hair, stiff poses and a million other things. But that guy is pretty hot, isn't he? Look again. I'll wait. Yum.
    Most importantly, RH didn't hang out with the Pinkertons. Nor did he know the very real Kate Warne. That bothered me when I first started writing, but I've come to terms with it. I'll admit, when I first started writing fiction I was wearing my Professional Historian Hat.Professional Historians are supposed to get things right. I wasn't getting Hazzard 'right.'  Still, I persisted, really for one reason. It was the name. Hazzard. How great is that?  George Washington Hazzard. Even greater.  
     Some readers have suggested that Hazzard is too twentieth century in his ideas about women. There's no way, they insist, that piggish antebellum dudes would be that attracted to a woman with a career as a detective and spy. But here's the thing. The nineteenth century was full of dudes with extremely liberated ideas about women and the twenty-first century is full of dudes with terribly icky ideas about women (this is me showing restraint and not naming any names). And Allan Pinkerton hired Kate and his male operatives worked with her and Hattie Lawson. We have pictures of Kate in male clothing, male disguise, standing around camp with the men. They had to have known she was a woman and they worked with her anyway. So why not a male love interest named Hazzard?  Isn't love Hazardous?
   And it's not just Hazzard, it's Lallah. In my second book in the series I've got an elephant named Lallah Rookh. She's based on a real elephant that very real circus man Dan Rice owned in the 1850s. But she died in 1860, one year before book 2. She took a swim in the Ohio River, got in over her head (literally) and got water in her lungs. That lead to pneumonia, which killed her. She could walk a tight rope, which is astounding, and she was the first elephant in America to do a headstand. So I resurrected her. Lallah has a cool story and a tragic end and I wanted to write about her. So I fiddled with history. Go me.  
   One of the things I've learned writing fiction is that fiction is . . . fiction. Historical fiction should get stuff right, but it doesn't have to get everything right. And no one really thinks Professional Historians get everything right. History is a tricksy bitch. 
Peg
PS--if you already read The Lincoln Special would you please post a review of it on Amazon, Kindle or Good Reads? I can't get any authorial traction without reviews. I've also got a small raft of people sending me typos/corrections. I think that's really cool. I'm going to upload another, cleaner version of the book at the end of the week. Thanks to all. 
​Spread the Love! 

     I've done it. I've written, edited, formatted and published my first novel. It's exciting and utterly terrifying.Now I know why people write and don't publish. Writing is fun. Publishing is risk taking. Along the way I have learned many, many things. Many! In life the Lincoln Special was a steam train that took President-elect Abraham Lincoln from Springfield Illinois to Washington DC, taking a looping tour up through the Northeast before turning south. The trip took 10 days.My Lincoln Special took 3 years.
     Things I learned: 
1. Reading novels is good preparation for writing novels. Reading books about writing novels is even better. 
2. Writing is the easy part. Learning all the technical stuff (web page construction, formatting, author pages, etc) was the hard part.
3. Those cute little section dividers in nicely formatted books are called Dingbats--how fun is that?. The swirly things on chapter title pages are called Printers Ornaments.
4. E-books are easier to produce than print books.WAY easier!   
5. Even a professional writer and editor has trouble getting her manuscript perfect.If you'd like to beta read one of the next novels send me an email. 
6. That was REALLY fun and I want to do it again. And again. (and I will-- Book 2 in the Kate Warne series is due out in Sept.)
   Anyway, enough about me. Now I need your help. If you read my book and find a typo, could you email me at pegalamphier@gmail.com? If you read my book could you leave me a review on Amazon or Good Reads? Reviews really help sell books and as a new author and publisher I need all the help you can spare.
   The book is available exclusively through Amazon. The ebook is available at the Amazon web page and through any Kindle reader or Kindle phone or computer app. The print edition will show on the Amazon page VERY shortly. Until then it available at the Createspace store. There's buttons for both places on the front page of my website: www.peglamphier.com
    If you enjoy the LS you'll be happy to know I've got 3 more in various states of preparedness. They are The Great Show, Rebel Belles & The Iron Widow. I'm also working on a steampunk/monster novel I'm calling The Perils of Petronella. It features the monster hunters Emma the Vampire, Sierra the Fae Unicorn and Therese, the Romany Spirit Medium. If those names sound familiar you know they are my daughter and her Lytle Creek friends. In short, my 3 best girls.
   Right now I'm under contract for a book about an Italian Civil War cavalry colonel named Louis Palma di Cesnola. Between writing Louis and trying to get the book formatted perfectly I went Social-Media-Dark for awhile. Thanks for your patience.
​    Remember to spread the love. The world's a lovely place if you just turn off the television and look around. Kisses.  
   
 
 

   Sunday, May 21, 2017, the Ringling Bros.and Barnum & Bailey Circus gave it's last performance. Sad times. I mean, not for elephants or other circus animals who spent their lives on the road performing, with all the attendant abuses of that life. Don't get me wrong.  But circuses were, for along time an important part of American history and a lynch pin of the American entertainment scene. When the circus came to town it was a big deal, an chance to see exotic things in a world with no Youtube or Snapchat. 
    Circuses go Way back. The first circuses in America were mostly clown and equestrienne acts. By the 1830s and 40s there were dozens of circuses traveling American roads, rails and rivers (by steamboat!).  Some were tiny "mud shows" while others had big tops and sideshow tents. P.T. Barnum got his start as a ticket taker and when he got his own circus he'd been in the business for decades. In the 1870s he combined his show with the Bailey Circus in the 1870s. And while Barnum is now probably the most famous circus man in American, he wasn't always. For awhile, in the 1840s and 50s Dan Rice reigned supreme,along with the Spalding& Rogers Circus. In fact Spalding and Rice had a long standing feud that Americans followed like we do celebrity affairs these days. 
   Dan Rice got his start as an animal trainer. His first act was Lord Byron, the Learned Pig. At one time or another he also had trick mules, a trained Rino, an albino camel and an elephant. When he got Excelsior in the 1850s he vaulted to the big time. That's an Excelsior poster at the top of this post, featuring the horse's biggest and most famous trick. He'd do this pose/statue thing while men carried him around the ring. The snow white Kentucky stallion could also climb stairs, count, do math and carry trick riders. Eventually Rice replaced Excelsior with Lallah Rookh, a freakishly talented elephant (she could walk a tight rope!). Lallah appears in my second Kate Warne novel, but Excelsior is a recurring character, appearing in all four of the novels I've written to date. So's Mr. Rice. Go read his Wikipedia article--what a character!
   You see, because we don't know much about Kate's life before the Pinkertons I got to invent for her a circus past. In my imaginary world she ran away from the circus when she was 15, after her parents were killed in a blow down (that's when a circus tent collapses--it's a much feared circus calamity). Yeas later Dan Rice gives Excelsior to her. Did this happen in real life? Nope. Absolutely not. Is it a good story? Sure.  Who wouldn't want to inherit a retired, super famous circus horse?
   The thing is, with the passing of the Ringling Bros. circus so too passes a piece of American history. The trick mules, the performing rhinos, the tight walking elephants might be better off without circuses, but what about all the circus people, who lived a life outside the boundaries of respectable conformity?  Is the country a better place for losing those folk and their way of life?  I don't think so.  Because there's too darn many people doing what's expected, what everyone else does, watching life instead of living it.  So, go out there this week and be weird. Live like you've got a circus horse in the back yard.

   Tap dancing and I have a love-hate relationship. It started long ago, when I was a wee thing, no more than six years old.  Mom enrolled me in tap class. I thought it was great fun but apparently I bugged my teacher. When the other girls heel, toe, shuffled right, I shuffled left. If they turned one way, I went the other way. My failure to conform (which was probably just a small girl's inability to understand right and left) got me kicked out of class.  A tap dance reject before I finished first grade!  Oh, the pain. Oh, the horror. Wipe the tears from your eyes and stick with me.  It gets easier. . . .
    The thing is, I still think tap is cool. It's one of the few original American art forms, along with the blues and jazz. It shares with the blues and jazz it has its roots in Africa and in American slavery.  The first "tap" dancer (the word wasn't applied to the dance until the 20th c.), William Henry Lane, danced his way to fame and fortune in the 1840s. He combined Irish clog dancing with African Gioba dancing, threw in some other stuff (there's whole books on this) and won over America with his explosive new dance style. He traveled the country in Minstrel shows, the first black performer to do so, and won more dance contests than anyone else.  He was hugely famous and they named before you knew it there was an entire dance style called "Juba Dancing" and Lane became Master Juba.  Unfortunately, Juba died of exhaustion and malnutrition (historians think) in the 1850s. This seemed immensely unfair so I revived him for my first novel, The Lincoln Special. I meant for Juba to be a supporting  character, but he got bigger and bigger. By the time I got to the second novel in my Kate Warne series Juba was carrying the book. Metaphorically of course.
    So I'm back to tap dancing. Only with words, not shoe (which is good because words respect non-conformity). Lately I've been tap dancing my way through this darn book launch. Friday I was trying to build a template for my email list and discovered I need a banner. Crap. Another darn thing to learn. SO this morning I made a banner. BY MYSELF.  Is it the best banner ever?  Probably not. Is it mine? All mine?  Yep.  Now I gotta tap dance back to the darn email template and figure that out. After I finish my this blog. Tap, tap, tap.  
   If you haven't already done so, please sign up for my email list.  I swear I won't spam you with "buy my book" crap. I will send you weekly historical tidbits, and the occasional publishing update and offers of free stuff. Right now if you sign up for the email list you get a free link to the first chapter of The Lincoln Special. 
   Thanks for reading!

I'm tired this morning. I couldn't get to sleep last night. Instead I laid in bed with my head whirling around, images and words competing with that high whining buzz that is the soundtrack for sleeplessness.  And I did it to myself.
   I've written thousands and thousands of words for articles, newspaper columns book reviews, encyclopedia entries and monographs (books). Writing doesn't freak me out. Then what's my problem, you ask.  It's this self publishing thing. You see, for my entire writing career every word I ever wrote was handled by someone else after I wrote it. Heck, I barely had to edit a document. Just write it and send it a publisher or editor.  And now I've decided to be my own publishing company.  It's thrilling. Thrillingly terrifying. Like walking through a dark wood, chased by a mean witch, worried about Lions, Tigers and Bears.  Oh My!
   I spent yesterday afternoon working on my self-publishing check list. Start a limited liability corporation? Check. It's Writing Wench Press. Create author pages at Goodreads, Facebook, Amazon and Pinterest?  Check.  Hire cover designer? Check. Edit manuscript one more time?  Check.  Find reviews? Where? Format novel? Huh? Buy ISBNs and bar codes? Nope! (Seems terribly real). There's more.  My checklist is 7 pages long.Some of it I understand, some of it I don't. It's scary.
   Then why do it? Because my whole life I've handed over my words, my ideas to a publisher and I've had little control over what happens next and been paid the tiniest of money. I'm tired of writing stuff people don't really read and I'm tired of not having control and I'm tired of working hard for tiny money. I don't care about money very much. I have everything I need and I like my job. I know people with more money than me. They don't seem any happier for it. Quite the opposite in fact. Mostly, I made a promise to myself a couple of years ago to re-invent myself. To become a better version of me, one truer to who I am and less responsive to what other people expect. Part of that pledge was a promise to myself to keep learning new things.
   Learning new things, trying new things, going new places, it's all terrifying. But it's in those spaces where I've taken chances (like leaving Bozeman and moving to So. Cal) that I've found who I'm supposed to be. So I push on. Like Dorothy and her friends. There was a lion in the woods and he scared Dorothy and the Tin Man. Then it turned out he wasn't so scary. So they sang a song and skipped away from the fear. That's what I'm going to do. And the poppies?  Well they're in front of me somewhere, but like Dorothy, I'll fall down and then get up again. As many times as it takes to get where I need to go.
   I think women my age are good at this.I know some astounding women and they inspire me very day. I think women are better at reinvention than men (I could be wrong though) because we have to be. Are you a re-inventor? Do you find things you're afraid of and then do them anyway? Why don't you share a little in the comments below.  Spread the Love!
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