Forgive my relative silence over the past few weeks, friends. I've been spending a lot of time in airports with spotty wireless connections, and I'm currently writing you from Rocky Mountain National Park, at the same location where I wrote Winter Jacket 3. Thunderstorms blow through the valley almost every afternoon, which helps explain some of the angst and heartbreak in that novel. I'm at a pivotal juncture in my serialized novel, The Final Rose, so you should probably prepare yourself for a little rain in that book, too.

I'm anticipating finishing up TFR over the next month, and it will be made available on Amazon for those of you who've been holding off on the slow burn at Wattpad. I'm also beginning to plot out my next stand-alone, Objective: Matrimony, which is the purpose of this blog entry. I'm a historian by training and profession, so it's a little remarkable that I've yet to embark in historical fiction. Objective: Matrimony will remedy that.

My grandmother was born in the early 1920s. Growing up, she would entertain my little sister and me with stories about her childhood and coming-of-age during the Great Depression. Her stories are the reason I'm a historian today and a large reason why I love to tell stories myself. One specific story has always stuck with me--the story of how her parents met. Long before online dating services, there was the newspaper. And in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, it was not unusual for men and women to post classified ads in national and local papers seeking a potential husband or wife.

My great-grandfather was a potato farmer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and my great-grandmother was a catalog model in Chicago. She responded to his Classified Ad for a wife, and they corresponded briefly over handwritten letters, before she uprooted her life to become his wife in northern Michigan.

Without giving away too much, this is the world in which Objective: Matrimony will take place. In case you're worried, this will still be a love story that follows the adventures of two women; it's just going to take place in the late 1800s instead of contemporary times. I'm extremely excited about this new project, and I can't wait for you to meet my newest characters. Until then, I hope you're still enjoying Elle and Hunter's swan song and have become invested in the continued weekly adventures of Nokomis and Lee.

Prost,

Eliza