Màiri's Musings From the Sunroom-To Dream of Langston

Mairi’s Musings From the Sunroom

I’m blogging today about the upcoming release of my new book, To Dream of Langston, a dream eight years in the making. It’s my first novel, and I wrote the first draft as a means of dealing with profound grief. It is, in every way, the book of my heart.

I will publish it in serialized e-book and print book format. Release date for the first installment of the serialized version is September 30. In anticipation, I offer the following for your enjoyment:

The ‘blurb’:

    From the wild and beautiful landscape of the moorlands of England's North Yorkshire to the rolling bluegrass pastures of Kentucky, one young woman's passion carries her from love's first bloom to a love everlasting.

    On the brink of womanhood, Katherine Fairbanks glories in the sweet love of the boy next door. When her life is brutally ripped apart by tragedy, she believes she will never love again and seeks only peace for her life. But betrayal sweeps her across the sea and lands her in the hands of a man she dares not trust.

    Thoroughbred breeder Jayce Langston has little interest in taking a wife. His time is consumed with the struggle to help his family recover from the devastations of America's Civil War. When a lovely, mysterious woman pursued by thugs drops in a deep swoon at his feet as he leaves a New York club, Jayce is both captivated and intrigued. He returns with her to his Kentucky stud farm in hopes of learning her identity.

     Together, they must work against terrifying odds to secure a future where love triumphs over loss.

An interesting fact about the Victorian era:

The use of ‘snipers’ in modern warfare originated during the American Civil War. Union sharpshooters favored the .52 caliber ‘Sharps’ (Berdan) rifle, while Confederate snipers used, to deadly effect, the English .45 caliber Whitworth, which had to be obtained from blockade runners.

The origin of a familiar idiom from the Victorian era:

“the three R’s–reading, writing and ’rithmetic”: It is believed the source of this phrase, widely used in mid-Victorian America, is from a toast given in 1807 by an English politician, Sir William Curtis. There is some disagreement among scholars as to whether Sir Curtis’ toast was made tongue-in-cheek, or if he was simply ignorant of the proper spelling of the words ‘writing’ and ‘arithmetic’.

An excerpt from Chapter Eight of To Dream of Langston:

Can it be only five years since that day? Surely, it is a lifetime, instead. What happened to that child who sat on the parapet of a stone footbridge and dropped gorse petals into the water, to watch them spiral away on the flood? Where did that girl disappear, whose only care was that Jamie should think her beautiful in her new dress? Is she gone, forever?

The memories of that day are etched in my mind with clarity as keen as wind off the snow; yet, they seem distant and unreal, as if belonging to someone else. Maybe they do. Maybe that girl died, and this new person I now am, took her place.

The pain of those memories is not erased, but faded somehow, like cloth bleached too long by the sun. Much of its power to wound is lost. The dreams that girl embraced were destroyed in a single instant of time. How strange, then, that another instant has brought new hope.