Starting Over, Again.

   At first glance the photo above my appear to be a young, male Civil War soldier if you look closely you'll see that what you're really seeing is a photograph of Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton Detective. Note the fine bone structure, smooth skin and tiny waist. Kate Warne has been largely lost to history (tho there was a mediocre one-season television show featuring her on Canadian BBC), in part because what she did was secret and in part because she was female. I'm about to publish my first in a series of novels about Kate and her Civil War adventures, The Lincoln Special (see the Writing Wench section at my web page www.peglamphier.com).  Over the next couple of months, as I lead up to my Launch Date (sometime in June) I'll blog about Kate and other characters in the novels.
   I'm going to do a lot better job keeping current on this blog. Here's my story, which you may judge B. S. or not.Two years ago I launched this blog with the idea that as I learned to write fiction I'd blog about it. It turns out that learning to write fiction while working two professor jobs and writing novels and setting up a publishing business is JUST TOO MUCH, specially if you want to occasionally cook a meal, do a load of laundry and talk to the husband.  I have to got to work or I can't buy dog food and pay my mortgage and there's no use blogging about writing if I'm not writing, so I had to do that to. So something had to give.  I've got four novels in various states of readiness now and the first one is Almost ready to publish so it's time to Start Over. 
    Starting over is something most of us have way to much experience with. It can be stressful, but it can also be a huge and exciting adventure. In the nineteenth century women were supposed to be submissive, passive, domestic. They were supposed to avoid the public sphere like a femininity-killing plague. Kate Warne (and lots of other women, some by choice and some not) took a look at those rules and said Bite Me. I mean, probably not literally, but you get the idea.  If she could become the first professional female detective in America and work as a spy to keep President Lincoln safe, then think what the rest of us could accomplish if we were just a tiny bit braver.  If we started over more time.
See you on the other side,
peg