Civil War Study

I have been reading books from the Civil War era that I believe will be very helpful to me as I write Armitage, even though the bulk of the historical portion of this novel will be set in the Reconstruction period.

Killing Lincoln written by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard dealt mostly with the events surrounding the death of President Lincoln, but the first section also described in detail the final battles of the war that lead up to General Lee surrendering to General Grant. It also brought out the point that Lincoln demanded lenient terms for the surrender. His goal was to heal the woulds of war and reunite the nation.

They Met at Shiloh was a novel written by Phillip Bryant who has been a Civil War re-enactor for about 20 years. It centers on four characters, two from the North and two from the South, all of whom fought in different units during the battle at Shiloh, and all of whom came in contact with each other in one way or another before this battle was over. This book is very detailed, as I am sure all the Civil War battles that are re-enacted are, and I found the detail about the uniforms, the terminology, the logistics and the tactics very interesting.

Ever the Optimist

I already have a blog for the first novel I wrote, Aurora Rescue. However, I am ever the optimist. I expect that novel to be published along with many more.

So, I have started this blog for the intent of having a centralized place to discuss all of my writing projects.

As I just wrote in my Aurora Rescue blog, I was a in a quandary for several weeks about my next step. Here is what I did about it. (Do I now seem a little bit like Cy Riverton in Aurora Rescue? Read the book when it comes out and decide for yourself.)

1. I started working on another novel. It is not part of the Aurora series. In fact, it could fit into the series I considered before Aurora Rescue. I wrote a vignette as part of my Jennie Graves series of novels which for the most part I have since converted to the first chapter of the book I have titled Armitage. However, in a three-day time span, I wrote four more chapters of the book (okay, one chapter was real short.) I very much want to focus on this novel and complete it, but I knew I had to get Aurora Rescue on it way go being published first.

2. I started researching the Civil War and Reconstruction eras like crazy. It was information I need for both the Aurora series and Armitage.

Exactly what have I been reading? Here goes:

Actually, I checked out about seven books from the county library. One of them happened to mention an aurora seen by the Civil War soldiers the night after the Battle of Fredricksburg. That was a very nice detail I need for a future novel in the Aurora series. I have not found that information anywhere else, so far, so I was happy to read about it. I also purchased these Civil War books for a reasonable price at the local book store.
 

I made a point to read The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks which is based on  a real life experience from the Civil War and after.

The local library has shelves of books on the Civil War but I did not find even one on the Reconstruction period. So I purchased this one. I love the Remington artwork on the cover. You can see how I tab pages that contain information I want to refer back to and take notes of later.  

To double-check some facts for Aurora Rescue, I reread parts of Crucible of War  by Fred Anderson. I also went back to my well-worn edition of Empire of Fortune by Francis Jennings.