You have until July 31 to head over to Jennifer Major's blog, Tales From The Redhead, for a chance to win a copy of Burning Sky. You'll need to follow Jenn's instructions to enter the drawing. But don't worry. They're easy. 🙂 I hope you'll take a moment to read my...

“Lori Benton gives us seasons in her debut novel Burning Sky. Seasons of planting corn, beans and pumpkins as backdrops to the ripening and challenges of lives working through chaos after a war and a terrible personal tragedy. [She] gives us seasons of the journey...

    And he [King Solomon] spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. 1 Kings 4:33 JKV The 1 Kings passage above...

On July 7, 1806, Meriwether Lewis and nine members of the Corps of Discovery ascended to the Continental Divide on their journey east from the Pacific Ocean... On the afternoon of July 6, 2013, my party and I followed in their footsteps. Splitting up the Corp...

The 18th century frontier family had much in common with the way Americans live and look at life in the twenty-first century. Getting by these days is challenging on many fronts, requiring more creativity and partnership in a family than often was the case just a...

For today's Research Wednesday post I'm highlighting a wonderful find I came across on line. In 1864, while civil war raged across the United States, a Congregational minister named Elias Hillard set out on a mission to find six men. There was urgency in his quest....

For the longest time I've admired those ladder bookcases, you know the ones with the slanted front, with shelves that get narrower as they go up. The bigger ones look like an A-frame sliced in half, at least from the side. With every new novel in progress, I expand my...

Or We-Search Wednesdays, for alliteration's sake. Today I'm highlighting a little book that packed a big punch when it came to outfitting botanist, artist, and physician Neil MacGregor, one of the main characters in Burning Sky. Living History, Drawing on the Past by...

Though it doesn't have a snappy alliterative title like Teaser Tuesdays, still I thought it might be a nice feature for this quiet blog each week to share a research source I'm finding particularly helpful or engrossing.Today I'm highlighting a book I bought as sort...

  Coming to terms with times of waiting is inevitably part of most writers' journeys. Mine too. I started "seriously" writing in December of 1991 I wrote several novels, queried many publishers (back in the 90s you could do this without an agent in the Christian...