Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Novellas, and a Novel in Progress

History inspires me—there are innumerable stories waiting in the dramas people like us, only in a different or highly dramatic time period, experienced, that we can imagine and bring to life, always keeping to the parameters of the actual history itself. I’ve published short fiction which include events from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, many from the perspective of ancestors—old family stories and even, I think, the DNA link, helps me imagine these lives, from the intense situations of the English Civil War, to the American Civil War, to World War II, and to the challenges of immigration in different generations.

Other historical fiction includes two novellas: one about a time-traveling shell-shocked World War I soldier, called The Druid and The Dragon, and another, The Line of Demarcation, about an American painter and a French young woman who find themselves involved in helping Jews and dissidents escape from the Nazi terror.

My longer historical fiction is Black Peter, A Coast Miwok's Journey, a novel about a Coast Miwok native who rebels against the repressive Spanish mission system in California and flees for his life to the Russian colony, Fort Ross, up the coast. From there his exile continues to St. Petersburg, where he becomes a horse whisperer and an opera chorus singer, to Paris at the time of the Revolution of 1848, and finally back to California at the time of the Gold Rush, but now as a hunted stranger in his native land.