I'm an active member of ACFW (American Fiction Fiction Writers), a moderator of the Civil_War_HIStory yahoo group, co-owner of CROWN fiction marketing, and a frequent reviewer of Christian fiction. Visit my blog about Upstate New York history.

I write historical fiction set in the War Between the States, touched with an inspirational edge. I’m currently working on a series about brothers from the Shenandoah Valley and their loves.
Elmira, my hometown, plays prominently in the series. Elmira is rich in history, and boasts the first all-women’s chartered school in 1855, and the infamous Civil War prison camp dubbed “Helmira” in 1864-1865, among many other historical distinctions.

Shenandoah twins Devon and Duncan Sharpe part in 1861. Will war, offense, or death prevent blood brothers’ reconciliation?

Above the steady patter of rain rose a higher timbre than oxen bell or lamb bleat. Metallic and chilling, the jingle of shackles lured his attention. Like a chained centipede, a fettered group of people two abreast and a dozen long turned along the dirt path. The ensemble would pass within a few feet of the barn en route to the auction block. Duncan stood alongside his brothers in the doorway until he could distinguish individuals through the haze. A gamut of Negroes clattered toward them, beginning with men whose hair showed the first signs of gray curls at the temples. Men in their prime followed, broad of shoulder and stout of chest. Adolescents shuffled near the end of the line, about the twins’ age of sixteen years. 

Duncan gawked from face to face. Servants had been a fixture his entire life, but this spectacle gave him pause. His curiosity peaked at the portrait gallery parading before him. A woman clutched a small child in her white-knuckled grip, and the pair passed so close that the rain ricocheted off their bodies onto Duncan’s goose-fleshed arms. The message in the child’s expression contrasted that of the woman whom Duncan presumed to be his mother. She regarded Duncan with a vacant stare and looked away. The boy’s brows knit at oblique angles, and he locked with Duncan’s eyes as if to communicate something—but what?

Then, just as phantomlike as the group of slaves appeared, they moved down the road until the swells of heat rising from the ground swallowed them.

Devon muttered in his typical cavalier fashion, but Duncan didn’t hear him. He homed in on a soft sound in the distance--the rhythm of footsteps, or weeping? The white hangman’s mask of John Brown flashed through his mind, and he pushed past his brothers into the dim interior of the barn to escape . . .

A Confederate Captain loses his soul mate, his health and his hope, but a minister's daughter must disarm his pride to renew his fighting spirit.

Ellen approached the crude operating table to determine her role. The patient lay rigid, gritting his teeth against his pain. His wide, dark eyes peered at her as if pleading for her to help him somehow. She reached down to touch the captain’s hand which clutched the table in white-knuckled grip, and he flinched.

            Lord, show me what to do.  Unqualified to help in any medical capacity, still she gathered in, as if to pray beside one of her father’s congregants.  “There now, Captain. It’ll be all right.”  Please, God, let it be all right.

The injured captain’s gaze darted from the scalpels and curettes to the doctor, and he tried to rise from the rubber mat. “What’re you fixin’ to do with those?”
Ellen pressed against his chest with both hands to encourage him to recline. “You must lie still for the doctor, now.”

The captain lay still then, perhaps too spent to fight, his chest heaving, muscles trembling in anticipation. She almost smiled at answered prayer, stroking the man’s hair away from his face, when the doctor pressed a blunt-ended probe into his shattered hip for the bullet still lodged there.            

The captain clutched her arm with the grip of a horseman and screamed. Tears and perspiration mingled at his temples and seeped into his hair.
A flash of white overtook her sight, threatening to fill in with the darkness of void. Colorful circles of light scattered like tiny fish in the pools of her vision as she struggled to stay on her feet. After several seconds, her near-swoon passed, the captain’s vice-grip still holding her.

Terror piqued the captain’s wild, unseeing eyes. “Oh, God of Heaven, let me die! Leave me alone and let me die!”

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