Saturday, January 30, 2016

Sample Saturday: The Zion Trail

Welcome to Sample Saturday!

I'm pleased to report that formatting is finished for the ebook version of The Zion Trail, and it only lacks some "publisher" work before it is released next month. See that box over to the right? The one that says, "Enter your email address..." That is where you subscribe to my Readers Mailing List so you will be among the first to learn the Launch Date of this brand new novel.

Am I excited? Maybe not as much as when the house on the hillside behind my house burned to the ground on Tuesday night, but that's a different kind of excitement (more like terror).


Instead, I am excited in a good way.

I'm also excited that the final version of the ebook cover is finished. Here. It. Is:


See the tag line? Guess what that means.

Enough suspense. Here's the sample for today. The Marshall family is about to make a huge change in their lives:
~~~

Late one night I awoke to use the chamber pot and heard my mother sobbing to my father that she could no longer bear to live here. The next morning, he presented us with a plan: instead of continuing to figure out how to plant crops this season, at the end of March we would gather to Zion, which meant we would begin a journey to Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Oh, the fuss and feathers that flew over that scheme! Sarah refused to go, crying the night through and arising with swollen, red eyes and a severe attitude not much mended by sleep. I had no patience with her. Taxed by all that had occurred, even the thought of losing my field did not deter my hope that another place—any place—would be better than this one.

Pa and John and I bore the brunt of carrying out the plan in the limited time until March thirty-first. Ma was still too weak to participate in much of the work, Mary Eliza was too young, and Sarah refused to perform any labor having to do with our removal. Accordingly, Pa tasked me with many kitchen chores. I therefore learned to accomplish many housewifely chores, and didn’t regret a minute of it.

John found my cheerfulness in the kitchen to be strange, and ragged me about it unmercifully. I didn’t care. I was desperate to get to Zion. If cooking and cleaning up and doing whatever I could to make it possible was unmanly, I simply did not care. Who was to notice? We had no visitors, no nearby kin, no one to wonder at my unnatural education in kitchen skills.

Only one thing chafed me: sharing kitchen time with Sarah. Although I wondered where my former compassion for my sister had gone, I had grown impatient with her constant haranguing against my faith, and her adamant refusal to obey our father. In my mind, she lived under her father’s roof; therefore, she owed him obedience.
~~~


Okay, what do you think is going to happen next?

Go sign up for the Readers Mailing List over there at the top of the right sidebar. See you next week!


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