WESTERN HISTORICAL
Date Published: April 1, 2014
Can an angel survive Hell on Wheels? When KIT CALHOUN leaves New York City with a train car full of orphans from the Immigrant Children’s Home, she has no clue she might end up as adoptive mother to four children in rip-roaring Cheyenne, Wyoming. At twenty-two, Kit has spent most of her life in the Children’s Home. Now she acts as one of America’s first social workers, serving as liaison between the home, the courts, and the children of the streets.
Kit has little doubt she is easing the plight of the homeless children, until the transcontinental railroad begins to span the country and she is chosen to accompany orphan trains to distribute city children as fast as the rails are laid and farms are carved out of former Indian lands. Eastern cities are overrun with homeless children, their parents sick with consumption or dead of accidents and disease. The farmers who take in the children are required to sign a pledge to clothe, feed, and educate them in return for their labor. Is this distribution of urban children to rural environs beneficial, as the churches that sponsor the dissemination insist? Kit begins to have misgivings.
Family ties are deliberately broken so that single children will have a better chance of being placed. Even so, Kit swears an oath to a dying woman that she will keep her son and daughter together. But when their train passes beyond the last settlements in Nebraska, Kit is left with no other choice. HANNAH and HELMUT, and teenagers CONNIE and THOMAS, become Kit’s sole responsibility.
Kit has little doubt she is easing the plight of the homeless children, until the transcontinental railroad begins to span the country and she is chosen to accompany orphan trains to distribute city children as fast as the rails are laid and farms are carved out of former Indian lands. Eastern cities are overrun with homeless children, their parents sick with consumption or dead of accidents and disease. The farmers who take in the children are required to sign a pledge to clothe, feed, and educate them in return for their labor. Is this distribution of urban children to rural environs beneficial, as the churches that sponsor the dissemination insist? Kit begins to have misgivings.
Family ties are deliberately broken so that single children will have a better chance of being placed. Even so, Kit swears an oath to a dying woman that she will keep her son and daughter together. But when their train passes beyond the last settlements in Nebraska, Kit is left with no other choice. HANNAH and HELMUT, and teenagers CONNIE and THOMAS, become Kit’s sole responsibility.
The first time handsome PATRICK KELLEY lays eyes on Kit inside the Casement Brothers store where he works in Julesburg, Colorado Territory, he wants her for his own. But circumstances, and a spectral-looking demented gambler as well as Kit’s certainty no one in his right mind would want her cobbled-together family, conspire to keep them apart. When Patrick and Kit and her brood ride Hell on Wheels into Cheyenne, they’re all forced to leave behind everything they knew and find ways to survive and thrive in the raw new American West.
#1 – Do You See Writing as a Career?
I didn’t for a long time, I had to earn a living! But now I
am retired so writing is my primary occupation.
#2 – What was the Hardest Part of Your Writing Process?
The hardest part was learning to promote. I had to look at
the writer, Alethea, as a person separate from myself in order to put her out
there for public consumption. I always thought it was just about the book, but
more and more the book is seen as “content” and the marketing is done around
the writer.
#3 – Did you have any One Person Who Helped You Out with
Your Writing Outside of Your Family?
In the early days, there were a lot of writing teachers and
other writers who offered invaluable advice. It still amazes me that I can walk
into a room and announce I’m a writer, and that is accepted by other writers,
and that they are willing to help someone else’s career.Writers are excellent
people.
#4 – What is next for your writing?
I am pushing hard for acceptance for a historical I wrote
twenty years ago. I had quit submitting it because of rejections, but it’s back
out there now and I’m hoping for an acceptance. I have seven chapters in a
prequel to that book, as well as another unrelated historical that I’m working
on.
#5 – Do you have an addiction to reading as well as
writing? If so, what are you currently reading?
I don’t think I could be a proper writer if I didn’t devour
books. I am an eclectic reader, I like all kinds of genre fiction as well as
literary work and nonfiction. At the moment I’m reading a 1949 novel of the
Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado by Dorothy Gardiner, called The Great
Betrayal.
DESCRIBE Your Book in 1 Tweet:
WALLS FOR THE WIND #Western historical orphan train novel,
NYC to HellonWheels Cheyenne, Dakota Territory. amzn.to/1kvMwVx
This or That?
#1 - iPd or Mp3? MP3
#2 – Chocolate or Vanilla? Do I have to choose?
#3 – Mashed Potatoes or French Fries? Fries
#4 – Comedy or Drama? Drama
#5 – iPhone or Droid? Droid
#6 – Fantasy or Reality? Fantasy
#7 – Call or Text? Text
#8 – Summer or Winter? Spring. I don’t like it too hot or
too cold.
#9 – Coffee or Hot Chocolate? Coffee
#10 – eBook or Paperback? Paperback
Alethea Williams: Western history has been the great interest of my adult life. I've lived in Wyoming, Colorado, and Oregon. Although an amateur historian, I am happiest researching different times and places in the historical West. And while staying true to history, I try not to let the facts overwhelm my stories. Story always comes first in my novels, and plot arises from the relationships between my characters. I'm always open to reader response to my writing.
June 25 - A Life Through Books
June 26 - Pure Jonel
June 27 - Texas Book Nook
June 28 - Book Nerd
June 29 - My Tangled Skeins Book Reviews
June 29 - RABT Reviews - Wrap Up
Thanks for hosting my tour! I'm looking forward to everyone's reaction to my orphan train novel, Walls for the Wind.
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