Tomorrow A YOUNG WIDOW’S PROMISE, a Civil War historical, is going to be released and I wanted to post a few things about it up front. It’s not what I normally write, and this time I decided not to use a pen name. AYWP is very low on the heat and strong on the emotion. So if you’re looking for a lot of sex, you’re not going to find it in this book.

First, it’s a novella with about 26,000 words. There are sexy scenes, though. And one of those scenes happens in the m/m subplot. Yes, there is a m/m romance subplot. But this novella will be in the m/f category.

The most important thing for me while I was writing this novella was that I wanted to have a strong female character who is just as passionate about her “cause” as she is about her man. There’s nothing wrong with books or stories that only concentrate on women who are passionate about their heros. But I wanted this character, Felecia Roundtree, to be just as interested in the cause she’s been fighting for long before she meets the love of her life.

And I wrote an epilogue this time. I rarely do this. But I think this novella called for it and I wanted to tie up the story so readers didn’t walk away feeling cheated.

Here’s an excerpt from the fist chapter:

FeleciaRoundtree sat on the edge of her bed in
the only white dress she had left since the war had
begun. She’d always preferred white because it
was simple and easy to care for. She should have
been wearing black, but she wasn’t seen often
enough to worry about it. Besides, this dress had
turned mostly pale gray by then anyway, and the
hem was beginning to fray. She’d been meaning
to buy fabric to sew a new dress, but it wasn’t on
the top of her chore list.

It was already after six on a warm, moist
Saturday morning in late August and she hadn’t
even finished dressing yet.
Felecia was thirty-seven years old but looked
more like twenty-seven. Her hair was long and

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strawberry blond and parted dead center; thick
waves fell into points below her shoulders. Each
morning, she haphazardly pulled it back and
pinned it into a chignon, exposing a face so delicate
and pointed and looked so much like a handsome
fox, old friends sometimes called her Foxy.

Before she started her day, she crossed her
legs and hesitated. She rested her chin in the palm
of her hand and sighed. Then she pursed her lips
and gazed through the open window of her second floor
bedroom, beyond the small, quirky cemetery
that covered the entire front of her property. This
was one of those mornings she still had trouble
believing she had a graveyard in front of her house.

She reached for a book on the cherry
nightstand alongside the bed, a small black bible
with faint traces of what had once been gold
lettering embossed on the frayed cover. She didn’t
open it. She just placed her right palm on top and
said a small prayer for her two young sons who
were off fighting somewhere in Virginia.