Immigrant Thoughts

I have watched the current anti-immigration talk from candidates like Donald Trump and it has disturbed me. I understand that some American workers may be angry if they think immigrants are taking their jobs, but we are a nation of immigrants and we should not close the door on people who are trying to do the same thing our ancestors did. 

Here’s what I learned about Irish immigration in my research for my “Rose Of Skibbereen” books. 

Ireland in the 19th century could not support its population. The potato famine made the situation desperate, forcing poor families to send their children away. None of them really wanted to go. They would hold “American Wakes”, like the one I portray in the first "Rose Of Skibbereen" book, and these gatherings were called wakes for a sad reason -- the families felt they were burying their sons and daughters because they knew they would never see them again. 

And it was true. My great-grandmother came to America when she was just a teenager, and although she lived until her eighties she never saw her parents or her homeland again. It was not an easy thing for these immigrants to leave a place where their families had roots stretching back hundreds of years. 

They left their families and came to this country, starting at the bottom rung of the ladder and enduring much hardship and even persecution. They did it because they were seeking a better life than what they had in their homeland. The first generations usually didn't see much improvement over the life they left behind, but their sons and daughters achieved a better life. That's certainly what happened in my family

I know there are some different issues today than there were 150 years ago but there are also similarities, even to the cry of, “They’re taking our jobs!”. People are still coming here for the same reasons they always did, it hasn’t been easy for them or us, but in the end it’s made America stronger and given a better life to millions. 

We should remember that when politicians talk about shutting the door. 

My Latest Ebook Is Out!

I have a new ebook out! It’s the latest in my “Rose Of Skibbereen” novels about an Irish immigrant named Rose Sullivan Morley and her many descendants. This is a historical novel series done in my own unique style, and at this point I’ve written about 300,000 words of it. The latest book brings the saga up to the present, so the story has covered 135 years now. Several dozen characters have come and gone, and I’ve had a great time getting to know them. 

Book Six is told through the eyes of Rosalie Morley, who is the great-great granddaughter of Rose Sullivan Morley. Rosalie has a unique way of looking at the world. She’s socially awkward but funny, blunt but witty, a thinker who’s also a dreamer. She shares the psychic streak that all the women in the family have to some degree. 

This book is different than the others in one big way: it’s a thriller. There is danger in the air in Rosalie’s world, and she has to find a way out of a scary situation with a stalker.

I don’t want to spoil the story so I won’t say any more. I hope you download the book and that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Tell me what you think about it -- send me an email. Or, if you want to post a review on Amazon or Smashwords, that would be great also. 

Happy reading!

Finally, I'm on the Web

My kids think I’m cool (well, as much as a Dad can be considered cool, anyway) because I’ve had a blog, Twitter, and Google Plus for years, as well as a bunch of other social networking profiles. However, it’s hard to be an early adopter of every new thing in the digital universe and still keep up with my writing projects. 

I confess I’m late to having a Web site, but finally, at long last, I’ve got one. It’s called simply “My Writing”, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve been fiddling around with it for months, and it’s finally in good enough shape to publish. It’s got links to my books, some information about my freelance services, and excerpts from my novels. Well, right now there’s only one excerpt, from Book One of “Rose Of Skibbereen”, but I have plans to upload more. 

I invite you to check it out! My Writing

What Would Hemingway Have To Say About The Kardashians?

Can you imagine Ernest Hemingway with a blog? I was thinking that today, when I realized I hadn't updated this blog in awhile. I grew up in an era when writers weren't expected to post daily updates on what they ate for breakfast, who they saw in the supermarket checkout line, and what they really think about Kim Kardashian's latest outfit, so I forget to keep up with all my online responsibilities. I have accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and of course, this blog, so there's no excuse for me to be so anti-social, right? I should be posting updates every hour, with lots of pictures, video clips, and funny captions, and instead I go weeks -- months, even! -- without posting. 

It's just that I always thought a writer was supposed to be busy creating other worlds, other characters besides Himself. I would rather socialize with the characters from my Rose Of Skibbereen books than spend time creating a John McDonnell character who is Internet ready and appropriately controversial. 

Most writers are not that interesting in person, but in terms of building a following in this social networking age, that's the kiss of death. You have to be interesting at all costs, able to gain legions of followers because of your comments, pictures, and the "events" that you can stage. 

But, like I said, that has never been the way most writers operate. Some of the greatest writers in the world of literature have been the kind of people you'd never even notice at a party. P.G. Wodehouse, who wrote almost a hundred classic books (most of which are still in print 50 years after his death), said many times that he led a boring, uneventful life. He spent his days sitting at a desk, immersed in the radiant world he created, writing down all the adventures of his unforgettable characters, and he went months without doing anything that was worthy of a Tweet or a Facebook post. 

And what about Ernest Hemingway? Oh, he could probably fill up a lot of Facebook with pictures and posts about all his macho adventures -- marlin fishing, big game hunting, boxing, fly fishing -- but you wouldn't see a peep about anything to do with his writing. Hemingway, like a lot of writers, didn't want to spoil the creative mood by posting daily updates about what his characters said or did. He was notoriously close-mouthed about his works in progress, and I doubt he would have posted any of his writing on social media for his fans to read. 

These are just two examples, but the list is endless. Most writers in the past would not have adapted well to social media. I realize there are writers today who embrace it, and good for them. If they can keep up with all the demands of having a public persona and interacting with their fans on social media, while still managing to write beautiful, imaginative literature, well, God bless them. I'm not one of them, it seems, and there's nothing I can do about that. So, I'll just keep writing my stories every day, and once in a while I'll pop my head out of my burrow, blink a few times like a mole who's found his way to the surface, and post an update or two. 

And if Kim Kardashian is still in the news, I'll offer an opinion on her latest outfit. 

Here's What I'm Writing

Just a quick update.

I know I haven’t posted here in awhile, but I’ve been keeping busy with my various writing projects nonetheless. Here’s a quick update, to let you know what I’ve been doing. 

• Fiverr -- I’ve been getting swamped with work on Fiverr, where I am available for brainstorming ideas and writing blog posts. I wake up every morning and find my inbox crowded with jobs from people who need help with things like: slogans for products, plots for novels, marketing input, branding ideas, and blog posts about dozens of subjects. I’m happy to help, and if you read the reviews, my clients are very happy with my work.
• Fiction -- I’m working up some ideas for a new horror novel that will be out before August, and also the last novel in my “Rose Of Skibbereen” Irish romance series. The “Rose Of Skibbereen” novel will be out by the Fall. I’ll keep you posted about my progress on that. 
• Playwriting -- I have now submitted my short plays to 16 theaters and festivals, and I’m going to continue submitting till I have 20, 30, 40 or more plays out there. It’s not easy to get a play produced these days, but I believe in my talent, and I am determined to see my theatrical writing performed. I’ll keep you posted about that also!

That’s it for now, but I’ll post more updates as I have news to report.

A Video Interview With Me

I was recently interviewed in the Doylestown Intelligencer newspaper about my "Rose Of Skibbereen" ebook series. They posted an excerpt of the interview at their Web site. In this clip I'm talking about the genealogy research that gave me the idea to write the novel. You can find it here.

A Toast To The Immigrants

St. Patrick's Day is coming, and every year around this time I start to think about the people I based my "Rose Of Skibbereen" series on. They are people from my family, my ancestors, and I learned about them through the meticulous genealogy research my mother did. She told me often about her old Irish grandmother, who died in the 1940s, and how she came over to Philadelphia as a young girl and worked as a servant in the houses of rich families. She had three sisters who moved here also, but she left a brother and a sister back in Ireland with her parents, and she never saw any of them again.

It was a hard thing the Irish did, the same as all immigrants do. They left their native land because of poverty, and they traveled thousands of miles to a new country, and often had to start out at the bottom rung of society, scrabbling to make a living the best they could. Many of them never had the money to buy a steamship ticket back to their homeland even for a brief visit, so they never saw their parents or the world they grew up in again. 

I think of that often when I think of my great grandmother, who is the person Rose is based on. She grew up in a rural part of Ireland in the 19th century, a place where there was no electricity, and none of the modern conveniences. I'm sure the first city she ever saw was Cobh, which was the town in Ireland where she boarded the ship to take her to America. Philadelphia, where she disembarked in the 1880s, must have seemed overwhelming, with all its traffic and people and sights and sounds. To make that transition, not only from one country to another, rural to urban, but also to live, like she did, for 60 more years and see all the changes that the 20th century brought, must have been a bewildering experience. When she died the world had been through two world wars, cars and airplanes had been invented, the telephone was a part of daily life, and there were a thousand other changes that must have made the world of her childhood seem like a dream. It's something I can hardly imagine, to see all that change in one lifetime, and even though I've seen some wonderful things in my life I haven't seen that rate of change. 

So, this year on St. Patrick's Day I'll lift a glass and toast my grandmother, and all the other immigrants who lived through so much. Because, through it all, they endured. 

I hope they found peace at their journey's end. 

Book Five of Rose Of Skibbereen Is Out!

Just in time for Thanksgiving, I have published the latest in my “Rose Of Skibbereen” family saga. This is Book Five in the series, and it takes the story through the 1980s and 90s right up to the dawn of the new millennium. The main character is Rosie Morley, granddaughter of Rose Sullivan Morley, the heroine of the first three books in the series. In this book Rosie moves to New Hope, Pennsylvania, and opens a bar and restaurant where she sings her beloved Big Band numbers. She also meets Jack Caldwell, a futurist, who captures her fancy with his optimism and his rugged good looks. Rosie’s son Pete gets into trouble in Northern Ireland, and for good measure there are some psychic overtones, some echoes of the spiritual music Rosie hears in her dreams. 

This series was based on some genealogical research I did, but at this point I’ve strayed far from that path. The characters are all fictional, of course, and their stories have developed in new and surprising directions. I think you’ll enjoy it!

The David Bowie Shift

I am not a huge fan of David Bowie’s music, but I’ve always admired his sheer chutzpah. I mean, this is a rocker who abandoned the Ziggy Stardust persona he’d created at the peak of his fame in 1973 and then created a more sophisticated persona for his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. It was the most expensive rock tour in history at that time, featuring a towering set with a catwalk and a cherry picker that lifted Bowie high in the air, and the sets alone cost $1.3 million in today’s dollars. Then, smack in the middle of that tour, Bowie took time off and completely stripped down the set, doing a 180 degree turn as an R&B singer for the rest of the tour.

I love performers like him (Neil Young is another who comes to mind) who refuse to be put in boxes. They don’t want to spend their entire careers churning out the same style of music, and they look for variety, new vistas, new challenges all the time.

I’d like to think I’m that way myself. From the beginning of my writing career I always wanted to expand my horizons. When I did commercial work I couldn’t stand being categorized as a “medical writer” or an “automotive writer” or “a business writer”. As soon as I started to hear editors and agencies label me like that, I wanted to move on to some other kind of writing. 

It’s the same thing now that I write fiction. You may have noticed that I write romance, horror, humor, poetry, and literary stories. I’m all over the block. Currently I’m almost finished another installment of my “Rose Of Skibbereen” romance series, but after that, who knows? I might want to write a mystery novel. I know that some readers would prefer that I stick to one category, one genre, but I can’t. It would bore me to tears to do that. I didn’t get into this writing game to keep writing the same things over and over. 

So, I ask that you have patience with me, and maybe broaden your reading options a bit, and explore something I’ve written that’s out of your usual taste. If you’ve read my romances, try a horror book. Or, if you like horror, dip into one of my humor collections. After all, it’s the same guy writing all these ebooks, so you’ll probably recognize my style no matter what the content is. 

Don’t worry, I won’t shift gears in the middle of a book the way Bowie did during that 1974 tour. Well, actually, I can’t promise anything. Who knows, maybe if I do I’ll invent a new genre along the way. Anybody for a horror-humor-romance?

What Genealogy Research Has Given Me

Rose Of Skibbereen would never have been written if it weren’t that I got interested in my family’s history. Growing up, I always liked to listen to my mother’s stories about her Irish grandmother, but I never really got bitten by the genealogy bug till my mother passed away and left me her folders of research, and some old photo albums. 

My mother did her research in the days before the Internet, when she had to take a bus downtown and pore through the Philadelphia City Archives. She spent hours at various government offices, she badgered bored city employees for help, she searched miles of microfilm and made copies on those clunky old machines that smelled like chemicals and took long minutes to make a shoddy, blurred copy. 

When I got involved it was much easier. I was able to search online databases and find records in a matter of seconds that my mother had to wait weeks for. I could connect with other people who had information about my family, and exchange photos and stories with them by email.

And it really got to me. Because what happened is I began to realize there were stories about these people, my ancestors, and some of them were quite tragic. There were men who abandoned their wives with small children, there was alcoholism and insanity, there was poverty, there was abortion, there were unwed mothers, there were immigrants who left Ireland as teenagers who never saw their parents or family again for the rest of their lives.

What I found was the gritty truth about my past. I grew up in the cocoon of suburbia, and I never thought anything dramatic happened in my family. I was wrong, though, because the generations before mine had lots of drama, although it was kept a secret from my generation. 

I got lots of material for my novel, although I used my imagination to embellish the facts in many cases. I got a new respect for the hardships faced by the people who came before me. And I got a new love -- genealogy -- that I’m thinking of turning into a second career. I love family history. Every family has its own secrets, its triumphs and tragedies, and every family is worth researching, I am convinced. 

It’s a project worth undertaking, and I highly recommend it. You may be surprised at what you find out when you do genealogical research, but I can guarantee you’ll get a deeper understanding of your family’s roots. 

If you want advice on how to proceed, contact me at mcdonnellwrite@gmail.com and if I can help you, I will. 

What To Write Next?

I am in between books right now, and I'm trying to figure out what to write next. I could write another installment of my "Rose of Skibbereen" series, because the last one ended in the mid-1970s, and there are certainly more stories to be told about the descendants of Rose Sullivan McCarthy. I have this perverse character trait, though, that gives me a fear of being stereotyped. I know a lot of writers would keep mining the vein they started, which in my case would be the saga of Rose and her family.
However, the rambunctious imp in me wants to do something different. "How about a horror story?" the imp says. "Or, maybe a one-act play? Now, that would be fun!" Those are the conversations I hear in my head every day when I'm between books. I can't go too long without writing something, so I'll have to choose a project soon. We'll see if the imp convinces me to do what he wants. Anyone want to make a request? I'll consider most requests, unless it involves writing a massive historical novel that would take years to research and write, because, well, I just don't want to be holed up at my writing desk that long. 

Actually, I've got a notebook with some ideas jotted down, and a few of them involve the horror genre. I haven't thought about scary stories in a while, but for some reason the idea of writing a good old-fashioned, hide-under-the-covers yarn strikes me as a worthy project. We'll see what transpires in the next few weeks.

Book Four Is Published

Book Four of "Rose Of Skibbereen" is published! This one took me longer to write, and maybe that's why it has more words than the other three books in the series. The extra words are not because the book covers a longer time period -- in fact, it only covers about 15 years in the 1960s and 70s.
Then again, there was a lot crowded into those years, as anyone knows who lived through them. The 1960s were revolutionary in many ways, and there were major changes in the way we lived and loved and thought about things during that time. That's really why I needed more words to tell the story -- the characters had a lot crammed into those years.
The main character of this book is Rosie Morley, the granddaughter of the original Rose of Skibbereen. Rosie is impulsive, tough, a gifted singer, egotistical, and a dreamer. Her passion and enthusiasm get her into trouble sometimes, and she hurts those around her, although it's usually not intentional.
Other characters who pop in and out of the story are: Pete, Rosie's son; Lucy, Rosie's mother; and Mercy Francis, who is actually Rosie's long-lost stepsister, who comes to Philadelphia on a reluctant quest to find old black and white film of her father, the scoundrel James Francis.
I have lived with this story for months now, and if I don't stop myself I'll babble on forever and give the whole plot away. I think it's a great addition to the "Rose Of Skibbereen" series, and it was fun to write, since I lived through the 1960s and this book brought a lot of memories back.
See for yourself, though. I hope you download the book, which is available on Amazon and Smashwords. And by all means, send me feedback about it! I want to know if you liked it or didn't, and which parts you liked or hated the most. Your comments will make my next book better.
One last thing: for people who don't have an e-reader, you can still read my book on your computer. Just go to Smashwords and you can download a version that you'll be able to read on whatever computer you use.
Oh, one final thing: "Rosie 1" was the cover that won in the voting, so that's what I used.

You Can Pick My Next Cover!

I'm almost ready to publish Book Four in my "Rose Of Skibbereen" series, but I'm stuck on one last thing: deciding on a cover. I commissioned two covers, and I can't decide which one I like better. So, I figured I'd let my readers weigh in on this issue. I'm going to post both covers and let you tell me which one you like best. I set up a poll (in the column to the right) to collect your votes, and the one that gets the most votes will be the cover of my newest ebook.
Some background information: one of the main characters in Book Four is Rosie Morley, the granddaughter of Rose Sullivan Morley, the woman who came from Skibbereen to Philadelphia back in 1880 and started this whole saga. Book Four begins in the early 1960s and Rosie is making a lot of poor decisions, as she is prone to doing, which cause no end of trouble for her and the people closest to her. Since she plays a major role in this book, I wanted her to be on the cover.
The problem is, I can't decide which of two pictures of the fictional Rosie I prefer. So, I'm asking for your help, readers. I would like to know which one you like the best. Let me know, and I will be happy to use the one that gets the most votes.
Here are the pictures. The first one is "Rosie 1".

The second one is "Rosie 2".

Let me know what you think! Thanks. The voting ends in three days.

Book Four Is Coming

We writers try our best to keep on schedule, but sometimes things take longer than we planned. I had thought I'd have Book Four of "Rose Of Skibbereen" published by now, but my revisions are going a bit slower than I anticipated. Don't worry, though -- I will have Book Four published in ten days, if not sooner.
Book Four starts in 1960, and as you might imagine, there's a lot that happens in that wild and crazy decade. I was around for those years, and it's been fun to write about an era that I actually lived through. Writing about the music, the politics, the conflict between old and young people that took place in that decade has brought back a lot of memories. The Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, rock n' roll, Carnaby Street fashion, and a parade of crazy characters -- they're all in this book. You'll get to meet them in a matter of weeks, so stay tuned for an announcement coming soon on this blog.
In the meantime, here's your hard-working author, slaving away at the novel.

People, Not Characters

Ernest Hemingway once wrote: "When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature."
In my novels I've tried to create living people, which means they are a mixture of good and bad, of noble and despicable qualities. They have many flaws, but they're also capable of kindness and grace. Like real people.
I've gotten some feedback from readers through emails and reviews on Amazon, but last night I had a chance to speak to some readers face to face, and I got some valuable insights about my characters.
For the first time ever, I went to a book club where the members were discussing one of my books, "Rose Of Skibbereen". I was nervous about going, but the members put me at ease right away, and it ended up being a truly enjoyable experience.
It was a special evening for a fiction writer, to sit there and discuss my characters as if they were real people. The members asked me questions about why Rose did something, or what was Peter thinking when he made yet another foolish decision, and as I gave them my answers it occurred to me that it was like explaining why someone in my family did something.
And that was the best part, because I realized the characters had come alive for these readers. They were not caricatures or cardboard figures, they were living people, warts and all. People whose lives you can get caught up in, which is why we read stories in the first place.
I couldn't be happier about the book club meeting last night. It was a special experience for an author, and I'd love to do it again. So, readers, if you have a book club and you'd like to invite me, contact me at mcdonnellwrite@gmail.com, and we can discuss the logistics. If it's possible for me to come, I'll be there.
I love discussing my people.

Another Good Review, And Some News

I promise I will not use this blog to broadcast every favorable review my books get, but I can't help it, I have to post this one. I sent a review copy of "Rose Of Skibbereen" to Sue-Ellen Welfonder, who is a best-selling author of romances set in the Scottish Highlands. I figured that Skibbereen, Ireland isn't that far from Kintail, Scotland. Their inhabitants share a Celtic soul, and a perspective born of the wild beauty of their lands, I thought, so maybe Sue-Ellen would enjoy my book. 

It turns out she enjoyed "Rose Of Skibbereen"so much that she gave me this quote to use. 

“McDonnell wields his pen as masterfully as the storytellers of his own ancestral Ireland.  Rose of Skibbereen is a gripping tale, powerful and evocative, and with such a strong sense of place and authentic characters, you’ll feel transported into one of the most compelling and heartbreaking periods of Irish history.  I was hooked from the first line and highly recommend Rose of Skibbereen.  This is historical fiction at its finest. Haunting and unforgettable.”

Thank you, Sue-Ellen! It means a lot to me that someone who writes best-selling historical fiction like you enjoyed my novel. I appreciate it!

The other piece of news I have is that I am now hard at work on Book Four of the "Rose Of Skibbereen" series. I had thought that I would stop after three books, but the response has been very encouraging from readers, who want the story to continue. I enjoy writing about these characters, and seeing where the twists and turns of their lives will lead them. I hope to have Book Four published in March, just in time for St. Patrick's Day. All I can say at this point is that the story takes place in the 1960s, so you know there will be a lot of change in the air!

Dreams And Realities In 2014

It’s the start of a new year, and the Internet is filled with people summing up the past year, proclaiming their plans and resolutions for the fresh new batch of 365 days that arrived recently, and generally doing a lot of pontificating about the passage of Time. 

So, I’ll weigh in with a bit of pontificating also. 

What did I learn in 2013?

That life is short, and you can’t wait around for your dreams to come to you. You have to reach out and grab for them. 

One reason I learned this lesson is that I lost my mother in 2013.

She was sick for a few years, and in some ways it’s a blessing that she doesn’t have to endure any more pain or humiliation, but it was still sad to see her go. I’ve lost both of my parents now, and there’s nothing like losing your parents to make you feel the passage of time. 

And so, now that I’ve realized the clock is ticking, it has occurred to me that I have a limited amount of time left in the game. The dream that I’ve been carrying around for my whole life, the one where I become a successful writer of fiction? I now realize that it’s time to stop dreaming about it and start doing the legwork to make it come true. I could always put it off when I was younger, stow it away in the “Someday” drawer. Not anymore. “Someday” is not some vague misty thing anymore. It’s getting closer all the time, and I can see the outline of it in my rear view mirror.  

Actually, I have been taking steps to realize my dream for some years now. When my father died in the 1990s I started writing short stories again, after abandoning them in my youth. I got some published, and that satisfied me for a time. 

Then, I realized that it was time to try bigger things. I wrote a novel, then another, then another. And, I have to say that my timing has been good. The last ten years have seen a revolution in the publishing industry, so that writers everywhere can get published more easily than at any time in history. The digital revolution has meant that you can publish a novel as easily as you can write a Word document, and in a matter of minutes you can have it available to more people than Gutenberg could have dreamed of when he printed the first hardbound book.

So 2013 was a bad year because my mother died, but it was also a good year because I published the first three volumes of my “Rose Of Skibbereen” series. I published 150,000 words about this Irish girl, based on my great-grandmother, who came to America in 1880 and had many adventures, heartaches and joys. To my great happiness, the ebook sold well. I was a novelist! It was a term I could never use before about myself, but now, by God, I could. 

So the lesson I learned in 2013 was that dreaming is a good thing, but you have to combine it with doing. If you want your dreams to come true, you have to start working on them, one day at a time. 

I won’t make any great predictions for 2014, but I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing -- writing every day, publishing more ebooks as I finish them. And if current trends continue, I’ll get some more readers along the way. 

And hopefully my dreams will keep coming true. 

Excerpt: Crossing The Atlantic

I've decided to post some excerpts from my "Rose Of Skibbereen" historical romance series here on my blog. These will give you the flavor of the book, and you'll be able to get a feel for my writing style. This section is from Chapter Two in Book One. It is about the ocean voyage Rose and her friend Mary took when they came to America in 1880. The scene takes place at night, during a terrible storm.

“If I ever get off this ship I’ll kiss the ground and never leave it again,” Mary said, as the ship settled itself before the next wave. “I’ll never get on another one of these floating coffins as long as I live.”

“Sure, and you’d never see Ireland again if you did that,” Rose said. “Unless you know another way of getting home, you’ll have to take a ship to come back.”

“God help me, if I have to take a ship I’ll never see my home again,” Mary said, as another boom of thunder roared in the background.

“Now, Mary, don’t talk such nonsense,” Rose said. “We’ll all be going home again, God willing.”

“We should have stayed,” Mary said. “If I was you, Rose Sullivan, I’d never have left, not with that fine McCarthy boy making eyes at me like he did to you.”

“He did more than that,” Rose said, mischievously. She was trying to distract the two of them from the terrible storm, and she thought talk of Sean McCarthy might do that.

“What do you mean?” Mary said.

“Why, he kissed me, don’t you know,” Rose said, feeling the color rise to her cheeks.

“Kissed you?” Mary poked her head out of her covers, and looked down at Rose. “Why the devil didn’t you tell me this before? That black-haired boy kissed you? What was it like, Rose? Tell me this instant.”

“It was like a spark of fire on my lips, and it spread through my whole body,” Rose said. “I can tell you it kept me warm the rest of the night.”

“You don’t say! How many times?”

“Just once! What kind of a girl do you think I am, Mary Driscoll? Do you think I’d be kissing a strange boy the whole night through?”

“No, but I can tell you what I’d have done,” Mary said. “I’d have sold my ticket on this blasted ship, and home I’d stay if a boy who looked like that kissed me.”

What do you think? If you'd like to read more, Book One is available here. Books Two and Three are also out, so if you like the story, you can continue on!

Book Three Of "Rose Of Skibbereen" Is Out!

I am happy to announce that Book Three of my "Rose Of Skibbereen" series is now published. This book covers the years from 1935 to 1960, and it follows Rose Sullivan Morley and her family through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the 1950s. There are some surprises in store for Rose, her son Paul and the other characters, and there is still a strong element of the supernatural -- perhaps even paranormal -- in this story. I've had a lot of fun writing it, and I am constantly amazed at the new directions the story takes. It's like real life, I guess -- you never know from one day to the next what's going to happen. I based this story on things I found out about my own family when I researched the family history, but it has taken twists and turns that I never anticipated.

I originally thought this was going to be a trilogy, but now I realize there will be four books in the series. I want to find out what happens to the family as it faces the second half of the 20th century, and all the way up to the present. There are new characters appearing on the scene, and I want to see how they grow and develop. That book will probably appear in February or March of 2014. For now, though, I hope my readers enjoy this latest installment of the Rose Of Skibbereen series!

As always, let me know what you think!

My Great-Grandmother's House

I'm back from my trip to Ireland, and all I can say is it was the experience of a lifetime. We rented a car and traveled in a big circle that started and ended in Dublin, and we saw breathtaking views at every turn. There were mist-shrouded mountains, gentle lakes, and remote beaches with waves crashing at the foot of cliffs that rose hundreds of feet in the air. The people were warm and friendly, the food was hearty, and the Guinness hit the spot after a long day on the road.
The high point for me was that I got to see the remains of the house my great-grandmother grew up in, outside of Skibbereen. She is the person I based some of my "Rose Of Skibbereen" books on, and it was a poignant moment for me to see this relic of my family's past.
If not for the Internet it wouldn't have happened. I posted a message on an Irish family history message board three years ago, looking for information about my great-grandmother's family. Just six weeks ago I was contacted by a woman from Skibbereen who said she knew something about the family. It turns out she grew up just down the road from the family farm, and she knew an old man who remembered the last surviving member of my great-grandmother's family to live in the farm house.
We stayed two nights in Baltimore, which is a nearby town, and this kind woman met me and showed me around. She was a fount of information about the area, and the families who have lived there for generations. She drove me around the winding country roads (most of which are barely wide enough for one car to drive on) and gave a running commentary on every house we passed.
And then we turned up a narrow, tree-lined drive and made our way to a whitewashed house with palm trees and ferns planted around it. Maura, my guide, parked next to the house and got out and introduced me to the owner, an English woman named Doreen. Doreen was very friendly, and said I could look around as much as I liked. I went around to the side, and there it was -- three stone walls that were all that remained of my great-grandmother's house. It was an emotional moment, and I stood thinking of how 140 years ago that little girl who lived there could not have imagined what Life had in store for her  -- that she would move to America and live out her days there, in a land so different from this little house surrounded by green, hilly fields. Or that she would marry and have children, and that her descendants would be so many. Or that one of them would come back so many years later to see the place where she was born.
Here is a picture of me in front of the house. Life takes many strange twists and turns, doesn't it?