Romantic Reads: Rayne’s Redemption

Story Behind the Story: Rayne’s Redemption

A guest post by Linda Shenton Matchett

Twins run in my family, and I’ve always been fascinated by them, especially how vastly different their personalities can be. For Rayne's Redemption, I created twin sisters Rayne and Jessica Dalton to explore what it would be like for a non-believer to pose as a believer to get something she desired, in this case, a marriage.

Would she have feelings of guilt or would she be unaffected because she thinks the ends justify the means? Would she succeed with her deception? How would the subterfuge affect those around her and would there be any consequences?

I had great fun creating Rayne because of the challenges associated with her character. In some sense, she is the villain of the story, but in another way she is a victim of her circumstances and her own belief system. She needed to be a difficult personality, yet likable. Strong-willed, yet not rigid.

For her “foil” I decided to use an Englishman for several reasons. First and foremost, I’m an Anglophile. I love all things British and most of my WWII books are set somewhere in England. My last few releases have been set in the western US during the 1800s, and I’ve missed my English characters, so I decided to drop one into Rayne’s Redemption. Having a character from a foreign country also allowed me to use the fish-out-of-water concept, one of my favorite types of story. I enjoyed including contrasts in the characters’ cultures too.

I love to seek my readers’ input on stories, so I polled the followers in my Facebook author page about where they’d like to see a story located. They not only selected Wyoming, but also made suggestions about the name of the town which ended up being Rocky Mountain Springs.

A lot of mail-order bride and western stories tend to have a farmer or rancher as the main male character. I decided to take a different route by having him fail in his attempts to work the land which added to his personal “baggage” of being a second son and feeling like he’d already let down his family. Flynn purchases a mercantile, an important business in western towns not only for the products made available from flour and coffee beans to patent medicines and dry goods, but for the opportunity to gather and catch up on the latest news.

General stores were nothing like our modern shops. The shelves would have been crammed with merchandise, crates, barrels, and boxes. With the unpaved roads and walkways, customers would have tracked in dirt and other waste from outside, and during the winter the stove would have left a fine layer of soot on everything. Mercantiles would also be very fragrant, and according to social historian Gerald Carson it was a “well-dug-in odor...a blend made up of the store’s inventory, the customers, and the cat...with ripe cheese and sauerkraut, sweet pickles, the smell of paint on new toys, kerosene, lard and molasses, old onions and potatoes, poultry feed, gun oil, rubber boots, dried fish, and ‘kept’ eggs. Makes my nose wrinkle just thinking about it!

What is something you learned about by reading a historical novel?

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Author Bio:

Linda Shenton Matchett writes about ordinary people who did extraordinary things in days gone by.  

A volunteer docent and archivist for the Wright Museum of WWII, Linda is a former trustee for her local public library.

She is a native of Baltimore, Maryland and was born a stone’s throw from Fort McHenry.

Linda has lived in historic places all her life, and is now located in central New Hampshire where her favorite activities include exploring historic sites and immersing herself in the imaginary worlds created by other authors.

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Blurb for Rayne’s Redemption:

Will she have to lose her identity to find true love? 

Twin sisters Rayne and Jessica Dalton have been swapping places their whole lives, so when Jessica dies on the eve of heading west to become a mail-order bride, Rayne decides to fill her sister’s shoes. The challenge will be faking Jessica’s faith in God. Can Rayne fool her prospective groom without losing her heart...or her soul?

Flynn Ward fled England to escape his parent’s attempts at marrying him off, but locating a woman to love in the Wyoming mountains is harder than finding a hackney in a rainstorm. Then the Westward Home & Hearts Agency offers him the perfect match. But when his prospective bride arrives, she’s nothing like she seemed in her letters. Is he destined to go through life alone?

Can two desperate people overcome their differences to find common ground ... and love?

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Buy Linda’s book on Amazon

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Connect with Linda:
Website/Blog: http://www.LindaShentonMatchett.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/LindaShentonMatchettAuthor
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/lindasmatchett
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Summer Stories: Shenandoah Road

Behind the Scenes: The Shenandoah Road
A guest post by Lynne Tagawa

Most authors start with theme or characters or plot—or all three—when writing a story. I confess that I did spend time on all of those things as well when I first gave thought to the idea of exploring the time period of the Great Awakening in the 1740s.

But as I did research on the time period, it seemed as though the setting itself steered the course of the project. I fingered through a huge book called Albion’s Seed, an encyclopedic description of the various types of people who had emigrated from the British Isles and settled North America. You might think that, hey, they all spoke English, weren’t they pretty much all alike?

Nope. They were almost all Protestant, spoke English, and had fair skin, but it is amazing how New Englanders differed from Quakers who differed from the planters down south. Not to mention the Scots from Ulster, Ireland, who flooded these shores in a wave lasting over fifty years before the Revolution slowed immigration.

Then revival breaks out in Connecticut under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield preaches in the fields from New England south to Georgia. Suddenly Benjamin Franklin can’t keep enough of Isaac Watts’s hymnbooks on his shelves. Everyone is singing. All that is in the story.

As I dug deeper, I discovered that everything was not as peachy-keen as it sounds. Good ministers disagreed with each other on the itinerant preachers rising up in Whitefield’s wake. They labeled these people “enthusiasts” who might harm the cause of Christ.

Between the cultural divides and the religious controversy, there was plenty of story material. I didn’t have to make up the tension and conflict—it was already there. Midway through the project, I discovered that a real-live minister in my story, a pastor in the Shenandoah Valley, disagreed with the revivalists. He’s kind of an important character, so my story took a little jag. Nothing I planned!

I’d tell you more tweaks I had to make to my story, but no spoilers! I will say this: it contains a romance, but it’s totally G-rated. I teach teenagers, and whenever I wrote a scene, in the back of my mind I’d think of my students. It is written for adults, but homeschoolers are sometimes given Herodotus to read. They’ll read whatever their parents let them. 

I hope you like it too.

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Author Bio:

Lynne Tagawa is married with four grown sons and three marvelous grandbabies. 

She’s written a Texas history curriculum in narrative form, Sam Houston’s Republic, and The Shenandoah Road, a story of the Great Awakening, is scheduled to be published in 2018. 

Lynne lives with her husband in South Texas.

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Book Blurb for The Shenandoah Road:

John Russell’s heart aches from the loss of his wife, but the Shenandoah Valley frontiersman needs to marry again for his daughter’s sake. At first, he believes he has found the right young woman, despite their differences in background, but his faith falters when time reveals she isn’t quite what she seemed. Can he truly love her? And what about his own failings?

Unlike her disgraced sister, Abigail Williams obeys the Commandments. At least, she thinks herself a Christian until a buckskin-clad newcomer courts her. He treats her kindly but also introduces her to a sermon by the controversial preacher, George Whitefield. Her self-righteousness is shattered, and she wonders about their relationship. If she confesses her lack of faith, will John continue to love her?

“Lynne Tagawa transports readers into the faith and hope, and sorrows and fears of 18th century colonial America. While other books feature the raw grit of frontier colonial life, this book goes deeper and reveals the heart.” —Douglas Bond, author of numerous books, including War in the Wasteland and Hostage Lands.

“The Shenandoah Road is an authentic and engaging journey back to the challenges of settling in the Shenandoah Valley” —Laura Hilton, author of Firestorm (Whitaker House, 2018)

“Raw, realistic, and historically packed, this story will make you think. If you enjoy stories with deep theological themes, you will enjoy this.” —Amber Schamel, author of Solve by Christmas, winner of the 2018 Christian Indie Award

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Buy Lynne's book on Amazon

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Connect with Lynne:

Amazon Author Page - https://amzn.to/2LZAh7R

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14845205.Lynne_Tagawa

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