Happy Book Lovers Day

Today is Book Lovers Day, a day that we celebrate introverts and literary connoisseurs. I have loved books all my life. Words on pages are plane tickets to distant lands. Characters are friends, enemies, and guides. Stories are my life as I wish it to be, or proof that I am better off than I believe. I have my favorites, and there are very few that I have set aside half consumed.

Among my best friends and favorite stories, I must admit, is the one I put to paper. I spent nearly ten years researching and writing In the Shadow of Mr. Lincoln. I learned about farm life in eastern Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century, to the point that it became a world as real to me as my own. The characters are so authentic that I could tell you what Abby thinks about women in the workplace and what Brian thinks of modern politics.

The most important thing, however, is that the characters know, or discover, themselves. And in following their personal journeys, we learn something about ourselves, too.

My goal is that by Book Lovers Day next year, In the Shadow of Mr. Lincoln will be on the to-be-read piles of book lovers, a friend waiting to guide to another world.