The Ancestral Pen

  I sat down at my desk this week to write the final chapter of my Patriot book, and I had to stop. Not because the words wouldn’t come, but because they poured out of me, literally. The kind that make your hands hover over the keyboard while you wait to see the words on the screen clearly again. Just as a reminder, Ann and Edward — the two central figures in this book — are not fictional creations. They are, in fact, my fourth great-grandparents. I won’t share the passage here because it belongs to the ending, and the ending belongs to the book. But I will tell you this: writing the final words of Ann’s story, I felt the full weight of who she was. A woman who carried burdens quietly, who loved fiercely, who gave thanks even when she had every reason not to. And Edward, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, faithful to the last. That faithfulness, that quiet love — it did not disappear when they left this earth. In some way I don’t fully understand, it found its way down through...

  Hello friends, I need to talk about something that's been weighing on me lately. My search history. You know that moment when you're deep in research mode, frantically Googling things for your book, and suddenly you stop and think, "If anyone saw my browser history right now, I'd have some explaining to do"? Yeah. That's been my entire week. Exhibit A: Medical Emergencies of the 1780s "How long does it take to die from a musket wound" "Can you survive a musket ball to the shoulder" "Revolutionary War field medicine" "Amputation without anesthesia survival rate" "What does gangrene smell like" Look, I need to know these things! Edward Beeson got shot at multiple times. People died around him. I can't just write "and then he was injured" without understanding what that actually MEANT in 1781. There were no ambulances. No antibiotics. No "let's just pop down to urgent care." Exhibit B...

  The Man Behind the Story And I want to hear about your Patriot ancestor. Hello friends, I've been eyeballs deep in the research on my Patriot ancestor, so I'd like to take a moment and share the backstory behind the book I'm currently writing. This ancestor is the very one I entered into the Daughters of the American Revolution with. I'll be spending a significant amount of time now feverishly writing to get the book done before our Idaho DAR annual meeting in April—I want to feature it there. I've already donated some of my other books to raise funds for the DAR, but I want to feature this one specifically. Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. Let me introduce you to the man behind the story. Meet Captain Edward Beeson Edward Beeson was born on January 1, 1757, in Guilford County, North Carolina, to Benjamin and Elizabeth Hunter Beeson. He was 21 years old when the Revolution began, living in what would become Randolph County—a young man in a region that wou...

  Life Updates from the Trenches Hello friends, It's been a week. And what a week it's been. Writing Update: The Patriot Book Saga One week of drafting outlines only to throw them out and start over again. It wasn't going well. I think—fingers crossed—that I have the start of something finally. We'll see. This new outline still has issues, number one being lack of sleep on my part. Sometimes I just stare at the screen and nothing makes sense. The words rearrange themselves. The plot points laugh at me. It's going great. Life in the 2 AM Club My daughter-in-law and I are finally finding a rhythm with the baby, but we are both still sleep deprived. I'm not sure how I did this with my own children because I did not have my mother or mother-in-law there helping me. Though my husband helped where he could, he also needed sleep to keep working and paying the bills. It's a humbling reminder that this parenting thing—and grandparenting thing—is no joke. We're ma...