Hello, and thanks for dropping by! I'm L.G. Vernon, long-time writer, and author of The Wilderness Road. I'm often asked how my ideas form? What takes flight as a bonafide story, and what lies dormant on the corner of my desk? I have an answer for that, of course.

It depends.

Take The Wilderness Road, for example. Its beginnings weren't even a kernel in my brain when we (that would be my husband, my daughter and I) took a vacation to the east coast several years ago. It was a meanering trip, through Nebraska and Iowa, stopping here and there to shop for antiques.

Our first stop of real import was Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There we absorbed the magnitude of just what had occurred in July of 1863. We took dozens of photos and drove the National Park Service's 'auto tour'. Repeatedly, we heard the comment that Gettysburg was the 'turning point of the Civil War'. I wondered at that, because it didn't seem to me that there was any abrupt 'turning'. It seemed to me, rather, in that summer and fall of 1863, that the war continued as it had; the Union and the Confederacy clashed again and again, each time General Lee taking his army south to recover, with little pursuit by Union forces.

So, there came the first kernel of an idea. Just when, if not Gettysburg, was the turning point of the war?

We continued our travels, first heading over to Washington DC where my daughter and I got to look up into the faces of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. We stood, owl-eyed and tearful as we observed the Honor Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington.  A horse-drawn caisson rolled slowly past, taking another hero to his rest. Having recently been at Gettysburg, walking the hills of Arlington~~the place that had once been the home of General Lee~~was particularly poignant.

After visiting Washington, we headed into Virginia~~the ground upon which more Civil War battles were waged than in any other state. At Fredricksburg, we walked Marye's Heights and it was there we saw a rendering in bronze of nineteen year-old Confedrate Sergeant Richard Kirkland, a man so possessed of compassion that he selflessly carried water to his wounded foes. His heroics so touched those around him that the battle actually ceased while he quenched the thirst of the wounded and dying.

He would be killed later, in 1863, at the Battle of Chickamauga. And another idea struck me. At what point does compassion subrogate fear? And why are some struck by it and others not?

From Fredricksburg, we drove a short distance to the Wilderness Battlefield. The first battle in the 1864 Wilderness Campaign, it was a fierce exchange between Union and Confederate forces on ground so thick with undergrowth and second-growth timber, that visibility was next to nothing. It was here that fires broke out in the woods, consuming the living and the dead, and it was here that Union General U.S. Grant began 'the long trek south'.

And it was here, on this obscure battlefield, a stone's throw from Fredricksburg, that the true turning point of the Civil War began. Because it was here that U.S. Grant made clear his intent to follow Lee wherever he went. In the weeks and months that followed, Grant saw to it that prisoner exchanges between the North and the South, ceased. He attacked on many fronts and, as he promised President Lincoln he would, he followed Lee without ceasing. He gained the nickname 'the butcher' and was very often found weeping over what had to be done. After all, the men he swore to defeat were Americans, too~~often aquainted, often related, often beloved.

And here I found the core of my story: How much horror is too much? How far must a man go in search of himself when the person he knew is gone?

And so, in my mind at least, I'd found the starting point for a great story~~the Battle of the Wilderness~~the turning point of the Civil War. And a great character~~a man who, emotionally scarred by his experiences, must rise out of himself for the sake of others.  But where to go next?

There have been  thousands, perhaps millions of Civil War novels written. I wanted to do something different. I hoped to develop characters that weren't stereotypes~~and from all walks of life, from Irish immigrants to former slaves~~and I wanted to include aspects of life in the mid-1800s that are rarely written about. I wanted to move my story people out of the East, just as thousands of Northerners and Southerners pulled up stakes and went~~and along the way explore life out West. And so, since I call Wyoming home, what better place to send my characters?

When we got back to Wyoming, I had dozens of ideas written down, a list of contacts at the National Park Service, and an almost uncontrollable zeal for this story. But, there was research to be done. LOTS of research. There were character studies to write, an outline to get down, and all the other tasks incumbent with the logical progression in getting a story on paper.

I also had a growing teenager who was involved in a dozen things at once, so instead of spending time here in my office, I often found myself 'living' in my car. By the time she was a senior in high school~~three years after our trip to the east coast~~I was less than half finished with my story. When she, whom I love more than life itself, went off to college, The Wilderness Road was done in less than four months. And I love my story  now just as much as I did when the ideas first hit me.

I hope you will, too.

Now that The Wilderness Road is contracted and set for release, I've begun another literary adventure. At this point, I know where my characters are going and where the story ends up. I'm just not sure,  yet,  how they get there from here.

As soon as I do, I'll let you know.

For now, I'm just Linda