Date Certain—What does it mean? Is anything certain anymore in our supposed post-pandemic world? I’d like to think so, and in some instances, I’m sure we can make a decent case for it, but more than ever, I’ve concluded that the Scottish poet Robert Burns was right about the “best laid schemes of mice and men”; they do “go oft awry.” I struggled through the years of pandemic isolation wishing I could make something useful of my sudden new time to write, finding that my creative energy had gone somewhere else to shore up my survival. But eventually nearing the end of the second year of isolation, I felt a nudge to continue with the construction of the third novel in my Emily Alden Trilogy.
I knew it would be the last book telling the story of a young girl, and then a woman, bucking the social trends of the nineteenth century to experience the life she chose for herself. Perhaps endings are so frightening I’d been battling that challenge as well as the pandemic, but I’d looked forward to this one. The truth about Emily carried me up and over the pandemic blues. To be on the journey from childhood to old age with her was a privilege, and watching her learn to embrace a different life with diverse goals she’d never imagined at first was exciting. The real-life characters who joined her from the pages of history helped support the imagined ones to ride through some very turbulent times, bringing Emily and her violin to an unexpected end.
So, no matter what else goes on in the schemes of mice and men, Emily Alden is ready to share her adventures and insights with her readers today, via her third and final historical novel, Tried As Silver. I hope you’ll join her on that Date Certain. Early readers of this third and concluding novel in the Trilogy have called it ‘uniquely satisfying’. I hope you agree with them. Happy summer reading, my friends, from the Unblocked! Writer.
Click here to be redirected to Amazon where you can buy Tried as Silver as well as the complete Emily Alden Trilogy.