Over the past few weeks, that lovely proof of my paperback I posted as last month's blog has been joined by her sister hardcover, and both print books are currently for sale at online book sites!

Amazon and other retail sellers require a 60-day pre-order period for books published by outside publishers that gives them data on how many units for them to have in stock. My release date is November 19th. I hope you will order A Woman of Marked Character for your personal reading, and later go back and buy holiday gifts for your family and friends! (At this writing, my e-book is not yet online but will be shortly.)

Already you can read excerpts here. A portion of a chapter is available for you to read on my blog post Excerpt from Chapter 8, Young Sarah Meets President James Monroe. And now I share with you my Author's Note for Book One 1812-1848 for you to enjoy.

Author's Note

I believe in magic—call it coincidence, happenstance, or Fate.

Smith's Point, Texas. Sunday, January 8, 1991.

I stood under an ancient live oak tree beside the grave of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix. It was, coincidentally, the hundredth anniversary of her death.

Some months before at a historical society meeting in Orange, Texas, where I was living at the time, Kevin Ladd, former director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville, presented a lecture on a woman who had lived and died at her ranch on that point of prairie jutting into the east side of Galveston Bay.

As a freelance writer, my curiosity took hold. Why did this Cherokee woman have a Texas historical marker commemorating her existence in this world?

I gathered as much printed information as Kevin could provide me. Then, armed with a few facts, I set out to answer that question. On that chilly January day, a friend and I went in pursuit of Sarah's grave. Asking around at the Smith's Point community, we gained permission to walk through a cattle pasture to an oak grove where a small family graveyard lay near Sarah's historical marker. I parked on the side of the road. Pulling on our muck boots, we slipped through a barbed wire fence and trudged across the prairie.

The live oaks were overgrown with Spanish moss draping and resurrection fern clinging; wisteria vines dangled and poison ivy entwined a battered chain link fence surrounding a smattering of family headstones. My photographs show a foggy haze hovering over coastal marshlands. Sarah's marker was a worn tan stone incised with faded black letters reading "Sarah Ridge Pix, 1814 - 1891." (Today, the McNeir Family Cemetery is trimmed and manicured, and a more recent pink granite slab marks Sarah’s life.)

I had read that the live oak trees under which Sarah was buried were planted near their homeplace by her last son Charles Forest Pix, from acorns given him as a child. Grand spreading limbs rose and arched over their graves, but that day I envisioned smaller trees planted a quarter of a century before her death. Forest lies near his mother, curbing outlining his grave.

I stood in the hazy mist imagining Sarah walking through mustang grapevines, dodging palmettos pointing sharply; the browns, the grays, the greens. The crackle of winter leaves.

That January day standing over the stone that marked her time in this world, I told Sarah that I would write her story.

Sarah's life—I was to learn through my decades of intense research—survived in her letters, family memories, and a few portraits; court documents; and occasional paragraphs in books and dissertations written about her well-documented Cherokee father, brother, cousins, and first husband. A university press to which I sent an early proposal of Sarah's story replied if I could provide a footnoted biography, they would consider publication; I felt there was not enough documentation to write such a book.

So I give to you here Book One of my two-part biographical novel, a word-portrait of Sarah imagined by me—researched with diligence and devotion with a bit of magic tossed in along the way. The answer to my long-ago question rests within A Woman of Marked Character.

Nancy Stanfield Webb

I hope you enjoyed this story of my discovery of Sarah's grave.

Here are my souvenir photos taken that wonderful day, January 8, 1991!