Welcoming Authors Diane Ashley and Aaron McCarver!!

photo © 2009 James Whitesmith more info (via: Wylio)


















Day 1

We are excited Among the Magnolias is being featured on the Heartsong Connection blog this week. This book, volume two of our "Mississippi Brides" series, has actually been several years in the making. It all began when we - along with our writers' group, the Bards of Faith (Hey, Bards! We love you!) - spent a day in Natchez, Mississippi. While there we toured one of the many antebellum homes, Rosalie, first own by Peter and Eliza Little. I (Aaron) especially loved seeing the nearby "cottage" and learning it was built, on request of the mistress of Rosalie, as a home for itinerant preachers. She felt the ministers would stay longer in the area if they had a nice place to stay. This planted a seed of an idea for a novel that simmered on the back burner, so to speak, until we began to plot our books for this series.

We all ready knew that book one, Across the Cotton Fields, would be Alexandra Lewis's story. She was a character from our Tennessee series whose family was located in Natchez, Mississippi, making her a perfect choice for the heroine of that book. She struggled with believing she needed a man to take care of her before learning to depend on God. We thought the heroine of this book, being the daughter of Alexandra, would respond too strongly in the opposite direction. Thus Abigail LeGrand struggles with the idea of trusting any man other than her father. She thinks marriage equals submission in every way and works to avoid committing to any man, especially the preacher who comes to stay in the cottage her parents built near their own plantation home. But this also keeps Abigail from fully submitting to God.

When creating the character of the itinerant preacher, we chose another character from our Tennessee series, Nathan Pierce. (His spiritual struggle will be the topic of tomorrow's blog.) The idea of the preacher for the hero worked great for the third book in this series, As the River Drifts Away, which will release this summer from Heartsong Presents. Diane had all ready created the heroine, Caroline, for this story set in Vicksburg during the Civil War and she happened to be the daughter of an itinerant preacher. Everything was falling into place.

The final piece of the "puzzle" was the orphanage. We had established in A Bouquet for Iris, the story Nathan Pierce first appears in, that he is very uncomfortable around children, preferring to avoid them entirely. We decided to have Abigail love children and work with an orphanage begun and supported by her parents, which we set up at the end of book 1. This would add another layer of conflict between our hero and heroine. In doing more research about Rosalie and Natchez for this book, we discovered that the owners of Rosalie, who had no children of their own, had also started a Natchez Children's Home, even taking in some orphans themselves including a niece. Isn't it great when God brings a plan together like this? We used Mississippi's most recognizable symbol for the title and the book was born. We hope you enjoy our story, but more importantly we pray you are drawn closer to God through reading the story of Nathan Pierce and Abigail LeGrand.

God works in mysterious ways. Can you name a few situations where everything fit perfectly together like a puzzle?