Summer is always a slow time at 2FishWeb. People spend time outdoors during the good weather, clients take vacations, and in the South, life slows down to conserve energy while the days are at their hottest. Having learned this from past years, this year I had a number of projects ready to develop as time became available.
In March of this year, my husband and I took a long trip by train across America — literally from sea to sea. We began in Birmingham (Alabama), rode the Crescent to New Orleans, the City of New Orleans to Chicago (with Arlo Guthrie singing in my head for eight hundred miles), and the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. After a gorgeous week in the Bay Area, we took the Zephyr back to Chicago. From there, we rode the Capitol Limited to Washington DC and home to Birmingham on the Crescent. Eight thousand miles by rail in 23 days.
Map of our planned 8000-mile train journey
The main purpose for this epic trip was to ride the Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. (Even though the map above shows Chicago to San Francisco through Portland, we didn’t go that way. More about that later, too.)
You see, I’m writing a book — a quilt-related novel set on the original California Zephyr in 1949.
“Research?” said my husband when I told him of the information I was finding on the Internet: lists of cars on the train and their floor plans, the route guide, even the dining car menus from 1949. “Research? The best research is to go live it! When are we leaving?”
So we went (learning a great deal about Amtrak and train travel along the way), and I came home with a hundred pages of notes, almost a thousand photographs, a deep, visceral appreciation of the sheer size and beauty of this country of ours, and the memories of a lifetime. (I’ll share some of those in later blog posts.)
The Great Hall at Chicago's Union Station
We came home and I started writing. I had actually written the first chapter, part of which takes place in Chicago’s Union Station, before we left and without ever having seen the place. (That would not have been possible ten years ago, without the Internet. But having been there made it easy to write in a much more real voice.)
The story: It’s just before Christmas 1949, and young Emma Carmichael is riding the Zephyr to San Francisco to marry her prosperous banker fiancé. Her grandmother, sad to see her leave home and unable to attend the wedding, arranges a quilting treasure hunt for Emma. She sends mystery quilt patterns to help Emma create her trousseau of thirteen quilts which tradition demands that each new bride bring to her marriage. But Emma has other things on her mind besides quilts. This journey is not quite as uneventful as she had imagined….
The novel, along with a block-of-the-month quilting program, is being published at Silver Road to California. You can read the Prologue and find out more about the novel here. At the end of the story, readers will receive two setting diagrams to use to finish their blocks into a complete quilt.
Silver Road to California is the first in a series of block of the month quilting novels I’ll be publishing during the next few years. I hope you have as much fun reading as I have writing!
And if you check out the site, please leave a comment here and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you!
