W...W...W...Wednesdays - February 12

This meme was created by MizB at Should Be Reading. To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…


• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading?

Still making my way through this one. I simply haven't had as much reading time as usual because I'm performing research for a book I'm working on.

Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.

We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.

Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.

What did you recently finish reading?

Read this children's picture book for my Christian book blog.

Every child wonders where belly buttons come from and why they exist. Discover the nonhistorical truth in a delightful, fun, and affirming way. Children will discover that belly buttons mean you are special and you are loved. After reading Where Do Belly Buttons Come From? you may never look at your belly button the same!

What do you think you’ll read next?

Thinking it will be this one, but it could be something else.

Welcome to the Steampunk World of Regency…

…where the power of steam has already passed from the age of unsatisfactory experiments to the first country-spanning railways and ships that no longer sail at the whims of weather. Roberta Stephenson is the daughter of the ‘Father of Railways’…a girl almost raised in the engine works and through her experience, and education in the most advanced halls of Miss Mather’s Academy for Girls, is fit to become manager and designer at her father’s steamship yard on the Clyde.

And Britain needs Roberta’s expertise, for fate in this world has dealt more kindly with Napoleon, allowing him to extricate most of his army from Moscow in 1812, and granting him at least a draw at Leipzig in 1813. With developments of the steamships begun in France in 1783 he is ready to take one more gamble to rid himself of the interference of Perfidious Albion, and the island’s safety may depend on the steam powered rams Roberta is offering to their lordships of the Admiralty.

Complicating Roberta’s professional life are her romantic suitors: Lord Julian Bond, man about town and Admiralty spy; the enigmatic Symington Holmes; and Engineer Lieutenant Alfred Worthington RN. It seems that Roberta is destined to choose one of these gentlemen, but will she choose wisely?

I'm also due to review this one soon, so it could be either.

Planning on self-publishing a book? Uploading files to a packager isn't the entire scope of work. That's actually the easiest task, but there are many more necessary tasks to be done.. This book explains the entire self-publishing process. It breaks up the publishing process into four timeframes starting four months before the availability date. This spreads the workload into easy-to-manage chunks.

The book describes the complete process necessary to self-published a book. Unlike those who maintain that self-publishing a book consists of simply uploading the cover and manuscript files, this book details all of the necessary preliminary tasks that have to be finished before uploading the files.

It’s a complete roadmap to get a book self-published. It’s organized by timeframes to break up the workload into manageable chunks.

What are you reading this week?