Like my earlier project, what would become one, two and three of the Adelsverein Trilogy, Daughter of Texas started out as a single volume, intended as a sort of prelude to the Trilogy. That was supposed to be about the German settlers who came to Texas in a large number in the mid 1840s under the auspices of the Adelsverein, or Society of Noblemen of Mainz. They had an entrepreneur scheme, to bring over settlers from Germany, which would reward them with lots of land and acclaim for having done a very good deed; helping farmers and craftsmen settle in a new land, with lots of opportunities  . . .  unfortunately, the Mainzer Adelsverein went bust, after about two years, but not before essentially dumping 7,000 immigrants onto the Texas frontier.

It was a fantastic story; to tell it in a way that readers could relate to, I made it a family saga. I created a German family – the Steinmetz family; parents, three daughters, two sons and a son-in-law, who come and settle in Texas. I also needed to create another character, a man already established in Texas but who could speak German, who would serve as their bridge between the life they had left behind, and the new one they must embrace  . . .  and incidentally, serve as a romantic interest for one of the Steinmetz daughters. So, that led me to create another family, the Becker family; long established in Texas – and almost in passing, I gave this character an older sister. I described her as being a woman who kept a boarding house in early Austin, who had been married twice, and knew practically everyone who was anyone in Republic-era Texas.

And I should emphasize that she started as a fairly minor character, fairly secondary – but when I came to thinking about what my next book was to be – I thought, why not write about Margaret Becker? Do the whole story of her life and her experiences: coming to Texas as a young girl, marrying the schoolteacher, and seeing the beginnings of the war for Texas independence from her home in Gonzalez. And then – the whole of that war, the ‘Runaway Scrape’ – where almost the entire Anglo population evacuated back to east Texas under horrific conditions – and what she did to rebuild her life. I had written, almost in the first chapter of the Trilogy, where her brother says in passing to another character, that his sister had been left to raise four sons when her husband died of tuberculosis – and what a story I could make of that? A story that was just alluded to in passing, but that could be another fantastically gripping story, of a woman meeting the challenges of that time.  Tell the story from her point of view, move her experiences front and center, tell of the people that she would have met, and known over the years of her life, from the age of twelve?

So I did  . . .  but when I had gotten up to about 350 pages of manuscript, the events of the war, the ‘Runaway Scrape’ and the death of her first husband – and I hadn’t even gotten into the romance with her second, or very far into all sorts of interesting but relatively little-known happenings during the years of the Republic of Texas – I decided that I would save all the rest for a second book about her life. So that’s where that stands. Daughter of Texas is available at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and in Kindle and Nook editions. Now, the sequel should be available in December, 2011 – I’m about two-thirds done with the first draft. No, I don’t have a problem with writer’s block – why do you ask?