Well, faithful readers. Here we are. Today is the day I draft up a little mini blog post on Drowning in the East River, which has been a labor of love for the last 5 years, which I finally just gave up and hit Publish.  (This is going somewhere… I promise…I hope). And, I promise I’ll follow this up quickly with a pop culture post to keep y’all entertained.

Why was this novel a labor of love, you ask?

Well… long story. The story initially took root as part of what was an almost 20 year genealogy quest in the Pierce family household. There was a old family story of our mysterious Great-Grandfather who, after the death of his wife, essentially abandoned my Grand-father (who was all of two years old at the time) with two elderly maiden aunts, and promptly disappeared from his son’s life.

For a long, long time we had no knowledge of what happened to him. There was a general sense that there was a sea voyage, and very little else.Even my Grand-father had no idea what happened to him.

Having this mystery hanging over your head as a child, probably shaped me more than I know, as we dug through records, trying to find what happened to him.

14-year-old me filled in the blanks with fantasy. Maybe he was a bohemian in Cuba? Perhaps he worked in the Irish Resistance movement in Dublin? There’s a lot  of tragic romance during this period in history (immediately post-WWI), and it was easy to get swallowed up in the world of the stories I was hearing. And I shaped the psychology and the pathos of my main character through the story of my Great-Grand-father.

While the real story wasn’t so romantic (massive stroke in his 40’s working as a ship’s electrician), Drowning in the East River fills the narrative in with the fantasy, creating a story of self-discovery in the face of adversity that struck me when looking at my family’s genealogy.

So, when I’m posting about the book *cough* available now on Amazon and iBooks *cough* that’s what I’m talking about. If the above piques your interest, see the links in the My Books section.