Tuesday, May 30, 2017

It's Blog Tour Tuesday and our God is MIGHTY TO SAVE!



Shout Hallelujah! Then sing a bar or two of Leonard Cohen’s beautiful ballad Hallelujah!


I’m so excited that my newest release MIGHTY TO SAVE has launched this month, two weeks and a day ago to be exact. It’s book nine in my Texas Romance Family Saga series. I’ve come from 1832 all the way to 1918, almost a century, and one of my favorite heroines Evelyn May Eversole Nightingale is the third generation, then of course, there’s her son Buddy, fourth from my patriarch Henry Buckmeyer. (I’m still in mourning from book eight, COVERING LOVE when he went to Heaven.)


Each one of these stories has been so different, and MIGHTY TO SAVE is no exception. The hero and heroine already met--and even pledged themselves--in the last installment when as a six-year-old, Evie asked the fifteen-year-old Nathaniel to wait for her, that she was worth waiting for. Of course, she had no idea what she spoke of; she’s only repeating the story of her mother Cecelia telling her daddy Elijah that she was worth waiting for.

But then God gave Nathaniel a vision of the precocious little girl all grown up, and he decided she was right.

So MIGHTY TO SAVE opens when he is overseas, a chaplain in the army stationed in France. His dearest wife—yes, they’re already married! Where’s the romance, Caryl? You read it and see if there isn’t plenty  These two were such a pleasure to write, no misunderstandings, no outside forces to tear them apart so they can come together again. No sirree. Together from the start, this married happily-ever-after couple fills the ages with their fun, friendly banter working together twenty-four/seven (like my husband and me )

And Buddy! Their four-year-old. I admit, I’m a sucker for the little boys! I reared seven myself, three I birthed and four grandsugars. It’s easy enough for them to steal my heart away. Buddy definitely does! Here, enjoy a little sample:

Jacket copy --- Never lean to your own understanding, but in all your ways, acknowledge God, and He will guide your way.
     Contrary to her parents’ wishes, Evelyn married a nonbeliever, but it all works out . . . or does it? Not only did the love of her life accept Christ, Nathaniel got baptized by fire and became a minister of the gospel. Woven into the breathtaking tale of love and redemption are two additional stories, Evelyn’s novels of faith, family, and forgiveness.

What others are saying ---
. . .  one of the best books I’ve read!
. . . I’d give this series ten stars!
. . . WOW! Hold onto your hats! Another wild ride
. . . You will love this story for sure and for certain!
. . . Caryl has an amazing gift.
. . . a powerful addition that strongly celebrates family and Christian values!

Excerpt --- And like in other of my stories, again you get two in one! :) Check out this excerpt from Pearl's story (set in the mid-1800s) ---
    Evelyn would have liked it better if Miss Pearl had been reading out loud. It would have been nice to tie the reactions with exactly where she read in the chapter.
    She finished the last page then looked up. “Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly how it happened, but I didn’t like it one bit.”
    “You didn’t? I’m sorry. What should I change?”
    “Not a word. What I didn’t like was how you put me right there—in Miss Ruth’s bedroom again. Why, I smelled the burned powder. Like I’d relived it. Awful night that was. Praise God for the Blood.”
    “Oh. Well. I am sorry for you, but that’s what my readers love. It is good, isn’t it? But Miss Pearl, are you sure about telling this part? There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
    “Self-defense, pure and simple. Best of all, I’d love clearing the name of that dear woman. The farmer’s family raised a stink on account of him getting shot twice, and his seeds being so swollen from where I kicked him.”
    “Was there a trial?”
    “No, honey. Took the grand jury less than ten minutes to no-bill her.”
    A twinge of regret nipped at Evelyn, but two trials in one book might be too much. “I’ll leave it as is then. It’s so awesome that Miss Ruth took up for you.”

Help Spread the word ---
#NewRelease MIGHTY TO SAVE #ChristianFiction #HistoricalRomance https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XYL9ZM4

MIGHTY TO SAVE #NewRelease 5-Star #HistoricalRomance #MatureRomance https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XYL9ZM4

@CarylMcAdoo #NewRelease MIGHTY TO SAVE #ChristianFiction #Evangelist #WW1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XYL9ZM4

Giveaway --- One book one, VOW UNBROKEN print copy to a random commenter & One Mighty to Save, book nine, ebook to a different random commenter!


the author's bio --- Caryl McAdoo loves writing stories for all ages that glorify God and is thrilled Christian fiction fits her life purpose so well. Bold not bashful, she’s quick to share the Bible principles she lives by through her characters and hopes each title ministers His love, mercy, and grace. Known as the “Singing Pray-er”—with a YouTube channel to prove it—the prolific hybrid author also loves praising Him with new songs He gives her. Her high-school-sweetheart-husband moved the family from the DFW area—home for fifty-plus years—to the woods and seat of Red River County. After Ron, Caryl counts four children and sixteen grandsugars life’s biggest blessings. The McAdoos live a few miles south of Clarksville in the far northeast corner of the Lone Star State.


Links :  Author Pages:  Amazon / BookBub / Simon & Schuster /  Book Gorilla  /  Southern Writers Magazine  /  Sweet Americana Sweethearts
Website (All First Chapters are offered here)Newsletter  /  YouTube  (Hear Caryl sing her New Songs!)  /  Facebook Blogs:  Personal / HeartWings (Devotional) / Stitches Thru Time (Misc.) / GoodReads / Google+  /  LinkedIn  /  Twitter  /  Pinterest  /  PUZZLE 

Blog Tour Tuesday: THE WOODWORKER'S MAIL ORDER BRIDE

Today’s Blog Tour Tuesday features
The Woodworker’s Mail Order Bride
By Heidi Vanlandingham

Book Description:

Ashamed of his criminal past, Anthony Trevain is living the solitary life he wants, but when he finds himself raising his orphaned younger sister, he’s forced to take a bride. Marriage to Rebecca is nothing like he thought, each day a struggle as he tries to keep his past a secret and his wife at arms’ length. To provide for his new family, he must accept a job from the one man who could put him back in the criminal life. 


To escape the clutches of her society- driven mother, Rebecca Townsend flees Baltimore as a mail-order bride. When she arrives in the mining town of Creede, Colorado, nothing is as she thought it would be. Rebecca falls in love with the stranger she married, but does Anthony love her enough to make their marriage work?

A series of incidents puts Rebecca and Anthony, their family, and friends in grave danger. Will their new family be torn apart before they can come together?

Excerpt:

Anthony’s lips twitched and, for the first time that day, he felt like laughing. That feeling quickly disappeared the moment his thoughts turned back to the task at hand. He needed to find the woman, Miss Rebecca Townsend, and get her secured on the train heading back to wherever she came from. He’d prove to everyone he could handle a ten-year-old girl, because no matter what life threw at him, he wasn’t taking a wife. He’d seen enough growing up. Marriage wasn’t wonderful or loving. In his experience, it was filled with anger, hate, and punishment.

He climbed up into the train and walked through the first empty car, then the next. Hope began to fill him as he pushed open the last door and stepped into the car. Maybe the woman hadn’t actually come in on the train, and he could return to building his cabin and figuring out how to deal with his sister. His hope drained away as he stared at the sleeping figure in the last seat. She wore a cameo at the throat of her dark blue traveling suit.

He forced one boot in front of the other as he made his way toward her, quietly easing his way down the narrow aisle. Standing in front of her, he drew in a shaky breath. The woman was beyond beautiful. Her long, black eyelashes looked like thick crescents, and were a stark contrast against her flawless, porcelain skin. Her pale pink lips looked silky soft and were slightly open. She had a small, black beauty spot just above the corner on the left side of her mouth. Even wearing a traveling coat, he could tell she was thin and a bit taller than the women he was used to. His fingers itched to pull on the ribbon that was holding the bonnet tight to her head from underneath her chin so he could see what she looked like without it.

Mentally shaking himself, he refocused. The last thing he needed was to fall for a pretty face. A woman’s beauty would never sway him from his vow against marriage. He leaned closer and lightly touched her shoulder, the scent of lilac filling his nostrils. The lady didn’t move. He rested his hand on her shoulder again and gently shook her.

Her eyes popped open, and she let out a startled gasp. He took a step back as she sat up straight then stood, her hand covering the cameo at her neck. He’d been correct about her height. She was tall, her forehead even with his nose. Her eyes widened in surprise. “I’m…I’m so sorry,” she muttered, grabbing for her small valise resting on the luggage rack above her seat. He reached around her and pulled the valise from her grasp and led her from the train to the outside platform.

“Are you Rebecca Townsend?”

“Yes,” she said.

The man continued to glare at her then gave her a rude grunt before turning in the narrow aisle. “Follow me,” he said and walked away.

“You must think me a terrible person. First, to descend on you this way, and then to fall asleep.” She prattled on and nervously wrapped and unwrapped the strings of her reticule around her hand. “I am sorry, but I had no other recourse. Staying in Baltimore was no longer an option.” They walked to the end of the platform, but she half-turned toward him instead of looking where she stepped.

As she began to topple sideways off the platform, he grabbed her arm and pulled her against him harder than he’d intended. She let out a muffled breath that warmed his chest, and for the briefest moment, she rested her forehead against him. She let out a soft chuckle, and a small frisson of electricity crackled from the hand still wrapped around her arm, up to his shoulder, and down to lower parts of his body.

He jerked his hand away, but not before the feel of her slender body pressed against his imprinted in his mind. Other than giving Nora a quick hug, he’d never touched another woman and wasn’t quite certain he wanted to touch this one again. She carefully slid her feet away from the top step. He met her blue gaze, immediately drowning in their cool depths as if he was sinking under the clear blue waters of the mountain lake behind his cabin.

“Thank you,” she said huskily. “I’m a bit clumsy when ruffled.”

She kept up with his fast pace as he marched her back through town toward the grocery. What he was going to do with this curious and definitely intriguing woman momentarily eluded him. But for whatever reason, he was loathe to put her on the train that would take her home. 

You may purchase The Woodworker’s Mail Order Bride from Amazon by

About Heidi Vanlandingham:

Have you ever picked up a book and lost yourself in the story, laughing on one page then cry on the next? This is my goal as a writer. I want to bring readers the same pleasure I have when reading a good book. My favorite genres are paranormal, historical, gothic, and young adult. And somewhere buried in all that is a great cozy mystery just waiting for me to discover it.

I live in the middle of tornado country. I write during the day and the rest of the time I can be found in a baseball stadium somewhere watching my academically brilliant and athletically talented son. I love to travel, prefer to read than do anything else, have an autistic son and several immortal fish who know I need their space for more books.

Connect with Heidi Vanlandingham:


Friday, May 26, 2017

Museum Gift Shops—a guilty pleasure


I’m going out on a limb here and admitting a particular weakness for museum gift shops.  I’m among friends, right? And no one will think less of me.  Not long ago, my husband and I took a 2-day trip to Tombstone in southern Arizona. He wanted to see the famous sights (OK Corral, Birdcage Theatre, Boothill Graveyard), and as an author of western historicals, I’m always looking for research opportunities.


Who knew all that history occurred in an area that is only three blocks long and four blocks wide? We started at the courthouse museum and I could have spent the entire day there. Great exhibits and specimens with detailed descriptions. We saw such a thorough depiction of the shootout of the OK Corral (and a carefully researched rebuttal) that we didn’t feel the need to sit in the hot sun to watch the reenactment.


For me, the real treasures are the books in the gift shop. The ones that have a narrow focus and are usually written by people who live in that geographic area. Children’s books featuring desert animals from the region, recipe books using native plants, biographies of famous people involved with the locale. (I did carry around at least one of these three types before making my final decision.) Because I live in a small cabin with limited shelf space, I truly had to restrain my buying habits but couldn’t resist three titles. One highlighted Arizona mining towns, another included stories of frontier female doctors or nurses, and the last was a picture book about Tombstone. I never know when one tidbit of first-hand information will be the exact fact I need to make my historical stories as authentic as they can be. So many research books, such limited shelf space. Sigh.

Anyone else confess to a similar guilty pleasure?

My only book so far set in Arizona was part of the American Mail-Order Brides series titled Libbie: Bride of Arizona. Alone for the first time, tomboyish Libbie Van Eycken accepts a mail-order proposal and travels across country to find a place to call her own. Arizona rancher Dell Stirling needs a wife but didn’t count on the eccentric creature that brings chaos in her wake.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

You Sidewinder!

Yikes! As if traveling on the trails westward weren't hard enough, the west and most of the United States is inhabited by rattlesnakes. Only Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine are free of poisonous snakes.

Now, most of the time a snake will slither away without a fight, but when they do strike, ouch!

And the baby snakes are worse than the adults. The reason being most of the time a baby will inject a full load of venom. Many a stock animal was bit and lost and occasionally people. The bite is not always fatal, but they are always painful. 

The treatment we see on TV and in the movies ~ cutting the bite area and sucking out the poison ~  is not used any more. Instead, keep still, get to a doctor, and try to identify the species of snake - without getting bitten of course. 

Other remedies usually included whiskey, tobacco, salt, eggs, and kerosene and gunpowder as well as poultice from various roots and plants. Many people no doubt survived because snakes don't always get a large enough dose of venom into the bite. 

Early newspapers on the prairie often included snake bite events and told if the victim survived or not. Those that died were often the young or old. Sometimes, their death may well have been more from the remedies as the bite. Some of the roots can cause death as well as great amounts of whiskey.

So watch yourself out there. Spring and summer spell snake weather. People are still bitten today. While their prognosis is better than their counterparts of the old west, five-six still die each year from poisonous snake bites.

Hope you enjoyed this slithery post about snakes. Think back to all the brave pioneers who marched through the country enduring all sort of hardship and give them a hearty thumbs up.
Have a blessed day!
~~~~~
I love to write stories about the old west and the brave men and women who settled our nation. You can find my books on Amazon under Patricia PacJac Carroll.  

My latest book is The Judge's Bride 



Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Receipts of the 1800s - Part 2



I'm a bit of a book pack rat. The annual Friends of the Library sale in Honolulu, Hawaii, is my crack... errr laudanum. I have more books than I could possibly read in  my lifetime and perhaps a few more besides. Part of my excessive collection is comprised of Civil War Era Ladies Magazines bound by year.

I thought I'd share some of the 'gems' I found in these editions, as it fits the Old West/Historical books that I write and I think it informs the world around my characters.

The first thing to note is that Recipes were called RECEIPTS. When I mentioned Receipts on another blog, people always wanted to correct me. I completely understand why, since we don't use Receipts in that manner in our modern world.

**Please Keep in Mind that I have NOT tested any of these recipes, so try them at your own risk**

Today, I have a trio of soups!!

Vegetable Soup. – Four quarts of cold water, a half-pint of small barley, and two tablespoonsful of beef dripping, or a lump of fat from cold roast beef, or any fat from meat which is not otherwise needed; a teaspoonful of salt; of pepper, half a teaspoonful.  Let this boil gently for two hours, the four quarts will then be reduced to two. Shred up two large well-cleaned carrots in slices not too thick, also four large onions finely shred or chopped, two heads of celery, and three or four turnips cut up in very small pieces; put all these in when the soup is boiling. Let it boil gently for an hour and a half. Mix in a basin, a piled tablespoonful of flour with a little cold water till it is like cream; burn in an iron spoon, a teaspoonful of moist sugar till it resembles treacle.  Pour on this a little boiling water, and mix it with the flour, then pour the whole into the soup, stir it well, let it simmer once, and the soup is ready.

Godey’s Lady’s Magazine 1864

Carrot Soup. – Take six or eight full-grown carrots, scrape them clean, and rasp only the outer rind, or soft red part, and if you have a ripe tomato, add it, sliced, to the raspings, but use no other vegetable except onions.  While this is being done, the brother of any kind of fresh meat which has been got ready should be heated and seasoned with a couple of onions fried in butter, but without pepper, or any other kind of seasoning, except a small quantity of mace and a little salt; put the raspings into two quarts of the skimmed broth, cover the stewpan close, and let it simmer by the side of the fire for two or three hours, by which time the raspings will have become soft enough to be pulped through a fine sieve; after which the soup should be boiled until it is as smooth as jelly, for any curdy appearance will spoil it.

Godey’s Lady’s Magazine 1864

LOBSTER SOUP (French). – This soup is certainly most excellent, and worth all the care which must be bestowed upon it.  Take three young lobsters, boiled, or four small ones; take out the meat and cut it in small square pieces; take out the coral, not the berries, pound it so as to separate it, and sift it through a coarse strainer; take two quarts of good veal stock, quite a jelly, and cold; add to it the berries bruised, a tablespoonful of anchovy sauce, two ounces of butter, melted before the fire, into which rub two tablespoonfuls of flour; put it into the stock with a blade of mace, let it boil for ten minutes, then strain it:  add to it the meat of the lobsters and the whole of the coral, stir it up so as to make all thoroughly warm, but  if it now boils the color will be lost; put half a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce into it and sent it very hot to table.  Forcemeat ball, of minced meat out of the head of the lobster, with the soft part, the tips of the tails, and other scraps, some bread crums, a teaspoonful of flour, a few minced shrimps, and a very little grated nutmeg, mixed together with the yelk only of an egg, made into balls the size of marbles, and fried, should be thrown on the top of the soup directly it goes to table.

Godey’s Lady’s Magazine 1864

NOTE: you may see some words that 'look' like I didn't know how to spell, but I have typed the entries here as they are printed in the book itself.

Thanks for getting hungry with me today!

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