We are diligently working on our latest project: The Light Attendant: A Canadian Bluebird Novel (working title). The story follows a Canadian Nurse through her experiences in Wold War I and the pandemic of 1918. The book has been a long time in the making and I am thrilled to see the project in its final phase.
This story actually began as an anecdote told by one of the characters in our first trilogy: Horizons, Winding Roads, and Coming Home, initially published in 2014. I had long been interested in World War I and the Spanish Influenza pandemic which followed at the end of the war in 1918. As a result, I used that bit of history in one of my character’s background stories in Coming Home, never knowing it would go on to become so much more. (For those of you familiar with Coming Home, you might just recognize the “guest appearance” by two of the characters as they help out in our new book.)
The research I did for that background story only served to stir my curiosity about those events. When I was asked to give a nursing presentation on immunizations in 2018, I couldn’t resist including a bit more research on the Spanish Influenza pandemic and the impact of the world’s initial encounter with H1N1.
The information I had come across continued to draw my attention and I started to think about the reality of the time and how that might look for those who experienced the war and the pandemic first hand. When my daughter found this book in a yard sale in 2019, I took it as a sign that I was supposed to start writing in earnest- which I did.
As tends to happen with our creative group, the project became much larger than originally intended. There was so much history to explore! One book became two, but I felt the stories needed to be told together. The result was two novels told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of the two main characters and spanning three books.
The Light Attendant: A Canadian Bluebird Novel, Part I, is due out in March, 2022.
More updates to come. Stay tuned!
