 Can you imagine wearing a corset? Which side of history do you think you'd land on? Author Heather Wood is here with us today, chatting about these things and more. Her books sound so good, so be sure to read all the way to the bottom to find out more! Heather, you weave your love of history into your beautiful Christian stories. What is it about history that draws you to it? I love history because I love sociology and learning about where the ideas and customs of our culture came from. Everything had an origin, from the ways we think about ourselves to the ways our cities are laid out to the words we use. Who started it? Did they know that the choices they made would be an influential part of culture a hundred or four hundred years later? Another reason is because the complexity of human history helps me to appreciate the complexity of our own times better. People 180 years ago were as concerned about the direction of their culture as we are, and oftentimes two now-revered leaders "back then" had opposing ideas and good people followed each of them. Those kinds of things bring me perspective and comfort in navigating the era where God has placed me. Your stories are all woven into one family saga, right? How hard was it for you to keep track of all the characters and plotlines after writing several books? Yes, I have one published series, and it's all about one family and their friends. There were times when I was plotting the later books when I realized something I'd said in a previous book had written me into a hole, or the situations I wanted to write for my characters were going to be impossible. It actually made my writing more creative and my plots less expected. Since I now had a puzzle to figure out to get the timelines to line up just so or have a character at a place I hadn't planned, I was able to take the stories directions that even I hadn't seen coming. Do you have a character who is more like you than another? In what way? I wrote Mary Pierce in Until We All Run Free with my personality but with a vastly different life experience. You'll see pieces of me in her though, from the way she loves birthdays to the way she says what she means to the way she wants to be seen as competent. I also have a lot in common with Jack, and writing his story had me digging deeper into my own junk than I wanted to. What drew you to the Civil War and the Chicago fire as the settings for some of your books? I'm from Chicago and have been a Civil War buff since around the seventh grade, so that one was easy. In fact, Until We All Find Home was a story I made up as a teenager and never wrote down until I was in my thirties. To this day, I've never read another Civil War novel set in Chicago. The Great Chicago Fire happened six years after the war ended, so if I was going to write a sequel, I was going to have to figure out how my characters were going to respond to the devastation of their city. If you lived during the Civil War, do you think it would be hard to pick a side? Which side do you think you'd end up on? Most people who lived during the war didn't want a war at all. It couldn't be anything but heart-wrenching to go to war against your own countrymen. The side I picked would most likely depend on where I lived and what narrative I'd been told my whole life. Since I'm from Chicago, I imagine I would end up siding with the Union. My stories talk about the fact that people fought for a lot of different reasons and can't be put in a box. There were, after all, Union soldiers who brought their slaves with them to serve them in the army camps. Again, we have a tendency to want to simplify history when it is in fact as complex and diverse as each of the individuals who lived then. Your books all have siblings. Do you base that on siblings in your own life? Any real sibling rivalries or stories pop into your fiction? I want to make it clear that all my characters are entirely figments of my imagination and none of them are based on people I know (except for myself, as I mentioned). With that said, I have six siblings, so siblings are a big part of my life. I love sibling stories myself, because it's fascinating how people raised in the same environment with the same parents can grow up to be so different from each other - and yet have random peculiarities in common. The siblings in my books, however, did not grow up together, and their differences are even greater. What's something coming up for you in the future? Can you give us a sneak peek? I'm working on the Young siblings' origin story now! Right now I'm in 1827 Baltimore with their father, ten-year-old Henry Young. The Young children didn't know their father, since he died when his oldest was seven, but I think they would appreciate knowing that he would have been able to sympathize with the struggles and experiences of each of his four kids. Their mother, Sinead, is still in Ireland and hasn't arrived on the page yet, but she'll make an appearance by the end of this three-book series. Last but not least, please leave us with one fact about yourself that very few people know. I'll tell you a secret: if I had two lifetimes, I 100% would still be Civil War reenacting. My priorities have changed (and I'm writing now!) but I miss having the time and budget to make myself beautiful things, put on a corset, and go hang out around a campfire while teaching visitors about 1860s fashion and culture. I suppose I do that with my pen now instead, but I absolutely miss it. Heather Wood grew up in the Chicago suburbs, loving history, classic literature, writing stories, and Civil War reenacting. After obtaining her bachelor's degree in Bible/Theology from Appalachian Bible College, she settled in Virginia with her husband David. Her early passions fuel her writing today, although she spends most of her days now working to infuse her love for God and good literature into the hearts of her four small children. www.heatherwoodauthor.com https://www.instagram.com/heather.wood.author/  When Justin Young is reunited with his orphaned siblings during the American Civil War, he decides to bring his widowed sister and younger brothers to live with him in Chicago, desiring to give them a home and a family. But he soon discovers that sometimes love is more painful than it is healing as he faces his own inadequacies. Along their journey towards reconciliation with God and each other, the siblings and their friends learn that real love often looks like the hard work of granting grace and second chances to other hurting, imperfect people with whom they have nothing in common. In the end, they each find that when they come home to God, He gives them the courage, freedom and grace to come home to the people they've come to love.  Heather's Christmas novella, Until We All Share Joy, is releasing on audiobook on Nov. 7 and is available for preorder now. Be sure to check it out!
https://www.audible.com/pd/Until-We-All-Share-Joy-Audiobook/B0CGRYS97D
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