CindyVallar.com is home of the historical novelist & maritime columnist
Title
Thistles & Pirates
Description
Born and raised in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, I spent my formative years reading books and writing poetry. While in college, I saw a movie based on the life of Jean Laffite, a gentleman pirate who helped Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Intrigued by the mysterious, I researched then started to write a novel about Laffite. Graduation, career, and marriage put that manuscript on a shelf where it remained until I began working as a school librarian for seriously emotionally challenged teenagers. I returned to writing to relieve the stress inherent in working in special education facilities. During a boring staff meeting, I wrote about a caped figure who crossed the Scottish Highlands during a fiercesome storm. After twelve years and numerous revisions, that kernel of an idea blossomed into my first published novel, The Scottish Thistle. I'm currently working to complete that pirate novel started many years ago while researching another novel set in the Dust Bowl of western Kansas or Texas during the Great Depression.
During my senior year of college, one of Mom's friends introduced me to a young man who attended my high school seven years before I did. Not only had we lived on the same street as children, but he delivered our newspaper, his mother taught my Sunday school class, and I went to school with his youngest brother. Tom and I married a year later. We celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary by moving from Maryland to Kansas.
I never know when new adventures will arrive on my doorstep. Soon after we vacationed in Austin, San Antonio, and Fort Worth, Texas in 2002, Tom's company offered him a transfer to the Fort Worth area. Little did we know then the trek we would take to reach our new home. Instead of moving directly from Kansas to Texas, we drove to Maryland a week after the 2003 snow storm hit the East Coast. Shortly before our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, we headed to Texas. In May we moved into our new home in Keller, which includes a library to house my collection of over 1,000 books.
