Historical Romance/Prairie Romance:
Ida has always gone her own way like a gentle breeze, drifting through social barriers as if they weren't even there. Like the breeze, her comings and goings are hard to keep track of, and her family assumes Ida's activities are the same as the other society debutantes of Pittsburgh. When she responds to the wilder wind of the Oklahoma prairie, she recognizes the untamed quality in her personality. She also comes to realize that even the wild wind has a Master. She submits to the hand of her Creator, her loving Heavenly Father, and allows Him to tame her willful nature.
Excerpt:
Ida Meade nodded wearily at the pronouncement. She’d heard it a dozen times since checking into the hotel a week before. Her response remained the same, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Haunted,” the brawny man grunted as he hoisted a burlap bag of rice to his shoulder. “That’s what I said.” He carried his load to the waiting buggy.
Watching Lucas plod back and forth from the storeroom door to the surrey, Ida recalled some of the others in town who’d nervously couched their warnings with snickers.
“I don’t believe it myself,” the clerk at the front desk of the Granger Hotel had said. He tapped a stubby pencil on the polished check-in desk. He looked cautiously around the lobby before leaning closer to whisper, “But there’s been people seen things. Things that aren’t natural.”
A day later, Ida interviewed a woman for the housekeeper position at the mission. Her lone applicant was more interested in talking about the haunted house than the job offered. After repeating a fresh bit of ghost gossip, the job applicant quickly assured Ida she didn’t believe half of the rumors.
“Especially don’t put no faith in O’Reilly’s story,” she confided. “He claimed he nearly galloped right o’er a ghost on the Burnside road.”
The woman made a noise of disgust. Ida thought for a minute she was going to expectorate in the hotel lobby spittoon, and breathed a sigh of relief when the woman didn’t spit out anything but words.
“It were night,” continued the woman, “and he mostly drunk, I think. As for me, don’t mind a-going there come the day, but you ain’t gonna get me to sleep there a-coming no night.”
And then, there had been the livery owner who hitched the buggy for Ida. “I figger I can handle a rattler, a bear, or coyotes," he claimed. "But little girl ghosts, . . .” The man shuddered dramatically and left Ida standing beside the bedraggled surrey. He’d walked off muttering, spit a stream of tobacco at a can by the large wooden door, and shook his head. Ida thought she heard him say, “Fool woman.”
Is he referring to me? Ida clutched her reticule and scowled at the man’s back. Well, he doesn’t know me. I’m anything but a fool. She let out a sigh. At least, I didn’t think I was a fool until I ended up here.
Every person Ida encountered had an opinion, a bit of wisdom or nonsense, to impart. She listened attentively and sifted the chaff from the grains of common sense. Having lived all her nineteen years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she wasn’t prepared for prairie life. She knew it and consciously beat down her pride to take instruction. Nothing would deter her from the Lord’s purpose. He had opened doors, prepared the way, circumvented all obstacles. She would establish the Indian school. She would teach the littler ones in that ramshackle farmhouse. The younger children would get their education without being shipped off to boarding schools.
Ida Meade refused to let the various horrifying ghost stories be the straw that broke her camel’s back. These references to haunting were merely more inconveniences in a long list of inconveniences that began long before she left her parents’ home in Pittsburgh. That list had seemed to multiply since her arrival by train to Elder Creek, a small town in the Northeast Indian Territory.
Why Donita Wrote Taming The Wild Wind:
I wrote Taming the Wild Wind because at the time I was writing romance. My mother played on the banks of the Wabash River as a little girl pretending she was an Indian princess. When she grew up she learned that her grandfather was part Native American.
Purchase Links:
Amazon (including Kindle). http://www.amazon.com/Taming-the-Wild-Wind-ebook/dp/B005IIRB1K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315851673&sr=8-1
Barnes and Noble (including Nook).
Author Bio:
Donita K. Paul retired early from teaching school, but soon got bored! The result: a determination to start a new career. Now she is an award-winning novelist writing Christian Romance and Fantasy. Her books include The DragonKeeper Chronicles, The Chronicles of Chiril and Two Tickets to a Christmas Ball. She says, “I feel blessed to be doing what I like best.” Her two grown children make her proud, and her two grandsons make her laugh.
Purchase Links:
Amazon (including Kindle). http://www.amazon.com/Taming-the-Wild-Wind-ebook/dp/B005IIRB1K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315851673&sr=8-1
Barnes and Noble (including Nook).
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