Origins
I had the idea for a book set in 1866 Atlanta back in the mid-1990s. At the time, I worked at the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, and the newspaper offices were located very near where Atlanta began. Perhaps that put ideas in my head, I don’t know. I made some notes, which I’ve since lost, and didn’t think much about it. My wife Deb and I were raising two small children and renovating our house. Any time not given to working, child-rearing, or renovation was used for sleeping. The path from those early ideas to publication was necessarily a long one. You see, getting ideas is the easy part. I’ve met many wannabe writers with ideas. The hard part is getting a readable, publishable manuscript. That takes time and focus.
Sometime around 1995 or 1996, I accompanied Deb, who is a French teacher, to a language conference in Mobile, Alabama. It was a working trip for her but a little getaway for me. One morning, using my loosely formed ideas, we brainstormed the book that became An Uncertain Peace in a Mobile, Alabama coffee shop as a CD of Ottmar Leibert’s Nouvaux Flamingo played in the background. I’ve lost the notes I made that day, so I don’t know how much of our thinking made it to the final draft, but that was the beginning.