Author Q&A with Michael Ross
Author Q&A with Michael Ross
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1. Tells us about your writing/ published book(s)
I published the first book, The Clouds of War, in the Across the Great Divide series with Harper Collins in May 2019. It follows two families, Will Crump and his sisters Julia and Albinia, and a slave family Luther, Jemima, Olivia, and Clara through the Civil War. I saw numerous parallels between the period of 1859-1862 in the United States and today – a deeply divided country, controversies over race, tariffs, sanctuary cities, riots in the streets, the potential for mass violence, even civil war.
The tag line for the Clouds of War is “A nation divided, a family torn apart, a love threatened, a dream of freedom.”
My next book in the Across the Great Divide series, is “The Search”, due out this fall. It follows Will Crump after the Civil War as he grapples with PTSD, making sense of God and the war. His search for peace leads him to a young Shoshone woman and drops him in the middle of Red Cloud’s War.
2. Where’s your favourite place to write?
I have a large upstairs room that is my writing cave.
3. How do you approach starting a new book?
I research the era, the setting, and the characters – characters most of all. I feel that historical fiction is telling people’s stories, real and fictional.
4. What’s your favourite genre to read?
Historical fiction – but I also read detective thrillers and mysteries. Favorite authors are Tom Clancy, James Clavell, Anne Perry, David Baldacci, and Robert Crais.
5. Do you do research for your books? If so, what kind of research?
I do massive amounts of research. I read scholarly papers, dissertations on the period. I read diaries – for The Clouds of War, I read over two hundred slave diaries, as well as William Still’s Underground Railroad. I read first-person accounts of battles from both sides, and newspaper articles of the time. I search for pictures from the Library of Congress and other sources. I read accounts from both the famous and the ordinary people involved in the events depicted. Whenever possible, I travel and walk the ground where my characters are shown – I visited Lexington, KY., the Shiloh battlefield, and other locations in the book. I interview people – I spent time with the curator of Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate, and for my upcoming book, I flew to Utah and interviewed a Shoshone chief.
6. How do you fit writing into your everyday life?
I was a software engineer for thirty-seven years, now retired. I often write between three and seven A.M., leaving the rest of the day free for wife, grandkids, and woodworking.
7. How do you approach ‘world-building’?
I immerse myself in the period. Just as you can tell people about the town where you were born, I make sure that nineteenth-century America is just as familiar to me as twenty-first century Kansas, where I live. I try to make the characters breathe and live, and let them tell their story.
8. How do you handle criticism
I examine it, and see what truth I can learn. Then I move on.
9. Tell me about your current work
I’m working on two other books, “Washington’s Drummer Boy” about ten-year-old Billy Sims, who served on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War in George Washington’s Honor Guard, and one on a Civil War nurse, based on the life of Mary Ann Bickerdyke.
10. Tell me about your main character
I have several, but in Across the Great Divide it’s William Dorsey Crump. He was a real person. I wrote a scholarly article about him that was published in the Handbook On Texas for the Texas Historical Society. Will was drawn into the Civil War following John Hunt Morgan and fought in the Kentucky Cavalry. He was captured and spent two years in Camp Douglas, the infamous Chicago POW camp. After the war, he went on to ranch in Dallas and founded two Texas cities, Shallowater and Lubbock.
I was born in Lubbock and knew his granddaughter when I was a child. For more on Will, see https://www.tshaonline.
Will’s sisters, Julia and Albinia were also real, but their characters were based on Pauline Cushman and Delia Webster, historical women who were respectively a Union spy and an abolitionist in the Underground Railroad.
Luther, the enslaved boy who grows to manhood during the book, was an amalgam of many that I read about in the diaries of enslaved people.
11. Would you want your book made into a film?
Yes, I would love that – though if I didn’t have some script control that would be scary.
In a perfect world, I would get to approve the script, and help decide casting. That almost never happens, though.
One Comment
Ana Brazil
Michael, I have also thought about having my historical fiction turned into a movie and my reaction is the opposite of yours! Since a book and a movie are soooo different, I’d be interested in seeing how a filmmaker (someone I respected enough to sell the rights to, of course) adapted my characters, plot, and theme to film. And I’d love to see how actresses & actors interpreted the characters I know & love.