Tag: Texas History

Welcome to a guest post from the amazing and talented author, Parris Afton Bonds! She has a brand new book release in her Texican Series, and I’m thrilled to have her visit with us today! Take it away, Parris!

When Jan graciously said she would make room for me in one of her blogs to talk about the Paladin clan of The Texicans series, I was reminded of how the Paladin horde had commandeered every inch of room space from my office.

My writer’s cell is four-feet-wide, and here I stumble, fumble, and grumble through writing my novels ~ but here, also, is where I fulfill my soul’s passion. My spirit takes flight and soars.

Here, also, is where the phantasmic patriarch of a founding family of Texas, the English-born rogue, Lord Alexander Paladín, first leaned over my shoulder and whispered in his husky voice, “The Paladín’s and their Texican’s story needs to be told, mi quierda.”

Foolish me.  I nodded my assent.  Who could resist Alex Paladín?  I could tell his story, of The Brigands and how the penniless Baron Alejandro de la Torre y Stuart came to the Mexican colony of Tejas to claim his deceased older brother’s land grant in 1835 and ended up fighting alongside Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto for independence from tyrannical Mexico.

Little did I know that over the next 4-1/2 years, the increasing numbers of the Paladín clan would crowd into my miniscule office, each to tell their own story that clamored of heartbreak and triumph, of risks requiring all, of love that surpassed even death.

Here in my small office arrived the Irish traveler Niall Gorman, who confessed to falling in love with his best friend Alex’s bride.  Here, also, into my cubicle nudged for room the Baron Karl Von Hess Lippe, to remind me that the predominant language of Texas had once been German and his desire had always been predominantly for Niall Gorman’s wife, the lovely Spanish aristocrat Rafaela Carrera.

The Tejano Jew Moses Solomon reminded me how he had staked his interests in land and banking to provide vessels for a navy of Tejas’s newly formed Provisional Government.  Also, elbowed in Kerry Paladín, to reveal in Volume II of The Texicans, The Barons, how he would lose his left arm in a minor skirmish of the Civil War, lose his libido, and almost lose the love of his life.

If there weren’t enough Paladíns already, Drake the Rake cleared a path to my chair and proceeded to tell how in Volume III, The Bravados, he would clear a path of its debris of bodies, deposited by the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, to look for the young woman he could never forget.

By now I was feeling claustrophobic and wanted nothing more than to edge my way out of my tiny office.  But, oh no, another arrives, the lone wolf Preston Paladín, determinedly insinuating a path through to me.  “How can you neglect my cousin Hannah’s courage under Nazi torture, sweetheart?  That has to be the heart of Volume IV of  The Betrayers!”  And, naturally, he revealed how he, the lone wolf, would be no longer lonely.

The Paladíns are completely taking over my office and my life.  A horde of Paladíns now camp out in my four-foot-wide office, night and day.

Relentless, they hound me, insisting I must pen Volume V of The Texicans, The Banshees.  Byron Paladín faces a nuclear meltdown at Los Alamos, Jack Paladín faces a Russian cold-war torture as a captured U2 pilot, and Sam Paladín faces both a political betrayal and the presidential assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

And, oh, there are so many more Paladín men and women with their both harrowing and happy stories occurring during the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, and the Viet Nam War.  Either I shall have to get a larger office ~ or stop the telling of the Paladíns story with Volume V, The Banshees.

“But, mi amor,” whispers still another intoxicating Paladín voice, as sensuous as sin, “you have yet to tell our own love story.”

eBook is available for only 99 cents!!!

PURCHASE LINK: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NR7WV7J/

About the Author:

Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of nearly fifty published novels. She is co-founder and first vice president of Romance Writers of America, as well as, cofounder of Southwest Writers Workshop.

Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of three best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the New York Times best seller Parris Afton Bonds has been featured in major newspapers and magazines and published in more than a dozen languages.

The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workshop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers. Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.

She donates spare time to teaching creative writing to both grade school children and female inmates, both whom she considers her captive audiences.

Follow Parris:

https://www.parrisaftonbonds.com

https://amazon.com/author/parrisaftonbonds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parris_Afton_Bonds