#the widespread use of old blood??? in what way cowboys would

[swallowtail-ageha]

I am happyyyy that the duskbloods is its own thing and it isnt a bloodborne sequel i have always been against the idea of a bloodborne sequel it wouldn't work

[jadesjunk]

Character Bio Example 1

This is an example of some bio writing work for my Red Dead Redemption Online character Eve.

Name: Eve (Last Name TBD)

Short for Evelyn but hates being called by her full name. Comes from her Irish ancestry and named after her deceased aunt. Comes from Aibhilín or Éibhleann, the latter can be derived from the Old Irish óiph ("beauty.")

Alternate nicknames include Evy/Evie which she went by as a child but doesn’t like to be called that anymore.

Also uses the aliases Eliza or Rose and after arriving Lemoyne she may use Rhode as a last name.

Age: 21

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian (Unaware)

Appearance

Height: 5’8”

Weight: 180lbs

Eye color: Green

Hair color: Red head/Ginger

Has always been on the skinny side but after running away her increased activity leaves her often more on the underweight side. She tries to maintain a healthy weight despite her higher metabolism.

Often wears her long red hair in a braid either down her back or over her shoulder.

Prefers wearing loose work shirts and pants with mens boots. In general prefers more masculine apparel but isn’t opposed to occasionally wearing a dress or skirt when in an appropriate situation. She does like mixing up her outfits and has a variety of feminine and masculine apparel, often enjoying wearing nice vests when she can afford them.

Her main outfit consists of a black cowboy hat, red work shirt with a sash around her midsection, basic black pants, black boots, red leather work gloves and a red and black poncho gifted to her by her friend Reyes. She wears a black gun belt covered in an assortment of useful items.

Personality Traits: Kind, Stubborn, Determined, Bit Naive, Quiet

Likes and Dislikes

Likes

Animals

Good food

Comfortable clothes

Being out in nature

Warm weather/summer

Gathering plants or animal samples

Harriet

Dislikes

Having to kill (humans or animals, does it out of necessity)

Poor meals

Being cooped up indoors

The cold/winter

Alligators

Men who assume she should be grateful to be hit on

Family (Living)

??? (Father)

Catherine (Mother)

??? (Eldest Brother)

??? (Middle Brother)

??? (Younger Brother)

Savannah (Previously Claire)

Friends

Wes

Reyes

Faye?

Harriet

Trelawny?

Nazar?

Skills/Work

Eve’s main skills revolve around her witchcraft and animal handling. She’s also an incredibly good cook thanks to her mother and those she’s traveled with. She picks up recipes from all over and has a knack for figuring out what’s missing in a dish just as much as she can sort out what she might need in a particular potion. She seems to have a natural connection with animals as well, able to quickly bond with any horse she rides and often can calm horses she doesn’t know relatively easily.

Eve’s witchcraft mostly revolves around making potions. She does like to make trinkets and talismans as well but she puts more faith in producing potions. She generally avoids rituals and sacrifice as it makes her uncomfortable and she doesn’t like the feeling of possibly calling on devils. Eve’s potions are generally more for improving one’s body such as numbing the body to pain or increasing stamina and improving your sight. She has carefully tested some potions with her horses, finding ways to vitalize them much like herself.

With firearms Eve’s main choice is rifles with short to medium scopes. She can use a pistol/revolver but most of the time prefers to use her rifle without the scope instead. When she isn’t pressured or panicking she’s a great shot but her accuracy greatly decreases the more she panics. She’s also pretty bad at riding or driving and shooting and usually prefers to ride shotgun on a wagon. Sometimes she can fire off several crack shots at enemies heads, killing each in a single shot but other times she panics so terribly she can’t even hit their bodies.

Thanks to Reyes she becomes pretty decent with a bow as well but usually only uses it in hunting for stealth kills. She’s okay with it from horse back but like her rifles is far better when still on a horse or on the ground.

Her skill hunting animals varies, oftentimes she tries to shoot from horseback either to kill with rifle or bow or attempts to tranquilize with her varmint rifle. Due to how erratic and at times small her targets are she has a far harder time making clean kills and sometimes even just hitting the body with the tranqs. She’s gotten incredibly good at tracking animals but unless she gets a solid shot standing still before it runs away (or attacks) she typically fails at getting a clean kill. Eve usually tries to avoid doing hunting, preferring to focus more on managing samples for Harriet. When she does hunt it’s usually more for cooking or if she needs ingredients/materials for other things. She will assist in hunts if needed for the gang but otherwise likes to put her skills to use elsewhere.

Backstory/Past

Eve was born to a relatively affluent family far north of New Hanover. (Traveling to Saint Denis is a several day trip south.) She has three brothers who were brought up to take over her father’s business. As their only daughter Eve was raised under relatively strict parenting. While her brothers were allowed to come and go more freely Eve was often stuck at home or only allowed to go out with her family. What little freedom she had came after she was 15 and she was finally allowed her to go on brief horse rides around their land alone.

Age 15-16: Eve stumbles upon an old leather journal belonging to her great grandmother. It was hidden away in the attic of their home in an old trunk with the last remaining heirlooms of her mother’s side. The pages were worn and frail from age and much of the scrawled handwriting was in gaelic. Eve struggled with translating as she wasn’t as fluent as her mother but she manages to translate most of it. The journal mostly contains accounts of her great grandmother’s life. Mixed in amongst the crumbling pages were recipes and notes on what Eve could only think of as potions, spells and rituals. Eve keeps the journal a secret from her family, carefully translating the contents over to a new journal of her own. Outside of working on the journal she also explores in the forest trying to identify plants. She accidentally poisons herself a few times but fortunately never too seriously and her mother doesn’t catch on.

Age 16-17: Eve discovers an old abandoned cabin deep into the woods beyond her family’s estate. Over the course of the summer she slowly begins cleaning the inside and converting it for her own use. She begins using her riding trips sneak away to the cabin and soon even does so at night. She gets caught coming home once by one of her brothers, thankfully the most understanding one who doesn’t ask questions and instead just helps her get the horse put away and back in bed without being noticed. 

Age 17-18: Potential suitors begin approaching Eve but many end up getting the message she’s not interested and eventually move on to other women. Her mother and father are frustrated by her lack of interest in men. Soon Eve unfortunately catches the eye of one particularly stubborn man who becomes incredibly enamored with her. She repeatedly turns him down and this frustrates him as he knows she would be well off and would make a beautiful wife. He begins to become obsessed with her, believing he deserves her. The suitor is used to getting his way, being a slick and charismatic businessman. 

Age 19: Eve is in her cabin when suddenly the door bursts open. She grabs for her shotgun (in case of predators) and aims it at the intruder. It turns out to be the suitor from town who refuses to leave her alone. After he mocks her and tries to tempt her into marrying him he causes her to panic and she shoots him in the abdomen. He falls flat on the floor of the cabin, blood spilling from the hole in his torso. Eve barely collects herself after retching onto the floor, covers the body in an old blanket and then buries it in the back. She changes clothes, takes her horse (Deseray, a blood bay arabian) and runs away. 

Her family never finds out about the murder, they do eventually suspect the suitor had done something but doubted she eloped with him after so many refusals. A widespread search commences but they never pick up any sign of her and eventually it’s called off. They mourn for her loss and pray that she’s alive and well out there somewhere.

After the murder Eve makes it a town or two over before stopping and gathering herself. Still horribly shaken she decides to head towards Saint Denis as a backup plan. If everything goes wrong she has family there and can contact her parents or brothers if it comes to it. At least she knows the area and how to get there. For a brief while she barely scrapes by in the wilderness before falling in with some Irish travellers on their way to Rhodes. She takes up work cooking and caring for their horses while traveling with them.

Eve learns how to better survive on the road thanks to them and is finally taught how to use a gun properly. By the time they part they gift her with a beautiful cob and point her in the direction of a man named Trelawny. The mysterious con artist gives her work to help her survive and helps her get setup at Rhodes stables with her two horses. Trelawny is the main person who teaches Eve how to talk her way out of issues or use her innocent appearance against others. While she’s still relatively naive and unfortunately a little too trusting he helps sharpen her senses and skills. 

At some point Eve runs into Harriet and picks up work sampling and studying local wildlife. She doesn’t really understand it at the time but while working for the animal enthusiast Eve begins developing a massive crush on her. (Mostly because she’s never been in love or crushing on someone.) Despite Harriet’s eccentricity the pair get along incredibly well (though most of it is Eve listening to Harriet wax on about animals and how horrible hunters are.) She ends up sharing her knowledge of natural remedies and concoctions, delighting Harriet and helping her with developing her sedatives, revivers and so on.

At some point Eve ends up running into Reyes at a saloon after both end up so drunk they start hitting on people of the same sex. (Eve at the time is still unaware that she’s lesbian.) They get thrown out together and Reyes invites her back to his camp to continue drinking. The pair have a good time, mostly downing more alcohol, singing, dancing and howling at the moon. Eve ends up messing up some of her clothes and Reyes gives her a spare poncho to wear. Eve makes a joke while drunk that since they match they’re the “Happy Ponchos” now. The two pass out before sunrise and in the morning she convinces him to let her tag along.

Reyes ends up teaching Eve how to hunt more efficiently and the best way to use as much of an animal carcass as possible. She continues to sticks around him like a lost puppy and learns more than ever before, becoming incredibly proficient in using a bow thanks to him. Eventually she even manages to craft a bow made of antlers from her best buck kill with his help. Through Reyes Eve also runs into her cousin Claire who has since left home and changed her name to Savannah.

[mforpaul]

CPR with Barisi? I'm in the mood for some self torturing angst.

Oh, I love this prompt so much you have no fucking idea! The other show I’m following rn is The 100 and I ship Bellarke (a torture itself). For the past six years the showrunner jr tells us they’re just “platonic” (watch your own show, man!”) and recently their “first kiss” was CPR (jr also told fans they’re misinterpreting this and one of the actors tweeted the other day that he also must be misinterpreting their whole relationship, hehe). So I have many feelings about perfect couples with a first CPR kiss and I don’t quite know what they are. But you want self-torturing angst, so let’s go for that.

*

Rafael doesn’t know where the guy suddenly comes from. He only sees that he’s old with dirty clothes, probably a drug addict and possibly living on the streets for half his life. Rafael is just tired. Caffeine and a little bit of alcohol is pulsating through his veines. It’s nearly Midnight. He and Carisi just walked out of the diner where they finally got something to eat after they worked all evening together on a case in Rafael’s office.

Rafael already reaches into his pocket to just give him 50 dollars when the mugger says the wrong words: “Give me your money, you faggots!”

“Easy, cowboy!”

Adrelanin kicks in before Rafael can think better of himself. There is no arguing with a lost soul searching for his next fix. He feels a hand wrapping around his elbow. Rafael looks up to Carisi next to him. He doesn’t know him that well but he guesses that the detective feels more offended by the slur than he does.

“Carisi, just leave it!”

“You can fuck someone else’s ass, fag. I want your money!”

Rafael will never remember what happens next. Carisi pushes his body between the mugger and Rafael with one index finger raised. There is suddenly a gun and he hears a shot. Rafael only understands this when Carisi’s body hits the pavement.

“Carisi, no!”

Within the matter of a second everything that Rafael has learned about first aid many, many years ago comes back into his head and he instinctively knows what to do. 

He falls on his knees next to Carisi and rips the detective’s shirt open. Rafael immediately understands that it wasn’t a normal bullet. The wound is widespread over the detective’s chest. The blank cartridge had left no bullet hole so there is no immediate bleeding that needs to be stopped.

Rafael looks to Carisi's face and there he finds the blood. He sees the blood leaking out of the detective’s mouth. His face is frozen in horror. Carisi looks back at him out of his bright, blue eyes with a few last words on his lips that he cannot manage to vocalize.

“Oh no, no, no, no, no!”

But Carisi’s eyes fall shut. Rafael rushes forward to feel the man’s pulse only to find none.

“No, Carisi, don’t do that to me!”

Rafael immediately starts to press his flat hands on Carisi’s rips. You need to use a lot of strength, that he remembers but he thinks that Carisi might need it more than him.

He thinks that they need a doctor and while he is starting the heart massage he contemplates if he can afford to lose precious time calling an ambulance. 

Rafael looks up and finds the mugger still standing there, paralyzed. His face contorted in shock he looks down to Carisi’s lifeless body.

“Call an ambulance!”

Rafael feels something stinging in his eyes and this is when he leans forward and presses his mouth onto Carisi’s.

There is a salty taste on his tongue and for a moment Rafael worries that the air he blows into Carisi’s mouth is conteminated by something. What if it won’t work? There’s something in his eyes, is it tears or sweat? He doesn’t know. Both are salty.

Rafael crashes his hands back into Carisi’s ripcage. His eyes catch the mugger who still hasn’t moved.

“Call a fucking ambulance!”

It’s tears. He’s crying. When he ducks down to blow another breath into Carisi he thinks that this is not right. It should be him. If anyone needs to die as unnecessarily as this, it should be him. An old, grumpy man who is too set in his own ways and with little ambition to change anything about it. Him who had always chosen work over people and not Carisi. Not a heartful, kind young man who still has a promising future ahead of him. A future, a family. Carisi should be a father, he would like that.

“I swear to god, if he dies I will hunt you down!”

This brings life into the mugger who rushes forward and searches for Carisi’s phone in his pockets.

This makes Rafael think that maybe he should talk to Carisi, too. Maybe he could say something that would keep him alive.

“Carisi, you need to be strong. You are strong. You and I both know that.”

It makes no sense! Rafael leans forward again and blows into Carisi’s mouth, mumbling all his pleas skywards into the breath.

“You cannot die like that. Don’t leave me.”

Maybe it’s his own life Rafael sees passing in front of his eyes or maybe it is just the realization that regrets are an aweful thing to keep living with. Rafael just like Carisi convinces people for a living, he makes arguments everyday. And right now, even though he had never felt a more immediate urgency in his life, he doesn’t know what to say to make Carisi stay with him.

“If you start breathing again, I’m gonna start admitting that I like working with you. It’s not even a lie. And I’m gonna invite you to dinner, but for real. I mean a date. I will ask you out! I will do that.”

Rafael holds Carisi’s head in place when he leans down again to press some air into Carisi’s mouth. Distantly he hears the mugger screaming into the phone and all he can think about is that he wants to hear Carisi talking again.

He feels air coming back into his mouth. Suddenly Carisi’s body shutters. Rafael lifts his head only a second before Carisi coughs blood into Rafael’s face.

“Sonny!”

Carisi burbles and spits and to Rafael these are the most beautiful sounds of the world. He pushes a hand underneath Carisi’s head and just helplessly watches him gasp for breath.

“You did so well, so fucking good!”

Rafael is amazed, he is. And he still cries, or again. And he swears to himself that he won’t leave this man’s side until- until he gets out of the hospital or something.

“Counselor?”

“Yes, I’m here. You gonna be okay, I promise.”

“You-” Rafael leans forward because Carisi obviously has trouble finding a breath for words. “Sonny.”

Rafael laughs. He laughs and he knows he will want to do that again. Laugh with him.

“Yeah, I called you Sonny and if you don’t have any objections I think I will keep doing that. But now don’t waste your breath, quite literally.”

[exitinertianovella]

The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’

A new Hollywood movie looks at the tale of the Mississippi farmer who led a revolt against the Confederacy By Richard Grant.

With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J.R. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide-outs. A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self-published novels about the rapture and apocalypse. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me.

I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. With a company of like-minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union.

In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight.

Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide-outs. The old folks call this one Sal Batree. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.”

We reach a small promontory surrounded on three sides by a swampy, beaver-dammed lake, and concealed by 12-foot-high cattails and reeds. “I can’t be certain, but a 90-year-old man named Odell Holyfield told me this was the place,” says Gavin. “He said they had a gate in the reeds that a man on horseback could ride through. He said they had a password, and if you got it wrong, they’d kill you. I don’t know how much of that is true, but one of these days I’ll come here with a metal detector and see what I can find.”

We make our way around the lakeshore, passing beaver-gnawed tree stumps and snaky-looking thickets. Reaching higher ground, Gavin points across the swamp to various local landmarks. Then he plants his staff on the ground and turns to face me directly.

“Now I’m going to say something that might offend you,” he begins, and proceeds to do just that, by referring in racist terms to “Newt’s descendants” in nearby Soso, saying some of them are so light-skinned “you look at them and you just don’t know.”

I stand there writing it down and thinking about William Faulkner, whose novels are strewn with characters who look white but are deemed black by Mississippi’s fanatical obsession with the one-drop rule. And not for the first time in Jones County, where arguments still rage about a man born 179 years ago, I recall Faulkner’s famous axiom about history: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

After the Civil War, Knight took up with his grandfather’s former slave Rachel; they had five children together. Knight also fathered nine children with his white wife, Serena, and the two families lived in different houses on the same 160-acre farm. After he and Serena separated—they never divorced—Newt Knight caused a scandal that still reverberates by entering a common-law marriage with Rachel and proudly claiming their mixed-race children.

The Knight Negroes, as these children were known, were shunned by whites and blacks alike. Unable to find marriage partners in the community, they started marrying their white cousins instead, with Newt’s encouragement. (Newt’s son Mat, for instance, married one of Rachel’s daughters by another man, and Newt’s daughter Molly married one of Rachel’s sons by another man.) An interracial community began to form near the small town of Soso, and continued to marry within itself.

“They keep to themselves over there,” says Gavin, striding back toward his house, where supplies of canned food and muscadine wine are stored up for the onset of Armageddon. “A lot of people find it easier to forgive Newt for fighting Confederates than mixing blood.”

I came to Jones County having read some good books about its history, and knowing very little about its present-day reality. It was reputed to be fiercely racist and conservative, even by Mississippi standards, and it had been a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan. But Mississippi is nothing if not layered and contradictory, and this small, rural county has also produced some wonderful creative and artistic talents, including Parker Posey, the indie-film queen, the novelist Jonathan Odell, the pop singer and gay astronaut Lance Bass, and Mark Landis, the schizophrenic art forger and prankster, who donated fraudulent masterpieces to major American art museums for nearly 30 years before he was caught.

Driving toward the Jones County line, I passed a sign to Hot Coffee—a town, not a beverage—and drove on through rolling cattle pastures and short, new-growth pine trees. There were isolated farmhouses and prim little country churches, and occasional dilapidated trailers with dismembered automobiles in the front yard. In Newt Knight’s day, all this was a primeval forest of enormous longleaf pines so thick around the base that three or four men could circle their arms around them. This part of Mississippi was dubbed the Piney Woods, known for its poverty and lack of prospects. The big trees were an ordeal to clear, the sandy soil was ill-suited for growing cotton, and the bottomlands were choked with swamps and thickets.

There was some very modest cotton production in the area, and a small slaveholding elite that included Newt Knight’s grandfather, but Jones County had fewer slaves than any other county in Mississippi, only 12 percent of its population. This, more than anything, explains its widespread disloyalty to the Confederacy, but there was also a surly, clannish independent spirit, and in Newt Knight, an extraordinarily steadfast and skillful leader.

On the county line, I was half-expecting a sign reading “Welcome to the Free State of Jones” or “Home of Newton Knight,” but the Confederacy is now revered by some whites in the area, and the chamber of commerce had opted for a less controversial slogan: “Now This Is Living!” Most of Jones County is rural, low- or modest-income; roughly 70 percent of the population is white. I drove past many small chicken farms, a large modern factory making transformers and computers, and innumerable Baptist churches. Laurel, the biggest town, stands apart. Known as the City Beautiful, it was created by Midwestern timber barons who razed the longleaf pine forests and built themselves elegant homes on oak-lined streets and the gorgeous world-class Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.

The old county seat, and ground zero for the Free State of Jones, is Ellisville, now a pleasant, leafy town of 4,500 people. Downtown has some old brick buildings with wrought-iron balconies. The grand old columned courthouse has a Confederate monument next to it, and no mention of the anti-Confederate rebellion that took place here. Modern Ellisville is dominated by the sprawling campus of Jones County Junior College, where a semiretired history professor named Wyatt Moulds was waiting for me in the entrance hall. A direct descendant of Newt Knight’s grandfather, he was heavily involved in researching the film and ensuring its historical accuracy.

A large, friendly, charismatic man with unruly side-parted hair, he was wearing alligator-skin cowboy boots and a fishing shirt. “I’m one of the few liberals you’re going to meet here, but I’m a Piney Woods liberal,” he said. “I voted for Obama, I hunt and I love guns. It’s part of the culture here. Even the liberals carry handguns.”

He described Jones County as the most conservative place in Mississippi, but he noted that race relations were improving and that you could see it clearly in the changing attitudes toward Newt Knight. “It’s generational,” he said. “A lot of older people see Newt as a traitor and a reprobate, and they don’t understand why anyone would want to make a movie about him. If you point out that Newt distributed food to starving people, and was known as the Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, they’ll tell you he married a black, like that trumps everything. And they won’t use the word ‘black.’”

His current crop of students, on the other hand, are “fired up” about Newt and the movie. “Blacks and whites date each other in high school now, and they don’t think it’s a big deal,” said Moulds. “That’s a huge change. Some of the young guys are really identifying with Newt now, as a symbol of Jones County pride. It doesn’t hurt that he was such a badass.”

Knight was 6-foot-4 with black curly hair and a full beard—“big heavyset man, quick as a cat,” as one of his friends described him. He was a nightmarish opponent in a backwoods wrestling match, and one of the great unsung guerrilla fighters in American history. So many men tried so hard to kill him that perhaps his most remarkable achievement was to reach old age.

“He was a Primitive Baptist who didn’t drink, didn’t cuss, doted on children and could reload and fire a double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun faster than anyone else around,” said Moulds. “Even as an old man, if someone rubbed him the wrong way, he’d have a knife at their throat in a heartbeat. A lot of people will tell you that Newt was just a renegade, out for himself, but there’s good evidence that he was a man of strong principles who was against secession, against slavery and pro-Union.”

Those views were not unusual in Jones County. Newt’s right-hand man, Jasper Collins, came from a big family of staunch Mississippi Unionists. He later named his son Ulysses Sherman Collins, after his two favorite Yankee generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. “Down here, that’s like naming your son Adolf Hitler Collins,” said Moulds.

When secession fever swept across the South in 1860, Jones County was largely immune to it. Its secessionist candidate received only 24 votes, while the “cooperationist” candidate, John H. Powell, received 374. When Powell got to the secession convention in Jackson, however, he lost his nerve and voted to secede along with almost everyone else. Powell stayed away from Jones County for a while after that, and he was burned in effigy in Ellisville.

“In the Lost Cause mythology, the South was united, and secession had nothing to do with slavery,” said Moulds. “What happened in Jones County puts the lie to that, so the Lost Causers have to paint Newt as a common outlaw, and above all else, deny all traces of Unionism. With the movie coming out, they’re at it harder than ever.”

Although he was against secession, Knight voluntarily enlisted in the Confederate Army once the war began. We can only speculate about his reasons. He kept no diary and gave only one interview near the end of his life, to a New Orleans journalist named Meigs Frost. Knight said he’d enlisted with a group of local men to avoid being conscripted and then split up into different companies. But the leading scholar of the Knight-led rebellion, Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones, points out that Knight had enlisted, under no threat of conscription, a few months after the war began, in July 1861. She thinks he relished being a soldier.

In October 1862, after the Confederate defeat at Corinth, Knight and many other Piney Woods men deserted from the Seventh Battalion of Mississippi Infantry. It wasn’t just the starvation rations, arrogant harebrained leadership and appalling carnage. They were disgusted and angry about the recently passed “Twenty Negro Law,” which exempted one white male for every 20 slaves owned on a plantation, from serving in the Confederate Army. Jasper Collins echoed many non-slaveholders across the South when he said, “This law...makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Returning home, they found their wives struggling to keep up the farms and feed the children. Even more aggravating, the Confederate authorities had imposed an abusive, corrupt “tax in kind” system, by which they took what they wanted for the war effort— horses, hogs, chickens, corn, meat from the smokehouses, homespun cloth. A Confederate colonel named William N. Brown reported that corrupt tax officials had “done more to demoralize Jones County than the whole Yankee Army.”

In early 1863, Knight was captured for desertion and possibly tortured. Some scholars think he was pressed back into service for the Siege of Vicksburg, but there’s no solid evidence that he was there. After Vicksburg fell, in July 1863, there was a mass exodus of deserters from the Confederate Army, including many from Jones and the surrounding counties. The following month, Confederate Maj. Amos McLemore arrived in Ellisville and began hunting them down with soldiers and hounds. By October, he had captured more than 100 deserters, and exchanged threatening messages with Newt Knight, who was back on his ruined farm on the Jasper County border.

On the night of October 5, Major McLemore was staying at his friend Amos Deason’s mansion in Ellisville, when someone—almost certainly Newt Knight—burst in and shot him to death. Soon afterward, there was a mass meeting of deserters from four Piney Woods counties. They organized themselves into a company called the Jones County Scouts and unanimously elected Knight as their captain. They vowed to resist capture, defy tax collectors, defend each other’s homes and farms, and do what they could to aid the Union.

Neo-Confederate historians have denied the Scouts’ loyalty to the Union up and down, but it was accepted by local Confederates at the time. “They were Union soldiers from principle,” Maj. Joel E. Welborn, their former commanding officer in the Seventh Mississippi, later recalled. “They were making an effort to be mustered into the U.S. Service.” Indeed, several of the Jones County Scouts later succeeded in joining the Union Army in New Orleans.

In March 1864, Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk informed Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, that Jones County was in “open rebellion” and that guerrilla fighters were “proclaiming themselves ‘Southern Yankees.’” They had crippled the tax collection system, seized and redistributed Confederate supplies, and killed and driven out Confederate officials and loyalists, not just in Jones County but all over southeast Mississippi. Confederate Capt. Wirt Thompson reported that they were now a thousand strong and flying the U.S. flag over the Jones County courthouse—“they boast of fighting for the Union,” he added.

That spring was the high-water mark of the rebellion against the Rebels. Polk ordered two battle-hardened regiments into southeast Mississippi, under the command of Piney Woods native Col. Robert Lowry. With hanging ropes and packs of vicious, manhunting dogs, they subdued the surrounding counties and then moved into the Free State of Jones. Several of the Knight company were mangled by the dogs, and at least ten were hanged, but Lowry couldn’t catch Knight or the core group. They were deep in the swamps, being supplied with food and information by local sympathizers and slaves, most notably Rachel.

After Lowry left, proclaiming victory, Knight and his men emerged from their hide-outs, and once again, began threatening Confederate officials and agents, burning bridges and destroying railroads to thwart the Rebel Army, and raiding food supplies intended for the troops. They fought their last skirmish at Sal’s Battery, also spelled Sallsbattery, on January 10, 1865, fighting off a combined force of cavalry and infantry. Three months later, the Confederacy fell.

In 2006, the filmmaker Gary Ross was at Universal Studios, discussing possible projects, when a development executive gave him a brief, one-page treatment about Newton Knight and the Free State of Jones. Ross was instantly intrigued, both by the character and the revelation of Unionism in Mississippi, the most deeply Southern state of all.

“It led me on a deep dive to understand more and more about him and the fact that the South wasn’t monolithic during the Civil War,” says Ross, speaking on the phone from New York. “I didn’t realize it was going to be two years of research before I began writing the screenplay.”

The first thing he did was take a canoe trip down the Leaf River, to get a feel for the area. Then he started reading, beginning with the five (now six) books about Newton Knight. That led into broader reading about other pockets of Unionism in the South. Then he started into Reconstruction.

“I’m not a fast reader, nor am I an academic,” he says, “although I guess I’ve become an amateur one.” He apprenticed himself to some of the leading authorities in the field, including Harvard’s John Stauffer and Steven Hahn at the University of Pennsylvania. (At the urging of Ross, Stauffer and co-author Sally Jenkins published their own book on the Jones County rebellion, in 2009.) Ross talks about these scholars in a tone of worship and adulation, as if they’re rock stars or movie stars—and none more so than Eric Foner at Columbia, the dean of Reconstruction experts.

“He is like a god, and I went into his office, and I said, ‘My name’s Gary Ross, I did Seabiscuit.’ I asked him a bunch of questions about Reconstruction, and all he did was give me a reading list. He was giving me no quarter. I’m some Hollywood guy, you know, and he wanted to see if I could do the work.”

Ross worked his way slowly and carefully through the books, and went back with more questions. Foner answered none of them, just gave him another reading list. Ross read those books too, and went back again with burning questions. This time Foner actually looked at him and said, “Not bad. You ought to think about studying this.”

“It was the greatest compliment a person could have given me,” says Ross. “I remember walking out of his office, across the steps of Columbia library, almost buoyant. It was such a heady experience to learn for learning’s sake, for the first time, rather than to generate a screenplay. I’m still reading history books all the time. I tell people this movie is my academic midlife crisis.”

In Hollywood, he says, the executives were extremely supportive of his research, and the script that he finally wrestled out of it, but they balked at financing the film. “This was before Lincoln and 12 Years a Slave, and it was very hard to get this sort of a drama made. So I went and did Hunger Games, but always keeping an eye on this. ”

Matthew McConaughey thought the Free State of Jones script was the most exciting Civil War story he had ever read, and knew immediately that he wanted to play Newt Knight. In Knight’s defiance of both the Confederate Army and the deepest taboos of Southern culture McConaughey sees an uncompromising and deeply moral leader. He was “a man who lived by the Bible and the barrel of a shotgun,” McConaughey says in an email. “If someone—no matter what their color—was being mistreated or being used, if a poor person was being used by someone to get rich, that was a simple wrong that needed to be righted in Newt’s eyes....He did so deliberately, and to the hell with the consequences.” McConaughey sums him up as a “shining light through the middle of this country’s bloodiest fight. I really kind of marveled at him.”

The third act of the film takes place in Mississippi after the Civil War. There was a phase during early Reconstruction when blacks could vote, and black officials were elected for the first time. Then former Confederates violently took back control of the state and implemented a kind of second slavery for African-Americans. Once again disenfranchised, and terrorized by the Klan, they were exploited through sharecropping and legally segregated. “The third act is what makes this story feel so alive,” says McConaughey. “It makes it relevant today. Reconstruction is a verb that’s ongoing.”

Ross thinks Knight’s character and beliefs are most clearly revealed by his actions after the war. He was hired by the Reconstruction government to free black children from white masters who were refusing to emancipate them. “In 1875, he accepts a commission in what was essentially an all-black regiment,” says Ross. “His job was to defend the rights of freed African-Americans in one of Mississippi’s bloodiest elections. His commitment to these issues never waned.” In 1876, Knight deeded 160 acres of land to Rachel, making her one of very few African-American landowners in Mississippi at that time.

Much as Ross wanted to shoot the movie in Jones County, there were irresistible tax incentives to film across the border in Louisiana, and some breathtaking cypress swamps where various cast members were infested with the tiny mites known as chiggers. Nevertheless, Ross and McConaughey spent a lot of time in Jones County, persuading many county residents to appear in the film.

“I love the Leaf River and the whole area,” says Ross. “And I’ve grown to love Mississippi absolutely. It’s a very interesting, real and complicated place.”

On the website of Jones County Rosin Heels, the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, an announcement warned that the film will portray Newt Knight as a civil rights activist and a hero. Then the writer inadvertently slips into the present tense: “He is actually a thief, murderer, adulterer and a deserter.”

Doug Jefcoate was listed as camp commander. I found him listed as a veterinarian in Laurel, and called up, saying I was interested in his opinions on Newt Knight. He sounded slightly impatient, then said, “OK, I’m a history guy and a fourth-generation guy. Come to the animal hospital tomorrow.”

The receptionist led me into a small examining room and closed both its doors. I stood there for a few long minutes, with a shiny steel table and, on the wall, a Bible quotation. Then Jefcoate walked in, a middle-aged man with sandy hair, glasses and a faraway smile. He was carrying two huge, leather-bound volumes of his family genealogy.

He gave me ten minutes on his family tree, and when I interrupted to ask about the Rosin Heels and Newt Knight, he stopped, looked puzzled, and began to chuckle. “You’ve got the wrong Doug Jefcoate,” he said. “I’m not that guy.” (Turns out he is Doug Jefcoat, without the “e.”)

He laughed uproariously, then settled down and gave me his thoughts. “I’m not a racist, OK, but I am a segregationist,” he said. “And ol’ Newt was skinny-dipping in the wrong pool.”

The Rosin Heel commander Doug Jefcoate wasn’t available, so I went instead to the law offices of Carl Ford, a Rosin Heel who had unsuccessfully defended Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, in his 1998 trial for the 1966 murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Ford wasn’t there, but he’d arranged for John Cox, a friend, colleague and fellow Rosin Heel, to set me straight about Newt Knight.

Cox, an animated 71-year-old radio and television announcer with a long white beard, welcomed me into a small office crammed with video equipment and Confederate memorabilia. He was working on a film called Free State of Jones: The Republic That Never Was, intended to refute Gary Ross’ film. All he had so far was the credits (Executive Producer Carl Ford) and the introductory banjo music.

“Newt is what we call trailer trash,” he said in a booming baritone drawl. “I wouldn’t have him in my house. And like all poor, white, ignorant trash, he was in it for himself. Some people are far too enamored of the idea that he was Martin Luther King, and these are the same people who believe the War Between the States was about slavery, when nothing could be further from the truth.”

There seemed no point in arguing with him, and it was almost impossible to get a word in, so I sat there scribbling as he launched into a long monologue that defended slavery and the first incarnation of the Klan, burrowed deep into obscure Civil War battle minutiae, denied all charges of racism, and kept circling back to denounce Newt Knight and the simpering fools who tried to project their liberal agendas on him.

“There was no Free State of Jones,” he concluded. “It never existed.”

Joseph Hosey is a Jones County forester and wild mushroom harvester who was hired as an extra for the movie and ended up playing a core member of the Knight Company. Looking at him, there’s no reason to ask why. Scruffy and rail-thin with piercing blue eyes and a full beard, he looks like he subsists on Confederate Army rations and the occasional squirrel.

He wanted to meet me at Jitters Coffeehouse & Bookstore in Laurel, so he could show me an old map on the wall. It depicts Jones County as Davis County, and Ellisville as Leesburg. “After 1865, Jones County was so notorious that the local Confederates were ashamed to be associated with it,” he says. “So they got the county renamed after Jefferson Davis, and Ellisville after Robert E. Lee. A few years later, there was a vote on it, and the names were changed back. Thank God, because that would have sucked.”

Like his grandfather before him, Hosey is a great admirer of Newt Knight. Long before the film, when people asked where he was from, he would say, “The Free State of Jones.” Now he has a dog named Newt, and describes it as a “Union-blue Doberman.”

Being in the film, acting and interacting with Matthew McConaughey, was a profound and moving experience, but not because of the actor’s fame. “It was like Newt himself was standing right there in front of me. It made me really wish my grandfather was still alive, because we were always saying someone should make a movie about Newt.” Hosey and the other actors in the Knight Company bonded closely during the shoot and still refer to themselves as the Knight Company. “We have get-togethers in Jones County, and I imagine we always will,” he says.

I ask him what he admires most about Knight. “When you grow up in the South, you hear all the time about your ‘heritage,’ like it’s the greatest thing there is,” he says. “When I hear that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but mostly I think about slavery and racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. We didn’t all go along with it.”

After Reconstruction, with the former Confederates back in charge, the Klan after him, and Jim Crow segregation laws being passed, Knight retreated from public life to his homestead on the Jasper County border, which he shared with Rachel until her death in 1889, and continued to share with her children and grandchildren. He lived the self-sufficient life of a yeoman Piney Woods farmer, doted on his swelling ranks of children and grandchildren, and withdrew completely from white society.

He gave that single long interview in 1921, revealing a laconic sense of humor and a strong sense of right and wrong, and he died the following year, in February 1922. He was 84 years old. Joseph Hosey took me to Newt’s granddaughter’s cabin, where some say that he suffered a fatal heart attack while dancing on the porch. Hosey really wanted to take me to Newt Knight’s grave. But the sacred rite of hunting season was underway, and the landowner didn’t want visitors disturbing the deer in the area. So Hosey drove up to the locked gate, and then swiped up the relevant photographs on his phone.

Newt’s grave has an emblem of Sal, his beloved shotgun, and the legend, “He Lived For Others.” He’d given instructions that he should be buried here with Rachel. “It was illegal for blacks and whites to be buried in the same cemetery,” says Hosey. “Newt didn’t give a damn. Even in death, he defied them.”

There were several times in Jones County when my head began to swim.

During my final interview, across a brightly colored plastic table in the McDonald’s in Laurel, there were moments when my brain seized up altogether, and I would sit there stunned, unable to grasp what I was hearing. The two sisters sitting across the table were gently amused. They had seen this many times before. It was, in fact, the normal reaction when they tried to explain their family tree to outsiders.

Dorothy Knight Marsh and Florence Knight Blaylock are the great-granddaughters of Newt and Rachel. After many decades of living in the outside world, they are back in Soso, Mississippi, dealing with prejudice from all directions. The worst of it comes from within their extended family. “We have close relatives who won’t even look at us,” says Blaylock, the older sister, who was often taken for Mexican when she lived in California.

“Or they’ll be nice to us in private, and pretend they don’t know us in public,” added Marsh, who lived in Washington, D.C. for decades. For simplification, she said that there were three basic groups. The White Knights are descended from Newt and Serena, are often pro-Confederate, and proud of their pure white bloodlines. (In 1951, one of them, Ethel Knight, published a vitriolic indictment of Newt as a traitor to the Confederacy.) The Black Knights are descended from Newt’s cousin Dan, who had children with one of his slaves. The White Negroes (a.k.a. the Fair Knights or Knight Negroes) are descended from Newt and Rachel. “They all have separate family reunions,” said Blaylock.

The White Negro line was complicated further by Georgeanne, Rachel’s daughter by another white man. After Rachel died, Newt and Georgeanne had children. “He was a family man all right!” said Marsh. “I guess that’s why he had three of them. And he kept trying to marry out the color, so we would all keep getting lighter-skinned. We have to tell our young people, do not date in the Soso area. But we’re all fine. We don’t have any...problems. All Knights are hardworking and very capable.”

In the film, Marsh and Blaylock appear briefly in a courthouse scene. For the two of them, the Knight family saga has continued into the 20th century and beyond. Their cousin Davis Knight, who looked white and claimed to be white, was tried for the crime of miscegenation in 1948, after marrying a white woman. The trial was a study in Mississippian absurdity, paradox, contradiction and racial obsessiveness. A white man was convicted of being black; the conviction was overturned; he became legally white again.

“We’ve come to terms with who we are,” says Blaylock. “I’m proud to be descended from Newt and Rachel. I have so much respect for both of them.”

“Absolutely,” says Marsh. “And we can’t wait to see this movie.”

[bethanyshawnovels]

Zodiac Shifters

A collection of books with an astrological spin on love. From Aries to Virgo… discover all-new tales of paranormal romance and urban fantasy. Zodiac Shifters features New York Times, USA Today, and other bestselling authors. Each month expect new releases based upon the twelve astrology signs.

Pisces - artist, dreamer, romantic

Out of the Ashes by Julia Mills

Meet the Guardian of the Zodiac and their companions the Dragon Guard of the Sea! Lost and thought dead, these mighty dragons arise from the depths to not only help to save all mankind but reunite with others of their kind. The mission is simple – get into the enemy camp, free the humans, return the demons to Hell and return home the victor. For a Daughter of Poseidon and her constant companion, Drákon – a centuries old water dragon, that’s called a good day at work. Everything is going as planned. Una, eldest daughter and Guardian of Pisces, has checked one and two off her list, and is headed to three when things get complicated. Brody Mason bows at her feet, pledging his allegiance to not only her but also, the gods and the Light. As a show of loyalty, he promises to take her to the portal from Hell and with his own blood help her close the door on the Underworld. This one act will rid the world of evil forever. There’s only one problem…he’s a Hellhound. It doesn’t matter that Drákon doesn’t believe him, fearing it yet another trick of Hades to deter them from their mission or that there’s fire in his eyes and the smell of brimstone on his olive skin, she can feel the truth in his words. It also doesn’t hurt that with just one glance he sets her heart ablaze and her pulse racing. Not that this is about love or lust, it is all about saving the Earth, protecting the humans, defeating her uncle’s evil…or is it? One leap of faith leads Una and Brody on a race against time and facing the fight of their lives. Hiding from Poseidon, Hades and an army of Guardians led by her sister, Zoe, this couple may have the best intentions but in the end, isn’t that what paves the road to Hell?

Release date: Feb. 28th 2017

AMAZON     AMAZON UK   AMAZON CA   AMAZON AU 

B&N/KOBO/iBOOKS

Excerpt 1 PG (please choose 1 and delete the other)

“They have invaded the entire western and southern borders. I fear the coast is next. I’m going to need you to go and help the humans with this battle. They are ill-equipped and just not strong enough to fight evil on such a widespread scale.” Una looked at her father, Poseidon, the god of the sea, as he stood beside his periscope with a worried look. She’d never, in all the millennium since her birth, seen the great god anything but confident and unencumbered by the woes of the Earth and Her human population, but this was different and much more personal. She hated to see the deep lines feathering from his glowing blue eyes or the downturned expression emphasized by her thick white mustache and beard. Family issues sucked, especially when you were a deity and your whims effected the world as everyone had come to know it. Hades, Una’s uncle and Poseidon’s older brother had caused trouble in the past but nothing so catastrophic or life threatening to the beings Una and her sisters had been charged with keeping watch over. Named the Guardians of the Zodiac, the Daughters of Poseidon had long been protecting Earth and her humans from afar. Una could scarcely remember the last time her boots had walked the terra firma, smelled the sweet scents of the many blossoms and tasted of the bounty only the small blue and green planet had to offer. It had always been their directive to lend assistance from afar, never to cross paths with the humans and always remain the deities they were intended to be. Things had now changed. Una would be the first of her sisters to fight alongside the ever resilient race with the hopes of saving them from certain demise. The first to do what they’d been training for since they were old enough to hold their weapons. Bowing, her bow at her side, the Guardian of Pisces asked, “When shall I leave? Shall I take Drákon?” Without turning away from his view of the Earth, Poseidon nodded, “You will need to leave this night, my daughter. When the veil between our worlds is the thinnest. By all means, take the dragon with you. You will need the help.” Breathing a sigh of relief, Una called to her constant companion and training partner, Drákon, a centuries old sea dragon her father had given the power to change from his original form to that of a human man. “We’re a go. Put on that flesh suit you’re so fond of and meet me in a hour at the docks.” “Hell yeah,” Drákon cheered, using the human vernacular he’d been studying for centuries. “Yippee ki yay…” “Whoa, there cowboy,” Una smiled, glad she’d been paying attention when her companion read out loud. “That’s a good way to meet the pointy end of Dad’s trident.” “Duly noted.” The ancient being was once again all business. “See you at the docks.” Working hard to chuckle and happier than she could admit to be leaving the pomp and circumstance of her father’s court, Una answered, “See you there.”

Excerpt 2 - Spicy (please choose one and delete the other)

“Hello, Pinkípissa Una. I missed you so when I awoke and you were gone.” Turning in his arms, she looked deep into the whiskey-colored eyes of the hellhound who’d captured her heart. She loved that he spoke in the native tongue of the gods. Combined with his deep, rumbling baritone and sexy accent, it was irresistible. She couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t take her breath away. Leaning into his embrace, Una sighed as his lips met hers. She opened completely, reveled in the arousal racing through her veins as their tongues danced a sexy tango of their own design. Desire filled her being, growing stronger, more profound with every second. Whimpering with need at the hellhound’s bold advances, their hearts beat as one as he stoked the flames of want and desire with his every touch. Spinning their bodies while maintaining their embrace, Una soon found her back against the cool of the stone behind her and her legs wrapped around he’s waist. Her panties were immediately soaked with her excitement as he rolled his hips between her thighs, teasing her throbbing clit feeding her overwhelming need to come. Raking her nails down his back, feeling the ripple of the tribal markings under her fingertips, Una held Brody close, digging her hands into the taunt muscles of his ass to keep him in place. Tearing his lips from hers, her hellhound nibbled along her jaw and down her neck as he slipped one hand under her bum and pressed his hips tighter to her center while his other hand traveled between her legs, ripping the silk of her panties and sliding two fingers into her already slick pussy. Una mewled as he fucked her with his fingers, turning her arousal into desperation. Shoving her hands into his long silken hair, the she-wolf pulled his mouth back to hers, and bit his bottom lip before sucking his tongue into her mouth. His resulting growl spurred her on as she rode his fingers with wild abandon, her orgasm careening towards her like an out of control wild fire. The pad of Brody’s thumb found her clit and with little more than a touch Una was screaming her release as untold pleasure spread throughout her body. Not giving her even a minute of respite, her mate pulled his fingers from her pussy, let her wobbly legs slide down his body and spun her around, caging her in with his own body and placing their combined hands on the boulder before her. Moving one hand from hers and sliding it between their bodies, Una heard the telltale whine of his zipper a second before his lips were once again at her ear whispering, “I must have you, i kardí mou. I must feel you wrapped around me, joined as one. You are mine, Una and I will have you, love you, mark you as my mate for all to see.” His words ended just as his calloused hand rubbed down the globe of her ass, slipped into her pussy and out again just before the head of his cock slid into her sleek channel. Her nails scratched at the rock as in one slow glide, her hellhound filled her so tightly she felt him in every fiber of her being. Their bodies fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. His chest was plastered to her back as he kissed her shoulder, whispering of his undying love and their eternity together. Pulling back, followed by a quick thrust that forced fire to rush through her veins and Una was lost to the pleasure. Over and over Brody thrust into her, forcing all thought from her mind, pushing her back to the edge of pleasure she had just fallen over mere minutes before. Needing to come more that she needed to breathe, Una begged, “Please… please, agapiméni Hellhound mou…” “Yes, agápi mou. Yes. Orycheío gia pánta.” She couldn’t stop the smile that crossed her lips as he stated she would always belong to him. Their love was so complete, so beautiful, at times not even she could believe how the gods, specifically her father, the mighty Poseidon, had blessed her. His hands closed even tighter over hers as he growled, “Say it! Say it, now!” Her body closed even tighter around his as he drove in and out of her with such force the words spilled from her lips, “Yes, yes, agápi mou…yours, always yours.” Her words pushed some button deep within the man she now had no doubts was her chosen mate. His strokes became frantic. His cock branded her as his for all eternity a mere second before she was flying high, the intensity of her orgasm stealing the breath from her lungs. Sure nothing could feel any better, Una suddenly felt his canines sink into the flesh of her shoulder. The mixture of pleasure and pain shattered whatever control she had been holding onto. Lights, like fireworks, burst behind her closed eyelids. She screamed and moaned and begged. Her nails extended into the claws of her water dragon, one of the many forms that were hers to call, as beautiful, shimmering blue-green scales appeared on the backs of her hands. One final thrust and Brody was roaring so loud the ground beneath her feet shook. “Mine! Dikos Mou!” Her pussy sucked him deep inside, her body reveled in the feel as he bathed her insides with his warm semen. Una never wanted to be anywhere but in Brody’s arms. The world be damned, she had found her forever Mini orgasms continued to rock her core as his cock slid from her pussy and he spun her around. Kissing her like she was the most precious thing in all the world, her hellhound lifted her into his arms and walked into the cave they would be calling home while n earth. “Oh, agápi mou, my Una…”

About the Author

Hey Y’all! I’m Julia Mills the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author of the Dragon Guard Series. I without a doubt admit to being a sarcastic, southern woman who would rather spend all day laughing than a minute crying. Living with my two most amazing daughters and a menagerie of animals, keeps me busy but I love telling a good story. Now, that I’ve decided to write the stories running through my brain, life is just a blast! My beliefs are simple. A good book along with shoes, makeup, and purses will never let a girl down and no hero ever written will compare to my real-life hero, my dad! I’m a sucker for a happy ending and alpha men make me swoon. I’m still working on my story but I promise it will contain as much love and laughter as I can pack into it! Now, go out there and create your own story!!! Dare to Dream! Have the Strength to Try EVERYTHING! Never Look Back! I ABSOLUTELY adore stalkers so look me up on Facebook and sign up for my newsletter at JuliaMillsAuthor.com. Send me a message! Thank you for reading my stories!!! XOXO Julia

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