Today I'm talking to Catherine Wilson, author of the historical fiction When Women Were Warriors Trilogy. Tell us a bit about yourself,  why you write, what makes your books unique, where your ideas come from and so on.    I am a 72-year-old white woman whose family has lived in the United States for almost 400 years. You would think we would have had all the benefits of the folks who got here soonest, but the men in my family died off at an incredible rate, leaving widows and orphans to struggle along as best they could. As a consequence, I am descended from a long line of very tough women, while the absence of men in our lives was a given. I grew up with my mother and my grandmother, my mother’s mother. As a war widow, my mother was not considered a ‘single mother’— a bad thing in the 1950s — and when I was teased (we call it bullying now) for not having a father, a loud “He was killed in the war!” would shut them up. Nobody dissed war heroes in those days. I … [Read more...]