Laura C. Rader

June 15, 2024

My father passed in 2009 at the age of 86, my husband in 2012 at the age of 57, so all my daughter and I have today are memories. My mother was the one I turned to for hugs and confidences and comfort, but my father was the person for adventure. My Dad took me…
June 9, 2024

SALES Hatfield 1677 sales on Amazon have placed it in the top 25 throughout its first three weeks in the categories of Biographical Historical Fiction, Military Historical Fiction, Native American Literature, and US Colonial Period History. (Above image: June 9, #25, Biographical Historical Fiction) Thank you to all of you who have purchased Hatfield 1677…
May 27, 2024

As promised, a list of many, but not all, of the sources I used in my research for Hatfield 1677. I discovered the story of Massachusetts Bay Puritan colonists Benjamin and Martha Waite and their adversary, the Algonquian sachem Ashpelon, at the Carlsbad, California genealogical library in 1993. I continued my research in the summer…
May 22, 2024

Excerpt from Hatfield 1677, Chapter Three: On May 22, a small band of men traveled to the Falls to search for those who might have survived the battle, and to bury our dead. Filled with grief and the foreboding of more pain to come, I accompanied them. Blogs may be weekly this month as I…
May 13, 2024

My debut novel, Hatfield 1677, will officially be released next week, Tuesday, May 21. It will be available for purchase online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I am diligently working to place it in indie bookstores and at Barnes & Noble bookstores here in North Carolina, in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and in my childhood home…
May 5, 2024
April 13, 2024

I don’t use the word often: overwhelmed. Apparently, neither do many of us. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (which is the only one I will use since reading the marvelous The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams) it occurs only once in every one million words. Also, according to the OED, the adjective…
March 20, 2024

Rachel Carson wrote her masterpiece, Silent Spring, after receiving a letter in 1958 from her friend, describing the death of birds around her property in Massachusetts, resulting from the aerial spraying of DDT to kill mosquitoes. A decade ago, Elon Musk—who brought about the death of the little blue Twitter bird—argued with Larry Page over the pros…
February 29, 2024

Yesterday was the full cover reveal of my soon-to-be-published historical fiction novel, Hatfield 1677. My publisher, Acorn Publishing, used the services of Damonza to create a beautiful cover. I was part of the process, and sent them assorted images I found online that shared my vision but never completely, and vague descriptions such as “I…
February 28, 2024