Tag: Zina Abbott

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Two Sisters and the Christmas Groom by Zina Abbott – Christmas Countdown Blitz





My name is Robyn Echols. Zina Abbott is the pen name I use for my American historical romance novels. I’m a member of Women Writing the West, Western Writers of America, and American Night Writers Association. I currently live with my husband in California’s central valley near the “Gateway to Yosemite.”

I love to read, quilt, work with digital images on my photo editing program, and work on my own family history.

I am a blogger. In addition to my own blog, I blog for several group blogs including the Sweet Americana Sweethearts blog, which I started and administer.


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Annie Flanagan happily moves to Jubilee Springs to work as a maid for Delly Nighy, the daughter of her former New York City employer. For one thing, very few know that her next younger sister, Kate, has signed up with the Colorado Bridal Agency and started writing to an Irish miner, Michael O’Hare, in the same town. Both Annie and her mother back in New York grow concerned when the second man the bridal agency puts Kate in contact with is a miner in Central City. He’s not Irish—and he’s not Catholic. What is worse, she seems to prefer him over Michael.

Kate Flanagan, working as a scullery maid to help support her family, desperately desires to escape the dead-end poverty allotted to Irish women living in the lower east side of Manhattan in New York. Anxious to find a husband out west, she signs up with the bridal agency suggested by her sister. After living with her alcoholic father, she is leery of choosing Irishman Michael O’Hare for a husband. As much as she wants to live near her sister, dare she take the chance Michael O’Hare will not turn out like her da?

Annie and Michael grow closer as they work together in order to persuade Kate to come to Jubilee Springs. She needs to come soon—before winter sets in and disrupts the railroad service that will bring her to the high mountain mining community. Kate agrees to travel to Jubilee Springs before Christmas, but several factors, including the train, threaten to derail this romance.

Michael knows what he promised. He knows what he wants. In the end, will he marry the bride who has captured his heart?




Q&A With the Author:

What inspired this Christmas/Winter book?

I wrote for a multi-author series two years ago, Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs, including a novel titled Dead Set Delphinia. A secondary character in it from New York named Annie wished to get the address for the mail order business she learned Delphinia used to give to her sister, Kate. Two years later, I felt I still needed to write Annie’s and Kate’s story regarding how each came to Jubilee Springs

Do you have other Holiday books? If so, what are they are for which Holidays? If not, what other books do you write?

I have one other Christmas holiday book, Too Old for Christmas, set in the 1856 California gold rush town of Columbia. My other holiday books, a trio of related novellas, once again from the Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs series, Aaron’s Annulment Bride, Cat’s Meow, and Bargain Bessie, revolve around Independence Day in 1881.

What is your largest unfulfilled dream, and what are you doing to reach it?

I would like to have one of my books end up on the U.S.A. Today’s Bestseller’s List. I’m working on it—I’m writing.

Tell us about things you enjoy — what you do for fun or personal satisfaction besides writing?

Besides writing, I enjoy reading, quilting, and photo-editing. I make a lot of my own promotional banners/memes.

Are your characters/stories/scenes, etc. based on anything in real life?

Some are; some aren’t. I do a lot of research to make my stories as realistic to the time period as possible. Although Jubilee Springs in my current novel is a fictional town, it is loosely based on the topography and history of a real town in the Arkansas River silver mining region in the Rocky Mountains. Some, like my recently-published Escape from Gold Mountain, is almost more fictionalized history rather than historical fiction. Even though some of my characters and story elements are fictional, I used real people and incidents of that time as the foundation of the story.

Tell us one Christmas or Winter tradition that you love to do every year, and why it is so special to you. 

My husband and I were married six days before Christmas. Almost every year, we go to the same foothills restaurant to celebrate.





To view our blog schedule and follow along with this tour visit our Official Event page Part 1 
  Official Event page Part 2 









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Charlie’s Choice by Zina Abbott – Valentine Countdown Blitz

My name is Robyn Echols. Zina Abbott is the pen I use for my historical novels. I’m a member of Women Writing the West and Western Writers of America. I currently live with my husband in California’s central valley near the “Gateway to Yosemite.”

I love to read, quilt, work with digital images on my photo editing program, and work on my own family history.

I am a blogger. In addition to my own blog, I blog for several group blogs including the Sweet Americana Sweethearts blog, which I started and administer.

Prequel to the Atwell Kin series:

Charlie, it would be easier to stop the flow of the great Missouri and Kansas Rivers than to prevent the Americans from coming to Kansas. 

It is 1856, and the United States opened Kansas Territory to American settlement two years before. Land belonging to the once-powerful Kansa tribe, known to the whites as the Kaw, was sold by treaty to the Americans a generation earlier.

His Kansa mother died from smallpox while Charlie was young. He lives with his American father who owns a trading post in Bonner Springs near the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. A child of two nations, Charlie learns through harsh experience he is not always accepted, including by the father of the pretty redhead who has caught his eye. The arrival of thousands of white settlers makes matters worse.

Frustrated, Charlie visits his Kansa uncle to learn the tribal ways, travel the Kaw Trail to their buffalo hunting grounds, and become a warrior with a warrior’s name. Once he knows both worlds, he will decide which will best serve him in the future.

Meadowlark’s traditional father wishes her to marry Broken Wing, a highly-respected full-blood Kansa warrior close to his own age. Meadowlark rejects being the junior wife under a dying oldest wife and a wolverine of a second wife. Once she learns her childhood friend who left the tribe years earlier has returned to the Kansa, she seeks him out. Even if he does consider her for a wife, can she persuade her father to allow him enough time to prove himself as a warrior? Will her father accept him for her husband in spite of his mixed ancestry?

Will Charlie decide on a future with the white Americans, or will he fight the coming of the Americans by clinging to the past with the Kansa? Will he try to straddle both worlds? What will Charlie choose?


Q&A With the Author:
1.  Tell us about things you enjoy — what you do for fun or personal satisfaction besides writing?
I have been making lap quilts. I came across my collection of pink cancer ribbon fabric last summer and thought, I need to make a few quilts ahead for friends who end up seriously sick and need a friendship token or something they can wrap around them or look at when they are too sick to do much else. The next thing I knew, I had one friend after another develop serious health issues (a consequence of being older). I’m behind, but enjoying designing the quilts for each recipient. I have yet to use the pink cancer ribbon fabric, but will make at least one quilt using it when I get caught up.
2.  When did you first realize you were an author?
When I was in junior high school, I used to stay in my downstairs bedroom to write short stories instead of watching television with my family. Now, being a PAID author – that took a little longer.
3.  Have you done anything writing-related, but besides actually writing your books, that seemed to get a lot of positive response? Something that encouraged you?
When I worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a rural letter carrier, I also worked many years as a release-time union steward representing many offices in many counties. My ability to research, interview, organize facts, and then write up grievance files and research reports is what helped me succeed. It was more technical/legal writing rather than fiction, but I enjoyed it.
4.  What is the thing you struggle with the most while writing? And how do you defeat it?
I struggle most with everyday life interfering. I struggle with balancing helping others with ending up being the go-fer slave of others to help them accomplish THEIR projects while mine languish.
5.  What is the “message” of your writing?
My historical romances often draw from my genealogical research regarding laws that particularly affected women—their rights, or more to the point, their lack of rights when it came to property, voting, inheritance, etc. Even in the book I’m featuring today, my hero becomes aware of his lack of inheritance rights because of the circumstances of his birth.
6.  Are your characters/stories/scenes, etc. based on anything in real life?
See number five, above. I get annoyed with so-called historical authors who do not do the research and write about contemporary laws, rights and attitudes in historical settings. I try to have my characters either display some of the attitudes of the day, run up against said attitudes in other characters in the story, or realize what they are up against legally. Also, most of my books include actual historical events and even real historical characters.
7.  What are your future projects?
I will be publishing Virginia’s Vocation, which is my next book in the Lockets & Lace multi-author series. It is also my next book in the Atwell Kin after Charlie’s Choice which I’m featuring today. I will be publishing Diantha which is my second book in The Widows of Wildcat Ridge multi-author series. In addition, I have two longer books I wrote two and three years ago. They both need a little fine-tuning research, some revision and copy-editing. I will be working on them, and hope to publish at least one of them before the end of the year.

To view our blog schedule and follow along with this tour visit our Official Event page Part 1 
and Official Event page Part 2