Patricia: The reason why I will write a historical fiction piece is because I can’t put all of the facts together to make the story non-fiction, so I’ll fictionalize that part that I’m unable to make all the hinges fit.
I’ll use Runaway Home as an example of how I used non-fiction material to create a fictional book and why it is realistic. We believe, in our family, that an ancestor of ours is an Apache Indian. The part of Alabama that my family lived in is right at Pensacola, where Alabama and Florida and Georgia come together. The train tracks went right through there.
The Crossley’s found and raised an Indian, they said, and his name was Abraham. They never said who or where he came from, but that he was found — this is the story. Well, I have visited all over everywhere trying to… find out if there’s any documentation where he might have come from.
We were unable to find anything, but in the process, I learned an awful lot about the Apache Indians. So I wrote a non-fiction book about the Apaches in the True Book Series. And then I wrote a historical fiction book about my ancestor and I called it Runaway Home and I used all the information that I had learned about the removal of the Apaches from the Southwest into Pensacola, Florida, and how they did put the kids… Some of the kids would runaway from the train when they would stop to allow the men and women to relieve themselves.
