Searching for Novel History in Chicago

Well, it’s starting to feel like fall around here. I’ve packed away our summer clothes, brought out the sweaters and scarves, and my kids are asking for flannel sheets. October also marks the beginning of my intense writing season for the book that’s due to my publisher in February. That’s right—eleven days after Veiled in Smoke releases, the second book in the same series (The Windy City Saga) is due. Book #2 in this series doesn’t have a title yet, but it picks up with the same family introduced in Veiled in Smoke, and is set in 1893, during the World’s Fair.

So I don’t have any big book announcements to make right now, but a lot is going on behind the scenes. My family and I just returned from a research trip to Chicago for the book I should start writing this week. Just to be clear, I have been researching with books and online resources for months, but there is really nothing like going to the setting for my novel. Mixed in with family visits to various museums and the Shedd Aquarium, I was able to:

• spend two hours with my private tour guide, Kevin Doerksen of Wild Onion Walks. He showed me where my characters would have lived and gone to church, along with some of the buildings that would have been part of their lives in 1893. This is the same tour guide who helped me out last summer as I was researching for Veiled in Smoke!
• tour the historic Auditorium Theatre (pictured below), which is where one of my characters plays the violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
  
• take a tour of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, which is where one of my characters serves as a volunteer.
• spend a few hours in the Research Center of the Chicago Historical Society, looking at guidebooks for the World’s Fair and microfilm of the daily newspaper the Fair produced. (The Chicago Historical Society is housed in the same building as the Chicago History Museum.)
• spend more hours in the Newberry Library, researching Chicago in the early 1890s
  
• visit the Museum of Science & Industry (pictured below), the only building constructed as part of the Fair that still exists today. Of course the inside is completely transformed from its original form, but the size of the building alone was important for me to experience.
  
• purchase a few more research books I wouldn’t have known existed if I hadn’t taken the trip.

My family and I also managed to enjoy some deep-dish pizza from Giordano’s and gelato from Eataly while we were there. Yum!

Now that I’m home, I need to finish reading the books I brought home from Chicago and then begin to write. So if I seem quiet on social media over the next few months, just know it’s because I’m busy working on another Chicago story which I hope will fascinate you as much as the history fascinates me.