Yours Truly, Thomas Trivia (No spoilers)

Release day for Yours Truly, Thomas is in less than two weeks. For those of you anxious to read this story here is a list of trivia to hold you over!

• I came up with the idea of utilizing the dead letter office when I was touring a historic post office in the Midwest and the tour guide mentioned returning letters that they couldn’t place to the dead letter office. The Smithsonian has excellent resources online if you are dying to know more like I was when I heard about it.
• Penny’s last name is Ercanbeck which is a modge podge name made from an old family name and my maiden name squashed together.
• The original draft of this book did not include her sidekick dog. The next draft included her dog but he was described as an Irish Water dog named Lulu (we have a cat one of my kids named Lulu). We changed the dog breed and her name before the final draft.
• If you read and enjoyed The Hope of Azure Springs know that this book is stand-alone but it spends a lot of time in Azure Springs and we get to visit Caleb, Em, The Howell family, Margaret and Eliza. This book takes place in 1883; The Hope of Azure Springs took place in 1881.
• I took my oldest two boys to DC and we spent a lot of time at the Postal Museum. It’s amazing the time and energy that was put into returning letters that were lost in the mail. Some favorite pieces of trivia learned from research were that more women than men worked at the dead letter office at the time and the envelopes they saved because they were proud they were able to do the “detective work” to return them.
• The quote I chose to include at the beginning that I believe captures the “message” of the book is, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” by C.S. Lewis. I took a course on Lewis in college and have loved the ways he describes things ever since.

There’s so much more I’d love to tell you about the letters that fall into Penny’s hands, the man that sent them and her quest to set it right but I don’t want to ruin anything for you!

Yours Truly, Thomas, coming July 2, 2019