Tag: DSP

I’ve been writing since I was twelve or thirteen, but my fascination with and love of history date back to well before that, beginning in fourth or fifth grade when I devoured every history book in our meager school library. When I graduated from high school and joined the army, being posted in places with excellent libraries that gave me access to history books that I hadn’t know existed, only fueled my love and activated my desire to learn more—especially the role that women and minorities played in history, facts that were often omitted from the history books I had access to in pre-Civil Rights Texas.

It was only natural, I suppose, that my love of history would impact my writing. Whatever I write, I strive to make it as historically accurate as possible, and I also enjoy writing stories about characters, people, and events that have been either overlooked or omitted from the history books accessible to American students.

Even though I’ve written in multiple genres for the past ten years, I’ve primarily written westerns, which have given me many opportunities to tell the true story of the Wild West. But it’s not just the historical inaccuracy of popular media’s portrayal of the American West that bothers me. World history writ large has often been whitewashed, sanitized, and rewritten to eliminate entire people from the record. My current publisher, DSP, has been at the forefront of putting historically accurate, while still entertaining, western fiction on the market for readers around the world. But it has gone a step further. It has provided writers like me with a platform to explore a broad range of subjects, ranging from military novels to historical fiction.

I’ve written several titles that’ve given me the chance to delve deeply into U.S. and world history and come up with some interesting —and I hope entertaining —characters and events that I’ve been proud to share with a global audience.

One of my first forays into historical fiction that was off the beaten path was The Ethiopian, a story of a soldier in Hannibal of Carthage’s army during the Punic Wars, who is captured by the Romans and sold as a gladiator. Although entirely fictional, it was based on historical events, and in researching the topic, I discovered that the interactions between ancient Roman and Greek civilizations and those of Africa were far older than I’d previously been taught.

I’ve always been drawn to American history, and the more I study, the more I discover that the history taught in American classrooms is often a mix of fact and fiction. For instance, the way President Chester A. Arthur is frequently overlooked in studies about American presidents led me to write Chester A. Arthur: Changing Course, which describes some of the truly remarkable things he accomplished as head of state and how he broke away from the traditional political mold of his time.

   Few people over forty are not familiar with Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, but probably only a handful who know that Wallace was a Union general in the Civil War who fought a losing battle that prevented the Confederates from taking the nation’s capital at a crucial point in the war—my effort to correct that lack of knowledge was The Lost Battle That Saves Washington: Monocacy Junction.

My most recent adventure in the realm of writing and righting the historical record is The Nubian Queen, a story about a queen of the Kush Empire (in what is now northern Sudan, Africa) who, after the Romans had conquered Egypt and then set their sights on the gold mines of Nubia to the south, thwarted the Roman invasion.

I hope that readers of this article will take a look at these offerings, which demonstrate that history is not only necessary for a better understanding of who we are and where we come from, but it can also be enjoyable.

These books have been published as e-books, and can be found at the following links:

The Ethiopian:  https://www.amazon.com/Ethiopian-Charles-Ray-ebook/dp/B0DRPGTZY9

Chester A. Arthur: Changing Course:  https://www.amazon.com/Chester-Arthur-Changing-Course-ebook/dp/B0DR3488HM

The Battle That Saves Washington:  https://www.amazon.com/Battle-That-Saves-Washington-Monocacy-ebook/dp/B0DH8M9XC6

The Nubian Queen:  https://www.amazon.com/Nubian-Queen-Charles-Ray-ebook/dp/B0F956KR87

Happy reading.