book details

Book: The Gray Ship by Russell F. Moran

categories: Book, Civil War, Civil War, Alternate History, Alternative History, Naval History, Historical Fiction, Time Travel

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Russell F Moran

about this book: The Gray Ship is my first novel. I've published five non-fiction books. The book is a time travel adventure centered around a nuclear guided missile cruiser that slips through a time portal in 2013 on its way to Charleston South Carolina for a commemoration of the Battle of Fort Sumpter and finds itself in 1861, two days before the beginning of the war.. The ship, the USS California, is commanded by a 36 year old black woman, a character in short supply in the mid nineteenth century.

The Gray Ship, a name given by the eyewitnesses from 1861, took me about 14 months to write, including time spent educating myself on the structure and techniques of fiction writing. When I began, the only thing I knew about dialog was that it involved people talking to each other, and their words belonged in quotation marks.

The book is an exciting adventure, and writing it was a real life adventure for me. It was amazing to live through the characters as I wrote their scenes. It has done well since its launch on Labor Day in 2013, hitting best seller status at number one on the Amazon science fiction/time travel category. Kirkus Reviews awarded it a coveted Star rating and it's on the Kirkus list of Best Indie Books of 2013.

According to Kirkus, The Gray Ship is a "...provocative, intensely powerful novel...wildly entertaining and profoundly moving."

Don't start reading it unless you have time to plow through the 382 fast moving pages. Will Captain Ashley Patterson and her crew change history? Dare they? Abraham Lincoln thinks it's a great idea. Ashley isn't so sure.

Available in paperback and Kindle.