To some extent, I feel reluctant rating and reviewing this book. I'm not the intended reader, although various people recommended it in a historical fiction workshop I attended. His advice and discussions feel a bit superficial, including warnings about not using anachronisms and the general writing tips -- "Always double-, triple-, and quadruple-check your prose to be sure you haven't gotten carried away by the action and written sentences like these ... 'He saw Cherokee warriors coming out of the corner of his eye.'" I also found myself skimming over all the promotion of his books and those of his wife, Dark Rain (e.g. "[It] formed the basis for my second historical novel, Follow the River, which has been in print since 1981 and has sold one and a half million copies"). He also insists on the limitations and fallibility of internet information and research; and while I don't take anything I find on wikipedia, for example, as gospel, his views seem a bit eccentric for the present day. I feel as though the author is kind and well-intentioned, but this book wasn't quite what I was hoping for.
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