Returning to the capital

To be sure, Washington, D.C. has changed in the last 35 years.

Construction fences and security barriers surround everything from the White House and the Washington Monument to various parks and tourist attractions. The traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, is heavier, and the subway system is more advanced. New museums and monuments, like the ones honoring Holocaust victims, African Americans, and veterans of the Korean War and World War II, have joined more established ones.

Even so, the nation's capital, in its 230th year, is much as I left it in the summer of 1984, when I interned for a congressman and got a close look at a city and a government at work.

I visited the area this past weekend while seeing my son, Matthew, who graduated from the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, and youngest daughter, Amy, who recently started a job in the city.

I found both the District of Columbia and northern Virginia, places brimming with reminders of our historical and cultural heritage, as interesting as I had the first time I saw them. Both will serve as backdrops for the first book in my next series. Set in late 1864 and early 1865, in the closing months of the Civil War, the novel will follow a modern American family as it begins a journey through time.

Though the series will have much in common with the Carson Chronicles series, it will differ in many ways. It will feature more history, adventure, and science fiction and follow a family that, for the most part, sticks together. Like my first three series, it will consist of five interrelated novels and feature multiple points of view.

I hope to start the new series in March. In the meantime, I will bring the Carson saga, a three-year labor of love, to a conclusion. I recently finished the first draft of Camp Lake. The fifth and final book of the Carson Chronicles series is still set for a January release.