The first thing I remember wasn't the machines or the smell of antiseptic; it was hearing my dad laugh down the hospital hallway. When we reached his room, he was surrounded by nurses admiring his Viking beard as he proudly showed off the beads braided into it. My husband rolled his eyes at me with a knowing smile, a silent acknowledgment that this was just another "Ranger Rick" moment. In an instant, the fear I had carried into the hospital began to melt away. As the nurses drifted out, my husband looked at him and blurted, "Gee Rick, looks like you don't have it so rough in here." We all laughed. My mom, equal parts amused and exasperated, shook her head and asked, "Were you flirting with them?" For a few precious moments, we forgot we were in a hospital at all. Three nurses stopped their rounds, not because of a medical emergency, but because they couldn't resist asking about my dad's braided Viking beard. That is my dad’s greatest gift. No matter what life put in front of him, his instinct was to make those around him feel a little less afraid. Looking back, I don't think he was pretending everything was fine. He understood something I wouldn't fully appreciate until years later: laughter doesn't erase pain; it simply gives you the strength to carry it. I grew up in a family where humor wasn't reserved for celebrations. It showed up during our hardest seasons, around hospital beds, kitchen tables, and long road trips when we were exhausted and running on hope. Someone would make an observation so perfectly ridiculous that the room would erupt. Nothing had changed; the circumstances remained difficult. But for a moment, everyone could breathe again. I didn't realize it then, but I wasn't just witnessing a family tradition. I was learning how people survive. Years later, when I began writing, that same instinct found its way onto the page. I never consciously decided to add humor to difficult scenes; it appeared because that is how I remember life. Even during the hardest chapters, there were moments that made us laugh, like the Swedish pancake battle that turned into a full-blown family argument in the middle of a campground. At the time, it was embarrassing. Now, it is one of those memories I’m grateful to have. Leaving moments like that out of my work wouldn't make a story more serious, it would make it less honest. Every campground morning started peacefully enough. Coffee brewed, breakfast cooked, everyone laughed... and then, inevitably, someone managed to turn it into a family story we'd be telling for years. One of the biggest misconceptions about writing family history is that painful stories must remain painful from start to finish. Real life doesn't work that way. Families don't stop being themselves because tragedy walks through the door. The personalities remain; the teasing continues. Someone will still say the wrong thing at exactly the right time. These moments don't diminish the hardship; they remind us of our humanity. I have found this to be equally true while writing historical fiction. As I dig through old letters and journals, I expect to find hardship, and I always do. But tucked between the difficult passages are flashes of wit, self-deprecating humor, and stories of everyday mishaps unrelated to the struggles surrounding them. Our ancestors weren't historical figures every hour of every day; they were ordinary people who teased one another and found joy wherever they could. That realization changed how I approach every character I write. Whether I’m chronicling a medical crisis or an immigrant stepping onto American soil with an uncertain future, I refuse to let my characters become mere symbols of suffering. I want them to remain fully human, which sometimes means letting them cry, sometimes means letting them laugh, and often means allowing them to do both in the same chapter. Laughter doesn't erase life's hardest moments, but it can carry us through them. The people I love taught me that joy and sorrow are not opposites. They often sit quietly beside one another, sharing the same room, the same conversation, and sometimes even the same sentence. My stories resonate because they reflect that reality. They remind us that even in our darkest moments, our humanity is never lost, and neither is our ability to laugh. If you’d like to continue exploring the stories, history, and inspiration behind my books, I invite you to subscribe to The Anchor, my monthly newsletter, and follow along as this journey continues. -TJ Nilsdatter Author's Note: Family photographs in this post have been artistically altered to protect the privacy of relatives who never imagined they would become recurring characters on an author's website. This decision was made with great reluctance, as it also meant withholding photographic evidence of my seventy-year-old mother and aunt streaking across a golf course. Some stories are simply too dangerous for the internet.

I have never been to St. Paul. That's the strange thing about writing this post. Most of the places in this series are ones I've stood in myself, places my dad or my grandmother described from memory, places that live in family stories passed down at the kitchen table. St. Paul isn't one of those. I know it only from ship manifests, census records, and city directories. It's the first American address my great-grandmother ever had, and I've never set foot there. Many branches of my Norwegian family first arrived there. Some made it their home, others homesteaded to South Dakota, North Dakota, or places further north in Minnesota. Others I've lost track of entirely, scattered into the paper trail the way families do. But before any of that happened, before anyone claimed a homestead or built a barn, they all passed through St. Paul first. It turns out that's not unusual. It's practically the rule. It wasn’t an accident of geography that brought them there. St. Paul sat at the absolute head of navigation on the Mississippi River, the final, rocky point where steamboats could travel north before the river turned into impassable rapids. Long before it was an elegant state capital, it was a rough-and-tumble settlement known as "Pig's Eye." It was named after Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant, a crooked-eyed, bootlegging whiskey trader who set up a shack at the river landing in the 1830s. Image credit: Albert Ruger, Chicago Lithographing Co., 1867. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. [1, 2, 3] The town might still be called Pig's Eye today if a French Catholic priest named Father Lucien Galtier hadn't arrived in 1841. Appalled by the settlement's rowdy reputation and its unholy nickname, he built a simple log chapel on the bluffs and dedicated it to Saint Paul. He famously declared that the growing town should be known by no other name, effectively converting "Pig's Eye" into "The Saintly City." By the turn of the century, the mud and whiskey shanties were long gone. Railroad titans like James J. Hill had laid thousands of miles of steel, turning the city into the undisputed engine room of the Northwest and a massive launching pad sending thousands of newcomers out onto the prairie. St. Paul in the early 1900s was one of the great landing grounds for Norwegian immigration into the upper Midwest. The original Union Depot processed thousands of new arrivals a year. It was a chaotic, cavernous maze of languages where land agents shouted about Dakota territory, streets veered off at odd forty-five-degree angles to match the river bends, and families stepped off trains into a city three stories taller and ten times louder than anything they'd left behind. The air in St. Paul didn't taste like the air in Norway. It tasted of coal smoke, hot grease, and the breath of ten thousand strangers. That's a line from The Sunstone Path, describing that exact moment of stepping off the railroad platform, and it's about as close as I'll get to spoiling anything. I'll say this much: St. Paul is one of the real settings woven into the book, and the research kept surprising me at every turn. For a lot of Norwegian families, St. Paul wasn't the destination. It was the decompression chamber. A place to catch your breath, earn a little money, and figure out what came next before the real journey west began. By Unknown author - Minnesota Historical Society Visual Resources CollectionPhotograph Collection ca. 1890Location no. MR2.9 SP8 p90Negative no. 2255-B, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42484164 What surprised me most in the research is how much of the city Norwegian immigrants built with their own hands. Carpenters and masons found steady work raising St. Paul up from the bluffs almost as fast as new arrivals could get off the train. The grand Queen Anne mansions along Cathedral Hill and Summit Avenue. Commercial blocks downtown. Entire church congregations, framed and bricked by the same hands that would later break sod on the prairie. If you know where to look, you can still see it. Take 1902. It was a brutal year to need heat. The anthracite coal strike back east dragged on from May to October, and by the time it was settled, coal prices had tripled in cities across the country. Across the country, some families resorted to burning furniture to stay warm. President Roosevelt himself stepped in to broker a resolution, the first time a sitting president had ever intervened directly in a labor dispute. St. Paul felt every bit of it. Drafty houses. Rationed coal deliveries. A hard, watchful kind of winter. And then there's Frogtown, a neighborhood I fell a little in love with while researching this post. Officially platted as Thomas-Dale, it earned its nickname from the chorus of frogs that used to sing through its swampy lowlands before the wetlands were filled. Frogtown became a bustling, working-class haven for waves of Norwegian, German, Polish, and Irish immigrants building lives on modest wages from the nearby Great Northern railroad shops. Small wood-frame cottages lined the muddy streets while electric streetcar lines hummed down University Avenue. Right in the middle of it stood a real anchor for the community: Trinity Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church at 515 North Farrington Street. The congregation had moved to Frogtown in 1885, but they lost their building to a devastating fire in 1902. They rebuilt with incredible speed, erecting a beautiful brick building on a solid limestone foundation. Designed in the shape of a cross, it featured a tall wooden spire, delicate rooftop embellishments, and glowing stained-glass windows. They worked fast enough to have the doors open again by Christmas. For newly arrived Norwegian immigrants, Trinity Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church offered more than a place of worship, it offered community, familiarity, and hope. The new brick building looked imposing against the dark sky. Its tall wooden spire reached up like a finger pointing toward the stars, and the Gothic windows glowed with the light of hundreds of candles from within. I think about that spire a lot. It felt like the right kind of place for a family who had just crossed an ocean to land in. St. Paul in 1902 was a city of contrasts. Mansions a few blocks from immigrant cottages. Streetcars gliding past horse-drawn drays. Norwegian hymns sung inside brand-new brick churches built by Norwegian hands, while half the conversations on the street outside still happened in the old language. Local Scandinavian newspapers like the St. Paul Tidende were freshly rolling off the local presses, helping newcomers navigate an environment that was becoming American while staying exactly what it was, all at the same time. It was a city constantly transforming itself, a reality anchored by the massive white structure rising over Wabasha Hill. Construction on the new Minnesota State Capitol had been underway since 1896, drawing hundreds of skilled local immigrant tradesmen, stonecutters, and laborers. For a family arriving at the turn of the century, the sight of that immense marble dome slowly taking shape behind a forest of wooden scaffolding and steam cranes was a striking reminder of just how fast the new world was building itself up from the ground. Minnesota State Capitol, Saint Paul, Minnesota, circa 1908. Photograph by the Detroit Publishing Co. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. If I were to travel to St. Paul today, I would find a city that has kept its promise as a gateway. The historic Union Depot has been beautifully restored, its neoclassical architecture humming once again with light rail, Amtrak trains, and modern travelers. And if I tracked down that old brick church at 515 North Farrington, I wouldn't hear Norwegian hymns drifting out into the evening air. Over the decades, the story of St. Paul naturally shifted. As those original Scandinavian immigrants established themselves, integrated, learned English, and eventually moved outward to newer suburbs or prairie homesteads, they left Frogtown behind. But Frogtown never stopped doing what it does best: acting as a landing pad for the next generation of new Americans. In the decades that followed, the shores people were leaving changed. New waves of Hmong, Vietnamese, and East African immigrants moved into the neighborhood, renting those same wood-frame cottages and walking the same streets. Today, that historic 1902 brick church belongs to the Ebenezer Oromo Evangelical Church, serving a thriving Ethiopian immigrant community. The language echoing inside those gothic windows is completely different now, but the soul of the building hasn't shifted an inch. It is still a sanctuary for people who crossed an ocean to start over. I may never stand on the old steam platforms, walk the bluffs, or find my ancestors' exact footsteps. But I know the place now, in the particular way you come to know somewhere through research and imagination rather than memory. Some places become part of a family long before anyone in that family ever sees them for themselves. Photo by weston m on Unsplash For my family, St. Paul wasn't the destination. It was the first breath taken on new ground. Everything after that is the story I'm still writing. This is only the beginning. If you enjoyed exploring the real history behind this place, subscribe below for more stories, historical discoveries, and updates as The Sunstone Path approaches its 2027 release.

Every family has a Ranger Rick. If you've read his profile, you know mine. But every family also has the person standing next to that storm, the one who doesn't get struck by lightning because she's already three steps ahead of it. In my upcoming book, The Unbreakable Anchor, that person is my mother, Astrid. The eye of the storm. The eye of the storm Let me paint you a picture of my mom, since you already have one of my dad. Where he was high-octane and theatrical, filling every room until there was no air left in it, she was crafty, frugal, gentle, and possessed of a patience I still don't fully understand. She didn't fight fire with fire. She didn't fight fire with fire. She just didn't burn. There's a story behind that, but I'll save it for the book. Her signature move, the thing everyone who knew her still brings up, was the deadpan. My father could be mid-catastrophe, blood pouring down his face, sighing like a man auditioning for a tragedy, and my mother would look at him with an expression that said I see you, and I am not moved. I used to think that was just her personality. It wasn't. It was a skill, and she built it managing her own father, who was apparently a legend in his own right long before Rick ever showed up. She didn't arrive at that calm by accident. She earned it, one overreaction at a time. Here's the thing people don't always see when they hear "she kept the peace." My mother was my Campfire Girls leader. She sewed my clothes and my brother's. She cooked meals that would've been at home in a much fancier kitchen than ours. She worked full time as a preschool teacher, a job she eventually handed down to me when I was a teenager. All of that, on top of managing a household where the emotional weather could change in under three seconds. Rick and Astrid. Different personalities, one remarkable partnership. Most of my best stories about her are tangled up in stories about my dad, because that's the terrain she was usually working in. There were more nights than I can count where my brother and I got loaded into the car in our pajamas to be taken to Grandma's until Dad cooled off. My mother was the one who softened the punishment when he overreacted. She was the one who could sit across from him, mid-storm, and get him to see it himself. That's not a small talent. That's diplomacy under fire, practiced daily, for years. One summer when we were setting up camp on a trip to Lake Wenatchee, yes the same campground in my dad’s story. The wind wouldn't quit that weekend. It often got windy there. My dad, stubborn as he was, insisted the canopy go up over the table. The canopy was no match for the wind. It kept collapsing no matter how many times we staked it back down. My dad was yelling at the canopy like it had wronged him personally. He was yelling at the wind too, and at anyone standing nearby, the whole production in full swing. My grandmother, who was there that trip, finally walked over to him and said, flat as anything, "Astrid didn't make the wind, Rick. God did." My mother didn't say a word. She just kept working the stakes back into the ground until the thing finally held. That was my mother. She never argued with the wind. She simply kept driving the stakes a little deeper. She was also the one who showed up to pick up the pieces, every time, no exceptions, which is a beautiful trait right up until it isn't. Looking back, I can see how that instinct overcorrected with my brother, whose adult life she stayed wrapped around longer than was probably good for either of them. She wasn't just a soft place to land. Sometimes she was the reason it took longer to learn how to land on your own. She was famous for making something out of nothing. Literally. We had end tables in our living room made from old cable spools she'd hauled home from a hardware store. She sewed, she crafted, and there wasn't much she couldn't build or fix with whatever was lying around. Every Christmas, our tree was covered with ornaments she'd made by hand. She made them out of felt, she sewed mini-wreaths, she did what she had to to make the holiday special. Which also translated to the gifts themselves. One year I received a “Mandy” doll with a whole chest full of outfits, every one of them she had sewn herself. Looking back at that, I realized the hours she put into making those moments special for us, long after we went to bed she was at that sewing machine, or in the kitchen, cooking lefse my brother would devour by the truckload. Long after we had gone to bed, my mother was still creating the memories we'd wake up to. One winter my dad wasn't feeling well, and instead of letting the tradition slip, my mother grabbed the saw, loaded my brother and me into the car, and trudged out into the snow to cut down our tree herself. We weren't going to miss it just because he was down for the count. That was her answer to almost everything. The tradition mattered more than the convenience, so she just did it. The Campfire Troop stories deserve their own book. She taught a whole group of girls to sew, cook, and craft, all with the same unbothered calm she brought to everything else. My favorite one still gets told at family gatherings. We were driving the whole troop home from a meeting at the school, seatbelts optional the way they were back then, and as we turned the corner toward our street the back door flew open and one of the girls went straight out of the car and into a ditch. My mother did not swerve, scream, or panic. She got to the end of the block, realized we were short one Camp Fire Girl, turned the car around, and went back for her. The girl was fine. As far as I could tell, my mother's pulse never changed. The rules did after that. Gone were the days where you piled in however many Camp Fire girls could fit in one seat. The 80’s were a special time. She taught far more than sewing and crafts. She taught confidence, creativity, and calm. Growing up, my dad's personality pulled us kids toward him. He was loud, so he got the attention, and getting his approval felt urgent in a way hers never did. It's only now that I understand my mother simply accepted less fuss around her own milestones than he got around his. For years I assumed she just didn't like being the center of attention. I'm not sure that's entirely true. I think she made room for him because someone had to, and she was the one who could. She's also, without argument, a phenomenal grandmother. None of my kids would be potty trained without her. She has never missed an event for a single grandchild, and she's always been the first one to volunteer for babysitting duty, no notice required. She even spent a whole week with my youngest son building a real Stabbur (a traditional raised Norwegian storehouse) out of popsicle sticks for his big Norway Project. From the first popsicle stick to the finished Stabbur, she made every project an adventure. And for me, specifically, she never stopped showing up, not even after I left home. She was there for me through the many struggles I've faced throughout my life. The stories in The Unbreakable Anchor would certainly have a different outcome if it was not for my mother. Here's the paradox of my mother: the same steadiness that made her easy to overlook is the exact thing that held the rest of us together. There was no theater to it, no scene, nothing that made you lean in and say "did you hear what Astrid did?" She never needed you to. She was just there, every time, doing the quiet work that made everyone else's story possible. Ranger Rick may open Chapter One, but my mother is one of the reasons we make it to Chapter Ten... and beyond. Every family has people whose quiet influence changes everything. Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more of the real people behind The Unbreakable Anchor. Sign up for my newsletter to follow along with the journey, I’d love to have you with me. -TJ Nilsdatter *Some images in this post have been artistically transformed or recreated from family photographs and personal memories to preserve family privacy while honoring the stories behind them.

This year, as America marks its 250th anniversary, a milestone honoring a nation forged in sacrifice and hope, I cannot think of a more fitting moment to pull back the curtain on what I have been quietly working on behind the scenes. When we celebrate the birth of this country, our minds naturally drift to 1776. But the roots of the American Revolution reach back more than a century, to the mud of our very first settlements. To truly understand the division that fractured the colonies, you have to go back to the very beginning. Beyond the palisades, ordinary families built homes, raised children, and struggled to survive in England's first permanent colony in North America. I am stepping onto entirely new soil. I am beginning a brand-new historical fiction series, and this time, the roots belong to my husband's family. As I looked back through photographs from some of our earliest trips together, I couldn't help but smile. Years before we ever traced his family tree, we had already walked the streets of Jamestown and stood on the battlefields of Yorktown, completely unaware that we were standing where his family's American story began. Looking back now, those photographs feel less like vacation memories and more like the first pages of a story we hadn't yet discovered. Long before we traced my husband's family roots to colonial Virginia, we had already walked the decks of Jamestown together without realizing the journey we had begun. Their American story did not begin on the windswept northern prairie. It began in the muddy, precarious settlement of Jamestown, where survival itself was a daily battle. Long before independence was declared in Philadelphia, the choices of those early generations were quietly shaping a massive conflict to come. By the time the American Revolution arrived, this single family tree stood deeply divided One branch descended from Jacobite rebels. These were men and women who backed a doomed uprising in Scotland, survived its brutal aftermath, and crossed the Atlantic seeking a life where no one knew their names, their scars, or their politics. The other branch became staunch British Loyalists, remaining fiercely faithful to the Crown that the Jacobites had once fought against. As the colonies moved toward revolution, families often found themselves divided by allegiance, with neighbors, and sometimes relatives, choosing opposite sides of the coming conflict. The American Revolution was never a tidy war between two distinct sides. It was a civil war that reached into homes, fracturing communities, brothers, and families. History often reduces these people to simple labels like Patriot, Loyalist, Rebel, or Traitor, but real life was never that clean. That complex, human struggle is the story I want to tell. I am endlessly fascinated by the places where history refuses to fit neatly into textbook categories. The farther I dig into genealogy, the more I discover that ordinary people rarely lived inside the clean lines drawn for them. They were simply trying to survive extraordinary times. One of my own photographs from Yorktown, where the American Revolution reached its decisive conclusion nearly two centuries after Jamestown was founded. Whether they were Jacobites fleeing political persecution, Loyalists watching their world collapse, Norwegian immigrants carving farms from the Dakota prairie, or the generations whose stories fill The Unbreakable Anchor, they all faced the same timeless question: How do you build a future when the world you once knew has disappeared? That question is the heartbeat behind everything I write. I will be sharing the official title and more details very soon, but I wanted you to be the very first to know that another voyage has begun. The Horizon: Fall 2026 and Beyond While this new series takes shape, the stories you are already following remain my highest priority. The Unbreakable Anchor (Coming Fall 2026) This book tells the true story of my family as we navigated military life, parenthood, profound challenges, and unexpected triumphs. It remains the emotional anchor beneath everything else I write because every family story I tell, in one way or another, begins with my own. The Sunstone Path (Coming 2027) Next year brings the first novel in my historical series, following my own great-grandparents as they leave Norway behind to build a life on the unforgiving Dakota prairie. It is a story of immigration, perseverance, and the quiet courage required to begin again. From the fragile clearings of Jamestown to the battlefields of the Revolution, this new saga follows one family as America struggles to discover who it will become. But the Revolution is only the beginning. This journey will continue across generations as one family's story unfolds alongside the history of a growing nation. One book launches this fall. Another takes shape for next year. And an entirely new American saga is just beginning to unfold. Thank you for walking these long, winding paths with me. The journey is just getting started. If you'd like to follow along, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter for future updates. — TJ Nilsdatter

If you've ever planned a wedding, you already know: there's the wedding you picture, the wedding you budget for, and the wedding that actually happens. Mine taught me the difference the hard way. Last weekend, I watched my firstborn marry the love of his life. What I learned along the way is equal parts logistics and heart. Nine months ago, this process began at a place called Ohme Gardens, where my son dropped down on one knee in front of the "Moment in Time" waterfall. From that moment on, my life has been pure chaos with a sprinkle of joy. The moment it all began: a proposal at Ohme Gardens' "Moment in Time" waterfall. What came next was merging my simple wedding style with my new daughter-in-law's vision. My own wedding was uncomplicated, and my style over the years has become even more so. My very first suggestion was that we do the wedding at an old, cute church in Elbe, Washington, one that fits 40 people, where we could all camp at the campground and have a nice backyard BBQ-style reception. The bride had different ideas, and honestly, her vision was inspiring. It took me down a path of discovery toward a fairy tale that fit both her and my son's personalities. The first decision was the venue. The bride wanted to be married in a church, not just any church, but one with character: stained glass windows, wood accents, and a beautiful altar. There happened to be one she liked about twenty minutes from my house. My planning brain went into overdrive, and I sprang into motion. I knew exactly where the reception could be held, a ten-minute drive from that church, a childhood location for me that felt like an enchanted forest wonderland. I was crunching numbers and pinning things to Pinterest before we'd even picked a date. We picked a date that worked around my active-duty middle son's deployment schedule and started getting the ball rolling until we learned the wedding needed to be on a Sunday to accommodate the Sabbath falling on Saturday for the bride's family's religion. That put a cold stop on the planning. A wedding in a church on a Sunday was going to be near impossible to accommodate, and our original church choice was a hard no. Time was an issue since we were less than a year out and the venue was priority one. I pulled together a list of alternatives, we made some calls, and only one church said yes. It was nowhere near either family, a two-hour commute for us both, but ironically, it was located in a beautiful Norwegian-themed town. We scheduled a tour. From the minute we pulled into that church parking lot, I knew it was the one. Scattered around the grounds were "stained glass" decorations that matched the massive wall of stained glass windows in the sanctuary itself. With the wood accents and arches that fit the theme, it was truly perfect. The reception hall carried the same things, a wide-open space perfect for a celebration. We booked it that day. One look at the wood beams, stained glass, and sanctuary, and I knew we'd found the church. The first real wrench came a few days later. The church coordinator called to tell me that our weekend was graduation weekend, and the reception hall was needed that morning to celebrate the graduates. That meant no setting up the night before like we'd planned. We would have exactly three hours that Sunday morning to set up the entire venue. At the time, three hours sounded fine. That was before I knew just how many decorations would end up stuffed into my SUV. Once the venue was secured, the next step was vendors. Prices were way over what I expected, so I picked an affordable DJ. But as the months went by and our decorations got more elaborate, I started stressing about that three-hour morning window. That's when I decided we needed a "day-of" wedding coordinator. Of course, the prices for that were more than the venue itself. I briefly wondered if we really needed one, but picturing myself trying to get ready for the wedding while coordinating centerpieces made me hunt for help. I narrowed down a list and made some inquiries. It's ridiculous how many businesses just ignore messages; I wonder how some of them stay afloat. One girl never even showed up to a meeting she set up herself. Her excuse? She slept in. Well that was all I needed there to put in the "do not hire list". I was about ready to go without a coordinator when I got a friendly message from a company just starting out. She was nice, responsive, and reasonably priced, so I went with her. They also offered bartender services willing to work with mocktails, since my son and daughter-in-law wanted a dry wedding. Just as the Christmas season hit, we had everything secured. I went straight from wedding planning into holiday mode, all while working on edits for The Unbreakable Anchor and the rough draft of The Sunstone Path. The centerpiece that inspired months of antique shopping, late-night crafting, and more Amazon deliveries than I'd care to admit. When the holidays were over, it was time to finalize the plans saved on our shared Pinterest boards. Our enchanted forest theme had evolved into an antique Hollywood-glam style featuring dusty pinks, navy blue, and gold accents. I started buying everything I could find on sale in that color palette. The bride linked me to a centerpiece she liked, and I ran with it: gold hoops, white twinkle lights, hanging votive holders on crystal strings, mirrors that reflected the light, and blue antique votives. Antique shopping came next. We were hunting for old frames and crystalware, the kind of things you find in antique stores for twice what you'd pay online. We did find an antique flower basket and ring bearer pillow that fit the theme perfectly. The UPS man was at my house pretty much every day for months. Then I turned my attention to Canva, designing all the signs: pink roses, blue and gold accents, and themed signs for the popcorn bar and gift table. I found gold antique frames to put them in, and a few weeks before the wedding, everything was coming together. My mom came over and helped with the remaining centerpieces, and my living room officially became the staging area. No need to see out the front window, I guess. Around that point, The Unbreakable Anchor edits went on pause. The manuscript has been sitting since April, on edit four, act three. (It resumes this week!) With the book on hold, my sole focus became the wedding. Every day I got out my calendar and spreadsheet we had been working on now for months and one by one could check things off the list. Eventually that red circled date was here. The house we booked at Christmas time was waiting and I could not wait to get there, that is if I could find room in the SUV to sit. The house we booked was on the water. It slept 14 of us so we could host my husband's family flying in from Florida. It was a perfect house and, the week of the wedding, the minute I stepped through the door, all the stress evaporated. One look at that view was exactly what I needed to brace for the emotional weekend ahead. One look at this view, and nine months of wedding planning stress began to melt away. When the wedding day arrived, it was pure chaos. I discovered muscles I didn't know I had. It was constant running and being the point person for every single question, especially because our coordinator wasn't there for the first crucial hour. Thank God for my family. My cousins were there. My cousin's daughter took over coordination duties. My parents, my brother, my brothers-in-law, the bride's father and stepmother, aunts and uncles, everyone showed up. It fit the theme of my own books perfectly: family, and how even in the most stressful moments, they come through for you. The wedding was beautiful. Throughout the night, people kept asking when I was starting my wedding-planning business. My answer was a swift "no way." I don't have the fortitude for Bridezillas. I imagine that is why wedding coordinators charge one to two mortgages. After months of planning, shopping, crafting, and spreadsheets, seeing the reception hall finally come together was worth every minute. We had about 20 no-shows who'd RSVP'd, leaving us with a whole truckload of Olive Garden that we handed out to anyone who wanted it at the end of the night. But at the end of the day, my son is happily married to his beautiful bride, and we somehow managed to get everything stuffed back into the SUV. I wanted a picture of that chaos, but my camera was apparently buried at the bottom of the pile, so I had ChatGPT whip up a fairly accurate representation of what my ride home was like. True story, really! 😉 Slightly dramatized. Only slightly. 😉 Looking back on the nine months since that proposal at the waterfall, I keep coming back to the same thing: none of the spreadsheets, the Pinterest boards, or the three-hour scramble actually mattered in the way I thought they would. What mattered was who showed up when the plan fell apart: the cousins who became coordinators, the family who filled in every gap I couldn't cover myself. If I could tell myself anything back at Ohme Gardens, it's that the wedding doesn't have to be perfect to be exactly right. And like I said, my youngest son, the only one not yet married, has already been warned: his wedding is getting cowboy boots, BBQ, and a campground. No stained glass required. -TJ Nilsdatter The stories I share here, whether family history, historical fiction, or milestones like this one, are all part of a larger journey. Subscribe to my newsletter for new stories, research discoveries, and updates on my upcoming books.

There is a particular kind of man the prairie produces, or perhaps more accurately, selects for. Not the loudest man in the room. Not the one with the most to say. The one who, when the land turns against you and the wind is howling and the rope between your door and your well is the only thing keeping you alive, simply tightens his grip and goes back inside to add another log to the stove. That man is my great-grandfather, Albert Buran. The man I never got to meet, but whose influence can still be seen through the generations. He was a man who made difficult choices. A selfless man who quietly took on burdens that were never meant to be his to carry. A man whose quiet strength built a legacy. A man who stayed. A fictionalized portrait of Albert, inspired by family photographs and historical research. Albert was born in 1882 in the steep, narrow valleys of Markabygd, Norway, where the ridges caught the sound and held it close, where farms were worked in thin strips of soil between rock and sky, and where a young man with any hunger for space could see, plainly and early, that there was not enough room for him. He left in the spring of 1903, crossed the Atlantic aboard the iron-hulled SS Celtic, rode the rails through the industrial chaos of Chicago, and stepped off a train in Minot, North Dakota, into a landscape that was the complete opposite of everything he had ever known. No ridges. No forest. No sound caught and held by anything. Just wind, and grass, and a sky so big it produced a physical vertigo in a man raised between mountains. He looked west. He stayed. What followed was the kind of life that does not make for dramatic stories told at dinner tables, but makes for everything else. Albert broke sod with a steel plow that screamed against a thousand years of stubborn prairie root. He hauled every drop of drinking water in wooden barrels from the Souris River miles away, because the shimmering sloughs dotting his claim were alkali and bitter enough to kill a horse. He descended into a four-foot hole in the earth by hand, day after day, until clean water finally seeped over his boots. He built his own walls out of the land itself. He did all of this without complaint, and without much company, and without anyone to tell him it was remarkable. To Albert, it was simply what needed doing. The prairie gave nothing freely. Every acre had to be earned. He is not the man who stands up at the barn raising and gives a speech. He is the man who shows up before dawn with his tools already sharpened. His neighbors learn this about him gradually, the way you learn anything true about a person of few words: through repeated evidence. He does not volunteer loudly. He does not seek recognition. But when the work needs doing, Albert is simply there. He has always already thought of it. That quiet reliability is his defining characteristic, and quietly, his greatest burden. The prairie does not reward sentimentality, and Albert rarely indulges in it, but there is a tenderness in him that he guards carefully. It lives in the way he tends his animals, in the patient and unhurried mornings he spent earning the trust of a wild copper stallion others would have broken by force. It lives in his garden too, where he moved through the rows with the same steady attention he gave to everything in his care, talking to his plants in a low voice the way other men talked to their horses, with no expectation that the conversation needed to go both ways. He understood, in some quiet and practical way, that living things respond to being noticed. That attention itself is a form of nourishment. He earned the trust of animals the same way he earned everything else: quietly, and over time. Survival on the Dakota frontier meant every pioneer maintained a garden to endure the brutal winters. Potatoes. Cabbage. Rhubarb. The practical things that kept a family alive when the snow buried the prairie and the wind turned merciless. But Albert planted something else too. Alongside the root vegetables and the work of survival stood rows of towering sunflowers in what the family later called his “Horseman’s Garden.” They were not there simply for beauty, though they brought that too. Albert harvested the seeds and pressed the oil from them, using it to condition the coats of his prized draft horses until they gleamed in the prairie sun for potential buyers. Even in the hardest country on earth, Albert understood that care mattered. That strength alone was never enough. Things survived better when they were tended properly. Where another man might have found the isolation of the North Dakota plateau crushing, Albert found something close to relief. The silence on the prairie is different from the silence of the Norwegian valleys, where the ridges held sound close like a secret. Out here it simply stretches, thin and infinite, until it disappears into the horizon. It asks nothing of him. It does not require him to perform or explain. With his dogs at his feet and his horses nearby and his garden rows in front of him, Albert was entirely himself. With his dog at his feet and the prairie stretching beyond the horizon, Albert was entirely himself. This is what I mean when I say he was the foundation. Not a man who demanded to be seen, but a man whose presence made everyone around him steadier. The land cost him constantly, and he paid constantly, and he did not keep a tally. His path in The Sunstone Path is not an easy one. I will not say more than that. But I will say that by the time I finished writing him, I understood something about Albert, and about the men in my family, that I had not fully understood before. I hope, when you read his story, you come to love him too. — TJ Nilsdatter Albert's story is only the beginning. Subscribe for updates on The Sunstone Path and future stories from my family's past.

If you think a brutal sea and a barren landscape are the only hazards at Cape Disappointment, you’ve never had to make a midnight run to the Long Beach emergency room with a child burning up from a terrifyingly high fever. That chaotic night, complete with an eight-hour wait, a whopping $3,000 out-of-network bill, and an aging ER doctor who literally rolled into the room using a walker, is just one of the reasons this rugged park became the backdrop for several family survival stories in The Unbreakable Anchor. In fact, the landscape left such a permanent mark on our history that an original photograph of the driftwood and shifting tides at Cape D eventually became the actual cover of the book. Tucked into the extreme southwest corner of Washington State, right where the mouth of the Columbia River collides with the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, lies a place that completely contradicts its own name. For years, my definition of Cape Disappointment was painted in a very specific shade of Pacific Northwest green. It was the color of my dad's old Toyota truck, that bright green rig topped with a red-and-white canopy that served as the carriage for our family's childhood adventures. Back when the park was still called Fort Canby, we only pulled that truck in there once, a short stop in the middle of a longer vacation down the Oregon Coast. It was a brief detour, but it became permanently burned into my memory for one reason: the wind. It was the kind of wind that whipped you right in the face, relentless and raw, sand peppering your skin until you ducked for cover. My mom hated it there. The wind never stopped. After that trip, my parents never returned, at least not until years later, when we convinced them to experience it again through the eyes of their grandchildren. My dad's bright green Toyota and pop-up camper at Cape Disappointment in the early 1980s. Long before RVs and reservation apps, this was how our family's adventures began. That first visit wasn't much to write home about. The driftwood graveyard. The piles of sand going on forever. The absence of trees in every direction. What I remember most is a landscape stripped bare, open and indifferent to the people standing in it. My dad had brought us to explore the old fort, which stood tall over the ocean and didn't disappoint, but the rest of the place had a raw, almost hostile quality that we weren't prepared for. It's ironic that what was little more than a windy pit stop in my youth would eventually become one of the most meaningful places in our family's story and a recurring backdrop in The Unbreakable Anchor. Cape Disappointment in the early 1980s. Taken from a bluff-top trail overlooking the Long Beach Peninsula, this view shows how much the landscape has changed before the forest canopy filled in. The name itself has a story worth telling. In 1788, English captain John Meares was searching for what he'd heard called the Great River of the West. When he reached this stretch of coastline, the treacherous sandbars concealed the river mouth so completely that he mistook it for nothing more than a shallow bay. Convinced there was no river to be found, he sailed on. He named the headland accordingly. Four years later, Captain Robert Gray found what Meares had missed. He navigated through those shifting sandbars and into the mouth of the river, naming it the Columbia after his ship. Gray's Harbor County here in Washington was named in his honor. What Meares saw as an ending was really just a hidden beginning, a river so vast and powerful it concealed itself behind its own geography. Lewis and Clark made their way here too, completing their extraordinary journey from Missouri all the way to the edge of the continent. You can stand in the interpretive center today and read their words, carved into a tree at the top of the bluff after they climbed up to take in the view: "By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805." Nearby, Fort Canby still stands, originally built during the Civil War and later expanded into an important coastal defense battery during World War II. For my boys, those visits were more than a history lesson. They were a reminder that the people who came before us faced impossible odds and kept going anyway. Originally built during the Civil War and expanded through World War II, Fort Canby helped defend the entrance to the Columbia River for generations. If you stand at the edge of the cliffs today, it becomes immediately clear why this stretch of coastline earned its grim reputation as the Graveyard of the Pacific. The headland is so rugged and deceptive, the sandbars so treacherous where the mighty Columbia River meets the open Pacific, that a single lighthouse wasn't enough to protect the ships trying to navigate it. It required two. Perched high on the cliffs is the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse, first lit on October 15, 1856, making it the oldest functioning lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest. But the massive rock formations blocked its light from ships approaching from the north, so the government built a second beacon. The North Head Lighthouse was completed on May 16, 1898, positioned two miles up the road to watch over the open ocean. When those lighthouses were built, the landscape around them was completely stripped of trees. Nothing but wind and cliff and churning water. Just two towers standing against the dark, doing their job, refusing to move. Decades after that first visit, after a massive multi-million-dollar state park renovation transformed the area, I returned to Cape Disappointment with my family and discovered something I hadn't expected: my favorite place on earth. It is completely full of trees now. A dense evergreen canopy has grown up over the years, shielding the campground from the worst of the wind, softening what was once a raw and relentless landscape into something quiet and sheltered. Wildlife moves through the sites at dawn. The smell of salt air mixes with Douglas fir and campfire smoke in that particular Pacific Northwest combination that gets into your clothes and your memory in equal measure. The same campground decades later. The open, windswept landscape of my childhood has given way to the dense evergreen canopy that now defines Cape Disappointment. We brought our boys there when they were young, and what happened over those years happened slowly, the way the best things do. The campground became a constant. A place we return to, over and over, like the tide. It became the backdrop for dinners that went until midnight, for conversations we couldn't have anywhere else, for the kind of quiet that only happens when you're far enough from the noise of real life that you finally remember what stillness feels like. Kathy and Carl have joined us there more than once, the same Kathy who has been my sister in every way that matters since we were teenagers, who showed up with her whole heart during some of the hardest chapters in this book. Cape Disappointment has held all of it. The celebrations and the worries we carried in our pockets. The laughter around the fire and the moments where Alex and I sat in the camp chairs long after the boys went to sleep, not saying much, just watching the trees and whatever else moved in the wilderness. One of our many campground visitors. At Cape Disappointment, it's not unusual to look up from your campsite and find a deer watching from the trees. There is a reason this place keeps showing up in our family's story. The Unbreakable Anchor is, at its core, about what it looks like to keep going when life doesn't cooperate. The health scares and the financial crises, the deployments and the long silences, the moments where the ground shifts and you have no choice but to hold on. It is about a family that learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that love is more logistics than romance, more showing up than grand gestures. Cape Disappointment is the physical version of that story. The headland has been pounded by weather and tide for thousands of years and it does not move. The same rocks that fooled Captain Meares are still there, still holding the lighthouse, still taking the full force of everything the Pacific throws at them. What looks like desolation from the water is actually foundation. What looks like emptiness is actually endurance. My grandfather would have had something to say about that, probably at full volume in his thick Norwegian accent, probably to everyone within earshot. He would have pointed at those cliff faces and found a way to turn it into a story about stubbornness and survival and why Norwegians make good sailors. And he wouldn't have been wrong. Standing on those wind-swept bluffs, I've come to understand what I wrote in the prologue: that survival rarely announces itself, and true strength looks less like heroics and more like persistence. The lighthouses weren't dramatic. They were steady. They showed up every night and did their job. Not the grand gesture, just the steady light. The Cape Disappointment Lighthouse has stood watch over the Graveyard of the Pacific since 1856, guiding ships through fog, storms, and shifting sandbars. We return to the Cape not to escape real life, but to stand on something that refuses to be moved. After a year like the one this book describes, standing on that headland does something for me that nothing else quite manages. It reminds me that the anchor is still holding. It always has been. Stay Connected The fog may hide the coastline, but Cape Disappointment never goes anywhere. Subscribe to the newsletter for updates on The Unbreakable Anchor, future books, and the places, people, and adventures that continue to shape our family's story. Planning a Visit To Cape Disappointment Cape Disappointment State Park is located in Ilwaco, Washington and offers camping, hiking, two historic lighthouses, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, and direct access to the coast where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. We recommend booking campsites well in advance. It fills up fast, and for good reason.

My grandmother rarely talked about her childhood. What I learned about where my family started in America came from stories overheard at the kitchen table: my dad and uncle trading memories while my grandmother’s musical laughter filled the room and my grandfather’s annoying chewing habits provided the soundtrack. The stories were always the same at their core: The endless drive from Marysville, Washington to Minot, North Dakota. Towering mountains and evergreen forests slowly gave way to the open prairie beneath an even bigger sky. The plains had their own quiet beauty, one I would only come to appreciate much later, but to two boys trapped in the backseat for endless hours, the Magic City was anything but magical. It wasn’t until I was much older that I started to understand why the place stayed with them. Years later, driving across the endless corn fields of Iowa myself, I finally understood part of what my father had tried to describe all those years. The prairie has a way of distorting time. The horizon barely changes. The road keeps unfolding endlessly ahead of you, mile after mile of open land that feels both beautiful and isolating at the same time. Somewhere in those long stretches of highway, I began to understand the Dakota plains a little better. The Dakotas could not have been more different than the fjords of Norway where so many immigrant families had come from. There were no similarities at all: not the climate, not the scenery, not the land itself. It was a harsh and unfamiliar world. Wheat fields stretched toward horizons so wide they barely looked real. The wind never stopped moving. In the Souris River Valley, the carved-out valley floor and rising plateaus made the landscape feel almost lunar, ancient and impossibly open. And yet people came. They stayed. They built something. That tension became one of the foundations of The Sunstone Path. Albert's Farm near Minot, ND The series follows several lives shaped by the Dakota plains, including Albert and Edvard, two Norwegian brothers trying to build a future outside Minot during the railroad expansion that transformed the region almost overnight. While Albert experiences the rough edges of frontier Minot firsthand, other characters in The Sunstone Path experience the prairie very differently, through family, faith, survival, silence, and the impossible choices that shaped immigrant life. Minot earned the nickname “The Magic City” in the late 1800s when the Great Northern Railway pushed westward and the town seemed to materialize from the prairie by sheer force of ambition. Like many frontier towns, Minot developed a rough reputation early on. Railroad workers, land speculation, vice, violence, and rapid expansion created a city that could feel lawless at times. From 1905 to 1920, Minot’s population exploded alongside railroad construction and waves of settlement, while court records documented widespread criminal activity throughout the region. Then came Prohibition, and things became even wilder. Minot turned into a supply hub connected to liquor smuggling routes running south from Canada. Bootlegging, prostitution, speakeasies, and opium dens flourished in the city’s underground economy. Smugglers reportedly used tunnels beneath parts of downtown to move illicit cargo through the city, earning Minot a second nickname: “Little Chicago.” Photograph of men with buffalo bones in Minot in 1886 from Minot State University's Digital Minot: An On-Line Museum of Local History This photograph, taken in early Minot, shows wagons that are not loaded with goods or supplies. They're piled high with buffalo bones. By the time settlers and railroad workers arrived on the Dakota plains, the great buffalo herds had been nearly wiped out. What remained were bones, millions of them, scattered across the prairie as far as the eye could see. Settlers and homesteaders collected them by the wagonload and sold them to eastern factories to be ground into fertilizer and made into carbon black for refining sugar. A single ton fetched just a few dollars. Men made entire livings from it. It is one of the stranger and more haunting details of frontier life. The same land being broken open for farms and railroads and cities was also being picked clean of what had sustained the Plains peoples for thousands of years. Minot was being built on ambition, yes, but also on bones. What fascinates me most is not just the criminal side of that history, but the contradiction sitting beside it. While bootleggers operated beneath the surface, churches were being built above ground. Families established farms that lasted generations. Scandinavian immigrants carved communities out of the plains and built lives sturdy enough to survive brutal winters, isolation, crop failures, and time itself. The Magic City was building its future on both ambition and vice. There is something deeply human about that. Albert experiences that version of Minot firsthand in The Sunstone Path. His first Fourth of July in the city captures the raw energy of a frontier town still trying to decide what kind of place it wanted to become: In the Magic City, the festivities didn’t wait for the sun; gunshots cracked against the dawn, the reports ricocheting off raw timber and false-front buildings that looked as though they had been exhaled from the prairie dust overnight. It was a town built on the frantic architecture of hope and gunpowder, where the American dream didn’t just arrive, it exploded into being. Albert and Edvard end up spending part of that Fourth of July in the Minot jail, the story of how they got there is one for the book, but sitting in that cell, Albert reflects on everything he had already sacrificed to build a life there: Albert sitting in a jail cell. The iron bars of the Minot jail cast striped shadows across the floor, smelling of stale tobacco and the copper tang of blood still drying on Edvard’s knuckles. Albert sat on the edge of the cot, the silence of the cell heavier than the humid July night. “I should’ve stayed in Norway,” he said, the sarcasm thin over a raw layer of exhaustion. But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. That line may sum up the immigrant experience better than any history book ever could. Minot continued reinventing itself long after those early frontier years. The Air Force base transformed the city into an important military community during the Cold War. The Bakken oil boom reshaped western North Dakota once again in the twenty-first century. Scandinavian heritage festivals still celebrate the immigrant roots that helped build the region in the first place. The city that sprang from railroad tracks and prairie dust never really stopped changing. But beneath all those reinventions, the prairie remains the same. Maybe that is why Minot continues to pull at my imagination despite being a place I know mostly through stories, research, and inherited memory. Some places become part of a family long before you ever stand there yourself. The Magic City, in the end, was never really about perfection. It was about survival. The story of Albert, Regina, and the families shaped by the Dakota plains continues in The Sunstone Path, scheduled for release 2027.

Not long ago, my family and I were out in the yard re-doing the landscaping when my shovel hit something completely unyielding deep in the dirt. When I finally cleared away the earth, I discovered I had uncovered a massive piece of a petrified log, ancient wood turned completely to stone, glowing with compressed rings of amber, rust, and gold. Holding that heavy piece of deep time in my hands made me look toward my plant shelf by the window, where two other specific stones sit side-by-side. One is a glittering, deep orange feldspar sunstone, a treasure my parents bought me from an Oregon gift shop while we were on an RV camping trip when I was a kid. The other is a piece of Iceland spar, a completely clear, colorless crystal I acquired years later to replace a family heirloom that was lost, which I write about in my upcoming multi-generational true family story, The Unbreakable Anchor. On the surface, they look like a simple Pacific Northwest rockhound's collection. But for me, they are a tangible connection to an ancient seafaring mystery that spans across the ocean and directly into my own heritage: the legendary science of Viking sunstone navigation. An Oregon sunstone in its natural matrix. While the stone itself didn't inspire the story, its name eventually inspired the title of my upcoming novel, The Sunstone Path. For decades, historians treated the idea of Viking sunstone navigation as pure myth. The old Norse sagas, such as the Saga of St. Olaf and the Hrafns þáttr Guðrúnarsonar (The Tale of Hrafn, Gudrun's Son), made passing references to a mysterious sólarsteinn, or sunstone, used by raiders to locate the sun on completely overcast days. Because no physical compasses existed in Northern Europe during the Viking Age, academia largely dismissed these accounts as magical folklore. The concept eventually broke into modern pop culture through the historical drama series Vikings, where the character Ragnar Lothbrok uses a small, clear gemstone to navigate his longship across the open, fog-choked North Sea to reach England. As a researcher tracing my own roots, I wanted to understand the actual science behind the screen. In the 2010s, historical and physical science finally caught up with the legends, proving that Viking sunstone navigation was an incredibly sophisticated method of maritime tracking. However, the tool they used wasn't the glittering, colorful orange gemstone most people picture today. It was that clear, colorless Iceland spar sitting on my shelf. The mechanics behind how this clear crystal tracks the sun through a dense sea storm are entirely grounded in optical physics. The North Atlantic is notoriously treacherous, plagued by heavy mist, thick cloud cover, and the deceptive haze of summer's midnight sun, which makes standard celestial tracking impossible. Iceland spar looks as clear as glass, but its structure naturally splits light to show a double image. When unpolarized light enters the stone, the crystal splits the light into two distinct beams traveling at different speeds and angles. Sunlight naturally scatters into rings around the sun, creating a hidden pattern in the sky. Even on the cloudiest days, this special crystal worked like a filter. A navigator would hold it up and slowly turn it. By looking through the stone, they watched the split images until both glowed with the exact same brightness. At that precise moment, the crystal pointed directly at the hidden sun with incredible accuracy. This legendary trick was proven true when divers explored a 16th-century English warship wrecked near the island of Alderney. Right next to the ship's navigation tools, archaeologists discovered a real piece of Iceland spar. This proved that sailors kept using the ancient stones for centuries, especially because steel cannons and iron tools could easily throw off a standard magnetic compass. You can read all about the discovery in depth through BBC News or explore the artifact details via Live Science. This history isn't just an abstract research project for me; it is woven directly into my DNA. My own family line stretches back to Norway, deeply rooted in the historic Gudbrandsdalen valley through ancestors like Paul Harildstad. Paul was an Eidsvollsmann, one of the historic delegates who gathered at Eidsvoll in the spring of 1814 to frame and sign the Norwegian Declaration of Independence. When you trace your heritage back to the steep valleys, historic farmsteads, and ancient routes of the Norsemen, the stories of the sea cease to be just text in a book. The very bloodline that walked the Gudbrandsdalen valley eventually looked toward the western horizon and made the immense, terrifying choice to cross the open ocean to the New World in the early 1900s. Together, the stones on my shelf and the petrified wood buried beneath my yard capture that dual identity. Oregon designated the feldspar sunstone as its official State Gemstone in 1987, its copper-flecked interior giving the stone a warm, ember-like fire, the exact sparkle that caught my eye in a small gift shop during a childhood camping trip. Beside it sits the clear Iceland spar once used by Norse navigators to track the hidden sun through storm clouds and sea fog. The objects that brought this story together: an Oregon sunstone, a piece of Iceland spar, and a fragment of petrified wood discovered beneath my own yard. Finding that petrified log buried in my own Washington yard recently brought the entire journey full circle. Petrified wood became Washington’s official State Gem in 1975, honoring the ancient forests buried beneath volcanic ash millions of years ago. One lineage of stone connects me to the deep geological past of the Pacific Northwest land I live on today, while the other connects to an ancient seafaring legacy across the water. At its core, the history of Viking sunstone navigation is about finding a way forward when the horizon disappears and the clouds roll in. It's about the tools we carry to keep ourselves oriented when we are navigating uncharted territory. That specific human weight, the idea of finding your bearings during life's greatest transitions, crossings, and unexpected storms, is the ultimate heartbeat of my writing. The title of my upcoming novel, The Sunstone Path, was inspired by that very idea. In the story, a sunstone passed down through generations eventually comes into the hands of my own great-great-great grandfather. To him, the stone becomes more than a simple heirloom. It becomes a reminder that even when the horizon disappears, the light itself is never truly gone. Regina listens as the legend of the sunstone is passed down to a new generation in this artistic interpretation inspired by The Sunstone Path. As he says while holding it up against the darkness: “It doesn't create light. It only reveals what is already there, hidden by the clouds.” That same search for orientation through uncertainty runs deeply through both The Unbreakable Anchor and The Sunstone Path, and the books still to come, stories shaped by crossings, inheritance, survival, and the invisible things that guide us when the horizon is lost. Book One: The Sunstone Path, coming soon. Don't lose the horizon. Subscribe to my newsletter for exclusive updates on The Sunstone Path.

Regina Lien, as she might have been in the early years on the prairie. When I first started writing The Unbreakable Anchor, it was meant simply as a gift for my children, something they could hold onto long after I am gone. What I didn’t expect was where it would lead me: deeper into my own history, into the lives of those who came before me, and into a question I hadn’t thought to ask, where does strength really come from? “She learned early that strength was not something you spoke of, it was something you carried.” Regina Lien is one of those answers. She is my great-grandmother, a woman I knew only from, fragments of my dad's memory. My grandmother, Regina’s daughter, rarely spoke about her childhood. What was passed down instead was something quieter, strength, steady and unquestioned. Regina was born in Jämtland, Sweden, in 1883, near the Norwegian border. In 1902, she made the journey to America with her family, eventually settling on the South Dakota prairie. The South Dakota prairie is not a gentle place. The winters are punishing, the work was relentless, and the community of Norwegian immigrants around her was held together by faith, stubbornness, and the unspoken agreement that you show up for your neighbors the way you hope they will show up for you. Regina is woven into all of that. She belongs to this place, even as the place keeps costing her. Regina is not a woman who talks about her feelings easily. She is the person her family turns to. Not because she volunteered exactly, but because she is simply the one who shows up, and people learn, over time, that she will always show up. A life shaped by the prairie; quiet, relentless, and enduring. That quiet reliability is both her greatest strength and, in many ways, her heaviest burden. But she is not without joy. There is warmth in her, and humor, dry and understated, the way Norwegian humor tends to be. She notices beauty: the particular light on the fields in late afternoon, the way a newborn smells, the sound of her native language spoken by someone who learned it the same way she did, at a mother's knee far from here. For a long time, Regina existed for me only as a name in a family tree and a few faded photographs. I knew the broad outline of her life. But the woman inside that outline, what she carried, what she feared, how she made sense of the things that happened to her, was lost. The Sunstone Path is a work of historical fiction rooted in real lives, real places, and real events. It is my way of preserving and honoring a story that might otherwise have been lost. Regina’s path in this book is not an easy one. I will not say more than that. But I will say that by the time I finished writing the chapters I have written so far, I understood something about her, and about the women in my family, that I had not understood before. I hope, when you read her story, you come to love her too. — TJ Nilsdatter Join my newsletter to be there when Regina's story unfolds in the Sunstone Path, coming 2027.

Some places stay with you long after you leave them. Lake Wenatchee, in Washington State, is one of those places for me. Nestled in the Cascade Mountains, it’s where towering pines meet clear blue water and the world seems to quiet down for a while. Over the years, trips to Lake Wenatchee became more than just camping weekends; they became chapters in our family story. The crystal blue waters of Lake Wenatchee. Lake Wenatchee sits on the east side of the Cascade Mountains, an hour and a half drive from my hometown of Snohomish, WA. Carved out of glaciers, the crystal blue, ice-cold lake stands in bright contrast to the tall pines of the Wenatchee National Forest. Campers and tourists alike flock to the state park to take advantage of the white sandy beach and cool waters to escape the heat of Eastern Washington. In the winter, the layer of snow insulates the noise and creates a pristine winter wonderland for recreation. For my family, Lake Wenatchee was a second home. Every summer we would pack up and head up here for weekends of camping, adventure, and just time spent together as a family. Weekends were spent hiking, horseback riding, and swimming, or taking a trip into Leavenworth, 30 minutes away. The vast majority of it was simply spent being a family: roasting marshmallows, playing cards, or sitting by the creek or the lake. Sitting by the lake was its own adventure. Perfect days spent by the water's edge. Swimming in the lake was not something for the faint of heart. The water is crystal clear, unlike some lakes on the west side of the mountains. There are no lily pads, no ducks, and no mosquitoes, well, I take that back. Mosquitoes could be a problem depending on the month. That meant the wind was welcome to keep them at bay, along with creating recreation of its own. When the wind picked up, Lake Wenatchee turned into a surfing haven. Well, what we called surfing. The waves were massive. If you could survive the cold water. There was nothing better than the thrill of the windy water. My cousins and I dove right in, of course, until our whole bodies turned blue. Right in the thick of it was always my grandma, surfin' the waves like she was sixteen. The lake was the start of the Wenatchee River, yes, the same river they give white-water rafting tours on further down. It was along this river that one of the moments from my childhood unfolded. That memory eventually became the first chapter in my book, The Unbreakable Anchor. "I was seven or eight years old the first time the river tried to take us. Old enough to remember the details, but too young to understand how close we’d come to something worse." -Chapter One The Unbreakable Anchor The bridge over the Wenatchee River. This is the bridge we anchored to that day, fighting the current of the Wenatchee. You can read the full story of what happened next in Chapter One of The Unbreakable Anchor. The Unbreakable Anchor is set for release Fall 2026. For those who have never visited Lake Wenatchee, I highly recommend spending a few days at Lake Wenatchee State Park. Between the crystal-clear water, towering evergreens, and mountain scenery, it's easy to understand why so many families return year after year. It's one of those rare places that still feels much the same as it did when I first fell in love with it. -TJ Nilsdatter Join the Journey. Subscribe for book updates, new blog posts, family history, and a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration behind the books.

Last night, as I was editing my Memorial Day graphic, I remembered a phone call I got from my father a few years ago. He was upset with me as I made a Memorial Day post on Facebook for my friends and family. He was upset that I left my grandfather off that post. I also left my son off it, my husband and my many uncles. I had to explain to my father the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. My grandfather in uniform during World War II. My grandfather's service deserves to be recognized, to be honored. But there is a difference between honoring veterans and honoring the fallen, and somewhere along the way, that line has gotten blurry for a lot of us. Memorial Day has quietly drifted into a general appreciation weekend for all who served, and while that comes from a place of love and gratitude, I think it unintentionally dilutes something sacred. Memorial Day belongs to the ones who never came home, the ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice, the ones who gave it all so we can be free. I didn't fully understand the weight of that until four years ago. Four years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, I sat in a packed auditorium at my son's boot camp graduation. I was among hundreds of proud, emotional family members watching our kids take one of the biggest steps of their lives. What happened at that ceremony, amidst all the pomp and circumstance, profoundly affected me. It was one of the most emotional days of my life, not just because my son had made it through, but because of what happened next. The command invited a group of Gold Star Families to attend. As each family was introduced, mothers, fathers, wives, and children who had lost someone in the line of duty, the entire auditorium rose to its feet. The applause didn't stop for fifteen minutes. Fifteen full minutes. There wasn't a dry eye in the building, not among the new recruits, not among the drill sergeants, not among the toughest people in that room. Nobody told us to stand. Nobody told us to keep clapping. We just did. Because some things don't need an order. As I stood there, now a Blue Star Mom, it hit me that these Gold Star Moms had once sat exactly where I was sitting, living in the moment, bursting with pride and excitement, watching their child begin a new journey. That journey just looked very different now. It took an extraordinary amount of strength for them to walk into that room. I'm honestly not sure, if I were in their shoes, that I could have done it. That moment stayed with me. And this year, it led me to a story much closer to home. My son’s Navy graduation ceremony at Great Lakes My grandfather served in World War II. He was an engineer for the Army Air Corps, assigned to laying airfields in the European theater, in France and in North Africa, in the thick of it. He was a quiet man and rarely spoke of his time in the service. He was also one of the lucky ones. He came home. He lived a long life. He got to grow old. I got to know him. Not everyone in my family's story was so fortunate. Before my grandmother met my grandfather, she was engaged to another man. She never spoke of him, not once, until my grandfather passed away. When she finally did, she told us simply that he was a pilot, and that he had been shot down over Italy. When she died, we found an envelope tucked carefully away in her hope chest. Inside was his photograph, a Bible, and letters, correspondence that had never been sent. A piece of a life that never got to continue. A hopeful WWII pin-up photograph my grandmother intended to send overseas to her fiancé to lift his spirits. Inscribed with love, it was never mailed. Ever since then, I have been searching for him. The man who did not return. The man who left her brokenhearted. The man who gave everything so that we could be free. I think I finally found him. He never came home What I discovered as I dug deeper was a story of loss that is almost too heavy to hold. He was a pilot shot down during the Sicily campaign. He never came home. And then, six months later, his brother, also a pilot, was lost too, shot down over Germany and never found. Two brothers, two sons, one family shattered completely by the war. Most people don't know that the military eventually created what is commonly called the "Sole Survivor Policy," a rule designed to prevent exactly this kind of devastation, to keep whole families from being wiped out by a single war. Years later, the idea behind that policy would become widely known through the movie Saving Private Ryan. That policy exists because of stories like theirs. Because of a mother who lost both of her boys. Because of a father, himself a World War I veteran, who knew better than most the price that freedom sometimes demands, and who paid it twice over anyway. That policy personally affected my grandfather, whose younger brother was able to stay home to work the farm. This Memorial Day, I am choosing to honor the distinction. My grandfather will always have my love and my gratitude. Veterans Day is his day, and I will celebrate him then with everything I have. But today belongs to the ones who didn't make it back. Today belongs to the Gold Star families who walked into that gymnasium with their heads held high while the rest of us wept. Today belongs to a young pilot shot down over Sicily, and his brother lost somewhere over Germany, and the mother who had to bury the idea of them both. Today belongs to every name on every wall. Every folded flag. Every empty chair at a table that was never meant to be empty. U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser / Arlington National Cemetery We owe them more than a long weekend. We owe them the truth of what this day is really for. Their sacrifices will not be forgotten.