Rita Gerlach lives with her husband and two sons in a historical town nestled along the Catoctin Mountains, amid Civil War battlefields and Revolutionary War outposts in central Maryland.

"Romantic historical fiction is one way people can escape the cares of life and be transported back to a time of raw courage and ideal love," she says. "The goal of my writing is to give readers a respite, and inspire them to live fully and gratefully."

Her fourth book 'Surrender the Wind', an inspirational historical romance set in Virginia and England, is due to be released from Abingdon Press in August 2009.

In many of her stories, she writes about the struggles endured by early colonists, with a mixture of both American and English history.

She began writing Beside Two Rivers in late 2006, of which she has several chapters in rough draft, with tons of notes and the story ruminating in her mind. You might be curious about the title. Along the borders of Maryland and Virginia, two rivers converge, the Potomac and the Shenandoah. The story begins there, in a breath-taking setting as the Revolutionary War comes to a close.

There are other novels next on her list for revisions, which will be ready for submissions in the near future. These novels were previously POD published and are out of print, entitled The Rebel's Pledge, Thorns In Eden and its sequel The Everlasting Mountains.

Her family claims that storytelling is their blood, handed down from centuries of Irish/English/Scot storytellers. Rita believes there just may be something to that theory.