Rockway Press has accepted for publication Voice of Stone and Conquistadora, the first two historical novels in Olivia's Inca saga. Expected publication date is in 2007. Voice of Stone covers the pre-conquest period before Francisco Pizarro's arrival in Peru and traces the intersecting lives of a stonecutter's family and a silversmith's family. Conquistadora picks up the story with the arrival of the campfollower Beatriz in Diego Almagro's army.

A new revised and expanded edition of Women at the Well will also be produced by Rockway Press.This book contains sixty-one women. Twenty-eight of the poems have not previously appeared elsewhere. Olivia has written entirely new dramatic monologues for: Sarah, Rebekah, Deborah, Delilah, Naomi, Hannah, Bathsheba, Abigail, Abishag and Jezebel. The following women are introduced for the first time here: Lilith, Cain's Wife, Lot's Daughters, Zipporah, Daughters of Zelophedad, Daughter of Jepthah of Gilead, The Levite's Concubine, The Witch of Endor, Queen of Sheba, Queen Athaliah, Huldah, Gomer, Herodias, Sisters of Yeshua, Mother of Zebedee's Sons, Peter's Wife, Mary Magadalene, and Sinful Woman at Capernaum. In

In 2006 Olivia completed the third novel in the Inca series entitled Daughter of the Conquest, which covers the colonization period in Peru from 1554-1590.

In March 2007 the Rockford Writers' Guild Press published her chapbook Novenas for Grandmother.

Her poem "New Orleans 2005" won 2nd prize in Rockford Writer's Guild Ides of March Contest.

Rod is finishing his sci-fi novel The Penultimate Summer.

First Paragraphs:

Voice of Stone: This was a time when stones spoke to the inhabitants of the Andean heights and when caves held the people's history. No voices cried out in anguish. The sons and daughters of the Sun listened to wind and water and shaped the rocks of their beloved mountains according to the will of the Inca.

Conquistadora: At first sight of shore, Beatriz, one of two women aboard the Spanish galleon of adventurers, doubted that the godforsaken land held hidden any treasure worth the risky transatlantic voyage, the overland jungle trek across the isthmus and the sail following trade winds along the coast of the continent. Sandy hills stretched as far as the eye could see north and south of the sun-splashed beach. Rolling waves, gentle on this day of February 1533 lashed the low shoreline in undulating swashes. Not a tree, sprig of grass on the shore. Sailors lowered the last two skiffs into the Pacific, as Captain Balboa had christened this ocean the other side of the world from Cadiz. Two cavalrymen calmed the startled Andalusian mounts being led from the hold of the Reina de la Mar.

Daughter of the Conquest: After a rock crushed my adoptive father to death at the Urcos quarry south of Cuzco, my mother took to her bed. She suspected the accident was no accident but couldn't prove it. I attributed the source to an unstable block of granite. Don Pedro, as she called him, was her third husband-the one she claimed she loved the most and had lived with the longest because death had not cut short this marriage as quickly as the first two. His real name was Juan Delgado, survivor of Cajamarca and Manco Inca's rebellion, a humble Andalusian stone cutter who had reaped the rewards of conquest in the New World, receiving a share of the gold and silver pillaged from the Incas. Of my real parentage, I knew nothing, only that my Indian mother was one of two concubines that my father, a soldier who had landed on the Peruvian coast with the Spanish expedition in 1532, had abandoned.

WRITER’S QUOTATIONS
No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written. - Alice Hoffman

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.. – Mario Vargas Llosa