Category Archives: Writing

Have I Said How Much I Love Writing About History?

In case you can’t tell, I love history. I think my interest started in high school when I had a cute young guy as my history teacher—I made sure to pay extra special attention to him in class. But my interest in history outlasted my 10th grade year, and in college I even considered becoming a history major. I’m fascinated by history because, though we can look back to see how the pieces fit to create the picture of who we are today, there is also a sense of “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I’m always amazed to learn about these people from the past who on the surface seem so different from us today—in their dress, their speech, their beliefs, their scientific knowledge—and yet they aren’t at all different from us in their hopes and dreams.

I remember when I decided to write historical fiction. I had seen Ken Burns’ The Civil War documentary on PBS (this was way back in the old-timey days of the 1990s), and from watching that series came an idea about the son of a southern planter who goes to fight for the Union during the war. My earliest goal as a writer was to become a screenwriter, and I did study a bit of screenwriting and film in college, so I tried the idea out as screenplay. I got as far as page ten before I realized that the blueprint of the screenplay wasn’t enough for me—I wanted to describe the details, what the characters were thinking and feeling, what they were wearing, what the room they were standing in looked like. The only way I could do that, I thought, was to write the story out as a novel. I began writing My Brother’s Battle in 1994, and I finished it about two years later. I’ve been writing historical fiction ever since.

There is something fulfilling about writing historical fiction. Historical fiction helps to make history more palatable for those who might be bored by nonfiction accounts. In these fictional snapshots, I can take one moment in time and flesh it out, add characters, both real and imagined, show their dress, their manners, and the events that were happening then. Research is an important part of the process, and I’m just odd enough to enjoy searching for the information I need to help me tell the story.

For Her Dear & Loving Husband, I wrote about Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the witch hunts in 1692. What a sad moment in early American history—the false accusations, the confessions to crimes the victims didn’t commit, the dungeons, the executions. How could this happen? How could neighbor turn against neighbor? Friend against friend? Husband against wife? To this day, we still don’t know the answer. For Her Loving Husband’s Curse, I delved into the forced removal of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. Book Three also has an historical background, though I don’t want to say what it is just yet (I will say there is a hint of it in Book Two). Through writing historical fiction, I have been able to imagine life in Biblical Jerusalem as well as life in New York City in the 1910s. For someone who loves history as much as I do, the opportunity to write about these different periods, or about any historical period, is a blessing.

Have I said how much I love writing about history? Sharing these moments in time with others is one of my great joys, and through historical fiction I hope I can help others develop their own love for history.

Paranormal Romance? Urban Fantasy? Historical Fiction? All of the Above?

I still don’t know exactly how to classify the novels from the Loving Husband Trilogy. Sounds funny, that statement, especially since Her Dear & Loving Husband has been out since April 2011 and now I’m working on the third and final book in the series. I remember when I became familiar with the genre Urban Fantasy last summer. Not too swift for someone who writes about vampires, right? I’m not sure how the term escaped my notice. I had heard it before, certainly, but for me the term Urban Fantasy conjures images of a futuristic city—like the Jetsons with their flying saucers and talking toasters. Since I don’t read novels that fit into the science fiction/fantasy genre, I didn’t pay much attention to the label Urban Fantasy.

Before, my best guess for the genre of the Loving Husband Trilogy was Paranormal Romance, and yet I was never entirely comfortable with that label. I have nothing against romances; in fact, I love them. But for my vampire James Wentworth and the human woman he loves, Sarah Alexander, I wasn’t sure the romance genre fully described their story. James and Sarah’s love, how it grows from tentative caring to passionate connection, is a major part of their story. And James is a vampire, which fits in nicely with the supernatural aspect of Paranormal Romance. But the romance, while important, isn’t the only facet of the novel. I know from several romance novelists that romance novels tend to follow a specific formula. I’m not so good at following formulas, so I wasn’t sure what romance readers would think of the books.

Then I began reading Paranormal Romance blogs, and I saw various discussions about Urban Fantasy versus Paranormal Romance. After some research, I found out that Twilight and the Harry Potter books fall into the genre of Urban Fantasy.  How did this affect how I viewed my own books? I found that paranormal characters are welcome in Urban Fantasy. Check. I found that in Urban Fantasy there is a coexistence between human and paranormal characters. Check. In Urban Fantasy the human learns of the existence of the paranormal. Check. In Urban Fantasy there can be romance. Double check. There is also emphasis on backstory, historical settings, and the characters may have tragic pasts. Check, check, check. Salem, Massachusetts doesn’t quite qualify as a city, but otherwise we’re on the right track here. And since Her Dear & Loving Husband is book one in a trilogy that features the same characters, that further qualifies James and Sarah’s story as an Urban Fantasy. Who knew?

And yet even Urban Fantasy doesn’t cover everything about the Loving Husband Trilogy. The books can also be classified as Historical Fiction, and no one was more surprised than me when I started seeing comments from reviewers calling the novels thrillers. A couple of people even put the books into the horror genre–James is a vampire, after all. I had the hardest time choosing categories for the novels on Amazon and Smashwords because so many genres seemed to fit.

What a realization, that Her Dear & Loving Husband fits into a genre–Urban Fantasy–I wasn’t even familiar with. I think that’s a pretty neat trick. I can’t wait to write my next book after I finish the Loving Husband Trilogy to find out what genre it belongs to.

Writing an Old War Story for a New Generation

While I’m finishing the final edits for my Civil War novel, My Brother’s Battle, I wanted to share this essay I wrote many moons ago. Portions of this post appeared in The Paumanok Review and The Copperfield Review. My Brother’s Battle was originally published in 2000 through Xlibris, but I was never happy with the results and it will be rereleased through Copperfield Press.

                      It is well that war is so terrible, or

                                              we should grow too fond of it.

                                                                                                         ~Robert E. Lee

The new (and much improved) cover for My Brother’s Battle from LFD Designs.

In writing my novel, My Brother’s Battle, I attempted to bring the epic story of the American Civil War to readers in a way that is meaningful to present-day sensibilities. Gone With the Wind will always be a favorite Civil War novel, but its views on issues such as slavery are difficult for many readers today to swallow, and its lack of war scenes doesn’t endear it to Civil War enthusiasts who prefer novels like The Killer Angels, Shiloh, or Gods and Generals. My Brother’s Battle has a little of both—life in a stately southern manor house as well as the war-time battlefields. While it might seem an odd shift in setting, the contrast makes sense as we follow Benjamin Honeysuckle on his search for freedom, for himself and for those he loves.

I spent years researching the American Civil War, and in writing the novel I paid particular attention to the discrepancies between how people think things were and how things really happened. It’s not that easy to say the North was right and the South was wrong. There were mistakes on both sides, both on and off the battlefield.

My Brother’s Battle was born from a sentence in the Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary on PBS. Like millions of viewers, I was caught up in the all-too-true images of war while watching that brilliant series, and I was intrigued when the story turned to how the War Between the States became a battle between brothers. What could cause brothers, who grew up in the same family, with the same values, in the same society, to stand for opposing ideals? That was the germ from which this novel grew. It wasn’t long before the character Benjamin Honeysuckle appeared to me. Benjamin is the son of a Georgia planter who, for many reasons, leaves behind the genteel world he knows to fight for the Union Army. His story is the classic hero myth. He journeys into the world to fight his battles only to discover he always had the strength within.

Through my research, my question became larger than a curiosity about brothers. The holding of slaves in the United States was a national travesty, but the white slave holders wouldn’t let go of slave labor and its resulting higher profits without a bloody war. The life of a slave, I learned, was horrible, and suddenly Phoenix became more than a lady’s maid. She became a symbol of all that was good and courageous in the African-American slaves who managed to maintain their culture and a sense of self-worth despite the inhumane circumstances of their lives. Phoenix stands tall in the face of her own inhumane circumstances, and she commands our respect, not our pity.

Suddenly, the story began to breathe on its own, as fiction will do, and writing this novel became a life-changing experience for me. I had to confront my own fears of leaving behind a comfortable life and making my own particular way in the world. I had to realize that I, too, have always had the strength within. I had to face the reality of prejudice in American society, a prejudice still strong, still fueled by the fear from generations ago when slaves were bought and sold without regard for their humanity. Writing this novel was more than stringing words into sentences for me. It was my attempt to weave together truth and fiction in a way that gives voice to the most important truth of all—we are more like each other than we are different from each other.

Introducing the Woman of Stones

And yet another amazing cover from Dara England for LFD Designs for Authors.

I’m nearly done with the final edits for Woman of Stones, and it should be ready for release next week. I know it seems like I write fast, but the novels I’m releasing now have been finished for years, sitting around on my hard drive collecting cyberdust. I had some time this summer—around researching and beginning the final book in the Loving Husband Trilogy—to get them cleaned up and pretty-like so I could share them with you.

If you think Victory Garden is a change of pace from the James and Sarah books, then Woman of Stones may as well be written in Greek. In fact, if it was written during the time it takes place—2000 years ago—it might have been written in Ancient Greek.

It might seem odd to discover I’ve written a novella set in Ancient Jerusalem with a story from the New Testament as the inspiration. For me, that’s one of the glorious things about writing historical fiction—inspiration can come from anywhere at any time. My inspiration for the Loving Husband Trilogy came first from reading the Twilight series and then watching True Blood on HBO. My inspiration for Woman of Stones began when I read Anita Diamant’s lyrical historical/Biblical novel The Red Tent. I was blown away by that book, so much so that as soon as I finished it I began reading it again. I loved Diamant’s poetic prose, her stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and her creative imagining of a Bible story from a woman’s point of view. A Bible story from a woman’s point of view? I loved the idea, and I loved the way Diamant made Dinah’s story come to life in the novel.

I don’t come from a religious family, so I didn’t grow up reading the Bible. I’ve read it in bits and pieces over the years, and like many people, I find a lot that’s inspirational there. One of my favorite stories from the New Testatment has always been the story of the woman dragged before Jesus, caught in the act of adultery. The woman’s accusers mean to teach Jesus a lesson, but Jesus is too wise for them and he makes them go away with a few pointed words: whoever of you is without sin, cast the first stone. The men dwindle away, and Jesus sends the poor woman along, telling her to sin no more.

Who was this woman, I wondered? How did she come to be at that place at that time? Having read The Red Tent, I decided to imagine a story for her. That’s all the novella is—my imagination piecing together a story for the woman who was dragged before Jesus as a sinner. I began writing in 2002 and I finished in 2004, five years before I started Her Dear & Loving Husband.

For me, Woman of Stones is a study in memory. I’m fascinated by memory, how we remember things, what we want to remember, what we choose to forget. I also wanted to tap into the stream-of-consciousness narration I found in Diamant’s novel, and I love that fluidity in a lot of Toni Morrison’s novels too. The novella became a first person narration from the Woman of Stones herself. We follow her as she remembers what happened to her in the Temple courts, how Jesus saved her, how she came to live in Jerusalem, why she wanted to live there, what her lover meant to her. She isn’t perfect, but who is perfect? This is probably the most “literary” work I’ve written because it focuses very much on the Woman of Stones and her telling of her story the way she remembers it. Sometimes she remembers in linear order, and sometimes she doesn’t. Mainly, I’ve broken one of the oldest Creative Writing 101 rules with this novella: Show me, don’t tell me. There is a lot of telling in this story, but I’m all right with that. To me, it fits the fluidity of the woman’s memory as she struggles to make sense of what happened to her. Plus, at 35,000 words it’s only a novella, so the telling format works better with this shorter story. I wouldn’t like it so much for a full-length novel.

After Woman of Stones is released, I’ll be finishing the revisions of a book I originally published in 2000 through Xlibris—My Brother’s Battle. I’ll have more to say about that one soon.

Finishing the Final Edits

Victory Garden is now available from Amazon and Smashwords. I thought I was going to get it out early, but then I stopped everything else to study for my Revised GRE General Test, which I passed with a 162 out of 170. I read that’s a competitive score, so whoooo! It was definitely worth it to concentrate on studying, but then it took me longer than I thought it would to finish the final edits of the book.

I have a funny way of doing my final edits for a book. I like to upload the book onto Smashwords and Amazon, download a couple of copies, and then I’ll unpublish it because it isn’t ready to be seen yet. I like to read it in both Kindle and Nook formats because I like to see what readers are seeing when they read it. To me, the language flows differently on the small-size screen of a Kindle or a Nook than it does on the computer when I’m writing. Some of the mistakes I caught were silly typos. I type about 100 words a minute, but I also make mistakes along the way. He looked at his watched. Huh? Unfortunately, as we know, spellcheck doesn’t catch that because watched is spelled correctly. One of the funnier mistakes I caught was the name of the movie theater where Rose spends a lot of her time. There were two main movie theaters in New York City during 1917-1921 when the story takes place—the Rialto and the Rivoli. The first time I mentioned the theater I said it was the Rialto, and then for the rest of the book I called it the Rivoli. I did some research on the Internet, and I discovered Rose would have had to visit the Rialto since the Rivoli didn’t open until December 1917 and the story begins in April 1917.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of whittling the sentences down, as I’ve discussed before. For example, if I have a sentence that reads “He had remembered that the door she had left open was never closed” my whittle finger would chop it down to “He remembered the door was never closed.” Unless the “she had left open” was necessary to understanding, it can go. Besides, if the door was never closed, obviously it’s open. Nine times out of ten “that” can go. Seven times out of ten “had” can go. I have what I call my No Extra Words rule, and if a sentence can do without a word, or words, they go. I’ve learned to be precise, slicing extra syllables away with a butcher knife and laughing the whole time like a Benihana chef, but I hope I have stronger sentences because of it.

Now, GREs and Victory Garden done, with the first draft of Book Three of the Loving Husband Trilogy under my belt, I’m onto the final edits of a 38,000 word novella called Woman of Stones, which is based on a Biblical story. I began that story about ten years ago, and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with you soon.