Tag Archives: writing

Loving Husband Trilogy FAQ Part 1

Her Loving Husband’s Return has been on the Amazon Best-Seller List since the day after it was released. Thank you.

I’ve received a number of questions about The Loving Husband Trilogy, so I decided to answer some of the most frequently asked questions here. Some of these I’ve answered in bits and pieces in various interviews. Today, Part 1.

1. Where did you come up with the idea for The Loving Husband Trilogy?

Here’s my answer in this previous post. Between watching True Blood, reading Charlaine Harris, Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, and the Twilight books, believe me, I had a brain full of vampire waiting to get out. Luckily for me, that vampire turned out to be James Wentworth.

2. Did you always know it would be a trilogy?

I did. From very early in the idea gathering process for this story I knew the connection between James/Elizabeth/Sarah and I knew the ending as we find it in Her Loving Husband’s Return. The further I went into mapping out the story, the more I knew I wanted to cover several different historical periods. In order to keep the story as I saw it a manageable length, I split it into three books. In an earlier interview I said as a joke that I wanted to avoid writing a 900-page tome that would send readers screaming for mercy. I wasn’t too far off. The combined page count of the Loving Husband Trilogy is 818 pages.

3.  How did you come to set the stories in Salem? Have you ever lived/visited there?

I decided to set the story in Salem by accident. I was deciding where to set the story, and I deliberately stayed away from the Pacific Northwest and Louisiana in the U.S. since other well-known literary vampires live there. I thought of my hometown Los Angeles or where I live now in Las Vegas, but neither of those felt right. Too bright, I think. Then I decided that if I wasn’t going Northwest how about Northeast? I pulled up a map of the U.S., looked at the Northeast, saw Massachusetts, and there in a little dot near Boston was Salem. That’s it. It took me as long to decide to set the story in Salem as it took me to write these sentences.

I have never lived in Salem or anywhere in Massachusetts. I was born in New York, but we moved to the West Coast when I was seven and I consider Los Angeles my hometown. In fact, I had never even visited Salem when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband. Thank goodness for the Internet, websites about Salem, and Google Earth. I did finally visit Salem in July 2011 while I was writing Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I loved it. In fact, I wanted to move there. Luckily, everything in Salem was where I thought it should be. You can see my posts about my trip to Salem here.

4. How did you decide which historical periods to use?

The decision to use the Salem Witch Trials was a no-brainer once I decided to set the story in Salem. Since I wanted the historical periods to echo what was happening to James and Sarah in the present day, I needed to choose the historical periods carefully. The Trail of Tears and the Japanese-American Internments happened to coincide with the way I saw the story progressing. To a degree, you could say the history informed the story; in other words, once I decided on the historical periods that helped me shape the plot.

5.  How long did it take you to write the books?

It was four years, almost exactly to the day, from when I first pressed fingers to the keyboard typing out the ideas for Her Dear & Loving Husband (in April 2009) until Her Loving Husband’s Return was published (in April 2013). It took longer than a year for me to write Her Dear & Loving Husband because it took time for me to find the narrative thread. The plot was more complex than other novels I had written, weaving the way it does between the past and the present, and it took time for me to work it out.

I read about these authors who publish 3, 4, 5 books a year and I’m amazed by them. When all is said and done, it takes me about a year to write a book. Keep in mind I’m not writing the whole time. I have to live with an idea in my head for a while before I ever start writing. I have to kick the idea around, soften it up, pull it here and tug it there to see if there’s anything in those odd daydreams. I kicked the idea around about the vampire missing his long-dead human wife for about six months before I ever began writing about James and Sarah. Once I start writing, it can take anywhere from 4-6 months for me to have a draft I’m happy with, and then the editing process is intensive because I’m persnickety about how the words read on the page. The editing process for me takes 1-2 months.

6.  Do you have editors/beta readers?

You betcha. It’s imperative to have other sets of eyes read your fiction. As authors we can get caught up in our own heads and we forget to make our stories cohesive for our readers.

Her Dear & Loving Husband wouldn’t be the story it is without the help of an amazing romance author and critique extraordinare, Laurin Wittig. I saw the story so clearly in my head, but I was having trouble articulating it on the page. With Laurin’s sharp eye and finely tuned comments, I was able to finally write the story I meant to write in the first place. Once I figured out what I was doing with Her Dear & Loving Husband, writing the next two was an easier process, though I always have editors/other readers helping me.

Here’s a Loving Husband Trilogy F.Y.I: The original title of Her Dear & Loving Husband was The Vampire’s Wife. Laurin suggested that The Vampire’s Wife was too much of a giveaway about the story, so after stumbling across Anne Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband” I changed it to Her Dear & Loving Husband. The revised title has the same idea as the original title, but it takes a little more digging to figure out what it means. And I love that the poem was able to serve as a connection between James and Elizabeth and James and Sarah. Little things like that make me happy.

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.

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.

Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Best-Selling or a Best-Writing Author?

The Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon has sparked some interesting conversations about writing quality and how well an author needs to write in order to produce a best-seller. This is hardly a news-worthy debate. I remember the same questions when Bridges of Madison County was selling like crazy. I remember it again when The DaVinci Code was on the best-seller lists. I heard it again when Twilight-Mania overtook girls and women all around the world.

A few weeks ago, as I was reading Joanna Penn’s wonderful The Creative Penn blog, I saw this interesting post about deciding whether she wanted to be a best-selling or a best-writing author. In her post, Joanna talks about the difference between books that are lauded as literary masterpieces but don’t make waves with readers and therefore don’t sell well and the books that aren’t considered literature or even particularly well-written but sold millions of copies. She has a point. There are authors whose cerebral style makes their stories and their characters detached and inaccessible. More than anything, people want to feel connected to the stories they read and the characters who inhabit them. Joanna’s conclusion? She’d rather be a best-selling author.

Best-selling certainly sounds cool, especially since I’m writing this in the glow of some good Amazon news: Amazon set Her Dear & Loving Husband to free, and as of my last check, it was #5 on the historical fiction list, #12 for literary fiction, and #190 overall. If you have a Kindle, by all means, enjoy a free copy. I even took a screen shot because I was so excited. After all, writers write because we want our stories read, and being a best-selling author means a lot of people have read your story—or at least bought it—or downloaded it—or whatever. It means a lot of people, okay?

But what do I want to achieve as a writer? What do I really want to achieve? I have a more literary style than other writers, which can work for or against me, I know, but it’s who I am. It’s my uniqueness. My fingerprint. I’ve had it, apparently, since college when professors and other students would comment on my literary style. The truth is I’m a frustrated poet, and while I’m not wise enough to write poetry, I can use the elements of poetry I love to create my own style of prose. John Forster, Charles Dickens’ good friend, biographer, and beta reader (yes, they had beta readers in the 19th century, they just didn’t have the name), used to point out to Dickens his tendency to fall into blank verse during the more emotional moments of his stories. I have the same tendency, though I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It gives a certain flow to the prose.

Language matters to me. How words string together into sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters matters to me. I will spend a half hour on a single sentence trying it with the comma here, the comma there, the comma in another sentence, no commas anywhere ee cummings-style. And being a teacher who often reads out loud to my students, I’m keenly aware of the flow of words, and I want my writing to sound as good read aloud as it does in the reader’s mind. That’s not easy, and it takes a lot of fine-tuning. My main challenge writing poetry-inspired prose is to keep my characters and their stories accessible to my reader. It’s okay for the language to be pretty as long as the reader can follow along, and, more importantly, care about what’s happening.

When I had Her Dear & Loving Husband critiqued in 2010, the critiquer, a romance novelist, suggested I leave out the more literary flights of fancy. She wanted me to leave out “The hunt, the hunter, the hunted…” passage, and she thought the scene between James and his father, where the father’s unconditional love shines through, could go. She wasn’t sure about Geoffrey, but then again no one’s sure about Geoffrey. She wanted me to turn my English professor James into an alpha-male, and she wanted more explicit sex scenes. In other words, she wanted me to turn it into a traditional romance. She pointed out that romance readers expect their books to be a certain way, and since she’s the award-winning romance writer I have no doubt she’s right. I took a lot of her advice, but the literary passages stayed. The poetry stayed. James, his tender, loving nature, stayed. Geoffrey…well, you know Geoffrey. He wouldn’t go away even if I asked him to. I knew I was taking a chance by not adhering to conventions, but I had to write my book the way I had to write it. My style, for its strengths and weakneses, is mine, and I wouldn’t change it to conform to the expectations for a romance novel. I knew I might lose readers because of it, so I had to decide that that was okay with me. I didn’t feel right making changes I didn’t believe in because “this is the way these types of books are written.”

Whenever I skim my own book reviews at Amazon or BN and see the ones that say, “This wasn’t what I expected, and I was surprised by how much I liked it,” I smile. I know my style isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t mind. There are readers out there who do like it, and I’ve received the most lovely e-mails any author can hope for from people who get my stories, crazy-style and all.

In the end, did I decide I wanted to be a best-selling or a best-writing author?  I’d like to be both, please. I still think it’s possible to write a story that readers will enjoy while taking care with the style of the language. That’s what writing is, isn’t it?

Addendum: I’m trying not to be OCD about checking my Amazon stats, but I have to admit it’s a tough battle because it’s so much fun. I just peeked again, and Her Dear & Loving Husband is now #9 in literary fiction, #94 overall, and #4 in historical fiction. What’s number 3 in historical fiction? Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Those of you who know how much I love Dickens can guess what it means to me to see my book next to his on the best-seller list.

Addendum Part 2: Her Dear & Loving Husband is now number 1 on the free historical fiction list, number 1 on the free literary fiction list, and #28 overall. Thank you, thank you to the many people who have downloaded the book.  I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.