I Was a Guest Speaker for the Lit Mag Love Course!

For my first bit of news, on Tuesday, 3/1, I had the chance to participate in a Q&A for Rachel Thompson’s course Lit Mag Love, which helps writers who want to submit their work to literary journals. I had a wonderful time answering the questions. It’s a five-week guided course, and the next session starts on May 15.

Interested? You can join Rachel’s waiting list here: https://rachelthompson.co/litmaglove/

For my second bit of news, for those of you who follow my blog to keep up with my latest book news, I’m pleased to announce that The Duchess of Idaho is finished and being polished up as we speak. The official publication date is 3/29/22. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.

For my third bit of news, I’ve finally updated my headshot. I’ve been wanting to do it for some time, but I wanted to wait until my natural (gray) hair had grown out enough that there wasn’t an obvious line of demarcation, which was about a year and a half (no joke). You can see it here.

Allowing the Story I’m Writing To Take the Lead

Writing The Duchess of Idaho reminded me that there’s always a point while I’m writing a new novel where I’m reminded of Dorothy Parker’s great saying, “I hate writing but love having written.”

There’s a lot going on in this little (okay, maybe not so little since it’s 100,000 words) book, and it took time for me to see how the pieces fit together. And there are a few pieces.

1. While The Duchess of Idaho isn’t a sequel to the Loving Husband Trilogy (it’s a stand-alone story that acts as the beginning of its own series) it still has many of the same characters from the Loving Husband Trilogy and it had to go along with the world that had already been established.
2. The Duchess of Idaho is the first time I’ve written a time-travel story. I wrote a bit about that experience here.
3. The Duchess of Idaho is an embedded narrative, a story within a story.
4. I was writing about a new historical era for me, the Oregon Trail, so I had a lot of research to do.
5. There’s a whole new cast of characters in The Duchess of Idaho. I actually had a list of character names/descriptions in the notepad on my computer so I could keep track of them all.

The Challenges of Storytelling

When I began writing Her Dear & Loving Husband in 2009, it took some time for me to understand how to make the past and present storylines work in harmony. It wasn’t until I had the novel professionally critiqued that I understood the flow of the story.

Luckily, once I figured out the plot writing the next two books in the trilogy, Her Loving Husband’s Curse and Her Loving Husband’s Return, came easily since they followed the same structure.

My next novel, That You Are Here, was a dream to write. That You Are Here is my only fully contemporary novel, and maybe that had something to do with the fact that writing it was struggle-free. I understood characters immediately and I saw the story play out like a movie, which meant all I had to do was take dictation. That book took me four months to write—crazy-quick, at least for me.

Again, with When It Rained at Hembry Castle there were challenges. I was back to where I was when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband—I had this whole new world to figure out. In the Loving Husband Trilogy, there are two points of view, from the two romantic leads, James and Sarah, and two time periods, the present and whichever historical period that novel is set.

When I began writing When It Rained at Hembry Castle, I thought I would use the same two-person point of view as I had in the Loving Husband Trilogy. After beating myself about the head trying to make it work, I realized that two points of view were not enough for this novel.

I haven’t yet tried the head-hopping omniscient third-person point of view (one of these days I’ll try that one), but for Hembry I opened the field so that we get the point of view of more than just the two romantic leads (in this case, Edward and Daphne). I limited the POV to one character for each chapter so it isn’t difficult for readers to follow.

How Do We Bring Our Stories To Life?

When I’m writing fiction, anything goes, which means sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what I need to do to bring each new story to life. The two-person point of view worked well for the Loving Husband Trilogy, so I assumed it would work for Hembry. It didn’t. There are too many characters in Hembry, and there’s too much going on for my two romantic leads to be everywhere.

I needed to let some of the other characters have their moments in the sun. Once I allowed the characters the freedom to speak for themselves, the headaches started to go away and the novel started to resemble the story I wanted to write in the first place.

For The Duchess of Idaho, there are also several points of view throughout the story, though again I’ve kept it to one character’s point of view per chapter. Primarily, we have the point of view from Grace Wentworth, the main character, but we also hear from her parents, James and Sarah, and her dear friend Olivia Phillips.

Like the Loving Husband Trilogy, there’s a past and present storyline, but it plays out differently in The Duchess of Idaho and I had to experiment a bit to see what that would look like in this world.

In Time, the Story Elements Will Come Together

Once I understand the plot structure and the way the pieces fit together, that’s when I’m in the flow of writing and there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. The first part of writing a novel has always been a struggle for me.

That’s when I flap about like a fish out of water (or an asthmatic without an inhaler—speaking from experience), spending hours writing scenes that don’t make sense and have nothing to do with the story I want to tell. Often, as I continue through the writing process, those scenes will be deleted.

Every time I’m about to give up, though, I force myself to keep going because I’ve been at this long enough to know that the “shitty first draft” phase will pass and the story will reveal itself.

How much hair I have in the end always remains to be seen, but bald or not bald, I know that I’ll figure out whatever it is that’s not working. This is something I need to relearn whenever I write a new novel, especially a novel set in a new world.

With every new novel I write, I need to remind myself that nothing is set in stone and I can experiment, play, and try new things until I find the winning combination. I could have imposed the two-person point of view on Hembry or Duchess because I’ve had success with it before.

Instead, I allowed myself the freedom to play around until I discovered what did work for those stories. After the heavy lifting is done, I can say that I love having written.