The Making of a Trilogy by Eileen O'Finlan

 

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When I wrote my debut novel, Kelegeen, historical fiction set in Ireland during the Great Hunger (aka Potato Famine) I wasn't planning on writing a sequel. I thought all the way through that it would be a stand alone. It wasn't until I completely rewrote the first draft that thoughts about what might happen to the characters after the story's ending started coming to mind. I was nearing the end of the rewrite when I made the decision that a sequel was necessary. I even ended Kelegeen in such a way as to lend itself to a continuation.

Next came Erin's Children. Erin, in this case, is not a character, but refers to Ireland (think erin go bragh), and her children are those who emigrated to escape starvation. 

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My first inclination was to set it in Boston as many Irish settled there at the time. I live in central Massachusetts so Boston is just under two hours from me. I figured I could get out there a few times as part of my reseach. Fortunately for me, I mentioned it to someone at work who told me of a great book about the history of the Irish in Worcester. 

Worcester is the city in which I work and very close to where I live. I changed my mind and, instead, decided to set it here, and I am so glad I did. What a great time I had researching the history of the city in which I've spent the majority of my life! I learned so many fascinating things, many of which I was able to incorporate into the story. After publication, I even had a request from a group of readers to give a walking tour of one of the sections of the city in which a large portion of the book takes place. It was a real joy and a wonderful way to connect with readers.

As with Kelegeen, when I finished Erin's Children I thought I was done with these characters. But, also, as with Kelegeen, they refused to let me go. So now it's on to research for the third in this Irish trilogy. I can hardly wait to dive into more of Worcester's past. This time the focus for the book will be on the next generation, so I'll be looking at the post American Civil War era of the 1870s and 1880s. 

For many writers of historical fiction the research is just as enjoyable as the writing, and I am no exception. Now that I have completed work on my next historical novel, The Folklorist, which will be released by BWL Publishing in October of 2023, I can focus on a deep dive into late Victorian-era Worcester. Yes!

The Joy of The End by Eileen O'Finlan

 

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Two of most writers favorite words are "The End." That's not because we don't like writing. Most of us love it. It's because "The End" represents that the first leg of a very long and often arduous process is finally finished. It can take months or even years to be able to type those words. For those of us who write in genres that take a tremendous amount of research before a single word of the story gets written, it may be even longer. 

It is not, however, truly the end for the author. The first draft is just the beginning. Once those glorious words have been typed, the author enters the next phase of the writing process - revisions. The first draft is only that, the first of what could eventually be many drafts before the book is finally done. I completely rewrote Kelegeen at least three times before it was truly finished.

Recently, I typed "The End" on the first draft of my current work in progress, an historical novel to be titled The Folklorist. Upon seeing those words appear on the screen, I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from me. I would not have been surprised to find myself floating around the room (okay, I would have been surprised, but maybe not that much). 

I knew perfectly well that it was not really the end. I'm now slogging through revisions, fixing problems, looking for any issues with pacing or continuity. Given that The Folklorist has a dual timeline, something I've never written before, it is especially challenging. But I'm up for a challenge, and, honestly, I've been delighted to find that the timelines held together on the first draft much better than I expected. 

So if there's still so much more work to do after the first draft has been completed, why is typing "The End" such a big deal? It's because of what it represents. An entire body of work has been completed. The author who likely had plenty of doubts, writing crises, writer's block, and general hair-pulling moments liberally sprinkled amongst times of pure writing joy, can finally say that a complete story has been written. The obstacles were overcome. "I did it!" may ring through the air.

Yes, there will be things to fix, add, delete, whatever. But a whole story emerged despite the times it threatened to keel over and die. And that is a feeling to which very few things can compare.

                                                        

When I Don’t Write, and When I Do by S. L. Carlson

 

I am S. L. Carlson, a proud and grateful BWL Publishing Inc. author. My books can be viewed and purchased by visiting https://www.bookswelove.net/carlson-s-l

 

WHEN I DON'T WRITE AND WHEN I DO  by S. L. Carlson

I am an author. I have been telling stories since I was a kid, with captive audiences wherever I could find them – siblings, cousins, friends, gullible adults. I have been writing down my stories for decades. I love writing. I love observing. My husband once bought me a T-shirt which read, “Be Careful! You may end up in my Novel.” <Raising my eyebrows about the truth in this.>

 

One time I was in Mississippi helping with hurricane relief. While our crew was taking a break, one man came up to me leaning against the tree shade to ask what I was scribbling: writing gobs of notes on things I saw, heard, and felt. It was all for potential future stories. He seemed relieved, as he thought I was some sort of spy keeping an eye on the group. Not quite sure if he was kidding or not. Not quite sure he was wrong, either.

One neighbor used to greet me from across the street with a dog howl. It wasn’t until after said neighbor returned from a long trip, that I told him I missed his howling greeting. He looked so hurt. “It wasn’t a howl,” he informed me. “It was a train whistle.” <Raised eyebrows again.> Yes, that one actually got rewritten into a book.

 

I write when I get an earworm – an idea, a conversation, an entire scene unfolding, etc. That used to happen at night until my husband complained of the clicking of the pen. When I switched to a pencil, he complained of the bed jiggling when I scritch-scratched on the paper on the nightstand. I then used to wake and type on the computer, but these days I mostly just sleep.

 

I love the pathways of outside adventures and experiences.

Subbing something (up to 3,000 words) once a month to my critique group keeps me writing during my darkest or most hurting times. We’ve been together a long time, and I’d hate to disappoint.

 

Three on-line writing groups I’ve been involved with are NaNoWriMo, the Goodreads 750 Group, and a now defunct BIW. That doesn’t count the several online critique groups I’ve been in for periods of time. I’ve done six rough drafts of novels during National Novel Writing Month, trying to keep up with the 1,667 words per day.  In Goodreads, all writers who sub less than 750 words to topic, then vote on the best story of the month. I won 1^st place several months in a row, so that it got boring and I stopped; but I will probably do that exercise again. I loved the personal encouragement of Book In a Week. You set a goal of so many pages to write, and then the first week of the month, tried to reach that goal.

 

I find it quite difficult to write while on vacation, or the holidays, or playing with the grandkids, or when there are major house or yard projects going on, or a tornado, or when there’s a pandemic (and moving in the midst of that), or when I get injured. These past 3 years have been difficult on the writing side of life.

 

Yes, there are several reasons why not to write, and I’m sure other writers can continue that list. But there are many more, very pleasant reasons why I do write. Now…off to revise chapter 16, which I sent to my critique group last week. Will our hero be able to save his village against all odds?

 

S. L. Carlson Blog & Website: https://authorslcarlson.wordpress.com

BWL Inc. Publisher Author Page: https://www.bookswelove.net/carlson-s-l

The Process by Victoria Chatham

 

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Earlier this month I attended the When Words Collide conference in Calgary and spent nearly three days listening to presentations, discussions on various writing topics by panels and – best of all – talking to other writers. One topic that seemed to consistently crop up was that of the process of writing. What is this magical process? As it turns out, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

What one writer loves, another abhors. Take Scrivener, for instance. I know several writers who swear they could not write a book without it. I looked at Scrivener, but whichever way I looked at it, however many people explained parts of the program to me, it made no sense. Rather than make the writing easier, it seemed like more hard work. Another author writes in longhand and then revises when she transcribes her work to the computer. That I can understand a little more. There’s something very basic about sitting with pen and paper and letting your words flow across the page in total freefall, the method by which Canada’s great W.O. Mitchell (Who Has Seen the Wind, Jake and the Kid, Roses Are Difficult Here to name just a few of his titles) wrote and which has been the basis of many authors giving birth to their ideas.

The idea of freefall is to simply write, with no attention to sentence structure, grammar, punctuation or any kind of editing. Use as many adverbs as you like! As Nora Roberts has said, you cannot edit a blank page. In getting down the bones of whatever your idea is, you are filling your pages and therefore have something to go back to revise and edit. Freefall is different to stream of consciousness which is an internal monologue reflecting a person’s thoughts, feelings or observations on what they see about them, whether it is another person, an event or something that has caught their attention. It is written in much the same way as freefall. That is, without worrying about grammar or the editing gremlin on your shoulder. Stream of consciousness writing does not actually tell a story.

You may be familiar with the term pantser, which refers to a writer who sits down at his/her computer and writes. I lean towards being a pantser. The only time I resort to actual plotting is if I get lost in the middle, when it becomes something of back-paddling scramble. My usual process is to write timelines for my major characters, decide what is going to happen to them, do whatever research I need to do and then sit down and write. Being an editor at heart I usually read the last six pages before I start another writing session, just to get myself up to speed on what I wrote yesterday and revise as I go. At the start of a book I’ll decide how many chapters it will be and stick a post-it for each chapter on my white board. There may be some notes about that chapter, more often not. I have to say that the further I get into a book, the less social I become. In fact, at about the half way point I am so engrossed I have been known to become quite grumpy if interrupted.

Once my book is finished, it goes to my critique partners and beta readers and when I’ve done whatever revisions might be necessary I kiss it goodbye and send it to my publisher. My process after finishing a book is similar to après skiing. There’s wine, chocolate, cozy blankets and sleep – lots of sleep.  

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LODESTONE LETTERS

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I’ve always had an interest in reading biographies of famous people, but it didn’t take me too many years to realize that these books, by nature, are only the opinion of a single writer. That’s when I started to read the notes and the bibliographies and these soon became as interesting as the book itself. This naïve reader had just “discovered” an author’s finest source material. 

As I, back in the day of inter-library loan, began to pursue these leads, I discovered the most exciting material of all, letters and diaries. The language isn't always easy for a modern reader. Eighteenth Century language has a circuitous, verbose style which tends to disguise the emotional thrust of the message. From these letters and journals, however, a voice still speaks; the past enters our present in a breath-taking way.

Here’s one which paints a picture of the realities of 18^th Century travel, of an Albany still forested, as the Marquis de Chastellux describes a Revolutionary War winter visit to General Schuyler’s mansion.

 

“It was a difficult question to know where I should cross the Hudson…for it was neither sufficiently frozen to pass over the ice, nor free enough from flakes to venture it in a boat. …I was only twenty miles from Albany; so that after a continued journey through a forest of fir trees, I arrived at one o’clock on the banks of the Hudson…A handsome house half way up the bank opposite the ferry seemed to attract my attention and to invite strangers to stop at General Schuyler’s, who is proprietor as well as architect…The sole difficulty therefore consisted of passing the river. While the boat was making its way with difficulty through the flakes of ice, which we were obliged to break as we advanced…”

Envision this world—so green, so cold! All you have between you and Old Man Winter is wool, felt and hide, and your feet and hands are continually numb. The Hudson flows like slate under an only single shade-up grayscale sky. A twinkle of snow sinks into the surface. The pines hiss, and the wind picks up as we are ferried across the water, the drifting ice striking the boat and icy droplets of water strike our face.  

I get inspiration from this stuff! Here’s another, a charming (and alarming) view into the life of Mozart, a musician on the English leg of his “world” tour, aged eight years and five months:

“Witness as I myself of most of these extraordinary facts, I must own that I could not help suspecting his father imposed with regard to the real of the boy, thou he had not only a most childish appearance, but likewise had all the actions of the stage of life.

For example, whilst he was playing to me, a favorite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time.

He would also run about the room with a stick between his legs by way of a horse. ..” 

~Daines Barrington, 28 September 1769, report to the Secretary of the Royal Society in London.  

I was happy to read that the little boy was allowed to have time with a favorite cat, that Leopold Mozart (“Papa”) didn’t play the martinet and order Wolfgang straight back to the piano. Like little boys today playing with cars, little Mozart would, in his imagination, ride horses.

I’m thinking, really excellent ones, matched, of course, maybe white or dappled gray…”

Sometimes these surviving letters say a great deal about kinks in personality, some not so pleasant, things you’d rather wish your subject hadn’t said, something a writer has to ponder and work to understand. Sometimes, when this happens, you may have to rewrite an entire character.  

It’s understandable—not to snoopy writers and historians, of course— that wives of men judged ‘famous” by their contemporaries often burned and bowdlerized their husband’s surviving letters—all and any they could lay their hands on.  In deference to those wives, whose spirits have been so forthcoming to their humble servant, here is a brief sample of something I'd rather not have read:

“Received December 22 of Alexander Hamilton six hundred dollars on account of a sum of one thousand dollars due me.”  ~James Reynolds

This is a receipt for the first part of the blackmail Hamilton would pay for his adultery with Reynolds’ wife Maria. She must have been a hot number, because talk about shooting yourself in the foot—this particular bad move just about takes the cake, both politically and personally! As I’ve studied his wife, Betsy Schuyler, I’ve grown to have the profoundest respect for her. She was a woman of convictions, the kind which helped her survive fifty years beyond the death of her husband. For me, she's become the  embodiment of the word "lady."  

Here's a happier excerpt (a flirtatious double entendre) from Nov 19, 1798, some years after his infidelity, sent by Hamilton to his wife:  "I am always happy My Dear Eliza when I can steal a few moments to sit down and write to you.  You are my good genius; of that kind which the ancient Philsophers called a familiar; and you know very well that I am glad to be in every way as familiar as possible with you."

  

And last, a charming diary entry, one from James McHenry, of later Fort McHenry fame, about Revolutionary War evenings while quartered with the rest of Washington’s ADC’s upon a substantial Pennsylvania household.

“Eight miles from Moors & 25 from Philadelphia. Head-quarters at Jonathan Fells (Doylestown). A raining evening. The company within doors includes a pretty, fullfaced, youthfull, playfull lass and a Family of Quakers meek and unsuspicious. Hamilton thou shalt not tread on this ground. I mark it for my own.”

This tells me that the recreational behavior of army officers/staff hasn’t changed a whole lot over the course of the last 250 years. It brings us, readers and writers,  closer to a world that is, in many ways, technically and socially, alien.  We no longer have to trust ourselves to a small ferry in sketchy winter conditions in order to cross the Hudson and arrive at the warmth, food and good company of the big house, but down at the core, we humans remain the same.

 

~~Juliet Waldron

 

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We've got Cows! By Tia Dani

(With apology to the writers' of the movie, "TWISTER".)

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Whenever we work at a restaurant, it means we're usually creating a new book.

Beginning a new story, always fires us up, however, sanity also rears its annoying pointy head and sniffs, "Where are you going to start?"

Since our stories are generally character driven, we first like to know our characters inside and out. We talk about who they are and what they specifically want. Once we've got their names and backgrounds, flaws, and why they are driven, then we work on where we're going with the story.

Actually sometimes a plot line will come to us first, but that's a topic for another blog later on. (Has anyone picked up we're always saving things for other blogs?)

Back to brainstorming. Our second step is who opens the story in their point of view? Normally we gear our books toward the romance genre (Dani's strong point), so we usually start with the heroine. Sometimes the hero will protest and win the argument. We're really not gender driven.

But here's where it gets tricky. Once we know the characters, know the underlying plot, we have to add flesh and blood to the story…the stuff that not only draws readers avidly into the book, but ourselves as well.

We rely on our handy dandy writing class rule. Every scene needs three parts:

1. Goal. What does the character want? CHECK. DONE THAT.

2. Conflict. A series of difficulties characters must face on the way to reaching their goal. CHECK…WAIT! HOLD ON…We're not exactly there yet.

Several minutes (actually hours) of discussion, heavy research, and some wine, maybe a lot of wine, one of us (usually Tia) yells, "We got cows!"

Imagine in the restaurant the looks we get are quite comical. "Cows? What cows?" Several people look around nervously. "Where?"

We grin at everyone and explain we're co-authors, Tia Dani, and Tia's yell, "We've got cows." is an expression for seeing difficulties (like in the movie where cows fly in the middle of a tornado.) Some nod and say, "I see." Others…look confused then go back to eating.

Now onto Rule Three: 

The Ultimate Disaster. What keeps characters from reaching their goals? By this time Tia is jumping up and down, waving her hands at a bunch of unseen cows in her mind. (Remember how she loves a great disaster.) Even Dani can't help but get drawn into the excitement. She has her own cows. With rapid-fire description, she embellishes great love scenes to go along with Tia's disaster(s).

By this time we have new people around us and we have to explain all over again.

But the really funny thing is, our waitress, who's gotten to know us quite well, strolls by and says with a grin, "Katie, bar the barn door. Tia Dani has their cows!"

                              This is how we look by the time we've finished brainstorming a book.

                                       © Graphixparanoid | Dreamstime.com - Mad Cow Photo

                                        cow photos by @ElisaLocci/DreamstimeStockPhoto

To find out more about the writing team Tia Dani and our books visit us at: 

http://bookswelove.com/authors/tia-dani/
https://tiadaniauthor.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tiadani.author
                                                          

CREATURE FEATURES by Juliet Waldron

Several years ago I decided to begin to write a story centered around a creature. By doing that, I knew I was entering a crowded, expert field that had been successfully creating vampires and werewolves, witches, and all the rest of the occult cousinage for many, many years.

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Still, why not? I had had a notion to write a sequel to Red Magic. Unlike the other novels I’ve written which are full-on historical fiction, Red Magic  was cross-genre in at least four ways, because there are elements of fantasy, history and adventure as well as the old-fashioned romance at the core. Moreover, if you end a story with the birth of fraternal twins-- in this case, a girl and a boy--there is an obligation to write a follow-up around them. It’s an ancient story-teller's convention, probably well-established by the time the Greeks dreamed up Apollo and Diana.   

 

Okay, so all well and good, but almost immediately I was stuck again. The tall, dark hero and his red-headed sister I already knew something about—their loves, loyalties and a few of their day-to-day human problems. The question remained: into exactly what sort of creature would my hero morph?

Personally, vampires alarm me. It seems to me there are enough scary people in the real world who fit into this category without making up fictional ones who are going to (somehow) become the love interest. On the other hand, I’ve always had a soft spot for werewolves, but there sure are a lot of them howling at the moon already.

I decided to step back a pace. Why not try something less limiting? Going after the all-encompassing “shape-shifter” idea seemed a way to make an unusual hero who wasn’t boxed into a particular set of conventions, such as drinking blood or only being active after dark. If the hero/creature could become different animals, his metamorphosis could be different every time, which would definitely give my imagination a work-out. Like the boy Wart in The Sword in the Stone, my hero could sometimes be a carnivore and sometimes a herbivore, sometimes four-legged, sometimes winged, as the need and/or inclination arose.

I'm nearing the completion of Black Magic now. If I can just keep my "fanny in the chair," it should be done within the next month and ready for a stern edit. For me, it's been quite an experience, a crazy road trip out of my usual historical writer's comfort zone. 

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