Launching a Novel

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On March 26th I hosted a book launch for my new novel, To Catch a Fox. For the venue, I chose Owl's Nest Books in Calgary because I'd held launches there for my two previous novels and I love this independent bookstore which is so supportive of local writers. You'd think launches would be old hat for me the third time around, but I always find something new to worry about. This time, in addition to reading and answering questions, I tried out a power point presentation using a system borrowed from a friend. At the last minute, I decided to rent a microphone and am glad I did. It was easier to use than I'd expected. Close to 85 people attended the launch and those at the back would have had a hard time hearing my voice, especially after it was strained from 40 minutes of talking.

My friend advised me to make my book cover the first slide, for people to watch during the introductions  

For my talk, I wanted an upbeat mood despite the novel's dark material. So I chose a travel photo theme and showed pictures from my two holidays in Southern California to research potential settings for To Catch a Fox. I found I didn't need notes, since each slide prompted me about what to say next. My idea was to give a sense of how I worked my own travels into the story and make the settings feel more real for readers when they later encountered them in the book.

This woman conveniently photo-bombed my picture of the Santa Monica boardwalk. Julie, my protagonist, jogs along this same boardwalk.  

Initially, I planned to save my readings from the novel to the end of the presentation. Then I realized it would be more interesting for listeners to look at a picture where the scene takes place. So I paused part-way through my talk for my first reading. I was afraid this might break the flow, but it served as a transition between my first and second research holidays.

Julie questions a clerk in this bike shop at the Santa Monica Pier. Like my husband Will and me, Julie and her sidekick Delilah rent bikes and ride on the boardwalk. Their purpose is to question more bike shop owners, who might have known Julie's mother in the 1980s. Will and I simply rode for fun. 

As a non-techy person, I had to make three trips to my friend's house to get the presentation working properly. My friend's favourite part of the program was the cheesy apartment that Will and I rented for our first California trip. Julie and Delilah stay in this same place. Another friend who has started reading To Catch a Fox told me she'd have thought I was exaggerating the racy décor if she hadn't seen the slide show.

The boudoir, where Julie slept. Delilah slept in the sofa bed in the cluttered living room.  

I started writing To Catch a Fox when I got home from the first trip. After two drafts, I felt confident of my Los Angeles area details, but wanted to get a better feel for the novel's primary setting -- a fantasy retreat. All I had was a vague sense that it was about a two hour drive east of Los Angeles. When my sister-in-law suggested we join her on a cruise from San Diego, Will and I tacked on a road trip to the California interior. Our explorations wound up locating my New Dawn Retreat farther south than I'd thought, in a sparsely populated orange growing belt. We began the drive with a stop at the California Citrus State Historic Park and bought a bag of oranges. They were delicious.

This landscape below is the closest I could get to my imagined retreat. The New Dawn Retreat in my story features a broad lawn enclosed by hills, with citrus and olive cultivation on the hillsides.  

For my second reading, I chose a scene set at the New Dawn Retreat.


The presentation wrapped up with questions and door prizes, which included an Owl's Nest gift card as my thanks to the bookstore, a recently published chapbook of one of my short stories and, most exciting of all, bottles of Dawn dish detergent.   

What I find most fun about book launches is seeing people from different areas of my life gathered together in one place. Friends, family, my fellow hiking and book club members, writer acquaintances, readers who've enjoyed my previous novels. I don't get a chance to talk to them all, but it's wonderful to see their supportive faces in the audience and to touch base briefly with a few.

And now, what will I do for my next launch? First I'll have to write the book.

"Cursed be he that moves my bones" by Karla Stover

     BWLAUTHORS.BLOGSPOT.COM

This weekend, while looking for something to watch on TV as I sat with two dogs on my lap making pine needle baskets, (and no easy task in Puget Sound where there aren't a lot of pine trees), I stumbled on one of the few programs PBS doesn't charge to watch. It was about a group of archaeologists and historians who wanted access to the contents of William Shakespeare's grave.


Unlike the majority of Great Britain's men of letters who lie in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner, Shakespeare was interred in Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church. I don't remember why they wanted a look-see, but they weren't the first hoping for a peak. After all, the grave is less than 3 feet deep. And in the mid-19th century, Ohio-born school teacher Delia Slater Bacon became convinced that if she was allowed to open the site, she would be able to prove "the works attributed to him had in fact been written by a coterie of writers led by Francis Bacon and including Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh and were credited by them to the relatively obscure actor and theatre manager largely for political reasons."

The teacher so disliked Shakespeare and was so vocal about both that dislike and her theory that after receiving some encouragement from Ralph Waldo Emerson she moved to England in 1853, "ostensibly to seek proof. She was uninterested in looking for original source material, however, and for three years lived in poverty while she developed her thesis out of ingenuity and 'hidden meanings' found in the plays."

Three years later, cold and hungry, she abandoned her plan of opening Shakespeare’s grave to look for the documents she believed would support her position. Perhaps she took its creepy epitaph to heart.

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, 

To dig the dust enclosed here. 

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, 

And cursed be he that moves my bones." 

One of her additional theories was "that Francis Bacon had hidden proof of the plays’ authorship in his grave." But by this time her brother begged her to come home," writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he believed that Delia had been verging on the edge of insanity for at least six years. Delia, however, refused to leave England.

Delia’s mental state worsened, and as she suffered from constant fevers and poor health, and became suicidal, she was ultimately committed to an asylum, first by the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, then by her brother after she returned to the United States in 1858.

As for the results of the PBS special, what the researchers found "is that half of the Bard's grave is undisturbed" but that the head end where his skull would have been contains nothing. It's merely voided space. The popular theory is that grave robbers took it many years ago.;

Carousels by Barbara Baldwin

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From afar, she heard the music,

A slow waltz from another time.

And the horses danced to a tune

They could not hear.

The carousel spun round and round,

Painted horses galloped freely.

And magic wove a wondrous spell

Through the silvery night.

Proud heads held high, the horses pranced,

Chasing mystic sounds to the past.

Seeking a world of fantasy,

They lured her through time.

Yet when the music ended,

And the horses finally stopped.

The magic still coursed through her,

Love had found her heart.*

            Who doesn’t love a carousel? Beautifully painted horses and a menagerie of exotic animals, gaily circling ‘round to the sounds of a Wurlitzer organ. It is childhood and knightly fantasies; a secret rendezvous and a race to freedom.

            I have a collection of musical carousel horses, some of which go up and down as the music plays. Others are stationary, just as early carousels had been. Today, carousels are often at the hub of shopping malls and county fairs. I’ve visited the 1901 Parker carousel in Abilene, Kansas, the Central Park Carousel New York City, and the historic Flying Horses on Martha’s Vineyard, among others. I even had the opportunity to see a carousel factory where they made carousel-like horses which at one time decorated a famous national restaurant chain. The carousels are all different and unique and we are fortunate this piece of our history has been preserved.

            It was at the Flying Horses where I learned some of a carousel’s forgotten history. The horses on this particular carousel do not move up and down as the platform circles. The uniqueness of this carousel is that at one point there is a metal armature sticking out containing brass rings. As riders “gallop” by, they can grab for the rings, collecting them during the ride. The history of this particular activity dates back to medieval years and the jousts that were held. Besides trying to knock each other off horses, a knight would gallop down the course and try to snare a large ring onto his lance. Sometimes the rings were held by pages, other times they were thrown in the air as the knights rode near. Some believe this is also where the expression “catching the brass ring” came from.

             Not all carousels were horses or animals attached through a center pole to a moving platform. Swing rides, the earliest form of carousel, were made with ropes and baskets that carried people and spun in circles around a center pole. There are still swing rides today at fairgrounds that have chairs suspended by chains from the top of the carousel instead of seats shaped like animals. 

Long before motorized platforms (as early as 1873) it has been noted that a live mule or a horse was hidden beneath the Carousel platform to power the amusement ride. The animals were taught to start and stop when the operator tapped on the floor.

            And then there is the restored Dentzel carousel found at State Fair Park in Dallas, Texas. Gustav Dentzel, a German furniture maker, lived in Philadelphia in the 1870s  and turned to carousel horse making when they became all the rage.

With all this history; the beauty and romance and my love of carousels, how could I help but write a story involving them?

My story involves professional photographer Jaci Eastman who photographs the Dentzel carousel for a magazine spread and finds a blurred image of a man in old fashioned dress behind one of the horses. She only believes reality can be photographed. So how can she photograph a man who doesn’t exist in her time beside a carousel horse that didn’t exist in his?

            Follow the romance and mystery of a carousel horse in “Spinning Through Time”, available through Books We Love or wherever you like to find your romance.

-- "Gorgeous story, it was lovely from beginning to end. A keeper. One of the best time travel romances I've read!” SS, Amazon review

*Opening of “Spinning Through Time”

Story Beginnings - By Rita Karnopp

Story Beginnings - The first word, first sentence, first paragraph and first page of your story are the most important in the entire book.  If you can’t grab your reader’s undivided attention by then – the story is over.

 

Many agents will admit if the first sentence doesn’t grab them … they don’t read another word.  Sounds a bit crude – but a weak story start is the ‘kiss of death.’  (Please pardon the cliché.)

So, what exactly are some story openings that could be great – or should be avoided?

 

Basics for Story Beginnings – There should only be one question to ask yourself after you write that first sentence.  Does it grab the reader – and drive her/him to read the next and the next and the next sentence?

If you want an agent, publisher, or booklover to read your story – make the beginning all it can be!

How can you make your beginnings effective?

• Pull the reader in with a captivating, interesting, or even humorous narrative voice.
• Quickly develop a character your reader can sympathize with or will care and is gripped with anticipation for his/her escape from a challenging predicament.
• Reveal your character’s decision - promising it will, more-than-likely, have back-firing consequences.
• Create tension – by disclosing pre-judgement conclusions – developing a feel of suspense or mystery.
• Create beguiling situations or present your character with un-realistic expectations or challenges – causing the reader angst and anticipation.

There is definitely a difference between ‘mystery; and ‘suspense.’ 

Mystery can be defined as the questions (who, why, and how) that arise from a situation or event.  Let’s say a car is pulled out of a lake and the driver is missing … but … the trunk is smashed in and they can’t open it.  The mystery develops when the reader asks who drove the car into the lake?  Who smashed-in the trunk and is there a body inside it?

Suspense develops when the reader asks, “What next?”  “Why would someone smash-in the truck?”  Suspense builds in the time it takes to figure out how to open the trunk … and fear of what they’ll find.

You can hook a reader/editor/agent by – setting the scene, adding tone, revealing genre, and by introducing at least one character.  i.e.  Leaning against the cold, rough, tombstone edge, Jesse inched his head around the corner.  “Danged-near impossible to see anythin’ out there,” he whispered.  “Think I mighta seen a lantern flickering up ahead.  I’ll kill her the minute I lay eyes on her.  Poke me if ya hear anythin’.”  A quick glance over his right shoulder confirmed his fears - Wyatt no longer shadowed his movements.

You really don’t have to do all those things right up-front.  Your goal is to hook the reader. The rest of the story will support why does he want to kill her?  What did she do to him and does she deserve his anger?  What happened to his friend, Wyatt? 

Seven Aprils - My Favorite New BWL Release by Eileen O'Finlan

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American women serving on the front lines in wartime is not as new as one might think. Remember Molly Pitcher (most likely Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley) who took over for her husband when he fell at the Battle of Monmouth.  Or what about Deborah Sampson, the young farmwoman who disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army to fight in the American Revolution.  An article on the American Battlefield Trust website entitled “Female Soldiers in the Civil War” claims a conservative estimate of between 400 and 750 disguised female soldiers fighting on both sides.  A few also served as spies.  According to the article women had a variety of reasons for taking on the hardships of camp life and risking injury or death including patriotism, the desire to remain with loved ones, a sense of adventure, and the promise of a reliable income.

Eileen Charbonneau’s new release, Seven Aprils, draws the reader into the life of one young woman who disguises herself as a man to serve in the Union’s newly formed medical unit for reasons quite different and even more compelling than those listed above.  To save her own life, Tess becomes Tom Boyde, assistant to Dr. Ryder Cole, and later takes on a third role as Diana, Dr. Cole’s prostitute lover.  How she manages to keep all her personas separate, adroitly recover and tend to the wounded even in the midst of frontline battle, and just as skillfully satisfy Dr. Cole’s lust for her makes for an adventurous, addictive tale.

Charbonneau’s adept handling of the changes from Tess to Tom to Diana never leave the reader confused.  The story, thoroughly engaging and totally believable, is filled with heart stopping adventure and smokin' hot romance. If you’re looking for a fresh take on a Civil War novel, Seven Aprils more that fits the bill!

In this excerpt from Seven Aprils Tess, who has become Tom, now becomes Diana:

    Tess turned. Madame Lanier stood in one of the room’s three doorways. Dress and hoops gone, she was still imposing in her silk dressing down. Tess felt more trapped inside her uniform than when the boys first teased her for not joining them at the swimming hole.

    “Would you loosen my corset strings, love?”

     Tess swallowed. “Sure.”

     Madame Lanier’s dressing gown sang as it slid off her shoulders and to the ground. Tess released the back tie that held in the cinch at Madame Lanier’s waist. She watched the ties slip through their grommets as she waited the space of a few of the woman’s deep breaths. “Is that all right?”

    “Perfect.”

    Tess secured the ties in the new position.,”

    “You have done that many times before, cheri," Madame Lanier said. “Now. Would you not like to do the same?”

    “Ma’am?”

    “Shed your uniform for one night? Remember who you are underneath those handsome shades of blue?” The woman eased Tess down before the dressing table with a gentle press at her shoulders. “They suit you, the blues. Did you wear the color in your other life?”

    Tess took in a careful breath. “Wore mostly homespun, back then. Browns from walnut casings, yellows from onion skins. A little green cloth from sage.” She was babbling. The truth, of course, and in detail. “I do admire the shade of blue. Made a mix of milk and blue pokeberry for my sleeping place in the loft once. Never got to paint it, though.”

    “Why not?”

    “My pa said I was putting on airs. Said plain board’s good enough for the menfolk of the family, and it was good enough…for—for…”

    “For you?”

    “Yes, Ma’am, for me.”

    What was she doing, talking like a magpie to this woman, and almost giving herself clean away besides? She heard Ryder Cole’s laugh from the room beside Madame Lanier’s. Her head hurt. If they discovered her a woman, would the army think he knew all along? Would they blame him?

    “You are a chemist, Private Boyde, with the making of your paints! Perhaps you’d like to investigate my beauty concoctions?” Madame Lanier gave out a short, throaty laugh. “Purely in the interest of scientific study, of course?”

    “I’d like that fine, Ma’am,” Tess said, turning her attention to the lace-covered table.

    “Good. Sit.”

    She reached over Tess’s shoulder and picked up a brush with an ivory handle as fine as those on Doctor Cole’s French-made surgical instruments. “We will do only what you like tonight, I promise.”

    “Thank you,” Tess whispered, hearing the relieved crack in her voice’s low tone.

    “Your hair has a lovely natural curl. May I?”

    “Uh… all right.”

    The hostess began her task. Tess tried to lose herself in the cut glass bottles leaking their scents, but the deep massage of her scalp was too wonderful not to revel in. Her mother had brushed her hair like this, so long ago. She closed her eyes, remembering.

    “You have never seen yourself as beautiful, have you?”

    Her eyes opened. Tess stared at the reflection of a stranger. Slicked down, always-pulled-behind-the-ears strands were now soft waves framing a round, flushed face, a nose off-kilter since Laban let the handle on the pump up too fast when she was eight and broke it.

    “Beautiful?” Her laugh sounded like dry leaves before a storm. “What would the point of that be, Ma’am?”

    Madame Lanier’s brows slanted in amusement. “Well, it’s been the point of my own existence for as long as I remember.”

    “Oh. ‘Course. Beg pardon, Ma’am.”

    The light, throaty laugh came again. It was true. This woman was not going to force her to do anything. She was not full of meanness like the few predatory men that Ryder, Joe and Davy shielded her from at camp. Maybe Ryder was right, maybe everything would be all right if she could just relax in this strange, gaudy place.

    Madame Lanier laid down her brush. She swiped three fingers full of a substance that looked like butter from the lilac-scented jewel bottle. She brought it to Tess’s temple and began kneading it in, counterbalancing the throbbing there.

    “Better?” she whispered.

    “Yes.”

    The skilled hands anchored her jaw now, and continued the gentle massage of her cheekbone, sliding across the bridge of her imperfect nose. The massage continued around her ear, down her throat. Is this how Madame Lanier started with the men? Those jealous men who were angry at the lady’s choice of partner-of-the-evening? It’s a wonder this woman didn’t live in a castle with those men at her feet, Tess thought.

    “Can you see it yet?” Madame Lanier asked softly.

    Tess stared at their reflections. “See, Ma’am?”

    She kissed Tess’s cheek. “That every woman with the fire of purpose is beautiful.”

    “Woman?”

    “And I see your purpose as well as I see the affection you carry for your captain.” She frowned. “As if you haven’t got enough burdens, my darling girl.”

    Suddenly, the weight of the day crashed down, turning the bottles blurry as Tess struggled to take in gulps of air. The woman’s long, strong fingers unbuttoned, then lifted off coat, vest and blouse until she found Tess’s own corset: plain boned muslin, tied towards a different purpose. She loosened the strings.

    “Breathe easy now. I will not add to your burdens. You’re safe here. You’ll always be safe here, do you understand?”

    Tess looked up at the woman’s reflection. “Will I?” she whispered

    “Yes. Now, let’s get that uniform tucked away for a few hours, shall we? Then how about a few of my night-off girls and I help you into some silks and finery?”

    Soon Tess had what she’d always wanted, though she’d never known it before that moment—seven sisters dousing her in lilac water, powdering her shoulders, pulling her waist tight under corset ties. They graced her neck with amethysts, found ear bobs, painted her lips and cheeks. She shyly pulled her braid from its secret pocket for them to marvel at. Then they combed her shorn hair back and pinned the cascading fall to it, even planting silk flowers where they attached it.

   As her transformation continued, they told her about picnics along the Potomac on their days off, and going to the theater where goddesses on a gold chariot were pulled by a great mechanical lion with real smoke coming out of his nostrils. Encouraged, Tess told them about her mountains back home, and how cool they kept the evening breezes even at this summer time of year, and the white birch trees with mushrooms growing in their shade—mushrooms big enough to fry up like a steak.

    When the girl in the cinnamon colored dressing gown asked about Ryder and his scar, Tess even told them about the first time she’d laid eyes on her captain, his doomed horse and the panther. When she got to the panther’s death throes, the girl let out a shriek, followed by mad giggles from others to hush up.

    The door to the adjoining room swung open.

    Tess felt Madame Lanier’s hand take her shoulder in an iron grip. She looked up into the mirror and caught sight of Ryder Cole standing in the door frame. His eyes darted around for an instant, then landed square on her face.

    “Diana?”

    It was her turn to shriek.

All of the Exciting New Releases and Features from BWL Publishing Inc. for April

Be sure and visit our BWL Publishing Inc. website for more details and information on these fantastic new releases.  http://bookswelove.net   

BWL PUBLISHING'S APRIL RELEASES

April is also Historical and Time Travel month at BWL Publishing. Be sure and visit us and click any of the book covers for details on all the great  historical and time travel novels we have available for our readers.