Ruth Hull Chatlien's Blog, page 12

Bringing Home the Gold

Hi all. I know I’ve been neglecting this blog. I’ve been trying to get into the new novel, and that’s taken most of my creative energy lately.

However, I just had to tell you all about a new honor for The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte. The book took the gold medal in the Reader’s Favorite Book Award Contest in the category of Fiction—Historical Personage! I’m really excited. I’ll be going to Miami in November to receive my medal. Woo hoo!

 

Book Review: The Secret of Jeanne Baret

The Secret of Jeanne Baret is a young adult historical novel that tells the fascinating story of a French girl who embarks on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure: disguising herself as a boy to take part in a scientific expedition and, hopefully, to become the first female to circumnavigate the globe. The story is well researched. Jeanne (disguised as Jean) travels to many exotic locations, meets people from a fascinating variety of cultures, and as she assists her master with his work, learns that she has a real flair for botany. I think this book could be a wonderful way to show girls how exciting science can be.

I had one minor issue with the story. At the beginning, Jeanne is very happy and thinks that she has achieved exactly what she wanted, so the early chapters didn’t have quite as much tension as I expected. Later, several complications arise: she makes an enemy among the crew, she narrowly escapes having her true identity revealed, and she even starts to fall in love with someone who has no idea she’s a girl. These plot twists help the story really move along. So I’d advise readers not to be fooled by Jeanne’s apparently perfect situation in the beginning. Keep reading. Once the action gets going, it doesn’t let up.

Building a Back Story

Yesterday, I figured out a plausible back story for the protagonist of my next novel. Like The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte, this one will be based on the life of a real women—but this story is more difficult because she left her New England home to go west and then refused to talk about her childhood because of some unspecified break with her family of origin. Historians have not even been able to identify her birth family with complete accuracy because there are three different recorded birth dates for her and two different maiden names!

Needless to say, this situation has both pros and cons. On the one hand, I get to make up her back story to suit myself, while on the other hand, the field is almost too wide open. It’s difficult to make choices that hang together properly. I’ve been struggling with it for several weeks and finally decided to read a history of the state where she grew up, which unfortunately, is one of the few states I’ve never even set foot in. Reading that book made a huge difference. I learned that the industry I thought dominated the state had all but died out by the time she was born, and something else entirely had begun to take its place. Then, about a week ago, I had an intuitive flash in which I “saw” this woman as a child in a distinctive setting. After that, everything fell into place. I now know how I’ll portray the events that brought about the unlikely occurrence of a single woman from New England leaving behind her well-established family and traveling alone to the frontier.

Marketing (per Walt Whitman)

This is for my indie author friends. A little wisdom about marketing by Walt Whitman. Not much has changed has it?

Getting Back to Normal

I’m really embarrassed at how infrequently I’ve been blogging. I’m well, but my attention has been focused on other things—mainly trying to develop a regular routine again. I’m working about 2/3 time, exercising regularly, marketing The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte, trying to get my garden in, and researching the new book. Blogging always seems to be the last thing on the list.

The good news is that, judging from how much exercise I am able to do, I seem to have built my stamina up to my pre-cancer levels. However, that’s still not all it could be because, during the six months before the diagnosis, I was working too much and not taking care of myself. Hopefully, my energy levels will continue to improve if I stick to my program of healthy eating, regular exercise, and slow, very gradual weight loss. But I don’t want to minimize this milestone. Even though I still have a long way to go to meet my end goals, I’ve achieved something important in getting back to where I was before the cancer.

I’m not going to make any promises about when I’ll be back to regular blogging, but I’ll try not to go a month between posts. Hope you are all well!

Beach Book Promotion!

Monday, May 26, is Memorial Day, which means that beach reading season is upon us. Personally, I think that you couldn’t do better than read The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte as you loll around in a beach chair, but maybe you’ve already read it. Besides, I don’t want to be as dictatorial as Betsy’s brother-in-law Napoleon! So I’ve put together a little giveaway that I hope will be to everyone’s mutual satisfaction and delight.

I am sponsoring a Rafflecopter giveaway of $20.00 Amazon gift certificates to help three lucky winners buy some summer reads. What do you need to do to enter? Help me promote my book.

There are several types of entries with varying points rewarded. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you earn one entry in the contest.

If you send out a tweet promoting my book or this giveaway (I’ve provided a couple of different options for what you can say), you earn two entries in the contest for EACH tweet. Plus, these entries can be earned once a day over the life of the promotion, so you can really rack up the entries! NOTE: To read what the tweets say, press the tweet button. You’ll be able to see what they are before you hit send. Remember that there are three different ones and you get credit for sending all three.

If you promote the book on a blog with a new post that contains the synopsis, the link to the book trailer, and the link to buy the book on Amazon, you earn a whopping five entries in the contest.

Here’s the synopsis:

As a clever girl in stodgy, mercantile Baltimore, Betsy Patterson dreams of a marriage that will transport her to cultured Europe. When she falls in love with and marries Jerome Bonaparte, she believes her dream has come true—until Jerome’s older brother Napoleon becomes an implacable enemy.

Based on a true story, The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte is a historical novel that portrays this woman’s tumultuous life. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, known to history as Betsy Bonaparte, scandalized Washington with her daring French fashions; visited Niagara Falls when it was an unsettled wilderness; survived a shipwreck and run-ins with British and French warships; dined with presidents and danced with dukes; and lived through the 1814 Battle of Baltimore. Yet through it all, Betsy never lost sight of her primary goal—to win recognition of her marriage.

Here’s the trailer:

Here’s the link to the book on Amazon:

http://amzn.to/1myCJ0v

Click here to go to my Rafflecopter giveaway

and start entering! The giveaway starts today (Sunday, May 18) and will end at 6:00 PM Central time on Memorial Day.

Wanted: Blocks of Time

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, it occurs to me that part of my problem is how much time I’m actually spending working on the new novel right now. As most of you know, I’m trying to get back to a semi-normal schedule after my bout with cancer. I’m working only about 60% time right now, so you’d think I would have lots of time for the novel. But three things are working against me:

1. I have a lot of new health-related things added to my daily routine, and those aren’t ever going to go away.

2. I’m really behind on household and garden chores, and I’m trying to gradually, oh so slowly, catch up.

3. It’s important that I don’t overdo my work hours for a while.

The upshot of all of this is that I’m working on the new book only about five hours a week. I plan to increase that over the course of the next few months because it’s really a pitiful amount. How can I get inside my characters’ heads when I spend so little time with them?

But it can’t be helped. I’m still in the situation that my health has to come first. It will get better when I can work at the writing at least 10-12 hours a week. I’m just not there yet.

Have you ever gone through a period in which you have so little time for your writing? What do you do to keep your excitement about the project alive?

Getting to Know Our Characters

I’ve been reading a lot of books to research the new novel, but I’ve also been feeling frustrated. I don’t really have a handle on the woman who’s my main character yet, and how can I start writing until I have a strong sense of who she is? I keep measuring my lack of certainty about this character against my understanding of Betsy Bonaparte, and really there’s no comparison.

Yesterday, however, I began to think that perhaps it is my memory that is failing me, not my creativity. I’m comparing how well I know Sarah, the new character, at the beginning of the writing process to how well I knew Betsy at the end of the writing process. I wish I could remember how strongly Betsy felt present to me when I was first reading her biographies, but I can’t. It seems to be a bit like what mothers say about labor; once you fall in love with that baby as a real physical person, you start to forget the pain of labor. I can’t really remember much about the early uncertainties and doubts I had about telling Betsy’s story.

As a result of that insight, I’m trying to ratchet down my expectations for this stage a bit. Once I finish reading and start developing the chapter outline and character biographies, I think things will improve. I’m sure I will get to a point where Sarah feels present to me. Plus, the real knowledge often comes in the actual writing. That’s where the characters usually start to come alive for me. That’s certainly how it worked with Betsy’s son and even with Jerome.

In some ways, I think I’m worried because I fear I won’t be able to pull off the feat of writing a novel again. But that fear is probably normal too.

If you’re a writer, what is this stage of the writing process like for you?

Musing About Conflict

I was going to sit down and write a book review this afternoon, but instead, my thoughts about the YA book in question are prompting a semi-philosophical post about conflict in fiction.

Let me give you a brief scenario. In the novel in question, the heroine doesn’t want the life that is proscribed for girls in her time period. She runs away and basically achieves her goal of an alternate life by masquerading as a boy in the very first chapter. The rest of the story is filled with interesting characters (some of whom have conflicts with the protagonist), exotic locations, and once-in-a lifetime adventures. In spite of all that, the first half of the book felt flat to me because there was no overarching tension, no big goal or conflict driving the story from episode to episode. The protagonist got what she wanted in the first chapter and she keeps telling herself how lucky she is.

Am I being too critical? Do you think it’s necessary to have a big conflict driving the story if there are a plenty of little conflicts and adventures along the way?

I should mention that eventually the overarching narrative does develop a big-picture conflict because the heroine begins to fear that her secret will be discovered—an event that would be doubly disastrous because she has fallen in love with one of her companions and knows he will feel betrayed when he learns that she has deceived him for so long. Once I got to the second half of the book, I was much more invested.

I just wonder if my expectations for the beginning were reasonable. I promised the author I’d write a review on Amazon (and I’ve told her of my concerns), but then I began to wonder if I were being too harsh. I’d love to hear what you all think either as readers or writers or both.

 

Status Report

Here’s what’s going on in my little corner of the world. I finished radiation five weeks ago. And after a couple of weeks, I realized that I wasn’t getting my strength back. When you’re undergoing radiation, your immune system puts all its efforts into dealing with the damage and it can’t always keep up with the other issues in your life. That’s what happened to me. My asthma got out of control, and I was coughing about two hours a day. It’s hard to build up energy under those conditions.

So I went to see the doctor who treats my asthma, and he gave me a whole slew of stuff, and about the middle of last week, the coughing finally subsided to manageable levels.

Since I was feeling better last week, I started to follow a more normal schedule. I worked half time, did a little bit in my garden, and did some research for the new novel. Next week, I’ll increase my work hours from 20 to 25, a workload that is going to be my new normal for the next few months. Then in late summer, I’ll evaluate whether it’s time to work full time again.

I suspect that I will start blogging again soon, perhaps at the rate of two or three posts a week. Right now, the bigger priority is to put in some regular hours on the new novel, which basically got shelved the whole time I was in treatment.

I hope you’re all doing well. What’s going on in your lives?