Roberta Grimes's Blog, page 52

Writing Your First Novel

As I was preparing to republish My Thomas and publish the first two of the Letters From Love novels, I had to “come out” to my legal clients and to friends who had never known me as a writer. Especially with people who had long known me as their business attorney, I had some strange […]

Imagine

I never was a Beatles fan. I found their early stuff unappealing, and as soon as I began to appreciate them Paul went and married Linda and broke my heart. Every girl I knew had a favorite Beatle, and the one you chose told us who you were: Paul appealed to the romantics, Ringo to […]

Bringing Martha Jefferson to Life

I came across Alf J. Mapp Jr.’s Thomas Jefferson – A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity in a bookstore one day in 1988, and I was taken with the title. My law practice was in hiatus because my housekeeper had been arrested for drunken driving with my young son in the back seat of her […]

God Is Real

                In decades of studying nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, I have been able to find no evidence at all for a vengeful Old Testament Jehovah-God.  Instead, that version of God appears to have been a last synthesis of the pantheisms which gave ancient peoples lots of people-like gods:  […]

Human Nature

Physicists do thought-experiments. Using everything you know about how certain things would work in certain situations, you shift some of the variables in your mind and see what happens then. I didn’t know that scientists do thought-experiments when I started thought-experimenting in the mid-seventies, but I discovered then – surprisingly – that experimenting in your […]

Characters

The biggest lesson I had to learn about writing fiction is that the writer doesn’t write the story. Instead, these supposedly fictional people come alive at some point, and they take over. If the writer won’t let that happen, the story dies on the page. It was Pearl Buck who made me want to learn […]

Thomas Jefferson Still Survives

Two of my big interests have long been researching death and better understanding Thomas Jefferson, and it’s fun when those interests come together! I met Jefferson in 1988 when I found the first volume of Alf Mapp’s excellent biography, Thomas Jefferson – A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity, a book that is even more timely […]

Sharing with you my formative night

Perhaps many folks can point to a single moment that transformed their lives, although for most that watershed moment likely happened when they were a bit older. I was eight years old on that singular night in April of 1955 when I went to bed as a normal kid. Then I was awakened just before […]

‘My Thomas’ a literary tour de force [a review]

Below is a review of my novel, My Thomas, that appeared in The Patriot Ledger: Roberta Grimes’s first major novel is a marvel, a historical novel whose detail, scope and depth seem much greater than the book’s slightly more than 300 pages. My Thomas captures the complicated nature and depth of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, […]

Review by Publishers Weekly

The following review of my book My Thomas appeared in Publishers Weekly: Cast in the form of a diary written by Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, Grimes’s first novel chronicles the years from their courtship in 1770 to her death in 1782. Atmospheric and richly detailed, with exact accounts of such contemporary activities as leaching dye […]