C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 52

A Classic Sequel

This week I had the fun of chatting with Pamela Mingle  about The Pursuit of Mary Bennet, her sequel to Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice. As someone who herself set out to build on a well-known story—in my case, Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)—I had a particular interest in why, and how, another author decided to undertake this task. Add in the fact that we both like Georgette Heyer, and you can see that this was a conversation begging to happen.

Although The Scarlet Pimpernel has spawned about twenty sequels, a highly regarded film starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon, at least two televised versions, a spinoff series, and a musical, it still can’t hold a candle to Pride and Prejudice in terms of sheer popularity. As Mingle notes in this month’s interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, the most difficult part of her project was overcoming the intimidating influence of Austen’s reputation to find a faithful yet innovative take on the five Bennet daughters and their destinies. Her solution to this problem was to avoid Elizabeth Bennet and her husband, Mr. Darcy—both of whom already have numerous novels devoted to them—and not to try to imitate Austen’s inimitable style but to tell her own story focused on a character from the original whom most people ignore.

It’s a highly successful approach, and although a book published by William Morrow cannot really be considered a Hidden Gem, I’m going to add it to my list of them anyway. With all the books that appear in print every day, it’s easy to overlook a treasure like this one—and for those of us who like sweet, smart historical romance with a classical bent, that would be a pity.

If you do like this novel, Pamela Mingle has also written Kissing Shakespeare, a YA novel published by Delacorte Books in 2012.

The rest of this post comes from the New Books in Historical Fiction site.

It seems fair to say that a large proportion of the English-speaking reading public has encountered Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice, either in print or in one of the many adaptations for stage, screen, and television. At the same time, the number of avid Austen readers who remember much about Mary, the third of the five Bennet sisters, is almost certainly small. Mary rates so little time on the page that scholars have questioned the need for her existence: could Austen not have made her point with three daughters, or at most four?

Mary is the sister in the middle—solemn and unattractive, liable to put her foot in her mouth at any moment, more enthusiastic than skilled at the piano. She is, in modern terms, the perfect subject for a makeover—which she receives to great effect in The Pursuit of Mary Bennet.

Three years after the events in Pride and Prejudice, Mary is dwindling into spinsterhood, in her own mind and that of her mother—a grim future for a gentlewoman in Regency England, one that would doom her to a life dependent on the kindness of others. Mary’s mother is already planning to send her off on the first of what promises to be a series of assignments as a high-class nursemaid, not quite a servant but not her own mistress either.

When Mary’s scandalous youngest sister arrives unannounced on her parents’ doorstep, Mary’s life takes an unexpected turn. Love, even marriage, becomes possible. But Mary has learned the hard way not to trust her instincts, and it will take a great deal to convince her that happiness lies within her reach.

As Pamela Mingle notes, it is not easy to step into Austen’s shoes. All the more credit to her, therefore, for doing such a wonderful job.

Swans Taking Flight

I thought it might be fun to delve a bit deeper into the issues raised in the writing process blog hop that I discussed in the last couple of posts. It’s been almost two years since I wrote “Romancing the Word,” and in those two years The Winged Horse has gone from rough plan to finished draft. By June, Five Directions Press will have published it. Meanwhile, I have a brand-new project: The Swan Princess (Legends 3: North). After a month or so, I’m almost ready to write, although I need to read a few more books first. But what does “almost ready to write” mean?

It means, first and foremost, that I have a story to tell and a sense of the major characters, who they are and how they will change. Most novelists, especially those who have written more than one book, would agree with this statement, but how we get there differs radically from person to person. My approach to a story is just that: my approach, not a prescription or a panacea. Still, I find individual differences fascinating, don’t you?

By instinct, I am what authors of writing craft books call a “plot person.” I approach a story first by imagining what will happen. By watching the characters respond to the events I create, I figure out what kind of people they are; then the plot shifts in response to them.

Other people approach their stories differently. In her interview with me, Jessica Brockmole mentioned that she starts by writing letters from the viewpoints of her characters, even for books that she doesn’t intend to end up as epistolary novels. Ariadne Apostolou, in my writers’ group, writes e-mails and sample scenes wholly inside the main character’s head—a technique similar to Jessica’s. Virginia Pye, in another interview, mentioned that she begins with a setting—a place—where she sees people slowly forming and moving about.

I start with a plot. My first draft of any chapter is a sketch, like a screenplay. Character X does this or says that, and Character Y responds. Feelings, settings, and thoughts come later. Because this is my natural approach, I began Swan Princess by drawing up a plot outline. I recognized right away that it contained a lot of events and characters for one novel, although only after showing it to my critique group did I accept that I had outlined most of the rest of the series. (They were very nice about it. The most important question they asked was, “Whose story is this?”—for the answer, keep reading.) I knew, but it took me another couple of weekends to figure out how to convince them.

To get there, I returned to my two absolute go-to writing craft books: John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story and Debra Dixon’s Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. I started at the beginning, just as I had with The Golden Lynx and The Winged Horse, and worked my way forward. I’ll probably keep reading, just to remind myself of points I’ve forgotten, but the important part of these exercises is to spark ideas, to encourage me to come up with responses to the questions they ask. One of my favorites is Truby’s “what if?” exercise, which demands that the writer take a basic story idea and push it in as many different directions as possible. Goal, Motivation, and Conflict focuses on the characters (as do most of Truby’s exercises): What do they want? What gets in their way? Of the obstacles they face, which are internal or moral and which come from outside, especially from other characters fighting for the same goals? These obstacles create the conflict that pressures the main character to change, because fictional characters like change no more than the rest of us, so they resist it as long and as forcefully as possible.

In this case, all my main characters have already appeared in earlier books, so I do have a good sense of them as people (the great advantage of series). Even so, that does not let me off the hook. Over the course of two books, the characters have grown, so I need to discover where they are in relationship to one another at this point in time, about 15 months after the end of The Winged Horse.

The advantage of doing this work is that it’s so much easier to revise plot lines and even character profiles when the change involves a paragraph, not pages and pages of text. I don’t want to constrain my imagination: on the contrary, the fun lies in the discovery, and my stories zig and zag as they go onto the page. But I have also learned that it helps to have a rough idea of where the characters are heading and what they need to learn on the way. Then, when they are happily running off into the forest, I can rein them in and redirect them along the path that will lead them to their ultimate destination.

So, if I have a story and characters, why I haven’t starting writing yet? Because this is a book about war: specifically, how war affects the men who fight it and the families who support them and the civilians who too easily become swept up in the violence. There are men who lead and men who follow, women seeking the warriors they love and women bent on protecting themselves from abuse while pursuing the opportunities created by a society in flux, people who harm and people who heal. Most of all, I want to examine the tendency of the Russian state to reject warriors who fail for reasons beyond their control, an attitude that became particularly obvious in World War II but occurred even in the 1530s, the period in which the Legends novels are set. To bring this attitude and this environment to life, I need to know more than I currently do about war in the 1530s—and war in general: how it was fought and how it affected people, even men who had been raised in the understanding that they would spend their lives fighting to defend their land from one would-be invader or another.

I am also learning about swans, an image that emerged from my subconscious in reference to this novel (swans, in Turkic cosmology, are both sacred and associated with the north, where they migrate in spring). The swan represents fidelity, in the many senses of that word, and the fierce defense of family. As I find out more about what they do and how they live, new elements of the story occur to me. In that sense, I am still gathering my forces. Not for long, though: I enjoy research, but I don’t want it taking over my novel. I need just enough to feel comfortable getting started.

And in case you’re wondering, it’s Nasan’s story. Daniil’s, too, and Grusha’s—and even Semyon’s—but first and foremost Nasan’s. After all, how could I write a book about war without my favorite warrior heroine leading the way?

The swan on my cover is © David Benton/Shutterstock 8554303.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

As noted on Monday, Pauline Montagna was one of the three writers whom I tagged in the writing process blog hop. Alas, she has had to pull out—due to circumstances beyond her control, as they say. The same circumstances have forced her to postpone indefinitely her guest post on “The Art of the Sword.” Nasan is terribly disappointed, but I’m sure she will adjust—with time. We wish Pauline all the best.

My third “tag” is now Marie Macpherson. Marie gained a Ph.D. in Russian Literature and took up creative writing after retiring from an academic career. Now the rich history of her native Scotland provides the inspiration for her fiction. Set during the political and religious turmoil of the early Reformation, her first novel,  The First Blast of the Trumpet, published by Knox Robinson Publishing, is a highly entertaining account of the life of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. (I can vouch for this, as I read the book last year and am eagerly waiting the second installment.)

Marie’s prizes and awards include the Martha Hamilton Prize for Creative Writing from Edinburgh University and the “Writer of the Year 2011” title, awarded by Tyne and Esk Writers.

You can find out more about her book at The First Blast of the Trumpet. And listen to me interview her on New Books in Historical Fiction. Take it away, Marie!



In addition, I thought it might be fun to update you on my two challenges for the current year. In History Challenge 2014: A Sail to the Past, I have achieved the rank of historian by reading seven books. (Duh! I am a historian!) I still have at least five to go for this year, but I am currently wending my way through Mark Brazil’s The Whooper Swan (wonderful book—I am so grateful he wrote it), as I gather details for Legends 3: The Swan Princess, so I will get back to those soon.

My Reduce the TBR Challenge is currently stalled at 11 of 24 books, but I expect to start working on those again in May and even to raise the endpoint to 36 books. Stay tuned!


This is also, officially, my 100th blog post. Never thought I could do it, but here it is!

Writing Process Blog Hop

As I mentioned on Friday, a few weeks ago I accepted Gillian Hamer’s call to take part in the Writing Process blog hop. The hop has just a few simple rules, including that you publish on a Monday the week after being tagged (hence my off-calendar Monday post) and link back to the blog of the person who tagged you in a kind of a tip of the hat. I’d also like to mention here how much I enjoy and recommend Gill’s novels. I still have to find time to get to her Complicit and Closure, which I have on my e-reader. I posted my review of The Charter last year—first in a new category of “Hidden Gems,” which tells you what I thought of it. She is definitely a writer to watch.

So, on to the questions:

1. What am I working on?
The Winged Horse—my third novel, second in the Legends of the Five Directions series—is with its beta readers. Two have responded; two are still working on the manuscript. I’m hoping to have all comments back by early May so that I can go through the text once more and have the book out on schedule in June 2014. In the meantime, I’m doing the preparatory character and story work for The Swan Princess (Legends 3: North). I love all the stages of writing, even revisions, but story preparation is particularly fun because I can let my imagination range as widely as I like. The reining in comes later, when I realize there’s no way I can cram all these ideas into one novel without it ending up longer than War and Peace.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
The genre of my work is pretty broad—historical fiction. My first novel, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, doesn’t even quite meet that requirement. It could be considered a time-travel romance, but it doesn’t involve actual time travel–just a computer game—or a real past, just a fictional one. It’s also very tame by the standards of modern romance. The Golden Lynx and its sequels are genuine historical fiction, but they differ from the rest of their kind by their location—sixteenth-century Russia and the surrounding lands ruled by the descendants of Genghis Khan. I blend real history, slightly altered history, and Turkic mythology in these novels. I use a historical note to deal with the deviations from historical fact and the mythology to reveal characters’ states of mind; I don’t intend the books to be historical fantasy.

3. Why do I write what I do?
I’m a practicing historian, specializing in pre-eighteenth-century Russia. I use the Legends novels as a way to reach people who otherwise have no reason to pick up a book on a place that seems too long-ago and faraway to have any relevance to their lives. If, by reading my novels, people want to find out more about this fascinating time and place where I have spent most of my adult life, so much the better!

4. How does my writing process work?
I use what could be called the modified snowflake method. In the snowflake method, the writer creates a rough outline, which s/he adjusts while writing. After two novels that took forever—because I had no idea where they were going until they got there, so I had to do a ton of rewriting—I have learned to make up an outline and ensure I have a story before I begin writing scenes. I use the exercises in John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story for that purpose. But I am a natural seat-of-the-pants writer who discovers her characters by throwing them into situations and watching them squirm their way out, so five pages into any story, the plot starts veering off in directions I hadn’t anticipated. Even so, the outline helps keep me on track and away from some of the more bizarre side paths.

It’s a modified snowflake method because once I start, I don’t bother to revise the outline beyond plotting out a few particularly thorny chapters. I just keep going and aim to end up more or less where I decided in advance.

Last, my job is to introduce you to the three writers who have agreed to continue the blog challenge.





Ruth Hull Chatlien has been a writer and editor of educational materials for twenty-five years. Her speciality is U.S. and world history. She is the author of Modern American Indian Leaders and has published several short stories and poems in literary magazines. The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte is her first published novel. 








Courtney J. Hall spent her formative years writing mediocre short stories and angst-ridden poetry before turning to novels and finding the critique group that saved her literary life. Her first book, Some Rise By Sin, is historical fiction set at the tumultuous end of Mary Tudor’s reign. Some Rise By Sin will be published through Five Directions Press in mid-2014. Courtney is a member of my writers’ group, so I can promise you that historical romance fans will love Some Rise by Sin.


Pauline Montagna was born into an Italian family in Melbourne, Australia. After obtaining a BA in French, Italian, and History, she indulged her artistic interests through amateur theater while developing her accounting skills through a wide variety of workplaces culminating in the Australian film industry. In her mid-thirties, Pauline returned to university and qualified as a teacher of English as a Second Language, a profession she pursued while completing a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. She has now retired from teaching to concentrate on her writing. As well as The Slave, she has published a short story collection, Suburban Terrors.  


For more on Pauline’s writing, join us for her guest post on May 9, “The Art of the Sword” (Nasan has already set aside a piece of her precious writing paper to take notes).

And once again, many thanks to Gillian Hamer for this opportunity! Talking about writing is almost as much fun as writing itself.

The Writing Process, Mine and Ours

This is my regular blogging day, but not my regular post. Having let Gillian Hamer talk me into joining the Writing Process Blog Hop—okay, she didn’t have to twist my arm: I volunteered before realizing that meant I had to find three volunteers, at which point my eyes got that deer in the headlights look and I began whimpering softly—I committed myself to posting on Monday, March 31. 

Being a Scot and naturally thrawn (which, to quote my mother, is what your friends call you when your enemies call you pigheaded), I would have gone ahead and posted on Friday anyway, except that it was a rough week at work and I haven’t had time to answer the questions. I did manage to find three lovely writers who agreed to continue this exercise. Some of them may now be whimpering in corners, but I’m sure they’ll get over it and find three victims of their own. I’ll announce their names, tell you a bit about them and their books, and link to their blogs on Monday as well.

Meanwhile, for reading on your Friday, may I suggest a post uploaded yesterday by my buddies at Triskele Books onto the Writers & Artists site. “The Rise of the Author Collective” looks at the value of group input in creating great books at all stages of production, from writing through publication and beyond (and mentions Five Directions Press and Writer's Choice, as well as other writers’ cooperatives). If you’re considering a cooperative as an alternative to traditional or self-publishing, you’ll find some good tips here. If not, you’ll be alerted to what we hope will become the next big thing in publishing.

Either way, if you’d like to know more, look for The Triskele Trail, put out by the same group of authors (Gillian Hamer, JJ Marsh, Liza Perrat, and JD Smith). The Kindle version is already available on Amazon.com. A brand new, spiffed-up print version will be out any day.

And please check back Monday for my full “Writing Process” post.

Sworn Sword

Last year, I wrote about changing views toward heroism. James Aitcheson, in my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, tackles the question of the military hero head on. Tancred, the narrator of Aitcheson’s Norman Conquest novels—Sworn Sword, The Splintered Kingdom, and Knights of the Hawk—is a character defined by war. It provides not only his means of subsistence but his identity, his reason for being. When a raid leads to the death of the lord Tancred has sworn to protect with his life, that loss jeopardizes his place in medieval society.

In that earlier post I traced a trajectory from the heroism of Beowulf, intensely individualistic and focused on the grand gesture that will lead to immortality—a system in which glory and vengeance make the inevitability of death worthwhile—to the esprit de corps of career soldiers. Tancred is, as one might expect, midway along that trajectory: he wants to avenge his fallen lord, yet the demands of knighthood send him, at least for a while, along a different path. He glories in battle but fights as part of a group, not as one heroic individual against a monstrous or magical foe. He questions the need to kill without avoiding the practice of killing. He fights to defend his lord and his fellow soldiers as well as himself. He is an independent person, a leader, but also a sworn sword. These tensions make him an interesting character, one worth following—even for me, a person more likely to pick up a good cozy or a smart, funny romance than a book about armies.

James and I talked about other things, too, including what it’s like to switch hats from historian to historical novelist and about the real Norman Conquest, the one that followed the Battle of Hastings and tends to get left out of the schoolbooks. It’s a good interview, and it’s free, so give it a listen. You won’t regret it.

And best of all, no smallpox. Even the laryngitis is gone. Maybe all the warriors scared it away.

Although the podcasts are free, the New Books Network has bills to pay. The hosts are a group of dedicated volunteers, but the server space and equipment cost money. One way you can help out at no cost to yourself is to click on this link just before you plan to buy something at Amazon.com, then choose a department from the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the page. If you bookmark the page, you’ll be able to find it even after this blog post rolls out of sight. And we will appreciate it!

The rest of this post comes from the NBHF site.

The chivalric society of medieval Europe resembled a pyramid, with each man sworn to serve the lord above him in a social hierarchy that reached up to the king. A warrior without a lord had no future, no means of support, no identity. So when Tancred, a Breton knight sworn to defend the newly appointed earl of Northumbria, loses his lord in an English raid, the loss not only deprives him of a leader as close as a father but threatens his entire sense of himself.

No matter that Tancred is away on another mission when the raid begins, that he fights nobly to defend his embattled lord, that he loses his sweetheart and almost his life in the raid. He has broken his oath, despite his best efforts, and no other lord trusts him to fulfill the terms of his service.

It is England in 1069, three years after the Battle of Hastings, and Tancred is fighting for the Norman invaders in hostile territory, where the English forces have rallied under the leadership of Edgar, the last Saxon prince. The earl of Northumbria and most of the two thousand knights under his command are the first casualties in what will become England’s last attempt to throw off a successful invader.

As James Aitcheson reminds us in this month’s interview, the grand battle that makes it into the history books marks only the turning point in any invasion. And although it has become a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, the Norman Conquest has traditionally been one area where that adage does not apply. Sworn Sword and its sequels reveal the other side of a familiar story through the eyes of victors who do not yet know whether they will win or lose.

Writer’s Choice

If you have been following this blog, you already know that Five Directions Press is not the only writers’ cooperative in publishing today. Indeed, when authors confront the array of tasks associated with self-publishing—editing, cover design, typesetting, marketing, and the general need to produce and upload files in multiple formats—it would be astonishing if people did not seek out like-minded and amenable souls to share the journey. I discovered Triskele Books—a group of writers living in the UK, France, and Switzerland—on GoodReads, the Internet book club, and engaged in a blog conversation with them last year. Their “how we did it” guide, The Triskele Trail, is available on Kindle and will soon be revised for print. If you think you might like to start your own cooperative, The Triskele Trail offers lots of useful information on what does and doesn’t work.

As a sign that this is indeed part of a broader trend, Joel Friedlander, whose The Book Designer should be on every self- and small-group-published author’s blog list, hosted an article on cooperatives by Jordan Rosenfeld a few months ago. It provoked a lot of comments and not a little interest among readers.

Just recently, I came across another coop, also through GoodReads. This one is Writer’s Choice, based in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Like Five Directions Press and Triskele Books, Writer’s Choice grew out of a critique group—in their case online—at the point where the writers involved had full novels that were getting good responses from agents and editors but, for one reason or another, no contracts. So they banded together and decided to take advantage of the new publishing environment. For the moment, they have three authors, each with a book in print, and more on the way.



G. J. Berger, South of Burnt Rocks—West of the Moon
Chosen as Best Published Historical fiction of 2012 by San Diego Book Awards, winner of the BRAG Medallion.



After three great wars, Rome has crushed Carthage. Now the undefended riches of Iberia beckon—gold, tin, olives, wine, and healthy young bodies to enslave.

Lavena, last child of the strongest remaining Iberian tribal leader, confronts the Romans who plunder and loot her land, at times helped only by her father’s favorite dog and a special horse. Guided by spirits of earth and sky, she strives to unite her people and oust the Roman menace. Based on real characters, places, and events, South of Burnt Rocks recreates that shadowy history—and eternal human nature rubbed raw.


P.D.R. Lindsay, Tizzie
 
There’s no slavery in the Yorkshire Dales—not in 1887, not ever. But loving families use artful schemes to enslave the innocent. Twenty-nine-year-old Tizzie is such an innocent. She has worked herself down to skin and bones as a dairymaid on the farm of her dear brother, his Scottish wife, and their three boys and one girl—Agnes.

Expert at many things, though not in spotting conniving entrapment, Tizzie longs to see young Agnes escape her own spinster fate. In trying to help Agnes find an education and avoid a life of drudgery in their male-dominated world, Tizzie begins at last to suspect her family’s treachery.

Soon she discovers it plans to enslave and use up Agnes, too.  With only her wits to guide her, Tizzie tries to right years of wrongs and set Agnes free.


Sharon Robards, Unforgivable (2014)
Bestselling author of A Woman Transported

Australia, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Sylvia, without a husband to legitimize her pregnancy, has no choice but to wait for the birth of her child in St. Joseph’s Hospital, managed by the Sisters of St. Anthony on behalf of the Catholic Church. No girl has ever walked out the front gate without leaving behind her baby. Sylvia intends to become the first.

In the great religious and social upheaval brought on by Vatican II, amid a thriving adoption industry driven by society’s fierce disapproval of unmarried mothers, a determined teenager battles with the nuns to save her child.




And on a different topic, I’m happy to report that my interview with James Aitcheson (Sworn Sword, The Splintered Kingdom, and Knights of the Hawk) went off without a hitch—or a cough. So stay tuned for the link to that podcast, which should be live by the middle of next week.

The Wonders of Wikipedia

After two years of running circles around me, The Winged Horse is finally off my desk and whinnying at my long-suffering beta readers. With any luck, they won’t find too much wrong with it, meaning that I can unleash it on the world in June as planned.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning on Legends 3, The Swan Princess. It’s a huge, soggy mess at the moment, little more than a bunch of disconnected ideas, half of them tossed up by my subconscious for reasons that remain unclear. So when not pushing myself to complete the exercises in John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, my go-to book for the beginning of any novel, I’m doing research. This is not the kind of in-depth, years-long research I use in writing history—although my mix includes books written by scholars, and even books written in Russian by scholars. Instead, it’s research to spark the imagination, to woo balky characters and tame a plot that threatens to have more branches than a holly bush, some of them every bit as prickly.

And my preferred site for that kind of research, or indeed any kind of research that is at a quick and dirty beginner level? Wikipedia.

Among scholars, such an admission is, shall we say, frowned-upon. And it’s true: Wikipedia articles can only skim the surface of their subjects and sometimes contain errors, despite higher standards imposed in recent years and enforced by the input of dedicated page editors. Even the Russian version, Vikipediia, which tends to have longer and fuller entries on the kinds of obscure topics that interest me—Islam-Girei Sultan of Crimea, the Venerable Trifon of Pechenga, the fortress of Ivangorod (Sebezh), and so on—can go only so deep.

But as a place to start, Wikipedia is marvelous. Most entries have pictures, public domain or Creative Commons, and maps and links to other, more informative sources. The entry for the Pechenga Monastery (where, readers of The Golden Lynx will remember, a certain character has been exiled to ponder his sins) led me to a small book in English, hosted on the digital Internet Archive, not only describing what remained of the monastery in the late nineteenth century and what was still known about its history but also recording legends associated with the monks themselves, including its founder, Trifon. It would be going too far to say that Trifon’s legend is historically accurate, but it is historically attested. And since I’m writing a novel, not a history, historically attested is more than good enough for me.

In other cases, a brief survey of current information addresses my needs. This tends to be particularly true of medical, geographical, and biological information. A list of symptoms, a map showing the range of a particular type of plant or animal, a description of topographical or species characteristics, even dates and the spelling of a name in Russian or Tatar can be invaluable. I go online, read the entry, print it if necessary, and I’m back in my scene. Even for work, if I’m checking the spelling of a name or the date when some event happened, Wikipedia is most likely to have the information I need readily accessible, front and center.

Last but not least, those pictures are precious. I’d love to visit Pechenga, but the chances of that are small. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons, I have at least an idea of what my antagonist may see as he gets ready to wipe the ice of the monastery from his fictional feet. I have downloaded views of the Sura River, Tatar dogs, flags and banners, ancient fortresses, flowers and animals, shamans and their instruments, and much, much more. All these enrich my understanding of the world my characters inhabit, even if they do not appear on my blog or on the covers of my books.

So let’s hear it for Wikipedia. It’s an example of the Internet at its most creative.  And even if you don’t choose, as I do, to support the site during its annual fund-raising campaigns, it’s a project worth celebrating.

Speaking of images, Photos.com, which I mentioned in a long-ago post, “Images, Images Everywhere,” is closing down as of March 10, 2014. The site owners will move existing accounts, including any unpurchased downloads, over to ThinkStock, owned by Getty Images as is Photos.com. Unfortunately—and perhaps not coincidentally—ThinkStock prices its images appreciably higher, at the same level as Shutterstock. So Photos.com is no longer a mid-level solution.



Maybe something else will come along to replace it. We can hope, right?



Konstantin Korovin, St. Trifon’s Brook, Pechenga (1894)
From Wikimedia Commons
This picture is in the public domain because of its age.

Bumps in the Road

Last week, I posted about Jessica Brockmole’s Letters from Skye . What I didn’t want to write there, because it would have taken away from her wonderful book, was that I spent the entire interview praying that I would make it through without collapsing in a coughing fit that would have done a tubercular nineteenth-century literary heroine proud. I almost made it, too. Forty minutes in, and not so much as a tickle. Then all hell broke loose. Poor Jessica—stuck on the other end of the line while her interviewer gasped for air.

I suppose it was fitting, in its own weird way, that I should be suffering from a chest cold on the day scheduled for my virtual trip to the Isle of Skye. Skye is—or was, the last time I visited it in reality—the kind of place that prides itself on thatched crofts heated only by peat fires and drafty castles perched on crags, a place where fishermen down oatmeal with salt, not sugar, and their wives take time away from doing the laundry by hand to walk the hills in a gray drizzle. On Skye, everything closes on Sunday, even the ferry and the bus, and when car meets sheep, the driver had better be prepared to throw the gears into reverse.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Skye. The island is beautiful, wild, and surprisingly remote for a place within sight of the mainland; it exists in its own temporal dimension, like Avalon of legend. And it comes through, with remarkable clarity and richness, in Letters from Skye. You can get a hint of the place in that gorgeous book cover. So, too, do Edinburgh—a city of such architectural harmony that it can give even Skye a run for its money—and the flat-as-proverbial-pancake prairies of the North American Midwest. Jessica has spent time in all these places, and to populate them she creates a set of characters who will stay with you long after you set aside their letters and move on to other books.

Jessica is great in this interview. But just about everything else about that morning was an exercise in Murphy’s Law. We persevered through the thunderstorm that no one in the local media had bothered to forecast (it sounded as if it broke right over my roof). I managed to head off my first bout of coughing; the New Books Network editor has removed all traces of the second, severe enough to wring a meow of concern from my Siamese cat. Do interviewers on NPR disappear for minutes at a time into what sounded even to me like a recurrence of last year’s bout with whooping cough?

Maybe they do, and we just don’t hear them. The audio equivalent of Photoshop has much to recommend it. Meanwhile, my belt marking “everything that can go wrong in an interview” has acquired another notch.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It was a fun and informative conversation despite the hiccups (and whoops), and the more mistakes I make, the less I worry about making another one. Not that I could have avoided this one, having already taken all the medicine I could find, but the point is the same.

If you happened to catch the interview before the editing took place (yes, thanks to a communications glitch, that happened, too), just download it again. It’s fixed now.

So a big thank you to Jessica, for grace under fire. And here’s hoping that my next destination arrives virus-free. Although the Norman Conquest sounds like an even less accommodating location than Skye. Maybe I’d better get a smallpox booster, just in case....

The Power of Letters

Most of the time, I don’t think of myself as old. In chronological terms I’m not—not yet, although the invitations to join the AARP have begun arriving in the mail. But by the standards of the technological dynamo that is the Internet, I am a dinosaur. I can remember a time when trans-Atlantic calls were reserved for death and disaster notifications. I scrawl best wishes by hand on my Christmas cards, even if time constraints and the sheer number of cards restricts me to a line or two. Those preprinted family news updates are not for me, however much I enjoy reading them from others. I feel awkward if I don’t acknowledge gifts with handwritten notes. And although I much prefer e-mail for its immediacy and its brevity, I have been known to send letters to elderly relatives—typed, these days, not written longhand, but I have many longhand letters in my past.

So the world depicted in Letters from Skye, the subject of my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, is not as alien to me as I expect it is to many readers. The idea that two individuals living thousands of miles apart, communicating through paper and ink, can move from respectful distance to friendship to love—buoyed only by the power of words—seems less strange than the idea that two people can form a lasting relationship on eHarmony.com. Letters, in a way, offer the perfect vehicle for romance: a combination of distance and intimacy that simultaneously delivers the reality and the illusion of connection. I could say the same of e-mail or social media: how many of those Facebook “friends” can truly be considered friends, even though we feel as if we know them after weeks of shared and liked posts? But the very slowness with which a letter passes from its point of origin to its destination imbues it with a particular charm. The line dashed off in haste must still wait days or weeks for a reply, with all the nail biting and trauma that implies. And what of the writer, who may not match up in reality to the reader’s expectations?

These issues and more form the heart of Letters from Skye, an in-depth and beautifully realized exploration of the power of the written word to pull people together and apart, to realize individual dreams, to cause and resolve family conflicts. Through a series of contrasts—the United States and Scotland, World War I and World War II, mothers and daughters, extrovert versus introvert—Jessica Brockmole weaves a story of burgeoning love and its unexpected consequences, both short- and long-term.

The rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction, where you can download all my interviews for free and subscribe to be notified of updates.

In March 1912, a college student at the University of Illinois takes time away from his usual pursuits—painting the dean’s horse blue, climbing dorm walls with a sack of squirrels, reading Huckleberry Finn—to write a letter to a Scottish poet living on the remote Isle of Skye. As the young man, David Graham, notes in his first paragraph, poetry is not his usual literary fare, but something in this book has touched his soul. A few weeks later, his poet, Elspeth Dunn, responds, initiating a conversation that will flourish as friendship and eventually as romance, with consequences that reach across the first world war and into the next.

To sustain a novel entirely through the exchange of letters poses a challenge to any writer, although the epistolary novel itself has a long tradition: the earliest novels adopted this form. Here David and Elspeth emerge as two distinct personalities, drawn to each other across the cultural divide symbolized by the Atlantic Ocean and the greater divide that propels David to war in France even as Elspeth clings to her island. But it takes the determination of a second generation at war to bring Elspeth and David’s story to its natural conclusion.

In this sparkling debut novel, Jessica Brockmole explores the many layers of connection that bind lovers and family members across the years and through adversity. With its exquisite descriptions of place and its ability to evoke the myth-drenched wildness of the Hebrides, Letters from Skye will pull you into the lives of David, Elspeth, and their families. It’s a journey you will not regret taking.