Emilie Richards's Blog, page 110

Wedding Ring “Quilt Along With” Giveaway

I love the approach of a book launch, even when the book was well and truly launched almost nine years ago. Now Wedding Ring, the first book of the Shenandoah Album series, is about to be re-launched on March 26th,  in a new format and with a brand new cover.

Recently I blogged about the way Wedding Ring and eventually, the entire Shenandoah Album series came about. When I began, I had no idea that a series would be born, or that Leisure Arts, a leading craft publisher, would be interested in creating pattern books based on the quilts mentioned in each of  the novels in the series.

I was skeptical when I heard about the offer. Leisure Arts likes to call their books “leaflets” and I had a vision of a page that opened like a map, with a few diagrams and a list of materials. Little did I know that they would be creating a softcover book, with quotes from my novels, breathtaking original and traditional patterns to match my descriptions, and beautifully rendered photographs. I was so thrilled when I saw the finished product. May I say that authors are NOT always thrilled with finished products, but this time, I certainly was.

Now Mira Books, my publisher, is reissuing Wedding Ring, and to celebrate I’ll be doing a pattern book giveaway to go with it. Read on.

How much do the Shenandoah Album books have to do with quilts, quilting, quilters? If you’re not a fan of any of those things, then the question is relevant. Might you enjoy the series anyway?

First and foremost each of the novels is about women, their lives, their relationships, the issues they confront, their joys and their sorrows. Sound familiar? Yes, they’re like my other novels, only this time wrapped in the comfort and beauty of quilts.

Wedding Ring uses an old tattered quilt as a metaphor for marriage.

In the second book, Endless Chain, a major character is befriended by a church quilt group who teaches her to quilt. The quilt pattern she chooses is symbolic of her own dramatic life story.

In the third, Lover’s Knot, a man inherits a quilt that might reveal the secrets of his family, a family he’s never known, but only if he allows his estranged wife to follow the clues.

The fourth, Touching Stars, is about the single mom proprietor of a B&B who uses star quilts to adorn her inn.

The fifth, Sister’s Choice, features a quilt that was given by one sister to another to help her see her destiny, and a new generation whose own destiny is in question.

Intrigued, quilter or not?  I hope so.

To celebrate the return of the first three novels in the series to print, I’ll be giving away autographed copies of the matching pattern books, four patterns books for each novel, one per week. To qualify for the pattern book giveaway, just comment on this blog or any of the blogs under the category Shenandoah Album Series on the right, and tell us why you like quilts, or what you like about them, or even why you don’t like them.

If you don’t quilt and don’t need the pattern book for yourself, your local quilt guild, museum or charity will be thrilled to have it, as would any friend who quilts or even your local library.

Here are the details:  Only one comment per person will be entered. You must have a North American address to qualify. (Sadly the pattern books are too heavy to send overseas.) Your entry will remain valid for the entire length of the contest or until you win a book. The first pattern book will be given away next Tuesday.

So let us hear from you by commenting. I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Inspiration: An Irish Blessing

Emilie in Western Ireland

Dear Lord,

Give me a few friends

who will love me for what I am,

and keep ever burning

before my vagrant steps

the kindly light of hope…

And though I come not within sight

of the castle of my dreams,

teach me to be thankful for life,

and for time’s olden memories

that are good and sweet.

And may the evening’s twilight

find me gentle still.

Like so many Americans, I have a fair amount of Irish blood flowing through my veins, and on St. Patrick’s day it always does a jig.  My husband and I have been to Ireland twice as I did research for Whiskey Island and The Parting Glass, and the entire country had a familiar feel, as if everyone I met was a distant relatives and the land was home.  What marvelous story tellers we met.  I like to think that’s where at least some of my love of writing came from.

Whether you are Irish or not, I wish you the blessings of this prayer.

The Write Way: When Drama Becomes Melodrama.

I am an unabashed fan of Les Miserables, the show and the movie. I suspect I would like the book, as well, although having picked it up at Books-A-Million yesterday, I realized I would need a camel caravan to carry it home. But Les Mis (and The Christmas Carol) are productions I never miss in any form.

Why those two? That’s another blog.

Recently I had the treat of seeing both the movie and the touring company of Les Mis within the same month. While neither were perfect, both were outstanding in their own ways. I found myself distracted, though, by the overdramatization of the stage version. Hence, the subject of melodrama vs. plain old-fashioned drama.

Dictionary.com defines melodrama as: A dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization.

Just as written the musical Les Mis borders on melodrama. Fantine’s fall from grace into prostitution, Jean Valjean’s heroic attempts to become a better man, the barricades where the best and brightest give their lives for very little. These are huge, sweeping events, and in any audience at any time you will hear the zippers and clasps of handbags as women rummage for tissues for themselves and their male companions. The music is so stirring, the melodies so easy to hum, the staging is so . . .

And that’s where the distractions occurred for me.

Let’s clear the air first. Melodrama is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is. Melodrama is like cotton candy. It’s so wonderful going down, but in the end, if it weren’t for sticky fingers, you wouldn’t be sure you really ate it. There’s nothing left, not even a lingering taste on the tongue.

Compare that with chocolate mousse?

The difference is substance, that sense that the world has changed when you leave the theater, that notion that you have changed, too, and will do something different from now on, be something different. (Whether that comes to pass or not.)

The production I saw billed itself proudly as more dramatic than previous versions of Les Mis. And they were right. At times this production stepped over my personal line into melodrama, pushing the tempo to a speed where the words lost meaning, asking fabulous performers to shout their lines so the musicality was lost.

The difference was particularly highlighted for me in one of my favorites, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” The first time I saw Les Mis Marius, the lone barricade survivor, goes back to the now empty room where he and his friends plotted their rebellion, and he laments their passing. At the very end of the song the friends appear in the background, and we know by their brief appearance that their ghosts will always haunt him.

Dramatic, yes! Melodramatic? No, because the song established Marius’s character, the loss he would never forget, his own ambivalence about his survival. The friends were part of that, a ghostly presence in his life.

The latest version placed Marius on an empty stage lit with candles. No chairs, no tables. The friends enter early, all carrying candles, and as the music builds (too much so that the lovely melody was overwhelmed) they dash wildly off stage.

Melodrama. I lost the flavor of the scene, Marius’s regrets, the familiar setting that was so necessary to the words of the song. By overly dramatizing the scene and not letting the story and music carry it, the power disappeared.

As novelists, no matter what kinds of books we write, we have to ask ourselves what we want our readers to take away. Do we want to bludgeon them with emotion, story, the sweeping grandeur of history? Or do we want them to fill in some of the blanks, reach within themselves to find meaning they will remember, be so stirred by the power of simplicity they will never forget what we have written?

That line is not always easy to find. But knowing there is a line and taking it into account means we’re halfway there.

Sunday Inspiration: “The Ebb and Flow of Life”

“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid that it will never return.

We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity…

Intermittency—an impossible lesson for human beings to learn…

Perhaps this is the most important thing: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid….

One must accept the security of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”

These words by Anne Morrow Lindbergh might help during times of transition, change, and crisis.  They are reminders that life is constantly changing, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but our challenge is to have faith in the journey.  Where are you now in the ebb and flow of your life?

Making Muckles Out of Mickles or Why Mira is reissuing the Shenandoah Album Novels

What are Muckles and Mickles you say and what in the world do they have to do with Emilie’s novels?

What, have you no Scots blood–as do many people in the Shenandoah Valley?  ”Many a mickle makes a muckle,” means that if you carefully accumulate many little things, you’ll end up with something larger and better.  And truthfully, I found this smile-worthy expression on the internet, not in an old family diary from my distant Ross family ancestors, but do we care?

So what do mickles and muckles have to do with the reissuing of the first three novels in my Shenandoah Album series?  Well, you see, the letters and emails you sent my publisher asking for more books in the series are the mickles, and they seem to have created a muckle (not to be confused with muggles, because I am not J.K. Rowling.).  We haven’t quite achieved lift-off on a new addition to the series, but the fact that the first three books are coming out in new and exciting trade paperback editions is, quite probably, due to all that mail.

Now, nobody’s told me this is why, but that’s not the kind of thing they WOULD tell me.  Publishers keep secrets almost as well as politicians do.  Still, Wedding Ring, Endless Chain, and Lover’s Knot with their lovely new covers, lovelier larger print, and loveliest price yet, ($7.99 at Amazon, for example) are a joy and a step in the right direction.

Do you remember how the Shenandoah Album series got its start?   I was writing all the time and had very little time to quilt.  One day it occurred to me that at the very least, if I couldn’t find time to finish the quilt in progress, at least I could write about quilts, quilters and quilting.  I decided to write a novel that used a vintage Wedding Ring quilt as a way to bring three generations of women together.  And since it was a Wedding Ring quilt, clearly the theme had to be marriage.

Intrigued?  I hope so, because I am so proud of this book and the four that followed, just as I’m proud of you for making your wishes known.

Wedding Ring comes out at the end of this month, Endless Chain in April, Lover’s Knot in May.  I hope you’ll buy and read them, if you haven’t already, or choose one or all as a gift for a friend.  They’ll make perfect Secret Santa gifts to stow away for Christmas, or thank you gifts for a friend who loves to read.

Do you have to like quilts to enjoy this series?  Quilts bind the books together in one way or another, but these,  like all my stories, are really about the lives of women.  Wedding Ring is about mothers and daughters, about growing old, about the different stages of marriage, about overcoming grief, about finding love when you had expected never to find it again.

I hope enough people will find the reissues and buy them that my publisher’s ears will perk up as they did at your mail.  Perky-eared publishers are the best kind.  And there’s at least one more book to add to this series.

If you are so inclined you can preorder Wedding Ring at:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Books-A-Million

Indiebound

Sunday Inspiration: A New Doorway

Welcome to the first Sunday Inspiration blog.  While during the past  two years I’ve thoroughly enjoyed finding poetry for you to enjoy on Sundays, I feel a need to branch out to other writings now. So while there will sometimes be poetry in this space, my Sunday blogs will broaden a bit to concentrate on illumination and encouragment.

Merriam-Webster calls “inspiration: “the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions.”  Many of us start or end our weeks in churches, where we receive inspiration to help us through the coming week or to help us make sense of the past one.  So many people have uttered or written so many wonderful things to help with that.  I look forward to finding and sharing those thoughts with you in the coming months.

I’ll be aided in this by my husband, who spent forty years in the Unitarian-Universalist ministry discovering myriad sources of inspiration and sharing them with the many people he worked with.  Who better than to inspire me?

I can’t think of a better quote to start with than Helen Keller’s, whose life was surely one of the most inspirational.  Are you pessimistic about upcoming events in your life, or will you struggle to find a way to use them to “sail to uncharted land?”

Let’s take that journey together.  Please feel free to share your thoughts by commenting here.

The lovely graphic with this quote comes from a website I discovered, The Quote Factory.  You can download their quotes and graphics as posters, so enjoy. You’ll be seeing many more of their quotes here, and I thank them for this valuable, uplifting resource.  

Don’t forget, too, that I have a board at Pinterest titled Wisdom of the Goddesses, which are thoughts the women who call themselves the Goddesses Anonymous  in my new series would find inspirational and helpful, and you will, too.  I’ll be adding these quotes to the board whenever I can.

Bake Me a Novel: Homemade Bread and the Writing Process

It’s not unusual to find me in the kitchen baking something or other. There I was again yesterday, preparing to make bread while I considered what to write about for my next blog.

Bread baking is a weekly ritual in my house, and I often use the time to think about my next writing project. As I was taking ingredients off the shelf and deciding which to use this week and which to save, I realized, as I did a few years ago, how many similarities there are in creating a delicious loaf of bread and a fabulous story.

Let’s face it, we bloggers have to take ideas wherever we can get them, right? Luckily the similarities are real, so here they are. As a side note, if you’re interested in my bread recipe, you’ll find it right here, in the blog where this idea first came into being. I’ll warn you by the time I’m done with my bread, it only vaguely resembles this basic version. Read on to see why.

Yeast: A loaf of bread begins with yeast, and a novel or story begin with an  idea.  All must be fresh.  All must be powerful enough that the bread (story) will expand into a pleasing finished story. Without good quality yeast, you inevitably have a flop on your hands.





Ingredients:  Every loaf of bread or novel require a vast variety of ingredients so that each project is sufficiently different from the last one to be fascinating as well as filling.  Ingredients must be be good quality and fresh, and the more organic and sustaining they are, the better the bread or novel.





Recipe:  While deviation from a set recipe is always encouraged to make bread (or novels) interesting, knowing a basic recipe and practicing basics first, are sure-fire techniques to becoming an excellent breadmaker or writer.  You can’t wing the creative process until you know what elements ought to be included and what instructions really need to be followed.





Patience: Mixing, kneading, rising, etc. take time, and rushing them results in a loaf of bread which isn’t pleasing to look at or to eat.  Creating a story page by page takes energy, commitment and endless amounts of patience.  If you’ve measured ingredients incorrectly, overheated the dough, or committed any number of errors, you have to toss out what you’ve done and start again.  In the writing world we call this revising, cutting and editing.





Baking: Finding the right temperature, the right place in the oven, the right pans, all make a difference for a great loaf of bread, just as finding the right setting, the right amount of suspense or romance (heat), the right genre or category for your novel, will make a huge difference in your success.





Eating:  Homemade bread straight out of the oven is as hard to resist as a wonderfully told story.  Hopefully the reader will come to the second with the same amount of enthusiasm and anticipation as the lucky recipient of a loaf of warm whole wheat chock full of sunflower seeds and dried apricots.

Neither baking bread nor writing a novel are for sissies, but both end products are worth the effort.

Bon appetite and happy reading.

Sunday Poetry: “There’s no end to the joy of climbing into bed…”

[image error]Welcome to Sunday Poetry. If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday poetry blogs here.

Did you know that the Poetry Society of America recently announced that Robert Bly is the 2013 recipient of the organization’s highest award, the Frost Medal?  Like Robert Frost, Bly writes poetry that celebrates how extraordinary the ordinary moments of life can be.

In this poem, “Climbing Into Bed,” he reminds us that bedtime should not be taken for granted, especially on chilly nights.  Don’t forget this poem when you climb into bed tonight.

Remember, we read poetry together here for the pure pleasure of the experience. There are no quizzes, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share. Absolutely no dissecting allowed. Just come along for the “read.” What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week? If you’d like to tell us where the poem took you? We’ll listen.

Cottage Renovations: When the North Wind Blows

If you’re following the renovation of our cottage in Western New York, I have some new photos to enjoy.  And I say “enjoy” because you will enjoy knowing this is not YOUR house and you don’t have to worry about what’s happening when you are many states away.

The truth, though, is that I was supposed to go to Chautauqua this month and see the progress.  Instead I persuaded my patient architect to just keep me updated by phone and photos so I could enjoy Florida weather and not drive on ice and snow.  So far it’s working.

The project is finally going full steam ahead.  Here are some of the highlights. (?)

If you’ve been following, you might remember what our kitchen looked like.  There’s a photo here.  Just scroll down to the end of that post.  Here’s the demolition:

Right now it’s been gutted, but that wall on the left will (or already has) disappeared making this one larger room. Not a pretty sight. . . yet.

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There, we’re making progress. That “box” to the right is part of the stairwell which will disappear because the stairs have been reconfigured. We’ll have a seamless ceiling.  We hope.

 

And here’s a closeup of the stairs and the former fridge residence. That will all disappear, along with the wall to the left. Shelves to the right were added after we moved in (a former broom closet) because there was absolutely no place to store food or dishes. I like it and asked them to leave it there. My architect’s assistant thinks I’m nuts.

I’m not quite sure what wall this is, but I believe it’s the one that came down in the kitchen. Look what was under the wallboard. Glad they documented this wallpaper for me.

Remember all the squirrel problems? Here’s what we’re doing about them. This is spray foam insulation to fill in all the gaps.

And here’s what the attic looks like now that the insulation is finished. Take that furry beasties!

So that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.  Tune in next time.  Eventually you will be able to tell there’s real progress building up instead of tearing down.

You Oughta Be “at” the Pictures

The Oscars are coming. On Saturday night, in fact. You probably already know that unless you haven’t watched television in months or read the paper or checked the Internet. We’ve already had the Golden Globes and the Screen Actor’s Guild awards. The Oscars may feel anticlimactic about now, but hang in there. This year there are real choices and good ones.

I’ll confess I rarely go to the movies. Or rather I rarely DID. Then in the fall we moved ten minutes away from a wonderful theater with stadium seating, wide aisles, comfy chairs and discounted rates on Tuesday evenings. That coincided nicely with a surprising trend. Suddenly there were movies I actually wanted to see. Not Comic Book 3, Return of the Bad Guy, but original films, with more happening than car chases (in or out of outer space) or heroes with superpowers fighting villains with superpowers.

2012, though, saw a resurgence of beautifully filmed and acted dramas and musicals. I’ve been mesmerized. And now some of my favorite films of the year will be butting heads at the Academy Awards ceremonies.

I haven’t seen them all, but here are my thoughts. Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis was breathtaking. From the moment he came on screen Daniel Day-Lewis WAS Lincoln. The dialogue, the costumes, the acting, the cinematography were magnificent. Really, how could it get any better?

Well, wait. Les Miserables with Hugh Jackman was breathtaking. (Yes, I already used that word, I know.) I am a confirmed Les Mis addict. I never grow tired of the story or the music. In fact I’ll see it on the stage (again) next month. But the movie was extraordinary. (New adjective.) While not everyone agrees, I thought it was brilliant (keeping count?) to film the real actors singing the roles at that actual moment and not dubbing in voices, even theirs. This was real time performance, and while not one of the actors had a Broadway quality voice–whether they’ve sung on Broadway or not–they had real voices (far better than most of us real folks singing in the shower) and the emotion carried the day.

Then I went to see Argo. I really didn’t expect Argo to be great. Good, yes. But wow, what a ride. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire second half. And yes, I was pretty sure I knew how it was going to end. But, you know, the filmmaker might have had a different view of this event than my memory provided. Who knew exactly how the ending had come about? My paltry grasp of Iranian hostage history went skittling out the door and I was putty in the hands of Ben Affleck, the director.

I’ll see two more of the films before Saturday. We’ve just rented the DVD of Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Tuesday we hope to see Zero Dark Thirty. I read Silver Linings Playbook and only just liked it, so I’m waiting for the DVD. I will have missed Life of Pi (which gets superb reviews), Django Unchained (I don’t do Quentin Tarantino) and Amour, which is 45 minutes across town and terribly sad.  My time was limited and I chose the films I most wanted to see.

So what does a novelist get from watching such fine films? Besides hours of quality entertainment?  I can tell you what I’ve gotten.

An appreciation for the power of storytelling.
An appreciation for quickly creating memorable characters.
An appreciation for editing.
An appreciation for the value of creating suspense by doing all the above well.

So which movie should win the Best Picture?  My vote would go to Les Mis, simply because of the breadth and power of the story which was so well captured in the film.  But I won’t be surprised or disappointed if I’m wrong.

What about you?