And now for something a little different
My guest blogger today is Phoebe Matthews, one of several thousand…well, okay at least a hundred…authors on the BacklistEbooks email loop. It's a great loop with a lot of good information for authors with backlists trying to wade their way into the deep and sometimes murky waters of self publishing. Along the way, you hear some cool stories too that make anonymous faces seem a little more personal *s* Enjoy.
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When I was very small, and the great-uncles smelled of whiskey and cigars, and the great-aunts gossiped about each other, I heard snippets of stories that were way too fascinating for the ears of children and so my sisters and cousins and I did a lot of pretending to be busy reading in a corner after Sunday dinner at my grandparents' house. The house was, and still is, in Chicago, a three story house built by an ancestor for his young immigrant bride. They were married in the 1870s, and I have a photo of their children sitting on the porch with their 4th of July decorations, 1885. The house is in walking distance from Lincoln Park Zoo. The street's name has been changed but the house is still there, converted into offices for a non-profit.
Over the years I played with the stories, planned to turn them into a long novel, did mountains of research, and then realized the stories weren't a novel, they were snippets of memories. For instance, my grandfather remembered seeing Evelyn Nesbit as the closing act at the vaudeville, swinging out over the audience on a swing with red velvet ropes. Oh yeah, of course she was fully clothed, this was vaudeville, not burlesque. She sat motionless in the swing, and never smiled. "Saddest face I've ever seen," he told me. But Evelyn, once a favorite model of Gibson, later married to a millionaire, had been the center of a scandal that rocked Chicago and left her with no other means of earning a living. All the audience wanted was a chance to see her. They didn't expect talent. (The 1950s movie titled Girl in the Red Velvet Swing starred a very young and gorgeous Joan Collins as Evelyn.)
And there was the cherry bomb story, and stories of the stage door Johnnies and the broken marriages and the screaming fights, all tales to clutter up our young minds.
The stories fit better into novellas. So that's how my Chicago 1890s trilogy started. Could have called it the Gay Nineties, which is what that historical era was once called, but that label would kind of mislead people now. If you watch Coronation Street, well, drag the theme back to Chicago 1890s when the Columbia Exposition opened and all the little boys in the neighborhood first saw and fell madly in love with Lillian Russell, including my great-uncles. The stories were passed down in my family, and then I added fiction to tie them together. Some are true as they stand, some are exaggerated, and some are pure fiction and on pain of painful death at the hands of family members, I won't say which is which.
As for the cover of the first novella, I tried a photo of the house. Everyone in the Loop group said it looked like a murder mystery. So then I searched thru BigStock and there he was, a young man who remarkably resembled ancient photos of one of the great-uncles. I know Marsha doesn't much like this cover, but ohmygod that's Rudy. Right down to the expression. Women went in and out of his life, and I don't think he ever figured out why.
- Phoebe Matthews
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