Sophia's Sofa Chat- A Visit With Abigail

I am in the mood to walk down and visit our local Fountain Park—where the heart of our community is located. I know my latest guest will have no trouble finding me. Our community fountain is huginormous and can be seen from the main road easily just beyond the library and the bike path, so here I wait for her.

The fountain in Fountain Park

Do you ever think back about your first encounter with the folks you know? I love how each of my sofa chats encourages me to do that.
My latest guest did me the honor of joining a group I formed here on GoodReads—Austenesque Lovers TBR Reading Challenge.
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Don’t let the group name fool you. We do a bit of reading challenging and a lot of book and movie talk and recommending. And yep, I realize that sort of defeats the purpose, but hey, a good time is had by all.

Anyhoots, she has been with the group from nearly the beginning. Her keen insights on books and wit along with encouragement to others and interaction in the group particularly impressed me. Then, how exciting is this, we both had our short stories printed together in an anthology, Sun-Kissed: Effusions of Summer. That added to my respect and knowledge so that I decided I would adore to know her in real life. Without further ado…

Abigail! Hi! Uh-oh! Watch out for the cyclist. Yikes that was close. Hey lady! Good to see you. How was your summer?
It’s such a pleasure to be able to meet you at last, Sophia! We have this mutual-admiration-society thing going on: I’ve always loved your boundless enthusiasm and energy for reading and writing, as well as the positivity you’ve brought to the Austenesque Lovers group on Goodreads. (Not to mention your fabulous story in Sun-Kissed; I think it was everyone’s favorite in the collection.) The Austenesque Lovers group is always my favorite stop on the Web! The past year has been a bumpy one for me in the real world, and the community of readers has been a lifeline. I have found our group quite the pick-me-up as well. Great group of encouragers!

Southeast Michigan in September is still hot and humid so enjoy the spray off the water here in the shade. We can snag an ice cream treat from the Good Humor wagon that comes through the park on his rounds.
It’s fun to be here in Michigan while the weather is still warm. You know what Mark Twain said about the Bay Area, where I live: the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Oh yes, I do remember that tricksy quality about Bay Area weather. I always knew that if I was melting over in the Valley that I could slip through the Coastal Mountains and it was a whole new climate on the coast. :)

Hope you don’t mind meeting up at Fountain Park. It’s one of my favorite places to pass through on my walks and of course the trips to the library right over there next to the old Heritage buildings and museum.
What about you? Do you have a favorite lovely place locally where you live that you frequent?

My sweetie and I both haunt a wonderful gift to our neighborhood called the Wave Garden. A homeowner had a vacant lot in front of his house; if anyone had built on it, it would have spoiled his view. So he bought the lot and had a landscape designer create a beautiful garden there—which he then left open for anyone to enjoy! I go there whenever I need to remind myself of the fundamental goodness of others.

picture from The Wave Garden webpage: The Wave Garden: http://www.gardenvisit.com/gardens/wa...

I know you live in Northern California’s Bay Area. I’m generally familiar with the region and spent some time there since I grew up just northeast of Sacramento. I hope to return for a visit someday.
Have you always lived there?
I am a recent escapee from Los Angeles—good move!

What are some of the places that make the Bay Area special for you? Best place to dine?
I love being in a spot where, in half an hour, I can either sample the excitement of a sophisticated city or lose myself in wilderness. I can take a ferry to the Embarcadero and indulge my inner gourmande at the Ferry Building, or wallow in the sublime on the Marin Headlands, or pop over to the Point Isabel dog park (the largest off-leash dog park in the country) for some serious canine therapy.

Ferry Building picture from travel all together webpage


Marin Headlands picture from VisitMarin.org page


The Bay Area also has a gift for repurposing structures from its industrial past to create vibrant public spaces. Just the other day, more than 2,000 people came together at an old Ford plant in Point Richmond that has been made into a public event space: they were all dressed up as Rosie the Riveter to set a new Guinness Book record for most Rosies in one spot. How random is that? It’s an ongoing rivalry with a Michigan city (you might know which),
***From this point on in the interview, the standard print refuses to work (gremlins, I'm sure) and my part in the chat will now be distinguished by italic print. Sorry for that. And now back to our regularly scheduled programing.
Ha! I certainly do. In fact, I just featured in a recent Sofa Chat the Willow Run and the Yankee Air Museum where the Michigan Rosies gather. But ahem, sorry to interrupt.

- and they keep trading the record back and forth.
Rosie the Riveter Challenge: http://richmondstandard.com/2015/09/f...

Picture of the Richmond Rosies courtesy of the Richmond Standard

As to dining, we have an embarrassment of riches in the Bay Area. You have to work to get a bad meal here. Being a little budget-conscious, though, I’ll skip over the Chez Panisses and give a shout-out to a little spot in an office block in Sausalito called Avatars. They serve Himalayan-Mexican fusion food, a mind-bending combo that works really well. And the people are so nice there—they foster a feeling of community. My professions keep me solitary much of the time, so it’s food for the soul to go there.

Well doesn't that blend sound intriguing.
http://www.enjoyavatars.com/

I have a confession to make. Would you believe that about a year and a half ago I was intimidated by you? Don’t laugh! Yes, it’s a fact. I saw your bio here on GR and noted that you are an editor. I have it in my head that editors are people with lovely grammar, are so articulate, and cringe when the rest of us butcher grammar rules. (I said you couldn’t laugh. Okay, well maybe a little so you don’t split in two.) So, anyway…I’m curious. What is it like being an editor? And, what is the grammar rule/s that most makes you feel homicidal when it is broken? I ask this so I know which one not to break and thus preserve my life.

It’s hard for me to imagine anyone being intimidated by a person who, like Miss Bates, finds it a challenge to limit herself to saying only three very dull things indeed! I’m undecided whether the excruciating dullness I suffer from is the result of being a copy editor or what turned me into a copy editor. And there’s a certain nagging-schoolmarm aura that hovers over the profession, for sure. I have to admit that my career was more a matter of inertia than intent: cast upon the world after going to a very old-fashioned girls’ school (grammar and penmanship) and graduating from college as an English major, what was I to do?
I’m not a very doctrinaire editor, though; working for many different publishers, I’ve had to learn not to become attached to one style rule or another. But I do have a pet peeve: I have been known to throw things at the TV when someone tells me that “looks can be deceiving.” “No, they can’t!” screams Abigail. “Looks are passive, and deceiving requires agency! Looks can only be deceptive.” And now we’re back in Miss Bates territory, I’m afraid.

Nonsense. See? I learned something. I am a 'looks can be deceiving' offender. Haha!

Switching gears, a bit, let’s talk about Abigail the reader. I know you love Jane Austen. What other authors make your all-time best list? Have you discovered any fantastic new to you authors or books this year that you can share?

This may be surprising, but I have a secret weakness for authors who overwrite. Michael Chabon is one—the jewels of sentences that fall from his pen! Just perfect. I want to bathe in his sentences. I want to dance clothed in nothing but his words. Also in the overwriting category would be authors who have swallowed the entire Oxford English Dictionary—like J. I. M. Stewart, an English don who also wrote murder mysteries under the name Michael Innes. I always get crushes on men who are smarter than I am, and this passion for too-too writers seems to be a corollary of that.
I’m dorky enough to read poetry sometimes, especially wordy paeans to nature: Pattiann Rogers is a great practitioner of that art. I love her work so much that in my Austenesque novel I have Darcy fall in love with Elizabeth while listening to her reciting a Pattiann Rogers poem. That was a bit of snark, actually: I find Darcy to be a bit of a sap, and I was punishing him for his “I’ve always considered poetry to be the food of love” remark (or however it goes). I would never treat Henry Tilney that way.

I thought your modern Pride and Prejudice retelling, An Obstinate Headstrong Girl, sounded engaging and added it to my wish list right away (still there, sadly, bad Sophia!). When did the germ of this story come to you? What was the process of bringing it from your imagination into print?

An Obstinate, Headstrong Girl was part homage, part exercise for me. I think my years as an editor have left me great at working with another person’s ideas but terrible at originality. I get a vague idea for a novel—a character, a scenario—but don’t know how to plot it out.
So for a first novel I wanted to work within a set framework, and naturally I turned to the Greatest Writer Ever. I set the story in the modern day (not quite present; I didn’t want to have to deal with social media) in order to force myself to think adaptively: Pride and Prejudice relies on a certain social order to drive the plot, and how could the plot be driven if the social order was different? I took the characters as they existed in the original, but they had to find different solutions for different problems because they were living in a different world.

As I worked closely with the text of Pride and Prejudice, though, another challenge arose: for me, the real magic of the book lies not in the characters or storyline but in the language, the exactitude of the words used. This was something I could not reproduce in modern terms. So I came up with the idea of having Jane Austen tell the story herself, as if she had accidentally time-traveled to California in 1999 and then told the story that was already in her head in the new setting.

Okay, that tidbit just made me sit up and pay closer attention. Time traveling Jane is great!

Of course, she did pick up some contemporary vocabulary and her characters speak in more modern language. But the narration is hers alone.

As for bringing it to print, I was hampered by a deep shyness about self-promotion. I approached a couple of agents and a couple of publishers, but didn’t really go to bat for the book. Luckily, I found a small Bay Area publisher who was looking to move from magazine publishing to book publishing. His company had some assets I lacked—a good designer, access to the Ingram distribution channels—and I had something he lacked, copyediting skills. So we made a deal. I underestimated the importance of a professional marketing operation, which is what a more mainstream publisher would have brought to the table. I had the silly notion that simply making the existence of my book known to the community of Austenesque readers would have sufficed to get it read, but I underestimated both the volume of books being churned out in that genre and the discriminating tastes of the readers! I’d say I was out of step with their expectations; mostly they want romantic fiction, and I was offering social comedy.

Yes, I can see how the mood and expectation of the readers affects the books marketability. Personally, I'm a fan of both romance themed and the comedies (which are fewer and farther between).

Now what about The Jane Austen Companion: With a Dictionary of Jane Austen’s Life and Works? How did you come to be part of that team of writers and is it a reference tool for the Austen enthusiast or more for scholars?
You’ll be relieved to hear that my connection with that project is a swiftly told tale! I wrote my undergrad thesis on The Watsons. One day I saw my thesis adviser in the elevator at the publisher where I was working and he said, “You’re just what we need! Come with me.” So I was pulled into a meeting where the book was being planned, and the editors needed someone to produce a Jane Austen dictionary (listing and identifying characters, place-names, literary references, family members, and so on) as an appendix to the critical essays that made up the rest of the book. I was starving, so I did it.
The Companion tried to straddle the worlds of the scholar and the fan, and wound up pleasing neither very much. Some essays are too intimidating and others are too simplistic. My dictionary was intended to be a quick reference, almost a glorified index; but I couldn’t resist putting in a million juicy quotes from the novels, and the editors could bring themselves to take them out again, so it’s a rather heftier project than originally conceived.

This would come in handy, for sure. I'm constantly forgetting names and details.

I loved that you chose to write a mash-up of Sanditon and Pride and Prejudice for your short story in Sun-Kissed. Dashing choice! And I learned so much from your series of posts on the Meryton Press blog highlighting and discussing Austen’s minor works. What draws you to the minor characters, the unfinished novels, and the minor works of Austen?

The Jane Austen of the published novels is very controlled. The plots are believable, the characters function within the boundaries of propriety (more or less), or are punished for straying. But in the unpublished works she really lets her freak flag fly! Crazy people do crazy, sociopathic, outrageous things. These works haven’t been toned down to suit a theoretical audience. I think if I had known Jane Austen personally, at a certain point I would’ve gotten fed up with civility and said, “No, seriously: tell me what you really think.” That’s the minor works in a nutshell—they tell you what she was really thinking.

Oh, tidbit,here. Do you know what I discovered today when looking something up about a character from Sanditon on Wikipedia? Sanditon was originally supposed to be titled The Brothers, but after her death, Jane Austen’s family chose Sanditon as the title. Had to be the Parker brothers, but ahem, back to our interview. ;)

Do you have any works in progress at the moment? If so, care to share about it?
After the Obstinate, Headstrong Girl, I tried to write a contemporary mystery-thriller, but I found I couldn’t scrub Jane Austen’s syntax out of my writing. It just wasn’t working. So there was nothing for me to do but retreat into the past. I’m working on a series of novels that take place in the year 1800 around a small market town in Surrey. Each book has different characters and a different type of story, but with overlaps and connections from book to book. The series is called Darking Hundred, and the first one (I’m about halfway through) is Coldharbour Gentlemen. It’s about a boy who gets mixed up in smuggling. So far at least, none of the stories has a romance element, though one or two center on a marriage.

Uh huh...you had my attention at 'smuggling' .

And final burning curiosity question… Are you going to finish your Austenesque Lovers Reading Challenge Goal for the year? Just teasing!

[Hollow groan] You mean I’m supposed to finish? I’m afraid the TBR list has the last laugh there, because no matter how many I read, it just keeps getting longer. And here I’ve been thinking you were a nice person for starting this group for us Austenesque fans, and really all along you were intent on leading us deeper and deeper into the quicksand. I see it now—you’re a fiend!
But where would we be if we actually did succeed in reading every book we wanted to? Just put me out of my misery if that ever happens!

*snort* You all blame me for everyone's growing TBR piles. Hand to heart- I really intended us all to lessen the pile. Really. Swear. Haha!

Sofa Starters:
Mint or Caramel? Mint in summer, caramel in winter
Heels or flats? Oh, flats; I’m already six feet tall
Elizabeth Elliot or Maria Bertram? Maria Bertram! She’s less annoying, and would be sure to run off with some man before long.
Spring or Autumn? Autumn; I’m on Team Anne [Elliot]
Cat or dog? Dog is my copilot! In fact, I was raised by wolves. Long story.
Beaches or Mountains? Tough one. I grew up with the sound of the sea in my ears, but my dreams were all about becoming John Muir.
Purple or Red? Red. Unless it’s a nice purply blue, like an ultramarine or a Persian blue.

And look at that, we walked along the path and made it right back where we started. Thank you so much for joining me, Abigail. It was a pleasure having you visit, but now I’ll let you get back home and back to your projects. I am honored to have had the opportunity to yak your ear off!

When Abigail is not on GoodReads, here’s where you can find her:
Nowhere else, I’m afraid. GoodReads is my only social medium. Hoping to have a Darking Hundred Web site up sometime next year.