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Crossing the Pond

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If you know me at all or have read my books, you’ve probably guessed I’m an anglophile. And a pretty rabid one, at that. In my view, the Brits do almost everything better, from TV to accents to cottages to cheese. A glance at my book and DVD collections reveals that my content consumption is heavily weighted toward the UK, so it’s no surprise that, as one friend recently commented, I write with a British accent.

So when my agent, Kimberley Cameron, suggested shopping my orphaned series to a British publisher, I was intrigued. I looked up Severn House online and discovered that they publish in both the UK and the US and market their books to the entire English-speaking world. They actually specialize in picking up orphaned series and mid-list authors—neither of which most US publishers will touch. They’ve been around for over forty years and have more than 600 titles in print, so this is no tiny fly-by-night press. I started to get excited.

Kimberly had me put together a package including the full manuscript of Cyanide with Christie (third volume in the Crime with the Classics series), descriptions of the first two books, and the first chapter and synopsis of the proposed fourth. Within a week of sending this package to Severn, she received an enthusiastic response. They were interested provided I could tighten up the mystery a bit. At this point my response ratcheted up to thrilled.

I did the requested revisions quickly and sent them off, and within another week we had an offer. A wee bit of tweaking and we were ready to proceed to contract. And before that week was out, I had the contract in my inbox. (Contrast this with four months from offer to contract in the case of my original publisher.) Cyanide with Christie is planned to release in November 2018 and Death with Dostoevsky about a year after that. (Contrast this with two years from contract to first book published and 17 months between books 1 and 2.) Now you can color me ECSTATIC.

The contract is signed and in the mail. I look forward to working with a publisher that is responsive, fast, enthusiastic, unafraid of highbrow subject matter (e.g. Dostoevsky), and committed to making my books the best they can be. The fact that Severn House is located in London—and I may have an excuse to visit their offices one day—is pure gravy. Or, shall we say, hard sauce on the plum pudding.

Cheers, mate! I’m crossing the pond!

It’s Release Day!

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Today, July 12, 2016, is the official release day of my debut novel, Arsenic with Austen. They call it a debut because it’s the first book of mine the whole world gets to see, but it’s actually the fifth book I wrote. The road to this day was long and arduous, paved with soaring heights and crashing depths (very Anne Shirley-ish), but we are here at last.

I decided when I was eleven that I wanted to be a novelist. My seventh-grade English teacher gave an assignment to write a story based on a given first paragraph, and I enjoyed it so much I knew that was the way I wanted to spend my life. My first writer idols were Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain.

Life threw me many curve balls over the years, both in terms of circumstances (which can nearly always be overcome) and in terms of internal hurdles (which are tougher but also yield to perseverance). It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties that I finally came to terms with the fact that I would never be happy until I got serious about writing.

For twelve years, give or take, I studied my craft, found my voice, wrote the million words Ray Bradbury says you have to write before you write one good. Found lots of wonderful, supportive friends, writers and readers alike, whose encouragement kept me going. Submission-rejection-revision-submission became my life. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Until Arsenic with Austen, my “overnight success story.” I submitted it once, to my fabulous agent Kimberley Cameron, and the rest is history. The history of my lifelong dream finally coming to fulfillment.

And what I feel now is not pride of achievement but gratitude. Gratitude to God, the true author of everything good in my life. Gratitude to all those supportive friends and family members. Gratitude to all the readers who have read, are reading, or plan to read my books.

Thank you for helping me fulfill my dream. And I hope your dreams come true as well.

12 Secrets to Writing a Great Novel

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Hint: There are no secrets to writing a great novel. But there are some things you need to know.

This post is a slightly grumpy response to the myriads of posts/ads I’ve seen lately offering to help you write a bestselling book in nothing flat. They make me wish English had no generic word such as book that can apply equally to any set of bound pages (or bytes of equivalent length), regardless of category, genre, or quality. Fortunately, we do have a specific word for book-length works of fiction: novel.

The shortcuts I’m referring to (at least, the ones presented in good faith, such as Michael Hyatt’s current offering)* might work fine for writing a nonfiction book, especially if it’s something connected with your business or area of expertise. But when it comes to writing a novel . . .

  1. There are no shortcuts.
  2. It’s hard. (Yes, it can be fun, but that doesn’t make it less hard.)
  3. It isn’t something everyone can do. You DO need education, training, talent, and lots and lots of practice. (According to Ray Bradbury, about a million words’ worth of practice.)
  4. It’s part of a tradition. If you haven’t been reading great novelists voraciously since childhood, you should probably drop everything and do that for the next twenty years. Then you might be ready to start writing.
  5. It isn’t quick. Despite the popularity of National Novel Writing Month, it is extremely rare that anyone is able to produce a complete, polished novel in 30 days. A year is closer to the norm.
  6. It isn’t formulaic. As W. Somerset Maugham said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
  7. It’s a lifelong commitment. A career. A vocation. It isn’t something any sane person would do “just for fun” or to check it off a bucket list. Before you finish one novel, the next one should be percolating in your subconscious.
  8. It’s individual. You can read all you want about other writers’ processes, habits, and journeys to publication, but ultimately, your process, habits, and journey will be uniquely your own.
  9. It isn’t a vehicle for a message. It’s art. You need to have something to say, but if you can express that something in a neat little sentence or paragraph, you should be writing nonfiction, not a novel. Art is more about asking questions than answering them.
  10. It isn’t a solo process. Writing itself is solitary—too solitary for some. But once you finish a draft, you’ll need critiquers and beta readers, and these people should not be your spouse, mother, best friend, or the English teacher who praised your writing in high school—unless those people happen to be publishing professionals or readers of extraordinary perspicacity and frankness. You’ll need cheerleaders and mentors and writing buddies to make it through the process. Ultimately, to publish, you’ll need agents, editors, designers, publicists, marketers, and readers as well.
  11. It’s all about quality. If you send your novel to dozens of agents and/or editors and it repeatedly gets rejected, the best response is to revise, revise, and revise again—not immediately to default to self-publishing. (Self-publishing is fine once you have objective testimony that your novel is the best it can be. It just shouldn’t be a substitute for doing the work to get it there.)
  12. It’s doable. If you persevere despite numbers 1–11 and complete a polished novel, you will have achieved something a great many people dream of doing but relatively few actually accomplish. You will have joined the Eternal Worldwide Brother-Sisterhood of Novelists, which is a really great group to belong to—whether your novel ever reaches a bestseller list or not. Congratulations and welcome to the club!
*Be careful, because there are lots and lots of such “services” that are not presented in good faith. They’re simply out to take advantage of people who want to achieve fame and fortune with minimal effort. Michael Hyatt and anyone he endorses can be relied on to offer integrity and genuine value. (No, I was not paid for this endorsement.)

Attitude of Gratitude for Writers

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happy-writerA wonderful man who was once my parish priest, Fr. Gordon Walker, lived by the motto, “You’ve got to have an attitude of gratitude.” That’s something I’ve always struggled with maintaining from day to day, but I’m growing more and more convinced it is absolutely key—not only to the spiritual life, but to life as a writer.

I haven’t actually tried this, but I’m willing to bet if you Google “writing life” or some similar phrase, you’ll come up with about 99 hits that focus on the difficulties of said life for every one that focuses on the positives. You’ll hear about how lonely life is as a writer, how emotionally wrenching, how thankless to slave away day after day with only the remotest hope of publication. And as for financial success, you can forget about that right now. Unless you’re Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, you’re doomed to work for pennies for the rest of your life. You’ll be warned that unless you have a vocation to rival Mother Teresa’s, you’d best stay away.

And yes, writing can be lonely, wrenching, and thankless. It is most certainly hard work. And I would agree writing is not for the faint of heart and not for anyone who can imagine a life without it.

BUT.

People finish novels—good ones—every day. People get published, even traditionally, every day. People get advance checks and royalty checks every day. Writers are out there making a respectable living every single day.

What’s to stop you being one of them?

Possibly your attitude.

I firmly believe we can affect the events of our lives—even those that appear to be beyond our control—through our attitude. If you are convinced you will never be published, never make a living as a writer, there’s an excellent chance that you won’t. You won’t be motivated to put in the excruciatingly long and difficult apprenticeship required of any artist. You won’t see the point of building a network of writing and reading friends. You won’t project the kind of positive attitude that makes people want to be around you, want to help you, and ultimately want to represent or publish you. Eventually, even your muse will shun you out of sheer disgust.

You’ll be digging your own literary grave.

But if you approach your writing career with gratitude for every opportunity, with hope and conviction that you can and will succeed (however you define success), you will put in those hours. You will pursue those friends, you will give back to the writing community, you will create an atmosphere of positivity around you that will draw people and make them want to help you, represent you, publish you, and ultimately, buy and read your books. Your muse will curl up on your desk and purr like a contented cat, and ideas will abound. Every little gain will lead to more gains, whether artistic, financial, or in the simple satisfaction of living the life you love.

It all starts with gratitude.

Why not try an experiment? Begin each day by listing five things you’re thankful for. If you’re struggling, you can start with things like air and water and life itself. Your family and friends. The roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the coffee in your mug.

Then move on to being thankful for the gift and the drive within you that pushes you to write. The opportunity—even if you’ve had to wrest it violently out of adverse circumstances—to sit down and write. The people who support you, if you have some. The experiences of your life, good and bad, that have given you material for writing and made you the person you are, with your own unique vision. The writers who have gone before you and inspired you. The tools you have for writing, whether paper and pen or computer or charcoal on birch bark. The time. The ideas. The words.

Once you start being thankful, it can get kind of addictive. And what’s really addictive is starting each day, each writing session, with a feeling of hope, of excitement, of joy. It will spill over onto your page, and your writing will take on a new luster. You’ll be on your way to becoming the best writer you can be.

And who knows? Once upon a time, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling were struggling in poverty and obscurity just like everybody else. The wheel of fame and fortune could spin your way just as it did for them. You could be one of the lucky ones.

But for now, you are one of the blessed ones. One of those anointed to create. Go forth and be thankful for it.

Don’t Mess with the Classics

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A couple of recent announcements of literary adaptations have given me cause to think about the merits and pitfalls of bringing beloved classic novels to film or TV.

Pride-and-Prejudice-1995-pride-and-prejudice-1995-16523891-540-363I by no means oppose the making of films and TV series based on my favorite books. The A&E Pride & Prejudice, the Emma Thompson Sense & Sensibility, the Kevin Sullivan version of Anne of Green Gables (with Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie), the Merchant/Ivory adaptation of A Room with a View, and the BBC versions of various novels by Dickens and Trollope are among my favorite things to watch. They don’t replace the books in any way; rather, they bring a new dimension to them. The performances of great actors can deepen our understanding of favorite characters. The visual medium immerses us in settings, costumes, and customs that are beyond our contemporary experience.

But all the versions I’ve mentioned above have one thing in common that not all such adaptations share: While they may add to or subtract from what an author originally wrote, they do so in a way that is faithful to the spirit of the book. They don’t impose a modern vision on the stories any more than is unconscious and therefore unavoidable.

The new Marilla, Anne, and Matthew

The new Marilla, Anne, and Matthew

Unfortunately, such is not always the case. I recently read of a new version of Anne of Green Gables being developed for Canadian television, and the description of it gave me pause: “While the new series will follow a similar storyline to the book that millions of readers around the world know and love, it will also chart new territory. Anne and the rest of the characters in and around Green Gables will experience new adventures reflecting themes of identity, sexism, bullying, prejudice and trusting one’s self.”

In other words, Anne Shirley is going to become a thoroughly modern girl in everything except her clothes.

And let’s not even talk about the utter desecration of Pride & Prejudice currently disgracing the big screen. Zombies? Please. Jane Austen would have some devastatingly witty remark to put that in its place in two seconds flat.

These two admittedly quite different uses of classic material bother me for more or less the same reason. You see, one of the most valuable things about classic novels is that they give us a window on a world that no longer exists—a world we have a lot to learn from. We can observe how people behaved in a past era and think, well, we don’t want to be racist like Scout’s neighbors, but wouldn’t it be nice if we all took care of each other in community the way people did in Avonlea? We don’t want to go back to a world that denies opportunity to women, but wouldn’t it be great if more people nowadays had the pure mind of Jane Bennet or the invincible self-respect of Jane Eyre? And we might even stop to realize that all those good qualities were informed by the pervasive Christian faith of the characters’ respective cultures.

If we impose modern values, expectations, and perspectives on these older works—especially if we try to bend them to address contemporary issues—we lose all that benefit. We might as well take any contemporary story, dress the characters in Victorian costumes, and call it a period piece. We may be entertained; we may get to feel good about ourselves because we’ve rooted for an underdog; but we will not be moved on the deepest level. Our presuppositions will not be challenged. Our hearts will not be changed.

So let’s not try to make all the classics more “accessible” by interpreting them through a modern lens. Let’s rather see them as they are, as they were meant to be seen—and allow them to interpret us.

Birth of a Mystery Writer

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arsenic with austenOnce upon a time, a young Russian literature graduate wanted something a little lighter than War and Peace to read. (Seriously, that volume weighs a ton.) So a friend handed her a copy of Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, and a lifelong love affair with detective fiction was born. After devouring Sayers’ entire oeuvre, our reader moved on to Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Patricia Wentworth, and even a few writers who were neither dead nor British.

Years later, our reader set the demands of work and family to one side and began to fulfill her childhood dream of writing fiction. After fumbling around in a variety of genres, she said to herself one day, “Self, you love reading mysteries. So why not try writing one?”

And because that reader still loved her classics—in English as well as in Russian—she found a way to write about them while also writing a mystery. She threw in some other loves—old houses, fictional small towns with casts of eccentric characters, and second chances at romance—and the Crime with the Classics series was born.

As a result of a little luck and a lot of previous hard work, the series was picked up almost immediately by agent Kimberley Cameron and then by editor Marcia Markland of Thomas Dunne/Minotaur Books. And so our author became a ten-year overnight success story. But will Arsenic with Austen truly succeed? Only you, the reader, know for sure!

Chosen by a House

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Wisteria Cottage front

A few years ago, I fell in love with a house. It was just like love at first sight for a human being—the kind of instantaneous, unreasoning wallop that has reduced many a better writer than I to clichés. It caught me off guard; it took my breath away; it floored me.

I’d admired the house from afar for years. It sits well back from the road in a charming if overgrown garden just around the corner from my home. The pale yellow siding, low gabled roof, and riotous garlands of wisteria twining the balcony railing pegged it as a “homey house,” the kind I felt I’d like to know better if I ever got the chance.

My chance came when I saw by the driveway first a “for sale” sign, then a sign announcing an open house. I dragged my husband from his Sunday paper and my son from his play, and we walked around the corner to see the house.

Wisteria Cottage side

A sign on the front door said in stern letters, “Do Not Open,” and directed all visitors to the kitchen door on the side. I climbed the few steps to the side porch, walked in the kitchen door, and started to cry.

I still don’t know why. The house simply opened its arms to me like a loving grandmother, and I laid my homesick head on her ample bosom and wept.

There was no logic at all behind this reaction. The house did not remind me of any of the places that felt like home to me in my youth—neither my grandmother’s shingled split-level with its wide lawn sloping down to the Chesapeake Bay, nor my great-aunts’ Victorian townhouse full of high ceilings and polished mahogany. Nor did it boast many of the features I’ve always considered mandatory in my dream house: where the fireplace should have been, an ugly gas heater squatted on the sealed brick hearth, and no tower or window seat was to be seen. Not only did the staircase not rise grandly from an open foyer, but the house had no foyer at all and the staircase was on the outside.

Further inspection and questioning revealed that the house—built in the twenties and never remodeled—had major structural problems as well. My husband and I lacked the time, talents, and resources to restore an old house; therefore, my dream home would come ready equipped with a good strong foundation under the weathered pine floors, computer-friendly wiring behind the plaster and beadboard walls, and capacious PVC pipes to feed a steady supply of hot water to the clawfoot tub.

Wisteria Cottage bedroomBut love is blind, and none of these drawbacks made any impression on my affection for the house, which only deepened as I moved from the airy, light-filled living room to the cozy den—just right for a writing room—and on into the warren of tiny rooms at the front of the house, where the precipitous slope of the floor provided a clear explanation for the “Do Not Open” sign on the front door. Upstairs, a blue-and-white bedroom nestled under one gable; I knew my then-twelve-year-old daughter, who could not be dragged from her book to accompany us, would feel just like Anne of Green Gables in that room.

Outside, my son capered across the wooden bridge that arched over the little brook and gazed longingly into the branches of the eminently climbable trees. Dotted about the yard were several tempting spots to linger with a spouse, friend, or good book for companion—one in a rose bower on the east side for coffee in the morning sun, another under the trees by the brook for tea in the afternoon shade.

I walked through the downstairs again, trying to memorize every detail. What was it that called “home” to me so strongly? Surely it had something to do with the deceased owners’ furniture and belongings that still filled the house, untouched. Would the kitchen have been so welcoming if the tall dresser that faced me as I walked in the door had not been filled with brightly colored Fiestaware pitchers and plates? Would the living and dining rooms have seemed so much my own if the ranks of built-in shelves had not been overflowing with gold-stamped hardcover books, if the sideboard had not held hand-tinted photos of the owners’ 1940s wedding in silver filigree frames, if the green nylon plush of the loveseat and chairs had not invited me to sit a spell and chat? I half expected at any moment to see the woman of the house come bustling in from the back porch with a basket of clean laundry, looking just like my Aunt Adee and asking me whether I’d like hot soup or a grilled bacon-and-cheese sandwich for lunch.

We lingered in the garden as other prospective buyers toured the house. I longed for Jedi or wizard-like powers to blind their eyes to the charm of the place, to let them see only the magnitude of the work it needed so they would go away unimpressed, and the ridiculously low offer that was all we could ever afford to make would have no competition. But whatever it was in that house that brought tears to my eyes seemed to affect others almost as strongly. The real estate agent broke gently the news that good offers had already begun to come in.

I sobbed all the way home—not in despair at knowing I could never own the house, but just because seeing it had shaken me to the core. The despair set in gradually over the next few weeks, as a real estate agent friend opened my eyes to the reality of the current market and the cost of restoration. The seller was reportedly impervious to any sentimental approach; my love for the house would not impress him. Not even the cleverest, most devious financing tricks would avail to make that house legally mine. At the end of a month, it was sold.

I pass the house several times a week, and I always check for signs of progress. My great fear was that the new owners would tear it down and rebuild, or gut the house and remodel it into a typical generic modern box. But so far very little seems to have happened. The external appearance of the house is unchanged. No construction crew has trampled the garden coming in to jack up the foundation or replace the roof. Either the new owners are willing to live with the house’s flaws, or they’ve perfected the art of stealth remodeling.

I’m mystified. And since I’ve never seen people there, only a car, I persist in thinking of it as “my house.” I’ve even named it: Wisteria Cottage—a homey, humble, welcoming name.

Perhaps someday the new owners will put the house on the market again, either untouched or restored with a fittingly reverent hand. By that time, perhaps the novel I’ve written, The Vestibule of Heaven—in which the house is not so much a setting as a character—will have become a bestseller, and I’ll have another opportunity to respond to “my” house’s imperious call.

But even if that never happens, I know now what I mean when I say the word “home.”

Why I Write

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This is an essay I wrote as an entry for a conference scholarship. I missed the deadline for the scholarship, but this came from my heart and I’d like to share it with you.

Why Writing Is Important to Me

Mama, A, K low res

Me at bottom, with my mother and my sister Anne

As a child, I was invisible. The shy second daughter of a working single mother whose devotion exceeded her energy, I did my best to leave the smallest possible footprint on the world.

As an adolescent, I was misunderstood—not by my parents, but by my peers. They mistook introversion for arrogance and assumed my preference for intellectual pursuits equaled disdain for the pursuits of others. I wrote for myself alone.

As a young mother in a difficult marriage, I was lost. My voice was drowned by the demands of children and a husband absorbed in his own needs. I tried to write, but with no encouragement, I soon gave up.

As an older mother with a second family, now in a supportive marriage, I realized at last that my spirit was withering for lack of expression. The only way I could find myself was to pour myself out on the page and watch what took shape. Job and children notwithstanding, I carved out space and time and began to write.

Eight years and four novels later, as a middle-aged woman on the cusp of an empty nest, I have served my apprenticeship. I have honed my craft, persisted through rejection, shared my lessons learned with those just setting out on this daunting but exhilarating road.

I have found my voice. I am ready to be heard. I will not be silenced again.

The Next Big Thing

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Today I’m participating in a “blog hop”—sort of like a chain letter for blogs, but without the guilt. I was tagged last week by Susan Cushman (thanks, Susan!), and at the end of this post I’ll tag several other authors, who will post on the same topic next week. Basically, this blog hop gives us all a chance to tell the world about what we’re working on without looking like we set up a blog just to tell the world about what we’re working on.

We’re asked to answer a series of questions, so here goes!

1: What is the working title of your book(s)?

The book I’ve recently finished writing is called The Ghostwriter.

5: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? (I moved this question to a more logical place in line.)

Reclusive author Maeve O’Shaughnessy hires her identical twin, Margaret, to be her public persona, but when Maeve goes into a coma, Margaret is in danger of losing her own identity as well.  

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?

Like most authors I know, I hate the idea of doing my own publicity and marketing. (I’ve found I don’t hate the reality quite as much as I hate the idea.) I’m an introvert, which makes it especially hard. But my sister is an extrovert. So I was thinking one day, wouldn’t it be great if I could get Anne to do all the marketing for me, because she would actually enjoy it. I played around with that idea and took it to its logical conclusion, and The Ghostwriter was born.

3: What genre does your book come under?

This is always a tough question for me. It’s sort of commercial literary or book club fiction, with a dash of magical realism.

4: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

emma-thompson-2I don’t choose actors to represent my characters as I’m writing; I envision them as faces I’ve never seen. So this is a difficult question to answer, because no actors I know of look at all as I imagine my characters looking. But I could see Emma Thompson—with red hair and an American accent—in the dual role of Maeve/Margaret.

1251305899_hugh_grant_290x402The love interest, Edward, is trickier. If you can imagine a cross between Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant—Tom’s wholesomeness with Hugh’s boyish charm—you’d have something like Edward. Unfortunately they’re both a little old for the part (all these characters are in their mid-40s).

6: Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agency?

The Ghostwriter has not been published. I’m represented by Kimberley Cameron, but she hasn’t officially taken on this title yet.

7: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It took about nine months to write the first draft, with three to six months of concept development and research before that. I read a lot of books about twins.

8: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The book that first comes to mind—the book without which I doubt Ghostwriter would have been written—is The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. But other than being about twins with concomitant identity issues, the two books have little in common.

I always have a hard time finding comparables for my novels. The people whose style mine resembles tend to write about different topics; hardly anyone writes about similar topics in a similar way, seemingly. Of the writers I know, I think Susan Cushman may be the most similar to me, but we’re both still awaiting publication.

10: What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I deal with the special connection between identical twins—twin language, telepathy, feeling each other’s pain, and so forth. It’s a fascinating set of phenomena with no satisfactory scientific or even spiritual explanation. I don’t attempt any explanation in the novel, but just sort of take the phenomena for granted, as a natural part of these twins’ lives.

That’s it for me. Next week on March 6, please visit the following blogs to read about these authors’ Next Big Things:

Charise Olson writes what she calls California fiction—”It’s like Southern fiction, but without all the humidity.” In other words, contemporary fiction with a humorous voice but with underlying serious spiritual and emotional issues.

Bev. Cooke writes a variety of genres for children and young adults. Her published works include Feral, told from the point of view of a feral cat; Royal Monastic, a biography of Princess Ileana of Romania; and Keeper of the Light, a fictionalized story about St. Macrina the Elder.

Katherine Grace Bond‘s latest book is a YA spiritual journey/romance, The Summer of No Regrets. She also teaches TeenWrite workshops where teens interact with each other as their characters.