Shelf Unbound Indie Book Awards Finalist

Silk: Caroline's Story was named as a finalist for the Shelf Unbound Indie Book Awards, and they interviewed me for their magazine, too! Read it here on page 24.

Royal Town Rambles Blows Author Over With Surprise Photo

I was beyond delighted to see this review of Silk: Caroline's Story on Royal Town Rambles, a blog centered on Kingstree's history. Linda did some digging and discovered a photograph of my own family tree's real-life Caroline, who was the inspiration for my very fictional character in my very fictional story. I didn't even know such a photo existed, and I'm thrilled beyond measure. I'd only had a description of her by writer Bessie Swann Britton as blond and pretty, but it seems she was more of a brunette, actually, like me!

  

Prohibition Museum Experience

My husband and I went to the Prohibition Museum in Savannah yesterday for a date day. I was drawn to it after a recent visit to the county museum in Florence, SC, where I learned that South Carolina had enacted statewide Prohibition years before the national ban--a fact which required a small, emergency edit to my Tapestry manuscript!  Phew! Thank goodness I took the time to visit that museum!  I was surprised how much I didn't know before going in the Prohibition Museum, too, such as: When Georgia also enacted statewide Prohibition (yes, way before national Prohibition, eight years before South Carolina), Savannah and residents of neighboring counties considered seceding from the state!

The museum was so well done, quite entertaining! It starts a bit on the side of Prohibition and gradually goes extremely anti-Prohibition, winding up in the historic Speakeasy. The visit to their Speakeasy incorporates the senses better than most museums with historic drinks like the Aviation and the Mary Pickford (a fruity cocktail). Totally sympathetic with women of the Temperance movement, but I enjoyed the Aviation, too!  I’d seen the violet drink made just in June during the Historical Novel Society conference as a popular early-20th-century drink.

A couple invited us to sit with them at their table in the Speakeasy (they’d nabbed it when my hubby stepped away, and I think they may have heard us lamenting losing our table). Anyhow, they were from Houston, visiting for the weekend for an annual tourist trip to Savannah. So nice talking with them, but the gist of it for me was a bigger appreciation for actually living in Savannah, as it really is quite lovely. Mostly.  I always get tickled when I meet people who've traveled from afar to experience what I get to do at a fraction of the cost.  Not that they don't have their own nearby attractions that they likely avail themselves of, as well, but I do think we have more than most, being such a tourist destination (and near to others like Charleston and St. Augustine, Orlando and beaches...).

Definitely a fun outing. There was so much information and all these amusing/entertaining cartoons and such of the era. Loved it! My one criticism, I suppose, is that a fantastic exhibit somewhere in the middle, a main feature, has Mr. Busch arguing fairly persuasively for anti-Prohibition, whereas the Temperance speaker focused more on God than practical arguments, making her seem an extremist--not helped by that being in the same room where they feature Carrie Nation, who did not represent most of the Temperance movement. I think perhaps that's where the shift occurs... The displays over the course of the museum really did follow the historical sequence, including with the shift in public reaction. And even though perhaps it seems a waste to us that Prohibition was enacted, it drastically reduced rates of child abuse and likely alcohol-related deaths overall, and I had the sense that alcohol consumption never returned to the pre-Prohibition levels.  Yet despite my Temperance leanings, I was so charmed with the crowded Speakeasy's ambiance. Bars are generally lined with TVs these days, and all the flickering lights are distracting and obnoxious, in my personal opinion. Perhaps it's for the best that they repulse me, as I suspect this near-teetotaler could easily become a lush!

Overall, a wonderful experience for two whose maternal grandfathers were both bootleggers--a topic also well-addressed at the museum, of course!

The Inkheart Trilogy by Cornelia Funke

I’ve just completed the fantastic Inkheart Trilogy (novels published 2003-2008) audiobooks. I’ve been weeks about it, but they are truly quite long stories.  As a writer, you can imagine how I adore the premise: a writer’s novel turns out to actually be another real world, which he seems to control (if not create altogether!). 

Funke’s storytelling is rich and meandering. Aside from the part of the story set in Europe in modern times, she’s truly created another universe, a complex one that seems rather medieval. Her characters are faulty, and very little is truly ideal. I listened to it probably over a decade ago and liked it more this time than last time, though perhaps that’s because I knew better what to expect.

Twelve-year-old Meggie is the main protagonist (if these stories can be said to have one), not the old Inkweaver, and of course she’s my favorite character. Her father, a bookbinder called Silvertongue, is warm-hearted and steadfast, tall and handsome (I suspect Funke was somewhat gone over him—and he’ll forever be Brendan Fraser in my mind, as that’s who played him in the movie version). The aged scribbler is likeable—fiesty and warm-hearted and full of himself to a ridiculous, perhaps justifiable, degree. You never know exactly how people are going to behave, yet it’s always believable—and sometimes breaks your heart with disappointment. Yet you often get happy endings of a sort.

During the process of listening to these novels, I was seized with the notion of rebinding some of my falling-apart study manuals from my naturopathic school days, and only as I was in the midst of rebinding them did I realize that I must have been inspired by Silvertongue’s craft!  I was sometimes hours on a single volume—but that was nothing next to the painstaking rebinding Silvertongue did, usually taking days, which was rather a consolation.  So not only was there bookbinding going on (albeit mostly just replacing tattered covers and old, broken plastic-comb spines on the books), but at least some of the manuals were in part about herbal therapies, an occupation of Roxanne, one of the most beautiful women imaginable. She is associated (being vague here to try to avoid spoilers!) with Dustfinger, the fire dancer. Yes, I suppose I should have said there is very powerful magic in the Inkworld. Fairies, giants, and enchantments—of course.  Most of the story does center on the adults, and it seemed to me that Funke was fairly realistic (as realistic as a fantasy story can be) in the process of giving Meggie her time in the spotlight; Meggie is quite subject to the whims, expertise, and authority of the adults, but she inevitably plays an essential role, if not always the key role, in the stories. I appreciate that Funke’s plots are hard to predict that way—and in many other ways.

I very much recommend this YA Fantasy Trilogy for anyone who appreciates this genre. Be forewarned that it’s more emotionally complex than most YA Fantasy, and the meandering style of storytelling is reminiscent of historical novelist Phillipa Gregory’s writing, in my opinion. I highly recommend both authors to about the same degree, depending on your genre preference—and mind you, Gregory is one of my favorites!

Indian Summer by Kellyn McClarry

 

A writing friend’s novel came out on Indigenous Peoples Day (October 11, 2021) and immediately hit #1 bestseller rankings on Amazon for Children’s Time Travel and Children’s Colonial Historical Fiction!  So proud of her!  Here is the blurb I provided for her novel. Click the cover photo to check it out on Amazon!:

In Kellyn McClarry’s Indian Summer, an ordinary boy of the 1970s spirals back to a time of Quakers and Native Americans near his Pennsylvania hometown. Struck with amnesia, he resides with a generous, hard-working Quaker family who are baffled by his strange ways. Meanwhile, he gets to know a small, peaceful Conestoga tribe, then is struck with horror at the atrocities committed against them.

With infinite patience, McClarry lulls readers into assuming Indian Summer is simpler than it really is. This holds true for both the plot line and for the character of Jack. McClarry’s timing is diabolically impeccable—revealing plot twists and new depth to characters only after readers have entirely convinced themselves of the story’s trajectory. Don’t underestimate this debut novel. Kellyn McClarry cloaks a brilliant wit in the guise of this story about a seemingly hapless, helpless, impatient, utterly ordinary boy. McClarry revels in how very ordinary he is, though, liking him quite well that way, I suspect. But McClarry’s inspirational streak does eventually come through, shining all the more for the timing of it all.

Chronicles of Chicora Wood by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle: A Fascinating Memoir

I ran across this gem of a family memoir made available as a free e-book by the Gutenberg Project. It was written by Elizabeth Waities Allston Pringle (1845-1921), who was a teenager at the time of the Civil War and went on to become a rice planter in her own right.  Apparently she’s written a whole book about that, too, but I haven’t yet read it. Chronicles of Chicora Wood (published 1922) was of particular interest to me because the author wrote about a locale fairly close to where my ancestors lived—and to where The Silk Trilogy is based.

I originally found the book when I was researching the word Chicora. I’d read that the SC Native Americans called the region Chicora, and I was quite curious to know exactly what Chicora encompassed, so I was delighted when I saw a book that might shed some light on it for me. It didn’t, of course, but I’m still quite glad I found it. Chicora Wood was actually the name of the rice plantation that Bessie was raised on, apparently renamed when she was a girl by her father for the Chicora Indians who (had) lived in the area. It seems that they once occupied the entire coastal area of South Carolina all the way inland to the Piedmont—according to the tribe’s Facebook page, anyhow, though many tribes live(d) in that broad area. I’d already had the notion that Chicora included much of the Lowcountry, though, and so this does confirm my inkling there.

I actually rather adore Bessie, the author of this work.  I found some criticisms of her ‘racism’ in reviews of her book, but I find her to be vastly less racist than, say, Mary Chestnut, or even Fanny Kemble Butler, who was an ardent abolitionist!  Bessie expressed at once how relieved she was at not having inherited the responsibility of the ownership of people—how she felt that that age had ended, and she was glad of it.  Some of the terminology she uses was not terribly flattering for the slaves in their care (and who took care of them), and perhaps Bessie whitewashed some of the darker moments from her mind, but I do believe that she found the entire institution of slavery to be rather awful. One of the criticisms of her that I ran across was that she acted as though the slaves wanted to be owned, and YES, she did present those awful scenarios—of families desperate to stay together, begging her father to buy all of them; of an old man begging to be able to stay with their family after the war, where he’d lived his entire life.  She was sympathetic to them, and she cried terribly when her now-nearly-penniless mother turned the wonderful old man away, saying she couldn’t afford to pay him. A slave woman named Phoebe sat with them as Sherman’s troops were nearly upon them, and they encouraged her to leave, but she insisted that she was going to protect them—Bessie was showing the complexities of the situation, how Phoebe was loyal to them even though she could easily have left them there. No, Bessie doesn’t in any way suggest that Phoebe should have left them there, nor does she ever overtly express sympathy for any rage on their part—nor does she go on about the injustice of slavery, even.  Certainly I would not describe her as any sort of abolitionist nor activist. She was just an intelligent and somewhat typical daughter of a slave-owner who loved her family and tells about life as it was, from her perspective. The end of the book is actually an interview with one of the older male slaves—it was interesting, and I think it was meant to reinforce that her father was a good man, as in part it related yet another time that her father bought slaves due to requests by others to keep those families together (I though it was a different time when I read it, but maybe not).  In fact, Bessie goes so far as to say right off that her father mortgaged the properties for this purpose, and that’s why they lost almost everything after the war.  Maybe she is an apologist for her father—okay, I suspect that much—but she’s not an apologist for the institution of slavery itself, not beyond praising how her West-Point-educated father managed the plantation and slaves, proud of his executive skill. There is a difference.

For descendants of slaves around Georgetown, SC, who are interested in genealogy, if you can get past the awful-but-typical situation those folks were in—and some of the common, now-offensive lingo of the day—then you might find some of the descriptions of the individual slave folks of interest.  For instance… Hagar isn’t such a common name, right?  She was only a bit older than Bessie, and there is a great story about her trying to help Bessie out—sneaking the little girl out onto the roof to get inside another room to see her dead baby brother, whom Bessie didn’t think she’d get to ever lay eyes on; Hagar was quite annoyed, however, with the girl’s lack of self-control when Bessie started to scream (despite having promised she wouldn’t).  Perhaps Hagar’s descendants, if there are any, would be interested in this anecdote. [Note that Hagar is the name of the key ancestress of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. I wonder if her parents practiced Islam? Hagar’s name is actually in the Bible itself, too, though...]

There were some other anecdotes about the (ex-)slaves as well, and Bessie mostly seemed to feel friendly towards them so long as she didn’t feel personally injured by them.  No, that’s not to say that the situation was okay for the slaves, but both Bessie and they were born into it, and she was glad when it was over—even if she wasn’t on the Yankee side. At all. She speaks with relief of having an uncle who was against secession—and therefore his family was able to help hers a bit after the war—but she makes sure to clarify that his wife, her aunt, didn’t actually agree with him.

Bessie was indeed the daughter of a rice plantation owner who made money off of the labor of slaves.  He was governor of South Carolina only a couple of years before the war started—and was an ardent secessionist, right along with most of the rest of the white population of the state. If Bessie is an apologist for him, it runs deep—she also relates how he gave her two severe switchings when she was little, and she seems to have convinced herself that those switchings made her adore her father even more.  So I’m not even saying that her father was a good man, but it does seem there were much worse people out there, and if Bessie is to be believed at all, he did seem to have a sort of moral code within the societal framework he’d been raised within.  He died of illness during the war, owning more than one plantation. Bessie and her mother didn’t have too difficult a time with the ex-slaves on the plantations where they had resided, but when they first visited a seldom-seen site, they actually did face a quite scary arrival, with the ex-slaves taunting them for hours, encircling them with hoes, singing about killing.  So Bessie was NOT saying that all the slaves were delighted to be slaves—not at all.

Whew… I didn’t mean to go on about that so much, but it is a touchy issue, and I can’t very well blog about Bessie’s book without addressing it—not without seeming obtuse at best.  And Bessie certainly addresses it!  However, she also talks so much about daily life, from well before the war—and after—and I loved being immersed in this primary source for how life actually was for someone of her social standing at that time.

She talks about wearing overshoes.  She talks about the schoolhouse on the plantation, then how she boarded in Charleston. Actually, I associated with so many of her mentions!  I play piano (pitifully--she was better) and have a weak but nice voice, and I journal and love the ocean, like so many people—but she also lived in a boarding school on Meeting Street, and I lived on Meeting Street for a year when I was at the College of Charleston (where her brother attended).  Her husband studied in Heidelberg, and I’ve done quite a bit of research around my supposed ancestress Sophia of Hanover, whose father’s people ruled as electors from there for centuries. Bessie has Huguenot ancestry, and my family claims to have some French ancestry (most likely Huguenot, given that area’s history). 

I even ran across the name of a woman who could possibly be my ancestress in these Chronicles of Chicora Wood. Mary Holland took care of Bessie’s mother when she was gravely ill. “[A]n old woman, but still tall and stately in figure, and with great dignity and poise. She was about the color of an Indian.” I was so excited to read this, though of course Mary is a common name…  and those are actually only the first and middle names of my ancestress, who was an old woman at the time, mind you! Bessie often refers to her cousins, at least, by only their first and middle names, and with all the Mary Janes and Mary Anns, why not a Mary Holland? My own Mary Holland’s granddaughter is the darkest-skinned of my great-grandparents hands-down, according to the one photograph I have of her, at least, so that description only intrigues me.  It’s so hard to find anything describing our ancestors in 1840 for the most part, unless they were public figures or otherwise news-worthy.

One of the broader take-aways I gleaned from this memoir is how very brief our country’s history is as an independent nation.  I was a little stunned, actually. Bessie was talking about how she was named for her great-aunt Elizabeth who lived with them, who had died about five years before the author was born.  Bessie’s mother was very close to the woman and missed her sorely. There are some tales about this great-aunt in her old age, but here is the part that so surprised me:  The older Elizabeth had married a man who was a doctor during the Revolutionary War.  Not a baby, even. A grown man!  Elizabeth herself was a teenager at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and was 21 years old at the end of it.  She had actually grown up in a colony of Great Britain!  So this woman had lived with Bessie’s parents, nearly crossing dates with Bessie, and then Bessie lived through the Civil War (only 19 years old when it was over). Bessie lived on well into the 20^th century—she’ll have died exactly 100 years ago on December 5^th of this year, actually!  All of my grandparents were born by then.  I think I already had a fairly good grasp already of how few generations there have been since the Civil War, but I hadn’t really thought about how there was even less time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. They were fairly close, less than a century apart.  Undoubtedly some people actually lived through both.

Mind you, though… the American colonies existed for almost as long under the rule of England as they have as an independent nation (with much fewer people, of course), so for a vast number of us, our ancestral history here is far longer than just going back as far as Bessie’s great-aunt!

I can’t say how interesting these memoirs would be to a person from outside the area, who has no personal connection to that region, but I found them fascinating.  For instance, as a child, Bessie went through a 3-day fast to treat her awful dyspepsia, drinking only a half-glass of milk topped off with water each day—and it worked!  Their English governess straightened her sister’s posture with having her lay on a board at an angle. The boarding school they went to in Charleston spoke only in French! She was advised by her uncle not to speak to non-uniformed men on a train ride alone, advice that nearly left her without her trunk (and she praised how things had changed since then for young women travelers).  So many riveting tidbits, and I both laughed at Bessie’s admissions and sympathized with her plight quite often.  She’s a much nicer person than so many others I’ve read, at least so far as she has presented herself.

All That Was by Tanya E Williams Sentimental & Nostalgic, with Ghostly Twists!

 

All That Was by Tanya E. Williams is a sentimental tale of a young woman named Emily who can’t get over her parents’ death over a decade ago. She’s tried to go on, finishing law school and joining a firm, but when she lands a gig dealing with archival records at the First United Methodist Church of Seattle, supernatural forces align to help her deal with her grief once and for all.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this story was the character of the ghost of Elizabet Thomas from the early 20^th century.  Emily had found Elizabet’s journals, spanning many years, and found them hard to put down—and meantime Elizabet was reading them over her shoulder, adding commentary.  I very much enjoyed Elizabet’s crisp dialogue and typical Victorian sharpness.  I’d imagine that most people driving down the road would be delighted if they were to turn the radio station to hear this ghost’s perspective.  Curiously, the author chose this ghost, a secondary character, for her first-person POV (saying ‘I’ instead of ‘she’).  I’m not sure I’ve seen that done before (as Emily was a 3^rd-person ‘she’), but it certainly helped draw me in to Elizabet’s perspective.  I occasionally became impatient with Emily’s nostalgia, but it suited Elizabet’s ghostly character splendidly.

For an emotional, nostalgic tale of loss and love and happily-ever-afters, with a twist or two thrown in, consider reading All That Was. Ms. Williams’ intrinsic kindness and thoughtfulness come through clearly, and I especially recommend it for sentimental souls who wish a respite from the brutal intensity so widespread in the world of literature today.

 

Author Interview by Tanya E Williams

Tanya E Williams interviewed the author for her YouTube show 'Book Banter'. Here's just a snippet. To check out the full 41 minute interview, visit Book Banter Episode 6 with Sophia Alexander - YouTube. Hope you enjoy!

Silk named an American Fiction Awards Finalist!

In Silk's second book-awards contest, it was named a finalist by the American Fiction Awards in the category of Family Saga!  I am so pleased and excited. I've received verdicts from 2 of 2 contests now, and Silk is has placed as a finalist in both!  In the meantime Readers' Favorite sent me a 5-star medallion and a lovely review, proclaiming Silk a masterpiece!  Grateful and amazed...  

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Not To Be Missed!

Recently, an interviewer and fellow author suggested that Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia might be a good comp title for Silk: Caroline’s Story. A comp title, by the way, is a familiar title that others might compare to a book of interest—for example, she might say to prospective readers, “If you liked Mexican Gothic, then you’ll love Silk.”

How wonderful to be compared to that amazing work!  After that comp-title suggestion, I of course picked Mexican Gothic as my fun vacation beach read while we went to Daytona on vacation last week.  I’d even already put it on my e-reader, which I actually did not take onto the beach this time, just read in our condo when I wasn’t on the beach or by the pool with a paperback.

So glad I read it, even if I don’t typically go for that genre.  I should have been clued into the type of story it was, given the term ‘gothic’ in the name, but I went into it expecting something a bit more… like Silk! Hah, comp titles work both ways!  I do recognize some of that same energy there, especially around Jessie (so if you were most fascinated by Jessie, you will likely be enthralled by Mexican Gothic). Of course, Mexican Gothic’s main character, Noemí, is different than any of Silk’s characters, at least for the first book of my trilogy; I’d say she’s most like Vivian, actually, in Homespun, the last installment of The Silk Trilogy—whom the interviewer has yet to meet.  Okay, I’m warming to the idea of it as a comp title, except I really don’t think they’re the same genre!  Silk has just a touch of Southern Gothic in a book that others compare to Jane Austen, whereas Mexican Gothic eventually swallows you whole with the horror. Oh wait, I did see her writing compared to Charlotte Brontë’s, actually... I think Moreno-Garcia uses the technical category of ‘speculative fiction’ instead of horror, perhaps. Maybe speculative fiction is a broader category? I almost never pick up horror reads on purpose.  Stephen King put me off that genre the first time I dipped my toes in those murky waters as a teenager, but more writing like this may make me quite the fan.

Mexican Gothic is about a young socialite in the 1950s who ventures away from Mexico City out to a rural village community in the mountains to check on her cousin Catalina. Newly-married Catalina has sent a worrisome letter, but when Noemí’s father tried to follow up with Catalina’s husband, Virgil brushed off his concerns. The gothic mansion that Noemí arrives at was founded perhaps a century before by Virgil’s English ancestors who reopened the old silver mine there; it had re-closed during the Mexican Revolution, and the family’s glory has since faded. The grand house is full of mold and operates with only a skeleton of the staff it once held. Noemí is determined not to abandon her cousin Catalina, but the longer she stays, the more the manor’s strange energy starts to affect her, too.

I loved this wonderfully-written, suspenseful story!  It’s now ranked as my #1 horror novel of all time, and I highly recommend it to anyone not too faint of heart.  The Mexican setting added a somewhat-exotic-to-me, fascinating air to the whole novel. So interesting to see the world from Noemí’s point of view, as Mexico really is the center of her world, truly a country full of variety—she’s from urban, modern, massive Mexico City; she leaves for the English manor near the rural village in the mountains, where she yearns for a carefree vacation to Acapulco—and to go off to their National University. Mexico is her world! 

I did have the feeling, however, that this novel was perhaps initially written as a vampire story.  The pale residents of the manor, the missing mirror no longer on the wall near the entrance, the stained-glass windows instead of more reflective ones, the old host only drinking strange-tasting wine at dinner and foregoing food…  Perhaps that was just to set the mood or to throw out a red herring.  I felt misled, especially since there was never much alternative explanation given for these overtly-vampirish tendencies.  Nevertheless, it somehow gave me a familiar, “Ooh! Vampires!” reaction that maybe made the actual scenario a little more familiar-feeling than it would otherwise have, as it was so peculiar in the end.  Well-done, but unique (to me, at least, as someone who rarely reads ‘speculative fiction’).  If Moreno-Garcia hadn’t gone that route, I wonder if I’d have had fewer hooks to really sink into the story with?  Such an artfully-crafted novel MUST have done this on purpose, simply to help draw us readers in. In the end, however, the antagonists were not so prosaic as vampires (who are not always prosaic, of course, but this was the classic setting!). No, this book was increasingly fascinating as I read along.  Speaking of which—I wasn’t hooked from page one.  I’d read many pages before I knew that I really wanted to continue with it, so if it doesn’t grab you straight off, stay with it!

Again, I don’t normally read horror, so what seems ‘extreme’ to me may seem relatively tame to aficionados of the genre. I wouldn’t know. And that ‘extreme’ graphic horror only lasted for a few pages, really, towards the end.  So don’t be scared off based solely on my review.  Perhaps Mexican Gothic is horror for people who don’t read horror.  I personally highly recommend it.  Five stars. Amazing, gripping novel set in Mexico. Not to be missed.

 

Necessary Sins, Book 1 of the Lazare Family Saga, by Elizabeth Bell

I was fortunate enough to 'meet' Elizabeth Bell at the virtual Historical Novel Society North American 2021 conference last month, and I was excited to read her novel set in antebellum Charleston.  Here's what I thought: 

The first installment of Elizabeth Bell’s Lazare Family Saga is a beautifully-written story for those who enjoy exploring the complexities of being human—the conflicting emotions and values, the anguish, and sometimes the sheer brutality. There is also joy and love and charm, and Ms. Bell does a wonderful job of capturing these emotions. I appreciated that this 19^th-century Charlestonian tale began in Saint Domingue (later Haiti), as Charleston’s roots do extend back to the sugar plantations of Barbados and the West Indies.  For all that I was born in Charleston and went to college there, that part of the area’s history has always seemed vague and elusive to me, but Ms. Bell brought it to stark, vivid life. 

The main protagonist of the overall story is Joseph, who is drawn to the priesthood, but he doesn’t even enter the story for some time.  This saga is very much about the Lazare Family’s several generations, even within this first novel.

Joseph is a devout young man who struggles to cope with overpowering feelings of lust.  Following this journey for hundreds of pages should make anyone sympathetic to Catholic priests who have to adhere to the absolute requirement of chastity, of not being able to marry those that they fall in love with—and being human, this will happen from time to time, at least for many of them.  The situation grows far worse and more ‘sinful’ in large part due to those very strictures—and the reader is so weary of his struggles by the end of the novel that it’s hard to really condemn him.  I think that was exactly the author’s mission—to make us sympathetic to this particular plight of devout young men who must pledge to remain chaste forever in order to join the priesthood.  I hope they don’t all struggle so much, but Ms. Bell quoted so much Catholic instruction on this very topic that one is left fairly convinced that Joseph is far from alone in his condition.

It’s my belief that one of the primary benefits to readers of reading fiction is to develop empathy, and Ms. Bell has created an entirely different situation for me to empathize with than I’ve ever encountered in any novel thus far—and she does it thoroughly, unstintingly.  For that and the impeccable research and the beautifully-perfected prose, I applaud the author.

Again, however, much of the story is sad. I was overwhelmed at times by the sheer number of deaths, and I’ve never agreed with that prevalent practice of depicting life as generally brutal-and-short for all historical times up until nearly the present.  For some people, sure.  For some times, of course. Ms. Bell zones in on those people and those times, though she also shows the joy in their lives.  Necessary Sins was eloquent and touching, but I felt trammelled by so many heartbreaking losses—and yet, I suppose perhaps that is part of how she wore us down to think, “Goodness, is it really THAT important for him to stay chaste?”  In the midst of so much sadness, is carnal love really such a terrible sin? Isn’t there a beauty and a comfort in it, oftentimes?  I didn’t leave the book with any firm answers as to their potential ‘sins’, but I do have more empathy now than I did for Catholic priests that way, if only because I’d never given it very much thought.  Perhaps chastity could still be held sacred without making it an absolute requirement for them?  Ms. Bell doesn’t really address this situation for monks and nuns, but one can’t help but extrapolate to them—maybe there could be a different order or cloister that they could transition to if they find the requirement too difficult, one for married monks and nuns?  As Ms. Bell says in the author’s note about another matter, she was trying to depict historically-accurate situations, not ideal ones. She leaves the conclusions up to us.   

Silk finally received its official copyright!

Whew!  I finally received my copyright in the mail yesterday for Silk! It took me THREE separate applications (yes, I had to pay anew each time) and much angst, like pulling teeth. I actually received my second rejection on my birthday, as you can see from this new application/registration date. But in the end, it is sort of fun how meaningful both dates on this application are: Silk was registered on my birthday (at last!), and the registration decision date was on Silk's release day.

Pro-tips:
1.) Use the Firefox browser to apply, or it'll just freeze up on you.
2.) Do NOT include preview chapters from the next book if you're applying via the 'one work by one author' application.

3.) Don't count on it going through quite this fast. Maybe they felt sorry for me, on my third try!

Silk's Release Day Comes with Most Welcome Jane Austen Flattery

Hello dear Readers!

Hurrah!  Silk: Caroline’s Story has at last been released to the world! (Purchase links at the bottom of this blog.)  If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the gist of the story, so I won’t bore you with a long description--see vendors or sign up for my newsletter on the side bar for a reading sample--but here is the nutshell version:

“It’s 1899. Caroline must choose between the town doctor and a Lowcountry farmer, but Jessie isn’t about to let this happen.”

That settled, I am still over the moon about a most amazing blurb that I wanted to share with you. It came from one of my favorite authors just a few days ago.  She said:
 
“The social realism of Jane Austen meets the Southern gothic of Flannery O'Connor in this absorbing novel by Sophia Alexander. Silk: Caroline’s Story explores questions of longing and desire, of jealousy and heartbreak, and of the fateful choices that shape one’s destiny—or doom us completely. Alexander has a true gift for illuminating the most intimate desires of her historical characters in this richly drawn book that I couldn’t put down." -Sarah Domet, critically-acclaimed author of The Guineveres.

When someone you admire so much gives you that sort of praise, you’re smiling for days!  And to top it all off, just this morning an advanced-copy reader told me, “I love the book. One of my favorite books is Pride and Prejudice, and Silk takes me back.”  So yes, my head is about as swollen as it can get.  I never dreamt of being classified in any way with Jane Austen!  Really, my ego is going to be quite unmanageable now.

My husband tells me not to feel badly about it, that my writing isn’t THAT bad.  Ironically, we’ve squabbled for years over Jane Austen!  I adore her, obviously, but he sides with Mark Twain, who said:

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898
 
"To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909

"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."
- Following the Equator

The above quotes are taken from a website, but I’ve heard them here and there for many years.  Mark Twain’s very intensity about Jane Austen makes me suspect he really loved her writing on some level, but that could just be my fanciful thinking! Really, though, isn’t it telling?:  ‘Every time I read Pride & Prejudice’!  Hmm… Sounds like he was really just frustrated at being in love with her when she was already dead long before he was born!

Doesn't Mark Twain look frustrated here?

What irony, given my long-standing disagreement about Jane Austen with my hubby, who oddly enough has gone through phases in his life where people called him Mark almost more than his real name of Michael!  (See where my fancy comes in there?)

So, anyhow, my head is clearly swollen with that amazing praise (no matter what Mark/Michael says), but all is not perfect in my world.  I should be celebrating at my debut novel release, and I am sorta, but I did shed a few tears this morning!  Amazon's 'Look Inside' function has screwed up my formatting. I was wondering why I had sales on other sites and virtually NOTHING on Amazon!  It's still screwed up, but an Amazon tech support guy tells me he's fixed it, that it will just take a day or two to be corrected on the site.  You'd think their tech guys could make it happen pronto, but I guess those are safeguards in place?  I don't know...  Never fear, though. The real Kindle version looks just fine.  It’s only that ‘Look Inside’ preview that is botched a little bit, and that glitch should be fixed within the next day or so, maybe even by the time you read this.

Thank you for waiting patiently for the release of my novel.  If you read it and enjoy it, please do leave a review.  It means so much to us authors, especially for our debut books.

Silk is available as an ebook on virtually any device, as a regular paperback, or in its large-print edition. So exciting to see it out there on all those vendor websites!  You can request it from your local bookstore, or click on these links to purchase it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Kobo, Scribd, or the Apple e-bookstore.

Onalex Books, $4.99 e-book; 276 pp., $14.99 paperback, ISBN: 978-1-955444-00-2; 469 pp., $19.99 large-print paperback, ISBN: 978-1-955444-01-9; available wherever books are sold.

Meet Addi & Gunther!

Today is my birthday, and my 19-year-old daughter surprised me with this linotype of Addi with her wolf-dog, Gunther. Addi is the protagonist of my as-yet-to-be-published YA (young-adult) fantasy novel.  I was over the moon at seeing this!  No, my daughter hasn't had any sort of specific class in how to create linotypes, just got the notion to do it, so looked it up online. She says this is still unfinished; somehow she's carved the lines in a tile, then inked it and pressed it onto a paper.  This was a 'sample' of what she's working on, she says.  Anyhow, it seems very period, as they used to create images with woodblocks and ink them onto paper for mass distribution. I could bore you with bragging about how innately talented my daughter is--but she has had art classes ever since she was little, and she even just took an art class at UGA. Hopefully you'll be seeing more of Addi and Gunther one day sooner rather than later, but it may be a while, since Tapestry is next in line after Silk!

Silk a Finalist In Its Very First Contest!

What a thrill to find out that Silk received an award in the category of historical fiction in an international contest!

Inspired by a writing friend’s success at an entirely different writing competition, I submitted the revised version of Silk for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2021. How did I choose that one from the many?  Well, it was the next one (recommended by some book publicist) due from among the ones I looked at! So, in a big rush, I did something I don’t know if I’ve ever done before—I paid extra for fast shipping to send the three required copies to them! (In my case, they were advanced reader copies, of course.) It always helps me to have deadlines so that I’ll get a move on things.

Speaking of deadlines, the contest has had a profound effect on another very pertinent one—because the organization will be publicizing its winners, Silk’s release date has been bumped up to June 30^th!  The e-book is now up for pre-order on Amazon—so do go ahead and reserve your copy if you read a Kindle and would like to ensure it’s delivered as soon as it’s released. As it becomes available with other vendors, I will try to keep you posted. If you prefer to own a paperback copy, mark your calendar for June 30^th, when it will be available to order.

So, I suppose one might say that the Next Generation Indie Book Awards has lit a fire under my butt not once, but twice!  Very efficient of them.  But it’s quite alright. I’ll bear such difficulties gladly. In fact, the day I found out about the award, my cheeks hurt from smiling so much . 

Silk on the Beaches of Hawaii!

A college friend is reviewing an advanced copy from the beaches of Hawaii, and she sent me these pics!  May you all find such perfect locations to read my novel (or any novel!), be it the beach or a cozy spot on your couch, with a cup of tea!

 

Writing Tip #2: Listen to Your Novel

Listen to your novel—and I mean this literally!  Once you’ve written and edited your book to where you think you’re about ready to fling it out into the world, take a few extra days and listen to it being read aloud.  You will catch redundancies, extra words, and awkward sentence structures that your glazed eyes just pass right over on the screen or on paper. After all, you know what you mean already, and it’s hard to read it so closely. Trust me, it is invaluable to hear the words spoken aloud.

Brace yourself.  The digital voices that reads your book in their relatively-flat monotone are nowhere near as wonderful as those brilliant voice actors who will one day make your work(s) sound like near-poetry. Nonetheless, once you’ve steeled yourself, take your story for a walk—or listen while you do chores, pet the critters, paint a canvas…  You may very well need some therapeutic activity to get through it, but it will be worth it in the long-term for your book if not in the short-term for your morale! Keep in mind that the advantages for your morale are more significant in the long run.

Various programs will read aloud your writing for you, but I use my Kindle Fire’s text-to-speech function with my Word documents, for which I’m infinitely grateful.  Keep reading if you want the instructions on how to use this device to listen to your audiobook, but otherwise, good luck and good listening!  Please do share with me your experiences with other text-to-speech programs in the comments.

As for the Kindle Fire, sometimes the voice glitches, and I have to continually check to see if I really had a typo, or if it’s just the voice narration. It’s usually the narration, but I’ve also caught many typos this way, so don’t neglect checking.  It is a hassle, though.

However, for all that I disparaged the monotone of the voice, it’s actually quite remarkable how well the auto-narrator reads the text.  So many inflections!  The pitch changes, even, when she reads conversation, to distinguish it from the other text.  Really impressive, honestly.

The Kindle document is slightly troublesome to set up the first time, as you’ll need to go into your Amazon account and tell it to allow documents from your email address to go through to your Kindle.  Here’s the procedure (at this point in time):

• 1. Log into your Amazon account.
• 2. Click on ‘Account & Lists’ at the top right of the page.
• 3. Under ‘Digital Content & Devices’, click on ‘Manage Your Content & Devices’.
• 4. Click on ‘Preferences’ (it’s on a white bar header at nearly the top of the page).
• 5. Click on ‘Personal Document Settings’.
• 6. Scroll down to ‘Approved Personal Document E-mail List’. Under this you’ll see a link for ‘Add a new approved e-mail address’. 

Whew!  There you are. I think you can take it from there. Took me ages to figure all that the first time. 

Once you’ve had your own email address approved, you can e-mail yourself attached documents at the email address listed in 'Personal Document Settings' under 'Send-to-Kindle Email Settings'. I usually use my Word documents—I don’t believe it will even read a PDF aloud for you, though you can still send it to read to yourself. But the Word documents can be better manipulated—fonts altered, too. The reading speed can even be changed.

Oh, but the documents don’t go right through!  No, sirree. Amazon will send you an email asking if you want that document to go through to your Kindle, and you’ll need to approve that within a limited-time window.  I usually just stay in my email account after sending a document so that I can approve it, watching for that confirmation-request email from them (maybe check ‘other’ and ‘junk’ folders if you don’t see that email right away). 

Make sure your Kindle is connected to Wi-Fi or a Hotspot. Your document will very likely not show up right away, however. Mine usually don’t.  I often have to Sync my device (that’s under the ‘Settings’ app on the Kindle Fire, way down on the menu) and then turn off my Kindle completely before I can get it to show up (after I turn it back on, of course). It might take a few minutes and another sync or two.  The troublesomeness of this varies, actually. Sometimes it’s easy-peasy, and other times I’m frustrated as hell.  But it’s best to go into it expecting a bit of a hassle.

Now, originally on my Kindle Fire’s Home Menu, the Documents App was clearly visible right off, but for some reason Amazon has restructured my Kindle Fire’s Home Page so that I have to go into the Utilities Folder to find my Documents App.  I click on this, and my emailed documents show up here.

Once your document downloads and you pull it up, you can tap on the screen to see various options. At the bottom right, there should be a text-to-speech option with a little sideways-triangle ‘play’ button.  Tap it to listen!  The Kindle will scroll through the pages while it reads aloud, and you can actually sit there and read it at the same time as you listen. That might be a wise thing to do, but I generally just keep the Kindle nearby so that I can easily mark whatever needs fixin’.  You don’t even need pencil and paper.  You can find the spot on your document, press on the word to highlight it, and press 'note' to enter your correction or thought.  When you’re done for the day, I advise entering those edits as soon as possible, while you remember them.  There’s an icon at the top of the page that looks like a page with lines across it. I use that to instantly retrieve my notes and marks so that I don’t have to scroll through the entire book endlessly.  It’s scary, but I delete these as I go—do save your Word document often on your computer as you’re making the corrections—so that I don’t miss any in the endless-seeming list.

I usually don’t bother entering a note, actually.  I just use a color-coded system for the highlighters. Blue means there’s a redundant word, change one of them. Red means delete.  Yellow means ‘Pay attention; this is kinda weird’.  Orange means ‘Change this! What were you thinking?!’

You can also bookmark the text.  That option is two over from the ‘note page’ icon.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of hassle, but it’s worth it to review your book in a different way.  You’ll be surprise how much you catch by listening to it.  And you might even enjoy the listen. I do on occasion.

Anxious People by Fredrick Backman Is Oh-So Depressing!

I do NOT recommend the book Anxious People by Fredrick Backman.  It is well-written, and there is a sort of dry wit, but is oh-so tremendously depressing.  The author portrays a series of miserable, hopeless lives and often purposely misleads the reader. Nothing so finely done as The Sixth Sense, where the twist at the end was plausible.  No, this is simply an unreliable narrator—well, does that imply it was intentional?  It’s obviously intentional.  Annoyingly so.

  But seriously, don’t read it.  One of the author’s more subtle tricks towards the end, if I understood it correctly (I listened to the audiobook and didn’t back it up), was to make you think for a moment that one woman had jumped off a bridge (a minor, surprising plot point).  The story was so depressing throughout that by that point, I almost found it a relief!  Needless to say, when I realized she hadn’t, I wasn't as glad as you’d expect, which struck me as dire.  But again, I’ll say that there is a snarky wit that keeps you listening/reading, and the author wraps things up tidily at the end--almost too neatly, as if the smidge of hope that the author is giving you is fake, just a nice, 'happy ending' for the book.  The connections between the characters’ pathetic lives unfold slowly, and that part is well done. If you do choose to listen to the audiobook, stick through to the end, at least, as the narrator will provide you with a hotline number for if you’re feeling suicidal.  You may need it.

Writing Tip #1: Finish a Novel Using Daily Word Counts

To write my very first rough draft ever, I used a 30-day novel-writing kit by the founder of NaNoWriMo (originally National November Writing Month).  It had inspirational cards, one a day, and a calendar to fill in with my progress. I loved it!  The most important part of this kit, however, was its emphasis on and support for keeping up daily word counts.  

It really isn't so impossible to write a novel in a month!  Less than 2000 words per day can bring you to a short-novel-length work. For an optimal word count of 70,000 to 80,000 words, however, a writer probably needs to extend well past the 30-day cycle. My daughter used the process effectively in a month-long break from school, keeping up her word counts, but her novel was not near to being done when her time ran out, and she never did get back to writing on it--not yet, anyhow (I keep hoping she will; she's incredibly gifted). Some authors may find it works to just stick to that 50,000-word initial draft length, making sure to wrap it up shortly after hitting the mark, and then go back to add descriptions and metaphors and senses later--all those things that draw in readers.  Sometimes you'll add extra scenes--and at other times you'll delete redundant sections. I can be extremely redundant, I've found!

The worst part is finding yourself rewriting, again and again, when you meant to merely be proofreading that final time.  Each time you go back to do a 'last proof', you think of a better way to say something, a new comparison, more succinct phrasing.  I went through a strange phase where I wanted to clarify everything, and so that was one massive rewrite, but then I went back through later, slashing it all, wondering how daft I thought my readers were!

I say that's 'the worst part', but really, I think my books improve in some way with each go-through.  The edits certainly take more time than the original drafts, so be prepared for that.  I've heard amazing authors say versions of the same thing time and again: "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm a great re-writer!"

Word counts help motivate me to continue my writing. That daily grind is essential to completing a novel and helps it to be cohesive. Print out a calendar and fill in a progress bar.  I even use little foil star stickers to help motivate me--a gold star means I've met my goal that day, but I get a star for any day I even meet half my word count!  After all, at that rate it's only 60 days to a short novel, right?

So there we go. The basics of my writing process in a single-blog nutshell!

Silk: Caroline's Story, My Debut Novel

'Caroline Corbett is ready for the 20^th century, excited to find work and meet new people, but she gets more than expected when a rough-hewn farmer and a small-town doctor both engage her affections. She must choose between the two, but in doing so she fails to consider the girl Jessie, a young sociopath riddled with jealousy. Before long astonishing and horrifying events are set into motion.'

I am both looking forward to and dreading the release of my debut novel, Silk: Caroline's Story on October 14th, 2021. It feels rather like the kids leaving home for the big, wide world--I'm relieved not to have to clean up after them anymore, but they're my babies! I wrote Silk the fastest of all my novels--and then proceeded to spend the greatest amount of time on it, revising, proofing, revising, adding, deleting, editing, and then revising some more in an endless cycle. I wanted to at least share the above blurb with you all here, as I haven't done nearly as much blogging about the novel or this process as I thought I would--though, in truth, I actually did share the initial writing process on a blog of yesteryear. I had been wrestling with some mysteries in my genealogical research, trying to piece together what might have happened. Initially I stuck with exact dates and tried to stay true to known facts--but by the time the novel was done, I realized I'd miscalculated. Some of the dates were off. Not that this was a huge deal, when main characters were already entirely made up. The story is mostly fiction, inspired from here, there, and everywhere--but it was initially inspired by the confusing web of my family tree.

 The whole trilogy is, in fact, based on genealogical research as its very base inspiration. It's so romanticized and fictionalized, however, as to be fairly unrecognizable (adding stories to get from point A to point B, just as much of historical fiction does). I originally wrote it with the real names of my ancestors and relatives, but most of those have since been changed.  Caroline's given name remained the same, however.  I did keep that much.