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.