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Pix of me in Amboise, with River
Loire in background. Ready to tour! |
Change. (A discussion and questions for you, dear readers.)We often think of change as major life events. A birth. A death. Marriage. Divorce. Moving to a new house or town.
But lately as in the past three years, I’ve begun to think of change as something subtle. The passing of years. The growth of grandchildren from 6 to 10. Their emerging personalities as they turn 12. How I look to myself in the mirror. How my husband stands now, his marathoning days so many decades behind him. Our changing preferences in foods.
Of course, the minor stroke I had in 2021 affected my feeling of invincibility. I had often talked (rejoiced) about the fact that I had made it to 77 without any daily meds.
Then in December ’23, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The surgery and treatment for that was intense. But frankly, they caught it early and my treatment was brief, even though now I see the team of oncologiests about every 3 months.
But something else changed in my writing. Having started daily wriiting when I was 33, with 2 babies and 1 toddler to love, I began to notice forty-odd years later that I wanted to write more. That I wanted it to mean SOMETHING. Not just my own satisfaction. Not just income. Not just the joy of writing romance, or solving a mystery. But as something of value that lasted longer than the hero’s last kiss…or the heroine’s renewal on life.
After all my years in undergrad and grad school, all the years researching every kind of history from that of the use of salt (really!) to the quarry where stones came from to go into Parisian mansions, I wanted something more from me. Something more for the reader.
What emerged was my desire to write a series that bridged the description of historical romance and historical ficiton. I wanted substance for me and for the reader who liked the past as backdrop but who, I thought, needed more to appreciate the problems. What resulted was my current series of romantic suspense, SCARLETT AFFAIRS. Here what I have poured into those plots is the very factual background of the years in which the world fought the attempt of Napoleon Bonaparte to rule over it.
I’ve picked one major event or conflict in each year that occurred, from 1802 through 1816, long after he had gone to St. Helena. Go here to start or continue:
Something else began to eat at me too. That I could not write as fast as I had before. (And the emphasis on keeping up sales, we authors are told, is to put out books as fast as possible.) Truly, that is not me.
But now I have begun to fiddle with a new new new idea. Romansy which is romance with fantasy and time travel, maybe a bit of paranormal shifting or witches or faes thrown in, is a new concept in plotting.
I’d say it is popular because real life these days demands something a wildly supernatural to counter the feroiciosly supernatural events in our daily lives.
So now we come to you. And here are my questions:
Have you experienced great change in your life lately? How are you dealing with that?
Do you see minor changes in your body (grey hair, indigestion, sagging interest in old delights, new interests in cards, conasta, bowling, etc) that you have dealt with or not?
Do you still read as much as you did before those changes, big or small? Do you read the same things, fiction, romance, mystery, whatever?
What have you read lately—fiction or non—that thrilled you or disturbed you?
Talk to me. I want to hear about the changes in your life.
WHY READ HISTORICAL FICTION? So much is being said about the demise of the popularity of historical fiction. Authors notice the sales numbers! Readers may not feel it, other than totaling up their current purchases and noticing what they tend to buy lately.
