Friday Fiction: Letters from Skye

This story unfolds as if the book were a suitcase of treasured letters.

Letters from Skye is organized around the letters of two women, mother and daughter -- and those they love. Elspeth, a poet, isolated on the Island of Skye, and perhaps not in love with her husband, begins to exchange letters with an American fan during World War I. As we read these letters from this time, we also are introduced to a mystery as the book shifts to letters written by Elspeth's daughter, Margaret, in Edinburgh during World War II, for Elspeth has disappeared.

The story is compelling, for these letters reveal the passion and uncertainty we rarely show outsiders.

The plot twists are delicious. Just when I think I've figured out what will inevitably happen next, the story turns, the characters behave unexpectedly (and are able to explain their actions later), and the question of how we honor commitments to those we love is answered. 

I was entranced by these characters, Elspeth and her Davey, and by how skillfully Jessica Brockmole creates the mood and settings of these two times, from the very rural and isolated Island of Skye, to Edinburgh and London.

When I spent two months in Scotland, doing research for Standing Stones, there wasn't enough time to visit Skye. Instead, I now remember the people and places of the Orkneys, Inverness, and Edinburgh, one of the key settings of Letters from Skye. 

Definitely a memorable read. 4.5 stars.

Read more about Jessica Brockmole here.

ROW80 Update . . . Cinderella redux

I put first dibs on the crust when I was growing up. No one else wanted to eat that often dried out, unwanted end piece. Except me. I was voraciously hungry all the time. At 11 and 12, I could out-eat my 6' 4" stepfather who worked in a steel mill and wore steel-tipped boots to work every day.

I'm thinking about Cinderella as a muse for writers, thanks to Elizabeth Anne Mitchell from ROW80. There she is, Cinderella, sitting in the ashes, hoarding her crusts, just one more starving, unpublished writer, hoping for transformation, that wave of a magic wand, yet bemused by the array of choices facing her just-finished novel.

Anne R. Allen's excellent article on the state of e-publishing/publishing in general, "Indie Publishing in 2013: Why We Can't Party Like It's 2009," intimidates as much as it informs. Amazon's recent spate of changes, Allen intimates, marginalizes the small, indie writer.

After what I thought was a careful comparison of Smashwords to Amazon as e-publishers, I chose Amazon to trial publish The Mermaid Quilt and Other Tales, largely because of their stand on DRM (the digital rights management debate). E-pubbing on Smashwords, with its multi-platforms, could allow the unscrupulous to carry off all those hundreds of writerly hours of hard work to new markets.

So I learned how to set up Kindle and paperback formats via Amazon (KDP and CreateSpace) and ventured out into the big marketplace. I'm still learning -- and will re-e-pub (if there's such a word) my collection of short stories with Smashwords and Kindle (taking a lesson from another ROW80 Colleague, Alberta Ross), on February 18, 2013, my personal liberation day from KDP Select.

If this Cinderella is sitting in the ashes of the fireplace, tearing her hair out and gnashing her teeth, it's because all of this is prologue. Publishing The Mermaid Quilt was a trial balloon to help me decide if I should e-pub my historical fiction, now up to two books. And the writing goes well on my main works in progress: I'm just finishing a "final" read through of Standing Stones, editing critically one last time. Do I sub to indie publishers? Do I self-publish? I honestly cannot decide. Your two cents???

Brown spotted hyena taking a mud bath

ROW80 UPDATE: WRITING: Looks like I'm on track to finish reading Standing Stones (95,000 words) and Years of Stone (80,000 words) for continuity before December 31st. Yipee! Or should I say Yahoo! I've been able to blog most days about the trip to Africa (despite a nasty cold) in my travel blog, On the Road Again,  MARKETING: Slow but steady. This week will write a press release and have posted some funny tweets re mermaids and stocking stuffers. CRAFT and PUBLICATIONS: Doing fine with reading writing magazines/books. The latest Writer's Digest reports that several "breakout" authors went through 40-60 submissions. So, I think I've only done about 20. Maybe time to dive in again. Standing Stones made me laugh and cry this week. I still believe in this story.

May your writing week go well.

On writing . . . and finishing . . .

Three books so far. One rests in a drawer. A thriller, Mothers Don't Die. One is being sent out somewhat sporadically. Standing Stones introduces the MacDonnell clan during the Scottish Industrial Revolution. The current work in progress, Years of Stone, set in Tasmania mid 19th Century, steams right along.

Some days I think I'm learning more about my characters, about how to write their story in a way that reveals some essential truth about the struggle we all face to make our lives a little better. Some days the next book teases me with sly thoughts, and I wonder how long it will be before Years of Stone is truly finished and ready for some form of publication. I also wonder when I'll jump into self-publishing.

But mostly I just write in the morning because if I don't, I get grouchy and feel something elemental is missing, an anchor that keeps me connected to the past and the future in a way that is uniquely mine.

Even when the writing does not go well, when I can't write a sentence that pleases me, I still learn something new. Did you know that 'fadge' is Victorian slang for a farthing? Fadge became the name of one of my characters this week. Here's how he introduces himself:  "You know why they call me Fadge?” He spat. “’Cause my life’s not worth a farthing.”

Fadge is a hulk of a man, silent, enduring, and he's probably spent far too much time in solitary. And yet he shares his Sunday meal of boiled beef with a fellow prisoner. He is also mad to escape. For I'm down in the coal mines this week, in the dank and dark places where men grubbed coal out by hand in tunnels no more than 4 feet high, and young boys ran baskets of coal back to the mine shaft, to be pulled up some 70 feet by a winch. These boys have no names.

I write to bring this history alive -- if for no one else, then for me.

On Aboriginal Tasmania

If only I knew more. My two local libraries scraped up two older books on aboriginal life in Australia, one from 1968 and one from 1969, both recounting tales from mainland Australia, not Tasmania. Internet research revealed some additional useful background, but my characters who come out of this tradition remain hazy. And then I found The Free Library. This searchable database of journals(and much more) revealed a back door into 19th Century Tasmania -- thanks to the work of Greg Lehman, a Tasmanian academic publishing in Australian Aboriginal Studies. He highlighted five new books. I list them here for the sheer pleasure of having found them, at least on line (next stop amazon and/or interlibrary loan):

• Ian McFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of Northwest Tasmania, A History (2008).
• Graeme Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law: A History of the Dispossession of the Mairremmener People of Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1832 (2010).
• Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonia Sea Frontier(2011).
• Robert Cox,Baptised in Blood: The Shocking Secret History of Sorell(2010) and Steps to the Scaffold: The Untold Story of Tasmania's Black Bushrangers(2004).

I want all of my characters to be authentic. My intuition has created placeholders, perhaps a half-dream of what the lives of aboriginal Tasmanians in mid-19th Century were like: some half-breed, some living between bush and town, some destroyed by rum, some hired or brought over from Victoria by the police as 'blacktrackers', some quietly assimilated, some moved out of 'settled districts' in that failed ethnic cleansing of the Black Line, some moved to Wybalenna, some clapped into orphanages, abandoned by both father and mother, caught between two very different cultures. I don't believe they were wiped out; I don't believe Trugernanner was the last Palawa (Tasmanian aboriginal). At least the books will give me a start on moving away from stereotype. I hope.

A writer's questions

I write daily. I read lots of good how-to-write-brilliantly articles. I sweat and send stuff out. I've even gotten a few things published now, but sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself. And I doubt, doubt, doubt.

This week, my questions now are:
--How do writers find the balance between setting, dialogue, action, and internal dialogue?
--How do writers create a sense of conflict?
--Is there a writing group online I could work with?
--Are my characters strong enough? Different enough?
--Specifically how do writers move a rough first draft to a final?
--How do writers sustain themselves when writing a novel?
--Are there smaller online writing groups that really work? How does a writer who's "on the road" find out about them?

Every writer's interview seems to indicate a different kind of process. Some work with intensely detailed outlines; others wing it. I know writing is a discipline, a long-term commitment. Even every time I pick up a new book, I'm noticing strategies and skills as the story unfolds.

Today's progress on Standing Stones: Found some wonderful research on conditions on the transport ships (think Australia, 1840), and discovered Australia put together a circle of massive standing stones (privately subscribed) in 1998 to honor Scottish (and Celtic) emigrees. After a rush of about 800 words a day, I'm slower today, wanting to fill in details that make the scene come alive. A new character fell off the boat literally, but no main characters got killed (which I was a little worried about). And the next step: Keep writing!