Lifescapes

Anticipating Lemons!

The Meyer lemon is blooming under its grow-light, while we're having our first taste of winter: freezing temps forecast for all next week. It's about time for winter, as far as I'm concerned: December is the warmest on record here in Central Texas. And not just here, everywhere. But the lemon tree is right on schedule. It blooms in  mid-winter and bears in early spring. Anticipating lemons--and already scheming to use them.

Homestead report. The weather has been so screwy that the fall potatoes are still growing. They're covered now for the cold week ahead. The spinach I planted last Sunday is up already. I've mulched it--it'll enjoy the colder weather. We have way too many perennial onions. These are non-bulb onions that I use like green onions, tops and all. The rest of the beds are filled with thriving henbit, a "weed" that the chickens adore.

Speaking of chickens: the Barred Rocks that were chicks last July are now laying an egg a day--baby eggs still, but beautiful and tasty. Now that they know where their nest box is and how to use it, they get to go out every afternoon. Lovely to have as many fresh eggs as we can use. Molly Maguire (our heeler) enjoys them too.

Book report. OMG, so much going on! I finished The Last Chance Olive Ranch (China Bayles #25)  but will revisit it in March before the due date (3/31). Loving Eleanor has garnered a coveted starred review from Kirkus and is earning praise from NetGalley reviewers--it'll be out on February 1. And yes, you can have a signed copy. The film project for A Wilder Rose is moving ahead. My current work-in-progress is another biographical/historical. I'm several chapters into it and still doing research. (Actually, for me, research continues throughout the writing process, since I love to keep tucking details into the text.) More about that when I'm further along in the process.

I hope you had a wonderful holiday celebration. I put up my mother's little Christmas tree, artificial but covered with her prized little ornaments, so it's special for me. There were just the two of us, so we had Cornish hens with rosemary stuffing and Bill's favorite lemon pie. My gift from Bill: an annual subscription to the online Oxford English Dictionary (yay!). Bill's gift from me: a new camera. (He took the lemon blossom photo.) We are NOT planning to overdo it on New Year's Eve, just a little fun food, a good film (not sure what's in the queue), and a glass or two of bubbly as we celebrate the year past--all those words--and imagine the year ahead: new words, a new voice. Stay safe, whatever you do....

Reading Note: For last year's words belong to last year's language/And next year's words await another voice./And to make an end is to make a beginning.--T.S. Eliot

 

 

The Research Behind LOVING ELEANOR

People who write historical fiction have to love research, because there’s such a lot of it.

Over the years, I’ve written historical novels featuring Beatrix Potter, Rose Wilder Lane, Jennie Churchill, Lily Langtry, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. All of these books have required an enormous amount of research to recreate the political, historical, economic, and cultural contexts within which the fictional story unfolds. Biographical fiction, which toes a delicate line between acknowledged fact and imagined truth, creates its own special research demands. And biographical fiction about a well-known, much-admired woman like Eleanor Roosevelt is extraordinarily challenging.

For Loving Eleanor—the story of Eleanor and her friend, Lorena Hickok (coming February 1)—I started in the usual place: by reading everything there is to read, and making notes, pages and pages of notes. There isn’t much published material about Hick, except for brief introductions to her Depression-era investigative reports to Harry Hopkins and a regrettably inadequate biography published in 1980 by Doris Faber. But the Roosevelts are the subject of dozens of books, so I ended up with a full bookcase. (You can check out the bibliography here. There's also a list at the end of the novel.)

In addition to the research in print and online sources, I visit key locations. When Bill and I were researching our British historicals, we spent lovely weeks in England, doing field research for all twelve books in the series. For Loving Eleanor, I visited Val-Kill, Springwood (FDR's family estate), the village of Hyde Park, and the FDR Presidential Library. My job was to learn all I could from the landscape, the local history, even the weather--and to take lots of notes and photographs.

Back home, I build the story out of what I've learned, working on a need-to-know basis that (I hope) keeps the reader from getting lost in a morass of historical fact. That said, when you’re writing about the First Lady of the World (as Harry Truman called ER), you simply have to get the facts right. The fiction must fit within the boundaries of what’s real: what people know, or think they know, about Mrs. Roosevelt.

But the real story, the private story of the friendship of Eleanor and Hick challenges what most people think they know about Mrs. Roosevelt. And since I’m interested in women’s hidden stories, what I’m chiefly after are unpublished documents. It is our great good fortune that Hick, who clearly wanted the story to be told, donated her collection of letters and other documents to the FDR Presidential Library: the letters tell the story. The experience of reading them is very much like listening to hundreds of hours of private, intimate conversation. I found myself pulled deeply into the worlds that Hick and Eleanor shared.

And for me, that’s when the real questions begin to arise. Who are these women, behind the personas they have created for themselves--or that family, friends, and historians have created for them? What do they want, what do they need? What are they afraid of? What is it they have to learn? Where is the real story, the hidden story? These are the questions that take us deep into the imaginative heart of fiction, but keep us within the boundaries established by the biographical and historical facts that research can discover.

Reading note: The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.--Geraldine Brooks

New GoodReads Giveaway: Loving Eleanor

  We're having a GoodReads giveaway! For a chance to win an autographed copy of my upcoming novel, go here. NetGalley pro readers, you can read the book now, on your Kindle or your computer. 

This biographical/historical novel tells the story of the decades-long intimate friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, documented by over 3300 letters held in the FDR Presidential Library. To read an excerpt and see some photos of people and places, check out this page. 

 

Deerly Beloved

It's deer season here in Texas. We  haven't seen any guys with guns this year (yet), but we have seen several nice bucks, including this splendid twelve-point whitetail buck we photographed from our front porch. This is the time of year when a buck has s-e-x on his mind and the does are either receptive or resigned, so we've been seeing plenty of deer hanky-panky. Molly Maguire (our Australian cattle dog) thinks it's her job to do the play-by-play, so there's plenty of excited barking, too. The veggie garden is fenced and there's enough open land around us that the deer aren't a problem, and we love to watch them. We saw a bobcat a couple of weeks ago, a rare sighting, only the second one we've seen in the nearly thirty years we've lived here.

Garden report. There's not much going on in the garden except for this spectacular kale, a hold-over from the spring garden. It's tasty, sauteed with a bit of onion and sausage. We may have fall potatoes if the hard freezes hold off for a couple of weeks. I planted them in August, using seed potatoes from the spring crop. This would be first time I've raised my own seed potatoes, a landmark achievement that's only possible in an El Nino year, I suspect. And it's a record El Nino: October was one of the warmest and wettest ever recorded here in Central Texas. Our lake is full and Pecan Creek is running for the first time in nearly four years: a lovely hiatus from the drought.

Book report. I'm delighted to let you know that Loving Eleanor--my novel about the friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok--has earned a starred review from Kirkus, another landmark achievement. The story of the intensely loving friendship of these two women (one of them the "First Lady of the World," as Harry Truman called ER) is a risky story, and untold. It's appearing February 1--but if you're a NetGalley reviewer you can read it now. I'm publishing it under my own imprint (Persevero Press), as I originally published A Wilder Rose. 

Speaking of which, I've signed the film option deal for Rose, for a possible cable network mini-series. This is a "live" project (meaning that it's not sitting on the producer's shelf, waiting for studio interest), and when it moves to the script stage, I'll share details. It's been fun and interesting to watch this process going forward--a whole new adventure for me.

Bill and I have also signed the contract for the UK publication of the Robin Paige Victorian/Edwardian mysteries, in print, ebook, and audio. It will be nice to have those books available for our friends who shop in British bookstores.

Works in progress. On the writing desk right now and nearly finished: the 2017 China Bayles mystery (The Last Chance Olive Ranch), for my Berkley/Penguin publisher. In research: another biographical/historical fiction, this one set during WW2. It's also a great story--can't wait to get started on the writing (as soon as Olive Ranch is finished). I'm planning to publish it via Persevero Press, as well. These days, I'm impatient with the long, slow process of traditional publication. I'm hoping to see it in print by Fall, 2017. 

Reading note. There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story . . . don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.--Stephen King