I somehow agreed to become a part of a blog chain based on meeting an author’s main character.  The idea originated on England, I believe.  I began reading with M.M. Bennetts’ post about a character who grew out of her book, Of Honest Fame, and demanded a book of his own.  Author Helen Hollick  then picked up the thread to re-introduce her main character Jesamiah Acorne, a sexy fellow with an uncanny ability to get himself into – and out of – all sorts of pirate adventures. Now Helen has passed the baton on to me in this series of posts by historical fiction authors in which we introduce the main character of our work in progress or soon to be published novel.

We all start with the same set of seven questions, so think of this as something of an interview.

 

Jonathan Edwards Grenville is the main character in my first real historical novel.  My previous books have built creative biographical studies of real people. Jonathan has the distinction of being a purely fictional character, although many of his experiences are based on those of historical figures during the Civil War.

 

The story takes place in and around Charleston, South Carolina  It opens shortly before the start of American’s Civil War and continues for a few years after the war has worn itself out.

 

Jonathan was raised in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. His upbringing made him passionately proud of his country and its  founding fathers who preached the virtues of liberty and equality.  If he did not openly profess abolitionist views, he still felt strongly that the institution of slavery was wrong. 

He sought a career in teaching and came to South Carolina around 1840 to teach American history in the country’s first free public institution of higher education provided especially for young men of the working and artisan classes.  Within a year or two he fell in love – first with a charming young Southern Belle who stood in line to inherit her family’s extensive cotton and rice plantations – and then with the whole aura of Southern charm and culture that surrounded her.

They married, raised a delightful family of seven children, and seemed to spend their charmed days in a world full of music, art, stimulating intellectual conversations, and gracious living.

This isn't a picture of Jonathan Grenville. I don't know who it is.  But it was taken in 1860, and it seems to me to look like my imaginary Jonathan.  He has the same sort of stunned, haunted look -- as if his world is collapsing around him.

 

And then came 1861! And for the first time in twenty years, Jonathan was forced to face the contradictions of his own life.  He spent his days in the classroom lecturing about the American ideal of freedom.  And then he went home to a house full of slaves and a lifestyle funded by the income from plantations worked by hundreds of slaves. He was a Yankee in a hotbed of Secession.  He was North; his wife was South. And he could not escape the war that raged around him. He lost his teaching job because he was a “Damned Yankee.” The family lost one plantation to the invading Union forces that attacked Port Royal Sound. They lost another to the Confederate Army that confiscated their land to protect a vital railroad line. The Great Charleston Fire of 1861 burned their house to the ground. And through it all, Jonathan blamed himself for his failure to live up to the virtues he preached.

 

Above all else, Jonathan remained determined to hold his family together – to protect them from the ravages of the war and to find a way to reconcile the political and ideological differences that threatened to tear them apart.

 

There was only one possible title for this story: Damned Yankee. And its sub-title is The Story of a Marriage.  For background, the reader may want to turn to my previous South Carolina books.  A Scratch with the Rebels told the story of the invasion that robbed the Grenvilles of their cotton plantation in the Low Country. Beyond All Price was set in the same location and painted a clearer picture of what life was like in the early years of the war.  And The Road to Frogmore focused attention on the whole issue of slavery.  When I wrote those books – all of them based on Northern characters -- I did not know that they would lead me into a novel about a Confederate family. But I can see now that they provided exactly the background I needed for this story.

 

Publication is so close that I can taste it.  Damned Yankee is currently available for pre-orders – both in paper and in electronic formats.  Click here to go to my website for details.  The final printed proof copy sits on my desk at this moment. The formal launch date is set for May 1, 2014, which is just about ten days from now – unless, of course, some of the calamities that surround Jonathan Grenville attack us here at Katzenhaus Books.

 

Thanks for visiting ... here is the next author to follow me; she will post about her main character on Tuesday, 29th April (next week).

If you haven' met Glogirly and her cats Katie and Waffles, you need to drop by and see what they are up to.  Katie looks amazingly like my Panda, and Waffles could be a double for Dundee, right down to the trouble he gets himself into.  But they've outdone themselves today.  Glogirly has a big announcement coming on May 1st, and so do I, but she's doing a better job of keeping it a secret than I am.  Waffles doesn't know and Katie's not telling. Here at Katzenhaus, Panda and Dundee are making plans in anticipation of an exciting book launch.

I've made no secret that my new book, Damned Yankee, will be released on that day.  What does Glogirly have planned? I have no idea,

but we will be waiting with twitching whiskers to find out.  In the meantime, Katzenhaus Books is delighted to know that May 1st will be a big day in several places around the internet.  Anyone else have plans?

Over the weekend, I was invited by a British friend to join a Blog Chain for writers of historical fiction.  Each Tuesday, several bloggers answer the same set of questions about the main character of the book they are currently working on.  Then those authors tap several friends to carry on the process the following week.  My husband tells me this is a form of a Ponzi scheme, but it seems like a good way to introduce our characters to new readers who love historical fiction.

I've agreed to follow my friend Helen Hollick, who writes both Anglo-Saxon historical novels and great pirate adventures.   I'm not sure which one she will be talking about tomorrow, but her characters are always fascinating, and more than a little sexy, especially the pirates.This blog will point you to her own contribution tomorrow, and then on the 22nd, I'll jump in with the story of my own Jonathan Grenville. Now I'm looking for about four more people to follow after me on April 29th.

Are you interested in following on in a Meet My Main Character blog chain? All you have to do is answer these questions:

(example here:  http://mmbennetts.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/meet-a-main-character/

 

 

Let me know via email  if you are interested.

 

The new book is coming along swimmingly! When I signed up with CreateSpace to have them print and issue the paper edition of Damned Yankee, I complained to my assigned design team manager about the length of time it had taken for them to get my last book published.  We futzed around with it for nearly three and a half months, which I thought was ridiculous.  (OK, I know.  Out there reading this are a bunch of writers who use traditional publishers, and they are shaking their heads at my innocence.  "Only three and a half months? Why, my last book took three and a half years to get through an agent and actually appear!") But one of the reasons I run my own small publishing business is that I don't want to spend that kind of time waiting around.

In the case of Damned Yankee, I've been thinking about the story since 2010, and it has taken me two years to write it and get it edited. Its time has come, and I want it out there for people to read.  Ergo -- the push to move quickly.  I submitted the raw manuscript to CreateSpace on March 12th of this year.  Today, 27 days later, I hit the final "Accept" button to start the presses.  Immediately, the company returned with another question: "Do you have a cover ready, or do you need help in creating one.?"  The answer was  "Yes, I have the cover completed, thanks to the talented Cathy Helms at Avalon Graphics," and I hit another "Submit" button.

Here's the completed cover layout. They have only to attach the cover to the completed interiors, and we will be in business.  Even with Easter and a Lions Convention getting in the way, we're going to hit the May 1st launch date, so mark your calendars.

I'm experiencing a bit of a lull this week.  The new book -- Damned Yankee -- is getting a final few corrections made, and the printer now says the final proof copy will be ready by April 15 -- a week from tomorrow.  Then I'll be back into it again as we kick off a launch, order books for a small book tour in South Carolina, and start marketing full time.

But what to do in the meantime?  I already have plans for a new book, based on my mother's family of eight sisters.  I've always been fascinated by their lives, but have been hesitant to write something that would offend family members.  Now I've decided that a fictionalized version will work -- with enough details changed (and the names, of course ) so that folks won't be finding grandma's dirty laundry being hung about.

And with that thought in mind, I've been exploring old family photos and scanning them into my computer for guidance and inspiration.  Some were taken in my own lifetime, but most go back well over 100 years.  I'm amazed at how clear they still are. Here's one example:

It shows my grandmother on the left, with her sister, her second oldest daughter, and her first grandchild.  It was taken about 1898. And what a different world it reveals.

Then I can jump ahead to 1915 and see the whole lineup of grandmother and her eight daughters. They're still very old-fashioned, aren't they?

And for another change, I found this portrait of my mother  (the youngest of the girls) in 1935 -- looking quite modern. 

I'm going to enjoy exploring that time at the beginning of the 20th-century and its enormous changes.

It's now Tuesday morning, and I'm still wallowing in old family memories, some of which  only originated in listening to my mother tell stories of her girlhood.  She looks lovely here, but she wasn't always so happy.

I can' resist including this picture of her one-room schoolhouse.  Obviously she was not pleased with having a class picture taken! That's her in the middle of the front row, arms folded and a ferocious scowl on her face. The picture is even scratched, lokking as if she tried to cross herself out.

Oh, and by the way, I'm scowling, too.  The blog trolls have been at it again, leaving their ads in the comments section. I tried leaving comments open but requiring my approval before they appear.  However, there are so many of the annoying ones that I've closed comments.  You can always e-mail me, instead, if you want to comment.

In case you missed yesterday's announcements on other social media, I am pleased to inform you that "Damned Yankee: The Story of a Marriage" is progressing quite nicely. The page proofs needed only a few corrections, and I'm now anticipating making the final "Print It!" statement around Easter.  The end of April promises to be typically chaotic around here, since we are running a big Lions State Convention here from the 24th through the 27th. But somewhere in there, I'll find time to check the physical proof and launch the other electronic formats.

Release day is now officially May 1, 2014.  As some of you are all too aware, Amazon will not do pre-orders for independently-published books, or for small presses that do not have an account with them.  So those of you who will be ordering Kindle editions or paperbacks from Amazon will have to wait until May 1 to get your copy.  However, pre-orders are available now for Barnes and Noble Nook editions and for Apple's iBooks.

I've set the pre-order price for electronic editions at $3.99; it will increase to $4.99 on release day.  The paperback versions will sell for $17.95 on Amazon and Smashwords, but if you want to pre-order your paperback, you can get a price break there, too.

Go to the Katzenhaus website (http://www.katzenhausbooks.com/The-Latest-News.html). There you'll find the button to pre-order a signed and bookmarked paper copy for a total of $20.00 (including shipping.)  What a deal!  Just do it soon, OK? I need to know how many paper copies to order when I give the "PRINT" command.

I'm reading page proofs for "Damned Yankee" this weekend and into the first part of nex week, so you won't be hearing a great deal from me.  However, here are a couple of articles that you may find interesting. They appear on my curated ScoopIt pages, but you can also find them from their titles.

The Historian's Point of View:  The Experiences of the Past, Seen through Current Events

On this site, I'll be gathering articles about the craft of history -- new discoveries, new methods, new controversies.  Today’s article again raises the question of whether history repeats itself..  Find it at http://www.scoop.it/t/the-historian-s-point-of-view

The Writing Game: A Collection of Advice and Clever Tips for Writers of all Genres

Every writer has a set of tricks to help navigate through thorny spots in the writing process. Maybe some of them will help you, too. Here’s a lis of this year’s writers’ conferences. Find it at: http://www.scoop.it/t/the-writing-game

Self-Publisher: How To Be Your Own Publisher without Going Bankrupt

Current views and helpful tips from authors who have switched to self-publishing. .Today we have support from a cookbook writer.   Find it at: http://www.scoop.it/t/self-publisher

The Road to Frogmore has several other couples whose lives and relationships  are interesting and sometimes puzzling.  Our third example concerns General  Rufus Saxton and Tilly Thompson, “the most beautiful girl on the island.”

 

General Saxton had an illustrious military career.  He was a West Point graduate and was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery at Harper’s Ferry.  But for much of the Civil War he was assigned to Hilton Head, SC, in charge of overseeing the Union’s efforts to deal with the newly-liberated slaves in the area.  That position put him in sometimes daily contact with Miss Laura Towne, and for some period of time he seemed to be courting her.  She was his guest at the festivities marking the Emancipation Proclamation, his dance partner, and his favorite conversationalist.  She, of course, had no interest in marriage, or even in his courtship efforts.

 

Suddenly in May 1863, Saxton married a girl who was 20 years his junior and to all appearances an empty-headed flirt recognized as the “most beautiful girl on St. Helena Island.” Tillie Thompson had come to South Carolina to accompany her newspaperman brother, who was editor of the Union newspaper in Beaufort.  Now and then she toyed with the idea of teaching in Miss Towne’s school, but no one took her seriously until she suddenly became Mrs. Rufus Saxton.

 

Despite their differences, all evidence suggests that they lived “happily ever after.”

 

 She's from South Carolina. Can she survive the War between the States while married to a "Damned Yankee?"

He's from Boston, but in Charleston, he's just a "Damned Yankee."

America’s Civil War was more than a political disaster -- it was a human tragedy. Yet somehow the victims held on to the hope that love for one another could mend the tears in  fabric of their lives. This new book will tell their stories.

Pre-orders of electronic editions are now available from the following booksellers. Your book will be delivered on the release day (now scheduled for May 15, 2014).

During the "Pre-Order" period, the electronic editions will sell for $3.99.

 

 

Autographed trade paper editions -- signed by the author and accompanied by a matching bookmark -- may be ordered here before the release date.  During the "Pre-Order" period, these books will sell for $15.00 plus shipping fee of $5.00.  They will be mailed on, or a day or two before, the official release date. Place your order on our website at www.katzenhausbooks.com/The-Latest-News.html

 

 

Cuteness Overload!

Sometimes a cat picture comes along that just blows away my determination to keep this blog devoted to serious writing and publishing tidbits.  This morning you have to meet Sami, who is helping to record "Beyond All Price" as an audio book. Really!

I showed the picture to Nutmeg, who is one of the Katzenhaus family of cats -- one who now and then sits on my lap and helps me type.  Nutmeg says she is sure that she and Sami are related. So welcome to Katzenhaus Books, Sami! You fit right in around here.