The Story So Far...
When I take a walk in the mornings, there's a patch of California poppies near the house, blooming at this time of year, very pretty and cheerful. If the walk is very early, I get to see the morning star as well.
The giant mountain of Stuff - including the inevitable aftermath of a death in the family - has been mostly gotten through, and I'm feeling a bit more normal. (Being told that yes, I would be teaching a class two weeks after Mom's passing - and being told this on the Friday before class began - didn't help...)
I lost about 2 months of work, so I'll be a bit preoccupied, but at least the research into 1920s Hollywood is fun (when it isn't jaw-droppingly appalling): writing a novel demands a level of detail not found in a lot of popular non-fiction. It's one thing to say, "In the early 20s Rudolf Valentino bought a house in the Hollywood Hills," but if my story is taking place in May of 1924, could our heroines have visited him there or not, and what turning would they be looking for off Sunset Boulevard? Yes, John Barrymore was in silent films, but had he come out to Hollywood by May of 1924 and did he have his pet monkey with him (and what was the little beast's name?). (And who was he married to at the time?) I ran into similar problems with the Ben January book I just finished, but with less information to go on: Where WAS Henry Clay in mid-September of 1840?
Maybe it's the historian in me. One of the things I've always loved about Georgette Heyer's romances is that it's usually possible to pinpoint when they're taking place, usually to within a few weeks. (And Harry Turtledove can put you down right on the day). I spent the first three chapters of a recent romance novel I was reading trying to figure out not merely what year it was, but what decade. It was vaguely oldey-timey (the women wore long dresses and corsets and everyone rode in carriages), but the author was real coy about specifics.
Thank goodness for those nice programs that tell you what day of the week May 9, 1924 was, and was there enough moonlight to see somebody's face if you were chasing around the Hollywood Hills dodging Stalinist agents?
Every job has its demands.
Hi Barbara, My book group is reading The Ninth Daughter. We meet on April 12, 2022. Any thoughts you can give us on this excellent book and series?
ReplyDeleteWe must have missed where the title comes from - I believe I read it was the nine daughters of EVE?
Thanks
Gingeet
Gingeet, thank you! I feel very honored that your group would be looking at one of the John & Abigail books - some of my favorites, though they never did real well in the marketplace.
ReplyDeleteThe original title was The Ninth Daughter of Eve (which comes from the ravings of the crazy minister in the story). The publishers cut it down to The Ninth Daughter, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I didn't want to risk publication delays etc by making an issue of it. I THINK I encountered the idea of the nine daughters of Eve (and the nine sons of Adam) someplace in one of the Puritan sermons I was reading back then - to get a sense of why people were drawn to the Puritan movement - but at this distance, I truly can't recall. (I know also that C.S. Lewis uses "two sons of Adam, two daughters of Eve" in one of his books, but I don't know if I extrapolated that idea from him, or found it elsewhere).
The series was published under the name of Barbara Hamilton because we all knew it wouldn't sell in high numbers, and if the publishing computer algorithm gets a Bad Number by your name it really screws your chances of selling other books. It seemed safer to do this. (Alternate-history fantasy writer Harry Turtledove has written some DELIGHTFUL historical adventure tales about Hellenistic traders on the Mediterranean under the name of H.N. Turtletaub, for exactly the same reason. The stories were something he longed to write, but as a professional in this business, he knew better than to fall foul of publishing computer statistics.)
The stories themselves had their origin when I was working on a straight historical novel about the first three First Ladies (and Sally Hemings), "Patriot Hearts." I loved working on that book, loved reading the letters John and Abigail sent to each other when John was away, first in Philadelphia and then in France. I've always loved the Famous Historical Sleuth genre of mystery writing, so I talked to my agent, talked to an editor who had been a good friend for many years, and outlined three John & Abigail mysteries.
I wrote them more or less "on spec," since I was contracted for other books at the time; I'm pleased to hear that people still read them and like them! I have three others in the series that I would love to write. Now that self-publishing through Amazon Kindle and platforms like Draft-2-Digital are more easily available, I have every intention of writing them eventually. At the moment, since I'm still teaching 1 class per semester (on-line, at the local community college) - and digging myself out from under a backed-up pile of deadlines that started by my taking on two extra projects a year ago - I barely have time to sweep the floors, let alone start another extra project... But I hope, in time, to continue the series.
I will close with the observation that writing a Famous Historical Sleuth mystery (or any story involving historical characters) requires a certain type of research: What would ABIGAIL HERSELF have thought and felt? What experiences shaped her life and perceptions of the world? (How was her life affected by her good-for-nothing wastrel brother? What were her relationships with her mother, her sisters, the hired girl who died during the Revolution? Did John's clerk live in the house with them or elsewhere? What were the residence halls like at Harvard in 1773? How long of a walk was it from Abigail's house to Paul Revere's?) Stuff that you generally don't find in regular histories.
And, I will say that I love the minor characters, like Paul Revere and Wily Cousin Sam.
I'm glad that other people love the series as well.