Posts Tagged ‘heroine’s bookshelf’

I’m deep in the thick of things, and writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf is simultaneously easier and more challenging than I thought it would be.  I feel kind of schizophrenic…by day, I’m instructing people on how best to use Twitter to promote their businesses and doing marketing plans.  But a huge part of me is busy sifting through the complexity of Louisa May Alcott’s relationship to her father and wondering about the architecture of corsetry in the Antebellum South.

Here are some tidbits I’ve come across in the past several weeks:

• Jane Eyre, illustrated:  A great collection of artistic interpretations of everyone’s favorite plane Jane, Jane Eyre
• Pioneer Girl:  A blog devoted to Laura Ingalls Wilder fact and fiction
• A fascinating look at the history of Times New Roman (and its connection to children’s book illustrator [famous for The Secret Garden and A Little Princess] Tasha Tudor)

Also, if you’re interested in issues of girls and boys reading (I sure know I am), check out my contribution to Newbery Honor winner and all around superstar Kirby Larson’s blog (coming next week sometime).  Preview here…

Well, some writers must have an ivory tower but I need trouble.

- Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Today opened with news that L.M. Montgomery’s The Blythes are Quoted will finally be published, extremely posthumously, in October.  Anyone who read Rilla of Ingleside and got a glimpse of the Blythes’ darker and more tragic side will probably relish the book, which is being teased as actually addressing adult themes like (shock!) adultery and (scandal!) revenge.  Sounds juicy…and I wonder if it will ever live up to the hype.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about.  I want to talk about prequels.

See, in perusing the news over TBAQ’s October debut, I found a note that Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne, has already sold a whopping 50,000 copies.

Can I get a whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

Though I am sure Wilson’s readers love his book for good reason, the popularity of prequels never ceases to amaze me.  Mike has often been witness to my not-so-silent rage over, for example, the hideous monstrosity that is the Little House on the Prairie sequels, the bizarre reimagining that is the Little Women diaries for girls.

Here’s the problem with prequels:  They are produced by writers who will never, ever be able to recreate the inner landscape, historical context, or internal motivations brought to the table by the original author.  For me, prequels puncture part of the magic of the Heroine’s Bookshelf…the existence of stories that won’t ever be fully imagined or completed.  My imagination (shock!) or my historical research always had to fill in the tantalizing blank spaces, gray areas, and gaps left by my favorite authors…and I am very okay with that.

What’s your take on prequels?

When I read the word “perseverance,” it’s in a self-conscious Jane Eyre type of voice, but that tongue-in-cheek delivery doesn’t really do justice to the concept.  All of the plucky heroines and authors of The Heroine’s Bookshelf have one thing in common:  they’re not easily swayed by fate’s slings, arrows, and twists in plot.  I’ve done my best to emulate them…but damn, it’s been difficult.

No, I’m not comparing the road to publication to the bitter moors or the rocky terrain of a broken heart.  But it has its own bumps.

I won’t bore you with all of the gory details on how an earlier, different incarnation of this book made it onto publishers’ desks and into editorial meetings…and died in marketing.  Repeatedly.

I’ll decline to elaborate on three years spent wringing my hands over the prospect of never having earned my trusty agent a cent and my seeming inability to come up with anything saleable.

I will gloss over the many years of false starts, trunked novels, and sore wrists.

I’ll simply throw out the truism I’ve come to after several years of ass-in-chair, I’m-doing-this-professionally “discipline” (punctuated with much gnashing of teeth and ripping of paper):  Publication, slow and ponderous and mysterious as it is, is the fun part.  But you can’t publish until you’ve edited, ruthlessly.  And you can’t even get that gutsy thrill until you’ve written, pitifully and in your socks and ratty headband, just you and the headphones and the blank screen, willing something out of your fingertips so that the editing and the publishing can happen.

If it sounds like I’m revving myself up for the work of actually writing the book, it’s because I am.  Accompanied, of course, by some of my best friends:  Louis May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Betty Smith.  

Soulful future author or freaky Victorian child?

Both.

This freckle-faced girl is Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Canadian, teacher, tortured optimist, dutiful preacher’s wife, “passionate friend,” and author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series.

We’re hanging out for the next week as I plunge into the writing process, on which Maud had this to say:

For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.

When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.