All Different Kinds of Free by Jessica McCann

The story was inspired by actual events, specifically the U.S. Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842. I first learned about it when I was doing freelance copyediting for a book about Supreme Court justices. The case appealed the conviction of a bounty hunter from Maryland  (Edward Prigg) charged with kidnapping Margaret Morgan, a free woman of color living in Pennsylvania who was alleged to be an escaped slave. The court case focused on state's rights, and the ruling represented the first time a major branch of the U.S. government made a proslavery stand. But I was most interested in Margaret and what became of her.

My original goal was to write a biography, and I spent about three years researching her life -- or, at least, attempting to research her life. The sad truth is that Margaret and her fate were irrelevant at the time. The issue for most people in the mid-1800s was much bigger than one woman's fight for freedom. Yet, to me, it was all about Margaret. When I realized I didn't have enough facts to write a biography, I was devastated and grudgingly packed away my research.

Then my mother-in-law loaned me a book, a fictional biography about George Washington, by Mary Higgins Clark. It was an entertaining read, and it gave me the idea that a fictional biography might be the only way I could tell Margaret's story and really do it justice.

That's how my novel was born. Tons of secondary research went into the book. I devoured reference books, diaries, slave testimonials, newspaper archives -- anything I could get my hands on to help me better understand what the average person experienced on any given day in that era. That research provided the factual framework of the novel, and I filled in the blanks based on what my mind, my heart and my gut were telling me as each scene unfolded.

What really happed to Margaret Morgan? No one knows. What I do know is that she suffered a great injustice. And it was a similar injustice suffered by thousands of other women just like her -- wives, mothers, daughters -- during that dark period in U.S. history. That fact is what propelled the fictional story I ultimately wrote.

The history books will have you believe the story of Prigg v. Pennsylvania is important because it ended in controversy and fanned the early embers of the Civil War. This book will have you believe the story is important because it began with Margaret.

All Different Kinds of Free is available in trade paperback and e-book from Bell Bridge Books. Learn more at the official website http://www.AllDifferentKindsOfFree.com

Buy the book from your local bookseller 

or from Amazon US

Amazon UK

Canada

Serendipity by Sarah Bryant

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most common question people ask me when I tell them that I’m a writer, and it’s definitely the most difficult to answer. It’s not so much that I don’t know (although at some point, flash-in-the-pan inspiration is always a factor) but that the origins of my books are usually so distant, so mundane, or so apparently unrelated to the finished product, that people either don’t believe me, or are disillusioned by the utter banality of the truth.
“Serendipity” is no exception. Its point of origin is seventeen years ago, my second year of university, when I was a competitive dinghy sailor. I woke up one morning from a dream about an old white wooden sailboat named “Heaven”, wanting to write about it, and sailing’s addictive quality, and of course, being a rose-tinted twenty year old, about love. The result was an abysmal short story about a girl who loved sailboats, and a boy who loved her. It sank into my “stories” folder without ever seeing the light of day, and I forgot about it until the following year, when my first real relationship ended in a spectacular mess.
Among other fallout, I quit sailing. I had to, if I didn’t want to see the boy in question every day. I missed it at least as much as I missed him, but there was no question of going back to either one. So what to do with the sudden, gaping hole in my life? Write about it, of course! I dusted off the sailboat story, trashed most of it, but kept the two characters and a few sentences belonging to each of them. Then I started listening. The guy was silent. But the girl had a lot to say about love and loss and disillusionment. I started writing.
It wasn’t until the following summer that Meredith’s pages of broken-hearted rumination began to take shape as a novel. But oddly, it had nothing at all to do with Meredith, or even sailboats. I was working that summer on a small teaching farm – a little bit of the nineteenth century marooned in the Massachusetts suburbs. Before I knew it, a world was forming in my head: one which took shape around that farm, as it might have been in a different time or place. And out of it, unexpectedly, the silent man began to speak. He was intelligent and wry and as-yet-inexplicably damaged. I put Meredith aside, and started writing Silence. I knew that they were connected, but how? Writing a novel about a sailing prodigy and a farmer seemed like a fool’s errand.
The answer came out of nowhere. Well actually it came from Adam, a friend I’d made at that farm, who announced one day, “My new favourite word is ‘serendipity’.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because serendipity explains everything.” I said, “Right, whatever,” but I found the word knocking around my head the next few days as I demonstrated the joys of cow milking and composting to a lot of hot, bored suburban children.
And then Adam took me to see his family’s farm. It had a huge old red barn, intriguingly empty. It was like a cathedral. It was big enough to hold a boat. And that was it, the flash in the pan: Silence was building a boat in his barn! And sooner or later he was going to need help; enter Meredith. Serendipity, indeed.
I’d like to say it all went smoothly from there, but that quote about love’s course hold true for novels too. I took “Serendipity” with me onto a writing masters program, thinking it was great. The tutor hated it, and did her level best to fail me. A year later, I was lucky enough to find an agent who loved it, and I thought I was sorted. Wrong again: the agent couldn’t sell it, and ultimately gave up on it. So did I.
I wrote other books, found publishers for them. It wasn’t until I was writing my third historical novel that “Serendipity” got its Eureka moment. I was bogged down in that third book, with two small children and too little time to do the research it required. Then something strange happened: I was slogging away at 19th century Edinburgh, but it was Meredith and Silence who kept speaking to me. And they were saying, “When are you ever going to figure it out? Our story belongs here!”
I still can’t believe that when I emailed my editor and said, “Um, about that book you’re expecting…is it okay if I write a completely different one?” she said yes without hesitation.
I took “Serendipity” back out, rewrote the first section as set in the 1890s rather than 1990s, and everything just fell perfectly into place. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to see that this story had always belonged in an earlier era. At long last, despite myself (and with a little help from Bob Dylan – just read it, you’ll see!) I knew exactly how to make “Serendipity” into the book it was meant to be. And if it took me seventeen years? Well, better later than never!

http://www.sarahbryant.net/

Walls of Jericho by Jonathan Hopkins

Every felt so annoyed about something you just have to stick your oar in?

You tell your friends how cross you are. Facebook it. Blog about it, maybe. Phone a radio show. Send a comment to the newspapers.

That's how I felt.

Why? It's a slightly complicated story.

Some years ago, my wife nagged me about...the usual stuff, really. About not being romantic, never buying flowers...etc, etc. So I had a brainwave. For our anniversary I'd deliver her flowers as...a Napoleonic Hussar, on horseback. Can't get much more romantic than that, thought I.

The horse was no problem, but saddlery and equipment was. No patterns available, you see, so I would have to make everything from scratch. That meant reading proper history books (ugh!). Lots of them. Trying desperately to glean enough information from contemporary pictures and diagrams to make accurate copies of bridle and pistol holsters. And other bits 'n pieces.

The thing was, every historian I read, with a couple of honourable exceptions, had a single view of the British cavalry fighting Napoleon. They were rubbish.

And as I read more and more disparaging comments I got more and more frustrated. The cavalry couldn't have been all that bad, could they?

It was when I started to read the few published cavalrymen's diaries, both British and French, that a quite different picture began to emerge. A story of lives full of even more hardship and tragedy than the average redcoat could have imagined. After all, at the end of a march the infantryman had simply to find food, a place to sleep, and clean his musket. The cavalryman had another life to consider before his own. Even this one obvious fact had been simply glossed over by most academics.

Well, they're not horsemen, are they?

So I decided I'd put the record straight. And because I'm no historian, I wrote a novel; the story of two young cavalry recruits. A journey from boyhood to manhood, for privileged and pauper alike. In it I've tried to give readers a feel of what these men's lives were really like.

Because historians don't seem to care. And in my book, that's not playing fair with men who fought and died for their country.

The wedding anniversary went fine, by the way!

Blog: http://cavalrytales.wordpress.com/

Web: http://www.cavalrytales.co.uk/

Whisper My Name by Jane Eagland

One of the main inspirations for Whisper My Name is something that’s intrigued me for years, but I couldn’t see a way to write about it. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is because that would reveal a key mystery of the plot!

Then I was researching for my first novel Wildthorn when I came across references to Victorian spiritualism. That’s one of the delightful things about research – what you chance on when you’re looking for something else. What I read hooked me in and, combined with the topic-I-can’t-identify-without-giving-away-the story, gave me the seed for Whisper My Name.

Until then I’d not realized how popular séances were in the nineteenth century. Even Queen Victoria was not averse to a spot of table-turning, apparently. Like her, many people treated it merely as a pastime, but there were others including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who truly believed that it’s possible, via a medium, to communicate with the dead.

I found the whole subject fascinating, especially accounts of what fraudulent mediums got up to. A ‘spirit hand’ appearing through a hole in the middle of the table turned out to be a stuffed glove on the medium’s raised foot. Mediums handcuffed inside cabinets could release themselves with a second key secreted in their mouths and ‘appear’ cloaked in white muslin to thrill their audience. One such who was caught in her underwear claimed to have been stripped by an evil spirit.

I was entertained by all this, but you’ll have to read the book to see whether my mediums are frauds or true believers. What moved me most, though, was the serious side of spiritualism – the powerful desire to believe that the people we love have not disappeared, that they are still ‘with us’ and that it’s possible to make contact with them.

From that impulse, my main character Meriel Garland was born. Motherless and still grieving, by chance she takes part in a séance…

Though spiritualism gave me the framework for my story what interests me most when I am writing a novel are the characters and their relationships. As soon as I started thinking about her, Meriel sprang to life. Lively, determined, she’s the sort of person it might be fun to know. But she’s not without her faults and here I wanted to set myself a challenge – to see whether I could portray the less appealing aspects of her character without forfeiting the reader’s sympathy. Whether I’ve succeeded or not, I don’t know.

Once I had Meriel, I then thought about Sophie Casson, the young medium, a very different character from Meriel. Quiet, enigmatic, I knew she also had a story which I had to uncover.

I brought the two girls together and the mystery began to unfold.

www.janeeagland.co.uk

Darcy and Fitzwilliam by Karen V Wasylowski

The story behind Darcy and Fitzwilliam began years ago when I first saw Laurence Olivier as Fitzwilliam Darcy.  This man was chic.  The character was a stylish alpha male without being a bully, sophisticated without losing a sense of humor.  He was arrogant at first then humbled before a master of the cutting word – his Elizabeth.  Why is it all women love to see a haughty man made weak at the knees with love?  Who am I kidding?

My adoration for Darcy had begun. 

Then there was Colin Firth in 1995 in all his beautiful Firthiness - exquisite smile, gorgeous hair, just enough masculinity to dazzle with a touch of vulnerability to make him loveable.  He was a more aggressive Darcy, more in your face (hubba hubba).  And love him we did.  Most fervently.

But…it was not until the 2005 movie that I could no longer hold back my true Darcy feelings.  It was Matthew Macfadyen, in all his Macfadyness that pushed me over the brink.  He is a very big man that somehow comes across as elegant.  He brought shyness to Darcy (never saw that coming) and a reason for his reticence to dance with Lizzy at the Assembly was suddenly more than mere snobbishness.  When he batted his lashes at the end, muttering, “I l-l-love you – most ardently,” a few hundred thousand hearts were added to the Darcy heap.  Mine among them.

I kept zeroing in on one scene, however, in the movie.  The scene at Aunt Catherine’s when she grills and grills Lizzy about her mother, her sisters, her accomplishments, or lack thereof.  Darcy is clearly mortified – his eyes glance at his Aunt’s face.  She must appear to him to be a modified form of Mrs. Bennet, with better style sense. 

He then glances at his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. 

Fitzwilliam glances at him.

That was the birthplace of my book - a shared look by two young men, one uncomfortable and one snickering, one bemused and another embarrassed by an older cranky relative.  My mind whirled with the associations, their secret look told me more than even the director had intended.  They had a history with this old bat, as we all have a history with our crazy aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers.  I identified completely. 

I began to write.

http://www.karenwasylowski.com/