Daughter of Texas by Celia Hayes

Very early on – by the time that I could actually read easily, I was particularly drawn to accounts of the American frontier in the 19th century. This, to judge by the inscriptions in books that I was given as gifts and recalled reading as soon as the ribbons and wrapping paper was off them, would have been about the age of eight or nine. It started with a deep and abiding love for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, about her family experiences as her parents moved between Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and was refined by my mother’s perspicuity in having a subscription to American Heritage Magazine (in the days when it was a hard-bound quarterly and without advertisements) and leaving it around where I could read it. Which I did, repeatedly, and from cover to cover; I was particularly drawn to stories about the westward immigrant trails – of families who packed up everything they owned in a covered wagon and headed west, on barely-explored paths into two thousand miles of howling wilderness.

After twenty years in the military, and twelve years of that spent assigned in Europe, I came home. My last assignment was in San Antonio, Texas – where I stayed, for various reasons, one of which was that the place began to grow on me. Texas turned out to be . . . well, a much more complicated and nuanced place than anyone would think from having watched movies. It’s more than just the Alamo – which everyone knows about in a superficial way, but there is so much more than that. Texas is kind of a demi-glace, a boiled-down reduction of the frontier – and by extension of the American experience –where a good few different cultures clashed and mingled. I discovered this dramatic and eventful – and relatively unknown history just by living a short distance away. After my first novel – about a practically unknown wagon train party on the California Trail, I was casting around for the next project; had to be the frontier, had to be 19th century and relatively unknown. And then I thought – why not the German settlements, in the Hill Country north of San Antonio? It’s a terrific historical anomaly, which hardly anyone outside of Texas knows about. Slap-dab in the middle of Texas are several counties and several towns which were settled almost exclusively by German immigrants in the mid-19th century. I thought I would do a single novel about that: an entrepreneur scheme, thought up by a group of well-meaning and well-financed German noblemen, the Mainzer Adelsverein (or the Society of Noblemen of Mainz) to bring over settlers from Germany. This would reward them with lots of land and acclaim for having done a very good deed; helping farmers and craftsmen settle in a new land, with lots of opportunities. Unfortunately, the Mainzer Adelsverein went bust after two years – but not after dumping 7,000 immigrants onto the Texas frontier.

I made a family saga, so that readers could relate: I created the Steinmetz family; parents, three daughters, two sons and a son-in-law, who come and settle in Texas. I also needed to create another character, a Texan German-speaker. He was intended to serve as a bridge to the new life they must embrace and as a heroic and romantic interest for one of the Steinmetz daughters. That led me to create another family, the Beckers; German by heritage, but long established in Texas. Almost in passing, I gave the hero-character an older sister. I described her as being a woman who kept a boarding house in early Austin, married twice, and who knew practically everyone of consequence in Republic-era Texas. In the first chapter of the Trilogy, her brother says in passing to another character that his sister had been left to raise four sons when her husband died of tuberculosis. I should emphasize that she started as a fairly minor and secondary character – but when I came to thinking about what my next book was to be, I thought, why not write about Margaret Becker?

Do the whole story of her life and her experiences: coming to Texas as a young girl, marrying the schoolteacher, and seeing the beginnings of the war for Texas independence from her home in Gonzalez. And then the whole of that war, the ‘Runaway Scrape’ – where almost the entire Anglo civilian population evacuated back to east Texas under horrific conditions – and what she did to rebuild her life. That story could be a gripping account of a woman meeting the challenges of that time. Tell the story from her point of view, move her experiences from just something mentioned briefly to front and center, write of the people that she would have met and known over the years of her life, from the age of twelve in eventful times and a special place?

Like the Adelsverein Trilogy, Daughter of Texas started out as a single volume, intended as a prelude to the Trilogy. But when I had gotten up to about 350 pages of manuscript, the events of the war, the Runaway Scrape, the death of her first husband – and I hadn’t even gotten into the romance with her second, or very far into all sorts of interesting but relatively little-known happenings during the years of the Republic of Texas – I decided that I would save all the rest for a second book about her life. So that’s where that stands. Daughter of Texas is now available at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and in Kindle and Nook editions. The sequel, Deep in the Heart should be available in December, 2011. No, I don’t have a problem with writer’s block – why do you ask?

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http://www.celiahayes.com/

The Chatelaine by Claire Lorrimer

Of all the many books I have written, THE CHATELAINE – the first of the historical family saga I called ‘The Rochford Trilogy’, is my favourite. The first saga was more or less written to outlines provided by a literary agent hitherto unknown to me. He was aware I had had over thirty light romantic novels published and persuaded me there was a dearth of historical sagas in the States. I said I would have a try!

The trilogy, The Women of Fire, (shortly to be published by Piatkus) went straight into the bestseller list in the States and was reprinted thirteen times in the first year. However, I now found I was enjoying this new genre of writing, and a report in an article about a missing baby started me wondering what had happened to the child. This evoked ideas which led to THE CHATELAINE.

By the time I wrote Chapter 1 of this book, I had learned how to go about plotting these lengthy sagas. I had begun my first effort in the same way I had written the light romances – put a piece of paper in the typewriter, type Chapter 1, and plough straight on to the happy ending. My first effort at a saga came to an abrupt halt when I discovered an elderly retainer serving drinks in Chapter 1, had reached the age of 120 but was still the family butler by Chapter 3! Likewise, a pregnant dairy maid had, poor girl, remained pregnant for two and a half years. Consequently, I devised a working chart and by the time I was writing THE CHATELAINE, I was minus these interruptions to the creative flow, so its creation was a lot less hard work and great fun to do. I’m happy to pass on a copy of my chart to any young aspiring author!

When planning a book, I choose a period of history which suits my story rather than the other way round. Historical data is secondary to the story itself although an historical event may trigger part of the plot. Educated on serials in women’s magazines in my youth, I aim to end each chapter with my reader desperate to start the next! I get so involved with my characters by the end of a book I want to write more about them – hence the trilogies.

Starting a book is always a bad time for me. I want to get on and tell the story in my head, and although I know the major characters, I have to describe them to the reader who can’t see into my mind! Red hair, blue eyes, quick tempered etc, etc. I note these down in a character description book so I don’t suddenly make a man ‘tower menacingly’ above his companion when he’s unusually short and fat. They must also behave in a way true to their character as I’m sure this is the way to make a reader believe in them just as they have become real to me. I have sometimes had serious discussions with my secretary as to whether a character should do or say something, both of us forgetting that a fictitious character can do or say whatever the author wants! They do become very real, even to the point where, when editing a chapter in a book called FROST IN THE SUN, I felt close to tears near the end – silly, I suppose, but that’s how real they seem.

People interest me enormously – far more than what they are wearing, what they look like. It’s one of the reasons I find young children so fascinating. They get to the core of a person and disregard the trimmings. I am impatient when I have to stop the action to dress who someone who I can see in my mind but have to remember the reader needs to be told the facts.

I have been writing books since I was ten years old, probably because my mother was an author and encourage me to do so – partly to divert my imagination into less disruptive channels than was my wont in those early days. It is close on a century ago that she began writing light romances for Mills and Boon and even now, is still read extensively in the libraries. People often say they don’t believe she wrote as many as 200 books, but I myself wrote three of these simple love stories every year, hence my uncompetitive total of 80!

Last week, one of my granddaughters telephoned me to say she had started reading an old copy of THE CHATELAINE which was the only book to hand, and that it had kept her awake most of the night and made her late for work next day. This gave me almost as much pleasure as when a woman came up to me after one of my talks to libraries, and said THE DYNASTY had enabled her to cope when for hours and days on end, she had sat by her terminally ill husband’s bedside. It had, she said, enabled her to escape into another world.

When I am writing a book, I am indeed in another world. I lose count of time and dare not leave anything in the oven lest for the umpteenth time, I ruin yet another casserole or cake. I have a timer on my desk to remind me I am due somewhere and I must leave my world and return to reality.

Do I enjoy writing? I don’t know how to answer that. All I can say is that when I get an idea for a plot, it nags me like a bad headache until I can get it down on paper and out of my mind. I am near completion of a new saga at the moment, and none too happy to set it aside in order to write this when I should be getting my current heroine out of her crashed car before it is too late!

www.clairelorrimer.co.uk

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