About Books: The Nicholas Keating Novels

 

 

The Nicholas Keating novels began as one short story titled, “Coffee.” The idea came to me as I was walking through my town one December afternoon. It had snowed a few days earlier, something that rarely happens anymore in December. The snow had been plowed and the sidewalks were clear except for occasional black ice where the snow had melted on the lawns and flowed onto the pavement. I nearly slipped on one bit of it.

That reminded me of a pair of boots I had in the 1980s. They were fleece-lined boots with 2-inch stiletto heels. That height heel isn’t that bad on high heels, but in my opinion, has no place on a pair of boots. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them. Yes, I wanted a dressy pair of snow boots, but that’s kind of a crazy thing to want. Snow boots are meant to get through snow. Dressy boots are not.

As I walked home, I thought about a woman wearing boots like that and falling because of black ice. And an image popped into my mind of a young man for whom chivalry wasn’t dead, who helped her up and made sure she wasn’t injured.

Of course, in stories, help is never simply a random act with nothing more to it. My town has a coffee shop that is quite popular, so I made coffee a center point for a thank-you mini-date.

The story was not without it’s amusing bits. The young man, it turns out, is a violinist on loan from a Welsh orchestra. The woman’s second run-in with him shows him with his violin case, but his youthful appearance makes her think the 25-year-old musician is still in high school.

Throughout the twists and turns of the short story, the two, of course, are attracted and end up becoming an item despite the woman’s (Rachel) certainty that men leave and the fact that the young man (Nicholas) is only on loan for 6 months.

When the story ended, it was a case of me wanting more of my characters. These two had quickly become friends I wanted to know more about. So, the short story quickly became a trilogy of short stories.

That trilogy, alas, wasn’t enough, and I ended up writing a second trilogy of much longer short stories. While the first three were told from Rachel’s point of view, the second set were told from Nicholas’s.  Then there was a connecting short story between the two so I could make a novel out of it.

Once I was finished with writing and editing, I tried to get the book published without success. On recommendation, I had a professional editor work on it.

When a professional edits a novel, they don’t cut things out or change things around.  They redline things and make suggestions on changes. Some suggestions are general (e.g. there’s too much dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere. Try cutting some of it down) some are direct suggestions of how to change a sentence. Many of the suggestions were right on target. I cut out two or three chapters  that didn’t further the story. But there were others that were ridiculous. For example, they took the most poetic description in the entire novel and suggested I change it to something bland. My husband was incensed about that. He had read that paragraph, and thought the sentence was perfect. In fact, he jokingly said he’d divorce me if I changed it.

The “professional” also commented that the book was too long and needed to be shortened. There was no way I could adequately cut as much out as they suggested without destroying the integrity of the book.

When a book is edited this way, there is no requirement that the author follow every suggestion made. It is what the editor thinks will make the novel more likely to be published.

I went through each suggestion, following some, like cutting chapters, and ignoring others, such as cutting a fantastic description. But in my desire to follow the request that I shorten the novel, I came up with an idea that the editor hadn’t suggested: I cut the book in half and made two novels. The first novel was the first three short stories and the bridge story. It formed a natural break. Since the second trilogy was longer than the first, it ended up making a novel slightly longer than the first.

I still had no success attracting a publisher. The ones who take unsolicited manuscripts – ones submitted by an author rather than by an agent – take very few novels every year. They are usually publishers that are smaller, so they don’t have the budget of, say, Simon and Schuster.

I also tried finding an agent with no better success. So, having heard of Amazon’s publishing branch, I thought I’d try self-publishing. At that time, self-publishing was finally emerging from a taboo that would guarantee no “real” publisher would ever touch your work to being the preferred route to go to prove to a future publisher that you had a following that would guarantee future sales.

Having decided to take the plunge, I discovered Amazon publishing encompasses a wide range of choices. They have generic covers for use, although that can mean your novel’s cover may have been used by others. Or you can pay a fee to have one of their artists design a cover for your book. Another alternative is doing your own cover. They give you all of the measurements needed to do that yourself.

You get to choose what size your paperback will be from 5 or 6 sizes. Making your book an e-book – only available on Kindle, of course – is another choice. You can do paperback or Kindle or both, and they make it easy to do each one. (Recently they have launched hard-cover book publishing as well.) There is no charge for any of this, since you're putting everything together on Amazon yourself.

Amazon allows you to decide on your royalty amount for the sale of each book, either 35% or 70%. The percentage you want to make also determines the minimum price for your book.

There are many things you can do with Amazon, like having them do marketing, editing and so on, each with a price tag. I chose to simply publish on their site. My sales depend on word of mouth. My husband has been kind enough to design most of my book covers (and a few have been pictures I’ve taken that he’s then designed as covers with the title and author placed on them). It does save me several hundred dollars from letting Amazon do all of the work, but I also don’t get the exposure they might provide. Of course, exposure doesn’t guarantee sales.

All of the homework aside, once I had finished those two novels, I realized I still wasn’t finished with my characters. I wanted to know about Nicholas’s childhood in Wales. So I wrote another book. Then I wanted to know how things worked out with families on two sides of the Atlantic. So I wrote another novel. Then, after some sorrows I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to know more about their son as he grew up. So there was a fifth novel.

By that time, I felt that I had written as much as I could about these characters. I didn’t want to over-write them. I’ve read series where this has happened, and it’s disappointing to me. I think it’s important for an author to know when to say when.

There are authors who have 15-20 novels about the same characters without making their characters boring. Bernard Cornwell has written 22 novels in the Sharpe series, and 13 in the Last Kingdom series. Patrick Taylor’s Irish Country Doctor series stands at 16 novels and counting without becoming repetitious or boring. That, particularly, could have become very repetitious in less skilled hands.

So far, I have limited my series to five books. My Dark Faery series was originally supposed to be four books, and it came as a bit of a surprise a few years after those four were complete that I had an idea for a fifth book, based  on the main Vampyre of the novels. But nothing has convinced me to write anything about those characters since the fifth book was finished.

I have made a conscious effort to have limited sequels to any of my books. So far, by the time I’ve written four or five novels in a series, I’m ready to move on and find new characters to write about. I’d rather leave readers wanting more than have them – as I did with one author – toss the books aside saying, “Enough, already!”

I also like to write my novels in such a way that a reader can start with any of the books in a series and not feel lost. There are references to things that happened in other novels, but with enough background that they’re not frustrated by having started in the wrong place. I think of the stories as somewhat circular in nature, so that the final story often circles back to where the first one started, yet each one is complete.

This didn’t happen with the Nicholas Keating stories. The novels progress from when Nicholas is 25 to when he’s in his 50s. But even still, a reader can start at any one of the novels and not be lost.

The Nicholas Keating novels are my favorites of all of the novels I’ve written. They’ve become comfortable friends, and I know them the way most people know their closest friends. Of course, I know far more about them than I’d ever tell. They are friends, after all.

 

I’d Like to Thank … My Muse

My brother-in-law gave me a mug that reads, “Please do not annoy the writer. She may put you in a book and kill you.”

I found that hilarious – and a perfect gift for a tea-drinking writer when I received it.

People who don’t write assume – from my experience – that writers use people they know as their characters, as if they couldn’t create characters on their own.

I’ve had people tell me – usually during an argument – “I don’t want to be a character in one of your novels!” To which I reply, “You wish!”

This is not some conceited retort. I think, at least to some degree, the people who say things like that do fancy themselves as the perfect “character” for someone’s novel. And there are writers who fancy themselves characters for their own stories.

Those of us of a certain age are familiar with Alfred Hitchcock making a cameo in every one of his films. And if he weren’t a screenwriter, Woody Allen wouldn’t have an acting career. Don’t believe me? Name one movie he was in that he didn’t write.

But seriously, I don’t use real people to play the part of my characters, and never have – even when I was 10 and made my first aborted stab at The Great American Novel.

My inspiration consists more of taking a line from a conversation. For example, a recent blog was inspired by something a friend wrote me in an email.

Another example comes from one of my novels, where one of the main characters’ father dies. The whole aftermath at the hospital is a recreation of what happened when my own father died – and that was only a year earlier, so it was still fresh.

Everything the wife did and said was what I remember my mother doing and saying. Yet the wife, a very minor character in the series, is otherwise nothing like my own mother. I only used that particular scene.

I also find it amusing that people who have read my novels will say, “Oh, so-and-so is you.” And they’re usually wrong. Yes, I am a character in nearly every one of my novels.

 But before you start thinking I’m a complete narcissist, let me clarify. My books are not autobiographical. I never set out to write a book about me, and so far I’ve succeeded.

One character in each book is who I wish I were instead of me.

And it’s never the character people think. (Okay, maybe in the first Unicorn story it is.) It’s always the first left-handed character you meet.

I am essentially a watcher. I observe the human condition, and apply it to my stories.

This is not unique. This is what writers do. Yet you never hear a writer receiving an award say, “I’d like to thank my muse, so-and-so, for giving me the line that inspired this film.” No, they thank the academy, their parents for sending them to a good university, their wives, partners and kids for giving them the space to create.

Yet it doesn’t all come from them. Someone sparked the idea. Anyone could be that muse. Writers just don’t usually talk about it.

Now a word of warning to all of you non-writers out there: Lest you think of making some grandiose speech you think I’ll include in my next novel, forget about it. The thing I find particularly inspiring is usually something insignificant that you say when you’re not particularly paying attention.

Besides, the wrong thing could annoy me, and I might put you in the next story and kill you.

Writing

To those who don’t write, writing is a mysterious process – at least, that’s what people have said to me; I’ve had stories floating around in my head all my life.

“It must be really hard to write a novel,” they say. But it’s not.

In general, characters comes knocking, and I hope they will go away. When they  don’t, I sit down and write about them.

My earliest creation happened when I was three or four years old. My favorite bedtime story was one my mother hated. Truly, the story was boring. But the pictures were great.

So, when my mother started reading, I told her that’s not how the story went. She told me to read it, then.

Not knowing my alphabet as anything but a song, I couldn’t read. But I proceeded to tell her my version of what was going on in the pictures. I even had characters with names, which the book did not.

My mother was startled by my creativity and ability to tell a coherent story. She told me I’d be a writer when I grew up – not an exciting idea to a three-year-old.

However, my elementary school essays gave no indication of writing talent.

Since my family never took summer vacations because my father didn’t like the beach, my, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” was less than a stellar exercise.

My grades were good, since the grammar and spelling were appropriate, but there was little room for creativity. (The nuns would have had a fit if I’d written about traveling to another planet for the summer.)

Not until seventh grade, when the English – Language Arts  – nun believed 13-year-olds should take responsibility for creating two pages a week of whatever they had to say, did I find my voice.

All we had to do was fill two pages. She wouldn’t even read it unless we requested that she do so.

And I did.

Every week.

My condolences to her for the hours she spent deciphering my handwriting and suffering through my attempts – always more than two pages – at poems, plays and essays.

And endless thanks for the words of encouragement she gave me in response.

That exercise taught me to just write and see what happened.

It informed my first university experience, which resulted in dual Bachelor of Arts degrees, one in creative writing.

I tried all sorts of writing, some successful, some not.

My poetry teacher gave me an A, not for talent, but for sheer volume of attempts handed in. He made me promise not to try to become a professional poet because I wasn’t any good at it.

Because he hated Hallmark cards, I would occasionally tease that I was considering applying for a job writing for Hallmark. I’d still like to see a line of humorous sympathy cards, since that’s the time you most need cheering up.

Similarly, biography writing turned out not to be my forte. When I interviewed a friend and wrote a piece based on what he told me, my instructor accused me of making the whole thing up, and gave it a very low grade.

If he was going to assume fiction, that’s what I’d give him.

For my final biographical piece, I invented a character, and wrote his biography. My instructor loved it, having no idea it was complete fiction. For that, he gave me an A.

And so my biographical fiction was born, no research required.

While most of the time characters come to me, I have, on occasion, written a story on request.

Dark Faery was created because a young friend was enamored of Twilight. She suggested that I could write a vampire novel.

 I told her my vampires would not sparkle, and the story would have to be something unlike anything I’d read before. No witches or werewolves to muddy the waters.

Hence, Vampyre Faeries.

Ironically, despite all the telltale hints, as well as Irish and Welsh names of the characters and references to druids, one reviewer wondered where all of this took place, since I never named a country.

Hello.

Faeries know no country.

But here’s a clue for you all: Wales and Ireland, folks.  Wales and Ireland.

I guess I should have drawn a map.

I’ve also created series on request. Both Dark Faery and my Unicorn series were supposed to be one-off ventures. But at the request of readers who wanted more, I turned them into series.

But how to get people to notice?

Write blogs, they said.

It’ll get you an audience, they said.

Well, that hasn’t happened, really. I haven’t had an increase in book sales because of my blogs.

In fact, my blogs are often only read by two or three people. And rarely do I even get comments on the blogs to know what suggestions others might have.

Blog writing is very different from novel or short story writing.

I thought it would be difficult.

I hoped it wouldn’t be as uninspired as my elementary school essays.

It has turned out to be as much of a creative venture as my stories. Ideas come unbidden in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep. Whether or not they’re inspired is not for me to say.

The main difference is that my stories are fiction, whereas the blogs are my thoughts and opinions on a particular topic, no characters required.

How’s that for how I spent my summer vacation?