Boomer Gothic and a Year of Her Own

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Tags

Barbara Michaels, Bronte sisters, mansions, Mary Stewart, shadows, Victoria Holt

Back in the day, my favorite fiction genre was gothic, and I read as many such novels as I could find. My favorite authors were Mary Stuart, Charlotte and Jane Bronte, Phyllis A. Whitney, Barbara Michaels, Elsie Lee, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Joan Aiken..the list is long. As an English major in college I read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and discovered Anne Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, more Poe, some of Dickens, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. You get the drift.

By the time I got serious about writing, the market for gothics had pretty much dried up, and I was reading mysteries. I decided to write one set in Denver, and after hundreds of years and thousands of revisions, I published two of them, the previously mentioned Finny Aletter mysteries, Scavengers and Obstacle Course (both soon to appear as e-books.)

But, in my heart of hearts, I still yearned for gothics. I wanted to tell myself a story set in an old house where odd things happened, and I wanted to create characters who began to regard each other with suspicion. Dark psychological overtones would match the shadowy corners and somewhere along the line, a scream would split the night. Good times would ensue. Thus was born Wisdom Court.

Set in Boulder, Colorado, Wisdom Court is an institute for accomplished women who have not yet achieved their professional goals. Each is invited to spend a year there (short trips home allowable, but most time is spent in Boulder), all expenses paid. Artist, scientist, writer, whomever the Board chooses, receives a year of her own.

Andrea Bellamy, the protagonist in book I, Edge of the Shadow, is a forensic artist who yearns to paint, and her invitation to Wisdom Court allows her to imagine a new career as a fine artist. Widowed some years earlier, she has seen her daughter through college and now has the opportunity to truly change her life. She takes a leave of absence from her job, rents out her house, and heads for Boulder. She is welcomed at Wisdom Court by the staff and other associates staying there. As she settles into bed that first night, her heart is filled with gratitude and her mind races with excitement. At last she will be able to focus on her artistic dreams. For at least this one year she can put herself first. And then she awakes screaming…

You’ll have to read Edge of the Shadow to find out what happens to Andrea and the other women at Wisdom Court. The book will be published online in the next few months. I’m writing about it now out of curiosity. Having written EOS as well as being two-thirds into the second Wisdom Court book, A Signal Shown, I’m wondering how many fellow gothic fans are out there. I don’t yet have throngs of blog followers, but I’m impatient enough to issue the question anyway: how many readers out there are interested in gothics? The Wisdom Court story arcs through three books, so I’m committed to at least the trilogy. Will I find readers to share in the pleasures? Let me know. I’ll keep writing.

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery | Filed under 19th century novels, e-books, Gothic, Hauntings, Wisdom Court

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Cue the confetti–wait!

16 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in 19th century novels, Writing

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I kept going, through wind and rain, through snow and what looks like spring now, but I know in my heart is actually Colorado’s dreaded Faux Spring. (Hearts have been broken, plants have been trashed, lives have been forever altered, all thanks to Faux Spring.) I would finish that last chapter come hell or bizarrely rampaging Republican candidates, I promised myself and virtually thousands of blog-followers.

Alas.

I reached page 328 yesterday and recognized in horror the chapter was finished. Unfortunately, I still had a crap-load of information to give my thousands of readers, primarily how the god****** book ends. (I warned you all at the beginning that I am a devotee of 19th century novels and I have to get in their little quirks now and again.)

I wept quietly for precious moments, all the while pondering the insanity of ever writing one word more. Verbal dexterity is a highly overrated commodity, I murmured into the silent air of the Garret. When no one murmured back, I printed out The Chapter, and placed it atop the obscenely high stack of pages already threatening my desk. Then, God help me, I began to format the–I shudder as I type this–Last Chapter. The one in which I tell my thousands of readers how the god****** book ends. And wouldn’t you know…I can’t get Word to put the page number in the proper place inside the heading. And after snaking my way through the miniscule mazes of the interminable menus offering this option and that, I can’t find any simple suggestion to tell me what to do, which means I’ll have to ask the IMac gods, and they’re so superior in their little cubicles with their pictures of Ren and Stimpy, and their tiny copies of the Desiderata tacked to their foam-covered walls. Just because I’ve been working on The Last Chapter so long that I’ve forgotten how to start another chapter. Pah!

Could this be a sign? An omen of other frustrations lurking in the days ahead?

I’m afraid to consult the Runes.

Wrestling with the last chapter

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in 19th century novels, Technology and Writing, Writing

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I’ve been revising the last chapter of my current novel for five months now. Not proud of that, let me tell you, but it’s the truth. As usual, there’s more than one reason for the god-awful paralysis that’s got me frozen on the edge of completion.

Edge of the Shadow is the first of the Wisdom Court trilogy. The story arc for the three novels follows associates at the women’s institute in Boulder as each works on a heart’s-desire project with total support, all expenses paid. (Did I mention there are eerie, disturbing things happening there?) Shadow sets up everything for all three books, and has to do it right. The climax has to make the reader want to run out to get the second book immediately. I’ve rewritten the damned ending so many times that I’m not dead certain it does that. I can’t tell you how eager I am to work on the second book of the trilogy–I’m at least 200 pages into A Signal Shown–but that first one has to be finished.

I keep letting myself get distracted with the New World Order of publishing. Like this blog, for instance. Plus I’ve been showing my face on Facebook & Link(ing)In, and tweeting now and again. (I think I may be too long-winded for Twitter.) I’m intrigued by the possibilities of all the networking, but the rule is, finish creating the product before you start marketing it, right?

It’s been a long time since I was published. Scavengers (1987) and Obstacle Course (1990) are mysteries set in Denver’s Capitol Hill. Bridey’s Mountain (1993), co-written with Mary Jo Adamson, is a saga set in Colorado. After Bridey, life got in the way big-time with family illnesses and such, and while I kept writing sporadically, I didn’t get near publishable quality for a long time. (That didn’t stop me from sending out Edge of the Shadow versions too early, thus burning bridges with some of the agents I knew. Stupid.)

My imagination is teased by the possibility of creating a shell for the trilogy. By that I mean I could use this blog and the Wisdom Court blog I’ve been messing with to write the back story of the women’s institute–a hang-out zone for readers. One of my favorite things in reading/writing is 19th century novels, and I’ve spent my entire writing career cutting the stuff that goes into those books. I’m talking about the descriptions, the Dear Reader asides, the plot cul-de-sacs I’ve always loved to read. Admittedly, current tastes don’t run to that and the faster pace and pared down prose are de rigeur for fiction. Still, I ponder what fun it would be to indulge myself in what I like, particularly if I decide to publish the trilogy myself. (And then I remember the old writing advice about how you should always “kill your darlings,” [because they almost always stink] and feel a puritanical guilt about indulging myself.) Sigh.

So, it’s time for a resolution, because what the hell else can I do at this point? I will finish Chapter Twenty-four of Edge of the Shadow. Within the next month. And then I will decide whether to send out agent queries one last go-round. (I recommend QueryTracker.org as a source of agents and advice for approaching them.)

I’ll let you know how it goes.