Showing posts with label French Revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French Revolution. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

What I learned writing my first novel, the ignorance of a beginner by Diane Scott Lewis


 Escape the Revolution: "Simply brilliant" Historical Novel Society.
To purchase my novels and other BWL booksBWL

Never write a rambling saga with too many characters that's bursting at the seams at nearly 200,000 words!

I started writing as soon as I could put words on a page; I loved to tell stories. I even had a short story submitted to a literary festival from my high school.

Then I joined the navy, traveled to Greece, met a man and married. And we're still married.


Two children came quickly. I didn't start writing again for twenty years.
Then I decided it was time to dip in the pen, again. Or rather, sneak in writing on my work computer.
The Rude Awakening: I thought I knew everything about writing, but found I knew nothing.

Escape the Revolution, which went through many names and covers, was my first effort.
I rambled on in my story, chapters too long, describing everything, cramming in my stellar research, and the book grew huge. 170,000 words. Who knew there were page and word limits.

Or POV (point of view) restrictions. Everyone had a POV, even a dog or a horse. Thoughts hopping all over the place. Actually, I wasn't that bad in this regard. I've read other authors who made these mistakes.
Where would my story go? I only had a small notion but didn't want it to end, so on I wrote.

Then I bought books on writing and editing. Another shock. There needed to be plot, and structure; your character couldn't just wander on forever to the next adventure. They must have a goal, a conflict, to drive them on. Each person should have a solid POV, perhaps one per scene; but too many characters with 'thoughts' can get confusing.
'Would', 'could', and 'should', must be used sparingly. Gerunds also should not be overused, all those words ending in 'ing'. So many things to avoid. Don't even ask about the much-maligned 'was'.
No double exclamations, heck, hardly any exclamations allowed.

Each scene must be its own structure with a beginning, middle, and end.
Passive vs. Active voice. 
Plus, get that research correct if you write historicals. You don't want any Tiffanys wearing bloomers in the18th century.

Develop your characters, even the minor ones; what is their background, their goals? Even the villains need 'reasons' why they act they way they do. 
Action, Reaction, Decision.


Exhausting. First, I stripped out too much from the story, then realized I needed to put much of it back in, just in a cleaner, tighter way. I had to cut the book into two books because of the length. 

The sequel: Hostage to the Revolution, was published to finish the story.



I'm glad I learned so much from books, workshops, and other authors. The knowledge has been worth it. I've been with my on-line critique group for sixteen years.

To find out more about me and my books, please visit my website: DianeScottLewis

Diane lives in Western Pennsylvania with her husband and one naughty dachshund.

Friday, August 21, 2020

My First Novel was Too Long by Diane Scott Lewis

When I decided to write a novel as an adult (I'd written many stories as a child) there was no internet, no easy access to information. I plunged ahead, (secretly, at work) writing on and on, with little thought to plot, structure, and novel length. I had no idea publishers and agents were so picky about the length of a novel. I'd seen and read huge tomes in the library, Gone with he Wind, for one. Why couldn't I write a 200,000 word epic?

Escape the Revolution
Add in all that stellar research to make my historical saga real, the word count increased. When I read a few How-To books on novel writing, imagine my shock. I had to cut it down, or cut it in two.

I even entered a contest and the judges were impressed but told me a twenty page synopsis was far too long. My story was too 'busy'. I had a lot of editing to do.

I read books on style and structure, took workshops, and attended Writers Conferences. I rode the subway in Washington, D.C. to research my time period (eighteenth century, French Revolution in England) at the Library of Congress. A writer's paradise, all those books!
Jefferson Reading Room, Library of Congress

I submitted to agents, editors, and small presses: no one wanted this huge epic. One offered to read it over if I could cut it down to 70,000 words.

I learned to tighten my writing, delete characters (painful), move the action along, cut out unnecessary words, structure scenes: they all need a beginning and end, no rambling. And I made my story into two books. There was the perfect break. My heroine leaves England to find her mother in America, but her past will follow.
Hostage to the Revolution

Thus, my two novels on the adventures of a displaced countess, running from revolutionaries in 1790, into the arms of a man who may have murdered his wife. Cornish taverns, evil rogues, a neglected child, a man of mystery, and a determined young woman who strives to remake her life.

To purchase my novels, and my other BWL books: BWL

Find out more about me and my novels on my website: Dianescottlewis

Diane Scott Lewis lives in Western Pennsylvania with her husband and one naughty puppy.

Friday, August 4, 2017

The Executioner by Katherine Pym



Click here for more info


David and Sarah Kirke live in a time of upheaval under the reign of King Charles I who gives David the nod of approval to privateer French Canadian shores. When Louis XIII of France shouts his outrage, King Charles reneges.

After several years, the king knights David and gives him a grant for the whole of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Soon, David is carried in chains back to England. He entreats Sara to manage the Ferryland plantation. She digs in and prospers, becoming the first entrepreneur of Newfoundland.


 Bio: Katherine, her husband and their puppy-dog divide their time between Seattle and Austin. Katherine loves history, especially of early Modern England which is filled with all sorts of adventure. 

~*~*~*~

King Louis XVI's execution by Sanson

Executioners are interesting although it is not easy to find a lot of data on these guys.  I know of two who were completely different. One was thoughtful, the other a menace to the public.

Charles-Henri Sanson
Charles-Henri Sanson was the executioner during the French Revolution. He executed Danton, Robespierre, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Before Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, he handed Sanson a locket of his wife’s hair. “Please return this to my wife’s mother.” 

Sanson honored Camille's wishes. While he was at the Duplessis’ household, Camille’s mother-in-law learned her daughter would be executed. Afraid Sanson would be recognized as the one who had guillotined Camille, and would Madame Duplessis’ daughter, he dashed away from their house, mournful of his vocation.  

I read once that the offspring of executioners in France were never allowed any other vocation but that of an executioner. He must marry an executioner’s daughter, thus keeping their grisly profession within a lower social stratum, and within the family. (Everyone must have been related. How many executioners could there have been in France in a given year?)

They were not allowed to live in town but at its outskirts. One of Sanson’s descendants was a known herbalist. People came to him for cures. Another Sanson, who could not bear a life of executing people, committed suicide. 

Jack Ketch somewhere in the crowd.
An English well-known executioner was Jack Ketch. There are no known pictures of what the man looked like. The one that shows up on Wikipedia and other sources is not the correct Ketch, but from the autobiography of another Jack. The clothes are not of the 17th century, either. 

English executioners were taught several ways to execute an individual; i.e., with fire, the axe, and the rope. I’m not sure if Ketch was very proficient in his vocation or a complete fool. He botched most of his executions.  

The hanging knot is supposed to be placed on the side of the neck so that when the poor wretch is thrust in the air, his neck should break, but Jack liked to put the knot at the back of the neck. This meant long strangulation. Family members were forced to run under the Tyburn hanging tree, grab the wretch’s legs and yank down, hoping somehow for a quick end. 

The Tyburn Tree
When Jack used the axe, he knocked the blade against the person’s neck several times before the head came off.  One tortured fellow was Lord Russell. It took four strokes of the axe before the man was finally dispatched. Because of his cruelty, a hue and cry reached the king. Jack Ketch was forced to write a note of apology to the Russell family, which published in 1683.

The Handsome Duke of Monmouth
The Duke of Monmouth expressly requested Jack Ketch make good use of the axe: “Here,” said the duke, “are six guineas for you. Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard that you struck him three or four times. My servant will give you some gold if you do the work well.”

There is no evidence if Ketch took the money, but he disregarded the duke’s request. It took several strokes to finally behead the lad. 

~*~*~

Many thanks to Wikicommons, Public Domain, &

Old and New London: A Narrative Its History, Its People, and Its Places, The Western and Northern Suburbs, Vol. V.,  1892, by Edward Walford

Monday, July 10, 2017

The Sequel to my best seller! How I had to create one.



Diane Scott Lewis was born in California, wrote her first novel at five (with her mother's help), and published short-stories and poems in school magazines. She had a short-story submitted by my High School to a literary festival when she was seventeen. She joined the navy at nineteen. Married her navy husband in Greece, had two sons. She now lives in Western Pennsylvania.
  
She had her first novel published in 2010. That novel is now the reworked Escape the Revolution.
But today we discuss the sequel, Hostage to the Revolution, due out July 19th.

What do you do when a book grows too big?                        

When I started writing, I had no idea there were word count restrictions. I'd read huge, lumbering books numerous times. But the fiction world had changed, especially for a new author.
The answer to this problem is you cut the story in half, or in this case, the last third, which was the perfect place to break the flow. When I wrote this first novel, originally titled The False Light, renamed Betrayed Countess, and now Escape the Revolution, it grew to nearly 700 pages. I suppose I didn’t want the adventure to end, but the novel was unwieldy, and out of control.
I had to shave off the last third, plump up that part of the story, and create a sequel: Hostage to the Revolution.

Below is the blurb to explain the first book ESCAPE THE REVOLUTION:
Forced from France on the eve of the French Revolution, Countess Bettina Jonquiere must deliver an important package to further the royalist cause. In England, she discovers the package is full of blank papers, the address false and she’s penniless. Bettina toils in a bawdy tavern and falls in love with a man who may have murdered his wife. Tracked by ruthless revolutionaries, she must uncover the truth about her father’s murder—and her lover’s guilt—while her life is threatened.

The Historical Novel Society called it: "Simply brilliant."

For the reviewers who lamented that this novel has no Happily Ever After, that’s because you need to read the sequel for the true ending. For those who haven’t read the first book, I hope you’ll download both novels.

Here’s the blurb for HOSTAGE TO THE REVOLUTION:

Sequel to Escape the Revolution. In 1796, ruined countess Bettina Jonquiere leaves England after the reported drowning of her lover, Everett.  In New Orleans she struggles to establish a new life for her children. Soon a ruthless Frenchman demands the money stolen by her father at the start of the French Revolution. Bettina is forced on a dangerous mission to France to recover the funds. She unravels dark family secrets, but will she find the man she lost as well?

This last book on Bettina’s story will be available July 19th.

I hope fans will enjoy both of these novels. I think readers will be satisfied with this surprise ending.







For more on my books, please visit my BWL Author page
Or my website: dianescottlewis.org

 

Thursday, March 31, 2016

A True Story of Time Travel by Eleanor Stem


The Gardens at Petit Trianon

Because I could not make it better, the following is almost verbatim from the source:

“On a hot summer’s afternoon in August of 1901, two respectable English schoolteachers, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, decided to visit Versailles on a sight-seeing expedition. They had never been there before. After looking in on the Palace of Versailles, they started to walk toward the Petit Trianon.

“Suddenly, without realizing it, they walked backward in time. They crossed a garden that did not exist in 1901 but which had existed in 1789. They saw and spoke to people who had been dead for more than a century. Their incredible psychic adventure, fully supported by years of research, created a sensation when it was announced in 1911. 

Le Petit Trianon
“Annie Moberly, age 55, and Eleanor Jourdain, age 38, with a guidebook in hand... took a stroll through the gardens. Their destination was the Petit Trianon, a small private chateau at the far end of the grounds, which...” Marie Antoinette used to escape court life. 

“Trying to find the Petit Trianon, Moberly and Jourdain missed a right turn, kept going straight ahead, began wandering aimlessly—and thus, as they would later claim, they took leave of the 20th century and reentered 18th century. 

“From what they reconstructed afterward, here is what they saw and here is what they encountered:

“Moberly, alone, saw a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building. Jourdain, alone, saw some old fashioned farm implements including a plow, lying on the grass. They both viewed two men wearing what appeared to be masquerade costumes—small tricorn hats and long grayish-green coats—and thought them to be gardeners. They asked these men the way to the Petit Trianon, and one man answered mechanically that they must continue ahead. Then, off to the right, Jourdain, alone, saw a cottage, with a woman passing a jug to a young girl standing in the open doorway. 

Garden Kiosk as seen today
“Jourdain remembered later how she felt as they had plodded onward. ‘I began to feel as though I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.’ Finally, they reached the edge of a wood, where they could see a man seated near the steps of a garden kiosk, its columns topped by a round roof. Moberly also recalled her reactions: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.’

“The two ladies had a closer glimpse of the man near the steps, and they were frightened. He was swarthy, pockmarked, and he wore a large hat and heavy black cloak. 

‘The man’s face was most repulsive—its expression odious,’ Moberly recalled. About to hasten away, the two women saw a younger man who apparently had come from behind some rocks that were in the path. He was handsome, his hairstyle resembling ‘an old picture’, and his face was flushed. He spoke to them eagerly in oddly accented French, trying to divert them from the path they had taken. They finally understood that he was giving them directions to the Petit Trianon. 

Marie Antoinette with her 2nd son in garden
“Following the young man’s directions, Moberly and Jourdain took another path to their right, crossed an attractive rustic bridge spanning a tiny ravine, skirted a narrow meadow, and at last came upon the Petit Trianon. On the lawn before the Trianon they stopped, and Annie Moberly watched an aristocratic lady—wearing a large white hat, and an old fashioned long-waisted green bodice above a full short skirt**—sitting and sketching the scenery. She was rather pretty, although not young, and she stared at Moberly. Then a uniformed official emerged from the Petit Trianon to escort the English ladies through the chateau before sending them away. 

“Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain left the palace grounds and took a carriage to the Hôtel des Réservoirs in Versailles to have tea before returning to Miss Jourdain’s apartment in Paris. Neither of them mentioned to the other [what they saw] at their visit to Versailles, at least not until a week later when Miss Moberly was recording impressions of her visit to France. As Miss Moberly came to the afternoon at Versailles, she began to feel a strange, dreamy, unnatural oppression. She stopped writing and turned to Miss Jourdain and asked, ‘Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?’ Miss Jourdain nodded firmly. ‘Yes, I do.’ And for the 1st time, each woman told the other how eerie an experience it had been for her.

“Three months later, when Annie Moberly was back in Oxford, Miss Jourdain came from Paris to be her house guest. Obsessively, they resumed their discussion of that afternoon at Versailles—and how it became apparent that while they had both seen certain things, each of them had seen something the other had not seen—or had been unable to see. 

Jourdain, alone, had seen the plow on the grass and the woman and girl in the cottage doorway. Moberly, alone, had seen the aristocratic lady sketching before the Petit Trianon. In those moments, both women perceived that something unusual, indeed something very unusual, had happened to them at Versailles—they had, inexplicably, stumbled backward through time into another age. They vowed to keep their experience secret, while each wrote up a separate and detailed account of the adventure and both agreed to do thorough research on the history of Versailles and the Petit Trianon. 

“For 9 years, Moberly and Jourdain did their detective work—digging into every archive available that had information on the background of Versailles. The two ladies visited Versailles again and again. When they had completed their sleuthing, they had learned that their afternoon in Versailles in 1901 had actually been in the afternoon in 1789.... The two ‘gardeners’ in greenish coats the women had met were actually two Swiss Guardsmen on duty that day. The girl in the cottage doorway was named Marion and she had lived with her mother on the palace grounds. The repulsive man in the black cloak seated near the kiosk steps was the Comte de Vaudreuil, a Creole friend of the Queen of France. And, the most exciting of all for Moberly and Jourdain, they discovered—from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and from the journal of Madame Eloffe, the Queen’s dressmaker (who had made her mistress two green bodices and several short white skirts** for that summer of 1789)—that they had come upon Queen Marie Antoinette herself as she sat sketching before her chateau. 

“The only sight Moberly and Jourdain did not identify was the rustic bridge spanning the ravine that they had to cross to reach the Trianon. The earliest map they could find—one copied in 1783 from the original plan for Marie Antoinette’s garden (which had been drawn by her architect but had subsequently been lost)—had not shown the rustic bridge or ravine. But no matter. Moberly and Jourdain were satisfied. They already had enough. 

“In 1911, Moberly and Jourdain published their findings pseudonymously in a little book entitled An Adventure.*** The book itself was a sensation, although critics did not take it seriously. Worst of all, the London Society for the Psychical Research, which collected facts on psychic experiences and had such prestigious members as Henri Bergson, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Lord Tennyson, rejected the adventure of the schoolteachers and announced that the experience was built on ‘the weakness of human memory’. 

“Defensively, Moberly and Jourdain began to reveal to friends, to faculty members, to their pupils, that they were the ones who had the adventure at Versailles. The families of their students were appalled. Faculty members were skeptical, and conflict grew. And generally, throughout England and France, the two schoolteachers were ridiculed by the majority of scholars, historians, and experts in psychic phenomena. The two women were regarded as romancers or hysterics—and the things they claimed to have seen were regarded as no more authentic than the rustic bridge and the ravine that they had been unable to prove had ever existed at Versailles. 

“But in the end, Moberly and Jourdain scored a stunning triumph. True—in 1901 there was no rustic bridge and no ravine, even though the women swore they had crossed such a bridge. True—De la Motte’s map of the gardens, done in 1783, showed neither the bridge nor the ravine. But suddenly, one day in 1912, Moberly and Jourdain learned that the long lost original map of the gardens drawn by Marie Antoinette’s architect Mique had been found—had been discovered, charred and crumpled, stuffed inside an old chimney in a house at Montmorency. And Mique’s original map was legible—and lo, it showed the ravine and the rustic bridge over it, which De la Motte had sloppily failed to copy down. Moberly and Jourdain were vindicated—and they published news of the great find in a 3rd edition [unavailable in google books] which, for the 1st time, bore their real names as the authors, for they were no longer ashamed but now were proud of their book. 

“How many other human beings had ever—since man has existed on earth—made such a journey as this one, backward through the time barrier into the distant past—and had returned with word of it?

“Miss Jourdain died in 1924 at the age of 61. Miss Moberly died in 1937 at the age of 91.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

** Skirts in 1901 were much longer than the styles in 1789 which were approx. ankle length.
*** The actual book An Adventure can be found [free download] in google books. My copy is dated 1913.
~~~~~~

Many thanks to:

Fully quoted from: The People’s Almanac by David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1975.
Wikicommons, Public Domain 

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