Writing, or rather story telling has always been a love of mine. Being a hopeless romantic, most of the stories I create will define my ideal of falling in love and overcoming life’s challenges to make it work. This fantasy fiction writing is a little different from the usual romance stories which I love to write. I have found that adding a little adventure and mystery helps me to enjoy the crafting of a story.
I am an old TV baby, growing up in the 50’s. I can remember when we didn’t have TV and the excitmement of getting our first black and white screen back in 1954. Serialized stories were still a big part of radio and early television. I have loved the ‘cliff hanger’ ever since. It allows the imagination to run wild while waiting for the sequel.
I have been a big fan of Beauty and The Beast since the inception of the TV show in 1987. The recent release of the DVD’s was instrumental in motivating me to write into the present time to give Jacob his mother back. The story line was inspired by a friend who took a similar journey. I hope I have done her justice while remaining true to the characters in her life and those of BATB. The concept of lost and found has a great deal of resonance for me. I believe that in birth we lose something of our connection to a greater world and our time spent on earth consists of a yearning to reconnect either with people who drive our life story or a desire to find a higher energy power which to some is known as ‘God’. I did not have the heart to rewrite what others have done in the past. We can’t alter history but we can refashion the future from our vast store of knowledge.
When the show first aired, I was so taken with the love story, it pushed me to fulfill a life long dream of writing my own book. I find it strange that the book was not published for twenty years. I put down the manuscript when the show ended. When I was able to sit and soak up the BATB stories on DVD, I was again inspired to refine and complete that book. At the same time, I felt an obligation to create online BATB stories of my own using some characters from the past as well as new ones who invade my dreams asking for release.
Last year, I was able to publish my book, The Will to be True/In the Shadow of the Blackbird. It is also crafted as a complex love story and set locally in Southern Ontario.
July/2011 update My new novel, Suspect, Love published in May 2011 is also now available from Authorhouse.com or Amazon.com.
The Will to be True Blog 
Launching the book
Posted in Comments, tagged book launch, friendship, The Will to be True on October 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »
I have to admit to being very excited by the official launch of my book. I didn’t think I would be. The process of writing and publishing is long…it took me twenty years to get to this point. Although the effort was not sustained from the beginning, some very cool questions came up during the party and I thought they are well worth reviewing.
ard winning brother in law deserves credit for taking a great shot of me (Bryan Davies photos) and thanks to all those who read the manuscript before the final priniting and encouraged me to just do it! The publishers, iUniverse were also extremely helpful and supportive.
Size matters to me in writing. I had a goal of one hundred thousand words which, I felt, constituted a fairly intensive and action filled story. That was my standard. A novel of 50-60 thousand words is acceptable but not for my first novel.
My manuscript did not languish forgotten for those twenty years. In fact I had prepared a very basic and unappealing presentation of the book, on 8×11 sheets in a three ring binder with a title page. Anyone who wanted to read it, could. But, it was incomplete and very poorly done. After all, the story was written originally on a pad, in pencil and transcribed on to a commodore 64, or one of those early pc’s.
Three years ago, a friend read it and encouraged me to publish it. When I got around to thinking it over, my original plan was to do that online because, by this time, my fanfiction stories were growing in number and readers.
All I needed was someone to type it for me. Easier said than done. I did it myself in the end because the format of fanfiction makes it easy. It was a good thing to do it myself anyway. I realized that the story did not sound or feel complete.
Deep in some old boxes, still preserved in a plastic bag, was the manuscript for part two, hand written in pencil, as I did in those days, and waiting to be completed. I had to write ten more chapters, 30,000 words this time but as I did the work, I fell in love with my characters, the story and the message all over again. What I can do now, I could not have done twenty years ago. I have learned that patience and persistance are truly virtues if life is to be fulfilled.
After a year, I completed the novel, had close to the 100,000 words, felt secure that the story could hold up under scrutiny and posted it online. To my surprise, it out performed my other stories. Confident that it could hold up undermore intense and professional scrutiny , I sent it to the publisher for printing.
No book is ever completed in isolation. My thanks, first and foremost, goes to my sister who read it and edited much of it. What is not corrected is only what I couldn’t afford to redo. She did a beautiful job.
The Gershwin family, through their lawyers gave me permission to use the words from a Gershwin song. That process was interesting. I love the cover and thank the photographer who took it. The clock, the bird, the leaves all fit with this time of year and the revelatory events in the life of the heroine. My aw
I am not one to push my own work, so I appreciate our colleague, Shelley who offered to be my publicist for the launch.
Nothing is ever done in isolation. The women whose life stories contributed to this work deserve my thanks for sharing their intimate selves with me and contributing greatly to the wealth of information about the emotions attached to just getting by, day to day, when life seems to hold you down. Disappointments, doubts, stress and violence are not confined to the poor and disadvantaged, nor the wealthy. It is a circumstance of this life in which we all participate. We must therefore strive to understand those around us whose lives may not be what they seem on the surface. Be a friend. That is the moral of my story.
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