Women's history

Most of the histories we read are about men. There are women, of course - all those men had to marry and someone had to bear their children to continue the family line - but much of history is silent on women beyond those roles.

That's the history I grew up reading. 

The history I grew up hearing was told by women about women, centering them and their daughters and sisters and mothers. 

Men - feckless husbands, charming but disappointing sons, some simply dead before their time - were peripheral to the stories I was told.

My grandmother Madeline - Maddy or Nan - had two husbands (divorced, separated) and three children (Margaret, Violet, and Harl, my grandfather - who managed to be simultaneously charming, feckless, and disappointing, and he died young).

Margaret had two husbands (and two divorces) and one child, Betty. 

Betty had one husband (magicked away from his wife, Margaret's neighbor and friend) and no children.

Violet had one husband (well managed, predeceased her) and no children. They would have interfered with her social activities and her clean house.

Harl had two wives (Jenny, my grandmother, who died by suicide with a laundry list of reasons and diagnoses, including the fact that her husband brought his mistress home for Sunday dinner, and Freda, the mistress, who brought two children from her first marriage) and three children: my mother, Genevieve Madeline (Gene) - after her grandmothers - by his first wife, and Richard (Dicky) and Minerva (Micky) by his second wife. Although Micky wasn't his, and he probably knew it and respected a solid revenge plot.

Gene had three husbands (divorced, died, predeceased) and one child. Me.

I was raised to consider husbands as pleasant, useful, and often short-lived additions to the family. Is it any wonder I waited until 46 to get married?

But the surprise ending of this history is my own surprise. That husbands are pleasant, useful, and hopefully stick around for a good long time, because I happen to like mine very much.

 

Coming Apart Now Available for Pre-Order

So Coming Apart is now available for pre-order from this link. The book will release on October 18, 2022, and if you've pre-ordered, it will arrive on your Kindle at midnight. As an added inducement (isn't that a nice way of saying bribe?), the book is priced at $3.99 for the first month of the pre-order, so all you bargain shoppers can save a little and get a lot.

In case I haven't mentioned it before, here's the blurb:

A woman who's lost everything. Her sister, who has everything. And a baby who means everything - to both of them.

Ava has always been poor, so she doesn't think the Great Depression will change anything. But when her mother dies and her coal miner husband loses his job, Ava's certainty falters. The last thing she needs is a letter from her estranged sister, asking for the impossible. 

Claire has everything she could ever want, except the child she promised her husband. When her sister's life falls apart, she reaches out to help - and finds the missing piece of her own marriage.

With everything at stake, Ava must choose: give up one child to save the rest or keep the family together and risk losing it all?

At this point, it's Amazon exclusive, and the ebook will stay that way for a while. I've been curious about Kindle Unlimited but never tried it before, and it seems easier to set it up from scratch instead of withdrawing the book from sale on all the other platforms to do it.

I hope you'll consider ordering Coming Apart. I'm so proud of this book - there's a ton of my heart in it, and a not inconsiderable amount of my friends and family's stories, as well. 

It's almost here!

The pre-order, that is. Not the book.

For those who haven't read From this Day Forward yet, for whatever reason - time, fear-of-mailing-list spam (I promise, after the first few signup confirmation emails, it's once-a-month and special occasion only), I offer this final inducement.

This is the beginning of the sisters' story, told from Ava's point of view. Claire gets her own shot at telling the tale later on.

***

Scranton is no more than ten miles from Scovill Run, but it is a different world from the filthy coal town that has been my home—and my sister’s—for our entire lives.

But no longer. Claire left home almost a year ago to take a job in Scranton, and if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted that I knew she was never coming back even then. She had always wanted to escape and now she’s managed it. Harry Warriner will be able to give her all the things she’s never had and always wanted.

“You understand, don’t you?” she’d asked, last time she came home. “He can give me so much.”

“What do you need?” Claire had always pined for the things girls like us had no business knowing about, much less wanting.

“Well, things...” She chewed her lip, her pretty face all puckered with worry that I didn’t understand. “Don’t be like that, Ava. It’s different for you. You have Daniel.”

She was right. I did have Daniel—or I would, when the war ended and the army sent him home from France. I’d always had Daniel, but he would never give me the kind of things Harry could give Claire before their first anniversary.

Miners didn’t spend money on gifts for their wives, no matter how much they loved them. If they had any left over by the time the bills were paid, it was put aside for hard times: leaky roofs, unexpected shutdowns, doctor bills. Kids.

As we rumble along roads that have never seen such an elegant vehicle, I think of my perfect baby boy, who does not know his father. My husband has never seen his son because I can’t afford to have a photograph taken, not when the only earner in the family is overseas and it’s just me and Mama, sewing and cleaning and taking in laundry until he returns.

Daniel’s army pay is all right, but I would rather have my man at my side, particularly when Mama and I get out of this big car and have to pretend we know how to be with people like Harry Warriner’s family. Rich people who think nothing of sending a car to pick up the bride’s mother and sister from their falling-down house.

I don’t know how Mama feels. She sits beside me on the plush seat, her knotted hands folded on her knee, nodding gently in time to music only she can hear. Claire wasn’t her favorite—Mama never played favorites—but as the youngest, my sister had privileges the rest of us never had. Getting to finish school, for example. I would have liked to have gone to high school, but that was the year our father died and Mama needed my help.

By the time Claire turned fourteen, things were a little better. There was never any question that she wouldn’t go to the high school in the next town over, and then try to make something of herself.

“I always knew she was destined for more. She’ll end up fine, you watch.” Her voice bears a hint of a lilt, forty years after she left Galway.

“Do you think it will change her?” I ask.

 “Of course, it will.” Mama turns to me. “But that’s what she’s always wanted, to be someone else.”

I nod and resume my silence, but her words irk me. I never had the opportunity to be anyone else. Certainly, no one ever asked if I wanted to be more than a miner’s wife, constantly worried about money, about my children, about whether or not my husband would come home from work.

Things must have been pretty bad in Ireland if my mother considered this an improvement.

The biggest difference in our situations is our husbands. I’ve known Daniel forever. He grew up across the road in a house just like mine, with parents just like mine. With tragedy just like mine. It was inevitable, and neither of us ever wanted to fight it. My father had his good points, but he grew harder and angrier with age, and he liked the bottle. Our home was never quiet, and none of us ever felt completely safe.

There is anger in Daniel, too, but not the kind that would ever turn toward his family. And both of us were so marked by our fathers’ love of liquor that we agreed we would never have it in our home.

Being in a place like France, there must be drink everywhere. I wonder if he still doesn’t drink, or if fighting has changed him. I can’t imagine his life over there; it was unimaginable enough in the mines, which have always terrified me.

A horn honks and I look up to see another car, too close to ours. While I’ve been woolgathering, dreaming of Daniel, we’ve arrived. The streets are rough but soon we turn onto a wide avenue that runs straight for blocks. We slow at a corner to let a streetcar pass and for a moment I think we have reached the hotel, but it is the train station, which is bigger than any place I’ve ever been, a five-story building with a clock face set above enormous pillars.

“This is the Searle Hotel, ladies,” the driver says from the front seat, as he pulls to the curb.

Ladies! I wonder how much they had to pay him to call us that.

“There’s Claire, waiting for us.” Mama straightens her hat and tugs on gloves that normally are worn only on Sundays. “Doesn’t she look pretty!”

“Claire always looks pretty.” Slighter than me, blonder than me, she is dressed in a dark blue suit with a froth of ruffles at the neck. Her pale hair is no longer in its familiar Gibson girl style but worn in a smooth band across her head, with the rest coiled in a complicated knot below the brim of her hat. She looks like something from a magazine.

If she’s changed this much before she’s married, moving to Philadelphia will take her from us completely.

***

And there you have it - the beginning of their time together, and the beginning of their separation. Read more by signing up here.

A matter of mindset

There's a lot to being a self-published author beyond the obvious writing and publishing aspects. Not all of it was even obvious to me when I started, and I'm sure there are still many surprises waiting down the line. 

One hurdle I've just hopefully overcome recently is my ability to convince myself that I need to learn how to do something completely before attempting it. Part of that is because I am a fiend for input. I love to learn new things and to read about all the different ways those new things can be done. 

But the problem there is that you can read and read and read, and never do. 

On the flip side, sometimes I decide to try something without knowing anything about it, and it either works - at which point I discount what I've done - or it flames out spectacularly, and I don't do it again. 

As an example, advertising. I've tried Facebook ads. They spend my money, and I've never gotten any sales from them. At the end of April, after speaking with a friend, I decided to try Amazon ads. There are a ton of books and courses on how to do this, but I just went to my publishing dashboard, clicked marketing, and set automatic targeted ads for Songbird on Amazon US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Automatic targeting means you let Amazon choose the people who see the ad. 

The US ad made a few sales. Canada and Australia never even got shown to people. And the UK? That did really well. 

So I recently decided to take a highly regarded free course on Amazon ads. The first three days talked about easier ad forms: automatic, keyword, and category ads. I understood them, I made my test ads, and I sat back to wait. Days four and five, however, were about deep category and keyword research, data scraping, and the dreaded spreadsheet, a word which, after 30 years of office work, still makes my brain cramp. I was done. 

But I did three days of the work and produced 15 ads from that, some of which are starting to show results. So the work I need to do on myself is to realize that while I didn't finish the course, that does not discount the work that I did do, and the work that I have done that got me to the point of taking the course. It happens 2-3 times a year, so the next time it comes around I'll sign up again and see if I can face that final section. But I have to realize that sometimes doing the thing is more important been learning about the thing. If I had made it through all five days, there's a good chance I would still be a puddle on the floor of my office, not capable yet of doing any of the class work. Much less any writing. 

Learning how our minds work, how to deal with them, and occasionally how to give ourselves grace, is harder than you'd expect.

July Roundup

Well, this was a fun one. Lots got done, and I even remembered to keep track of most of it.

I formatted and uploaded the ebook files for The Tudor Court omnibus, which I hadn't planned to do so soon.

I started recording the audiobook for Lady, in Waiting. Very slowly, as I wasn't sure at first that it would work, but I'm feeling more positive with a bit more practice. It'll be slow going, though - a chapter, then editing, then uploading. Rinse and repeat. I'm fitting it in between other tasks.

Advance reviews for Coming Apart are coming in - the book will be available for pre-order on August 18, although it's already uploaded and ready to go. I would just pull the trigger early, but I've got a plan here, and I'm trying to stick to it.

Work is going well on the sequel. I'm at about 50k words on Coming Closer, which is nearly the halfway point for a draft for me. I tend to run out of words at about 120k, then edit it down to something a little leaner. 

I also took a course this month on Amazon advertising. Now that I have three books listed, there are more organic sales than there were with just one or two, but advertising is a good thing, done right. I had already had some luck with an automatic ad (Amazon choosing who sees it) in the UK, but my US ads weren't working. This helped, so now I'm just waiting to see how it goes.

By this time next month, I'll be celebrating the launch of Coming Apart's pre-order, and I'll hopefully have some other news.