Katers!
Katers, you didn’t leave an email address, so if you could please email me at roseanna (at) whitefireprinting (dot) com with your snail mail addy, I’ll get it to Sarah.
And since it’s a holiday and all, I’m going to otherwise be lazy and not post a blog. đ Hope everyone has a great Labor Day!
Today I’m chatting with a new friend from my historical writing group, HisWriters. Jody Hedlund’s debut novel, The Preacher’s Bride, is set to release in a month, and it sounds so awesome that you should SO pre-order a copy if you don’t win.
Which of course brings us to entering-to-win. Usual drill. Leave a comment with an email address–but that’s not all! Jody has a special request too, at the end of the interview. You’ll just have to read it to see what question she’d like you to answer. And so, without further ado . . .
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About The Preacher’s Bride
In 1650s England, a young Puritan maiden is on a mission to save the baby of her newly widowed preacherâwhether her assistance is wanted or not. Always ready to help those in need, Elizabeth ignores Johnâs protests of her aid. Sheâs even willing to risk her lone marriage prospect to help the little family.
Yet Elizabethâs new role as nanny takes a dangerous turn when Johnâs boldness from the pulpit makes him a target of political and religious leaders. As the preacherâs enemies become desperate to silence him, they draw Elizabeth into a deadly web of deception. Finding herself in more danger than she ever bargained for, sheâs more determined than ever to save the childâand manâsheâs come to love.
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About Jody
Jody Hedlund is a debut historical romance novelist who was a double finalist in the 2009 ACFW Genesis Contest. She received a bachelor’s degree from Taylor University and a master’s from the University of Wisconsin, both in Social Work. Currently she makes her home in central Michigan, with her husband and five busy children.
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What’s your latest book?
The Preacherâs Bride releases from Bethany House Publishers in October 2010.
Oo, we get a sneak peak! Fun. =) And it sounds awesome–can’t wait to get my hands on a copy! Is there a theme?
Sometimes God will lead us down a difficult path or ask us to do hard things and he doesnât want us to avoid them for the easy way. Ultimately he uses those difficulties to shape our character and deepen our love for Him.
The messages of this story are the lessons that God has been teaching me over the past years. Through my own personal struggles, God has emphasized that heâs more concerned about my holiness than my happiness, and that I need to continue to live a life of obedience to him and walk the difficult path.
That’s sometimes a tough lesson to learn–but I fully believe the difficult path leads you to the most amazing discoveries. But back to books. What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?
I admit! Iâm a historical romance junkie! I rarely read anything but historical romance and I adore historical romance movies (my latest favorite Young Queen Victoriaâit was divine!). Iâm also a bit of a history geekâI love reading biographies and finding interesting but little-known facts and people from history. All of that naturally leads to my passion for writing historical romances and I honestly canât see myself writing anything but that.
Huzzah! Three cheers for historical romance! (FYI, we met through a historical writing group, LOL.) So what would your dream office look likeâand what does your REAL writing environment look like?
What I wouldnât give for a private, quiet, spot. Nothing fancy or special. Just a quiet place where I could go without any interruptions! But at this point in my life Iâm a busy mama-writer. I have 5 beautiful children ranging in ages from 5 to 13, and so the word âquietâ doesnât exist in my house. My REAL office is smack-dab in the middle of my home at the kitchen table. There I can still see everything and everyone (because we all know moms have invisible eyes in the backs of their heads!). Amidst the chaos, I somehow manage to eke out my daily word count.
FIVE kids? You have my awe and total respect. I can barely keep up with my two. And I totally hear you–any quiet spot would do! LOL. Are there any people who you rely on when writing?
This past year, I was able to come up with a system that helped me minimize distractions (by minimize I mean take it down from 100 interruptions an hour to 50). =) I hired my older children to babysit my little ones. Every afternoon during my writing time, one of my big kids would occupy and play with the youngest of my bunch, which freed me up to concentrate a little more.
My husband is also incredibly supportive. This past year we worked out a plan where I was able to get away to the Library on Saturdays for more extended writing time. He took charge of all the kidâs activities and even cooked dinner (most times successfully!) and had it on the table when I arrived home.
That is awesome. And obviously necessary. Five! Sheesh. đ Aside from writing, what takes up most of your time?
Iâm a full time teacher to my children, so the large majority of my day is spent grading math papers, giving spelling tests, overseeing crazy science experiments, and re-learning everything I never learned during my childhood education (five times over!). Occasionally I try to squeeze in load of laundryâbut only when the kids complain that theyâre out of underwear. =)
LOL–I just started homeschooling, but my oldest isn’t quite five. We’re not to the grading papers stage, but it did take me three days to fold one load of laundry this week. Who needs clean clothes, anyway? đ What are you writing right now?
At the beginning of the summer I finished writing my next book which is scheduled to release in 2011. And now Iâm in the process of researching and plotting a new story.
Can’t wait to hear about it! It was great chatting with you, Jody!
Thanks for having me today, Roseanna! I would love to hear from all your readers! Please stop by my Facebook Page or Twitter and say hi.
For a chance to win a copy of The Preacherâs Bride, leave your email and then also tell me your favorite romance movie! (And if you donât have a favorite romance, then shame on you! =) Tell us your favorite movie instead.)
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Be sure to check out Jody’s website and blog! You can find The Preacher’s Bride at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and ChristianBook.com.
Void where prohibited. Entry into the contest is considered verification of eligibility based on your local laws. Chance of winning depends on number of entries. Contest ends 9/9/10. Winner will have two weeks to claim prize.
Last weekend, we had dinner down at my grandparents’ farm. It’s nestled in a bend of the Potomac River, a little outcropping of West Virginia completely surrounded by Maryland. Mountains rise up all around their couple-hundred-acres of relative flatland, creating a vista I enjoyed for most of life from the nearby hill, where my parents lived.
On another relative-flat section on top of the hill, there’s a little regional airport. Right across the river there’s Cumberland’s train yard–and a four-land highway. So on this pretty little farm that you might think is isolated, you can hear and see all the signs of civilization. One of my friends once commented, “You can’t walk anywhere but to the nearest tree out here, yet I’m afraid an airplane’s going to hit me in the head.” =)
The kids were all outside playing after dinner–but it was hot, and that didn’t last long. Not for most of them. Rowyn, however, refused to come inside when the girls called it quits. Though a safe area, I didn’t want to leave him out there alone simply because the boy has no fear–who knows what he would chase to who-knows-where. So Mommy sucked up her distaste for extreme heat and went outside.
Rowyn was standing with head craned back. After greeting me, he pointed to the sky. “Airplanes up there,” he informed me.
I grinned. “Yep, there are airplanes up there.”
He kept on looking. “Rowyn go up there too.”
I chuckled. “Oh yeah?”
He nodded and turned his attention to . . . the top of the house? “Rowyn go on roof to see airplanes.”
Visions of two-year-olds scaling the siding in my head, I shook my head. “How are you going to get on the roof, Rowyn?”
Picture an exaggerated toddler shrug. “Don’t know either,” he said. (“Either” is a new word for him, and he uses it lavishly.) “Climb ladder. Where’s ladder, Mommy?”
Mommy, praising her grandparents for hiding all large tools and equipment away in the garages and sheds and barns, looked around and was happy to pronounce, “I don’t see a ladder.”
Rowyn sighed and stomped over to the side of the house. After studying it for a minute–the little wrought-iron bench, the chimney, the plants–he pointed to a high-reaching flowering bush. “Rowyn climb flowers up there.”
I laughed–I couldn’t help it. And I delighted in the imagination, the determination of a toddler. But more, it brought me back to that feeling of no limits. That feeling that the world is yours for the taking, if only you find that magic beanstalk leading you up to the clouds.
Yes, we have limits. We learn, we experience, and we realize that some things are impossible. We just can’t climb a flimsy flower up to the roof–and if we got up there, we still wouldn’t be close to the airplanes. But how often do we use that experience and idea of limits to not even try to reach our dreams? How often do we leave it at “Nope, can’t get up there this way” and not consider that we could take this other path, and arrive at the airport? That we could dig a ladder out, if the roof was our goal?
I think when the Lord called us to have childlike faith, this is what he was talking about. How like my little boy do we look to God? Trying to use our reason, our logic, to get to a goal, when reason and logic won’t get us anywhere close? How often does He shake his head and smile at us, knowing that even if He gave us the ladder we asked for, it wouldn’t get us where we want to go? But if we trust in Him–if we hold fast to the dreams He’s given us–maybe He’ll send a car to take us to the airport we didn’t know was there. Or show us, if we make it to the roof, that that was where we needed to get to all along.
The world has limits . . . and it has history that shows us they can be broken and overcome.
My prayer today is that we all recapture a bit of that two-year-old wonder and find a flower to climb up to our dreams.
See, we hear a little bit about a former king of Sparta who was exiled from his country when he recommended they align themselves with Persia’s King Darius. So when he peeps kicked him out, he naturally fled to Persia. When Xerxes launched the campaign against Greece, ex-kingy came along as an adviser.
Now, here’s the cool story. Herodotus heard that before the troops left Persia, Damaratus (ex-kingy) sent a message of warning home to Sparta. Kinda irrelevant since it didn’t come to anything, and no one claimed he included anything but, basically, and “I told you so” in the note. But Herodotus told us about it because it was so clever.
See, Damaratus took a typical message tablet–hinged wooden box that opens kinda like a book; inside are two wax surfaces, on which the message is pressed with a stylus. Close it up, and voila–your message is protected for the journey. But not exactly secure. Damaratus, though, did something never before recorded. He peeled off the wax and scratched his true message into the wood, then put the wax back on and pressed a benign one into the wax.
Of course, he peeps back in Sparta had no clue why exiled-dude was writing them with something so useless and thought long and hard on it until finally someone said, “Hey, let’s look underneath the wax.” Took them months to figure this out, apparently.
This was such a fun story, but there was absolutely no way I could work it into Jewel of Persia. So I stole it instead. đ I took the cleverness of the idea and made it the standard way two of my bad guys communicate when they’re apart.
Gotta love poetic license.
Hope everyone has a happy Wednesday!
Wow, this is the first time in a while I’ve had a Tuesday not scheduled with an interview or giveaway! I love giving exposure to my author friends, but I’m also glad to get to chat books again. =) And hey, chatting books is exposure for my author friends!
Lately I’ve been doing something I’ve never done before in my life–reading multiple books at once. Mostly because I’ve been reading one digitally on my hubby’s tablet. =) But the one I’ve been reading in book form is Cara Putman’s Stars in the Night.
I had Cara on here for a giveaway in July, and her book sounded so awesome that I–Miss Why Buy a Book When I Get More Than I Can Read From Publishers Anyway–ordered a copy. That’s saying a lot right there.
And it was money well spent. Though I (embarrassingly) haven’t finished it yet (I can count on one hand the minutes of spare time I’ve had this last month . . .), it’s soooooo good.
Stars in the Night has it all–the glamor of ’40s Hollywood, the mystery of who killed the heroine’s sister, the sweet, faithful, but terribly shaken Audra out for justice at any cost, and the troubled but smooth Robert who’s trying to decide how far he can go to make his acting career soar.
When Audra lands a job chaperoning the second Hollywood Victory Caravan, which is touring the country to sell war bonds, she knows that somewhere on that train is her sister’s murderer. But she knows that mystery and murder aren’t the only dangers awaiting her–if she can’t keep her emotions toward Robert in check, the consequences don’t bear thinking about.
Doesn’t it just sound fabulous? I love how Cara transports us to another era, one where the beautiful and the ugly coexist in the same skin, where the careful picture Hollywood creates reveals the knotted stitches holding its costume in place. And where two people have to determine where faith forces them to draw the line. In a world of ambition and lies, can love ever find a foothold? Can it survive the deadly secrets crashing down around it?
I’m really looking forward to the conclusion of this book, and you can rest assured that I’ll take the time to exclaim some more about it once I carve out the necessary hours to finish it.
It’s an interesting dichotomy. In historicals, we’re told we have to stick to recorded facts where we can, but anything not recorded we’re free to play with. I’m mostly cool with that. But in contemporaries, it’s a little different, right? History’s being recorded as we speak, and there’s very little these days that goes unnoticed. But still we novelists need room to work. So . . .
More often than not, we create within the bounds of our world but take liberties. Like, oh, towns. This is one that comes up often on the ACFW loop. Rather than set a book in a real life town and risk getting it wrong, we often choose fictional settings near real places. That gives us the freedom to put a coffeeshop wherever we please but still describe landscape and climate with accuracy.
There are exceptions to this, of course. If you want to set a book in a place you know very well, the risk of “getting it wrong” is far, far less. So go for it. And cities are also an exception, since they generally encompass more of what we need for a story.
I’ve done both in my books. Note to Self I set in Annapolis and Arnold, MD–a place I lived for six years. For that story I could work very well within the confines of reality, and I had fun sending my characters on short-cuts I’d driven and to restaurants I’d walked past daily while in college. In Yesterday’s Tides, I wanted an authentic Outer Banks town, but things down there change so rapidly I knew I’d better create one. So I named a town after the island (Bodie) and nestled it in the dunes between Southern Shores and Duck where really there’s a stretch of nothing. Then I was free to plop down whatever church I pleased, have a restaurant wherever I needed it, place an inn there, etc.
That said, I get really excited when I find a book–historical or contemporary–set in my neck of the woods. Sometimes they name places I know, which is awesome, and sometimes I get to try to figure out where their fictional town is in relation to the places I know so well. Always fun when an author does it well.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, sheâs homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her booksâŚto offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.