Controversial Subjects in CBA Fiction

My third novel, Lovelier than Daylight, is based on the Westerville Whiskey Wars of the 1870s.

I'm working on it right now, and it will be released in November 2012.

Because the novel is about temperance crusaders fighting a saloon (among other things), it must inevitably deal with the subject of alcoholic beverages and their abuses.

A couple of years ago, I told my dad that I had some concerns about writing this novel, even though it was part of my series proposal.

"How can you not want to write a novel about people blowing up a saloon?" he asked.

"Because handling the alcohol issue is going to be tricky," I said. "People have very strong feelings about it. But I don't write polemics, and I'm not going to portray the temperance crusaders as completely right and the saloon owner as completely in the wrong. I'm going to show all sides of the issue."

After all, I thought, this is a real story from history, and trying to paint it as a black-and-white situation would do a grave disservice to the actual historical account. In real life, it's often hard to tell the heroes from the villains, and the Westerville Whiskey Wars are particularly ambiguous in that respect.

Flash forward two years. Now that I'm embarking on the edits for this novel, I'm really enjoying the complexity of the novel's depiction of alcohol and the conflict surrounding the saloon.

CBA novels have a reputation for being preachy, which is sometimes deserved and sometimes not. More and more, CBA novelists are developing the craft and finesse to address even controversial topics in non-preachy ways. In fact, when a novel deals with a hot button topic, it is even MORE important to write it with a very light hand.

If you want to see the beautiful cover for this third novel, it will receive its grand unveiling at my Facebook party this Tuesday night, February 28th, at 5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, 8pm Eastern! Just click on my author page and we'll be having all kinds of fun conversations, plus GIVEAWAYS! An Ipod Nano and a Downton Abbey prize pack could be yours, plus gift certificates and free books.

Facebook Author Page for party Tuesday night!

Question for you: do you prefer historical novels to address complex real-life issues about morality and conduct, or would you prefer a lighter read that's more of a nostalgic portrait of a historical era?

In Which the Author Sings: Vlog

In Sweeter than Birdsong, Kate Winter learns a Handel song in her first rehearsal with Ben Hanby.

I have foolhardily recorded the first verse of this piece, because I knew you would be more curious if I sang it than if I posted one of the many professional, gorgeous versions out there. If you want to hear someone sing this beautifully, try Karina Gauvin's version on I-tunes.

Now you know, there is no length to which I will not go to promote my novel, embarrassing or not. :-)

For those who know music, I recorded this with a straight tone, which is a little weird, but my classical technique is so rusty that there is no way I'm trying it out in a public forum~ha!

Because the Book Itself is Not the Goal

Here's the most touching email I've received about my new novel in the last few weeks:

A woman who works against human trafficking (aka slavery in the twenty-first century) told me that Sweeter than Birdsong had encouraged her, because it depicts a great victory for nineteenth-century abolitionists.

I told a friend about this email during the book launch last week and I couldn't keep tears from coming to my eyes.

One of my greatest hopes for my novels is that they will encourage people to work in ministries for the oppressed, imprisoned, and brokenhearted. Inspiring historical figures like the heroes of Sweeter than Birdsong fought for those without a voice, and that battle still resonates today with millions in various forms of slavery around the world.

Getting an email like that is really the fulfillment of my dream. It's not about being published--publication would mean nothing if the story were not worthwhile. My dearest hopes about publishing are about what good might come from the truth in the story I tell.

This month, on February 26th, over 4000 churches will celebrate Freedom Sunday by remembering those enslaved by human trafficking. If you'd like, you can sign up, and maybe offer a prayer at your own church on that day. To find out more, go to this site from Not for Sale and the Underground Church Network.

http://www.freedomsunday.org/

How do you hope your work might affect readers?

Launch Week Begins!

Everything's in a whirl as we prepare for the Westerville launch of Sweeter than Birdsong!

This photo shows the historic Westerville home of the Hanby family, whose story inspired the Saddler's Legacy series that began with Fairer than Morning and continues now with Sweeter than Birdsong.

I am so excited about the launch schedule, chock full of meetings and talks and conversations with old friends.

Please excuse me if I'm a little sparse in the blogosphere this week. Next week I will be back, visiting blogs and posting pics from the launch.

And by next week, I should also get my editorial letter for Lovelier than Daylight. Just in case there's not enough excitement. :-)

What are you up to this week?

The Blessing of Good Editors and Proofreaders

I read a couple of really nice reviews of Sweeter than Birdsong today. I was so grateful to the readers, as I always am, for taking the time to write such thoughtful comments.

I was also overcome by thankfulness for my editors and proofreaders.

Sweeter than Birdsong had a long and challenging composition history, chiefly because it went through two significant rewrites over the course of three years. Without my editors, Ami McConnell and Meredith Efken, and my copy editor Becky Monds, it would never have reached the vision I dreamed up for it. But with their help, it made it through and is now a shiny, polished creation. It's so rewarding to see readers respond to the book as a whole, readers who haven't been through two or three drafts like my wonderful critique partners! I get to see the novel again through readers' eyes, now, and this is an amazing feeling after such a long development process. Plus, this was the first novel I ever wrote, and there's something particularly precious about seeing that first manuscript realize its potential.

I want to tell you how terrific the copy editing/proofreading team at Thomas Nelson is. Here are a couple of examples. At one point, I had made a passing allusion to something classical(I won't name it, so you won't get distracted if you're reading the novel). The proofreading team is SO good, and so detail-oriented, that they came back to me and asked whether that thing I named existed in 1856, citing a reason why it might not have. While it did, in fact, exist, their care for accuracy was just wonderful. The proofreaders also suggested that I switch the order of two chapters, and when I went back and looked at it again, I thought they were absolutely right. That's a big deal, and not necessarily something they had to mention to me at that point in the proofing process. But because they cared about producing the best work, they were looking for anything that might need changing, and their contribution was huge.

Here's another example that's even better, because I can give specifics. As some of you know, my books are based on real people. In the afterword of the book, I use Kate Winter Hanby's full name, Mary Kathryn. I spelled Kathryn in that way because I have visited the Otterbein cemetery in which her gravestone bears that name. But the proofreaders checked the spelling of her name, and discovered that one reliable source lists it as Katherine, not Kathryn. (How great is it that the proofreaders even checked her NAME!)

I went back to the director of Hanby House and asked her what she thought. She said that in her opinion, the more reliable of the sources is correct with Katherine, because the gravestone was erected by later admirers, not by Kate's family. And here's another complicating fact: on her marriage license, Mary Katherine Winter is listed as Mary C. Winter!

So the proofreaders who read the novel checked everything, taking nothing for granted. And the result was excellent, which was especially important because we had a fast, fast turnaround on the line edit and missed a few things before galleys. I can't imagine better proofreaders, copy editors, or developmental editors than the ones who have blessed my work. And I don't even know my proofreaders' names! So, proofreaders, if you're out there, know that I would LOVE to thank you in person some day. Maybe I can worm your secret identities out of Becky. :-)

Did you know that novels went through this many edits? I didn't, before I went through the process. If you had all the time in the world, you could possibly do all these edits yourself, though even then it would be impossible to match the combined expertise of five professional readers at the top of their professions! But once authors go under deadline, there just isn't always the time to catch everything personally.

How do you catch your errors in the editing process? Do you have any tricks to recommend?

Twentieth-Century Historical Novels

For those of us who spent decades of our lives in the twentieth century, the idea of a twentieth-century historical can seem odd. Hey, that was MY century! How did I become a relic? ;-)

But the reality of it can't be denied. Twentieth-century historicals run the gamut from the Edwardian grace of Downton Abbey to the cultural upheaval of the Vietnam war. At this point, even the 1980s probably qualify as a setting for nostalgia fiction.

I've read three twentieth century inspy historicals in the last year or so, so the subgenre is on my mind.

The earliest set of the novels was Allison Pittman's Lilies in Moonlight, a story about a buoyant flapper on the run from her painful childhood. She must come to terms with the more serious side of life when after a night of partying, she stumbles into the garden of a wealthy but scarred WWI veteran. I loved the author's vivid portrayal of the cultural moment in which the pre-WWI world represented by the hero's aging mother runs full tilt into the Jazz Age and the first intimations of 'female liberation.'

The next story, chronologically, was Bonnie Leon's colorful and well-researched romance Wings of Promise, which shows the challenges a female bush pilot faces in the late 1930s in Alaska. Here's another pivotal time for American culture, just before World War II broke down barriers and sent women into factories and business in unprecedented numbers. This author was very astute to set her story in Alaska, where the frontier aspects of life made gender-based job restrictions a little more relaxed than they were in the lower 48 states. Still, the heroine faces challenges from the men in her professional world, who react to her femininity in extreme ways and are unable to separate it from her professional identity. This is the only realistic way to depict the situation, and I appreciated it. Few 1930s era men would be able to see women in the workplace in the "gender-neutral" way favored by twenty-first century companies.

The last novel in my reading series was Catherine West's Yesterday's Tomorrow, an intense romantic drama about a female journalist who goes to Vietnam and butts heads with an anatagonistic male photographer. Vietnam is not a common setting for romances, but Catherine West pulls off the combination of tragedy and redemptive events with aplomb. The 1970s push us along the line between the past and the present. The young adults of that time were so different from today's young adults in ways that we tend to forget, but there are also universal experiences of young adulthood that make Yesterday's Tomorrow resonate in the twenty-first century.

Considering these novels chronologically would make for a thoughtful discussion as certain themes and historical developments pop naturally to the surface. It makes me want to run the kind of study for adults that educators sometimes plan for children, in which the study of history takes place through literature. Wouldn't that be fun? To have a book group committed to history that arranged its readings by theme or period? You could arrange them in a linear way, as I've described the three novels above, or you could study two or three historical novels together that were all based in the same period, and compare and contrast them. Or, you could read a work of fiction in conjunction with a history of that decade, and see how they matched up.

It only works if you use the novels of authors who really care about reflecting the actual historical moment about which they are writing. Many historical romances show very little of the larger cultural scene, and instead turn a narrow lens on one man and one woman who might have lived at almost any time in history because they aren't obvious products of their cultural time.

All three of the books I've mentioned here are truly historical fiction rather than romances with a little historical flavor. The real historical fiction is the kind I enjoy, though I know people who prefer less historical setting and an exclusive focus on the relationship in isolation from the bigger picture of its time. It's all a matter of taste.

How do you feel about historical novels? Will you read a novel from one era and not another? Do Regency historicals give you hives? All opinions welcome as you will probably make me laugh, and you always make me think.

Publishing, Popularity, and Politicians

I've been reflecting lately on how marketing works in the world of CBA publishing.

I want to preface this post by saying that I believe in the mission of inspirational publishing, and that's why I write books for this market. I believe there must be a place where books with a Christian worldview and Christian characters will not be rejected out-of-hand, as they are in many secular markets.

But today, I want to talk about the nuts and bolts, the aspects of CBA publishing that have nothing to do with message and everything to do with the non-missional side of publishing. Because like it or not, there are moments when who we are as writers may come into conflict with the necessities of business. It happens in every industry, because businesses are part of the world and can't always be ideal.

So here is a very practical post about the everyday experience of CBA publishing, setting its mission aside for the moment.

CBA publishing is somewhat different from mainstream publishing because the circle of publishers and writers--and even readers--is so much smaller.

This has advantages and disadvantages.

The chief advantage is that it may be easier to break in because it's a smaller market.

The chief disadvantage is that one's personal popularity in CBA circles is likely to affect success. As people will sometimes say it, "It's a family, it's a small world."

Some people may not consider the influence of personal popularity a disadvantage. Some people are natural politicians: good at persuading and charming others, good at never saying anything disturbing or out of place.

And popularity is not necessarily a bad thing--sometimes it is earned by the truly compassionate, the truly good, the truly unselfish.

But popularity also has another face: the face of the Politician.

The Politician may be a likeable person, and may have many sincere virtues, but what distinguishes the Politician from others (for the purposes of my post here) is that his chief concern is popularity. It outweighs all other factors in most situations. The Politician always considers first and foremost how an action will LOOK to others, because that is the most important factor in remaining popular. And that's why, in the political world, some people have become popular and then been unmasked as imposters. Because Popularity does not always represent Truth.

Which brings me to my point.

Everybody knows that if you want to be popular, it's usually a good idea not to tell the whole truth. Truth is hard. Truth challenges. And most people are more likely to gravitate towards people who make them feel good. Popularity tends to be feel-good, not challenging. That's why Jesus appealed to some but not all. That's why he ended up on a cross.

So here's the problem, for most writers.

A good writer is the opposite of a Politician. A good writer values Truth, first and foremost.

But the Politician is more likely to succeed, in a world dominated by self-marketing, because writers who value Truth first have a natural tendency to dislike politicking, with its emphasis on superficiality and saying the right thing rather than the true thing.

And though the Politician may be successful, and may be a nice person, his work is less likely to tell challenging truths. To preserve his popularity, the Politician will tell the 'nice' challenging truths, the ones that appear deep but don't really stir at the deepest levels. Because when Truth gets powerful, it divides as well as uniting. This is why some editors will 'blandify' the work of their authors. They see it as their job, in order to make the author as popular as possible. (I'm so blessed that my editor doesn't blandify!) Every now and then, a challenging book will break out, but it's more likely to happen to a feel-good book that doesn't contain anything controversial. This book won't be very realistic, because reality is intrinsically controversial, no matter how faith-infused your worldview.

I have over-simplified in this post, admittedly. People come in all kinds of gradations between valuing truth and valuing popularity. But I wanted to bring up the point because at heart, I'm a Truthteller, and that's why I'm a writer. And so I want to know what you think of this tension between popularity, marketing, and truthtelling. Because having learned a few things in my time behind the scenes in publishing about the difference between appearances and reality, I haven't yet seen anyone talk about it.

How does this affect you? How do you handle the occasional conflict between Truth and the desire to be popular? How do you handle it in your writing?