Tag: Countess of Cons
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Behind the Chapter: Who Is Mrs. C. J. Seeley?
One of my favorite parts of writing Countess of Cons was taking the fragments I found in old newspapers, court records, and city directories and figuring out how they fit together into Catherine’s story. Sometimes a single newspaper article gave me the bones of a scene. And sometimes another article came along and complicated everything.…
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Behind the Chapter: How a 125-Year-Old Newspaper Wrote This Scene
Sometimes the hardest part of writing narrative nonfiction is imagining scenes that were never recorded. Sometimes the scenes are already waiting for you in a 125-year-old newspaper. When I wrote Nothing Really Bad Will Happen, I often had to reconstruct scenes from fragments. I knew where my ancestors lived and what they looked like, but…
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Behind the Chapter: Building a Courtroom Scene from the Historical Record
One of the questions I’m asked most often is: “How do you know what really happened?” Take this 1892 courtroom scene from Countess of Cons. Justice Kersten regarded the woman brought before him—the set of her shoulders too proud for pity, the hands too restless for innocence. Whatever she’d done, she didn’t look like someone…
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The Manuscript Is Finished. The Book Isn’t.
People often imagine writing a book ends when the author types The End. I wish. This week I completed the final revision of Countess of Cons, my upcoming historical narrative about one of the Gilded Age’s most fascinating con artists. It’s a milestone worth celebrating—but it’s far from the last step. A finished manuscript is…
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Why Didn’t They Go to Jail?Crime, Aliases, and Opportunity in the Gilded Age
I have been reading The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, because who wouldn’t want to read about a Gilded Age woman who rose from immigrant housewife to the leader of New York’s largest crime syndicate? As I read, I’m thinking: Geez, this woman makes Catherine look like small potatoes. (For those who don’t know, Catherine Seeley is…
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Finding Catherine, Finding Connection
On the third day of our writing retreat in Ireland, Lynn Palermo asked us to reflect on the following questions: Think about the connections your story makes possible. What connections brought you to this story? Who are you hoping to connect with through your writing? How do you want that connection to shape the way…
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From Gilded Age Grifter to Aer Lingus Diva
I’m sitting at Gate 9 at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut, waiting to board a 6:05 p.m. plane to Dublin. The seats are filling fast. Uh oh. Does that mean some poor schmuck is going to get wedged between me and my husband? He likes the window. I like the aisle. (Seventy-year-old bladder. Two kids.)…
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Chicago, 1892: A Day in the Life of a Divorced Diamond Seller
I took up Coach Carole’s Thursday GenAI Club challenge for Week 2: Time Travel Thursdays. The prompt invited us to time-travel with a favorite ancestor, so I adapted it for my husband’s great-grandmother, Catherine—who just happens to be the subject of my next novel (Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter). I…
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