Tag: Writing
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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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Things That Make Me Twitch: Unconfirmed Birthdates
NOTE: I am cross-posting this to my other platforms as the topic may be of interest to all. I am on the very last read of my forthcoming novel, Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter. Yes! The last read before I hand it off for one final round with my beta…
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In Honor of April Fools’ Day… Let’s Play a Dangerous Little Game
It feels only appropriate, given my subject matter, to celebrate April Fools’ Day with a bit of deception. After all, if anyone appreciated a well-executed ruse, it was Catherine, the protagonist of my forthcoming novel, Countess of Cons. She was also my husband’s great-grandmother. Below are five “facts” drawn from her life. Some will sound…
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New Cover, New Format, Same Story That Refuses to Let Go
I redesigned the cover of Nothing Really Bad Will Happen—and yes, I did it for the most modern, unromantic reason possible: I want people to actually notice the book on Amazon. Not because the story needed a makeover. The story is the story. It’s lived in my family for generations, in silences and fragments and…
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Where I Am Now: Restructuring Countess of Cons After Beta Reader Feedback
It’s been almost a month since I received all my beta readers’ feedback on Countess of Cons. You know that moment when you realize you weren’t as close to the finish line as you thought? Not exactly a surprise, but still… The gist: readers needed neck collars to recover from the whiplash caused by too…
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Polished-but-Dead: Editing With AI (It’s Complicated)
Remember that song, “Video Killed the Radio Star?” (If you don’t then I’m pretty pleased—that means younger people are reading my blog!!) Lately, while editing Countess of Cons with Scripty McPromptface in the room, that song has been looping in my head. Because the way MTV changed music in the 1980s—suddenly it wasn’t just the…
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