My best 1st quarter so far, one sale better than in 2012
Well, I had my best first quarter ever in terms of book sales. I sold 17, which is one more than the first quarter of 2012. Of course, then I had four items for sale, now I have twenty-four. So it’s a lot fewer sales per title.
Thirteen books came in two batches. An internet friend bought six of my short stories in one shot, and a woman in my office bought seven short stories in one shot. The other four were on-line purchases by people I don’t know. Actually, that’s not true. I’m sure the one person who purchased the newly released Preserve The Revelation is an online writer-friend.
The table below shows how they are distributed among my publications. Note also that this shows a sale in April. So I know the second quarter won’t be a goose egg. You’ll have to click on the chart below to enlarge it enough to read it.
Perhaps I should have spent time cleaning my work area, which is en-route to non-functional.
Weekends are almost busier for me than weekdays. Sure, on weekdays I have to drive 15.5 miles to the office, work a 40 hour week (plus some), fight evening traffic, and come home mentally exhausted. But somehow that seems more organized, more manageable, than do my weekends.
It started with ducking out of the office a little early Friday afternoon. I thought we needed milk, so I stopped by Braum’s on the way. When I pulled into their parking lot my phone rang. It was the wife, saying she was ordering pizza for supper from Papa John’s, and hoping I hadn’t left the office yet. I had, but Braum’s was less than a mile past Papa John’s, so I said I could easily backtrack a little. She placed the order on-line, something she’s tried a number of times before without success, as her computer always locked up at the last step. This time it worked, so I drove back south, and waited the 25 minutes for the pizza. Thus, I arrived home at my usual time.
Friday night I went to The Dungeon after supper. I had numerous tasks I could work on, from filing, budgeting, book research and publishing, and income taxes. I decided to use my time to fix the cover for the Smashwords edition of Preserve The Revelation. It was only 1340 pixels wide, and the minimum width is 1400 for inclusion in their premium catalog. That was graphics work I could do, so I did it. It’s now awaiting Smashwords’ manual check to see that it’s okay. I hope to get that on Monday. The premium catalog is important, because through that the book is pushed out to Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and other vendors. Without that, it just sits at Smashwords, where nobody buys anything these days.
The Dungeon can be depressing, at times. I really, really, really need to spend time cleaning it.
I was in The Dungeon only an hour. Went upstairs, and for the rest of the evening I divided my time between vegging out, a few minor tasks, and research/organization in Documenting America: Civil War Edition. I had printed the book that week, and so had a good copy of what I’ve done so far. I saw that I was farther along than I thought. I made a table of where each of the thirty chapters stand. That will help me to plan what to work on next.
Saturday, I slept in (till 8:00 a.m.). By 9 I was outside, doing yardwork; specifically, continuing to rake leaves in the back yard. It’s a gravel yard, and getting leaves off it is more difficult than off a lawn. I don’t want to rake the gravel off, so I have to be careful how I rake. I had only the lower, rear portion still to go, a strip about 20 feet wide by the width of the lot, which is 120 to 150 feet. I was able to do only a little more than half. The remainder will be an easy task for next Saturday.
Inside, my next task was helping my wife get on the road to Oklahoma City, where she’s to spend a week plus helping our daughter with the grandchildren during an especially busy time. But first I had to make the weekly Wal-Mart run, for groceries and prescriptions she needed for the trip. This included bringing some boxes of children’s clothes up from the basement and loading them into the van. We store quite a few boxes of those clothes. She got on the road around 4:00 p.m.
At that point I went to The Dungeon, and decided that the income taxes were the next thing I needed to do. I had made a good start a couple of weeks ago, so the work I had left was to fill in a few items from the tax forms we received, finish my writing business profit/loss, and hence Schedule C, and plug that into form 1040. I then moved on to our stock trading business taxes. Surprisingly, that went fast. I had those done by around 6:30 p.m. Well, not exactly done, because I’m not sure about one item. Figuring out whether what I plugged into the spreadsheet is correct or not will take a couple of hours, something I’ll probably do tonight. Then all that’s left are the State taxes, and I’m done for another year. Oh, yeah, and the mother-in-law’s taxes as well.
Saturday night I did some more reading and research for DA-CW Ed, profitable research into source documents, and went to bed at a decent time. It helped that I didn’t have to teach Life Group this Sunday.
Today was Life Group and church. I knew I needed to get some walking in, so after lunch walked about 1.5 miles. I didn’t push it. Although I walk a fair amount, I’m out of shape due to having not walked while I had a cold recently. But I got it in, and wasn’t too worn out afterwards. No more, that is, than a 45 minute nap wouldn’t cure.
So I was finally at my computer, in The Dungeon, for my prime couple of hours of writing work. I spent the time copying source documents into my Word file for DA-CW Ed. That might not sound like much, but I had to look for them on-line, to hopefully save typing them. I was able to do that, as well as find a couple of source documents for the Battle of Gettysburg, documents that had previously eluded me. I also modified the file for my most recent short story, “Growing Up Too Fast”, for Smashwords, and uploaded that. Smashwords accepted it, and it’s now awaiting the manual check for inclusion in the premium catalog.
That brings me to Sunday evening. After some light cleaning that’s been nagging at me, and leftovers for supper, I read in the source documents. The first step is deciding what to excerpt from them to keep in the book. Several of them are long, over 3,000 or even 4,000 words. I’d like the excerpt to be between 700-1200 words, but will go more words when I need to. I made good progress in that. I’m not ready to give a new estimate of how close I am to completion, but definitely got closer to that goal.
So, a busy weekend. With progress. With a fulfilling feeling. Now on to the workweek so I can rest a bit.
It’s published as an e-book at Amazon; print book and other e-book formats will follow soon.
Preserve The Revelation is published. It’s not selling, but it’s published. The proof copy of the print book should arrive today. I’ll get the e-book up for Nook, Kobo, Apple, etc. this weekend. Time to move on to something else.
That something else is my next book, Documenting America: Civil War Edition. There’s a long story to this book that I’ll try to make short and simple. My first full-length book to publish, back in May 2011, was Documenting America: Lessons from the United States’ Historical Documents. I enjoyed writing that. I found so many available documents, in this information age where digitized historical documents come online every day, that I knew I could make it into a series. Before long I had more than a dozen titles, all of which I knew I could easily write.
Published in May, 2011, I’ve sold a whopping 54 copies of this.
I decided my next one would be on the Civil War. The first one didn’t concentrate on one era in US history. Instead, I selected a variety of documents that interested me, from 1711 to 1898. It was fun, finding the documents, excerpting them, writing something about their historical significance, and tying them to an issue we face today. I had actually written a number of them as published and potential newspaper columns. When I decided, in February 2011 that I would make it into a book, it came together quickly.
Fast forward to mid-2013. I was searching around for what book to write next. The US was in the midst of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. I decided to make that the next one. I decided what the year limits would be, made a quick outline of the first few chapters, and wrote the first chapter. At the same time I was writing first chapters of three other books, to see which one felt right. Alas, Operation Lotus Sunday flowed easiest, and I wrote and published that. Once that was done I picked up DA-CW Ed again, added more to the Table of Contents, and wrote a couple more chapters. For some reason, it still didn’t feel right, and I went on to other things.
The next time I looked at it was early 2015. The sesquicentennial was about over. I had lost that window. Not that such a deadline was critical, but if I wanted to gain a few sales from the Civil War interest that the anniversary was generating…
What am I saying? When have any of my books ever found interest from current events? The election of 2012 didn’t help The Candy Store Generation, even though it included a discussion of that election as the campaign was being waged. The Chicago Cubs’ drive for their first pennant in 108 years last fall didn’t help sales of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People or Headshots, not one bit. The idea that I thought Civil War anniversaries would help my book to sell was, at best laughable, and at worst delusional. I guess one can always dream.
I’ve already started thinking about the cover to the Civil War Edition. It takes me a long time to make a cover on my own.
Still, I took up the book again and worked on it, taking it up to about forty percent complete before I once again set it aside, somewhere around February 2015. Why did I do that? I still planned to write the book. But as I dug into the source documents behind the major events of the Civil War, two problems hit me full blast. One, I got tired of all the battles. When you write about a major war, battles will be predominant in the contents; you can’t avoid that. Second, I would read the source documents and start falling asleep. No joke; they were either boring me or I simply couldn’t concentrate on them. Still, from time to time over the years, I pulled the book out, even as I was working on other things, and either researched, wrote, or edited what I already had.
Now it’s 2017. No meaningful Civil War anniversaries will come up for decades. Yet, with my novel done and published, and trying to decide on what to publish next, I decided to return to DA-CW Ed. In January, I returned to my main source document, the Annals of America, and read. Lo and behold, I was able to read with amazing retention and clarity. I’m not sure what the difference was between early 2015 and early 2017, but it was a huge difference. I went to Atlanta for a conference in February, took my source book with me, and read and read and read and didn’t get tired of it.
So, what’s the status of the book? I have thirty chapters identified, which will be the final count. I have source documents in hand for all but one of those, and it’s possible I even have it for that one, reading it pending. I have my Word file created and correctly organized. I have about twelve chapters fully written (subject to editing, of course), and I have the source documents in my file for all but about eight of the chapters. Last night I added the Siege of Vicksburg source document, and began editing it. In terms of organization, I’m about 95 percent there. In terms of source documents, I’m about 60 percent there. In terms of original writing—hmmm, that tougher to figure. Maybe not more than 20 percent. Still a lot of battles to write about and draw lessons from.
Last December, I established a goal of having this published in May 2017. That’s only two months. I’m not sure I can do that in time. My actual writing will begin this weekend (if I get my income taxes done, that is; otherwise it will be next week or weekend). I’ll blog about my progress from time to time, or will post it on my Facebook author page.
The final tweak to the cover changed the beasts’ eyes to glowing red.
Some time ago I posted about my church history series of novels. And in several places I’ve posted about the book in that series that I’ve been working on, Preserve The Revelation. As I wrote elsewhere, I finished the book January 14 this year, and set a goal to have it published by March 8.
It took longer to achieve than I expected. I made three rounds of edits, plus one extra edit of the first chapter. Each of these rounds took a week or two. I missed the deadline. Fortunately, when you self-publish there’s no real significance to a deadline. Can’t get your work done by one? Shrug it off and set a new one. So that’s what I did, sort of. I just decided I’ll get it done ASAP. That date turned out to be Thursday just passed, March 23, 2017. That’s when I got it up on Kindle.
This is my sixth novel (one of which is really a novella), and my 24th item published. That kind of perseverance feels good, though it hasn’t translated yet into sales, consistent sales. March will be a good month for sales, totaling maybe 14 to 16, depending on if I get any for PTR. So far I’ve sold one copy. Hopefully I’ll sell a couple more this month, and more the next month.
The print book cover.
Since Wednesday, I completed the formatting for the print book, and finished uploading it today. Now waiting on CreateSpace to approve it. Print covers are significantly more complicated than e-book covers. I’ve done a couple of my print covers, but didn’t want to tackle this one. My internet friend Veronica Jones-Brown did both covers, the e-book first, then the print. I should hear in a day or two whether everything is okay with it. I’ll then order a proof copy. If all goes well, about a week from now I should have the print book for sale. Between now and then I’ll get the Smashwords formatting done. I think it is formatted correctly already, but need to run through it once or twice more.
So my work on PTR is almost done, probably less than two hours time total to go. What’s next? I’m already working on my next book, which will be a non-fiction title. You’ll be hearing about it in these pages before long.
Last weekend I finished the Sherlock Holmes stories. This has been a four-year journey, I think. I’ve blogged about it before, but, to be honest, I don’t feel like searching my archives and linking to the earlier story. Perhaps I’ll add it later.
An original Sherlock Homes illustration, by Sidney Paget.
My wife and I started reading S.H. about four years ago. I picked up the two-volume set produced by Barnes & Noble from their bargains table. I would have preferred to get the three-volume set published by Norton, for they have the chronological order of the stories identified—the order that Holmes’ adventures took place, that is, not the order they were written in. But I bought the B&N ones, so that’s what we read in. I also have a paperback of some of the stories, and I downloaded a couple of files for my Nook. As we started, we passed the B&N book back and forth and read aloud. As we got further into them, and a story was in an alternative volume, I read from that and my wife kept the other.
At some point our joint reading petered out. The language isn’t archaic, but you can tell it’s not quite modern. References in the stories aren’t always clear, so you have to decide to plow (or ‘plough’ at Watson would write) on with limited understanding or consult the endnotes. Whatever the reason, we got through the first volume and a little way into the second before we quit.
I don’t like to leave a book unfinished, so at some point I picked it up again. I read 1/3 of it, set it aside, and about a month or two picked it up again, and, as I said, finished it last weekend.
My judgment of it…doesn’t matter. Holmes has been around for 125 years; his position in the legion of detective heroes is solid; A. Conan Doyle’s standing among authors couldn’t be higher. So whether or not I liked the Holmes stories doesn’t matter. But, this is a blog that includes my opinions, so I’ll give it. I liked the Sherlock Holmes stories, but not as much as I expected to.
The way detective stories are written has changed over the years. Now writers give clues in the story so that the reader can figure the story out along with the detective-hero. Doyle didn’t do that. Holmes has knowledge the reader doesn’t. He sends telegrams we don’t know about till after the fact. He goes places and sees people the reader knows nothing about. Partly this is because Watson is the point-of-view character. The story is always solved, but the reader is unable to assist.
If I were rating the Sherlock Holmes opus on Amazon, I’d give it 3.5 stars. But the big question I always answer about the books I review here: Will I keep it in the library, and will I read it again? I will definitely keep it. If life gives me enough years, and enough time in those years, I’ll read it again. For sure I’m going to re-read the second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four. I must have been reading or listening without comprehension on much of that, for at the end of the book I couldn’t have told you much about it. As for the rest, re-reading will be when leisure and interests converge, sometime in the future, probably the distant future.
The cover tries to keep the theme for the series that my son started for me on the first story.
As I’ve mentioned on these posts, my main work-in-progress these last several months has been my novel Preserve The Revelation. However, while writing it (since last September), other things have come to mind. One of them was a new short story, an unplanned one in the Danny Tompkins series. That had been bubbling up in my mind since around last October. I wrote a few notes about it, to preserve them. I even started the story in manuscript, lost it, and started it again on another sheet of paper.
I found the first paper, merged the two beginnings, and wrote maybe 500 words. All of this, mind you, in odd moments after finishing my work daily on PTR. It was February 14th that I sat and typed what I had, then kept going. In early March I finished the story, took a week or so to read and tweak it. All of this was on days I was letting PTR simmer, to give me time to get a fresh perspective on it. At some point that included starting work on the cover. It all came together this past week. I uploaded it to Amazon on Thursday, March 16. By Friday everything had synced up on all of Amazon’s systems, so I announced it on Facebook. So far, no sales. I haven’t yet put it up on Smashwords and other sites.
“Mom’s Letter” was the first in the series. This is the cover my son did for it.
The story is this: Daniel Tompkins, now in his sixties, comes to a better understanding that, due to life circumstances, he missed much of his teen years. This affected his adult ability to relax and have fun. He ponders how to break free from this baggage of youth.
This series started in 2010 when I wrote “Mom’s Letter“. It was the story of the day Danny learned his mother had entered the hospital to die, something that happened while he was at scout camp, something he hadn’t seen progressing as the summer wore on. Later in life he found a letter his mom wrote to him at camp that week. That started a flood of memories, and inspired Daniel to write a poem about it.
The second in the series.
I first wrote that story for a contest, one that a lady in church told me about. I submitted it (didn’t win), and later expanded it beyond the word count allowed by the contest. The best part of the story was in those extra words added. I ran the story through an on-line critique group, and two real life critique groups. When I made the decision to self-publish, I didn’t want to start with a book, so I decided to use this to learn how to do it. It first went live for sale on Amazon Feb 15, 2011.
The third in the series, and the first I did the cover for.
I never thought of making that into a series. It was a story I wanted to tell. But then I thought, perhaps Daniel had other memories of when he was young Danny who had just lost his mother. Could these memories help some other teenager who faced similar circumstances? The story of the wake and actual funeral seemed the logical thing to do next, so I wrote “Too Old To Play“, the title taken from the poem that’s included in the story, a poem that pre-dates the story. Then came “Kicking Stones“, featuring Danny’s memories of returning to school after his mom’s death, told with the metaphor of kicking stones on the walk to and from junior high. This had a lot of Daniel’s inner thoughts and reflections.
#4, a cover I also did.
Then came “Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral“, which featured Danny’s father, how he coped with his wife’s death, and raising three teens on his own. Then, since I’d focused on the dad in a couple of stories, I decided I’d better do one on the mom. So I wrote “What Kept Her Alive?”, which showed the struggles Danny’s mom went through and how her life was perhaps prolonged because of the activities she took part it, activities she could do from her invalid’s couch.
This cover, of a stamp collection box and a few stamps in front of it, isn’t doing what I’d hoped it would do. I may re-do this one.
So now, the series is complete. No, really. I know I said that after the last one, but I feel a sense of completion with publication of “Growing Up Too Fast”. I do plan on republishing each of the earlier ones, to tweak the covers to be more alike, and to add links to all stories in the series in each book, now that they are all published. I’m also thinking of combining them into a “boxed set.” We’ll see; maybe later this year when I have a lull in writing and publishing activities. I will, of course, keep you all informed should that happen.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day. That’s not a day I normally celebrate, but since much of the world is, I figured I should mention it.
The real subject of this post, however, is one I touch on with some regularity: busyness. This is one of my frequent themes and complaints. Of course, I do it to myself. If I didn’t want to write and publish books and stories, I wouldn’t be near as busy as I am. If I didn’t insist on balancing my checkbook (as I believe most people aren’t doing these days), or keep up with a budget spreadsheet, or neatly file financial receipts and records, I’d have a lot less to do. So, yes, I realize that the way I want to live and conduct life contribute to that busyness, or maybe even create that busyness.
One metaphor frequently used to describe someone who is busy is to say “He can’t see the forest for the trees.” I suppose that doesn’t apply only to a busy person. It could apply to someone who focuses on individual tasks without being able to see the big picture.
My problem right now is just the opposite. I can’t see the trees for the forest. I have such a massive amount of items on my to-do list I can’t see my way clear which one to tackle first. I could do any one task, any two tasks, maybe even any five tasks, and see no less forest of tasks waiting for me.
When that happens, which has been frequently of late, I tend to back off and do nothing. Which isn’t good, since the tasks are still there and more are being added. That’s where I’ve been of late, backing off and doing nothing. That can’t happen for long, however, and I finally got back to my list and started looking for trees.
On the non-writing list, I tried to figure which were the time sensitive ones, and work on them. Income taxes, of course, are a big one. But before that came car registration. But before that came personal property assessment. All this can be done on-line these days. The last couple of years I waited too late to do it on-line and had to go to the DMV. This year, though, around March 1st I went on-line and did the assessment. Then around March 8th I went on-line and did the renewal. Yesterday the stickers for the license plates came in the mail. Today they got on the vehicles. One item down—or maybe I can count that as three items.
On the writing list, I have my novel, Preserve The Revelation, almost finished. It needs one final read and tweaking of chapter 1, then it’s publish. Then I have the next Danny Tompkins short story, then the civil war book, then another short story, then…the list gets really long. I took a stab at felling a couple of “maintenance” type trees: I re-did my biography on my Amazon author page and on my website. Neither ones were major tasks, but they were part of this huge, impenetrable forest in which I can’t see trees. Well, I saw those two, and they are gone, for now at least.
This Danny Tompkins short story is an odd thing on my list. I thought the series was over with the last story, but two circumstances in real life gave me the idea for one more. A couple of months ago I outlined it and wrote an opening paragraph, mainly to get it out of my mind. But the day I finished the first round of edits on PTR, I had an extra hour to find a tree to cut down, so I began typing on “Growing Up Too Fast”. By the end of that day I had the story complete save for a good ending. I finished that last weekend. Sent the story to three beta readers, getting comments back from two. Incorporated those comments into the story, fixed ALL the typos (I think), and, last night, I went through the steps to publish it on Amazon. It’s done, my 23rd publication there.
I’m going to wait a few days to announce the story, because it takes that long to get it added to your Amazon page and for it to sync up with your Amazon statistics. Most likely my Monday blog will be about that.
So some trees are gone from the forest. It’s still a forest, however. Still plenty of trees tightly packs, so much so it’s still hard to see them. But, I feel better. If I can get PTR published, at least in e-book, I can pull off writing all together to do my taxes. Once I get those done, I’ll feel like working in the forest again, finding one tree at a time and getting rid of it.
This was my first novel; but, if plans work out, it will actually be the second in the series, and “Preserve The Revelation” will be the fourth.
For the last month I’ve been working on re-publishing my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Actually, I’ve been working on it much longer than that. Last summer I re-read it on my Nook, marking places where I found an error or where I thought the writing could be improved. I did that in anticipation of writing and publishing a sequel to it. Just yesterday I put the finishing touches (I think) on Preserve The Revelation, and will publish it in about two weeks.
I started writing Preserve The Revelation in October, 2012, as part of a four-book trial writing period. PTR didn’t get “selected”, so I worked on other things. Until September 2016, when I picked it up again and began writing. In the summer before that, knowing PTR was coming, I re-read DLA, knowing I would want to re-publish it before publishing PTR. I finished PTR on January 14, 2017, and immediately shifted to DLA.
One of the things I wanted to do with DLA was change places to contractions. Early when I was writing it, I got advice that people back then didn’t talk in contractions, that they were much more formal than that. As a result, I wrote things such as “Let us eat” and “I will go with you tomorrow”, instead of Let’s eat, and I’ll go with you tomorrow. Did people speak and write in contractions in the 1st Century? I don’t know, but I suspect that every era has colloquial ways of shortening their speech. So, in the 1st Century, speaking in Greek or Aramaic, people would have shortened their speech and writing, as we’d say “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” As a result, the most common criticism of DLA was that it was stiff. How much did lack of contractions contribute to that? I figured quite a bit.
When I reread DLA, I found about two dozen typos, but there were hundreds if not thousands of places where contractions would lessen the stiffness of the dialog and narrative. I did search and replace for common word combinations reduced to contractions in English. As a result it shortened the book by over 1,000 words, I think closer to 2,000 words. That was a lot of searching and replacing.
I had that work done in mid-February, and shifted back to PTR for the first round of edits. Once those were done, I went back and forth between the two books. I made the print version file of DLA final, uploaded it to CreateSpace, and waited for the proof to arrive. I started a third round of edits on PTR. The two progressed simultaneously at that point. Last Friday I uploaded the print file of DLA to CreateSpace, after a couple of failed attempts that I didn’t understand, and waited for their automated system to tell me it was okay. That okay came at midnight, so this afternoon I made that my main task. Got it done around 2 p.m.
Well, that wasn’t my only main task. I had to make two last minute changes in the Kindle version. I did that, uploaded it, checked it on the on-line viewer, and saw it had a mistake. So I went through it again, this time getting it right. That was done somewhere around 3 p.m., I think. Then I typed the third round of edits in PTR, which I finished in manuscript Sunday morning (not going to church because of a lingering cold). Those were done around 5:30 p.m., at which time I exited The Dungeon to go upstairs and fix supper.
So, this weekend, while prevented from doing outside work due to my cold and to the rain-snow combination on Saturday, I made major progress on writing. I didn’t work on stocks, or filing. I did complete entries in the checkbook, which had been lost for a week. But except for that, it was all writing, and it felt good. Now, it’s on to making the Smashwords edition, and working on an almost complete short story—as well as finishing touches on PTR, of course.
You meet people over the Internet in many different places. Sometimes you meet them in real life; sometimes you don’t. I’ve never met Carol Ashby. We know each other a little from following the other’s comments at the “Between The Lines” blog of the Books & Such Literary Agency. I saw Carol post a comment about writing Roman Empire era books. I’m not writing about the empire, but my church history novels are set in the Roman Empire. So, I thought I’d like my readers know about Carol and her books. Hence, this interview.
DT: You say you’ve written professionally all your life, in things such as lasers and semiconductors. Now you’re also writing creatively. Tell me about what brought that on.
CA: Writing creatively; that’s a good distinction, Dave. While research is creative work because you’re pushing the frontier of what’s known, you don’t write it up “creatively.” When I was publishing in sci-tech, I was always careful to make sure it read as good science, not science fiction.
So why the switch? For several years, I’ve been watching the persecution so many Christians face in too many parts of the world, but especially now with ISIS. I was thinking about the parallels to the situation when Imperial Rome tried to destroy the followers of Jesus. Then the story that will be the second novel in the Light in the Empire series, Blind Ambition, came to me the last Friday in September in 2013. I started writing the first high-tension scene of the novel that night.
DT: Looking at your Amazon page, I see your published novel, Forgiven. The cover suggests ancient Rome. Tell us about your novel.
Available at Amazon.com
Forgiven is actually the fourth novel I wrote, but I decided to bring it to market first. It’s set in Roman Judea, and I had hoped to ride the wave of a blockbuster movie. Ben Hur didn’t do well in American theaters, although it did much better overseas. The wave here was more like the waves on a lake than something a surfer could ride.
Forgiven is a much better choice for my first published novel since it deals with a problem we all suffer from: how can we forgive what seems unforgivable? How do we keep our anger over something that can never be changed from poisoning the way we treat similar people who may have had nothing to do with what happened? How can we forgive them if it turns out they were responsible but didn’t mean to do it?
Forgiven takes place in Galilee only 10 years before the Bar Kochba Revolt that finally ended the Jewish hope for freedom from their Roman overlord. In AD 122, Rome had already destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and only 5 years earlier it ruthlessly crushed the Kitos Rebellion. Jewish anger was simmering close to the surface, and the Roman troops charged with keeping the province peaceful never knew when violence would erupt.
In that caldron of unrest, a Messianic Jewish family is trying to live peacefully as they follow Jesus as their Messiah. Then the oldest son leaves to join the zealots in their guerilla attacks on the Romans. The second son goes to persuade his brother to come home, and a Roman officer kills him by mistake.
That accidental killing is the starting point of the story. Then the reader meets the brother of the Roman officer who killed the second son. He’s planning to kill his older brother for a larger inheritance and blame a zealot. His hired assassins bungle the job. When the dead son’s twin sister and younger brother are faced with the choice of rescuing the badly injured Roman or letting him die, they obey Jesus’s command to love their enemy and take him home. Rachel persuades her father to put his love for Jesus above his anger with Rome, pretend Lucius is Greek to protect him, and let him stay with them until he heals.
His brother wants him dead, her older brother wants to kill him if he’s Roman, and her father obeys Jesus’s command but struggles with having him around because he’s part of the group that killed his son. Forgiven is a story of love, hatred, friendship, and forgiveness. It portrays the emotional and spiritual struggles of more than one character leading to a deadly climax and, I hope, a satisfying conclusion.
DT: It’s part of a series titled “Light In The Empire”. What are your plans for this series?
I’m planning six to eight novels in the series. Each focuses on a deep cultural conflict based on ethnicity or class, the power of Christian love to overcome those, and the transformation of people that can result in response to that love. Each picks up one or more characters from another novel in the series and places them in challenging circumstances where decisions about living their faith must be made.
Each one is a story of hope about human love and spiritual transformation, a story about how our faithfulness can inspire another to open his or her heart to God. It’s interesting how the plot for the next novel that’s a new twist on the theme takes shape in my mind even before I finish the one I’m working on. As long as that keeps happening, I’ll know God wants me to keep writing the Roman series.
DT: You said the second novel in the series will be out by May. Tell us about that one.
Will be available in May 2017
Blind Ambition is actually the first novel I wrote. It’s set in AD 114 mostly in Germany near Mainz. The tagline describes it well: “Sometimes you have to almost die to discover how you want to live.”
The provincial governor has given the Christians in his province the option of sacrificing to Caesar or dying. His son, Decimus, is a tribune in the legion who’s headed for a stellar political career like his father. When he’s robbed, blinded, and left for dead, a young German woman who follows the Way finds him. Valeria knows it’s his duty to have her and her family killed, but she chooses to love her enemy and takes him home to care for him. Decimus has been raised to think of Christians as vermin to be exterminated for the good of Rome, so what’s he going to do when Valeria and her brother and sister love him like family while never hiding their love for Jesus from him?
DT: So, are you working on the next book in the series, and perhaps the next after that?
CA: I have two more novels that are finished and ready for the final editing. They should be out within the next year or so. I have another two that are fully plotted and about half written. There’s a fifth that I’ve partly written that will probably end up novella length. Plus I have some rough plans for two more. They all follow the series theme of difficult friendships growing into love coupled with the spiritual transformation of characters whose journey to faith is inspired by the faith of those who love them.
DT: Do you see yourself branching out from ancient Rome as the underlying period for your work in the future?
CA: I’m compulsive about getting the history right. I’ve got so much invested in both time and academic books (more than 60 at the moment) about the Roman period that I decided to create a Roman history site at carolashby.com with what I’ve learned. I write articles on different topics (taxation and medicine are next), review Roman-era books, make Latin wordsearch and crosswords, and post real Roman recipes with fun facts about ancient culinary practices. Each morning, I look to see where the site visitors came from during the night, and so far, they’re from 39 different countries, counting the US.
That was my first “author” website. It’s lots of fun for me, but not very personal and not a springboard to different settings. Most of my international visitors probably aren’t interested in Christian historical fiction, either.
I’ll be publishing Roman for a while, but I’ve already branched out a bit. The second novel I started writing was actually a romantic thriller set in Colorado in 1925. It’s another story about the power of Christian love to overcome differences in class, ethnicity, and the expectations of family and society, but I don’t have plans to bring it to market for a while. I set it aside while I wrote 3 more Roman novels. I went back to it and “finished” it over a year ago to enter a contest, but working on the Roman novels keeps me pretty busy.
DT: You said you are self-publishing the series What led to that decision?
CA: My husband and I decided from the beginning that we would donate the profits and offer the novels for more creative ways to support missions in Africa and the Middle East. When I learned that I would be selling all my rights to the books and not be able to use them like we wanted if I went the traditional publishing route, I took several deep breaths and made the leap into independent publishing. There’s a lot involved in doing that successfully, but if that’s what it takes to keep the flexibility that comes from owning the rights myself, then I’m willing to do it.
I’m at work, at my desk, trying to figure out how to be productive today. We spent the weekend in Oklahoma City, on a dual family event. Ezra’s birthday was March 1, and we celebrated this weekend. Elijah’s dedication was Sunday. So all four grandchildren have been dedicated to God’s care and service.
Since these were two family events, and since some people would be driving in for them but wouldn’t want to spend the night, both took place on Sunday: the dedication during the normal worship service; and the party right after at Incredible Pizza. This is 50,000 sq. ft. of mayhem. Noisy, crowded, chaos. The kids liked it, and that’s what matters. We were there a couple of years ago for Ephraim’s and Elise’s birthdays.
So today it’s back to the grind, at work and at home. I had my manuscript with me over the weekend, but only managed to look at 30 or so pages. That will be my main writing focus this week, that and re-publishing Doctor Luke’s Assistant. My proof copy should arrive this week. If it’s good, I’ll get the print and KDP and Smashwords editions republished this week.
