Nothing Shy About Her

* A CIVIL WAR ROMANCE by MARY ANN WEBBER*

You’ve just landed in the New World, a place of excitement and beauty – 400 years in the making! 

People here are free to follow their dreams, make their own mistakes and seek love in their own way.

I’m Mary Ann Webber and I love writing about this country’s romantic places and times. 

Voyage with me on the Godspeed.  There’s much to discover in the New World!

Like many authors, Mary Ann Webber began writing fiction in elementary school. Writing took a backseat as life became her biggest challenge. She wanted it all—marriage, home, children, grandchildren, teaching career in Virginia and Arkansas. Her early life experiences now add depth to her current characters. During the years her writing was on hold, she collected history books related to periods she found fascinating. As a result, she often spends more time researching than writing. After early retirement, she moved to Dallas to be near her children and grandchild and immersed herself in writing.             

Her novella in the anthology NORTHERN ROSES AND SOUTHERN BELLES, is the first time she’s been published by Wild Rose Press.

Caroline: Mary Ann, how did you come up with the idea for NO DECORUM?

McCollum-Chidester House, once a”revolving door” headquarters for Confederate and Union armies in Camden, Arkansas, is now a museum.

Mary Ann: I’ve spent time in Camden, Arkansas, and visited the grounds of the Chidester House, where the yearly Civil War reenactments take place - so I have a real feel for the area.

A few years ago, I was surprised to learn the Union forces under General Steele occupied Camden for only eleven days. While the bloody Red River Campaign of 1864 raged through Arkansas and Louisiana, the Confederate and Union forces jockeyed in and out of position in Camden.

What can happen in the span of eleven days? I decided to pack as much life into this time as I could, and the story wrote itself while I continued my research.

This is unlike anything I’ve ever put on paper. The heroine is an innocent – but headstrong – teenage girl. Unlike my usual heroines, she seems to call the shots with everyone around her. Only a heroine like Juliet could make so much happen in such a short time.


Caroline:  Tell us about your writing schedule. Do you write full time?

Mary Ann: My stories pop into my conscious mind as full blown movies, in living color, complete with soaring music, sound effects, and the highest paid actors. I have no idea how it happens. The characters arrive and do their jobs. I scramble to find the right words and put it all down on paper. This never happens on any sort of schedule.

I write full time in the sense that I have no longer have an outside job, such as the twenty-two years I spent teaching in public schools.

Some writers switch on their writing muse when they turn on their computers, but I have a muse who thinks she’s a prima donna. “Dahling, must we do this every morning?” she groans. Then I remind her how many camera crews and actors are waiting for us and how we need some royalty checks. She usually sighs and crawls out of bed.

Caroline: LOL Love your attitude, Mary Ann. Your muse’s sister must be my muse.  Is there a reason you’re drawn to the Civil War era?

Mary Ann: My ancestors fought on both sides in the War Between the States, but probably the real reason is because my sister and I spent years sitting in dark movie houses watching GONE WITH THE WIND. It left us permanently warped. My sister says her husband has no idea how much he owes to his resemblance to Rhett Butler.

Caroline: Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t know. What else do you have in the works for us?

Mary Ann: I’m working again on my “epic” novel, A MAN AT THE DOOR.

Also, I’m plugging away on five novellas. They’re all historical – except for one, DAKOTA WINDOW. It features time travel inside a Manhattan apartment.

Caroline: Five novellas? Wow! I remember reading part of A MAN AT THE DOOR and loved it! I hope you finish and submit it soon so I can read the rest of the story. Now, though, how about sharing a blurb for NO DECORUM for readers?

Period photo of The City of Camden paddlewheeler. It’s loaded with cotton bales and headed downstream on the Ouachita River toward New Orleans.

Mary Ann: Here’s the blurb:

What can happen in eleven days? In the Civil War, towns could be occupied and reoccupied by opposing armies. And just as quickly, young enemies Juliet and Randolph could fall in love, marry, and be torn apart. This fast moving tale carries a story of sudden infatuation and unending love. It happens when decorum is cast aside.

Caroline: How about an excerpt?

Mary Ann: I have two, one long and one short. Let’s start with the short one:

The Confederate Women’s Memorial at the Ouachita County Courthouse.

Juliet’s voice betrayed her alarm. “What’s wrong? What are you seeing?”

 He slowly circled her. “Turn so your back is to the lamp. That’s it. Now I see what it is. Stand very still and lift your arms straight over your head. Right. Now look up at your fingertips.”
In a twinkling, Randolph grabbed the nightgown and whisked it over her head. Juliet stood naked in the middle of the room and Randolph swallowed at the vision. “Now, everything is just as it should be.”

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Randolph lifted the curtain and gazed out the bedroom window. “It’s almost dark. Let’s go have some fun.”

“I thought we were having fun.” Juliet rolled over and looked at him.

 He grabbed her hands and pulled her to her feet. “Take off that dress and put on the one you wore to church.” He grinned at her. “Don’t wear anything under it.”

 “I don’t think it’ll fit without a corset. What do you have in mind?”

Randolph emerged from the wardrobe with the church dress and tossed it to her. He also threw her a blue shawl. “Here, you’ll need this, too. It’s cool outside.”

 “Where do you think we’re going?”

 He held a forefinger to his lips. “It’s a secret. We’re going to the church. Wear old shoes. The grass will be wet.”
Juliet was intrigued. She never imagined marriage would be such fun. When Randolph came up with new games or funny roles to assume, she knew his Dolphie side was ready to play. She slipped into the dress and her husband fastened the bodice.
Leaving by the front door so they wouldn’t be seen, they held hands and ran to the unlighted church. Once inside, Randolph whispered, “We don’t know each other’s names.”

Juliet was breathless with excitement. “Yes, Sergeant.” She crept to the back of the church as Randolph moved across the front, bumping into pews.
Reaching the aisle, she moved slowly and deliberately toward the front. If her eyes hadn’t adjusted, she would still have found Randolph, seated as before in the aisle seat of the first pew.
She dropped onto his lap.
He moaned deeper than she’d ever heard him. Recovering, he whispered into her hair, “Young lady, this seat is taken.”

Caroline: LOL I remember that scene. Precious! Mary Ann, thank you so much for visiting with us today.

NORTHERN ROSES AND SOUTHERN BELLES is available from The Wild Rose Press in both print and e-download and is also available from Amazon and other online stores.

EPIC, the Electronically Published Internet Coalition™ (www.epicauthors.com) is delighted to announce that your entry, Northern Roses and Southern Belles, is a finalist in the Anthology Romance Category of the 2011 EPIC eBook Awards Competition™.

The winner of EPIC’s 2011 Anthology Romance Category will be announced at our annual conference, held in historical Williamsburg, Virginia, March 10-13, 2011.  Come join us: mix with your peers, attend wonderful workshops, eat fabulous food, learn more about EPIC…and discover the winners of our growing eBook competition.

You can find more details at http://www.epicon-conference.com/

The Age of Innocence

It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, and Edith Wharton became the first woman to receive the award.

I have blogged about Edith Wharton in the past but I keep learning more about her. SO . . .  here I go again! This time it’s about current media references to Edith Wharton’s life and work.

She was born January 24, 1862 in New York City, to George Frederic Jones (the saying “Keeping up with the Joneses” is said to refer to the family of her father) and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander.

Wharton combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was acquainted with many of her era’s other literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a gentleman of her social class and shared her love of travel, however they had little else in common.  When Teddy began suffering deep depression, they stopped their traveling. In 1908 her husband’s mental state was determined to be incurable and she divorced him in 1913. In 1968,  some of her newly found papers revealed that she began an affair in 1908 with Morton Fullerton. He was a journalist for The Times, and in him she found an intellectual partner.

She deplored Victorian home decorating and crusaded against it. She and her friend, architect Ogdon Codman, Jr., teamed up and wrote the ground breaking book, The Decoration Of Houses. It was published in 1897, republished in 1978, and my copy (a gift from my sister) is the 1997 edition. which is used by architectural students. An essay, The Decoration of Houses as a Basic Text by Alvin Holme, AIA, is included in this edition.

In 1937, at the age of 75, Edith Wharton died of a stroke at the domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, now in Val d’Oise. The street is today called Rue Edith Wharton. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.

Here’s a curious and very current song by Tellison in which Edith Wharton is invoked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_k9fuhwIGY&NR=1

There is a surprising awareness of Edith Wharton in our popular culture. Here are some other examples:  

• In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Edith Wharton (Clare Higgins) travels across North Africa with Indiana Jones in Chapter 16, Tales of Innocence.

• Edith Wharton is mentioned in the HBO television series Entourage in the third season’s 13th episode: Vince is handed a screenplay for Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon by Amanda, his new agent, for a film to be directed by Sam Mendes. In the same episode, period films of Wharton’s work are lampooned by agent Ari Gold, who says that all her stories are “about a guy who likes a girl, but he can’t have sex with her for five years, because those were the times!” Carla Gugino, who plays Amanda, was the protagonist of the BBC-PBS adaptation of The Buccaneers (1995), one of her early jobs.

• A musical version of The Glimpses of the Moon was presented in New York City in the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room in early 2008.

• Suzanne Vega‘s seventh studio release Beauty & Crime contains a song named “Edith Wharton’s Figurines.”

• “Edith Wharton’s Journey” is a radio adaptation, for the NPR series Radio Tales, of the short story “A Journey” from Edith Wharton’s collection The Greater Inclination.

• In 2009, Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, was investigated for paranormal activity in the hit Sci Fi Channel reality series Ghost Hunters.

• In an episode of the CW show Gossip Girl, “The Age of Dissonance”, the cast star in a production of Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence“.

The nine royal offspring gave Victoria a total of 42 grandchildren. The widowed Queen believed that by linking the royal houses of Europe through intermarriage, war could be avoided through family diplomacy. Being an only child, Victoria couldn’t have understood how naive her plan actually was. 

Three grandsons of Queen Victoria occupied thrones in Europe when the continent plummeted into The Great War, now known as the World War I. They were Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of Great Britain, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia   

Victoria’s first grandchild, Willy, was born in 1859. He had a “defective” arm, now called Erb’s palsy, which may have contributed to many of his peculiarities. Willy ascended the throne of Germany in 1888.

He is the focus of a new book by Miranda Carter: GEORGE, NICHOLAS and WILHELM, Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. (Knopf, $30) This book was reviewed in The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, May 23, by Special Contributor, Tim Redman.

Redman is professor of literary studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.

As a lover of all things related to the British monarchy, I was more than intrigued by this unlikely grandson of Queen Victoria. Since reading the review, I’ve been scouring the internet and my own books about royalty looking for information on the almost forgotten ruler.

The three cousins bore a striking resemblance to each other, and occasionally posed for portraits in each other’s uniforms. 

 In the first photo, Nicky and George pose in their own uniforms. In the second picture, Willy wears Nicky’s Russian Imperial attire and Nicky wears Willy’s smashing uniform with its spiked helmet. 

Willy was known as Kaiser Bill by the American soldiers and the allies who fought valiantly against the German armies.

After Armistice Day, the German monarchy was demolished and Wilhelm went into exile in Doorn, Holland. There he kept a low profile and lived out his life with his second wife on a beautiful estate called Huis Doorn. 

The wonderful 1933 photo on the right shows Kaiser Wilhelm standing in a driveway at Huis Doorn. He had finally grown a beard similar to those worn by his cousins when they were all young. Still dapper, Willy now had coat pockets in which to hide his trembling palsied hand.

Outliving his cousins, he died in 1941 at the age of 82. He is buried in a fine mausoleum built for him on the estate.

Titles should be original.  

They should make a casual reader or viewer pause and give a few more seconds of consideration to a movie or book.  The wide range of entertainment choices available today makes it mandatory to grab the attention of our targeted audience or readers.

Several years ago I gave up on TV series with alphabetical titles. NCIS, followed by a word or two, or a phrase followed by capital letters such as SVU (I used to wonder if the cops drove SUVs) turn me off. My brain resists giving those shows a try.

Most of you are not acquainted with this old western series. It must have started over sixty years ago and was considered a break-through TV show. I’ve always loved the title: GUNSMOKE. I think a genius must have stumbled on it. They could have named it GUNS THAT SMOKE or WESTERN GUYS HANGING AROUND A SALOON, etc, but no. They named it with one powerful word: GUNSMOKE.  

I love “off the wall” TV titles, ones that inspired question marks in my mind when I first heard them. They still tug at me after years of seeing them. MEDIUM, FRINGE, THE MENTALIST, CASTLE, FLASHFORWARD, and LOST (well, LOST lost me a few years ago. I think the writers are lost and ask each other what craziness they can concoct for next week’s idiocy, but - I still think LOST is a great title!) 

I also love the title, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? No one would watch a prime time Friday night show with the word GENEALOGY in the title – uh, well, I probably would.

Wait. I’ve just listed my favorite TV shows!

Another quirk of mine is the use of overworked words in romance titles – such as LOVE, PASSION, DESIRE, MIDNIGHT, HEART, etc. They are lovely words – and they certainly belong in romance writing – but they are OVERUSED! I always wonder if I’ve already read the book when I see one of them in a title.

I’m currently working on a story (while I’m supposed to be working on my taxes!) set in Jamestown, Virginia in the 1680′s. The hero is one of King Charles II’s illegitimate children. He has made an unlikely new identity for himself in the new world as a tobacco farmer. For years I’ve thought the title should be JAMESTOWN ROYAL. A few days ago a new title came to me: JAMESTOWN IMPOSTER.

I think, I HOPE, it raises questions in the brains of would-be readers.

THE PRIZE IS CASH – FEATURING THE CIVIL WAR PRESIDENT – ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

GO TO THIS BLOG TO ENTER: 

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: BEYOND SCARLETT AND RHETT

 It’s time for that pesky CSA Generals Quiz. In the interests of bipartisanship
and political correctness, the prize will feature a portrait of the president
who presided over the UNION during the Civil War.

The competition opens at Midnight Friday, February 26th, and ends at Midnight
Sunday, February 28th. You have a three day window of time in which to review
the three Confederate Generals spotlighted on this blog.

Write your answers in an email and send them to my alternate email address:
parkerpelham@…

On Monday, March 1, I will place the names of entrants who made 100%
in a box and let my grandson draw the winner. I will immediately announce the
winner’s name. The winner can send me her mailing address, and Abraham will soon
be on his way in an envelope.

WARNING: Watch Abraham. He has a way of slipping through your fingers.

Mary Ann Webber

The heroine is a headstrong, but innocent, teenage girl who seems to call the shots with everyone around her. I recently heard someone say if No Decorum became a movie, the role of Juliet Burnham should be played by Miley Cyrus.

That’s not exactly what I had in mind – but I have to admit the choice would be perfect.