The purpose of Featured Author Saturday is twofold. Yes, I want to give authors a forum for telling the world about their work, but there are pleny (perhaps too many) of places to do that. The primary purpose for Featured Author Saturday is to give readres a window in to the lives and minds (very messy places those) of the authors they love and some they have yet to discover.
Today, I’m going to tell you what I get out of writing, and I’ll use my re-issue of One Moment’s Pleasure to give examples. Allow me to quickly disabuse you of any idea that I get rich from writing. My income has yet to reach four figures on any kind of regular basis. I’m blessed with a spouse who enjoys my writing almost as much as I do but earned enough (we’re retired now–sort of) to keep us in “kippers and slippers” while I pursue my passion–writing novels.
Well, not my only passion, I have been married to that wonderful man for more than forty years (lucky me). But writing, story-telling is my passion. It has been since I was two and old enough to understand a good story when I heard one–reading came a little bit later, and my Grandpa was a terrific story teller. So were both my parents, although I don’t think they realized it at the time. As a kid one of my favorite times of day was dinner. We’d sit around the table eating and talking. Mostly my folks –two professors–would talk abut their day. Every day something interesting always happened in their lives. So I assoicate stories with love and affection, So much so, that I still get a ‘good feeling’ high when I’m deep in writing mode.
I also get headaches–not literally–but stress and frustration from my personal calling. Most of that comes from trying to reach an audience. Marketing is a real headache because it just doesn’t feel natural. All that family story-telling as I was growing up meant that I view writing novels and other forms of story as a shared activity. Yes, yes, I do a lot of it sitting alone at a computer. However, as fun as drafting a story can be, the real pleasure is in sharing. I could never be a diarist or a writer of private journals because those forms of writing are intended no to be shared. Where’s the fun in that?
And that’s another clue, as an author I not only get to live my dream, my passion, I also get to have fun. Fun for me is solving puzzles (I play on-line Jigsaw puzzles when I need to let my brain rest from writing. Fun is also playing with words. I love a good or bad pun. (Real groaners are a huge source of laughter. So how is writing a novel like solving a puzzel? Well, it’s pretty much the same as why many of us read novels. We want to know what happened. We want to follow the characters along as the solve the problems, or puzzles in their lives.
Now here’s where my book One Moment’s Pleasure comes into the pictue as an example. Almost every story I’ve ever written started with a sort of ‘what if’ question. I like to think of those as puzzles because one response leads to another question leads to another response and on to another question. Sort of like a Chinese puzzle box or a set of nesting Russian Dolls. The initiating question for One Moment’s Pleasure was “What if, a woman in the Victorian Era was required to have a child in order to inherit her grandfather’s fortune? The standard trope is that the grandfather’s will would required his heiress to marry and produce a child. Not what was missing in the initiating question of One Moment’s Pleasure. Ah yes, the marriage. In the standard trope, the pending heir or heiress resents being forced to marry for money. How much more would a woman, in a male-dominant cultuer like 1870s Boston, resent being forced to use her body and bear a child for such a mercenary reason? (See we’ve already got a second question?) We also have to wonder if she would or would not do the deed? Bearing a child for money in 1870 did happen, but those women who allowed themselves or were forced to be used in such a way weren’t considered heroines in any way shape or form. And what the heck was an elderly male who lived in a society dominated by the ‘Puritan Ethic’ doing placing such a scurrilous and scandalous condition upon his heiress anyway? Now we have lots and lots of questions and we haven’t gotten close to writing a single word.
These questions, or puzzles, and several hundred others had to be answered, conflicts with story plot and reader expectations had to be resolved, motives for the story actions that were used to solve these puzzles required that my characters take specific actions, unique to them and their situation to respond to the difficulties my growing mass of story questions. By this time, I’m deep in the drafting process, which for me is where I discover the answers and solutions to all the puzzles by telling myself the story as I write. That sounds a whole lot easier than it is, but it is a set of difficulties that I absolutely love, from which I receive a great deal more than One Moment’s Pleasure. It is my sincere hope, that when you read (I won’t say if) One Moment’s Pleasure, you receive as many moments of pleasure as I had in writing the book.
About One Moment’s Pleasure: One Moment’s Pleasure will become a lifetime’s passion when spinster, Edith Alden, embarks on a search for her missing sister. Pretending to be a rich bored woman looking for an interlude with an anonymous male Edith enters the San Francisco bordello where her sister was last seen. She escapes the bordello almost too easily, but she can’t escape the passion ignited by a stranger’s kiss.
Born and raised in the brothels of the California gold rush, Dutch Trahern worked for years to erase a childhood spent committing petty crimes and worse in order to survive. That past comes back to haunt him in the form of a woman he rescues from prostitution. Now his hard won respectability is threatened by an irresistible desire for a woman he shouldn’t want.
Available for pre-order NOW with official release on Monday April 20, 202
My Personal Invitation to you: Please join me and author Jude Knight on Monday, April 20, 2020 at https://www.facebook.com/groups/BellesBrigade/. We will celebrate release day of our most recent novels with a Book Tennis party and all sorts of other fun. Yes, there will be prizes.
About Rue Allyn: Award winning author, Rue Allyn, learned story telling at her grandfather’s knee. (Well it was really more like on his knee—I was two.) She’s been weaving her own tales ever since. She has worked as an instructor, mother, sailor, clerk, sales associate, and painter, along with a variety of other types of employment. She has lived and traveled in places all over the globe from Keflavik Iceland (I did not care much for the long nights of winter.) and Fairbanks Alaska to Panama City and the streets of London England to a large number of places in between. Now that her two sons have left the nest, Rue and her husband of more than four decades (Try living with the same person for more than forty years—that’s a true adventure.) have retired and moved south. When not writing, enjoying the nearby beach or working jigsaw puzzles, Rue travels the world and surfs the internet in search of background material and inspiration for her next heart melting romance. She loves to hear from readers, and you may contact her at Rue@RueAllyn.com
Find Rue On-line: Keep up with Rue Allyn by subscribing to her newsletter and get a free copy of Knight Protector when you do, or find her here:
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