A New Feature on my Website….

Elizabeth Camden The Lady of Bolton Hill Leave a Comment

I thought I’d add a little content to spiff up my website called “Book Extras.”

All books have a ton of behind-the-scenes stories that never make it into print. Sometimes there are entire chapters or alternate endings. There are usually several versions of book covers or titles. Readers are often curious about what triggered an idea, or what details from the novel were based on historical fact and which were pure fabrication.

I will be including some of these details on my website, and have just rolled out the extra content for The Lady of Bolton Hill. You can check it out here.

When I first wrote The Lady of Bolton Hill, I had several chapters at the beginning devoted to Daniel and Clara’s early friendship. For a number of reasons, those chapters had to be cut, but I am thrilled I can now release them to curious readers. There are also some alternate covers for the book and other behind-the-scenes trivia.

I will eventually release Book Extra sections for all my novels, but The Lady of Bolton Hill is up first. I hope you will swing by and check it out!

A Guilty Pleasure: The Revenge Plot

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One of the most popular new television series this year was ABC’s Revenge, an over-the-top romantic soap opera set in the glittering world of the Hamptons.  I confess to getting sucked in.  The plot features a young girl (Emily) whose adored father is framed for a horrible crime and sent to prison, where he is murdered.  Her subsequent years were spent in psychiatric wards as the villains try to neutralize her by convincing the world she is crazy.  The story picks up as Emily, now a powerful young woman, returns to the Hamptons under an assumed identity to wreak havoc on the people who destroyed her father.

Revenge plots are intriguing because they combine our desire to see an underdog get an upper-hand over someone who did him or her wrong.

Readers have a sense of fair play and they want to see the good guy win….but the protagonist in a revenge plot is walking a very fine line as they risk becoming a bad guy themselves.

I played with the revenge fantasy in The Lady of Bolton Hill.  Daniel’s quest for vengeance on a business rival was rife with unsavory aspects, and although I wanted the reader to sympathize with him, I definitely had him walking along that razor-thin edge where he risked falling over into the villain category himself.  This gave me the opportunity to explore some of the ethical issues between vengeance and justice.

For me, there are a handful of things a good revenge story must have if it is going to work as a thrilling novel in which you can still root for the protagonist:

  • The reason for revenge must be believable, profound, and have lasting consequences….otherwise the protagonist comes off as a petty, amoral jerk.
  • The ethical angle must be addressed.  I think this is where the ABC series Revenge stumbled a little.  Emily unleashes a real reign of terror and doesn’t balk very much when innocent people get entangled in her web.
  • The consequences of the revenge should be explored.  Watching the villain get his comeuppance isn’t very satisfying if we don’t see the ripple effect it has on the hero.

While I don’t want a steady diet of revenge stories, a good one every now and then is a delightful, guilty pleasure.

 

 

Bane….Is….Back!

Elizabeth Camden The Lady of Bolton Hill, Writing Life 12 Comments

I’m hugely excited to announce that my next novel, Against the Tide, will feature my all-time favorite character.  Bane Alexander first appeared in the Lady of Bolton Hill as a whiplash smart and lethally dangerous 17-year old troublemaker.   He is now all grown up, has straightened himself out, and is ready to set the world on fire.

If you haven’t read The Lady of Bolton Hill, no worries.  Against the Tide is an entirely stand-alone novel set in Boston of 1891.  The heroine is Lydia Pallas, a translator for the U.S. Navy whose skills Bane desperately needs to unravel a smuggling ring.

It took me a while to dream up a heroine who was a match for Bane.  Bane is such an overwhelming force who was a scene-stealer in The Lady of Bolton Hill, so I needed a woman who could match him in terms of wit, intelligence, and bravado.  She also needed to have a deep gash of vulnerability that would slice through Bane’s tough, cynical hide and make him go weak in the knees.  I think that Against the Tide is the most romantic of any book I’ve written.  Look for it to hit the shelves in October of 2012.  Keep your eyes peeled!

 

North & South

Elizabeth Camden Ramblings about Romance, The Lady of Bolton Hill 3 Comments

When The Lady of Bolton Hill was first released, a handful of the early reviewers compared it to a miniseries called North & South.  I mistakenly thought they were referring to the John Jakes mini-series by the same name.  The John Jakes story was set during the American Civil War and featured two men whose differing political allegiances tore their friendship asunder.  It bore literally zero similarity to The Lady of Bolton Hill, so I dug a little deeper and found the BBC miniseries based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

I decided to order the BBC version of North & South through NetFlix and take a peek.  I am so glad I did!  The BBC version is a splendid tale of star-crossed lovers and class struggles.  Set in Victorian England, it tells the story of a privileged young woman who moves from a serene, bucolic village to a grimy factory town.  There she meets the brooding and passionate John Thornton, who owns one of the largest factories.  These two could not be more opposite.  Mr. Thornton develops an immediate attraction to the heroine, but Margaret is repulsed by what she perceives to be his cruelty and ruthless business practices.

The storyline is good, cinematography is gorgeous, the soundtrack is haunting…but what really makes the movie is the magnificent Richard Armitage who stars as John Thornton.  Just beneath his stern demeanor we can see this simmering, passionate man who is ripped apart by his unrequited love for Margaret.  Time and again she stomps on his heart, to which he responds by getting colder and more remote….but the viewer can see him wrestling with these terribly inconvenient emotions he can’t subdue.   He is a complex character and it is fascinating to watch him confront one challenge after another over the course of the miniseries.  Oh, and he’s also smoking hot.  Just saying.

I admit to a fair amount of trepidation before watching North & South.  So many reviewers had commented on the similarities between my book and the miniseries that I worried people might think I had sponged ideas or plot lines from it.  Although there is a superficial similarity in the basic plot (rich factory owner, girl of privilege who disapproves of his business tactics) that is where the similarity ends.  And after watching the miniseries, I was flattered down to my toes that people thought my book and the miniseries were mentioned in the same sentence.

 If you’ve never seen North & South, you are in for a treat.  It is available on NetFlix, and also on the new streaming video service from Amazon.

The Lady of Bolton Hill: The Cover Story

Elizabeth Camden The Lady of Bolton Hill, Writing Life 2 Comments

After years of madly scribbling away in the privacy of my office, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to finally know that actual people are reading and enjoying my book.  A huge majority of the comments note the lovely cover.  I agree!   

At the very beginning of the design process, my editor asked me to write up some notes about what the characters look like and the setting of the book.  Unlike many inspirational romance novels that are set on the prairie, The Lady of Bolton Hill takes place in Baltimore during the gilded age, so it was important to communicate the setting so people knew what they were getting.  Hence, the skyline through the window.  In my design notes, I spoke a lot of the heroine, Clara, as a very refined and gentle woman.  This quality really comes through on the cover. 

Aside from those initial notes, the cover illustration is an aspect of the book I have almost zero control over, so I was sweating bullets over what it would look like.  In my head I have a vision of the tone, setting, and atmosphere of the book, and it is a huge leap of faith to turn all that over to someone else.   I was very lucky to be paired up with such a gifted artist, Jennifer Parker, for my first cover.   

It was late at night when I got the email with the cover image attached, and my computer was unusually sluggish.  I remember the wave of nervous anxiety as I waited for that image to load.  I think I was clenching my teeth so hard I almost gave myself lockjaw. Anyway, what a huge relief to be greeted with something so lovely!  

I never realized how much work goes into the design process.  The cover illustrator actually came up with several mock-ups of the cover before settling on the lady in the blue dress.  Here are the rough drafts of alternate cover ideas:

Once they decided on a lady standing before a window, they hired a model, a photographer, and went to work.  Here are the two, almost identical versions of the cover that made it to the final round:

They ultimately decided on the version on the left.  After that, they began working on the artwork, text, spine, and layout of the back cover.  All in all, I was immensely pleased and humbled to have such a great team of people working on my cover. 

Bibliomania

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Bibliomania is a recognized psychological condition characterized by the obsessive need to possess books.  For those of you who read The Lady of Bolton Hill, you know the novel’s villian suffers from bibliomania.  I’ve always believed that a really good villian ought to have an admirable trait (a hobby, love for a person, desire to succeed) that has been magnified to such a degree that it turns him or her bad.  This makes them infinately more fascinating than the run-of-the-mill villians who are motiviated only by greed. In The Lady of Bolton Hill, Professor Van Bracken has an obsessive love for antiquarian books.  He will do anything in order to acquire enough money to pursue his love of books, including building a mansion in the Vermont wilderness which he keeps at a constant 60 degrees, the optimal temperature for book preservation.  The setting is chilling both physically and spiritually.  The Professor’s bibliomania also leads to a string of crimes and  kidnappings to amass the fortune necessary to acquire the world’s rarest volumes.  

For anyone interested more in real life bibliomaniacs, I recommend Nicholas Basbane’s fabulous book A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.  I drew heavily on this book for insight into the condition.   Basbanes sheds light on the subject by providing dozens of cases of real-life bibliomaniacs, such as the homocidal Don Vincente, a Spanish monk whose monestary was mysteriously robbed of all its valuable books in the early 1830’s.  Shortly after the unsolved robbery, Don Vincente left the order and opened a rare book store in Barcelona.  Over the coming years, Don Vincente committed at least eight known murders of men who possessed fine book collections, most of which ended up in the former monk’s shop.  Don Vincente was ultimately caught and executed for his crimes in 1836. 

Basbane’s book recounts dozens of such stories, and it is a fiendishly good read for people who enjoy the world of rare book collecting.  

Here a a couple of other unhealthy book obbsessions:

  • Bibliophagy (book eating)
  • Bibliokleptomania (book stealing)
  • Bibliotaphy (the hoarding and hiding of books, usually through burying them)
  • Bibliomancy (using books, usually the Bible, for divination by flipping to a random page and pointing to a passage)

 

 

The Ability to Forge our own Destiny

Elizabeth Camden All about Me!, The Lady of Bolton Hill 1 Comment

I have always loved the theme of people being able to forge their own path in life, especially if it involves defying expectations.  In America we often take this for granted, but I think it was a fairly new concept in the course of human history.  Throughout the ages, most people simply followed in the well-worn paths that had been carved out for them by generations of their forefathers.  If your father was a farmer, you became a farmer.  A blacksmith? A printer?  You began learning the trade as you grew up and worked alongside your father until you were ready to take over the reins. 

I admire people who defy expectations.  In The Lady of Bolton Hill, Daniel was destined to work in a steel mill until he was an old man…..but with an immense amount of work, a bit of ingenuity, and a lot of luck, he broke free of the mold that had been built for him.  Clara also defies expectations.  Despite her father’s determination that she become a world-famous composer, she breaks away to forge her own path as a journalist.   It is not always easy to break out of those expectations, but if a person is true to him or herself….has a level of introspection and faith that they are on the right path….forging your own destiny is not only possible, it is the best way to live.   

We have so much more freedom now.  This can be a mixed blessing, which I see on my college campus every day as young adults struggle to define themselves.  Panic begins to set in during their senior year when they realize that reality is looming just a few short months away and they are still uncertain about what they want to be “when they grow up.”  The temptation to dive into graduate school is intense.  In many cases, it is a mistake.   

I don’t think we can blame young people for struggling with what kind of career they want to pursue.  In the course of history, this is a very new concept.  I tell the my students that there is nothing wrong with “treading water” for a few years while you decide what you want to do.  I certainly did.  After college with a degree in history (and what precisely do you do with that?) I worked in an entry level position as a data entry clerk.   It was during those two years of self-reflection that I determined what I ultimately wanted to do with my life.  To my dismay, I learned that becoming a librarian would require a master’s degree in Library Science.  This was in the early 1990’s, before the era of online education, and since there was no graduate program in Virginia, it required me to move to Indiana for my degree. 

Leaving everything I knew behind to trek out on my own was scary, a financial burden, and a lot of work, but I had the gift of freedom to forge my own destiny. And that turned out to be a very good thing. 

Photo courtesy of James Walsh

Daily Caylee

Elizabeth Camden The Lady of Bolton Hill, Writing Life Leave a Comment

Okay, I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m going to blog about the Casey Anthony trial.  Believe it or not, it really does relate to the book I just released (The Lady of Bolton Hill).  Writers tend to snatch little pieces of inspiration from real life to weave into their stories, and since I live only a couple of miles from where the Casey Anthony tragedy happened, I have been inundated with news about this notorious case from the day it broke.  I used to see teams of searchers combing the woods near where I live in an attempt to find the missing baby.  

For those who don’t read tabloid news, Casey Anthony is a young woman whose two-year old child, Caylee, disappeared without a trace three years ago.  Inexplicably, Casey told no one about her daughter’s disappearance for a solid month while she indulged in a wild round of partying, shopping, and summer fun.  Caylee’s body was found about six months later.  Prosecutors believe that Casey, tired of being a single mother, deliberately killed the child in order to cut loose and live the good life.  

All this happened around the time I was writing the first draft of the manuscript that would become The Lady of Bolton Hill.  Fairly late in the manuscript I needed a quick illustration of how low and depraved drugs can drive an otherwise decent person to behave.  During that summer, the Casey Anthony investigation topped every news broadcast, and voila, I had my example.  The heroine recounts a quick, one-paragraph story about a young widow who loses all interest in her daughter in order to feed her craving for narcotics.  In my mind’s eye, that young widow was Casey Anthony. 

Casey Anthony finally went on trial last week, which was ironically the precise week The Lady of Bolton Hill finally hit the shelves. It is hard for me to believe that I have been shepherding this story towards publication for a solid three years, but the resurrection of the “Daily Caylee” news cycle caused me to remember the summer three years ago when I was sweating bullets as I madly pounded away at my keyboard with a story that was pouring out of me.   

As wonderful as the publication process has been for me, I wonder about what life has been like for Casey Anthony.  In the past three years that young woman has been sitting in a jail cell, probably counting her regrets every hour of every day.  I hope she can turn her ship around.  Even in jail I believe she can find a way to do something meaningful with her life.  If we believe in the concept of redemption, we must believe the possibility for it extends to Casey Anthony.  She will certainly be found guilty of something, but I hope she can find some sort of peace and reconciliation with herself.

On Conquering Anxiety

Elizabeth Camden All about Me!, The Lady of Bolton Hill 2 Comments

Somehow, the book-signing has evolved into a right of passage for authors.  Frankly, I’d rather have a tooth pulled than talk about myself, hawk my books, or in any other way draw attention to myself.  When I first landed the contract for The Lady of Bolton Hill, I assumed I would be one of those writers who quietly published her books without telling friends, co-workers, or neighbors.  I simply dread the attention or the perception that I might be trying to foist my books on them.  Revealing myself online is easy for me, but in real life? 

Anxiety is a strange thing.  The logical portion of my brain, normally so dominate in my life, collapses in the face of mild provocations like meeting someone new or attending a book signing.  I can marshal a dozen perfectly logical reasons to quell the anxiety, but I’ve been living with this long enough to know that these techniques will be useless in the face of a social interaction. 

So along comes an opportunity to participate in a book signing at a nearby LifeWay Christian Store.  My instinctive reaction was to run and hide.  I know that unless you are a superstar (hello, Tim Tebow, Nora Roberts, Ken Follett), the likelihood of sitting alone at a table while listening to crickets chirp in the background is pretty high.  Still, LifeWay has been generous in helping me promote my debut novel, and I simply could not repay that sort of kindness by letting anxiety get the better of me and refusing to come.

How fortunate I was to have two other seasoned authors sitting at the table with me.  Mark Mynheir is a homicide detective who writes suspense novels, and Dan Walsh is a pastor and author of historical novels.  Not only were these guys terrific company who helped show me the ropes, they both had plenty of experience in dealing with the public and book signings.  There was also a lovely young lady named Rebekah who did a wonderful job as a greeter for the event.

As is often the case with these irrational anxieties, within about five minutes of entering the store I was perfectly fine.  I have learned the only thing that works to defeat an attack of The Nerves is to meet it head on in a frontal assault.  I am always fine once I get to an event (a party, business meeting, etc.) but the run-up is awful.

So my first book signing turned out to be a thrilling event.  I moved a respectable number of books, met some terrific fellow-authors, and felt much better about not letting my amorphous anxieties get the better of me.

Still… to this day not a single one of my neighbors or co-workers know that I’ve written a novel, nor are they likely to in the near future.  I suppose I need to take this sort of thing one day at a time!