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Elizabeth Bell, Author

Undeniable Love. Unflinching History. Unforgettable Fiction.

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    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 1: Necessary Sins
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 2: Lost Saints
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 3: Native Stranger
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 4: Sweet Medicine
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Blog

Do I Get An A+?

September 8, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

Firstly, I am thrilled to share that Amazon.com selected Necessary Sins, the first book in my Lazare Family Saga, as one of their Prime Reads for the months of September, October, and November 2021. If you’re a U.S. member of Amazon Prime, that means you can read the Kindle edition of Necessary Sins for free now through November 30, 2021. Alas, this offer is available only to U.S. Prime members. Amazon makes the rules, not I!

Please help me spread the word to other U.S. Prime members who enjoy historical fiction, family sagas, stories of forbidden love, or stories set in Charleston! Click on the image below or here’s the link to Necessary Sins on Amazon.com.

Secondly, I’m glad I was able to get together my A+ Content before my Prime Read months—but now there are considerably more eyes on my book pages, and I’m second-guessing my choices!

What is A+ Content, you ask? It’s an area on each Amazon book page where the publisher can add more information and/or pretty images. This area used to be available only to big names, but now Amazon is allowing all publishers to use it—including indie publishers like yours truly.

We have to follow certain parameters, and we get five spots per item to fill with A+ content, which must be approved by Amazon folks. I had to decide what aspects of my fiction to feature and then hunt down images. I wanted a common theme across all four of my books. I decided to focus on my settings and have my captions be a narrative—but I had to avoid spoilers.

Below, I’ve shared all of my A+ content. The titles are links to how the images actually appear on Amazon, under the “From the Publisher” section on each book page. Each novel has four unique images followed by a series image that I used for all the books.

Any text in the A+ images has to be legible on both desktop computers and mobile devices. Therein lies the rub. In making the text large enough for mobile devices, I may have made it too large to look good on desktops. What do you think? Is my A+ text too shouty and overwhelming? Should I dial it back a little?

Book One of the Lazare Family Saga: Necessary Sins

Book Two of the Lazare Family Saga: Lost Saints

Book Three of the Lazare Family Saga: Native Stranger

Book Four of the Lazare Family Saga: Sweet Medicine

What did you think? I agonized over every detail, from images to colors to fonts, and I want to make sure my A+ content is fabulous before I expand it to the UK, Canadian, and Australian Amazon sites.

In this post, at least one image for each book is clickable and will take you to a secret page of behind-the-scenes info. I purchased most of the images from a stock site called DepositPhotos, and I added text using Canva.

Finally, on the Amazon pages for Necessary Sins and Lost Saints, you may have noticed that these first two books in The Lazare Family Saga are now available in hardcover! Native Stranger and Sweet Medicine will be in hardcover soon. The conversion process is lengthy and complicated, but the end product is both beautiful and durable. I can hardly wait till the set is complete!

Filed Under: Going Indie, Publishing, Sale

What I’m Working On Now

April 14, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

Now that I’ve published all four books in my Lazare Family Saga, I’ve had interviewers and readers asking about my next project. My answer will disappoint many. It disappoints me too. I wish I had the luxury to write full-time, to dive into something new.

The reality is, I do not. My time and energy are severely limited by the “real job” that keeps a roof over my head—not to mention all the other unavoidable crap that eats up your “free time” when you’re an adult. Scintillating activities like car maintenance and dishwashing. That’s why the Lazare Family Saga took me nearly three decades to research and revise. Most weeks, I have only a few hours to devote to something of my choosing. That’s it.

The other reality is: I had to publish this series independently, and I’ve spent thousands of dollars I could barely afford in order to get the Lazare Family Saga into readers’ hands. I simply can’t do that all over again. This series has truly been a labor of love and my life’s work.

My challenge now is to make the most of my magnum opus. I need to devote my precious few free hours to learning marketing, which I absolutely loathe. But I have to reach new readers and make the last three decades worthwhile.

I’m also planning new formats: hardcovers and audiobooks. I’m particularly excited about the latter. I adore audiobooks and listen to an average of two per week. Audiobooks are how I experience 99% of my fiction and much of my nonfiction—it goes back to that limited free time. With audiobooks, I can multitask.

Vintage books with headphones plugged into them

Once upon a time, I dreamed that a miniseries would be made of my novels—after all, miniseries inspired me. I know now this won’t ever happen. But if I can find a great narrator, audiobooks will be the next best thing. Unfortunately, great narrators are expensive, so it will be a slow process.

I’ve had people try to tell me I have more books in me, but I don’t think I do. I’ve filled this series with the things I love, and the struggles and triumphs of the Lazare family are extremely personal for me. I feel as if I wrote every word of this saga with my blood.

If you enjoy the Lazare Family Saga, please recommend it to other readers, and please leave reviews of my books. I cannot adequately express how important those are or how much they mean to me. And please consider rereading my series in a few years. I’ve carefully crafted each scene and line with foreshadowing, callbacks, subtlety, and symbolism. I think you’ll get more out of my books the second time. Savor them!

Red feather pen writing "With Love" in blood

Please note: While there are other authors named Elizabeth Bell, the only books by yours truly are Necessary Sins, Lost Saints, Native Stranger, and Sweet Medicine, the four books of the Lazare Family Saga.

Filed Under: Going Indie, Publishing, Writer's Life, Writing

A Lazare Family Tree

March 1, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

If you’ve found yourself reading the Lazare Family Saga and trying to remember just how Character X is related to Character Y, you’re in luck! Using Canva, I created this handy color-coded family tree, which hopefully looks a little bit like it was painted on parchment.

When I thought I’d be attending the 2021 Historical Novel Society North America Conference in person and would have an author table, I imagined printing up this family tree as “swag” to give away. Sadly, COVID has made this year’s HNS Conference 100% virtual. So I offer this digital version for you to download yourself. Click here for a high-resolution PDF.

Please note: This family tree contains spoilers because it reveals who marries whom and whether they have children, but these are spoilers only for Book One of the Lazare Family Saga, Necessary Sins. Most of these Book One spoilers occur in the bottom two rows of the family tree. In order to minimize spoilers, I include no death dates, only birth dates.

Trigger Warning: The Lazare Family Tree contains rape.

Not only will I be attending the 2021 Historical Novel Society Virtual Conference, I’ll also be presenting! Two other authors approached me about being on their panels. I was honored. I said yes and helped them write the proposals. In mid-February, both proposals were accepted by the HNS Conference Board! Here are our topics:

WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION ABOUT NATIVE AMERICANS
Danielle Apple, Elizabeth Bell, and Michael Ross

This panel will describe the challenges in writing about Native Americans in the areas of research, language and culture, obtaining cross-cultural help and cooperation, effectively transmitting oral histories, and dealing with the publishing industry for Native American stories.

BATTLE FLAGS, FALLING MONUMENTS, AND THE LOST CAUSE MYTH: THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF ANTEBELLUM AND CIVIL WAR FICTION
Elizabeth Bell, Glen Craney, Susan Higginbotham, and Sadeqa Johnson

The past is never dead, wrote Faulkner: It’s not even past. Perhaps more so than any era in American history, the Civil War is viewed through the prism of current social and political divisions. Our panelists will discuss new challenges and opportunities in writing and selling novels set during this period. Topics will include: Creating empathetic Confederate protagonists for a woke readership; ramifications for book covers; balancing authenticity and sensitivity using racially-charged language; navigating the minefield of cultural appropriation; interpretations of slavery and the Underground Railroad by emerging African-American voices; and public expectations and the persistence of the states-rights narrative.


I highly recommend Historical Novel Society conferences. If you’d like to attend, here’s the website with the program and all the info. You can get the discounted Early Bird rate on registration through March 15, 2021. I hope to (virtually) see you there!

Filed Under: Conference, Historical Fiction, Historical Novel Society

The Sweetest Medicine

February 9, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

The title of the fourth and final book in my series, Sweet Medicine, used to be the title for the whole story, back when I thought that story was a single novel. I like the phrase because it’s a seeming oxymoron—a pattern I ended up using for all my titles. How can medicine be sweet? Isn’t it an unpleasant necessity?

I also like that the word medicine has multiple meanings; and on the surface, those meanings are in opposition. Broadly, medicine refers to either science or spirituality. My saga involves both these definitions, rooted in my two primary settings: Charleston, South Carolina and the American West.

One of my main Charleston characters is a doctor. He represents the “science” part of medicine. He attends medical school in Paris and practices in Charleston. He dissects cadavers, uses a microscope, and prescribes drugs. In Sweet Medicine, this character performs a procedure on himself that is not only straight from Victorian medical texts but also utterly horrifying. This medicine is anything but sweet.

An engraving of the human heart that could be from a Victorian text and a vintage microscope

My chapters set in the American West focus on the Cheyenne Indians, or Zizistas as they call themselves. For the Zizistas, the word medicine can be an adjective that means “holy,” as in the tribe’s sacred possessions, the Medicine Arrows. If someone or something has medicine, it has spiritual power. Zizistas medicine also involves healing, but of the whole person, body and soul.

Even the phrase Sweet Medicine comes from the Zizistas. It’s the name of a Zizistas prophet who predicted the coming of white men. Sweet Medicine himself was named after a medicinal plant.

The word medicine has other meanings that I unpack in my work. One of these is bound to surprise you. Sweet Medicine is about healing many different kinds of wounds, wounds that go all the way back to Book 1 in the series. Ultimately, love is the sweetest and most powerful medicine for my characters.

Cover of the novel Sweet Medicine by Elizabeth Bell
Sweet Medicine releases in just one week!

Filed Under: Interpretation, Publishing, Release Day, Writing Tagged With: titles

What’s in a (Character) Name?

May 6, 2020 by Elizabeth Bell

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare famously wrote:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

But he gave those words to a lovestruck teenager. I suspect Shakespeare himself felt differently, that all writers do. Names matter. It matters whether you call someone “a slave” or “an enslaved person.” It matters whether you call a person Zizistas (their name for themselves, which means “the People”) or Cheyenne (another tribe’s name for them, which means “we do not understand their language”). It even matters what you call a rose, as my character Joseph discovers in Lost Saints.

The rose called Maiden’s Blush—or less demurely, Cuisse de Nymphe Émue. If you don’t speak French, plug that into Google Translate for a rough idea of why it’s naughty. For a better translation, read Lost Saints. 😉
Photo by Nadiatalent

I’ve agonized over the names of every one of my characters. Across the quarter century I spent writing the Lazare Family Saga, I changed their names many times till I found just the right ones. In this post, I’ll share some of the character names I rejected after finding they didn’t fit and explain why I chose the names I did.

In early drafts, Joseph’s relationship with Tessa (Necessary Sins and Lost Saints) was only backstory to David, Clare, and Ésh’s love triangle (Native Stranger and Sweet Medicine). My fictional priest wasn’t yet a point-of-view character. At that time, he wasn’t Joseph and she wasn’t Tessa.

Instead, my priest was named Thierry, a classic French name. I liked the sound of it: TEE-i-ree, with a silent h and lovely rolling r’s. But for a main character, it’s too French; English speakers are sure to mispronounce it. For a while, I switched to Étienne, also sadly too French. Not wanting to lose Thierry or Étienne entirely, I gifted them to more minor characters, Joseph’s relatives.

For my priest, I chose Joseph, naming him after both Biblical men with this name. Old Testament Joseph is enslaved, but his sufferings have a purpose; because of them, he’s able to save his family. He’s also famously chaste. So is New Testament Joseph. In Catholic iconography, Mary’s husband Joseph is often portrayed not as his young wife’s age but as an old man with white hair, reinforcing the Catholic dogma that he and Mary never had a sexual relationship. Not even after Jesus was born. Heaven forbid she should be so “defiled”! No, Saint Joseph is beyond all that. So my character Joseph’s name is a reminder of this impossible standard of “purity.” My Joseph tells himself that God gave him Tessa as He gave Mary to New Testament Joseph—to admire but not to touch. Ever. Really?

Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus by Guido Reni, circa 1635

Tessa was initially named Aisling (pronounced ASH-ling). I loved the Irish legend behind the name, a legend about a beautiful woman who foretells change the way this mortal woman changes Joseph. Aisling means “vision.” An Irish character should have an Irish name, I thought. Not so fast. As I got deeper into my research, I realized that a good Catholic family like Tessa’s would never give their daughter a pagan name like Aisling. I needed to find a saint’s name. Furthermore, because the British Crown controlled Ireland in the 19th century, Irish people had Anglicized names.

So decided to name Joseph’s beloved after Saint Teresa of Ávila. She’s called Tessa, which sounds softer and more feminine. It also invokes the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), a work to which I am indebted for some of my themes. Even before he meets Tessa, Joseph has a relationship with Saint Teresa. He marvels at Bernini’s statue of the saint in Rome, and Tessa herself deeply admires her patron saint. I explain why in Necessary Sins.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Photo by Benjamín Núñez González

Until the final few drafts, Tessa’s daughter was named Cara. Her father wanted to name her Carolina after his state. Tessa and everyone who really loved the girl called her Cara, which is both Italian for “dear one” and Irish for “friend.” Perfect, right? But like Aisling, Cara wasn’t Catholic enough. There aren’t any saints named Cara. Her final name, Clare, honors Saint Clare of Assisi. It also honors the beautiful Irish county where Tessa grew up.

The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, Ireland, where my characters Tessa and Liam were born

David was initially named Donatien (do-nah-TYENH), a French name meaning “gift.” Yep, same root as the English word “donation.” Again, I loved how it rolled off my tongue; but again, it was too French, and English speakers were sure to mispronounce it. When I learned it was the first name of the infamous Marquis de Sade (who is nothing like David), that was the nail in Donatien’s coffin.

Instead, I named Joseph’s nephew for the Biblical King David, whose name means “beloved.” King David sins about as badly as a man can sin. He covets Bathsheba, who’s already married to David’s friend Uriah. So David has Uriah killed to get him out of the way. Yet the Catholic Church canonizes King David as a saint. God not only forgives David, He blesses the fruit of his sin: Bathsheba bears David sons, and their descendants are both New Testament Joseph and the Virgin Mary. Scholars doubt that Bathsheba married her husband’s murderer willingly. So the name David ties into my “necessary sins” theme: it invokes grace and good coming from bad.

With both Cara/Clare and Donatien/David, I kept the first letters of their names the same. Sometimes a letter simply sounds right for a character, so I concentrate on names that start with that letter till I find one that fits.

My saga’s fifth major character was initially named Iye. I found this name in Connie Lockhart Ellefson’s The Melting Pot Book of Baby Names, one of many name books I consulted as I pondered what to call my characters. This was before websites like “Behind the Name“—I was researching old school.

Connie Lockhart Ellefson’s The Melting Pot Book of Baby Names (1990)

This Melting Pot book was my favorite because it organized names by cultures and countries and told me how to pronounce those names. Under the North American Indian section, I found the male name “Iye (EE-yeh): smoke.” It didn’t mention a tribe of origin, but it was close to a Scottish name I wanted to use for this character’s “white” name: Ian.

Yet again, I realized few readers would pronounce this name properly. Even if they did, Iye was a bit too close to Eeyore from “Winnie the Pooh” or the nonsense syllables “E-I-E-I-O” in the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” My work is for adults. My heroine is going to be saying this name in intimate scenes, and nobody should be sniggering.

I sense a pattern here: younger me had a penchant for giving characters exotic-to-me, difficult-for-English-speakers-to-pronounce names. Research, revise, and learn. Bizarre, anachronistic names are a sign of an amateur writer who’s pleasing her own fancy and doesn’t care about authenticity.

Most importantly, this fifth character was Zizistas (Cheyenne); he needed a Zizistas name. I could write a whole post about Zizistas names. To be brief, I settled on Ésh, short and sweet with an appropriate meaning: “sky.” Unlike Zizistas babies, this (mostly) white baby was born with sky-blue eyes.

One of my early readers asked why the name Ésh has an accent over the É. Acute accents (´) usually signify emphasis on a syllable, so monosyllabic words don’t need them. My reader was wise to ask. In fact, the word Ésh has two syllables, but I’ve elided one (omitted it). The word should properly be spelled Éshe. The Zizistas language has whispered syllables, meaning that final e is almost but not quite silent, like a breath. I thought leaving it off aided with pronunciation, so that readers wouldn’t say “Esh-eh” or “Eh-shee” in their heads. I retained the accent mark because I thought “Esh” looked less foreign and had less dignity. To my Charleston characters, Ésh is an “other.” His thought processes are different than theirs. He’s the primary “native stranger” of Book 3’s title, and I wanted his name to reflect that.

You’ll notice I’ve been purposefully vague about who Ésh actually is. If you want to find out, you’ll have to read my saga. 😉

Filed Under: Authenticity, Historical Fiction, Research, Writing

When the Research Rabbit Hole Leads You Back Home

April 3, 2020 by Elizabeth Bell

It’s funny how I’ll puzzle over a story problem for months only to realize that the answer has been all but staring me in the face. Although most of my historical series, the Lazare Family Saga, is set in South Carolina and (what is now) Wyoming, I live in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C. That will soon be relevant. Journey down the research rabbit hole with me…

The Lazare Family Saga grapples with racism and slavery in the antebellum American South. Sweet Medicine, the fourth and final book, takes the characters into the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. I had to figure out what the Lazare family should be doing during this momentous period in American history, something that would make a fitting capstone to my saga and “bring it all together.”

The title of Book 4, Sweet Medicine, has multiple meanings. One of these is literal: two Lazares are medical doctors. Another meaning is figurative, referring to spiritual healing. For one particular character (I’m being deliberately vague to minimize spoilers), I wanted his Reconstruction choices to encompass both literal and figurative healing. Although he is a physician dedicated to helping others, he is himself psychologically wounded.

I wanted this character to be involved in educating newly freed African-Americans as a way of reclaiming his ancestry and healing his fractured identity, since the Lazares are a multiracial family who have been “passing” as white for most of the series. Before Emancipation, penalties for teaching an enslaved person to read included imprisonment and hefty fines. An enslaved person caught with a book would be whipped and often sold because his/her master considered an educated slave dangerous. Both during and after slavery, when an African-American learned to read, it was a way of declaring his/her personhood, of declaring that (s)he was worthy of more than manual labor. During Reconstruction, whole families—from children to grandparents—eagerly attended classes. After the devastation of slavery, education provided a means for African-Americans to heal themselves spiritually. White supremacists understood the symbolic and practical importance of education and frequently targeted schools and teachers.

But how could I pair this pro-education idea with literal medicine? The Reconstruction part of my story appears as an Epilogue. I don’t have fully fleshed out scenes to go into great detail. My characters’ Reconstruction choices must pack a satisfying emotional punch within a few paragraphs. Since the character in question commits a felony in South Carolina earlier in Sweet Medicine, I had to keep him away from that state. Beyond this limitation, the possibilities were mind-boggling. This is the part of historical fiction where the author conducts much more research than she’ll ever use, because she needs to eliminate possibilities.

At first, I placed my character at Hampton Institute. Today, this is Hampton University, located in my adopted state of Virginia but a solid 2.5 hour drive from me. I liked that enslaved people first escaped to Union lines near Hampton. I liked that Hampton University continues to thrive today, one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities a.k.a. HBCU (meaning their student bodies are primarily African-American). But there was no medical connection with Hampton.

Another central subject in my work is Native Americans. They too were educated at Hampton, which would seem to be a vote in its favor. However, Hampton was one of the colleges where the white teachers sought to “kill the Indian, and save the man”—in other words, to strip the Native students of their culture.

Even with its black students, Hampton focused on vocational and agricultural degrees. This was actually called “the Hampton Idea.” Instead of being offered a “higher education,” students were trained to do manual labor because many white people thought freedmen were not (yet) intellectually capable of more cerebral careers. Even black people like Booker T. Washington advocated the Hampton Idea, which argued that African-Americans should “stay in their place,” accept racial segregation, and not expect to become social equals with white people. By placing my character at Hampton Institute, I felt I would be endorsing harmful prejudices.

So where should I place my character during Reconstruction? As it turns out, I have lived near the solution for over a decade and have borrowed books from its library many times: Howard University in Washington, D.C. I knew Howard was also one of the HBCU. I vaguely knew it was founded just after the Civil War (1867). But I didn’t realize how special Howard was.

Howard consisted of multiple colleges from the beginning: law, theology, normal (for training teachers), and medicine. Its founders understood that given an equal chance, African-Americans are every bit as capable of succeeding in intellectual professions as white people.

Not only that, Howard’s advanced curriculum was open to all races and both sexes from its 1867 founding. Howard admitted at least a few Native American students. Two of its medical professors in the 1870s were men of color, and one professor was a white woman. The #1 fear of white supremacists is black men intermingling with white women—and that very “amalgamation” was happening at Howard during Reconstruction.

Considering the segregation to come, Howard University circa 1870 was ahead of its time and Too Awesome Not to Use. Eureka! I’d found the perfect capstone to my family saga—practically in my own backyard.

Dr. Isabel C. Barrows earned her degree at Woman’s Medical College of New York City in 1869 and also studied in Vienna, Austria. She was a professor in Howard University’s Medical Department from 1870-1873 (a year too late to appear in the below group photo). She specialized in diseases of the eye and ear.

You might notice that the professor on the far left is a man of color, Dr. Alexander T. Augusta. In fact, so is the second man from the right, Dr. Charles B. Purvis.

Dr. Alexander T. Augusta was born to free black parents in Norfolk, Virginia. He earned his degree at Trinity Medical College in Toronto, Canada in 1856. He was the first black medical officer during the Civil War, commissioned as a major and appointed head surgeon of the 7th U.S. Colored Infantry. Dr. Augusta was also the first black hospital administrator in the United States; the first black medical professor, teaching at Howard from 1869-1877; and the first black officer buried at Arlington National Cemetery (1890). You can see a photograph of him looking dashing in his Union uniform here.

Dr. Charles B. Purvis was born to free black abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He served as both a nurse and a surgeon during the Civil War and earned his degree at Wooster Medical College in 1865. Dr. Purvis was a professor in Howard’s Medical Department from 1869-1907. After the Financial Panic of 1873, the university was in dire straights and could no longer pay its faculty. Dr. Purvis continued teaching without a salary for three decades because he believed in Howard’s mission. Without him, the medical school probably would not have survived.

You’ll notice from these photographs that Dr. Purvis could have passed as white. He identified as black and was refused admittance to the American Medical Association because of it. Dr. Purvis’s father, Robert Purvis, was born in Charleston, South Carolina and was active in the Underground Railroad. Finding him was another lovely “full circle” moment in my research, a real-life echo of my fictional Lazare family.


All images in this post taken from the book Howard University Medical Department: A Historical, Biographical, and Statistical Souvenir by Dr. Daniel Smith Lamb, published in 1900. You can view the book in its entirety here: https://dh.howard.edu/med_pub/1

For the history of Howard as a whole, check out Howard University: the First Hundred Years, 1867-1967 by Ralph W. Logan, published in 1969.

Filed Under: African-American History, Historical Fiction, Racism, Research, Writing

Why Go Indie?

March 11, 2020 by Elizabeth Bell

The short answer is: I had no choice.

The slightly longer answer: If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t know my novels exist.

But let’s back up a moment. You may be asking yourself not why but “what is indie?” It’s a term that’s also used in music and film. “Indie” means “this artwork is independently produced; it isn’t bankrolled by a large company and isn’t beholden to their demands.” Indie artists are usually a little different; we don’t quite fit the mold demanded of our contracted colleagues.

In my case, “indie” is short for “independent author.” This is our preferred identifier because it signifies that we are professionals. We don’t just slap a first draft on Amazon and expect the adoring public to flock to it. It’s fine to call us self-publishers, but don’t call us vanity publishers. We know our work has worth, but we can also take constructive criticism. We know we can’t do it all by ourselves. We have editors and cover designers. We have printers, but we are our own publishers. We’ve cut out the middle man between ourselves and our readers.

Now, for the why. At the age of fourteen, when I vowed to become a published author, I thought I’d be “traditionally published” by a major press. I thought I’d have a literary agent who’d be like my fairy godmother. I thought the title pages and spines of my novels would say Hachette or St. Martin’s. I thought my novels would be in brick and mortar bookstores. I thought my publisher would send me flowers on my release date, and I’d go on a national book signing tour.

Yes, I really thought like this: I might not have much, but like Cinderella, if I only worked hard enough, eventually my fairy godmother (literary agent) would reward me.

None of that has happened or likely ever will. After almost three decades of researching, writing, and revising my Lazare Family Saga project, I spent four years seeking traditional publication for the first book in the series, Necessary Sins. I researched how to query literary agents and which agents were the best fit for my work. I wrote and rewrote my query letter, sent query after query, and pitched to literary agents in person at writing conferences. I’m an introvert, so the latter was particularly terrifying. In all, I approached well over 100 agents. Some editors at publishing houses allow you to query them directly. When my agent well ran dry, I tried that too, submitting to about 15 editors.

I got a few nibbles. My biggest excitement was the enthusiasm of an agent at Writers House, who called my work “masterful.” She imagined she could sell it as a hardcover original. (That’s a big deal and was part of my dream.) She requested a “partial,” the opening chapters of Necessary Sins. The agent then requested the full manuscript, which she received while she was attending a music festival. She related how she frantically searched for WiFi so she could download the rest of my novel and find out what happened next. We had long conversations over the phone.

But neither this interaction nor any other led to a contract. The most frustrating thing about querying is that authors rarely get a why. More than half of the agents and editors I queried didn’t bother to respond, which is typical in the publishing business. Most of the others sent form rejections, the same canned response they send to other hopeful writers, whether those writers followed all their guidelines and were querying a project in the agent/editor’s preferred genre or whether the writer sent gobbledygook. “Not right for our list,” etc. etc. ad infinitum.

Knock till your knuckles are bloody. The gatekeepers aren’t listening.

By pitching in person and speaking to other querying writers in my genre, eventually I was able to cobble together a why, which came down to: “Your work is risky. Agents and editors are afraid of risk; they want an easy sell. You are a knee-jerk rejection.” Why is my work risky?

  1. The agents and editors who claim they’re seeking historical fiction really want women’s fiction in a historical setting. Preferably a 20th century setting. In other words, a female protagonist, and she’d better be ahead of her time to make her “relatable.” My protagonist in Necessary Sins is—gasp—a man, and he’s very much a 19th-century man. (Read this blog post to understand my why.) The Publishing Industry knows most readers are women, and it thinks women want to read about women. So the moment an agent/editor/their assistant realized my main character was a man, they rejected my novel.
  2. My work is “too long.” Necessary Sins is about 140,000 words, which works out to nearly 500 pages in a paperback. This isn’t really that long, considering I was inspired by epic historical fiction / family sagas from the 1970s and 1980s that are nearly twice that length. But the 21st century is the age of Twitter. The Publishing Industry has decided that readers have short attention spans. They want debut novels of about 80,000 words. Shorter is even better! Longer books cost more to print, so if they fail, the publisher has lost more money. Unless you know someone in publishing and/or you’re a man (preferably both), publishers don’t care if your novel is a meticulously edited masterpiece that really needs to be longer than average. The moment an agent/editor/their assistant realized my book was over 100,000 words (the absolute limit), they rejected my novel.
  3. My work is not “own voices.” Many of my point-of-view characters are people of color and I am white. It doesn’t matter how many years of research I’ve done or how nuanced my characters are. It doesn’t matter that the Lazares’ ancestry is mostly white and they are so light-skinned they can “pass.” This is the reason that Writers House agent finally rejected me; I am a marketing problem. At this point, agents/editors/assistants probably reject all queries with characters of color in which the author doesn’t declare her/himself to be “own voices.” Even if I made it past the first two hurdles, this one is insurmountable—at least for an unknown debut author with no connections in publishing.

So after almost three decades of dreaming and labor, after more than three years of pleading at the pearly gates of publishing, I finally had to admit that my work wouldn’t be traditionally published any time in the foreseeable future.

Anna Lea Merritt’s “Love Locked Out” (1890)

Now for most writers, this would be a temporary setback. They would have another completed project or at least another story idea. This other novel would be more marketable. Then maybe down the line, once they’d acquired an agent and publisher and proved themselves via the success of the other project, the author’s agent might potentially accept the risky project later on.

But I don’t have any other novels. The Lazare Family Saga is my passion project, my labor of love. I have sacrificed everything else in my life for twenty-seven years to complete this story. I don’t have the time, energy, or money to do that again, and no other characters are demanding my attention the way the Lazares did. I have health issues and a full-time job that leave me only slivers of time for writing. I can’t wait around for a bolt of lightning that may never strike.

If I’d queried for another couple of decades, there is a teeny, tiny chance an agent would have thought my work worth the risks. But then she’d have to find an editor who agreed with her. And that editor would have to convince her publishing house. I have a better chance of being struck by lightning. And the more I learned about traditional publishing, the less keen I was to offer it my soul—and my writing is my soul. This may be partly sour grapes, I admit. But I have heard so many horror stories. There are no fairy godmothers in publishing, but there are a lot of mercenaries who don’t care a fig about authors.

Maya Angelou wrote: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” For me, the agony of an unpublished story is even greater. You’ve done all the work. You’ve forged a completed novel you’re proud of. You believe it’s an important novel, and the people who read it praise it—but that handful of people are the only ones who’ll ever know your novel exists.

Unless you stop clinging to those pearly gates and find another way. Unless you go indie. That is why.

My arms are tired, but I’ll get there!

Filed Under: Going Indie, Publishing, Writing

What’s a Claire-Voie?

December 3, 2019 by Elizabeth Bell

On the spine and back cover of my paperbacks and on the title page of all my novels, you’ll see my logo above the words “Claire-Voie Books.” What’s a claire-voie, you ask? It’s a gardening term borrowed from French that originated in the 17th century. A claire-voie (pronounced klair-vwah) is a window or opening that either looks onto a garden from outside it or that allows a person in one garden “room” to look into another part of the garden.

A claire-voie often features wrought iron openwork. I first came across the term in a blog post about Charleston, South Carolina, where the majority of my fiction takes place. Here are two examples of claire-voies in Charleston, windows onto private gardens (my own pics).

  • Claire-voie on Lamboll Street
  • Claire-voie on Meeting Street, next to the Branford-Horry House

My character Tessa has a claire-voie that is set into the garden door of her Church Street house, half-hidden by climbing roses. This opening allows someone walking down Longitude Lane, say a lovelorn priest named Joseph, to peer into her garden. Tessa’s claire-voie was inspired by these real-life garden doors on Longitude Lane in Charleston:

Joseph and Tessa, two of my central characters in Necessary Sins and Lost Saints, are both gardeners. It’s how they initially bond. Tessa’s garden door with its claire-voie is important to their relationship, and it will be important to her daughter as well. Joseph has French ancestry, so he knows the term. If you’re paying attention in Chapter 38 of Necessary Sins, you’ll discover that claire-voie also has a more risqué symbolism. Nobody does unconscious double entendres like a repressed Victorian priest.

I’ve been a Francophile for as long as I can remember; I took seven years of the language and lived in Aix-en-Provence for a semester. Literally, claire-voie translates from the French as “clear-way.” (Claire needs an e because voie is feminine.)

If claire-voie reminds you of “clairvoyant” (clear-sighted) that’s because the two terms have similar linguistic roots. I named my imprint Claire-Voie Books in order to evoke both. I designed my logo to symbolize Tessa’s claire-voie, among other meanings.

A claire-voie symbolizes my work as a writer as well. In my most recent newsletter (November 2019), I talked about my creative process and how I’ve felt my stories already existed in some nebulous other world. In order to tell them, I’m peering through a claire-voie into that other world and taking notes. I also talked about the spiritual dimension of my writing, how I hear my characters’ voices. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “clairvoyance” as “a supposed faculty attributed to certain persons, or to persons under certain mesmeric conditions, consisting in the mental perception of objects at a distance or concealed from sight.” The Encyclopedia Britannica defines clairvoyance as “knowledge…not obtained by ordinary channels of perceiving or reasoning.” When I’m “in the zone” and writing, when my characters are speaking to me, I do feel like I’m in a trance, as if I’m seeing things with my “mind’s eye.”

In addition to “clear,” the French word “clair” also means “light,” as in Debussy’s beautiful piece of music “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight). Claire-voie has a second meaning in French: a clerestory, the upper windows in a large church or cathedral that let in more light. Since most of my characters are Catholic and Joseph is a priest, this meaning is also appropriate to my work.

Nave of the Church of Saint-Aignan, Chartres, France, showing the clerestory (upper windows) by Poulpy on Wikimedia Commons

I’d like to think that in my historical fiction, I’m shedding light on truths that are too often concealed. As to why I needed my own imprint to tell these stories, that’s a tale for another blog post!

Filed Under: Going Indie, Interpretation, Publishing, Writing Tagged With: ironwork, logo, meaning, symbol

What’s That Symbol?

October 27, 2019 by Elizabeth Bell

You may have wondered about the ornate, round design I use as an avatar. It’s a logo I created to symbolize my historical fiction series, the Lazare Family Saga.

Claire-Voie Books logo

I was able to pack a great number of meanings into this design, significance both complementary and conflicting. Paradoxes are at the heart of my work; rather than either/or, I choose and. To quote Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1892):

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The shape was originally inspired by the historic wrought iron of Charleston, South Carolina, the setting for much of my saga. Here are just three examples of Charleston ironwork, limited to circular designs, my own photos from a research trip in April 2018.

  • Joseph Manigault House
  • Market Hall
  • Private home on King Street

With the help of a designer on Fiverr (a lengthy, frustrating, but ultimately successful endeavor) I created my own pattern by combining elements from two particular wrought iron gates in Charleston.

One gate stands on the campus of the College of Charleston at the 1846 Knox-Lesesne House (14 Green Way). I love this gate so much, I bought a necklace based on the pattern from Charleston Gates on Etsy.

I wore this necklace while I wrote much of the Lazare Family Saga’s penultimate draft. During my 2018 research trip, I was able to view the Knox-Lesesne gate in person, but it was obscured by a poster.

The other Charleston gate that inspired me is located at a private home on the Battery (the area near the sea wall). I first discovered this gate on Pinterest. Here’s a beautiful shot of it on Alamy Stock Photo. When I visited, it was obscured by a sign but enhanced by a friendly canine.

Within their circular designs, these two gates contain “hearts and flowers,” symbolizing both the romance and the gardens in my work. But there’s a lot of additional symbolism to unpack.

The four-petalled central flower represents Charleston’s rich botanic history and the fact that two of my central characters, Joseph and Tessa, are gardeners. Throughout my saga, but especially with these two characters, I use the Victorian Language of Flowers (a subject for another post).

Those could be the four showy bracts of a dogwood, a Southern favorite with special significance for Tessa. You’ll have to read Necessary Sins to find out why. 😉

The central shape could also be a four-leaf clover, evoking Tessa’s Irish homeland.

The shape at the center is a quatrefoil too. That’s a Latin word meaning “four leaves.” Quatrefoils were often used in Gothic cathedrals because they symbolize the Four Gospels. Thus the shape evokes my characters’ Catholic faith and Joseph’s priesthood.

  • Quatrefoils in the pointed arches of Lincoln Cathedral
  • Quatrefoil stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral
  • Quatrefoils above the doors of Reims Cathedral

Yet my logo also signifies Native spirituality and the Western parts of the Lazare Family Saga. To the Zizistas (Cheyenne Indians), the number four is holy because it represents the four directions and the Sacred Powers who reside there.

A circle divided into four quarters recalls a medicine wheel, a native symbol of rebirth. The four parts are the four phases of a person’s life and his growth in wisdom. My character Ésh has a quilled medicine wheel on the medicine pouch he wears around his neck. In Book 4 of my series, Sweet Medicine, I mention a giant medicine wheel made of stones on the High Plains. Such medicine wheels still exist, and they are sacred places to Native peoples.

  • A modern interpretation of a medicine wheel.
  • A miniature medicine wheel
  • The Medicine Wheel in Bighorn National Forest, Wyoming

Many ancient cultures consider circles holy because they have no beginning and no end. Likewise, my logo reflects and repeats itself. Rebirth is a motif in my saga; it’s why I named the central family the Lazares, after the Biblical figure of Lazarus.

Around the outside of my logo, the heart shapes signify the importance of love in my work. But the shapes also resemble sankofas.

Sankofa (from Deposit Photos)

A sankofa is a symbol from the Akan tribe in what is Ghana today. This region of Africa is the homeland of many people fated to become American slaves, including a character introduced in Book 3 of my saga, Native Stranger. He’s an enslaved blacksmith named Shadrach, and he makes a sankofa pendant for his beloved.

Literally, sankofa translates to “Go back and fetch it.” The symbol is about going back in order to go forward. To Shadrach, a sankofa means “Learn from the past so you can change the future”—even when that past is painful. To me, a sankofa also represents historical fiction, the importance of remembering and making the past come alive in the present.

Between the hearts in my logo, the triangular shapes are veined leaves radiating from the central flower.

Claire-Voie Books logo

But if you consider those “veins” in the three dimensions of wrought iron, they would be spikes, evoking chevaux-de-frise. These were a nasty defense mechanism installed around some 19th-century Charleston homes to defend from invaders, especially rebelling slaves. Chevaux-de-frise survive on the fence of the Miles Brewton House on King Street.

These spikes counterbalance the potentially gooey “hearts and flowers” elements in my logo. They say “There is romance here, but there is also danger—even suffering.”

Or are the spikes just leaf veins after all? Don’t get to close, or you might find out… Is this the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, or the sacred Tree of Life?

These may not be circles, but they are spheres!

I would argue that love is both Knowledge and Life, both Death and Rebirth. Remember I said my work is about contradictions?

Speaking of forbidden fruit and rebirth, the ouroboros is another circular symbol featured in my books: a snake eats its own tail and thus sustains itself for all eternity, creating an infinite loop. Likewise, the events in my saga are often cyclical, echoing from one generation to the next. For the Lazare family, is the loop fulfilling or destructive? Or both?

An ouroboros (from Deposit Photos)

Speaking of double-edged swords, my amazing editor, Jessica Cale, saw something in my logo I didn’t: four swords. The sword points are the “leaf veins” or iron spikes that begin between the lobes of the quatrefoil. The sword handles are ornaments I borrowed from the Battery gate (the one with the dog). I thought these ornaments simply gave the design flair and helped to suggest wrought iron.

Claire-Voie Books logo

In Book 2 of my series, two characters do pretend to “cross swords,” though they’re actually tree branches. Later, the Battle of Turkey Creek (a.k.a. Solomon’s Fork) between the Cheyenne and the U.S. Army is decided when the white soldiers draw their sabers. And there is a Sword Gate House in Charleston, named after its famous ironwork.

This home was once an elite girls’ school run by Madame Talvande, a Saint-Domingue émigrée who is a minor character in Necessary Sins, Book 1 of my series. So my subconscious put those swords there. 😉 Another happy accident: my logo also suggests a compass rose, symbolizing my characters’ travels.

By Vloeck

As a whole, my logo reminds me of two things: a rose window and a wagon wheel. A rose window neatly brings together both Catholic symbolism and floral symbolism.

  • Rose window interior
  • Rose window exterior
  • Wagon wheel

The wagon wheel recalls the emigrants on the Oregon Trail, the settling of the American West by Euro-Americans and the destruction of the Native Americans’ way of life (another double-edged sword). My designer and I are currently working on the back cover of Lost Saints, Book 2 in my series, which will feature a wagon wheel. It could also be a stagecoach or train wheel, methods of transportation my characters use in later books.

One of my favorite pieces of historical fiction, the 2005 TNT miniseries Into the West, follows a white family and a Lakota family throughout the turbulent decades of the 19th century. The writers use both the wagon wheel and the medicine wheel to symbolize these cultures’ values and the conflict between them. The white family is even named Wheeler.

So those are most of the meanings packed into my logo. The symbol is also a claire-voie. What’s a claire-voie? Follow this link to my next blog post!

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: ironwork, logo, meaning, motif, symbol

The Importance of Warts

September 20, 2019 by Elizabeth Bell

My fellow historical novelist M. K. Tod invited me to write a guest post on her excellent blog A Writer of History. From Colonial Williamsburg to historical novelists, I argue that those interpreting the past should strive for authenticity, even—especially—when it’s not pretty. Or as I like to call it, The Importance of Warts. Read my post here.

You’ll find a clickable list of all my guest posts and interviews here. That page is also linked to the bottom of my About Me page.

Filed Under: Historical Fiction, Writing Tagged With: authenticity, interpretation, racism

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