Elizabeth Bell, Author

Undeniable Love. Unflinching History. Unforgettable Fiction.

Historical Fiction

My Debt to Colonial Williamsburg

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Most of my Lazare Family Saga series takes place in the 19th century, so you might think visits to an 18th-century living history museum wouldn’t be terribly useful to my research. In fact, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia was one of the richest sources for my fiction set mostly in 19th-century South Carolina. Here’s how!

After I moved to Virginia in 2004, I visited Colonial Williamsburg as often as I could and absorbed its historical delights like a sponge. This is how I read nonfiction as well; I rarely know which details will be useful, even crucial, in my historical fiction, so I devour them all. Finally, I had to cut myself off from travelling, finish writing my Lazare Family Saga, and publish it. Then COVID hit. It’s been six years since I last visited Colonial Williamsburg. 

I remedied that in December 2022. Before, I’d always stayed “on the cheap.” For the first time, I was able to rent one of the Historic Area’s Colonial Houses: a restored 18th-century kitchen with a working fireplace and a canopy bed. I’d never slept in one before, and I loved its coziness.

My cozy canopy bed and fireplace inside the Market Square Kitchen, a restored 18th-century building and one of the Colonial Houses in Williamsburg. Joseph and Tessa could be hiding behind the bed curtains!

My visit reminded me of all the reasons I love Colonial Williamsburg. To me, its two greatest aspects are ones I hope I’ve recreated in my historical fiction: Colonial Williamsburg awes me with both its scale and its depth. The Historic Area isn’t just a handful of restored or reconstructed 18th-century buildings. It’s the largest living history museum in the world: 301 acres and 604 buildings—truly an epic recreation of the past. The people who interpret these spaces often spend decades researching their characters and unearthing forgotten details from primary sources. In the Historic Trades, master craftsmen must apprentice for seven years just as they did in the 18th century. 

Lafayette outside the Governor’s Palace
Martha and George Washington

These interpreters’ dedication inspires me as a writer. Colonial Williamsburg was the foil that allowed me to see and correct the gaps in my 19th-century knowledge. Because CW interpreters know daily 18th-century life so thoroughly, they challenged me to think about my characters’ primary century in new ways. 

My Lazare Family Saga does begin in the 18th century, albeit in the last decade and in the Caribbean, not in Virginia. Nevertheless, when Marguerite dons a detached pocket (Necessary Sins, Chapter 4), this comes straight from my visit to the milliner’s shop in Colonial Williamsburg. The wigmaker helped me understand that curious fashion. Cooking over an open fire didn’t change much from the 1700s to the 1800s. Nor did blacksmithing.

Milliner’s shop
Governor’s Palace Kitchen

Happily, many of the objects displayed in the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg are from the 19th century. I studied several examples of men’s neckwear to describe Joseph’s (Necessary Sins, Chapter 21). Tessa’s brown cloak with white lining in Chapter 29 was based on a cloak I saw in the CW Museums as well.

I researched The Lazare Family Saga for so many years and visited Colonial Williamsburg so many times, I can’t always parse chicken from egg: Did I read about Noah’s Ark toys (Lost Saints, Chapter 11) in a book before I saw a complete set in the CW Museums? I think I researched 19th-century couches online and chose the perfect shape for Tessa’s méridienne before I spotted one on display in the Museums—but having that real-life example helped tremendously and directly inspired the tasselled pillow I mention in Lost Saints, Chapter 8.

A late 1800s Noah’s Ark toy set
A circa 1820 couch shaped like Tessa’s green mérdienne
https://emuseum.history.org/objects/68744/couch#

On my tour of the Randolph property, I learned about an enslaved maid named Eve, inspiring me to give René’s mother the French version, Ève, for her slave name (Necessary Sins, Chapter 1). The real-life Eve escaped slavery as well. Tragically, she was recaptured and sold to the West Indies as punishment.

On a visit to CW’s Great Hopes Plantation (sadly this site seems to be closed now), I saw a modern blacksmith’s recreation of a slave collar. I combined this atrocious design with a slave collar I’d seen in a Louisiana museum in order to describe such a collar in Chapter 9 of Necessary Sins. In Chapter 40 of Native Stranger, Cromwell mocks Easter for eating too many ginger cakes. Every time I visit CW, I do exactly this. 

In Chapter 6 of Necessary Sins, the racist Marguerite commands her grandson Joseph: “Don’t you ever trust a negro with your shaving razor!” This remark was inspired by a walking tour of Colonial Williamsburg that discussed the enslaved population. Our guide gave personal grooming, including shaving razors, as an example of how intimately the lives of enslavers and enslaved intertwined.

George Wythe’s office. Note the portmanteau and microscope case atop the desk at right
One of Colonial Williamsburg’s live oaks and tourists in a carriage

The most iconic tree of the antebellum American South is the live oak (Quercus virginiana). These don’t grow in Northern Virginia where I live; but they do grow in Williamsburg! The Colonial Garden may be the first place I saw pomegranate blossoms. I know it’s where I learned about cold frames (Necessary Sins, Chapter 17). What might a man of science have in his office? How do flintlock firearms work? How does one climb into a carriage? CW answered these questions among countless others.

Colonial Williamsburg is truly hands-on history, and these are some of the ways it’s had a profound impact on my historical fiction. I can hardly wait to return.

Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 2

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Are you ready for the real designer wizardry?

To quote Desdemona in Othello: “O, these men, these men!” The male characters on the ebook covers of Necessary Sins and Sweet Medicine were particularly challenging to represent with stock images. No single image would do; my cover designer, Damonza, had to combine multiple images and make them look like they belonged together.

Joseph Lazare, the protagonist of Necessary Sins, is multiracial: White French, African (Yoruba), and Native American (Dakota). He’s also a Catholic priest, and this is his primary identity. There were no images of appropriate men in cassocks on stock sites. Lots of White men and a few dark-skinned Black men, but none with curly black hair and the right skin tone.

Do any of these men say “tortured priest” to you?

A couple of Latino priests seemed promising, and in fact Joseph’s racist great-grandmother tells Joseph and his father that they’re part Spanish. But the Latino priests didn’t work because they either had a modern hairstyle (cropped too short); they had beards (until modern times, Catholic priests weren’t allowed to grow facial hair); and/or their expressions were simply silly (see above). For serious historical fiction, I needed a serious expression. Their short hairstyles, facial hair, spectacles, and silly or smiling expressions also prevented me from finding any White man who could “play” Joseph, whatever he was wearing.

In addition, most cassocks (a.k.a. soutanes) on stock sites weren’t appropriate for the early 19th century. The buttons couldn’t be plastic, and the priestly collar couldn’t be the starched modern kind (see above). I found an acceptable cassock at last, even if the man wearing it was White. Fortunately, given the right two images, my designer was able to do a “head swap,” combining the head of an appropriate Black man with an appropriate cassock like a digital paper doll.

Let me show you the original stock images I suggested to my designer for Necessary Sins and then the final design. (My designer sourced them from Shutterstock. I’ve purchased the same images from Depositphotos, which is more reasonably priced for small-scale users like me.) First, Joseph’s head:

You’ll notice that I had my designer lighten this man’s skin. Considering the history of Black people chemically lightening their skin to fit in with White culture, this bothers me. But as I indicated above, I just couldn’t find a White or racially ambiguous man who was right for Joseph; their expressions, hairstyles, and/or beards were always wrong. This man’s curly black hair is perfect for Joseph. (My designer filled in the top of his head from another shot of the same model.) I also like the way his full hair echoes the shape of Tessa’s bonnet and vice-versa. His features are really “too African” to pass for White as Joseph does, but using a Black model felt more truthful than using a White man with modern hair. Like all of my female cover models, this model (or at least the photographer) is Russian too!

Joseph’s body, the same model who appears on the paperback and hardback covers of Necessary Sins, there with dramatic lighting inside a confessional. Note the cloth cassock buttons and soft collar. While this photo wasn’t taken in Russia, it was taken in Ukraine. (I dearly hope that both the model and the photographer are safe right now.)

The unhelpfully captioned “A young girl in a hat stands against the background of the forest” by Darya Komarova. This woman is really too young for Tessa; I’d guess she’s in her mid-teens. I wish there wasn’t so much hair in her face, but at least it’s the right color. Her dress is on the ugly side, but her silhouette is unmistakably 19th century even at a small size. Those poofy “leg-of-mutton” sleeves are distinctively 1830s, and Tessa and Joseph meet in 1835 (when she is 19). The way she’s holding that book allowed my designer to have her holding onto Joseph’s arm instead:

The final cover, thanks to the magic/talent of the designers at Damonza. The sunset with flying birds was their idea. I think it evokes the cover of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, also set in antebellum (pre-Civil War) Charleston. I asked Damonza to add the palmettos, the state tree of South Carolina with a memorable place in Charleston history.

If you’re thinking “That’s not a Charleston house,” you’re right. This is Dunleith in Natchez, Mississippi. Mansions with columns all the way around the outside are typical of Natchez and Louisiana. When I was experimenting with my own cover mockups, I tried some actual Charleston homes available on stock sites, but none of them said “antebellum American South” at a small size and at a glance the way this one does.

In Necessary Sins, Tessa marries into the Stratford family, who do own a home like this with columns all the way around the outside. I gave the Stratfords a Louisana connection so they’d be inspired to remodel their South Carolina home in this style. With its wraparound verandas, its spaces that are both outside and inside, public and private, this architectural style fits perfectly with the duality at the heart of my family saga. The Lazares themselves are simultaneously Black and White, happy and miserable, pure and wicked…

Fun fact: Once upon a time (two decades ago), I slept in a four-poster bed inside this very house, Dunleith. Built in 1855, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1974 and a bed and breakfast in 1976. I was in historical heaven that night. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Another bit of fun: Before I had my designer combine images, I tested my concepts by creating mockups in a program called Canva. I needed to make sure the man and woman were about the same size, so I duplicated his head and brought it closer to hers for comparison. I was sleepless and stressed out at this point and a little bit bonkers, so I thought it would be funny to put his head in her bonnet. The result gave me some sorely needed laughs. Designing covers is long hours of hard work, especially when you’re doing it for the second time around. This bit of silliness helped. Did I make you laugh too?

On the cover of Sweet Medicine, Joseph’s nephew Dr. David Lazare is also comprised of three stock images. I asked my designer to add a medical bag to fit the title and his profession. I also wanted David to be wearing his signature Vandyck beard. The original model was clean-shaven, and here’s proof! 

While I purchased the rights to this image, I’ve purposefully posted the low-resolution watermarked version to prevent piracy per the FAQ at PeriodImages.com

Yep, David’s facial hair is transplanted, likely from this model whom I sent my designer as a reference. David’s beard is probably my favorite bit of Photoshop wizardry on my covers. Victorian men took pride in their facial hair—unless they were priests or American Indians. 😉 This Vandyck really makes David look like David. 

As for the building on the cover, that’s another story. My designer and I went through several ideas for the setting image. My characters take a cross-country journey in Sweet Medicine, so my first thought was a train or a stagecoach. But a train isn’t specific to the United States, and there aren’t any good stagecoach images on Shutterstock or Depositphotos. Furthermore, a method of transportation made David’s medical bag look like a suitcase by association.

I also considered pretty mountains, perhaps a mountain lake. Again, not technically specific to the United States. As I stared at the four new covers of The Lazare Family Saga lined up together, mountains didn’t quite fit. They didn’t say “American history” in and of themselves the way the setting images on the first three covers do. In their lower images, Necessary Sins, Lost Saints, and Native Stranger all feature predominantly white man-made structures that say “19th-century United States” at a glance and at a small size. I decided we needed another white building to echo the one on Necessary Sins. 

What’s special about the structure I chose for Sweet Medicine is that it’s actually doing double duty. The novel begins in South Carolina, and this building looks like it belongs there. In fact, this Greek Revival structure is the oldest Wyoming building still standing—the officers’ quarters at Fort Laramie, constructed in 1849-1850 and nicknamed “Old Bedlam” after its raucous parties. The architect was a New Hampshire man, Lieutenant Daniel Phineas Woodbury, and the blocky wings were part of his original design. They contain kitchens, storerooms, and cooks’ quarters. 

Here’s a photo I took on a research trip to Fort Laramie back in 2006, when the building was decorated with bunting for Independence Day.

Although my point-of-view characters don’t know the name Old Bedlam, the building makes an appearance in both Lost Saints and Sweet Medicine when they visit Fort Laramie. This military post was an important stop along the overland trail, within sight of the Rocky Mountains. I like the way Old Bedlam evokes both of my saga’s major settings, the Old South and the Old West. 

Old Bedlam also gave me an opportunity to include an “Easter egg” on the cover of Sweet Medicine, a “Waldo” hidden in plain sight.

These ebook covers’ primary purpose is to shout “I’m historical fiction!” at a small size. But I couldn’t resist asking my designer to add a second character besides David, a character discernible only if you view
Sweet Medicine at a large size. Even then, the second character will be tiny. Can you find him?

Click on the cover for the file, where you can zoom in.

Here are a few hints: This character’s name is Allister, and he also represents his distant cousins Mignon and Reinette. He belongs to E. P. Vaux, but Allister has been visiting one of Old Bedlam’s kitchens in hopes of a treat.

Or click here to cheat and see a closeup view of the character. 😉

I hope peeking behind the scenes of my cover redesign has been a treat for you, dear reader. I’d love to hear what you think!

Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 1

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After five months of research and revisions, the ebooks of The Lazare Family Saga have brand-new covers at last! If you’re curious why and how they look the way they do, make yourself comfortable. The creation of these four covers for my fictional family saga is a saga itself, so I’ve split it into two parts. You might also want to check out this prequel post on why my original covers needed an update for the digital world.

In short, I think of these as my “billboard covers.” Their purpose is to shout “I’m historical fiction set in the 19th century United States! If you like that, check me out!” as potential readers scroll through Facebook, Amazon, and anywhere else they appear online.

In my cover breakdown, I’ll be speaking from the point-of-view of an indie historical novelist whose books are intended for an adult audience. Also keep in mind that whatever I chose had to be sustainable over a four-book series. The covers have to follow the same “branding”; at a glance, the books must visually belong together.

There are three main routes in book cover design:

  1. Hire an illustrator to paint or otherwise create a custom illustration for your book cover. This method was popular in the past and includes the original covers of the books that inspired me to write historical sagas, books such as Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds (1977) and Brock and Bodie Thoene’s Zion Covenant series (1989-1991). Back when I thought I’d be traditionally published, this is what I expected my books to look like.

    But times change. Not only is custom illustration prohibitively expensive for an indie author like me (you’re paying not only the illustrator but also a designer to create a book cover using that illustration), such book covers have become rare even in traditional publication, at least for serious historical fiction aimed at adults. Custom illustrations can look cartoonish and give the impression that the book is Young Adult or another genre like fantasy in which illustration remains popular.
Where it all began: My mother’s copy of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds with its original illustrated cover. Thanks, Mom!

2. Hire a photographer who hires models who resemble your characters. The photographer would find costumes appropriate to my book’s time period and do a custom photoshoot, probably incorporating period-appropriate props like jewelry and furniture. They might even take the photos at a historic 19th-century property. All of these elements cost heaps of money, so again, not in my budget for a four-book series.

3. What most indie authors do is choose a talented designer to combine and manipulate existing stock images available on sites like Despositphotos and Shutterstock. Because the first two cover routes weren’t financially feasible, this had to be my choice both for my original covers (now limited to the paperback and hardcover formats, created by Bookfly Design) and for my new covers (ebooks and forthcoming audiobooks, created by Damonza).

Using stock images is easier in some genres than others and easier with some characters than others. Since my fiction is character-driven, I wanted to put people on all the covers this time around. But if some of your characters aren’t White, you have fewer options because there are fewer non-White models on stock sites. In addition, decent images of people wearing historical clothing are few and far between.

Sure, there are women in “vintage dresses,” but these are usually painfully bad approximations of historical clothing. Since the contents of my books are meticulously researched and accurate, I didn’t want cover models in clothing that is glaringly wrong for my setting—or any historical setting, only a fantasy version of past fashions. Furthermore, these models in “historical” clothing almost always have modern hairstyles and/or makeup, which ruins the effect.

An even worse example of cringe-worthy stock photos are the results for “Native American.” Almost all of these are so atrocious, they are offensive to anyone who knows anything about Native culture. Think naked White women lounging in fields wearing eagle feather headdresses. Shudder.

Do you see what I had to wade through? Imagine HUNDREDS of pages of these.

I should note that an indie author doesn’t have to find stock images before approaching a designer. But designers appreciate it because it saves them time, as long as you give them a few options and don’t insist that Images A and B must appear on the cover even if they don’t work together. The lighting may be incompatible, for example. Moreover, I know 19th-century clothing and American history—not to mention my characters—better than my designer, so I know better which stock images are rubbish and which are close enough.

The problem of finding the right images is exacerbated by the fact that most of the best-for-historical-fiction photographers on stock sites, the ones who have images of models in decent historical clothing, are Russian. English isn’t their first language, so these Russian photographers label their images with generic or misspelled keywords that make the photos hard to find.

For example, the stock image I chose for Tessa on my Necessary Sins ebook cover is titled “A young girl in a hat stands against the background of the forest.” (She’s wearing an 1830s bonnet and gown.) The image we used for Tessa on the paperback and hardcover is “Beautiful woman with long hair in a long white dress. He [sic] sits at the vintage table and looks away.” She is wearing a Regency gown from the early 1800s. It’s truly a mislabelled needle in a haystack situation.

“Beautiful woman with long hair in a long white dress. He sits at the vintage table and looks away.” By Darya Komarova. This woman’s hair is perfect for Tessa, so I’m glad we get to keep her on the paperback and hardback covers. Cropping her not only avoids her modern eye makeup but also disguises the fact that her dress is a couple of decades too early for my character.

This is why I spent weeks searching stock sites for models who might “play” my characters, using every keyword I could think of. Ninja Tip: I found some photos by clicking on every vaguely decent image of a person in historical clothing that came up in my search, no matter the era, and then viewing the photographer’s other images. This is how I found “Girl in a hat.”

My main goal in redesigning my ebook covers was to say “I’m historical fiction!” at a small size. I knew the best way to do that was to include images of people in historical clothing plus distinctive setting images like an antebellum mansion and covered wagons. Because of branding, before I approached a cover designer with this idea, I had to find usable images of all five of my major characters as well as four good setting images.

The character who initially worried me most was Ésh, my “White Indian.” He couldn’t be wearing a feather headdress (he’s not a war leader), and he needed to be wearing a shirt (he’s not in a bad romance novel kidnapping a White damsel). As you can imagine, I was over the moon when I found this stock image:

This man isn’t 100% right for Ésh. His hair is too dark (my designer lightened it) and too short, and Ésh’s preferred weapon is a bow and arrow. The decoration on his head is called a “roach,” made of porcupine hair. This kind of headdress wasn’t typically worn by the Cheyenne, but it’s possible when you factor in trade and personal preference. At least it’s not an eagle feather headdress. As stock images go, this man is awesome. And yes, even “Ésh” was taken by a Russian photographer!

This is the image that made representing my central characters on my book covers possible. Since this is the only image of this model that I really liked, this man’s position also dictated that the other characters would be seen from the front. Most of my final character images weren’t uploaded to stock sites till 2020, so they weren’t available when my first designer and I were working on my original covers.

A slightly more useful caption: “Beautiful girl in historical dress, gloves, near the house,” also by Darya Komarova.

My designer lightened the hair of this model for me as well, so she would better resemble my character. Her hair is far too short, and Clare would wear it pinned up, but those aren’t things my designer could fix.

This is another case where only one shot of the model expressed my character; in the other shots of this woman, she looks snooty. Here, she simply looks spunky, perfect for Clare.

On the cover of Native Stranger, I’d hoped to make Clare’s skirt white so that it could better echo the tipis and vice-versa. However, the title had to be legible, and we had to keep a light-colored title for series branding. Therefore, the woman’s skirt had to have some color. My designer went for layering the skirt over the tipi image, which is a cool effect. Here are the final covers:

You’d never know it, but originally the stock image of the wagon train and landscape was black and white; my designer colorized it. That’s only the beginning of what a good designer can do. Next week, I’ll take you behind the scenes on the two most complex covers in my new set: Necessary Sins and Sweet Medicine. Psst: Joseph and David were each created from three different stock images!

On Second Thought…

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"Ring out the old, ring in the new…"
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

In November-December 2021, I completed a new edit of the entire Lazare Family Saga. I am a perfectionist; I could honestly go through these long books every year and find things to change. But I shall endeavor to be satisfied with Version 2021. My primary purpose was to make certain I was happy with the text of all four books before they become “set in stone” in audio format. This should happen in 2022, depending on how long it takes me to find a narrator and his or her availability.

As for the ebook and print editions, the beauty of being an indie author is that I can make changes at any time. These edits weren’t substantial enough to qualify as a revised edition; they were mostly a scattering of line edits for clarity.

I did tweak some scenes with Joseph and David. I have always loved these characters, because—not in spite of—their flaws. But I’ve realized that some readers find them difficult to like, so I’ve tried to soften some of Joseph and David’s reactions to keep them more sympathetic. One of my earliest readers said I have a tendency to “turn it up to 11,” referencing the hilarious film This Is Spinal Tap. And yes, yes I do. Teenage me who conceived these characters wasn’t satisfied with wounded heroes; they had to be profoundly screwed up so that their redemption was as dramatic as possible. But I sometimes crossed the line into melodrama. So I’ve tried to rein in my over-the-top impulses while retaining Joseph and David’s authentic Catholic/Victorian wounds.

I also realized that a scene between Clare and Verily was more focused on the heroism of White mistress Clare teaching her enslaved Black maid Verily than it was on Verily’s agency and desire to read. This was a holdover from an earlier draft and a less socially conscious version of myself. Shame on me, regardless. So I tweaked that scene too.

The other significant edit I made was in changing the first name of the English-born plantation steward Mr. Cromwell—most characters use his last name—from Byron to Lucas. He’s a tricky man to name because of his duality. (HERE BE POTENTIAL SPOILERS.) Cromwell is gorgeous and brilliant—and ruthless. Multiple characters mistake him for a good guy, even a romantic figure—which is exactly what he wants them to think, because he’s actually a villain.

What would you name this man?

This model is a decent physical match for Cromwell, although his attire is more Regency, a few decades before the 1850s when the character appears in my story.

(Image source: Servian Stock Images via Depositphotos)

In my early drafts, Cromwell’s first name was Lyndon. I liked the idea that “a boy named Sue,” a young man with a “weak” name, became tougher because of it. But in a pivotal scene in Book 4, Cromwell forces a female character to say his first name, and I didn’t want something “wimpy” in this context of sexual threat. Since Cromwell is Byronic—”mad, bad, and dangerous to know” in the immortal words of Lady Caroline Lamb—I changed his name to Byron. But I was never really happy with it; Byron was too on the nose, and it was “de trop” to name him after two larger-than-life English historical figures. (“De trop” = excessive, literally “too much” in French.)

The Cromwell half had to stay. In fact, this is the only character name that hasn’t changed over the course of three decades. As I explain in Book 2, this name is meant to recall the ambitious and ruthless Oliver Cromwell, “the butcher of Drogheda” (the real place in Ireland, not the fictional one in Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds). I also love the sound of Cromwell, the harsh opening and the soft conclusion—back to that duality.

I needed a first name with more subtlety, but I couldn’t find it. Then I listened to the audiobook of Courtney Milan’s A Kiss for Midwinter in-between December 2021 edits, and the name of one of her supporting characters lit a lightbulb in my brain: Lucas! It was perfect! It recalls both Lucifer, a traditional name for the Devil, and Luke from The Thorn Birds. Yet Lucas also sounds proper and sexy. Thank you, Courtney Milan! (Seriously, check out her books. She’s awesome.)

Changing Byron to Lucas created a small domino effect: I had to make sure that my find and replace function didn’t eliminate the times I still wanted to say Byron (the poet). I also had to change the name of a minor character in Book 3 who was called Luke, and I had to make sure that find and replace didn’t eliminate the times I still wanted to say Luke (the saint). Oh, the joys and challenges of being an indie author with technology at my fingertips!

An update to my formatting software, Vellum, also allowed me to add this lovely background image to the first pages of each chapter in my print editions: roses with falling petals. The symbolism is perfect for my garden-inspired love stories.

Please note: although all of these changes are now live on Amazon, they’ll take a few weeks to show up in the copies you can buy from other places like Bookshop.org. It’s complicated! And if you buy a used copy of my books, none of these updates will be present. (I the author and publisher also won’t receive a penny of compensation from such a purchase.)

Why didn’t the name Lucas—or any of these other text changes—occur to me earlier in the three decades I’ve worked on this series? I can only quote the saying: “Hindsight is 20/20.” I’ve been so close to this series for so long, I had whole passages memorized. It’s difficult to edit in such a state. Only several months’ distance and a larger pool of reader feedback have provided me with the perspective I needed.

I do apologize to any readers currently in the middle of The Lazare Family Saga who are tripped up by these changes, in particular Byron Cromwell becoming Lucas Cromwell. Hence this explanatory blog post. As Joseph would say, “Mea culpa.” You have witnessed the imperfect and dynamic creative process. 🙂

Necessary Sins Has a New Cover!

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Being an independent author means a constant, steep learning curve. Most recently, what’s literally kept me up at night is the realization that my beautiful book covers are nevertheless preventing The Lazare Family Saga from reaching readers. In the 21st century, books—especially indie books like mine—are competing in a crowded digital marketplace. A book brand-new to a reader browsing Amazon or Facebook has literally two seconds to communicate “You would like me!” before that reader scrolls past, never to think of it again. Book covers communicate “You would like me” by reminding readers of the books they love and by communicating genre. Beautiful as they may be, my current covers aren’t doing either of those essentials well.

I thought I understood good cover design. I planned my covers for years as I was writing. I even based my cover concept on other historical novels I’d seen. But those covers came from traditional publishers with marketing budgets and/or authors who were already established. I’m trying to reach people who’ve never heard of me, so my covers have to work harder.

I didn’t fully appreciate The Two-Second Rule or the importance of a cover looking good at thumbnail size. In a digital environment, a book isn’t a physical object to be leisurely admired but a tiny postage stamp that needs to work at a glance. My current covers from Bookfly Design are beautiful and they illustrate my books well. Between picture research and fine-tuning, these covers represent years of painstaking labor by both my designer and myself. I love them, they’re works of art, and I’ve got them hanging on my wall.

The four original covers of The Lazare Family Saga

Alas, I’ve learned the hard way that a beautiful work of art does not necessarily make a good book cover. At thumbnail size, these covers aren’t doing their jobs of attracting new readers. There are too many focal points: top image, decorative title plate, and bottom image. People don’t know where to look, so they look away. To quote a marketing adage: “The confused mind says ‘No.'” The first cover, the most important one, is also communicating the wrong things. It’s not saying “antebellum American South” or even “historical fiction” clearly, and many people are mistaking it for genres it’s not.

If you’ve read Necessary Sins, you know why I suggested to my designer that we feature the hands of my priest protagonist, Joseph Lazare. When he’s ordained, his hands are anointed; and when Joseph and his soulmate Tessa touch hands in the book, the moments are erotically charged. But that eroticism is apparent in the cover only if you’ve already read Necessary Sins. To people brand-new to my work, those tender joined hands apparently indicate “This is sweet and clean Christian fiction”—in other words: “There is no on-the-page sex and this book will confirm your faith.” Which is not at all what Necessary Sins is about!

Therefore, in the short term, I worked with my current designer to revise the cover of Necessary Sins so that it more clearly communicates “forbidden love in the antebellum American South involving a Catholic priest.” I was happy to find stock images we could use for both Joseph and Tessa. These images were just uploaded to stock sites in 2020, so they weren’t available when we were designing the first Necessary Sins cover back in 2019.

The new Necessary Sins cover

Can you make out the Spanish moss and the parterre garden behind the woman, typical of my Charleston, SC setting? They aren’t as clear as I’d like, but that’s a saga in and of itself. The woman’s barely-visible attire might also be mistaken for a nightgown. In the original image, she’s fully dressed.

As you may know, chopping off people’s heads is standard practice in historical fiction covers, and it certainly has its advantages. I love the dramatic lighting in the image of this priest in a confessional, but the top half of the model’s head is all wrong for Joseph. The model is a White man with brown hair in a 21st-century style; but if we crop him correctly, he’s more racially ambiguous and can “pass” for Joseph, my black-haired priest who has French and African ancestry and passes as White.

The right mood for Joseph, but the wrong looks (from Depositphotos)

As of this writing, the new cover is live only for the ebook of Necessary Sins. My designer is currently at work on the paperback and hardcover versions. The “hands cover” has become a limited first edition—so if you love it like I do, now would be the time to buy it. 😉

Prefer the ebook? You’re in luck: my shiny new cover and all its contents are on sale for just 99 cents/pence through December 8, 2021. I do like how the man and woman are separated on the new Book One of the series and united on Book Four. It’s great symbolism.

The Lazare Family Saga with the new Necessary Sins cover

However, this new version of Necessary Sins doesn’t solve the thumbnail problem or pass the Two-Second Test. In order to fix those, after much figurative hair-pulling and literal gnashing of teeth (damn TMD), I have decided to hire a new cover designer to completely redo the whole Lazare Family Saga series. I hope we’ll end up with people on all the covers, and that we’ll be able to include their full faces. After weeks of searching, I’ve found some promising new stock images.

We can’t use the shot of the priest in the confessional with the dramatic lighting, because I’m determined that Joseph will finally have the right skin tone on my upcoming covers. This is impossible with an unedited stock image, because light-skinned Black men in cassocks simply don’t exist on stock sites. But my new designer should be able to do a “head swap” and dress a light-skinned Black model in a cassock, given the right images. Have I found them? Will my designer find them? Will we go in a totally different direction with the new covers?

Only 2022 knows.

Your turn! What do you think of the new Necessary Sins cover? What would you like to see on my redesigned Lazare Family Saga covers? What are some of your favorite historical fiction or family saga covers? Are you an author with a cover revision saga of your own? I’d love to hear from you!

A Lazare Family Tree

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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!

What’s in a (Character) Name?

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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. 😉

When the Research Rabbit Hole Leads You Back Home

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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.

The Importance of Warts

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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.