The
Power of History lingers in the toolbox of authors. Every book written
with diligence includes some research. Even Sci-Fi and Fantasy writers
have to research what often is a thin line between truth and
imagination. Science breaks barriers all the time, turning what once was
a dream or quirk of imagination into reality. Airplanes, automobiles,
spaceships, submarines, reactors and robots—all were once locked in the
imagination and dreams of inventors and writers. There was a time when
such dreamers were ridiculed or even killed. Remember, the earth was deemed flat, until ancient navigators proved otherwise.
History always fascinates me, particularly the drama of conflict, its
collateral damage and after-shocks. You’d think that lessons learned
from the world’s earliest conflicts to Cyber Wars would serve as
cautionary tales for the future. But human nature prevails over caution.
And conflict always makes for a good story. Whether it’s spun into a
tapestry of war and/or romance between characters, it will be a measured
requirement by agents, editors and ultimately readers who determine the
next BEST SELLER.Think of Gone With The Wind, a novel
which rolled multiple conflicts—real and imagined—into an international
best seller that remains on every list of all-time favorite novels. Granted, the movie version gave it a huge boost. Casualties
of America’s Civil War reached 1.5 million—more than all combined wars
involving American soldiers. Over 65,000 books have been written about
this devastating period. A hundred seventy years later, that war still
engages controversy. Think about the recent statue and flag conflicts in the South. Collateral
damage lives long when immortalized in written history about a war that
decimated America’s population, ended slavery, accelerated Industry and
subsequently grasped the 19th Century need for American settlement of the West. (Another favorite era of romance and tragedy.)
Almost
40 years ago, I was writing my first novel. The storyline covered the
colorful era that accelerated western settlement after the Civil War.
Western posts meant to protect settlers from Indians were springing up
everywhere in the American West. The novel’s POV was from a German/Irish
heroine and a half-Sioux hero who as children were caught in opposing
massacres between Indians and whites. Navigating through historic times
and their own prejudices, they grow up to find each other in a love
storywith conflict that was an epic write—over 700 pages. The
size for a lst novel had something to do with ultimate rejection.
Devastated, I packaged the typed ms. and put it on ice. Literally. For
30 years it was shelved in a garage freezer while children, pets, homes
and horses took control of my life.
Writing
was on the back burner, unless it was an occasional article or short
story. However, one of the living characters in that huge novel was General Luther Prentice Bradley, the
commander of Ft. Laramie from 1874-76. Coincidentally, this same
commander had survived the Civil War. While researching that first
novel, I had written to Bradley’s living grandson in 1978. Prentice
Bradley, the aging grandson sent me valuable historic anecdotes his
father recalled as a child living at Ft. Laramie. It was many years
later that coincidence. . . or karma would defrost the freezer novel,
which was eventually scanned into a computer word file—with a lot of
formatting errors to correct.
The Publishing Industry at the time was just beginning to recognize
the threat of self-published authors who dared to forego agents and the
dreaded “slush pile” of hope. Still, I began to pitch the book to agents
at Writing Conferences and got similar blowback. Too long. Could it be a series? Could you write a shorter book first, establish a website, platform and base? From
a dozen Conferences all over the country, I learned what I didn’t know I
needed to know and much of that had to do with persistence and timing.
