Rescue Dogs and the Making of a Subplot
February 13, 2013 by ciji · Leave a Comment
Like many millions on our planet, I love animals and have had a cat or a dog in my world virtually all my life. My current pooches, seen here around Christmastime, are two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels: Ensign Aubrey and Charlock (a.k.a Cholly Knickerbocker). They prove to me each day that dogs teach us our best lessons about noble behavior and unconditional love.
Around the time I was noodling about the plot for my stand-alone contemporary sequel to the “time-slip” novel I wrote nearly fifteen years ago, A Cottage by the Sea–Hurricane Issac was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. One day last August, I did an Internet search to see if an amazing group based in Ojai near Santa Barbara called the Search Dog Foundation would be sending dog/handler teams as first responders, an assignment they have shouldered for many of the cataclysmic events this past decade: 9/11; the Oklahoma City bombing; hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and the earthquake in Haiti, and even traveling as far as Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
I began to drill down deeper on their amazing website and learned more about their fantastic work of rescuing dogs languishing in shelters (where many unadopted animals, sadly, are ultimately put to death) and then training these lucky canines survivors to be part of search-and-rescue teams all over the United States. The Search Dog Foundation, the brain child of the amazing Wilma Melville (on left, red jacket), is in the process of building a $14 million dollar K9 training “ranch” where firefighters and police officers are brought together with their newly-graduated “partners.” As I gazed at their intriguing picture gallery on the site—I had a major epiphany!
The new book would return to central Cornwall where a craggy, windswept coastline, woods and moors often lured “day trippers” to this glorious part of Britain into dangerous situations requiring all out search and rescue efforts. Did first responders in the UK use dogs on their search-and-rescue teams, I wondered?
On my first Google look-see, up popped all volunteer “Cornwall Search and Rescue Team”—and the stellar men and women who employ air-scenting dogs to help find missing persons who may have fallen off a cliff or down one of the many abandoned tin or copper mines in the area, or have wandered into trouble on the rough terrain of the many moors.
As I dug further into this subject, a sub-plot unfolded effortlessly: that of stories about these wonderful people who bring others to safety in cooperation with official “rescue” organizations and institutions such as the Royal Air Force, H.M. Coastguard, and the local constabularies of Devon and Cornwall that coordinate both military and civilian enterprises engaged in search-and-rescue work. Hey, even Prince William is a part of this world!
And then another brainwave! Why couldn’t the hero be a veteran in the dog bomb-sniffing squad, late of the British forces in Afghanistan? I remembered seeing an image of a TDH (tall, dark and handsome) fellow in a Ralph Lauren ad who was the perfect “model” for Sebastian Pryce, a mysterious figure that returns to Cornwall with a newly-trained search dog—and some secrets of his own.
He suddenly appears at Barton Hall, a shabby-chic castle on a remote cliff near the village of Mevagissey, with the novice T-Rex, a Border Collie who very inappropriately attempts to have his way with a female dog on the estate belonging to an American woman who just stepped out of a battered Land Rover!
Suddenly the “search dog subplot” became key to the entire novel, That Summer in Cornwall, about this same American who is stunned to learn that she is now the legal guardian of a child she’s never met. At the urging of the child’s Anglo-American aunt (Lady Blythe Barton-Teague, heroine of the first novel), Meredith Champlin and her eleven-year-old “Beverly Hills Brat” decamp for Cornwall for the summer and—
Are you surprised I felt the need to return to the enchanting land of my Ware ancestors to refresh the research? The workings of a novelist’s mind are mysterious, indeed…
Making “The Lists”
September 5, 2012 by ciji · Leave a Comment
You’ve heard the line “I was an overnight success after twenty-five years?” Well, that certainly applied to yours truly when I received an email early in the summer from my publicist at Sourcebooks/Landmark . “Great news!” chortled Beth Pehlke. “Your book Midnight on Julia Street is going to be a Nook Daily Find August 24th!” The price would be dropped to $1.99 that day as a way of encouraging new readers to discover a bargain novel by Ciji Ware…and hopefully be inspired to buy my other books at full price.
I figured that was very nice and put it in my electronic date book to remind myself to go online to have a look when the date rolled around and post something on my Facebook Author Page–and then promptly forgot about it.
Much to my astonishment, by noon on the 24th, Midnight on Julia Street (a book published originally in 1999 and reissued in June of 2011) “opened” in the #2 slot on the Barnes & Noble list that day…and a few hours later was #1! I checked that title on Amazon, and lo-and-behold, the price had dropped to $1.99 there, too. Now I had a nice “come on” book on both big online sites. It was exciting for an author who’d written eight books, only one of which made a few city lists like the Los Angeles Times for a few weeks, and another on an Extended List (above the 100 mark)–but never anything “national.”
Then, exactly a week later, my cell phone rang on Thursday, August 30th, and my editor, Deb Werksman said excitedly, “Julia Street has made the USA Today Bestsellers List at #54!” Soon my writer friend Peter Lerangis from New York posted on Facebook that I should definitely be doing the Happy Dance as this list is a “bar code” compilation of every book in America that was sold last week, including cookbooks, self-help, nonfiction, “coffee table books,” and–yes–fiction. “This is serious stuff,” said he.
The following day, Friday August 31, my cell phone rang again, and I swear, when I saw it was Deb Werksman calling for the second time in two days, my heart stopped and I thought, “They made a mistake…I didn’t actually make USA Today…” and she’s calling to break the news.
“Why would your editor call two days in a row?” she asked, and I could hear the excitement in her voice. Not waiting for my guess, she announced, “Julia Street made TWO lists in the New York Times this week! You’re #18 on the New York Times Bestsellers e-book list, right after Stephen King and you’re #27 on the combined e-book and print list between James Patterson and Danielle Steele!”
“What???!!!”
I was having coffee at Poggio’s–a wonderful trattoria that serves great Italian java in the mornings– with my dog walking group, and I think my screams shattered a few cups of foaming lattes, to say nothing of nearly scaring my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Ensign Aubrey, witless. Fortunately, I was smiling and doing a jig, so everyone there assumed no one had died. I told my walking pals what had just happened and they told everyone else while I danced around the outdoor bistro tables, trying to hear what else Deb was saying about such wonderful news.
Later that day, author pals from all over the country started posting my happy news. Then the site Goodreads posted my announcement and a bunch of other readers and authors weighed in.
What struck me, when I finally calmed down, was that we are in a totally new world as authors. For the first time in history, there is very little standing between an author and her readers and a book like Midnight on Julia Street never really “goes out of print” anymore. Here it is, eleven years after its first edition, making the all-important New York Times & USA Today lists for the first time! Thanks to the Internet and online book sales, a novel that had a modest distribution in print back in the day can always–given a late-life electronic push–find new audiences that, in this case, were attracted by the price (a bargain); by New Orleans (the setting) during a week when Hurricane Isaac was bearing down on the Gulf Coast; by their love of good music and food (which play a secondary role in the plot); and by a media-based story (faintly autobiographical) about a tired, worn-out television reporter who successively gets fired from her on-camera jobs for –gasp!–telling the truth.
Talk about a shot-in-the-arm for a tired novelist and “recovering” TV and radio journalist!
Now, each morning since Deb Werksman’s calls, I cannot wait to put the seat of my pants on the chair and my hands on the keyboard. “Making the Lists” for the first time is truly inspirational for a writer who’s been in this game a very long time….
“YOU’RE A FINALIST!”
August 14, 2012 by ciji · Leave a Comment
Every once in a while during my twenty-five years slogging away as a novelist, there are surprises that land on my doorstep–or in this case, via my InBox.
Today, the president of Women Writing the West, Suzanne Lyon (a novelist herself, of course) sent me word that my historical A RACE TO SPLENDOR was one of three finalists in the coveted (at least in my world) category of Historical Fiction for the 2012 WILLA Literary Awards, presented in October of this year for works published in 2011.
As I said today to several friends, “Being a finalist in the book world is a little like living in Hollywood until they hand out the Academy Awards. One finds oneself often saying: ‘It’s an honor just to be nominated’ “–and in this case, that is absolutely a true statement!
Willa Cather, as anyone knows who had eighth grade English with Mr. Pritchard at Sunset School, was the Pulitzer Prize winning author of novels chronicling frontier life on the Great Plains in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark.
I was one of the first wave of writers to join the then fledgling WWW. A majority of New York editors in the early 1990s (and some currently) found any stories set west of the Hudson River and before WW II as “unlikely to succeed in the marketplace.” SPLENDOR certainly was a novel that fell under that rubric.
In 2000, shortly after my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, I had begun to research a novel about the real life figure, Julia Morgan, the first licensed woman architect in California, restoring the devastated Fairmont Hotel in the wake of the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. My (then) agent clucked and nodded discouragingly when I submitted the book proposal. My (then) editor was totally unenthusiastic about such a project. And when I went ahead and wrote the book anyway, my (then) publisher turned it down, flat.
This was, as all writers of fiction will recall, just about the time the publishing industry was seriously starting to implode in response to the Digital Revolution. No New York publisher was likely to take a chance on anything other than another Harry Potter book, or perhaps allowing John Grisham to write a nice children’s story.
As is so often the case with books that ultimately find an audience, I had become one of those authors completely beguiled by her characters, the setting, and the drama of creating for a modern audience stirring events from the past. Writing with my hair on fire, I was literally unable to let go of an idea I believed deserved to see the light of day. I would, by turns, hang out in the opulent lobby of the Fairmont atop Nob Hill, or dig into the archives to find pictures of the devastation that Julia Morgan faced, only 34 years old and fresh out of architecture school.
Looking back at this painful period, I suspect I did six or seven complete rewrites as different “publishing professionals” gave me their worldly-wise input. Finally, after a few more rejections, I put the book in a drawer and returned to my Day Job, writing nonfiction (as in Rightsizing Your Life: Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most, Hachette/Springboard Press, 2007).
This was, of course, a career move that helped me pay the light bill, and I am forever grateful to the wonderful editors Jill Cohen and Karen Murgulo who published that tome, and to the Wall Street Journal that dubbed it “One of the Top 5 Books on Retirement” the year it came out.
But meanwhile, my heart was yearning to return to writing historical fiction and my new agent, the fearless Celeste Fine, now of Sterling Lord Literistic, gathered all my rights from the sadly-out-of-print Ware Oeuvre and pitched five historicals to the redoubtable Deb Werksman who, along with the amazing CEO at Sourcebooks, Dominique Riccah, were founding the historical imprint, Landmark. Deb knew my work, made a package deal to bring out reprints with some well-planned revisions and totally wonderful covers, and then asked the fateful question: “Has she written anything new?”
“New?” Not exactly, but I searched my electronic files for the version of the newly-titled A RACE TO SPLENDOR I felt was truest to my original vision, and we emailed it directly to her, saying “It’s a draft, mind you, and needs some work.”
They bought the book! And yes, thanks to some sage and insightful suggestions from the very experienced and tactful Ms. Werksman, I did a 20% rewrite/tweak and the book was published with its fabulous cover in April, 2011 (the 105th anniversary of the 1906 cataclysm), given a spectacular publication party in the penthouse of the Fairmont — and received wonderful reviews, I’m happy to note.
And now it’s one of three finalists for the prestigious WILLA Literary Awards in the Historical Fiction category.
If that doesn’t give poor, benighted writers a sense of hope, I don’t know what will… It took more than a decade from the conception of the idea to craft the fictional telling of the amazing early California women architects –until today’s announcement.
So on this particular novel, for sure, it is an honor “merely” to be nominated…and to have one’s name mentioned in the same sentence as Willa Cather.
Natchez Revisited on the Veranda…
March 11, 2012 by ciji · Leave a Comment
My latest release from Sourcebooks Landmark, A Light on the Veranda, was March 1, and with it, the usual “guest blogging” I’m asked to do on some terrific historical novel sites that I will link to below. What has been such a joy is to have dug through masses of photographs that I took during the research period into the “Town that Time Forgot” for the stand-alone sequel to Midnight on Julia Street.
With every novel I have ever written, there is always a “story-behind-the-story” and with Veranda this certainly held true. Rather than retell my various adventures, I thought I’d just post the guest blogs as they hit the Internet.
Here are links to the first three:
And also Great Minds Think Aloud
If you enjoy these three, it would be terrific to let the blog hosts know! And come visit me at Facebook:
Culinary Research in the Big Easy
January 11, 2012 by ciji · Leave a Comment
A wonderful new “Author’s Cut” edition of my novel, Midnight on Julia Street, was recently released by Sourcebooks, and prompted so many memories from the days when I was researching life in modern day and 1840 New Orleans. This “time-slip” story deals with burnt out television reporter who arrives in the Big Easy with high hopes that at last, she can tell the truth as a journalist without getting fired. (No such luck, I’m afraid…)
Julia Street–once the heart of the cotton warehouse region of the city in the 19th century–is host these days to trendy galleries and fabulous eateries like Emeril’s. 
This part of town became the focus of many a foray I made into the wonderful world of Louisiana cuisine that, at times, figured in the story of a young professional getting to learn about a city famous for a certain flavor of magic and mystery. Scents, especially, became the “way back” for the heroine inexplicably to slip between the city’s storied past when “Cotton was King” and the modern day of cell phones, digital news-gathering, and a city that never stops celebrating.
Part of that celebrating that I had the good fortune to witness generally involved that most hallowed of all culinary traditions in NOLA: making a good Gumbo! Everyone, it seemed, had his or her own special recipe or way of making a roux–the “building block” of any respectable gumbo. There are seafood gumbos, chicken and sausage gumbos, even vegetarian gumbos, but the one I developed over the last fifteen years was made either with quail, Rock Cornish Game Hens, or–if pressed for time–organic chicken thighs…or even a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket!
So, if you want to add to the sensory experience of reading my historical novel Midnight on Julia Street, get into the spirit of the Mardi Gras season that started with Twelfth Night (January 6, 2012) and will run until Fat Tuesday (February 21) by trying out my version of New Orleans Gumbo as posted in my blog…and if you like your gumbo spicier, just add pepper flakes and more cayenne!
