Another excerpt

I'll post a few of these excerpts I find while editing, and then start posting about the third book in the Bayou Beni series.

More from "Sowing Freedom, Reaping Joy"

The night of Jean-Luc and Pascal’s departure found Margaret, Eileen and Ruth in the kitchen after dinner washing up. Ruth thought this a perfect time to ask Margaret about love. 

“Mama,” asked Ruth, “When did you know you were in love with Daddy? What did it feel like?”

Margaret looked appraisingly at her daughter. “Why ask, Ruth? Has someone caught your eye?” Margaret was scrolling through the eligible men at Teach Abhainn and couldn’t think of one that would match well with her Ruth.

Ruth looked at Eileen to see if it was appropriate to share her friend’s secret. Eileen gave a slight nod, so Ruth plunged in. “Not me, Mama. Eileen thinks she may be falling in love with Gaston.”

Margaret reached out and took Eileen’s hand. “Well, he is quite handsome, and I imagine you find him exotic, being from New Orleans and having spent considerable time in France.”

Eileen blushed, and answered. “Oh, Margaret, at first I did find Gaston intimidating for his good looks and life experience. But the more time I have spent with him the more I have grown to really like him. I like his kindness, the way he thinks, the way he is slow to judge. He is also very respectful of my knowledge with the horses, and has even listened to my advice over Seamus’ on occasion. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think. When I am worried, being with him calms me. But when I see him looking at me a certain way, my heart races and I can feel my face flushing. Is this what love feels like?”

“Oh, child, “ said Margaret, “Love is the easiest and hardest thing in the world to describe. Have I ever told you me and Roby’s story?”

“Mama,” said Ruth, “You never told me you and Daddy’s story.”

“Well,” said Margaret, “You all needed to be ready to hear it. And now you are. An important truth before I tell you this story. Many love stories are ordinary. They aren’t like the operas and the plays in the theater. Many a young man or woman looks for a story like on a stage, and that is not how real people fall in love. But for each couple, their own love story is magical to them."

Editing has an up side

I completed my first edit of the manuscript for "Sowing Freedom, Reaping Joy".  Editing is hard and tedious, but I found a couple of passages while editing that I really am proud of.

Here is one of them:

Jean-Luc leaned forward.  “How do you do it? How do you keep such a deep and abiding faith

in a God that allowed you to be enslaved?  I question Him sometimes, and I am ridiculously
blessed.”

Roby reached out and took Margaret’s hand as he responded.  “God never said it would be
easy, just that He would hear us when we cry out to Him.   Jesus taught us that we would
all have a cross to bear. My cross has been slavery, and that has been a heavy cross.  
I have lived with the weight of slavery my entire life. I have woken up every morning, and
gone to sleep each night knowing that I could be sold away from my family, or my family
sold away from me.  I have never forgotten how it felt when Mr. Ronan purchased my
mother and me away from our family in Virginia. But in spite of that heavy burden,
there have been many blessings. I have a beautiful wife and children.  All of our children
are living, not a single child lost to accident or disease. Mr. Ronan was a benevolent

owner, and Cormac and Maeve O’Malley the same. Seamus and Eileen are family.
So while the Good Lord gave me a heavy cross, he gave me more blessings.  And now,
the greatest blessing of all is within sight. It is easy to stay faithful to God. He didn’t
make me a slave. He gave man free will, and some use that will in ways that turn away
from God. Just because there is evil in the world it doesn’t change the fact that God is good.”

Worrying

After working on my historical novel on and off for about four years, it is finally complete.  One of the things that happened in the process was me having a stroke in May 2015.

It was a minor stroke, and I have made a full recovery, but for a while my short-term memory was unreliable.  I would research a particular aspect of life in 1854, and promptly forget what I had researched.

I needed to rehab my hand, so I switched focus to crochet for a while, and then got the idea for my modern novels and finished them first.

In all that time, there has been an awful lot of change in the world, and I started worrying that the picture I paint in my historical novel would be offensive to some people, as if I am trying to whitewash history.

The book is the first in a series I'm calling "As It Could Be".  In the book, a devout group of Catholics create a community that is welcoming and supportive of all God's children.  This includes former slaves, native Americans, and French immigrants and their children.  The community will grow in future novels to include other immigrants to Louisiana.

My original intent in writing the books was to imagine a world where people like the deBouchet's and the Chauvin's and the Allard's and the Thomas's actually existed, and changed the course of history for themselves and the members of their community.  But as I progressed in my writing, and as the world progressed in the understanding of privilege and cultural appropriation, I worried that people would view my book much differently than I had intended it.

The more I thought about it, the more tangled my thoughts became.  Until I had a moment of clarity.  There were good people in 1854, who did try to create a more equitable society in the United States, and in Louisiana.  They were abolitionists, and conductors on the Underground Railroad.  They were farmers who supported the other farmers in their community, regardless of skin color or nation of origin.

There were colleges in the United States that welcomed women and people of color.  There were schools in New Orleans who did as well.

While my books are undeniably fiction, and present a view of history that is not traditional, I believe the people in my books could have existed.

As the books progress through time to the present, there will be accounts of the darkness that exists in life, but the light will always win. 

I need to believe that in my writing, in the same way I need to believe that in my life.  I hope that my stories bring that light to others as well, and help them to believe in a world that is as it could be, rather than as it is.

Third Manuscript Submitted

I did it!

I finished my historical novel, "Sowing Freedom, Reaping Joy" on Tuesday.  Today, I submitted the manuscript to the US Copyright Office.  Now comes the hard part, editing and formatting for paperback and Kindle.

I'll be blogging more again, as I talk about the book and what I hope people take from it when they read it.

I'm anxious to start on the third book in the Bayou Beni series.  The tentative title is "Blessings from the Past".  What do you think?