So I shot lower this time and won second place in the Western Pennsylvania Romance Writers Bump Fiction contest on Saturday, October 29, 2011. Couldn’t make the festivities but I sent in the story — under the short story tab above — and won second place! So it was my first prize for fiction! Hope you like it.
Well didn’t end up being one of the finalists in the Mills & Boon contest but there were 1100 entries and only 21 finalists. It was a good experience. Also didn’t win for my Abigail Adams entry. Guess she isn’t romantic enough!!
She strikes me as someone who was romantic in a realistic kind of of way.
I also signed up at goodreads.com and at another site I learned about through the contest, smashwords.com.
There was also another site where you upload the first chapter of your novel and other people add chapters and finish the book for you. Kind of amusing but I didn’t join.
This site is a place to organize my reading likes and links.
So I’ve spent a ton of time on the Mills & Boon websitef Romanceisnotdead.com over the last several days.
They’re sponsoring a small contest of sorts for people to name their favorite heroine. They didn’t not specify that it had to be a fictional heroine, so I chose Abigail Adams, the wife of President John Adams.
I thought I’d repost it here. I’ve loved Abigail Adams since I first saw “1776″ in 1972. It’s a great movie and musical if you’ve never seen it.
One of the Mills & Boon “mentors,” Liz Fielding, commented that she’d read a romance about the Adamses called “Those Who Love” by Irving Stone. It was written in the late 1960s.
So I’m going to post below.. one thing I didn’t include was Abigail’s quote that “all men are tyrants.” Essentially she was saying that women need to be guaranteed rights because men won’t give them. Here it is:
My heroine is a real life heroine, but also the heroine of the Broadway and movie musical “1776″ — Abigail Adams, the second “first lady” of the United States. Perhaps I’m letting my patriotism get in the way, but I believe Abigail is someone we can all learn something from.
I admire Abigail Adams because she was strong enough to stand up for women’s rights at a time when women were treated more like property than partners, but also romantic enough to leave a correspondence of 1200 letters between herself and her husband that documented the love they had for each other.
Historian Joseph Ellis says the letters “constituted a treasure trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in American history.”
The movie and musical are largely based on the Adamses’ letters, and many of the letters passages’ are used in the songs. In the show, Abigail counsels her husband when he claims the rest of the congress finds him “obnoxious and disliked.”
Abigail married at 20 and bore six children, and raised the children mostly by herself in Massachusetts while her husband was away in Philadelphia, then the capital of the colonies.
Through the letters we learn that Abigail was literate, intelligent, and that her husband took her advice seriously on political matters. She was the more emotionally balanced partner.
Along with her husband, Abigail thought slavery was evil, and he was the only one of America’s “founding fathers” to have never owned a slave. She once took a black youth into her home over the objections of neighbors to teach him to read and write.
As a teen, she is said to have had her head “forever buried in some book.”
She was the first wife of a president to live in the White House, and took pains to turn it into both a historical place and a home. She believed in women’s rights and is believed to have influenced her husbands views on how women should be treated in the late 18th century.
At the end of her life she wrote a series of letters to Thomas Jefferson, who was long her husband’s chief political opponent.
I keep waiting for someone to write a novel about Abigail Adams, detailing how she lived her remarkable life. Maybe it’ll be me….
Abigail Adams, the second First Lady
The beginnings of a blog are always difficult to start. But this one centers on my career as a romance novelist and writer. I have begun a romance novel, Comanche Pearl, about a woman who is kidnapped by Indians in Texas in the 19th century. She mates with an Indian and has his children, but is effectively kidnapped away from the Indians — by a white man who was trying to protect her when he was a boy. It’s a love story, but a bit of a complex one, as Rebecca copes with coming to grips with the culture clash she has to muddle through. Living as an Indian is NOT like living as a white woman in 19th century Texas.
Here’s the first chapter if you’d like to read it. I’ve entered it into a Mills & Boon contest for new writers. “New Voices,” that is. We’ll see how the public comments on it!
It should be noted that the Comanches were one of the most difficult Indian tribes to control in the 19th century. They were on the plains, racing on horses long after most Indian tribes had settled on reservations. Rebecca — known as Wheat Woman among the Comanche — has some of this untamed spirit within her — and most of the white world — especially the white women — don’t like it.
I am still searching for an agent and/or a publisher.
I’ve also written a short story, The Other Side of the Mirror for the Western Pennsylvania Romance Writers “Bump in the Night” Flash Fiction Contest.
It’s a contest for paranormal stories of one thousand words or less.
I had never thought of writing a paranormal story before, but the idea came to me very easily and was very easily written, so maybe it was meant to “be.” Let me know what you think. I could win a $10 gift certificate and a a year’s
membership in the group, which would be good.
Judging is on Oct. 29, so it’s kind of a Halloween thing. Let’s hope for the best!
