But it didn’t.

I read it and thought, “Yup.”

The specifics were new to me, the number of signatures, the tidy efficiency of the process. The rest wasn’t. I recognized it with the weary dispassion of meeting an old enemy. One who’s been fought many times.

So, there you are. Again.

The power to decide what happens to a woman, what she owns (including her children and her own body) even whether her account of reality is legitimate, is held in many hands. Husbands. Fathers. Judges. Doctors. Clergy. Legislators.

That power remains where it’s always resided, it’s simply using new instruments to achieve the same end: conservatorships, custody courts, involuntary commitment proceedings, statehouses, Congress. It’s still viable. We’ve just added more forms, with better fonts.

There is a reason the novel that has been dogging me for years is set in 1898. Not because the past is atmospheric, or fascinating (okay, partly because it’s atmospheric and fascinating). And definitely not because I wanted to provide the reader an escape.

Quite the opposite, if anything. History provides the leeway a modern setting doesn’t. Set my story in the present and the reader immediately begins to examine the mechanics. Could this really happen? Could that judge legally do such a thing? I would do my research, make the case airtight, and still lose readers’ attention to spite-googling.

But set it in 1898 and the reader is more willing to accept the premise. Yes, this could happen. Yes, it did happen.

Which leaves room for more important questions. Not only “how did this happen” but “what factors made it possible?” Not just “That’s monstrous” but “I know that monster.”

That’s one of the reasons I write about the past. Not because I have discovered some intriguing bit of esoteria I feel obliged to present to you (though there is plenty of that. But for other posts) but because so much of our present was wired in the past.

And if we examine the blueprints for that wiring, we might see how it works and see why it was designed that way and, yes, see the architect.

There he is. Again.

But why a murder mystery? I’m notoriously squeamish. Despise torture porn in any form. Won’t touch a book that graphically describes the infliction of harm. So why?

Because there are no larger stakes. I could write a mystery about the discovery of a lost heir, what happened to a missing person, how an online scam was uncovered. Each has potential for being an absorbing intellectual puzzle and I love a good puzzle. Parsing a tidy little problem is akin to sitting on a riverbank unraveling a wind knot: it becomes its own pleasure (and, to those eyeing that sentence skeptically because they have tried unraveling their own wind knots, yes, really).

But the mysteries I relish most are those that arrange themselves not around an act of violence, but around the motive for the violence. “How” is usually a matter of following a map of clues. “Why” takes a writer on a trip no map covers, navigating the places between what a person did and what allowed them to do it.

Which brings me to my corpse. I mentioned him in a early post, then followed up with one about parsnips. For the record, that was me being arcane. This is me being frank. My mystery is set in a forgotten corner of turn-of-the-century Manhattan. It is finished, and it is currently off seeking its fortune while I wait. I hate waiting. So, I’ll be bothering you with these essays? posts? in the meantime.

Some of you who have known me as a romance writer may be reading this with a raised eyebrow. I get it. I spent more than twenty books exploring how people fall in love, which has to be one of the Great Mysteries. But while writing those books I often opened doors that led to more mysterious places. Some dark. All of them fascinating. And some irresistible. I had to regretfully close those doors, because what was inside them had no place in my romances.

Well, it turns out, not only am I bad at waiting, I am bad at resisting. And, eventually, I didn’t.

The past several years of exploring the world have filled me with questions I didn’t realize I was collecting. Questions that led back to those doors. My home in the Driftless has given my curiosity room to wander. Here, I can stand in a spring-fed stream teasing apart a wind knot (literal and figurative) and follow one stubborn strand wherever it leads.

Sometimes it leads to murder.

And why.

We bought 20 acres of degraded pasture because the view from up-top was beautiful. Stunning. Soul nurturing. The view up close is less so, especially to someone whose eye is trained to see what shouldn’t be there. And what shouldn’t be in our prairie is a legion of alien invaders like buckthorn, honeysuckle, musk thistle. But worst of them all is Wild Parsnip which comes complete with a Thanos grade weapon: sap.

The goo running through Wild Parsnip is phytophototoxic. If it gets on your skin, you will get second-degree burns, blisters, boils. Maybe a hospital room. In your eyes, it can blind you. But here’s the alien, weird as shit part: Only if the sap on your skin is exposed to sunlight.

No sun; no problem. Sun light on goo? Uh-oh.

When I realized the extent of the problem on our land I came up with a simple, ingenious solution. We go scorched earth. And I meant that as an actual proposal. Poison every green thing on our parcel to be rid of the terrifying poison of one particular plant. Fortunately (I guess) cooler minds and stronger backs prevailed. Those would be my husband’s.

Because, he assures me, the better way is slow. Though, lets’ be honest, it offers none of the satisfaction of total annihilation.

Parsnip is a biennial. So the plan is to mow or dig the plants after they bloom but before the bloom sets seed, late enough that the fresh growth won’t get a seed head in either. Then again next year. And again the year after. You aren’t killing the plant so much as starving its grandchildren, drawing down the seed bank one denied generation at a time, until there’s no parsnip left to sprout.

And we, okay, fine, he, does it in helmet, face shield, long sleeves, and gloves, often in ninety-degree heat. We, he, looks magnificently miserable, like someone paying for some pretty nasty sins. Hour after hour, day after day. And still every single walk through the meadow turns up one more we missed.

That’s the part that sticks with me. We shouldn’t be out looking for parsnip. We should take the win, and see all the places it isn’t. But the places it isn’t keep turning up a straggler…

And somewhere in there, my friends, is the entire experience of doing a revision. Gotta love a good metaphor.

And just because I was silent didn’t mean I wasn’t working. I was. And I wasn’t exactly silent, either. I told my agent, my husband, my long suffering friends and the lady at the dog park who recognized me. Somehow. Though I admit to telling the lady with the desperate assuredness that comes of reciting the same words for years because after so long people start to doubt you.

And not without reason. I’ve been writing this dang historical mystery on and off since I “retired.” Sometimes it left me alone for a couple months, but I could never forget it. It just lurked in the night, waiting for my head to hit the pillow to fill me with the unique Guilt that only an unfinished novel can produce.

Well, it won. I eventually excised my writerly demons and wrote the drat thing. And the truth is, the drat thing is… wonderful.

Now, if you’ve read me, you’ve read Historical Romance. If you read what comes next, you’ll be reading a historical mystery, rich with character, detail and a devastating crime. Water charts its own course and that sort of thing…

My agent got it a few weeks ago and now…well, we will see. In the meantime, I’m going to write here, unhoarding all the research and fascinating historical and psychological minutiae I uncovered along the way. There are things about 1898 New York I cannot wait to inflict on you.

There will be other stuff too. Food, because I am One with All Things Food. Fly-fishing. A 20-acre prairie we are fighting to restore and Roo, my 85-pound baby, descended from greyhounds, German shepherds, and a valiant line of pit bulls. He is, as of this writing, valiantly challenging a branch that blew across the drive.

I’ve missed this. Pull up a chair.

Here’s my entire pitch for First Knight, my inclusion in the anthology Parallel Truths: It’s first and foremost a romance, one I had a blast writing. It has a battle-weary knight, a take-charge heroine, marriage-by-proxy, enemies-to-lovers— In essence, all the good stuff, and all brought to vibrant life under the amazing, talented hand of Álvaro Sarraseca. Because second of most, it’s a graphic novel, and isn’t that pretty dang exciting?

If you’d like to take a peek and get in before the door closes on Friday, here’s the link.

Then it’s back to the usual, which around here could be 1898 New York or the elderberry blooms enticing me to try my hand at cordial-making.

See you soon,

Connie

As a writer, I spend hundreds of pages (and dozens of times that many hours) bringing a story to life in a reader’s imagination. A book, a novella, relies on the gradual unveiling of characters and relationship and plot. It’s a different animal from the visual arts, where a world can be revealed at a glance.

And when you love a story, you just want to see it—as long as it aligns with the one you’ve built behind your eyes. Show a reader the “wrong” actor wearing a beloved character’s name and you haven’t added anything to the experience, you’ve depleted it.

A graphic novel offers something in between. It preserves the intimacy of reading while adding a visual dimension that can reveal something entirely new. A gesture. A look. The Moment. It’s an exciting and new way of experiencing story.

That’s what excites me most about having First Knight included in the Parallel Truths Kickstarter, where my battle-weary knight and the bloodthirsty wife-by-proxy he forgot he even had, have been brought to a new kind of life under the talented hand of Álvaro Sarraseca.

The Parallel Truths Kickstarter runs through June 26. If you’d like to experience First Knight as a graphic novel, it’s here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/authorventuresllc/parallel-truths-a-multi-genre-graphic-novel-anthology?ref=e51nuo

I’m Connie Brockway. If you are a Historical Romance reader, you may have read one of my 20-plus books. I know. I’ve been quiet for quite a while. I’d like to claim I was lying on a beach, twirling a paper umbrella in a piña colada while letting the well refill. But the truth is the well was never dry, it just tapped into a different source. I’ve been writing the whole time, you see, but from a different place.

Tomorrow, June 9, the first “new thing” comes out of it. It is a Kickstarter for a graphic novel anthology called Parallel Truths, a collection of multi-genre stories from twelve writers, including Andy Weir, Eloisa James, Tony Lee, and nine others. My contribution is a medieval love story called First Knight, illustrated by Álvaro Sarraseca, who draws the way I hope I write.

He survived the Crusades. Now he has to survive his wife.

→ Parallel Truths on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/authorventuresllc/parallel-truths-a-multi-genre-graphic-novel-anthology?ref=e51nuo

If the campaign is the kind of thing you back, you back it. If it isn’t, no harm done.

And now the other new things , in shorthand.

An idea gleaned from a local headline twenty years ago would NOT leave me alone. It morphed into a historical mystery, now finished and waiting to take flight. I’ve set Fallen Ladies in 1898 New York, not drawing-room New York City, but Inwood: a rural enclave uneasily balanced between the modern and the past. In it, a fallen society widow finds a body. More about that as the wheels of publication turn.

There is also a Regency novella series called Fetching Love coming in April 2027, written with my longtime friend Eloisa James. Four stories, one Kickstarter, a generous portion supporting Bond Between rescue.

And there is my greyhound(ish) Roo, descended from a noble line of greyhounds and German shepherds, and a less noble line of pit bulls. He weighs 85 pounds and is afraid of leaves. You’ll meet him a lot.

I told you I’d been busy. Pull up a chair.