Author: tammayauthor

Writing has been Tam May’s voice since the age of fourteen. She writes stories set in the past that feature sassy and sensitive women characters. Tam is the author of the Adele Gossling Mysteries which take place in the early 20th century and features suffragist and epistolary expert Adele Gossling whose talent for solving crimes doesn’t sit well with the town’s more conventional ideas about women’s place. She has also written historical fiction about women breaking loose from the social and psychological expectations of their era. Although Tam left her heart in San Francisco, she lives in the Midwest because it’s cheaper. When she’s not writing, she’s devouring everything classic (books, films, art, music) and concocting yummy plant-based dishes.

From Novel to Series: The Evolution of The Waxwood Series

Photo Credit: Biarritz – La Grande Plage – L’Hôtel du Palais – L’Église Orthodoxe, Rafael Toussaint, 2013, oil on wood: Colibrix/Wikimedia Commons /CC BY SA 3.0

If you were to poll most writers, you’d probably find many of their books and series have a story behind them — how they came to be, what sparked the idea, what real life people inspired the characters. That’s because we take inspiration from everywhere, everything, and everyone. There’s an old joke that says, “Don’t piss off a writer or you might find yourself as the character who gets killed off in their next book”. This is an exaggeration, of course, but the fact remains we gather threads of inspiration from the world around us, just like any creative person.

The inspiration and evolution of Waxwood Series is a little complicated but I’ll try to explain it.

The Waxwood Series began as a single, stand-alone work of contemporary literary fiction in 2004. I was going through some heavy-duty family issues at the time (which I’m not at liberty to disclose) that forced me re-evaluate the meaning of family and look at my own psychological reality. I saw for the first time some of the denials and illusions I had been holding on to since a child. It was a difficult time for me, and while I had no interest in writing a memoir or a “based on true events” kind of story, I was interested in this idea of how, when we face our past as adults, we see things as they really are, which aren’t always as rosy as we think they are or were. But only through this kind of self-honesty can we start to heal those wounds, stop repeating past mistakes, and move on to the future.

I knew I wanted to write a complex story about one family where the members were in denial of their dysfunctionality and the toll it had taken on their lives. I wanted to write a story where circumstances forced member os the family to face those demons, and I was curious who would be able to handle them and who wouldn’t. The book I ended up writing had 3 separate narrative voices: The adult daughter’s, the adult son’s, and a voice that belonged to the young woman who came into their lives and changed them all. The story was about a well-to-do San Francisco family spending their summer in a resort hotel whose relationship crumbles because of an ambitious, ruthless young woman looking to exploit the vulnerable, needy mother and her wealth to get ahead in her career as a chef.

I finished the first draft, roughly 85,000 words. But when I set out to revise the book, I kept coming up against a brick wall of dissatisfaction, doubt, and anxiety. I kept changing the story, the characters, putting the book aside, then going back to it. I was convinced it was just an amateur effort and should be shelved, for, although I have been writing since I was a teenager, this book was my first serious dip into psychological literary fiction.

And yet, the family in the book wouldn’t let me go. It took me many years to realize why I was so attached to them — although their background and situation was entirely different from mine, they were dealing with emotional and psychological issues that were close to my own experience.

When I began self-publishing in 2017, I picked up the book again. Reading through it, I realized the story of this San Francisco family needed to be told so that their psychological evolution was the focus rather than the idea of a stranger infiltrating into their lives and ruining that relationship. The ruin had to come from within the family structure and not from without. Their interactions with the outside world would force them to face the past, but it couldn’t override the life-changing revelations that the family members had to reach on their own.

To that end, the three separate voices became three separate books for the series. I considered the daughter of the family (who eventually became Vivian Alderdice) the main protagonist of the series, but I knew I didn’t want the series to be just about her. Her brother had his own story in the original novel, which I have kept (and which will be Book 2 of the Waxwood Series). The young woman who, in the novel, was the catalyst for change (alibi, not a very positive one) has her own story as well, which will be Book 3 of the series.

I also knew I wanted to change the original book from contemporary to historical fiction, and that both the collective and personal history of this family were relevant. Therefore, I conceived of the story of the previous generation (the grandparents) and the effect of their past on the present generation.

You can read more about the Waxwood series here.

The first book in the series, The Specter, is now available for preorder on Amazon and other online retailers. You can find out more about the book and the links to those retailers here.

How Do I Bring The Past to Life?

***This post is part of the OWS CyCon, a 3-day event for readers and authors hosted by Our Write Side.***

For me, the short answer to the question “how do you bring the past to life in your fiction?” is “through characters”. My writing is all about character. My first book is a work of contemporary short stories in the psychological fiction genre, and my more recent historical fiction continues in that vein. Characters, for me, are not just what they do but how they think, feel, act. What they don’t do, think, feel, and act is as important to me as when they do. I write about their psychological reality as well as their physical reality. Their own personal past is always relevant in the stories I write. For example, in my current series, the Waxwood Series, secrets hidden in the past come back to haunt a Gilded Age family and force them to look back in order to move forward.

Adding a layer of history, or, if you prefer, the collective past to the personal past, complicates matters, because my characters show themselves to be both products of their time and rebels of it. This is not true for every character, of course. Some of my characters are stuck in their own time warp, unable to behave and do anything beyond what their era expects of them. But some recognize the limitations in which their time forces them to exist and break free from them. This is especially true of some of my women characters. Women’s history has always been very important to me. The separate spheres has always fascinated me and my female characters often recognize their entrapment and want to transcend it. The main character of my series, Vivian Alderdice, becomes aware of the limitations put upon her as a debutante in San Francisco society through her grandmother’s own struggles, which are revealed to her in letters from the past. Vivian fights throughout the series to come to terms with these limitations and find her own version of life. Her struggles may be part of the late 19^th century about to be thrust into the modern era, but some of them overlap struggles many young women have today, even though the expectations of the 21^st century might be very different.

For me, it’s not enough to get all the physical details as accurate as you can (though that’s important too). History comes to life only when we see people on the inside speaking to us about their time so we can know about ours.

To what lengths will one go to exorcise a specter?

One rainy morning in 1892, people gather to mourn the death of San Francisco socialite Penelope Alderdice. Among them is a strange little woman named Bertha Ross, who claims to have known “Grace” in the 1850’s in the small town of Waxwood. But Penelope’s granddaughter, Vivian, has never heard of Grace or Waxwood.

Bertha reveals surprising details about Grace’s life in Waxwood, including a love affair with Evan, an artist and member of Brandywine, Waxwood’s art colony.Vivian’s mother, Larissa, insists Bertha is an imposter who has come not to mourn a woman she knew in her youth but to stir up trouble.

Vivian, however, suspects the key to her grandmother’s life and her own lies in Waxwood. She journeys to Brandywine where she meets Verina Jones, Evan’s niece, and discovers a packet of letters her grandmother wrote forty years ago about her time in Waxwood.

As Vivian confronts the specter that holds the truth to secrets buried in the family consciousness, she examines her grandmother’s life as a mid-19^th century debutante and her own as a Gilded Age belle. Will she find her way out into the world as an autonomous being, or will she be haunted by the specter of her grandmother’s unhappiness all her life?

To purchase a copy of The Specter, now at a special pre-order price for a limited time, you can go here.

Please go on to the next author on the blog tour, Richard White:

With an established career of published works, Richard White wanted to take on another writing challenge. As his agent put it, like Mountain Dew, and Mello Yello.

A pseudonym offered him a new opportunity to reach a new and different group of readers. The first western Shotgun Bo Rivers book, Letters From The Grave was published in 2017, and readers were soon drawn to the concept of Beauregard Rivers. With Laramie’s Thunder well on its way, Shotgun Bo Rivers will leave his mark in the Western Genre.

https://beauregardrivers.ga/how-i-brought-the-past-to-life/

COVER REVEAL!!! The Specter (Waxwood Series: Book 1)

Photo Credit: Portrait of Sonya Knips, Gustav Klimt, 1898, oil on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria: Aavindraa/Wikimedia Commons/PD Old 100

The cover for my upcoming book The Specter is here!

For most authors, every cover has a story behind it. For me, my fiction is all about the characters and my covers are all about people. My fiction is also all about people in the context of their time grappling with their own past. I wanted a cover that would reflect this.

When I started coming up with ideas on how I could convey this about The Specter, the idea of featuring a woman in a pink dress came to mind immediately. The pink dress and the woman with red hair relate to a character in the book and the painting I used reflects a portrait of that character mention in the book and its effect on Vivian Alderdice, the main character of the series. I can’t give away more than that just yet – you’ll have to read the book to make the connection.

I’ve always adored old paintings and old images and this one by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt caught my eye right away. On the one hand, the woman (identified in the title as Sonya Knips) is the picture of late 19^th century womanhood in her pretty in pink dress, her right hand clasping a pink handkerchief demurely at her knee, the picture of innocence. On the other, there is a defiance in the way her eyes stare directly at you, the way she is leaning forward a little with her left hand grasping the arm of the chair in which she sits. Some of this isn’t visible in my cover but you can see the full painting and learn more about its background here.

Ironically, Klimt was known more for his later work as a symbolist painter which is vastly different from this painting. Symbolism was a movement that led into surrealism and the idea of making the real unreal relates to my newsletter this month, which will be sent out at the end of this week.

The buy links will be up on my website very soon. For now, you can read more about the book if here and more about the series here. You can also read an excerpt from the book here.

Revealing the Hidden: Psychological Reality Revisited

Photo Credit: iceberg painting 2, oil on canvas, Philippe Put, taken on August 21, 2013: Philippe Put/Flickr/CC BY 2.0

“Our psychological reality… lies below the surface….” (Nin, Ch. 2, location 816)

Welcome to my new blog! It’s actually not a new blog – it’s the old blog in a new place.

There’s no better way to kick off my old blog in a new place than by revisiting one of my first blog posts. I chose this one because psychological reality is the foundation of everything I write, from my fiction to my blog posts. Even though I’m moving into different territory in terms of genre, my fascination with this concept hasn’t waned since I first discovered it. But the concept has evolved for me over these last 3 years.

The idea festered for years before I published my first book, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories in 2017. The term was first introduced to me in Nin’s book The Novel Of The Future. I was fascinating by this idea that reality was more than what we experience in our daily lives, something that, as a teenage wrier, I had discovered when I dove into my own stories and lived the lives of my characters.

I know the concept sounds abstract. But psychological reality is really the opposite side of the coin to physical reality. We have what we experience on the surface through our contact with the world. This is the life through the sensations and intellect and the patterns we form as we go through our daily routine.

Psychological reality is the hidden aspects of our lives, the things we try to shrug off or don’t talk about because we know they have a deeper meaning and connection to some of the unpleasant aspects of our lives. It’s the stuff that doesn’t always come to the surface, whether we know if or we don’t. It’s made up of a tapestry of emotions, perceptions, and motivations, and goes beyond what we do or see in our daily lives, as it forces us to examine how and why we do what we do and makes us question what we’re really seeing.

For example, a while back, I wrote a story based on an interesting incident my mother told me about a birthday celebration she had while I was living in the States. My father was doing some contract work at the time for a big chemical plant (he was a chemical engineer before he retired) and was working with a young man whom my mother met a few times. My father mentioned he wanted to take my mother out for her birthday and asked the young man to recommend a restaurant. On the day of my mother’s birthday, when my father asked for the check, the server informed him it had already been paid. My mother found out later the young man who had worked with my father had paid it.

The story intrigued me and I wrote about it using a fictional couple who were middle-aged and had been estranged for some time. The incident with the birthday dinner took on meanings behind a kind gesture and became a story of emotional tensions between the couple, the husband’s failure to understand his wife’s emotional needs, and the young man’s platonic appreciation for the woman he had only met once but who had shown an understanding and compassion for his art which his own wife did not understand. The story that surfaced was more about those difficult emotions than it was about the birthday party.

A story might be just a story meant to entertain. I read a lot of classic mystery stories where the mystery is intriguing and the “whodoneit” engaging. I love Agatha Christie because she writes stories that lead to unexpected twists and turns and readers get caught up in trying to solve the mystery themselves. There are no hidden meanings behind why the criminals commit their crimes. There’s some background, perhaps, as to what motivated them, but these are more surface level facts, like a blackmailer who is killed to stop him from draining the purse of a widow who can no longer pay him.

One of the reasons why I love19th century fiction is because it is devout of the modern obsession with realism (though, of course, there was a school of literature at the time that attacked just this issue). Victorian fiction has been accused of being too ornate and sentimental and far-fetched. I just read an article where poet T. S. Eliot slammed Victorian mystery writer Anna Katherine Green for lapsing into sentimental melodrama. But, in fact, Green’s fiction is about characters and their psychological motivations and her stories have more psychological reality than most mystery fiction.

My upcoming historical family saga, The Waxwood Series grew out of my own psychological reality and digs into the lives of the Alderdice family. They are a wealthy Gilded Age family, high up on the San Francisco social register, but the mangled relationships between its members mirrors the kind of dysfunctionality we’re more familiar with today. The series traces the way in which psychological realities such as hidden family secrets, half-truths, evasions, dreams, and unexplained family mementos lead Vivian, the main character of the series, down a path of self-discovery. But the series includes other characters outside the family who also take their own journeys and make their own discoveries. The thread of looking back at the past so that it won’t stop the future runs through all four books.

Anais Nin sums it up when she says, ““[one can] only find reality by discarding realism.” (Nin, Introduction, location 115, par. 2). This is not to say realism doesn’t have its place in fiction. Historical fiction is filled with real facts, real events, and real people that make the past come alive for readers, as well as the social, political and cultural realities related to a certain era that still speak to us today. But if we become too obsessed with physical realities, we miss out on understanding life and understanding ourselves on a much deeper level

Works Cited

Nin, Anais. The Novel of the Future. Sky Blue Press. The Anais Nin Trust, 2014 (original publication date 1968). Kindle digital file.