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.

How Small-Town California Inspired Waxwood, The Series

The old Southern Pacific train depot in Benicia. It used to be the entrance of the town and the last stop before passengers boarded the ferry that took them to the East Bay and San Francisco. I was told in the visitor’s bureau that the depot was placed there in 1902 and was functional until the 1940’s, when cars began to replace train travel in that area. Personal photo.

Last year, I was able to visit the San Francisco Bay Area, one of my favorite place of all time. During my trip, I saw Benicia, a small little town that I had researched quite extensively and I wrote a blog post about it here.

At the time, Benicia was the inspiration for the location of my upcoming historical mystery series, The Paper Chase Mysteries. What I didn’t realize until after I started to revise my upcoming book The Specter, was that parts of Benicia had infiltrated into my idea of the town of Waxwood, the town on which my Waxwood Series is based.

Element of Benicia make Waxwood a character as much as any other of the human characters. It’s a small, quiet, little town with the kind of slow-paced rhythm you would expect from small-town America. Right on the Carquinez Straight, it has a small pier where you can walk and enjoy the view of the hills and the Benicia-Martinez Bridge. People are laid-back and friendly. There’s a rich art community there with local artists displaying their work in small shops down First Street.

Here’s Vivian’s first impressions of Waxwood from The Specter:

By the time Vivian stepped off the train at the Waxwood station, early afternoon had settled in. She saw immediately what Mrs. Moore meant about there being “nothing there.” Compared to the city, Waxwood was half-deserted and nearly pitiful in its emptiness. She could see only the train tracks trailing a bay whose size was paltry compared to the one bordering the city. And yet, Vivian was at ease in this small village with its slowly moving waters and nearly deserted street. Even the station agent’s expression seemed bucolic as he smiled at her from his caged window.

Not an auspicious view for a town, perhaps!

As I mentioned above, Waxwood is a character in the series. It’s not just the place where the Alderdice family goes for their summer vacation, or the place where other characters in the series end up. Waxwood is as alive and changeable as the characters themselves.

The Waxwood Vivian visits in Book 1 of the series, which takes place in 1892, is not the same Waxwood she sees six years later in Book 2. Like all of America in the Gilded Age, Waxwood goes through some rapid changes. It becomes more commercialized, more touristic, less quaint and quiet. It has its own ominous presence and ghosts, much like the characters in the series. In this way, it mirrors the evolution of the characters, especially Vivian.

Why did I name the town Waxwood? The idea of the wax wood trees (which do not exist in real life, as far as I know) intrigued me. In The Specter, Vivian encounters the forest with another character, Ruth:

The hill they had ascended, though not so very steep, was crowded with tall trees with umbrella tops and a strange, glossy wood. Vivian slipped off one of her gloves. Her hand moved to touch the shiny tree. The matted sheen felt almost rough to the touch and a little sticky.
“The surface softens with the sun and hardens with the moon,” Ruth said. “It’s why they call them wax wood trees.”

Certain elements have always fascinated me and wax is one of them. Wax can be both pliable and unyielding, it can be creative, molded and shaped into anything you like. And it can be dangerous, as when a candle tips over with the potential to set a curtain or a room on fire. The wax wood forest has its own significance in the series, which is the subject for another future blog post.

To find out more about The Specter and pick up your copy at a special preorder price, you can go here.

To find out more about the Waxwood Series, go here.

A Personal Look at the Gilded Age

This is one of the most iconic cartoons of the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller’s monopoly that sparked the anti-trust acts in America (not to mention a slew of progressive reforms that would characterize the era following the Gilded Age).

Photo Credit: Political cartoon showing a Standard Oil tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped aro und the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. Keppler, Udo J., Puck, v. 56, no. 1436 (1904 Sept. 7): Animalparty/Wikimedia Commons/ PD US

Several months ago, on my old blog, I posted about the Gilded Age, which is when my upcoming book and series takes place. I focused on how it was a time of excess, commercialism, dirty politics and class divides. I’ll be posting a revised version of that blog post on this new blog at some point in the future, but for now, you can read it on my old blog here.

Because the first book of my series is coming out and already available for preorder, and I’m working diligently on the second book, I thought it was time to offer a little more personal insight on what brought me to this time in American history, and why I am so fascinated by it.

My exposure to the Gilded Age began in 2007. I was back in Texas and searching for some direction in life. I already had a master’s degree in English but was a little bored with teaching college English courses. So I decided to enroll in a master’s program in History to broaden my teaching prospects. It was a logical choice for me, as I loved literature and writing, but I also loved history and felt I was missing background and knowledge both from a professional and artistic perspective.

One of the first courses I took was about the history of America in the late 19^th century. Our course textbook was The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, a collection of essays written by different historians subjects relevant to that time and our time (big business, politics, popular culture, etc). While some essays interested me more than others, I was compelled by how much of the foundations of 21^st century America were set down more than one hundred years ago. I was inspired by this course to look back at the past and see its connection with the present and future.

Although the idea for the Waxwood Series didn’t come until much later, I knew right away I wanted to eventually write fiction set in this time period. It was such a vibrant time of change not only on the practical level (like politics, business, and entertainment) but on the societal and psychological level, with shifting ideas and values. When I started to conceive of the Waxwood Series, I wanted the Alderdice family to be stuck in the past of old Victorian ideals of family, loyalty, and life. I could envision them being in direct conflict with their environment, where the world was changing all around them (especially in San Francisco, the hub of the Far West at that time). I saw the conflicts between the older generations of the family (the grandparents and the mother, Larissa) and the younger generation (Vivian and Jake). These conflicts I knew would be subtle, cryptic almost, embedded within the family drama and they would come out in the unwritten and unspoken acceptance of family behavior and values based on those old ideals.

Since the Gilded Age is thought to span approximately the last quarter of the 19^th century, I had quite a few decades to choose from when I thought about when I would set each of the four books in the series. I chose to place the last 3 books at the very end of the 19^th century for a reason. Hurling the Alderdice family into the new age by Book 4 offered a fascinating way to look at how this family would cope, leaving open questions for their future.

Part of writing historical fiction, for me, is about more than just reliving the past. It’s also about how characters react to the changes around them and adjust themselves (or, in some cases, don’t adjust). In the Gilded Age, changes in America were happening so rapidly that a family like a wealthy and influential family like the Alderdices would be reeling from the impact. These families were the most reluctant to change for obvious reasons — the old world ways were working for them, so why rock the boat?

So in the Waxwood Series, history plays an important role, but what the story is really about is the Alderdice family within their historical time. As I explained in my recent blog post for the OWS CyCon blog tour, history comes alive for me when we see the people in it. That’s what I hope to give readers in my fiction.

To learn more about The Specter and get hold of a preorder copy, go here.

You can learn more about the Waxwood Series here.

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.