BY GRACE is on her way…

I am very excited and happy to say  that I gave the go-ahead to my book developer on the second book in THE HUACHUCA TRILOGY,  BY GRACE! It will soon go to Amazon and the next step will be to study the proofs for corrections before it is made available to you and yours.

I have occasionally used a writer’s practice of writing the biography or backstory of a character. This usually happens if I’m stuck in the narrative, need a writing exercise to loosen up the creative energy, or need to move the story along.

In BY GRACE, I did this with two characters, the protagonist and her nemesis: Grace Pelham and Jeremy Quackenbush. I was aiming to get a better understanding of their characters and motivations. Incidentally, I used family names for their last names…fun to do.   Here’s GRACE…

Grace was born in 1880 in Albany, NY to Elizabeth (“Liz”) and Lester Pelham. Liz died in the days right after Grace’s birth, with time to pass on her expectations to Lester. He was to do all that he could to keep her safe  and with him until she was grown; then, he was to “send her out into the world to find a place, a purpose and, just maybe, a prince of her own.”

Liz immigrated from England, at twenty, to live with her sister and family in Albany. She met Lester, ten years her senior, soon after in the store he inherited from his parents, killed in a boating disaster.. When a flash fire killed Liz’ family and she was the only one to escape the tenement, Lester and she married. She was his “Princess Liz” and he was her prince. Lester has only very distant relatives in the farmlands of upstate New York, none of whom are a resource for Grace at his death.

Grace is 18 when we meet her, taller than her tall mother, with the same delicate long fingers on strong hands. She has long blond hair and gray-blue eyes. She finished local schooling at 16 but has been tutored by her father all her life. He always read to her whether books, newspapers or the labels on museum displays, answering her questions patiently or eliciting her thoughts. They frequented the capitol, the museums, the varied neighborhoods and businesses; people from all over the world visited their waterfront emporium in its heyday and from them she also learned of the greater world.

Lester encouraged her to develop skills that would be of use and enjoyment: her constant drawing of the minutia of the world; ice skating, rowing, hiking, sewing, cooking, managing the store and its books. She took music lessons, the violin, but often left practicing to draw. She had playmates and friends all over the city but few that she could call intimate. The ending of her school days served to isolate her from most as their parents feared the waterfront and its society.  Still, she managed to meet them occasionally about town.

She has never had a boyfriend and has a romantic view of her parents love but knows little of its physical expression. Her frequent visits to the Museum of Natural History have given her the basic biology of reproduction but not the connection to how a lasting relationship enters into the process.  Grace knows nothing of the joys of human sex. She is somewhat worldly wise while retaining a Victorian innocence.

The book opens with Lester’s imminent death and the preparations he and Grace have made for her future. She is diligent under his tutelage in “cooking the books” to her advantage, preparing a varied wardrobe and plotting her departure from Albany which holds no future for her. She knows she can support herself in shop keeping, sales or doing books while she seeks her true vocation and identity. Grace has funds enough to see her settled in the city of New   York.

The quest begins.

Photo from Queens College School of Library Services Collection