Welcome, readers, to my first guest post by an author! This isn't just another interview...nope, this author actually contacted me wanting to tell y'all about her new book, Pride, Prejudice and Cheese Grits. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it sounds like a fun book...so without any more ado, let's get started with Mary Jane Hathaway's post! Read through, and at the bottom, you'll get an author bio, a book blurb, and the thing you've all been waiting for...a giveaway!
Hello! I’m so excited to be talking
about my new book, “Pride, Prejudice and Cheese Grits”! Wait, did the blogger
reader count just slip? I think I heard the sound of hundreds of people quietly
clicking past this post. But why, dear ones?? It’s historical and it’s about
the Civil War and it’s funny.
What can go wrong?
I hear a brave soul in the back
yelling out something about that title… I can’t quite catch it… Blasphemy? How
can cheese grits, that so lowly of the Southern dishes, possibly occur in the
same title with Austen’s wit and genius?
Oh. I see. Well, let me explain.
Like some girls who love romance
and historical writing, I am beyond obsessed with Jane Austen. Obsession is for
amateurs. Napoleon was obsessed with Josephine. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his
ear for that girl whose name nobody can recall.
None of those ended well because
they were merely obsessed. (Okay, also a bit nutso, to be honest.)
Austen fans sprint past obsession
and head for the kind of clarity that comes from dedicating one’s entire life
to the cause of all things Jane.
So, once we’ve established that
point of reference, you can start to see how everything relates back to Jane.
What Jane Austen thought of eating less than two courses at meal times. What
Jane Austen thought of when to wear white. What Jane thought about refusing
offers of marriage in a dignified way. (Maybe that last one doesn’t come into
play much for a lot of us. *sob*) But still, Jane becomes a guiding force in our
lives.
We whisper her best lines when
we’re too mad to make up our own vicious come-backs. We put down that handful
of frosted flakes and pick up a blushing red apple. We take time out from the
endless e-mail and Twitter and facebook to arrange some flowers because that’s
what Jane would do.
As I started writing this book, I
had a firm idea of my heroine and my hero and my cast of characters and my
plot. It was mine, mine, mine! I giddily wrote scene after scene that made me
laugh or cry or glare. (I’m one of those writers that makes HERSELF laugh or
cry, even re-reading it. I’m pretty easy that way.) So, it was a little
annoying to have Jane’s best lines running on a loop in the background of my
mind. I fought it mightily, drowned it with noise, and doused it with scads of
NYT bestselling historical thrillers that made no sense and were completely
inaccurate.
My brilliant heroine, a Civil War
historian from a town named Flea Bite Creek, was good enough, right? Who needed
Austen to muddy it up?
Nope.
She was still there. Sometimes
arching a brow, sometimes hiding behind a book, but mostly laughing at me.
So, I started to write each chapter
by getting my Jane quote out of my head and onto the page. I wanted hero and
heroine to have a great big nasty fight? “I could easily forgive his pride, if
he had not mortified mine.” Natch! I needed the villain to be fooling the
entire world with his smarminess? “Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy
manners as may ensure his making friends- whether he may be equally capable of
retaining them is less certain.” How about our heroine seeing the injustice in
the world and not letting it pass without a comment? “My dear Lizzy, do not
give way to such feelings as these. They will ruin your happiness.”
And on it went until we’d finally
reached the end of our tale of the heart, set in Southern academia, with our
hero realizing that his hopes were not dashed, after all. “It taught me to hope,”
said he, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before.”
Wonderful! The book was finished!!
I promptly removed all the Austen quotes and set about editing it. Polishing
and cutting and slicing and dicing. Ow. Owie. YOW. But it had to be done. Now
it was a nicely sized novel, 300 pages, fun to read and ready to be submitted.
But it was missing something. I
fiddled and rearranged and sulked and grumped.
The book was no good. Not without
Jane. Not without her subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) wit and sense of
irony. Certainly not without her as a compass for my story, when I use her as a
compass for my living.
So back in she went. And from there
I heard from dozens of agents, scores of editors and a handful of publishers that
this book would never sell. Too weird. (Cheese grits? What is that exactly?
Nobody loves Southern culture, they said.) Too complicated. (Nobody can follow
Civil War history, a fight for antebellum mansions, a family drama, a mystery,
a crime, and a romance all at once, they said.) Too boring. (Nobody reads about
academics, they said. Academics are boring. They live in their own little
world, surrounded by imaginary and real-but-dead people.) Too quiet. (Nobody
wants to read about people who love Austen when they can read about a hot female
bail bondsman in love with two even hotter men. Unless I could put some of that
in the book? they asked. I actually laughed at that because some day, somewhere,
maybe there will be a Jane Austen/ Stephanie Plum mash-up which will sell like
hotcakes. But I think that’s a bit more than I can pull off.)
And that’s when I stopped
listening. I love Southern culture! I love mysteries and crimes and romances
and family drama and Civil War history! I love academia and professors and universities
and memories of those all-night pizza parties when you’re a freshman and gain
forty pounds because your mother isn’t there to tell you to eat something green
and Twinkies aren’t breakfast food.. (Oh, maybe that was just me? *cough,
cough*)
And mostly, I love Austen. I love
Pride and Prejudice. I’m beyond ‘love it’ all the way into the ‘I think I would
have to marry this book if it wasn’t illegal’.
So, that’s the story of how ‘Pride,
Prejudice and Cheese Grits’ came to be written, and rejected, and resurrected
by the good folks at Amazon. Bless their little hearts, letting us digitize any
random thing! Yee-haw, my friends, that means more books about subjects we
love!
I hope you enjoy my little slice of
Austen mania. The next book in the series, ‘Emma, Mr. Knightley, and Chili-Slaw
Dogs’ will be coming out in May 2013. Until then, my sweets, stand tall in
whatever particular form of genius (not craziness, NOT!) your historical
literature obsession brings you!
BIO: Mary Jane Hathaway is the pen
name of an award-nominated writer who spends the majority of her literary
energy on subjects un-related to Jane Austen. A homeschooling mother of six
young children who rarely wear shoes, she’s madly in love with a man who has
never read Pride and Prejudice. She holds degrees in Religious Studies and Theoretical
Linguistics, and has a Jane Austen quote on the back of her van. She can be
reached on facebook at her regular author page of Virginia Carmichael (which is
another pen name, because she’s just that cool).Book blurb: Shelby Roswell is a
history professor on the fast track to tenure until her new book is crushed in
a review by the famous historian, Ransom Fielding. She struggles to regain her
momentum only to discover that Fielding has taken a visiting professorship at
her college. The place that was once a refuge from the poverty of her past is
now a battlefield of Civil War proportions.
Ransom is still struggling with his
role in his wife’s accidental death six years ago and was hoping a year at
Shelby’s small college would be a respite from the reminders back home. He
never bargained for falling in love with the one woman who would give anything
to make him leave. Together Shelby and Ransom learn that home is never very far
away, and when you least expect it, love arrives.
With a cast of Civil War
re-enactors, an evil wedding planner, antebellum mansions, and several
mysterious diaries, 'Pride, Prejudice and Cheese Grits' will take you on a
touching and hilarious ride through a modern South you haven't seen before.
Book Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/PridePrejudiceAndCheeseGrits
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Book Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/PridePrejudiceAndCheeseGrits
