In Bellevere House, there are a number of women characters and the first two that jump to mind are Faye Powell and Helene Carter. Faye is the main protagonist of the story and we spend a lot of time in her mind, her perspective on things. Helene, on the other hand, is a newcomer who’s just arrived in this pleasant little place called Parkdale. She’s come with her brother and there are several things that he does while he’s in Parkdale. But Helene immediately sort of attaches herself to Faye and never lets go, in a sense.

The two end up being really good friends and I wanted this to be a positive message and an alteration from the original book. When I was going through it, I noticed these areas with a lot of tension and undercurrents—a falsity, if you want to call it that—between the original counterparts to Faye and Helene, Fanny Price and Mary Crawford. There’s all this jealousy that Faye feels on account of Edmund, her cousin, and there’s an insensitivity to that in Mary, to the point where she just doesn’t get a good feel for Fanny’s personality at all. And the friendship, of course, is like a cracked glass from the beginning.

The negativity that comes from this threads its way through the whole book. It’s a wonderful book and just amazingly realistic at times. But I didn’t care for this particular relationship between the two women at all, frankly. Also, if we take away the conflict, we get to see a lot more of Faye’s relationship with Ed and how their dynamic really springs from each other and not from an outer irritant like this girl swooping in to maybe interfere with their romance. And Fanny and Edmund are one of the things people remember from the book, so diminishing all this quiet sort of catfighting between the girls made me able to bring Ed and Faye to the forefront and clarify what’s going on in a way I really liked. I went through several drafts before I quite pinned down what that relationship was, but not viewing Helene as a problem was a big first step.

And there will be more updates.

I won't deny that Bellevere House hasn't always been the most fun to write for me as an author. I took it on as a challenge, not for fun, and I was surprised myself at the direction some arcs of the story took. If this book surprised me at first, it continues to do so. The initial reaction to Bellevere left me in little doubt that it had no future and no audience. It had fallen flat on readers and was to be discounted as an ignominious member of the Jane Austen collection. Since I had written it exclusively for this collection, I will say I was more than a little ticked-off by this because it seemed to me all my effort was being wasted. 

I planned to keep it only as long as was necessary, since no one would ever want to read it again after the collection's first run. By this time I was already involved in other projects and more than happy enough to do this. In fact, I didn't have time to devote to Bellevere anymore and I had even written a contemporary version to give the story a chance since one of the biggest sources of concern was how I handled the vintage era. It's dialogue, slang, pop culture, and cliches. However, Bellevere-vintage-version (annoyingly, I now felt) just got consistent reads on Amazon. The pageviews on my website were steady tending towards high and often jumped by 1000% if I mentioned Bellevere or even if I did not. If I talked about another of my books, the Bellevere page soared. 

I really felt like tearing out my hair. 

I'm not sure why people look so much at a "rejected" book.  I've often tried to send sunken books afloat again and it doesn't usually work. It's an uphill task at the best of times if you try. While I'd like to think this is just an after-thought as people come from another VJA book and sort of try Bellevere out of a sense of duty, I'm not sure. If I didn't want to read a book I'd skip it whether it was in a series or not. 
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And there will be more updates. 

This book was begun several years ago, as part of a group project. My sister started the project and I knew most of the other members personally, some for years. So I agreed to join. There was much defensiveness last year because I portrayed some of the characters in my book as immoral, something that wasn’t done in any of the other VJA books I’ve read so far. Even my mother, who was editing it, spent literally 75% of the editing time, on a deadline, going over and over and over and over and over and over and over a few chapters early on which showed parties, a scene between Myrtle and Horace, and some slangy 30s dialogue. I had to really push her to move on and I could not see why all the concern was necessary. All of this material was light and unimportant because the characters were the same without it—cavalier, often selfish, and immoral.

But that IS the interest in Mansfield Park. I didn’t take Mansfield Park because I related to these characters. It was because MP is a story that’s rarely told right. Rarely told truthfully. Every movie, every retelling seems to get something wrong. And since finding the story that’s really in the story is what I do, I felt the task was mine since I had to join the collection. This was the story that I found inside Mansfield Park. It's a book about virtue, that’s true. Everyone praises virtuous Fanny Price or has obvious motives for bashing her. But it’s also a book about vice and most of the people interested in the book do want to discuss that side of behavior. I looked into the mirror of the story and this is what I saw. It’s not a personal reflection on me or my writing. In fact, this is my only story ever to show such characters. I don’t usually take on books with that as their hidden “true story.”

I didn’t feel the book ultimately had a lot to say in the vintage era. That’s why I switched it this year. MP was contemporary in Austen’s time and unlike some of the others it really, really needs that setting. And since telling the true story is what I do, I want Bellevere to do the best possible job of that while it’s still being marketed.

And there will be more updates. 

With Bellevere House coming up for sale next week, I thought I’d post a bit about Jane Austen. When I was growing up, JA saturated my house because of my mother. Some of my earliest creative efforts involved making little picture books of Pride and Prejudice, although I haven’t been interested in the story since. She really was just wallpaper and I didn’t think she was interesting. She was just there.

After working on the JA project, I began to rethink this author and her fans. My mother was not typical. Her view was old-fashioned even when she was young (the 1960s) and one of the few other fan-type commentaries she enjoyed was a book written in the 1940s. The 1940s. So I wasn’t prepared for the 21st century fans, or even late 20th century fans. The cult. The explosion. The Jane Austen girls. I didn’t know who these people were and I didn’t overly care. But I did gradually notice their movies and fanfiction had a tone I didn’t expect. Some of the movies were dark, sleazy, or bizarre; others droning, angsty, or a bit odd when portraying characters. (Such as Harriet.)
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I hadn’t thought of working with any of the novels in an in-depth way and I lumped them all together as DeBooksByJehnAusten. (Sounds like a name for a fan website, doesn’t it?) Once I did, I noticed surprising things, and when I watched the movies closely, instead of casually, I saw more. And then I was reminded of that old 1940s book. The authors of that book had rated the novels from best to worst and I’d wondered why they put P&P so near the bottom and Emma so near the top. True, I didn’t care about P&P—but didn’t everyone love it? And EMMA? Boring, BORING Emma at the top??

I came to feel that was entirely true. Their list was pretty much accurate. Even then, they were seeing something I wasn’t in these books. And after I overheard someone talking about the parents in JA, as a way to rate the books, I saw they also all agreed. So here, partly based on them, partly on personal experience, is my official Jane Austen list.

• Emma ~ a bit boring and something about it feels old and overdone. (Somehow.) But it’s harmless and cute. Much more interest in Frank Churchill than you’d think.
• Persuasion ~ slow and truly for a niche audience. But not as bad as you’d think, even if characters like the Elliots seem stuck-up and remote.
• Mansfield Park ~ deeply frustrating. After working with it, I concur. There’s so much that’s good, but something about the audience’s view (and the characters themselves) is unlikable and vague.
• Northanger Abbey ~ I want to like it. I really do. It used to be my favorite and underlying it’s still harmless. But the view of so many characters now makes them out to be bad people.
• Pride and Prejudice ~ shady, shady. True, many just think they’d like to be witty, clever Lizzie in a fancy dress. But there’s a dedicated audience that needs explaining. And why does it convert so well to having the characters as little kids? I'm not the only one to do this. That’s weird.
• Sense and Sensibility ~ There’s not much to say at this point. It’s  . . . become more dark than it used to be. It’s hard to speak well of any of the men and even Mrs. Dashwood seems questionable.

And there will be more updates.