It's my pleasure to welcome author, Jerri Corgiat, to OVER COFFEE. Jerri is the author of Love Finds A Home series which she originally wrote and published through Penguin Signet and is now available in ebook format from Istoria Books.
So the other
day, my epublisher, Istoria Books, asked me if there were any books in the
public domain by authors who had influenced my writing. I took a gander at
Project Gutenberg (link at end) and turns out there is. Louisa May Alcott.
This got me
thinking about books I’ve read, public domain or not, that have influenced what
I write. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
and Little Men and Jo’s Boys. All the books by Janet
Lambert. And Georgette Heyer.
Louise May
Alcott needs no introduction. Who doesn’t know Little Women, right? To my mind, the much less famous Janet
Lambert, a prolific young adult writer from 1941 to 1969, should need none,
either.
What they have
in common is they wrote—and wrote well—about families. Big families. They also
wrote series. Little Women was the
most famous of a trilogy.
And Janet
Lambert… fifty-four books, most interrelated.
In 1941, in Star-Spangled Summer,
she gave readers Penny Parrish, daughter of an Army officer… and for the next
twenty-eight years, she doled out books about Penny’s siblings and Penny’s
children and Penny’s friends and people who spun off from those books and by
the time she was done, Penny was a forty-something actress… what a body of
work.
Whether it was
Orchard House or an army post in Fort Riley, Kansas, these authors created a
world.
As an adolescent
in the late 1960s, I stumbled into these worlds. I visited them time and time
again. And, in an example of imitation as the best form of flattery, I wrote
the Love Finds a Home series,
creating, I hoped, a contemporary world where the characters grow and change,
move, age, and recover from or celebrate major life events. Even the town
doesn’t stand still. To date, there’s a book for each of the three sisters, one
for the sister-in-law, and then the fifth, which features the mistress so
scorned in the second. And now a sixth is in the writing, starring one of the
nieces—only nine when the series started and now twenty-eight. They all have a
romance at their center, but family dynamics and topical issues all play a part
in shaping the stories.
I’d loved what
I’d read in my childhood, so I consciously set out to do something similar. In
short, the authors I’ve loved dictate what I write. Or do they?
Although I
acquired a stepsister when I was seventeen, I grew up an only child in a big
city, a state or five away from extended family. I was introverted and shy,
timid in new situations (all very hard to believe now!), and I idealized big
families. I idealized small towns. I wanted to be a courageous heroine. I
especially wanted to be a gutsy heroine who had the undying love of a valiant
man.
So then, nature
must have had the edge in determining what I write… or at least that’s what I
concluded until I considered the third author I endlessly read as a young
woman.
Georgette Heyer.
Readers of
romance know her as the Mother of All Regency Romance Authors. She published
near-fifty books, beginning in the early 1920s. The last was in 1972. She is a
huge favorite of mine; I still have all of her books, dog-eared from the
numerous times I’ve read them, which is saying a lot as I’ve shed hundreds of
others over the years. I have rarely met an author who could draw a character
better than, or even as well as, Georgette Heyer. She illustrated not by
telling, but by gesture and action and speech and with such a delightful and
subtle, sly wit, I periodically pause in reading her work and want to applaud.
But unlike my
aspirations to be the Janet Lambert of contemporary family-saga romance (Louisa
May Alcott? I don’t even go there), I don’t want to write Regency Romance. I
don’t want to live in that age, or to be bound by convention as her characters
are. But I’d be thrilled if I could create one who lives and breathes the way
hers do.
Personal
predilection likely drew me to reading and writing about big families in little
worlds and the intrepid heroine at the center.
And Louisa May Alcott, Janet Lambert…and
Georgette Heyer…showed me the best way to do it.
- I’d love to hear who your favorite authors were when you were young. And, if you’re also a writer, which were the most influential on your work?
Sing Me Home, book one-Love Finds a Home series Jerri Corgiat
Lilac O'Malley Ryan doesn't even recognize country music star Jonathan Van Castle when he bursts into her store. And she's bewildered by what seem like tongue-tied attempts at charm. She just wants to make a sale-and get him out the door. But it turns out to be a lot harder getting that to-die-for smile out of her mind...
And once they put their rocky start behind them, Jon and Lil will discover what happens when two unlikely lovers hit the perfect note... Excerpt (you will find the excerpts to all her series in her website sidebar)
When you’re
ready to leave here (but not before!), here are some fun sites to visit:
http://www.georgette-heyer.com/index.html Lots of enjoyment for Heyer fans or simply if you’re interested in the Regency era. Original book covers, quizzes, bio, tone of information on the era, a fan listserv, suggested books.
http://www.louisamayalcott.org/alcottorchard.html Tour the rooms of Orchard House where Louisa May Alcott lived, wrote, and set her stories.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Free books (in the public domain) for download.
~*~*~
Jerri Corgiat’s five romances in the Love Finds a Home series (Sing Me Home, Follow Me Home, Home at Last,
Home by Starlight, and Take Me Home) were
originally published by Penguin are now available as ebooks through Istoria Books
Visit Jerri website or on Facebook
.
