PW: I’m excited about today’s Fiction Friday Interview with inspirational, historical novelist, Elizabeth Camden. Elizabeth Camden’s debut novel The Lady of Bolton Hill, released this month. Welcome to The Literary Mama, Elizabeth. Tell our readers a little about yourself.
EC: Thanks for having me! I have a day job as a librarian at a small college in Florida. I spend around two hours each day commuting, and during this time I used to start spinning stories for a novel I hoped to one day write. A few years ago I finally screwed up the courage to actually start pounding out a manuscript.
I don’t think I could ever quit my day job. Not only do I love being a librarian, but it provides me with the fuel I need to be creative. Some days I help students research the arcane details of a renaissance court case or the symbolism in a Matisse painting. Other days I am dissecting the migration patterns of sea birds or how cheese is made. All of this helps trigger ideas that I can pump into my writing.
PW: What is The Lady of Bolton Hill about?
EC: The Lady of Bolton Hill is set in gilded age America. Daniel and Clara were quite young when they met and shared an intense, immediate bond based on their mutual love of Chopin. Music certainly can have that sort of pull for teenagers, can’t it! They were separated by Clara’s disapproving father, and the novel begins when Clara returns to the United States after more than a decade abroad. The chemistry between Clara and Daniel immediately blazes back to life, but they have followed such wildly divergent paths that they don’t know if they can find a way back to each other, even though they both crave it.
I adore a good turbulent story with love, betrayal, and heartbreak, all punctuated with periods of soaring joy and utter delight. That is what I aimed for with The Lady of Bolton Hill. I’ll be curious to hear from folks if they think I got it in the ballpark.
PW: What sparked your initial idea for The Lady of Bolton Hill?
EC: When I was in college, I found myself paired with a complete stranger for a roommate. She was a worldly city-girl with a Brooklyn accent so think it was hard to understand her. I was tidy, she was messy. I was quiet, she had a laugh loud enough to be heard in the next county. We had absolutely nothing in common except we both adored an extremely obscure band from Ireland (The Pogues, in case anyone is interested.) In an instant, all the differences were swept aside and we immediately bonded over a mutual love of a band no one on this side of the Atlantic had heard of.
I drew upon that unlikely friendship to form the initial flare of attraction between Daniel and Clara. They have wildly divergent temperaments and upbringing, but they both adore the deeply romantic music of Frederic Chopin, and that bond serves as a foundation upon which a magnificent romance ultimately blossoms.
PW: If this book were made into a movie, who would you like to play Clara?
EC: I think Keira Knightly would have the perfect blend of refined gentility with a backbone she can turn to when she needs it. Some of the cover copy for The Lady of Bolton Hill called Clara “feisty.” I have an instinctive reaction against that word, which to me carries a whiff of bratty. I think Keira Knightly would know how to do “feisty” right!
PW: How did you get started writing fiction? What was your road to publication like?
EC: It was bumpy! I played around with a lot of genres and styles before settling in to write historical romance. I think those early years of experimentation were a huge boon, as I’ve been able to weave elements of mystery, adventure, and gothic into my writing. Just a dash. My writing sits squarely in the romantic genre, but I’d like to believe that all those early manuscripts have helped lend a richness to my writing. Or maybe I’m just fooling myself, and those years of struggling were a pointless waste of time, but I don’t think so!
PW: Do you have any other novels we can look forward to reading?
EC: Thanks for asking! My next book is called The Rose of Winslow Street, and it is set for release in January 2012. The setting is a small New England town in 1879. Into this peaceful, idyllic village comes a brash warrior from Romania, who storms into town with a wealth of mystery, long-buried secrets, and a heart as wide and deep as the Atlantic Ocean. He is a strong, fearsome man, but pretty quickly he develops a soft-spot for the heroine, which is a huge complication for him. It is hard to say more without delving into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
PW: How can readers get in touch with you?
EC: I am on Facebook, or you can also drop by my website. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to hear from readers. Writing is a very solitary experience, so to finally have people actually reading my work is wonderful.
I blog at http://elizabethcamden.com/blog Three times a week I write about my thoughts on the romance genre (in novels, movies, real life, etc.) In my day job I am a librarian, so I also post lots of pictures of mouth-watering libraries. I hope you’ll swing by for a peek!
Thanks for stopping by, Elizabeth!
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