My Dearest Miss Fairfax by Jeanette Watts

Please welcome Jeanette Watts My Dearest Miss Fairfax

Jeanette Watts will be awarding a crazy quilt tea cosy to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

My Dearest Miss Fairfax

by Jeanette Watts

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GENRE: Austenesque/Historical Fiction

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INTERVIEW

What would you want your readers to know about you that might not be in your bio?

I do my homework! In any of my historical fiction, if I say it’s December of 1878 and it’s raining, I was reading an almanac for 1878 and read that it was a very wet month that year. When I talk about the dance etiquette, it’s coming from dance etiquette manuals that live in my library, supplemented with materials from the Library of Congress’s collection. When I describe the bonnet shops my characters are going to in Weymouth, that’s because the historical society of Weymouth scanned and sent me the street directory for 1816, and I pulled the names for the milliners straight from the directory.

If you could be one of the characters from any of your books, who would it be and why?

I think I would be Regina Waring from “Wealth and Privilege” and “Brains and Beauty.” Even though her life is a stressed-filled roller coaster ride, she’s devastatingly gorgeous, even more devastatingly smart, and she just makes things happen. And her wardrobe. I want her wardrobe. So many gorgeous bustle dresses! I had a lot of fun writing about Regina’s wardrobe.

If you were the casting director for the film version of your novel, who would play your leading roles?

You know, I think I would like to hold a talent competition for the role of Jane Fairfax! This character is an exceptionally talented pianist, and I would love for the person playing the part to really be able to play the pianoforte.

I would also ask Miranda Hart and Anya Taylor-Joy if they would reprise their roles as Miss Bates and Emma Woodhouse.  While unfortunately the 2020 movie version of Emma is not a very faithful adaption of the book (I have to warn people if they have only seen the 2020 movie of Emma, my book won’t make much sense), their portrayals of their characters were quite splendid!

Do you belong to a critique group? If so how does this help or hinder your writing?

You know, I’ve tried belonging to critique groups, and it was never very helpful. I think it’s just been bad luck. One of them wanted to critique one or two pages at a time…. When here I am with the entire manuscript of a 280 page novel! I had a woman saying, “I just don’t believe this character is a pharmacy major.” I answered, “Well, that’s a good thing…. She changes her major on page 172.” Where does character development happen, if it’s all supposed to be there on pages 1 and 2?

I’ve been in other critique groups where they wanted to talk about their work, not mine. Which is fine, we can all take turns. I’m happy to talk about your work. But I’m going to try to find a nice way to tell you that this book is not ready for publication. Chapter one, your characters are supposed to be good friends who get together after work for a drink, so all this exposition is just weird. Chapter two, you have “disembodied voices” coming from the guy standing right behind you in line. Chapter three, you have run-on sentences so long, I can’t read it all without stopping to take a breath. When you publish it anyway, then wonder why people are buying your book but not reading more than ten pages of it on Kindle…. I guess it helps my writing by seeing all the pitfalls other people fall into.

What is the best and worst advice you ever received? (regarding writing or publishing)

I had a college professor my freshman year who gave my class the advice that changed my life forever. He told us not to stop and agonize over each word, and rewrite each paragraph while writing. Just spit it all out, and go back later to edit. I have seen so many authors talk about their agonies over every sentence, all the time they’ve wasted second guessing themselves, and rewriting the same paragraph ten times. I just don’t do that. I start writing. It’s the first draft. Things will change. I have an unfinished manuscript where I threw away the entire first third of the book. But I have never had writer’s block, and I have never suffered all the pain and agony I see other writers suffer.

The worst advice I ever received was when agents told me that they loved my book, but they wanted me to rewrite some things before they’d represent me. I spent months rewriting the manuscript, and then they didn’t like the book any more.  Several agents did that to me. Eventually I wised up, and figured out that agents are crazy, and I needed to find an agent who wasn’t wanting to be a writer instead.

Do you outline your books or just start writing?

I have a horror of outlines! When you force your characters to stick to the outline, there is a horrible cost. When characters are really well developed, they surprise you. They don’t do what you think. They go off in directions you weren’t expecting, they refuse to do things you planned on them doing.

In my first book, I introduced a character that was meant to create a romantic entanglement for my hero. But nothing came of it. My hero was a one-woman kind of guy, and there was just no enticement in the world that would distract him from his devotion.

My last two books have been based on Jane Austen novels; it’s not quite an outline, but it gave me some rigid guidelines that I had to follow. The characters were not my own: they are Jane Austen’s. Because of that structure, there is no wriggle room for characters to go off and surprise me. It added some interesting writing challenges for me.

I’ve seen other authors of Jane Austen fan fiction who will just make little changes, or allow the characters to go off and create new surprises. But that just doesn’t work for me, especially in my latest novel, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma from Jane Fairfax’s point of view. I want readers to come away from the book saying, “Yes! That is exactly what happened.”

Do you have any hobbies and does the knowledge you’ve gained from these carry over into your characters or the plot of your books?

Oh my goodness yes! My hobbies are very closely tied to my writing.

• I am a dance historian. It’s sort of a cross between a job and a hobby. It’s certainly a passion, a calling. Dancing has shown up in some form or another in every single book I have written. Sometimes it’s only the smallest of references, a couple of lines that make my dance students giggle with recognition. Other times, I can delve more deeply into the etiquette of dancing at different points in time. It’s one of the joys of writing historical fiction, I get to talk about historical dances!
• I am an avid seamstress. I have an entire bookcase in my sewing room devoted to books on historical dress, Pinterest pages divided by decade, and photo albums of dresses I have visited at museums, sometimes with curators who have let me see the insides and undersides to know exactly how these garments were made. My entire basement is a giant costume closet, with separate departments for Renaissance costumes, Regency costumes, hoopskirt dresses, bustle dresses, Ragtime dresses… and a men’s department for my husband. It’s one of the things that drives me crazy in poorly-written historical fiction, when they get the clothing wrong. It can be hard to watch television shows, sometimes. I loved The Gilded Age, but all the outfits with a heavy ridge down the back drive me crazy. Outfits in the 1880s like these have front closures. So I find it great fun to talk about clothing! It’s so much less work to describe it on paper than it is to make the entire outfit.
• I am a huge history buff! My favorite reading for fun is biographies and history books. When I travel, my favorite thing to do (outside of visiting wineries, that is) is visiting historical sites. Old castles, forts, mansions, palaces, battlefields, and museums are all the first things I go to see. It’s sort of like I spend all of my playtime doing research, and then occasionally I turn some small portion of that research into a book.

Do you have an all time favorite book?

I am a huge fan of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books! They are this fabulous cross between history and storytelling. I was a little devastated to read Caroline Fraser’s excellent biography, “Prairie Fires,” and learn all the ways that Laura coated things over. It feels to me like she lied to her readers! I’ve had to learn to forgive her, and accept that these stories are still valuable eyewitness accounts of our American history, even if she glossed over her personal life. The truth was harder, which made it more heroic, but she was writing for children, after all.

Have you started your next project? If so, can you share a little bit about your book?

The project that I have just launched is called “My Dearest Miss Fairfax.” It is a very careful retelling of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” When I say careful retelling, I mean I went through a second hand copy of “Emma” that I bought at a used book store, and highlighted every single sentence in the book that contained a clue to what was going on with the secret engagement between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. I reassembled those elements like puzzle pieces or the reconstruction of an archeological site. Then I filled in the gaps with my best educated guess.

Since my readers will mostly be Jane Austen fans, the creation of missing information is terrifying.  And it can be in the smallest minutae. Names, for example. Jane Fairfax grows up with Colonel Campbell’s daughter, who gets married and becomes Mrs. Dixon. What was her first name? Jane Austen doesn’t tell us. So I have to come up with a name. Since England is full of Janes, Marys, and Elizabeths because they are the names of English queens, I looked to the royal family for inspiration. George III was nominally on the throne while his son the future George IV was the regent: one of the younger princesses in the family was named Sophia. So that’s how I filled in the information gap.

Who is your favorite actor and actress?

Even when it comes to movies, I’m a history buff! Most of my favorite actors and actresses are now dead. I love Errol Flynn. What a beautiful animal he was! And Olivia de Havilland was not only a luminous leading lady, she was smart and tough and the only thespian in all of Hollywood with the guts to take on a studio mogul – and sue! AND win!

I adore silent movies, and thoroughly admire Buster Keaton. He wasn’t just a talented actor, he was a genius filmmaker!

Can you tell us a little about the black moment in your book?

Essentially, it’s a full-blown nervous breakdown. My poor protagonist has been trying to keep her guilty secret, deal with her crazy relatives, fend off a meddling acquaintance who won’t take no for an answer, while she is separated from absolutely everyone she loves best. She has reached the point where all her hopes for her future have been shattered. While she has resolved to make the best of things, she is still a lonely and scared 21-year-old, trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.

What is your favorite reality show?

It’s the one I have been trying to produce! I filmed the pilot for a show about social dancing in the United States. Not the “Dancing With the Stars” nonsense: real people doing real dancing. Irish dancing, salsa dancing, swing dancing… I still hope to get funding for the project. It’s going to be AWESOME when I can get it off the ground.

BLURB:

How much would you gamble for true love? Jane Fairfax dreaded her future as a governess. But genteel solitude seemed her fate. Then handsome, charming, rich Frank Churchill asked to marry her – IF his rich aunt agreed. If their secret engagement was discovered, Jane would be ruined. Frank seemed worth the risk; but the stakes got higher when the aunt refused her consent!

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EXCERPT:

Mr Churchill caught the end of one of the long ribbons from her bonnet, which were flying madly in the strong breeze. He toyed with it for a long while, then looked up into her eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” Jane answered. Her heart started beating harder. That was a lie. Maybe her breath was catching in her throat because she was lying: she fell in love with him the moment she saw him, rescuing the poor store clerk. Or maybe it was because he was standing so close to her, just on the other end of her bonnet ribbon. She felt her cheeks growing warm, and tried to talk herself out of blushing. He was not standing any closer to her than when they danced together, or sat on the same bench at the pianoforte. Why should it fluster her that he was wrapping the end of her bonnet ribbon around his fingers like that?

“Neither did I.” He tied a knot into the very end of the ribbon, then caught the other flying ribbon, and did the same to its end. “I thought love requires mutual respect and understanding, and complementary temperaments that can only be discovered with a judicious application of time and conversation.”

Jane hid her trembling hands inside her muff. She wished there was a way to hide the fact that she was trembling all over. “I understood you from the first moment I saw you,” she admitted, her voice little more than a whisper.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Jeanette Watts has written three Jane Austen-inpsired novels, two other works of historical fiction, stage melodramas, television commercials, and humorous essays for Kindle Vella.

When she is not writing, she is either dancing, sewing, or walking around in costume at a Renaissance festival talking in a funny accent and offering to find new ladies’ maids for everyone she finds in fashionably-ripped jeans.

Contact Links

Website: www.JeanetteWatts.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JeanetteWattsAuthor

Twitter: @JAMLW_writer

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6967936.Jeanette_Watts

https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/jeanette2420/_saved/

Instagram: jeanetteamlwatts

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

Jeanette Watts will be awarding a crazy quilt tea cosy to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

RAFFLECOPTER:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f4169