Guest Post at Historical Fiction eBooks
Today I am over at my home away from home at Historical Fiction eBooks but I thought some of you might be interested in my post about When Truth is Stranger than Fiction. Here is the introduction: My Victorian San Francisco Mystery series features Annie Fuller, a widow who runs a boarding house, supplements her income as a clairvoyant, and investigates crimes. She fights hard to maintain her economic independence, and this independent streak gets her in trouble and causes personal and romantic difficulties. This is fiction, but it also is laced with historical fact. On occasion, the factual elements of my books are harder for readers to swallow than the fictional parts. For example, some reviewers, after reading my first book, Maids of Misfortune, complained that my protagonist, Annie Fuller, is “too modern” in her attitude and behaviors. Yet, some of the Read more…
Bloody Lesson Goes on Sale today.
Available in print and for the Kindle here! Bloody Lessons is the third novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and in celebration of this launch I am making the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, free on Kindle for 3 days (9/15-17) and discounting the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, to 99 cents for a week (9/15-21) on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iTunes, and Smashwords. Do tell your friends that they can get the whole series the next 3 days for under $5! And a treat for those of you who have joined my Facebook author page, I will announce later today a contest with $5 Amazon gift cards as prizes that I will be running over the next two weeks. Thanks to all of your for your support and now go buy your copy Read more…
Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers–Part Three
This is the final part of my 3-part series on San Francisco teachers in 1880. I hope it helps deepen your enjoyment of Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series. “Who were the women who did succeed in passing their examinations and securing jobs in San Francisco, Portland, or Los Angeles? And, what were their jobs like once they got them? Over eighty percent of the female teachers in these three cities in 1880 were single, and over two thirds of them were single and under the age of thirty. In Portland and Los Angeles, over two thirds of the female teachers had native-born parents. Nearly three quarters of the young single women teaching in (San Francisco) were either foreign-born or of foreign parentage, and a least a third of those who lived at home Read more…
Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers: Part Two
In my newest Victorian San Francisco Mystery, Bloody Lessons, the question comes up over whether a teacher got her position through undue favoritism on the part of a school board member. Once again, a plot point came right out of the pages of my dissertation and the newspapers of the time period. And once again, the controversies of the past, in this case over city policies governing the hiring and retaining of public school teachers, echoes controversies in the present. “No matter what their salary, women highly coveted the job of teaching in the nineteenth century, and by 1880 a position in the California or Oregon public schools was not always easy to obtain. In the 1850s and 1860s a teacher had to go through a yearly examination order to get and to retain her job, and examination that was Read more…
Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers–Part One
From the start, my plan for the series of mysteries set in Victorian San Francisco has been that each book should feature a different occupation held by women of that period. In Maids of Misfortune, my protagonist, Annie Fuller, goes undercover as a domestic servant, in Uneasy Spirits, she investigates a fraudulent trance medium, and in my short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, the elderly seamstresses who live in Annie Fuller’s boarding house are on center stage. In Dandy Detects, it is another boarder, Barbara Hewett, who is the main protagonist. And it was while I was developing her background story, including her work as a teacher at the city’s Girls’ High, that I decided that my next full-length book after Uneasy Spirits would be about the teaching profession. In less than two weeks, that book, Bloody Lessons, will Read more…
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