Shadows of Time

 

Shadows of Time

by Jackie Meekums-Hales

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

GENRE: Women's Fiction

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

BLURB:

 

Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s  present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.

 

Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

EXCERPT

 

The wind was roaring down the side of the house and through the chimney, and the daffodils were bending their heads in submission. It might be nearly spring, but that news did not seem to have reached the village yet. The smell of burning wood always brought back memories of bonfires at the bottom of the garden. Cathy's thoughts lingered on bonfire nights at the farm next door, when the children had ridden down to the middle field on bales of hay on a trailer pulled by an old tractor. How simple everything seemed then.

 

Cathy sensed that June’s tense shoulders meant she was steeling herself for something unpleasant. Cathy was busy trying to work out how to ask her what was wrong, when suddenly, staring into the flames, June announced, “We may have to sell the house, you know.” 

 

Cathy heard the words but didn’t believe she had. “What?” 

 

“We may have to sell the house. The solicitor phoned today about the reading of Mum's will. The house may not be ours, Cathy. We may have to move.” 

 

“WHAT?”

 

“Stop saying what! It seems that someone has appeared out of nowhere since Mum died. Something about someone else being entitled to something. I don't know the details. I’ve been dreading telling you, and I didn’t want to say anything in front of the twins.”

 

“How on earth could that be? I don’t believe it! There can’t be anyone else, can there? There must be a mistake!” She felt the cosy, comfy world she had come back to claim crumbling to ashes and dust.

A Word With the Author

1.Did you always want to be an author?

It wasn’t something I could even dream of, when I was young. If you were a working-class girl from the suburbs of London, you didn’t dare to aspire to something like that in the 1950s and 60s. I did, however, have a mum who encouraged us to read and a dad who told great bed-time stories, so my imagination was always nourished, and I just started writing. As a child, for fun I invented plays for my group of friends to perform in front of parents, dressing up in old curtains and over-sized shirts! As a student, I began writing poetry as an outlet for my thoughts and feelings, and when some was published in a booklet called “Bricks”, I was surprised that others could relate to them. That made me think it was possible to write for an audience. As a young adult, I wrote fragments of prose, but I had no label for them, as “flash fiction” wasn’t a term I’d ever heard of then, and sheets of hand-written prose just went into a box in the bottom of the wardrobe. There was no internet. I had no contacts. I had no hope of doing anything with them. I had several single poems printed in anthologies across the years, and I started writing short stories, but only for consumption by family and a few friends, or to encourage those I taught. When a class of fourteen-year-olds was struggling with Shakespeare’s language, I went home and wrote a rap about Macbeth, to grab their interest. When we looked at formulaic writing, I wrote them a fairy story to a “recipe”. When they felt doom-laden with poetry of the First World War, I wrote a cheerful poem to prove it could be done. I was less an author and more someone who just wrote, because the drive was there and I loved doing it. I was so busy as a teacher and with family that it wasn’t until I retired from teaching that I could allow myself the ambition I’d held in check all those years. Maybe I could actually do something with all this writing. I had a couple of things accepted for publication on line, and finally I had the time and confidence to tackle writing a novel. 

2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.

I had the best birthday present ever, when, a couple of days before my seventieth birthday, I received an email from Between The Lines Publishing, offering me the chance to have my first complete novel published. I’d searched the web for publishers that were accepting manuscripts, and I’d joined the Society of Authors, but I was well aware of how difficult it is to find someone willing to take on a new author. I felt incredibly lucky. Poems had gone into anthologies and stories had been published online, but this was just the most exciting prospect of having a dream come true- after over 30 years of teaching literature to teenagers, to hold in my hand a novel I’d written myself. I also felt it was important to represent some of the unspoken emotions women have carried, often because of the injustice of society. I’d been fighting inequality since the 1970s, and yet it’s still out there. I was allocated an editor, and we began working through the manuscript. I was on a steep learning curve, but I was able to build up a really good rapport with my editor, and she guided me through how to improve what I’d written. Some words had to go, some had to change, and some had to be added. I became acutely aware of my own foibles, and I developed more skill in “show, not tell”. I learnt so much from my editor, as the manuscript went back and forth with tracked changes and annotation! We found we both enjoyed discovering differences in vocabulary on opposite sides of the Atlantic, too. When we had worked through the whole text, it went to the next stages of proof-reading and preparation, and I chose some people to read it ahead of publication. That was nerve-wracking, as you hope they’ll like it! It was thrilling when the cover was produced, because the art reflected what I’d said I’d like to see, and there it was, brought to life on the page. I’ve been gathering people who can’t wait to read the finished product, and I can’t wait to hold it. 

   
3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

I have eclectic tastes in reading, and I have to acknowledge that my favourite author of all time is Jane Austen, but there are so many good women writers in today’s market. I have read quite a bit of Tracy Chevalier, and among British writers, I’ve enjoyed Salley Vickers.

4.What's the best part of being an author? The worst? 

The best part is getting to know your characters and the satisfaction of losing yourself in your imagined world, telling their stories. The worst part is when you are stuck, stalled, struggling to know which direction to take next, although with my third novel, I found it kept writing itself and the problem was ending it! 

5.What are you working on now? 

I’ve written two more novels since “Shadows of Time”, but I’m working on revisions and self-editing, because they are both in draft form. I did the first drafts during Nanowrimo of 2020 and 2021, but that involves getting the words down, and they are far from polished. I’ve also been submitting pieces of flash fiction and poetry to various online publishers, so that I keep producing something new while revisiting the old. Sometimes, I “write” something in my head while I’m out walking, and then hope I can remember it when I get to my laptop! I’ve just formed an idea for another novel, but that’s a story still to be written…

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Jackie is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival  2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside. 

 

Twitter account:  Jackie Meekums Hales, writer (@jackieihales) / Twitter\ https://mobile.twitter.com/jackieihales

Blog: Jotting Jax

https://jottingjax.wordpress.com/

Goodreads: Jacqueline Hales - Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/128512053-jacqueline-hales

Facebook author page: Jackie Meekums Hales | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/Jackie-Meekums-Hales-103410038936426/news_feed

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION 

Jackie Meekums-Hales will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway