Hope. Dreams. Life... Love: Jane Austin Lied to Me

JANE AUSTEN LIED TO ME

Jeanette Watts

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GENRE: Romantic Comedy Audiobook

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BLURB:

What college girl doesn’t dream of meeting Mr. Darcy? Lizzy was certainly no exception. But when Darcy Fitzwilliam comes into her life, he turns out to be every bit as aggravating as Elizabeth Bennett’s Fitzwilliam Darcy. So what’s a modern girl to think, except....

How could my hero be so wrong?

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EXCERPT

Sept 5

Well! That was interesting. My roommate invited me along to this frat party she was going to. She went through something called rush week, and she is now pledged to a sorority. She said the frats are less formal than the sororities, and even though I wasn’t a pledge I could go with her. I figured, why not, it should be fun, right?

I got to meet the guy she’s chasing. I couldn’t blame her for being interested. He’s cute, and sweet, and considerate, and a total people-pleaser. One of his parents must be the demanding sort who is never happy.

He introduced us to his friend… whose name is Darcy Fitzwilliam! I wasn’t sure at first that the guy wasn’t just pulling our legs.

“Your mother obviously loves Jane Austen,” I laughed.

“Obviously,” he answered. Not much to go by.

“I love Pride and Prejudice,” I continued.

“I hate Pride and Prejudice,” I can only describe the look he was giving me as hostile.

“I think you will find yourself very much in a minority,” I answered, returning his look with one of my own.

We didn’t talk any more that night. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot!

A Word With the Author

1.Did you always want to be an author?

Does fourth grade count as “always?” I used to tell stories to my best friend while we walked to school. She’s the one who made me start writing them down. When I started college, I was an English major because I wanted to be a writer – and that’s where I got side tracked for a while. I got my Master’s Degree in Cinema-Television, thinking I wanted to be a college professor talking about the history of film and showing Buster Keaton movies. But life has a funny way of continuing to twist things. I ended up writing television commercials, and other marketing materials, and one-act melodramas, and so many other things before I got to my first book.

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

I had started other writing projects, but Wealth and Privilege was the first one I completed. I’ve heard it said that the first book is the hardest. It’s so true. It took me ten years to write it. Of course research was a lot harder when I started than it is now. I had to drive to Johnstown to research the 1889 flood; today archival materials and things like census records are online.

That said, there is a lot of writing that happens in between the research, and that took a long time, too. It requires a reshuffling of priorities. The laundry gets done, but not the writing. I finally got the book finished because of a different best friend: every day, she would call me up and ask me one simple question: “have you worked on your book today?” I could only stand saying “No” so many times. It made me drop what I’m doing to go write. And then to get some writing done before her phone call. Eventually I more often said yes than no, and I actually crossed the finish line because of her help.

That’s just getting it written: there’s another five year saga of query letters and publishers and rewrites and crazy agents. But the end result was the first of five fiction books and a dance manual in print.

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

Funny thing is, I don’t read much of the genres I write in! I mostly write historical fiction, but I read biographies and other history books by David McCullough and Ron Chernow. (How else am I going to get my history right if I don’t read it?) If Inlook on my bookshelves, I have more Phillippa Gregory than any other single historical fiction writer.

I also have two modern books and one historical fiction novel that are Jane Austen-inspired, and while I love Jane Austen herself, I don’t read Jane Austen fan fiction. A lot of it is alternative “what-if” kinds of stories that shuffle around the characters, and I honestly don’t care for that. Other sub-genres introduce sex scenes, which also doesn’t work for me. It seems so very…. UN-Jane-like. So I love reading the sub-Reddit on Jane Austen (which is where I got intrigued and challenged into writing My Dearest Miss Fairfax), but I don’t read much of the sort of thing that I write. To me, fidelity to Jane Austen’s original text is extremely important, and I don’t find that in the sampling of other books that I’ve tried.

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

The best part are those days when I know where I’m going, what scene is next, I’m spending a couple of days in a pretty place where I will have few interruptions, and my characters tell me this is NOT how this scene is going down, and the story goes off in a different direction that I wasn’t expecting, and I have pages and pages of story that I hadn’t even known were in me.

My worst day as a writer was the day I had published Brains and Beauty directly to Kindle. It had been edited, and beta-read, and green-lighted, but I hadn’t started the process of doing a physical book yet. It was going to be 600 pages! My first book was almost 400 pages, and agents said that was too long for a new author. 600 pages? That was not going to work. I yanked the Kindle version offline, and took a machete to the manuscript. Readers who downloaded the book were confused, they didn’t see any problems. I was glad of that, at least, but I had to cut out a lot to make the book a more reasonable – and marketable – size.

5.What are you working on now?

Now that I’ve finally gotten Jane Austen Lied to Me out on audiobook, I can get back to finding vocal talent for Brains and Beauty. Audiobooks are monstrously expensive to produce, and I need just the right voice.

Meanwhile, various members of the Jane Austen Society of North America have suggested various possible next JAFF projects, and I’ve started multiple other stories – a third book set in Pittsburgh to go with Wealth and Privilege and Brains and Beauty, a trilogy on Abraham Lincoln (I live In Illinois not just in the Land of Lincoln, but right near the Sangamon River where his legal career started), and another book set in Turn of the Century Chicago.

As soon as I pick one and settle down, it will be much easier to get some writing done…