Dear Reader…
It’s a privilege and my great pleasure to have this chance
to talk to you, thanks to the idea behind this unique blog. I still haven’t
fully gotten into the groove of social media so this opportunity is doubly
welcome.
I’d like to be able to answer the questions that interest
you most, but I can only guess at what those are. So maybe, I’ll just take a
stab at what the first one might be, based on the questions I often get asked
by book bloggers.
Why write?
When you get down to it, writing is unrewarding, based on
the criterion of number of sales—arguably a criterion less weighty than that of
making enough money to live on. An enlightening 2013 article in the Huffington
Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-dietrich/the-writers-odds-of-succe_b_2806611.html)
gives a two percent probability that a book will sell 5,000 copies. The average
book sells 500. And those were statistics gathered at the start of the
self-publishing explosion. That probability might be lower now.
So why write? Every author has unique reasons for persisting
in the face of such odds. I didn’t really know why I’ve persisted. When asked
this question, I’ve given the facile answer that it’s because I love words. In
fact, it’s more than that. And it wasn’t until I was painting a large picture a
couple of years ago that I realized what the deeper reason might be. Why
did that insight come at that moment?
Because the subject of that painting is essentially what I deal with when I
write fiction.
I start every new novel the way I start a new painting. Essentially, I’m
facing a large blank canvas, sometimes intimidated by the empty, titanium
whiteness of it. When any painter starts to fill a blank canvas, there’s always
some central question—often a philosophical one that goes to the core of who
she is—which intrudes into that work. I realized then that the central question
for me is what being a woman means in this society at the time I’m working on a
piece. A question I’ve turned over in my head many times and to which I’ll keep
seeking answers. As in the picture I was painting, it’s the issue at the heart
of novels I’ve written.A love story is often the pivot around which my stories revolve because in life, love of one form or another is what most often drives us. My stories hardly ever satisfy the format of romance novels because of what I focus on. So I call them Women’s Fiction. My goal is to nuance what it means to love, mostly from the woman’s point of view. But loving is not something you can take outside the context of how a particular life is lived. So, ultimately, the story becomes one about life, about issues women and men face, and the changes we inevitably go through.
I hope that in knowing why I write, you’re likelier to find
something that will connect us through the story you are or will be reading. In
Hello Agnieszka, you’ll find at least
three love stories. Two of them between Agnieszka and two different men at
different times and the third, between a mother and her daughter.
But that isn’t all. There’s also Agnieszka’s passion for
music, a passion that leads to shattered dreams but which also sustains her in
her heartaches.
All the best and—as Elizabeth Bennet writes to an aunt in
Pride and Prejudice—all the love I can spare from my husband and my son.
Evy
P.S. If you’re curious about my painting, it’s at https://www.evyjourney.com/the-naked-art-of-writing-and-painting/
About the Author
Evy Journey has
always been fascinated with words and seduced by beautiful prose. She loves
Jane Austen and invokes her spirit every time she spins tales of love, loss,
and finding one's way—stories she interweaves with mystery or intrigue and sets
in various locales. SPR (Self Publishing Review) awarded Evy the 2015
Independent Woman Author bronze for her writing.
She's lived and
traveled in many places, from Asia to Europe. Often she's ended up in Paris,
though—her favorite place in the world. She's an observer-wanderer. A flâneuse,
as the French would say.
The mind is
what fascinates her most. Armed with a Ph.D., she researched and spearheaded
the development of mental health programs. And wrote like an academic. Not a
good thing if you want to sound like a normal person. So, in 2012, she began to
write fiction (mostly happy fiction) as an antidote.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:
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About the Book:
Elise thought she knew her mother.
Agnieszka Halverson is a caring woman, a great cook, and an exceptional piano
player; but living in a secure, predictable world, she’s also a little dull.
Her world is devastated when her oldest son attempts suicide, and Elise finds
her mother has a past—both sweet and bitter—that she must now reveal to explain
the suicide attempt. A past rich with a passion for music and shattered dreams,
betrayal of a sweet but tragic first love, second chances and renewed hopes.
Born to immigrant parents weighed down by
their roots, Agnieszka takes solace in learning to play the piano, taught by a
sympathetic aunt who was a concert pianist in Poland before World War II. But
when her aunt betrays her and her parents cast her aside for violating their
traditional values, can Agnieszka’s music sustain her? Can she, at eighteen,
build a life on her own?
When she finally bares her soul to her
children, Agnieszka hopes they can accept that she has a past that’s as complex
as theirs; that she’s just as human, just as vulnerable as they are. But do her
revelations alienate her husband and can they push Elise farther away from her?
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