A New Year and a New Anthology
by Paula Gail Benson
Happy new year to all! I hope your reading and writing is bringing you much joy.
I’ve written before about belonging to the Lowcountry Romance Writers (LRWA, a chapter of the Romance Writers of America). I’ve continued to be a member, even though it is based in Charleston, S.C. and I live in Columbia, because its membership is so delightful, and its programs and projects offer some great opportunities to learn and practice the craft of romance writing.
Even though I have a few romantic short stories to my publication credit, I don’t consider myself primarily a romance author. My concentration lies more with mystery stories.
I do have great admiration for romance authors in their ability to work out unique stories following a fairly-well defined and expected structure. I also really appreciate their tremendous expertise in marketing their work. Not to mention that reading a good romance about fascinating characters facing strong, realistic challenges is a wonderful fictional diversion because you can always count on a happy ending.
For the previous two anthologies, I’ve enjoyed working on time travel stories. In Love in the Lowcountry, Volume One, my characters journey to Charleston of the 1930’s. My story in Volume Two has modern characters interacting with those living during President George Washington’s visit to Charleston.
For the upcoming Volume Three, which must involve a South Carolina vacation, I followed up on the antagonists featured in my story from Volume One. How do two very disagreeable folks redeem themselves and find they might have their own love story?
Are you a fan of Bill Murray’s movie Groundhog Day? Well, picture the former antagonists having to relive fifteen-minute time loops, each period taking them further back in history. Combine that with a connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s military service on Sullivan’s Island and you have my new story, “Poe Substitute.”
Please watch for news of Volume Three, which will be released in early March 2025. I’ll be bringing you additional updates as the time for publication approaches.
If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll check out our previous Love in the Lowcountry (A Winter Holiday Collection Book 1) (now available on Amazon Kindle for only $1.99—14 great stories!) and Love in the Lowcountry Volume 2: A Winter Holiday Collection (also available on Amazon Kindle for only $1.99—11 great stories). And don’t forget to celebrate with our LRWA authors the release of Volume Three in March 2025!
By Lois Winston
I don’t know how I didn’t know about this series of books, but I’m so happy I stumbled upon them. Mrs. Polifax is a New Jersey widow who walks into the CIA one day and offers her services as a spy. Surprisingly, they take her up on it! And that’s the start of a very entertaining book featuring an extremely endearing character. The author wrote fourteen books in the Mrs. Polifax series before her death at the age of eighty-eight in 2012. I’ve already started the second one.
If a book doesn’t draw me in by the third chapter, I won’t waste any more time on it. There are too many books to read and not enough leisure hours in my day. Even so, there are books I finish but soon forget. Then there’s The Dutch House. I first picked this book up because it takes place in a town where I went to college and later lived for several decades. But I kept reading because the author is so adept at crafting both characters and plot.
I bought this book several years ago but just got around to reading it this summer. At 880 pages, it’s quite intimidating and requires a huge commitment of time. Because I don’t care for horror stories, I’d never read anything by King other than his book on writing. However, I’m old enough to remember the day Kennedy was shot, and the concept about a man who goes back in time to prevent the assassination fascinated me. I flew through it, unable to put the book down until my eyelids grew heavy each night.
Disclaimer: the author is a dear friend, and I was lucky enough to read this book prior to publication. Daisy Harriman, one of the main characters in the book, was a real person. When she requested a room for the night at the Waldorf Hotel, she was turned away because she wasn’t accompanied by her husband. Appalled by her treatment, she set out to change history, creating The Colony Club, the first woman’s club of its kind in not only New York but the world. The novel also incorporates other historical people of the Gilded Age, including Stanford White, who designed the building, and actress-turned-interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, who decorated the Colony Club’s rooms. The author is a meticulous historian who creates a richly accurate depiction of the times, especially in the treated of women, making the book extremely au courant for today’s readers.