Susan Provost Beller

I seem to need to reinvent myself every twenty years or so. A number of years ago, I wrote here that I'd decided to try something new and was working on three possible historical fiction stories. I told my readers that I wasn't sure whether this would work out, but that the fun lies in the writing and in the finding out if this will be a new career path for me. Those of you have checked in periodically probably wondered what I was doing taking so long!

But I discovered that writing fiction is different from writing non-fiction and that it took some time to learn how to write in a character's voice instead of the neutral presentation of a historian! Having always preached to those who ask about writing that it is about persistence, I couldn't just give up. I persisted and now the first two of those fiction books are ready for you to read.

Published as Kindle books by amazon, you can read a selection there and decide whether it is worth the 99 cents each it will cost you to download them to your e-reader, computer or smartphone. I am excited about both Hannah's War and The Buckle and hope my readers will be too!

Book three was giving me more trouble, but what can you expect from a book which begins with a modern boy saying:

"I walked in the forum with Augustus Caesar today. We discussed the price of grain coming into the port at Ostia and whether something should be done to control the exorbitant cut being taken by the middlemen who arranged the unloading of the ships and the transport of the grain into the city. We stopped at the temple dedicated to his ancestors and Augustus, all humble and pious, made an offering to the gods. We separated before dinner as I felt I had taken up enough of his time.
I can't start the story this way, even though it is the truth. Everyone would say I had totally freaked. Okay how to make this all make sense. This story begins with my dad's assignment to spend three months in Rome--now there's a boring opening for what has turned into the weirdest experience in my 15 years of life. Scratch that one."

And his adventure only gets weirder from there! This is the story I will go back to when I finish all the work I am doing on family history.  

My youngest son, Sean, likes to say that just once he would have liked us to go on a vacation where he didn't learn anything. That's a good place to start writing about myself--I am an intensely curious person and love the research part of being a non-fiction writer. In fact I often tell students when I visit schools that I would be happiest just doing the research!
I came to writing by way of genealogy so that tells you right away that I am interested in history. When my first child, Michael Patrick, was born in 1972, I started researching my family tree. When my daughter, Jennie, was born in 1975, I was offered a ninety-five year old christening dress that had first been worn by my great-grandmother. That dress kept me going on the genealogical research. And that research combined with a few other items, like a puppy, turned me into a writer.

I wrote my first book (or at least the first part of it) as part of a Children's Literature course I was taking at the University of Vermont as I worked on my Master's Degree in Education. With the book half written as the final project for the course (I did get an A!), I intended to put it aside. Except that we had this new puppy, named Darby. On weekday mornings everyone was willing to get up and play with Darby. On Saturdays and Sundays, however, it seemed that no one else could hear him crying for attention. So Darby and I developed a routine. I would get up and let him outside and then make coffee. Then he would come in and settle down in my lap while I worked on this manuscript until everyone else was ready to start the day.

It didn't take long to finish the book on these Saturday and Sunday mornings. The next job was to get it published and that took much longer. Many rejection letters later came the magic moment when I received my first acceptance letter. The book, Roots for Kids, was published in April 1989 and is still available in a reprint with Genealogical Publishing.

The same small press that had published Roots was trying to branch out into other children's books and that gave me the chance to write Cadets at War: The True Story of Teenage Heroism at the Battle of New Market, followed by Woman of Independence: The Life of Abigail Adams, Medical Practices in the Civil War and Mosby and his Rangers: Adventure of the Gray Ghost. But then Betterway was sold to a larger publisher that didn't want to continue publishing for young readers.

Right at the point where I was leaving my job as a school librarian, I lost my publisher, which was a good thing, because it made me move on to other publishers. My next two books came out with McElderry Books--To Hold this Ground: A Desperate Struggle at Gettysburg and Never Were Men So Brave: The Irish Brigade during the Civil War. To Hold this Ground earned me my first award, as an honor book for Maine's Lupine Award, and a New York Times review.

By now, writing history for middle and junior high students had become such a part of my life, that I could no longer imagine doing anything else! What has been wonderful over the years has been to be able to move into other areas of history that I love, e.g., the Roman army book in the Soldiering Series.

But history can be shared by many means and that is what led me to using some of my massive  Civil War research to write two fiction books that I self-published through Amazon. As I noted above, that was a harder endeavor than I expected it to be!

Almost fifty years ago, I got started on my husband's family history, and then on my own.  The last several years I have moved away from writing for publication and back to writing for family, compiling family histories for myself, my husband, and my in-law kids.  With the knowledge I already had of American history, it has been very exciting to see how these family stories intersect with the history I have enjoyed researching for so many years.  I hope to finish writing and researching this material within the next two years.

And then, who knows?! But I can pretty much guarantee it will have something to do with history!!!