Several friends and family joined me August 12th for my Adrift release party/meet up at the Michigan Maritime Museum for a short cruise aboard Friends Good Will. We had a great day for a sail. I was in heaven. Big stupid grin on my face.

Family and friends, post-sail. Friends Good Will and downtown South Haven, Michigan behind us.

As I said, we had a lovely day for sailing—perfect, actually, except for the swell. (We’d had some weather come through the day before.) Everyone handled it, though. Even me. Thank you, Blisslets.

My sister, my books, and me. And a cannon.

One of the hands holding me steady so my brother-in-law could get that perfect shot. Plenty of wisecracks flying at this point—I enjoy sailor humor, as you all know full well. (Actually, this man reminded me of my character, Mark Findley—”impudent man,” as Molly would say.)

Then that hand went and proposed marriage with a ten cent ring—apparently a running gag on Friends Good Will. I was highly offended. Clearly. Then he asked if my husband owned a shotgun. (Sadly, my husband wasn’t able to come. The day’s one low point.)

The Michigan Maritime Museum offers visitors plenty to see, including a collection of small craft and Coast Guard vessels:

Petite, 1953. The mainsail is gaff rigged—the sail is attached to a yard, which is raised by the halyard, creating the trapezoidal shape. This was a common fore-and-aft rig in the 18th century.

This is a daggerboard*, for those of you who read Adrift and are wondering what one is. A daggerboard is used with shallow keeled sailboats, allowing them to sail further into the wind. It goes up and down through this casing.

*99% sure it’s a daggerboard and not a centerboard.

Here’s something cool: Merryman, a 26 foot Revenue Marine (Coast Guard) lifeboat designed and built in the 1870s. Notice the short masts and sprit sails—the sails held up by a diagonal sprit, or yard: these masts could be stepped up or down quickly, depending on the needs of the rescue and the weather. When Mr. Findley bequeaths Grandfather Robb’s Penelope to Josiah, he mentions its sprit sail.

You had better believe I will be back. Also: I’ve begun petitioning my husband for sailing lessons:

A girl can dream, right?

Aboard Friends Good Will, August 12, 2023. Video by Nick Renken.

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UPDATE: I finally hit upon a final floor plan:

ORIGINAL POST:

This week’s adventure in writing: playing eighteenth century architect. As I sat down to work on Molly Chase Book Three, I realized I never mapped out the floor plan for the Chases’ house.

The easiest solution would have been to research colonial homes and pick a floor plan, way back when I began this project (2017? 2018?). Alas. I was not so forward-thinking as that.

With two books under my belt, I needed to match the floor plan to what I’ve already written. And I need it to meet the needs of Book Three’s plot. And it needed to be rectangular-ish, like a true colonial. Plus, the house has no HVAC and no artificial light, of course, so rooms need fireplaces and passages need windows. Figuring this out for a large home—not McMansion sized, because colonial homes weren't that big, but certainly big enough—was not the easiest task, y’all.

Thankfully, while googling colonial homes, I saw some with wings built onto the original rectangular floor plan and had an “ah-ha!” moment. Maybe Mr. Chase built onto his house after he and Mrs. Chase married? I could see him doing that. And now I have a floor plan!*†

Ground Floor

Main Floor

Third Floor

*Historical accuracy and structural soundness not guaranteed. Build at your own risk.

†I still need a fireplace for the workroom. Not entirely sure where to put it...

Finally, seven months after its release, someone has objected to the religious content of In Pieces. Before publication, I had thought it would be the first complaint I’d hear. That it took seven whole months is proof that I’m small potatoes.

Don’t feel sorry for me. We are all free to like or dislike a book, the religious critique doesn’t bother me, and I am not here to debate a reader—that would be silly. But the fact that I finally did receive that criticism reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about religion in fiction generally, and religion in the Molly Chase series specifically. I’ve been thinking through approaches and guiding principles, and I’m curious to know what y’all think.

No one likes “preachy” fiction. The workings of grace are mysterious, and our attempts to describe religious experience often fall flat, especially for readers outside the writer’s denominational soup pot. Authors are instead advised to depict religious experience at a slant, rather than directly, whenever possible. Doing so keeps the themes from reading on the nose.

But what do we do when we have a story about religious people? Who grapple with religious truths? Who experience religious awakenings? Who live within and react to the particularities of their religious culture? Whose beliefs shift or make demands and effect their choices and comprise the story’s plot? Do we ignore these stories all together, out of fear of writing preachy fiction?

Of course not. Many great novels take up religious subject matter. Novels like Brideshead Revisited, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Brothers Karamazov, Silence, anything by George Eliot…

…but I am no Evelyn Waugh or Sigrid Undset or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Shūsaku Endo or George Eliot. Therein lies the problem.

What to do?

Dostoyevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov (Wikipedia).

Let me pause to lay my cards on the table. I was raised in the Church of God and became a Catholic my senior year of college. While I was in the process of converting, I met my husband, a cradle Catholic and “revert,” or a fallen-away Catholic who returned to the faith. He is now a theologian and professor of Catholic studies at a Protestant college. (You can learn more about his story here.) I am not a bitter convert. I have nothing but love and gratitude for the people who taught me about Jesus and baptized me. I see my conversion as a continuation of the journey I began under their care. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.

I say this not to downplay the real and painful divisions in the Church, but to emphasize that a person can embrace what is common to all Christians, in the hope of restoration and full communion, while holding to one’s own beliefs.

Despite my background, I never set out to tell a Protestant-to-Catholic conversion story. Conversions are notoriously tricky to write, and I was plenty annoyed when Josiah Robb decided this was his (and consequently Molly’s) path. I understand now why the story itself demands a conversion, but I was and continue to be uncomfortable writing it. In the early draft of what became In Pieces, I tiptoed around the subject, not wanting to annoy or upset future readers—it’s a subplot, after all, so no need to draw attention to it. Right?

This was the manuscript I submitted to WhiteFire Publishing at the end of 2019, several months before they—we—founded Chrism Press for Catholic and Orthodox Christian voices. WhiteFire serves a broad range of Christian audiences, yet I remained concerned that my book was too Catholic for them, even with my soft-shoe approach. Again, I’m a convert. I know both sides, and certain things simply do not translate across the Tiber.

Little did I expect WhiteFire to ask me to lean into the book’s Catholic themes.

Which makes sense! Better to write with boldness than to placate a hypothetical antagonistic reader, right? (I can hear my publisher’s voice right now: “Let the audience self-select!”) Yet I still wanted to write something that engaged, rather than enraged, non-Catholic readers. The Catholic viewpoint is as valid a storytelling viewpoint as any, but I wanted to avoid preaching to the choir. After some back-and-forth (“Are you sure?” “Yes, we’re sure”), I got to work.

These are the tactics I employed:

(1) I reframed the fundamental conflict as personal and familial rather than theological. Know thy genre: this is a story, not a theological treatise. (Zzzz…) I moved most of Josiah’s theological wrestling to the backstory so that he has but a handful of questions remaining when the book opens. The conflict instead centers on his relationship with his devout Congregationalist mother, Sarah Robb. He doesn’t want to disappoint or worry her. A reader may or may not care about the religious stakes, but family conflicts are universal.

(2) I developed Sarah Robb’s character to ensure she wasn’t a straw man. With the help of my writing group—all Protestants—I worked to make sure Mrs. Robb’s side of the conflict read well. I had already determined she was the daughter of a minister; it wasn’t a stretch to show her as educated, well-catechized, and wise. I reworked any dialogue or narrative that smacked of small-mindedness or bigotry. I also legitimized her criticisms of Josiah’s discernment process—she can see his shortcomings. (For the record, I adore Mrs. Robb. She’s one of my favs.)

(3) I brought in other viewpoints, including Molly’s. Molly’s family is Episcopalian, and her late mother had a rich faith life born of redemptive suffering. One of my favorite Molly lines: “Molly never understood why these distinctions mattered. Her mother had taught her that God’s grace was at work in every person who sought Him.” However, Molly’s opinion is decidedly a minority opinion, because…

(4) I set the conversion in its particular historical context. In Pieces opens in 1793, thirteen years after Massachusetts amended its constitution to allow the free practice of religion and two years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. At the time, once-Puritan Boston was going through a religious upheaval, seen in its new denominational plurality and felt most acutely in the rise of Unitarianism, as church after church renounced “irrational” Trinitarian theology. This was (and is) a big deal. Bostonians of 1793 cared deeply about theological and philosophic principles. We may live in a relativistic age that sees “religion” as antithetical to faith, but not they. That Josiah is an armchair theologian, and that Mrs. Robb is panicking about her son’s unorthodox views, fits the setting.

(5) Finally, I left certain questions unresolved—most importantly, the matter of Josiah’s conversations with his dead father. Was his childhood vision real? Is this wishful thinking, as Mrs. Robb thinks it is? He may very well be delusional. His experience is sketchy even on Catholic grounds, despite Catholicism’s theological framework for private revelation and saintly intercession. The reader is free to interpret things as he will.

Was I successful? Well, at least one reader thought I failed miserably. C’est la vie.

Panning back from my own work, it’s worth asking ourselves what we’re looking for when we read “religious” stories. Do we want to recognize ourselves? Do we seek edification? Affirmation? Knowledge? Understanding? Familiarity? Unfamiliarity? What conflicts and questions are we interested in? Not interested in? Do we like our religion explicit on the page, or kneaded into the story’s dough? Do we not like religion at all? And why are our preferences what they are?

Writers: Are you eager to write about religion, or do you shy away from it? Why? What do you think is the best approach to take?

Have thoughts? Contact me here.

Introducing Molly Mouse - a mouse version of my book’s heroine. My friend made the clothes following the pattern from the American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking. She even made a false rump!!!

Molly Mouse is a gift for my youngest, as it’ll be many, many years before she can read Mama’s book.