A New Project Begins

I never used to post about the books I was writing.

In my previous incarnation (as a fantasy writer under the name Liane Merciel), I pretty much just figured that while people might theoretically be interested in the process of a Big Name Writer like Stephen King or Michael Chabon, it was highly unlikely that anybody was going to care the slightest about what went into me plinking out my own little novels. And who was I to say anything, anyway? I didn't even know what I was doing, and I had very little confidence that any of it was any good.

Fast-forward a few years and a few books and a genre hop and a name switch, and my perspective has changed a little. I'm not planning to write about imaginary worlds in this next project. I'll be writing about New York City in the 1930s and struggling showgirls trying to make it through the Great Depression. My heroes and heroines won't be wielding magic swords and wizardly powers, but feathers and paste and cameras and grit. And their concerns won't be with the fate of the world, but only their own.

Because the stories I'm planning to tell now are anchored more solidly to real history (not that the others weren't, but they were generally about two steps removed from their inspiring events), and because their concerns are more direct reflections of present-day issues like surviving in an adverse economy and learning to embrace and control one's own sexuality (which, for women, was fraught in the '30s and hasn't become a whole lot less so today), it's easier to talk about them in connection with the events and ideas that inspired them.

So that's what we'll be doing here. Along with the more-than-occasional political rant, because the second purpose of this blog is to serve as a repository for some of the things I put out on social media elsewhere, and all that stuff is panicked screaming about where we appear to be headed as a nation in January 2017.