Felicity Goodrich's Blog

For the past year or so I feel as though I am living a second life inside my imagination while working on my next book.

Whenever I’m writing something so large, I sometimes feel lost inside my own story. As though I’m living two lives, one outside here in the real world and the second swallowed up whole by a different time and place. For the past year, I’ve been living at the dawn of World War One.

For a long time, I never wanted to write anything set during the first world war. When I was a kid, I saw the season finale of Blackadder Goes Forth where the cast of characters goes “over the top” and to certain death. I thought it was the most beautiful and heart-wrenching ending to a cast of zany characters and their historical adventures. I knew I could never write something so achingly funny and beautiful, and so I never wanted to try. Why bother trying to say something which has already been said so perfectly by someone else?

I’ve been thinking about the ending scene often recently. It still holds a place of high praise in my eyes. The humor isn’t dark or morbid, it’s perfect. It makes you want to cry for the laughter it brought you and for the painful truth it tells. Someone like Blackadder is the most fitting cynic to see the futility of world war one through. I still love the ending and it still makes me want to cry, but now I have my own story to tell set during that beautiful summer of 1914 right before the world was torn asunder. I have my own heart-breaking battle scene that makes me want to cry. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel I’ve written something as perfect as the mark Blackadder left upon my mind, but I’ve done my best, and I cannot wait for you to read it.

Technically, I believe this was the first mini history lesson I wrote up several years ago but since I had to rescue it from the depths of unloved Facebook, it can be the second.

Late last night, when we were all in bed.
Mrs Leary left the lantern in the shed.
And when the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said,
"There'll be a hot time, in the old town, tonight!"

The night of October 8th, 1871 was the start of the Great Chicago Fire. It raged for two days and killed up to 300 people and left 100,000 homeless in the booming young city. Due to severe drought and the majority of the homes being built from wood in the "balloon" frame with tar or flammable shingles for a roof as well as wooden sidewalks, the fire did considerable damage in a very short time despite a rapid initial response from the 185 firemen in the city. Contrary to popular belief, it was never determined what started the fire, (the family cow, men gambling after nightfall, or if the fire was related to additional fires throughout the Midwest that day, but the O'Leary barn was the first structure to go up in flames.

A silver lining to the fire? Due to a generous donation from the United Kingdom to help rebuild the city, the Chicago Public Library was established and replaced the previous paid membership libraries before it with a free version open to everyone in the city, which is today the 9th largest library in the United States and holds 5,721,334 volumes of books over 80 locations throughout the city.

Today in Felicity’s Mini History Lessons, a pick-me-up for all struggling artists out there, don't worry, you can always be famous after you've died!

On November 14th 1851 American novelist Herman Melville’s book Moby-Dick was published in the United States by Harper & Brothers having been released in the UK on October 18th of the same year under the title of The Whale by publisher Richard Bentley. For the American publication, Melville added the epilogue after British reviewers expressed frustration that the UK release was narrated by a character who had not survived the shipwreck and therefore could not be narrating the story. In the end, this did not save Moby-Dick from American critics, many of whom relied upon British reviews to formulate their opinion. The first American review released by the Boston Post states "We have read nearly one half of this book, and are satisfied that the London Athenaeum is right in calling it 'an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact'" and stated “'The Whale' is not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper.” The British release sold 500 copies, the American release only 3,215, a total of 3,715 as opposed to Melville’s first novel Typee whose combined sales totaled 16,320. The novel was considered a failure and though Melville continued to write and publish, he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for over 20 years.

Melville died in 1891, a forgotten footnote in the history of the written word.

In the 1920s, literary underground movements rediscovered Moby-Dick and scholars took an interest. In 1921 Carl Van Doren called Moby-Dick a “pinnacle of American Romanticism”. In 1923 D.H. Lawrence praised Moby-Dick as a work of first order even though he had read the original UK release lacking the epilogue. In 2015, a first edition of Moby-Dick was valued at 60,000$.

In 1924, 33 years after Melville’s death, Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville’s final novel, which had taken him over five years to complete, was finally published.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer.

In and of itself, this probably isn’t unique. I’m sure most published authors would say much the same thing.  For some, this we walk path was easier; for others, harder. What separates us is mundane, is the dream that matters. And I have lived that dream.

I wrote my first book when I was 12 years-old, though I wouldn’t recommend reading it any time soon. It is the work of a child dipping their toes into their own voice. Despite its flaws, I remember being immeasurably proud of myself when it was completed, a feeling I doubt I’ll ever replicate again. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my passion was never going to be an easy path. Sure, there were some signs but for whatever reason they were never a top priority and more of a passing concern.

As a child, I couldn’t read. I don’t mean I had trouble with reading or I didn’t enjoy it, I mean I could not read if my life depended on it. I couldn’t spell, I couldn’t read, and the idea of learning a second language was as farfetched to me as one day setting foot on the planet Mars. When book reports and reading assignments became a thing I was expected to complete, my illiteracy glowed like a shining star. My writing hung on a display board beside my classmates, unique in its atrocious penmanship and the fact that my book choices were always years behind the level of my peers. I wasn’t a lazy child, but something was wrong.

It was my mother who finally found a way through the impenetrable fog of the written word. When I was in fourth grade, she began to buy me comic books. Bless her, she couldn’t bring herself to buy me anything violent or vulgar, so I was left with Casper and Little Dracula. Content choices which, in hindsight, may provide a glimpse into the foundation of my interest in macabre myths and legends. Short sentences coupled with imagery finally broke through the barrier inside my mind and the fog cleared. At last, I was able to read. I still couldn’t spell to save my soul, but the floodgates opened and I could read.

And did they ever open.

Months after being given my first comic books, I leapt ahead of my peers. Suddenly, I was reading Sherlock Holmes, The Princess Bride, Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe. The book that started it all though, was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was the first book I ever read on my own and it is no understatement to say, it changed my life. This was what I wanted. I wanted to reach someone, anyone, just one person, the way this book had reached me. I suddenly knew who I was meant to be. That little girl promised herself she would get her debut novel published before she turned 30.

I’m not sure how I decided upon the number 30. I think as a thirteen-year-old kid it felt like a long way off, but not too old so as to make life feel over.

Lucky for me, I was born at the perfect moment in time for someone with my still unknown weakness to achieve their dream. By the time I was in middle school most homes had a home computer and internet access, by high school all papers were expected typed and printed in a word processor, and by college every student needed a laptop. Spellcheck saved my neck on more than one occasion. Without it, no matter how hard I tried, words still fell apart as they left my fingers. Once the spelling of a word was committed to memory, it stuck forever, but before memorization, even the simplest ones tripped me up. They still do. You don’t want to know how many little red lines have appeared as I type. But, just as the old fear of never having a calculator on you proved obsolete with the advent of the smartphone, so too did my inability to spell with the advent of spellcheck. In short, I could easily fake it so long as I never had to participate in another dreaded spelling bee ever again.

It wasn’t until college when the general education requirements caught up with me and my university insisted I learn a foreign language, that someone finally noticed something wasn’t right. I’d spend hours sobbing over French homework, forced into taking advance placement courses because I had both French and Spanish on my high school transcripts. My inability to spell in English was only more humiliating in French where, for some reason, I couldn’t even sound out the words and trick my mind into participating. I knew I was putting in the work and I knew I wasn’t incompetent or stupid, so why couldn’t I do this?

I am dyslexic.

It’s a cruel word in and of itself. For a dyslexic to spell out the condition they suffer from they’re forced to trip over a slew of rare letters within the English language. I’d always been told that dyslexia made people read words back to forwards, and I knew that wasn’t my problem. Letters didn’t move around upon the page; I didn’t read them backwards. I just couldn’t read them. It was around this time that I learned how large of an umbrella dyslexion is and that I belonged firmly beneath its shadow.

There was a comfort in this knowledge. At long last, I knew what was wrong. I knew where my limitations lay and where my strengths were. I could manipulate my mind in a way I never had before, trick it into behaving the way society thinks a brain should work. It was only then that I was truly able to write.

I finished my first real novel during my junior year of college in 2007, but didn’t know what came next. The world was changing. The publishing industry didn’t look the same anymore. 2007 was the year Amazon released the Kindle. My future publisher, Amazon Publishing was launched in 2009, and my imprint not even a glint in the milkman’s eye as it were. Agents couldn’t agree if they wanted electronic or paper submissions and all the hard and fast rules seemed to be dissolving. Never the less, I threw my hat into the ring.

It didn’t happen right away. I finished college and moved onto graduate school 3000 miles away from where I was born. I wrote off and on and would try every now and again to find an agent or publisher, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I finally got my break. I signed with an agent and he found me a home with Lake Union Publishing. On April 12, 2016, seven days before my 30th birthday, The Vow was released. I had made my dream a reality. It wasn’t how I thought it would happen. I couldn’t have known when I was 13 what the future would look like, but I made it happen.

The journey doesn’t end there, but this entry does. I’m looking towards the future now and trying to figure out what happens next. There is one thing I know for certain though, the path was never clear. The future evolved before my eyes as I grew up with technology, and I have little doubt it will continue to do so going forward. If that 13-year-old girl could make her dreams a reality, then so to can a 33-year-old woman.