Fellowship

Character Reveal: Leslie

Lynette M Burrows

In a character reveal, characters from my books (in print or works-in-progress) answer questions from a standard personality assessment test. Today’s character reveal: Leslie. You first met Leslie, Ian’s sister, in Fellowship. She also appears in the second in the My Soul to Keep series, If I Should Die. Watch this website for sneak peaks and cover reveals in the third quarter of 2020. Who Leslie Ann Elizabeth Hobart was sixteen when she appeared in the Fellowship. Younger sister to Ian, Leslie worked as an aide at a local physician’s office for her school sponsored work program. She appears in If I Should Die with vital information that challenges Miranda and a doll that brings back unpleasant memories for Beryl.  1. Who is your role model? When I was in school, my role model was Clara Barton. Clara was a self-taught nurse who risked her life to care for soldiers in the battlefield during the Civil War. And she founded the American Red Cross. Now, it would have to be the woman who disguised herself as a man and fought in the Revolutionary war, I forget her name—Deborah something—Sampson? Yes, I think her name was Deborah Sampson. 2. Who knows you […]

Outtake from Fellowship & A Lesson

Lynette M Burrows

I’m deep in the last minute edits for Fellowship before I send it to the proofreader. Writing a book in the same world as My Soul to Keep that is not a sequel, has been interesting. So this week, I want to share an outtake from Fellowship and a lesson learned about writing before research. I am both a planner and a pantser. By that I mean, I write the story with a general outline. Since the outline isn’t very detailed I often go “off on a tangent.” I let the characters take me places that often end up on the cutting room floor as this excerpt did after I learned an important lesson. Before Research Ian opened and closed his fists over and over. It was weird. He’d never been afraid of hiking through the mountains before. It’s not right. Not fair. The Blue Ridge Mountains are my mountains. It was where Pop had taught him to hunt and fish and think. Pop was wrong about the Fellowship though. He thought it just needed some improvements. Pop used to talk about a time when he was young when he could walk where ever he wanted, even the streets of […]

Do You See a Dystopia in America?

Lynette M Burrows

Dystopia is all the rage right now. Nearly every day in America, someone refers to a dystopia. From The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu to the current administration in America. A dystopian American society seems closer than ever. Discussion usually becomes a lament that “America is turning into a dystopia.” Do you see a dystopia in America? It’s both in the present and the past. We’ll take a look at a few historical examples, but first… What is Dystopia Dystopia is “an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.” Merriam Webster Dictionary Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937), a Russian novelist, wrote the first dystopian novel, We. Also a playwright and satirist, he was a “chronic dissenter.” Tsarist censors condemned, arrested and tried Zamyatin. He won an acquittal. He wrote a novel, We, in 1921. His manuscript circulated in Russia but he could not publish it there. An English translation was published in the United States in 1924. The original Russian text was published in New York in 1952. The story tells of a “Single State” where workers live in glass houses and have numbers rather than names. According to Goodreads, the novel is “ a resounding cry for individual freedom.”  […]