Please welcome David McCracken author of Far Beyond Woman Suffrage
David McCracken will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
Far Beyond Woman Suffrage
by David McCracken
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: alt-history/coming of age
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
INTERVIEW:
1 How did you come up with your idea for your novel?
I had just finished my first novel, Fly Twice Backward: Fresh Starts in Times of Troubles, an alt-history sci-fi multi-media autobiography. (Got all of that?) I got interested in the centennial of the Woman Suffrage amendment. As I read more about it, I was impressed by the dramatic richness of the event. I thought about a possible storyline and saw I needed to put a young woman into the heart of the struggle. I liked writing heroic women in Fly Twice Backward, so I landed on Mercy. She got herself into the fray and acquired a personal life that fit the personal side of woman suffrage. Her parallel personal story would add human context and help me work in the needed history without being too didactic. The rest of the story just grew as I worked from that base. I needed an exciting opening, and Mercy provided it landing in a jail cell and learning more about how she got there. Her developing story provided a mature element that moved me from the YA novel I’d planned into an A-YA. I think I ended with a book older teens could enjoy as well as adults.
2. What expertise did you bring to your writing?
I was a teacher, economist, and programmer. I think my novels will always have an element of teaching, as painlessly as possible. (Except probably for the vampire one I’m doing on the side for fun.) Economics taught me the need to examine all the consequences of actions. Programming taught me writing is like the fun of programming, making all the pieces work together. I tend to have a lot of interlocking pieces, but try to let the reader just have “aha!” moments to see them.
3. As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans?
The novelette seems the right length for me, though the first book was over 500 pages. I see this one as the first of a set of six, maybe over 600 pages in total and maybe too ambitious at 81, but it gives me a chance to explore the events surrounding me as I grew up. Writing the beginning of that vampire book was so much fun, though, I wonder if I might be sucked away into the night zone, where I can just make up a lot without needing the extensive research that went into Fly Twice Backward and The Prices of the Vote. In them, I sometimes felt the need to spend hours checking one fact, putting a high value on accuracy and clarity. Many good sources just glossed over details I was trying to pull out, like exactly when the preliminary Tennessee woman suffrage for presidential and school board elections took effect.
4. If you could be one of the characters from this book, who would it be and why?
Oh, I’d like to be myself in the first novel, falling back to age twelve with a fresh body and a fresh start. I would know all I do about what’s coming, some of it very lucrative advance knowledge, so I would have the power to do good things with the power money would bring. And I would have the chance to get to know my birth family as I never did in my self-centered younger years. Before they all died too soon.
5. What is the best and worst advice you ever received? (regarding writing or publishing)
Write what I want, how I want, what’s meaningful to me. Don’t try to write what someone else would want, except how what they will want can guide what I want. (Remember the part in an earlier answer about my self-centered younger years? I guess I never outgrew that, for best and worst: that’s what I’ve gotta do.)
6. Do you outline your books or just start writing?
I have a developing outline in my head that grows out of my writing. I get clearer on it as I write into it. What I see determines what I write next … or back before. I write in scenes, but sometimes I realize another scene must come afterward or first. That’s why the modified diary approach I used in both books suits me, and it’s so easy to move pieces around with Word’s outline view.
7. How do you maintain your creativity?
Naps, snacks, and the Starcraft computer game. And news--that’s always good for a laugh or a cry. And walks with my dog in the woods. Also, binge reading in other people’s books, though I don’t often take time for that. Oh, and rereading my favorite parts in my two novels.
8. Who is your favorite character in the book. Can you tell us why?
Mercy. I love her growth. And oh, what’s coming down the line for her! Stay tuned!
9. Are you plotting bunnies, angels, or demons?
Hopefully, all three in each of the main characters. I need to learn to love the demons more. In The Prices of the Vote, I didn’t take much time for that, deferring more complete development to the coming volumes.
10. Anything else you might want to add?
My mantra is “It’s the feelings, Stupid,” to borrow a Bill Clinton campaign idea about the importance of centering on the economy.
My method to conveying the complex, more simply: break it into smaller parts, spread them out, and intersperse them with events and conversations that illustrate and amplify them, even if indirectly. Or just give a break. The climactic scenes in The Prices of the Vote involved a lot of that, over and over.
BLURB:
Far Beyond Woman Suffrage: The Prices of the Vote
It isn’t just about women in long skirts finally voting. The racists and the rich know that, and the politicians worry.
Mercy Martin has an inside view as the battle for woman suffrage nears a climax, but she encounters many puzzles:
- So many women and Southern states oppose votes for women;
- So many people are afraid it would bring on free love, abandonment of family, economic catastrophe, or communism.
- So many suffragists are willing to abandon black women voters.
From an innocent teen to a young adult, Mercy has a central role in the campaign. She advances from confinement in a suffragist jail cell to the national campaign for the suffrage amendment. She campaigns around Tennessee, ending at the capitol for the explosive climax in the last state that might ratify the amendment and grant the vote to women.
Why should something so clearly right be so hard, and why were some bitter compromises made? Mercy is right in the middle, relied on by key players. Along the way, she acquires a husband, a baby, and better parents than she was born with.
This is an intimate view via alternative historical fiction, as accurate as it can be and as thoughtful and moving as it must be. In this first novella of a series, Mercy jumps into the campaign for woman suffrage and prepares for a vital role in the coming decades. She’ll continue on into the wider civil rights struggle growing out of woman suffrage.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCERPT:
Progress? 1/12/1918
I excitedly wait before my shift on the line to discuss with Miss Sue news I heard about, that the House approved the woman suffrage amendment 274 to 136 two days ago! “So, we’re almost there?” I ask her when she’s passing by, checking how we pickets she’d assigned for the day are doing.
Her mouth tightens: “Sweety, we’ve just begun. That’s just over the required 2/3, and I understand the Senate will refuse even to debate it until October. “
“How can that be? Don’t they know it’s right … and important?”
“They’re afraid of the heat they’ll get from both sides and probably can’t line up the votes to pass it. In Southern states, a vote for woman suffrage is political suicide because negro women there would be able to combine their votes with Northern liberals.”
I look down: “Then it’s hopeless?”
“No, an election is coming. If they postpone a vote until after the election, we might win the few more seats we need.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not letting any of them off the hook, especially not Woodrow Wilson. It’s his Democratic party, his responsibility. No excuses. He’s got to produce the votes.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
David McCracken became a political activist when the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Fellow students joined him in urging the school board in Winchester, KY, to integrate immediately. He campaigned for a Democratic governor and joined the ACLU before he graduated from the University of Kentucky. After debating at U.K., he got a degree in economics and a job with the U.S. Department of Commerce.
When his daughters approached school age, he became increasingly concerned with how he wanted them schooled. Researching that, he decided teaching was what he really wanted to do. He got a master's degree in elementary education at Murray State University. He taught for several years, until the fact that his girls qualified for reduced-price lunches based on his salary got to him. Ronald Reagan's anti-government policies prevented him from returning to government work, so he took programming courses and shifted careers again. Programming was like being paid to solve puzzles all day, but teaching eventually drew him back until retirement.
For many years of this time, he was working intermittently at a novel that became Fly Twice Backward: Fresh Starts in Times of Troubles. This concerned his waking on his twelfth birthday, trying to figure out what had happened, following his new opportunities, and ultimately outliving an evil president resembling Donald Trump. After thirty-six years, David finally published it as an interactive alt-history Kindle novel. He soon started, Far Beyond Woman Suffrage: The Prices of the Vote, an alt-history novelette dealing with the campaign for woman suffrage. He finished this piece in just ten months. At 81, he is bold(?) enough to plan this as the first of a six-volume set dealing with the far-reaching results and implications of woman suffrage. His completed novels and another in the works are presented for discussion on a new website, DoFancifulFlights.com
David now lives with his third wife, stepdaughter, and step-grandson near Winchester, VA. He has a son from his second marriage, six grandchildren, and two stepchildren. And a wonderful black dog with four white feet.
Website: http:// DoFancifulFlights.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/702749.David_McCracken
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Far-Beyond-Woman-Suffrage-Prices-ebook/dp/B09DPSTN35/
The book will be on sale for $0.99 during the tour
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:
David McCracken will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
