Cindy Thomson returns to my site today, and just in time for St. Patrick’s Day! Cindy has written three novels set in Ireland during the Dark Ages as well as nonfiction that complements those novels. Click here to read her previous guest blog. Glad to have you back, Cindy!
Before I published a novel, I dreamed of not being called an author, but a novelist. I’d written some magazine articles and was in the process of having a baseball biography, Three Finger: the Mordecai Brown Story, I co-wrote published so I could rightly be referred to as an author, but novelist was my ultimate goal. Then after my first novel, Brigid of Ireland, was published, I realized that I had done a lot of research on the history of ancient Ireland that I thought readers might be interested in. And so I returned to nonfiction with a book titled Celtic Wisdom, published by an imprint of the same publisher. That book went out of print and having the rights returned to me, I re-published it under the title The Roots of Irish Wisdom, Learning From Ancient Voices. As I continued to write novels in that ancient time period, I followed Roots up with a book titled Celtic Song, From the Traditions of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales.
You might wonder if I was enjoying nonfiction after professing my love for fiction or if it had been a simple business decision. There was a time when I told the agent I was with back then that I was afraid I might be better at nonfiction than fiction. That was a reluctant confession because as I said, fiction was my dream. Readers are the final judge, but that no longer concerns me. I enjoy writing both and can foresee doing so in the future especially when the nonfiction has a connection to the fiction.
I write historicals. As a reader, I’m interested in the background history of a novel. Had an English king actually relinquished his crown to marry a divorcee? Were American-Italians actually sent to internment camps along with the Japanese during WWII? A really good story will often send me off to look up more information. Many of the readers of my books tell me they are the same way so this is an instance where nonfiction and fiction can marry happily. But I also write some baseball pieces. A biography on a little-known player that I wrote about will soon appear in a book on the Federal League. I haven’t written any genealogy articles lately, but I hope to return to that one day. These are nonfiction projects that I enjoy and I’ve done these types of articles and essays for many years, long before my fiction was published. I think it’s okay to have many interests as an author. But the idea that nonfiction can pair with fiction only came to me after my first novel came out. And it took me awhile to write the second book, but I would like to continue if I can. I’m curious about things so my readers will likely see me put that curiosity into research that will eventually come out in a book somewhere.
What about you? Do you follow up novels with some nonfiction reading?
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I thoroughly enjoyed Celtic Song. So much interesting information. In Celtic Song, I learned that my favorite hymn “Be Thou My Vision” might have originated in the eighth century, and it is written in the poetic form called a lorica. I’d never heard of that kind of poetry before I read Cindy’s book.
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Known for the inspirational Celtic theme employed in most of her books, Cindy Thomson is the author of six novels and four nonfiction books, including her newest, Finding Your Irish Roots. A genealogy enthusiast, she writes from her home in Ohio where she lives with her husband Tom near their three grown sons and their families. Visit her online at CindysWriting.com, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest: @cindyswriting and Book Bub: @cindyswriting.
