I'd like to give a warm welcome to Pat Bertram, the author of Daughter Am I. Pat is stopping by my blog today to chat a bit.
Scarlett O’Hara was originally called Pansy. If Margaret Mitchell had kept that name, would her epic novel ever have become so popular? I doubt it. A Pansy would be sweet and biddable with rare moments of stubbornness, but she could never be as strong-willed as Scarlett, and she would never have caught and kept the attention of such a worldly man as Rhett.
Though Scarlett fits the name of the character in Gone With the Wind, it could not be the name of a medieval heroine. In those days, almost all girls were named Mary, with Elizabeth coming in a distant second.
I suppose if Gone With the Wind were written in the 1980s, Scarlett’s name would have been Heather. Odd to think that in another forty years, youth will scorn that name as being old-fashioned, fit only for elderly women, much like Effie is today. (I shudder to think how many babies being born right now are being named Britney, Lindsay, or Paris.)
But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that names matter. I had fun naming my aged gangsters in Daughter Am I. In keeping with the times -- bootlegger times, that is -- I gave them nicknames that matched their characters. (Now that I think of it, I don’t remember what their “real” names were, only their nicknames.) I called my wise old conman “Teach,” my dapper little old forger “Kid Rags,” my ex-wrestler “Crunchy.”
And then there’s my hero, poor Mary. She starts out so young and innocent, and ends up on a road trip with six feisty old gangsters and one ex-nightclub dancer. I had not intended for her to keep the name Mary. It’s so not the name of a heroine of today! Nor is my Mary a medieval maiden. I named the character Mary Stuart after Mary Stuart Masterson in the film Bed of Roses because both Marys were strong but vulnerable when it came to love, both were very smart yet a bit naive. I never did change my Mary’s name. By the time I finished the book, the character and the name were inextricably entwined. At least it’s fairly innocuous. Like Margaret Mitchell, I could have named my heroine Pansy. Ouch.
Description of Daughter Am I: When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents-grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born-she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. Along the way she accumulates a crew of feisty octogenarians-former gangsters and friends of her grandfather. She meets and falls in love Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great-grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.
About the author:
Pat Bertram is a native of Colorado and a lifelong resident. When the traditional publishers stopped publishing her favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. Daughter Am I is Bertram’s third novel to be published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC. Also available are More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.
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Thanks for stopping by Pat! I definitely can't imagine the heroine of GWTW being named Pansy. Daughter Am I sounds like an interesting book. To my blog readers, you can click here to read chapter one of Daughter Am I.
