Hello, Janeite friends!
I hope that you're fine and merry wherever you are and , especially, that you are ready to join today's guest at My Jane Austen Book Club, C.P. Odom. Let's discuss his new variation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Consequences. Looking forward to reading your comments to the guest post and to the excerpt from Consequences!
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| C. P. Odom |
My
second novel, Consequences, was recently published by Meryton Press, and
Maria Grazia has been gracious enough to invite me to talk about it. Both it and my first novel, A Most Civil
Proposal, are variations on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Essentially, they are “what if” stories,
which look at how things might have turned out if some element of the story
went in a different direction. A Most Civil Proposal
pivoted around Darcy making a more civil proposal at Hunsford rather than the
proud and arrogant proposal as in the book.
Would that really lead the story in a different direction and, if so,
how would events transpire? The critical
point in Consequences is Elizabeth Bennet’s angry and vituperative rejection
of Darcy’s proposal. The book has two
parts resulting from differing consequences resulting from that critical
decision.
I’ve
read most of Austen’s other novels, but Pride and Prejudice is the one that
continues to call to me. Both my two
novels came into the world as fan-fiction postings on the old Hyacinth Gardens
website. I kind of stumbled into reading
and then writing Jane Austen fan-fiction by accident, resulting from reading my
first wife’s beloved Jane Austen’s books following her untimely passing almost
twenty years ago. I’m continually
surprised to find myself writing in this arena—after all, as a long-time
left-brained engineer by training and a former Marine by inclination, one would
think my writing efforts would be in something other than Jane Austen’s
world. But life is always full of
surprises, isn’t it?
