Winds of Change - author interview Carole Eglash Kosoff

Winds of Change Book Tour

Carole Eglash-Kosoff lives and writes in Valley Village, California.   She graduated from UCLA and spent her career in business, teaching, and traveling.  She has visited more than seventy countries.   An avid student of history, she researched the decades preceding and following the Civil War for nearly three years, including time in Louisiana, the setting for Winds of Change and her earlier novel, When Stars Align.  It is a story of bi-racial love.  It is a story of war, reconstruction, and racism, but primarily, it is a story of hope.

This is her third book.  In 2006, following the death of her husband, she volunteered to teach in South Africa.  Her first book, The Human Spirit – Apartheid’s Unheralded Heroes, tells the true life stories of an amazing array of men and women who have devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to help the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships.  These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day.

Her second book, When Stars Align, chronicles the Civil War and Reconstruction through the love affair of Amy, a white girl, and Thaddeus, a colored man born of the rape of an eleven year old slave girl and the teen heir to Moss Grove.
You can visit her website at www.windsofchange-thebook.com or connect with her at Facebook at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=553077163.

About Winds of Change

The racially charged love and conflict of the critically acclaimed When Stars Align become more entrenched after the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Amy had taken her daughter, nephew, and a son she’d had never been able to acknowledge, born from her love with Thaddeus, her colored lover, to San Francisco, as a refuge from the intense racial scrutiny of the South.
They are forced to return to their old home, Moss Grove, a successful Mississippi River cotton plantation, as young adults.  They discover facts about themselves that refute everything they believed regarding both their parents and their racial background.  It changes the lives of each of them.  Bess and Stephen’s love is thwarted.  Josiah struggles with echoes of his past.
It is a tumultuous time in American history that includes the inventions of airplanes, automobiles, telephones and movies midst decades of lynchings and economic turmoil.  It is the Spanish-American War and World War I.  Racial biases complicate lives and relationships as newly arrived immigrants vie with white and Negro workers all trying to gain a piece of the American dream.  Winds of Change is a soaring historic fiction novel that stands alone but follows the next generation from those we came to know in When Stars Align into the 20^th century. It is a socially relevant, historically accurate, saga of decades often overlooked in American

history.

Interview 

Q:  Give us an example of a typical writing day.

I don’t write everyday but I try to write at least 4-5 times a week.  I write until I hit a ‘glitch’.  Rather than force it, I stop and let my mind wander to other things.  Usually the answer hits me about 4 in the morning.

Q:  Do you write on a computer or with pen/pencil and paper?

 

I use a computer that allows me flexibility in editing.  I can also send it to friends who critique both the plot and the grammar.

Q:  Do you work from an outline?

I do on the non-fiction I write but not on the historic novels.  My novels, however, span decades, and I need to know where the story is heading. 

Q:  Biggest Pet Peeve about the writing life.

Having to do so much marketing by myself.  I love the writing and I have even come to be tolerant of the publishing process but the new paradigm of books and ebooks makes marketing my responsibility.

Q:  Biggest Career Surprise

That at this point in my life I’d be working on writing my 4^th book.

Q:  Worst rejection you’ve ever received?

It didn’t have to do with my writing but with a life event and it wasn’t easy to deal with and move forward.

Q:  Nicest rejection you’ve ever received?

  

I’d love to represent your book but I can’t find a publisher.

Q:  Where do you see yourself in 10 years? 

Hopefully alive and still traveling and playing tennis and writing.

Q:  What’s next for you?

 

Finishing my current book and beginning on the next.

Q:  Who is your favorite author, and why?

Two…Gore Vidal and William Manchester…they bring history alive.

Q:  What are a few of your favorite genres and why?

Historic fiction, historic non-fiction and social science fiction.

Q: In writing your book/novel if you could do it again what would you do differently?

My current novel, Winds of Change, contains a great deal of history.  I had hoped to have more plot and less history but the events were so compelling I wasn’t able to accomplish it…I would try again.

Q:  Where do you write from? (location and description)

I have a pleasant well lit office, music in the background, and dogs lounging nearby.

Q:  Do you have a writer’s studio? Describe it for us and what is the view you see from the window?

Lawn and trees

Q:  Writer’s Block – If you have ever experienced it – how did you resolve it?

By walking away from the computer until my mind unravels the problems.

Q:  Have you ever abandoned any books/novels in progress?

Not recently but I have in prior years

Q:  Advice for the audience, first time authors, those choosing the writing life.

Keep reading and writing.

Q:  Who or what was your greatest influence that made you want to be a writer/author?

My love of telling a story.

Q:  How did you feel holding your book in your hands for the first time?

It was magic and I could feel my entire body tremor.