#AuthorInterview: “A Room in Blake’s Folly” by J. Arlene Culiner

Today, author J. Arlene Culiner is sharing details about her book, A Room in Blake’s Folly. Let’s get started.

What was your inspiration?

I’ve always been fascinated by shabby old hotels, places that existed in the days before renovation, norms, and mass tourism. And when ensconced in one of those throwbacks to another era, I do enjoy imagining the long-gone guests and their forgotten dramas. 

One sagging old Nevada hotel where I stayed years ago conjured up boomtown days and silver mines, and I’ll never forget my ghostly room with its faded wallpaper, rattling sash window and creaking floor. The memory of that hotel has stayed with me, and it became the Mizpah Saloon in A Room in Blake’s Folly.

Beginning in 1889 and ending in 2022, the book’s six chapters describe the evolution of a Nevada silver mining town and the fate of those who live there there — not always, by choice: a mail order bride who discovers her husband is a brute; a former prostitute who meets a silver baron; a desperate Russian war refugee, and a woman who protects spiders. And throughout, there’s one deep secret waiting to be revealed.

Sounds fascinating. What kind of research did you do for A Room in Blake’s Folly?

I went to the wonderful National Library in Paris and I read everything I could get my hands on about the Far West, its history, injustices, even its archaeology.

Are your characters based on anyone you know?

Forget imagination! I love writing about people who are different, who have never really fit into mainstream society. All my characters are people I’ve met although I’ve had to disguise them. If I didn’t, I’d have an unruly and furious crowd pounding after me with spears, pikes, longbows and deadly curses.

Haha! We don’t want you in danger! All writers suffer from writer’s block at least once in their career. What’s your go-to cure?

It’s the first draft that kills me and brings on an attack of writer’s block so deadly, that some manuscripts take years to complete. I’ve learned not to worry about them. I just put them away knowing that I’ll get back to them one day, and that once the terrible first draft is done, I’ll have all the excitement of working all the other drafts — second, third or even fifth. 

Putting a book away for a while is a good way to cure writer’s block. I’ve done it myself. Sometimes the romance genre gets a bad reputation for being cliché and full of Fabios. How do you respond to that?

I agree — why fight with people? I admit there are bad romances, and clichés, and silly characters. I then say that there are also excellent romances, with wonderful characters and excellent storylines. That keeps people quiet.

Awesome. Thank you for visiting. It’s been fun.

Blurb

If only the walls could speak…

In one hundred and fifty years, Blake’s Folly, a silver boomtown notorious for its brothels, scarlet ladies, silver barons, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town. Although the old Mizpah Saloon is still in business, its upper floor is sheathed in dust. But in a room at a long corridor’s end, an adventurer, a beautiful dance girl, and a rejected wife were once caught in a love triangle, and their secret has touched three generations. The six stories in A Room in Blake’s Folly tell the tale.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt3VkYUTVNk

Purchase Links: https://books2read.com/BlakesFollyRomance
Author Links: https://linktr.ee/j.arleneculiner

Excerpt

   “You a widow?”
  “No.” She could hear the tightness in her voice and feel the tension in her shoulders.
  His eyes glinted. “A runaway wife.”
  “Not that either.” Did she have to say more? She didn’t. But since people were bound to be asking that same question over and over, she might as well get used to it, even though the answer was only partially true. Even though it could never express what her life had been like up until now. “I left of my own accord, but with my husband’s full agreement. He’ll be looking into getting a divorce.”
  “And your children?”
  Ah, there it was. The big question, the one thing everyone would be curious about. “No children. I’ve never had any.”
  He said nothing. Had he heard the note of anger in her voice? She’d done her best to sound neutral, but neutrality wasn’t an easy note to hit. How vividly she remembered the first time she’d caught sight of her future husband, Sam Graham, waiting with a little knot of men by a shanty train station in the middle of nowhere. He and the others had been eager to grab a sight of their brides-to-be, women lured west by the promise of marriage, land, and a home. How had the other women fared? Had they been as discouraged as she at the sight of the vast lonely wasteland, the emptiness, the bleached-out colors, and the coarse men who would be their lifetime partners? Men honed by the elements, a hard life. And rough alcohol.
  Westley Cranston stood, walked in her direction—no, walk wasn’t the word she could use. He sauntered, a slow, elegant saunter. A man sure of himself, of his power to seduce. Yes, that was why she’d felt so wary yesterday. He stopped when he was standing beside her. Smiled. No, there was nothing seductive in his smile. She’d been wrong. What had she been imagining? That she was still the young attractive woman she’d been years ago? What a fool she was.

Author Bio

Writer, social critical artist, and impenitent teller of tall tales, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a mud house on the Great Hungarian Plain, in a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, a haunted house on the English moors, and beside a Dutch canal. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest where, much to local dismay, she protects spiders, snakes, and weeds. Observing people everywhere, she eavesdrops on all private conversations and delights in hearing any nasty, funny, ridiculous, sad, romantic, or boastful story. And when she can’t uncover any salacious gossip, she makes it up.