Kindness will prevail.

Yesterday the writing of my WIP, "The Conviction of Hope" left me feeling a bit traumatized. I hope my readers will get the same feeling. (That's the point of writing fiction, drawing readers into the world you create so they feel for the characters.)

My main female protagonist, Elizabeth Bartlett, suffered a substantial amount before being sent to Norfolk Island in 1796. With some creative licence I've added a few more dramas to her life in the first few months on the Cullen farm.

Kindness will win in the end, though.

Relationships

My WIP is the prequel to my historical fiction trilogy. Book one in the trilogy introduces James Blay (convict transported to Van Diemen's Land for life in 1812), his wife Sarah and their three boys : James, William and John. It also introduces James Tedder (convict transported for seven years on the same ship as James Blay). Most of the other characters in the book are my ancestors as are Blay and Tedder.
Book two follows the characters as they deal with the highs and lows of life in a convict colony.

Book three picks up the generations who moved to Port Phillip (Melbourne, Victoria) to start a new life. It steers the reader through the development of a new city, a recession, a World War, and the Great Depression. It too shows how families unite in trying times.

The prequel is giving me grief. I wrote the first three books with a very clear understanding of where the stories were going and how each character's part would be portrayed. The prequel is a very intimate look at the development of a relationship between my 5xgreat grandparents. Although the other books explored the relationships between my grandparents, 2x, 3x and 4x great grandparents, I think of myself as trespassing on the personal lives of James Bryan Cullen and Elizabeth Bartlett.- 5x great grandparents.

More effort on my part needs to go into distancing myself from them as ancestors, and treating them as characters who have a job to do.

Beta reading

I'm beta reading for a fellow author at the moment. He has written a novel for the young adult market. Reading his work adds to the insecurities I have about my own work. Writing is hard. Finding people to read your work is harder.