Old Tomes & Teapots: The Jude Mooney Saga
Please welcome my second guest blogger for the month of September: Viola Russell. Viola blogged about writing her work in progress for her historical series The Jude Mooney Saga.
The Jude Mooney Saga:
When I wrote From Ice Wagon to Club House: The Life of Jude Mooney, I thought that I’d put the characters to rest when I typed the last sentence. A few months later, I was writing about those characters again. They wouldn’t let me sleep; they whispered to me in my dreams. Ice Wagon had left Jude’s story unfinished—not only his but the fate of his family.
My historical fiction has often mirrored my own family history. Love at War, my World War II novel with Nuala, a strong female character, featured a family very much like my own. All of my uncles were in WWII. My parents’ generation lived through it, felt the Depression, and survived however battered. Some were lost, and that’s what I wanted to illustrate in my tale. Hard times demand blood—blood and sacrifice. Ice Wagon was loosely modeled after my father--a handsome rogue who had lived as a bootlegger, a horse trainer, a businessman, and a bookie. He challenged the laws that dictated how a man of his social status had to live; he forged his own way at a time when too many wasted away in a crippling Depression. Sam, my father, did what he had to for survival, and while Jude’s story doesn’t completely mirror Sam’s, it contains many similarities. Jude’s sons also represent aspects of my father’s personality. These characters couldn’t let me go.
When Ice Wagon ended, Nieve, a sensual woman much younger than Jude, had lured him into marriage after the death of his beloved wife. Jude’s sons, Daniel and Paul, had to flee to their parents’ native Ireland for their role in an informant’s death. Jude and his brother-in-law started their own business in an effort to escape their entanglement with the Matranga crime family. I’d left my characters’ story unfinished. This family’s saga could develop into several books. This story is one of the American experience—hardship, loss, tears, mingled with success.
About the Author:
Viola Russell is the pseudonym for Susan Weaver Eble. A homegrown New Orleanian, she holds a doctorate in English literature from Texas A & M University. She has traveled far and wide and relishes the memories she has made in places as distant as England, Ireland, Canada, and Jamaica and as near as Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Massachusetts. She lives with her husband Ben, the love of her life, in a New Orleans cottage and is most comfortable at her computer creating the worlds that drift into her imagination.
