Unity and growth – love this image!

Welcome to my new combined website and blog! For years these two have lived at two separate addresses, and the two dwellings felt disconcertingly like the workplace and “home.” Now the two are one, the url/address is one, and I feel much more centered.

This is my first blog on my new WordPress Premium site! Why blog at all, you may ask? Today, to be a published author, one needs a website, a blog, a presence on a broad array of social media. There are days when all authors (at least the many I have come to know!) resent the time it takes to engage in “marketing” – time no longer available for the activity we love best, writing! Yet, blogging brings marketing and writing together – because it is writing! The fiction stories and novels and the blogging go together, support each other, and keep me thinking critically about my writing choices and crafting written pieces that deal with real life.

A “Woodstock” typewriter – really?

I hope to carry you right along with me, to acquaint you with my choices, my process, related research and travels, and influences from society, politics, arts and music. Writing blogs helps me reach out to readers in between my larger – and long-longer-longest – projects!

Please take a few moments to run through the website menu selections beneath the header of the protester offering a flower to a policeman. Much on the new website was adapted from my old site, but there are a few new aspects, and there will be more to come.

Header

The header is connected through general themes of the insanity of war and the healing power of love, themes found in my re-released novel, The Berkeley Girl, in Paris 1968 (Sand Hill Review Press). Is the girl pictured in the header a “flower child” of the 60s? Or is she an ordinary girl, struggling to live, laugh and love during an extraordinary time?

Besides further discussion of topics related to the history and relevance of The Berkeley Girl, both the website and the blog will preview upcoming publications:

• A sequel to The Berkeley Girl, just completed and currently being edited. More about that to come – as well as sneak peeks into its pages and the opportunity to weigh in on certain aspects!

• Short fiction and novels about America’s immigrant generation during the late 19^th and early 20^th After three years of research into my family history, I am now beginning to wrap up the tumultuous, pivotal “60s” and turn my attention to these earlier, remarkable stories. Stay tuned!

Thank you for reading this far, and for being supportive of my dream to write about things I care about! Also, please note and bookmark the change in the address to elisefrancesmiller.com/.