Musings About 'Alexandra'

I was recently thinking about this book (story) Alexandra, and giving it a critical appraisal: if it had been someone else's work, how would I assess it?

What would not be widely known (or known at all, come to think of it) is that it was written in chunks, because I was very busy teaching, for the first time, and I rotated from book to book—I vaguely remember working on at least three books at that time—and working out, in my head, the stories of the books I was not writing at the time!  That makes me sound like a genius, but I'm sure that that's what most authors do. 

Early in the story, Queen Alexandra and Princess Genevieve set out on a tour of the nation, and their first stop on their way is at a estate in Westholm.  This is the point at which, in my opinion, the story settled down to be serious. 

It was still a little silly, I was still portraying the three girls as silly teenagers, but important subsidiary characters appeared, and seemed to tamp down the foolishness quite effectively, especially Lena, the warden of the Lodge and the farm complex. 

Shortly afterward, there are preliminaries to an invasion, and the tone gets a lot more serious. Then there actually is an invasion, and the two principal characters get separated for almost half of the book.  I'm reluctant to get into more detail, but let's just say that Alexandra and Genevieve are out of communication for about a year.

Meanwhile, Genny was conscripted into addressing the nation each day, in a war of propaganda, to keep up morale.   I enjoyed writing Genny's political speeches; there were at least three of them. 

Lena (Magdalena) was a character whose creation gave me lots of satisfaction.  There are two more characters who were great inventions: Nevenka, and Katya.  The first is a spy; the second was, in fact, the woman who becomes the president / head of state of the enemy country.  I wrote a couple of speeches for Katya as well!

Don't worry; it was not all about speeches; there was tons of romance too.  Most interestingly, there were characters aged from 8 years old, all the way to 80 years old, and even older.  I was in love with each and every one of them by the time I was done writing!  I'm a little sentimental. 

K