Please join us in welcoming Cynthia Ellingsen, bestselling author of The Lighthouse Keeper and The Lost Letters of Aisling. Her latest book, The Cut of the Moon, is out now!
Lately, I’ve spent much of my day traveling through time. It’s fun. There’s no stress about flight delays, what to pack, or whether to spend $8 on an airport coffee. I just get to hop into whatever decade suits.
How do I pull this off, you ask? Dual timeline novels. I love stepping back into time and exploring what it would be like to live there, while keeping one foot firmly in the present.
This might be because I was born long before the birth of the internet. My brain knows the right now right now right now you can do more do it all right now vibe but it can also step back into the 80’s and remember the silence. The beautiful complexity of longing, the promise of boredom. In that stillness, there was always something waiting to be found.
I step into the past while writing because I’m always hoping to find something. This time, in The Cut of the Moon, I found all sorts of secrets waiting to be uncovered.
The historical timeline in The Cut of the Moon takes place during the roaring 20’s and the Depression. I got a front row seat and I gotta tell you, the main character, Ruby, really goes through it.
Ruby starts the book as a pampered fifteen-year-old living large at her family’s luxurious cattle farm. She steals her sister’s engagement ring, in hopes the theft will prevent her sister from getting married. Instead, the theft results in the murder of one of the servants.
Ruby flees to New York City, where she ends up working as a servant herself. When the Depression hits, a much hungrier (but much wiser) Ruby returns to the family farm and discovers her family has been hiding some dark secrets.
The glamour of the twenties, complex family relationships, and surprising facts about the Depression kept me eager to return to that time period each day. I also loved stepping back into the present. In that timeline, the main character links up to the past while searching for the stolen engagement ring from so long ago. (If you’ve read any of my other novels, you know I love a treasure hunt.)
People say, Don’t live in the past. I don’t – I like being right here – but at the same time, I do love the freedom to skip back and forth while writing and reading dual timeline novels. To remember the good ol’ days and explore all the pieces of time I never got to experience… until writing them down.
Question for authors: Does writing offer you the same level of escape as reading?
Question for readers: What skill would have helped you survive the Great Depression?
Cynthia Ellingsen is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Lighthouse Keeper and The Lost Letters of Aisling, as well as several novels for women.
She is a Michigan native and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her charming family and two sassy Siamese cats.
The Cut of the Moon
A startling mystery and a longing for love link two women, a century apart, in a haunting novel about family secrets by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Lost Letters of Aisling.
Jewelry designer Lindsey McKenna is thrilled to be working at an antique exhibit at a local landmark that has been her obsession: the Wind Thorne estate. During the 1920s, it roared. Until an unsolved murder shadowed its legacy. Today, restored as a museum, Wind Thorne draws crowds of visitors to upstate New York. When one of them approaches Lindsey with an old diary, Lindsey is drawn deeper into Wind Thorne’s storied past.
It’s 1925 when young Ruby Thornhill steals her beloved sister’s engagement ring—a naive but heartfelt attempt to stall her upcoming wedding, which Ruby fears will tear the siblings apart. What the theft triggers thrusts Ruby into danger, and with it comes the realization that Wind Thorne is home to potentially inescapable secrets.
Aided by a charming gemologist, Lindsey gradually uncovers Wind Thorne’s history—and to her surprise, her own history as well. Now two young women, nearly a century apart, are righting the wrongs of their family and putting the past, and all its heartbreaking mysteries, to rest.
Buy Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Cut-Moon-Novel-Cynthia-Ellingsen-ebook/dp/B0DVCG65H7
Chicks on the Case 
Hi, Cynthia! Congratulations on The Cut of the Moon. It sounds excitingly twisty. And thank you for visiting Chicks on the Case. To answer your question, yes, writing does give me a similar escapist feeling as reading. I love getting drawn into the world I’m creating in a similar – though not quite the same way – as getting lost in worlds I read about.
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So fun to be here! I love the word twisty – I’m going to have to start dropping it into conversation. 🙂
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Thank you so much for visiting us today! I can’t wait to read this book. And yes, absolutely, writing definitely does take me away…sometimes when I am in the middle of a session and am interrupted, it takes a second to click back into real life. We call that The Zone around here, ha.
Curious: Where in upstate New York is Wind Thorne located? (Asks someone from upstate New York.)
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Yes, I love the zone! It’s a daring move for anyone to interrupt the zone! Wind Thorne is in a fictional town in upstate New York, next to the river. Delighted to share your name!
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The Cut of the Moon sounds wonderful—definitely my kind of book. I’m going to go look for it now.
But I’m afraid I’m woefully lacking in Depression survival skills. 🙂
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I bet your skill would be making us laugh at a time we need it!
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Cynthia, thanks for being here! I love how you can travel back and forth in time through your dual timelines. The Cut of the Moon sounds intriguing!
I’m always escaping into my writing; in a way it’s more consuming than reading because the world gets built up around me.
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This book sounds so intriguing, I will be grabbing it because reading definitely allows me to escape to other times and places. As for depressions survival skills, well growing up with depression era parents, I do know how to wring the most out of everything, even if I rarely do these days! Oh, I do scrape out every drop in a jar or bottle and wash out ziplock bags to reuse, so I guess her spirit is still hovering over me!
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Same with my grandmother! Literally yesterday I felt a twinge of guilt throwing out a “perfectly good” ziploc bag!
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I still wash those Ziploc bags…
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How wonderful! If I could pick an era to time travel to, it would be the 1920s! As for your question, I can escape better by reading, but sometimes I write a scene and then later I can remember it as if it really happened as if I were there and had experienced it firsthand. Thanks for stopping by; your book sounds great!
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I, too, am the product of Depression-era parents, so I’ve always been thrifty and love nothing more than standing in front of a shelf at the grocery store comparing prices of tomato sauce and white beans to get the best deal.
As for books, I do sometimes get swept up in my own writing, but it’s so much more relaxing to crawl into bed and enjoy the hard work someone else has done on their own novel!
Thanks so much for visiting the Chicks today, and congrats on “The Cut of the Moon”–it sounds terrific!
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Cynthia, thanks so much for visiting us. Writing definitely does not provide the same escape as reading. It’s much harder! But I do love visiting the worlds and characters I’ve created.
As to surviving the Great Depression, I’m woefully lacking on skills. My mom was a Depression era kid, and an immigrant. She told me she’d pick up half-eaten lollipops other kids dropped on the street as a treat for herself!
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Cynthia, thanks so much for visiting Chicks today! I have never written an historical story, but I’ve always loved reading them. The Cut of the Moon sounds amazing–and what a beautiful title, too. My mom was born in 1920. She was always grateful that her family lived on a farm, because during the Depression they were able to grow their own food and feed both the extended family and those who worked on the farm. My great-grandma also fed the guys who came by looking for meals in return for day work. (The farm was in New York State, near Geneva.)
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What a gorgeous cover! I would pick up your book just for that.
For me, writing does not offer the same form of escape as reading, but it does provide an opportunity to neatly arrange someone else’s life, which is something my friends would prefer I not attempt in real life.
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