Kate Gallison's Blog

Naked Came the Creole Gumbo

2012-01-17T15:38:00.000-05:00

She came tearing through the Lafayette cemetery, stark naked, covered in diamonds and blood, running for her very life, stumbling into a marble mausoleum, tripping over a tree root, falling, getting up, running on. He was behind her, gaining. She reached the unlocked cemetery gate, ran across the street in the darkness, ducked through the back door of the most notorious bawdy house in the city of New Orleans, and bumped into a large, well-dressed man.
"Hello, sugar," the man said. "You busy right now?"
It was Huey Long.

Thus began the infamous bodice-ripper I tried to write a few years ago with two other women I had met at a week-long workshop. What did we really call it? I've forgotten now.

It seemed like a wonderful idea when we started. I had credentials, having written eight published books. Rae had singular gifts, honed at one of those famous MFA programs in Iowa or wherever. Carol had actually completed a formal course on how to write erotica. How could we fail?

Rae had the idea to set the book in depression-era New Orleans to take people's minds of their present-day economic woes. That sounded good. And of course there must be sex scenes. The younger women were more than willing to write the sex scenes, since I was way too prudish, and I could provide the Crescent City ambiance, being the only one among us who had ever been within a thousand miles of New Orleans. And so we began as we meant to go on, with gusto. Or gumbo. The first chapter was a killer, as you can see from the above, which pretty much summarizes it. Once inside the house, of course, Magnolia or whatever it was we called her had to become one of the working girls, or risk being thrown to the mercy of Beauregarde, her murderous husband.

After setting up the situation we had to introduce a bunch of colorful characters, put them in scenes, and slide in some juicy back-story about Beauregarde, who murdered Magnolia's innocent maid (the sister of the blind whorehouse piano player) and maybe some political stuff about the run-up to Huey Long's assassination. I was very uneasy with the sex scenes. While Rae wanted to go upstairs and get handy professional tips from the other whores, I found myself wandering into the kitchen and pestering the kindly black cook for gumbo recipes. Carol tinkered with our dialogue and dressed the madam in inappropriate outfits.

It was starting to look as if it might not hang together. Our styles were too different. I seemed to be trying to turn it into a murder mystery, if not a cookbook. Then Rae wrote the sex scene.

It was too much for me. Not that it wasn't brilliantly written. It was. The situation was that Magnolia was forced by the madam to put out for one of her less attractive customers or leave the house. The encounter was not like yummy fantasy sex but like real sex one might have with a mildly unpleasant stranger, an encounter that leaves one feeling embarrassed, inadequate and judged. I know this is Art, I said to myself, but I can't stand it.

So Rae and I sort of let it lapse. I threw away the scene I had written of the voodoo orgy in Congo Square and the one where they killed the Huey Long character. Some months later Carol sent us a wistful email. What were we doing with the book? We said we had both become involved with other projects. Which was actually true. Rae is a hotshot on the internet now and I turned myself into Irene Fleming for a bit. I don't know what Carol is up to. It was fun working with them, but I won't be collaborating with another writer any time soon. It doesn't work for me.

Yesterday I Googled Myself

2012-01-15T15:19:00.000-05:00

Not, you understand, because I'm a self-absorbed narcissist, although I can't persuasively deny it, but because writers who are trying to get themselves into the public eye are supposed to check from time to time to see whether their names are appearing online a lot. In order to do this we enter our names in a Google search, in quotes, and see what comes up.

So what did I find? 8400 hits. 100 pages of hits. I've been at this for quite a while, it seems.

Strange things appeared. And normal things as well. First of all I found stuff I put out there on purpose, like this blog, and The Crime Writers' Chronicle (my group blog), and my web site (www.kategallison.com). Then there were guest blog posts I'd done. An occasional interview. And a few reviews of my books, most of them kind. Many, many offers to sell books of mine, from Amazon and other online bookstores, from Ebay, and from Belgrave House, who reprinted the Mother Grey backlist for readers of ebooks. Google books. Somehow a number of my books got put up on Google Books.

One site claimed that I was 25 years old. That was piquant. Another claimed that I was 79 and my name was Galloway. That, too, was sort of intriguing, but once again false. One site offered a download of my first book, Unbalanced Accounts. Since they had no right to do this I was quite annoyed. There was no contact information on the site or I would have fired off a blistering letter. I put the case in the hands of the Authors Guild. If you want to read Unbalanced Accounts you can find it on Amazon Kindle, and I think you can 'borrow' it from Amazon for free. I, for one, never steal stuff if I can obtain it any other way.

But the things I brooded over longest were the reviews on Goodreads. Now, the Goodreads folks are generally lukewarm about my work. Why that should be, I'm not sure; probably their tastes don't run in the direction of the sort of stuff I write, light comedies of manners with dead bodies showing up from time to time. Perhaps they like stories of earth-shaking conflict with everyone's emotions endlessly described. I don't know, because I don't read anything that they read. Quite likely that's one of my problems.

I got a few complaints on Goodreads that I can sort of understand, for example that there isn't enough sex and violence in The Edge of Ruin for it to be considered a real murder mystery. Or car chases. No car chases. Of course, in 1909, you could outrun most of the existing cars on foot. Maybe they're right about there not being enough sex. I did have two of the movie actors getting it on in the hotel linen closet, but it happened off the page. I guess I should have been more explicit about that encounter. (The maid uttered a piercing shriek and dropped her armful of towels at the sight of Mr. Chalmers' wrinkled, heaving buttocks. Faye Winningly, moaning softly, was still wearing both her shoes. There was a hole in the sole of the left one.)

Perhaps, for the modern taste, I should have been more explicit about everything, not just the sex. Subtlety doesn't fly these days. To get subtlety you need an active imagination. To get subtlety you have to have a common culture with the person who is being subtle, so that when I raise one eyebrow you understand at once what I mean by that. We don't have that commonality anymore. Cultural diversity has its drawbacks.

I'm still trying to figure out what the fellow on Goodreads meant who accused my work of being amateurish. How could that be? Ten of my mystery novels have seen publication. For fifteen years I made excellent money writing software manuals, good ones, too, user documentation that you could actually follow. I know how to say exactly what I mean, and clearly. If I'm not a professional writer I'd like to know who is.

But enough of this, at least for another year. I promise I'll stop whining about my Goodreads reviews. In fact I promise never to go on their site again. The next time I post I'll tell you the story of how two other women and I tried to write a steamy bodice-ripper together. It's a very funny story.

This Morning I Set Fire to my Oatmeal

2011-12-31T10:21:00.000-05:00

It wasn't actually this bad.

My normal morning breakfast, cardiologist-approved, consists of half a cup of oatmeal flakes, a handful of raisins, and a pinch of sea salt, in a microwave-safe bowl, with the microwave set to run for three minutes. We're having a party tonight, happy new year to you, by the way, and I'm a little behind in my preparations. I was supposed to have made the pecan pies yesterday. So today I feel a little stressed, a little rattled. Harold needed the microwave for his bacon. He has to go to work on Saturdays. Hastily I popped my breakfast into the cooker, as my dad used to call it, punched the minute-button thrice and retired to the dining room to read the Times.

It was not very long before smoke and expressions of alarm came rolling out of the kitchen.

Flames were issuing from the microwave. The raisins were all on fire. What had I done? I'll tell you what. In my mad haste to get breakfast I forgot to add the water.

Harold blew the fire out, God love him. Eventually I summoned the nerve to pour a little water on the smoldering raisins. The dish did not crack. The bacon was able to be cooked. I fixed myself a bowl of dry cereal and retired to the dining room to eat it in shame. "What's wrong?" Harold said. "I set fire to my oatmeal," I said. "It's the beginning of the end. Dementia is upon me."

"No it isn't," he said. "You do that all the time."

"I do?"

"I seem to recall you burned a hole in a pot five years ago."

"Oh. Right."

"And what about the time we went out and left something on the stove that caught fire and Karen had to break into the back of the house and put it out."

"I don't remember that at all." Karen hasn't lived next door in something like twenty years.

"And what about that aluminum pot?" Yes, I melted the bottom right off an aluminum-clad pot. That I remember well. The melted aluminum took on a viscous quality like chewing gum. It was interesting, but I couldn't get it to go back on the pot.

"Relax," he said. "You're not getting any wiftier. Just stay in the kitchen with the pies. Take your computer in there."

So here I am. They'll be done in another half hour.

Christmas Memories #4

2011-12-23T10:46:00.000-05:00

I promised to tell you what happened when we went to Granny Hill's house after we finished having Christmas with Ma Gallison. I don't remember what that ride was like, though I know we had chains on the back wheels going klish-klish-klish all thirty miles of the way, and as a result had no problems with skidding or getting stuck. When we arrived we found a spray of evergreens with a big red bow hanging on Granny's front door instead of a wreath. The reason for this was that Aunt Billie, my grandmother's sister, was visiting from Kingston, Ontario. Her husband, a famous and beloved Canadian general, had died that year. She was still deeply grieving. To hang a wreath on the door would have reminded her of that constantly, she said, and she couldn't stand it.

In the modern day we have no tradition of funeral wreaths on the doors of the dead. To us, Billie's horror of Christmas wreaths seems eccentric. You're probably thinking that Billie was one of those cranky, willful old Edwardian aunts who appear in the English costume dramas. In fact Billie was nothing like that. To us children she seemed merry all the time, always joking, the best possible company for Christmas next to Granny herself. The women of my mother's family cultivated a light-hearted spirit that made them a joy to be around.

I was horrified to see that Granny had received presents in the mail and had opened them as soon as she got them, sooner than wait for Christmas morning. When I scolded her for this – well, I never would have scolded my grandmother, but I did say, "tut, tut" – she told me she didn't save her presents for later any more. I saved the lesson for later: old people don't wait for things. At least the smart ones don't.

Next morning we again opened stockings. I remember two presents from that Christmas, a bag of barley sugar animals and a game of Mister Ree, which was sort of like Clue. I love candy. I love board games. We all played Mister Ree after a sumptuous Christmas dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by with plum pudding, soaked in brandy and set on fire. What a spectacle! How we all laughed! We should have plum pudding this year. We should play a board game. Cross and Blackwell's plum pudding is pretty good. I think I'll go out and get some.

Have a very merry holiday season.

Christmas Memories #3

2011-12-22T21:02:00.000-05:00

The year we moved back to New Jersey from the midwest I was twelve years old, my sister nine. For the first time in recorded history it seemed that we lived close enough to my grandparents to go and spend Christmas with them. When I say grandparents I mean my grandmother Gallison in Vanceboro, Maine, and my grandmother Hill in Saint Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, for by the time I was twelve both of our grandfathers had died.

Granny's House

But which grandmother should we spend the actual Christmas day with? They lived only thirty miles apart, but it was thirty miles of snow-covered dirt road. What we did ultimately was to follow the route we always followed on our summer visits, north from Bangor through the woods to Vanceboro, where we would stay with Ma, and then across the river and off to Saint Stephen to stay with Granny.

Thing was, it wasn't summer. My father knew perfectly well what he was getting into; he grew up in Vanceboro. So as we set out on the last leg of our journey he had the tire chains with him. In the trunk of the car. Night fell, and so did the snow, thick and fast, as we headed into the dread Tomah Woods. All my life I had heard of the horrors of the Tomah Woods, for the Gallisons were not enthusiastic outdoorsmen, though they lived at the farthest outposts of civilization and had been known to work as camp cooks. The Tomah Woods were menacing, it was said, full of kill-crazed moose, runaway logging trucks, mountain lions. And yet there we were, driving through it.

Actually it was darker
than this, and also
nearly vertical

Visibility grew worse, the snow deeper. My father drove more and more slowly. No one else was on the road. It got to be two in the morning; my mother and sister were asleep in the back seat. I was supposed to talk to my father and keep him awake, as I remember. Finally we stopped halfway up a steep hill, the wheels spinning. We could go no further without the chains.

My father had to back down the hill to the nearest flat place.

There was a garage at the foot of the hill, possibly the only building for fifty miles in any direction, but the people who worked there were nowhere to be seen and they had turned out the lights before they left. Still, in front of it was a flat place. While my mother and sister continued to sleep my father laid out the chains, just so, backed over them the way you're supposed to and fastened them on. No creatures came out of the shadowy darkness to get us, but that's not to say they weren't watching.

How I admired my father. What a hero. What a competent person. Of course his mother, waiting by her wood stove in Vanceboro, expected no less. He had told her he would get us there that night, and he did.

In every little town in Washington County there is a woman called Ma by everyone, as a term of respect. In Vanceboro that woman was my grandmother. She was still up when my father pulled the car into the barn, which was attached to the house in the manner of Maine barns. It smelled of cordwood, piled to the ceiling against the coming winter, and of kerosene and machine oil. We stumbled the length of the barn, over the worn linoleum in the shed, and into the warm kitchen where Ma welcomed us, fed us a snack and sent us to bed. She had put up a tree in the parlor and decorated it with amazing fiberglass angel hair. The next day we had Christmas. We found our stockings hung on the clothesline in front of the kitchen wood stove, for there was no mantel.

And that was our Christmas at Ma's house, playing happily with our new toys, stuffing ourselves with treats. Tomorrow I'll tell you about Christmas at Granny's house. But I won't tell you which Christmas fell on the twenty-fifth of December, because I don't think I ever knew.

Save the Local Drugstore

2011-12-15T11:24:00.000-05:00

My phone rang a few minutes ago. The caller was a young man from the pharmaceutical insurance and supply company that services retired New Jersey state employees. He wanted us to save ourselves some money by arranging for generic medications to be delivered by mail instead of picking them up at our local pharmacy. (Cue video of smiling elderly actress hobbling to her door on her walker and welcoming the mailman, who grins and hands her a life-saving package of drugs.)

I said, no, thank you. He said, but the first shipment is free. I said, we buy our drugs from the pharmacist around the corner because we want to keep him in business. That is your reason, then? he said. I expect he was entering something on his computer. Yes, I said. Even if it would save you money? Yes, I said. We parted cordially.

He seemed like a nice young man, and what the hell, he had a job, not like a lot of young fellows of my acquaintance. After I hung up the phone I said to Harold, I should have talked to him longer. Maybe I could have got him on our side. Yes, Harold said. The two of you could go and camp out at Occupy Trenton.

But the thing about keeping the local druggist in business is more important than money. It's a quality of life issue. I would have to be really up against it, I would have to be down to eating cat food, before I would consent to have generic drugs sent to me in the mail. (The mail? Really? You do know that the Post Office is cutting services, right?) I could die three times before the medications got here, to begin with. I am not, and I do not propose to become, one of those old ladies who takes so many drugs that even her doctor has forgotten what she's on, what the side effects might be, whether they're even effective. That handful of pills I swallow every morning are nutritional supplements. Nutritional supplements. Not offered by the monstrous pharmaceutical insurance and supply company. And the occasional over-the-counter allergy pill.

When I do need a prescription drug, it's for some passing ailment, and I need it right away to encourage the ailment to pass. I take a short stroll downtown, I hand the prescription to Morty Barnett at Bear Pharmacy, he gives me my pills or whatever. Him I smile at. I do not smile at faceless bureaucrats packing pills in a mailroom somewhere.

Actually it's just as well that I didn't unload this rant on that fellow on the telephone. It might have spoiled his day.

Christmas Memories #2

2011-12-08T07:30:00.000-05:00

I used to work in one of the great software houses of central Jersey, all during the eighties. Actually I worked in two of the great software houses. The first one, in a fit of wild prosperity, built a palatial corporate headquarters where everyone had an office with a door and all the best computer equipment. In the middle of the software palace was a huge atrium with gardens and trees, tended by a gardening service. Young women in gardening service uniforms used to come in to feed and water the trees, murmuring to them lovingly. I played opera tapes in my office with the door closed while I worked. No one could hear them but me.

I sold a couple of novels. At home I had an adorable young child with whom I wanted to spend more time. And so I left the software house for a year or so to try to make a living writing mysteries. When the money ran out I went back.

In my absence, the prosperous software house had fallen on hard times – overextended, perhaps – and another software house had bought it. New people were in charge, ruthless people, creatures from Mordor almost. The trees were gone. Three-quarters of the old employees were gone. A new crowd had joined the remnants of the old crowd, the survivors of another brutal corporate takeover. Walking the halls, wandering in the atrium, I saw shock and despair on the faces of everyone I met. If I ran into one of my old colleagues, we would greet each other like survivors of a disaster. You! You're alive!

People continued to be fired. Supervisors were forced to rank their staff and let the lowest go. Two thugs from security together with the Human Resources director in his funeral suit would appear at the door to your brand-new cubicle (the offices with doors had been torn out) and escort you to the parking lot. That was so you wouldn't trigger the virus you were presumed to have installed to bring down the company. Because of course you hated the company. Everybody hated the company.

And now Christmas was coming.

We still had an hour for lunch, and we had a large space on the ground floor off the atrium where the fitness equipment used to be before the new management got rid of it as a frivolous waste of time, a space where we could meet and sing together. A bunch of us decided to give a Christmas, or should I say holiday, concert. We rehearsed, among other things, the Hallelujah Chorus. Every lunch hour we would get together, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and sing the Hallelujah Chorus, one of the noblest expressions of human hope and joy in Western culture. We delighted in the beauty of one another's voices. It was sublime.

The day of the so-called Christmas party, or holiday party, arrived. Possibly there were company-supplied refreshments, I can't recall. Our choir assembled on the floor of the atrium, among the stumps of dead trees and ruined gardens, and sang a few secular numbers, Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, Winter Wonderland. Peering down at us, impatient for everyone to get back to work, was the boss. He was not the uber-boss, for Sauron himself was squatting in his lair in the main corporate headquarters in another state. But he was the boss of that particular facility. And he was looking down on us in disapproval, because we were not at work serving the software house.

We sang the Hallelujah Chorus, as loud as we could. The sound penetrated to the farthest reaches of the building, maybe even to the Human Resources office. People came out of their cubicles and looked over the railing. You can't sit down during the Hallelujah Chorus.

I think about that event sometimes, when the state of the country looks dark. You may think you have us under your heel now, but the kingdom of our God is at hand. Everybody sing.

Christmas Memories #1

2011-12-06T13:12:00.001-05:00

When I was a small girl I lived in Woodbury, New Jersey. Lots of interesting stuff went on there, back in the day. A passenger train ran through the town, because there was a war on and public transportation was a necessity, what with gasoline and tires being rationed. My best friend, Deborah, and I used to hang out at the station and watch the trains go by, loaded with soldiers. Roxby's, where you could get candy, ice cream, and comic books, was right across the tracks on Cooper Street. I can still recall the smell, a rich mixture of chocolate, licorice and newsprint.

Perhaps in an effort to keep me off the street my mother signed me up for Bluebirds. Deb was in it too. Bluebirds was to Campfire Girls what Brownies is to Girl Scouts. We met once a week, paying four cents dues. The meetings opened with one of the girls lighting a candle. I could not do this, since my mother had forbidden me ever to touch matches. Neither did I know by heart half the Christmas carols we all went out one night and sang. Ever the green monkey. Sometime I'll tell you what my life was like at the Catholic grade school, as the only protestant. But enough about Sister Heinrich Himmler. I was telling you about Bluebirds.

We were assigned a project. How long did we have? I can't recall; perhaps a month. Each Bluebird was to make and furnish a doll's house to give to one of the sick children in Cooper Hospital, which in those days was in Woodbury. Awards were to be given. Deb and I fell to and madly designed furniture, mostly chests of drawers made out of match boxes, which we had in plenty since our parents smoked to excess to accompany their drinking. Then we made things to put in the drawers, cutting out make-believe doll clothes with scissors. Our houses were cardboard boxes, but we couldn't figure out how to make them look anything like dwelling places for dolls. Just the same, we were keeping busy.

Then the deadline came rushing at us. In three days we were to produce furnished doll houses, and all we had were cardboard cartons and matchboxes full of ratty scraps. My mother was appalled. Deb's mother was appalled. Naturally they took over the work and produced credible doll's houses, painted, papered, windowed, doored. We brought them to the next meeting, along with our mothers. Penny something, I think her name was, won first prize. Her doll's house was beautifully constructed of masonite with glassine windows and practical, hinged doors. It was painted cream-color. Penny, blushing with pride, stood up and collected her blue ribbon.

Then the troop leader read off all the names receiving honorable mention, which was to say, us losers. We were supposed to stand up. My mother almost stood up, she said, since she had done all the work. Well, Penny's father had clearly done all the work on her house. But, so what? It was nothing to Deb and me. And then we all picked up our doll's houses and paraded down the street to the hospital.

"What? Why?" said Penny.

"We're supposed to give them away," I said. It was the whole point. She had not understood this.

I still remember the look of delight on the face of the little sick girl who got Penny's dollhouse. Even more clearly I remember Penny's howls of despair. Yes, she wept, and loudly, standing in the doorway of the little sick girl's hospital room, so that her handy and clever-fingered father (Why was he not at war? I now ask myself. Must have had one of those essential jobs) had to pick her up and carry her away. My mother clucked disapprovingly. Deb and I felt somehow vindicated.

There's a moral in there somewhere about how to have a Merry Christmas, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

The Morning After Halloween

2011-11-01T08:00:00.007-04:00

The first of November in Lambertville is like Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, the day after Mardi Gras, when the sun rises on streets empty of visiting revelers, lollipops and chocolate bar wrappers littering the gutters. The residents are exhausted.

We are recovering from the battering of Nature, at least most of us are. Some still have no electricity, hence no heat or lights, and in the farther reaches of West Amwell no water either, since electricity is required to bring it up from the well. When the snow fell on Saturday it stuck to the unshed leaves of early autumn trees and weighed the branches down to the breaking point, especially the weak, fast-growing limbs of the ornamental pear trees that were so popular years ago until time proved them unsuitable. Only a tall stump is left of the tree that used to grow in front of our house. On Saturday afternoon the branches all bowed to the ground, and bowed, and bowed, and then suddenly with a bang exploded right off the tree. The neighbors have agreed that it must be replaced with something that will do better. Perhaps an oak.

The Halloween parade that was to have taken place on Sunday was canceled by the city. Things were still messed up. Multiple trucks from the electric company were at work on many downed wires. But on Monday night, Halloween night, the police closed Union Street to traffic and the crowds came in their thousands, babies dressed as bats, grownups dressed as witches, a girl dressed as a lighted jellyfish. So the holiday was saved.

And now it's over. In the distance I can hear the sound of computers being booted as NaNoWriMo begins. Not participating myself, but I do have to get busy on the Work in Progress.

The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Prizewinners

2011-10-25T07:23:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to boast that I'm one of 'em. The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance has given The Edge of Ruin their prize for the best historical novel to come out in 2010 about New Jersey. (I didn't ask them how big the field was. Some things you're better off not knowing.)

There were four of us this year who got a prize from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, or NJSAA, me and three real historians. Tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock in the Pane Room on the first floor of Rutgers' Alexander Library on College Avenue in New Brunswick, we're going to get together and talk about it.

2011 NJSAA Author Awards Winners:

Non-fiction scholarly category:

Ezra Shales. Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
See: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/Made_in_Newark.html

Non-fiction popular category:

Michael S. Adelberg. The American Revolution in Monmouth County: The Theatre of Spoil and Destruction, (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2010).

Link to footnotes and accompanying essay:
http://www.monmouthhistory.org/images/MCHA_essay_final_in_word_2003.pdf

Non-fiction reference category:

Joseph G. Bilby, ed. New Jersey Goes to War: Biographies of 150 New Jerseyans Caught up in the Struggle of the Civil War. (Hightstown, N.J.:
Longstreet House, 2010).
A publication of the New Jersey Civil War 150th Anniversary Committee, see: http://www.njcivilwar150.org.

Fiction and poetry category:

Irene Fleming. That's me! The Edge of Ruin, (New York, N.Y.:
Minotaur Books, Macmillan, 2010).

See: http://us.macmillan.com/theedgeofruin-1

When the Great Depression Began and Ended in Lambertville

2011-10-18T08:00:00.005-04:00

For those of you who may be curious about the beginning and end of the Great Depression, in case we have to go through another one, or in case we are actually in one, as some suggest, I have a benchmark for you.

Some say the Stock Market Crash on October 29, 1929, marked the beginning of that grim period in our nation's history. It's true that when the bottom fell out of the stock market things looked mighty dark. But, the low point? That came in 1930, on the day when the Lambertville Free Public Library got a monthly bill for $4.00 from the telephone company and the board voted to remove the telephone.

Now, this was in a time when there were no cell phones. If you needed to make a call you found a pay phone and put a nickel in (first having felt in the change slot to see whether the caller before you had neglected to take his change). Was the library phone used by patrons in 1930? Was it used by the librarian to call scofflaws who kept their books out too long? Whatever use it had been, the library board considered it superfluous.

That's right, folks, there was no telephone in the Lambertville Free Public Library for another thirteen years, when the board voted to restore phone service. So 1943, at least in Lambertville, marked the end of the Great Depression.

Makes you think. What if things got so bad the libraries had to shut down their internet connections?

Bag the Cat

2011-10-11T08:00:00.006-04:00

We interrupt the regular broadcast of news about the War of 1812 to bloviate upon our writing career, such as it is, what there is of it, as the family used to say about a vaguely unsatisfactory meal. On Wednesday last I had lunch with my agent. The Work In Progress I had hoped to hand him was not quite finished, so that I was forced to deliver a lame elevator pitch for it.

Turns out that the plot I had so craftily constructed last spring with the aid of that excellent how-to book, Save the Cat, was so complex and convoluted that it did not readily lend itself to an elevator pitch. This is a red flag for flaws in a manuscript, by the way. If you have to go on all day about what your book is about, to the point where your agent's eyes glaze over (assuming you're lucky enough to have an agent), then the book is probably a dog. Good books beget snappy log lines.

About halfway through the lunch he began offering helpful suggestions to improve the work, or at least make it easier for him to sell. By the time I had finished my post-prandial coffee I realized that a Major Rewrite was in order. Harold and I had company this weekend, so that today was the first chance I had to get to it. Many things in the WIP want straightening out, but the most starkly evident is this:

The cat must go.

So with apologies to all my fellow cat-lovers out there I'm removing all references to the kitty. I'm not even worried about what it does to my word count. Word count is the least of my problems right now.

Dropping the Ball This Week

2011-10-04T17:02:00.000-04:00

I haven't got a single thing to say this week, not about The Collingswood Book Festival, which took place on Saturday and was great, not about life in Lambertville, which goes on as usual, not even about the War of 1812. I'm cleaning out the attic, which doubles as a guest room, because we are having guests. The task of digging out five trashbags full of dead sewing and knitting projects – first of all determining which ones are actually dead, and which merely comatose, and then carrying their rotting corpses down two flights of stairs and out to the curb – has been exhausting. My mental faculties, such as they are, are not up to blogging this week. Next week I'll be back, posting with my customary charm and erudition.

Stay tuned.

Organizing Your Plot

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

I used to keep an outline on the computer of whatever novel I was working on. That way I could look at it, see what day it was when such-and-such happened, see who knew about what, who was still friends with whom, who had been murdered and who was still alive &c &c. You would think a person could keep stuff like that in her head, but I like to jump around so much that it's hard for me to know where I am in the cosmic order of things.

And so I kept four files open on the computer whenever I was working: my outline; my research file, which might contain head shots of my characters and details of their lives, as well as maps of cities, train timetables, historical timelines and the like; an outtake file, where I could save things I cut in case I came to like them again; and, of course, the actual Work in Progress.

The trouble with this system was that as I worked things changed, not only the names of characters but the sequence of events, the events themselves, even the days of the week and the dates. Sometimes I remembered to go back and revise the outline, sometimes not.

When I set out to write my latest, I hit upon a terrific way to keep track of the stuff I used to use the outline for. Here it is, in case you work in Word and want to use it too.

Embed your notes about the action and the day of the week in the text as separate paragraphs, and style them H2. Chapter headings, of course, are H1. Another approach is to rough out your outline in H2 headings and then fill in the text as you write.

In this way you can run a Table of Contents (Insert - Field - TOC), update it from time to time, and see at once that you have only one Friday in the week and that it follows Thursday, that Millicent already knows Angelique's secret by page 30, and that the scene you need to go back and fix between Millicent and Rupert is on page 22.

Try it. You'll like it.

Civil Unrest and the War of 1812

2011-09-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Civil unrest in this country is nothing new. Folks have been rioting here since the white people first annoyed the Indians. Sometimes the protestors are opposed by the police and the civil authorities, the way they were in the nineteen sixties, the way they are today in the Occupy Wall Street movement. At other times, the civil authorities ignore the protestors, even cooperate with them.

This is how it was in the first Baltimore Riot, when the very first casualty of the War of 1812 was created by a protestor dropping a rock on the foot of a passerby. The police were absent. The mayor was there, passing among the rioters, remonstrating gently with them.

What were the people of Baltimore upset about? Not the war. They were delighted when the country declared war on Britain on June 18, 1812. Federalists were against the war, but those of the Democratic-Republican persuasion were hot to get started fighting. In Baltimore, a city of 41,000 and growing apace, many of the residents were French, German, and Irish immigrants, and most were Democratic-Republicans. Not war protestors.

No, they were mad at Alexander Contee Hanson, who with his partner Jacob Wagner had dared to denounce the war in his newspaper, the Federal Republican. They began to gather at Hanson's newspaper offices on Gay Street as soon as the despised issue of his paper hit the streets, and by nightfall they were in such a passion that they tore the building down. Hanson and Wagner were not there, and so escaped a tarring and feathering.

But Hanson came back to Baltimore the following month and published a new issue of the Federal Republican, denouncing the Republicans of Baltimore as tools of Washington politicians and a rival publisher (the Baltimoreans had been rioting ever since he left). He published his street address. Two thousand rioters showed up to attack Hanson and his supporters; when they rushed the house one of the attackers was shot to death. The mayor and the police took the Federalists to jail, promising them safety, but the rioters broke into the jail and attacked them in an orgy of violence that some compared to the French Reign of Terror. One of Hanson's friends was killed and several others tortured and dreadfully maimed. Hanson himself was badly wounded.

We hope things don't come to that on Wall Street. As in Chicago in 1969, it can be tough sometimes to see who is doing the actual rioting. If past events are any guide, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

They're After Us Again

2011-09-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

I see by all the uproar that the masters of Facebook aremessing with us again, tweaking the format, proposing to collect all sorts ofnew kinds of personal information about us that we may let slip in the courseof our social interactions. There's an old New England saying regarding this:Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. Since Facebook is not expectingto turn up its toes anytime soon I suggest another slogan: Mum's theword.

We – that is, my friends and I – are on Facebook for tworeasons, chiefly: to share family pictures and stories, and to connect withpeople who might do our writing (or other) careers some good. Many people inthis latter category are actual friends, that is, people we like, people wehelp when we have the chance. Facebook is a handy way to keep abreast of things with all these folks, easier than email or checking blogs and web pages, way easier thansnail mail. But make no mistake: We are being watched. Statistics and personalinformation are being gathered and – what's that word they like? –monetized.

Monetized. They're turning you into money, friends. Nolonger is our greatest fear the terror of having our employers see those fratparty pictures where we got hammered and took off our Abercrombie and Fitches.Now they're – What? I don't even know! That's the horror of it! But the bottomline is that somebody is going to make money off our stupidity, and it won't beus. Never mind learning the clever fixes your friends are forwarding to you tokeep your Facebook posts private. Next week all that will change anyway. Justremember two things:

If you don't want to see it on the front page of the weeklytabloid, don't post it online.

If your thoughts are worth actual money, you probably want to save them, copyright them and sell them your own self.

What I'm Up To These Days

2011-09-19T14:17:00.000-04:00

Now that the cool weather is upon us I'm happy to say that I'm experiencing that snap of returned consciousness that comes with the end of a steamy summer. I have plans. First of all I plan to brag about the prize I got from the NJSAA (that's the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance) for The Edge of Ruin until everybody gets sick of hearing about it.

But that won't take long. Then I plan to get busy, or busier, on the two books I'm working on right now, the suspense novel that takes place in a town much like Lambertville and the book about the sailor girl in the War of 1812. Which pretty much takes care of my mornings.

Then I'm actually going to drop the twenty pounds I've been promising to shed for the last ten years. I figure I can do that between noon and one. Maybe I'll stop eating and tap dance.

But what I wanted to announce today is my intention of doing more with this blog.

I'm already posting every Friday to the Crime Writer's Chronicle, which I hope you're following; four really interesting writers are on that with me. But for this one, I'm going to try to post every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, starting next week. Tuesday's posts will explore aspects of the War of 1812, hoping to gin up some interest in that wacky conflict in advance of the bicentennial. Friday and Sunday, random subjects, until I finish the suspense novel, at which time I may begin running excerpts from Bucker Dudley.

I'm going to have to put one of those gizmos on the blog now that make you copy hard-to-read letters into a box before you can comment. Wish I didn't have to, but I'm being snowed under with the attention of Russian spam bots. I hope you'll forgive me.

And that's what I'm up to.

A Prize for the Edge of Ruin

2011-09-12T07:09:00.000-04:00

The Edge Of Ruin, the comic thriller I wrote under the name of Irene Fleming about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has won a prize, the annual fiction award of the NJSAA (New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance). I must confess that I'm thrilled.

These folks are historians, not mystery fans necessarily, so the thing they like about it is the history. I think I got it right, not only the events of 1909 but the feelings and attitudes of the people of that time. Research is so much easier now than it used to be. Newspapers have put their old stories online and indexed them. The Library of Congress offers old silent movies reconstructed from the paper copies that were submitted to them for copyright protection.

Apart from the internet there were movies and books. Kino offers silent movies. Netflix offers silent movies. As for books, my two main sources were Fort Lee, The Film Town, by Richard Koszarski, and Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lucas, as well as many biographies and autobiographies. To say nothing of the stories told me long ago by my grandmother, who was living and working in New York City in those days.

I was perfectly comfortable writing about that period. 1812 is more of a stretch. Although Bucker Dudley is set in the Regency period it is in no respect a Regency novel. Most of it takes place at sea, or on military bases, or in the North Woods among the Mohawk Indians. Bucker hardly ever wears a dress, much less a corset. But it's fun. The history is as solid as I can make it. I have something like eighteen linear feet of books on the many aspects of the ever-fascinating war of 1812, and yet I manage to move the action along without boring information dumps.

I'll save the information dumps for the blog. Next week I'll talk about General Wilkinson, that wretched scoundrel.

Hurricanes

2011-09-03T13:06:00.000-04:00

There is at least one hurricane connection for the War of 1812. Early in the war, perhaps a month after the declaration, a tremendous hurricane struck New Orleans and decimated the American fleet. (That is, it beat the fleet up pretty badly. "Decimated" ordinarily means "destroyed a tenth part," and don't let anyone try and tell you otherwise. In this case "decimated" means beat the fleet up pretty badly, but I don't have time to find out how badly, because I'm sitting in a rental car under a tree in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, outside the library, which is closed on account of Hurricane Lee. Fortunately their internet connection is available.

So I'm going to leave this spot now, before the tree falls on my rental car. I'm going back to my mother-in-law's house and sit on the porch, watching the wet tree limbs whip back and forth, working on my novel. Later on I'll tell you more about the damage that the unnamed hurricane did in 1812, how it affected the war effort, how a naval officer whose ship was destroyed wrote to the war office in Washington begging not to be put under the command of General James Wilkinson. I'll tell you more about Wilkinson too. He was widely hated. I hate him myself.

Farewell until better weather.

Heroes of the War of 1812 - Thomas Masterman Hardy

2011-08-22T08:00:00.003-04:00

Sir George Cranfield Berkeley

You will recall the account of the infamous affair of the Chesapeake and the Leopard that occurred in late June of 1807, where Captain Humphreys of the HMS Leopard fired on the Chesapeake before she had a chance to clear for action, killing three American sailors. You will recall that this was done on the orders of the arrogant Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, commander-in-chief of the British North American Station. What you may not know is that Sir George had a beautiful, high-born, spoiled, self-centered daughter named Louisa. Her uncle was the fifth Earl of Berkeley. Her brother was the Duke of Richmond.

Lady Louisa Berkeley

Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy met this young woman in Halifax when she was nineteen and he was forty, a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, and he courted her, because he was a rich man and a newly-made baronet as a result of his naval endeavors and it was time he married and begot an heir to the title. He had been at sea for half his childhood and all of his adult life. At Trafalgar he was Admiral Lord Nelson's flag captain aboard the Victory. Steady, intelligent, wise in the ways of the sea and fighting ships, Hardy was not greatly different in temperament from the fictional Captain Aubrey of Patrick O'Brian's sea stories. He was not literary, witty, or romantic. He was not a smart Regency buck of the sort that Louisa preferred.

Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Baronet

But there were no smart Regency bucks in Halifax; they were all far away in London. Hardy, if he wasn't smart in the sense of Society, was at least a great hero. And so on November 17th, 1807, they were married.

Berkeley was recalled to England as a result of American complaints about the Chesapeake-Leopard affair, although the English felt that it served the Americans right. Hardy put to sea in the Triumph to cruise the Bay of Chesapeake, walking on eggs, as it were, to avoid offending the Americans further. He never knew when the Americans might take it into their heads to attack, and so the stoves on board the Triumph were never lit, even in his cabin, where his poor bride sat alone and shivering. Some honeymoon.

She never forgave him.

All this and more can be found in a book written by one of their descendants, John Gore, who admired her more than I do: Nelson's Hardy and his Wife.

THE BRINK OF FAME Was Released Today

2011-08-16T09:50:00.000-04:00

It has nothing to do with the War of 1812, but instead is a book about Hollywood in 1914. Still, you might enjoy it.

The War of 1812 – Yippee! Games!

2011-08-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

A number of entities, including the U. S. Park Service, are gearing up for the War of 1812 bicentennial by making video games out of the various events. YouTube advertisements for their efforts have stimulated profane and hostile nationalistic rants in the comments section by flame war trolls whose ancestors were dodging the draft in the potato fields of Eastern Europe in 1812 (unlike mine, who were dodging the draft in the woods of Canada – Oh, yes, and one by the name of Boyd who was a doctor on a British hospital ship in the Mediterranean during the conflict). Ignore the inane remarks and enjoy the tantalizing videos. War can be fun, if you don't get sucked into the hostility.

Partisan American Politics and the War of 1812

2011-08-07T21:16:00.000-04:00

If you can imagine it, the United States was deeply divided in 1812 along party lines. The parties were the Federalists, based mainly in the Northeast and favorably disposed toward Britain, and the Republicans, who were mostly Southerners, unfavorably disposed toward Britain and keen to go to war on the Northern border. The president, James Madison, was a Republican and a Virginian, the anointed heir of Thomas Jefferson, who was president before him. They thought that going to war was a swell idea, even though Jefferson and the Republicans had been instrumental in dismantling the standing army (standing armies could not be trusted, and cost money) and also the navy (same deal). It was Jefferson who said that the taking of Canada would be a "mere matter of marching." Nobody ever asked him what the Canadians would be doing while the Americans were marching.

At last the irritations of rampaging Indians and forcible impressment of American seamen, to say nothing of the lust for Canadian land, became too much to bear, and Madison declared war. Here's how the legislative branch voted on the declaration:

All the Federalists, most from Northern states, voted no.
Thirteen Republicans, four of them from New Jersey, voted no, led by John Randolph of Virginia, who felt that Madison was selling out Republican principles.
A few, including those representing the western territories (Mississippi and Indiana), abstained.
The rest of the Republicans, led by the War Hawks, voted to pass the declaration, and the United States was off on its ill-prepared adventure.

You can read all about this and many other aspects of that war in The Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 by David Stephen Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, from the Naval Institute Press.

You'll be happy to know that after the War of 1812 was over the Federalists faded away and everybody got along with everybody else in a time officially known as the "Era of Good Feeling."

I'm afraid it didn't last.

Why We Fought the British in 1812: The Thing with the Indians

2011-08-01T08:00:00.246-04:00

The Battle of Tippecanoe

They wanted the Northwest Territory.

They were encouraged in their desires by the British, who occupied trading posts and forts throughout the Western frontier of the United States long after the Treaty of Paris concluded the American Revolution. With British encouragement the Indians continued to believe it was possible for them to hold the Northwest Territory against the Americans and stop the encroachment of land-hungry American settlers on their hunting grounds.

Even after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 (on the site of present-day Toledo), when Mad Anthony Wayne drove their warriors before him and the British refused to open the doors of their fort to let them in, some of them thought, we can still unite the tribes and resist the Americans.

This was Shawnee leader Tecumseh's plan, when territorial governor William Henry Harrison refused to relinquish the three million acres along the Wabash River ceded in the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809. The "Delawares, Putawatimies, Miamies and Eel River Miamies" were the signatories to the treaty, and for the three million acres they were to receive the following: "to the Delawares a permanent annuity of five hundred dollars; to the Miamies a like annuity of five hundred dollars; to the Eel river tribe a like annuity of two hundred and fifty dollars; and to the Putawatimies a like annuity of five hundred dollars." Tecumseh's position was that the Indians were one, and the separate tribes had no authority to sell land that belonged to all the Indians.

In the real world such a position can be maintained only by force of arms. The British happily provided rifles. Tecumseh went on a tour of the southern tribes to gather support, leaving his brother, Tenskwatawah the Prophet, in charge of the Shawnee capital of Prophetstown, where the Tippecanoe flows into the Wabash River. Now Tenskwatawa was a man venerated by the Shawnee as a person of supernatural powers. He preached a return to the old Indian ways, and he told the warriors of the tribe that the American bullets could not wound them if their hearts were pure. Before you say, "foolish native superstition," you might reflect that this was also the belief of Duncan McColl, a devout Scot.

It was to Prophetstown that William Henry Harrison came with a thousand men to parley with the Indian leaders. "We will talk to you tomorrow," they said. The Americans made camp nearby and went to sleep.

At four in the morning the bravest of the Indians came creeping into the camp with orders to murder Harrison and his senior officers. They were followed by three waves of charging warriors, secure, at least at first, in their invincibility. But God was not on their side, after all. Harrison escaped death, his forces overcame those of the natives, and he was able to mount and lead a cavalry charge that drove the Indians into a swamp before he burned Prophetstown to the ground. Thirty-eight of the Indian dead were found in Harrison's camp. It was a terrible defeat for them; Indians never left their dead if they could help it. Most of the survivors lost all faith in Tenskwatawa.

This and many other ripping stories can be found in Col. John R. Elting's sardonic account, Amateurs, to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812. He begins it, "The United States swaggered into the War of 1812 like a Kansas farm boy entering his first saloon. And, like that same innocent, wretchedly gagging down his first drink, the new nation was totally unprepared for the raw impact of all-out war." The book goes on in that vein. You want to read it.

Of Tecumseh, more later.

Why We Fought the British in 1812: Sailors' Rights

2011-07-25T08:00:00.157-04:00

On June 22, 1807, the United States almost went to war with Britain, five years before the actual declaration of the War of 1812.

The affair of the USS Chesapeake and the HMS Leopard, which drove then-president Thomas Jefferson to the brink of declaring war, is explored in detail in the Naval Institute Press's Injured Honor, by naval historian Spencer C. Tucker and diplomatic historian Frank Reuter. It's a ripping story.

The Chesapeake was a frigate of the American navy, bound for the Atlantic and Gibraltar on what was expected to be a peaceful voyage, with civilian passengers aboard whose luggage cluttered the gun deck. The Leopard was a two-deck British ship of war, part of a squadron patrolling the area off Hampton Roads, cleared for action, gun ports open, the tompions removed from the muzzles of the guns, carefully maneuvering around the Chesapeake for the advantageous weather gauge. It did not occur to the Americans to worry. Commodore Barron did not beat the men to quarters. Why would he? the U. S. wasn't at war with Britain. He hove to when requested.

A boat put out from the Leopard and rowed to the American ship. Commodore Barron permitted Lt. George Meade to come aboard, thinking that the officer had mail for him to carry, a common courtesy amongst seagoing vessels of different nations. Instead the officer presented a demand from the Leopard's Captain Humphreys to be allowed to search the ship for deserters from the British Navy, by order of Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, commander-in-chief of the British North American Station. Quite properly Barron refused. Still he did not send the men to battle stations.

Meade returned to the Leopard, which promptly delivered three broadsides into the unprepared Chesapeake at close range. Confusion reigned among the officers and untrained crew of the American frigate. Three of the Chesapeake's men were killed and sixteen wounded, including Barron himself. The commodore was forced to strike his colors and permit the insolent British to remove four seamen from his ship. It was an intolerable humiliation.

The American people were furious. Jefferson called out the militia. He nearly took the U.S. to war over it, but in the end he deemed the country ill-prepared for war and chose instead to declare a trade embargo to weaken the British economy. The ploy backfired, beggaring New England merchants. But that's a story for another day.

Duncan McColl: Soldier, Minister, Pacifist

2011-07-18T08:00:00.033-04:00

There is a quality to the St. Croix River Valley, the border between New Brunswick, Canada, and the state of Maine, that makes people love it with an almost irrational attachment. To my mother it was "up home." To the Indians it is sacred ground, and I've heard they want all of it back. To Harold A. Davis, a historian who grew up in Calais, Maine, it was an object of affection and intense study, out of which came his charming book, An International Community on the St. Croix (1604-1930).

The book contains many wonderful tales. One of the best is the story of Duncan McColl, founder of the first Methodist congregation in St. Stephen and St. Davids, in New Brunswick, Canada. His role in the War of 1812 was remarkable.

When this revered churchman was a young fellow in Argyll, Scotland, he was recruited to serve in the 74th Regiment of Foot, formed to help put down the American Revolution. At the Battle of Castine in Maine he was sent to take a message to one of the British officers. In doing so he was exposed to enemy fire. The bullets ripped his clothes and his headgear, but never touched his flesh, by which sign he understood that he was meant for a life in the service of God.

33 years later, after many struggles, Duncan McColl was the pastor of a thriving Methodist congregation, whose members lived on both sides of the international border. The day war was declared was a black day for them, and for everyone in the St. Croix River Valley. But Duncan McColl called all the men together with a proposition. "I've baptized you and married you," he said, "And I don't believe you want to fight each other." They said they didn't.

"Good," he said, and gave them a paper to sign in which they swore not to attack each other. And so by his efforts Duncan McColl, who had in his day been a brave soldier, made sure that peace would prevail, on that part of the border at any rate, between the warring countries.

Sailor Girls in the War of 1812

2011-07-11T08:00:00.007-04:00

Bucker Dudley is the story of a young girl who ran away to sea dressed as a boy and was caught up in one of the great naval battles of the War of 1812, the clash of HMS Macedonian and USS United States. When I tell people this, they narrow their eyes at me, as though such a thing could never happen. And yet such things did happen, if not every day, then certainly from time to time.

An excellent book about the phenomenon is Suzanne Stark's
Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail, an entertaining yet scholarly work that explores the lives of all sorts of women who found themselves on shipboard in those days, from the wives of officers and sailors to the prostitutes who came aboard when Royal Navy ships were in port to the occasional young girls who dressed as boys and " 'listed in the Navy" for a lark or by way of running away from bad situations at home.

Legends exist about such girls, and songs have been written about them. Here's one of the most famous.

Fourth of July Story

2011-07-04T08:00:00.016-04:00

Here's one for you from the mists of folklore. I heard it from my father.

On the border between Maine and New Brunswick, in the Saint Croix River valley, relations have always been cordial between the Americans and the Canadians, even during the War of 1812 when their governments told the people they should be fighting each other. By 1812 the tradition of the Fourth of July picnic was deeply ingrained, even among the people of St. Stephen and environs, though the town had been settled by fleeing United Empire Loyalists.

So the whole community was looking forward to the annual fireworks display. But due to the shortage of powder, the Americans nearly had to call it off that year. Disappointment was felt all over the valley.

"See here," one of the men of St. Stephen said. "No need to cancel our picnic just because we happen to be at war. The St. Stephen armory has a plentiful supply of rockets and gunpowder the English sent us. We were supposed to use them to repel an invasion. Do you plan to invade us?"

"No," said the people of Calais.

"Then take the powder. It should make a nice display. We'll see you at the picnic."

The powder made a memorable display. Indeed the fourth of July picnic was elegant, as they say in those parts, and everyone lived happily ever after until the British navy appeared in the Bay of Fundy and menaced Eastport. But that's a story for another day.

1812: Why we Fought

2011-06-27T08:00:00.037-04:00

Last week I promised to fill you in on some of the more bizarre details of this strange conflict. The most bizarre thing about the War of 1812, as near as I can determine, was that it was the American government who declared it.

Why start a war with the strongest naval power on the planet? Well, we were mad at them. Free Trade and Sailor's Rights was the rallying cry at the time, and that had to do with arrogant British sea power interfering with American commerce and impressing American seamen to serve on British warships. But there were other issues.

In the West (which is to say, places like Ohio and Kentucky) the American settlers were solidly behind any war that would get rid of the Indians, who allied themselves with the British. The Americans wanted the Indians' land. They moved onto it in droves. In response the Indians became the first anti-American terrorists. Mutilated corpses make for a lot of bad feeling; the Indians were hated and feared.

Population pressures drove a lot of pro-war sentiment. In that agrarian society the average American family needed enough fertile land to grow food. Not only Indian land looked good to them but Canadian land as well (and eventually, Mexican land, but that's another story). The conquest of Canada, as Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked, was a mere matter of marching. Resistance to Yankee forces was not expected.

After all, the British were busy fighting the French. How much trouble could a few Canadian farmers possibly be? So with a tiny standing army, a few inadequate forts, an ill-trained and skittish militia, and a navy consisting of six huge frigates and a number of lesser vessels, the United States of America went to war.

Not everyone liked the idea. The day after war was declared a Baltimore newspaperman published an issue of his paper denouncing the war. Outraged Baltimoreans converged on his newspaper office, broke up his presses, and pulled the building down. Then they attacked his supporters, killing some and wounding others.

Next: New England.

1812 Revisited – War with Britain!

2011-06-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

In scarcely a year it will be the two hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the War of 1812, a war that was pretty much fought to a draw between the United States and Britain. What do you know about this conflict? Not much, I'm willing to bet. Even the hard core followers of the British Navy in the old days of sail, and there are plenty of those people, aren't aware of some of the battles that were fought on the Niagara frontier, or the role of the woodland Indians, or the fact that the New England states were so adamantly opposed to fighting the British that they were ready to secede from the union.

There is much interesting scandal to be known about the War of 1812. It ain't just dates and battles, folks. I came across stuff that you won't believe while I was researching background material for Bucker Dudley. There was treachery, cowardice, drooling incompetence, illicit sex, and raving madness. And that was just what went on in James Madison's Washington. I've decided to tear the veil from this little-appreciated conflict and tell you all. But it will take time. Watch this space for news of what happened two hundred years ago.

Prejudice, Pride, and V. S. Naipaul

2011-06-06T08:00:00.011-04:00

Back in the old days, when a lot of the great ripping yarns were written, they were written for a very narrow audience, by writers of very narrow experience.

Case in point: Beau Geste (1924), by Percival Christopher Wren. The thrilling story of life in the French Foreign Legion and the fall of Fort Zinderneuf is marred by a scene in which the Beau stops on his way out of England to visit a pawnshop, where the writer pauses to invent and then insult a stereotypical Jewish pawnbroker. All of the readers were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you see, and if they weren't, they wanted to be, and if they didn't want to be, well, they ought to. So let's bash the Jews.

Nowadays when nearly everybody who reads either has Jewish friends or is Jewish (What! You don't know any Jews?) the scene stands out for the piece of offensive tripe it is. Jewish people aren't like that, if they're like anything in particular. But now that I see that the book came out in 1924, a mere decade before the rise of Hitler, who had lots of admirers in England, I'm thinking that something much more sinister was at work here than simple ignorance.

But what about V.S. Naipaul? He's the one I sat down to write about. He said last week that no woman has ever been his equal in the field of writing. Their heads are full of sentimental feminine tosh, he said.

Nonsense like that would have been accepted without a murmur fifty years ago, the same as slurs against ethnic groups. Today it is greeted with a huge public outcry. My writer friends are mad at him. I'm not mad at him. I feel a vague unease, as if a passing rabbit were taking a crap on my grave. There are men everywhere who want to belittle us and stuff us back in the kitchen. Even now some antifeminist Hitler figure is rising from the bowels of the Tea Party, coming to take away our shoes and strew tacks in the yard.

Is Naipaul the greatest writer since Shakespeare? I couldn't say. I've never read him. Nor have I tried to write manly literary fiction. We in the whodunit game are out to entertain people, not stun them with the size of our packages, though I wouldn't turn down a Nobel prize in the unlikely event that somebody showed up at the door and offered it to me.

Men who do nothing in this world but put words on paper have to puff themselves up somehow. I'm sure he's a better writer than I am; otherwise, why does he keep getting prizes? Still I think you'll agree that people will be reading Jane Austen and Toni Morrison when the name of V.S. Naipaul is forgotten. I've forgotten already what the initials stand for.

Touring the Designer House

2011-05-30T08:00:00.001-04:00

Last week my friends from the Lambertville Streetwalkers (a walking group, not the other sort of streetwalkers), drove to Doylestown, PA, for a tour of this year's designer house. The official details for the house tour can be found on the designer house web site: http://www.buckscountydesignerhouse.org/.

It pains me to report that yesterday was the last day of the tour, so you can't go on it, but if you like the house it can be yours for a few million dollars. It's quite nice inside, though we weren't allowed to take pictures anywhere but on the grounds outside. The house was originally an old stone farmhouse, now greatly enlarged and modernized. I thought I'd show you a few of the pictures that artist Pat Shamy took of the grounds.

Here we all are standing in a light rain, having tramped
appreciatively through the beautifully decorated rooms
(each done by a different designer) until
we were surfeited with decor.

The barn. No horses there right now, but after you buy it you can buy some horses
and hire a stablehand for a few dollars more.

Much of the decor is color-keyed to the barn.

Charming views, everywhere you look.

A great place to find a dead body, no?
Maybe I'll set a mystery novel here.

Thanks to Pat Shamy for the pictures.

Bleeders! Gorks! Chinkers!

2011-05-23T08:14:00.000-04:00

No, I don't know what that means either, but it was the screamer headline on the Trenton Times sports page this morning. Those of you who follow sports probably know what it means. For the rest of us, it looks mighty like three expletives strung together. I like those expletives. Gorks, how I like them! (I'm always on the lookout for new expletives, especially since I vowed to actually stop swearing.)

When I was a little girl my best friend Deb Snyder and I used to try to swear. Since no one ever cursed in our presence--ah, those were gentler times--we had to make up our own curse words. The most terrible expression we had was "shad an the godost." It doesn't look like much in black and white but when you shout it, with the accent on the last syllable, it has a terrible power. I still use it sometimes when I bang my finger. What does it actually mean? I guess it means, "I am displeased."

Asterisks and symbols are good for representing real curse words on the internet, but one can't always remember whether a bad word is spelled "@#%&" or !@#$". So maybe the home-grown curse words are preferable. Oh, no. It's ten after eight already. Chinkers! My gorking blog is late.

Training the Brain

2011-05-16T08:00:00.063-04:00

I took out a one-month subscription to Lumosity, that site that promises to improve one's mental function by means of little games. God knows I can use it. My brain is a shambles. We'll see whether their program actually does me any good.

First thing they do is ask some questions about one's lifestyle. Mine is pretty dull, no smoking, no drinking, moderate-to-low amount of exercise. Okay, I sit too much, but they didn't ask me that. Then one plays a couple of their little games to get rated on various mental skills. Then they send an email with one's recommendations and ratings. All this is free, by the way, in case you feel like indulging. You have to give them your contact info first, of course, so that later on they can hound you or shame you into signing up for the paid course.

My lifestyle was okay with them except for a few things. I wasn't taking on enough new challenges to suit them, and I wasn't regularly training my brain. I can understand how that would bother them. But one thing they found fault with puzzled me:

You're drinking a moderate amount of coffee or tea. Improve this.

At first I thought, Yes! I will increase my caffeine consumption. It's bound to make me feel more alert. In the immortal words of my father, if a little is good, a lot is better. But on closer examination I discovered that they actually wanted me to stop drinking coffee.

Give up coffee, my last vice? Never! Without caffeine I would spend my whole life in a total stupor. Maybe what they say is true, though. Maybe coffee ultimately makes me stupider, the way cigarettes ultimately make a smoker more nervous, craving nicotine to calm his nerves. I might try that. In some other life. If I do I'll let you know how it works out. Don't hold your breath, though, waiting for me to stop drinking coffee. I'm pretty sure it would be bad for your brain function.

A Lambertville Memoir: Blood, Bones, and Butter

2011-05-09T08:49:00.001-04:00

We read Blood, Bones, and Butter, the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, for our book group this month, written by Gabriella Hamilton, famous chef and now famous writer. It's a memoir, not a crime novel, so I'm out of my officially credentialed field of expertise here, but I found it to be an excellent piece of writing and I wanted to tell you so.

First of all, if her meals are as deliciously satisfying as her sentences and paragraphs, it must be a wonderful experience to eat at her Manhattan restaurant. Reading this book will make you hungry, although there are no actual recipes included in it. You will fly to your kitchen in search of something real to cook, and you will feel dismay because, not only is there nothing real to cook, but your pots, pans, and utensils are not in the state of rigorous order and cleanliness that Gabriella Hamilton would require.

Secondly, as far as the memoir goes, she dishes without oversharing. I think this is a good thing. Most of us could paint our ex-spouses naked (as they could paint us, if they had the skill) and people would be appalled. But we draw the cloak of charity, rightly. The reader understands that her mother is sore at her father, that she herself is sore at her husband, but she never tells us precisely why. We are left with the feeling that it is the nature of women to be angry at men, or in the nature of men to irritate their women.

And thirdly, the early part of the book is a charming picture of old New Hope and Lambertville. This is why the book club ladies picked it up in the first place, for we are Lambertville women. We heard that Jimmy Hamilton, Gabrielle's father, was unhappy with the book. Mr. Hamilton is a very big frog in our little pond. He runs a restaurant of his own, right across my back fence. No longer the penniless Bohemian of Gabrielle's childhood, he has enough money to endow various public works, and enough generosity to give cooking lessons to the old folks at the geezer health club where I work out. He is a helluva nice guy. I'm not sure what he hated about the book. I like him even better, knowing he was once a penniless Bohemian with romantic visions, like the rest of us. You'll be happy to know that now and then he still roasts lamb outside over an open fire.

Anyway, read the book if you get a chance. It's good.

Malice Domestic

2011-05-02T08:00:00.004-04:00

Home at last from another swell conference.

Sadly, I was unable to find my camera at the last minute when I was leaving for Malice Domestic early Friday morning. As a result I was not able to take any movies of the view from the Hyatt elevator as it goes up and down (one of the fun things I like to do in strange hotels with fancy glass elevators). Nor was I able to take any pictures of myself posed with any of the Big Guns of Traditional Mystery. Nor was I able to photograph my roommate, Robin Hathaway, and me in our elegant outfits for the Malice Domestic banquet on Saturday night. That was not because there was no camera, but because we never got into those outfits. They were in our hotel room at three-thirty in the afternoon when the lock on the door failed, sealing us out, sealing our possessions (including our outfits) in.

Nor was I able to take any pictures of the kindly West Indian locksmith who slaved over the lock for two and a half or three hours before digging it out (you should see the scars on the door). He replaced it with a new one just in time for us to come staggering out of the banquet, still dressed in our day clothes, our hands numb with clapping, our lips stiff with cheers for the honorees, our bellies stuffed with delicious food, and fall into bed.

It was swell. The Hyatt took serious money off the bill for our inconvenience, not all that inconvenient for us, maybe inconvenient for people who wanted to see us in our glad rags. Next day were our panels, perfectly successful. Mine was put up on Twitter by Criminal Element
@crimehq. Interesting to see that. (See how reading tweets makes your sentences shorter.)

But as I said, I'm home now, and dying to get into my own little bed. Alas, The Washington Post says that President Obama wants to speak to us all in the middle of the night, and he won't say what about. It could be a message about the end of the world for all I know. I dare not go to sleep. What if the world ended while I was sleeping?

Later:

Went to sleep anyway. Awoke to hear the joyful news that Osama Bin Laden is dead. Distressed to hear that we buried him at sea. I can understand where that would discourage the tendency of his supporters to gather at his gravesite and make trouble, but what about the ones who are going to deny that he's really dead? Couldn't we have saved his head or something? Put it on a pike in Lafayette park? Such a waste.

Cold Turkey

2011-04-25T08:00:00.001-04:00

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have kicked the online shopping monkey and can devote all my computer time now to writing the thriller, answering my emails and playing mah jongg. The bad news is that my credit card is no good.

Not only is my credit card no good, the online account I used to use to look at what was going on with it has been scrubbed. I can't access it. My ID and password are okay, but the account has ceased to exist. But, as I said, this is very exciting. Think of the hours I'll now have to write, play mah jongg, do housework, eat, and go to the gym. Not necessarily in that order.

This all started on Saturday afternoon. The phone rang, and it was a robot from my credit card company hinting darkly at questionable charges that might have been placed on my account. I was offered a number of choices, one of which was to forget the whole thing, roll over, and go back to sleep. It sounded too sinister for that, so I held out for choice number four, which was to speak to a live human. The human was very helpful. Someone had tried to use my credit card number to reserve a room in a cheap motel somewhere in the U.K., she said.

"Nope," I said. "Not me." She said that was what they figured, since whoever tried it had used an address different from mine. The charge had been denied. Still she told me to destroy my credit card and wait till they sent me a new one.

Hey, at least I'm home. The same thing happened three years ago when I was at Malice. I had no way to pay the hotel bill until I discovered a branch of our bank across the street from the convention hotel where I was able to score some cash. We are so vulnerable in the modern day. At any moment credit card failure can strike, leaving one stranded between endeavors like a losing musical-chairs player stranded between chairs.

So now to return to my work in progress. Or my game of mah jongg. Too bad; there are some really cute dresses on the Nieman-Marcus site.

The Fashion World -- Can You Find Perspecitve There?

2011-04-18T08:00:00.004-04:00

Reese Witherspoon has famously -- infamously? -- suggested in an interview in the May issue of Vogue magazine that people who love fashion often lack perspective. The blogosphere is in an uproar over this; Ms. Witherspoon has been denounced by some as an ingrate. You say this in a Vogue interview? When they're putting you on the cover? But the fact is that she's right. And the fashionistas aren't alone in this. Almost everybody lacks perspective nowadays.

Last week I stumbled onto a long discussion on a West Coast guy's blog about building things. He invited people to comment on what they were building. Not one of them boasted about building anything the country needs, or the world needs, unless you count the families some of them said they were building, or their gardens, or new parts of their houses. One young woman said she was building her brand. Her brand. The world holds its breath.

I like fashion. I'm pretty sure I lack perspective, although I'm also pretty sure I know the difference between my navel and the universe. Fashion -- pretty people in pretty clothes -- is one of those things, like music, that can distract the mind from the grimmer realities of life. And who doesn't need something like that? Who can bear, after all, to have perfectly clear perspective?

Not Blogging Today. Working on Book.

2011-04-11T08:00:00.011-04:00

Instead of throwing together my usual fevered stew of random observations I'm taking the day off to go and look at the Lambertville Free Public Library up close. I'm trying to write a scary thriller set in that building, an old mansion that used to belong to the first mayor of Lambertville. Doctor Lilly.

Much of the book takes place there. Being an old building, rumored to be haunted, it can be creepy at times. I'll tell you the title of the book later. Here are the first few paragraphs. They scared the children's librarian:

On the night when I first discovered Thora in the library, I thought I was alone. All the lights in the building were out but the one in my office. The old building was quiet except for the creak of the heating system, the slow tick of my office clock, the far-off scurrying of mice, and the hiss of freezing rain falling on the crust of the snow piled up outside.

I never believed the stories about the Wetherford Public Library being haunted, even though they say a man was found dead of an overdose in a bathtub upstairs, back before I was born, back before the borough took the Beasley mansion for taxes and turned it into a library, way back in the days when some slumlord rented it out for apartments. No haunts had ever troubled me in my years as library director.

And yet, a sound like someone moving around in the reading room reminded me of the rumored haunt. Could someone besides me be in the library? Had the clerks left one of the doors unlocked again? I called out: "Is someone there?"

The noise stopped.

The Perils of Air Travel # 468

2011-04-04T08:00:00.016-04:00

We left town last weekend and went to Florida. We're back home now, for you house burglars thinking of hitting our house, where the Doberman is always hungry for new flesh and there isn't anything to steal anyway. But on Saturday we flew to Orlando from the Philadelphia airport. At the Philadelphia airport I experienced a new thrill.

I've been getting the treatment from the TSA folks for some years now, ever since I became an old lady and thus one of the softer targets. (Hey, you haven't seen a soft target until you've watched them make a two-year-old baby take off his little white shoes to be sure he hasn't filled them with explosives.) Back in the days before everybody had to take his shoes off they used to select, oh, I don't know, every seventh person, or every helpless-looking old lady, to demand a look at that person's stocking feet. I was always it.

But this time, in a Saturday-morning mob scene of families bound for Disney World, as I put my Macbook in the tray and piled my shoes, outer garments, and one-quart plastic bag on top of it, a very cross TSA lady came and told me the Macbook had to go all by itself in a separate tray.

So, okay. I put the Macbook in a separate tray and pushed my stuff onto the rollers of the x-ray machine. A fellow beckoned to me to walk through the metal detector, and then I was required to go and stand in a box with marks where I was supposed to put my feet.

As I stood there, wondering idly whether I was being bombarded with radiation, another fellow told me that I had been randomly selected to have my laptop inspected. "Now what?" I thought to myself. Well, you know what they say, they do things differently every time to keep the terrorists off balance.

I was allowed to step out of the box. The same cranky TSA agent who had told me to put my Macbook in its own tray was returning from visiting some gizmo or other with a Macbook in her hand. "Here's your laptop," she said, and put it in a tray by itself.

I picked it up. Something didn't feel quite right. I looked at the x-ray machine, and here came an identical Macbook in its own tray. I had a feeling that the one in my hand wasn't mine. I held it up and said, rather loudly, "Is this someone else's Macbook?" None of the other travelers expressed interest. The TSA guy manning the second box said, "Just put it back in the tray."

I did this, and picked up the Macbook that had just come out of the x-ray machine, booting it up to make sure it had the wallpaper I put on it last week, Hokusai's Great Wave. Slow of wit as I am, I didn't think much about this strange mixup until I got off the plane in Orlando, when I suddenly thought, "I could have lost the Macbook," and got all goose bumps. Another day has gone by, and now I'm thinking how very queer it was that no one else seemed to want to claim the other Macbook, how very queer it was that the TSA folks wanted me to shut up about it and go away. Hmm.

Now I have a sticker on my Macbook that says Melbourne Beach, so that I will know it immediately from all the other Macbooks. I'm working on a story about Arab terrorists getting my Macbook, opening it up, muttering, "Where are the plans from Hassan?" in their heathen tongue, while I try to figure out what happened to the manuscript of my work in progress and what is all this foreign gobbledegook on my laptop.

Shoes

2011-03-28T08:00:00.046-04:00

The ladies are gearing up for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar banquet. Those lucky enough to be going, and the still luckier ones who are up for an Edgar, are combing the stores and trolling the internet in search of the perfect festive shoe.

This is one of those things that men don't understand. I'm not going to try to explain it to them here, but rather I'm going to muse and rhapsodize on some of the perfect shoes I've had over the years and the perfect shoes I still yearn for. Harold doesn't understand either. There's a box in the attic labeled "Ymelda Marcos Shoe Collection" in his scornful handwriting, in which some of my old perfect shoes are resting quietly, including the red patent leather perforated square-toe sling-backs with the black heels that my sister and I invested in together, getting maybe two wearings apiece out of them before they went out of style. I would wear them tomorrow if my feet hadn't spread from narrow to medium in the last fifty years.

The prison matron shoes are in there also. They used to be bone-colored with brown piping and stacked leather heels, rather sweet really, until something fell on them and stained them, whereupon the shoemaker talked me into letting him dye them black. After that I couldn't wear them without looking down and seeing Lotte Lenya's feet on the ends of my ankles, in that part she played, Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. All those shoes need now is knives in the toes.

What I like to see, looking down at my feet, is something that reminds me of Bette Davis stepping out of her stateroom in Now Voyager, after the big makeover. You know the shot, her trim little ankles, her divine shoes. The dress and hat didn't hurt, either, but that's a discussion for another day. I went into a shoe store, The Velvet Slipper in Peddler's Village, a couple of years ago and explained my requirements. The young woman seemed to understand, and produced a couple of retro-looking pairs. I settled on a pair of peep-toe sling-back stacked leather wedge-heeled Chie Miharas, bone-color, lightly trimmed in burnt orange. Divine. They don't start to hurt until I've been standing around in them for at least an hour.

I'm almost ready for a second pair of Chie Miharas. Nieman Marcus has some I really like, if I could only dig up the money somewhere, purple and blue with thick cork platform soles and heels. Maybe I'll stick up a Seven-Eleven. The thing about Chie Mihara is that her shoes are never on the cutting edge of trendiness, so that they don't date right away, and yet they always look perfectly in fashion. If I were going to the Edgar dinner I might wish that she made evening shoes, but she doesn't, not really. On the other hand I'm not really going.

The Quest for Fitness

2011-03-20T20:42:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow at two in the afternoon I have an appointment with a trainer at the geezer gym at the north end of town. I have to see her because I came to the bottom of my exercise sheet and there are no more blank spaces for recording my activities. To get a new sheet you have to go be evaluated. It's the rule, and to tell you the truth it's time. I need a different routine.

I started going to the geezer gym last October. Since they're part of a physical therapy office, I figured they wouldn't do my back any harm, or if they did, at least they could put it back the way it's supposed to go right away. Maybe. Before I knew I had these back issues I used to go to the hardbody gym, where the young folks work out. But Ralph, my trainer, left for another gym, and shortly after that I found out I wasn't supposed to lift more than thirty pounds. It became difficult. Some of the things I was doing might have been making my back worse.

Ralph was a trip, though. If he hadn't left I'd probably still be over there wrecking my back, just to hear his stories about the old days when he was a New York City homicide cop. I got such great stuff from him that I was seriously considering taking our training sessions off on my Schedule C. He told me, for instance, that perps with guns can seldom hit you. He was never afraid of getting shot. Guys would be standing six feet from him blazing away and the bullets would all go wild.

Except that one time he did get shot. "What was it like?" I asked him.

He pointed to a place in his side. "It was like getting stuck with a knife and then they put a cigarette in the hole. The bullet, like, burns, you know?" I thought that was great. That was something I could use. I didn't think to ask him then whether he had ever actually been stuck with a knife.

But the folks at the geezer gym are much more sedate. Nobody wears spandex. And working out is easier. There is a circuit of weight machines that are simple to adjust. You don't have to make the body builders come back and remove the hundred-pound weights that they left on the machines, because there aren't any weights, and there aren't any body-builders. Okay, maybe I miss them a little.

The Delaware, Flooding Again

2011-03-14T00:01:00.055-04:00

Lewis Island on Friday

Since the water came up this weekend and got our attention, I thought I'd talk a little bit about what the river is like here.

The Delaware is about half a mile wide between Lambertville and New Hope. Normally it's teeming with wildlife. On a sunny day when the river is tranquil and clear you can look down from the bridge into water the color of tea and see leaves and rocks on the bottom, as well as crowds of fat two-foot carp, all facing in the same direction, huddled together. Snapping turtles big and small crawl up and sun themselves on the concrete piers of the bridge.

Ducks fly here and there and land in the water, elegantly, using their wings as ailerons to slow themselves for landing. Goose gangs waddle in formation on the shore, or head out and swim to New Hope. Each gang is made up of something like a dozen white geese and one or two gray ones. I don't know why. Sometimes a pair of swans shows up.

The river in flood is turbid, full of mud and debris. It flows very fast. I have no idea what the carp do to keep from being swept out to sea, perhaps they don't resist, but the waterfowl stick close to the banks where the water is slower. Harold and I went down to the river on Friday morning to see how far it had risen. Two little ducks sped by, carried on the flood. Others toiled upstream, a terrific struggle. We found Lewis Island to be mostly underwater. A little strip of rocks stood up above the maelstrom. One of the goose gangs squatted on it uneasily, as if trying to get comfortable.

A large flock of Canada geese came upstream toward them. We waited to see what would happen. Would they challenge the white geese for their dry spot? No, they paddled on past. The goose gang looked at them, and then at each other. With one accord they slipped into the roiling water and followed them.

It seems strange when you think about it. These creatures can fly, after all. They can walk. Why would they want to be in that water? Who knows what they have on their minds? I don't understand everything I see. This doesn't mean there's nothing to it.

How to Become a Published Writer

2011-03-07T00:01:00.008-05:00

A good friend of mine, a high school classmate, in fact, has just found a publisher for his first novel. His name is George Rittenhouse, and the book is called Hanging Around Hollywood, from Lighthouse Publishing. It's a jaundiced look at the seamy underbelly of Hollywood, not the playground of glitzy film stars but the hangout of homeless bums and slackers. The story is told from the viewpoint of a Presbyterian minister (vaguely resembling my friend) who works in a huge Hollywood church seething with politics. Weird murders and church politics. What's not to like? I was tremendously pleased that he let me read it. It's great fun.

The fact that the book has found a publisher proves the truth of Robert A. Heinlein's rules. The publishing industry was very different back in Heinlein's day, but some things never change. I personally embroidered these rules on a piece of linen some thirty years ago, with flowered embellishments. The project postponed for me the necessity of actually writing anything for a good three months. All those cunning little stitches...

At any rate, without further ado, Heinlein's Five Rules for Getting Published:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put what you write on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

That's how it's done. It may take decades, but if you follow these rules you will be published.

Heinlein did not promise that you would become a great writer if you followed his rules, although it stands to reason that the more you write the more you improve. He promised only publication. We've all met folks at cocktail parties who have a great idea for a book. We've all met other folks at the same parties who have had a work in progress for thirty or forty years. You have to write it in order to get it published. You have to finish it.

But, no rewriting, you say? How can this be? You must consider that Heinlein was educated at the Naval Academy, where he was taught to say what he meant the first time. Naval officers must write orders, which must be clear and unambiguous. So it wasn't hard for him. The rest of us may need a bit of rewriting. Just don't pick over your work until it loses its flavor and your hair gets gray. If the agent says fix it and you trust that person's judgment, fix it. If the editor says fix it, the editor is paying. Fix it. Otherwise move on and start another project.

And be persistent about sending it out. This is the key to success. Just ask my friend George Rittenhouse.

My Sister Died on Thursday

2011-02-27T16:18:00.000-05:00

She was a respected fine artist, a beloved wife, sister, friend, mother and grandmother, and a beautiful soul. It's been about seven years since she was diagnosed with stage 4 sarcoma, and she and her husband, who was in it with her the whole way, put up a hell of a fight.

Ordinarily I think it's tacky to drag your griefs around in public, and I wouldn't even post this, except that Liz and her daughter Kelly worked up an obituary she liked before she died and I wanted you to see it. We're putting it in various newspapers as well. It costs an arm and a leg. Did you know that? Newspaper publishing is going to finance itself on the backs of the grieving. (Yes, I'm angry that my sister is dead, as you can see, and I'll attack anything that comes within range. Newspapers, the governor... may he rot...) Anyway, here it is.

Mary Elisabeth "Liz" Donovan, renowned artist and beloved wife, mother and grandmother, died peacefully on February 24, 2011 at her home in Melbourne Beach FL after a long battle with cancer. Born in Philadelphia PA, Liz was the author of Painting Sunlit Still Lifes in Watercolor, published in 1997 by North Light Books, which has influenced a generation of still life artists. A resident of St. Michaels MD and Melbourne Beach FL, Liz moved to Ellicott City MD in the late 1960s. She began studying graphic design and fine art at the Corcoran School of Art and Maryland Institute of Art. She later studied oil painting and drawing with David Zuccarini and has taken the workshops of Don Stone, Jeanne Dobie and Alex Powers.

Liz Donovan earned the special honor of being selected as a Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society and formerly served on the Board of Governors as a Signature Member of the Baltimore Watercolor Society. As a Signature Member of the Washington Society of Landscape Painters and Plein Air Painters of the Treasure Coast, as well as many other artists' societies, Liz's work has received numerous awards in juried exhibitions. Three of her paintings have been honored with awards of distinction and featured in Rockport Publishers' volumes, The Best of Watercolor 2, Painting Texture, and Painting Light and Shadow. Her paintings are also included in Rockport Publishers' books The Best of Watercolor and Flowers in Watercolor and Quarry Publishers' Watercolor Expressions. Liz Donovan was named a finalist in competitions of The Artist's Magazine and American Artist. The April 1999 issue of American Artist magazine presented her work in an article titled "Still Lifes and Sunlight." More recently, Liz Donovan won "Best in Show" at the 2006 Local Color plein air exhibit in Easton MD.

Liz was preceded in death by her parents Herbert and Georgena Gallison. She will be greatly missed by her husband of 48 years, C. Richard "Dick" Donovan, her sister Kate (Harold) Dunn of Lambertville NJ, her children Kelly (Brian) Anderson of Santa Rosa Beach FL, Karen Donovan (Bob Aydlett) of San Francisco CA, Tim (Heidi) Donovan of South Riding VA and her adoring grandchildren Maiti and Cedric Donovan.

Private family services will be held, memories and condolences can be shared at
www.brownliemaxwell.com.
Memorial Donations can be made to the Sarcoma Foundation of America or the Corcoran School of Art.

Brain Freeze

2011-02-21T00:01:00.059-05:00

I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday night, or I think I did, with an idea for today's blog post. I was going to talk about adoption, a topic close to my heart. I'm starting a new book, in which one of the main characters is a grown adoptee. In the course of researching it I had a long talk with a friend who is an adult adoptee, about the problems of finding one's birth parents once one was grown up.

As I lay in bed, awake, asleep, who knows, I blocked out an interesting and cogent essay on the adoption dynamic, on how dreadful it must be to have no idea where you came from or who your people might be, or where your child has gone. I was going to call it "Where Babies Come From." That was sure to pull an audience.

In the morning the whole brilliant piece was gone, if it had ever been there. What can I say? I had taken an allergy pill before I went to bed. They usually shave a good twenty-five points off my IQ. I'm still feeling the effects. I sat down just now to write another post on the subject and came up with nothing but pompous drivel.

I can't write today. Luckily I'm not a journalist on deadline. Nobody is paying me to do this. I'm going to take a pass. Here's a picture of the cover of my next book, due out on August 16 of this year. Have a look. It's moderately entertaining. I'll be back next week when my head clears.

The Birth of the Movies

2011-02-14T00:01:00.085-05:00

THIS JUST IN: TUESDAY'S PRESENTATION HAS BEEN CANCELLED. IT WILL BE HELD ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 26, AT 2:00 AT THE ROBBINSVILLE BRANCH LIBRARY. CALL AHEAD FOR RESERVATIONS:
609-259-2150.

Tomorrow evening at seven o'clock I'm going to the Ewing branch of the Mercer County Public Library and do my illustrated talk on the birth of the movies, where I show people how the first American moving images were produced in Thomas Edison's studio by his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, and where the movies went from there. It's quite an interesting show. Like a lot of things, cinema wasn't shaped by the intentions of the people who first put it together, but by its inherent possibilities.

Edison--no surprises there--saw his movies as a way to make money by selling Kinetoscopes, his patented peep-show devices. He was always a hardware guy. When his people told him that the public wanted to gather in theaters and watch movies as a group, up on a screen, he was outraged. He figured the most you could sell would be one projector per city, whereas a good kinetoscope parlor offered at least ten peep-show machines, sometimes as many as twenty.

After he finally understood the potential of the nickelodeons, Edison still didn't get it; for a long time the films he made were suitable only for cigar-chomping men. You've no idea how low Edison could sink until you've seen his offering of a girl on a trapeze taking off her long black dress with its leg-o-mutton sleeves, then her petticoat, corset cover, garters, and stockings, all the while flinging these items at a pair of dirty old men in a nearby balcony. In the end she's dressed only in tights and a trapeze artist's outfit. Revolting.

And I'm going to show it at the Ewing Branch Library, yessir. Along with The Great Train Robbery, a later Edison Studios offering that was a huge hit because it appealed (finally) to everyone. And an early one-reeler from D.W, Griffith, which he made while he was still honing his craft (not that he ever stopped). Then I'm going to show the last half of C. B. DeMille's The Cheat, the half with all the sex, violence, and shameless racism. It's wonderful. Sessue Hayakawa was an exceptional actor all his life, but when he was young he was also a handsome hunk.

Drop around if you're in the neighborhood of Ewing, NJ, on Tuesday evening, or if you'll be in Robbinsville on Saturday, February 26, come to the Robbinsville Library at two in the afternoon, where I'll be doing the same show. Or get your own library to drop me a line and get me to come there and do it. I have a couple of other gigs lined up later. They're listed on my website (http://www.irenefleming.com/ireneloc.htm).

Tear it Down

2011-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

One of my side jobs is as a docent at the Marshall House, where I talk to the folks about the life of James Wilson Marshall, finder of the first gold in California, and about the life of the house where he grew up. The story of the house, built by James Marshall's father in 1816, is fraught with drama. It sits next to the Catholic church, which used to own the house and a whole row of little houses much like it. They're all gone now, crushed under the bulldozers of the 1960s to make a parking lot for the faithful.

The Marshall House would be gone, too, if not for the efforts of a parishioner, Mrs. Alice Narducci, heroine of the Lambertville Historical Society. It is said that she stood in front of the bulldozers and screamed at the drivers to make them leave the Marshall House alone. The church deeded the house to the state, the state leases it to the historical society, and you can come and tour it on certain festal days and any weekend afternoon in the tourist season.

When I tell this story to the visitors, many of them turn pale. How could the church be so wicked? Then I have to explain what things were like in the 1960s, since many of them weren't yet born. The PBS presentations that explain those years to the young are focused on the war, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and all those social upheavals that pitted one group against another in this country. They don't mention the bulldozers. But people in that time, as I remember it, had no idea that anything old was good, much less irreplaceable. Look what happened to Penn Station. It's dirty! Tear it down. There's plenty more where that came from.

Nearly everybody thought that way. Nearly everybody with money sought to modernize whatever they had control of. Every now and then an Alice Narducci would pop up and fight to save a part of the past, but mostly it went down the drain. Nowadays the pendulum has swung the other way. Everything must be saved. Antiques Road Show has shown us the way. Most of of us never did know the difference between our trash and our treasure. Instead of throwing away the treasure, though, now we save all the trash. And so it goes.

Winterfest

2011-01-31T00:01:00.099-05:00

Many of you may think of Lambertville, if you think of it at all, as the home of the Shad Fest, the annual brouhaha loved by the tourists and detested by the locals for its disruption of our normal town life. But there's more than one festival a year in our little burg. Last weekend was Winterfest, a celebration of winter. Yes! It's still possible to celebrate winter, even though most folks in New Jersey are so tired of snow right about now that they wouldn't care if they never saw another flake.

But what's not to like about Winterfest? Ice sculptures pop up all over town. The Marshall House is open in the afternoon. We had a parade on Saturday! The South Hunterdon Regional High School Marching Band was in it, causing me a tug of nostalgia for the years when our son John played a trumpet in that band.

Mummers mummed. Mummers are a Philadelphia tradition, string bands in gaudy costumes to rival a Mardi Gras krewe, marching and strutting. Sometimes the locals get out there and strut with them. Veteran's organizations handed out flags to the children, who merrily waved them. Girls on floats threw candy. I ate some. I'm not sure it was a good idea.

I watched the parade and then opened up the Marshall House for tourists. It was warm in there, and many visitors came in. When the snow started to fall a great rush of people thronged into the warmth, maybe twenty souls, with pink cheeks and snow in their hair, a crowd in the front hall. Would the old floor hold them? I told them all about James Marshall, finder of the first gold in California, and all about the house where he grew up until they warmed up and went out again.

And so it goes, life on the surface of our little town, glistening and lovely. The dark underbelly is another matter. I'm at work on a new series, by the way. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Staggering toward Self-Promotion

2011-01-24T00:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, folks, I now have in my hands the tools for successfully launching The Brink of Fame, this book of mine that will come out in the middle of August: two advance reader copies (ARCs, to insiders in the know) and a killer trailer. The trailer is cool. You see it above. The ARCs are also very nice. My problem is twofold: how to get people to look at the trailer, and who to give the ARCs to.

You can see for yourself that the trailer is fun. The book is also fun. Here's what you can do for me: you can send a link to this page to all your friends. Or all the friends you have who might enjoy seeing the trailer. Unlike the book, the trailer is free. Free entertainment. What could be nicer?

The problem of the ARCs is more difficult.

The thing is, what I like to do with free books--and at this stage of the game I only have two of them--is give them to my relatives. Or give them to my friends. Or give them to someone who likes my work. But if I'm ever going to get anywhere in this business I'm going to have to spend all my resources promoting myself, and that includes my two poor little ARCs. No longer can I make presents of these things to my sisters-in-law. No longer can I give them to Annie and Lesley. I have to get these puppies into the hands of Important People Who Will Buzz About Them.

This is where I pull out the business cards of all those folks I talked to at the conferences who expressed interest, the ones who run huge bookstores with widely circulating newsletters, or who blog about books online and have way more followers than I do. They were so kind, they promised to review the book, I can see their faces as clearly as my own. I just can't remember their names. The cards, where are the cards?

Ohgodohgodohgod I'm going to have to clean my office.

Jury Duty

2011-01-17T00:01:00.077-05:00

Okay, gang, here it is the second week of the new year, and here I sit in the jury room, waiting to be called in front of a judge and presented with some hideous criminal case that will destroy what is left of my faith in human nature. In Hunterdon County.

I expected this sort of thing when I lived in Trenton, and I got it, too, serving on a grand jury once a week for something like six months in the year after the riots. That would have been 1969, I think. the most horrifying specimens were paraded in front of us that year, child molesters, arsonists, murderers, and we had to indict or not indict. We let all the marijuana cases go, as I recall, partly because the laws had been greatly liberalized that year but our defendants were to be prosecuted under the old laws, and partly because when we got home most of us planned to toke up.

My faith in humanity was not shaken by this experience, silly twit that I was. I had no idea what was going on. I dressed myself in a gray flannel suit and a white blouse with a high ruffled collar, and I looked so wise and cool that I was elected deputy foreman, even though I was dumb as a box of rocks. One thing I could always do was dress. Newspaper friends of my then husband used to try to pump me for information about the cases, but I was useless to them, not because it was unethical to discuss these things outside of the court, but because I hadn't the faintest clue.

Now here I am again, a petit juror this time, waiting to be called for a case. Or not. I hear there's an alleged child molester coming up for trial, and a young woman who allegedly murdered a beloved old man of the town. Ugh. With any luck at all the lawyers will settle, and the bailiffs will send us home.

Later that day--

I'm home now. My fears were not realized, I'm happy to say; we were not faced with a nasty criminal case. (I guess this means I get to keep my faith in the human race, although, of course, the bad guys are still out there.) What happened was, we were herded into the courtroom and gently briefed on a civil case involving a motorcycle accident. Many jurors were chosen and subsequently rejected, probably because they themselves had been involved in accidents at one time or another. Or for other reasons. We didn't know, because they all approached the bench to explain themselves privately to the judge and the lawyers while the white noise machine blocked our hearing.

So how did I get to go home, you ask? Simple matter. I approached the bench when my turn came and revealed that my eldest had been involved in a motorcycle accident some years ago.

"Do you feel that this might affect your judgment in this case?"

"Well, I've had a thing about motorcycles ever since."

"A thing?" the judge said.

I shugged. "I hate 'em." Tell the truth and shame the devil. They all smiled and showed me the door.

Return with us now to Yesteryear

2011-01-10T00:01:00.121-05:00

The stars being in conjunction, the rights in hand, and the hardware and software up and running, I have chosen this auspicious time to put my first two published books, the first two books in the Nick Magaracz series, up on Kindle.

The mechanics of the process are tedious but not difficult: Scan in two pages as tiff files, convert from tiff files to RTF files, repeat until end-of-book. Put RTF files together in word processor as book-length work. Comb through for glitches. Format paragraphs.

Publish on Kindle per Amazon instructions. Be pleased with the results.

This description of the process leaves out the emotional impact of revisiting Trenton, New Jersey, as it was in the early 1980s. Things change. These two books--Unbalanced Accounts and The Death Tape--have become historical novels while my back was turned.

Down-at-heel P.I. Nick Magaracz himself must be eighty years old by now, bouncing his grandchildren on his knee in his house in Hamilton Township, thinking about writing his memoirs, maybe, missing his wife, Ethel, who died of cancer in 2005. The clerks of Unbalanced Accounts are all retired as well. So long ago. As for The Death Tape, it takes place in the ancient world of large mainframe COBOL-driven data processing, as remote today as the lost world of Atlantis.

And yet these books are still worth reading, though a whole generation has grown up since I wrote them, and my writing style is different now. The characters still come alive for me. The plots are as strange and compelling as ever.

Got a Kindle? Give them a try. They're cheap! They're entertaining!

Long Week's Journey Into New Year

2011-01-03T00:01:00.262-05:00

I know that plenty of people had trouble getting back home from the South last week, when the snowstorm closed a slew of airports and stranded a number of pilots in cities far from the planes they were supposed to pilot. So I want you to understand that I didn't come here to whine at you. Lots of folks were worse off. Nevertheless, I burn to tell you my story.

Family Reunion

First of all, the plan was to have a family reunion-type Christmas in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, with Harold's sister 'n'em. This entailed gathering our boy John from the West Coast, and ourselves from the East, without re-mortgaging the house to pay for plane tickets. So I spent the better part of an afternoon a couple of months ago getting the very cheapest fares available to us all, on several different airlines. I assured my friends that we would be home in time to host the annual New Year's Eve party.

Harold and I planned to fly round-trip to New Orleans on US Airways and rent a car. John was to fly Delta to Atlanta and then to Gulfport, where we would pick him up. After a week's jolly visiting we would all return to Lambertville, which is to say, Philadelphia International Airport, Harold and I nonstop on US Airways and John on Airtran with a stop in Atlanta. But on Sunday the snowstorm came.

Snowy Airport

The snow was so deep in Philadelphia that they cancelled a football game in the stadium, a stone's throw from the airport. Things looked bad. Monday morning a robot called from US Airways and expressed regret that our flight was cancelled. Airtran was still set to go, so we piled into the rental car and drove sixty miles to the airport in New Orleans to put John on his plane and then try to find some way to get ourselves home.

Fleur de Paris Hat

US Airways rescheduled us on a flight leaving the following day. "View haloo," we said. "We'll party in New Orleans tonight." So we booked a room at the Drury (excellent hotel), strolled the French Quarter, browsed the Fleur de Paris (divine couturier and milliner), and dined at the Bon Ton (superb restaurant). Next morning the robot called again. Again our flight was cancelled.

We rescheduled for a flight leaving at three o'clock on Wednesday and went back to Ocean Springs.

It was nice to see the folks again. Being polite souls they stifled their cries of, "Not you again," and smilingly let us into the house. Next day we climbed back into the rental car and set out for New Orleans in plenty of time to catch the three o'clock flight.

Bridge over Ponchartrain

Or so we thought. But the Louisiana Highway Department had other ideas. Halfway across Lake Ponchartrain on the I-10 bridge the traffic suddenly slowed to three miles an hour, and if you know that bridge you know it's way longer than three miles.

The construction work and consequent slowdown had been announced that morning in the Times-Picayune, but we hadn't read it. By the time we reached the gate it was twenty after three. Our plane had left on time. (Unheard of, someone said.)

The sympathetic airline clerk found us two seats on a plane leaving on Thursday. Another night in New Orleans. Off to an airport hotel this time, in a shuttle packed with stranded stewardesses. It was comfortable enough, but I wanted to be home. The party was to be on Friday. At dawn on Thursday morning I sprang out of bed and wrote down the menu and a shopping list. Ham, gumbo, green salad, pecan pie. Simple matter. We watched the Burn Notice marathon until it was time to go back to the airport.

By suppertime on Thursday we were home at last. No sign of John; he was hanging out with old friends. More Burn Notice, and then to bed.

Me and my chopping knife

Friday, the day of the party, I took my shopping list to the Giant. There wasn't any frozen okra for the gumbo, but in the produce section I found the last two packages of fresh okra in the Western Hemisphere. It came from Nicaragua. Saved. I went home, made the pies, scrubbed the bathroom, changed the bag on the vacuum sweeper, chopped vegetables until blue in the face, made the gumbo, roasted the ham (recipes on request), shoveled the clutter out of the dining room while Harold ran the sweeper, thought about a shower (too late), sprayed perfume on myself (Burberry), changed my clothes, and let the first guest in.

The party was a success. People like gumbo and pecan pie, and friends brought other stuff as well. It was great. The only thing was...

Dark scary highway

The only thing was, I had to take John to the Philadelphia airport before dawn the next morning. Why me? Well, I don't drink alcohol. I figured that while everyone else was hung over I would be fresh and bright. The way it actually went down I was kind of tired. In fact only my terror of falling asleep kept me awake. I-95 is scary in the dark with no traffic.

Anyway, happy new year. I'm all recovered now, after two solid days of sleep. I don't think I'll be flying again anytime soon.

How to Write a Popular Blog

2010-12-27T00:01:00.011-05:00

My agent, still hoping that I can turn myself into a popular and successful author, has recommended assiduous blogging.

How to become a popular blogger? Probably a bad idea to use words like assiduous. Writers love words, readers maybe not so much. Readers want a good story. Readers want what they want.

What do readers want? I went online to find out how to do a successful blog, and was advised that I must first ask myself this question, before I even begin blogging. Writing my books, I don't ask this question. I ask myself, what would I find charming and compelling? And then I write it. Those that like it, find it, or many of them do, and the others don't hear about it, which is what is bothering my agent.

Still, blogging is another animal. The successful blogger must find out people's needs and fulfill them. It is said that one can do this by analyzing Google statistics. I was discussing this with Harold at Sneddon's this morning as we ate breakfast. He said, "Ah. Airline reservations, travel information..." This didn't sound like something I was prepared to offer. I came home and looked up Google statistics. It seems that what people really want is advice on anal fisting and how to have a miscarriage.

(Sigh.)

I need hardly tell you that I don't find these topics charming or compelling. So I'm making a New Year's resolution. The public be damned. If what you want is kinky sex, questionable medical advice and tiny little words, you must look elsewhere. I hereby resolve to write charming and compelling things on my blogs, in big words if I feel like it. I'm going to please myself. Stick around if you want to.

Peter

2010-12-20T00:01:00.067-05:00

It struck me like a thunderbolt. It was the strangest thing.

I was sitting at the dining room table here, talking to my husband and a friend of ours, my fingers idly roving over the keys of my Macbook. I can't even remember what made me think of it, but a children's book I used to own popped into my mind and I found myself doing a search on the title.

Suddenly, there it was.

When I say I used to own this book, I mean it was the book I used to look at all the time when I was little, the one I used to read to my sister, the one on which we based a large part of our fantasy life for years and years. Peter Pan. The story of a bunch of little kids with no parental supervision.

It was the lack of parental supervision that made the story attractive to us. My father built a dollhouse for my sister, and a nice one, too. My mother crocheted rugs for it. We had, I think, a dozen thumb-sized babies who were supposed to live in it. Our parents gave us a mother and father to take care of them, carefully dressed and groomed grownup dolls made of rubber-covered wire in a scale of one inch to the foot. The mother had black eyeliner and red lips. The house was splendidly furnished and decorated.

But whenever we played with the dollhouse stuff, the babies put the plaster of Paris cakes and ham and the tiny pillows and blankets into a bus we had made out of erector set parts, climbed aboard, and hit the road. Mom and Dad stayed behind in the dollhouse. We had the most charming adventures, none of which I can remember now. Peter's gang. I can't remember exactly when we stopped playing Peter, but it must have been when we got to be teenagers. We grew up.

My mother gave me the book at some point. She said she meant to give it to Liz, but I had written my name in the front of it, Kathleen Gallison, probably in the first cursive I learned to write, back in third grade. I cherished it for a long time, but I can't remember seeing it in this house. We have lived here for twenty-seven years.

Sometimes I used to look for it. I would have liked to read it to John when he was little. Not that I would have wanted him to shun parental authority. When he was a small child, though, he used to remind me of the children in that book, the one illustrated by Roy Best. They were so beautiful. Their cheeks were so pink. The images have stayed in my mind all these years, so that when I saw that the book, the very edition, was available online for mere money, I had to have it.

"Why?" the men said. "What will you do with it?"

"I'll look at it," I said. "It's beautiful." I showed them the pictures. "This was Roy Best's masterwork. All the rest of his stuff was nothing but tacky pinups." Our friend thought that Tinkerbell was hot.

"The pinups probably paid the rent," my husband said.

"All the same." Ninety dollars was a lot of money for an old book, but quite cheap for a work of art. Hadn't I just gotten a check for royalties on my e-backlist? I would be a fool not to buy it, the desire of my heart. A few clicks of the mouse and Peter Pan was mine.

Lying in bed that night, I thought, I ought to give it to my sister for Christmas. It means as much to her as it does to me. Then in the morning I realized there was probably another one for sale out there. We could both have it.

The Trailer Park

2010-12-13T00:01:00.041-05:00

Book trailers are all the thing right now. Nobody knows whether they do any good for one's sales or not. Still, a number of us have them, both writers who sell well and those who sell not so well. I made a great book trailer last year to promote The Edge of Ruin, because editing film is a hobby of mine. Here it is again, in case you missed it:

Now I have to make another one for The Brink of Fame, which is due out in August of next year, and for some reason it's harder. The music to play behind the trailer does not come readily to mind. The arc of the trailer is elusive. The computer I made the first one on was so clogged with stuff when I went to use it that I had to format the hard drive, reinstall Windows and then try to find drivers for my peripherals. That ate up a couple of days. The book is really good. I like it a lot. Maybe I'll just tell people the book is really good and I like it a lot.

It might be that a slick, professional looking trailer is no longer necessary after all. This one by Stuart Ross might be the worst trailer of 2010. Or it might be the best. The Huffington Post can't decide, but you can, if you want. Leave me a comment. Tell me what you like in a trailer.

Inspirational Comic Book Characters

2010-12-06T00:01:00.002-05:00

A fad of some sort was going around Facebook last week whereby we would all put up pictures of favorite comic book characters from our childhood, instead of pictures of our own faces, to be our profile pictures. This was supposed to strike a blow against child abuse somehow. I don't quite get that, but I'm game for anything that will postpone the work I have to do on my novel.

So I decided to give it a shot.

You must understand that when I was growing up comic books were it, as far as entertainment went, comic books and radio shows. We're talking about the forties, a decade when women were strong, because they had to be. The role models I found in the comics were stronger and hotter than even my mother could stand, which is why I had to sneak my comic books under the covers and read them by flashlight.

Naturally, I wanted to grow up to be Wonder Woman. Except that Wonder Woman seemed to get captured and tied up all the time. What was up with that?

Okay, the Dragon Lady was good. The worst thing that ever happened to her was that she was kind of sweet on Terry, of Terry and the Pirates. Meanwhile she got to be the boss of everyone in sight.

Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, wrote interesting women. (For those of you under a certain age, The Spirit was a comic-book sized supplement that came with the Sunday paper, and Eisner was a genius.) I didn't like Ellen Dolan all that well--she was the police commissioner's helpless, often-kidnapped daughter, The Spirit's sweetheart--but the bad girls were people I wanted to grow up to be. They tied him up on occasion.

I wanted to be P'Gell.

Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner, drew a few cool females. My mother, unhappy with my untidy room, called me Moonbeam McSwine once. Moonbeam was certainly a strong woman, in more than one sense of the word. But I did not grow up to be Moonbeam, or P'Gell, or the Dragon Lady. Instead, I grew up to be Mammy Yokum, wearer of hats, mother of sons, worker of amazing miracles.

And that's not a bad thing.

Where Writers Get Their Ideas

2010-11-28T15:31:00.000-05:00

Inspiration comes from many places.

Today we had our annual parish meeting at Saint Andrews. Father Townley told us he had been talking to a colleague or two about the financial struggles the church faces, the struggles most churches face in the modern day.

One of his colleagues pointed out to him that St. Andrews is an aging parish. She meant this not in the sense that the church has been standing on the corner of York and Main for 130 years (it has), but in the sense that most of us in the pews are getting old and gray.

Another colleague advised more internet exposure. Tweet on Twitter, he said. Establish a presence on Facebook. Launch into the blogosphere. Maintain the web page. That ought to pull 'em in.

Putting these two concepts together--the old, gray parishioners with their fountain pens and Underwoods, versus the new forms of communication--tickled me. Behold the geezers grappling with modern technology for the glory of God, snarking on Twitter, oversharing on Facebook, fighting tooth and toenail for a higher rating on Google for their web page. I could write a short story. It would be a simple matter to work out a story arc, bang out a handful of pages and sell it to a magazine that prints charming, fluffy fiction. But, wait. There aren't any magazines like that anymore.

All right, then. I have another idea. On Friday I was lunching at Sneddon's with Harold and we got to talking about what he's been reading lately, a succession of grim-jawed men's thrillers that are wildly popular with modern readers. Heavy enough to hold the door open in a stiff breeze, these tomes, though penned by a number of different grim-jawed men, have certain elements in common. Besides the length. It should be possible to use these common elements to whip up a thrilling grim-jawed men's potboiler.

The adventures of Butch Bammer, for instance. Former CIA agent Bammer fights for freedom and justice against the forces of the evil federal government/evil Democratic party/evil Hunterdon County sheriff. Homeless, he keeps a stash of weapons and clean underwear in every major U. S. city. His superpower is the secret knowledge of the time and location of every AA meeting in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston.

As our story opens, Bammer stands in a public shower, admiring his hair and muscles and washing somebody else's blood off himself.

It's true that I have difficulty writing anything longer than 60,000 words. How to make it long enough? Here's yet another idea. We could get every member of the parish to write a chapter. It would be swell. We could sell it to Simon and Schuster or somebody, publicize it on the internet, tweet about it, make the New York Times best-seller list. We could get the sprinkler system installed, the gutters fixed. Think of it.

Next Sunday I'll mention it to Father.

Infrequent Flyer

2010-11-22T09:11:00.002-05:00

Last week I flew to Houston and back to see my sister. I tried to do this without spending inordinate amounts of money. For those of you who don't travel by air very often, I thought it would be good if I shared some crumbs of flying knowledge I picked up in my travels.

First of all, air travel is not what it used to be. I'm sure you've heard this, if you haven't experienced it first hand, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. The first time our mother and father flew anywhere it was so long ago that the airplane had propellers and flew in and out of Chicago without any problems. They came home with airline goodies. Presents from the airline. It might have been TWA. There were cocktail napkins and fancy stirrers, and I think there was a cardboard sign that said "occupied" or "do not disturb" or some such thing. The exact use of such a sign escaped me; the "occupied" sign was supposed to be left on your seat when you went to the loo, I guess; the "do not disturb" sign could be balanced on top of your hat if you wanted to pull it down and take a nap.

Years later I had a boyfriend who flew frequently. He used to bring me silver envelopes containing the most divinely seasoned almonds. But that was then, this is now. Remember airline food? Whether you thought it was good or not, at least they fed you. In the twenty-first century we get one little silver envelope of pretzels for lunch, washed down with a few ounces of ginger ale. Almonds, schmalmonds.

And the boarding process. Ah, the boarding process. Not that long ago, families with small children used to be invited to board before anyone else. No more. Big strong executives and executive-ettes swagger onto the plane first, while mothers of three-under-three wait patiently, screaming babies hanging in their hair. This is what business class is all about. If your ticket is paid for by an international corporation, you get to board the airplane ahead of the suffering peasants.

So what? you say. That's what I thought, too. I can be patient. You have no idea how patient I can be. But there are consequences for being last, as I was to discover.

After the golden few in business class take their seats, zone one gets to board, and then two and so forth. Silly me. I thought the zones were geographical. They are not geographical, folks. They are hierarchical. The higher your zone number, the more the airline gets to crap all over you. Zones have nothing to do with seat numbers, or with efficient boarding practices, or whether you'll be in people's way when they are trying to get settled.

My boarding pass said Zone 7. As I straggled down the boarding ramp behind all the other passengers, a flight attendant announced that the overhead bins were all full. I was forced to surrender my roll-on before I got on the plane. They smiled and gave me a tiny yellow ticket in exchange for it. So much for my plan to bypass the baggage pick-up process. It was one of those wrenching moments. I was supposed to change planes in Atlanta. I thought, "I'll never see that bag again."

"I'll never see that bag again," I said to the woman in the seat next to mine, in row 17, not so far back in the plane or so far in the front that I would have to be in zone 7. She reassured me that the airline seldom lost bags. "What zone are you?" I said. She said, "Zone one."

"How is this possible? My ticket says zone 7, and I'm sitting right next to you."

"We paid an extra ten dollars when we reserved the seats online."

Ah. Money.

So now I know something I didn't know before, and I pass it on to you, in case you're as unsophisticated as I am about flying. Sooner or later I'll figure out how to game the system, if I fly often enough. Maybe I'll even fork over the ten dollars.

You'll be happy to know that my roll-on made it safely to Philadelphia.

Candy from Strangers

2010-11-08T17:07:00.007-05:00

I was sitting in Madison Square Park, watching the dogs come and go with their owners, counting the instances of red-soled Christian Louboutin pumps, and enjoying the Manhattan experience generally while I waited for six o'clock to come. At that hour the November meeting of the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America was to begin. It was a pleasant afternoon. Nothing seemed amiss.

As I sat on my bench, loafing and resting my feet, two young people came up to me with a clipboard. "Do you have five minutes to fill out a questionnaire?" the girl said, in lightly accented English. "We are German students, and we are doing a survey."

"Certainly," I said. "I can give you half an hour." I was way early for the meeting.

She handed me the clipboard, stacked with filled-out questionnaires. It seemed the survey had to do with attitudes about 9/11. I remember that one of the questions on the front of the sheet was, "Do you have a conspiracy theory about 9/11? If so, what is it?"

That one was easy. Al Qaida planned and executed the attacks under the direction of Osama Bin Laden. If that isn't a conspiracy I don't know what is. I wrote it down.

Then they wanted to know whether I knew anybody who died in the attacks, and the answer was no. I turned the sheet over. Had my behavior changed since 9/11, and if so, how?

Of course it has. I didn't know how, exactly, except to say that I no longer open my mail on the dining table. That's because of the anthrax attack. That mail went through my post office.

So I filled out the last of their questions and handed the clipboard back to the girl. The two smiled and thanked me. She handed me a cellophane packet of German gummi bears. Here's a picture of it.

They went off down the path, looking for another subject. I gazed after them for a while, and then looked down at the candy in my hand. I started to laugh.

Did they honestly think I was going to eat that?

2010-08-25T13:47:00.000-04:00

The Grapes of Sourness

a short story

Beauregard Marin adjusted his tie in the men's room mirror of the National Arts Club. Why is it, he asked himself, that no one but me seems to know anymore how to tie a decent bow tie? Why is it that no one seems to recognize a properly written English sentence any longer? Why is it, in fact, that no one reads? He combed his few locks of white hair across his bald spot, flicked a bit of lint from the lapel of his good suit, and brooded over the latest statistic his wife had brought him from the internet. Seventy percent of American adults never put their noses inside a bookstore. Eighty percent never read a book. As a professional crime writer he viewed this news with alarm. As a novelist, chronicler of the inmost workings of the human heart, he wondered: what were the other ten percent doing in the bookstore if they never read a book? Drinking coffee and picking up dates for Saturday night?

Perhaps there was no reason in the twenty-first century to tie a bow tie. Perhaps there was no reason to read. Marin squared his shoulders, sucked in his stomach and went forth to face the membership of the New York chapter--the most powerful chapter, everyone said--of the National Association of Crime Writers. Marin was to be one of the speakers at tonight's meeting. The subject of the panel was "Resurrection: How a Writing Career can Rebound from the Depths of Failure." Marin had come to the end of a number of projects, and changed publishers a number of times. Never had he regarded these events as occasions of failure. You write something else and carry on. Nevertheless the program chairman had included him in what his colleagues were now calling the failure panel, along with two other writers who as far as he knew had never been failures either.

When he was invited to participate he had agreed, thinking, this will be something of a hoot. I can give fatherly advice to the younger writers. They will eat their chicken and look up to me, the dean of all the crime writers, their mouths hanging open in admiration. But between the time of his acceptance and the day of the panel he received a phone call from his agent informing him that the publisher had dropped his series. Butch Bammer would fight crime no more.

Marin, less resilient than he had been in his youth, was deeply distressed by this news and began to mope around the house in his underwear. "Publishers. They suck the juice out of you like an orange, and cast your empty rind on the garbage heap. We'll have to live on Social Security now." His wife expressed sympathy by patting him and mooing. Eventually she went on the 'net and gathered all the information she could, the same as she did when one of the family got physically sick. The news she brought him did no more good than the coffee enemas with which she had treated her mother in the last days of the old woman's illness.

"Beauregard, this is terrible. Something like ten thousand new crime novels are published every year just in the United States alone. Who can read ten thousand books in a year? You'd have to read more than a book an hour, and that's if you never took time out to sleep. And that's just crime novels. Of all the fiction books, it's more like forty-five thousand. Of all the books, it's a million. A million new books in a year. And if you missed one of last year's books, forget it. You'll never have time for it. Or the space. Imagine trying to find room in the house for ten thousand crime novels. Every year."

"So?"

"There are too many books. The publishers are making too many books."

"I think the idea is to get the books into the hands of readers, dear."

"Well, there aren't enough readers either. It says here that thirty-three percent of high school graduates never read books after they finish school and forty-two percent of college graduates never read books after they get out of college. What do you think of that? A million books. No readers." Yes, he was doomed. Bring on the coffee. "It's the publisher's business model that's failing, don't you see? They're beating a dead horse. It's not your fault."

She was right, of course, it wasn't his fault, but the fact did not cheer him. Marin could not escape the conclusion that none of what he had been doing for all these years was worth doing. There were too many books. Why write more? Books were useless trash, fit only to be pulped. When these thoughts took hold of his mind Marin suffered the literary equivalent of a priest's loss of faith.

Nevertheless, on the third morning of his disgrace he shaved his face and pulled himself together. Because one aspect of his problem had suddenly come clearly into focus. And it struck him that he had it in his power to do something about it.

The time had come for the failure panel. Marin nodded in passing to the portrait of Joyce Carol Oates that hung in the elegant hall of the Arts Club and strode boldly into the dining room. With his chin up he made his way between the tables to take his place on the dais between the moderator and the other two failure panelists. The faces of the diners turned to him like flowers to the sun, expectant. They were the faces of some of the foremost talent in crime fiction, all still getting published, big guns, best sellers among them.

So Marin was here to tell them how to survive failure. The New York writers. Writer X, whose book won a contest for unpublished writers four years ago and went on to become number one on the New York Times list, where it remained ever since, together with its sequels, so charming to the many admirers of vampire cats. Writer Y, who bought a house in the Hamptons this year on the strength of his latest advance. Every Friday the in-crowd met there to play high-stakes poker. Writer Z. Even Marin admired Z's work. It was a shame about Z, a shame about all of them, really, but you had to break eggs to make an omelet. Anybody could tell you that.

The caterers had left the dessert all alone in the hall while they served the entrée. Doctoring it had been a simple matter.

It wasn't so much that there were too few publishers, or too few readers, or too many books. The problem was that there were too many writers. Marin considered explaining this to them as the first bodies hit the floor.

Blood on the Floor at the Bargain Basement

2009-07-16T15:00:00.002-04:00

Those of us who shop from time to time on RueLaLa.com have been getting email from them since the beginning of the week telling of an amazing sale due to open at eleven o'clock eastern time this morning. Many designers, deep discounts, incredible values, it was to make the mouth water.

I personally was poised over the keyboard at ten fifty-nine, because the thing about RueLaLa is that even on an ordinary day you have to jump on the merchandise really fast or someone else out there in cyberspace will get it before you do. Even if you drag your designer item off to the shopping bag, unless you check it out and pay for it at once, there's another shopper in your size (or nearly) who will snatch it from your grip.

So, how did it go, you ask. Well, they were right, the designers were famous, the brands were wonderful, and at first I could actually see what size the dresses came in (not mine, alas), but as soon I had finished browsing among the Frye boots (fantastic bargains), things began to slow down. Freeze, even. I clicked in vain on the lovely M. Missoni knitted thing, but I never could get it to pass me on to the page where I could see the sizes it came in, and maybe order one. Frozen out. And then I realized: A million other women had gotten ahead of me.

I did manage to snag a Badgley Mischka silk dress in a lovely soft print of blue-green flowers, more or less age-appropriate, deeply discounted, suitable to wear to somebody else's wedding (in case I ever get asked). But as I swiftly checked it out I could almost feel the grasp of unseen fingers on the thing. By then it was barely ten after eleven. All over the country women were piling onto the site, digging at each other with electronic elbows.

And then, as I tried to get back into the fray and have a look at the remaining goodies (selling out fast), it came to me. This was the modern equivalent of the bargain basement rush. We used to see it in the movies, fat people pulling each other's hair, hitting each other with purses and umbrellas, dragging the merchandise out of one another's hands. The difference was, we couldn't see each other. We could only get in each other's way. And of course the merchandise wasn't getting all shopworn.

No clerks were trampled in the melee. But at twelve noon, when all the adminstrative assistants on the east coast were free to leave their labors and pursue their personal interests, so many signed on to view the offered bargains that the whole store collapsed. It was two-thirty before RueLaLa could get up and running again.

You'll be happy to know that I jumped right on as soon as they reopened and secured another bargain. After trolling through page after page of size six fashion creations (much easier to do now that everyone had gone away), I found a pink linen jacket in my size (I think) marked down from $1,200.00 to $119. Crowing in triumph, I siezed it and checked it out. I've never had a twelve hundred dollar jacket on my back in my life.

Of course, there may be something wrong with it. You know what Groucho Marx said: "I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member." Maybe a jacket discounted that far isn't something I would actually want to wear. Maybe I wouldn't be caught dead in it. But, hey, I have it. You don't.

The Witch Thing

2009-05-26T19:21:00.000-04:00

Spectral Evidence, my story in the MWA anthology edited by Linda Fairstein, THE PROSECUTION RESTS, is beginning to attract some attention. I find myself thinking about the Salem witch trials again.
The question is, how could a panel of the best educated and most respected men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony have been so gullible as to fall for the lies and histrionics of a crowd of vicious little girls? How could they condemn twenty-five innocent people to a shameful death?
And you say, well, these people weren't like us. It was the olden days, after all. Or it was actually the work of the Devil.
My theory is that the crimes of the judges resulted from a sort of category fault. That is to say, they were viewing what they were seeing from entirely the wrong angle. It happens all the time, usually with consequences far less lethal. For example, at St. Andrews we run a flea market every month to raise money for our struggling church. People come and buy things that other people have donated. Some customers will say, what, only a dollar for that? Here's five, keep the change. They are entering into the spirit of supporting the church, and as a result they walk away feeling good about themselves. Others say, what, a dollar? I'll give you fifty cents. When we let them have the item for seventy-five cents, they feel that they have won the game of bargaining, they are wise and thrifty, and they, too, walk away feeling good about themselves. But they have actually lost, because they are playing by the rules of the wrong game.
Another instance. There comes a time in HUCKLEBERRY FINN when Huck feels that he must turn in his friend Jim for being a runaway slave. After a struggle with his better nature, Huck gives in to his sinful side and protects his friend. He feels bad about himself. By society's rules, which he well understands, he has failed in his duty. But these, too, are the rules of the wrong game.
The judges of the witch trials worked out of rule books prepared by the fathers of the Puritan church, Cotton Mather and his colleagues. The rules were very clear, and based on their actual experiences with people afflicted by witches. Surely a judge who would not follow these rules, through inappropriate tenderness of heart or unseemly regard for the standing in the community of an accused witch, would be derelict in his duty, no?