Bucker Dudley. It's what you want to read.

Here's a scary thing. I just spent seven years writing a young adult historical novel. None of my publishing contacts thought they could sell it. I know only four or five young persons of fourteen and up, only one of them reads, and I'm not sure she even has a Kindle. Nevertheless I've decided to offer BUCKER DUDLEY as a Kindle serial of maybe five episodes, and see whether anybody buys it.

Ninety-nine cents an episode. If you have a Kindle, the first episode is free! Find it HERE. If you don't have a Kindle, you can pay 99¢ for the first episode and read it on a free Kindle app on your computer, smartphone or tablet. You can download a Kindle app HERE.

I'll sweeten the pot. Enter my contest. If you win I'll buy you a Kindle.

Now, you're asking yourself: Why would I spend my precious time in this short life reading about Polly McCaskie's adventures in the War of 1812, when there are so many reasons not to? First of all, she's Canadian. (I had an editor tell me some years ago, before the rise of Louise Penny, that nobody wanted to read about Canadians.) Secondly, it's the War of 1812, for cat's sake. Nobody but Canadians even likes that war. We in the U.S. are embarrassed by it. The British marched into Washington and burned the White House. President Madison ran like a hare. We don't want to hear about that. It's humiliating.

Furthermore the adventures in this book, while taking place in the Regency time period, are so far from the fashionable clubs and drawing rooms of London that they might as well be happening in another universe. Nobody says, “La, indeed, sir.” Nobody even wears corsets, except maybe in Sackets Harbor, and then they don't talk about them. Captain Leonard of the United States Navy is a rake, I guess, but he isn't an attractive rake, and he gets in serious trouble for it. Are there ladies? No, not a lot of ladies. Half of the major female characters make love for a living. Others are tough Indians scratching out a hard existence in the Canadian woods.

Actually that's why you want to read it. BUCKER DUDLEY will take you out of this worrisome world of the twenty-first century and carry you off to sea, and into the deep woods of Canada, with a girl who retains her light-hearted outlook in spite of war and dreadful vicissitudes. In the end she rediscovers her true love, an American seaman. Between the two of them they strike the blow that puts an end to this miserable war.

I would recommend it to teachers as an aid to teaching the War of 1812, if anyone wanted to teach that, and if the prostitutes didn't play such a prominent role in the plot. As it is I can hear the parents screaming. Oh, well. Leave me a comment if you want to be included in the drawing for the Kindle.

Monkeystorm is Finished and Available on Kindle and Nook

It's up. I meant for it to be a Young Adult novel, but it might be too far over the top. I defy you to read it all the way through without causing coffee to come out of your nose:

MONKEYSTORM

Teen-aged Carina Nebula (as she calls herself) breaks out of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and goes home to right a terrible wrong: her older brother, Gilbert, killed their parents and put the blame on her. With her new boyfriend, Spike (unemployed game designer, homeless person, and possibly also a vampire), she sets out to ruin Gilbert's reputation, steal his money, destroy his software company, and bring him to justice. But it's harder than it looks. Gilbert has powerful allies, too, and he is still on a killing spree.

When Bad Things Happen in a Good Town

I digress from my usual rants about the War of 1812 today to talk about evil and small town life. A popular young Lambertville woman has gone missing.

I always tell people that if I want to be ignored I get on a bus and go to Manhattan. People disappear from Manhattan all the time without causing a ripple. Here in Lambertville a person can't get a haircut without its being noticed, let alone go missing.

Sarah Majoras left John and Peter's, a bar and musical venue across the Delaware River in New Hope, around two o'clock last Saturday morning and walked across the bridge, heading for her home on Union Street. She never got there. Cameras on the bridge caught her heading down Lambert Lane, taking a shortcut along the canal bank. No one appeared to be following her.

It was very, very cold that night, well below freezing, and remained so for days.

Everyone in town is upset. Helicopters, those birds of ill omen, circled overhead all day yesterday and the day before. TV news vans converged on the town. Sarah's friends formed search parties, posted leaflets, knocked on doors, and poked in the waste places by the edge of the river. Police divers broke through the ice of the canal and looked for her underwater. More police rowed up and down the canal with sonar equipment. The state police parked a forensics van by the bridge across the canal. Today it's too foggy for the helicopters to see anything.

Sarah Majoras was–is–a graduate of South Hunterdon Regional High School, the valedictorian, they say, one of many sweet, charming young people with many friends. The town is full of them.  None have any particular desire to go off to Manhattan and become hedge fund managers. They like rock 'n' roll. They know how to have fun.

Her friends hope to find her alive, though I'm thinking that even if she lay down under a bush and took a nap on the way home (and why the hell would she?) hypothermia would have got her before very long. Worst case, she fell in the canal and drowned. Very worst case, she was murdered. Rumors are rampant. People who don't know him suspect her boyfriend. Others think it was Guatemalans or Mexicans. There was a guy a couple of years ago who attacked a jogger on the canal path. People remember that, and they think maybe he's back in town.

Knowing they are suspected, perhaps expecting the attention of the immigration authorities as a result, the young Hispanic men have disappeared from their usual haunts in town, the corner where they wait for work, the library where they surf the internet.

The curious thing to me is the speed with which this story blew up. The state police were all over it at once, not waiting the usual time for a missing persons case but at once. Was it because of the uproar on Facebook and the internet, or something else? What did they think, and why did they think it?

What happened to Sarah? Reporters and strangers will offer all sorts of speculation. There is no answer until there's an answer.

Putting a Historic Figure in the Novel

As near as I can determine, there are no pictures of Captain Benjamin Forsyth.

He was an American hero of the War of 1812, leader of Forsyth's Rifles, a dashing if rowdy and larcenous crew involved in many important battles on the Canadian-American border in the Thousand Islands area. He plays a part in the story of Bucker Dudley. When Bucko was imprisoned in Elizabethtown, Captain Forsyth and his Rifles crossed the frozen river, raided the town, and released all the prisoners. This was an actual raid, carried out by the actual historical personage, Captain Benjamin Forsyth. But what did he look like?

Sean Bean

I like to think of him as looking like Sean Bean when he played Richard Sharpe of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles, a gorgeous hunk in a skin-tight uniform, broad-shouldered, maybe six and a half feet tall, his handsome brow creased with the consciousness of having killed many men and broken the hearts of many women.

But maybe he was short. It has been said that in the woodland skirmish where he lost his life Benjamin Forsyth climbed up on a stump to see what was happening, whereupon a British marksman picked him off. A tall man wouldn't have had to do this. And maybe his shoulders weren't broad at all. You can never tell about the people of that time, since broad shoulders were so unfashionable that even a man who had them would be painted as not having them, wearing those cramped, pinch-shouldered jackets that were in style in those days.

Portrait of General Hull

But who cares? I'm writing this story. I can make Captain Benjamin Forsyth as fine-looking as I like. It's called poetic license. My poetic license hangs over my desk. Take a look at it. The powers it gives me are sweeping.

Secession!

Most Americans, when they hear that the Texans want to secede from the union, immediately think the case parallels the Civil War (aka the War Between the States). They do not think of the War of 1812, when the New Englanders nearly seceded. Yes, folks, in those days it was the Yankees who couldn't stand the bull from Washington anymore. They even went so far as to meet in Hartford to go forward with their plans for secession. Here's how it went down.

First of all the New England merchants and farmers were sore at President James Madison. They hadn't voted for him, but for DeWitt Clinton, the Federalist candidate. When he declared war on Great Britain they were filled with alarm and venom. The war quickly began to go badly. The British blockaded all trade. The merchants lost money. In spite of New England's refusal to support the war with money or men, the federal government continued to fight against the British.

After two years of things not going their way, the Yankees decided they weren't going to take it anymore. In December of 1814, with the war dragging on, delegates came to Hartford from all over Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, as well as a few from New Hampshire and Vermont. Nobody knows how the treasonous meetings went, for they kept no minutes, possibly for fear of being hanged. In the end they backed down from outright secession and made a list of amendments they wanted made to the Constitution. They sent a delegation to Washington to put their list before the Republicans in charge of Congress, without hope of winning them over, but thinking to embarrass them.

The delegation arrived in Washington to make their constitutional demands about the same time that the news arrived that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, Jackson had whupped the British in New Orleans, and the war was over. How embarrassed they must have been. The New England Federalist cause was irrelevant now. As a result not only the New England secessionist movement but the entire Federalist party lost all influence in the country, and withered away completely.

The Texans might want to think about that.

Historic Storm

In the midst of all the current hysteria about Sandy the Frankenstorm I was moved to cast my mind back to the War of 1812 to see whether I could think of a big storm that left its mark on the history of that conflict. There was one that I know of. Not a hurricane, not even a nor'easter, the squall that struck Lake Ontario on the night of August 8, 1813, was evil enough to take the lives of many sailors.

Ned Myers was aboard the schooner Scourge, a merchant vessel commandeered by the American navy and fitted out – overbalanced, actually – with eight heavy guns on the deck. He told the story in his memoirs, Ned Meyers, A Life Before the Mast, dictated to James Fenimore Cooper.

The American fleet was pursuing the British over the lake that day, though the wind was almost still. The Hamilton and the Scourge, two schooners, rowing with all their might, fell behind the other vessels. Night fell. Captain Osgood expected to fight some more. After mess he told the exhausted sailors to sleep at their stations, leaving the sails up, waiting for a breath of wind.

The night grew chilly. some of the men went below where they could sleep in the warmth. On deck Ned Myers fancied a drink, and he was headed for the hatchway when he heard a strange rushing noise to windward. The sky turned black.

A sudden bolt of lightning. A crash of thunder. More lightning and a violent wind that rolled the vessel over to larboard, sending the guns, the shot boxes everything heavy and unsecured careening across the deck, the sailors along with it. Injured men cried out. Ned Myers sprang to throw loose the jib-sheet, shouting to the man at the wheel to put the helm hard down. Ned and another man succeeded in letting fly the lee topsail sheet, but as Ned got hold of the clew line he realized the vessel was going over. The water was up to his breast.

All the men below were lost, including Captain Osgood, and most of those on deck as well. Myers escaped by jumping off just as the ship went down. By chance he swam to a leaky rowboat that had been towed behind the Scourge, and rescued some of his fellows. What happened next – how he was rescued by the British, sent barefoot to prison in Halifax, and managed a daring jailbreak – can be found in his book, widely available online. The Scourge itself rests on the bottom of Lake Ontario together with the Hamilton, sunk in the same storm, preserved as an archaeological site.

Always to be Calling it, Please, Research

Tom Lehrer fans will recognize this line from his immortal hit, "Plagiarize." When I set out to write BUCKER DUDLEY it was not my intention to rip off other people's work, but to write something fresh and original about a very old idea: the sailor girl who went to sea dressed as a boy.

And I wanted to write about the War of 1812.

I didn't know a whole lot about the War of 1812 before I started reading. Americans don't. It's a big deal in Canada, because they figure they won it, which they did, sort of, and yet not. The idea of a shooting war between Canadians and Americans intrigued and horrified me. My father was American, my mother Canadian. They grew up thirty miles from each other.

What most Americans know about the war is the part where the British burned Washington, and then were repelled from Baltimore, where our flag still flew from Fort McHenry in the dawn's early light, after which they sailed off to New Orleans and got soundly whupped by Andrew Jackson's troops.

There was a lot more to it than that. First off the Americans declared war on Great Britain, the most powerful naval force on earth, without having an effective army or navy. It was not a popular war. President Madison sent raw troops to Canada under incompetent officers in the mistaken belief that their invasion would be welcomed. The troops were terrified of Indians, who wouldn't fight by the rules. The New Englanders were so distressed by the whole mess that they started making plans to secede from the Union.

Showing the craziness through the eyes of an adolescent girl who found herself in the middle of it became the task of writing the novel. Bucko does fine. Good health, a cheerful outlook, and remarkable athletic ability see her through most of her trials. The first draft of BUCKER DUDLEY showcased many fascinating characters that I came upon in my reading, but the multiple point of view necessary to feature them pulled focus from Bucko's struggles.

John Norton, the half-Scot, half-Cherokee Mohawk war chief, was too good to cut out of the book in the second draft: handsome, fascinating, bloodthirsty, irresistible to women, ultimately a tragic figure. So he is Bucko's cousin, on the Scottish side, her last remaining relative. She must go into the woods to find him after her ship is destroyed.

In the coming weeks I'll blog about the characters I had to cut. I already told you about Duncan McColl, the soldier minister who was a force for peace on the Maine-New Brunswick border, and Alexander Contee Hanson, the newspaper publisher who detonated the Baltimore riots, and my beloved Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy (Nelson's Hardy), whose aristocratic young wife never appreciated him. There are many others of interest, both noble and debased. Check back here from time to time to find out all about them.

Blackmail Yourself (or let us do it for you)

I saw on MediaBistro yesterday that a new free service called Aherk is offering to blackmail you into finishing your novel, or painting your dining room, or whatever. All you do is state your goal and its deadline and send them a compromising picture of yourself. If your Facebook friends (you see, Facebook has to be involved here) all agree that you have achieved your goal by the deadline, then Aherk won't post the picture on Facebook. Otherwise your reputation is toast.

The concept raises a few questions.

First: Free? What are you getting out of it, Aherk? Oh, yes, my blackmail pictures. After I achieve my goal, perhaps I'll get monthly emails from you demanding fifty dollars.

Second: What sort of pictures do we consider compromising in 2012? In my case, something would have to be Photoshopped. Me wearing Republican campaign materials on my head. Me in bed with the paperboy. (Actually we have no paperboy.) Me using the wrong fork. In point of fact, I haven't done anything in years that couldn't be shown on Facebook with perfect aplomb. At least, I don't think I have. It's true that my memory isn't what it was.

Third: What happens if your Facebook friends all want to see your embarrassing picture so badly that they are willing to lie to Aherk about your achievements? We all know about Facebook friends. Some of them are actual friends, but some of them are just these people who once asked you to friend them, and when you couldn't remember whether you'd ever met them or who they were you said, fine, we're friends. Maybe yes, maybe no.

And finally: What sort of moron gives blackmail pictures to perfect strangers? What sort of society are we living in where people would even expect each other to do that? Who are all these vultures hanging around waiting for me to embarrass myself? Why is the twenty-first century such a total cesspit? (snort… drool…)

Minimalism vs. Abundance

The brilliant small life. Elegance, which is to say the state of having made choices, and having discarded the unworthy and kept only the best. This is what most of us want, except for the pathologically greedy, the disgustingly rich, and the hoarders. We don't want to be those people. Right? We want to lead lives of diamond-like brilliance.

Good luck with that. I've been working on it for more years than I care to remember, and it's one step forward and two steps back. Still, the struggle is worth pursuing.

I was going through a copy of Eating Light this morning, looking for enticing recipes, when I realized something about my kitchen. I don't have half the stuff it takes to make these gourmet dishes. I don't mean the big, perishable things, zucchini, cauliflower, meat, but the spices, specialty oils, gourmet vinegars, and ethnic sauces and condiments that make a dish stand out, not even getting into the cooking utensils required to prepare some ethnic dishes. Quite frankly, I can't give all that stuff house room. Nor can I use the spices and condiments up before they go bad. And then it struck me: one's kitchen is like one's closet.

Yes, standing in the kitchen moaning that there's nothing to eat is not very different from standing in front of the closet moaning that there's nothing to wear. And the things the experts tell you about your closet are also true of your kitchen.

For example:

Minimalism. There is a school of thought that says you should have no more than ten items of clothing for a season, excluding shoes, socks, underwear, scarves, gym clothes and evening wear. It's very French. In order to pull it off you must buy tops and bottoms in a single main colorway, with everything co-ordinating so well that you can dress in the dark. (If you're in New York it has to be black.) In the kitchen, you can apply this philosophy as well, paring down your need for many jars of spices by sticking to a single cuisine. (If you're in New Jersey it has to be Italian.) I wanted to cook a Swedish dish the other night only to find that it required cardamom, which as luck would have it costs fifteen dollars a jar at the local supermarket. Back to chicken cacciatore for me.

When Julia Child first came on the scene I was a young housewife. I learned a lot of what I know about cooking from watching her show. I don't recall that she used a food processor; her tools of choice were a big sharp chef knife, a balloon whisk, an assortment of pots and pans and a few bowls. As time goes by, though, and one loses the snap in one's wrist, a food processor can be a very nice thing to have. Likewise the bread machine, the ice cream maker – Still, I know how to keep a minimalist French kitchen. If I wanted to do that. (You see how easy it is to stray from the ideal.)

Suitability. Your closet and your kitchen should both be in harmony with your lifestyle. Your ten items of clothing will be different if you stay home and raise children from what you would wear to go to business, different also according to your age and degree of physical fitness. Likewise the things in your kitchen. If you have only twenty minutes at a time to cook, you shouldn't be investing in stockpots. If you have children to feed, maybe not so many spices and strange sauces.

Cost per use. A pricey classic can be a bargain if it will be worn or used often. You want to pay big bucks for your winter coat, which you will wear every day for four or five months out of the year, depending on where you live. Ditto your saute pan, good for making chili, frying pork chops, stir-frying, almost anything you might want to cook. I could never understand the impulse that makes women pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a wedding dress that they will wear only once. I know you want to look presentable, but really.

So there you go. These are my thoughts for today on how to be elegant and lead an elegant life. I'm going down to the kitchen now and chase the meal moths out of the cupboards, maybe pare down the spices, throw out the cinnamon I bought at the Acme thirty years ago. Tomorrow, the closet.

Sliding Doors (the movie)

Note to self: When network TV fails to amuse, go watch a Gwyneth Paltrow movie.

Sliding Doors is a great one. I never heard of it before last night, when I was looking for something to "watch instantly" on Netflix. Maybe you never did either, since it came out in the same year (1998) as Shakespeare in Love. But you should see it. It's two stories, really, taking place with the same characters in parallel universes, one where Helen misses her tube train on the way home from being fired from her job, and one where she catches it, meets the attractive James on the train, and arrives home in time to find her parasitic failed novelist lover in bed with his old girlfriend.

The faithless lover, played by John Lynch, is so slimy you have to laugh, and his paramour, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, is so nasty you want to hiss at her. James (John Hannah) is nice, but the villains get all the great scenes. You should see it if you're at all inclined to romantic movies. Or Gwyneth Paltrow movies.

Back to the Fifties?

Republican voters are flocking to Rick Santorum (or so he says) because he is leading the charge back to the mid-twentieth century. Actually, I can sympathize with their desire for a return to what we believed was a simpler time. Eisenhower was president! As long as there was a light on in the White House we knew he was taking care of us, even after he had his stroke and started talking funny. It's true that Rick Santorum is no Dwight Eisenhower. I don't think anyone would argue with that. But what if he could really bring back the fifties? Wouldn't that be nice?

Of course that depends on how nice the fifties were for you. If you were a Black person, maybe the fifties weren't so hot, what with sitting in the back of the bus, getting turned away from the lunch counter, and being treated with disrespect generally. If you were a girl having a baby out of wedlock, maybe not so nice either. You would have to give up your sweet little baby to be raised by strangers so that he could have a name and a legitimate place in society. But, say, if you were white and never had sex for pleasure, or outside of marriage, great times.

Especially for white boys. Oh, wait, there was the draft. If you weren't of a military turn of mind you had to have a really good story for your draft board, sole support of your widowed mother, tear stains on the application for exemption, and even then they might take you. Elvis himself, in mid-career, was sent to Germany wearing Modern Army Green.

But we were safe in the fifties, as long as we didn't get so far out of line that we attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Maybe not in our cars. There weren't any seat belts. Maybe not in our houses, what with one thing and another. In our schools, certainly. All of us knew to get under our desks when the Russians dropped The Bomb on us.  Those crazy Russians. They hated us so much for being free.

As much as I loathe the twenty-first century, global warming, Islamist terrorism, uncomfortable air travel, bad manners, Chinese poison in the cat food, beach-front high-rise condos, the plague of plastic bags, I'm not sure I would want to go back to the nineteen-fifties, even if Santorum really had it in his power to take me there. And, you know what? he doesn't. None of them do. We're going to have to sort this mess out ourselves.

Naked Came the Creole Gumbo

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 off 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

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

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

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

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.

Ma

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

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

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

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

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.