Tear it Down

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

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

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

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

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!