From Laurens to Laurens

I’ve been thinking about houses recently. Spring has finally come to my part of the country, so it’s time to get out the honey-do list and start those projects. We got a new roof put on our house a few weeks ago. With that budget-busting job out of the way, we can work in the yard and catch up on painting, cleaning windows, and the myriad of other chores that go along with owning a money-pit . . . I mean, an old house.

Most people, I think, have a house that holds a special place in their lives. For me it is my maternal grandparents’ house—MaMa’s and PaPa’s. I lived there for the first four years of my life, as my father finished his Marine Corps service at the end of WWII and he and my mother tried to figure out what their married life was all about. They met in the fall of 1941 but did not marry until 1944, in California. As soon as my mother realized she was pregnant in early 1945, she returned to her parents’ home in Laurens, a small town in upstate South Carolina.

That home was a two-story house (plus an attic) built in the 1880s, with huge rooms, 12-foot ceilings, a front porch that ran around to the side of the house, and a vacant lot behind it and another one on one side of it. No child could have asked for a better place to live or to visit. The house imprinted itself on me, like a mother duck on her ducklings. I was the fifth grandchild out of a brood that eventually numbered fourteen. Ten of the fourteen of us lived in the house for some portion of our childhood—six of us, unfortunately, because of divorce or the death of a parent. Every holiday saw us coming together in Laurens, and the grandchildren got to spend some time there during the summers.

One reason the house was so special to me was that my family moved around a lot as I was growing up. My father was always trying to make things better for himself and his family, so he changed jobs and residences with a frequency that would be impossible today. As a result, I went to two schools in different towns in first grade and lived in three different houses between second and fifth grades. In sixth and seventh grades I went to four different schools in three different towns. I had just learned to spell Cincinnati when we moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This stage of my life—the mid-1950s—is the focus of my book Perfect Game, Imperfect Lives: A Memoir Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Don Larsen’s Perfect Game. You can read a sample at my web site: http://www.albertbell.com. There are links to order it online, or contact me and I’ll sell you an autographed copy. Now back to our program, er, blog.

We bought a house when I was in fourth grade but moved before sixth grade. We bought another house when I was in tenth grade, but before eleventh grade we had moved again, back to South Carolina. My parents moved twice more while I was in college—from South Carolina to Virginia, then to Tennessee. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way “home” to a house I’d never seen for Christmas my senior year (no GPS in those days). To cap the process, they moved one last time, back to South Carolina, while I was in graduate school and spent thirty years in that house.

That’s why home, for me, was always that big old house in Laurens. No matter how often my parents’ address changed, I knew I could always find my way back to MaMa’s and PaPa’s. That’s why there’s a large picture of that house in my house and a piece of the gingerbread from it hanging on the wall. (PaPa had it removed in the 1950s because it was so hard to paint. My pack-rat mother kept one piece.)

When my wife and I started our family, I told her I wanted a big old house, and I didn’t want to be moving around every few years. I’ve been blessed to have a good college teaching job that has enabled us to stay put. We bought our first old house in 1978 and lived there for sixteen years. The house we bought next was only a few blocks away, not quite as old but bigger.

All four of my children went through the same school system, from kindergarten to graduation, and are still friends with people they’ve known since they were six years old. By contrast, when I was in grad school I ran into a young woman whom I recognized. I knew we had gone to school together. While we talked I racked my brain, but, as we were parting, I finally had to ask her, “Where did I know you?”

Now I have an eleven-year-old grandson, who calls me PaPa. My wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to buy the rental house next door to us in 1998. We had a long run of excellent tenants, but my younger daughter got divorced when my grandson was two, and they came to live with us. They had one of our apartments for a while and now, along with my daughter’s boyfriend, occupy the entire house, except for the basement, which is my older son’s territory since he got downsized out of a newspaper job. I don’t have as big a house as my grandparents had, but between my two houses I do have more room. And we’ve needed it. Fortunately, my kids and the significant other are employed and able to pay rent.

Now to tie this into Pliny the Younger, the sleuth in my series of Roman mysteries. (Bet you thought I couldn’t do it.) Pliny, a wealthy aristocrat, owned several houses, but his favorite was a seaside villa at what is now called Laurentum, about 17 miles southwest of Rome. When he describes the villa to a friend he refers to it as Laurens meum. Yes, Pliny had a house in Laurens!

My Life With Horses

by Laura Crum

My first memory is of riding a horse at the family ranch. I believe I was about three. I am sitting in front of my uncle Todd on a dark horse, I remember the black mane. We are loping alongside a dirt road that led from the main ranch to the lower barn. My parents are driving in their two tone gold and white sedan (this would have been 1960) along the bumpy road. From my seat on the horse they appear small, far beneath my lordly height. They wave to me.
I remember the wind and the flying dark mane and the rhythm of the lope, the sense of power and speed and freedom. I remember feeling both literally and symbolically above my parents in the car. We were going FASTER than the car. I was on a horse. I do not know if I was obsessed with horses before this moment, but I certainly was afterwards. I can chronicle my life through horses from this point forward.
I don’t have a photo of that early ride; I do have a photo of a moment that I don’t remember. My uncle was selling a pony named Tarbaby, and apparently I was placed on the pony to show how gentle he was. The notation below the photo indicates that I was two years, three months. I certainly look happy. The back of the photo reads, “Pony For Sale.”

After this my horse memories become random. I remember once being at the lower barn with my father (who was no horseman). Again, I would have been three or four. My uncle had a sorrel horse tied to a hitching rail. I must have begged to sit on the horse, though I don’t remember this. I do remember my father asking my uncle if he could put me on the horse. And all these many years later, I remember the hesitant tone in my uncle’s voice as he said, “Sure.” And I remember him quickly stepping up to untie the horse (good move). I sat happily on that horse for a few moments and then was put down again. End of story. But I wonder if that horse was all that gentle.

My uncle only occasionally made time to put me up on his horses. But I helped him feed, if I was allowed to, and I just plain followed him around whenever I could. By the time I was six or seven, I knew all his “regular” horses by name. Since my uncle was something of a horse trader, there were horses that came and went. But Lad, the gentle brown gelding with the blaze face, was a good rope horse and a permanent resident. I was sometimes allowed to ride Lad, when my uncle had time to supervise. There was Dutch, who had to be put down due to a broken leg. And when I was about eight years old, my uncle bought a wonderful horse named Mr Softime.
I don’t have any photos of Mr Softime, but I remember him perfectly. A bright bay with no white and a big kind eye. Softime was an ex-racehorse, an appendix bred QH, which means half TB and bred to run. In short, he was a hot horse, and only four years old. I was not allowed to ride him—for many years. But I hung around his corral and fed him grass all day, if nobody ran me off. Many years later I bought Burt, pictured below, because he reminded me of Softime.

As I got older, I learned to ride—because I insisted on it. My parents had no interest in horses, but I pestered my uncle, and I begged my parents for riding lessons, which they somewhat grudgingly agreed to. I rode English at a local riding school and learned to jump. But my heart was always with the cowboys.
Once I could ride tolerably well (at about eleven or twelve), my uncle let me ride his rope horses and his trading horses. And thus I grew up riding a wide selection of horses, some of whom were quite willing to buck and bolt and rear, let alone spook and be what English riders call “very forward.” I rode them all. But Lad, with his big white blaze, and a sorrel horse named Tovy were the two steady Eddies who stayed until they died and carried me on many of my childhood horseback adventures.
And I had my share of adventures. We used to slide the horses down the fifty foot sawdust piles at the old ranch and jump them over handmade jumps created out of pallets and crates, and when I was fourteen I regularly rode Lad solo through the hills and down the suburban streets—usually bareback. At fifteen I was allowed to buy my own horse (with my hard earned money) and for $175 (cheap even then) I bought a recalcitrant bay gelding named Jackson.
Jackson had many faults and few virtues. The virtues were that he was sound and cheap and an OK trail horse. The faults were that he was ill broke and stubborn, willing to kick and rear and not particularly cooperative about anything. But I was fifteen and I thought I was tough and I rode this critter solo through the hills and down busy roads and often swam him across the San Lorenzo River (again solo—I have no idea what my parents were thinking or if perhaps they secretly wished to be rid of me). Once when I was saddling Jackson by myself at the small shack of a barn behind our neighbor’s house where I kept him, he kicked me in the head and knocked me out. When I came to, I finished saddling him and went riding. I never told my parents.
Eventually I figured out that Jackson was not much of a deal and I sold him to the local riding school. I was all of nineteen and I had an even BETTER idea than buying another ill-broke backyard horse. I would buy an unbroken colt and train it myself(!)
Never mind that I had never actually trained a horse myself. I had ridden plenty of green horses and I had survived Jackson—what could go wrong?
So did I buy a gentle colt, carefully chosen for me by my experienced uncle? Well, no. I bought a completely untouched four-year-old mare with very hot bloodlines, and this choice was Ok’d by my experienced uncle. In retrospect I’m pretty sure he must have wanted to be rid of me, too.
Honey, the mare, was a handful. She was also a very “marish” mare. Pretty much put me off mares for life. And really, she would have been a difficult project for an experienced horseman. She barely knew how to lead when I got her and she was in the fall of her four-year-old year and as full of herself as a horse can get.
I got her broke. I didn’t die. But by the time she was five and was reasonably safe to ride, I had learned that she did not love me and I did not love her. So I sold her and bought a very cute 5 year old green broke gelding who was for sale cheap. I was in college by then and I took this horse, Hobby, off to school with me.
Hobby was cute, but stubborn. I found out very soon why I had been able to afford this horse. He bolted whenever he felt like it, and nothing, including pulling his nose around and dallying the rein to the saddle horn, would stop him. He just ran until he fell down.
A year of this and I had him cured of most of his bad habits, but once again, I was sick of him. I sold him to a woman who kept him the rest of his life and taught her kids to ride on him (and they won a bunch on him in the show ring), so I guess I did an OK job with his training. But I wanted a forever horse. One that I really liked. And then came Burt.

(to be continued)

PS—For those who may wonder what the heck horses might have to do with this blog, my mystery series has an equine vet for a protagonist and is very horse-themed. I like to let readers know that I come by my knowledge of horses quite honestly. No internet research involved here (!)

Deja Whew

I’ve avoided reading my old books. I prefer being delusional—not that I imagine them to be better than they were. No,  I love being sure that the last one I wrote was better than the others and proves I’ve grown as a writer.

And then there’s the smaller consideration: how many typos did I miss and how many clunky sentences did I fail to fix?

But now I’m trapped in my own past. My new ebook publisher—BooksBNimble—is doing the Jake Samson books as well as Blackjack and I’ve been proofing. This week I’m reading through Samson’s Deal, the first one in the series. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had a memory that it wasn’t very good. My first effort in the genre. Almost my first book. How embarrassed would I have to be if my students read it?

Cringing, which is very hard to do when you’re sitting at a keyboard, I peeked inside.

Would the characters be ridiculous? Would the plot be weak? My questions were beginning to sound like someone singing “My Funny Valentine.” When you open it to speak, are you smart?

Only one thing I found embarrassing. Over and over again I committed the crime I warn my students about. Word repetition. The old “I guess that’s your favorite word, huh?” problem. So if you read it, or reread it, forgive me for that.  

But still, I began to enjoy myself. Literally. The self of quite a few years ago. And Jake the alter ego. And Rosie. His cats Tigris and Euphrates and her standard poodle Alice B. Toklas. The house and cottage where they lived, my old house and cottage in Oakland. A time machine that took me back to there and then. And the book was pretty good, too, much to my relief. Not to toot my own horn. Isn’t that a wonderful expression? Must go back to medieval trumpeters.

I digress. The book doesn’t go back that far. Quite. But it was a world without cell phones, personal computers, supermarket chains selling organic food. A world where long-hairs and commie-baiters faced off and you had to stop at a pay phone to make a call and you couldn’t Google anything.

Maybe I should think of it as a historical mystery.

 

Gardening and Dreams

Lea Wait, here. When I think of my grandparents, especially my grandmother, I think of her gardens. In her home in

My Grandmother, when she was 22

Roslindale, Massachusetts, where I spent some of my earliest years, she had a wonderful large rectangular rose garden, with a circular brick path in the middle that I loved to run around. I also loved to fill jars with the Japanese beetles that ravaged those roses – and pull off their legs.

So — her garden wasn’t entirely a romantic experience. At least for the Japanese beetles. 

After my grandfather retired, my grandparents shared a home with my parents in New Jersey in the winter months, but, in the summer, they all shared the home in Maine where I live now. My grandparents would head for Edgecomb as soon as they deemed it warm enough — usually in early April — so they could start gardening. They installed a kidney-shaped iris garden near the porch, and a large garden near the barn which included raspberry bushes, vegetables, and flowers. The raspberries were especially important to them since during the hard days of the Depression when they’d lived in New York City they’d dreamed of being able to grow and eat raspberries.

My grandmother would get up early to “beat the birds to the berries,” and lay the damp, ripe red raspberries she’d picked on cookie sheets to dry on card tables at one end of our kitchen. Later in the day they’d be turned into raspberry pies or shortcakes — or, if not perfect, jams, jellies, or syrups for the winter months. Tomatoes were canned. Mint became mint jelly for winter lamb. And, of course, we had fresh flowers all summer, and fresh salads, and vegetables for the table. I helped to some extent by weeding and picking berries and vegetables and stirring sauces and straining jellies, but my mother and grandmother did most of the work. By the time I was old enough to make a major contribution I was assigned to lawn mowing, and by fourteen I had a summer job as well.  But the garden, and its products, were all part of our summers in Maine.

When I had my first home in New Jersey I, too, had a garden. I planted daffodil bulbs in the fall because I loved spring flowers, and I grew vegetables and a few annuals in the summer. I was a single parent, and the vegetables helped with my budget as well as being fun to grow.  The snow peas seldom made it to my stir fries: my daughters ate them off the vines.  I loved that.  Somehow, despite working full-time and studying for my doctoral comps, I remember canning tomatoes until the wee hours of the night (or morning,) and being proud of the line of canned tomatoes and tomato sauce on the shelves lining the steps to our basement.

One year a lot of tomatoes ripened just as we were to leave for our Maine vacation. Not wanting to lose that fruit, I packed two grocery bags full of ripe or near-ripe tomatoes, put them on the passenger seat next to me, the children in the back seat, and headed north. I figured I’d make tomato sauce in Maine. 

It was a hot July day. As we drove through New Jersey and New York traffic, the tomatoes kept ripening. And, as I took a sharp right exit  turn onto the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut … both bags of tomatoes fell.  Sideways.  Onto me. 

To shrieks of delight from my daughters, I found myself driving the remaining six hours to Maine covered with smashed, ripe tomatoes. In our family, that turn will forever be known as “the tomato turn.”

It turned out that was my last garden. I moved again, to a larger house, when my family grew, but although I started a garden there, nothing grew. We were on a hill, and there was little topsoil. 

Daffodils in Lea’s Yard Today

 The lawn was mostly moss, and even my daffodils didn’t grow, although every year I persistently planted more bulbs. 

So when I finally was able to move to Maine full-time, I knew one thing I wanted to do was bring back the gardens. They had long since disappeared; there’d been no one to take care of them since my grandparents died so, gradually, they’d been taken over by lawn. I hired someone with a tractor and started again. I planted vegetables, and flowers. That first year I was busy, writing, and taking care of my mother, and didn’t give the garden the care it needed. The flowers survived to some extent. The vegetables provided fodder for various types of insects and the local woodchuck. But I discovered, to my delight, that the violets and johnny jump-ups that my grandmother had loved appeared, as though by magic, in the places she had planted them, so many years before.  

And in the fall I planted daffodils.

And they bloomed in the spring.

Violets Along the Path

I soon realized my writing and my family were more important to me than my garden so it, too, is now gone; all that is left now is the slate path I laid that first year. The daffodils delight me every spring, and I add to them regularly. 

But every year, near that slate path in the grass, the violets come back, reminding me that my grandmother lived her dream here, in this house; in this yard. She wanted a garden, with raspberries. And she made that happen.

I, too, had a dream. I wanted to write. And I’m making that happen. Her violets are here as witnesses. I don’t think she’d be disappointed that I haven’t continued her garden. I think she’d like that this house is still a place where dreams come true.

Hungry Authors

Frank Bruni recently wrote a fascinating New York Times column about politicians desperate for attention. One of them was former Congressman Anthony Weiner, now famous for tweeting pictures of his privates to someone other than his wife, and then denying it.

Weiner explained his reckless behavior by saying he craved adulation, friends,  attention, and relentlessly sought them all via Facebook and Twitter. It was a sobering story and I think it has some lessons for us as authors.

When I published my first book, there was no Internet that we could search to see how our books were doing and where our careers might be headed.  There were reviews in print, and that was it.  By a certain point after a book was published, there wasn’t much to read anymore about yourself or your book, unless you were touring and there were interviews or features along the way.

Today, we’re drowning in information.  Maureen Dowd put it cleverly in the Times: “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”

And we authors now have endless opportunities to make ourselves miserable by insatiably reading every last Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads review; checking whether our Facebook author page is getting likes; worrying about whether our tweets will get re-tweeted; obsessing over comments on our blogs; setting up Google alerts for every mention of our names and books; worrying that our web sites aren’t getting enough traffic.  Some authors, begging for attention, even go overboard and live too much of their lives in social media, recording every twitch of consciousness as if the fate of publishing depended on it.  Their neediness–however disguised–is epic and sometimes pathetic.

What we do as authors is so very different from politicians, and we spend so much more time alone.  But that’s exactly what makes the Internet as seductive  for us as it is for them.  It’s a drug we should all worry about relying too heavily on, at the expense of our work.  Increasing how many followers we have on Twitter or friends on Facebook shouldn’t be more important than making ourselves better writers.

Where have all the letters gone? Or…why I love men who can write.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a real letter. I write novels so one would think that letter-writing would be embedded in my DNA.  I’m dating myself but I actually remember having a class called Penmanship. When I was in elementary school book reports and themes were written long-hand in cursive. Communication with family or friends who lived in a different city or state was done mostly by writing letters. Only occasionally, even when I was in college, did I make a long distance phone call. That was reserved for emergencies.

Like almost everyone in today’s busy world, however, I‘m part of the problem. I type my novels on a computer and I e-mail. I do write thank-you notes when appropriate, and I send cards for various occasions often including a sentence or two if the person is special to me and I haven’t found the right card. More often than not, I just sign my name. But I have saved letters or rather, my mother saved letters and cards and I inherited them.

Prior to my selling my New Jersey home several years ago, I had to go through the mountain of boxes and paraphernalia that had accumulated in our attic over the many years that we had lived there. In a little black suitcase that I’d taken from my mother’s apartment after her death, I discovered a treasure trove of letters, photographs, and cards for all occasions. Some were letters my siblings and I had written to her from wherever we found ourselves—camp, college, or in later years, Europe. A few were from my children. But the most poignant for me were the letters and cards that my father had sent or given my mother both before and after they were married. Theirs was a love story that ended far too soon.

My father died when I was fourteen so my memory of him has dimmed. I do recall that after his death, people referred to him not only as a gentleman, but as a gentle man. These letters have given me insight into the father that I, as an adult, never had the chance to know, but I now know where my love of writing came from. They say that one person in a relationship always loves a little more than the other which may or may not be true. But in the case of my parents I believe it was my father, or at least he had the greater ability to put his feelings into words. Every card to my mother had a loving note or poem appended and this was true until the day he died.

In one letter in their “courting” days he wrote of his attempt to give up smoking, an inconsequential example perhaps, but I’m sure he was doing it to please my mother because in those years the public had not been made aware of the dangers of smoking. (I know how she felt about the habit, though, because she brainwashed my sister and me into believing that women who smoked look like dragons!) Sadly, as disciplined as my dad was, he never succeeded in quitting. He smoked all of his life which undoubtedly contributed to his early death of a heart attack.

And I may be wrong about who loved who more. My mother was a beautiful woman but she never remarried. She wasn’t an easy person to please and that may have been a factor, but I believe the bar had been set too high. No man was ever going to fill my father’s shoes.

We are all individuals but there’s much, along with our physical appearance and talents that I believe we inherit from our parents. In the process of my cleaning out closets, I found a small box on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t looked on that shelf (or attempted to dust it) since we had bought the house when my children were small. To my surprise, it contained photos and letters from my high school days. In it were twenty very moving letters from a young man I’d met at a house party at Cornell where my sister went to college. We’d dated on and off for several months before I went off to college in Pittsburgh and he went into the military.

Life is funny. Was I destined to find those letters after so many years? What unseen hand had led me to that box? Why didn’t I just toss it? All I can tell you is that today I am living in California and I’m living with this man. I also plan to write letters again. Not often and not to just anyone but I’m sure I must have something memorable to say that’s worth my children getting teary over when I’m gone in the way far off distant future. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just write something wonderful on their birthday cards.

Creating Characters

I’m in the early stages of writing the next Jeri Howard book, titled Cold Trail.

The book will feature a number of characters that readers have seen in earlier books in the series, including members of Jeri’s extended family.

I am also in the process of creating some new characters to people my book. Two of those new characters are named Lance and Becca. I’m writing the scene where Jeri talks with Lance. Becca has not yet appeared, but she’s about to walk into the scene.

Lance and Becca. Who do you see when you read those two names?

The people you visualize may not be the people described to Jeri by another character. Or the people Jeri sees when she finally meets them.

It’s up to me, the writer, to add the details. Hair color and style, clothing and shoes, facial features, physical movements, psychological quirks, and backstories. It’s not just a matter of what they look like or the spaces they inhabit. How do they relate to the other characters in the book? What role do they play in the plot?

When I create characters out of those two names, I want the reader to see the people that Jeri sees, people who may well be concealing something of themselves from Jeri.

Bringing Lance and Becca to life got me thinking about how I create characters.

When I first began writing about my protagonist, Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard, I kept detailed notes on how she looks and the clothes and shoes she prefers to wear. I even visualized the apartment where she lived when I began the series, using the floor plan of an apartment I’d once looked at in the Adams Point section of Oakland, near Lake Merritt. Later in the series, when Jeri buys a small house in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, I used another real floor plan, that of the house bought by an acquaintance. I know how Jeri furnishes these places and of course I know all about her cats.

Writing about an environment I can see helps me create characters. I do a lot of location research, all the better to see my characters in the world I create for them. It could be as simple as a drive through Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, looking for a likely home for an ex-con mechanic named Acey Collins, in Take A Number. Or visiting a house in Mendocino, on California’s north coast, inhabited by a character in A Credible Threat.

Or riding trains for Death Rides the Zephyr.

Much of the action I’m writing now takes place in Petaluma, in Sonoma County, an hour or so north of San Francisco. It’s familiar territory. I have friends who live there. In fact, every few months a group of fellow writers and I meet in Petaluma for lunch.

Small wonder that the scene I’m writing now, with Lance and the soon-to-show-up Becca, takes place just down the block from the restaurant where we meet for our writerly lunches.

You see, the surroundings say something about the characters I’m crafting.

And so do names.

How would you see Lance and Becca if I told you I’ve changed their names to George and Carrie?

FATE IS A FACT OF FICTION

“Fate” is a one-word tautology. Doris Day, that smooth-talker, told us all about it: “Whatever will be, will be.” Fate is the inescapable future, depending on the undeniable present, which is built of the unchangeable past. We can’t change our fate; we can only discover it. We may affect our future, perhaps, by quitting smoking or by driving drunk, by studying hard for the LSAT or by quitting IBM in a huff, but when we do that we’re only acting as an agent for fate.

Whether we bring about our fate by exercising free will, or whether it’s all written in stone, or on the wind, doesn’t really matter. It’s gonna happen. I don’t know if the stars and planets have anything to do with fate, but I’m guessing probably not. Is fate just a sequence of silly accidents that pop and fizzle throughout time and space? I don’t think so. I also don’t believe there’s a Big Dude in the sky charting it all out with a quill pen and papyrus, or may stone tablets, or maybe a golden abacus with pearl buttons, or maybe a giant Excel spreadsheet, spread out all over the firmament. Is fate merely the inevitable result of how a bunch of vulnerable dominos were set up sometime during the Big Bang, so that how we fare and how we die are just the consequences of the laws of chemistry and physics, constant and fair throughout the universe? Who knows? Who, for that matter, has time to care?

Fate is a fact of life, the way of the world, and the human condition. But these definitions are too limiting, because the inevitable and interconnected march we’re all on, plodding or racing into the future, also affects other living beings; other gasses, liquids, and solids that may not contain what we self-importantly call life; and other places in the vast universe, hot spots and cold spots where change may be wildly different phenomena. Fate happens out there, too.

Was fate established by an intelligent designer? Nope. Fate just is, always was, and, chances are, always will be. Whether or not it is propelled by intelligent design is a giant can of wriggling worms that I don’t care to open.

Fate is a matter of fact.

Moving on, fate is also an essential ingredient of the man-made microcosm of existence that we call fiction. We writers have every right to call ourselves the creators of our model-size universes. And we plot our stories using intelligent design. Or if we’re not plotters, we at least hold the reins intelligently. And we get to rewrite and revise, which is something even the mythical Big Dude can’t do.

However we think of fate when we talk about the real world, we can get better handle on it when we make up our stories, based on how we understand the laws of fairness and irony that define the stories in human culture.

The concept of fate is essential to storytelling and fiction writing. And one thing to know, one rule to follow or disobey at your own peril is: Dire predictions come true.

This is true in drama: Chekhov told us that when a rifle is hanging over the fireplace in Act One, that rifle must go off before the final curtain comes down. And when rifles are discharged on stage, someone’s going to get hurt.

The rule works in movies, too. If a character you love starts to cough from some illness, you’d better get out the Kleenex, because chances are that character won’t live long enough to read the credits.

Fate was essential to Greek tragedy. When an oracle tells King Laius that his infant son will one day kill him, he and his wife cripple the child and leave him to die on a mountaintop. Does the infanticide work? No way. The kid grows up, comes back to town, unwittingly kills his dad, and I won’t say what he does to his mom.

In the fairy tale, when the spiteful fairy godmother predicts that the infant princess Briar Rose will, on her sixteenth birthday, prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep for a hundred years, there’s no point in the King’s ordering that all the spinning wheels in town be burned. He’s be better off shopping for a good mattress.

And when the soothsayer advises Julius Caesar to beware the ides of March, he’s not really telling Caesar to call in sick on the fifteenth. What he’s saying is, “Dude. Better get your affairs in order, because come the sixteenth, you’ll no longer be wearing sandals.”

So, in fiction as in fact, it’s pointless to try to outsmart fate. The house always wins. To buck fate is to engage in hubris, and the penalty for hubris is always a most unwelcome irony. The so-called Higher Power named Fate shrugs and thunders, “Told ya so.” Of course in real life we can’t help fighting to survive (as we usually should); and because our fiction is about the human condition, our characters are likely to try to beat the odds, even if all they can hope for is a temporary respite.

There is a big difference, however, between human fate in fiction and human fate in fact. The fate of a character in a story ends with the words “The End.” An extension is allowed in the event of a sequel, and of course as long as the story remains in print or remains on shelves or on the Internet, the character’s fate is still accessible and knowable, but that fate is a done deal. The character may rest in peace.

In what we like to call “real life,” a person’s fate does not end with the words “rest in peace.” Death is part of the fate of each of us, but it rarely means the story is over. Because most of us, for better or for worse, are entitled to, or saddled with, an afterlife. No, the afterlife of which I speak has nothing to do with pearly gates and golden slippers, or with brimstone and pitchforks. The afterlife that is part of our lingering fate is made up largely of memories stored by friends and family; of tales told about us if we’re in any sense famous; and of DNA passed along for generations to come, for as long as human beings populate the planet, which may sound like quite a spell but is only a blip in the time span that is eternity. The point is: our lives may end but our presence remains and dwindles for a long time before it fizzles and whimpers into oblivion.

I think what makes us writers write and wish to be read is to keep our fates in progress for a while after we die. And why do we write as beautifully as we can while we are still in partnership with our fates? That’s probably the moral to this discussion: we all, willy-nilly, leave tracks in the sand. We don’t want to be remembered for ugly, obnoxious, lazy, antisocial tracks that stink of plastic litter, broken glass, and shit. No. Let us be remembered for having given the world something of value. If we have any influence over our fate, let it be this.

 

 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

A big topic of conversation lately has been the use of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, or rather the effective use of social media, to promote a product or an event or, in my case, a book.  I confess that I have been resistant to engage, finding all that stuff to be both time consuming and, frankly, time wasting.  But, as things are now in the publishing world, I understand that I must.

Like Rip van Winkle, I had a long nap in my publishing career.  Not as long a nap as old Rip’s—he slept through the American Revolution, remember?—but during the decade that I published only short stories and no books, the world of publishing and book selling had a revolution of its own. When I re-emerged in 2009 with “In the Guise of Mercy,” it was suggested in the nicest yet strongest way that I should get a web page and a Facebook account, participate regularly on author blogs, and post on various fan-based Listserv groups.  I did, I do, what I can with available time, my most precious and most scarce resource.  But it seems that every week there is something new out there, and each new medium requires more time and more tending.  So, the big question is, are the social media productive as promotional tools?

 After the success of Shaken, an anthology of donated short stories to raise money for Japanese relief after the great tsunami, my friend Tim Hallinan, who edited the stories, asked the contributors if we wanted to participate in yet another group project, this time a discussion about how we each develop our stories.  Do we plot meticulously, or do we fly by the seat of our pants?

Twenty-one of us, an international group of well-published, award-winning authors, signed on and “Making Story: Twenty-One Writers on How They Plot (The Twenty-one Writers Project)” became a reality as an E-book, though there is now also a paperback version,.  In September, when the book was released, all twenty-one authors promoted the book using whatever social media we had at hand. That’s when I learned what a hashtag is; yes, I feel like a dinosaur sometimes.  Sales were brisk during the initial weeks.  And then, as happens, after a while we all went off and focused on other projects.  Between the September and April, the book’s sales dropped off. 

Tim, whose background is in marketing, suggested that, in honor of Tax Day, April 15—also Titanic Day, ironically—we offer the book for free on Kindle.  For five days, in shifts, all twenty-one of us Tweeted, posted, blogged, and flogged.  Lo’ and behold, the book zoomed to the top tiers of Amazon sales, if you can call a giveaway a sale.   We were number one among books about writing.

During the week since that offering, sales at the regular $3.99 bargain bite have been respectable.  It will be interesting to see how long the afterglow of the big push lasts, and what collateral effects it might have on increasing books sales of the contributors and the follow-up volume next summer about developing story characters.  

Can the social media be used effectively for promotions?  Sure, given enough time, effort, and variety of media involved.  Would I alone be able to create such a move in the rankings as twenty-one of us working together affected?  Nope.  I know that there are bloggers, tweeters, reviewers and Likers (is that a new noun?) for hire at the rate of about five bucks per post.  But I’m a school teacher edging toward retirement, so I doubt I’ll ever go that route.  Oh, and if you Tweet me, don’t be in a hurry for answer.

Writing the Regional Novel. (Is regional a degrading word?)

by Nancy Means Wright

     When my first mystery came out in 1996, Kirkus Reviews wrote: “Regional fans should keep an eye out for this one.” Although it was a complimentary remark, I worried about the slightly derogatory word: “regional.” How far, I wondered, does the “region” extend for my particular setting? Is it all of New England, or just Vermont? Is it limited to Addison County in which I’ve situated my fictional Branbury–a place used in fourteen books to date? 

     I’m wholly at home in this Vermont town composed largely of dairy farms and apple orchards. In the mid-19th-century Victor Wright made a comfortable living with his merino sheep; he helped the nascent Middlebury College grow through gifts of steaming manure–a fact exploited by my offspring in their college application essays. A neighbor’s  herd of Holstein cows grazed in the pasture behind my former house. An apple orchard, ripe with Jamaican pickers like dark birds in the trees each fall lay next door to our fifteen-acre tree farm. I helped write a town history, which included the tale of Victor’s horses running away with his gig on an icy hill, and hurling Vic off to a frosty death.  

     As I considered a setting for my first mystery, I thought of William Faulkner in Virginia, who drew on the local geography and family history (notably his great-granddad’s Civil War adventures) to create his now famous Yoknapatawpha County. He found it liberating to use his own “little postage stamp of native soil worth writing about.”  His publisher didn’t think so, but we all know that Faulkner proved the fellow wrong.

     I had already set a YA novel and a family memoir in “Branbury.” And recently I exploited my husband’s ancestors, who in 1767 walked up into Ethan Allen’s Republic of Vermont to make their pitch. A regional novel for tweens, Walking into the Wild is the story of three young  siblings braving an unsettled wilderness filled with wolves, catamounts, Tories and Indians. I think of them when I travel Route 7, once the rooty “cow path” they walked.

     To me Vermont had always seemed a contemporary Eden, a land of milk, honey and mountains, a garden for healing and meditation. But as I began to research, I discovered the snake in the garden. Small farmers were being forced to sell; a high school girl’s letter to the editor complained that her kid brother was being bullied in school because his boots smelled of manure when he got to class.” I put that boy in my novel and named him Vic (for victim).

     In my series, Vic complains of farm chores, but grows, like his farmer mother, to love the land itself.  A Boston Globe editor who reviewed my novel, said that locale should be “a reason, not merely a setting for plot,” and I agreed. Vermont is a land of extremes: ice, snow, heat, mud. Winters we huddle beside our woodstoves; when claustrophobia sets in, tempers tend to explode. The perfect setting for crimes of passion? Setting becomes character as weather, seasons, local history and landscape influence one’s actions–and not always for good. Only months ago a Vermont couple who had mowed grass for a young schoolteacher and her toddler lured them to an isolated spot, crying help. And then raped and strangled her in front of the helpless child.

     My single mother dairy farmer embodies all the old New England tenets of self reliance and faith in an ideal justice. She sees her state as a kind of liberal Utopia where legislators have voted equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race or gender. She tends thirty cows, broken fences, and veggie garden, hoping for a just world. But she watches Branbury farms die off, and her town sprouting fancy restaurants and boutiques. Flatlanders build monster homes and send her own taxes to the moon.

     Yet in my first mystery, Mad Season, her son Vic is kidnapped by a “local.” Hometown Vermonters differ little from out-of-staters. While researching Stolen Honey,  I discovered the 1930s eugenic project, whereby poor French Canadians, Abenaki Indians, and so-called “degenerates” were sterilized in order to “breed better Vermonters.” So no, Branbury is not the mythic land of milk and honey. The archetypal apples in my favorite orchard are also prey to maggots and bagworms. Regional writers don’t need the international suspense novel to show greed, jealousy, hate, violence in the world. It’s all embodied here in our small “postage stamp.” We regionalists can address social and political contexts just as broad as any novel set in the great cities of the world.

     But  we can’t transplant our stories to the cities without losing the local color that makes them unique: The hills and lakes where 18th-century Green Mountain Boys once ambushed the Redcoats; the vibrant reds of autumn and the maple sap dripping each spring into the wooden buckets. Global warming may eventually kill them off, but while they last, the regional novel can dig deep into their roots.