Round Robin: Truth and Fiction

Turdus Migratorius, aka The Round Robin!

Fellow PP bloggers, what real-life case of murder, mayhem or crime has fascinated you to the point where you have used it as inspiration for fiction? Doesn’t have to be the whole case, could just be elements of it, say a true crime that you’ve used as the springboard to your fictional crime? Or taking it further, is there a real-life case that you’d like to write about one of these days, something that has intrigued you to ask, what if . . .? and think about answering that question with your own version.

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Sheila Simonson: Like most people, my experience with crime has been slight but shocking. I’m not awfully interested in the psychology of murderers. They strike me as either self-absorbed or stupid, with serial killers even less interesting because they’re obsessive. However, I’ve always been interested in the impact of a killing on family, friends, and innocent bystanders, and on the blow to the social contract that allows us to trust each other. The real crime that hit me hardest happened about ten years ago.

We live two blocks from Main Street, Vancouver, the heart of the old town, and there’s a good Chinese restaurant within walking distance. We go there often. My fiftieth birthday party was even held there around a big circular banquet table. Apart from the good food, what we liked best about the Peking Gardens was the hostess, Joy. Her husband was the chef, but Joy made the place jump. She had a wonderful sense of humor and a prodigious memory. One of her friends, another Chinese woman, was a waitress we saw occasionally. That woman was married to an American, and we gathered that it wasn’t a match made in Heaven. One day the friend asked Joy to come home with her after work because the husband was threatening her. To make a long story short, he shot his wife and Joy, killing both of them, and then made everything hunky-dory by shooting himself, a very American, very male pattern of behavior. The family was devastated, of course – the husband, a charming daughter, and a little boy who was born in this country. So were the restaurant’s patrons, and there were all the messages of sympathy and tributes to Joy’s personality you could wish for, but I think the clientele are still in mourning for a lovely woman who was only trying to help a friend.

Denise Osborne: After a book signing in Omaha, NE, one of the book store clerks, Diana, took me to a house where a woman had been murdered, the crime never solved. Two other book store clerks had recently moved in to the place and had been talking up a fancy dress party where guests were to come as murder victims. Well, Diana was distressed by this plan and wanted me to Feng Shui the house. First off, we got lost TWICE before we arrived even though Diana had been there on several occasions. Located in a cul-de-sac, we encountered another car driving around, and they were lost.

Diana didn’t want my husband, Chris, to come in the house, so he stayed outside talking to the people who were lost. The entry was one of the worst you can have (according to Feng Shui):  stairs leading up to the first floor and stairs leading down to the basement. It’s a configuration popular in this part of the country.

We first went to the basement to the spot where the body had been found. It was a small utility room off a family area.  Yes, it felt spooky but even spookier was a large wall in the family area that the book store clerks had painted blood red.

Upstairs was another disturbing feature:  a laundry room with wallpaper that repeated over and over and over “I HATE laundry.”  The word “hate” was three times as large as the other two words and blood red. You walk in and see the word “hate” jumping out at you in all directions.

Finally, the two clerks had a dog that would not go into the basement and rarely even left her kennel. I asked them to let the dog out so I could meet it. It stuck to me like a barnacle, walked me out to the car, and tried to get in the car.

All these elements I’m using in the next Feng Shui mystery, which I’ve titled House of Lost Souls.

Laura Crum: Actually, most of my mysteries are based on something that happened in real life – whether something that was told to me or something I knew about first hand. The barn fires in Hayburner, the gutshot man who insisted the gun went off while he was cleaning it in Forged, the “rapist” in Breakaway–these were all based on actual events I came in contact with. The attempted suicide at the beginning of Slickrock – and his airlift out by helicopter – was a scene I actually stumbled upon and then assisted in the rescue. The horse who breaks a leg at the beginning of Roped was something I witnessed. Every single horseback chase scene I ever wrote was founded on places I’d actually ridden through on my own horse – maybe not at top speed and with a villain chasing me, however. And the central crime in ALL my stories is, indeed, based on a real crime I’d heard about and that intrigued me. I try to keep my books as close to what might actually happen in real life as is possible – given the improbable premise of a veterinarian who is an amateur sleuth. But then, all amateur sleuths are a bit improbable – particularly those with a dozen murder investigations to their credit (!)

Camille Minichino: Of the many hundreds of scenes I’ve written to date, in 20 books, there’s only one that I still get comments on. It’s a scene in The Beryllium Murder, about the true crime of flashing! It takes place in Walnut Square, Berkeley, in a restroom. The set of men’s and women’s stalls is located up an outdoor flight stairs, off the street in front of a collection of shops. My character settles in a stall, hears someone walk in, then sees a pair of feet in front of her, on the other side of the stall door. People, especially women, tell me how scary the scene is, how strikingly written, how they think of it whenever they’re in an isolated stall, and how they will never use that particular facility again. Maybe because I wrote the scene exactly how it happened to me.

Kathy Lynn Emerson:  You asked about cases of murder, mayhem or crime that inspired us. It’s mayhem that makes an impression on me, especially cases involving excessively stupid criminal behavior. The problem, of course, is that even though such incidents happen all the time in real life, in both the distant past and the present, they have an unfortunate tendency to seem unbelievable in a novel. In one of my Lady Appleton novels, Face Down Before Rebel Hooves, the plot centers around the Northern Rebellion of 1569, when the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland took up arms against Elizabeth I of England. What fascinated me was the role the two countesses played. They were both far more combative than their husbands. Making them into characters readers could believe in was a real challenge. An even more hair-brained treason plot was concocted in 1540 by a group of men who wanted to capture Calais, which then belonged to England. They planned an invasion for “herring time” but were so disorganized and had such a total inability to keep secrets that the entire scheme fell apart. The mayhem this created, especially for innocent bystanders who were accused of knowing what was being plotted, played a major role in one of the non-mystery historicals I write as Kate Emerson (Between Two Queens). As Kaitlyn Dunnett, I write a contemporary humorous cozy series set in Moosetookalook, Maine. The story in A Wee Christmas Homicide revolves around smuggling toys into the United States from Canada. True story . . . from a clipping I saved way back in 1998 about trunkloads of Beanie Babies being confiscated at the Maine border. In my version, they are Tiny Teddies, the gift every kid just has to have for Christmas. But here’s a real example of mayhem that will probably never make it into one of my novels. Who’d believe it? At one of our local branch banks, a would-be thief stopped at the drive-up window. He pointed a gun at the teller and demanded money. The reply, even as the teller pressed the silent alarm, completely ruined the poor crook’s day. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. “This is bulletproof glass.”

Nancy Means Wright: In 1994, my whole entry into the mystery world began with a local Vermont crime. I read an article in the Burlington Free Press about two elderly, altruistic Vermont farmers who distrusted banks and kept their cash in barn coats, rafters, or under a mattress. Word got around, and one night two hooded guys banged on the farmhouse door, yelling for help. Once in the house they assaulted the pair and left them for dead. Luckily the brothers survived, but the perps were caught when they flung the cash about in bars and restaurants and one proprietor noticed that it reeked of barn and called the cops. I loved the idea of manure solving a crime.

To this point I’d been trying to write the great American novel. I abandoned the idea and wrote my first mystery, opening with the crime itself and the purloined barn cash. Ruth Cavin at St Martin’s accepted it and I never went back to the great American novel. (Which wasn’t so great, anyway.)

Janet Dawson: Many of my plots come to me from real life. Of course, real life is messy. In fiction I can wrap it up the way I want to.

A murder involving people from my Colorado hometown led to Kindred Crimes, in a writer’s fictional explanation of a seemingly inexplicable double homicide. Several years ago I clipped a short article out of the San Francisco Chronicle, about a stash of wallets, some dating back to World War II, found in the ceiling ducts of an old barracks at Camp Roberts in Central California. I kept that clipping for a long time, knowing that it would find its way into a plot. It did. I used it in Bit Player.

A case in the Bay Area has fascinated me for years. A woman’s body was found in a shallow grave in Humboldt County. A little girl’s body was found in the bay near Sausalito, buried as a Jane Doe by the town’s citizens. There had been a report of a woman and child missing, but there was a time lag of a year or more between the discovery of these two bodies. And the state of decay seemed to indicate that the child died much later than the mother. How could they be related? But they were. From what I’ve read about the case, the woman’s partner, the father of the child, killed both – but he kept the child’s body in a freezer for a time before disposing of it. The man committed suicide before he could be brought in for questioning.

And I would really like to know what happened to Thomas Riha. The professor was from Czechoslovakia. He taught Russian history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, my undergrad alma mater. In March 1969, he vanished. To this day, no one knows what happened to him. Or if they do, they’re not saying. Enter one Galya Tannebaum, a woman with a shady past and a penchant for spinning big yarns about Cold War intrigue. She played cat and mouse with the press and the authorities, claiming to know what happened to the professor. Eventually Tannebaum was committed to the state mental hospital in Pueblo, Colorado, where she killed herself in the early 1970s.

Intrigued? So was I. Years later, I wrote Till The Old Men Die. The plot involves a professor who was murdered, and a mystery woman with a shady past and a penchant for lies.

99 WORDS—THAT’S ALL SHE WROTE

During the past week I learned that I won’t be teaching my class, “The Joy of Story,” this summer. I was sorry to learn this, because I enjoy the classroom, and have enjoyed for the past twenty years being a part-time teacher of creative writing here in Humboldt County, and before that in Santa Barbara.

 

 

As I got used to the notion of not teaching, though, I realized I was also relieved. Having taught writing courses throughout my fifties and sixties, I now feel as if I’ve said all I have to say, and now that I’ve entered my seventies, my voice isn’t as strong as it once was, either literally or metaphorically.

 

Also during the past week I learned that our local free weekly newspaper, the North Coast Journal, printed three of my 99-word short stories in their Flash Fiction Issue. This was a boost to my ego, for though I don’t enter contests as such (I don’t believe writing is a competitive sport), I submit my work here and there from time to time, and it’s always a pleasure to see my words in print. We write to be read, after all.

 

It’s more than, or less than, a coincidence that I got news of my teaching career and my 99-word stories in the same week. I’ve been writing 99-word stories exactly as long as I’ve been teaching writing. I have used this art form as a challenge and a teaching device in nearly all the classes I’ve taught and workshops I’ve led.

 

As a reward to my students, for most of the years I taught, I published an annual anthology of student work. I invited my students to send to me their 99-word stories based on a yearly theme. Over the years I published little volumes of stories inspired by Snow White, The Trojan War and the Travels of Odysseus, Little Red Riding Hood, Pygmalion, Cain and Abel, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Pandora, Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling, Alice in Wonderland, and Sherlock Holmes. (I think there were others too, but these are the ones on my office bookshelf.)

 

Spreading the art form of 99-word stories may have been my most significant contribution as a teacher. I gave writers a chance to see their words in print, and I let them learn the joy and power of economical writing. I also showed them how much our writing is inspired by literary archetypes.

 

So I have decided to devote one post per month on my blog, “The Joy of Story,” to 99-word stories sent to me by my readers. This will begin in June, and the first deadline will be the first of June. The theme of the June 99-word story issue will be “June Is Busting Out All Over.” Write a story about whatever that means to you: getting out of school, a wedding, graduating, being a father, hoisting a flag, or whatever else June means to you.

 

A few rules:

• One story per writer per month.

• It has to be a story. (Something happens to somebody.)

• The story must have exactly 99 words.

• All rights to the work remain the property of the writers, although I have no way of policing or enforcing that.

• Send story by email to: jmd@danielpublishing.com

 

This is not a contest. I will include in my post all stories sent to me, unless I find them offensive (but I’m broadminded). I may do a bit of editing if I think it will help the story, and you’ll just have to trust me on that.

 

Spread the word. The more writers, the more stories, and the more stories, the better!

 

I will now close by showing off the three stories of mine that were printed in this week’s Flash Fiction Issue of the North Coast Journal. One is inspired by Hamlet, one by the parable of the Prodigal Son (or the life of Wyatt Earp), and one by a lesson I learned about love from my newborn son.

 

 

Gertrude’s Soliloquy

 

My son and Claudius have never gotten along. I think the boy somehow blames Claudius for his father’s death. Crazy, but you know how kids are.

Claudius suggested boarding school, and I went along with it. We were newlyweds, and a kid moping around the house is no aphrodisiac.

But now my son’s graduated. He’s back, and he’s worse. And Claudius isn’t much better. He can be a real shit sometimes.

“They teach you philosophy, boy? Zen? Existentialism? Nihilism? Ever think about nonexistence? Something you might consider.”

Honestly, those two. They’re going to be the death of us all.

 

 

Letting Go

 

Wyatt returned to the ranch yesterday, beat up, broke, smelling like a polecat. I told Morgan to quit early and fire up the cookstove.

After supper, Wyatt told stories about rodeos, grizzlies, goldmines, and whorehouses. Morgan just sat there.

This morning Wyatt rode off grinning, fifty bucks in his new shirt pocket.

“How long you reckon he’s gone for this time, Pa?” Morgan said. “I wisht he’d stay away. You never quit work early on my account.”

I saw I’d lost another son. I pulled out another fifty and said, “Better saddle up quick. Maybe you can catch him.”

 

 

The Catcher in the Night

 

He cried again. My wife groaned, “My turn.”

“I’ll go. I’ve been awake since last time.”

I grumped to the night-lighted nursery and leaned over the crib to change the amonia-perfumed diaper, then held his sobbing body to my chest, resting in a rocker. I promised to protect him from the cold attacking his body, and from all life’s slings and arrows, if only he’d let me sleep.

Deal.

Peace filled the room, the strongest feeling I’d ever known.

We both slept in the rocker that night. Next morning, I was the one with the cold, and no regrets.

 

 

 

World’s Biggest Typo

I’m giving in to jet lag from a great trip to the Edgars and Malice Domestic and re-purposing a blog from my recent tour. In fact, I’m hoping that the great publisher combo of Susan and John can explain how the switch could have come about.

The World’s Biggest Typo

 Twice a year, members of Sisters in Crime of Northern California host a “showcase” where we’re invited to read from our newly published work. One after the other, usually about 8 or 9 of us at any given event, stand behind the podium and read a selected passage. Maybe the first chapter, maybe a particularly funny or gripping section from the middle. We have 5 minutes.

Question: How many typos can you expect to find in an already printed book in 5 minutes?

Answer: I don’t know, and I certainly don’t want to find out.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, I never read from my latest release, or any book of mine that’s been published. I know I couldn’t stand it if I came across a typo and could do nothing about it. In fact, I never even open my books once they’re published. Call it Typophobia.

At the showcases, I read from a Work in Progress – that way if there’s a typo or an awkward phrase, I can fix it on the next draft.

So, it serves me right that one day at a signing, I came across the WBT—the World’s Biggest Typo in one of my books.

A woman bought “The Hydrogen Murder,” in hardback, from the bookseller and brought it to the table for me to sign. At least, on the outside, it looked like “The Hydrogen Murder.” The cover was right, the flap copy and photo were correct.

I opened the book, ready to pen my name. But something was off. What was Simon & Schuster’s logo doing on the first page? Avalon was my publisher.

I kept going, flipping pages, gasping as I went. The printer (or someone!) had put Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ between the covers of my book. I removed the paper cover and saw that even the printing on the spine was correct for “The Hydrogen Murder.” In the photo, you might be able to make out the flap copy (mine) on one side, and the title page (Bradbury’s) on the other.

I’m sorry to tell you that there is no resolution here—the bookseller had no idea where she’d gotten the book; no other book in her stock of Hydrogen Murders was like this one.

I’ve often wondered if the great Ray Bradbury ever opened one of his copies of “Fahrenheit 451″ and found “The Hydrogen Murder,” by Camille Minichino.

If so, it might not have fazed him—after all, he writes sci fi.

Can you top that for a typo? I’m willing to relinquish my title to the WBT for a good story.

Thinking about Travel

I like to travel, though it’s increasingly expensive–and exasperating, especially at airports.  My husband and I recently flew from Portland to Austin via Denver on Frontier Airlines, the planes with cute wild animals on the tails.  I don’t know what the animals symbolize, but each plane displays a different one.  We flew a polar bear.

Apart from the Rockies–always spectacular–and the odd architecture of Denver airport, my slantwise view of Colorado caught the very straight roads and very square fields, which led me to historical musing, easy to do from the middle seat.  What would this nation look like if nineteenth century surveyors hadn’t cut the whole country into a vast grid?  The mountains would be the same, but not the land around them.  Even the lakes and rivers have been altered by human intervention, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes subtly.  All I know is that in Denver the grass at the airport was already tan, whereas Portland is still green.

My friend Sarah met us at Austin airport, and we hugged and laughed and chatted for awhile, but I was still in historical mode.  How wonderful it is that close friendships can continue even when friends move away.  Until WWII, Irish families used to hold an “American wake” when family members immigrated, because they’d never see each other again.  My brothers are now scattered from Mexico to Florida to Washington, my sister lives in Colorado, my nephew Todd lives in Norway, and my nephew Charlie is in Afghanistan, bless his heart.  We can still talk, and so far we can still visit some of them, but how long will that amazing freedom last?  My husband’s nieces post daily photos and comments on Facebook, and so does my son, but virtual visits lack the splendid detail of a real face-to-face.

So what did I notice in Texas?  How pretty it is in the hill country, now the drought is easing.  April is wildflower time–not just bluebonnets, but Indian blankets, sneeze weed (fine yellow flowers despite the name), prickly poppies (tall stalks with delicate white blossoms), wine cups, mustard, Indian paint brush, Missouri primroses, and some early prickly pear blooms.  Lady Bird Johnson did a lot to ensure the survival of that splendid array of spring flowers, and the hill country is Johnson territory.

Sarah’s house is near Burnet on Lake Buchanan, which went down considerably because of the drought.  Elaborate boat ramps stick out over fields of flowers instead of over water.  There are frustrated fishermen.  Indian sites which had been inundated were exposed along the banks of the river that was dammed to form the lake, and it’s fairly easy to find chipped flints and even hand tools lying there quietly where they fell.  The lake is on the immigration route for birds and butterflies.  We got to admire both the permanent residents and some of the visitors.  The buzzards, strangely enough, were particularly graceful, and it was lovely to wake up to bird call every morning (though not to buzzard call).  Sarah has a resident blue heron.

Where Sarah lives the dirt is reddish.  Elsewhere, near Marble Falls, it fades to the gray of granite, and huge batholiths, exposed caps of granite, dot the landscape.  When I was writing my first novel, I could not get it going until I knew the color of the dirt in my chosen setting.  That involved a trip to Hampshire and Devon.  (Gray and chalky in places, in the first instance, and red along the coast of Devon with exposed fossils and seams of blue clay.)  I got three novels from all that dirt, though I “had to” take another trip for the last of the regencies.  Of course, I saw other things too.  Like people.

This Texas trip brought me in contact with a lively audience of about forty at the Burnet County Public Library, where I did a talk on “Latouche County,” a.k.a. the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge.  They were very kind and cordial, and their questions showed they were sharper than tacks.  They even bought books.  I also met with Sarah’s book club–terrific women, and the meeting was held at a farm with a handsome herd of goats.  A couple of days later we visited Fredericksburg, once a colony of German settlers.  It was also the birthplace of Admiral Nimitz, among the few people who could control Douglas MacArthur.  My father served under Nimitz, so I bought my brother Al the most recent biography.  (Al was a Navy captain and is a history buff.)  Then we hopped in the van and got lost looking for Luckenbach.  No highway signs, probably because there was no highway.  However, we finally found the place and caught the tag-end of a boozy outdoor country-music concert.  For some reason, they were also playing chicken s–t bingo.  The winner was whoever had the number a chicken pooped on.  It was funny at the time.  At Austin airport there were T-shirts inscribed Keep Austin Weird.  No problem doing that with Luckenbach.

One thing traveling always does for me as a writer is to invigorate language.  That’s partly a matter of listening to local speech.  You sit down in the evening to eat supper in Texas.  And somebody called someone on a sale.  That turned out to be a cell phone.  Traveling has a more fundamental effect on language than pronunciation and vocabulary differences.  It stretches the meaning of words.  River, for instance, and tree.  When I hear river I think of the Columbia because I see it every day, and I was terribly disappointed the first time I saw the Seine.  On this trip, I had to stretch the definition of river to include the Pedernales, although it’s a pretty stream or crick (my pronunciation) or rivulet.

The trees (juniper and live oak mainly) are thick on the ground in the hill country of Texas, but the oaks are dying off.  Around here, of course, we have what I was surprised to know is a rainforest, though obviously not tropical–all the conifers you can name with just enough native deciduous trees to make autumn interesting.  And two major national forests.  I don’t think I could live very long where there are no trees.  For me, though, the biggest stretch on this word trip was hill.  It’s called the hill country.  So where are they?  I saw some bumps in the flatness.

My husband’s grandmother, who was raised in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, felt cramped and oppressed by our mountains when she moved west as a young woman (part of the way by covered wagon).  I once trailed a bunch of students from the Pacific Northwest through England with a tour guide who took us to the Cotswolds, leapt from the coach, gathered the students around her, and announced that when she was there she felt as if she were on top of the world.  They laughed.  She was offended, but they didn’t mean the Cotswolds weren’t pretty.  They are, not to mention historical and picturesque.  But they aren’t mountains to someone who wakes up to Mount Hood or Mount Saint Helens, and they’re surely not the top of anything.  Snowden, I grudgingly admit, is a mountain.  It’s said that the Inuit have forty words for snow.  Maybe English needs forty words for mountain.

Travel is good for writers for a lot of reasons, but shaking up the language may be the most important benefit, and when you come home you notice where you are.  I think I see a river.

The Grand Adios. Or is it holá?

Wendy Hornsby

The big topic of conversation at our house of late is retirement.  Though Paul is already a pensioner, I am still a couple of years away from finishing at the college and crossing that threshold.  Before I pass over, there are many decisions that need to be made about how, when, where we retire.

The why of it is easy:  I’m not getting any younger and I want more time to write while I still have a few brain cells and we want to travel while we still have good knees.  The folks at the State Teachers Retirement System have answered the how question; let me assure you that “rich teacher pension” is an oxymoron, and if anyone tries to persuade you other wise, send them to me.  Every Monday morning I grow more certain about the when part.  The next question, then, is where?  Do we stay put, or do we move elsewhere?

Recently, Paul and I got together for dinner with three of my former UCLA housemates and their spouses.  We have remained friends through college, boyfriends, marriage, babies, launching careers and now, ending those careers and scattering out of the Elay area.  Among the eight people at the dinner table, five had already retired and the rest of us would soon.  The question of where to retire dominated the conversation.  All of the others had, or were in the process of, selling the homes where they raised their children and were planning to move to less expensive areas.

Our hosts had recently purchased a brand new home on a fairway in a brand new over-fifty-five development out on the far edge of civilization, i.e. the desert.  All over the Mojave and the Sonora deserts, like mirages shimmering in the distance as you zip by on the Interstate, you will find random gated communities for seniors, instant towns built around golf courses and Costcos.   The developments aren’t there because someone thought the desert was good for oldsters, but because the land comes cheap.

For about the price of a one-bedroom condo in our beach-front neighborhood, our hosts bought a lovely big house with a fairway as a back yard.  The trade-off for us living so far out would be convenient access to certain amenities we think are essential:  an airport and good medical facilities, tolerable weather and some cultural offerings, such as an accessible symphony or some theater, good restaurants, an interesting community outside the gates.

Another couple at the dinner—for her wedding she dressed me in harvest gold silk moiré, I put her in hot pink chiffon for mine—was selling a big house overlooking thirty acres of avocadoes and moving into a 450 square-foot RV.  For a while, anyway.  They will head off on the land version of a cruise around the world while they decide where to end up.  Sounds interesting, and challenging.  I’d be more inclined to load up the trunk of the Honda and invoke my AARP discount rate at hotels than live in an RV, even a very big one, but wandering for a year or so could be a grand and fun adventure; something to think about.

Last week, spring break for me, we took a trip that began with what we call The Kid Loop.  We went up the San Joaquin Valley to visit my son and his wife in Fresno, and then crossed the state to see my daughter and her husband in Menlo Park. Menlo Park put us next door to Palo Alto, so we were able to meet Meredith for a lovely lunch before we headed up to Sonoma County to go house hunting.

Everywhere Paul and I visit, we try on the area.  We tour neighborhoods, look into the real estate, talk to the locals.  This is what we have learned:  no matter where we end up, there will be trade-offs; college towns, even if they are small towns, offer most if not all of the requisite amenities on our list and are far less expensive than big cities are; we are spoiled by Southern California’s weather.

That last one, the weather, keeps coming up when we consider the Midwest where Paul’s family is, and the Pacific Northwest where much of my family is, as well as the Southwest and the Atlantic shore.  Parts of Europe are gorgeous, cheap and clement, but too far from family; I am still hopeful of a grandchild one day.

The dream retirement house will have space for a real garden again, a guest room that doesn’t double as an office, a beautiful view that doesn’t include either stucco or asphalt, good walks, a nearby village.  And, of course, will cost less than our beach house sells for.  Is that too much to ask for?

We have some time to make the big decisions.  And once made, those decisions won’t necessarily be final.

Turn Your Page into a Stage: a Little Theater in Your Fiction

by Nancy Means Wright

Ever since I played 18th-century Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer in high school I’ve been in love with theater. Decades later I can still recite the opening lines–in a British accent, of course: “I vow, Mr. Hardcastle, you’re veddy particulah!“  I recall the struggle to relate not only to a frustrated mother with a son my age, but to a female from a different century and culture. What could she and a 16-year-old girl possibly have in common? But then our director introduced us to the Stanislavsky method of acting, based on the concept of emotional memory in which an actor goes deep inside herself to recall moments of anger, sorrow or jealousy, and then transfers these feelings onstage, both physically and psychologically. In this way, the actor becomes not only the characters but her own self.

So I recalled the anxieties I had living in an all-girls school boarding school where my mother was a disciplinary housemother; and before that my older brothers, teachers, pastors, uncles who were forever, it seemed, shushing and telling me what to do. And I poured all these restrictions into the character of Mrs. Hardcastle, who was always being put upon.

Since then I’ve acted in or directed dozens of plays for amateur (mostly) and repertory theater. My son has inherited my passion and has his own Very Merry Theatre for children and young adults in Burlington, Vermont. Summers his ancient van travels the state, pulling a stage on a flatbed trailer. Many of the plays in his repertoire are adapted from Dickens and Shakespeare, keeping the original language, and a few are plays I’ve adapted for him from my own novels. For theater has crept into my writing as well; I can’t seem to keep my fictional characters from putting on amateur shows. In Midnight Fires, set in an Irish castle, my sleuth discovers a clue to a killer through a family rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a local village presentation of Macbeth heightens suspense as my sleuth observes the spectators’ reaction to Macbeth’s imaginary dagger.

Of course I use “the method” to physically set the scene and to become my character(s).  I’ve always thought of a novel as a play in three or five acts, with each scene propelling the action forward. As I write, I’ve taught myself to envision the scene as if on a stage: to see how the characters use their props, to observe gestures, reactions to a bit of action or dialogue. To watch the body language: a shrug, a roving eye, a frown or grimace that suggests conflict. And then to show it as one does in theater.

It’s fun, for instance, to see how relationships alter as a character enters or exits a room. And I try to set a goal for each scene–a character’s desire or plan that either works or fails; at chapter’s end I leave a hook as a play might do. My spouse and I have been watching reruns of the 70′s Poldark, in which each episode ends with a gasp. Will Poldark escape when the smugglers are betrayed and the soldiers come charging? Will pregnant Demelza drown in her fishing boat when the storm blows up? We know the main characters will persevere, but oh, the suspense and conflict!

Most of all I use memory and transference to morph into my main character. It helps to nurture a close connection with the protagonist–a little empathy goes a long way. This has been easy with my historical Wollstonecraft series. For though far less famous, I have quite a lot in common with Mary: our writing and teaching, our conflicted nature (reason versus the hormones), our empty pockets, the faux pas we’ve made, and yes, the rejections. So through that connection I feel free to imagine and invent. In a new memoir, A Memory Palace, author Mira Bartok describes her traumatic brain injury after an 18-wheeler plowed into her car on the NY Thruway. To write her award-winning book, she employed a method called a “mental walk,” using visualization to recall information: faces, lists, emotions. She’d imagine the layout of a building, or placement of objects within a room, and then create links to things she wanted to remember. She’d take an imaginary journey through a house, recreating each room, letting it act as a memory peg: the kitchen might bring to mind a special event, or recall a person, an emotion.

In much the same way the mental walk might help us to turn into our fictional characters and thereby live alternate lives. Truly, I can’t think of any career, other than the actor’s, in which one writer can live so many lives–and in one book!

“It’s a Puzzlement” – Yul Brynner, c. 1956

 

I’ve been a puzzler (some say, I’ve been “puzzling,” and that may also be true!) all my life. It started with math, where every day’s homework was a puzzle. For algebra: If one train leaves a station in Chicago going 30 miles an hour . . . For geometry: Given two sides of a triangle …

I loved those problems, which to me were just games and puzzles. My newest protagonist, Professor Sophie Knowles feels the same way. She teaches math at a small New England college, creates puzzles for magazines, and, by the way, solves one or two murders per book.

We often hear that mysteries are like jigsaw puzzles, that writers and readers enjoy putting the pieces together, ending up with a satisfying solution, much like turning 1500 jagged pieces into a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies.

In a way. But mysteries have to be like challenging puzzles, not the easy kind where all the pieces are piled before us with one brisk dump from the box, and what’s required is simply to sort them by color or shape and fit them together to match the picture on the cover of the box.

Are mysteries like crossword puzzles? Sort of. In a regular crossword, all the clues are there in a couple of columns. In most cases, there are black squares that are cues to word length. We fill in the blanks and enjoy a sense of accomplishment when every square is filled in.

Again, good mysteries are more challenging than that.

In a good “whodunit” mystery, there are many sets of clues that unfold: some are hidden in plain sight, some are subtly presented, some not; some are within the character profiles and arcs, the setting, or the plot. These mysteries are solved not by simply putting a given number of known pieces together, but by first sorting out the pieces that matter from the ones that don’t. Maybe there are a couple of red herrings; maybe there are no herrings of any color.

I’ve seen jigsaw puzzles where the manufacturer has deliberately included extra pieces that don’t belong in the scene. Similarly, there are the crossword puzzles that are diagramless. No black squares give us the word length; we have to figure that out ourselves.

Those puzzles are more like the great mysteries, where the clue is that the dog did not bark or the answer has been in the letter on the mantel all along.

Sometimes I worry that I’m wasting time with the morning acrostic, or the Sunday NY Times crossword, or the countless word games I find in print and online.

Is it enriching my life that today I located 40 Beatles songs in a word search grid?

I take my answer from no less a puzzle figure than Erno Rubik (b. 1944), sculptor, architect, and inventor of the Rubik’s cube (patent, 1975). He has this to say: “The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life, our whole life is solving puzzles.”

Some of us get more practice than others.

Inventing Agriculture

 

Last year, in transit between one life and another, I didn’t have time or space or roots enough to create a vegetable garden.

 Oh, I could feel my sap rising.

 The urge is deep in my genes, my ancestral memory. I’m the first woman to drop grape seeds on the ground and make the connection when plants sprout.  While the men were out spearing mastodons, I was noticing that corn was growing from the band’s garbage heap. Aha. Put seeds in the ground, reap a crop. What a concept. 

But I didn’t plant anything in the small patch of  thin hard soil back by the pampas grass. Instead, I watched the purple wildflowers live, breed, and die, collected  the nasturtium seeds that rolled around in the driveway, and ate tomatoes bred for long-distance shipping.

 And when we found our house, it already had a raised-bed vegetable garden in a far sunny corner of the lot.  Kismet.

 So now, when I should be writing, or reading someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, I’m staring at the dirt measuring the progress of the Blue Lake stringless pole beans, wondering who is nibbling at the tiny leaves of chard and who stepped in the beet seedlings, asking the squash seeds why they haven’t germinated, and thinking maybe I should pinch off those little tomato blossoms.

 No, I decide, I’ll let the tomatoes make their own decision about the blossoms.

 The invention of agriculture takes patience, observation and respect.

 I stand there looking at the dark, soft dirt and I am so perfectly happy.

 

Good Horse Books for Kids

by Laura Crum

Since my eleven year old son is a voracious reader, and he has a horse and loves him, horse books are very high on our priority list. We’ve read quite a few of them over the years, some of them written by authors from the Equestrian Ink blog (a blog I have been part of for four years). So today I want to talk about some of our favorites. And I’m going to start out with our “home” authors.
The first book we read that was written by one of our authors was Linda Benson’s “The Horse Jar”. My kid had seen this book on the sidebar of our blog, and thought it looked interesting. Linda very kindly sent him a signed copy (a big thrill). We read it together, and we both really enjoyed it. The characters were very believable and the story was one that a 9-10 year old could totally relate to. I loved the basic storyline, which shows a child making a very mature, loving, but difficult choice. My son is still very fond of this book.
Then, more recently, Alison Hart came out with “Risky Chance” in the Horse Diaries series (this series is written by different authors, the common elements being the theme—books from a horse’s point of view set in different periods of history—and the excellent illustrations by Ruth Sanderson). My kid had wanted to try these books for a while (they were featured in the Chinaberry catalog—one of our favorite catalogs), so we ordered “Risky Chance.” This one my son read on his own, and reviewed here on the blog. I also read it, and really enjoyed it, particularly the setting (Southern California TB racing during the Depression). At this point my son became a Horse Diaries fan, and Alison very kindly sent us a signed copy of her other Horse Diaries title, “Bell’s Star.” The book is set in New England in the 1800’s and deals with a runaway slave and a Morgan horse– we both liked that one a lot, too. Again, this was a book my kid read on his own and it kept his interest right until the end. Alison’s knowledge and love of horses really shines in both of these books. Now we’re busy acquiring the rest of the series.
Most recently, I ordered Alison’s book, “Gabriel’s Horses”, because after reading about it on her website, it seemed like it would make a perfect start to doing a “unit” on the Civil War. As a homeschooling mom, I am always looking for books that will provide a good prop for learning about something. And “Gabriel’s Horses” did not disappoint.
Set in Kentucky during the Civil War, the book is about a slave boy who wants to become a jockey. Gabriel is about my own son’s age, and the story painted a vivid portrait of what his life was like. We read the book chapter by chapter, with exercises (provided by me) of mapping the Confederate and Union States…etc. The book was GREAT—really kept both of us interested, gave you the feeling and many facts about the Civil War and slavery, without being too horrifying (which many books—even kid’s books—about this war are, because it was a truly horrifying event in terms of suffering). I recommended it to the teacher who leads our homeschool group, and she is going to read it to the whole group of kids next year. Again, the horse element was very well portrayed.
That covers the children’s books we’ve read so far by authors from the EI blog, though I’m sure we will be reading more. Certainly the second and third books in the Gabriel trilogy, and possibly Linda’s new book, if we ever start reading ebooks or it comes out in paper. So far we read only paper books, but who knows what the future will hold.
We have, of course, read many of the old classics—just finished “Black Beauty”, which is still a great read. Read “The Black Stallion,” which was well liked, and “The Island Stallion”, which I loved as a child, but my kid was not as enthralled by it as I was. We read my personal favorite, “Smoky the Cowhorse,” again, not as big a hit with my kid as it was with me. Maybe he needs to be older. Misty of Chincoteague was well received, also another childhood favorite of mine, Elizabeth Goudge’s “The Little White Horse.” I thought about reading “My Friend Flicka”, but when I reread it myself to preview it, I decided no, it’s just too dark. Maybe in awhile. Same verdict on Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony.”
So, there are a few good kid’s books about horses. Anyone want to chime in with your own favorites?

Too Much Information

by Taffy Cannon

In a world awash in acronyms, some have become so universally known that everyone from Great-Aunt Edna to your neighbor’s preschooler can tell you what they mean.  One of those is TMI, for Too Much Information.

Generally it’s used to cut off somebody who is sharing a whole lot more than you want to know about a medical problem or procedure, or reportage of somebody else’s outcries in the throes of passion, or an explanation of just exactly what goes into the passage of federal legislation.  It can also be more benign, as when a fervid engineer shares all 1,439 steps in the creation of a biodeboomax, or when your dieting cousin takes you on an eight-ounce by quarter-cup rundown of the previous week’s caloric intake.

Too much information, however, is something altogether different to many writers, more on the order of  a way of life.

We are always accumulating too much information, because most of us love doing research and have great difficulty stopping, even when it’s time to write the book.  And then we have to continually fight the urge to provide an information dump when a casual aside is more appropriate, to mention somebody’s use of a galvanized widget-cutter without outlining the history of widget cutters, or taking a side trip into the galvanizing process.

There’d be a Twelve-Step program for this, except that the committee researching bylaws is still checking out how other nonprofits got started.

Too Much Information is also descriptive of everything that is currently right and wrong about the emerging electronic society.

Every minute of every day, anyone who logs on to the Internet has the possibility of being sucked into a million different informational black holes.  It is deliciously easy to follow a story that appeals or intrigues, to learn the nuance of who said what and how, to become an instant expert on pretty much anything that currently tickles your fancy.  And if you’re following it on Facebook, you also get to add your own impressions, and maybe even start a little war if you’re feeling feisty.

What’s scary is how quickly this informational explosion has happened, how fast we have moved from looking something up in the outdated Britannica in the hall bookcase to immediately exploring every aspect as seen by an array of different but attentive eyes.  Now we can get not only the background but also every tiny development on a breaking news story.  Not in the morning when the paper lands on the porch, or on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, but right this very minute.  As it unfolds, usually with video.

Simultaneously as reports whiz in from parts of the world recently viewed as remote and exotic, the bloggers rev up: pinstriped political reporters briskly tapping New York Times keyboards and dudes in their underpants hunched over laptops in the parental basement.  No need to wait for analysis any more.  It’s concurrent with the events, and often precedes them, since a frightening number of these people know exactly what they want to say long before there are any facts to bolster the prejudices.

So who do you believe?  What’s really happening?  And how will future generations make sense of this informational explosion, if they even care?

James Geddy House

When the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg began, archaeologists were puzzled by fragments of glazed terra cotta found in digs around town, often in the filled-in privies where broken crockery had been routinely tossed.   It wasn’t much more than two centuries after the pieces had been discarded, but nobody had any idea what they were from or for.

Then a complete whatever-it-is was unearthed at the James Geddy house, and contemporaneous documents finally revealed the answer. These odd pieces of pottery were known as “martin-pots” and hung beneath the eaves of houses to attract nesting birds.  The birds, in turn, would feed their fledglings with the omnipresent Virginia coastal mosquitoes and other bugs, providing themselves with dinner and the colonists with natural pest control service.

Eighty years after the baffling question first arose, you can Google “Colonial bird bottles” and get nearly five million hits.  Of course, mosquitoes are still biting in the Tidewater, too.