Rosina Lippi's Blog, page 29

pardon the mess while I reorganize

This place needs a thorough cleaning so I’m in the process of combining the old weblog with this weblog, which is a messy undertaking. I can only spend a half hour a day on this project, so please bear with me until things shake out. There will be an index to help you locate particular subjects or posts, and I hope to get it launched by the end of the weekend.

Downton Abbey

Jill (my agent) brought this to my attention (it's about six months old but I'm –as ever — behind the curve) from Slate:

Julian Fellows

Yesterday we learned that Julian Fellowes is developing a TV series set in Gilded Age New York City for NBC. As fans of both Fellowes’ work—from Gosford Park to Downton Abbey—and historical TV shows more generally, we immediately started guessing just which people and events from that period might inspire him. Fellowes frequently delves into the stories of historical figures for his dramas… The series will be set in the 1880s, a decade Fellowes has described as “a vivid time with dizzying, brilliant ascents and calamitous falls; of record-breaking ostentation and savage rivalry; a time when money was king.”

My novel-in-progress (The Gilded Hour) is set in 1880s Manhattan, as you may have read here. Jill thinks this is very good timing.  Maybe I should send Mr. Fellows my research materials and notes, all two thousand + pages worth.

But if he calls the series The Gilded Age  I'm worried I'll have to change my title, just when I got comfortable with it.

And I've been meaning to ask: is there any interest in a excerpt out there?

Downton Abbey steps into my territory

Jill (my agent) brought this to my attention (it’s about six months old but I’m –as ever — behind the curve) from Slate:

Julian Fellows

Yesterday we learned that Julian Fellowes is developing a TV series set in Gilded Age New York City for NBC. As fans of both Fellowes’ work—from Gosford Park to Downton Abbey—and historical TV shows more generally, we immediately started guessing just which people and events from that period might inspire him. Fellowes frequently delves into the stories of historical figures for his dramas… The series will be set in the 1880s, a decade Fellowes has described as “a vivid time with dizzying, brilliant ascents and calamitous falls; of record-breaking ostentation and savage rivalry; a time when money was king.”

My novel-in-progress (The Gilded Hour) is set in 1880s Manhattan, as you may have read here. Jill thinks this is very good timing.  Maybe I should send Mr. Fellows my research materials and notes, all two thousand + pages worth.

But if he calls the series The Gilded Age  I’m worried I’ll have to change my title, just when I got comfortable with it.

And I’ve been meaning to ask: is there any interest in a excerpt out there?

Karin Slaughter: Grant County

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Somehow or another Karin Slaughter never came into my radar, which is surprising as I like this kind of crime drama, a lot. So now I’ve read the first three in the Grant County series, and I feel compelled to write a short review.

Slaughter doesn’t coddle her characters. She throws believable stuff at them. Extreme extreme, but still within the realm of believable. Her people are complex, nuanced, and each of them handles the dog-awful stuff differently. There are a couple of characters who could be more developed, but then there are characters who have small roles but who are incredibly well drawn and vivid. Eddie, I’m looking at you.

In particular one character — Lena Adams — was interesting to me in this third novel because she’s been through hell, and there’s no telling if she’ll be able to pull herself out of the resulting self destructive spiral. I thought her development was handled really well, and then out of left field: a twist I never saw coming. Now I am really wondering how Slaughter is going to handle this in the rest of the series. She’s not afraid to do bad, bad things to her characters but she’s also making things challenging for herself. Which is brave, and promising both.

Warning: not for the faint of heart.

View all my reviews

prequels, once more with feeling

I had an email today from Judith:

Please write a book about Cora Munro from her childhood to her meeting and marrying Daniel Hawkeye Bonner, and a separate book telling  Daniel’s story from infancy up to and marrying Cora. Please !Please! Please!

People often ask about prequels to the Wilderness books, but Judith’s request was more detailed than most. And very heartfelt. I do appreciate such enthusiasm and encouragement, but the truth is, these stories just are not in my head.  With a lot of work I might be able to get Cora’s life story down, but Nathaniel was raised by Mahicans. That means years of research, or faking it. And I can’t fake it. I wish I could, my life would be easier.

I do take reader concerns and wishes to heart, but this is not something I can do. Regretfully.

scrivener and letting go

Scrivener is software developed specifically for writers. I started using it in 2007 (that is, when it first launched), and I’ve upgraded as the software evolved. I’ve stuck with it so long because it does some important things really beautifully.

There’s no better way to gather and organize the kind of complex research material that I use writing historical fiction. If you’ve read any of my Sara Donati novels, you may have a sense of how much I get into, from Jamaica sugar trains to 18th century refining furnaces to battlefields outside New Orleans and commercial greenhouses in 1880s New Jersey. So this I have always loved about Scrivener, the fact that I can keep a lot of diverse material close at hand and look through it without leaving the manuscript aside.

However. I’ve written five+ novels starting out with Scrivener and about a quarter of the way through, I’ve had to give up and transfer over to Word. And here’s the reason.

Scrivener prides itself on being flexible enough to meet the idiosyncratic needs of every writer. To achieve this end, there is a  ‘compile’ process. I say to Scrivener, Hey, I need to print out chapters 1 through 20 in draft form to pass on to a reader. Could you pull that together, simple page numbers, chapter numbers, etc?

In theory this is simple. In fact, it is probably simple in most cases. But in my case it’s not, and despite  more than five years of trying to get an upper hand on the compile process, I now declare myself defeated.

On the surface it seems straight forward. I have

(1) front material including title page, character lists, timelines, map legends (not the map itself), author’s note, dedication, epigraph

(2) a prologue

(3) 50+ chapters divided into Part I, Part II, Part III

The page numbering needs to start after the title page, and stop before the Prologue. Then start up again with ’1′ at  the prologue, and continue, not showing up on the “Part I” “Part II” pages. The chapters need to be numbered, but not the prologue.

There is a lot of documentation to help the writer set up the compile process to get what s/he needs, and I have read it all. I have also bought a ‘dummies’ type guide and read that, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading on the user forum. But no matter what I do, I can never get the manuscript to print out in plain draft form (that is, no fancy formatting) with the numbering handled correctly.

I tell myself, eh so what. So you’ll have to do a little extra work when you export the draft. But what happens is, I get completely distracted by the process of numbering pages and chapters, and I get derailed for at least one day. Sometimes more. That is, Scrivener is supposed to make the writing process more streamlined, but in my case, it’s disruptive.

No doubt a lot of people will tell me that I’m being computer illiterate or phobic, but anybody who knows me knows that I am very comfortable with all kinds of software and web machinations. I’m not dumb. I can handle Photoshop and InDesign and a lot of other not-simple software programs with a decent level of proficiency. I did in fact post on the user forum about this larger issue. I did so very carefully and politely, but I got no constructive responses. At this point I should point out that Scrivener is not free. The mac version costs $45, and while there is a huge and active forum, it’s staffed by volunteers who have lives beyond helping hapless writers number pages.

If you search you’ll see that Scrivener has a great reputation. I have come across only one review that mentions the issues that frustrate me:

So Scrivener stops supporting publisher workflow once you have submitted the manuscript. And arguably it stops an hour before then, because figuring out how to modify the output format generated by the Scrivener “Compile” menu option is a black art … I found it easier to slurp the resulting Word document into LibreOffice for final tidying up and reformatting before I submitted it. Scrivener doesn’t support Word’s paragraph style mechanism as far as I can tell; it simply emits styled text. So it’s output isn’t a direct product you can feed into an unattended turnkey pre-press package: you’ll still have to pay someone to drive InDesign for you. [emphasis added]

So I have to leave Scrivener behind. I’m not happy about it, but I just cannot spend anymore time fiddling with the complexities of the compile process.  It seems to me that the software developer has lost sight of a writer’s larger goals and is too enamored of  technology for technology’s sake, but I can’t follow that lead.

If you have software you use that you like that allows you to write and keep track of your research at the same time AND you work on a mac, please tell me about it. I’ll have to do some serious window shopping and trying-out before I decide how to proceed and how much time I’m willing to put into the learning curve. Thoughts? And be nice.

 

 

 

calling all multilinguals (updated: now with testicles)

I posted this on facebook and got a lot of good responses, but I’m going to try here as well. The scenario is this: one character tells another character that there’s a list of about ten phrases he can say in fifty different languages or dialects of languages. She doesn’t believe him, and challenges him. The sentence she chooses (of the ones on his list) is “Why did you kill your wife?”

Eventually you’ll find out what I’m doing with this.

So I need to have this sentence in every possible European and eastern European language, but here’s the important part: I can’t use school-room French or Swedish or whatever. I need vernacular, colloquial and even rude translations. Below are some of the suggestions I got through facebook (I had lots of information on Polish, Russian, etc., but I couldn’t get the software to deal with the Cyrillic alphabet). As you’ll see, some people were very specific about the geographic variety of the language in question, or about the colloquialisms. That information is  really useful.

And I really, really need different regional varieties of Italian. Sicilian, Calabrese, Neopolitan, Roman, any anything else. [update: Stephanie really delivered on this, but I'm always happy to hear more. Thanks, Stephanie!]

Examples:

Language
Geography
Translation
Notes


 Italian
Colloquial
Perchè hai ammazzato la tua donna?
/



Salento
Perce’ hai ccisu muierda?
/



Florentine
O perché tu ha’ammazzaho la tu’ moglie?
/



North East
parcè atu copat to femine?
/



Sicilian
Picchì a ttò mugghieri l’ammazzasti?
/



Lombardy
Parghé te gà mataa a la femma?
Rough translation, this dialect doesn’t traditionally have a written form



Siracuse
Perche’ hai ucciso tua moglie?  (or)  Pichi a mazzato a ta mugieri?
/


 French
Senegal
Pourquoi est-ce que tu as tué ta femme?
/



colloquial
Pourquoi t’as tué ta femme?  (or)  Pourquoi t’as buté ta meuf?  (or) Pourquoi t’as tué ta meuf?
the kind of French you might hear spoken in the slums of a big city, for example. It includes ‘verlan‘, which is a way of inversing syllables of words to create slang.



Cajun
Fi pi tchar, pourquoi t’as tué ta femme?
“fi pi tchar“  the euphemism we use for “fils de putain” ["s.o.b."]


.
.
.
.


 Spanish
Spain
¿Por qué mataste a tu esposa? (or) ¿Por qué mató a su esposa?
/



Madrid
¿Por qué mataste a tu (maldita) mujer/vieja?  
maldita = damned; vieja = old lady



Madrid ‘español castizo’
¿Por qué cojones te cargaste a la parienta?
Both of these have a little vulgarity thrown in for good measure. They are roughly translated into “Why the fuck did you kill your woman/wife?” “Carallo” and “cojones” are both the vulgar term for testicles.



Galicia
¿Por qué carallo mataste a tua mulher?
_Row_16_Cell_4_


Spanish [South America]
Colombia
¿Por qué mataste a tu desgraciada mujer? (or) ¿Por qué putas mataste a tu esposa?(or) ¿Por qué coños mataste a tu esposa? -


your ‘f-king’ wife

Why the fuck did you kill your wife?

*see Laura’s comment below


Portugese
Portugal
Por que matou sua mulher?
/


Catalán
Catalonia
¿Pe què vas matar a la teva esposa? (or) ¿Per què va matar a la seva esposa?
/


Norwegian
Oslo
Hvorfor drepte du dama di a?
slang



Jærsk
Keffor drepte du kånå di?
/



small town south of Oslo
Hvorfor drepte du gamla di?


amla is a little disrespectful, somewhat like ‘your old lady’.   “den fordømte kjerringa di‘ = Your damn old lady



[Bokmål]
Hvorfor drepte du konen din?
/


Swedish
 Sweden
Vafan mördade du din sambo för? (or) Varför dödade du din fru?
/


Finnish
Southern Ostrobothnia
Minkä tähären tapoot emäntäs? (or) Minkä tähären soot emäntäs tappanu?
/



Helsinki
Miks sä tapoit emäntäs?
emäntäs is an old word for wife, but it is becoming re-popularized



Helsinki
Miksi tapoit vaimosi?
/



Pori
Miks sää tapoit vaimos?  (or)  Miks helvetis sää tapoit vaimos?
helvetis = the hell


Dutch
 Holland
Waarom vermoorde jij je vrouw? (or) Waarom heb je je vrouw vermoord?
A mild swear word for a female would be: rotwijf, kelerewijf (kelere is derived from cholera, most Dutch swear words have something to do with diseases)


German
Baden-Wuerttemberg
Warum haschd du dei Frau umbracht?




Berlin
Warum hastn deene Olle abjemurkst?
very colloquial



Swiss  [Alemannic]
Warum hascht diin Wiib erschlaha? (or) Warum häschd dini frau tötet?



Dutch
Holland
Waarom vermoorde jij je vrouw? (or) Waarom heb je je vrouw vermoord?
A mild swear word for a female would be: rotwijf, kelerewijf (kelere is derived from cholera, most Dutch swear words have something to do with diseases)


Dutch
Holland
Waarom vermoorde jij je vrouw? (or) Waarom heb je je vrouw vermoord?
A mild swear word for a female would be: rotwijf, kelerewijf (kelere is derived from cholera, most Dutch swear words have something to do with diseases)


Luxembourgish

Firwaat hues de deng aal Fraa embruecht?



Bosnian
Sarajevo
Jebote, zasto ubi svoju zenu?
literal translation would be “F@@@, why did you kill you woman?” Word “zasto” has above S alphabet small V, as it reads (sh), and is an alphabet in Bosnian/Croatian, Serbian language, but doesn’t exist in English language.


Hungarian
Hungary
Miért ölted meg a feleséged?

Litany by Billy Collins & performed by He Who Must Be Adored

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine…

-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker,

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,

or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman’s tea cup.

But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Billy Collins

dear happier readers

You all sure know how to cheer a person up. I’m so thankful for your support and good wishes.

And it looks as though we have a deal. I just had a long email from Jill, to which I wrote an enthusiastic reply. Right before I hit ‘send’ I noticed a whale of a typo:

It’s great to get such good noose right before the weekend.

Conflicted, that’s me.

Noose

(third-person singular simple present nooses, present participle noosing, simple past and past participle noosed)

(transitive) To tie or catch in a noose; to entrap or ensnare.

Dear Grieving Reader

Dear Rosina,

I have just finished your book The Endless Forest. I must admit it was with considerable trepidation I began to read the epilogue and could quickly see the direction we were headed. I had suspected such an ending was coming but I am devastated all the same. Please, I beg you, tell me you will be starting a new series along the same tenor as the Bonner series!  I have enjoyed this family so

much and your storytelling I am hoping this is not the end of this genre o writing for you.

Yours truly,

A grieving fan

Dear Deanna:

I hate to think of you grieving, but on the other hand I am glad to know that the Wilderness series means so much to you. I can tell you that the novel I’m working on is about some of the Bonner grandchildren The first novel in what I hope is a trilogy is set in Manhattan in 1883. Its tentative title is The Gilded Hour.

Right now the wondrous Jill (my agent) has one offer from a publisher and is talking to other houses, as well, so I can be reservedly optimistic in saying that GH will in fact see the light of day. But publishers are far harder to engage these days, so there is still the possibility it might not happen.

If you are really interested in following along as a couple of Nathaniel’s and Elizabeth’s grandchildren make their way, please leave a comment. You never know what little bits of information will make publishers happy.