Lea Wait's Blog, page 296

Weekend Update: January 17-18, 2015

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Sarah Graves (Monday), Susan Vaughan (Tuesday), Kate Flora (Wednesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday), and Lea Wait (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Lea Wait:  I think our weekend update is a little quiet this week because … we’re all writing! (Gee.)That being said, next Saturday, January 24, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett and I will be speaking at the library in Ellsworth, Maine at 10:30 in the morning, bringing copies of our books for purchase and signing.  Hope some of our friends will stop in to talk mysteries!

Kate Flora: So, while we’re all chained to our desks, writing away so you’ll have new books to read, here’s a bit of entertainment for you from Dead River Rough Cut:

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share. Don’t forget that comments are entered for a chance to win our wonderful basket of books and the very special moose and lobster cookie cutters.

 

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora: mailto: kateflora@gmail.com

A most unusual tour

Sun or moon?

I count those assembled, matching name tags with the ones listed on today’s tour sheet. “Nice number,” I say quietly as I check off the last couple who just hurried up and are slightly out of breath. I cough discretely and wait until I have everyone’s attention.

“Glad you all could make it. I think you’re going to enjoy yourselves big time. I’ve been taking people on this one for the past three years and I never get tired of watching the reactions as people look into some of the more exotic rooms. Heck, I learn something new on pretty much every tour because things are constantly changing.

“Let’s go over the ground rules. First, stay together. If you get lost or wander off so you can’t see the rest of us, it might get dicey. Last October, we lost a young couple and couldn’t find them for three days. By the time we did, he was howling like a banshee and she refused to wear anything but a ratty Patriots sweatshirt and fur undies, so be careful. Photos are fine, but remember that what lighting there is can be strange so you might not get the image you expect. Finally, The tour can’t cover everything and you might feel like you need a place to stop and rest. Unfortunately, the nature of this area is such that we must ask you not to touch, sit on, or lean against anything. This was covered in your waiver agreements that each of you signed. If you’re uncertain whether you can abide by the terms, please let me know before we get going and I will have someone wait with you until we return. Any questions?”

Nobody raises a hand or asks to back out, so I stash the clipboard and make sure my flashlight is working properly before leading the group through the funny shaped portal and up a spongy pink incline. After pausing at the top, I take a deep breath and head into the warm darkness. There are no actual lights, but the amazing amount of energy surrounding us often manifests itself as shimmering sheets of luminescence, most often blue, but depending on the overall emotional climate, these can shift to green, purple, crimson, or on very rare occasions, black.

“We’ll start with the rooms on the left and spend about ten minutes exploring each one. When we’re finished, I’d really be curious as to which one each of you think is most interesting and why. First up is what we call childhood memories. You will note that some of the displays look like professionally made dioramas, while others are more like abstract paintings. We suspect this is directly correlated with how clear the memory that created each one was as this room was developed.”

Bet Alfred would like this picture

I stand off to one side as the group moves slowly, making quiet comments as they look over various exhibits. I’ve become pretty familiar with the contents of this room because it has barely changed. Over in the corner is the miniature replica of Frontier Town with an unhappy boy sitting in a car in the parking lot. The same figure appears in almost every other piece on display, one with a friend bending over a downed weather balloon, another where he’s awkwardly casting a bamboo fly rod on a sun-dappled river, one where he is carrying a small wooden boat down a hill, one playing chess with yet another boy, still another where he’s curled up in a corner listening to an ancient radio in the dark.

We leave this room and enter one where the same figure again appears in each painting or diorama. He’s a teenager now and everything in this room is much sharper. I’m never quite sure whether this is due to more maturity or because the memories are more emotionally charged. In one, he’s lying beside a twisted motorbike at the foot of a giant elm tree. Next to it is one where he’s driving a dark blue sedan and a girl is sitting very close to him. In another, he’s on some sort of train in a big city, right beside one where he’s on a long sandy beach at twilight, looking longingly at a pretty girl who is watching fireworks fill the sky over a dark sea. There are a couple more that stand out. One where he’s raking blueberries and the last one where he’s taking care of a large flock of chickens.

After we spend more time than usual in the room I’ve come to call the 20-something memory gallery, a room that’s notable for the sharp emotional contrasts (some dioramas like the one that has to be Woodstock, are brimming with energy, while others like one where he’s sitting alone in a dark bedroom with his face in his hands, obviously filled with despair), we hustle through the rest of the memory rooms that seem to be divided roughly by decade and feature things like the mixed emotions of fear and hope as we see him attend his first AA meeting and then one right beside it where he’s holding his first child, to one a couple rooms away where he has a shit-eating grin as he sits behind the wheel of a $40,000 Dodge Charger that’s tricked out like a race car.

Sunset at Campobello

“Now we move on to the rooms I like best because they’re always just a tad different,” I say as we go up another incline and turn left. “First up is what we call the curiosity storage area. I’ve brainstormed with other staff members who run similar tours and we think this is a repository for oddball questions that might someday be answered and become parts of a book or a short story. You will notice that every wall is chock full of filing cabinets and each drawer has a label, but there’s always a big pile of stuff on the table in the center. Remember, look to your heart’s content, but don’t touch.”

Once again, I move aside to give everyone a chance to study things. I love to watch their expressions as they read some of the labels. There are entire file drawers devoted to things like naked mole rats, oversexed narwhals, which flavor (aside from spruce) chewing gum holds its flavor the longest, what in heck was her name anyway?, is there a town by that name in Idaho?, the list is endless. On the table lie at least a hundred questions that haven’t been filed yet. Today we can see ones like If bigfoot really exists, does he/she have a favorite baseball team? And Imagine what the result would look like if a deer tick was suddenly turned mutant by a burst of cosmic rays. By the time we’re ready to move on, I can see more than a few glazed eyes among the crowd.

Next up is the room of unfinished stuff. It’s scary how many things this guy has in the works. There are short stories about those ubiquitous free AOL discs getting mad at how often they were trashed in the 1990s and what happens when they exact revenge, there are several books in some stage of completion. I’m partial to the one about a magician who fled his world halfway across the galaxy and came to Earth because there were no 12 step programs there and he was a hardcore addict. When he arrived, he found that he had to use his magic in extremely controlled doses or his addiction would flare up big time, but he fakes a college degree and ends up as a librarian, working in Boston where he rescues the rarest cat on the planet and discovers in the process that baddies from all over the universe are trying to take over Earth because they can use portals all over it as shortcuts to move themselves and their plunder from one part of the galaxy to another. There’s another one about a poor kid from the coast who loses his temper and punches out a rich guy and ends up in prison where he’s put in touch with someone who has connections to a rogue group in the Israeli army who work with him on a monster theft on the peninsula where he grew up. It involves a surplus Chinese submarine, blowing up the Piscataqua River Bridge and bamboozling the Coast Guard.

The room also has bundles of short stories in various stages of development as well as a hefty pile of, ‘I think these are cool, but they’ve been rejected’ stories. Depending on my mood, I always leave this room depressed or excited as hell. I notice similar expressions on the faces of my charges.

The next room is my favorite because it’s ever-changing and is guaranteed to freak out at least half the folks on the tour. It’s the one we refer to as the ultimate fantasy room. Unlike most of the others, this has all sorts of videos running simultaneously. Some are pretty tame like the guy pitching for the Red Sox, shooting a ten point buck or holding up a five pound brook trout, but then there are the x-rated ones. I love to watch the way tour members react when they see the one where he’s sitting in a light blue bathtub filled with freshly poured lime jello, accompanied by a very buxom young woman. There are several others that are even steamier than this one and, as I say, they change on every tour.

The last room on this floor is called ‘Not Enough Time In This Life’ I’m pretty sure it was set up after the others when the owner realized that there were simply too many things to experience or do in the time remaining before he left this world. If you look at the dioramas and that’s all there are in this room, each one has a distinctly otherworldly appearance. Things like suns with strange hues, extra moons, trees and mountains that aren’t of this world, creatures that must have snuck out of somebody’s imagination. There are a couple common themes running through all of them. In many of them he’s riding a horse, carrying a sword and a musical instrument, while accompanied by an attractive woman who has her own sword and a longbow.

I lead the group around a curved area overlooking the lower floor until we reach another ramp, this one going down. We find ourselves near the next to last room, one that has a polished brass sign over the doorway that says “Never Enough Time, But That’s Not Always A Bad Thing.” I stop and ask the group how many know what a TBR pile is. Several raise a hand. I turn and lead them inside. There are several gasps, mostly of delight and from those who knew what TBR stands for. This could be every man’s idea of the perfect reading room. There are ten foot high dark oak bookshelves lining three walls. Two ultra-soft recliners occupy corners near the unadorned wall and each has perfect lighting for a reader. The shelves are filled with titles that I swear change to tempt whoever is perusing them. I know from previous discussions with tour members that no two people see the same books on a shelf. I’m convinced even a total non-reader would delight in spending time in this room. I lead my entourage out with great reluctance.

Confession: I love NASCAR live.

The final room is reminiscent of those refrigerator magnet sets you give and get for Christmas and birthdays, the ones with themes like literary or garden words where someone starts arranging them in order on the fridge door and two weeks later the person in the family with OCD has turned the whole box into an epic run-on sentence. In this instance, words, questions, puns and jokes lie about haphazardly as if someone was trying to mix up unrelated stuff and have it make sense. There are whiteboards with partially finished sentences and questions on them, things like “My Wife accuses me of being in coherent almost every night, but I swear I can’t find it in my DeLorme Atlas.” Right beside that is “How come nobody is ever whelmed or tached?” Every time I bring a tour through this room, I make sure I check out the whiteboard I’ve come to call, ‘words that ain’t, but should be.’ There are faux words with absurd definitions up there like Fritilarity, the sound an amused butterfly makes, or swornhoggler, criminal activity by a dyslexic fraud artist.

It takes a few minutes for everyone’s eyes to adjust to the afternoon sunlight once we’re back outside. I’m not at all surprised by the rash of positive comments about the tour. It happens almost every time I guide a group through our writer’s brain tour.

The awesome Dodge Charger

Now, it’s your turn dear reader. What would a guided tour through your mind look like?

Some things you didn’t know about me

Jayne Hitchcock here – I’m getting over bronchitis, so I’m doing a quick post for today.

I figured I’d tell you some things you probably didn’t know about me.

1. I’ve been writing since I was very young. I still have a play I wrote when I was eight years old (seriously). I may even post it here if I can find time to retype it. It was about monsters and the school I was in let me direct it.

2. I was the editor of my high school paper the three years I was in school (I skipped my Junior year).

3. I wrote a column for our local paper in Oxnard, California when I was a Senior in high school

4. Although I grew up in California, I was born in Saco, Maine

5. I was in advertising for quite a few years as a copywriter and even had my own ad agency for a few years before my late husband got transferred to California for three years in 1989

6. In 1992 I moved to Okinawa, Japan and worked for an off base newspaper called Japan Update. Because my husband was in the Marines, I had to get permission from the base General before taking on the job. I wrote articles for them the three years I was there.

7. Okinawa is where I got my first six books published – all of them about Japan (see my web site for info on these)

8. I took the Writer’s Digest writing course via snail mail while in Okinawa (they didn’t have the Internet back then, ha ha)

9. The first article I wrote as a result of that course was about llamas. I got to interview the actor Dennis Weaver for it – he had a llama farm.

10. I am a huge Star Wars nerd. Ask my husband!

Iguana Do Some Writing?

Hi. Barb here. In a great counterpoint to Lea Wait’s post about Maine winters yesterday, I thought I’d post about my new writing companions in Key West, Florida.

My husband and I are here for two months, and due to, umm, a little too much fun over the holidays, I am on a strict writing regime. I’m in first draft mode, which I have learned I must endure to get to the part I love, love, revisions. I’ve told everyone I know that if I write 1000 words everyday (including weekends) and get in the pool everyday, it’s a good day. What about the hundreds of other temptations Key West has to offer? If I finish those two tasks early enough, fine, I can play, but if not, too bad.

Lately, as I write in the late afternoons, this guy has been joining me. He’s a green iguana. They came to Florida as pets and now have overrun the place. Apparently they reproduce like crazy, up to 50 eggs in one nest. They’re territorial and not worth trapping, because once one is gone a new one will soon move in to replace him.

They can grow up to five or six feet, and I did see one in the vacant lot behind us who was as big as a dog. They’re herbivores and won’t hurt you unless they’re cornered. But I have to admit, I’m creeped out by the way they look. It’s like Jurassic Park has opened a petting zoo in our yard. Don’t worry! I won’t be petting them. I’ve seen how the movie turned out.

The first time I saw one, it was our backyard one, not this front yard guy. I was in the pool and heard a rustling overhead and I looked up into the palm trees and there he was, eating a tasty lunch of new palm leaves. He seemed supremely undisturbed by my presence, which is more than I can say for myself. I jumped out of the pool I was cowering beside the house when my husband arrived home. He pointed out that given the spray bottle of “Iguana Be Gone” on the deck, I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised.

The pool guy

The iguana proceeded to stroll along the top of our fence, casual as you please. Iguana Be Gone, by the way, is mostly cinnamon and garlic and impresses iguanas not one whit.

The creepiest thing about iguanas, aside from their obviously creepy looks, is that though they have evolved to climb trees quite efficiently, they cannot climb down. Instead, they have the ability to fall up to forty feet without injuring themselves. When we used to come to Key West with my mother, we stayed in a multi-story resort. When a big iguana came hurtling off the roof onto the cement pool deck–THWUMP!– it freaked me out every time.

Apparently they can be quite the pests, and love to poop in your pool. We haven’t had this problem yet, and I’m hoping if we continue with our current live and let live policy, things won’t escalate. In the meantime, I’m getting used to seeing my writing companion hanging around outside my window in the afternoons.

 

Maine Winters

Lea Wait, here – and, yes, I’m in Maine.

If you live in Maine, people from away often ask: Do you stay there all year?

If the answer is “yes,” then you’ll often see a shaking head and the comment, ” How do you cope with the snow and cold?”

The answer is: Snow and cold aren’t problems. Oh, I’ll admit that, living in a house built in 1774, I do sometimes wonder how people kept warm here two hundred years ago. But over the years central heating and a woodstove and electricity and indoor plumbing (water from our own well) have made a major difference in the house’s temperature. And that doesn’t even begin to mention attic and cellar insulation and storm windows. (And a friend with a plow and, in real emergencies, a generator that keeps the water and heat on, if little else.)

But here’s the real secret: Maine, at least near the coast, where I live, doesn’t get THAT cold. Sure … in the 16 winters I’ve spent here we have had some sub-zero days. In fact, in the past week …. But not that many. And snow? Some winters it’s on the ground for months; other years there’s very little. In the past couple of years (really, it’s true!) New Jersey and Connecticut have gotten more snow than we have on the coast of Maine. And Maine copes very well with the amount it gets. Schools and businesses don’t often close, mail is delivered, and rarely is there a line at the supermarket for bread and milk and batteries.

And, although I certainly love Maine in the warmer months (how could anyone not?) there are special joys in the wintertime.

When the deciduous trees (no, not all Maine’s trees are firs and pines) lose their leaves, the views of the water are even more breathtaking.

The crackling ice on the edge of tidal rivers is beautiful.

Many Maine organizations, from churches to schools to libraries to Ys and book groups, schedule most of their activities in the winter. In summer, most Mainers are focused on visitors. Winters are for the locals.

Winters are the time for writers to write, artists to paint, craftsmen and women to create. Focus comes more easily; there are fewer distractions than in other seasons.

Winter is a time to catch up with all the movies you didn’t have time to see last summer; the books you’ve been wanting to read; the recipes you’ve clipped but haven’t forgotten. It’s a time for neighbors to gather together, relax, and get caught up.

I’ll admit it’s a dark season. In December and January the sun sets before 4:30 in the afternoon. But it’s also a time for the warmth of lit windows and fireplaces. A time to assess the world, and our place in it. A time to study garden catalogs and boating magazines; to plan trips, or even take them.

Many Mainers who don’t have children in school take their vacations in January, February, or March. Some businesses that have been open 7 days a week for months close then. Those who aren’t snow mobilers or skiiers head south for a week or a month. It’s a quiet time here, and everyone has their own way of enjoying it.

For me, it’s a time to focus on writing. This year I have a manuscript due March 1, and another to start then. For my husband, who’s an artist, it’s a time to work on new canvases that will be ready to hang when galleries open for the (summer) season.

It’s a time to talk and reassess our priorities.

This time of year we wear sweats and sweaters and sometimes long underwear. We feed the birds and admire the wide vistas that are hidden in other seasons. We make bean soup and beef stew and fondue. We enjoy being together.

What season could be better?

Weekend Update: January 10-11, 2015

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Lea Wait (Monday), Barb Ross (Tuesday), Al Lamanda (Wednesday), Jayne Hitchcock (Thursday), and John Clark (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

from Kathy Lynn Emerson: Starting Monday at midnight, I’ll be doing a Goodreads giveaway of three copies of the UK edition of Murder in the Queen’s Wardrobe. The link to enter (although I think you have to join Goodreads to do it) is https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/121317-murder-in-the-queen-s-wardrobe

The giveaway runs from January 12 until midnight January 26. The book will be published in the U.S. in hardcover in March with the Kindle edition to follow. This is the first in a new historical mystery series set in the 1580s. This first one takes place in England and Muscovy (Russia) and involves the protagonist, Mistress Rosamond Jaffrey, in both sleuthing and spying. I’m categorizing it as a “cozy thriller” with a sleuth who has a few personal issues to work out—issues appropriate to the sixteenth-century setting, of course.

In the advance planning department: keep the date April 11th open. The second Maine Crime Wave, sponsored by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, will be held on that day in South Portland. The regulars at MaineCrimeWriters.com will be well represented among the panelists and workshop presenters. The incomplete list available at this date includes Kate Flora, Barb Ross, Lea Wait, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett, Sarah Graves, Al Lamanda, and alums Gerry Boyle and Paul Doiron.

Lea Wait: Monday night, January 12, I’ll be speaking at the Freeport Community Library in Freeport, Maine at 6:30. And Friday night, January 16, I’ll be joining other authors and illustrators of books for children at Nerdy Authors Night from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Falmouth Elementary School. Both events are free and open to the public.

And this week was the debut of my Twisted Threads! To read a short prequel and sign up for a giveaway, click on http://wp.me/p3nHH-5RU

 

 

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share. Don’t forget that comments are entered for a chance to win our wonderful basket of books and the very special moose and lobster cookie cutters.

 

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora:  kateflora@gmail.com

 

First Love

Dorothy Cannell: My first book The Thin Woman was published in 1984. After some serious finger counting (my math level being a first grade C-) I realized that’s thirty years ago. Hard on the heels of that thought came the memory of the wonderfully, magical year I spent writing it. The children would leave for school in the mornings. I’d clear the kitchen table and heft my manual typewriter (purchased second hand by husband for fifty dollars) onto it and give myself three hours in the world of my characters and a house named Merlin’s Court. I knew nothing about publishing, the vagaries of the market, or even that there were such people as literary agents.

I had fallen in love with a story about a young woman who’d been given the opportunity to live a fairy story, tinged with the menace of evil that inhabits those of the suitably named brothers Grimm. I did not know I was writing a mystery. I thought of it as a gothic frolic.

Yes, I dreamed of selling what was then called Cobwebs and Candlelight, I fantasized about seeing my name on the cover and imagined the shower of amazed congratulations received. But that was secondary to reveling in tapping out the story Ellie (narrating character) was telling me sentence by sentence, page by page. No pressure to write something as good as or better than had gone before. No deadline. No glimmer that this was the start of my Ellie Haskell series.

When I meet writers aspiring to be published I understand their yearning to have their book accepted and published; and I say, “Treasure this time when it’s just you and your story. It is a time that will never come again. There will be others in the future, perhaps better written, more matured, richer, but the process may not have that sparkling optimism that comes with writing your first love.”

 

 

 

 

 

We Are Charlie

Yesterday morning’s news from Paris has rocked me to my core.  As I made my morning cup of Irish breakfast tea I heard the report on NPR:  twelve people killed in a terror attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine that has published controversial Muhammad cartoons.

Vicki Doudera here. It’s so horribly wrong on several levels. First – the taking of innocent lives – but second, the taking of those lives because the murderers were offended by free speech.  Third – I’m not a scholar of world religions, but I’m pretty sure that Muhammad did not advocate murder as a way to solve problems. (Nor did Jesus, but  I realize many wars have been waged on His behalf despite that, too.)

The French are beyond shocked. It’s the worst attack in their country since World War II. Several of those killed were household names, cartoonists who resonated very deeply with French culture. This is a wound – a big one.

I’m remembering my year of living in Paris, slogging up the stairs, fresh baguette in hand, to my little 4th floor apartment in Montmartre. I am heartsick for the city, for the people I remember, for their sense of trust and safety that has been shattered by this vicious act of terrorism.

And I feel a solidarity – not just with the grieving citizens of France, but with artists everywhere.  Anyone who dares take up the pen, whether to draw cartoons, shape stories, paint pictures, or express an opinion, is putting themselves, just like those who worked for Charlie Hebdo, in the line of fire.  I may write crime stories that seem on the surface to be innocuous, and yet they undoubtedly have the power to offend someone, somewhere.  My last book dealt with the growth of a shadowy secret service in Russia.  The facts are true, woven into fiction. Could they offend? Could some twisted mind read Deal Killer and want to do me harm? 

The answer – for anyone who dares write more than drivel – is yes. We are all Charlie, we are all united, we all must stand up for free speech and against measures that “offend” this or that group.  We may not always like what we see or read, but that is the cost of living in a free society, one which allows every voice – no matter how offensive – to be heard.

Vive la liberté. Pick up your pen and write.

All it Takes is One Clue

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Today I want to tell you a story about solving a real-life historical mystery. There’s no murder. There isn’t even a crime. That doesn’t cut down on the thrill of finding the one clue that leads to more discoveries and, finally, a solution to the puzzle. Where does one find such mysteries? Try climbing your family tree.

my grandfather, Fred Gorton

I’ve been interested in genealogy for a long, long time. My grandfather, who was born in 1878, put together a family history when he was in his eighties and I was still a pre-teen. He wrote to all his relatives to track down names and dates and recorded them meticulously. When he was done, he had a little pamphlet printed to distribute to everyone in the family. Of course, he insisted that it was his great-grandfather who first came to this country back in the 1790s, when it was really a much more distant ancestor back in the 1630s, but aside from that small misconception, he did a pretty good job, especially for a man who only had an 8th grade education.

These days, it is much easier to do genealogical research. Anyone who has ever seen an Ancestry.com commercial or watched Who do you think you are? has some idea of how to go about it and most of the research can be done online. The biggest stumbling block, however, is still the same thing that caused my grandfather to go astray—what someone in the family claimed was true . . . that isn’t.

That’s where the mystery solving comes in.

Susanna Hartley, Grandad’s mother

In the pursuit of my hobby, I’ve been climbing both my own family tree and my husband’s. One branch of his family in particular, the Hartleys, took some doing to untangle. It wasn’t that we didn’t have information on them. It was that some of what we had was wrong. Susanna Hartley was my husband’s great-grandmother. Her son, aka Grandad, always boasted that she was one of the “Philadelphia Hartleys,” making it sound as if the family was both wealthy and prominent in that city. Of course, this is the same man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson—an out and out fabrication. He knew full well the family had been in Maine since right after the Revolutionary War. Then, too, there is the complication that Ralph Waldo has no descendants.

When I took my first look at the Hartley connection, twenty or so years ago, I quickly discovered that the Hartleys might have settled in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, but they were definitely not part of the upper crust. They worked in the woolen mills there and sometimes traveled to Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to find similar work. The first of the family to come to the U.S., or so everyone said, was Ellis Hartley, who applied to become a citizen in 1872. On one of his daughters’ death certificates was the information that he had been born in Manchester, England. Extrapolating from census records, this would have been in about 1851.

A few years ago, I revisited my research. By then, I had access to Ancestry.com. I was sure that with a name like Ellis Hartley, he wouldn’t be all that hard to find in census records for Lancashire, England. Boy was I wrong. Ellis Hartley isn’t quite as bad as John Smith, but there were four or five of them in the right age range and geographical area. I made my best guess at which one he was, plugged the information into a family tree on the Ancestry.com website, and called it good.

About six months ago, another Ancestry.com subscriber contacted me out of the blue to say she thought our family trees were connected. According to her, Ellis Hartley was the son of John and Susanna Briggs Hartley . . . of Yorkshire. She didn’t have too much information. Her interest was in the Briggs family. But once she provided me with a clue—the fact that Ellis’s mother, uncle, aunt, and a few siblings all came over to the U.S. together—and a few more names, I was off and running. The confusion over what county Ellis came from? It turns out he was born in Lancashire, right on the border with Yorkshire, and the family moved about ten miles into the neighboring county when he was a boy.

painting of the sailing ship Saranak being towed into port by a steamboat

The most exciting discovery was a ship’s manifest for the Saranak for 1866. There was a reason Ellis Hartley hadn’t shown up in earlier searches. His name was spelled “Ellice” in the manifest. Other finds quickly followed—census records, birth records, marriage records—but I wasn’t having any luck figuring out what happened to Ellis’s father. Then it dawned on me that he might have come over earlier, to scout the land, as it were, and there he was. He didn’t arrive in Philadelphia, where the Saranak landed. He came by way of New York, about six months earlier, together with his oldest son and a married daughter.

I won’t go on and on—relating adventures in genealogy can be right up there with showing off baby (or cat) pictures—but if anyone is interested in reading the results of my research into family history, the index to my grandfather’s biography and various family trees I’m working on can be found online at Family History along with an assortment of photos of people and places. The real message here is that if you enjoy solving mysteries as a reader, you might also like to try solving them in your own family, exposing misconceptions, finding clues, and eventually figuring out where the story really began.

The Story Behind the Story

Kate Flora here. It’s January, which is not among my favorite months except in one respect: January as many writers will tell you, is a fabulous writing month. When I have to put on my heaviest coat–the one that makes me feel like a kid in a stiff snowsuit–just to walk to the mailbox, you will not find me complaining when my work requires me to sit for hours at my desk. I am not tempted out into the garden. I certainly won’t swim in the sea. It isn’t a lovely day to take a walk. Lying on the ice in my driveway watching the clouds float by and imagining shapes in them really isn’t on. But sitting for many hours, slaving over a revision? I’m ready to embrace it in January.

So let’s talk a little bit about revision. Years ago, when I was a young and inexperienced writer, I hated revision. I did not embrace it. During the ten years I spent in the unpublished writer’s corner, having those awkward conversations at cocktail parties that usually ended with, “Are you published?” and when the answer was no, someone walking away to find a more interesting conversational companion, when I finished a book, I would poke at it a few times, put it away, and start a new one. If someone criticized a story I was writing, I would put it away and start another one. When an editor sent a rejection letter, I would paste it to the bathroom wall and start another book.

But I got over that. I evolved. I stopped being so childish and emotionally tender. I accepted that writers need to learn to deal with criticism. I learned to listen to the comments I was getting, looking for common themes or threads, and then rewrite the books. I stopped sulking when an astute reader said, “Your character is being stupid and Thea wouldn’t do that, she isn’t stupid.” And I started getting published, which meant I had an actual editor who might send me a nine page, single-spaced letter detailing the changes that she wanted, ending with “And pump up the Andre quotient.” Then we would have the discussion, or the argument, over those changes, reach an agreement, and I would make some, not make others, and end up with a better book. Thank you, Claire Eddy at Tor and Leona Nevler at Ballantine, for believing in my books and making me rewrite ’til my eyeballs bled.

Then I started my Joe Burgess series. One January day–yes, January, I decided to pick up on something people kept saying when I did library and bookstore talks. It went something like this: Reader–I’ve always wanted to write a book, and someday, when I have a free weekend, I’m going to write one. I confess to being amazed. It takes me anywhere from six months to several years to write a book, and I was meeting people who could do it in a weekend. Awed, disbelieving, and challenged, I decided to see how fast I could write a book. So I sat down that January and wrote Playing God, my first Joe Burgess police procedural. Four and half crazy months later, during which I wrote about ten hours a day and at the end of which I was so devoid of words I couldn’t write a grocery list, I typed “The End” at the bottom of a 485 page manuscript.

The agent I found to represent it–Joshua Bilmes–was never able to sell it, but he turned out to be the best editor I’ve ever had. He made me get rid of characters and telescope (combine) others. He made me take 100 pages out of the book. He helped me showcase the story and characters and give the book the dark voice and tone it ended up with. He taught me a lot, but the most important things he taught me were what are now my own rules for rewrite. Once the book is done, I make an “after the fact” outline. For each chapter, I describe, in just a few sentences, what happens. Then I ask the all-important questions:

How does this chapter or scene advance the plot?

How does this chapter or scene deepen or develop central character(s)?

Would the book be any different if this chapter or scene wasn’t there?

Eventually these rules expanded to also include a read in which I consider almost every word and ask whether it needs to be there, because I discovered I had a tendency not to trust my reader and so I said things too many times. There are still two words in Playing God that I’m not happy with.

Thank you, Deni Dietz and Gordon Aalborg at Five Star. Again for making me rewrite.

Learning to love rewrite is something I will undoubtedly have to learn, unlearn, relearn, and then learn all over again. Writers tend to love their words, their characters, their scenes. But the part of the beauty of writing is that the learning is never done. So I’ll embrace rewrite, reject it, relearn it, etc. Much like that lover you can’t stay away from because the attraction is so powerful.

And this January? I’m rewriting a book I have rewritten at least eight times over the last eight years. I don’t know if it will work this time. A year ago, in frustration, I hired a private editor to help me figure out why the editors who were reading it weren’t drawn to my central character, when I liked her a lot. The message: I’d taken the advice from Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel–to put a character in a bad situation, make it worse, then make it worse, and then figure out how to make it worse–too literally, and failed to first make my reader care enough about my character to want to follow her through all that.

I’m halfway through this rewrite. I don’t know if it will work this time, either. But I’m embracing the new clarity, trying to bring out the character’s voice and strengths, and hoping I’ll get it right.

So, you’ve always wanted to write a book? And sometime when you have a free weekend you’re going to write one? Well…welcome to eight years of free weekends, January weeks, and everything in between. And good luck.