Carol Newman Cronin's Blog, page 64

Self-Sufficiently Grateful

I like to think of myself as a self-sufficient person. I pay almost all my own bills, buy my own boats and cars. I even put out the trash this morning. And that makes it easy to forget one basic fact of life: there are many people who make my joy possible.

So this year, I'm giving thanks and naming names. I'm sure I'll forget someone, so  if you've helped me in the past year, thank you! (Carole at BankNewport—who cleared up a pesky lost check with grace and thoroughness—this means you.)

Here goes, in no particular order: a list of the people who make it possible for me to live an offbeat and truly wonderful life.

Paul Cronin, out getting some air

Paul Cronin

If this were the acknowledgement section of a book, the husband would be mentioned last. But since I thought of you first, here's a public shoutout: thanks for making my life more enjoyable by being so supportive of your non-traditional wife! I look forward to more joint projects (and maybe even a vacation?) in 2011.

Clients

For some reason this great group of people thinks I'm worth the money they pay me, even when I disappear to a regatta during what should be a regular work week. Thanks for allowing me a very flexible schedule—and for staying solvent in a tough economy, so I can continue to thumb my nose at the unemployment figures.

Readers

Writing and publishing books can seem like a thankless and lonely job… until some random email comes in from an unknown reader who picked up one of my books at a library or bookstore and wrote to say "Keep Writing!"  Thanks to readers known and otherwise who have shared their enjoyment of Oliver's Surprise and Cape Cod Surprise this year.

Teammates

For the past few years, I've done a lot of competitive sailing with a group of women who not only give up leisure time to freeze and boil with me, but who also make me laugh. Thanks also to the ever-widening circle of sailing friends who help make the regatta parking lot such a nice place to hang out.

Kim Couranz

In particular for 2010 I want to call out Kim Couranz, one of the top Snipe crews in the world, who crossed the line before me in every single race of our 8 regattas this year. Our fifth place finish at Nationals qualified us for the 2011 Snipe Worlds, and I'm really looking forward to more sailing together next year.

Community

I've lived in Jamestown, RI for almost fifteen years, longer than I've lived anywhere else, and a large part of my contentment is the people I see around town. I may not know your last name, but the friendly familiarity of our interactions comforts me. Whether I run into you at dinner downtown or in the post office, or if you're one of those from whom we borrow tools and expertise, thank you for your positive outlook on life. And a very special thanks to all the great folks at Jamestown Hardware, who never laugh at the projects I take on.

Fellow Authors

A new circle of friends was added to my life in 2010 when we gathered together a gaggle of Boston-area authors to talk about how best to market our novels. Since then this loose-knit group has helped launch five books, including Cape Cod Surprise. Best of all, there's more to come, beginning with Juliette Fay's launch in January 2011. I can't wait to share in the future successes of such a smart and supportive group!

Volunteers

Lots of people make my racing possible by running regattas, providing housing and airport pickups, storing cars and boats (that means you, Peter and Connie Commette), and generally supporting my addiction to one-design sailing around the country. I try to thank you whenever I think of it, but it can't ever be often enough.

Nameless Small Favor Doers

Sometimes those unexpected good deeds from someone I don't even know can take on a special significance. Locally we call them "Jamestown moments," but they happen in many different places. So to all the unknown folks who have done me a favor in 2010, especially the nice woman I met yesterday at the grocery store checkout—thank you.

Family

Scattered and diverse as we all are, there's a strong bond that holds us all together. Best wishes to both Newmans and Cronins for a great Thanksgiving, and Paul and I look forward to sharing it with many of you!

Scribbling in Scrivener

Scrivener |ˈskriv(ə)nər|: A clerk, scribe, or notary.

Back when the luscious and literary word "Scrivener" was popular, there was no choice of how words were recorded. Some sort of writing implement was used to etch or draw letters on to some sort of (hopefully) flat surface. Good light was expensive, and so was good paper. Just transferring ideas into readable form was a huge challenge.

Today's authors have a choice of media for capturing our stories:

1. Longhand pen/paper — a must for some, hopelessly old-fashioned for most.

2. The typewriter — a dust-covered icon of the good old days (back when authors were starving in garrets, seldom interacted with readers, and never—heavens no—had anything to do with hand-dirtying sales.)

3. The word processor — which allows us to move pieces of text around like so many icefloes in a winter harbor, hopefully stringing together a readable narrative.

4. Scrivener — "The biggest software advance for writers since the word processor." (That's according to author Michael Marshall Smith.)

My grandmother, the novelist Daisy Newman, spent most of her fifty-year career tapping away on a series of typewriters, grudgingly switching to a word processor for the last book she published. Even after she adopted the word processor, her method of editing remained the same: type out a fresh paragraph, scissor it down to a small strip, and then paper-clip it over the offending text on an existing page. Even to my eight year old eyes it looked cumbersome, but it worked for her; she produced numerous novels (and one sprawling non-fiction history of Quakers in America). Four of her books are still in print, almost twenty years after her death.

When I started writing typewriters were the tool of choice, but their spelling was terrible and editing seemed cumbersome. What a joy to discover the blinking green cursor of that first word processor! Now my typing could keep up with my thoughts, and I could go back later to edit my thoughts into something that would be understandable to others.

And two decades later, I've discovered an even greater joy: the ultimate flexibility and mind-expanding potential of Scrivener.

According to its website, Scrivener was designed for managing large writing projects and is "particularly suited to writers who don't always think in a linear fashion." Need to access a photo or website that captures the flavor of a particular scene? Have a shimmer of an idea that needs to be written down, long before it will be obvious where it belongs? Want to capture a snippet of dialogue that comes to mind when imagining a character?  Scrivener makes it all easy. After using it for just a few months, it's completely revamped my approach to big writing projects.

I've never been a good outliner. Oh I'd start off by writing an outline, but once I had the barest sense of a story I would turn the characters loose. This has led to some great scenes and two published books, but I've also followed barely-formed characters down a lot of dead end streets—and hung on through many a wild goose chase.

Thanks to Scrivener, I'm test-driving a different approach. Now I write ideas on electronic "note cards" and then group them together by character name or subject or scene. These note cards can easily be reordered on the corkboard, and there is room for as much detail as necessary on empty "pages" that lurk in the background. Click on the note card and bing! The details pop up in a different window.

Research ideas (even those as vague as "talk to Cathy" ) can be collected in a special unstructured section that accepts URL's, photos, PDF's—almost any file form. No more searching my desk and pockets (and washing machine) for that one wrinkled receipt with the most important link ever written on the back.

I'm really enjoying the freedom of this new approach, but I've had to do some brain rewiring. Though I've never been a slave to daily word count I have found comfort in the pages piling up, even if half or more of those pages will eventually be winnowed out. This time around, at least in the planning stages, there is no buildup of text to reassure me that my story is coming together. All I see is ideas that may or may not fall into place in a story that may or may not turn out as planned.

Writing is much more than just putting words on a page, and how that "page" appears even in first drafts can be hard to separate from how we view the entire project. Scrivener is teaching me how my brain works, and that's leading me to a new way of building a story.

Will it work? Just like with longhand, typewriters, and word processors, there's still only one way to find out.

Escaping to the Sea

[image error]I figured I'd like Sea Escape, since it was set, mostly, in a house on the beach just south of Boston. I'm also a sucker for stories that reveal the mysteries of a family's past. But it's the writing that really drew me into the world of Laura and Helen, into their spellbinding tangle of old love letters and old grievances and new life challenges. The writing is what made me fall in love.

The daughter, Laura, is mother to two lovingly imperfect children. She is also sister to a mostly absent older brother. And the book reaches back into the past far enough to include her grandparents… though only as background for the earliest of the love letters that Laura's father would write to his wife Helen over years of separation. The main story is between Helen and Laura, at the end of Helen's life.

Laura has always resisted reading her father's letters, which her mother has carried around since his death twenty years earlier.  She doesn't think her curiosity about a father she barely remembers would justify the invasion of privacy. But when her mother has a stroke, Laura tells herself that her father's words will give her mother peace.  She doesn't count on also learning how complicated her parents' relationship really was.

The novel moves forward chronologically, but it also steps back in time as Laura works her way through the decades of finger-worn papers filed carefully in an old shoebox. Helen spent most of her marriage making her house (also named "Sea Escape") perfect for her husband's return—until he died on his final trip home, when Laura was in her teens.

What Laura learns from the letters is her father's true reasons for staying away.  Griffin skillfully gives the reader just enough information to keep the story moving without making anything too obvious. Just like real life, we can glimpse bits and pieces of the past through the letters, but the story is never wrapped up too neatly to feel unrealistic. As the very first sentence explains, "Letters are windows casting light, illuminating the ties between two people."

My only complaint about this lovely book (and it's a small one) is that some very dramatic scenes are described with such sparse language that I had to go back and reread the section to make sure something calamitous had really happened. Yes Laura is a nurse and not prone to dramatics, but in a few key places this dry reporting is taken too far.

Reading Sea Escape will probably teach you something about yourself, and it will definitely teach you something about the characters you grow to love.  Don't wait until next summer to devour this very satisfying beachside story.

Boats Meet Books in Newport

"Author's Corner – what's that?"

"You wrote these books yourself?"

"What age group are they meant for?"

"Where do I find a bathroom?"

Those are just a random sampling of the many questions I answered this past weekend at the Newport International Boat Show.  Probably not the first place you would think of for bookselling, but it turned out to be a great venue for my two Surprises.  With abundant sunshine and temps in the 70's, the weather was perfect for boat gawking out on the docks.  And once t...

The Family of Snipe

This post first appeared on the Boats.com blog.

Sailors know that summer in Annapolis means heat, humidity, motorboat chop, jellyfish—and no wind. So when a hundred and thirty Snipe sailors choose to spend a week of August vacation there, they must be counting on something more than just the sailing to make it worthwhile.

Cronin and Couranz round the leeward gate mark with another boat tight on their transom.

That something more is the chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones...

Dreaming Like A Real Author

I always wanted to be a "real" author.  Long before I knew how to spell "synopsis" or understood the need for a rock solid query, I imagined stroking the cover of a book I'd written myself.

Now that I've stroked not just one but two of my own books, I understand there is more to being a "real" author than just writing a good story.  In order to give our creations the best possible chance at success, we also have to market and sell our work.  And apparently that concerns my subconscious, since ...

Cape Cod Surprise Meets Olympic Spirit

What a party it was! I heard someone ask, "Why isn't the Boston Globe here?  This is an EVENT."

On Thursday, July 1 2010 we launched Cape Cod Surprise. The weather was perfect; sunny but not too hot, and not a speck of humidity (by Boston standards at least).  The Sail Loft generously provided their delicious chowder and appetizers.  And so many writers and sailors bought books and helped us celebrate, I lost count. Thanks to everyone who came to launch CCS into the world, especially to...

On the Ways with Cape Cod Surprise

Ready for the splash?

On Thursday, July 1, 2010, with your help, we'll launch my newest book, Cape Cod Surprise, at the Sail Loft in Boston's North End. The invites have been sent out, the raffle prizes are coming together, the books are waiting to be signed… and the early summer weather has us all ready for another adventure with Oliver.

Best of all, proceeds from all books sold at the event will go to support Piers Park Sailing Center, a community organization in East Boston that provides...

A "Surprise" Launch Party!

Now for the fun part! The launch party for Cape Cod Surprise will take place at the Sail Loft in Boston's North End on Thursday, July 1.  The event will be a chance to meet some new characters, reunite with faces familiar from Oliver's Surprise… and best of all, raise money for a great cause.  Proceeds from every book sold will go toward the educational programs at Piers Park Sailing Center.

PPSC in East Boston gives over 1000 local kids the chance to go sailing every summer.  They also...

Cape Cod Surprise: It is Finished.

I know, I know, I wrote a few weeks ago I was finished with the new book.  But "finished" has different stages.  And though the authorly part was complete, the graphic design work (cover and interior) weren't quite ready to go to press.

It's quite unusual for an author to design her own cover, but most authors don't have graphic design experience.  Being able to use all of my talents to create a beautiful book (as well as a good story) is one of the great things about working with publisher a