K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 17

I Vant to Be Alone

No blog last week since I was out of town. Thought I carried my computer with me, I never turned it on. I wasn’t back on line ‘til Tuesday. At that point I was very far behind, and a bit reluctant to turn it on for fear of having my wrist slapped for my absence.
I find it very easy to give up email, cell phones and other “handy” devices for a day or so. Returning to them is overwhelming. I had 300 emails. Many could be ignored but a few needed answers two days before I read them.
Access to such devises makes life move faster, and I’m not sure I want that. I’d like to slow down and not be there when others call, because they must, to find out what I am doing now. Or to tell me what they are doing.

The Meaning of Food

On the radio this weekend I heard the phrase: the social life of lobsters.
The context was that most of us who eat lobsters don’t ever think of them as living feeling beings. I spend a lot of time at the museums trying to bring people closer to the origin of their food. Something must have clicked because in my daughter’s latest short story the protagonist is eating lunch with her date and he orders lamb. She thinks, but doesn’t tell him that she may have raised the lamb he is eating.

Corn and wheat probably don’t feel pain when stripped from the stalk and ground to meal or flour. I know for a fact that chickens don’t much like being killed. I doubt that lambs do either.

Today our food is grown and processed somewhere far away. The whole moral implication of eating has shifted. We are no longer responsible for raising and killing what we eat. The virtue of food is in its nutrition, or lack there of, what it will do or not do to our bodies. We have lost contact with the growing thing that will be our dinner, be it plant or animal. Once I ate one of the chickens I had raised from little fluff balls, I never saw a chicken dinner the same way again. I know the name of the cow in our freezer.

Do you think we have lost or gained by distancing ourselves from the origin of our food?

Constructing a Song Chain

Yesterday I started formatting my Holiday Story. For years now I have sent out a short story in place of Christmas Cards. I usually start writing August but this year it was September before I finally got word one on paper.

Most of these stories are around 2000 words. I don’t find writing and sending stories is any more difficult that finding the appropriate chards. It sure is more fun. But way more time consuming.

I once estimated it takes me 36 hours to write a short story. At 3000 words that comes to fewer than 100 words an hour. For sake of comparison, I have written 600 words in the last hour, without stopping to improve plot or character.

As much care goes into plotting a short story as a novel. The characters have to be almost as fully formed. A short story has to be more economical than a novel. Every single word has to carry weight and point toward the outcome.

I do save some time on character development by writing series characters. This is story two for Silas and Hannah. The settings, too, I reuse. I’m not sure what the model for Cobbs Crossing is, but many of my settings are places I work, or historic sites I have visited. I doubt that the reader ever sees that connection, but I am sure it makes the story richer.

Watch for Silas and Hannah in “The Song Chain” in the writing section of my Goodreads page.

Tiz the Season

I started my Christmas story in September and have been slogging away at it consistently since then. It isn’t the word count that is important (I’m at 1900) but joining the beginning to the end in a way that makes sense. I start with a sentence or a paragraph, a brief description of a scene or an encounter and then ask “what next?”

I have the beginning and the end but connecting them is no straight line. What would the protagonists know and how would they find it out? Why would the villain travel south and then north again? If he wouldn’t, what did he do? Is the horse an important clue or should I leave it out? Does Hannah ever find the eggs she needs for her baking?

Many writers start at the beginning and move through the story, outlining first and then filling out the bones. These are the “outliners”. The rest of us are called “blank pagers” or “pantsers” because we write by the seat of our pants. Both methods work fine, neither makes writing any easier.

I think I have all the wrinkles figured out, now I have to edit out the things that no longer fit and make sure the narrative follows logically. Sometime in early December I will post Hannah and the Earworm on my Goodreads author page and you can judge for yourself. Oh, I probably need to work on that title some.

The Magic of Books

The New College changed its name after John Harvard left the institution his library of 400 books and a bit of money.

My own library is many times the size of his. Most is made up of paperback fiction, but a fair percentage is hard cover classics. My library is strewn around the house in bookcases and in piles on the floor. Some that I have read and want to keep, is in boxes in the attic.

As a high school kid I baby sat in a house (I hesitate to call it a home) that had not a single piece of reading material in it, not even a TV guide. These were well educated upper middle class people with small children. This is so inconceivable to me that I have remembered it in detail. I even went through the trash looking for old newspapers. I can’t imagine living without something to read.

We seem to be returning to the day when 400 books were considered a huge library. With hand held reading devices, we will limit the number to something more manageable than my personal library. I probably could cull to a few hundred that I wanted to keep and feel and read from paper, and stuff the piles on the floor into some electronic thingy.

Can’t you just see John Harvard leaving his Kindle to the college?

What They Said and What They Meant

My editor asked me if I really meant that my protagonist considered herself better than everyone else in town. I had referred to her as one of the “better sort” in a story.

Everyone in the town found themselves in one of four categories. The “better sort” owned land, and had people working for them; they were influential in the government of the town and perhaps of the county or colony. The “middlins” were mostly skilled workers who sold their labor to others but who were capable of holding down good jobs. The “poorer sort” were free but unskilled workers. At the bottom of the ladder were the slaves and the indentured, who may in fact be skilled laborers.

This story is set in the early 18th century. Hannah absolutely believed she and Silas were better than most anyone in the town and that those positions were God given.

As a writer I am caught between presenting these people as I think they were and presenting them in a way that is palatable to today’s reader. I use my grandparents’ speech patterns to make the dialogue sound old but still understandable. Now and then I have to change words or meanings or actions in order to make the character sympathetic. Hannah would never accuse anyone of witchcraft or ignore a beaten child or wife. But she would never expect to vote or keep for herself any money she earned.

So what did I do about her being the “better sort”? I made her a member of the gentry instead.

What it Must Have Been Like

I write something every day. It may not be much and it may not be planned. I work on my fiction less that I would like to, and have not worked on my Christmas story for several days now.
I have been too busy working on background.

This weekend was Fall Festival at Newlin Grist Mill. The site looked a lot more like and active 18th century homestead than it usually does. There were people everywhere. I had two chickens and two lambs in a small pen near the barn. The cow was home sick.
Spinners, lace makers, a gunsmith, millers, bakers, cooks, and the public mingled in and around the historic buildings.

One forgets that history isn’t about buildings but about people. To see the site filled with happy active people gives one a real feel for what it must have been like in 1750.

Writers' Genders

I have been a member of Sisters in Crime for maybe 15 years. The mission is to put female writers on a par with male writers. I had always considered myself to be unprejudiced in this matter. This morning I got a poke with a sharp stick. I have just finished reading Island of Exiles by I.J. Parker. I loved it. Just the right amount of sex and violence. So I went looking for the author to see what else I might find in the series. I was shocked to find that ‘I’ stands, not for Isaiah but for Ingrid. Then I was shocked that I was shocked.
I firmly believe that gender has nothing to do with how well you write or what you chose to write about. Could a woman write Jack Reacher? Probably, but would she be published? I’m not going to try to answer that. I have worked hard to rid myself of the inclination toward male writers being good and female writers being iffy. I can only assume there is a lot more prejudice out there than I thought.
K.B. (the K stands for Katharine, not Kenneth)

The Downs and Ups of Doing History

Down:
On Saturday I attended a presentation on disease during the Civil War. While the germ theory of disease was known, clean air was thought to be the way to good health. Proper windows and curtains were important but doctors didn’t wash their hands or satirize their equipment. When people ask if I wouldn’t like to live in Early America all I say is “doctors and dentists.”
Up:
This morning I grabbed something from the fridge and stuffed it into my cooler for lunch. Little did I know that a whole 18th century tavern meal awaited me when I got to work. Meat pasties, carrot pudding, slaw, bread pudding. Tea rather than a rum punch.
Newlin Grist Mill where I work is doing a tavern night this weekend and the staff got to be the guinea pigs for the food if not the drink.
Spices were expensive in the colonial period. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice were kept under lock and key. They were used in both savory and sweet foods so some of the tastes, while not what we are used to, are pleasing. What a wonderful lunch.

A Few Good Writers

The last month and a half have been very hard for me. A sea of troubles culminated in an actual flood. Our house was an island, but we managed to keep the water out of the house with sandbags and vigilance.
I was feeling pretty low last Tuesday when I bagged my regular activity to go to a book signing at a local library. I have known this author for years and try to go every time she speaks near my home.
I walked in the door as she was greeting people and talking with the library people who were going to introduce her. As soon as she saw me she crossed the room and hugged me. Neither of us are the touchy-feely kind of people but that hug was just what I needed.
Writers are solitary people. One has to be to sit at a desk for hours pulling stories out of one’s head. But she is not the only member of the writing community to make me feel cared for. Three plants on my kitchen windowsill attest to the caring of my online writer friends. I am still getting cards from far away writers who are just finding out about the death of my husband.
I have found writers to be enormously giving, friendly, and supportive.