K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 2

In the Inglee Household, Santa is Black

One of the stranger things about Christmas in our family is our total and unshakable belief that Santa Claus is Black.

As a family we are about as white as you can get. Both my husband and I can trace our ancestors back to the early colonial period. We have just enough Native American thrown in to be truly American. How can a family like ours celebrate a black Santa? Blame that on my daughter.

It started when she was very young and her day care badgered one of the parents into putting on a red suit and jolly attitude and giving out gifts. Joe had two attributes not usually associated with Santa, he was thin as a rail and of African descent. So my daughter knows for sure that Santa is a skinny black man.

We first discovered her belief when, a year or so later, we took her to the mall to visit Santa. She screamed her lungs out and refused to have anything to do with him. This wasn't an unusual reaction. The store was full of screaming kids. We didn't think much of it until, on the way home she told us that he wasn't the real Santa because he was white. 

The next year we were downtown looking at the decorations in the store windows. She watched the foot traffic carefully, and noted the Santa bell ringers on every corner. She asked how could there be so many, wasn't there only one? She took my hand and went up to one.

"You're the real Santa."

"What makes you think that?" he asked.

"Because you are the only one who is black."

We as a family still believe that Santa is black. We have a large collection of ceramic Santas, all black. We use black Santa gift wrap.

A couple of years ago, black Santas became more readily available. I picked up a ceramic Santa for my daughter's collection. When I got to check out, the clerk leaned across the counter and whispered, "You know this Santa is black, don't you?"

"Yes," I answered, rather loudly, "Our family believes Santa is black."

You don't suppose Santa could be a black WOMAN, do you?
 

Happy Birthday Louisa

Today is Louisa May Alcott's birthday. Thought I often forget it, she is my favorite writer. My favorite work? Not Little Women of her fireside reading, nor Behind the Mask, the darker fare she liked to write.

My two favorite pieces are Hospital Sketches about nursing, and a short story about the author being bothered by a woman who collects a grasshopper off the lawns of famous writers, and the lengths the author will go to in order to rid herself of such pests (not the grasshoppers). I think the grasshopper story is in Life at Plumfiled. After first reading it, the story seemed to vanish from existence. Anybody provide a citation for it?

Louisa was 20 years older than my Emily (The Case Book of Emily Lawrence). Emily's father would have been friends with Louisa's father Bronson Alcott. In fact many of the episodes in Emily's life are straight from biographies of Louisa. In the "Lothrop Brigade", the story of the Professor coming home from an abolitionist meeting with a bloodied head? That was Bronson Alcott. Emily's older sister Anna tells of dinner with the James family, where the men refused to let the women get a word in edgewise. This was Louisa's experience.

Louisa served as a nurse in Washington during the Civil War. In Hospital Sketches she describes the whole experience, from her first interview in Boston, to her return home when she was too ill to continue the work. Perhaps this is why I chose to set many of my Emily stories in Washington.

Louisa saw herself as caretaker for her father, a man who couldn't seem to care for himself or his family. Bronson died March 4, 1888. Louisa died March 6, 1888. It was said at the time she followed him into death because he still needed her.

November 11th, 2016

I have been reading a perfectly lovely book. Engaging characters, vivid setting, strong plot. I was zipping along wondering how it was all going to turn out, and actually making notes on what was happening. The author describes the garden with loving care, and clearly knowledgeable about music. I love books that teach me something. This book made me want to go out and fix up my yard that is sadly lacking in care. Want to know what it was? The Uninvited Guest by Debi Grahma-Leard, published by Riverhaven Books.

I was zipping along, wondering when the nasty house guest was going to get hers, and then I came to a screeching halt. The flute teacher "dueted" with her student. What? Duet is a verb? Since when? My computer spell check doesn't think it is, but my computer spell check is pretty dumb and frequently gets me into trouble.

Being the kind of reader I am (remember, I like books that teach me something and this was surely something I didn't know) I picked up the dictionary by my foot. The American Heritage Dictionary lists duet as a noun, not a verb. So I dashed off emails to two friends, one a musician and one a wordsmith. Both replied they didn't think "duet" was a verb, but when they looked it up, sure enough it was. Since 1822 apparently. My own hardcover OED, which I consulted after the fact, said yes it can be a verb, but it didn't give any further information, an example or a date of use.

I don't know how an author can tell that they have written something that will tear the reader out of the work and into some other mental endeavor. Do my readers put down the book and look up the history of fingerprinting to see if Emily actually could have found the murderer by the bloody print on the weapon? Does my pedantic use of an unfamiliar word rip the reader away from the text? I once used "antidisestablishmentarianism" in a manuscript. That isn't a word one gets to use a whole lot any more. It has to do with the government approved church. If you want to know more, look it up or email your friends. That particular manuscript has yet to be published, but you can bet that word will vanish with the first editing.

Authors really can't know how readers will react to the things they write. Writers see the work from the inside. They know way more about any story that actually ends up on the page. It takes a reader who isn't so intimately involved with the manuscript to find the jarring moments that seem so perfect to the writer. An editor reads like a reader not like an author. I can't tell you how many times my manuscripts have been saved by good editing.

Am I going back to finish reading the book? Absolutely. I am dying to know what happens to the wicked house guest.

Watching Salem

I am not an historian but I make my living doing history. I work as an interpreter at a 1704 grist mill. I also write historical short stories.

This week I started watching the TV show Salem. It is a piece of fiction set in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1680s and '90s, the period leading up to the Witch trials and probably including the trials themselves. But I will never get that far. I made it almost all the way to the end of the first episode.

As I say, I am not an historian so the facts of the case never bother me as much as the way daily life is presented. I could live with John Alden (the son of "Speak for yourself, John", and Priscilla Mullins) as the best preserved 60 year old I have ever seen. But I was beginning to fuss about the clothing. Most of the women wore white linen caps, as they should. Mary Sibley, the beautiful young love interest wore a bit of black lace on her head. Not very practical. The single thing that made me realize that this series was not for me was a quick glance Mary's hands. Her fingernails were perfectly manicured, sparkly with clear nail polish. This is a woman who never did any hard labor. Now, of course she was the wife of the richest man in Salem, but even a woman of status did her share of the work. There simply were not enough hands to do everything that was needed.

I am not fond of the portrayal of Cotton Mather (see picture) as another young hunk. He was in his late 30s at the time of the trials. I'm not sure he was ever a hunk, even during his teenage years when he was a student at Harvard. He was a brilliant and caring man, who is seen here as a raving fanatic.

What didn't bother me was the portrayal of the devil as a real creature. I though he was sort of charming, if over sexed. He certainly was more interesting than any of the real men in the story. I wanted to see more of him than little flashes.

What the viewer is deprived of here, is the view of these people living on the edge of a wilderness, three months of rugged ocean journey from their home. They have clawed out a tiny bit of (English) civilization on the coast of an unforgiving land with inhabitants who don't act at all like Englishmen. They face death daily. They work hard to stay alive. They are dependent on the stability of their community to support them.

Isn't this a far better story than that of pretty ladies and gentlemen lusting after each other?

Contamination

I hate it when my characters contaminate crime scenes.

On page 84 of The Case Book of Emily Lawrence, Emily picks up a murder weapon, looks it over carefully, and takes it back to her cabin. She and Charles were traveling just off the coast of Connecticut, not on the open sea. The year is 1882.

In 1880, she tramples all over a crime scene, walking on the carpet, scraping at the marks on a windowsill, scuffing through the snow were the footprints may point to a possible perpetrator.

In the unpublished stores, she moves a body before the police have been notified. I'm sure she does endless other things we know better than to do today.

I always get nervous when one of my characters contaminates a crime scene, or fiddles with evidence. I've been to endless presentations on crime scenes, and the first and foremost principle is that you don't fiddle with them. I have learned well, but in Emily's day there was no such thing as contaminating the crime scene.

No one thought much about the sites that we now know hold clues to what happened, and even who did it. Police were there to stop crime, not to solve it.
If you have read any Sherlock Holmes you know that the cops are routinely astonished at Holmes request that nothing be touched until he arrives. The first Holmes story A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887 and gives a pretty good picture of how the police acted at the time. The Metropolitan Police, Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard was formed in 1854 but didn't become official until 1878.

Most of the police force in Washington was composed of patrolmen, not detectives. Cambridge had three police stations at the time but no detective division. I had to mess around with history some to give Emily officials to work with in the police.

Edmond Locard, famous for Locard's exchange principle, wasn't born until 1877.
Still I am stuck in the present day and it is hard for me to make my protagonist act in a way that counters all my modern sensibilities.

I'd be interested to know if any of you are bothered by things in your writing or reading that, while all right for the time or place, aren’t modern day best practices.
 

I Hate Summer

Today is September 8, and the temperature at 6 AM is 75 degrees, and it is supposed to go into the low 90s.

I am never aware of how enervated I am in hot weather. I think I am perfectly fine until it cools down and I look back at my output during the hot spell. A little bit of writing, two short story submissions. As little housework as possible.

Even in the cooler mornings, dog walks are all less than a mile.

I feel perfectly fine, not a thing wrong, my window air-conditioned works just fine, and I am comfortable here at the computer with my glass of ice tea.

In bed, the window AC is too noisy and I can't seem to control the direction the cool air is blowing. My big window fan broke and I had to replace it with a noisy one.

No wonder September is my favorite month. I come back to life. September has always been my most productive month.

In June I participated in a 250 words per day challenge. I wrote every day except two, and made it over the limit every writing day but one. I worked on a couple of projects. I wrote a short story and submitted it for publication, I picked up a novel I had put down to work on The Case Book of Emily Lawrence. I wrote a birthday story for a friend. Then the hot weather and a screeching halt to pretty much everything.

I went to work as required. Two days a week, air-conditioned. Stuff I like to do.

Each week I accomplish two writing assignments, my blog and a letter to my sister. I did manage the letter but the blog was spotty at best.

The worst thing about the heat is the things I forget. While I am of an age to become forgetful, I have always has always made a tendency toward inattention. I have spare car keys stashed around because I come in and put mine down without thinking. Then later I don't know where I put them. The worst this year was buying a three pack of mouth wash, taking one out and using it. When I tossed the bottle, I had no idea where I had stashed the other two. They will turn up when I start looking for places to hide Christmas presents.

Fan Fiction

 Before I decided knew I wanted to be a serious writer I wrote fan fiction. That seems to be some kind of terrible confession, but I believe everyone does it.
My first attempt was a Margarete Henry pastiche. I didn't use her characters but mine were very like hers in all but name.

As a young mother I wrote personalized works for my daughter to explain things like why I had to go away and that I would come back. I wrote moral fables favoring diversity (The Puce Elephant) and self-reliance (I don't remember any titles if they even had any). I thought this would be the direction of my writing career, and was not fan fiction unless you consider Dr. Seuss.

Then Star Trek came along. And I wrote some of the worst Star Trek FIC ever. I found it embarrassing, so I destroyed it. Not just the sex, but the inability to make characters work, and my misunderstanding of the science involved.

When I found Wild Wild West, I discovered it was easier to slip myself into that world. That doesn't mean the writing was any better. The late 1800s spoke to me in a way that the future didn't. I think that maybe Emily started as WWW fan fiction.

Fan Fiction (FIC) taught me how to put a sentence together in a real written story, how to make characters do what I wanted them to do, how to plan a story arc. It also taught me to sit and write. I was writing long hand on legal pads at that point, and hand writing was about as fast as my mind worked, so it suited me well. I still have all the handwritten bits of my first and unpublished novel, A Pleasant Place to Die.

A week or so ago my daughter handed me a text book, yes a real text for a collage class, called FIC, by Anne Jamison. She treats fan fiction as though it were real literature, and a proper subject for a college level class.

The book stands at the very edge of my familiarity. There were words I don't understand, mostly related to writing for the internet. Concepts that are still beyond me. But they seem authentic and I will continue to struggle with them. Slasher, wank, and verse, for example. I have meanings for them but they aren't the ones in the FIC vocabulary.

We all started at the very edge of the writing worked and wormed our way in by sticking to the craft and improving our use of it. Many of us began with fan fiction as I did.

Yesterday at a book signing a woman read me a passage, a bit of FIC she had written that was very lush and descriptive. I have forgotten what she told me the subject was, but I remember some of the phrases. I encouraged her to write more and find herself a safe writing community.

Writing is writing and people who do it are writers. Everybody has to start somewhere.

Where Are My New Glasses?

I am accident prone. No I don't fall down stairs, though I do trip over my feet from time to time and my balance is poor.

These are a different kind of accidents. If I order lobster bisque I will get clam chowder. If I order a piece of clothing on line I will get the yellow one, not the blue one. This happened often enough so that I have stopped complaining. I really would prefer the more pedestrian clam chowder, and I can make do with yellow if I wear a jacket over it.

This is why I seldom buy things on line. Who knows what I will get in place of the thing I ordered.

This last month has topped everything in the order department.

I have had my blue framed bifocals for ages and was beginning to struggle. Time for new glasses.

On June 17 I went to BJs Optical with my new prescription and ordered a pair of red unlined reading and walking around glasses. Since they offered a second pair for $60, I ordered a pair of computer glasses. I didn't care what color the frame was. My computer doesn't make judgements about my appearance. I pointed to the frames next to the red ones of my choice. "Those," I think they were kind of a silvery grey.

I was told I could pick them up in two weeks. Two weeks and one day later I went to get them.

"They aren’t in yet, and the 4th of July holiday will move the pickup date to July 5th." I gave them an extra day and went back on July 6. "Not in yet. They should be in, I don't know what happened. Try again in a couple of days."

Much to my amazement they were in on July 8. Well one pair was in, the red ones. My bifocals. The morning of July 9, I put them on in place of my old ones and went out to walk the dog. Everything was fine until I realized I couldn’t read the license plates on the cars we walked by.

July 10 was a Sunday so I expected Optical to be closed. It was open when I did a bit of food shopping. I got everything I wanted, in the correct amounts.
Turns out Optical was open. I explained my problem, rushed home to get the glasses, and brought them back.

"Well of course you can't see while walking the dog. These are your computer glasses. The others haven’t come in yet."
"But the red ones were supposed to be my everyday glasses and the computer glasses had some other color. Does that mean my everyday glasses are going to be some color I don't even remember picking out?"

She checked the computer. "Purple."

OK next dilemma. Do I delay the delivery of the regular glasses, yet again, by requesting another color frame? Or do I go with PURPLE, and hope that they come in at all?

Suddenly my mind was full of all the horrible things that could happen if I changed the order. Would they lose it entirely? Would they give me someone else's glasses? Would they say they never heard of me?

Tomorrow, July 14, three days short of a full month after I placed the order, I will go over to see if my PURPLE everyday glasses are in.

Maybe I can make these two pair of glasses last the rest of my life, because I don't want to go through this again.

Why Doesn't Research Stay Done?

Why doesn't research stay done? Why do I have to keep looking up the same thing over and over? Why does it seem like history changes between dives into the records?

I don't know the answers to this, but here are a couple of things I have run into.
For the novel I am revising now (working title Death on the Delaware) I have to deal with the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. I researched it when I started the story a couple of years ago. I did it again before I picked it up for the first uncompleted rewrite. Third time, I am now looking into it again to participate in a words-per-day writing challenge. First time I didn't find it interesting enough to incorporate it into the writing, except by mere mention. Second time I discovered the "Give us our 11 days" campaign. Nice etching by Hogarth. That would be fun to write about. So I shifted the dates a bit, only to abandon the work again. Third time, and it may stick. Turns out (maybe) the GUOED campaign may have been a figment of Hogarth's imagination. There seem to be only two references to it, Hogarht's picture and one other.

I figured out how my characters would have reacted given their lot in life and went with that. Then a friend wrote and suggested, maybe living in the colonies, they didn't even know about it. That was fairly easy to solve. Were any newspapers published during those 11 days? The Pennsylvania Gazette, Ben Franklin's paper was published on September 1. 2. 14 & 15. Missing eleven days, or none depending on how you count.

Emily and Charles (The Case Book of Emily Lawrence) attend three churches in the course of the book: First Parish Cambridge, what is now All Souls in Washington, and The Universalist church in Rutland, Vermont. All Souls has a website that lists many of the ministers but not the one who served while E&C were attending. They built a new building while my characters attended, but the present building is newer still. First Parish has been helpful in several ways. I wrote the whole first Emily novel with the idea that the church interior had never changed. That is a pretty dumb assumption. Ernest Cassara, board chair, showed me a photograph of the interior as Emily would have seen it. The current minister, Clyde Grubs, put me in touch with the Andover Harvard librarian who gave me the name of the minster who had married the happy couple.

I didn’t need as many details for Rutland, but the church historian supplied the name of the cemetery where Charles and his family are buried, and a few facts about the church itself. My first go round made me feel secure that the church was there, so I wrote it into the story. It turned out it wasn't established until after I need it, so I made the assumption that a group of funders met for some time in homes until they pulled together enough support to establish he church.

I suspect I read what I want to believe the first time around and then when I recheck, I begin to see the light.

Where are my eleven days?

My novel set in 11 days that didn’t exist
Odd, the way history pops up to disturb my writing.
I had written several thousand words on a novel when I realized that somewhere in the action, 11 days are missing.

 No, I didn't misplace them. In September 1752, Great Brittan decided, with good reason, to lop off those 11 days. The colonies, being British, followed suit.
Matching the calendar to the solar year so that all the days align properly is a difficult thing since the solar year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and a handful of seconds long. You can't chop that up evenly into days even if you had a clock accurate enough to give you that information.

The Julian (for Julius Caesar) Calendar made January 1 the beginning of the year and brought the system in line with the solar year. A gradual creep over the centuries put the calendar year 11 days off the solar year. The Gregorian (for Pope Gregory XIII) Calendar was closer to the natural cycle of the solar year. The Gregorian year was still about 26 seconds longer than a solar year.

Most of Europe switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1500s, but Great Britain and other protestant countries saw no reason to follow a Pope’s decree.
For an agricultural based society this shift didn’t much change daily life but it did cause some confusion. George Washington was born on both February 11, and February 22. That’s just one example of how the loss of eleven days can mess things up. Another: imagine leaving London on June 28 and arriving in Paris on June 17th.

I hadn't yet figured out how all this would work for my characters when I set it aside to work on another project. In the time the three ring binder sat on the shelf, my subconscious dealt with the problem. When I picked up the work again last week and printed out a calendar for 1752, it was very clear the days were missing. September was three weeks long.

Some problems for my characters? You bet.

A major event, like the anniversary of the death of a child, was swallowed up along with the missing days. What is the poor mother to do when it is her habit to spend the day in seclusion? What will she do next year when the date is restored to the calendar, but in her heart is not the date of his death?
Poor Silas probably doesn't know when he has to get his paperwork to his boss the county sheriff. Rents are due, but the renter has fewer days to make the money to pay them.

And for this town in particular, a local festival has to be shifted to a date other than the traditional one. That would cut 11 days out of preparation time. Maybe it won't be as much fun this year. Maybe this isn't really much of a problem since the town is dealing with the murder of a stranger.