K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 21

Resolutions

Every year I make New Years Resolutions. They are actually goals for my writing which stretch me just a bit. Without goals I would write six stories a year, and submit none of them. I usually attend two conferences a year. I enter a contests or two because I work well to a deadline.

At the start of 2010 I set goals of writing 12 short stories, submitting 6. When I counted up my work for the year I had 13 short stories and 7 submissions.

So, in 2011, I will work on another rewrite of my novel and submit it at least once. I will write a short story each month. That should be manageable. I am already half way through story number one, and dashed off a second 500 word opus yesterday, instead of submitting this blog.

I do have one fall back resolution. I make it every year and keep it faithfully so by the end of the year if the others have not gone well, this one makes me feel like a success. I will not smoke cigarettes.

Editors

I am totally incapable of producing a perfect manuscript. I tried to do it here and you can bet any entry that has no typos, misspellings or missing words has been edited.
There was a post on one of my writers’ loops saying that there is a missing word in the second line of Tom Clancy’s latest. I’m sure you have found errors in books by well-known authors. Where are the editors?
I buy most of my books at an independent bookstore and was talking to the owner, who is himself an editor. It had been clear to me that while the more famous writers had been edited early on, at some point the editors disappeared. BSO said that yes, editing was cut to a minimum for fear the author would switch publishers. One well-known author did switch houses because they were NOT editing his work. Good for him.
Editors come in two varieties. One edits for story elements, flow, awkward sentences, characters acting out of character. The second edits for errors in the word structure. I am lucky enough to have an editor who does both.
So my most heartfelt thanks and best wishes for happy holidays to my editors, Ramona, Greg, Kaye, and especially Betsy who makes all right with this blog.

Tradition

Christmas is a time of Tradition. I represent two of them. My family is descended from the Separatists who came to the new world because they were required by law to attend the Church of England. Here they could establish their own church and worship as they pleased. Christmas was a day like any other, with work to be done.
I interpret a Quaker family in the Mid-Atlantic who did not celebrate Christmas. Christmas was a day like any other, with work to be done.
My own celebration of the holiday is minimal. The older I get the more pared down it gets. I usually get a big gift for each family member but it is seldom given on Christmas Day. My daughter got hers about a month ago, and my husband gets his in the middle of January. My niece gets hers monthly.
My husband, who is descended from those other colonials who came with the celebration writ large on their hearts, insists on a tree, a crèche, a tiny village, and excessive gifts.
We all agree on the food. Big dinner with every imaginable condiment.
Today is Christmas Eve, and I am sitting in the Mill office dressed as one of those Quaker women who fussed about the noise and public drunkenness of the non Quakers in the area who were less staid, and in her opinion, less reverent.

Clothes and the Woman

Seems most small museums do their Christmas programs early in December. Greenbank’s and the Hale-Byrnes House’s were on the same day. I spun at Greenbank and my friend spun at Hale-Byrnes. I have several sets of period clothing, but she had none so I lent her my best shortgown, a blue and blue on white print from Williamsburg and a scarlet petticoat of linen, a touch of hand knit lace on the cap.
We have to be able to work in the clothing we wear. It’s supposed to be roomy and comfortable. Only dress up clothing had to look good.
When I retrieved my clothing last evening, I asked how she did in it. Her comments led me to believe she saw the value in dressing properly. She got lots of complements on the lovely shortgown, but beyond that she could move freely, and she looked the part both in dress and posture. Each historical period has its own way of holding the body based on the clothing of the time. The clearest example of that is the 1860s with tight corsets and dropped shoulders.
My daughter pointed out to me that when we go to sites as tourists and talk with a costumed interpreter we take on the posture of the interpreter as though we were dressed, not in jeans and tee-shirt, but in period clothing. Some interpreters pick up on that and answer you as though you were one of them.
Just one more way that doing can inspire the writing.

Is Phoebe dying of The Brooklyn Enigma?

Phoebe is dying of a wasting disease, and my readers want to know what that disease might be. Not one of the characters knows any more about it than is described in the story.
The same reader who would be upset if I fired a muzzle-loading musket twice without reloading wants me to name a disease that may not have been discovered, named, or described for another hundred years.
Some of my stores are set at a time when people still believed an imbalance of humors caused disease, and germ theory was in its infancy. By the late 19th century diagnosis was coming into its own. Doctors might be able to tell you what you had but they couldn’t cure or even treat it.
I am not sure if readers want an old fashioned name like Epizooty, or Kings Evil, or if they expect a more modern term like Crohn’s disease (named in 1938) or Diabetes Mellitus (described as early as 1425, but not treatable ‘til 1922), or even Anorexia Nervosa known in the 19th century as “fasting girls” or “the Brooklyn enigma.”
Since I write in close third person, I have to go with what my characters knew. Phoebe has been seen by several doctors who can’t agree on a diagnosis. What they do agree on is that it is sure to end in her death.
Balancing the reader’s need to know with an accurate historical presentation is a difficult line to walk.
What would you do if Phoebe were your character?

Giving thanks

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. As a kid I spent the day at my grandparents in Plymouth. Each year townspeople representing the Mayflower Company marched from the dock to the church. My grandfather, at 70 was Elder Brewster who was in his 30s on the Mayflower. Over the years my appreciation for the holiday has altered. Early on I felt gratitude for my ancestors coming to the new world and the hardships they bore to make a home here. When I was a young adult the holiday became a day of mourning for the native people. One of the first acts of my ancestors was to steal the corn supply of the natives. Now I think of Thanksgiving as homage to my foremothers. The women did all the work but what they created was spectacular. The men sat around drinking (in 1621 it was water since there was no beer). Given my penchant for history, I do most of my cooking using old tools and techniques, cranberries from the bogs of Cape Cod, homemade mincemeat and pie crust. Maybe next year I will cook over an open fire.

New England Crimebake

I spent November 11-13 with a group of crime fiction writers, some famous, some obscure, some just getting started. They write in every subgenre possible. This is the seventh year I have attended New England Crimebake. At first I was happy to absorb all the craft tips I could get. Oh, yes, I went because some of my favorite authors were the guests of honor. The first year it was Robert B. Parker, the second it was Linda Barnes. I love local color and these two writers give me Boston in ways I recognize and respond to. Over the years I have gravitated to several authors, now my friends, who write the short stories and novels I love to read, Steven Rogers and Leslie Wheeler among them. I have been through most of the workshops and could probably give a lecture on blood spatter and lock picking. While I take pride in my writing and come here to hone skills, I seem to have become a one person welcoming committee. This year I came armed with 40 names of on line buddies and tried to find each. I seek out people standing alone looking bewildered. I love it when people say, “You’re KB.” Or remember me from last year when I was one of the first people to speak to them. So while I am not yet of the status to hand out tips from the podium, I am enough of a writer to be able to welcome new writers into the community.

Sleeping with the Fish

I have just received word that my short story “Sleeping with the Fish” is going to be published. I submitted it to an anthology ages ago and word came this morning that Fish Tales has been picked up. Seems a bit fishy? The anthology is the project of a Sisters in Crime chapter called the Guppies, or The Great Unpublished.
Clarissa Dillon, daughter of a Quaker miller in colonial Pennsylvania, finds a body in the mill pond, and tracks down the killer. Clarissa Dillon is a real person and when I asked if my character could use her name, she agreed as long as she wasn’t the murderer.
I am not a Quaker, and even if I were, there have been so many changes since the 1700s that I had a hard time with the details. The real Clarissa was a great help with the customs and the wording.
While I liked the fictional Clarissa a lot (I like the real one, too), the set up of the story makes it hard to have her appear as a recurring character. I have no doubts that the mill will appear again.

Writing and Those Pesky Historical Errors

I complain about historical errors in other people’s work but I almost never catch them in my own, even the most glaring ones. Fortunately someone pointed out to me that Robert Philips could not have been four years old when his first son was born. I fixed that before the book went to press.
I have three known errors in my first mystery novel. One is inconsequential so I didn’t bother to fix it. I’d be interested to get a letter from someone telling me that James Pierce (who?) was in Europe when he was supposed to be appearing in my novel. One is so spread out that only a very careful reader would find it. Could Charles actually have studied under William James? One disturbed me enough to change it. The Fresh Pond hotel had burned down several years earlier, making it very difficult to stop for coffee.
Every now and then the opposite happens and I blunder into something I hadn’t intended. One character I concocted turned out to be a real historical person. True, he teaches in a different department and he lived two miles from his fictional self.
In another work, needed a reason for worker unrest and while reading a contemporary news paper I discovered that several factories had cut workers pay by one third only a week or so before my story was set.
I can hardly wait to be in a position to have my fans complain about the errors I missed.

Interpretation and Those Pesky Historical Errors

Closet taxes? Sleep tight in a rope bed? Pop goes the weasel? It is amazing how many incorrect ideas pop up when we look back at how our ancestors lived. Some sound correct, some are outlandish. Sleep tight seems to apply very well to a rope bed where the ropes had to be tightened regularly to take up the sag. But that weasel thing never made much sense to me. Most machines used to make cloth have animal names, a jenny, a billy, a swift so why not a weasel? A clock reel, or weasel, is a device for winging newly spun yarn into skeins. The fortieth revolution of the reel causes a wooden lever to drop into place, hence the pop. Now listen to the nursery rhyme:
All around the cobblers bench
The monkey chased the weasel
And
A penny for a spool of thread a penny for a needle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop goes the weasel.

Not a word about spinning yarn. Turns out “pop” is slang for pawning. So the cobbler pawns his weasel to buy thread and needle. What’s a weasel? Not a clue.

People didn’t write about the things that were so ordinary that everyone knew them. They did write about things that were not ordinary or that they needed to pass on to others with whom they had no face to face contact. A mother might send a knitting pattern or a "receipt" to her daughter far away.

Am I correct in my period garb? I can't know for sure. I just do the best I can and keep going.