K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 4

Reading or Writing

The first thing I ask new writers is what they read.

Some are startled: "Read? I'm a writer, not a reader."

Some are apologetic: "I read only mysteries" or (pick your least favorite genre). Like I expect them to tell me they have just finished Paradise Lost or a Greek tragedy.

Some can babble on at length about the last 20 works they read, sometimes even tell you what this has to do with what they are writing now.

Here is one of the few absolutes I know. You can't be a writer without being a reader.

I have a tendency to separate my reading from my writing. I always have at least one book going but if I am writing up a storm, my reading slows down, even stops. If I am reading voraciously my writing screeches to a halt.

I've been plugging away at two related short stories. The first is finished and off to the critique group, the second is stuck on a plot point. It should be easy to solve, but it isn't. Very frustrating. So for the moment I will take a vacation and read.

Right now on my reading list I have ten novel beginnings, the first thousand words or so. I have to read and judge then for a contest. I have one entry now and my mail box will have filled up with the others before I publish this blog. I really love this kind of reading. Of the ten pieces, one will make me want to read the rest of the novel. One will make me wish I had never read even this much of the novel. The rest will fall somewhere between. We are given a score sheet, but we don't actually have to comment on what we read. I always send a comment and I truly hope my comments are helpful. I don't want to discourage anyone from writing no matter how bad the early attempts are.

Then there is the play I promised to read two weeks ago. I'm not sure I can be much help with that one.

A friend, Kaye George, has asked me to write a blurb for her new book, Requiem in Red. I love reading unpublished works, especially by writers I know and like. I am waiting now for Delivering the Truth by Edith Maxwell to be published so I can send off my review.

I do have to admit that the book I am reading now is an anthology and the first story in it is by ME. It is a lovely, slim volume with 17 stories under 2000 words in length. Like a plate full of petit fours, I am sampling by author and title, not in the order chosen by the editor. 

Look it up: Let It Snow, the best of Bethlehem writers Roundtable. Available from Amazon for $8.99.
 

February 11th, 2016

I love giving tours of the 1739 Miller's House. It consists of four rooms, two up, two down. The necessary is almost all the way to the barn. We don't know if they had a well, or where it was if they did, but there was always water in the stream. It is a charming place until you populate it with the 14 people who may have lived there. No heat, no electricity, no running water but lots of kids to do the lugging.
Several months ago I gave a family a tour. As I was ushering them out the front door the mother said "I could live here."

I've done this long enough to know you don't argue with anyone who says that. I really wished, at that moment, I could send her there and see how long she would last. Who would do her hair and nails? Would she actually be able to feed two meals a day to 14 people?

I love watching those shows were they take people like her and transport them to the setting of their dreams. I particularly liked Colonial House. It was set maybe 100 years earlier than the Miller's House, but many of the problem are the same. My favorite quote is, "Should I wear this dirty cap today or the other dirty cap?"
But these shows are all about taking people with unrealistic ideas and putting them in a situation in which they have to fail, and making fun of them when they do.

How well would I do if put in a situation like that? I have no idea. I think I could live with no heat, no electricity, no running water. I am not so sure I could do the amount of work necessary to get through a day. Imagine making a Thanksgiving dinner every day forever. I can spin and weave and sew, but I can't imagine those chores filling my whole day because I has to supply clothing for the family. In the end I would fail too, and viewers could laugh at me.

A couple of months ago, I found another series of shows where people who are experts in certain fields are transported to an historical setting, and live there for some time. They know how to grow crops, they know how to cook feasts over wood fires. They know how to mix and administer medication. They go back in time to test their theories and to learn more about how what they know fits into daily life. History is people's lives.

The show I am watching now is Victorian Farm. Ruth Goodman is the scholar who holds it all together. Look her up on You Tube.

In this series she and two archeologists set up housekeeping on a English farm that has been abandoned for 50 years and try to bring it back to life. They find experts, dress them properly for the time and invite them in to show the residents how to do things, a plasterer, a plowing champion, a threshing team, a shepherd.

I'm sure the participants have a dark night of the soul sometimes, but what shows on film is all up beat, all educational both for the farmers and the audience. I kept jotting things down that will help with the interpretation of the Miller's house.

Is there a salt hole in the fireplace? I will have to look. It is a small recess above the fire where a bowl of salt is kept dry to keep it from clumping. Oil of earthworms is good as a salve on a bruise. Milk gets out ink stains. Handy stuff to know.

February 04th, 2016

Doggerel
 
I am no poet, but I can write a mean bit of doggerel.  I am particularly fond of Limericks.
A limerick is a five-line comic poem with a rhyme scheme of AABBA. Lines 1, 2 and 5 have three feet, shorter third and fourth lines have only two feet.
Well, that takes all the joy out of a funny, slightly ribald, joke poem.
A better definition is this by that ubiquitous author Anon:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
     But the good ones I've seen
     So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Sorry, you are not going to get the dirty ones here. But they aren’t hard to find. You probably even know a few.
Edward Lear was famous for this form of poetry, and he was really good at it.  Many are both clean and funny.
Here is another by Anon.
An epicure dining at Crew
Found quite a large mouse in his stew
Said the waiter, "Don't shout,
Or wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting, one too."
 
When I have an idea for a story, or a journal entry or any number of other things, I stick it in a word file, try to give it a title that I will recognize, and save it on a thumb drive. Every now and then I will go through one of my drives and find all kinds of treasures. Yesterday I found a file entitled Newlin Doggerel. In it were two bits I don't remember writing.
A word about the setting for these bits of idiocy. Newlin Grist Mill is a bit of nature set on Route 1, in the midst of suburban sprawl. We have an operating 1704 grist mill, 160 acres of trails with various habitats. Balancing the history, the nature conservancy and the needs of the park goers isn't always easy.
First the limerick.
Said the snake to the toad and the frog
We live in this wonderful bog
But life isn’t gay
When every day
We are chased by that gentleman’s dog.
 
And then the blander form of poetry. If this form has a name, I don't know what it is. Do you?
 
Little drops of water
Fall upon the pond
Overflow the mill dam
And the stream beyond.
 
Cover up the parking lot
Turn the paths to mud
So welcome to the grist mill
And our annual spring flood.

What's That Supposed to Mean?

I wrote this blog because the cat is wicked depressed.

Any of you have those funny statements that say one thing and mean another?

Word play has always been a part of my family's humor. My father taught it to my mother. At least I assume he did, since my mother's mother was often puzzled by it, in a good-natured sort of way.

My mother once came home from a meeting and was laughing so hard it took her half an hour to make us understand what was so funny. The very respectable and knowledgeable speaker had said that Paul Revere hung two lanterns (he didn't) in the tower of Old South Church (it was Old North Church) to signal one if by night and two if by day (really? Did Longfellow get it wrong?). That was fifty years ago and my family still uses "one if by night and two if by day" to mean a grievous historical error.

My daughter and I have adopted the phrase "Because the cat is wicked depressed" as a reason for doing or not doing something. As in: "Why didn't you do the dishes?"

It is a line from a sitcom that we didn't much enjoy. The guy calls his friend to give him an excuse to walk out on a girl in the bar, and the friend offers "You gotta come home because the cat is wicked depressed." We were laughing so hard we missed the rest of the poorly written dialog.

My daughter has never forgiven me for telling her that popcorn is called POP corn because when the kernel is heated enough, the tiny bit of gun powder in it explodes and tears open the casing. Hey, that's what my father told me so it must be true.

Word play is what writing is all about. Putting words together is a way no one else though of doing it before. And in ways that please the reader. A family history of such goings on may contribute greatly to a writer's skill.

As for our own cats, they think the whole thing is pretty silly.

Changing the Time

I just finished up the last correction on my late 19th century series, and emailed the manuscript to my editor. I decided to pick up an unfinished story set almost exactly 100 years earlier. What I didn't realize was how wrenching that would be.
Everyone seems confused for the first week or two after the beginning and ending of Daylight Savings time. What I felt was a version of that.

I had never thought about how I adapted to the period I was writing, and how hard it would be to re-adapt to another period. Apparently I have never written two time periods in one day.

Emily Lawrence exists in a word just on the edges of modern conveniences. She starts out with an ice box, oil lamps, hand pumps to bring water into the house, and wood fired stoves. At the end of the series she has electricity, flush toilets, running water and gas stoves. If Emily needs to travel, she goes by steam train, carriage, or steamship.

Iccarus Norton has none of that. Oil for lamps is expensive, so candles if you can afford them, and rush lights if you cannot, are all that is available. Wood stoves? No stoves at all, cooking is done on an open hearth or in a wood fired oven. Water is carried into the house from the well in wooden buckets, refrigeration is in spring houses, usually some distance from the house. Iccarus travels on horseback. The only other option is by stage coach, or private carriage. Roads are unpaved, and poorly kept.

But I am the writer, sitting in the comfort of a heated home. I can get up and pour myself a cup of hot coffee whenever I want. I can fix a quick meal and heat it in the microwave.  Hey, I am writing on a computer instead of using Iccarus's quill pen or Emily's fountain pen. I have an automobile to take me to the store where everything is available.

Iccarus rides five miles to his new job along a road I traveled by car many times in my childhood. I have to change that picture in my mind. I have to make sure he doesn’t reach for a lamp when he would only have had a candle. He would be active during daylight and seldom worked into the night. I sent him out to question a man harvesting wheat. I saw in my mind a harvester drawn by horses. Wrong. Scythes and a wagon. The house I imagined was from a period half way between the two I was struggling with. Wrong. The store in the town was the one where I bought my school clothes. Wrong.

Once I have adjusted my own being to the time period I don't have problems with modern things popping up where they shouldn't, or with things from another period I have just finished writing about. Once I am in the time I am writing about, I make few (not none) historical errors.

Last night I had a dream in which I lived in a dwelling that paralleled the mill where I work. Each of the three floors of the house opened onto a floor in the mill, one in 1704 and the other now. I kept going back and forth from dwelling to mill. An allegory for my writing?

The Naming Game

There it was on page 12. “Elbert Lothrop”.

Most of the time I am in charge of what goes into a story but every now and then the characters themselves take over. Sometimes I know when it is happening, sometimes the characters slip it by without my noticing.

Professor Lothrop is the father of my protagonist, Emily Lawrence. I have named the four recurring characters of Emily’s parent’s generation after my own family members. The Stevens, next door are named after my own parents, Elizabeth and Henry. Those names have stuck. Emily’s parents are Arthur and Emma after my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother. Emma has been fine with her name, though my grandmother though it old fashioned. It’s the professor who has been giving me the most trouble.

I have written more than 50 short stories and four novels with Emily as the point of view character. Her family and the Stevens don’t appear in all of them. I keep an extensive list of characteristic for everyone. Dates of birth, eye color, what they take in their coffee. Because some appear so infrequently, I have to refer to it often.

I’m not sure how Emily’s father slipped through. As I said, he started out as Arthur, but then, when I wasn’t looking, he changed his name to Albert. This would not do, too close to another character who seemed satisfied with his name: Alfred Cox.

I didn’t have any need to argue with Arthur/Albert, since he wasn’t going to appear in print any time soon, so I left him with whatever name he preferred. That is no longer an option. I have compiled a collection of Emily short stories and have signed a contract with Wildside Press. The issue of this name must be settled NOW.

Father Lothrop appears in the first two stories. Edits on the first story went smoothly, but then in story two, suddenly and unexpectedly, there is Elbert. I suspect Elbert will be his final choice. In real life Elbert is my great grandfather. It is also a more uncommon name than most of my characters have found for themselves.

Please, sir, be satisfied with this name.

Metaphors

 
I love a good metaphor. Any story packed with well-wrought metaphors will win my heart. I ran into similes and metaphors in Sophomore English class at Peabody High School. I can still see the room. Tall industrial windows, wood paneled walls. Everything was dark brown. Bobby sox were in at the time and we all went home with black scuffs on them from the floors that had been oiled regularly for the last hundred years.

I don't remember anything we read that year except "The Most Dangerous Game". I do remember we had lots of grammar and lots of writing. That year we learned figures of speech. I still remember most of them. I should use more in my writing. Simile and Metaphor were my favorites. I had no desire to represent sounds or use a part to represent the whole, but comparisons won my heart.

Let me define metaphor for you just in case you were out that day: a figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy. (American Heritage Dictionary) A simile is a light version of a metaphor in which the comparison is stated not implied. Got it?

A metaphor is better defined by example. Here are a few:
William Blake: "Oh, rose, thou art sick." It's not about roses at all but about the shame of illicit love.
Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Winter Evening, after a description of a quiet snow scene, ends with "and miles to go before I sleep." Is he talking about getting home and lying under a warm quilt or is he talking about death?

I referred to the fire trucks in the last blog, as Christmas lights. That's a metaphor. Had I said "blinking on and off like Christmas lights" that would be a simile.

Most of what I write is historical. While I try to get the history right, I am often caught in the quandary: did I get the way people act and feel right? There really isn't any way to know. Even taking part in a reenactment can only take you part way. The car is always waiting to take you home to all the modern conveniences.
For that reason I see everything I write as metaphor. It isn't here and now, but it reflects it. I can’t imagine what it was like to live with some of the conditions my characters have to contend with. I can relate to similar conditions and use that to illuminate my own life, and yours. That is a ready-made metaphor.

When I started writing this, I was going to fill it with wonderful metaphors, but when I sat down to write, I couldn't remember a single one. One of my more important writing activities is walking the dog. The metaphors I did come up with came from reciting poetry to her for half an hour every morning. Poetry is compact and lends itself well to metaphor. Prose is more spread out and isn't so much in need of metaphor.

Metaphors make the writing richer, the mind of the reader struggle more with the meaning behind the meaning. They don't appear often in kind of fiction I read these days. What a loss.

So…send me your favorite metaphor.

Christmas Lights

At 6 PM on Christmas Eve, the local bakery caught fire. It was the blinking red lights that caught my attention first. Some kind of Christmas celebration? Then the howl of truck after truck as it joined the fray. I've never seen so many fire trucks in one place before. From my back porch I could see the flames coming out the west side of the building.

The last customer was gone by the time the fire started, the place closed up for the rest of the holiday. No one was in the building.  It took only a few minutes for someone to call 911. We live within easy walking distance of two fire stations, so by 6:15 everything was in full swing.

My daughter and I dashed out our back door, across the parking lot of the heating and cooling business, and into the mob of Elsmerites (Elsmerians?) lining the south side of the highway. The road was closed in both directions. I'd be willing to bet that most of the motorists trying to make their way east or west had no idea how to get around the obstruction.

By the time we had joined the crowd, flames were leaping out of the roof of the building. The man in the red shirt talking to the fire marshal had to be one of the owners. Firemen were throwing flaming loaves of bread out the back door.

The parking lot had been full all day, with patrons spilling out onto the highway, and other nearby parking lots. Many is the time I cursed them when the traffic of a Sunday morning or holiday eve made travel from my home to work difficult. I think I will miss the nuisance.

I walk my dog early in the morning, and I often am passing the parking lot as the baker arrives at 4 AM with a cheerful wave, and "Time to make the cookies."
Of course I speculate on the cause. The fire started immediately after closing, in the kitchen area. I have to believe it was carelessness in shutting down after a 12 hour day. There is no word from the fire marshal yet.

Now what is the baker, who will no longer be showing up at 4 am to make the cookies, or the sales staff who suddenly, on Christmas Eve, find themselves with no workplace, going to do? The bakery had survived turmoil for years, and I expect it to survive this.  The owner said they will reopen on the same spot, but they don't yet know how extensive the damage is.

For the time being there are no Christmas lights across the highway from us, only a boarded up building.

For years now I have written a Christmas story which I se...

For years now I have written a Christmas story which I sent out in place of cards. One of them actually won an award. Others are in my short story collection for which I have just signed a contract with Wildside Press.
Often they are sweet feel-good stories. Sometimes they are a mystery featuring one of my series characters. This year's is very strange. I had to write the death of a favorite character for the above mentioned collection. It was the most difficult story I have ever written. This seems to be a little sliver of it, like a piece of glass embedded in your finger that you can't quite get out.
So meet Henry James who had to come along sometime. Happy Holidays.
 
Henry James and the Long Trip Home
London, December 1891
Emily was tired of the formal manners, the fussy clothing and the conversation about trivial things with people she didn’t know. There must have been twenty of them around the huge table.

There was only one other person in the room that she had met before. Henry James was seated to her left. She was surprised to find he knew who she was. "You are Anna Lothorp’s little sister," he said. She was so astonished she could only nod in answer.

"How did you get invited to this dreadful affair?" he asked. The servant who appeared between them with a carafe, gave him a withering look.

She sighed and told him, "I was to come with friends, but there was an illness in the family."

He was much more of Anna’s age. In fact Anna had dined at their house on Quincy Street, and had hated every minute of it. And now Emily was about to repeat the experience.

"How long have you been here? I seem to remember Willy writing to me that your husband had died and you had taken your grief abroad."

"If you mean in Europe, March 1890, so almost two years. I’ve been in London for about a month.”
"Have you loved every minute of it?" he asked, with a cutting sarcasm. Could he read her thoughts?
"No. It was fun at first, but…"  She was trapped between Mr. James on her left and someone named Bryant on her right. It would be impolite to burst into tears right here.

Mr. James deftly changed the subject. "Have you been to the South Kensington Museum?" he asked.

"No. Should I go? What is there worth looking at?"

"Harvard would do well to look into establishing a museum of its own. For art, I mean, not for those dreadful Natural History exhibits. How can something dead and stuffed be natural?"

She took a deep breath as her tears receded.

"Now be a good girl and talk to the gent on the other side of you. Lord, how I hate these affairs."

It felt like hours before the guests were allowed to leave. Emily was reminded of waiting for the school day at Mrs. Agassiz to end.

As they bustled into their coats ready to step into the cold damp evening, she found Mr. James at her side.

"I would be honored if you allowed me to show you the museum tomorrow. It has some fine examples of Flaxman and Landseer. I can pick you up at the Fields place about two if that is convenient."

Why does Henry James want to take me to a museum? He must want something.
"I must admit, I have an ulterior motive. I hope you will love the museum, of course. I was hoping to find someone like minded to enjoy it with me."
Likeminded? Does living a quarter of a mile apart make two people like minded? Surely he was simply being kind.


The day was bright and clear but cold. She would spend the morning in the shops looking for things to send to her nieces and nephews for the holiday. Late as always, it would be well into the New Year before they received them.

She found perfect gifts for each of the children if they had been ten years younger. Nothing that would suit the young men and women they had become. Nothing for their mothers; even less for their fathers.

A small leather-bound note book appealed to her, but she didn't know of anyone well suited for it. She liked it enough to spend more than a few coins on it.
By two she had put away her purchases to wrap and send tomorrow and was ready when Mr. James rang the bell.

Emily asked him what he was working on at the moment. He laughed and replied, "When in doubt in conversation with a Cambridge man, ask him about his book. Every man in Cambridge is writing a book. The old saw should include the many women who are doing the same."

"But you actually are," she protested.


It was getting dark when they left the museum. Mr. James slipped a small package into her hand. She could feel the smooth paper and lacy ribbon, but she was unable to distinguish the color in the shadows of the cab. The box was heavier than she had expected.

"Oh, but I have nothing for you."

"This is a gift, not a present. There is no obligation to reciprocate. I think you will understand when you open it."

Under the street lamp in front of the Field's house, Emily untied the silver ribbon with care and tore the red paper off the box."

"This is the fossil of a chambered nautilus. It's very nice but…"

He took her free hand as an elder and wiser brother might. "The golden spiral. There is a bit of history that comes with the object. Remember the Holmes poem? 'Leave thy low vaulted past, let each new temple, nobler than the last'…well, you know it.

"Professor Agassiz gave this to your father sometime before the war. Your father had to make a very difficult decision."

"But he and father didn't like each other. Why would he give him such a gift?"
"I believe you are confusing academic disagreement with personal dislike. You remember the great debate that followed your father's book on education. But didn't the Lothorp girls attend Mrs. Agassiz's school? And didn't your father continue to attend the Professor's morning lectures fairly regularly?"
She would have to think about that for a while.

"How did you get it?" she asked him.

"Your father gave it to my father when he had to make a similar decision, and he passed it on to me when I decided to give up law to write novels."
He shrugged as though the whole story were perfectly clear.
"Now you are making a decision that will change the rest of your life. You must have it."
 
 

Buying a Book by its Cover

I always judge a book by its cover.

As a kid I read horse books. I don't think I had one that didn't have a full color beautiful horse to call my attention to it in the book store or library. Oh, wait. Riding Days in Hooks Hollow had a lovely gentle line drawing of three children. Even as a kid it appealed to me.

I am one of the few people who read The Name of the Rose from cover to cover, even translating some of the Latin bits as best I could. Why? Because the cover on the book store shelf said "read me."

For several years the portrait of a nun on the cover of City of Silver by Annamaria Alfiieri called to me from the book tables at a conferences. Finally, I bought it and read it.

Victoria Thompson's work always has a painting of a street scene somewhere in New York City. While I love the books and the covers, I am often confused by the tiles which give nothing away but the setting. Have I read Astor Place or was it Gramercy Park?

The last Charles Todd book I bought was (in part) because of the Iron Bridge on the cover. I have loved the Iron Bridge since I first saw it in college art history.

Cozies over the last few years have been sporting wonderful, inviting covers. Bright colors, interesting settings. Almost as many cute cats as You Tube. I am not a cozy lover but I do read a few every year, and it is the covers that sell the books to me.

Recently at a used book sale, I found an Anne Perry book. I hadn't read The Sins of the Wolf. I like Anne Perry, but the cover was off putting. It was the photograph of an urban street scene. From the clothes, I'd set it around 1895, maybe even 1900. My first thought was "I didn't know Anne Perry ever wrote anything about New York City. OK, maybe it was London. It was only 50 cents, so I bought it. The first thing I did was look up the original book, in part to see the cover, and in part to read a synopsis. I was astonished to see two ladies in hoop skirts on the cover. Turns out it is set in 1856 or 7, at the end of the Crimean War. Way different and way more appealing to me.

I'm pleased to say that, in this case, the book is very much better than its cover.

It isn't the quality of the cover as much as the elements in it that grab me. The covers don't have to be professional, nor even good art. Not very well done line drawings, poorly constructed collages of interesting things, a horse, any kind of a horse. I will pick these books up and read a few pages.

I read one book with a cover in black and dark purple because the black thing looked like a sunken ship, couldn't read the title. Terrible cover; loved the book.