K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 8

It's Not the Gift, It's the Giver

 

Waltham, Massachusetts 1932 There it was, the perfect Christmas gift. A lightly used copy of Emerson's Society and Solitude with notations by a recently deceased local minister, Elbert Whitney. Because it was a used book it was well within my budget, and because it had been written in, it cost even less. But for me the comments added to the value. I put a few coins in the hand of the bookstore owner and headed home with the treasure.

About half way home, while I was mulling over the value of this gift as compared to the last few gifts I had given my husband, an odd thought kept pushing its way into my brain.

Last year I had given George a sweater I had hand knit, working for months in secrecy. I modeled it after a garment he had seen on a passerby and commented on how much he would like one "just like that."

I searched everywhere for the wool, scoured women's magazines until I found an appropriate pattern then labored for hours in secrecy. On Christmas Eve, I wrapped it in red paper with white ribbon. I presented it to him with some ceremony as the children were taken up with opening their own presents.

He removed the paper slowly and with great care. When he had freed the sweater, he unfolded it, looked at it for a few seconds. It was hard to tell what his reaction was until he said, "Very nice," and set it down on the arm of the sofa. To my knowledge he never picked it up again. I have never seen him in the fruits of my hours of labor. Nor did he notice when I gave it to the church to pass on to someone who really needed it and would appreciate it.

Then I remembered his birthday present. Not so grand, but a nice token. I am not a connoisseur of fine liquor, but our next door neighbor Mr. Morse is. So I asked him what I should buy. He was kind enough to go to the store with me and help me pick something out. Hubby turned his nose up at it, because what could I possibly know about fine scotch.

That was bad enough but what happened next really stung. Mr. Morse, figuring that my husband had loved the gift, gave him a small bottle. Hubby went right home, and tasted it. "This is wonderful. I wonder why I have never had it before." I went to the cabinet and pulled out my own gift to him.

"What's this? I don't remember you giving me this."

There is a whole history of unappreciated gifts. Don't get me wrong, George is a wonderful husband and I don't doubt his love or care. We enjoy each other's company, and many of the same things appeal us both. A family picnic in the country is a delight to for us and the children, ants and all. When he takes the train into Boston on business, he frequently asks me to go along with him, and we spend at least part of the day wandering the streets of Beacon Hill, hand in hand. He is a fine father to our children. He loves them and encourages them in their childish pursuits. He will get down on the floor and play with them.

As a gift giver he is a champion. He seems always to know just the item that will wrm the heart of the recipient. He presents the gifts with great drama and ceremony.

There was one gift my husband accepted with grace and even appreciation. He had a love for silk pocket handkerchiefs. There must be twenty in his drawer, representing ten years of Christmas and birthdays.

 

I couldn’t stand the idea of giving the little volume of Emerson only to have it languish on the shelf unloved like the sweater I had labored over for so long.

So it was that I hatched a plan.

A week before Christmas I went to Mrs. Morse and told her what I had in mind. She thought the whole idea was outrageous, but she went along with it. Maybe because she thought it was so funny. She actually laughed when I told her what I wanted.

I took the little volume, wrapped it in the some inexpensive and garish bright green paper with an equally cheap pink ribbon and tucked it away in the kitchen towel drawer where I knew George would never look.

On December 23, I baked a batch of nut bread, and carried the loaves around to the neighbors. I'm not a great cook, though I have failed to starve my family. I am not a bad baker and the distributing of the loaves was a yearly tradition.

I went to the Morse's last, at a time I knew Mr. Morse would be there. I carried the little, carefully wrapped book in my pocket.



 

On Christmas morning we gathered around the tree to open the gifts. The children were properly appreciative of their assortment of toys and clothes. My husband loved the silk pocket handkerchief I gave him and tucked it in his breast pocket to show it off. We enjoyed a sumptuous and traditional dinner, and had settled in for a quiet afternoon simply enjoying each other's company.

Just as the sky was growing dark, Mr. Morse knocked on our door.

"George," said Mr. Morse, "I received the most ridiculous gift from a business associate. Some old used book. Take a look. I thought you might like to have it."

He pulled the Emerson out of his deep pocket along with the hideous paper and ribbon.

"Oh, my," said George as he took the book. And running his finger over the leather spine and following the waves of the marbled cover, he kept repeating, "Oh, my. Oh, my."

Then he turned to me. "Look Lidia, this has to be the best gift ever."

 

 

 

I send you this story with apologies to my great-grandfather Elbert Whitney, the original owner of the book, my childhood neighbors the Morses, but most of all to Roy. This narrative is based on a true incident which involved a book, but no green paper and pink ribbon.

Other Important Sites

These are the last two of the five sites that have had the most influence on my writing.

If you are a writer, are you dependent on real places?

If you are a reader, do you enjoy visiting the places you read about?

 

The Norlands

When I was in college my father was a circuit rider in Maine. He served three Universalist churches, Livermore Falls, Livermore, and North Jay. There was a fourth church, a little building on the property of the Washburn estate, The Norlands.   It was open only in the summer.  Preachers on vacation could pick up a small stipend, for a sermon, probably recycled from the winter at their own churches. I think my father preached there once a year.

While we were living in the Falls, the steeple of the Norlands church was felled by a hurricane. The last bit of knowledge I had about it was there was no money to replace it.

Fast forward years. I can't remember who told me, maybe my mother, that the site had been opened as a living history museum, and that one of the girls I had known when I was in college was associated with it. The staff of the museum offered a course to U. Maine students who were prospective history teachers. It was an immersion weekend of daily life activities from the 1870s.

Check it out here:  http://www.norlands.org/

In 1999 I scraped together enough money to pay for the weekend and rent a car to drive up from Boston. I brought with me the dress I made and mentioned in the first blog in the series.

We cooked, cleaned, cared for the animals, and did other farm chores.

The staff had photo copies of the town records for the time, so we spent afternoons looking into our characters. I was the wife of a saddle maker. Imagine my surprise when I found out she died several years before the 1870's date of the weekend.

Sunday was church followed by dinner, to which the minister had been invited.

I am usually pretty much in control of my emotions but I found it impossible to enter the church for the Sunday service. I stood in the vestibule for some time after having sent my "children" in to the service.

I had recovered enough by dinner to question the minister about his sermon. I finally got to use the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" in the dinner conversation. That was a first and a last.

 

 

 

Fort Delaware

 

There is an island in the Delaware River just south of Wilmington called Pea Patch Island, a corruption of Pip Ash Island. The location is important since it restricts river traffic to Philadelphia and Trenton. The island is marshy and building on it was iffy, since anything of any weight sank into the slime.

Try this:  http://www.destateparks.com/park/fort...

A bit before the civil war, the army was successful in building a fort of granite, brick and earthworks. It was meant to be an artillery strong point, but ended up being a prison camp for Confederate soldiers and Delaware Residents who favored the rebel cause. Delaware was one of a few slave states that remained loyal to the Union. Northern Delaware favored the North in the war while Southern Delaware favored the South. While the state as whole remained loyal to Lincoln, there was an active reverse underground railroad.

Fort Delaware is now a state park. Once a year they have a weekend of living history called Garrison Weekend. Re-enactors come from everywhere, North and South.

It was at a Garrison Weekend when I crossed to the island in the ferry with a woman trying to keep control of her clothing that I decided I was never going to wear a hoop skirt. Glad I missed that fashion trend.

 

Of course there are other sites that are important to me and my writing, but these are the ones that I think were essential to my development.

Plimouth Plantation

When I was in grade school, my grandparents lived in Plymouth. My grandfather had been minister of the Pilgrim Church and had retired there after his last posting in New Hampshire.

At the time Plymouth was the home of such thrilling tourist sites as Plymouth Rock, a statue of the Pilgrim Maiden near the town brook and a reconstruction of one of the original houses.

My daughter may never forgive me for parking the car under the statue of Massasoit and making her cross the road so she could see Plymouth Rock, a boulder in a cage with "1620" embossed into it.

I was in junior high school when Mayflower II crossed the Atlantic to be permanently docked in Plymouth.  This may have been the first time I realized that being at a site gave one a feel for what there had actually been like. While there were a few tourists and one or two crew members on the ship when we boarded, it was easy to imagine 102 passengers and a full crew of 35 stuffed into the tiny space for a three month voyage. I couldn't imagine anything worse except perhaps imprisonment or death, which would have been the fate of the colonists had they not crossed the ocean.

I went home and read the Mayflower Compact.

Years later I visited Plimouth Plantation, a reconstruction of the original village. It interprets the year 1627, the last year of the indenture. The next year each colonist would have earned several acres of land and part of a cow. The group would spread out around Plymouth Bay.

Try this: http://www.plimoth.org

Unfortunately for us, the Pilgrims in the village today are first person interpreters. That means each is assigned a character to represent. They behave as thought they were that person, and they can't break character. Sometimes this works fine, sometimes it doesn’t. When we wanted to find the chickens, we were told, "There are chickens everywhere." Later we found out the chickens hadn’t been let out that day. John Alden asked me where we were from. I didn't know how to answer since I live in a colony that wasn't going to exist as a European outpost for another seven years. On the other had I had a nice conversation with Alice Bradford about her husband's book.

The advantage these little houses had over the one in the park by the dock, is these were lived in, well sort of. There were hearth fires. Each house held some personal item. No one was home at Miles Standish's place but he had left his musket and ammunition behind.

How very easy this made it for me to write a series of stories set in the colonial period. First came the award winning "Weaver's Trade" set in the Howland house which was behind my Grandparent's place. Next came several short stories set in the stockade before the diaspora. I didn't even have to close my eyes to imagine myself in Faith Ivey's place, I knew what it would be to live through a New England winter, or trying to keep a clean house when the floor was dirt.

While I see Plymouth when I write, I have not really decided where the stories take place. They are set in a fictional village on the line between Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony. Unless I need some law, belief, political structure, or a specific event, it doesn't matter much which I chose.

Newlin Grist Mill

Do you know what a water powered mill sounds like? Since much of the workings are made of wood, the mill operates with a low grumble with a regular clicking, almost a hum, as the wooden gear teeth mesh. In the background is the constant sound of water rushing over the wheel. It is fairly easy to talk over the noise. But when you begin to climb the stairs from the milling floor to the grinding floor, the vibration is intense, giving you a feeling for the power that is surging through the whole machine.

When my family first moved to Delaware in 1976, we visited as many historic sites as we could find within an easy drive. There is no shortage, from Colonial through WWII. One of those places is Newlin Grist Mill. When we went there in the early 1980s, the 1704 mill was newly restored. We were fascinated. We always intended to go back, but we never did, until the day I went up to interview for the job of receptionist/interpreter.

Take a look: http://www.newlingristmill.org

Newlin is more than an operating gristmill. It is 160 acre park with nature trails, a blacksmith shop, an apple orchard, gardens, log cabin, and a colonial kitchen. We stock the ponds with trout for fishing between March and October. I have a tendency to remember the dogs that come to the park rather than the people and many of them have become my friends.

I was lucky this time. I could wear the same clothes I do at Greenbank. Work clothing doesn’t change much over time. Look at jeans, we have been wearing them since 1873, perhaps longer.

I had been working there for a year or so when a call went out for short stories for an anthology, and I knew at once Newlin had to be the setting.

I am a visual writer. I see a movie in my head and write it down as it goes by. I have to be as familiar with the setting as with the characters. The story happens at two locations, so Greenbank was the sure choice for the second. How long do you suppose it would take a wagon to cover the 15 miles between the two sites? Pretty much all day with a stop at the 9 Tun Tavern which was about half way between the two sites. The story, “Sleeping With the Fish,” was published in Fish Tales, A Guppy Anthology: http://www.wildsidebooks.com/Fish-Tal...

Actually there are more sheep than fish in the story. But of all the stories I have written, this is the most dependent on the site. Come visit and I will show you where the body was found, where Clarissa lived and where the sheep who solved the whole thing were kept.

I have a second story featuring Clarissa that I am still working on. I can see clearly where she and her father stand in front of the mill to confront the thief.

Are other writers as inspired as I am by places? Do readers have favorite places for fiction settings?

 

 

Greenbank Mill and Philips Farm

This week I am starting a series to pay homage to the sites that have taught me history, given me a platform for my writing, and a chance to show off my newly learned skills.

The first is Greenbank Mills and Philips Farm.

 

 

 

Greenbank is a water-powered mill, built in the 1750s, run by Robert Philips in the late 1700 and early 1800s. It was one of the earliest automated mills in the country, using Oliver Evans system. In 1810 the family built a woolen mill called the Madison Factory, named after President James Madison. In 1815 the family had 300 sheep to supply wool to the mill. Find out more here: http://www.greenbankmill.com

Greenbank offers a series of educational programs for school kids, and tours and teas for adults. Want to lean about daily life in the New Republic, a time when people were trying to figure out what it meant to be American? Want to learn about the process of milling grain? Want to see how a water system works to power a mill? Want to learn why farmers changed from raising multi-purpose animals to single purpose animas in the Industrial Revolution? Want to learn to spin and weave? Greenbank is the place to learn all that, and more.

My association with Greenbank started when I told a friend and Civil War buff that I was writing an historic novel set in 1892. He told me I needed to get into the cloths my characters wore and do the things they did. The Civil War was a good place to start. There is no shortage of events around here. We happen to have a Civil War prison camp a few miles and a short boat ride from my home.

So I made myself a Quarter woman's outfit (no hoops, thank you) and headed for Pea Patch Island, and Fort Delaware.

 



 

Once I had the clothing I had to wear it more than once. When our local tourist railway reopened after damage to the trestles from Floyd, I put on my outfit and went to see the train. The Wilmington and Western runs steam trains a few miles up the track to a picnic grove, and back. Since I was in period clothing, I could have ridden the train for free, but I decided to find out what was on the other side of the bridge.

To my amazement, the bridge led to a gristmill from the turn of the century. That is the 18th to the 19th centurie. I stayed to work with the heritage sheep and the educational programs for both kids and adults. This required a whole new outfit.

 



 

Much to my amazement, I found I wanted to do everything. I started out simple; I made soap and candles. Then I did some simple cooking over an open fire. I am neither a proficient cook, nor a skillful fire maker. I liked the sheep. I had worked with horses for years, so the sheep seemed easy. Since those early beginnings I have plowed a field with horses, worked oxen, butchered a sheep.

My friend was right. The skills I have practiced do show up in my writing. Maybe my character doesn't run the mill, but she knows what the clothing feels like, how it both restricts her and frees her. She knows what it is like to hunker beside a hearth fire and stir the cornmeal mush for hours 'til it thickens. She knows what it is like to have to carry all the water used in the house from the stream or the well, and what it means to do chores by candlelight or fire light.

 



 

My first published work was a kids' book I wrote for Greenbank. Farmer's Daughter, Miller's Son is set in 1816. The protagonists are John Philips and his sister Catherine. Real kids in a real family. I had little idea what actually happened that spring, but I knew enough to put together a story. What I do know is they farm cut back the flock of sheep from 300 to 150. The new section had been added to the house the year before. But more important was that these two kids wanted something, and struggled to get it. The sheep in the cover painting is Betsy, our Marino ewe.

 

Nice to Visit, but...

While taking a hot shower this morning, my mind wandered back to one particular tour I did of the Miller's House. I try to make the people on the tours realized that life in the 1700 was very different than life today. It would not have been unusual for 15 people to be living in a house twice the size of my living room.

One of the women on the tour said, "What a lovely house. I could live here."

I failed to engage her imagination. Her beautifully manicured hands would be rough and callused in a few months. Her shining hair would lose it shimmer and silkiness when she started washing it with lye soap. But never mind; there are no mirrors in the house.

Before I realized that arguing with her wouldn't do any good, I said, "I don't think you would. No heat, no electricity." Then I had the sense to shut up.

If demonstrating life in old houses has taught me anything, it has made me very sure I would not want to live there.

Most of the women I show through the house realize life in the 18th century is not for them when I tell them that if they want to put bread in to bake at 9 am, they need to start firing the oven about 5.

It is really fun for me to show people around and tell them about the daily life of the miller and his wife (and maybe 10 kids). I am frequently asked, "Wouldn't you love to live here? Why else would you know so much about it?"

Just because I could live her doesn’t mean I would want to. Our family has plans to move there in the face of the zombie apocalypse, but that doesn’t mean it would be my choice to do so.

 

What we have that they didn't:

Heated houses

Hot running water

Privacy

The germ theory of disease

Grocery stores

Planes, trains and automobiles

Quick and easy communication with people at a distance

 

What they had that we don't:

Slavery

A life expectancy of 42

Small pox, yellow fever, child bed fever

Years when food was scarce

On the other hand they had tightknit supportive communities, we might even say intrusive.

Full employment:if you wanted to work you could find it, even if it was something you didn't like doing it, or get paid well for it.

 

I listen to the classical music station almost all day every day. Much of the music I love is music that had been written when the Millers were living in the house. But had they heard it? Had the Philips, or the Newlins or the Millers ever heard the Brandenburg concerti? Musical instruments were rare, expensive and highly cherished. Time to play them even more so.

No. I think I will stick to my modern comforts and probably appreciate them more for knowing what life could be like.

Why Nano? Why not?

November is Novel Writing Month, Nanowrimo, or Nano for short. The challenge is it write 50,000 words on a piece of fiction beginning on November 1 and ending before the end of the month. That comes to over 1600 words every day, including Thanksgiving.

You may start with an idea, an outline, and lots of research, but you must not have started the actual writing.

So how many words of fiction have I written this November? Slightly more than zero. Everyone around me is madly dashing off the daily word count, and I am sitting on my thumbs.

Writers block? Not exactly. There are at least two months every year that I don't write any fiction. Or engage in any creative projects. I read a lot and try to catch up on research. Usually they are the summer months, but not this year.

I haven't pushed myself except for one project, my Holiday Story which I have been laboring over for a few weeks. I usually start the writing in August, but this year it was October. The reason I usually start so early is that formatting the thing takes about twice as long as writing it. It is now done and formatted. Next is the cover. Still up in the air about that. The formatting and cover design don't count.

I do have a novel in process, and I have been poking about at it for a couple of months, mostly organizing, not much writing. Every year Nano encourages me to get working on it again. This year I have been plowing through the scenes and trying to get them in some kind of order that makes sense.

I write primarily short stories and that won't do for Nano. Writing 50,000 words in short stories is way harder than writing the same amount on a novel. My stories average 3500 words so that would be 14 stories, one every two days. Each has to be plotted, be populated by a cast of characters, and a setting realized. Like a novel each has to have a beginning middle and end, each a crime and a solution. I average about 6 stories a year, so that is half of a Nano submission.

Those brave writers to take part in Nano spend the better part of October setting up to begin writing, and at the end of the month, if they finish, they have a 50,000 word piece of fiction. But they are nowhere near finished. If the word count took them through the whole plot, they now have a first draft. That's as far as many writers get. The hard work starts again when they begin to rework the draft.

Nano teaches a writer to turn off the censor in the brain and keep putting those words on paper.

Nano teaches a writer to finish a draft.

Nano teaches a writer how he or she best works, outlining or writing off the top of the head. Writers are either plotters or pantsers. Me, I'm a pantser, writing by the seat of my pants.

Many a fine published writer was forged in the fire of Nano.

Many would be writers give up after the intense month of work.

Mysteries That Aren't

This morning's headline in the local paper (yes, I still get a paper version) reads: WE HAVE A PIECE OF EARHART AIRPLANE.

At last the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance is discovered. Well, no. Actually the group that uncovered the plane part has been searching that particular atoll for years and has turned up bits and pieces, a knife, a bit of shoe leather, that have kept them coming back to look for more.

So why have they been keeping it such a secret? Again, it has been no secret. The group actively fundraised for the search, and has publicized everything they have found.

About five years ago they convinced me that they were in the right place. But I live in Delaware and the group TIGHAR (look it up) is local so information turns up from time to time in the newspaper.

Just because something is a mystery to you, doesn't mean it is a mystery to everyone.

Years ago I was at a dinner party and one of the guests mentioned that SOMEONE is keeping the contents of the Dead Sea scrolls a secret. Who? She didn't know, just that elusive someone who keeps all the secrets and makes sure the public knows nothing. I invited her to borrow my copy of the translations that had been made from the scrolls they had unrolled and pieced together. The rest really is a mystery since the scrolls are delicate and have to be unrolled slowly and under strict conditions. Of course, there is more to the story. If you are interested, again, look it up.

No one can know everything, and yes, lots of things are mysteries. People and Governments are keeping secrets. But when I run into someone who is wondering why our government isn’t telling us about the things that interest us, I wonder if they have looked it up before they pass on this myth of secrecy.

The internet has made it possible to look into things, that before were mysteries because we didn't have access to the knowledge. That's why we have encyclopedias and now Wikipedia. Information is out there for people who are curious enough to look into it. 

We all love a mystery. So much that we are willing to label something a mystery that really isn't. 

That's what keeps us mystery writers in business. Writers are told over and over that there has to be motivation for someone to look into strange deaths odd coincidences and things that aren’t explained. The prime motivation for any sleuth, fictional or not is always curiosity.

Curiosity sends me to the texts when I read "Mysteries of the Bible Uncovered" or "Secrets of the Witch Trials" two subjects I actually know something about.

Curiosity keeps me writing when I am just a anxious to find out who did it as any of my readers.

Curiosity keeps readers at it to the bitter end.

 

Pictures

I've been thinking a lot about pictures of late. I recently had my author photo updated. I have been using ones of me in period clothing. I finally found a professional photographer to do some of me, some of my daughter Bodge (OK, Elizabeth Inglee-Richards: elizabethingleerichards.blogspot.com) and some of us together in case we ever appear anywhere as mother and daughter authors. I think I have picked two I like best of me, and the one of us together laughing is great. I have yet to post them anywhere. So hang on, I will debut them soon.

My regular readers will notice that I have changed the photo at the top of the blog page from a man walking through a plaza to the top of the Nelwin waterwheel. I don't know where the plaza photo came from, but I took the waterwheel photo. I love the colors in it, though it is simply oak and plaster. Let me know what you think of it. Other pictures taken at Newlin can be found at Newlingristmill.org, or the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/newlingristmill.

I have finally finished my Holiday story. I write one every year, create a cover for it and send it out in place of Holiday cards. So now I am working on the cover design. The story includes a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson and an early 20 century housewife. I own the book in question, so I may photograph or sketch it. Let me think about that for a few more days.

I put together a series of my Emily short stories into a collection. I doubt that I shall ever interest a commercial publisher in it. I will do it myself if I need to. That means a cover design. I can fool around with artworks, good enough for a card but I am no were near accomplished enough to do a cover myself.

The back side of my search is copyright. I need photos that either I took myself, have permission to use or that are out of copyright. But that's a whole different blog.

I have the title typed out in a combinations of fonts that I like, and that is unique. I have been prowling through line drawing that are out of copyright. Maybe I can set an image of Emily against a background of a Victorian interior, or a scroll design. Maybe a Morris floral pattern.

Dover press has some lovely background designs in its catalog. I will take a look.

People who write generally are involved in other arts. Drawing and painting has been my other interest but I have not invested the time in it that I would need to be really good at it. Three of my family members were professional artists, at least for a time. I turned to writing.

If you are a writer, I'd love to hear from you about how your covers came to be. If you are a reader, what is it you like or dislike about a cover?

 

 


 

 

Nemesis

There may be a few spoilers in here, but if you don't know Sherlock Holmes had a nemesis, then you had better read "The Final Solution."

I watched the first episodes of Forever. I think I am going to like the show. OK, so the doctor in the lead is a rip off of Sherlock Holmes, complete with British accent. I truly hope he stops dying in every show. The only reason for it seems to be that he comes back from death naked and wet.

What I really like about the show is that the nemesis showed up at the very beginning, and only as the voice on the phone. Most TV shows introduce the nemesis around season three when watchership is dropping off.  This feels fake to me. If the guy is so hated, where has the hater been for the last two seasons or the first 27 stories? In prison, out of the country, busy with his own stuff?

Holmes' Moriarty doesn’t show up until "The Final Problem," originally written as the last story in the cannon. This left him without much of a roll to play since he died shortly after his appearance. Simple solution, have Watson pull stories out of his memory where he now sees the hand of Moriarty. But Holmes could not stay dead and may have lived on to be Conan Doyle's own nemesis.

Time to pull out the trusty two volume Oxford English Dictionary. Nemesis is the Goddess of retribution. Definition 1: An agent of retribution. Definition 2: a persistent tormentor. So Nemesis is really a she.

In the case of fiction, a nemesis is a character, usually, but not always, evil, who runs thought the story arc as a sort of dark threat. The lead character has to do his regular work and ward off the thing that seeks to destroy him (or her).

Holmes/Moriarty, Castle's Kate Becket/her mother's murderer, James West and Dr. Loveless, Batman and everybody. I'm sure you know dozens of others; add your favorite to this list.

Our heroes are good, maybe with a flaw or two. Sometimes a nemesis can trigger something in the hero that shows another side of his character. He might prove stupid or over emotional when dealing with his nemesis.

Can the writer use her to show something we the reader or viewer doesn't know about our hero? Is our hero truly good and being tormented unjustly? What is it about the nemesis that both compels and repels the hero? Or the reader?

The problem for a nemesis is that she has to get away at the end of every adventure. Perhaps she never comes close enough to get caught. Perhaps something distracts our hero.

Or does the nemesis provide a boring character to blame things on?

My characters don't have such dark shadows luring somewhere just out of sight. As I think about writing darker, I realize that maybe they should.