Sara Donati's Blog, page 3

Streamlining

This weblog first got going in 2003. For many years I posted at least once a day, usually on writing and craft themes, but I also reviewed novels and movies and did some autobiographical writing. Traffic here was lively for quite a long time.

Maybe five years ago now I started to slow down, in an effort to cut back on my wondrous collection of procrastination techniques. Now I rarely post here. If there’s news about a reading or new publication, I put that up on FaceBook, where I have two foc...

Not quite an excerpt: Where the Light Enters

Over the coming months I will be posting bits and pieces about Where the Light Enters to help tide you over until publication.  This first time I’ve got a piece of my research to share. These real estate/rental ads are from the New York Times in 1884. The two outlined in yellow are relevant to the story. 

And they are, in my view of things, just plain interesting. The rental market has sure changed. 

click for larger size

After the War

On Facebook Suca Johnson pointed me to this website: Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery  where Villanova graduate students in history are collecting newspaper classified ads that appeared after the Civil War.  African American families broken up by slavery  began the search for one another.  Here’s one I found especially moving:

“Abraham Blackburn, Newburgh, NY, finds his mother after writing 256 letters of inquiry,” Newspaper report of family reunification, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL)...

Did I mention…

that I finished Where the Light Enters?  It will be 2019 before it hits the shelves, I’m sorry to say. But I did deliver it to my editor.

Help Me Name a Character

It often takes me a really long time to settle on a name for a character.  For example:  there is one young woman in Where the Light Enters whose name still is not right. I have some time to fix this — until the copy editing phase closes — but I’m at a loss. 

If you had 100+ daughters, you’d likely run out of names, right? Think of it that way. Elizabeth, Hannah, Martha, Lily, Jennet, Anna, Sophie, Rosa, Lia, Laura, Margaret, Nora – all unavailable.  

Sometimes I try to get my imagination goi...

time travel, lexicon-style

Now this is what I call a stone wall.

Merriam-Webster’s website has a feature I just discovered, called Time Traveler.  

They promote it as a way to see all the words used for the first time in a given year. So for example, in 1880.   I stumbled across this because I wondered when the verb stonewall first came into use. 

Before you dissolve into puddles of delight, there are some issues to consider.  A word may be widely used in a community before it ever finds its way into print, so this kin...

Medical Research and the Historical Novelist

If you are writing historical fiction about doctors who are professionally active, you have few options.

First, you can jump over what they do with and for their patients, for example: “Difficult surgery today, I’ll have trouble sleeping.”  Sometimes this is fine; you don’t want to overwhelm the readers with gore. 

Other times you need to be more specific. In order to establish the time and place, you have to draw a picture, in words. And to do that you have to know what actually went on. 

So...

Truth Inside the Lie

Under My Skin: Volume I of my Autobiography to 1949. This was the first volume of a two volume autobiography, covering  birth in 1919 to leaving Southern Rhodesia.

I just came across this quote by Doris Lessing (from the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin):

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” 

In the dedication for the novel It, Stephen King says:

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” (That bit is part of a longer sentence, but works better on its own.)...

Bad Guys in 18th Century Pennsylvania: Stories Waiting to be Told

Genealogy is interesting to me primarily because it’s a way to look at and understand history. In researching my own family history I have come across material for dozens of novels, more than I could write in three lifetimes.   

1796 Runaway advertisement for Oney Judge, a slave from George Washington’s presidential household in Philadelphia. Source: Wikipedia

If there’s one universal truth about writing fiction, this is probably it: happy, contented, well adjusted people don’t make for good...

Tragedy Encapsulated: Ephemera

Ephemera is generally understood as bits of paper  originally meant to be transitory, but that have nevertheless become collectible.  Collage artists are fond of ephemera. So are historical novelists. Give me a stack of bills, ticket stubs, used envelopes, menus, newspaper advertisements, postcards, labels, instruction pamphlets and birthday cards from the 1880s and I’m busy for days. To get a sense of the kind of material out there, have a look at the eBay category Ephemera 1800-1899.  

Most...