Sara Donati's Blog, page 5

Pickup Truck

As it’s father’s day I thought I should post this short story, which was published in slightly different form in Redbook (not Good Housekeeping, as I misstated elsewhere) in 1992. It is based on my relationship with my father in the last months of his life, but it is fiction. First hint: my name is not Claudia Busacca.

Pickup Truck

Lately, Claudia Busacca has been noticing that many of the old men she sees, on the street, in the grocery store, everywhere and anywhere she goes, resemble her...

A Manhattan You Won’t Recognize

If you could step into a time machine and go back to Manhattan in 1884, this is what you’d find where today the New York Public Library stands.

The Croton Distributing Reservoir was the above-ground reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue that provided  the city’s drinking water for much of the 19th century.  From Wikipedia: “The reservoir was a man-made lake 4 acres (16,000 m2) in area, surrounded by massive, 50-foot (15 m) high, 25-foot (7.6 m) thick granite walls. Its facade was done in...

so long, bluehost

I’m in the process of switching to a new webhost, which means that things will be wonky here for the next one or two days.  Just a heads-up. 

 

The Gilded Hour and Its Sequel

I know, you want the next book yesterday.  I know. I would love to have finished it already, but: not yet. 

Have a look at this in the meantime. It comes from Electric Lit, and it makes me feel a whole lot better. Maybe not you so much, but me. And that means I can write more easily. 

click for dull size image

crazy all the time: writers

Here’s the thing about writing, especially writing fiction: You do it alone. In your head, sitting by yourself, your mind splits itself into three or ten or a hundred personas. These characters talk to each other, conflicts blossom and a story takes root and grows.  If writing is going well, you lose time. You fold in on yourself and disappear into your own mind. Your subconscious becomes superconscious. When you come back into the world, you may be surprised to see that it’s raining. Or the...

19th century household hints: from bedbugs to hartshorn

I’m always running into terms which stump me while reading 19th century newspapers and articles.  You can look things up, of course, but what we now understand under ‘hartshorn’ may have changed a lot since the 1880s. 

The best source for information on 19th century terms, especially when it comes to housekeeping and medicine (in my experience) is archive.org, where out of print works are made available to read online. And the technology is very good. You can search for terms inside books, re...

If you write fiction

….or want to write fiction, or are interested in the process of writing fiction: 

Insomnia drove me to do some work, but weariness kept me from actually writing. So I spent an hour going through old posts on craft (plot, pov, characterization, etc etc), and I’ve organized them into something I hope is usable.

It’s incomplete, but it’s a start.  

You’ll find the index to these posts under “writing and craft” in the menu just under the top banner. Please let me know if you run into any problems...

Why Anna and Sophie have chapped hands

In the 19th century the most important advance in medical science was called (at the time) Listerism.  Simply put, Joseph Lister, working with  Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology and the discovery that bacteria cause putrefaction and infection, came to a conclusion:  In a medical setting the first line of defense is to keep the patient isolated from all such bacterial agents. There were two ways to achieve this: Antisepsis (using chemicals, usually carbolic) or asepsis (using heat) to s...

Keel boats & Jemima

I had a letter from Janet with a couple questions about the Wilderness novels:

I have really enjoyed all your books, However, there are a few points here and there that have puzzled me. First, in Endless Forest, I don\’t understand why Callie and Ethan think Jemima could possibly have a legal claim on the orchard. Didn’t she steal the deed and sell it off to that preacher? Callie bought it back and presumably has the documents to prove it, so she didn\’t inherit it from Nicholas. I would thi...

old mothers

So, mother’s day.

The farthest back I can trace my maternal line is six generations.

I give you  Rixte Margrethe Tjarcks born 1732 in East Friesland on the Dutch border, died June 1795 in the village of Aurich.

This is not a drawing of Rixte, but it could be. Right time period, right part of the world.  And yes, her name is unusual for us, but it was actually quite tame for her time and place.