Sara Donati's Blog, page 6

turmoil in technology land

Just a heads-up: Due to a web server meltdown, things are in a jumble.  Of the many hiccups please be aware that  all the links in the right hand column are broken.  As soon as I get that problem sorted, I’ll delete this post.

newspapers.com: the agony and the ecstacy

Despite the very high price, I subscribe to Ancestry.com for two reasons: First,  it’s an outstanding resource for a historical novelist, because it gives me access to images of documentation (for example, birth and death certificates; citizenship applications) and to census pages which in turn tell me a lot about the way people lived. If I need to name a character and I’m stuck, Ancestry.com will rescue me. If need a sense of how much a bricklayer earned in 1880, a little digging there will...

Sex

I had a very earnest email from Cynthia with a question that deserves an answer:

I am captivated by the life, struggles, and victories of the characters in your Into the Wilderness series. The one thing I find dissonant and disturbing is this intense and at times shocking elaborate sexual revelation. Being a Christian woman who discerns what to read by God’s directive moral command, it leaves me uncomfortable to say the least. Especially the homosexual endeavor in Lake in the Clouds. I know...

The Virgin Cure and Professional Curiosity

On International Women’s Day

I’m reading Ami McKay’s The Virgin Cure, a novel set in Manhattan in the 1870s.  It’s always a bit of a gamble to read novels set in approximately the same time and place I’m writing about. If the novel is poorly done I can put it aside and forget about it; if it’s well done I’m wracked by curiosity.

The Virgin Cure is extremely well done. The story is about Moth, a little girl raised in the worst slums the city had to offer until her mother sells her to a rich w...

Sandwich interruptus

Sometimes a sandwich can be a masterpiece. Just the right combination of things in perfect proportions. Textures, flavors, everything in harmony. This phenomenon has been explored on film. In Spanglish, a world-class chef makes a sandwich for himself alone. He is looking at it lovingly and croons, very softly as he picks it up: Ooooh, baby. At that moment, just as he’s about to take a bite, two people barge in, arguing.  Sandwich interruptus.

This scene was carefully planned, as noted on the...

Falling in Love

A couple times in my life I’ve avoided falling in love. The first time I was aware of doing it was in 1985, which was a watershed kind of year for me: I had a breast cancer scare (that turned out to be benign); My father went into a steep decline and died; A six-year long relationship finally crashed and burned; I met the Mathematician; I started field work for my doctoral dissertation; and I saw a movie that I tried not to see.

The Eric Garden was a tiny theater on Nassau Street in Princeton...

Software for Writers: ProWritingAid

If you add together all my published work — academic, popular press, fiction — I’ve got something like 1.5 million words in print.  To provide some perspective on this, I wrote my doctoral thesis (1985) with WordPerfect 1.3, and my first published short story with whatever version of MS Word that was floating around in 1990. 

Over the years I’ve tried all kinds of software to help with keeping my research, storylines, characters and timelines organized. Theoretically Scrivener does this, and...

What ails you?

I had an email from Cristy:

Hello,
I am most of the way through The Gilded Hour and loving it! Yet I am torturing myself trying to figure out what “common ailment” the slack faced young girl from chapter 43 suffers from?! Please enlighten me!

It’s a very short passage Cristy is asking about. Anna and Elise are discussing a patient who is very young and whey-faced, or pale. She is pale because she’s lost a lot of blood, which follows from abortion. A woman who takes too much of certain herb...

Next weekend: See you in Chicago

Actually I’ll be in Elgin, outside the city, for the Elgin Literary Festival on January 27 and 28. It’s a big affair stuffed to the brim with interesting speakers and panel discussions, and it’s all free to the public.

The Elgin Literary Festival is a free celebration of the written word for both readers and writers taking place in Downtown Elgin, a blooming center of the arts. The Festival aims to highlight bookish culture and provide writers and readers a place to create and appreciate the...

Who Writes Like Me: Literature Maps

I recently came across Literature-Map, awebsite that has some magic formula it uses to predict which authors you will like based on the name you give them. So say you adore Hemingway and are hoping to find an author you’ll adore just as much. You go to this website and type in his name, and up pops a map. You can see Hemingway’s map here.

According to this map, you will probably like Faulkner and Salinger (because their names are closest in proximity to Hemingway’s), and you probably won’tli...