Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 9

I PUT UP AN EBOOK!

Trust me, this is a big deal for me.  If technology is a train, I’m running along the tracks trying to catch hold of the caboose.  But I was sad when my novel ISLAND JUSTICE went out of print, and much as I love used bookstores, it is galling to see my books sold online with no royalty coming to me, the person who created it.  So I decided to bring ISLAND JUSTICE back to life.

I learned a lot in the process.  More on that another time.

For now, go to and buy my book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ISLAND-JUSTICE-ebook/dp/B007VSRBVU/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338394092&sr=1-2

Even better, read it… and best of all, leave a review.

Or buy it from Smashwords. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/154451

Or from Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/island-justice-elizabeth-winthrop/1002618566?ean=2940014545853

Let me know what you think!

 

PUTTING TOGETHER THE JIGSAW PUZZLE

Putting together a personal history of one’s parents in the years before you, the writer, was conceived or even dreamed of,  is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, knowing that there will always be some pieces missing.  You will have to fill in the blanks with your own imagination or simply acknowledge to the reader that there are blanks.

Lately, I’ve been working on a section of the story that takes place soon after my parents met in August of 1942.  Somehow, although my mother was sixteen and living in Stanway House attending a secretarial school in the Cotswolds and my father was training with his regiment in Yorkshire, he managed to get down to London on leave to meet her.

In putting together the puzzle of that fall in 1942, I assemble all the pieces I can;  a timeline of the war in England, letters from my father to his family, letters from his brothers and father to him, my mother’s memories of the time.   But I find  I’m often distracted by bits and pieces that might not fit, but still give such eloquent testimony to the daily life during the war on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an example, here is a piece of a letter from my grandfather, a dairy and shade tobacco farmer in Connecticut, a staunch opponent of FDR, even though his wife is Eleanor Roosevelt’s first cousin and they will spend that Christmas in the White House.

November 1, 1942

Dear Stew,

O ne o t her r ather a m u sin g form I re c e i ved the o t her day w a s i n r e g ard t o m y b e e s. It tra ns pi r e s that be ekeepers ne ed a sma l l amoun t o f s ug ar t o feed th e ir bees d urin g the w inter in or d e r t o kee p them h a ppy and st r o n g f or t h eir s p r ing act ivi t ies . T h e C o n ne c t i c u t Beeke e p e r s A s s o c iati on, of whi c h I am a h umble m e m ber , h a s evi d e ntly ta ke n this up w ith v a rious governmen t al a utho r i ti e s, becaus e th ey h a v e r e ceive d a form wh ic h they h av e in tur n distrib uted to their m emb e rs in o r d e r to sec u re t h is e x t ra su g ar . T he f irs t q ues tion o n my form was, “ H ow ma ny hives have y o u?”  The se c ond question was , “H o w m a ny b ees in each hi ve ?” I di dn’t r e ad a n y more a ft er th at , as I felt pr e t t y w ell s t o p p ed . If I co u ld g e t s o me of th e bureau cr a ts to co m e and c o un t the bees for m e , why t hen it w oul d be o kay . ·

I love the irony in my grandfather’s voice, the anti-administration dig he gets into this description, knowing his own son is a confirmed and enthusiastic Democrat.

Can I use this letter in my book?  I’m not sure yet, but no matter what, reading it enlivens and enriches my own knowledge of the time and of the characters I’m portraying. That can only help make my book richer and more satisfying for the reader.

RESEARCH ON THE WEB

Sometimes I bemoan how much time the Web and the Internet seem to steal from my real work which is putting one sentence down after another.  Other times, I’m grateful. Today I’m grateful.

I knew that even though my mother had qualified to take the exams for Oxford University in 1942, because it was wartime in England, she was sent instead to a secretarial school in Gloucestershire named Carr Saunders so that she could be “useful in the war effort.”  And even though her memory at 84 years is not as good as it used to be, she can still come up with remarkable details about her past.  “Because the Carr Saunders sisters were bombed out in London, they moved down to Stanway House,” she tells me on the phone.  “It was a house in the Charteris family.  He was the Earl of Weemys and March.”

The Earl sounds to me like something out of Alice in Wonderland, but I go trolling around the web and find lots to help me imagine my mother’s nine months learning how to type and take shorthand.

I find pictures of Stanway House.

Home of the Carr Saunders Secretarial School during WW II

I find a biography ofFrancis Charteristhe man who lent the two sisters Stanway House so they could continue to run their secretarial school. I learn the proper way to spell Wemyss!

But best of all, I find a book called OLD STONES, The Biography of A Family. In a snippet about Stanway House, I learn that her mother went to the secretarial school two years before my mother, that she remembers it was so cold that the water in the glass by her bed froze at night. The author, A.S. Penne, has a website so  now she and I are in touch and may meet on one coast or another.

Today I am grateful for the web!

WHAT KEEPS US WRITING?

What keeps us writing especially with all the dire news about book publishing?

For me, it’s simply this.  I can’t not write.  It’s what I do.  It informs the way I think, the way I read.  Writing weaves itself through my day whether I enter a note in a notebook or don’t.  It’s always there.  So that keeps me writing.

Publishing?  That’s another story.  For now, I’m so deep into the writing mode that I try to stick my fingers in my ears when it comes to publishing news.

“My agent doesn’t want even to read my work unless the book has a clear, defined audience.”  “I’m publishing my book myself.” “Writers can no longer make their living from copyright.”  “Ebooks are killing traditional publishing.”  Some of these dark messages come from the media, from the blogosphere, but most of it from my friends, long published authors themselves.

But still, every weekday morning, I find myself back at my desk, ass to chair, researching my father’s military record or my mother’s trip to Paris the day Hitler invaded Norway, fitting the jigsaw pieces of their life together to make a coherent narrative.  Someday this book will be done and I will lift my head from the screen and start trying to sell it.  But I won’t go there now.  I’ll simply keep writing because that’s the first and most important part of my job.

Finally, I’m lucky enough to hear through the Internet or my guestbook, words from my readers. They feel to me like messages in a bottle thrown onto the waters of the web.  Last week, this one floated up onto my shore and into my mailbox from a blogger at this link:

http://vcmw.livejournal.com/124434.html

To keep the kid’s book theme running, I guess I’ll go with my first favorite book.  That would be The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop.  Mrs. Wood gave it to me to read in the 1st grade.  It wasn’t the first chapter book I read but it was the first one given to me by someone at school, and I got to sit in the back of the classroom and read it all by myself.  This was huge, and I can still remember how it felt to sit there and be given permission to lose myself in this story, just privately.  I don’t think I had to write about it or give an oral report about it or draw or do a diorama or anything.  No one else in the class read it – just me.  Sometimes it’s lovely to have a book you share with others, but a private book is also a great pleasure, especially when you’re small and don’t have many private things.

I loved the medallion that made things small.  I still think the lesson in it is a good one, and the idea that even if you love someone that doesn’t mean you can hold on to them no matter what they want was a really tricky one for me to get my head around at age 6.  I never learned to do gymnastics, but somewhere in the back of my mind I was always fascinated by them because of this book.  I suspect the book may have something to do with the number of apples I eat as an adult, too.

Imagine that. Something like twenty years ago, a teacher gave this first grader my book to read.  And she or he still remembers it and remembers it well.

Now that keeps me writing. How could it not?

MONDAY MORNING BLUES

Mondays are always the hardest writing day for me, mainly because I’ve learned over the years to treat myself like a worker who goes to an office. Starting on Friday nights I try to give my writing brain a rest. Although this doesn’t always work and I have a notebook with me at all times, on Saturday and Sunday, I tend to channel my creative impulses into sketching, museum visits, gardening, cooking, knitting, attending theater or dance appearances.  These all feed my writing even though I’m not accumulating pages. On the business side of my job (and yes, writers need to be good business people too), I don’t open royalty statements or emailed appearance requests or fan mails during the weekends.

I do read and edit manuscripts by friends. I still get up early and sit in my favorite spot where I do poetry exercises. I watch a movie that helps me understand a setting or read a book that’s related to my current project.  But in general, I don’t open up the file I closed on Friday night until Monday morning.

I know there are writers who tap away on a project no matter the day of the week.  I used to do that, when I needed to use every minute I wasn’t working at my day job to finish a manuscript or when I was a young mother and scribbled away weekends in coffee shops when I could get a sitter.  In those days, I was fierce about piling up pages and proud of it.

But times have changed. I’m an older, more experienced writer which simply means I’m smarter about my own process. I find now that although I write for shorter periods of time, I’m more efficient. In a novel, I know pretty quickly when my character has gone off the tracks.  There’s no way she’d be hanging out in that bar or buying a motorcycle.  Or in the personal history piece I’m working on now, when I can’t move the scene forward, it means I need to do more research.  For example, what did the Gibraltar docks look like in 1940?  That’s the only way I can understand what my mother must have seen and smelled and heard when she was boarding the evacuation ship that took her to London.

For years, I’ve relied on Hemingway’s old trick.  Never stop at the end of a chapter or even a paragraph.  On Friday nights, I stop in the middle of a sentence.

But Monday mornings are still hard.  If I can’t get the scene moving or the character talking, these days,  I stretch my writing muscles another way.

I write a blog entry.

DO WRITERS GO ON VACATION?

So I’ve taken the last week off.

Well, actually, a writer never takes time off.  Someone once said, “A writer is never not writing,” and it’s become one of my mantras.  I’ve been writing poetry in the early morning as usual, I’ve been setting myself up in a different work space in the country and just this morning, I typed PART 3 at the top of a new screen.  But for the last week, I haven’t been sitting down at a designated time, turning off the email, and allowing myself to become completely absorbed, to fall into the dream if you will, of my current book.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.

I always carry a notebook with me and as usual,  I’ve been jotting down titles of books I want to read, ideas for poems, descriptions of a scene or a person in front of me.  That’s writing.

I’ve been trying to teach myself iambic pentameter by creating as many as I can scribble down in ten minutes (from an exercise in Stephen Fry’s wonderful book THE ODE LESS TRAVELED).  Here’s my favorite.  “The chairs recline as if they had a right/to be the humans they’re supposed to host.”  That’s not good poetry, but I think it counts as iambic pentameter. (I have a tin ear when it comes to meter.)  And it means I’m writing.

I’ve been eavesdropping in diners at breakfast. That’s writing.

I’ve been walking and browsing in stationery stores and knitting and swimming laps and listening to recorded books and all the time, my mind is wandering, and all of that is part of my writing process.  Things are cooking in my unconscious mind, so that when I come back from vacation and sit down at the computer,  the book will surprise me by suddenly opening up in a new direction. The work my unconscious mind does when I’m “on vacation,” informs and directs and enriches the writing I do when I’m planted in the chair.

But the vacation time, the “never not writing”, wandering time cannot go on for too long or else I get grumpy.  I call it creative anxiety.  I snap at my husband, make mistakes in my knitting, tense my shoulders when swimming.  It creeps up on me.  It means I have to get my ass to the chair, my fingers to the keys, the words moving on the screen.

It means vacation is over.

SETTING and CHARACTER

As a fiction writer, I've always like to visit the setting where my story takes place. For example,  in my recent novel, Counting on Grace, the book really came to life when I found the site of the mill where my character had doffed bobbins in 1910.  Many times I went back there to listen to the water sluicing over the dam, to stare at the same forested Vermont hillside Grace might have seen from the second floor window of the textile factory where she worked.  That was the best way I knew...

DIGGING DEEPER

I've just finished a section of my new book. It tells the story of my father's experience at the Groton School and I'm calling it SLACK AND WITHOUT FORM, a phrase lifted from one of the Headmaster's reports to my grandparents about their son's lackluster academic performance.   Most of this essay is based on letters between my father and his parents as well as the correspondence between the Rector Endicott Peabody, the head of Groton and my grandfather.  To my surprise, my grandfather did...

THE PERFECT READERS

In June 1982 I attended the Wesleyan Writers Conference in Middletown, Connecticut.

Ironically this is the town where my father's family hails from and most of my ancestors, including my father, are buried in the Indian Hill Cemetery up above the college. Back then, I wasn't particularly interested in my relatives. I was there to hone my writing skills. The director of the program of the conference  introduced me to to two other writers, Margaret and Betsy, and the three of us have remained...

LOOKING OVER A WRITER’S SHOULDER

I’m deep into a new long project this time, a personal history for adult readers.  Although I’ve published two novels for adults (ISLAND JUSTICE, IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE), this is the first time I’ve attempted a non-fiction memoir form.  It tells the story of my parents’ love affair during WWII which includes sailing through the evacuation at Dunkirk, the death of my mother’s only brother at the battle of El Alamein, a romantic meeting in a Yorkshire castle and my father parachuting behind enemy lines in France while my mother worked as a decoding agent in MI5 in London during the bombing.

As you can imagine, this project demands an enormous amount of research and I’ve found out the wackiest things.

For example, it turns out that for about twenty minutes in the 1890′s, my great-grandfather, Joseph Wright Alsop the 3rd, was the lieutenant governor of Connecticut.  In 1890, he won on the Democratic ticket as the running mate of one Luzon B. Morris, but the election was contested and the Republicans triumphed after a legal skirmish.  My great grandfather died of a heart attack on June 24, 1891, probably from the stress of the political battle.

So if you’re interested in “watching” a writer battle her way through a project, feel free to drop in here where I’ll be posting my triumphs, my struggles, the ups and downs of wrestling a book like this to the ground.