Meredith Allard's Blog, page 26

Historical Fiction Inspiration: Salem Before, During, and After the Witch Trials

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James’s House (Sorry…the John Ward House)

I loved visiting Salem, Massachusetts while I was writing Her Loving Husband’s Curse, the second book in the Loving Husband Trilogy. Imagine my surprise when, behind the Peabody-Essex Museum, I encountered the John Ward House, which was built in 1684. Long, brown wooden slats. Diamond-paned casement windows. Steep, pitched gabled roof. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?

This is James’s house!

I felt like Sarah when she sees James’s house for the first time: I knew this house though I had never seen it before except in my dreams. This was one of those strange life-imitating-fiction moments I encountered a number of times while visiting Salem. And, like Sarah, I had to touch the scratchy wood for it to sink in that the house was really there. I took picture after picture so I could prove to myself later that James’s house was real and I had stood in front of it. I half-expected to see Sarah walk through the front door.

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Pickering Wharf

From there I walked to Pickering Wharf, which also plays an important role in Her Dear & Loving Husband since that’s where Olivia’s shop, The Witches Lair, is located. The Witches Lair is the type of shop you see occasionally with psychic readings, tarot cards, amulets, crystals, and books of spells. While Olivia and her shop are fictional, there are many psychic shops in Salem, and there is at least one psychic with her own shop in Pickering Wharf alongside the boutiques and restaurants. Located at the edge of the bay, the gray-blue and beige-toned buildings look out into the stretch of water, and there’s the Friendship, the three-masted ship—just the way I described it, thank goodness. I ate lunch at Capn’s, wandered around the shops, watched others eating at the tables outside taking advantage of the sunny summer day, took pictures of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Pickering Wharf is peaceful, calm, and beautiful.

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The garden at the House of the Seven Gables

I hung around Pickering Wharf for a while, then walked down the block (everything in Salem seems to be down the block from everything else) to the House of the Seven Gables, made famous by the novel from Salem’s favorite son, Nathaniel Hawthorne. From his cousin, Hawthorne learned the story of the old house, and from there came the inspiration for his story. The house is every bit as grand as you would expect. Larger than James’s house (excuse me, the John Ward House), the house has seen a lot of history since it’s one of the oldest buildings in the Salem area. Passed from one family to another, made bigger, rooms and gables added, along with that secret passage made famous in the novel, the house was turned from a personal residence into a museum. I felt myself pulled back in time as I toured the rooms and looked at the furniture, the wall hangings, and the clothing. Outside the house is the garden, a burst of pinks and purples, and as I admired the flowers I saw the sea stretching out to the horizon, one of the most scenic sights in Salem. I even met two friendly cats wandering about greeting visitors. There are other buildings on the grounds, too, including the red house where Hawthorne was born. Hawthorne was born a few blocks away, and the house was moved to its current location in the 1950s. It’s a humble house since the Hathornes (the original spelling) were not a wealthy family.

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The cat at the House of the Seven Gables

I described the museum in Her Dear & Loving Husband. It’s an important moment for James and Sarah. They’re still tentative in their relationship at this point though they want to know each other better. On Halloween, James takes Sarah to see the house, and they see the gables, the garden, the Hawthorne House. He shares his knowledge (and James knows a lot about Salem in days gone by). They become more attracted and attached as they stand there together. I am glad I was able to stand there as well. Of all the sights I saw in Salem, I think the House of the Seven Gables was my favorite.

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Salem State University

In Her Dear & Loving Husband, James Wentworth has inserted himself into the human world as much as he can. If he wants to seem human, I decided, then he would have a job. What job? English literature is the only subject I can discuss with any intelligence, so James became an English professor. An odd job for someone of James’s paranormal disposition, but, as James himself says, any job besides Grim Reaper would seem odd for him. I wanted his love interest, Sarah, to work at the college, too, since it’s easy for them to run into each other if they work together. She became a college librarian. I did a search for colleges in the area, and there was Salem State College.

While on the campus I stood in front of Meier Hall, the School of Arts and Sciences, where Sarah spies on James while he’s teaching his Romantic Poets class. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the novel. The university is larger than I imagined, or at least more spread out. It’s a beautiful campus, fresh-looking, clean, and the green of the grass and the new trees make it an inviting place to be. Of course, I wasn’t taking or teaching any classes, which may have led to the fact that I found the campus peaceful. The summer school students may not have found it as inviting as I did.

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A settler’s house from 1630s Salem (then Naumkeag) in Pioneer Village

Right across Lafayette and down the block, in the state park near the bay, is Pioneer Village. More than any place in Salem, walking onto the grounds of Pioneer Village is like falling into a time warp to the 17th century. The Salem Witch Museum and the Witch Dungeon Museum were interesting, but I didn’t feel the pull of the 1600s in the museums. I felt like a 21st century tourist looking at scenes from the 17th century. At Pioneer Village, you walk into meadow-like grounds of overgrown grass, weeds, trees, front yard gardens, and historically accurate replicas of the homes of the earliest settlers to the area. The costumed docents walk you around, explaining everything, answering questions. Pioneer Village was the closest to a complete immersion into the past I found in Salem.

I visited Boston too. I didn’t have a lot of time there, but I walked the Freedom Trail, led by a knowledgeable, costumed guide with a great sense of humor and more than a passing resemblance to George Washington. I ate lunch at Faneuil Hall and saw what was perhaps the highlight of my trip—the hotel where Charles Dickens stayed during his trip to Boston in 1842. I also snapped a picture of the building that housed Dickens’s U.S. publisher. Maybe not as exciting to non-Dickens fans, but I thought it was pretty cool.

How much did visiting Salem add to the Loving Husband Trilogy? Everything. It wasn’t necessary for me to visit since I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband without setting foot in Massachusetts, but there was so much more depth in the descriptions of Salem in the last two books in the series because of my visit there.

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Historical Fiction Inspiration–The Salem Witch Trials

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A book on witchcraft from the Jonathan Corwin home in Salem, Massachusetts. Corwin was one of the magistrates during the witch trials.

Understanding the basic premise of Her Dear & Loving Husband was the easy part, and I thought this novel would be a simple love story between a vampire and the human woman he loved. I didn’t have any expectations for the book beyond that, but then things grew complicated, as they tend to do. I had my characters’ names –James Wentworth and Sarah Alexander–and I had a basic premise of who they were. But I still needed a setting. While wondering where to place the story, I stumbled onto an historical background that surprised even me.

I was looking over a map of the United States trying to decide where to set the story, and nothing was popping out at me. I deliberately stayed away from the Pacific Northwest and Louisiana since other well-known literary vampires live there. Transylvania–probably not going to work for me. I thought of my hometown Los Angeles, and then I thought of where I live now in Las Vegas, but neither of those felt right. Too bright, I think. Yes, Las Vegas is the nightlife capital of the world, perhaps a good thing for a vampire, but the Vegas nightlife scene would have added an extra element to the story that didn’t feel right to me. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Then I decided that if I wasn’t going to set the story in the Northwestern United States, how about the Northeast? I pulled my U.S. map a little closer, looked at the Northeastern seaboard states, saw Massachusetts, and I thought hmmm… I love American history, and there is plenty of that in Massachusetts. Could there be some history in this love story? James has lived over three centuries, after all. While I was looking at the map I saw that there, in a little dot near Boston, was Salem. My history-loving brain immediately thought of the Salem Witch Trials, and I was sold to both the setting and the historical background.

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The town square in Salem, Massachusetts near the Witch Trial museum.

When I watch the news these days (or try to avoid the news, more like), I’m surprised by the constant references to witch trials or witch hunts. This is the worst witch hunt you’ve ever seen, as some people like to say. But I know better. I know what the Salem Witch Trials were. They were not a joke. When I decided to use the Salem Witch Trials as the historical background for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I felt as though I had a duty to share the witch trials as they really were, with all of the ugliness–the terror, the accusations, the madness–and real people with real families with real lives died as a result. Since I wanted the historical period of the witch trials to echo what was happening to James and Sarah in the present day, I needed to make sure that the historical background coincided with the present-day story. To a degree, you could say the history informed the story; in other words, once I decided on the historical period, that helped me shape the plot.

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The Salem Witch Trial Museum.

Leave it to me to write a novel set in a New England town I had never been to. I was born in New York, but we moved to the West Coast when I was seven and I consider Los Angeles my hometown. I never visited Salem when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband. Thank goodness for the Internet, websites about Salem, and Google Earth. I did finally visit Salem while I was writing Book Two in the Loving Husband series, Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I loved the town. In fact, I wanted to move there. Luckily, everything in Salem was where I thought it should be.

It was a surreal feeling when I first arrived, and it had to sink in that I was actually in Salem. Hey, I might see Sarah walking these streets! Not James, of course. It was daytime and he was sleeping. Yes, I know James and Sarah are fictional characters, but they’re my fictional characters, which makes them real to me (and hopefully to anyone who reads the novel). The first thing I did was take the red trolley car around town. Salem is an easy town to walk through,  but the red trolley is nice because the tour guides are knowledgeable and give extra insights—a Salem FYI. Did you know that Salem’s name was Naumkeag, after the original natives, when it was first settled in 1626? Or that Salem is probably a shortened version of Jerusalem, Hebrew for city of peace or dwelling of peace? City of peace is a good name for that town because I did feel peaceful there.

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The Friendship in Salem Harbor

There’s a quietness, a calm in Salem that I can’t associate with any other place I’ve been. It might be a New England thing, or a Massachusetts thing. But people are different there. They smile at you. Say hello. I think the seaside has something to do with it. The coastline along the bay is beautiful, scenic, the bay stretching out into the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the trees along the coast adding green to the blue of the water. There are the little boats chugging and bobbing in the waves, caught in the mud at low tide, and there are people wandering along, some sightseeing. The beaches are popular and families with moms and dads and children and grandparents splash in the waves and sit in the sun. I have always found something serene about the ocean, the peace of going home, if you will, and Salem has the tranquility of the bay every day, rain or shine.

After the trolley, my next stop was the Salem Witch Museum, across from Salem Commons. I looked first at the statue of Roger Conant, who helped to settle Salem (then Naumkeag) in 1626, and he looked every bit as imposing and unforgiving as I thought he would. Raised several feet off the ground in the center of the road, Roger stares across the town like a disapproving headmaster over a roomful of unruly boys. At the Salem Witch Museum, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it looks just as I described—a large brick building, a former church, in fact. From my research for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I was already well-versed in the details of the witch trials, but I was interested in how the Salem Witch Museum portrayed those horrible days in that very place over three hundred years before. I liked how the various scenes showed the progression of the tragedy. How does one turn against a neighbor? A friend? A wife? All these years later and we still don’t know the answer, and that’s what makes the Salem Witch Trials still a frightening time, perhaps because we realize it could happen again under the right circumstances.

The Salem Witch Trials are much on my mind these days while I’m writing Down Salem Way, which again places James and Sarah in harm’s way in 1692. I think setting Her Dear & Loving Husband during the Salem Witch Trials added a depth to James and Sarah’s love story that wouldn’t have existed without the historical background. Which is one of the many reasons I love writing historical fiction.

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Historical Fiction Inspiration–Her Dear and Loving Husband

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A book on witchcraft from the Jonathan Corwin home in Salem, Massachusetts. Corwin was one of the magistrates during the witch trials.

Understanding the basic premise of Her Dear & Loving Husband was the easy part, and I thought this novel would be a simple love story between a vampire and the human woman he loved. I didn’t have any expectations for the book beyond that, but then things grew complicated, as they tend to do. I had my characters’ names –James Wentworth and Sarah Alexander–and I had a basic premise of who they were. But I still needed a setting. While wondering where to place the story, I stumbled onto an historical background that surprised even me.

I was looking over a map of the United States trying to decide where to set the story, and nothing was popping out at me. I deliberately stayed away from the Pacific Northwest and Louisiana since other well-known literary vampires live there. Transylvania–probably not going to work for me. I thought of my hometown Los Angeles, and then I thought of where I live now in Las Vegas, but neither of those felt right. Too bright, I think. Yes, Las Vegas is the nightlife capital of the world, perhaps a good thing for a vampire, but the Vegas nightlife scene would have added an extra element to the story that didn’t feel right to me. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Then I decided that if I wasn’t going to set the story in the Northwestern United States, how about the Northeast? I pulled my U.S. map a little closer, looked at the Northeastern seaboard states, saw Massachusetts, and I thought hmmm… I love American history, and there is plenty of that in Massachusetts. Could there be some history in this love story? James has lived over three centuries, after all. While I was looking at the map I saw that there, in a little dot near Boston, was Salem. My history-loving brain immediately thought of the Salem Witch Trials, and I was sold to both the setting and the historical background.

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The town square in Salem, Massachusetts near the Witch Trial museum.

When I watch the news these days (or try to avoid the news, more like), I’m surprised by the constant references to witch trials or witch hunts. This is the worst witch hunt you’ve ever seen, as some people like to say. But I know better. I know what the Salem Witch Trials were. They were not a joke. When I decided to use the Salem Witch Trials as the historical background for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I felt as though I had a duty to share the witch trials as they really were, with all of the ugliness–the terror, the accusations, the madness–and real people with real families with real lives died as a result. Since I wanted the historical period of the witch trials to echo what was happening to James and Sarah in the present day, I needed to make sure that the historical background coincided with the present-day story. To a degree, you could say the history informed the story; in other words, once I decided on the historical period, that helped me shape the plot.

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The Salem Witch Trial Museum.

Leave it to me to write a novel set in a New England town I had never been to. I was born in New York, but we moved to the West Coast when I was seven and I consider Los Angeles my hometown. I never visited Salem when I wrote Her Dear & Loving Husband. Thank goodness for the Internet, websites about Salem, and Google Earth. I did finally visit Salem while I was writing Book Two in the Loving Husband series, Her Loving Husband’s Curse, and I loved the town. In fact, I wanted to move there. Luckily, everything in Salem was where I thought it should be.

It was a surreal feeling when I first arrived, and it had to sink in that I was actually in Salem. Hey, I might see Sarah walking these streets! Not James, of course. It was daytime and he was sleeping. Yes, I know James and Sarah are fictional characters, but they’re my fictional characters, which makes them real to me (and hopefully to anyone who reads the novel). The first thing I did was take the red trolley car around town. Salem is an easy town to walk through,  but the red trolley is nice because the tour guides are knowledgeable and give extra insights—a Salem FYI. Did you know that Salem’s name was Naumkeag, after the original natives, when it was first settled in 1626? Or that Salem is probably a shortened version of Jerusalem, Hebrew for city of peace or dwelling of peace? City of peace is a good name for that town because I did feel peaceful there.

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The Friendship in Salem Harbor

There’s a quietness, a calm in Salem that I can’t associate with any other place I’ve been. It might be a New England thing, or a Massachusetts thing. But people are different there. They smile at you. Say hello. I think the seaside has something to do with it. The coastline along the bay is beautiful, scenic, the bay stretching out into the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the trees along the coast adding green to the blue of the water. There are the little boats chugging and bobbing in the waves, caught in the mud at low tide, and there are people wandering along, some sightseeing. The beaches are popular and families with moms and dads and children and grandparents splash in the waves and sit in the sun. I have always found something serene about the ocean, the peace of going home, if you will, and Salem has the tranquility of the bay every day, rain or shine.

After the trolley, my next stop was the Salem Witch Museum, across from Salem Commons. I looked first at the statue of Roger Conant, who helped to settle Salem (then Naumkeag) in 1626, and he looked every bit as imposing and unforgiving as I thought he would. Raised several feet off the ground in the center of the road, Roger stares across the town like a disapproving headmaster over a roomful of unruly boys. At the Salem Witch Museum, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it looks just as I described—a large brick building, a former church, in fact. From my research for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I was already well-versed in the details of the witch trials, but I was interested in how the Salem Witch Museum portrayed those horrible days in that very place over three hundred years before. I liked how the various scenes showed the progression of the tragedy. How does one turn against a neighbor? A friend? A wife? All these years later and we still don’t know the answer, and that’s what makes the Salem Witch Trials still a frightening time, perhaps because we realize it could happen again under the right circumstances.

The Salem Witch Trials are much on my mind these days while I’m writing Down Salem Way, which again places James and Sarah in harm’s way in 1692. I think setting Her Dear & Loving Husband during the Salem Witch Trials added a depth to James and Sarah’s love story that wouldn’t have existed without the historical background. Which is one of the many reasons I love writing historical fiction.

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Fiction Inspiration—Her Dear and Loving Husband

[image error]It’s always exciting to me that Her Dear & Loving Husband continues to find new fans every day. It currently has 148,000 reads on Wattpad, and it’s gaining more reads and likes every day. That, plus the book has been bought or downloaded over 250,000 times—no small potatoes as far as I’m concerned. Thank you to all of James and Sarah’s amazing fans.

One of the main questions I get asked about Her Dear & Loving Husband is where I came up with the idea for the story. I talked in this post about how Her Dear & Loving Husband has a lot in common with Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. I’ve only just read Outlander so that didn’t play a role in inspiring Her Dear & Loving Husband. Still, there were other books and TV shows that helped to inspire James and Sarah’s eternal love

The story begins in 2007, when I was teaching middle school American history. When I was in the school hallways I’d see the girls walking around the school holding these black books and I didn’t recognize the book. Finally, I asked one of my students who was reading it what the book was, and she said, “Oh, Ms. Allard, it’s Twilight. Don’t you know Twilight?” I didn’t, and I asked her to tell me about it. As soon as she mentioned vampires I tuned out because I wasn’t into vampires, which I associated with horror stories, and I’m not into the horror genre. Even a few fellow teachers had raved about the book, giggling over it like our teenage students. A few weeks later another student tossed Twilight onto my desk. “Ms. Allard,” she said, “I’ve read that book too many times and I have to find something else to read. You can read it.” I appreciated the gesture, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I figured I’d take it home, skim through it enough to get some character names, and then say how much I loved the the story when I returned the book to its rightful owner.

As I skimmed through the book (okay, there’s an Edward…here’s a Bella…) I thought some parts looked interesting enough so I ended up reading the whole thing. Even though Twilight is meant for young adult readers, I found the story interesting enough to decide that maybe vampires weren’t all bad. Yes, in case you’re wondering, I did end up reading the whole Twilight series. If I hadn’t read the Twilight books I never would have watched True Blood on HBO, and it’s more accurate to say Her Dear & Loving Husband was inspired by True Blood. 

There’s an episode early in the first season of True Blood (I think it’s episode four, but don’t quote me) where vampire Bill is giving a talk at Sookie’s grandmother’s church. Someone shows Bill a picture of his family from his human days before the American Civil War, and Bill becomes so emotional at the remembrance of them. That’s what clicked my brain into gear. Here’s this vampire who has everything humans only dream of—extraordinary strength, immortal life—and yet he becomes so emotional at the sight of the ones he loved as a human.  After that episode, I wondered…what happens to a vampire who lives forever? Obviously, the humans he loved would have died somewhere along the way. Would he forget about them and go on? Would he have trouble moving on? What if he fell in love again? What would that look like, and who would he fall in love with? If he was so in love with his wife, could he ever love anyone else?

I didn’t have any immediate sense that there was something tangible like a novel in those oddball daydreams. I like to tell stories, and I’m always kicking scenarios around this empty head of mine, most of which come to nothing. When I was still thinking of this vampire idea six months later, I decided to see if there was anything to it.

The exact date I began writing was April 15, 2009. It was a Wednesday. I remember the date because I was off for Spring Break that week. I had just come back from a few days in my hometown, Los Angeles, to spend some time by the beach and visit my favorite coffee/tea joint—Urth Café. Back home in Vegas, I woke up that Wednesday morning and the crazy vampire idea was distracting me again. I made myself eggs, toast, and coffee, sat down at the computer, and started typing out whatever I knew about this vampire and the woman he loved. The story even had a working title—The Vampire’s Wife. In case you were wondering, James’s official birthday is April 19 because that was the day he found his name. When it comes to character names, I feel like the name is inherent in the character; in other words, they already know their names, but they leave it to me to guess. I feel like the miller’s daughter scrambling to guess Rumplestiltskin’s name. Is it Bob? Is it Herbert? Is it Randolph or George or Ichabod? At some point I do guess correctly, and that’s without the help of a messenger spying on the One-To-Be-Named. I can’t write about a character until I know his or her name, so that’s always my first step when I write a new story.

After I had my main characters’ names—James and Sarah, and of course Elizabeth—it became a matter of deciding where the story was going to take place. At this time I had no sense that this story would move back and forth between the past and the present. In my initial conception of the story, it was going to be a present-day love story between a vampire and the woman he loves. It turns out that choosing the setting was the most decision I made while writing Her Dear & Loving Husband. And this is where the element of historical fiction came in.

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Outlander—Who Knew?

[image error]Only millions of fans around the world, that’s who.

Outlander is one of those books I’ve been meaning to get to for years—I mean really, years. My interest was renewed since there has been so much hoopla over the Starz series, but since I don’t get Starz I haven’t been able to watch yet. I finally bought an ebook version for my Kindle two summers ago, but still it sat. It was one of those covers I kept looking at, but I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately and Outlander was a next time…next time…book for me.

I finally finished reading Outlander two days ago, and now I could kick myself for waiting so long to read it. I already have book number two downloaded onto my Kindle. The funny thing about Outlander is that so many of my Loving Husband Trilogy readers have asked if I’ve read Diana Gabaldon’s books, and a few asked if the Outlander series served as an inspiration for my own James and his beloved Sarah. Obviously, no, Outlander wasn’t an inspiration for the Loving Husband Trilogy since I’ve only just read the first in Gabaldon’s engrossing series.

There’s no need for a detailed synopsis of Outlander here since there are so many around. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, 20th century inhabitant Claire Randall time travels to 18th century Scotland where she meets mighty hunky Jamie Fraser. The two certainly have their fair share of obstacles as they fall in love. Claire is torn as she has to decide between her life (and her husband) from the 20th century and Jamie. Don’t let this short description fool you. It’s a lengthy story with plenty of plot twists.

Having read the book, now I can see why readers have asked if Outlander was an inspiration for the Loving Husband Trilogy. I can see why both series would appeal to the same readers. Both are stories about a love that spans centuries. Both feature a James (yes, in the Loving Husband Trilogy Sarah calls him Jamie). My James’ last name is Wentworth, the prison in Outlander—a silly point but one I thought I’d make anyway. Both are historical fiction, though the Loving Husband books go back and forth between present day Salem, Massachusetts and their historical periods—the Salem Witch Trials, the Trail of Tears, and the Japanese-American internments, respectively. Outlander is an actual time travel novel, as in Claire travels from the 20th century back to the 18th century. Her Dear & Loving Husband isn’t really a time travel novel, although there are certainly time travel elements. Fans know what I mean. My James is more an intellectual than a warrior, though he has his moments, and if he’s not exactly human, well, no one’s perfect. I do think my James would look pretty damn good in a kilt, but I digress…

I remember when I was a kid and I would get totally lost in the many books I read. I lived on the prairie with Laura Ingalls Wilder and I sat on that farm alongside Wilbur and Charlotte. The older I’ve grown, the more difficult it has become to become totally lost in a book in that way. Outlander is the first book in years where I felt as though I was totally escaping my real world while reading. Simply as an historical novel it’s worth five stars for the way it sweeps you into 18th century Scotland. Gabaldon weaves Claire and Jamie’s story through twists and turns like a master writer. If you love historical fiction, you will love Outlander, and, I’m sure, the subsequent books. If you love a good love story thrown in, all the better.

Book One in the Outlander series down, seven more to go!

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In My Next Life I Will Be a Stand-Up Comedian

I found myself in need of some cheering up so, in accordance with my ongoing fling with Netflix, I spent a lazy Sunday watching different stand-up comedy specials. Some of the specials I loved, and some I watched for about ten minutes before I decided they weren’t for me. I’ve loved comedians for as long as I can remember. I’m dating myself here as the child of the 1970s I was, but I remember listening to records like Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy, Robin Williams’ Reality, What a Concept, and anything by George Carlin (yup, kids, we had big, round record albums in those days).

No matter which comedian I watched on the stage, microphone in hand, pacing before the audience, saying their witticisms (or not-so-witticisms, but that’s entirely a matter of personal taste), I had a sense that these were people who followed their hearts. Despite family protests, lack of money, difficulty starting their careers, they followed their dreams, and getting started in comedy clubs is not an easy thing to do. To me, the comedians were a lesson about staying true to your vision for yourself no matter what others have to say.

Writing is a tough enough gig, but writing that makes people laugh is especially hard. The ability to write and tell jokes consists of a few different skills. You need to be observant about the world, and you need to be able to share those observations in a way that could only have come from you. Timing is everything in comedy. The way someone tells a joke is as important as the words being said. A comedian needs patience so they don’t speak too quickly and lose that timing. They also need to be able to read their audiences. The way a joke worked last night might not work tonight with this audience. It must be a thrill to get an immediate reaction the way stand-up comics do. That’s one thing novelists don’t experience–immediate reactions.

It’s harder to make people laugh than it is to make people cry. Many people are saddened by the same things—such as death—but our senses of humor are largely dependent on how we’re feeling at any given moment. If we’re having a good day we’re more likely to laugh. If we’re having a bad day we’re more likely not to laugh. Senses of humor are like thumbprints, we each have our own unique version, so for a comedian to be able to get a roomful of strangers to laugh at the same thing at the same time is no small gift.

As I was watching the comedians talk about their families I realized that I have more than enough material about my own family to keep me going from comedy club to comedy club for years. But don’t we all?

Who knows? Maybe in my next life I will come back as a stand-up comedian.

Here are a few of the stand-up comedy specials I enjoyed. If you’re in need of a laugh, try them out:

Hasan Minhaj—Homecoming King. I’ve loved Hasan on The Daily Show, but I found his special particularly meaningful. It was the right amount of humor and poignancy as he talks about his experiences growing up Muslim in America.
Jim Gaffigan—yes, I watched all five of his specials. I had never seen his stand-up before, and I loved him. He talks about every day stuff we can all relate to—watching Netflix, eating too much, and being lazy.
Tracy Morgan—Staying Alive. Beware—this one is pretty raunchy, but it was still great seeing him come back from that horrible crash. It’s Tracy Morgan doing what he does best—make people laugh.

The Joy of Art Journaling

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While I’m going week by week through Julia Cameron’s course The Artist’s Way, I thought I’d share a bit about art journaling since I’ve been using it as the basis for my artist’s dates. I tried out art journaling last summer, loved it, and then I totally let it drop and didn’t touch any of my paints, pencils, or stencils for nearly a year.

I fell in love with art as a sophomore in college when I took an art history class. I didn’t know much about art then, but the class fulfilled a liberal arts requirement so I grabbed it. The class covered the time period from the earliest cave paintings in France through the Roman Empire. I remember the professor who seemed so ancient to my 19 year old eyes, but was probably in his mid forties, not old at all now that I’m in my mid forties myself. He was a slight, slender man in his khaki pants, polo shirts, and sweater tied around his neck though it was summer in the San Fernando Valley in California. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as excited about their subject as that professor was. He spoke with such enthusiasm, describing the hieroglyphics inside the Egyptian pyramids as though they were indeed handed down by the gods. I remember the professor leading a class expedition to the J. Paul Getty Museum, and I remember the feeling of complete enchantment as I studied the Greek statues and pottery. I found the professor, and his subject, endearing, and it was because of that class I developed a lifelong love for art.

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As much as I love to visit museum exhibitions, I never thought of myself as much of an artist. I was a writer, so I had to content myself with creative expression from writing. A number of years ago I dabbled in painting with acrylics, but that didn’t last long. I tried to take a painting class at the extension university where I was teaching creative writing, but the teacher wasn’t all I hoped she would be. She was a short French woman with the oddly elfin look of Dobby from the Harry Potter books. Her dyed jet-black hair was cut into an ear-length 1920s flapper’s bob and she wore huge round black glasses that took up the whole of her face. She tottered around the classroom shrugging at the students’ paintings the way only the French can. There was no instruction. There were no directions. She put some flowers in a vase on a stool at the front of the classroom and told us to paint what we saw. I looked around the classroom and saw students painting, but I didn’t even know where to start. I had never taken an art class. Yes, I loved to look at paintings, but looking and painting are two very different things. I started painting the flowers in the vase the best I could. Finally, Dobby stopped besides me and shrugged. “You are supposed to paint what you see,” she said. “This is what you see?”

Before I could answer, she shrugged and moved on. A little while later she stopped near me again.

“Why is your canvas so small?” she asked. Now it was my turn to shrug (I’m French too, you know). I didn’t remember there being a canvas size requirement in the class materials list, I said. Dobby opened her arms wide. “If you want to learn to paint, you paint big!”

I told her I didn’t think I was going to learn how to paint from her if she didn’t give us any instruction. I was a complete beginner and knew nothing about painting. Her only response was “Hmpf!” as she tottered away. Another student next to me shrugged and said that that was just the way the teacher was. I grabbed my materials, left the room, and got a refund for the money I paid for the class. I practiced a little on my own, but then decided I didn’t know what I was doing so I stopped. I still considered myself a wanna-be artist, but I limited my non-writing artistic experiences to watching craft shows on TV.

In time I started coloring, which I do enjoy. It’s stress free because someone else has done the drawing. All I have to do is choose which colors I’m going to use and have fun filling in the blanks. One Saturday afternoon I was watching one of my favorite craft shows, Scrapbook Soup on PBS with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, and she had a guest on who talked about art journaling. Certainly, I knew what journaling was. Like most writers, I’ve been keeping a written journal for years, but art journaling was something new.

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If you’re not familiar with art journaling, it’s the same as writing journaling except you’re using art supplies like colored pencils, paints, stencils, and stamps. Just as with writing journaling, art journaling is about the process and not about the finished product. When we keep writing journals we don’t worry about what we’re writing—we’re just writing. It’s like the writing practice Natalie Goldberg refers to in Writing Down the Bones or the morning pages of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Art journaling is art practice. We’re playing with the supplies, trying out different paints and different styles and different color combinations, not worrying about the final result. You can art journal on whatever paper you have handy—a bound journal, a composition book, even junk mail, old books, or magazines. You don’t need to take art classes. It’s the same learning by doing mentality that helped me become a writer, and since no one is going to see my art journal but me, I don’t have to worry about some little Dobby hovering over my shoulder shrugging as if I had no business so much as passing an art supply store.

When I began art journaling, I started slowly, buying some cheap acrylic paint at the discount store, and I already had a pretty good stash of colored pencils, crayons, and markers because of my coloring. I had an old sketch book from the Dobby days when I tried to paint the first time, and that became my art journal. I love stencils because I don’t have to worry about my drawing skills. I added a few paint markers to my stash, and I had a box of patterned scrapbook paper because I’ve created scrapbooks on occasion. Art journaling is simply about playing with what you have, allowing yourself to express yourself in whatever way you feel in the moment. The only way to do it wrong is to not do it at all.

Now, if you’re anything like me and have suffered from compare-itis, you’ll find it’s very easy to fall back into that trap when art journaling. Many of the people who make art journaling videos on YouTube or post their artwork on Pinterest are professional artists, so it’s very easy to look at their examples and think, “Well, I suck. What’s the point?” But that goes against the very purpose of art journaling. You need to look at the examples as what they are—examples—and then do what you can do in that moment. You can make your art journal pages look however you want—you can make them more like scrapbook pages, calendar pages, bullet journals. You can paint flowers, stencil flowers, doodle flowers. If you try something and don’t like it you can either paint over it with gesso or try to work with it. You can’t do it wrong. How cool is that?

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Art journaling must have been invented for someone like me—someone who loves to play with paint and color but doesn’t have much background knowledge about how to actually make art. Some of my pages are kind of cool, and some are kind of weird, and some are kind of cartoony, but you know what? It’s all good. Anything I do in my art journal is right for me. So there, Dobby!

While I will always be a writer first, I’m enjoying discovering other artistic pursuits. I’m glad Julia Cameron’s course The Artist’s Way is prompting me to explore other avenues of creativity; mainly, I’m glad I’ve found my way back to art journaling.

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The Artist’s Way Week One

Last week I started participating in Julia Cameron’s 12 week course The Artist’s Way. It might seem odd that I would start such a course at this stage of my writing life. I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, I’ve had short stories and articles published since 2000, and my novels have been published since 2011. I was doing all right, right? I was writing, publishing, and finding successes where I could.

I wrote last week about how suddenly, after writing and publishing for years, I hit the wall of Resistance pretty hard, leaving me with bruised extremities and a soft-boiled ego. What happened? You name it, and it was probably right–I was lazy, I was afraid of failing, I was afraid of dreaming too big, I was tired of battling between what I wanted to write and what I thought I should write.

I’ve always believed that you will find what you need if you open yourself up to receive it. On a whim, I pulled The Artist’s Way off my bookshelf (it was one of the few paperbacks I kept after I embraced the minimalist movement and started donating books and other things I no longer used). I skimmed through the pages and recognized it as a 12 week course that needs to be worked through rather than read cover to cover. I made the decision to take the plunge. Luckily for me, I had just reread Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and Goldberg’s suggestions went along perfectly with the purpose of The Artist’s Way. Here’s what I did for Week One:

I completed my morning pages for each of the seven days. If you’re not familiar with Cameron’s morning pages, it’s a journal that you keep every day. The only rule is you have to write at least three pages, but otherwise you can write about whatever you want. The idea is just to get the thoughts flowing. Natalie Goldberg refers to it as writing practice. I use Goldberg’s idea of using sensory detail and memories and life happenings as fuel for my writing. Here’s a sample from my morning pages from last week:

I have been to this hospital too many times to count. It is as though the hospital itself waves “Hello! Welcome back!” whenever it opens its sliding glass doors to me and I walk from the 115 degree dry desert heat into the cold, stale air of the waiting room. If I think about it, I can count the number of times I have been here: one…two…three…four…five…six…seven… My mother calls this hospital her home away from home, and it is. The hospital is located at the north end of Tenaya Way, the medical district with doctors’ offices, physical therapists’ offices, blood-draw offices, and MRI offices. There’s also a post office and a pub for those in need of a pick-me-up from waiting in tight-fisted doctors’ offices or hospital waiting rooms where people are packed tighter than pencils in a box. There is the serenity of the mountains in the distance, but there’s also the freeway just a few feet away, and if you stop and listen you can hear the zoom of the car-chase type speeds as vehicles zip past, as though the drivers believe they are race-car champions. 

I won’t bore you with the rest of it, but you can see that I’ve incorporated Goldberg’s idea of including sensory details as a way of practicing the pinpoint eyesight through which I can observe the world and use in my writing.

I did my artist’s date. An artist’s date, according to Cameron, is a weekly chance for us to get in touch with our inner creative person. It’s a chance to do something fun and creative simply to do something fun and creative. This week I did a page in my art journal. I discovered art journaling last summer and fell in love with it, and then I didn’t touch my journal for months. It was great fun to pull out my paints and stencils again, and I’m sorry I let it go for so long. The inspiration for this page came from Mimi Bondi , a French mixed media artist living in Australia. I love Mimi because she’s all about finger painting and having fun and doing whatever you want and you can’t do it wrong, which goes right along with the intention behind the artist’s date. If you’re looking for art journaling inspiration, check out Mimi’s YouTube page.

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I answered the questions and completed the tasks at the end of Lesson One. I wrote my responses right into my morning pages journal. I took a walk (in 115 degree nose-bleed dry desert heat, which is great commitment, I must say), and I discovered that the monster who has done the most to discourage my creativity and my writing is me. Now there’s a revelation.

It’s only been one week, but so far so good. So far I’ve read the lesson for the second week, and I’m looking forward to the discoveries ahead.

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9 Tips for Submitting to Editors

[image error]This is one of my most popular posts. I decided to reshare it after I revised it a bit. I hope you find it useful as you prepare your own writing for submission.

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After I was invited to speak at the Henderson Writers Group, I had to decide what I had to offer that was useful. As the executive editor of The Copperfield Review, an award-winning literary journal for readers and writers of historical fiction, I realized I could offer tips on how to make submissions stand out so they had a better chance of being published.

Most writers write with the intention of being published. Not all writers. A few years ago I taught a creative writing workshop for adults in California and I had a lovely older lady as a student. She was taking my class because she wanted to write her life story for her grandchildren and she wanted to write it well. But most writers want to submit their work to magazines, journals, agents, and book editors so they can be published.

Every day writers give editors many reasons to say no to their submissions. If you can help your submission stand out from the crowd, in a good way, then you can increase your chances of getting a yes and being published. Here are my best tips for submitting to editors.

Don’t…

9. Cc every editor you’re submitting to in one email

Most editors understand that writers are sending simultaneous submissions, meaning that writers are sending their work to several journals at a time. Even so, it’s important for writers to take the few extra minutes to send a separate email to each individual editor. It looks more professional, like the writer cares about presentation. Cc’d submissions look lazy, quite frankly, and other editors I know agree with me. Every time I’m included in a cc list with other editors, inevitably a few of the other editors will email me and ask “Did you see that email?” Then they’ll follow the question with something like “What a jerk!” or some other expletive I won’t include here. I don’t look too closely at cc’d submissions, and neither do other editors I know.

8. Misspell the editor’s name

7. Confuse the editor’s gender

Make sure you spell the editor’s name correctly, and check to see if the editor is a boy or a girl. If I had a dollar for every time I received an email addressed to Mr. Allred I could have bought out Borders and prevented it from going out of business. I’ve seen my name as Allston, Allen, Allan, and every other variant of All— you can think of. On The Copperfield Review The Staff page, my name is there, spelled correctly, and you can see at a glance that my gender pronoun is ‘she.’ It’s the same for other editors or agents—the information is on their websites. Just three weeks ago we received a submission addressed to “Dear Sirs.” There isn’t a single “sir” on the staff of Copperfield. That submission was laughed right into the no-thanks file. Details are important. Really.

6. Resubmit a new version of your work 

Whether your work is accepted or rejected, don’t resend a new version to the same editor. If your work was rejected, it wasn’t right for that editor for various reasons. It isn’t anything about your talent or even that particular story. Different editors have different preferences, that’s all. Keep sending the story out to different editors. But don’t send it back to the same editor, even if you’ve reworked it—that is, unless the editor has specifically said to send it back after you’ve made revisions.

That goes for work that’s been accepted too. It’s happened where we’ve accepted a piece for publication and then the writer says something like, “I’ve reworked my story. Here’s the new version.” If we accepted it, then we thought it was fine. We don’t need a new version. At Copperfield, we stopped accepting new versions because we were doing twice the work—formatting the original we accepted, then formatting the new one. Now on our guidelines it says writers need to send in the version they want to see online since what they send us (if it’s accepted) is what’s going up. Send in your best stuff the first time, and that will make the process easier for you and for the editors.

5. Forget to let editors know your work has been accepted elsewhere

I took a quick poll of a few editor friends of mine. I asked them what their number one pet peeve was concerning submissions, and every one said they’re most annoyed when they choose a work for publication and then find out the work has been accepted elsewhere.

The issue isn’t that the work has been picked up by another journal. Nearly every editor I know is a writer too, and we’re thrilled when other writers are published whether it’s in our journal or someone else’s. The problem occurs when we aren’t told a submission is no longer up for consideration. At Copperfield, we spend a lot of time reading and rereading every submission we receive. If authors don’t tell us their work has been accepted elsewhere and we spend time considering their work, we’ve just wasted hours, and, like many of you, we don’t have hours to waste. A simple e-mail is all it takes. No long explanations required. But it is expected, professional courtesy to let editors know your work is no longer up for grabs.

Do…

4. Send in your most polished work

I’m a writer too, and I know what it’s like to be eager to be published. It takes discipline to keep reworking a piece until it’s polished and ready to submit, especially since the revising process could take weeks or even months. You don’t need to rush the submitting process. Literary journals, agents, and publishers aren’t going to disappear.

Run your work by a critique group. Take writing classes. Read some great short stories and examine their greatness. Develop an ear for well-written dialogue. Unwieldy or unnecessary dialogue is a common problem in submissions we see at Copperfield. Give yourself time to grow into the writer you want to be. I know we live in the “I want it now” era, but there’s no rush. You’re on no one else’s timetable but your own. Make sure your story is the best it can be before you send it off to editors.

3. Proofread your queries and submissions

It’s important to proofread for typos and other boo-boos. It goes back to showing editors, agents, and anyone else you’re submitting to that you’re serious about writing. You’re not sending in something you wrote off the top of your head, and you took the time to read and reread to check for mistakes. Sometimes it’s hard to catch your own mistakes because your eyes see what they expect to see, and they expect to see what you meant to write. Maybe you meant to write ‘she’ instead of ‘the’ but your finger went to the right instead of the left and…you know how it goes. And spellcheck, while a great tool, isn’t perfect.

It’s helpful to have another set of eyes proofread your work for you. Whether it’s a friend with a firm grasp of language and spelling or you hire a professional editor, someone else will often catch those pesky typos before you do, and that will help you create a professional looking draft most editors will be happy to consider.

2. Read previous editions of the journal/publication to see what they publish

Sites like New Pages or the Literary Magazines page from Poets & Writers are great resources for finding journals that publish stories like the ones you’ve written. When I first started writing historical fiction I searched for journals that published that genre, but I couldn’t find any. As a result, I started my own—The Copperfield Review. With so many journals online these days, it’s easy to click through their stories to see what they like to publish, and it helps to whittle down your list of possible submissions.

The Copperfield Review is a journal of historical fiction. You’d be amazed at the countless submissions we’ve received over the years that were not at all historical in nature. Writers waste their time sending their non-historical submissions to us. That’s one more rejection letter they wouldn’t have received if they had checked our website. Even a cursory glance would show that The Copperfield Review is a journal of historical fiction.

If you write science fiction, seek out science fiction journals. If you write mystery, humor, romance, inspirational, literary—whatever it is, there’s a journal out there that publishes it. Send your work to those journals because you’ll have a better chance of being published. And if such a journal doesn’t exist, start your own. It worked for me.

1. Follow the submission guidelines exactly as stated

As a writer myself, I understand that sometimes submission guidelines seem petty, even vindictive—you know, a way to make writers more miserable. What does it matter if it asks for a third person bio? What does it matter if I send in seven poems at a time instead of three? But those guidelines exist for a reason, and editors notice if writers don’t follow them. You’re going to have to trust me on this.

Maybe the problem is the word guidelines, which sounds more like submission suggestions. The guidelines exist because the editors need some semblance of sanity, a method to our madness, to help us weed through hundreds of submissions per edition. For example, we don’t accept file attachments because we caught viruses when we did. We only accept one poem at a time and we have a word limit for fiction and nonfiction because we’re a tiny staff with day jobs, families, and other life obligations. We ask for a third person bio because books, newspapers, and magazines use third person bios. I understand that to authors it might not seem like a big deal whether they send in a bio in first or third person, but it makes a difference to us as we put each new edition together.

For writers who want a one-size-fits-all file that will work as a submission for fifty different journals, I’m afraid that’s not likely. Submissions that follow the guidelines are the ones we look at seriously for publication. Writers careful to follow our specific guidelines at Copperfield are showing us that they take their writing seriously, they care about presentation, and they’re making the process easier by giving us what we’ve asked for. All I can say is a hearty “Thank you!” to those writers.

It isn’t so hard to send in a strong submission. It boils down to being professional, sending in your best work, and following the guidelines. If you can do those things, the sky is the limit for your writing career.

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The Discovery, the Bones, and the Artist’s Way

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In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg talks about beginner’s mind, where we go back to the beginning to remember what it is like to try something for the first time. As someone who has been writing since high school with the intention of being published, and as someone who has had a few literary successes I thought I knew what writing was.

And then I didn’t.

It was the stuff outside writing I started having problems with. I understand what social media is and how to use it (some of it, anyway). I understand more about marketing than I did before Her Dear & Loving Husband was published. Suddenly, publicity and marketing became overwhelming because there’s too much out there. Blogs, books, podcasts–all proclaiming “I’ve sold a million books! This is how you can do it!” And then when I didn’t get close to the numbers the experts claimed to have achieved I felt smaller than a gnat. I wanted to sell a million books too, so I allowed myself to be persuaded by iffy claims and false advertising–sometimes from people who hadn’t sold any more books than I had. If I had been around in the era of the carnival barkers I would have fallen for their every sales pitch, believing that saw dust would cure all my ills. I followed every publishing site, read every book, and listened to every podcast searching for that magic nugget, that one big reveal that would set me on the road to becoming the Next Big Thing.

One day, not too long ago, everything I was reading about publishing started to feel like noise–a residual sound like a tintinnitus-type ringing in my ears. Then I wondered, how have I contributed to the noise? Is that what being a writer is now? Spreading noise instead of thoughts, opinions, and ideas? Instead of sharing stories? How much of my work has come from my heart, and how much has come from my beliefs about what I think others want from me? As of right now, I know what I do not want: I no longer want to contribute to the noise.

As soon as last week I was making myself crazy trying to discover what kind of books I should write that would make the most money and how quickly I could write those books and how to best market those books and which influencers I should connect with and how to publicize everything to my best advantage.

Only I didn’t want any of it.

Somehow, call it a flash of enlightenment, I understood that I was marching to the beat of other people’s drummers instead of my own. I’m a pretty independent-minded person, and even I followed the pied piper.  I went along because I lost track of what being a writer meant to me. I lost track of being an artist, of seeing the world through wide, open eyes that recognize life on earth as the miracle it is, like when I taught kindergarteners–a job I adored–because everything was new to them. The simplest experiment–making bubbles from soap and water and empty strawberry cartons and watching the sunlight reflect rainbow prisms as the bubbles floated away in the white-cloud sky–made them point and giggle with glee. In that moment those bubbles were the greatest thing ever. After 23 years of writing, that’s what I wanted for myself–I wanted to watch bubbles with wonder. I wanted to get back to beginner’s mind.

I’ve read Writing Down the Bones too many times to count, and this morning I finished reading it once again. But it was a different experience this time. This time, it hit me exactly in the innards. I had seen myself as a writer for many years, and while I always loved what Goldberg said and took a lot of it to heart, I didn’t really understand the book until this latest reading. I had also read Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way before, only the first time I read it cover to cover, which is not how the book was meant to be experienced since it’s a 12 week course to be studied week by week. I loved what Cameron said about living a creative’s life, but I didn’t take it to heart because I thought I was already doing all right in that department.

Maybe I wasn’t as creatively all right as I thought. I want to get back to the heart of being creative and the soul of what I really love–writing. I am really only at home in the world when I’m writing. I am now going through Cameron’s course week by week. I’m on week one. I’ve started doing morning pages (or writing practice, as Natalie Goldberg calls it). So far I’ve done my morning pages every day this week, though I haven’t done my artist’s date yet. I have a feeling Saturdays will be my day for my artist’s date. I think I would like to do a page or two in my art journal, using finger paints and designing whatever I see in my mind’s eye at that moment. I haven’t touched my art journal in nearly a year, and I have missed it.

For so long, writing had become a chore because I had so many other worries. Like Natalie Goldberg says, writing does writing, and that’s where I lost my connection–to writing and myself. I was trying too hard to push the writing this or that way thinking I should do what others told me to do instead of doing what my heart wanted to do. That is always a mistake.

I’m looking forward to working through The Artist’s Way. I’ll share my experiences as I go through the program week by week. So far, week one, I find the process freeing and exhilarating and exactly what I need right now.

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