Ruth Tenzer Feldman's Blog, page 23

Centennial of The Lost World

When Miriam Josefsohn visits the public library in Blue Thread, she borrows the newly published book by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World. She starts to read it on the streetcar home.

I knew I would enjoy the book. The first chapter was about a young woman who wasn’t ready to get married. Good for her!”

Later, when Miriam kazooms back 3,000 years to the steppes of Moab, she tells Serakh,

“This is straight out of The Lost World.”

To which Serakh answers…predictably,

“Do not feel troubled, Miriam....

Copyedit Contest!

Yes, you can do this! All it takes is a close reading. A very close reading.

Blue Thread has over 65,000 words. So far, I’ve noticed that two of them are incorrect. That means that the editors and proofreaders for the book did an excellent job catching my mistakes. Still, our errors are your chance to win this set of unique postcards from Portland artist Addie K. Boswell and enough gorgeous ribbon to make Eliza Lane’s suffragist bow.

Here’s the deal:

Blue Thread contains a typo in Chapter 16 and...

Corsets: The Ties That Bind

A corset might have been a delightful garment in medieval France. The word came from the diminutive of “cors” meaning “body” and it meant a lace bodice. But by about 1800 a corset referred to a stiff, restricting undergarment. Miriam Josefsohn in Blue Thread, was thankful that she wasn’t wearing one during her travel back to the steppes of biblical Moab.

Corsets…I don’t know how Mama can stand them.

Here’s an ad for a corset from the Morning Oregonian, February 18, 1912. The corset featured her...

Designing the Guts of Blue Thread

Here’s how it worked. I delivered a manuscript to the folks at Ooligan Press. They delivered a book to you. One of the key people in that metamorphosis was Brandon Freels, the interior designer for Blue Thread.

Now that the book is published, I asked Brandon to talk about his experience. Listen up!

What was entailed in designing the interior of Blue Thread? What was the most difficult part? The most enjoyable?

Designing the interior really means making choices. It’s about picking margins, fonts,...

Eliza Lane’s Super-Easy Suffragist Bow

The cover of Blue Thread features a bow that Miriam Josefsohn might have worn in the 1912 campaign to give women in Oregon the same voting rights as Oregon men. Eliza Lane made that bow, which, as she shows us, is a cinch to make. Take it away, Eliza.

Tools and materials:

button with a pin back

scrap of fabric

scissors

permanent marker

needle and thread

24″ of ribbon

6″ piece of thin wire (such as from a twist tie)

safety pin

To make the VOTE button, cover pre-made pin with fabric. Cut a circle from fa...

I Gave Whirlabout New Media a Whirl

As of this month, according to a rough estimate, about 157 million people in the U.S use Facebook. Nearly 15 million Facebook users in the U.S. are thirteen to seventeen years old. Facebook is only one small corner of the social media available over the Internet. Communication between readers and writers, as witnessed by the recent blog tour for Blue Thread, has advanced to a whole new level.

The mechanics of this sort of communication comes easy for some, but, I confess, not for me. So I turn...

Time Travel…Really?

Albert Einstein, 1921

During one of my workshops at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, a student asked me whether I believed in time travel. We’d just spent about an hour discussing techniques for writing about time travel, but I hadn’t expected the question. After some blah-blah-blah on my part about friends who were physicists, I answered yes.

Doh! A couple of hours later, I remembered the quote attributed to Albert Einstein that I had put at the start of Blue Thread:

People like us,...

Peaches, Cream, and Cobbler

Peaches originated in Asia thousands of years ago and were brought from Western Europe to the American colonies, where peach trees thrived and Thomas Jefferson took a fancy to them. “Cobbler” in the food sense is an American English word and has meant a deep-dish fruit and pastry concoction since about the 1850s. Peach cobbler is nearly “as American as apple pie” and just the sort of dessert all-American Miriam in Blue Thread would love.

I took an extra dollop of whipped cream and savored my l...

Cover Designer Kelsey Tells All

According to various Web sources, the phrase “you can never tell a book by its cover” first appeared in print back in 1946 in the novel Murder in the Glass Room, by Edwin Rolfe and Lester Fuller. But in the case of Blue Thread, I’d like to think that the contents does justice to the book’s beautifully designed exterior. Here’s a shout out to Kelsey Klockenteger, who won Ooligan’s cover design competition for Blue Thread.

And here’s the inside story of the outside of the book, as told by Kelsey...

National Licorice Day

According to a licorice store in Lincoln, Nebraska, April 12th is National Licorice Day. I have no idea how long there has been such a holiday, but my guess is that National Licorice day wasn't around in 1912. Still, Blue Thread's Miriam didn't need an excuse to buy her favorite candy.

I decided to cheer myself up on the way home. I sipped water from Mr. Benson's new outdoor bubbling drinking fountain by the depot and discovered a new confectionery, Rose City Candies. I bought a cone of...