Juliet Waldron's Blog - Posts Tagged "juliet-waldron"

Why Possum Tracks? Because in the authorial world, that's the creature with which I identify, a small despised creature that scuttles quietly through the night, seeking a few crumbs with which to sustain my ability to create. I mind my business and gather what the others who are more fortunate have discarded, or what they will not consume, the grubs, worms, bugs, of this writing life. I'm not ashamed of what I am. It is necessary for some of us to clean up after the riotous dinners of the much-lauded others.

With sharp claws, I dig after the grubs of truth buried in the dirt of history. I persist; my lineage is ancient. My family lived in Gondowanaland ever so long ago, and my descendants--rare, strange and endangered--still remain in far off Australia, which drifted away from neighboring continents and became lost.

I will speak of the past, of the meaning of writing about history and occasionally about writing, but the last is mostly immaterial since we've all become scribblers in this electronic (and probably short-lived) all-consuming age. I will talk about men and women and about their tangled relations, about love, power, character,good and evil, night and day, and about the small creatures of the earth and the flight of birds, moonrise and set, and about the signs of nature which exist to illuminate and delight even the most dreary life.

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http://www.julietwaldron.com

~~Juliet Waldron

I’ve spent a lot of my life fixating upon dead heroes, which means, as we turn into October, I’m entering my favorite other-worldly season. (Maybe “hero” isn’t quite the word, but “famous historical personalities” is unwieldy.) Richard III came into my life early, just pre-teen, via a discarded paperback, “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, fished from a wastebasket in the lounge of a 1950’s Barbados hotel. For some reason, this mystery story about a man whose chosen motto was “Loyalty Binds Me” and whose reputation had been unjustly blackened, started an obsessive fire in my brain which is, even 50 some years later, burning hotter than ever.

Richard started life in 1452, which is a long time ago—560 years at Fotheringhay Castle, now nothing more than a heap of earth where the original motte and bailey stood. As you can see from the picture, 500+ years doesn’t leave much behind! He was born on October 2, which makes him a Libra. If the Tudor spin doctors are to be believed, he was a seriously out of balance child of this supremely balanced heavenly sign. If the skeleton just recovered proves to be the King, it appears that he had a deformity at birth, a severe scoliosis, which would have caused his right shoulder to be carried high. He only lived for thirty-two years, but he (or his distorted shadow) has left a large mark on World consciousness via Shakespeare’s blood-and-thunder melodrama.

This blog is not about Richard, though. It’s about time, of which we humans don’t get a large slice. I’ve been flailing around more than twice as long as this particular dead hero, but have made not a jot of difference to the greater world. Still, King Richard, his fair wife, Anne Neville, and others of the bloody Plantagenet cousinage have been wandering about, talking, loving and fighting in my head since childhood. When the excavation in that Leicester car park came up with those bones--scoliosis, battle wounds, and all—it started the whole royal parade, complete with banners and drums, echoing inside my mind. The images come seeping out, a moving picture of antique glory superimposed over the ordinariness of daily life. I feel closer to these semi-imaginary long dead than I do to my neighbors. After all, these royal shadows have been with me from tropical beaches to Cornish cliffs and all the way to this present slough of suburban senior citizenship.

It’s 11:11 p.m. Sometimes it’s 12:12 a.m. And other times it’s 3:33 or, maybe, it’s 4:56. These are clock times which snag my imagination. They happen mostly during the dark hours, when I wake up, check the time, shake my head and stagger off to the bathroom, or to let the cat out, or to wander around the house for a bit until my old joints unkink a little so I can go back to sleep. I suppose I shouldn’t waste time thinking about whether it means anything, but the problem is that during the 60’s I dabbled in numerology, and that even earlier, sitting on the floor to the off-stage right of a Barbadian bar, I read books about ancient aliens visiting earth, prehistoric collisions with Venus, or African tribes who knew all about the invisible-to-the-naked-eye-dwarf companion of the blue giant star, Sirius. I’ve been soaking in this other-worldly, one-brick-shy-of-a-load content since I was a post war child, with predictable results.

Whenever I wake up I always look at the clock, and because there is usually some variation of what I take to be a “meaningful” configuration, I’ve begun to imagine these are messages—from somewhere, about something. Don’t ask me what, although I’ve wasted plenty of time wondering.

Are these omens, messages from a hitherto uncommunicative universe?

Will the TARDIS land in my bedroom? (If you prefer "Stargate," that'll work too.)

Is something with three long limp toes and a snaky snout from some hideous Lovecroftian dimension waiting just behind the bedroom door?

Or is it just my imagination running away with me over a series of unrelated, random events, aka Reality as usual?

The character who keeps coming back! Most writers have them. The book that can’t or won’t be finished--those too are on every writer’s hard drive. My particular dark horse always returns in the first warm weather, this year occurring in April.*

She’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times before. I’ve journeyed repeatedly to this world across a time which now spans thirty years.

Nanina's is the first story/book I ever wrote, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of "Mozart’s Wife," this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing while pinned inside her dress.

I’ve heard authors talk about “channeling” their characters. There are many accounts of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sound as if they should be taken with entire handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I've had working on Nanina's story, I know it can happen.

Ordinarily it takes a period of study and focused concentration to make your "dolls" get up and show you where they want to go. In this case, however, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She desperately wanted to tell me about her grand passion,about what happened to her after it ended, and about how she coped with the death of the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her only God.

So tulip-time April comes again, and her voice returns, calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is “romance.”

I hasten to add that it’s a “romance” in the broadest sense of the word, in the way "Romeo & Juliet" is a romance. I’m not using the modern commercial meaning. This is a tale of the old-fashioned bloody-insanity that a great passion can sometimes be, the kind which all too easily slides into tragedy. It’s the dark side of "Mighty Aphrodite," which makes completing this vulnerible young woman's story so difficult for me.

~~Juliet Waldron

*Finished at last, published in 2011 as
"My Mozart," Nanina's story now stands beside the story of "Mozart's Wife" as a kind of ecstatic flip side image.

Happy to Be Interviewed by Books We Love today.

As has been said, "The past is never gone. Why, it's not even past." That's been a life-time theme for me, always having a ghost or two about the house and
an idea or two in my head.

A lovely teaser, too, with the cover of my latest 18th Century Viennese story of dangerous love:

Nightingale

http://bwlpp.blogspot.com/

The first turkey I ever cooked myself was in 1964. I was a young married, an ex-student, as was my husband. We were living in a dismal basement apartment in NYC, with a front window whose view was the back of the building’s garbage cans. Needless to say, we kept the blinds closed. We shared a bathroom with some elder ladies who we never saw, but who, no matter how loudly I scrubbed the tub after using it, would come in as soon as I’d left and wash the entire bathroom all over again. I suppose I can’t blame them, for lots of people in the city lived in fear of all manner of dangerous unknowns.

We’d managed to buy the turkey, a small one, although it took some financial planning to get the cash together, as I didn’t have a job. Only my husband, Chris, did. As a nineteen year old with zero skills, it didn’t pay much and rent took most of that. As for me, I’d left the hospital I’d been working in back in Philadelphia and come to NYC in order to be with him. Plus, I was violently morning sick—to the 9th degree. I mean, Rosemary, in “Rosemary’s Baby,” had nothing on me. The only things I could reliably keep down were weird cravings: green pea soup, white bread, grapefruit and sardines. Anything else—upchuck! Maybe that’s why the invisible ladies next door were so diligent about scrubbing our shared bathroom.

On the big day we cleaned up our turkey as I’d seen my parents do, slapped it in a big bakeware pan that we’d found in the kitchen, turned the oven to 350 and then walked over to Broadway to see a little of the Thanksgiving Day parade. We were so far uptown that there wasn’t much to see, but there were bands and high school kids from out of town feeling really proud of themselves, and people wrestling with a couple of balloons—my favorite, Dino the dinosaur—being dragged about in the gusty wind. The other big moment was seeing Fess Parker of Davy Crocket fame, waving and smiling from the back of an open car. Like a zillion children from my generation, he’d been my hero back in the fourth grade. I’d wept while watching the Walt Disney show the night “Davy” died at the Alamo.

Now that child’s life seemed incredibly distant. Chris and I looked at each other. We were married, pregnant and close to broke. Whether one or either of us would ever get back to college—and how the heck we would manage it--was still up in the air. Nobody's parents were happy. With all this drama swirling through our minds, the parade, so very pointedly for little kids, got tiring fast.

We turned and walked back through the wind, weak November sun, and grimy uptown streets to our little pad. When we got there, the place was redolent with roast turkey and baked potatoes. The bird made snapping noises as the juice splattered about inside the oven, casting a kind of smoky pall around the kitchen. We decided that this must mean it was cooked. Chris fetched it out, and lo and behold, it was done, all crispy, juices running clear. I was a little surprised that I was, for the first time in months and all of a sudden—genuinely hungry. It was quite a fine meal, our first Thanksgiving—meat, potatoes, squishy store bread and a freshly opened can of cranberry sauce.

Who knew I’d be remembering it fifty-one years later?

~~Juliet Waldron

See all my historical novels at:
http://www.julietwaldron.com

“You goddamned puffed-up little nobody!” The planter had Alex by the shirt.

Ordinarily, he would have defended himself, but this was an important customer, so, instead, he only twisted and ducked. The ham fist struck his back, almost knocking the breath out of him as he wrenched free.

“I’ll teach you to talk back!”

It had not been because of anything, really, but simply because the fellow was in a foul mood. He’d entered the store in a rage and passed it along in the casual fashion a man might kick a cur in the street. Mr. Cruger watched from the back, but made no move to interfere.

The customer is always right. Especially this son-of-a bitch! And Cruger’s absolute indifference to right or wrong, is the best the filthy snake can do….

At quitting time, Alexander was off down the beach. He hated his life and everyone in it.

“God help me, or even the Devil.” He spoke aloud, feeling supremely daring. “When the next war comes, I shall jump ship and run straight to it.”

There was a special place to which Alexander went whenever he wanted to be alone. It was a rough trek through a forbidding grove of twisted manchineel and then up a brush-covered headland. After a slow ledge-to-ledge descent down the cliff face, he’d reach an outcrop a mere twenty feet above high tide, but hidden from anyone above.

Today, all he wanted was to stretch out, to listen to the boom of the waves. He anticipated a rare moment of fantasy, one that involved sailing away, maybe to some distant war, or maybe to America to see his friend Ned Stevens...



~~ Juliet V. Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

Historical novels with grit and passion

The opener of MY MOZART as a kind of Mozart Kugeln sweetie for the Maestro's Birthday,

January 27th


"Mozart, Ich liebe dich. I love you. Love you."

"Come, Nanina Nightingale. Come and give your poor old Maestro some of your ‘specially sugary sugar."

My mouth on his‑‑the friction produced warmth and sweetness, with a decided undertone of the expensive brandy he liked, flowing from his tongue to mine. I slid my arms across the brocade of his jacket, none too clean these days, and swayed a slender dancer's body against him.

Let me assure you that my sophistication was assumed. It really doesn't matter - then, or now. I was young, foolish, and drowning in love. I was seventeen. He was thirty five.

I believed he knew everything--that he could see right through me with those bright blue eyes. He probably could. He'd been my music master--and, more--my deity, ever since I'd met him, in my ninth year...

Angelica Ten Broeck, patriot heiress, writes in her diary a few days after the American defeat at New York, 1776.


I still can't believe what I saw outside of Aunt Letitia's parlor windows last night. The whole City south of her house was on fire. We were afraid, and the servants stood before the door with muskets in hand. So much smoke blew about that even inside the house we were coughing. The whole sky turned red, and throngs of people carrying pitiful bundles of clothes ran and wept, driving their cows and horses down the street.

I hadn't believed it could happen, that General Washington could be driven out of New York and that the British would rule here again, but that's what has come to pass.

My Aunt believes that Americans set fire to the City themselves, that British troops were not responsible for this arson. This morning the fires still burn, and we've heard that more than half of the buildings downtown are in ruins. Auntie and I had hot words on the subject at breakfast, but after what I've seen and heard of this war, I confess I am truly not certain of what the truth is.

It's unimaginable, the things my Uncle Ten Broeck has written of, terrible things being done all up and down our peaceful valley, the looting and burning, the cruel maiming of horses and cattle done by those who must have nothing but evil in their hearts. Everywhere, my Uncle says, men settle old scores with their neighbors, while hiding these dreadful crimes behind politics--as if calling themselves "Loyalist" or "Patriot" can excuse the wicked things they've done.

Oh why did I ever come to New York? It has turned out exactly as Uncle Jacob warned. I've been a great fool, traveling in the middle of a war! All I want now is to go home, to sail up the river back to Kingston, but now I am trapped behind the lines of our enemy. My Aunt Letitia says that I--and my inheritance--are safer here, that because my Uncle Jacob is a patriot and defies the British, he will be hanged and his lands forfeited to the Crown. It is better, she says, that I "not be involved in his folly and ruin."

She keeps saying she wants me to marry "a respectable English gentleman" and "leave forever this barbaric place". She doesn't seem to understand that I am an American, bred in this land and rebel to the bone. Even though General Washington has been defeated, I believe that in the end--somehow, someway--our Cause will triumph and that one day we shall enjoy the blessings of true liberty and peace...





Angel's Flight originally published as Independent Heart is the Revolutionary War sister book to the award-winner, Genesee.



~Juliet Waldron~
See all my historical novels at:
http://www.julietwaldron.com



















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Once a week you find these in the lobby of the grocery store. I have a habit of reading through them. There are the usual advertisers, the churches, the realtors, the auctions, the used car dealers, restaurants that offer “early-bird” specials for seniors, and club listings—chess, photography, computers, knitting, quilting, and a host of support groups. There are a few obituaries, but I hope never to find the few people I do know featured. There are classified ads, too, and these are mostly the reason I read it.

Every once in a while there’s something that makes me smile. My most recent favorite said: “Found! One of those things you pick up things with in the 300 block of Mayberry Street.” This writer had good intentions, but the words to describe the object he’d found eluded him. Still, he did note where he'd found it, and perhaps that would reunite the owner with the lost object.

Sometimes, the ad reveals something about the mental state of the person who wrote it. This is unintentional, but here’s a good one, full of anxiety: “Lost blue tool box full of tools. I’m not sure where I lost it, but it’s blue, full of tools and says Erector on the lid. Reward! Thank-you.”

You can tell that losing the box was a terrible thing, but you can also tell that the writer has probably lost a lot of other important things over the years. As someone who can relate to absent-mindedness and loss, I sincerely hoped someone eventually returned his toolbox (blue).

Another ad, one I responded to, said: “Help me please! I have 31 cats who needs good homes. Bring cat food.“

I went to the place—the back of beyond behind a very small somewhere along-the-highway town and up a hill via a gullied dirt road. There I found a ramshackle house and on it's last legs barn. There were cats everywhere, running for cover. A woman, thin and tired looking, with tattoos all over her arms, came out and we sat down together on the grass. She explained that she had worked at a shelter, but couldn’t endure the weekly euthanasia, and so had ended up with all these cats. I could see straight-away that most of her cats had no use for people—probably with good reason.

I watched cats skulking under the rusting junkers and behind old engine parts that littered the yard. After a few minutes, she opened the big bag of cat food I’d brought and spread it on the ground. Skinny cats came swarming from every direction. After gulping hastily, all keeping one eye on me--the unknown--most ran away. I’d been watching an orange threesome, scrawny nine month adolescents. The kind weary woman pointed them out, calling them "my orange brothers.”

One, the skinniest and shabbiest, climbed onto my lap. As soon as I touched him he began to purr, a huge roaring purr. He drooled with joy as I began to pet him, very gently. His eyes were washed-out yellow. His fur was dry as straw and his nose ran. I could count ribs and feel his knobby spine.

I felt a strong emotional connection—and then he bit me, grabbing the skin of my forearm with his teeth and twisting like a bulldog. Just a millimeter short of drawing blood, he leapt off my lap, stood just out of reach and continued to gaze at me, trembling, drooling, and purring.

“He didn't mean that,” she said. “He just gets excited.”

Naturally, this desperate, sick, love-starved soul is the one I took home. You never know what kind of cool stuff you'll discover in the local advertiser...


~ Juliet Waldron