Kathy Lynn Emerson's Blog, page 5

Two New Lea Wait Historicals Published

When on June 18 I heard I’d been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, it took me only an hour or two to know one of the things I wanted to do with the time I had left.

Most readers of this blog know I write three contemporary mystery series. But I have to admit that my first love is writing historicals, and I’ve had five historicals published that are set in 19th century Maine for ages 8 and up. (Many of my readers are also adults, and I’ve been thrilled when adult literacy or English as a Second Language groups have chosen to read them, too.)

My historicals have been honored by being nominated in 14 states for student choice awards, and I’ve always especially loved speaking to school groups.

But two of the historicals I’ve written were never published. Editor or publishers changed; other genres (fantasy, dystopian, vampires) became more popular; so my books have been sitting patiently in my computer, waiting for their time to come.

And I’m now thrilled to announce that they’re out in the world — on Amazon for now (in paperback and e-book formats) but soon to be on other sites, and in some bookstores. Tuesday night I introduced them at a library talk in Southport, Maine, and sold all the copies I had (I’ve re-ordered) so I hope that’s a sign of things (and sales) to come.[image error]

The first book, FOR FREEDOM ALONE, set in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1846-47, is the story of a father and his three children who were among the tens of thousands of Highlanders thrown out of Scotland by the English between 1780 and 1860 during what became known as the Highland Clearances.  (The English replaced those they thought of as their tenants with sheep.) Displaced, some families were able to get to Canada or Australia, and a lucky few to the United States. But many found themselves sharing slums in Glasgow and Edinburgh with survivors of the Irish potato famine and the industrial revolution. Very little has been written about this period, or what it cost the Scots to survive. Today historians estimate that ninety million people around the world claim Scottish ancestry — many of them descendants of those displaced during the Clearances. Perhaps you are a descendant of one of those families.

In FOR FREEDOM ALONE a father who has always taken care of his family finds he cannot find work in Edinburgh, although women and children can get jobs in mines, factories, and some businesses, because they cost less to employ. Fifteen-year-old Meggie is lucky to find work as a hotel maid. Kirstie, only four, huddles in a dark room to be safe. And twelve-year-old Rab must learn the ways of the streets, and of the boys who live there. As they all struggle to make their dream of getting to America come true, they learn truths, some bitter, about themselves and each other.

[image error]The second book, CONTRARY WINDS: A STORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION , is set in 1777, in Boothbay and Wiscasset, Maine, and then at the Battles of Saratoga, and revolves around the lives of an newly immigrated family:  the oldest son is in the Continental Army, the second son is a member of the Seacoast Defense, a group in Northern New England who attempted to defend the coast from the British Navy, and the younger two children play critical roles. Sarah goes to stay with an English woman she met on her trans-Atlantic journey and who now lives in Wiscasset, where there are more people (and food) than on ends of District of Maine peninsulas. She soon learns there are more Royalists, too, and that everyone must be watched. Meanwhile, her brother Rory runs away to join the York Militia, which marches from southern Maine to the banks of the Hudson to reinforce troops that will fight the first decisive battles of the Revolution: the Battles of Saratoga.

Filled with accurate details of life both on the home front and in the militia, Sarah’s and Rory’s exciting stories alternate, as they both find their courage can make major differences to the future of their new nation.

With hopes you’ll check out these newest books, and, if you enjoy them, you’ll write reviews, and recommend them, so they can reach as many readers as possible.

And — yes — I have one more historical — this one an adult historical mystery — that I’m polishing. Stay tuned!

The Post Where I Tell You We’re Selling Our House in Boothbay Harbor

by Barb, happily typing away in her study in Portland, Maine

Yes, it’s true. After a long, difficult decision process, Bill and I have put our house in Boothbay Harbor on the market. Our ties to to the house are deep. Bill’s mother bought it in 1989. For my kids, and my nieces and nephews, it is “Grandma’s house.” I wrote about her purchase of the house here.

Here is the listing, in case you know anyone who is looking for a Victorian house with tremendous harbor views. http://www.tindalandcallahan.com/drealty_listing/1054

Here’s the house shortly after it was built in 1879 by Captain George P. Murray.

[image error]

And here it is today.

[image error]

The very best thing about the house is sitting on the wide front porch and watching the activity in the harbor.

[image error]

Here’s the master bedroom.

[image error]

You can see the rest of the photos online.

Let me hasten to add, this doesn’t mean the end of my Maine Clambake Mystery series, which many people know is set in a suspiciously familiar Busman’s Harbor, Maine. There’s a new novella collection, Yule Log Murder, coming October 30, and a new novel, Steamed Open, coming December 18.

But it does mean the end of an era for us. In June, Bill had a different set of his siblings and their kids up every weekend. It was a time for laughter and tears and saying good-bye.

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

If you happen to know anyone who’s in the market for a place to make a lot of memories, pass the listing along!

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

[image error]I have boundless energy at about four-thirty in the morning. Mental energy, that is – not necessarily physical, though that varies. But lying in bed at that hour – which is, incidentally, about the time Magnus the Cat decides he’d like to snuggle (usually on my head) – I can move mountains with the power of my mind. From climate change to home decorating to a dazzling array of get-rich-quick schemes that, at that darkest-before-the-dawn hour, seem completely viable… All of these tend to demand they be heard just when I’m longing for the dregs of a good night’s sleep.

These ideas range from inventions to book ideas to blogs to web-based reality shows. From online magazines to niche-market Kombucha operations. At that hour, I rarely long for something small or quiet or easily managed, all of which are my default positions in the clear light of day. God forbid I just think to myself, “Gee, how about if tomorrow I start a blog?” No, no, no. It has to be the biggest blog. With a corresponding website, multidimensional logo, podcast, and theme song to go along with it. Early-morning Jen does not know how to go small.

Most of these inconveniently timed idea-paloozas are spawned by financial worries: Is there enough from book royalties this month to cover mortgage, student loans, medical bills, car insurance, unexpected computer repairs? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to put away for retirement, much less for the dream of buying cute little eco-friendly cottages for my Mom and Dad one day soon.

I wonder, sometimes, what would happen if that bold and fearless 4:30 a.m. Jen Blood were unleashed on the waking world. What if I just let her take the reins for a while, focused on a new craft Kombucha that would set the world on fire? The problem with this, I suspect, is that 4:30 a.m. Jen Blood is a fickle beast. What seems perfect one early morning is discarded as too daring or too drab the very next day. A plan that I’m sure could motivate a generation to end climate change seems downright bizarre by the time I’ve had my morning smoothie. I envy people who have an epiphany once a decade, and know this is The Thing they must act on – like that scene in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise wakes up in the middle of the night, writes a manifesto, quits his job, and ends up with a sweet new business and 1996 Renee Zellweger in his bed. Epiphanies are much less clear cut when they strike three or four times a week.

There are times, however, when the same idea wakes me up rarin’ to go before the sun rises for consecutive days in a row – sometimes for a whole week. When this happens, it’s generally a safe bet that this is an idea worth acting on. The Flint K-9 series came to me that way. Nearly twenty years ago, in fact, I believe that’s how Erin Solomon was born.

Do other writers go through this, or are all their mad morning ideas more fiction focused. Does Kate Flora, for instance, have wild plans for revolutionizing the American flower market through some growing secret she has yet to share with the rest of us? Is Susan Vaughan plotting real-life bank heists when the sun comes up? Or am I alone in questioning the financial viability of this path I’ve chosen, and looking for creative ways to supplement my income until the day something magically coalesces and all the bills are paid without a single early-morning thought as to where that money came from?

It’s now 5:51 a.m. at the homestead, and it appears I’ve run out of answers at this point. Instead, you’ll have to settle for a question: When do your moments of inspiration strike? Have you had a eureka moment that you did end up acting on? How did it turn out for you? Comment below, and let me know.

Jen Blood is the USA Today-bestselling author of the Erin Solomon Mysteries and the Flint K-9 Search and Rescue Mysteries. Learn more about her and her work at http://www.jenblood.com. 

Making Writing Space, Redux

We’re just back from our annual visit to beautiful Brooklin, Maine, the inspirational place I wrote about here on MCW three Augusts ago. We had two marvelous weeks there this year (which means, of course, twice the bracing swims, twice the stunning sunsets and twice the fabulous blueberry pie). Immersed in a new series, I also got twice as much writing done.

When I went back to read the post I wrote in 2015 about how it feels to be surrounded by E.B. White’s spirit when we visit Allen Cove, I realized I couldn’t say it better, so here it is again.  I hope you enjoy this August 12, 2015 post, and invite comments about the places that inspire you.

**

What happens to me when I cross the Piscataqua and plunge rapidly into Maine at a cost of seventy-five cents in tolls? I cannot describe it. I do not ordinarily spy a partridge in a pear tree, or three French hens, but I do have the sensation of having received a gift from a true love. And when, five hours later, I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do.”—E.B. White, Home-Coming, 1955

 I am lucky enough to live in Maine all the time and don’t have to cross the Piscataqua to make a pilgrimage to Allen Cove in Brooklin, Maine, where the incomparable E.B. White lived and wrote for so many years.

[image error]

E.B. White

But just as he did on his long rides from away, I feel a delicious anticipation when crossing the Narramissic River in the Hancock County town of Orland. From there it’s less than a half hour to the shore of Allen Cove, where I also lived once upon a time. My period of residence began eight years after the 1985 death of the famed essayist, author and authority on writerly style.

[image error]

The gravestones of Katharine and E.B. White, admirable, brilliant writers both.

In the mid-90s I lived in a rented cottage on the south side of E.B. and Katharine White’s former hayfield, across the road from their old saltwater farm. Though I had turned in my journalist’s badge by then, I still thought of myself as a writer, self-identity being a fairly fixed thing by the time you’re thirty-something. I was a recent law school grad, and had yet to realize that the legal and literate sides of my brain could sing—or at least hum—in harmony. Though the writer part of me was in a fallow period, I thought a lot about the man who used to live across the road. I bought and read as much of his work as I could find. (I later discovered Katharine White’s work, which is a blog post for another day.)

The summer folks who had bought the Whites’ farm urged me to hike around on the farm throughout the winter, and even loaned me a pair of snowshoes for that purpose. Without the smell of humans on the land, the deer would decimate the orchard, they said, so tromp around to your heart’s content. That’s how the Whites’ former place became mine to ramble during the cold weather months 20 years ago.

I was especially drawn to the converted boathouse on the shore of Allen Cove where E.B. White wrote. I spent considerable time peering through the window of his former writing space, studying its spare beauty.

Here’s how he described it:

The house in which I sit this morning was built to accommodate a boat, not a man, but by long experience I have learned that in most respects it shelters me better than the larger dwelling where my bed is, and which, by design, is a manhouse, not a boathouse. Here in the boathouse I am a wilder and, it would appear, a healthier man, by a safe margin. I have a chair, a bench, a table, and I can walk into the water if I tire of the land . . . A mouse and a squirrel share the house with me. The building is, in fact, a multiple dwelling, a semidetached affair. It is because I am semidetached while here that I find it possible to transact this private business with the fewest obstacles.—E.B. White, A Slight Sound At Evening, 1954.

[image error]

Semidetached in the boathouse

My visits to his former coveside writing space occurred at a time when I was unable to achieve the semidetachment necessary to make up my own stories. Yet I yearned for a physical and mental writing space of my own, on the shore of Allen Cove or any other shore for that matter. I was learning to be a lawyer in rural Maine, but my new profession still felt like playacting, and part of me wanted to be offstage, writing the lines.

Two decades later I have figured out that I’m capable of doing both. I am a lawyer and a crime writer. My writing space is nothing like the boathouse into which I peeked on those cold afternoons on the shore of Allen Cove. But like White, I write every day, and feel as though I’ve received a gift when I cross that little river on the journey back to Brooklin.

[image error]

A blueberry pie is always a gift

This year, two days after I delivered the manuscript for my third Joe Gale mystery, we pointed the car north and east and yelped with joy when we crossed the Narramissic. We only had a week, but boy, did we make the most of it in a modest rented cottage around Allen Cove from the Whites’ place.

[image error]

Allen Cove at sunset, August, 2015

We ate lots of blueberry pie. Took looooong swims in the cove when the tide was high. Hiked through hushed woodlands. Ate more pie. Sat in awe of sunsets that went on for an hour. Watched  a gang of greater yellowlegs dance along the shore. Listened for the nightly hermit thrush serenade while doing the supper dishes. Slept with the windows wide open to welcome the cool night breeze off the water. Ate still more pie.

[image error]

A greater yellowlegs sashaying along the shoreline

And every now and then I picked up the binoculars and reconnoitered the shoreline of the cove until E.B. White’s little boathouse came into focus, still standing for the proposition that every writer needs to find their own space to write.

Brenda Buchanan is the author of the Joe Gale Mystery Series, featuring a diehard Maine newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. Three books— QUICK PIVOT, COVER STORY and TRUTH BEAT—are available everywhere e-books are sold.  She is hard at work on a new series that has as its protagonist a Portland criminal defense lawyer willing to take on cases others won’t touch in a town to which she swore she would never return.

 

Weekend Update: August 18-19, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday) Jen Blood (Tuesday), Barb Ross (Wednesday), Lea Wait (Thursday), and Dick Cass (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 Maureen Milliken is happy to announce the publication date for BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST, the third in the Bernie O’Dea mystery series is October 31.

[image error]

When Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Lydia Manzo becomes lost in the woods and is found dead weeks later, it sets off a chain of events that upsets the fragile peace of  Redimere, Maine.  As newspaper editor Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea tries to sort out the truth, Police Chief Pete Novotny also disappears into the woods. Maine’s northwestern High Peaks region can be a dark wilderness, but the woods suddenly seem very crowded as another too-hot summer of deceit and death simmers in Redimere, Maine.

BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST joins COLD HARD NEWS and NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS in the Franklin County, Maine-based series.

Maureen and Maine Crime Writer Jen Blood will also be at the Designing Women show in from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, at Longfellow’s Greenhouse in Manchester, Maine. The craft and arts show raises money for the local sexual assault advocacy program. Come on by for a great day and to say hi!

Lea Wait will be speaking about her latest books, and the research she does for them, at the Southport Memorial Library, Tuesday, August 21, at 7 p.m. [image error] DEATH AND A POT 0F CHOWDER, set on an island similar to Southport, will be her major subject, but she’ll also be talking about her two [image error]newest historicals for ages 8 and up — one of which, CONTRARY WINDS, is partially set in Boothbay and Wiscasset, Maine in 1777.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Kaitlyn Dunnett: The large print edition of Crime & Punctuation is available now. It has a different cover from the other editions, but I like this one, too.

[image error]

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Using Local Events and Issues As A Plot

[image error]Vaughn Hardacker here: I am currently working on a new novel that deals with the Bald Mountain mine issue. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Bald Mountain (located in T12 R8, D-3 on map63 of DeLorme’s The Maine Atlas and Gazeteer) in close proximity to the Fish River, which feeds into the Fish River chain of lakes (Fish Lake, Portage Lake, St. Froid Lake, Eagle Lake, Square Lake, Cross Lake, Mud Lake, and Long Lake) before feeding into the Saint John River in Fort Kent. A company that was  once a small New Brunswick, Canada company has grown into a giant mega-corporation owning the timber and mining rights to over 500,000 acres of land in northern Maine. The geologist who determined that Bald Mountain is a site with deposits of copper, zinc, gold, and silver. However he also stated due to the massive quantities of iron sulfide (which creates sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water) and arsenic mining the site was too

[image error]

AMD in stream near Pittsburgh, PA.

risky from an environmental perspective. To get to the point, the potential for Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) is so high that the mine could be a major environmental disaster waiting to happen. Currently, Maine has the strictest mining laws in the United States and there is a major push in Augusta to ease them so that the mine can go forward.

This is an example of a local issue screaming to become a plot. Add the discovery of the body of a female state senator who is the key person holding the line against the Maine Department of Environmental Protection easing the mining regulations in the trunk of her car on the American Reality Road in the North Maine Woods and we are off and running (I’m currently approaching the 45,000 word mark).

Each and every one of us writers has been asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” I always respond the local and national news as well as controversial issues happening right in my back yard. So if you are like me and once you finish a book you spend time trying to come up with a new idea, talk to people in your neighborhood and learn what are the local issues that have them hot and bothered.

By the way, two mining companies have already studied Bald Mountain and both came to the conclusion that the potential for AMD getting into the ground water and our lakes and streams is far too great and the cost of clean up could be greater than the profit gained. Several  similar mines in Canada and the U. S. have turned into disasters and the estimate of the time until the sulfurous containing minerals are exhausted and the water is clean again could be hundreds or even thousands of years. (There is currently an AMD clean up project at the Iron Mountain mine near Redding, California that has cost $200,000,000 to date and scientists estimate that it will continue to produce AMD for 2,500 to 3,000 years.) They walked away from the project. What research I’ve done into the controversy has me concerned that factions within our state government will allow the mine to go forward. I for one have written to my local representatives in Augusta but have become aware that at least one of them has a personal interest in making sure that the project moves forward? I’ve always said that we have the best government that money can buy.

Weekend Update: August 18-19, 2018

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday) Jen Blood (Tuesday), Barb Ross (Wednesday), Lea Wait (Thursday), and Dick Cass (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 Maureen Milliken is happy to announce the publication date for BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST, the third in the Bernie O’Dea mystery series is October 31.

[image error]

When Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Lydia Manzo becomes lost in the woods and is found dead weeks later, it sets off a chain of events that upsets the fragile peace of  Redimere, Maine.  As newspaper editor Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea tries to sort out the truth, Police Chief Pete Novotny also disappears into the woods. Maine’s northwestern High Peaks region can be a dark wilderness, but the woods suddenly seem very crowded as another too-hot summer of deceit and death simmers in Redimere, Maine.

BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST joins COLD HARD NEWS and NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS in the Franklin County, Maine-based series.

Maureen and Maine Crime Writer Jen Blood will also be at the Designing Women show in from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, at Longfellow’s Greenhouse in Manchester, Maine. The craft and arts show raises money for the local sexual assault advocacy program. Come on by for a great day and to say hi!

Lea Wait will be speaking about her latest books, and the research she does for them, at the Southport Memorial Library, Tuesday, August 21, at 7 p.m. [image error] DEATH AND A POT 0F CHOWDER, set on an island similar to Southport, will be her major subject, but she’ll also be talking about her two [image error]newest historicals for ages 8 and up — one of which, CONTRARY WINDS, is partially set in Boothbay and Wiscasset, Maine in 1777.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Who needs a vacation when you live in Vacationland?

If I’m repeating myself, forgive me. I love Maine, you know I do. But don’t ask me what I did on my summer vacation, because I haven’t had one.

[image error]

At least I get to work from home a lot of the time, so it’s almost like having a vacation.

That hasn’t stopped everyone else. One of the issues with living in a beautiful village where the population doubles in the summer is that half the people are on vacation. As I write this, at 7:41 p.m., music is blaring from the place it blares from this time of night most nights. I can hear shouts and boat motors, probably from people parked in their boats listening to the blaring music.

Speaking of which, I haven’t seen much of the people from away who occasionally visit their house across the street this summer. There was one night, however — a week night — when a group of about two dozen Millenials spent the night blaring music and shouting the F word until 2:30 in the morning.

And it wasn’t even good music. Are the kids being ironic when they blare Steve Miller at 2 in the morning, or have they just been bombarded with so much mediocre music the past two decades that they think he rocks?

I went over there one night three years ago — it was September, time for this foolishness to be over — when the man of the house was in the garage, which has been converted to a “man cave,” blaring — I’m not making this up — The Golden Girls. I listened for two hours — laugh track blah blah blah laugh track blah blah blah — then about 12:30 a.m. went over with my maglite flashlight, a jacket thrown over my pjs, and told him I had to get up in five hours to work. He seemed startled. I’m not sure if it was by the sight of me, or the fact that, yes, people do work in this town.

[image error]

That’s right, don’t friggin’ wake me up. Took this selfie after I came back from scaring the hell out of the guy blaring The Golden Girls at 12:30 a.m. a couple Septembers ago.

So, to recap: Yes, the same house that kept me up on a work night blaring Steve Miller kept me up on a work night blaring The Golden Girls. To quote Dylan: If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show you the scars. (That’s Bob Dylan, not the guy who works the counter at Starbucks, kids).

His wife, the first time she backed into my neighbor’s mailbox and knocked it down, asked Dave (the neighbor) how often he’s here. “All the time,” Dave said. “I live here.”

In any case, I’m not complaining, even though it sounds like I am. It’s not lost on me that I get to spend my life in a spot that most people get to spend two weeks in and spend the other 50 weeks dreaming of being here.

And I get to work at home a lot of the time. And, I have to say, I don’t mind tooling around Maine for my job, either. There could be worse ways to make a living.

One recent day, I had to go to Millinocket and, even though my book is done, a character in the book drives from my fake town in Franklin County to Millinocket. I wondered what the  route was like.

[image error]

Went from Millinocket to Belgrade via Somerset and Franklin counties a couple weeks ago, and I don’t regret the detour. This, I believe, is Moscow, Maine. Route 16 and nothing but scenery.

So, yeah, a little out of my way, but I drove it anyway. I didn’t regret it. No blaring music here. No laugh track. No idling boats. Just Maine.

[image error]

I may not get any sleep, but I have a book! Yes I do. Take that, you loud vacationers.

Speaking of which, the third in the Bernie O’Dea mystery series. BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST is due out October 31. You know, the time of year it’s nice and quiet.

Too Darn Hot

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, writing this on August 10, the first relatively cool day we’ve had in weeks. More heat and humidity are due in next week, when this blog will actually appear. Let me just say . . . yuck!

I like living in Maine precisely because we don’t usually have more than a handful of hot, humid days each year. 2018 has already broken the record. DO NOT tell me climate change is a hoax. It’s pretty obvious something untoward is going on with the heat index.

We have window units in three rooms—the living room, the bedroom, and my office. Air conditioners work pretty well for controlling how hot it gets in the house, but the humidity is another matter. Did I mention I hate to sweat? Worse, my brain doesn’t work properly when the weather is steamy. It’s a good thing the current manuscript (the one set in March) is in a “resting” stage, because I doubt I’d have produced anything readable in this weather.

[image error]I visited New Orleans once, back in the 1990s, in the summer, for a RWA conference. It’s an interesting city, but the humidity nearly killed me every time I went outside the hotel. Drinking hurricanes helped, but only up to a point. I did make a successful pitch to my editor at the time (for the book that became Echoes and Illusions), but my most vivid memory of those few days is of being profoundly uncomfortable.

Our recent heat wave has been on a par with that experience, only it’s lasted longer (23 days and counting). Here in western Maine a lot of places aren’t air conditioned at all. The heat builds up inside during the day and it doesn’t have anywhere to go at night. Forget sleeping well if you don’t have something to help cool things off. Even in air-conditioned buildings, energy savers cut in and out, making you sweat just before you get another blast of cold air. The end result is a lot of cranky people.

[image error]

Animals aren’t happy either. I took pictures of Bala for International Cat Day (August 8). She wasn’t about to move, let alone be cute for the camera. Maybe cats have the right idea—sleep until things improve.

[image error]

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of nearly sixty traditionally published books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries (Overkilt—November 2018) and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at www.TudorWomen.com

 

Mistaking the world for a book

A friend for whom the expression passionate reader is a vast understatement sent me this quotation from Michelle de Kretzer’s The Hamilton Case:  “Now I saw that I had fallen for an old enchantment.  I had mistaken the world for a book.”  He knew I would assume the second sentence applies to him.  As I was considering the extent to which it also applies to me, I opened the latest issue of the monthly magazine published by my alma mater.  The lead story bore the headline “Beyond Books” and proceeded to unfurl the usual clichés about how this distinguished university research library offered so, so much more than mere books.  As someone who had roamed the stacks of that library as an undergraduate in love with books, I felt a bit betrayed.  I’m not a luddite, or at least I don’t think I am, but I do love books and think they should be at the heart of a library.  Had I myself “fallen for an old enchantment?”[image error]

It’s not that I mistake the world for a book.  I know the difference, and I love both.  In fact, I think each leads us into the other.  This seems particularly true of mystery novels.  Cozies, the kind I read and write, turn their worlds upside down through crimes like murder and then restore the world through clever detection, the solution of the mystery, and the punishment of the offender.  I read them to affirm my faith in the human capacity to right wrongs and restore order in a fallen world.  Okay, not to get too pompous here:  I read mysteries because they’re so much fun.  Ditto, for that matter, any fiction.

For me the connection between books and the world parallels that between a practice session and a real game.  Whatever the sport, in practice you try out moves, hone your technique, experiment with new patterns.  When you get out on the field against a real competitor—another team, a single opponent, or the mountain or ocean you’re up against–you’re prepared to bring all that practice together in the form of a polished game. Reading represents practice, a way of getting ready for the world.  Reading fiction you explore character, see how various forces come together to motivate action, test moral principles, understand the consequences of behavior.  You ready yourself for what we call the “real” world by playing in the fictional one.

And it works the other way around.  Reading is enhanced by everything we experience outside it.  That’s why we say a character in a novel reminds us of someone we know or why when two characters face a moral choice their dilemma resonates with us because of a situation we actually experienced.

This connection between books and the world seems to me at its most interesting with young children.  My granddaughter, two and a half years old, can’t read of course but is read to so frequently and intensely that it’s fair to say her real world and book world are nearly one.  The mouse dentist who pulls the tooth of the wily fox in William Steig’s Doctor De Soto is absolutely real to her, and she acts out that and other stories with her dolls and soft animals.  When we see a parade of circus animals marching up her driveway they are as real as the ones she sees in the books I read to her.  So when she’s read to she’s practicing life, and when she experiences life she brings to it what she’s seen in books.

Now it’s obviously possible that people can so conflate books and the world that they no longer know the difference and so become, literally, insane.  But that’s an extreme response that, thankfully, few minds succumb to.  For the rest of us, most of the time, books and the world have a productive and enriching relationship.  The greater worry, I think, is that as reading seems to be declining in our culture, people will lose the ability to practice life through books and to enhance life itself through what they learn from books.

But in the meantime, for myself and my granddaughter and all those folks who love to read, I say it’s just fine to occasionally fall for the old enchantment and mistake the world for a book.

[image error]