Emilie Richards's Blog, page 124

The Pleasure and Treasure of Old Books

We're moving.  I've mentioned that before, but today it's just shorthand.  If you've moved, you understand.

Part of moving is decluttering.  I've mentioned that, as well.  Going through memorabilia has a certain charm.  Yesterday I sorted through a bag of old cutlery, separating the silverplate pieces from the stainless.  The silverplate was my mother's, not expensive or rare, but hers.  I will keep it, polish it and use it.  Along the way I found a sturdy knife and fork with USN on the handle.  Michael's father was in the navy.   The rest?  Thank you, Goodwill.

Silverware is simple.  Keep the good stuff and donate everything else.  Then came the box of books.  Old books, some very old. (Hoarder alert.)  Once upon a time we attended an auction and won a batch of unopened boxes.  Most of the stuff was cool but useless.  But old books?  We never throw out old books, right?  After all, they might be worth, well, who knows?

I remember the auction, but not where it was or how long ago.  The fact it has faded from memory is a clue.  But looking through the box?  Be still my heart.  The Canterbury Tales with gorgeous illustrations.  Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and its sequel.  Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel.  Horatio Alger's Dan the Newsboy.  Atlases, leather bound dictionaries.  None in great condition, but all intact, if faded.

What in the world will I do with them?

Thanks to the Internet, I hopped online to see if we had found treasure again.  We hadn't, although for a moment I thought the Canterbury Tales might be.  But no, ours, as glorious as it is,  might be worth $20, but only if I spent a lot of time and energy looking for a buyer.  The other books?  A few dollars here, a few there or nothing.  No sense in pretending.

So back to square one.  I don't think libraries want old copies, not even for sales.  This is the first year our church is not doing a book sale.  The rare book stores I called either weren't buying or weren't interested.  I forgot to explain they could just have the books.  I'll be sure to tell the next store, but I doubt that will impress them.

So what do I do?  Why am I spending all this energy on a box of musty books?  Why do I care? 

These are books.  People owned them.  People read them.  People dreamed about their content. A century or more ago somebody sat at a desk, just the way I do, and wrote them.

Canterbury Tales will come with me.  Dan the Newsboy might, as well.  The others?  I'm still thinking.  If you have any good ideas, be sure to let me know.

CHU Ought To Be in Pictures

Today a quick CHUsday update.  Remember CHU or Cookbook Hoarders Unlimited?  Last year we had fun sharing recipes from cookbooks we hadn't used in years or even possibly, never.  When the giveaway that went with it ended I promised occasional CHU updates if I found something to share, and today I'm as good as my word.

I'm a fan of the King Arthur Flour catalog.  I love the wonderful flours and food products, and since I bake all our bread, I'm always looking for new things to add to my pantry.   Among other products I've tried and approved their Harvest Grains blend, the Ancient Grains flour, and the Vital Wheat Gluten (great to add a tablespoon or two if you use all whole grain flour, which I do.)   I routinely use their white whole wheat flour when I make my weekly oatmeal bread and was successful keeping their sourdough alive until I just didn't care to anymore

Every time I looked through their catalog, though, I came across a product called Original Bakewell Cream.   Now, call me a biscuit snob, but the catalog swore that the best biscuits come from New Englanders who use this product, and, of course, having grown up in the South, I knew for certain the best biscuits came from cooks on the lower side of the Mason-Dixon line.

I wasn't always a biscuit snob.  I grew up in Florida, but I never had a "real" biscuit until 7th grade, when a friend invited me for dinner and her mother made fried chicken, homemade biscuits and chicken gravy.  I was pretty sure I'd walked through a portal to heaven.  While we never ate this meal at home, the moment I began to cook for myself, this was my "special meal" the one I made any time anyone in my family needed cheering up. 

As the years progressed and I learned about things like "cholesterol" I reluctantly stopped frying chicken and making gravy.  Sadly the biscuit part of the equation wasn't hard to stop, in fact it was a relief.  The problem was that my biscuits themselves were "hard" and always had been.   It never seemed to matter what recipe I used.  Whether I tried step-by-step cookbook biscuits carefully rolled and cut, or beaten biscuits like I learned to make as a VISTA volunteer in the rural Ozarks. My biscuits were tough or mealy.  Only rarely was I proud of what I'd accomplished.

Then last month I finally broke down and bought Bakewell Cream.  Despite its New England origins.  Despite my prejudices.  I followed the recipe on the can and only substituted butter for shortening, to avoid trans-fats and go straight for the artery-cloggers.  Every time the biscuits have risen high and been light and fluffy.  Even after they're frozen, they're a delight.

My apologies to all the fabulous cooks of New England who've been using this product for generations. I can't believe I ever doubted you.

So if you're a biscuit snob, but your biscuits are less than perfect, give this product and the recipe that comes with it a try.  CHU won't be sorry that you did.

Sunday Poetry: By The Selves We Had To Be

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.   If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday poetry blogs here.

I collect poetry as I find it.  Sometimes I search while writing my own chapters or paragraphs, trying to avoid setting more words on paper myself.  Sometimes I search when a poem I've stumbled on hasn't spoken to me and I demand a second chance to be dazzled.  I don't know when I found this poem, but I do remember loving it.  And now I'm sharing it with you.

Poetry about lives that somehow fell short of expectations speak to me this year, as I try to sort through a death in my own family and the potential that never quite came to pass.  I take comfort in the line.  ". . .that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was." 

So thank you for that healing insight David Ray, you who, in turn, thanked a poet in "Thanks, Robert Frost."

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Absolutely no dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read."  What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

All Those Things I Needed To Know

The title of this blog sounds like a slightly different version of my first list blog, doesn't it?  Of course for that one I had questions that had never been answered.  Today I'm sharing answers to questions I've researched for my next book.

Every novel requires a mountain of research.  Sometimes it's as mundane as the right word for an object I've never called anything except " that thing"  "Thing" shows up a lot in my first drafts. 

Sometimes the research is so esoteric I can be forgiven for not having the answer right at the front of my brain waiting to leap to my pages.  How often, for instance, would any of us need to know, as I did for Fortunate Harbor, how to hide gold coins from a metal detector?  (One way is to hide them in aluminum cans, since the aluminum will set off the detector and possibly fool the treasure-hunter, a fact I didn't use–the fate of most research.)

Research should never show.  Of course "never" is a word that's hard to live up to.  All novelists know better than to parade newly found knowledge of a subject like a prize Weimaraner at the Westminster Dog Show.  (Did you know that the word Weimaraner  comes from the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimer-Eisenach, Karl August?)  Of course we all do it if we can get away with it.  Not because we want to show how well-read and intelligent we are, but because we find research so fascinating, we are convinced our readers will find it fascinating, too.  Think The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.  Brown's love of his subject was greatly responsible for the popularity of his novel.

Of course,  more often, if we launch into lectures on our subject of choice, our readers will roll their eyes and pitch our books.  Those of us who are not Dan Brown have to hide much of what we've discovered, and deliver the rest in small doses. 

Just in case you wonder what I'm up to these days as I launch into my second book in the Goddesses Anonymous series, here are some research snippets I've picked up in the past week.  Assemble them and you'll know my story. 

Twenty high schools in Georgia use horses as their school mascots
Burke County, Georgia, produces the most peanuts in the state
In North Carolina you can be arrested for "concealing" an item in your pocket or purse while you're still inside a store.
A packet of ketchup or an orange might be considered contraband in prison
The parts of a "chopped" car are usually worth more than the car would be intact
More than 40 different wildflowers have been identified on the Oconaluftee River Trail in the Smokies.
Plant asparagus in North Carolina between November and March

Did you figure out my plot?  I'm afraid that's likely to be harder than detecting gold in a Dr. Pepper can.  But I hope you had fun anyway.  I did.

Finding Treasure in the Strangest Places

My husband and I are about to start a new adventure.  We are moving, although our destination is undecided, and it's time to put our house on the market.  If you've ever moved, you know the next thing that happens.  Not choosing a realtor, not painting the woodwork. 

Decluttering.

Michael's plan to declutter is simple.  Dump everything in the trash.  Being something of a hoarder, mine's a bit more advanced.  Go through the house, weigh carefully the pros and cons of packing or tossing.  Keep almost everything.

Our differences–which I call the Goldilocks System–actually make for a fairly sane strategy, because we're forced to compromise. This pile is too large, this pile is too small, this pile is just right. 

Last weekend Michael decided to clean out the desk in our living room.  I told you his plan, and he was true to form.  All the papers in the top drawer were dumped into our recycling container on the theory that if we hadn't looked at them for years, there was nothing worthwhile among them.  I told you my plan, too.  I took them out and began to sort, receipt by receipt, envelope by envelope.

Oddly enough for once, my system made sense.  Half of the older receipts had credit card numbers on them.  So with great pride I carefully piled them for shredding and tried to keep the "I told you sos" to a minimum.

Then I found treasure.  Among unopened envelopes containing pleas for money and credit card applications, were two checks.  Checks!  Written at the end of the twentieth century.  Checks mixed in with mail we had apparently tossed in the drawer as our movers were packing to move us from Ohio to Virginia.  Checks totalling about $200.

Enter my plan once again.  The checks had expired, but I didn't assume they had been reissued and cashed.  Never look a treasure trove in the mouth.  So I did some research.  As it turns out one check had been referred to a website aptly called missingmoney.com.  All I had to do was do a bit of paperwork and the money will eventually be mine.  The second was as simple as an email. 

As a writer I hoard ideas.  Characters I've considered and tossed in one novel show up in another.  Plot fragments I've ignored too long work their way into new books.  Themes I forgot to use are reissued in a slightly updated form and valued more for what they can now accomplish.  Either I'm a novelist because I hate to let go of any idea before its fully used, or I'm a hoarder because I've seen how worthwhile, how useful, the simplest most inconsequential things can be. 

And in the long run, as long as the house gets cleaned and the books get written, does it matter?

Sunday Poetry: Later There Was Sleet

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.   If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday poetry blogs here.

When I chose this poem early in the month I knew we were expecting snow that weekend, perhaps as much as an inch, but it never materialized.  We've had a sprinkling or two in Northern Virginia this winter, but not enough to convince my moss phlox that spring hasn't arrived.  I see pink and lavender blossoms sprinkled like stars over the mossy ground, and the closest thing to snow are snowdrops blooming with my crocuses.  Winter seems like an event in our mutual past.  So with no snow on my southern horizon, I thought I would conjure up some with this wonderful poem, in case I don't have another climate-driven opportunity.

Midwinter by John Unterecker is a visual portrait of a winter night in Donegal.  When I read it I feel as if I'm  there with him. The Poetry Foundation website, which I've linked to, also gives us a chance to learn a little about the poet.  Enjoy that, too, although nowhere is there mention of Unterecker's birthplace, so whether he is actually from Ireland, or simply able to call up this imagery from his study of W. B. Yeats, I leave for you to discover.  I couldn't.

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Absolutely no dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read."  What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

Can We Judge A Book By Its Cover?

Early in my writing career I grabbed every novel I could find in the series romance genre to get a feel for what authors were writing and publishers were buying.  I remember one in particular.  The novel was charming, the cover was so truly horrific that I kept going back to look at it as I read. 

Could the people depicted right there on the front for all the world to see, actually be the attractive, lovable characters in this book?  Do I remember the story?  Nope.  Do I remember the cover?  Vividly.

Early in my mystery career I remember being grabbed by yet another cover.  Cottage garden flowers adorned the front of a stone house, but the lovely blossoms all had faces, scary faces.  I snatched that one off the bookstore shelf, terrified someone else would reach for it first.  Do I remember the story?  Nope.  Do I remember the cover?  Vividly.

I think of these two books every time I see a new cover for one of my books.  No one will ever convince me covers don't matter.  If a cover doesn't represent the story, if the characters look like road kill on the highway of life, if colors jar or a design looks like someone's first attempt at Photoshop, the book will suffer.

With that in mind I was particularly outspoken about my next cover.  The novel, One Mountain Away, is the first in my new series, Goddesses Anonymous, set in Asheville, North Carolina.  You can imagine that the first book in a series needs to jump off bookshelves into reader's arms.  I knew the cover needed beautiful mountain views, because Asheville's the kind of place where you can aim your camera in almost any direction and gasp at your own results.

I didn't see the cover until my publisher "finished" it.  I wasn't happy.  The good news is that after lots of negotiation and publisher goodwill, changes were made.  Great changes.  So today I can happily present to you the new cover for One Mountain Away.  I hope you'll like it as much as I do. 

I would love to hear your opinion, and as always I'll value your comments.  In the long run, what I think and what my publisher thinks are immaterial.  What you think, what you reach for at your favorite bookstore in August, will make all the difference.

Lists: I Love You Because. . .

Happy Saint Valentine's Day.

Did you know today's holiday became popular during Chaucer's time?  The real "Valentine" is obscured in legend, based on the lives of two Catholic saints, although the stories of neither hint at romance.  But the world loves lovers, and in the 14th century,  historical facts were stretched and altered.  Now, of course, we celebrate romance on February 14th and don't look closely at the reason why.

All of us have loved someone.  The luckier we are, the more people we have loved and been loved by.  Have you thought about why you love someone in your life?  What traits, qualities, strengths or even weaknesses attract you? Spouse, parent, child, friend?

Anyone who adds an item to the list by commenting on this post or any "list" post this month will be entered in a drawing for an autographed novel.  No religion, politics or snarkiness allowed–at least nothing too snarky. 

Just follow the topic and speak from the "heart."  My list is dedicated to my husband, but yours can be dedicated to anybody past or present.  Please feel free to tell or not tell whom your comments honor.

I Love You Because:

1–Because you refuse to stop taking silly pictures of us everywhere we go

2–Because you aren't ashamed to get excited about life

3–Because you stand up for unpopular causes

4–Because you love our grandchildren as much as I do

5–Because you love everything I cook, even the failures

Celebrate love with us today and share your own list.  And while you're at it?  Don't forget to comment on Mollie Cox Bryan's interview for a chance to win a scrapbooker's "brag book" from Mollie.  Random.org will choose a winner late tonight.

Sunday Poetry: Curved Close and Warm

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.   If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday poetry blogs here.

Valentine's day is fast approaching, and this poem recently graced my mailbox, to remind me of the beauty of two people in love.  On Tuesday I'll start a list especially for the holiday, but in the meantime, please read with me the lushly evocative Nightsong by Philip Booth, brought to us, as poems on Sunday Poetry so often are, courtesy of The Writer's Almanac. 

Just a reminder why I don't usually print poems here, and instead link to another site?  Writer's Almanac and all the other sources I use have permission to post the poems I choose.  I do not have permission, unless the selections are old enough to be out of copyright.  To do so anyway would probably not bring down the wrath of copyright attorneys, since this site is, in the scheme of things, a blip in the blogging universe.  But copyright matters, and the poets who willingly share their poems deserve to be honored with our compliance in exchange for their generosity.  If you love their work, consider buying it to share with your friends.

What's more romantic than a wonderful volume of poetry on Valentine's Day?

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Absolutely no dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read."  What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

Pinterest: Pinning Your Hopes on the Internet

The Fear Factor

Another new toy on the Internet?  Yikes.

The first time I visited Pinterest.com, I knew better than to stay.  Pinterest is the definition of a detour on the highway of life.  All those gorgeous images?  I knew I could lose my way for hours.  It was time to pack up and go home.

The second time, motivated by social media gurus, I realized I had to join in.  Besides, what a great way to share the inspiration behind my upcoming series of novels, Goddesses Anonymous, which debuts in August.  As I found interesting facts and photos, I could add them with one click.  Keeping everything in one place is a challenge, and Pinterest would help.

The Whys and Wherefores

I began a journey into the how-tos.  First I learned Pinterest likes users to invite other users, so after a mention on my Facebook page, I was granted three immediate invitations.  I was in. 

Now what to do?  Pinterest gives choices of people to follow, but I quickly deleted most when I realized our interests were different.  I created some boards the site suggested as starters and added a few of my own.  Hmmm. . .  I downloaded the "Pin It" button to my IE Favorites Bar and suddenly  it was intoxicatingly easy to add anything I wanted to keep or show off.  

Addiction in Progress

As I began to understand, I looked for boards with interests like mine.  I found some about Asheville, the setting for my series. I created my own Asheville board and added a photo or two.  I went to the website of a restaurant mentioned in One Mountain Away, the series debut novel, and pinned a photo to the board.  Wow, I was having fun.

Although cottages have nothing to do with my writing, I am about to renovate an old Victorian era lake cottage in Western NY, so I checked out cottage boards and found charming ideas.  Plus I was able to pin some Better Homes and Gardens photos I'd fallen in love with so I could view them often.  I was beginning to really understand.  Suddenly the world opened up to me.  Quilts, knitting, home decor, and recipes! Somebody stop me.

I'm still a new Pinterest user, which you will discover if you go to my fledgling boards.  But I can testify to the addiction factor.  When I visited this morning to take a screen shot for this blog, I was so distracted that an hour later, when I finally wrenched myself away, I found I'd forgotten the screen shot. 

It's Popular Why?

Social media began with blogging, moved to Facebook with shorter messages, then to Twitter with its short-short messages, and now to images.  We're all busy.  We all have access to so much wonderful Internet content, we can't spend too much time anywhere.  Enter Pinterest, with its instant visual punch.

New and Better Fears

I still worry about copyright.  I can't quite figure out why it's okay to pin photos I find on the Internet on my Pinterest board, and not okay to use them to illustrate my blogs.  If photos are properly attributed, Pinterest should be a publicity boost to any website, and the site links to sources, so we can trace photos back to the copyright holder.  But still, the subtle difference eludes me.

Pack Your Bags

Come visit me and see Pinterest for yourself.  If you need an invitation, visit my website and ask for one.  I'm happy to oblige.  But pack whatever you'll need for a good long stay.  And don't say I didn't warn you.