Ave atque Vale

by Sheila Connolly

I first posted here almost exactly four years ago.  I was honored to be asked to join the blog, because back then I was a relatively new writer (my first book had been published a year and a half earlier), and I was still learning about the universe of writers and readers.  PDD’s writers had always struck me as thoughtful and intelligent and well-informed, and I had learned a lot from their posts.

Being part of the blog forced me to be thoughtful too. Sometimes it’s easy to toss off a quick post about whatever strikes your fancy at a given moment.  You can be cute and glib and make a few people laugh or smile, and then they forget about it.  There’s nothing wrong with entertaining people--isn’t that what fiction writers do?  But making readers take a step back and think is harder.

The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the past four years.  Early fans of Dick Tracy might have seen it coming (remember that wrist device?) but probably the rest of us who yearned to become writers had grown up with a very different model, one that involved sitting in an unheated garret with a quill pen.  No sooner did we think we had learned something than the publishing universe made a 90-degree shift and we had to start all over (more than once).  When we did master a medium, such as one of the social networking sites, it collapsed of its own weight or was taken over by somebody else or its managers decided it should be something different.

I’m sounding like a Luddite, aren’t I?  I embrace technology, and the expanded opportunities to communicate with many people in a timely fashion.  And there’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle: the Internet is not a flash in the pan, but a part of our daily lives.  But that comes with its own problems, not the least of which is the demands that constant, instant communication place on our time.  We’re afraid we’ll miss something critical or be left out of the loop, so we’re always checking this or that.

And that can be a challenge for bloggers.  Remember when blogs were new? They were a novelty and a curiosity.  Then for a while, everyone believed they had to have a blog, or participate in multiple blogs, often egged on by their agents, editors and peers. Predictably, thousands of blogs popped up, and now it’s very hard to stand out, much less attract new followers. No one person can follow more than a handful—and that includes me.

So we at Poe’s Deadly Daughters are folding our tents and slipping away. (I was thinking of quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poignant poem The Day is Done, where this image originated, but since Longfellow tended to be a bit longwinded, it’s better to read the whole thing here. Don’t worry—the Daughters will all be around, just not in this space.

Thank you all for following us.

Who Do We Think We Are?

by Sheila Connolly

We’re all writers here, which means we create characters from our imagination.  That means we observe and analyze people (hoping we’re not too obvious).

But I started wondering about how people choose to present themselves to the world, and I realized I had a perfect (if small) sample, when I was looking at the Personals section of an alumni magazine for an institution of higher learning that shall remain nameless. It’s not a very long section, tucked in the rear—I guess a lot of alumni, most of whom are older and/or widowed, don’t want to admit they’re having trouble finding connections in the real world.  The young’uns still have hope, so they don’t bother.

So these well-educated people have one column inch, more or less, to define who they are—or who they want potential partners to believe they are. I was curious to see what features the seekers believed were important.  Here’s a list of first words, most often bolded: 

Well-traveled
Searching for
Warm, witty
A breath of fresh air
Warm, youthful (looking for someone 60-70)
Beautiful professor wonderful smile, contagious laugh, sparkling blue eyes
Smart and pretty, gracious warm and slender

This is the first thing you’ll see in a person’s listing; the opening chapter, in book terms, where you have to snag the reader’s attention and make them keep reading.

The next item is most often about the appearance of this person (each line comes from an individual listing): 

Radiant, inspiring, attractive, slender

Youthful, in shape, petite, brunette
Fit, very youthful (at age 70)
Stunning 5’8” blonde
Attractive
Beautiful, outgoing, slender, fit, an eye-catcher
Handsome, intellectual
Dynamic and outstanding VIP, stunner
Exceptionally accomplished, beautiful blonde, slender, fit

Beauty and fitness seem to come out on top.  I suppose we all want that from somebody north of 60.

What are these beautiful healthy people looking for?

Love, laughter and a beautiful future

Professionally accomplished (is that a code for wealthy?), healthy, active
Nice, sensitive, warm, finds humor in banter and whimsy
Someone to help me make the rest of my days more agreeable
A world traveler, exuberant with international sophistication, who enjoys contributing and giving back
Gentleman
Authentic, intellectually curious, loves nature/outdoor activities
Rugged/masculine on the outside and sensitive, kind, with good values on the inside
Soulful, creative, intellectual, attractive, thin, accomplished

There seems to be a balance between those who will share the life of the mind and those who want to go hiking, at home or abroad.

Whether they know it or not, these seekers have written the beginning of a romance novel or twelve.  Only they’re not young; they’re on the downhill slope of their lives and they’re still looking for that elusive someone.  Maybe they had it with someone who is now gone, but hope lives on.

Why is beautiful more important than kind and funny?  Is nobody looking for someone who will make you tea when you’re sick, and take out the trash and clean the cat litter?

And why are these listings so sad to read? Is it because they’re fiction?  How many beautiful people do you know?  I’m willing to bet you know more kind, nice, decent, helpful, responsible people that stunners. But admit it:  you kind of like to read about the beautiful (if lovelorn) ones.

 Coming February 4th

Vacations

by Sheila Connolly

Earlier this week the top headline (above the fold on the front page) in the Boston Globe read, “For majority of workers, vacation days go unused.”

I laughed.  What’s a vacation?

All right, I’ll admit that I actually took a vacation this year—two weeks in Italy.  But I felt so guilty that I had to write a book about it (Reunion with Death, released in November).

I also spent two weeks in Ireland recently—but that was work.

I love my work! I don't need—or want—a vacation, because it feels like my entire life is a vacation.

When I started writing, I had just been fired from what I thought was the perfect job. I was angry and hurt, so I said something like “I’ll show them,” and I started writing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I had something to prove, and I knew I had started late, so I was trying to catch up. In the end I spewed out roughly a million words before I slowed down. Okay, maybe a lot of them were not good words—the writing was sloppy, the plots were weak, and I kind of dwelt on dark crimes. Yes, now I write cozies, so I must have gotten all that anger out of my system. I also learned a lot about writing along the way.

And I loved it.  Once I’d purged that bile, I wanted to keep going. I never went back to a day job, so I had something else to prove:  that I might be able to make a living with writing.  Took a while (close to ten years), but it finally worked out.  Beginners, do not try this without an outside income source! Partner, trust fund, lottery win—all will do just fine.

Nowadays I have found that almost everything I do feeds into my writing.  I can’t go to a store without watching other people and wondering, what if they were planning a crime? What secrets do they have? I can’t admire a pretty landscape without looking for places to hide a body, or picturing a corpse washing ashore. Everything becomes fodder for some future book (the ex-government administrative employee who is now raising alpacas on a farm in western Massachusetts is definitely going to show up—I met her at a tag sale). 

 

The trip to Ireland was certainly work:  I talked to quite a few pub owners and employees, including the woman who owns what used to be the pub that is the model for Sullivan’s in my County Cork books. I got an impromptu lesson on Irish whiskey from a liquor distributor who also happened to be the evening’s entertainment at a Dublin pub. I talked to one bar maid who wants to go back to school to become a forensic analyst, and a nice young man who was planning to go abroad to teach English as a second language. I talked to yet another pub owner about the food service regulations imposed on establishments by the European Union.

In the past I’ve traveled just to see things, and I loved it then. Now I “see” things through a different lens, and it’s still wonderful.  Plus writing gives me a reason to go places and talk to people, which is always a good thing since being a writer means spending a lot of time glued to a chair in front of a keyboard and talking to the cats.

I love being a writer.

 Coming February 4th!

 

The Music of the Sentence

by Sheila Connolly

I love flea markets and farmers markets and junk sales and antiques fairs, because I never know what I’m going to find. That includes Irish markets, where it’s even more likely that I’ll find something unlikely and unexpected. The Skibbereen (West Cork, Ireland) Saturday market is no exception.  This was the second year I’ve been there, and I always come away with something.  Lots of somethings, in fact.

The food products are amazing, but that’s for another blog.  They also sell live poultry there (I don’t have much use for a duck, now, do I?), and there are always a couple of junk stalls.  Oh, and the guy selling hand-carved magic wands.  Yes, I bought one, made of bog oak, which is supposed to be wood a thousand years old, pulled out of a bog.

 

One of the sort-of antique stalls was run by an English couple.  I first spotted an old book on a pile there and was of course drawn to it, and we started chatting.  Turns out the husband has written a mystery about the discovery of a Viking horde on a beach somewhere, so we had something in common.  And yes, I bought the old book I had first seen:  It’s called:

A Grammar of Rhetoric, and Polite Literature; Comprehending the Principles of Language and Style, the Elements of Taste and Criticism: with Rules for the Study of Composition and Eloquence; Illustrated by Appropriate Examples.

 

It was written by one Alexander Jamieson, published in London in 1818. There’s a hand-written inscription which I think says (it’s in Latin) it was given as a prize to an outstanding student named David Sherlock in August 1830 (it doesn’t look as though young David used it much). It’s bound in red leather with gold stamping, and the edges of the pages are gilt.

 

My initial impression, upon opening the book at a random page, was that one would have to have a pretty impressive education simply to read any part of it.  This is not a primer for beginners!

But reading even the index is immensely entertaining (no, I will not claim to have read the book yet). Some chapter headers might come from a modern document on “How to Write,” while others sound absurd.  A few samples:

Under characteristics of style: “The Nervous and the Feeble of the same Import with the Concise and the Diffuse.” Huh? Of course, “An Author may write simply and yet not beautifully.”  On a more reasonable note, “The Foundation of all good Style, is good Sense, accompanied with a lively Imagination.”

There are sections on Historical Writing and Philosophical Writing. There is an entire section devoted to “On the Nature and Structure of Sentences, the General Principles of Perspicuity, and the Harmony of Periods.” Then there’s a chapter on “The Various Species of the Unintelligible,” which begins with “The unintelligible, from want of meaning in the writer, proceeds from vacuity of thought.” The writer seems to be saying, think before you write.  Good idea.

When we arrive at the part about the Harmony of Periods, the writer says,

Those words are most agreeable to the ear which are composed of smooth and liquid sounds, where there is a proper intermixture of vowels and consonants; without too many harsh consonants grating upon each other or too many open vowels in succession, to cause a hiatus or disagreeable aperture of the mouth.

I could happily go on, for the small book is nearly 400 pages long, but I think you get the drift.  Our man Jamieson was a Scotsman, a schoolmaster, a teacher; he went bankrupt and then became an actuary (rhetoric doesn’t pay the bills?).  This little grammar was very successful when published, and there were at least 53 American editions. It would have been used in colleges and was widely quoted (and even used for female education!).

Clearly the methods of teaching writing have changed since 1818, but I’ve always thought that something was lost when we stopped reading the old classics, if only for the sounds of the words. I think it bears thinking about, if we as writers want to reclaim what Jamieson calls “the music of the sentence.”

 

The second book in the County Cork Mystery Series, coming February 2014

 

 

Ireland

by Sheila Connolly (aka Sile ni Conghaile)

I write a mystery series set in Ireland.  Sometimes I think it’s presumptuous of me to pretend to know enough about somewhere else to write convincingly about it.  That’s why I travel to Ireland as often as I can (well, that’s not the only reason).  I’ve been there twice this year, once to Dublin alone (at both ends of a trip to Italy), and then over the past two weeks.

There is, I think, a temptation to portray Ireland as cute and quaint—all those old guys in tweed hats sitting around dim pubs over an endless pint of Guinness swapping tales for hours on end; all that endlessly green scenery punctuated with cows and sheep and the occasional ruined castle. The thing is, it’s kind of true, so it’s a challenge to write about it without lapsing into caricature.

I’m not sure why I feel I need to try to create an accurate picture of the place.  Most of my readers will never know if I’ve nailed the small stuff, but (I think I’ve said it before) most writers feel an obligation to get their facts right.  You’d think this would refer mainly to police procedures or what happens to a decomposing body or how a particular pistol works, but to my mind it goes beyond that. I find myself trying to work out tiny details, like what the trash bins look like, or how the weather is reported (re the latter, a forecast that we would call overcast and partly cloudy is a “dull day” in Ireland), and the fact that the Irish use “Please” more often in public signs.

And there are other things about Ireland that we in this country don’t always think about.  I’ll admit I’ve always lived in a suburb of one or another large city, so when I go to Ireland the quiet is almost a physical thing, because it’s so different than what I’m used to.  We’ve rented a rural cottage for a couple of years now, and there you can hear a car coming for several minutes before you actually see it (although the road we were on served only two houses, and I saw two motor vehicles, one tractor, and a bicyclist in the time we were there).  You can hear a dog barking or a cow lowing for miles.  Airplanes?  I think I noticed one in two weeks.

 

It’s the same with the light—or the absence of it.  In this country we are so much surrounded by light, all the time.  There are streetlights every hundred or so feet on the street where we live at home.  Why?  It’s a fairly rural, quiet community.  When did it become mandatory to illuminate everything in an unearthly orange glow?  Inside our houses we have at least tens of blinking or glowing lights—on our phones, our televisions, our radios, our surge protectors, our computers, our servers, our routers, our microwaves…the list goes on.  On our hilltop in Ireland, in the middle of the night you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  What you could see was not only stars, but the Milky Way arching overhead.  I think I’ve seen it only three times in my life.

[Note: I was thinking of inserting a black image here, to give you an idea of just how dark it was.] 

Tell me it’s not a different lifestyle when you’re not constantly besieged by visual and aural stimuli.  When all you have to deal with is the shifting forces of nature.  When you are reminded of how bright the moon really is, and how very dark it is when the moon isn’t shining.

I know, I’m jetlagged as I write this.  Humans were not meant to traverse thousands of miles in a day.  It messes not only with our bodies, but also with our heads.  What time is it?  What day is this?

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good thing, to be reminded of the things we cannot have, like true silence and darkness.  If I threw over everything, sold all my worldly possessions, and bought that small cottage in Ireland, would I come to hate it?  It is too quiet, too dull?  And could I live without the Internet? I’m still thinking about it.

 

 

Coming February 2014

Getting Started

by Sheila Connolly

I’m supposed to be starting to write a new book, with a deadline of February 1.  But “starting” is such a slippery term!

This new book will be the third in a series, which means that the setting and characters are already established, although I have the option (and maybe even the need) to introduce a few new ones.

A plot might be helpful. That’s not to say that the plot doesn’t change during the course of the writing, but I need a starting point, a hook, a key, a precipitating idea that starts the story rolling. It doesn’t have to appear in the first chapter, although it should be close to the beginning, else the writer spends a while meandering around admiring the scenery and introducing the characters (for some readers, not for the first time). Note:  the body doesn’t have to be appear in the first chapter either, although that does make a striking start, giving you the opportunity to explore the who and the why immediately.  Who is this person covered with blood, and what’s he doing lying on my floor?  I’ve ever seen him before!

But I do write murder mysteries, therefore there should be a murder. That means I have to decide what concept is worthy of killing someone for. I assume the cast of characters—both official and amateur—will be able to solve it, but I have to give them a crime to solve.

All this sounds as though I know what I’m doing; that I plan ahead and know where a story is going to go when I first open that first file or type “Chapter 1.”  I don’t.

I sent off edits to two books last week, so those books are essential done, save for some proofing.  Sigh of relief.  Now, what do I do with some free time?  Worry—about getting the next book started.  But after writing quite a few books, I’ve discovered something:  if I wait for it, the book starts demanding to be written.  It’s not a conscious process, but if I turn my attention to something else (like polishing the furniture or raking leaves), a scene will start jelling in my head.  I have to work from the beginning, although I do visualize snippets of what will follow, so the first scene is first to emerge, like an (old-fashioned!) photo materializing on the paper in a tray of developer. 

And that’s where I am right now.  I “see” the opening scene, and I see how it leads to the one that follows and the one after that.  No body yet, although I think I know who dies, and the new character that will lead us to the murder appears up front.  That first chapter is a tricky one, because I have to fill in just the right amount of backstory (who are these people and why should I care? sez the reader) and also kick off the action so the story moves forward.  I have to make sure that I don’t depart from the personalities of the existing characters—a person can’t have been morose for the entire last book and suddenly become cheerful, or not without a good reason, which would probably be a clue to something.  I have to remind readers why they liked the last book in the series enough to pick up this next one.

I know the scene in my head is the place to start because it won’t go away. I have to set it down.  It’s almost a physical itch, to put my fingers on the keys and get started, and writing anything but that chapter just won’t do.

So, in the third County Cork book (still nameless), Maura Donovan is sitting at the well-worn kitchen table in the century-old cottage in Ireland that she inherited, trying to figure out how she can possibly afford to keep her pub running on the paltry profits she’s been making over the past few months—and she doesn’t know that the answer is sitting on a barstool at the pub waiting for her.

Coming November 22

Mean Girls

by Sheila Connolly

I'm in the midst of first-round edits for the next Irish book (Scandal in Skibbereen), and I've noticed that my editor has commented more than once that she thinks that my protagonist, and a newfound friend, are being mean to a newcomer.

I've been working with my editor for quite a few books now, and I think she's good at what she does, particularly at finding plot holes and balancing pacing and character development within the book.  But on this issue I don't see what she's seeing.

In the book, an American stranger from New York arrives in the small Irish town and meets my protagonist Maura Donovan in the pub she's managing there.  The stranger starts wheedling Maura to help her on a quest, and Maura, trying to be supportive of an American visitor, agrees.  But the newcomer is pushy and aggressive and rude, and she's never satisfied: there's always one more thing she wants.  She's not very likeable—and that's the way I wanted her.

So she tests Maura's patience. Maura keeps trying to explain to her that her New York strategy is not the way to get what you want in Ireland (based on Maura's observations after three months in the country!), but the message is not getting across.  The result is that Maura and her friend Gillian keep trying to rein in the pushy American—and my editor thinks that makes them look mean.

Cozy mysteries have a loosely defined set of internal rules.  There is a protagonist, most often a young woman, who usually ends up solving the crime that occurs in the beginning of the book.  She must be likable and appear sympathetic to readers, so they will root for her to succeed. This protagonist surrounds herself with friends, who help her solve the crimes, and they can display a range of personalities, but they're usually likeable too.  We want them to find the killer, working together.

But that does not mean that everyone who appears in the book must be "nice." Sometimes there are characters who nobody likes, for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes they're a suspect in the murder, or even the killer, but sometimes they're not necessarily guilty of anything other than being "not nice."

In Scandal, Maura and Gillian are trying to be helpful, but they're not getting any credit for it.  They're trying to smooth the visitor's way so she can get what she wants, but she keeps trampling right over them and making things worse.  Is it any wonder they don't like her very much?

I'll admit Maura is kind of rough around the edges.  She grew up in a blue-collar part of Boston and she's never had much education.  She's socially unpolished.  She's also kind of bewildered about the turn her life has taken in the last few months, but she's getting used to it. 

Now she has a foot in both worlds, Boston and small-town Ireland; her past and her future.  Whether she's admitted it or not, to herself or to anyone else, her heart now lies in Ireland.  The pushy newcomer represents the worst side of what she's left behind, and she feels protective of her new friends and new home.

There are plenty of available examples of female protagonists who don't play by the rules.  Think of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, or Kathy Reich's Temperance Brennan (at least as portrayed on the Fox show Bones).  Or the protagonist on The Bridge, a new cable series that debuted recently, who has Asperger's and manages to annoy a lot of people.  Being "difficult" is all right—as long as the writer makes the character more than one-dimensional.  You have to show enough of the character's softer side to make the reader want to like her.  And that's the tricky part.

I's challenging to create obnoxious characters and make them more than one-dimensional. Ideally, over the course of the book they begin to change and grow.  Besides, it's a lot more fun to write them!

Listening to the Irish

by Sheila Connolly

Long before my County Cork series saw the light of day, I started taking Irish language classes at a local Irish cultural center.  The classes were offered by an organization called Cumann na Gaeilge, which translates to Friends of the Irish.  I spent five years of Thursday nights trekking to the center, and emerged with a rather rudimentary knowledge of contemporary Irish, plus a few memorized poems and songs.  No fault of the instructors—it's a notoriously difficult language to learn.  In truth, mostly I went to listen, since both my primary instructor and more than half the people in the class were Irish-born (which does not necessarily mean that they learned the language in Ireland in their early years), and I wanted to absorb the speech patterns and inflection.

Due to internal conflicts, Cumann na Gaeilge split apart in the past year, and my former instructor founded a new group, Ar dTeanga Dhuchais, which means Our Native Language, to offer language classes.  Somehow I found myself agreeing to be treasurer of the new group, mainly to keep some contact with the language.  Recently we held a meeting at an Irish pub in Boston.

I was the only American-born person at the table of five.  I knew two of the people there, and the other two were strangers to me.  I mostly listened, and after a while I wished I'd had a recorder with me, because what I saw unfolding was exactly what I've tried to include in my irish-based series.

First a stranger (Irish) walked up and started a conversation with Seamus, one of the men at the table, asking if they'd met before.  They hadn't, but it turned out that Seamus's brother had worked in the same union as the newcomer (all but one of the men are now retired from one or another of the building trades).  Then there ensued a long conversation amongst them men about what other contacts they shared, covering a few decades.  There was a strange aside when the newcomer was somehow reluctant to reveal his surname, at least until everyone (or at least the men) had established his bona fides.  (It turned out to be Keneally.)  And then this segued into where each had come from and when (but not why) and who and what they knew back in Ireland.

And I'm sitting there still as a mouse, gobsmacked (another good Irish phrase—"gob" means mouth in Irish) by what I'm hearing, because it's exactly what I wanted in my book, and here I am hearing it like it was a script, or something I wish I'd written.  These men are decades removed from "home," and yet they're still talking about where they came from.  Not on a grand level, but about details—about waiting for the tides, and curraghs (a kind of small boat I'd only read about), and harvesting kelp not for food or fertilizer but to dry and use in weaving. About neighbors helping neighbors when the seas were too rough to travel to the mainland from the little islands off the west coast. About families maybe none of them knew, but they knew about from others.

All the elements I've seen in Ireland—as an American outsider—were there:  the attachment to the land, the connection to a network of people, the way of establishing not "if" but "how" they connect with an Irish stranger. All rolling out in front of me, unasked. 

I'll be in Dublin again on Sunday. I can't wait.

Writers' Moments

by Sheila Connolly

People who don't write won't understand why sometimes their writer friends go still, with a distant look in their eyes.  No, it's not a form of seizure:  we're just paying attention in a different way.

It often happens unexpectedly. Every now and then, we'll be going about our normal business, and a little bell goes off in our head:  this would be great for a story.  It's like a switch is thrown, and  suddenly all your senses are on high alert.  You're paying attention to details—sights, colors, the space around you, facial features, voices, and just about anything else.  Or maybe it's like when your cat suddenly sits up and pricks its ears, watching or sensing something you haven't even noticed yet (my cats once spotted a mouse coming down the stairs on the other side of the house in the dark).

It can happen anytime, anywhere.  For example:  this past weekend I attended a (non-writer) conference, and stayed in a slightly shabby midrange hotel in the Boston suburbs.  I was headed downstairs for the cocktail hour, and when the elevator arrived on my floor, there were already two people on it, clearly a couple.  And that alarm went off in my writer head, and I started making mental notes (all the while trying to look like I wasn't looking at them, of course, and obviously I don't have pictures).

The details:  both thirty-something, tall, attractive, fit, well groomed and (for lack of a better word) interesting-looking.  He was wearing beige dress pants and a sage-green fine-waled corduroy jacket that looked like suede, so smooth that I wanted to touch it.  She looked a little more "artsy," with slim jeans, layered shirts and a scarf.  They were a well-matched pair.  They never said a word during our three-story ride down to the lobby.  Neither looked like they were trying to impress anyone, but they definitely didn't look like they belonged at that hotel—I would have put them in Cambridge or Boston. I really would like to have known who they were and what they were doing there.  But I didn't ask.  That would spoil the spell.

All this in less than a minute.  I will file them away and use them somewhere, like when one of my protagonists gets on an elevator, and the people already in it make her feel like she should turn around and change clothes, get a haircut and find a new job.

Something similar happened when I was in Ireland last fall, on a much bigger scale.  I had the chance to visit the pub that is the model for Sullivan's Pub in the County Cork series. When I first saw it, it was called Connolly's. In its heyday it was a widely-known music venue in Ireland (far beyond the regional level—musicians whose names you'd recognized have played there, even though it can hold no more than maybe a hundred people, at least legally).  I hadn't been inside in over ten years, and it's no longer open, except for special events. But I wanted to see how accurate my memories were, so I knocked on the door because the woman in the café down the street had told me that the last Connolly owner still lived above the pub, and she was there, and I ended up spending a couple of hours in her parlor with her cat on my lap talking about the old days. Of course I was delighted to be there, and of course I was taking pictures of the place like crazy.

There went that bell in my head again. I realized that the whole plot of the third book in the series had just fallen into my lap. Not just bits and pieces, but the whole story. Suddenly I was looking at details in a new way, and figuring how I could use them to give the story color and substance.

And that's one of the joys of being a writer—the gift or the craft of seeing in a different, more intense way, and then sharing that vision with other people.

Rapturous Research

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Sean Pidgeon, a writer as well as a reference publisher for John Wiley & Sons.  Given his day job, it should be no surprise that he is much invested in literary research, but he was surprised to find that it had a formal name:  research rapture.  He did some online digging and formulated this definition:

…the delightful but dangerous condition of becoming repeatedly sidetracked in following intriguing threads of information, or constantly searching for one more elusive fact.

Sound familiar, writers? Pidgeon was talking primarily about writers of historical fiction, but I'm convinced it applies to any fiction, or at least to those writers of fiction who have a fondness for facts rather than pure invention.  I'm one of them.  Yes, I confess:  I am a research addict.

The Internet makes it far too easy—all those links, like breadcrumbs forming a trail to that one perfect fact that you really, really need for your work in progress. 

I'm still in the midst of writing the second book in my County Cork Mysteries. In it there's a murder at a manor (I swear I wrote the original version of this long before Downton Abbey premiered).  I'm writing about a real town, and I've seen the local manor—from the outside.  Now, this is not historical fiction, nor do I have to stick to "only the facts" about the place.  I don't expect to see the interior; I could, but currently it's a Catholic retreat house, and I daresay the interior in its current state would not fit well with my story.

It has not been difficult to find the history of the family that owned the place when they first enter into my story, in which the last descendant is still living there (not true in reality:  the last descendant died in 1983), going back to the 17^th century.  This I derived from multiple websites, starting with that of the retreat house, and then wandering through sites that discuss Irish social history and others focused on architecture.

One of the most intriguing and relevant tidbits came from the Census of 1901 (also available online), which shows the details of the house that year.  For example, this was clearly the Big House of that townland:  where most residences in that townland had two windows in the front (a basis for valuation in those days), the Manor House had 17.  Where the other houses had mainly between six and 11 rooms, the Manor House had 25.

Equally interesting are the individuals listed in the Big House as of the census date.  There were three family members living there in 1901:  the widowed mother (the nominal Head of House) and her son and daughter, both unmarried.  All three belonged to the Church of Ireland (Protestant).  This family of three was attended by four staff:  a cook, a housemaid, a parlor maid, and a kitchen maid; all were Catholic. The cook and the kitchen maid spoke both Irish and English.  There was also a "Visitor" below stairs—a retired nurse from America. So there you have the sociological make-up of a family that belonged to "the gentry" of the day.  And that's the snapshot I needed for my book.

I went off on other tangents, of course.  For example:

--laws pertaining to ownership and registration of firearms in Ireland (strict)

--European Union regulations for establishments serving food (lots of forms to fill out)

--Laws pertaining to serving alcohol

--The number of surviving nunneries in County Cork (more than you might think).

Many of these diversion may result in no more than a line or two in the finished book—something like, "What about opening a restaurant?" "Forget it—too much paperwork." Others lead to questions that can best be directed to human beings rather than the Internet—things like, "how strict are you really about opening and closing hours?" (I asked—there's a lot of flexibility.)

Can readers tell if we can back up those throwaway comments with fact, or if we're just making it up as we go?

Why is Betty White Wearing My Clothes?

by Sheila Connolly

Earlier this week I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting for my appointment.  The ubiquitous large-screen television was on, tuned to a morning talk show.  Normally I don't watch these, because my brain works best in the morning so that's when I write.  But in this case I was a captive audience. 

Betty White was one of the guests.  I admire Betty White:  she's smart, she's funny, and she just keeps on going at 90 (her 91^st birthday is next week).  But what I realized was that she was wearing my clothes. My public uniform, my go-to outfit for conferences, dinners, public appearances, etc.  Black pants, black top, colorful tailored jacket, low-heeled black shoes.  Did I mention that she was 90?  I'm not.

So how did I get it stuck in my head that this was how to dress "nicely"?  I grew up in an era where there were clothing rules for everything.  Things had to match (shoes and purse, for instance).  Underwear was never supposed to show ("ahem, it's snowing down south"), except in some rather bizarre Maidenform ads.   

In my childhood, going to visit my grandmother in New York meant a frilly dress with petticoat, black patent leather shoes (always too small) and socks with lace trim, and white gloves (don't ask me why).  Ladies who lunched wore hats at the table, and applying lipstick in public was considered crude.

I also lived through the seventies when all those rules blew up, but we got past that. And then I lived through the professional "power suit" for women era—you remember, the ones with shoulder pads?  And the blouse with the bow at the neck?

I never saw my grandmother wearing a pair of pants.  She wore a girdle and stockings to take out her trash (down the hall within her residence hotel).  My mother wore pants:  double knit polyester with elastic waistbands.  I still have flashbacks when I walk into the Women's department at a big department store, because my mother is everywhere there. I wear blue jeans, often. It is beyond my imagination to picture either my grandmother or my mother in blue jeans.

What does this have to do with writing?  Well, for one thing, we're supposed to describe our characters, so we as writers have to make decisions:  would our protagonist wear blue jeans to this event?  If she's going out to a nice dinner, what does she wear?  How does she judge someone she sees, based on their clothing? And what do those choices tell us about the character?

Industry studies show that most genre readers are women forty or older.  I'm making a wild guess that most cozy protagonists are slightly younger, in their thirties.  My operating theory is that that age is ideal: old enough to have some life experience, young enough to have options for the future. And while the clothing rules may be more relaxed these days, I think I can still describe how a thirty-something woman would dress.

I'm going out on a limb with my new series, where my protagonist is in her mid-twenties.  And she's blue-collar.  She's been raised by an immigrant grandmother, and she's had to work most of her life, after school and now that she's graduated from high school.  She has no life plan beyond getting by.  When her grandmother dies, she's completely unmoored—no family, no home, no clue.  (Don't worry—her life improves quickly, I promise.) And so far, she wears mainly blue jeans, with one slightly better pair of pants for funerals and such.

Lena Dunham of Girls

But I'll admit it's a stretch for me to write about someone the age of my daughter (who has opted for a kind of classic retro style—button down shirts, cashmere cardigans, pencil skirts and the like).  But I look at something like the popular HBO series Girls and what the protagonist there is wearing, and I go, huh?  Is this fashionable, or is the young woman supposed to appear clueless?  I have no idea.

Are there consistent basic standards for appearance?  Is there some timeless dress code that transcends generations? 

And why are Betty White and I wearing the same clothes??

There and Back Again

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I found myself browsing in a used bookstore in Brooklyn.  I was with friends, and we were waiting for a table at the restaurant next door, and of course I spotted the bookstore before the car even stopped moving. And of course I bought something.

 

What I found and fell in love with was a thick and yellowed volume titled Scarborough's Official Tour Book for New York, New Jersey, Canada and the East, copyright 1917, issued under the aegis of the New York State Automobile Association.  Since I had great-grandparents and grandparents who lived in New York, New Jersey and New England about that time, and I grew up in New Jersey (and learned to drive there), I had to have it. 

 

Consider it the Google Maps or MapQuest of its day, because the book provides step by step directions from getting from here to there—when the world was a very different place.

 

The entries are arranged by trip.  Let us say we wish to travel from Atlantic City to Philadelphia in 1917, some 61 miles. The details appear on p. 138, and begin by informing us that there is a very good gravel road as far as Berlin, then macadam thereafter.  I won't give you the entire itinerary, but it includes such details as "go south on Atlantic Ave., following trolleys," followed by "bridge."  At 9.3 miles you pass a cemetery on the right; in Elm, at 34.9 miles, you go under a viaduct, then over two viaducts in short order.  At 41.1 miles, "Danger.  Turn left under viaduct, then curve right, and cross railroad."  When you arrive at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Camden, you take a ferry across the Delaware River to arrive in Philadelphia.

 

Or say we wish to voyage from Morristown, New Jersey to New York City, a trip I made with my family countless times when I was young.  Start at the east corner of the park (what park? Where?) in Morristown.  Go under the railroad—Washington's Headquarters will be on the left (yes!).  Go straight at the four corners, then follow the stone road to a bridge.  At Florham Park (just down the road from my high school), go straight, "soon leaving macadam (for what?)." A school will be on the right.  Go over the bridge, and the macadam reappears.

 

Then we wend our way through South Orange, Newark (cross a couple of bridges there, then "turn sharp left at open space into park…bear right at fountain), Jersey City, and Weehauken, where you have to take the 42^nd St. ferry.  Apparently you arrive in New York only when you reach Columbus Circle.

 

These trips take place in fairly well settled areas (relatively speaking). How about taking a trip from New York to the Hamptons on Long Island?  When we arrive at Amagansett, after 109 miles, we are warned of a mile of "sandy dirt road" and then at 113.5 miles we find this:

 

From here … you will have very poor road of deep sand.  Follow directions of the occasional white pointed boards.  The red pointed boards point out the worst ways. (These board pointers are changed occasionally owing to the trails becoming cut too deep in sand.) After reaching mileage 18.9 you have mostly dirt road with occasional sandy places.

 

If you survive that, there's a large summer residence on the hill at the left at 113.6 miles.  There is also a saloon one block to the left at mile 115.1 (are the authors suggesting you may need one by then?).  And BTW, look out for the large rock on sharp curve at mile 127.9.

 

Travel must have been a real adventure in those days! No highways, no bridges over the big rivers; no guarantee you'd ever find a paved road where you were going. Most of the navigational benchmarks were viaducts, bridges, trolleys and cemeteries.  You'd better travel with a companion to read the directions out load, since if you stop, you might end up sinking into the sand or mired in mud on an unpaved road.

The book is also sprinkled with illustrated advertisements for hotels ($1.00 to $3.50 per day), plus ads for garages (some of which promise "NEVER CLOSED"—those unpaved roads must have been hard on cars, not to mention the people bouncing around in them. 

 

P.S. If anyone wants to know how to get from Point A to Point B in the eastern US in 1917, let me know.