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!

 

Peter O'Toole

by Sheila Connolly

Peter O’Toole, who died earlier this week, changed my life.

No, I never met the man or had any other form of contact with him, beyond what most people would:  his movies.  But in a way he was responsible for setting the course for a part of my life.

A friend (plus a parent who did the driving) took a small group to see Lawrence of Arabia for her birthday.  I think I was twelve, maybe thirteen—and it was the first movie I can remember understanding in an adult way.  I was literally stunned into speechlessness by it, for most of the ride home.  It was an unexpected turning point for me.

But it was two others movies that shaped several years

of my life:  Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968). In case you’ve forgotten, O’Toole played the Henry II (1133-1189), King of England, Count of Anjou, and lord of a string of other realms, including Ireland. He had inherited Anjou from his mother’s side of the family, and then he consolidated his hold on that part of France by marrying the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine (who was a memorable woman in her own right, having married both the King of France and the King of England (in sequence, not at the same time), and outlived them both).

Up until those two movies, most of what I knew about the Middle Ages came from watching episodes of Robin Hood, a television series from the 1950s. Twenty years later I was a medieval art historian; my doctoral thesis was about the sculpture which decorated a monastery in Angers, in  the heart of Anjou. I owe that in no small part to Peter O’Toole.

I’ve never been one to watch historical movies or read historical fiction. Mostly I pick holes in them, yelling at the screen or the page about what they got wrong—and, yes, I can do that for Becket (the fresco in the apse of what is supposed to be the church at Canterbury is the wrong era and style altogether). But Peter O’Toole’s two performances sold me on Henry.  Because of those I’ve visited Canterbury Cathedral; I dragged my mother and daughter to Sens Cathedral in France, where Becket spent his years in exile; I’ve visited Chinon (also in France), where Henry imprisoned Eleanor; and I’ve visited Fontevraud Abbey, to which the widowed Eleanor retired and lived out her days.  Eleanor, Henry, and Richard were buried there, and while their physical remains are gone now (since the French Revolution, one theory holds), the full-size stone sarcophagi are still on display.

The Plantagenet court, led by Henry and Eleanor, had a major impact on the arts of the day, in sculpture but more particularly in music and poetry. Years ago I studied styles of twelfth-century church carvings from England and France, trying to show that there was a connection fostered by the royal court (in the form of money from the wandering court). 

Henry and Eleanor were a power couple, if you will:  smart, shrewd, devious, hungry for power.  Too bad their children didn’t inherit the right genes.  Richard (you know, the Lion-Hearted) married but may never have consummated the union and produced no heirs, and preferred to go haring off on crusades, from which he had to be ransomed. (I’ve also visited his ruined castle in Les Andelys in France.)  Their youngest son John reigned from 1199 to 1216, but is perhaps best known for losing the Angevin empire for the English and caving to the English Barons and signing the Magna Carta (a purely formal gesture, since neither side followed it; I’ve seen two copies of that, too).  The sons could never quite live up to the standard set by their parents.

So, back to Peter O’Toole.  Maybe he’s my earliest imprint of an Irishman:  talented, quick to speak and to anger; his own worst enemy.  But no one could call the roles he took on dull or tame. He lit up the screen, and occasionally the stage; even when he was bad, he was larger than life. He will be missed. 

 

   Coming next month!

 

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

Irish Bookstores

by Sheila Connolly

I love to visit bookstores.  You know, the real ones, in buildings.  My family trained me well:  we used to go to Doubleday’s in New York, as a treat, or to Brentano’s in the first mall I saw, in Short Hills, New Jersey (I remember when it was being built, and I used to take the bus there before I could drive).

Alas, too many of them are gone now.  Those that survive hang on by their fingernails, fueled more by the dream of owning a bookstore than by the income they generate. Most indie bookstore owners these days are there for the love of it.

 

But that’s not true in Ireland.  I know, because I’ve tried to visit as many bookstores as I can.  When I’m in Dublin I usually stay in a hotel around the corner from the Temple Bar, where there are plenty of bookstores, starting with The Gutter at one end, past the radical one (called Connolly’s). Closer to Trinity

College there are a couple of good used bookstores.  Go toward Saint Stephen’s Green and you find one that actually had a section for Cozies (I asked the woman at the register why, and she said, because people ask for them.  Yes!)  Cross the bridge over the Liffey and you have Eason’s, the country’s largest chain.

 

 

And it’s not just true of the city.  I spend a lot of time in Skibbereen in West Cork.  It’s a thriving market town with a population of about 2700 people.  (The supermarket and the weekly year-round farmers’ market make me want to weep, they are so much better than mine here.)  Three bookstores, including one that features an array of antiquarian books and maps.  Not just “old” books, either:  the last time I was in there, they had a first edition of a book by the 16^th century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, in its original binding, and if that wasn’t enough, according to the bookplate it had once belonged to the Dean of Trinity College.  And it wasn’t locked away in a glass case—I held it and leafed through it.

 

Ireland is a country that cares about books.  And writers as well: Ireland offers tax exemption to artists (who live in Ireland) and who produce “original and creative” work, including books and plays. It must have artistic merit of course, and this is defined thus: 

--A work has cultural merit if its contemplation enhances the quality of individual or social life as a result of its intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic form and content. 

--A work has artistic merit when its combined form and content enhances or intensifies the aesthetic apprehension of those who experience or contemplate it.

There are more details and exceptions, but you get the drift.  The maximum amount an artist can exempt is €40,000, which as of this writing is about $53,000.  I’d bet most writers would be happy to earn that much, exempt or not.

Books are expensive in Ireland.  The mass market format is all but unknown, so there are only hardback and trade format.  The latter usually costs about $15 a book—and yet the stores thrive. One clue that I haven’t been able to follow up on came from a recent conversation with a writer at Bouchercon (he’s English and lives in England, but he writes fiction about American crime), who told me that in the UK and Ireland the government provides some form of subsidy for bookstores.  Would that it were so here!

 

My own books are not available in Irish bookstores (even the one set in Ireland).  Happily (or unhappily, depending on how you feel about Amazon) they are available through Amazon UK, although that’s fairly recent.  Yes, they will ship to Ireland, but the shipping cost per book is more than the cost of the book itself. Sigh.  The books don’t appear to be available in Kindle format, and I can’t speak to how many Irish residents use e-readers anyway. It’s an imperfect (literary) world. 

But as you read this, I will be in Ireland, stopping at every bookstore I see. 

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

Lá Fhéile Bríde

by Sheila Connolly (or maybe today it's Sile ni Conghaile)

Tá lá atá inniu ann lá Bhríde. Today is the feast day of St. Brigid of Ireland.  She's the female counterpart of St. Patrick, but she gets far less publicity, at least outside of Ireland. People don't go out and over-imbibe green beer in local pubs to honor her.  More likely, they'd drink milk, since she was a dairy-woman in her early life—and the saint you'd appeal to if you want your cows to produce a lot of milk.

It's great fun to read the online descriptions of St. Brigid, because they're all over the place.  The serious Catholic ones give us one story:

She was born sometime in the mid-fifth century to a pagan father (Dubthach) and a Christian slave mother (Briocsech) and was contemporary with St. Patrick. Dad's wife thought maybe Brigid's mother was a bit too tempting, so she had her sold along with Brigid, but with the promise that the daughter would be sent back to dear old Dad sometime later.  When Brigid was ten, she joined him, and he put her in charge of the dairy, but she insisted on giving most of the milk away (seems she kept giving lots of stuff away).  Dad then handed her to Dunlag, King of Leinster, who when he handed her back ten years later, told Dad to free her, which he did.

Brigid went on to found the first religious community for women in Ireland, on land given to her at Kildare by the same King Dunlag (there is still a Cathedral church of St. Brigid on the site, although it dates from the early 13th century), which flourished, and led to the establishment of many others all over Ireland. The convent became one of the greatest centers of learning in Europe, no doubt assisted by the school of art (which in those days meant illuminating manuscripts) that she also created. It should be no surprise that she is the patron saint of scholars. When she died, she was buried with St. Patrick (except for her head, which for some reason is in Portugal). Not too shabby for a poor peasant girl.

But if you choose to take a less mainstream religious view: 

Another source says she "became a vestal virgin in service to the Brid, goddess of fire, and eventually she ended up the high priestess at the pagan sanctuary of Kil Dara, built from oak, which was sacred to the Druids, but somewhere in there she converted to Christianity. However, over the centuries Brigid kind of got muddled with the pagan fire goddess Brid, and the pagan holiday Imbolc got folded into a Christian holiday, and they both marked the beginning of spring.  Time for feasting (eat a lot of milk and butter!).  Light candles or fires.  Hang those rush crosses (known as St. Brigid's crosses) over your doors and windows to protect your house from fire and lightening. 

On one of my trips to Ireland, over a decade ago, a friend and I found ourselves visiting a Brigidine nunnery (yes, they still exist, more than 1,500 years after Brigid set up the first one).  It was an unforgettable experience.  Most of the nuns were elderly, with few young replacements coming along.  They were unspeakably thrilled to have visitors, and after giving us a full tour of the building where they lived, including their archives, they insisted we stay for tea and cakes and bread and jam, and then a group of them clustered around to watch us eat. It should be no surprise that I'm incorporating part of this in a book.

But Brigid makes a good role model, whichever way you look at her.  Reading between the lines, she was determined, she knew her own mind, she took a broad view of things, and she got things done. Smart woman!

My first book set in Ireland, Buried in a Bog, comes out next week.  Naomh Bríd, beannaigh mo leabhar.

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?

Solstice

by Sheila Connolly

I had a nice thoughtful piece about plotting all ready to go, and then I had one of those "duh!" moments:  today is the Winter Solstice.  Since I'm writing this post, you may infer that I do not adhere to the Mayan theory that the world will end today. 

 

But I will confess to a long-standing fascination with prehistoric monuments, many of which are aligned with one or another solstice—no mean achievement in a time when tools were rudimentary at best, and calculations were based on untold generations of observations and oral histories.  Think Stonehenge (which I have visited more than once) and Avebury (larger than Stonehenge but less well known—I have also been there, including a day after the summer solstice when, yes, there were people there who were hugging the stones) in England; the standing stones in Carnac in France; and the many stone circles in Ireland, with a particular concentration in County Cork. (I know, there is a batch in Cornwall, but I haven't seen those yet.)

 

The Drombeg Stone Circle is one I've seen many times, because it is a truly moving and mystical place.  But there are other more obscure circles, and my daughter, my husband and I have gone wandering through the lanes of Ireland hunting for them.  We have walked across wheat fields (my apologies to the farmer), and attempted to wade through mucky fields and cross streams and avoid angry dogs and curious cows in this pursuit—not always successfully.  But we relish the hunt, thrilling at the sighting of our elusive pray in the distance.

One we couldn't reach--too much mud

This year we found several but could get close to only one.  The instructions for finding it ran along the lines of, "turn left at the garden center and follow the right fork of the lane for 1.3 km, then walk up the hill."  But we triumphed. The circle was small but lovingly maintained, in a well mown field with a sturdy gate.  We rejoiced. 

 

I have always accepted the theories of the various alignments of the stone circles, but this was the first time it became personal. Two of the opposing stones were carefully lined up with each other, and on close inspection, each bore a shallow groove on the top, perpendicular to the main faces.  The grooves lined up with each other as well. 

The stones and grooves aligned

 

I was fortunate to have a compass with me.  No, I don't usually carry a compass, but after getting lost in the dark lanes more than once (and having a conversation with a local policeman about where we thought we were going, which turned out to be completely wrong), I saw a nice one in an shop and bought it.

 

Anyway, I laid the compass on the stone and sighted along the groove, toward the opposite stone, and came up with a near-perfect southwest direction. Which wouldn't have meant much to me, except to satisfy my curiosity.  But later that day, we returned to our rented cottage and I realized the sun was setting, so I grabbed my compass and checked the point of sunset:  a southwest alignment.  Only a few weeks before the solstice.  The ancients had it right.

 

It is powerfully moving to run your finger along a shallow cutting that someone made with great effort a couple of thousand years ago, to find that their calculations were so accurate.  It's like touching the past.

 

Welcome to winter—and to the beginning of the lengthening of the days and the return to spring.  Celebrate!

Simplify

by Sheila Connolly

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

 

I have a t-shirt that I bought at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau's one-time home.  Yes, there's a gift shop now, with a view of the pond.  The t-shirt says only, "Simplify, simplify," and I wear it when I go to yard sales, flea markets and the like, to try to remind myself not to buy every useless item that catches my eye.  One flaw in that theory is that I can't see the shirt when I'm wearing it, and if the vendor reads it, they'll be encouraged to get rid of the item they can tell I'm coveting. 

 

If I'm a hoarder, it is only of the little things (sounds like a book title, doesn't it?  The Hoarder of Little Things).  No, I don't have head-high stacks of old papers and magazines that I really do mean to get around to reading someday: I recycle my paper stuff regularly.  No, I don't have cans of soup that are as old as my daughter (although some of my spices have sentimental value and probably taste like dust by now).  My biggest problem is the endless accumulation of small items that must have seemed important at some point, and that I can't seem to toss.  They cover our most of our horizontal surfaces, and they keep multiplying.  Periodically I toss them into a box, which then sits there for a while.  If I get really frustrated, I put the box somewhere else—in a little-used bedroom or even in the attic.  But you will notice that I don't throw it away.

I'm thinking about this now because (as I have said in various places more than once) I just came back from a trip to Ireland, where I spent ten days in a relatively new cottage (if you can call a four-bedroom stone house with a Jacuzzi a cottage).  The owner bought the property and several others around it to graze his cattle—he's a dairy farmer—but he carved out a patch from each of two properties to build a new house on, intended for sale.  He and his teenage sons built them themselves, and they did a great job. Then the Irish economy tanked, so he rents out one, and the other one sits unfinished. 

 

Our rented cottage had all the essential furnishings—beds, couches, a satellite television, and a well-equipped kitchen.  What is did not have is "stuff"—all those accumulated items that drive me crazy at home.  Horizontal surfaces were clear.  There were only a few pictures on the walls, and even fewer rugs.  There were no "things" everywhere.  And I didn't feel that it was sterile and impersonal; I felt that it was clean and simple. It was a relief. That made coming home all the harder, because I was so aware of my own clutter.

 

This past week I had lunch with a few mystery writer friends.  One is moving to a new city, leaving behind her home of many years and settling into an apartment.  She's wrestling daily with what to throw away, what to keep, what to take with her.  The rest of us around the table have moved at some time in our lives, and we're all fighting creeping clutter, so we know all too well what she's talking about.  We laughed when we all admitted that we keep buying storage boxes, hoping that shifting the "stuff" from one place to another, even putting a label on it, will make things better.  The friend who is moving is shredding a lot of old papers; no one else admitted to owning a shredder.  Me, I've still got my grandmother's cancelled checks in the attic—I'm sure there's a story waiting in there somewhere, a biography of my grandmother based on where she shopped in the grand department stores of New York.

My writing space is a mess.  There, I've admitted it.  I save items that interest me, that I hope might someday find their way into a book—but I never know where to file them, so they sit in a pile, and then I move the pile, and then they're lost.  There must be a better way.

 

Simplify! (And all suggestions welcome!)

Silence

by Sheila Connolly

I live in a mid-sized town (population 22,000, more or less) in what is defined as a rural area.  And it is bright and noisy.

 

Okay, it's not Manhattan.  I used to love visiting my grandmother when she lived there, in a residence hotel in midtown.  When my sister and I stayed over (always a treat!), we could hear the ceaseless honking of taxi horns far below us.  I remember waking up in her apartment once and not hearing that familiar sound—because an overnight blizzard had shut down the city.

 

The sound of trains has been a consistent background to my life, since my family almost always lived near a commuter rail line, and I have continued that in my adult life.  For a time we lived across from a BART station outside San Francisco, and the first train of the morning served as an alarm clock:  when I heard that whistle and rumble, I knew it was morning, and time to get up.  The same was true when I lived in Swarthmore, and we lived three blocks from the train station.  Now I live two blocks from the farthest station on my line for the train to Boston.

 

My current town has streetlights, as did the ones before.  They're good things, I suppose, letting drivers find their way and discouraging burglars, maybe.  But they're obtrusive.  Unless you are compulsive and cover all your windows with three layers of curtain and blind, you can't escape the light from the street.  It's never really dark.

 

A few years ago cartoonist Gary Trudeau had a brief thread in which one of his characters started inventorying how many lights were on in her room, on her electronic devices:  alarm clock, phone, CD player, computer, surge protector, etc., etc.  Again, never fully dark—you can navigate by the On/Off indicators, without turning on a single lamp.

 

Why am I talking about this?  Because I'm in Ireland, in a small house on a windswept hill, the same place we stayed on our last trip.  And at night it's dark.  There are no street lights—heck, there are barely streets, only half-paved lanes, and no one just happens to drive by.  No light pollution.  You can see the lights of a few neighbors, but they may be a mile away.  Likewise, it's quiet: no cars, no trains, no airplanes above.  There might be a dog barking over the hill, or a restless cow lowing somewhere if it's summer and they're out in the fields.  We did once stay at a bed and breakfast where they had three thousand sheep, and the chorus by day was fascinating—who knew there were so many variations on "baa"? But they were quiet at night.

 

How often these days do we encounter true darkness, true silence?  Many years ago I toured a prehistoric cave in France with a guide and a small group of people.  The guide turned off his light (the only one), and you couldn't see anything, not even the hand in front of your face. That is rare, and disorienting.  Imagine those prehistoric people who ventured into that dark, with only a torch—and left artworks behind. We don't do that any more.

 

I'd wager than most of us writers surround ourselves with light and sound, but maybe the Irish are such renowned wordsmiths because they have that silence to fill (I know, it's not unique to the Irish, but still). 

 

Has anybody done a study about city versus country authors?  Whether external noise is a help or a hindrance to a writer? How much energy to we spend blocking out those external distractions? Does it matter?