Fonts

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read that New York City will be changing the font on its street signs from Highway Gothic (which it has used since the beginning of city highways) to something called Clearview.

Per Wikipedia, "The FHWA Series fonts (often informally referred to as Highway Gothic) are a set of sans-serif typefaces developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration and used for road signage in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and New Zealand. The fonts were created to maximize legibility at a distance and at high speed."

 New York chose to use the font in all-caps mode (sometimes considered "shouting" in Internet parlance).  Now there is a federal mandate that requires that those signs in all capital letters must be replaced with mixed case (upper and lower) signage.

When Highway Gothic was first used, there was no formal testing of the readability of fonts.  At least there was a consistency to the appearance of road signs, not only locally but also nationally.

 But now science has caught up with fonts, and early researchers found that Clearview is 16 per cent easier to read than Highway Gothic. If you're going sixty on a highway, you'd have an extra 1-2 seconds to respond, or a few hundred feet. Clearview may have less personality, but it's more legible, particularly from a distance.

The old (left) and the new (right)

Would that publishers would think the same way.  Certainly publishers have used a variety of fonts over the years. I've always enjoyed the little notes on the front or back pages saying that a book was printed in Boldoni Bold or some such, even while not knowing what the heck they were talking about. At least the publisher was proud of its choice. But by and large, these days mass market paperbacks are published in something that looks pretty much like good old Times New Roman. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that to an average reader, it simply looks like "book" font.  They don't have to think about it.

But there's another twist (and please, editors and publishers, tell me if I'm wrong).  Mass market books, at least those from Berkley, are issued in a standard size and page length (check any Amazon listing)—304 pages (it was 288 pages for a long time).  This is because that size fits neatly, 48 to a box, and all boxes are the same size.

Now, the standard word count for my type of paperback—cozies—is anywhere between 65,000 and 80,000 words. This is a pretty wide range.  If you write long, as I sometimes do (topping out at 84,000 words), does the publisher change the page count? 

No. They change the font size and/or the line spacing, making it a bit harder to read. Now consider that most of our readers are women of middle-age or beyond, who may be having problems with aging eyes, and you wonder why the publisher is sacrificing ease of reading for shipping convenience.  Or driving readers to e-readers where the owner can adjust the font size onscreen.

Who wins?

Nobody Knows Where You Are

by Sheila Connolly

I've probably touched on the topic of childhood imagination and free play before, but not long ago the point was driven home again.

On my recent trip to Italy a group of us were talking about what we used to do for "play" as children, in the halcyon days of the nineteen-fifties.  Back then, parents weren't hovering over us or scheduling back to back activities to make sure we used every precious hour wisely (and in a way that would get us into a good college and assure our career path forever—ha!).  And back then we also had "recess" during which our teachers threw us out onto a sketchy playground and told us to have fun for half an hour.

We did.  When I was in elementary school, we had a "gang" of sorts (it was a small class, maybe thirty kids total, and our gang was five or six people, who I can still name today).  On the playground we often acted out what we'd seen recently on television, or more often, distilled it into the generic plot:  a bunch of guys rode horses and galloped around and shot at people (the bad guys, I hope), and the lone designated woman of the group stayed home and tidied up the ranch house.  That role was usually assigned to someone we didn't like very much but who really wanted to be part of our group.  (Sorry, Helen, if we scarred you for life.)

At home it was a different story.  We moved into a new house when I was seven, and there were few kids in that neighborhood (we didn't count the mildly retarded boy next door, who was best known for trying to run over his dog with a lawn mower, although he and I did once catch an opossum in a bucket together).  Luckily for me, one of my school friends lived immediately behind our home (immediately in this case was several hundred feet, through a partially wooded area), and for the three years we lived there we were fast friends.

And we had free rein, to go and do whatever we wanted to.  My friend was the last of four children in her family, several years younger than her nearest sibling, and I think her parents had kind of given up on the child-rearing thing.  If there is an antithesis of hovering, they fit the bill.  I had a younger sister, but she was too little and too prissy to join in our somewhat rough adventures, so basically it was the two of us. 

We roamed, we explored.  We investigated abandoned buildings, we went swimming in a creek, we even indulged in a little mild vandalism (don't tell). And what my college classmate said brought that all back:  nobody knew where we were.  Our parents could not have found us without bloodhounds. I admit that even at that age I wondered whether if I fell down and broke my neck, my friend would bother to tell anyone about it, or would just go on about her usual business. And this wasn't in some rural area—this was in a commuter suburb of Philadelphia, although there was still a lot of open space. It was only a couple of miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and once we walked that far.

The world is not like that today. It's a wonder that we haven't started embedding a tracking device in our children before they even leave the hospital when they're born (we do it for our pets, don't we?).  We panic when they're out of sight.  We hand off our precious darlings to other (vetted, respectable, trustworthy) parents, making sure they know they're in charge and on duty. We worry, about perverts and kidnappers and accidents.

I don't think my parents were careless or uncaring.  In retrospect, I'm honored that they trusted me, even at seven years old.  I earned that trust, mostly:  I usually told someone where I was going (if "out to play" or "to the woods" is a definition) and when I was told to be back by a certain time, I made sure I was (I had a watch early on).  But I had a lot of freedom, and the adventures we had in those short years are still among my most vivid memories.

Are we cheating our children?  Are we depriving them of creativity and independence?

What She Didn't Do

by Sheila Connolly

This past week the news in my area has been full of stories about the tragic death of Amy Lord, a young woman living in Boston.  She was only 24, and had moved not long ago to South Boston (the notorious "Southie" that spawned Whitey Bulger, currently on trial in Boston for multiple murders and other crimes, but now increasingly gentrified), sharing an apartment with roommates, working, and enjoying her independence.  She was educated and pretty, and had everything going for her, including a loving and supportive family not far away.

Then one day she opened the door to the wrong person, who attacked her.  That was bad enough, but then he insisted that she go with him—in her car—to get cash for him from ATM machines.  And here's where the story goes awry.

They stopped at five ATM machines.  In broad daylight.  On busy streets, in plain view—there is bank surveillance footage of at least one of these stops, and you can see the cars passing on the street behind. So why did she meekly get back in the car with her assailant, over and over, rather than running like hell, screaming, into the bank or to a police station or almost anywhere else?  The man acted alone; he wasn't holding her family or her children or even her dog hostage. Why did she do what he asked, and then keep doing it?

I know it's wrong to blame the victim.  Of course she was terrified and disoriented—things like this don't happen to nice pretty girls from the suburbs, certainly not in the middle of the day. But why couldn't she have found a way to get away?  Instead she accompanied him, and at the end of the day he stabbed her and dumped her body in a wooded park (where she was found very quickly).  Could she have saved herself?

As writers we are charged with creating characters who are both appealing and believable.  We want the readers to be able to identify with them, so that they care what happens to them.  Of course, what you as the writer set down on the page is not exactly real life, and you can shape your fiction any way you choose, but you usually want your characters to be liked..

We all carry in the back of our minds the movie image of the sweet young coed who is all alone in the house when she hears a suspicious thump in the basement while all her sorority sisters are out on fabulous dates (and the nerds are at the library).  So she decides to investigate, usually clad in the skimpiest of nightgowns, barefoot; maybe she takes a flashlight (the lightbulbs are always burnt out in these basements).  Of course things end badly for her, but we all know she was asking for it.  We label these young women Too Stupid to Live.

I'm not for a moment saying that Amy Lord made such poor decisions, but I can't shake the feeling that she should have been more proactive.  I can't believe she didn't have more than one opportunity to save herself, merely by making noise and running.  Would he, could he have shot her?  Maybe.  Would he have hit her?  Possibly, but by no means surely.  Wouldn't being shot be preferable to what actually happened?

Please don't think I'm unsympathetic, because this bright, talented young woman's death is truly a tragic waste.  But I keep thinking, if I had read this in a novel I would have said, "What's wrong with you? Do something!"

Color

by Sheila Connolly

Since the Zimmerman verdict was handed down, issues of race and profiling have bubbled to our cultural surface again.  That fact implies that they have never gone away, despite the election of a president of African-American (and Irish!) descent.

I'm not going to debate the politics or whether the legal decision was fair.  What I do want to talk about is my own unusual history with people of color—something I rarely mention to others, as though it was a shameful secret.  I grew up with black servants. Live-in help, plus a few who came in weekly to do laundry and cleaning.

No, I was not a rich kid, and that era of my life lasted less than a decade.  It was a reflection of my mother's pretensions (my father was an Irish kid from Syracuse—heck, his mother and aunts had been hired servants—so it wasn't his idea).  Yes, both my parents worked; the fact that my mother had a job (professional designer for Lipton Tea in New York and its satellite offices) that took her out of the house overnight periodically necessitated some kind of in-house care for my sister and me, and for a few glorious years in the 1950s my parents could afford to pay other people to do the things they couldn't or didn't want to do.

But this isn't about money, it's about race relations.  For the first ten years of my life I grew up with housekeepers, cooks, laundresses, and cleaners who were all African-American (or Negro, back in those days).  My mother dealt with them fairly and paid them a competitive salary (I probably have the records in the attic somewhere), plus making Social Security payments for them.  She provided them with living quarters, and took the housekeeper along for a month at the Jersey shore each year. She talked to them over shared lunches, if not precisely as friends, then at least as people, not "the help."

And I just accepted it as the way things were.  But bear in mind, I lived in a succession of lily-white mid-Atlantic suburbs. There wasn't a black kid in my class until I reached eighth grade.  At that point we lived in a town that had a black "ghetto"—all of one block long.  And once our town made national news because a boy a couple of years older than I was dared to go to a local barber shop for a haircut, and was not happy with the results, probably because none of the barbers had ever tried to cut black hair.  I walked home past ABC news trucks recording his protest.

But I had to learn about racism from the outside in, because I had never seen it when I was growing up.

Fast forward a couple of decades.  When I moved from California to Pennsylvania in 1987, I went to work for a small municipal financial advisory firm in Philadelphia.  When I say "small" I mean fewer than ten employees—yet we were ranked among the top ten firms nationally. Why? Because the company was run by a black woman, which made us eligible for minority set-asides (for both color and gender), starting with Philadelphia, where the first black mayor, Wilson Goode, was in office.  New York had a black mayor:  another client.  So did Baltimore: yet another client.

In that company I was the minority, the only white face on the staff.  I was there because I was a good number cruncher. I wasn't always included for presentations to potential clients (often minorities), but I almost always went along for presentations to institutions like the national rating agencies (Standard & Poor's, for example) where the staff was mostly white. Discrimination?  Or just a business reality?

Now I live in a small town in New England where a quarter of the population has Irish roots—but there are next to no black people.  Few enough so that it's a shock to meet one on the street.

And as President Obama said this past week:

There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors or cars…. There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.

I've become that woman, in spite of my background. Is that profiling? Does that make me prejudiced?

My husband grew up in the Midwest, where there were few minorities, so his childhood experiences have to be different from mine.  Still, we've had black friends, and we've welcomed them into our home (along with Asians, Indians, gays, lesbians and at least one transgendered person).  But I won't deny that racism exists in this country, and that we're conditioned to make assumptions and snap judgments, all too often based on skin color.

The majority of the fictional characters I have created are white.  That's because most of my readers are white.  Does that make it right?  I have to keep in the back of my mind that my Irish family would have been met with contempt and even violence when they emigrated to the United States from Ireland.  And I also remember that at least one of my early New England ancestors owned slaves, and passed them on to his heirs in his will.

How much have things changed? Will they continue to change?

Remember this?

Reading and Memory

by Sheila Connolly

As I read my newspaper at dawn this morning (I'm trying to avoid the heat—five a.m. can be very pleasant, I've found, and yes, I still read a paper made of paper), my eye was caught by a short article in the "Be Well" section, with the headline "Reading and writing preserves memory, researchers say."

Briefly: Researchers at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, where there is a Memory and Aging Project (per their website, still recruiting participants, if you're interested) announced this week that a multi-year study they have conducted strongly suggests that "participants who reported reading and writing throughout their life, especially in old age, were 32 percent less likely to show deterioration in brain regions involved in memory," and "those who reported infrequently reading and writing into old age experienced a 48 percent faster rate of memory loss."

I feel so much better.  Okay, the study involved only three hundred octogenarians and depended upon answers to a survey (and we all know they aren't always accurate) as well as physical observations upon autopsy, but it's encouraging nonetheless.  The old adage "use it or lose it" still applies.

I've been reading before I can remember, and I've never slowed down, as my overflowing bookshelves can attest.  I've been writing for over a decade now (longer if you want to count academic papers in my younger days, as well as grant proposals and reports a decade or two later).  But who knew that I was preserving brain cells all the while?

Carl Sagan is reported to have said, "The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." How rare is it that something that feels good is also good for us?  And even better, we as writers are performing a valuable service to our readers, by providing them with books that will help sustain their brain function for years.

And now I have another justification for all those books in my To-Be-Read pile:  I'm stockpiling therapeutic tools.  I'm not sure how well that rationale (rationalization?) applies to the thousands of books I've saved over the years, but I might want to reread them.  Would it be a sign of aging if I can't remember whodunnit in some of them?

Memory is a tricky thing.  Sometimes we rewrite our own, or we selectively mask or erase certain parts.  I had an odd conversation with my husband this weekend, when I described in detail a wonderful O'Keefe and Merritt gas stove we had in the first house we owned, and he had no memory of it at all.  (For the record, he used it as much as I did.) Wiped from his databanks.

In return, he accuses me of blotting out the second car we bought together.  Maybe.  I think he drove it a lot more than I did, commuting to work. I had a different car at the same time, and I can tell you a lot more about that one.

Sometimes these days I feel the need to document everything in the house, particularly items I've inherited from four generations of my family, because I'm the only one who knows what they are and where and who they came from, and my daughter won't know what each piece means, when she comes to inherit it.  I haven't done it yet.  But this weekend I sorted through my t-shirt collection, and I can still tell you when I acquired each one, and where and why. Maybe I'm just practicing. (I have a lot of t-shirts.)

But reading is something else.  It seems to be using a different part of our brain.  I'll be happy to sacrifice my memories of my t-shirts if I can continue to enjoy reading and writing.

You Want Me to Pay For This?

by Sheila Connolly

I belong to quite a few writing-related loops (or whatever they're called now), not that I read all of them regularly.  But I enjoy keeping tabs on what other people are doing, which gives me some insight into what other writers believe are the most current and best marketing tools in this very competitive and quickly-changing business of writing and publishing.

But a week ago I read one post that rocked me, although I suppose it was inevitable:  a writer has set up an account on Kickstarter to pay for the production of his next book.  Yes, he want his "friends" to subsidize the design, printing, marketing and promotion for his latest book.  He offers a menu of rewards for the investment.

Now, this is a writer (who I don't know personally and will not name) is not a novice.  He published two books (both mysteries) less than a decade ago, and he has published two more since as ebooks only.  He admits they were modestly successful, and received some positive reactions from reviewers—things we all hope for.

But now he's ready to quit his day job and try a different strategy for his new thriller, and he wants his past/future readers to finance it.  And he thinks this will give him more exposure and reach than either finding a traditional publisher or publishing it directly himself. He wants the money up front to pay for marketing, copy editing, book design, formatting, printing, audio, website updates, launch parties and a tour.

This person wants to raises $18,000 through Kickstarter for all of the above expenses. Please wait until I stop laughing.

Now, I consider myself a modestly successful writer.  I have something like 15 books out there, two of which were NYT bestsellers.  I've been writing full time for nearly a decade now.  And $18,000 exceeds my personal promotional budget for all my books in a given year—and for the past few years I've published three or four each year.  Heck, it exceeds most of my net annual income from writing over the past few years. Yes, my publishers cover a lot of the tasks on that list above, which are not free—and they take a hefty cut of the sales proceeds to cover them. Do those numbers add up?  I have no idea, but they come with the package of being published by a major publisher, who gets my books into a lot of bookstores.

But I manage my own website; I produce my own newsletter; I buy ads in appropriate publications; I travel to conferences (with promotional materials that I design and pay for myself) and library and bookstore signings. I have never had a formal launch party, and I certainly haven't gone on a sponsored tour (my main publisher seems to reserve those only for the famous and well-established authors in its stable). My publisher does not pay for any of these—I do. I don't expect strangers to pick up the tab.

Is this author naïve?  Arrogant? Does he have a lot of friends with deep pockets? (Apparently he's already found one who was willing to pony up $1,000, the top sum, although it could be his mother.) I suppose he thinks it's worth a try, and it's an interesting experiment.  I will watch to see how well he does.

But I'm still troubled by the overall tenor of his pitch.  He considers $18,000 a "lean and mean" (his words) budget for this.  He's willing to let his backers do the editing for him if they chip in at least $80. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me—editing by committee is never a good idea. As far as I know, neither splashy (expensive) launch parties nor national book tours are standard for a mid-list (at best) author.

If this author went the traditional route, he would need to sell a whole lot of copies to earn $18,000.  Yes, the publisher would earn more. I think I'm missing part of the equation here. Maybe I'm just too mired in the traditional way of doing things. (As an aside, I think Kickstarter is a great concept and can do a lot of good—I just don't see how it fits here.)

What do you think?  Is this the wave of the future, or a waste of time?

Souvenirs Redux

by Sheila Connolly

By strange coincidence, I was gifted with a highly unlikely souvenir this week, and I'm still trying to fit it into my worldview of collecting mementos.

The backstory:  a Philadelphia friend and former colleague was the model for one of the characters in my Museum Mystery series.  She was going to be a background character, except she's kind of shoved herself into the foreground and plays an increasingly important role in the ongoing stories.  Disclaimer:  I didn't originally tell the real person about it (the character was always one of the good guys, not an evil killer), but now she knows and she's tickled pink by the whole idea, especially since I told her I'd add a love interest for her in a coming book (in both the books and in real life she's divorced).

I initially included her because she has a long and intimate association with Philadelphia history, through a string of ancestors whose name she still bears.  That led to her involvement at the historical society where I worked, when she was on the board (as were her father and grandfather before her). She (the character) was the perfect go-to individual for anything to do with who's who in Philadelphia, going back a couple of centuries.  Since my protagonist is not a native Philadelphia, she needs just such a resource person on hand.

Anyway, to jump to the present…  The National Museum of Korea, in Seoul, recently mounted an exhibit they called Art Across America, and a lovely 18^th-century portrait of one of those (real) ancestors and his family became the emblem for the exhibit.  Now, my husband has spent time in Seoul, over several years, and he has visited that museum on various occasions.  He will attest that Koreans are fascinated by all things American.

My friend, intrigued by all the hoopla that her ancestral family had occasioned in far-off Korea, decided to go see the exhibition in place.  She brought back souvenirs.  She shared a couple of those souvenirs with me.  The prize of the collection was…a towel with the iconic portrait on it.

No, not a tidy tea-towel such as you might find in an English palace (I think I have some of those squirreled away somewhere—the English do like their tea, and their bone china must be dried properly, of course).  This, in contrast, is a fuzzy if thin plush towel, made in Korea.

What do you do with a commemorative towel?  What were the Koreans thinking?

You can't dry the dishes with it, can you?  Isn't it kind of insulting to swab off your pots and pans with an historical figure?  If you do, is it some kind of obscure implied insult to our culture? Or major ambivalence?

If you are Korean, do you hang it on a wall, where it will sag, fade, and collect dust?  Do you frame this towel? Or do you store it carefully with all your other commemorative towels, and then on important family gatherings, take out the towels and pass them around for group admiration?

I'm baffled.  As I said before, I treasure many, often obscure souvenirs, that evoke strong memories in me.  But I have never envisioned cherishing a towel. 

Released June 2013

Time Out

by Sheila Connolly

Sharon's post earlier this week put my recent adventures abroad in a new perspective for me.

View from Capitignano in Tuscany

The backstory:  I just returned from a two-week trip to Italy, planned by two of my college classmates and announced at our reunion last June.  Space was limited to forty (no spouses or partners), and since there were more people who wanted to go than spaces, the organizers held a lottery, and I was one of the lucky winners.  I put my name in the day it was originally announced, without even thinking about it.  I'd been to Italy once before, decades ago, and had never planned to go back, but when the gods drop a gift in your lap, you don't quibble about the wrapping paper.

It was fabulous, and I'm sure I'll be telling you more in coming days, but I was struck by how well the trip fulfilled many of Sharon's suggestions.

--we spent ten days without seeing a television set or a newspaper.  I assume someone would have told us if something major had blown up (especially if it interfered with air travel), but otherwise we were cut off from current events.  Ah, peace.

--there was no time to read.  Of course we all brought books (both print and digital), and we had access to plenty more, but somehow reading never fit into the schedule.  We were busy from dawn to after the late dinners, and then we fell into bed and slept. No need to lull ourselves to sleep with words—by ten most nights we had to fight to keep our eyes open.

--no marketing.  Ah, bliss. (Well, I might have to admit that the group I was with was the perfect demographic target for my kind of book, but I didn't run around flogging the books to anyone who would listen.) I had a book published on June 4th, Monument to the Dead, and the extent of my promotion for that was a newsletter to my fewer than 1,000 subscribers.  Period.  No social networks, no guest blogs.  I could get email on my phone, but no way was I going to try to respond to blogs and posts on a two-inch screen.  It was a clean break.

--Exercise.  Sound of hysterical laughter.  In northern Italy, it seems that everything is on a hill.  Uphill.  We walked, and walked, and walked.  Through towns clinging to mountainsides, through fields with Roman ruins, into the center of a mountain of marble in Carrara.  In Florence we saw at least three museums (all in different parts of the city, of course), and then took off on our own to shop or, in my case, to hunt down the perfect gelato.  We did not sit in a café and admire the passing crowd; we were the passing crowd.

--Eating?  Amazing.  And healthy.  Lots of very fresh tomatoes, and olive oil from trees only feet from where we ate.  Incredible seafood, from the sea we could see as we sat at our tables.  Wine from grapes right down the hill. The aforesaid gelato—I tried nine flavors, sometimes two in a day.  But in small, intense portions.

--No planning.  One of the most appealing things about this whole idea was that I didn't have to organize it, past getting myself to Italy on time.  I didn't have to hunt down places to stay, rent a car, make decisions about which museums or towns to see, or where and when to eat.  It was a great relief to let someone else worry about all that stuff.

--One thing Sharon didn't mention:  Talking.  We writers are often solitary

Monterosso in Liguria--the view
from my patio

people, and there are days when my main companions are my cats (yes, I talk to them).  On this trip I was thrown into a group of forty interesting, accomplished women, some of whom I knew to some degree, others I recalled only by name.  Many I hadn't seen for forty years, so there was a lot of catching up to do.  And we did, at meals, in vans as we sped (as much as you can speed on Italian mountain roads with scary hairpin turns) from one incredible site to the next. Smaller subgroups shifted and mingled.  We sang, we toasted our tireless coordinators, both of whom deserve a medal for putting all this together.

--And one more thing:  the views.  We humans seem to define certain views as beautiful, and I'll agree—misty mountains receding into the distance, terra-cotta colored towns scattered in lush greenery, peeks of the sea.  All lovely.  Does it change your perspective to be surrounded by beauty like this? 

Did I write anything?  Nope, nothing beyond a brief email to family.  Did I miss it?  Not really, because it was important to be in the moment. Will I be using the experience in a book?  Of course.

I think it fits Sharon's definition of a break.  Is my brain detoxified?  I think so, if I can get past the jetlag.  What day is this?

In my Grandmother's Footsteps

by Sheila Connolly

When you read this, I will be in Italy, if all goes as planned.  And for once, I didn't have to do the planning—this is a trip for a group of us who were in the same college class, proposed a year ago at one of those milestone reunions.  Two classmates who have access to villas and vineyards and good things like that are doing all the organizing; all I have to do is show up.  No spouses or significant others allowed.  I feel like I'm walking into a Lifetime network movie.

I always knew I wanted to go to Europe, thanks mainly to my grandmother.  As I've mentioned before, she was orphaned young, and anything she achieved in life she did through her own efforts.  She ended up in upper management at Lipton Tea Company in New York in the 1950s, which was a pretty significant achievement in those days.

She was "encouraged" to retire in 1958, when she wasn't even sixty.  Her long-time mentor was retiring, and a new administration was coming in, so she had little choice.  But the company gave her a nice parting gift:  a luxury trip to Europe.  This was defined as a working trip:  she had been instrumental in assembling a collection of tea-related antique silver items for the Lipton Collection, and she was asked to take it on the road to the capitals of Europe that summer. 

And they put her up in style!  She took the Queen Elizabeth (the first) one way, the Queen Mary the other.  She had a driver in each country.  All her rooms were booked for her, all meetings scheduled, all appointments made. All she had to do was be there and be charming, which she did well.

And of course she sent postcards to my mother, my sister and me.  We dutifully kept them and put them all in an album, which I still have, so I can reconstruct the trip.  If we assembled it right, she started in London (not surprising, since most of the silver pieces were English in origin), and the first postcards are of the guards at Buckingham Palace, in late June of 1958.  Then Holland (yes, colored postcards of cute little Dutch girls wearing wooden clogs), Lake Lucerne, and on into Italy—Florence, Rome, Venice (lots of postcards from Venice—she must have liked it!), and finally Paris, by way of the chateaux of the Loire Valley.  The trip took a month.

Then she joined us at our rented house on the Jersey shore, laden with souvenirs—I still have some of the little soaps and tiny perfume bottles she brought me, tucked in a trunk in the attic.

Her trip had a tremendous impact on me.  I knew early that I wanted to follow in her footsteps (only more than just once!), and ended up majoring in art history so I'd have a professional excuse to do it.  It was fun traveling as a starving student back in those days, when you could get a prix-fixe three-course meal for less than five dollars, and a hotel room in the country might cost you ten.  Renting a car (a Deux Chevaux which sounded like a lawn mower and had about as much power) was the big splurge, but it enabled me to see out-of-the-way places and small towns, and actually talk to people.  So I visited all the sites (except for Holland) that matched the long-ago postcards from my grandmother, and much more.  And later I took my mother and my daughter (together) on the same trip through France.

For a while life got in the way, so there was a decade or more without any grand trips, but now I'm making up for lost time.  And forty years after my first (and only) visit to Florence, I'm going back, to visit the Duomo and the Uffizi and Michelangelo's David—and the extraordinary gelato! My first visit was with a college classmate, so it's fitting that the next one should be as well, except that this time there will be thirty of us, and drivers.  And the better part of a lifetime of accumulated wisdom so I can appreciate what I only glanced at before.

Criminal History

by Sheila Connolly

I spent much of the past few weeks on the road, both at the Malice Domestic conference (where I saw two other Daughters, Sandy and Liz, if all too briefly) and doing research for my current work in progress, the nameless #5 in the Museum Mystery series, which in this particular case is set both in Philadelphia and in one of its suburbs.

In the first book of that series, Fundraising the Dead, part of the plot hinged on the creation of a new history museum in Philadelphia.  I didn't make this up:  it was a concept that was talked about within the Philadelphia museum community (which I was once part of) for quite some time, over a decade ago.  Happily it finally came to fruition, and the new and improved Philadelphia History Museum opened in 2012.  This trip gave me my first opportunity to visit it.

It was a slightly weird experience because the new museum acquired many of the paintings and other objects that once belonged to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where I worked for several years, so at every turn I kept meeting old friends and familiar faces. Everything was handsomely presented, and I was glad to see that they had found a new home.

But I also encountered some items on display that were new to me, and one in particular intrigued me:  a police mug book from around 1900. (Note: I took several pictures, a practice that was once prohibited in most museums, but the advent of the cell phone has made it all but impossible to regulate, so in this museum at least it's permitted.) A quick online search reveals that it was Allen Pinkerton who invented the mugshot in the 19^th century. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency first began using these on wanted posters in the Wild West days. By the 1870s the agency had amassed the largest collection of mug shots in the United States.

The mug book in Philadelphia was both familiar and unfamiliar.  As you can see, it's a large bound volume.  Miscreants are included in the familiar two photographs, from the front and from the side. The first thing that struck me was that all criminals were allowed to wear their hat for the frontal photo.  Given the era, some of those hats, particularly among the women, were rather elaborate.

Yes, there were women criminals in the mug book.  Regrettably it was possible to view only the one double page on display (from December 1903), so I couldn't do a meaningful assessment of the ratio of men to women, but those two pages included four women. All were respectably dressed and behatted.  I couldn't decipher the crimes, save for one: Ethel Larson (wearing a very strange hat) was accused/convicted of Larceny. I presume the "Sus." that appears under many of the photos means "Suspect."  Other crimes included pickpocket, burglary, embezzlement, conspiracy (of what was not recorded), and breaking and entering.  There were two black faces on the pages.

The pictures are crisp and clear, the details written in legible script.  To a genealogist this is a strange treasure trove; to a mystery writer it's a delightful glimpse of crime in another time. There is a curious aura of respectability to the photos, despite the fact that the people depicted are accused of a crime.  All were allowed to clean up and dress up for the important act of being photographed.  Contrast that with the quick and dirty mugs shots of today.

How I wish it were possible to spend time leafing through this book, and others like it!  Would we find differences between the faces of then and now? Did a psychopath look different in 1903?  

Dearie

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I've been reading Bob Spitz's excellent biography, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child. It's a massive book (576 pages), exhaustively researched and full of detail, but it's not to be hurried.  I'm somewhere in the middle at the moment.

No, this post is not about cooking, although I adore Julia Child.  I own three copies of her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and it has shaped my culinary life.  I attended a lunch-hour demonstration she gave in San Francisco many years ago, and I still have the handouts.  I was never privileged to run into her on the streets of Cambridge when I lived there, but I did visit her local grocery store, and I kept a picture of her kitchen taped to my refrigerator in my Cambridge apartment.  Smith College, which she (and my daughter) attended, holds an annual Julia Child Day.

Many of us who have grown up with Julia Child, either through her cookbooks or from the PBS televisions shows, don't realize the impact that one cookbook had on the way Americans cooked—or how much work went into the making of it.  And as I read Spitz's book, I came to view the cookbook as a "book" rather than a tool.

Think back to the distant 1960s, when quick food was the norm and TV dinners were in their heyday.  Fast = good.  Women didn't want to be chained to the stove.  As a result, a lot of women sort of forgot how to cook, and worse, they lost the pleasure of cooking.

I first visited France in 1971, and while my mother was a good plain cook, who (to her credit) used fresh fruits and vegetables and didn't overcook everything, I realized with my first meal in Paris (coq au vin in a small restaurant on the Left Bank) that there was a lot that I'd been missing. I never looked back.  When I moved into my first apartment (with a tiny kitchen), the first thing I bought was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, even before I bought a bed.

But to return to the literary side, Julia Child demystified French cooking.  She laid out step by step instructions, and explained in simple terms why each step was necessary.  Her recipes worked, and turned out exactly as described, with portions sized for people with normal appetites.  On occasion she would say things like, this may curdle during this step, but don't worry—it will smooth out later.  And it did.

What Spitz makes abundantly clear is the prodigious amount of research and testing that went on in Julia's kitchen (or many kitchens, in different countries, over several years).  She could write authoritatively about how to do something because she had done it over and over herself until she knew it worked.

And then she could explain it, clearly and simply.  What's more, Spitz points out that there is a story behind the whole book.  Julia loved French cooking, and she wanted other people to love it, rather than being scared by it.  So her book is a love story, and she gives little anecdotes and comments all along the way, to make us feel closer to the food, and she succeeds admirably.  The cookbook is worth reading even if you never pick up a sauté pan, and if you want to know how it achieved its elegant simplicity, read Spitz's book.

(BTW, Bob Spitz is mystery writer Nancy Martin's brother-in-law)

Right Brain or Left Brain

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I was reading a review in the New Yorker about a crime-themed television show and came upon the citation of the following statement from the "showrunner" (I'm still trying to figure out what that title means) of a different crime-themed television show, who had said that:

Either it's a left-brain journey, where you're just connecting the dots of who the suspects are, or it's more of a holistic journey where a young girl is murdered, these are the potential subjects, and this is why.

I said "aha!" because this resonates with me:  I argue with my editor all the time about it.  I'm usually far more interested in why the victim ended up dead—who would have wanted to kill him/her?—than in setting up a list of possible suspects and knocking them off the fence one at a time.

The thing is, I seem to be a right-brain writer, but I'm a left-brain person.  Oh, I know, my editor is saying now, "but where's your protagonist's emotional response to the body/the big reveal?" I'll concede that my protagonists tend to be observers and analysts.  They do not dissolve into floods of tears in a crisis, they simply take in the situation and act accordingly.  So I'm a macro right-brain writer, but a micro left-brain one.

I know, this is over-simplified.  Nobody is entirely one or the other.  I did, however, take a quickie on-line test and it showed overwhelming left-brain dominance.  I wasn't surprised.

What's the basic definition?  Right brain:  emotional, intuitive, creative; likes music, images and colors.  Left brain:  prefers logic and reasoning; is more comfortable with language (putting things into words rather than responding emotionally) and numbers.  Think Kirk vs. Spock, Napoleon Solo vs. Ilya Kuriakin, or…Castle vs. Beckett?  Of the first two pairs, you can guess which one I preferred.  For the last…I'd like to hang out with Castle, but I'd rather be Beckett.

Maybe I'm just confused.  I was once an art historian, so I must like images.  Except that I spent a lot of time analyzing images, not wallowing in their beauty.  Pretty colors make me happy.  But then, I love languages, which may explain why I can speaks bits and pieces of at least five.  But I hate math.  Still, overall I like to think of myself as logical and analytical.

But does that work for writing?  To me, understanding human interactions, and an individual's response to particular circumstances, and then conveying that effectively to readers, is the best possible goal. We talk about "character-driven" versus "plot-driven" stories, and it should be noted that the great majority of mystery readers are women, who are generally credited with greater emotional responses, so they should (in theory) respond to the first category.  On the flip side, male readers tend to prefer books in which taciturn men blow things up and shoot people, with the occasional detour to spend about fifteen minutes with a woman (think Jack Reacher). Funny thing—the latter sell better and get more press.  Go figure.

When we write in a genre, and I do since I'm a full-blown cozy writer, we know there are guidelines to be followed.  If the genre is thrillers, there must be, well, thrills; in cozies, there must be cats and crafts and kooky sidekicks.  I get that.  But I keep trying to sneak in a few more substantial elements, and I think I've arrived at what one reviewer called a "meaty" cozy.  I like that. Maybe my two brains are actually working and playing together these days.

Deadlines

by Sheila Connolly

April carries the weight of everyone's least favorite deadline:  Tax Day.  April 15th strikes fear into the hearts of many, and inspires annual surges of loathing.  Yes, I mailed my federal taxes on April 15th; I managed to send my state taxes electronically on the 14th (for the first time), yay me.

We as writers face deadlines all the time.  Admittedly I have more than many do, since I write three series, by choice.  Actually I was pleased when that arrangement was formalized, because it meant that I knew what my forward schedule would be for years, rather than book to book. Same due date for drafts, same month of publication, for each series, stretching out to 2015 at least.  It's good to know what's coming.

Of course, there are other writing-related things that have to be fit into the intervals, like conferences and research trips.  Yes, I do research for all my series.  It's such a burden to have to sit in pubs in Ireland or tour museums in Philadelphia or visit harvest festivals in western Massachusetts.  Poor me (not!).

There are studies that suggest that many people work better and think smarter when under pressure (i.e., with a looming deadline). I've always felt that way.  Even in high school, I had a well-calibrated sense of how long it would take me to accomplish something, and how long I could defer it before starting.  No, I wasn't the kind who pulled an all-nighter right before a major paper was due, but I know I needed a certain sense of urgency to spur me.  Apparently I'm not alone.

Which doesn't explain the high school honors history course I took, where we were all assigned one research paper due in the spring. A couple of days before the paper was due, our teacher asked the class, "who has started the paper?"  Nobody raised his or her hand.  Defeated, he cancelled it.  I'm still not sure what went wrong.  We were all smart, hardworking, college-bound kids, but maybe we had no idea what went into researching a topic (remember, this was before the Internet).  But I never waited that long to start anything again.

When you're working on something creative, there's always the lurking question, what if I run dry at the wrong time?  What if I can't figure out how to end this thing and it just sputters to a halt?  Is it better or worse to submit a product that you know isn't your best, that still needs some fixing, rather than missing that all-important deadline?  If you've got a good editor, he or she is going to notice, and it's not fair to rely on the editor to remedy your mistakes, when you know you're in the wrong.

But if you miss that first deadline, is it the beginning of the end?  Will you start getting sloppy after that?  Ah, what the heck, it's just a date.  What's a few more days? Or weeks?  But then you run the risk of being labeled undependable by your publisher, and we all know that there are a lot of eager writers waiting to grab any slot that opens up. 

Me, I need the structure.  I like being able to look out at my coming year and know what's coming, and when.  I'm not a hare, I'm a tortoise, slow and steady.

And very busy!

Sometimes There Is No Why

by Sheila Connolly

Recently the wildly successful mystery writer Lee Child wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, titled "A Simple Way to Create Suspense."  While what I write is hardly similar to his books, what he said made a lot of sense to me.  It can be boiled down to this:  Ask a question. Then don't answer it.

At a regional conference, Dennis Lehane recently spoke about a related idea.  As an example, he suggested beginning a book with the protagonist—call him Joe—opening the refrigerator trying to decide what to eat.  Immediately we want to know:  what did Joe decide?  If the author never tells the reader what Joe ate for lunch, we feel cheated, because we humans are hardwired to look for answers.

In both Child's and Lehane's examples, the opening question, trivial or not, creates a sense of tension.  Child takes it a step further by deliberately withholding the answer.  As he wrote,

        "Someone killed someone else:  who? You'll find out at the end of the book.  Something weird is happening:  what?  You'll find out at the end of the book.  Something has to be stopped:  how?  You'll find out at the end of the book."

Keeps you reading, doesn't it?

This is something my editor and I have been wrestling with in the edits for my next Museum Mystery, Monument to the Dead.  Someone dies in Chapter 1, but it seems to be a natural death.  Then other people are identified as having died the same way, but all were called natural deaths.  Question 1:  are these deaths natural, or is someone killing them?  There is no evidence of murder, and nobody has investigated these deaths.

But to say they were murdered, someone has to ask:  why?  Who would want these people dead? There's no obvious reason for killing them.  So my protagonist and her allies go to work trying to find links between them.  And they do find a primary connection, but that doesn't explain the "why". That's because the "why" makes sense only to the killer, and it's not obvious to anyone else.

My editor (with whom I have worked on many books) wants to make this a more typical cozy, with a body up front (got that), and a cast of likely suspects who are first to be identified and then eliminated one by one.  I don't have that. There is really only one person who would have a motive for killing these people, and it takes the whole book to identify that person (and it's my protagonist's very specific knowledge that finally points to the killer).

I read an official FBI report on serial killers that states that motive is not the first thing an investigator should look for. FBI profilers caution against working to identify motive rather than looking for the killer.  And in most cases that makes sense. Follow the evidence first.

But I'm trying to twist it around in my book, because there is very little physical evidence to be had:  the victims are long buried, the autopsies cursory, the crime scenes cleaned up.  For me, the "why" is the important question. And I do give an answer.

The tragic recent events have left everyone asking "why?"  Why would anyone decide one day to start killing innocent children he didn't even know? Why would some guy set his house on fire and start shooting at anyone who came to put the fire out? Investigators are digging for every piece of family history, where the weapons came from, et cetera, et cetera, and reporting every shred of tangible evidence to the hungry press—because people want that "why." 

But what if the "why" is never answered?  Lee Child has got it right: we want the answer.  These awful events will linger in our memories, because that missing "why" will haunt us.

Lee Child, me, and this other guy