Ave atque Vale

by Sheila Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you all for following us.

Who Do We Think We Are?

by Sheila Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radiant, inspiring, attractive, slender

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

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

What are these beautiful healthy people looking for?

Love, laughter and a beautiful future

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

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

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

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

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

 Coming February 4th

Vacations

by Sheila Connolly

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

I laughed.  What’s a vacation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

I love being a writer.

 Coming February 4th!

 

Poe in Boston

by Sheila Connolly

It was only this year that I learned that there is a public art project to honor Edgar Allan Poe in Boston.  What makes that funny is that he didn’t have very nice things to say about Boston.

As you’ve no doubt learned or seen over the years, Poe is commemorated in multiple cities. But he was born in Boston, to travelling actors.  No, the house isn’t there anymore—it was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by the state Transportation Building.  He lived in Richmond, VA, with foster parents after his own parents died.  There are Poe museums in Baltimore, the Bronx, and Philadelphia as well as Richmond; the room where Poe lived as a student at the University of Virginia are preserved in his honor.

All Poe has gotten from Boston until now is a small plaque on the wall of a luggage store. (Hmm, maybe there’s some irony there, because he certainly traveled around a lot.)

Why do we care?  What is it about dead writers that draws the average tourist accompanied by two point five whining children? Do they think some spirit of the author lingers in the stone and concrete?

It is interesting to note that the (much more successful) author Stephen King made a nice contribution earlier this year to the proposed monument.  It arrived at the Poe Foundation of Boston, which is managing the project, on April Fool’s Day, and was briefly thought to be a joke. You have to believe that King planned it that way, right?

Poe’s relationship with the city of his birth was a rocky one.  He sometimes denied having been born in Boston at all. He was contemptuous of the literary elite of Boston and the area, especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, saying they were “incapable of recognizing a decent poem if it fell onto their precious Common,” and frequently referring to Boston as “Frogpondium,” in reference to the frog pond at the Boston Common. In 1845 Poe gave a reading at the Boston Lyceum which bombed (he recycled an existing poem, one of his youthful efforts, rather than presenting something new) and the local papers slammed him.  In 1848 he tried to commit suicide in Boston but failed.

 

 

And still the city chooses to honor him, if belatedly.  They’ve commissioned a statue, to be erected in Edgar Allan Poe Square, a brick-paved plaza at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets.  The statue, to be executed by New York sculptor Stefanie Rocknak, features Poe with a humongous and rather terrifying raven swooping out of an open trunk, with a human heart (really? Yes, I know it’s a reference to The Telltale Heart, but still…) and loose papers fluttering behind him. Running after an elusive idea, or trying to flee a city he didn’t like?

How ambivalent we are about our writers! But maybe Longfellow had the last word when he said, “Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.”

 

Manor houses! Lost art works! A doomed romance!  All you could ask for in a mystery novel, coming February 2014

 

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

Technology

by Sheila Connolly

 

My great-great-grandfather, Silas Barton, was one of the founders of the General Electric Company.  At least indirectly:  he was responsible for rescuing the floundering Thomson-Houston Electric Company, persuading them to move to Lynn, Massachusetts and getting them the contract to electrify a new building being erected there by the Grand Army of the Republic, of which he was a member. He went to work for Thomson-Houston, and even managed their Chicago office for a couple of years. I still have a pair of light bulbs they made before 1900. In 1893, Thomson-Houston merged with Thomas Edison’s New Jersey-based company and General Electric was born (they still have a plant in Lynn).  Silas worked for GE the Boston office for a few years. He didn’t follow them when they moved to Schenectady, New York, but his brother Daniel did, and worked for them for the rest of his life.

 

By interesting coincidence, Thomson-Houston won the contract to introduce electricity to the town where I now live, at the time that Silas was working for them. So there’s a direct (family) line from the 1890s to the current that’s flowing through my laptop as I type now.

Those of us of a “certain age” share memories of a lot of evolving technologies.  When I first used a telephone (you know, those clunky black things with a rotary dial), there was a live operator, and you had to give her the phone number you wanted.  Now I have an iPhone.

When I was in high school my computer science class (the first offered by the school—we had to borrow computer time from a local college, and the computer was larger than my refrigerator and lived in a chilled room), we toured the local New Jersey Bell Labs offices, which we were told was cutting edge at the time.  Now my aforementioned cell-phone does most of what we witnessed there.

My father was the custodian of the family’s cabinet-model “record player,” a piece of furniture encased in mahogany, with storage for some records as well as a radio built in.  My sister and I were not allowed to touch it.  He and my mother were partial to Broadway musicals, and I can still sing along with most of them, because they used it regularly.  Now (you guessed it) my cell-phone can handle the same music instantly, with better sound quality.

And now there are digital books. I come from a family of readers.  We lived in a series of rented houses, mainly built in the 1920s, and most of them had “libraries” with a lot of built-in bookcases, so storage was never a problem. Now I can download books onto my (yes) iPhone or iPad or Nook—more books than any of those houses could have held.

We had an Encyclopedia Britannica for homework.  Now we have Google.

And we handle all of this in our overtaxed brains.  Yes, I can still remember my grandmother’s phone number from the 1950s.

Funny—if there are any links among all of these technological advances, it is that the delivery systems have consistently become smaller and faster.  Does that mean we are a mobile and impatient society?

 

By the way, my ebook Relatively Dead (May 2013) includes descriptions based on the house where Silas Barton lived in Waltham, as well as the cemetery where he is buried.

 

 

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

 

 

What do we want from our leaders?

by Sheila Connolly

The other day I was driving somewhere and found myself wondering, “did Napoleon have anxiety attacks?” Don’t ask me why I was thinking of Napoleon—it’s not something I do often. But I asked myself, did he wake up in the middle of the night and ask himself, Am I doing the right thing?

Think about it. Here’s the man who wanted to take over most of the civilized world. But physically he was tiny: I once saw a uniform that had been his, in the chateau of Malmaison in France where he lived with his wife Josephine, and he was far shorter than I am, and slighter (although pudgy in his later years). One source I looked at said he was 5 feet 6½ inches tall. My daughter is taller than that. This man was an emperor and commanded armies. Don’t you ever wonder how he did that?

And what about all those other historical figures that we grew up hearing about (the condensed version, at least). Do you ever find yourself pondering, Was Julius Caesar allergic to grain? Was Joan of Arc afraid of spiders?

We don’t have answers to many thing like this because it clouds our cherished vision of these people as somehow larger than life, or more than merely mortal. They had power; people followed them, and sometimes died for them. How could they be flawed?

There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe recently, titled “The myth of the visionary leader,” by Leon Neyfakh, about whether the public figures who we admire—presidents and the like—are actually the best leaders. We think we want vision and charisma and boldness, which are obvious traits. According to a 1977 paper by Abraham Zaleznik, classically heroic leaders possess imagination and a tendency toward risk-taking. In other words, they are bigger and better than we are.

Charisma may not be a good tool for actually getting things done, although that doesn’t stop us from voting for charm and good looks. But what we really need is someone who can make things happen, who is flexible, who can make effective compromises—not the people who hog the limelight and are in the love with the sound of their own voices.

Curiously, two weeks later in the Globe there was another related article, this one by Joanna Weiss. She was addressing the fact that it was kind of hard to distinguish between the two Boston mayoral candidates, both decent people and accomplished politicians (and both men of Irish background). In order to separate themselves they fell back on their own life stories. Weiss included in her analysis the example of Abraham Lincoln, cited by historian Michael Vorenberg. When Lincoln ran for President in 1860, he perceived that what the people wanted was an independent, self-reliant, strong individual; someone who stood out from the other politicians, who were mainly elite urban lawyers. So Lincoln’s handlers polished up the story of the boy raised in a log cabin, splitting rails and reading by firelight—a story we still repeat in schools today. The reality was that Lincoln was, yes, a smart lawyer in a suit (and without a beard), but that wasn’t what the voters wanted. Lincoln tailored his public image and won.

 

Would you vote for this man?

 

Should we as voters feel cheated? Manipulated? Or are we totally jaded by the endless onslaught of political spin? What do we really want from our leaders, and what does it look like? (By the way, Boston will have a new Irish mayor. Now, which one was he…?)

 

 

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Coming November 22nd

 

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