REUNION

by Sheila Connolly

This weekend I'm attending my 40^th reunion at Wellesley College.  That one has always been a landmark because the college development/fundraising office figured that by then we'd have made our fortunes and be ready to come up with a Really Big Gift.

Well, not so much.  Through no fault of the college's I've wandered through five careers.  Or maybe that was partly the college's fault, because they convinced us all that we could be whatever we wanted to be.  I guess my problem was that I was never quite sure what I wanted to be, so I tried a lot of different things, like art historian, investment banker, and professional genealogist.  In any case, no fortune to donate, save for gratitude.

I avoided my first few reunions, in part because I lived on the opposite coast and couldn't afford the airfare, and also because I didn't think I had anything to say.  I think the first one I attended was my 20^th reunion.  It's always both fun and depressing to go back and see many classmates all at once, and try to fit the faces in front of you with the shiny-bright 22-year-old faces you remember.  Yes, we all got older—except in our memories.

One thing that has always saddened me about these reunions is the people who are not there. That's the downside of attending a prestigious and renowned college:  people have expectations of you.  Your parents, your professors, even you yourself, expect you to go out and conquer the world.

You have to remember I attended college during one of those optimistic feminist waves.  If I recall accurately, about 3% of female college graduates nationwide attended a professional school (law, medicine) after graduation.  Now it's more like 50%, so I guess there have been some positive changes. But I daresay that Wellesley's average was higher, and I do remember the fierce competitiveness among biology majors fighting for those few slots in medical schools (which has something to do with why I changed my major from biology to art history).

But I have heard too often that the graduates who choose not to attend reunions stay home because they feel they simply aren't successful enough.  They aren't CEOs of Fortune 500 companies; they don't run government agencies; they haven't saved any small countries lately.  They have merely lived simple productive lives:  married (we did that in those days), raised a family, held a job, volunteered for community organizations, taken care of ageing parents, often all at the same time.  And still they feel that they don't measure up against their college peers. That saddens me.

I feel extraordinarily lucky to be where I am today:  a published writer.  Maybe I heard the college message, that if you want it enough, and work hard enough, you can succeed—but I know that doesn't hold true for a lot of  people.  I can now look back on my varied careers and say, all of it goes into my writing.  I've learned from everything I've ever done. I choose to count that as success.

Which still doesn't mean that I can catch up with the sister graduates, such as Katherine Hall Page and Diane Mott Davidson.  Maybe by my 45^th reunion? 

P.S. Recently our class reunion coordinator put out a call, saying, "We want to invite each of you to share something special about yourselves in the form of a picture or item that we can display."  What would you choose that summarizes your past five years, or where you are now in your life? Not an easy choice!

TURNING POINTS

by Sheila Connolly

Everyone has moments when they know that they're about to make a decision that will change their life and their future history. It may be momentous, like accepting a marriage proposal, or it may be as trivial as buying one kind of cereal rather than another (and you find a dead rodent in the box and you sue the maker and become rich and buy your own island).

I've had a few. One was the first time I saw Wellesley College on a college tour. I took the tour (something like the eighth college I'd looked at, in the company of my mother and grandmother), and I knew that was It, settled, done. I even said so in my diary.

That's my daughter, not me, but the
view hasn't changed

Another was when I was looking for places to stay when my husband and I were taking our daughter on her college tour, and I clicked on a link for a bed and breakfast in western Massachusetts and found Muddybrook Farm, and said, "wait—I know who built that!" We stayed there, and it formed the heart of what is now the Orchard Mystery series, for which the sixth book comes out this summer. One fortuitous click, and a series was born.

Another occurred when I was applying for jobs not long after that, and my finger hovered over the "Send" button, and I thought, "this could be important." It was, although not in the way I had anticipated: I was fired after six months. But that was what gave me the time and opportunity and even the compulsion to try writing full time. If life hands you lemons—write a book!

And another happened this past weekend, when I attended a full-day seminar given by agent/writer Donald Maass, sponsored by Sisters in Crime New England. (I'd include pictures of the event, but most of us were too busy taking notes to use a camera!)

Normally I avoid "how to write" events and books, not because I'm arrogant enough to think there's nothing I need to learn, but because there are a lot of good ideas out there and there's no way to read them all, much less implement them all. But I've been hearing about Maass from a lot of sources for a long time, so I went.

I won't go into details (take the seminar yourself!), but about six hours into it, with 30+ pages of detailed notes, a cramped hand and a whirling head, I realized what was wrong with my protagonists: they were wimps.

When we (as women) write female characters (targeted at our largely female audience), we want them to be people that our readers can identify with. They should be imperfect, struggling, but ultimately triumphant, and above all, it's drummed into us that THEY MUST BE LIKABLE!

How do you make a central character likable? You give her a few modest flaws, some distinctive talents, a dash of vulnerability, and an innate sense of honesty and justice. And don't forget loyalty. Sound like someone you'd like to hang out with?

Sure, but remember, this isn't literary fiction, this is mystery, and after you've subjected your protagonist to a few murders, up close and personal, maybe even some direct threats by a crazed killer, don't you wonder how the heck she forges on, still cheery and perky and just plain nice?

One challenge to writing a series is to give the characters room to grow. I usually take my protagonist at the beginning and dump her into a difficult, hazardous, stressful situation—with a body—and see what she does. Of course she solves the crime by the end of the story. But wouldn't you like to see her learn a little something from her experience? (Apart from, "try to stay away from dead bodies and killers.") If she is static, she becomes boring and predictable.

To make matters worse, I've made a couple of my protagonists professional women. They're supposed to be smart and maybe even managerial. So why are they taking 288 pages to solve a murder, and wringing their hands and complaining "why me?" all along the way to the Trusty Sidekick and the Potential Love Interest?

Listening to Donald Maass, I realized that this had become a problem for me. My protagonists were being buffeted by outrageous fortune, and they were sitting back and taking it. And I decided I'd had enough. Ladies, your trial period is over; you've earned your stripes in crime solving; now please, please take charge of your life. If you're in a new profession or position—make it your own. If you've been waffling about that hunky guy who's hanging around, take the initiative and tell him how you feel. Or cut him loose. But make some decision!

Will it be the right move? Time (or my readers) will tell. Is this epiphany due to the wise words of one speaker? Not altogether, although it was his lecture that jumpstarted the process. (Of course, another one of my marginal comments during the lecture was "there are mice!" So maybe not all insights are useful or usable.)

What does it take to spur an "aha!" moment for you?

Changing Times

by Sheila Connolly

This week I was invited to give a talk to a library group in the middle of the state. It's in an area I love, and it came with dinner. Since it's not much more than an hour away, I said yes.

This was not a group of writers, but a group of mystery readers from a local library. They were uniformly enthusiastic (the event was sold out, with a waiting list). There was no fixed topic, so I spoke about how I became a writer--and about publishing.

Over the past year I've come to realize that I stand with one foot in the old and one in the new. I'm a dinosaur, a member of the last wave to come up through the ranks in a traditional way. I labored in obscurity for years, kept writing, kept submitting to agents (by snail mail!), until I finally connected with a good agency (that had already rejected me more than once) that made that first sale for me and has been doing right by me ever since.

But someone who is hit with that "I want to write!" lightning bolt now will have a very different experience.

And then I realize this was not the first time I have straddling the line.

I attended a Wellesley College, then and now a respected women's college. When I entered in 1968, nothing much had changed since the 1950s. We had to wear skirts when we went into the Village a few blocks away, and to dinner in the dorm. We had to sign out if we expected to return late, and we needed our parents' permission if we were going to be away overnight. When someone came to our dorm to see us, they had to be announced by the front desk, and there was a code: a visitor was female, and a male was a caller. Men were not allowed above the first floor, except between two and four on Sunday afternoons, and when you had a gentleman caller, you were expected to leave your door open and keep three feet on the floor. Weekly tea was served, with the housemother pouring, and house-baked goodies. It sounds practically Victorian, doesn't it?

By the time I graduated in 1972, there were no rules. I lived in two co-ed dorms (the women far outnumbered the men, though). We'd been through the student strikes, and the college had ultimately thrown up its hands and said we could take a pass/fail grade in courses because everything was so chaotic. Nobody signed out, and boyfriends stayed over regularly. Those four years spanned the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

And that's where we are in publishing. The rules are shattered, like a glass fish tank, and agents and editors are flapping around in the puddles trying to figure out what to do next. The big publishers are working hard to pretend that the old model still works. The agents are more flexible and are opening up their own small publishing divisions to produce ebooks. And a lot of writers are saying to themselves, "Why do I need either an agent or a Big Six publisher? I can just clean up my manuscript and reformat it to make it available online, all by myself." And they do, in increasing numbers. Bookstores are scrabbling to redefine themselves—at least, those that manage to stay open at all.

So here I am again, with one foot in each camp. I came up the traditional way, but my agent has her own small publishing company. And I reserve the right to pull out those early rejected novels, blow the dust off, and publish them myself if I choose (with a healthy dose of editing!). It's scary, but it's a really interesting to be a writer. And like most of the writers and publishers I know, I'm not sure where things will end up.

But as long as people want to read, whether on paper or on a digital screen, I'll keep writing.