Almost Real

Sandra Parshall

I still need mailing addresses for Felissa L. and Sandi Lewis, who won free Christmas mysteries last week. Please e-mail me at sandraparshall@yahoo.com!


Every Christmas season brings new toys, but only now and then does one catch on and become THE toy, the one every kid absolutely must have and parents drive themselves crazy trying to locate and acquire. Remember Cabbage Patch dolls? This year the “it” toy is the Zhu Zhu Pet, a toy hamster that does all the cute things real hamsters do without expecting food or a clean cage.

Zhu Zhu Pets were created by a guy in St. Louis who has suddenly found himself the head of an enormously profitable family-run company based entirely on a little mechanical rodent. The hamsters are supposed to sell for $10, but they’ve become some scarce that they’re fetching several times that amount on the internet. And once you’ve bought the hamster, what kid will be satisfied without some or all of the “accessories” available? The slide, the skateboard, the fun house, the playground, the little car and garage, the adventure ball, the wheel and tunnels, the “hamster city” ($129.99) – swallow hard and pay up, if you want your kid to be happy with his ersatz pet and stop begging for a real one. (For a while there, it seemed the Zhu Zhu Pet called Mr. Squiggles, pictured above, might be recalled, after a consumer group claimed it contained harmful levels of antimony, but the government has cleared Mr. Squiggles of the charge.)

What will you do if you can’t get your hands on a mechanical hamster for the kid in your life? Don’t despair – this is the golden era of fake pets. Consider the Zzz Animals, artificial puppies and kittens that do nothing but lie on their beds (included) and sleep. According to a catalog, their “little midsections” rise and fall in an amazingly lifelike imitation of breathing. And “the best thing about them is that they’re not real!” No walking, no feeding, no messes to clean up, no biting visitors or scratching the furniture. These “pets” never even wake up. Orange tabby and black and white kittens are available, along with a line of puppies – chocolate lab, pug, Shih-Tzu, beagle, schnauzer, golden retriever, Yorkie, Cavalier King Charles, and just in time for the holidays, the new Portuguese water dog that looks exactly like Bo Obama. Batteries not included.

Looking for something more active? Check out the monkey and puppy that say “Hello!” and proceed to “roll on the floor and laugh and laugh” before saying “Goodbye!” and shutting down.

Then there’s Scoozie, the all-purpose mammal. It looks kind of like a squirrel, but it purrs like a cat and wags its bushy tail like a dog – when it’s happy. If you neglect a Scoozie, it growls at you. It has light and sound sensors and responds to its environment. This fake pet does have to be fed, although the catalog copy doesn’t reveal its dietary requirements (perhaps there’s an expensive fake food available?) or whether it needs a litter box or regular walks. It sounds like almost as much work as a real pet, but I guess you save on vet bills. Maybe that’s the next thing: an artificial pet that needs shots.

If Scoozie is too much trouble and the rolling, laughing monkey and dog freak you out, try the Christmas bear, which will read “The Night Before Christmas” in what is described as “a soothing male voice” (accompanied by soft background music) while rocking back and forth. It will read your child to sleep so you won’t have to do it.

There’s a whole industry producing artificial life forms that are promoted as trouble-free, mess-free substitutes for the real thing. Maybe they fill a need in families where no one has the time to care for live dogs and cats. But it all seems rather sad to me. A child growing up without the companionship of a pet with a unique personality and real needs is missing out on a vital connection to another species. I have lived my entire life with cats and dogs, and through them I have learned to respect and care for all animals. They have taught me that sometimes I have to put my own needs and plans aside. They have shown me that if I give love unconditionally, I will receive it in return, many times over.

I can look to my left as I write this and see our cat Emma sleeping on her pillow under a lamp. Her midsection (not so little, alas) rises and falls with each breath. Any minute she’s going to wake up and start making demands, as real animals are inclined to do – pet me, feed me, love me.


Her brother Gabriel is already sitting by my chair, giving me that look I know so well: If I don’t leave the computer right now and give him a meal, I’ll find out just how much of a nuisance he can be.


They drive me crazy sometimes with their fussy appetites, and they scare me witless when they get sick.

I wouldn’t trade them for all the mechanical hamsters in the world.

November Numbers

Sharon Wildwind

The numbers for November are in, and they are not good. I’m afraid I’ve been seduced by the dark side, or at least the art side.

I run a tally of how long I spend every month on writing and the writing business. A couple of months ago I discovered how much easier my computer’s calendar program made this task. Instead of fumbling through the mass of papers on my desk for a pen and day timer, I learned how to click on the calendar program, select the activity color, and type in a word or two. Bingo. Instant documentation.

The good part is I am getting a much more accurate picture of how I spend my time. The bad part is I am getting a much more accurate picture of how I spend my time.

In November, I spent as much time at my art table as I did at my day job. My initial reaction was that every hour I’d spent at the art table was an hour stolen from writing. How dare I short-change my precious writing time!

After calming down over a cup of tea, I realized that November had included an unusual circumstance. It’s called a vacation. I’d had a mini-vacation in September, which coincided with a brief, but very uncomfortable, illness. Not much play value there. Before that, my last vacation had been in April. Maybe I was due. Maybe I was way overdue for some play time.

Here’s what I did when I should have been writing.

Paper crafters use a handy tool called a bone folder. I’ve coveted a Teflon™ bone folder, but not its price, for a long time. Then I saw some furniture gliders in a hardware store. The top of an orange juice can, quilt batting, a piece of cotton cloth and a furniture glider makes a dandy folder.

Let’s get the disaster out of the way. I had an idea of making campy paper mâché paper trays. Instead of saying boring things like “In,” or “Out,” they would tell it like it really is: “Someone else’s problem,” “Likely not this year,” and “I have no clue.” I bought cheap boxes to use as the base. The corners were flimsy, so I reinforced them with linen art tape. The white tape on the brown cardboard looked yucky. I dyed gesso with ink and lay down a base coat. This caused the box to warp. I haven’t gotten around to applying the paper mâché, but I suspect when I do, it will be another layer of disaster. At least this has given me another tray name, “Another layer of disaster.”

Not everything was a disaster. This card, for the newest member of our family, came out rather sweet.

So did Blue Belle and Christmas Rose, the Glitter Girls from Tinsel Town, a place where they still make Christmas ornaments the old-fashioned way. They clean the factory floor each night and are allowed to take home left-over scraps. Belle is an artisté who makes Christmas jewelry and wreaths. Rose is no less an artist (but maybe with slightly fewer pretensions). She’s always experimenting with unusual combinations and loves a bit of whimsey, like adding a row of embroidered ducks to her pieces because there should always be Christmas quackers.

Great workout pants, but they had a sports logo down the leg. I’m willing to wear my heart on my sleeve, but not someone else’s advertising on my leg. This is much nicer.

So maybe it was okay to play art instead of writing. In fact, maybe every writer should try art from time-to-time. Not that these projects can ever replace that wonderful feeling of correct comma placement, or the perfectly constructed gerund modifier. Yeah, right.

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Quote for the week

There is so much you can accomplish by playing with what’s already in the house.

~Anahata Katkin, creative journalist and collage artist

To see some of her wonderful art journals, click here.

Waiting and What it Brings

by Julia Buckley


I've posted here before about Waiting for Godot; last time I related it to the characters in Charlie Brown. (I think that Charles M. Schultz must have read that play).

Right now I am awaiting my agent’s thoughts on my manuscript revisions—a nervewracking time for any author—and I got to thinking once again about the notion of waiting itself.

There’s a reason that Samuel Beckett used the present participle in his title Waiting for Godot; waiting itself is an existential experience. No matter what one is waiting for—-a ride, a letter, a ringing bell—-one is always caught in the center between hope and despair. In addition, the wait is an entirely separate entity from what precedes it and whatever might end it. The wait, in many cases, is misery.

Don’t believe me? I’ll show you my youngest son in the month before Christmas. As he sees it, Christmas and its attendant joys are always, always too far away—until they are suddenly there and gone, which brings him brief happiness, then depression. This, then, is the human condition.

My students, when we read Godot, share their own painful experiences of waiting: waiting for the phone call from that special someone; waiting for Christmas break, spring break, graduation; waiting for a report card; waiting for age eighteen, then age twenty-one, then waiting to officially “feel adult.” (Good luck with that one).

George Santayana famously wrote, “There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval,” and I suppose the challenge is in fact to try to enjoy whatever wait we are currently enduring. The advantage of waiting is that one can lean toward hope, even embrace it, because in that temporary state we can own whatever future our imagination can conceive.

So here’s to waiting: not a misery, but a little moment of the eternal, in which everything is, and everything is not.

(photo: I snapped this shot at a Chicago el stop. If you've waited for enough el trains, you understand the whole philosophy of waiting and its relationship to the universe).

The Day My Characters Started Talking to Me

By Brad Parks, guest blogger

Once upon a time, when I was a newspaper reporter living a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of writing existence, I would happen across an interview with an author. Since I harbored this wild dream of someday becoming an author, I would always stop and listen (or read) to see if I could learn anything.

Usually, there was a point in the interview where the esteemed author would be asked how she figured out what happened next in her books, and she would say something along the lines of: “Well, my characters talk to me. They tell me where the story ought to go.”

And I’d always think to myself, “Yeah, lady? Do your characters also tell you you’re a nut bag? Because that’s what you sound like right now.”

I mean, what an absurd idea. Characters – fictional creations – dictating the direction of a story? As if they had some kind of free will? Ridiculous.

Then I started writing fiction.

And suddenly one day my characters… they, uh… they started talking to me.

It didn’t happen during my first manuscript. (Then again, that manuscript is still sitting in a drawer somewhere – and maybe now I know why.)

No, it happened while I was writing Faces of the Gone, my debut novel from St. Martin’s/Minotaur. The protagonist is this investigative newspaper reporter named Carter Ross. Part of his deal is that while he works in Newark, New Jersey – a gritty city which is approximately 95 percent
minority – Carter is this clean-cut WASP from the white bread suburbs.

And while I enjoyed the juxtaposition of character and setting for the first two chapters, Carter didn’t start talking to me – really talking to me – until the beginning of Chapter 3. In this scene, Carter has scored an interview with members of the Brick City Browns, a Newark street gang who might have information about a quadruple homicide Carter is covering. But first, Carter has to prove to them he’s not a cop – by smoking marijuana with them.

So there I had Carter in this room with these gang members, and they’re passing the joint, having a good old time. And I figured everyone would get mellow enough that the Brick City Browns would eventually spill what they knew, and Carter would go on his merry way.

But then Carter started talking to me.

“Psst, Brad, I can’t handle my weed,” he said.

“You can’t?” I asked (in my head).

“Not even a little,” he replied. “C’mon, I’m the whitest man in Newark. I wear pleated pants and drive a Chevy Malibu. Look at how I cut my hair, for God’s sake! I tried pot once or twice in college – just to say I’d done it – and haven’t touched the stuff since.”

“So… uh, what do I do now?” I asked.

“I don’t care what you do,” Carter explained. “I’m baked out of my mind. Just let me chill out for a while.”

But, of course, I couldn’t – the scene would get way too dull. So I had him stand up, and, sure enough, he went toppling over into a wall full of boxes, spilling their contents all over him – to the amusement of the gang members smoking with him. Then I had Carter go back to the newsroom, still stoned, bumping into his executive editor, who gets suspicious when one of his reporters smells like he just came from a Grateful Dead concert. Then Carter bumps into his sometime love interest.

The result is that I got some of the more amusing scenes in my book, scenes I never planned but happened more or less spontaneously simply because I was listening to what my characters had to say. Do your characters talk to you? Come on, don’t be shy. I promise I won’t call you a nut bag.

To learn more about Brad Parks or Faces of the Gone, visit www.BradParksBooks.com. To be pelted with monthly fits of nonsense from his small army of underpaid interns, sign up for his newsletter. To be subjected to such drivel on a more regular basis, become a fan of the Brad Parks Books on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (www.twitter.com/Brad_Parks).

Writer's Block, Reader's Block, and Georgette Heyer

By Lonnie Cruse

Recently on the DorothyL mystery discussion list the subject of Writer's Block and Reader's Block came up. Great discussion, so I wanted to bring it here to PDD.

For me, the dreaded Writer's Block usually hits when there is something missing in my manuscript, usually something I should have researched and haven't. Therefore it niggles at the back of my brain, preventing me from moving forward until I take care of business. Or it hits when I'm not sure where to go with a character and I'm trying a new direction and the character is resisting going there. I once had to "fire" a character as the murderer in a book because she whined and whimpered all over the pages and flat out refused to pick up a weapon. My characters now know not to mess with me. I hope.

And what fixes Writer's Block? Usually taking a shower, which means I can't write down ideas, so they hit me as fast as the water from the spout. Taking a break from writing also helps. Getting some rest. Taking a walk. Things like that.

What about Reader's Block? Wanting to read and being unable to? The lovely Del Tinsley coined that phrase on DorothyL, sort of as a joke, I expect but it caught on, and readers began chiming in with their Reader's Block. Well, I sometimes have it too. Reader's Block usually hits me after I've read a book with plot holes large enough to build a skyscraper in, or the characters do something totally dumb. You know what I mean: There's a storm, power's out, a killer is on the loose in the neighborhood, and the character goes down into the dark and scary basement without a flashlight or a weapon. Sigh. When I read books like that, it's hard for me to get back into reading. And when that happens, it's time for me to go back to my old favorites.

Sometimes I choose a favorite current writer, like the lovely and extremely hilarious Donna Andrews. Her series always leaves me in a good mood. I have her newest near my bed (I generally read at bedtime or in the car when Hubby drives.) Also have Anne Perry's latest Christmas mystery there.

However, at the moment I'm mostly reading on my Kindle and that's where the Reader's Block rouble actually started. I'd downloaded a freebie or two and they were pretty much worth what I paid for them . . . nothing. Left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Bad taste behind my eyes? I dunno.

I was trying to figure out what to read next when I found a Georgette Heyer romance in my closet that I picked up at Sam's Club and hadn't started. I took it in the car as my new "car read" because it's huge and I wasn't sure I'd still enjoy her, so this was sort of a "test read." A couple of decades ago I read nearly all of her books and loved them, but tastes change, and mine sure have. Bottom line, I really am enjoying that book.

About that time someone on DorothyL mentioned that Heyer had also written some mysteries. Mysteries? Why didn't I know about them? Off to Amazon I dashed, via the Internet, and downloaded a sample. Before I even read chapter two of the sample, I was ordering the book for my Kindle. The book was just under $10, and I HATE paying that much for a book on Kindle, mainly because it's an e-book and not a printed copy. I try to stay in the $5 range when I buy, and I do download all the freebies I can. I can always toss them if they aren't readable. Back to my point.

The Heyer mystery is very enjoyable, my Reader's Block is gone (at least for now) and I plan to buy more of her books. Maybe some kind family member will give me a gift certificate from Amazon for Christmas? Just a thought. (Hint, hint) I blew my birthday gift certificate on Poirot DVDs. Well worth it, but I still need books.

If you are a writer, how do you get around Writer's Block?

If you are a reader, how do you get around Reader's Block?

Please feel free to share, I need all the help I can get. And thanks for stopping by!

Books I Couldn’t Have Written: Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series

The winners of the free Christmas mysteries are Felissa L., Shirley, Janel, and Sandi Lewis. Please send your mailing address to sandraparshall@yahoo.com. Congratulations, and thanks to everyone who entered! Buy books for holiday gifts!

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been taking a break from mystery reading. Instead, I’ve been rereading the six books in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, in anticipation of the new one coming out soon. I’m finding them even more absorbing than on first reading, when I hurried through the pages—and there are a lot of pages in each book—impatient to know what happened next. Gabaldon pulls off a bravura performance every time, and as I read slowly enough to notice what she’s doing, I can see a number of different aspects of mastery of the novel form that I can’t imagine myself ever achieving as a writer.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading Gabaldon, Outlander is the story of Claire Randall, a young married woman fresh from nursing on the battlefields of World War II, who steps into a stone circle on a hill in Scotland in 1945 and unexpectedly finds herself in the Scotland of 1743, two years before the rising of the Highland clans in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the tragic defeat at Culloden that broke the clans forever.

From the second Claire steps through the stones, I was swept away into the 18th century so powerfully that I hated to come back. Claire meets and is forced for her own safety to marry a young Highlander, Jamie Fraser. Jamie is the quintessential romantic hero and high on the list of fictional men that women readers wish they could take to bed. But he’s also a complex and intelligent man, a warrior, a scholar, a farmer, a woodsman, a born leader, and yes, very, very sexy. And Claire makes a fine heroine, with her healing skills (reinforced by a medical school education and twenty years of modern doctoring when she goes back to Jamie the second time), her courage and competence, and her adaptability to the very different life she finds herself in.

So what’s so great about these books?

1. They’re genre-benders: epic historical novels with a touch of magic and a strong dose of romance, which in this case means both Big Love and erotica. Gabaldon didn't invent the time travel romance, but I think she took it to a new level.

2. They’re well researched historically, giving a vivid picture of the times that ranges from battle to domestic life in great detail without being one bit pedantic. The research is not only tightly woven into the plot but transmuted into the fabric of character and action.

3. Extraordinarily well developed characters—they’re so well defined that I have had very little trouble keeping track of the huge cast of secondary characters over six books. They pass the “feels like family” test with flying colors. Jamie and Claire in particular are very lovable, and the secondary characters are variously likable, endearing, exasperating, hateful, or fascinating, just like real people..

4. Plotting. Something is always happening, and everything that happens is filled with tension, conflict, and excitement. And there’s plenty of forward momentum—each scene serves the story. On rereading the first book, I found a wonderful scene near the end that I had missed, believe it or not, on first, second, and third reading, probably because I was so eager to get to the resolution each time. I wonder if other readers noticed that Claire actually wrestles a wolf to death with her bare hands outside the walls of Wentworth Prison. Yes, Claire and Jamie are larger than life. But this reader is delighted to suspend disbelief.

In the fifth book, The Fiery Cross, she’s added three third-person point of view characters to Claire’s first-person narrative, and makes their experiences big and small—from fighting off a rapist to brewing an herbal remedy for migraine—so interesting that the reader is happy to linger and savor every moment. There’s a wedding scene (Jamie’s Aunt Jocasta marries Duncan Innes, one of Jamie’s followers from Ardsmuir Prison) that goes on from page 403 to page 545, and I swear I didn’t get tired of it for a moment.

5. Description, setting, smells, textures. Gabaldon rings endless and beautifully crafted changes on the weather, scenery, and conditions of 18th-century life. Thousands and thousands of them without repeating herself, apart from a fondness for the word “declivity.” Nobody’s perfect.

I don't have my copy of the new book, An Echo in the Bone, yet, but I've read the first scene. It’s every bit as gripping as the first 18th-century scene in Outlander. Jamie is lying wounded on a Revolutionary War battlefield, and Claire has to defend him from an awfully persistent mother-and-son duo of scavengers who want to slit his throat and strip him of his possessions. I can hardly wait to read the rest.

Have Yourself a Murderous Little Christmas

Sandra Parshall

Eggnog and tinsel? Sure, they’re nice, but mystery lovers still need their murder and mayhem fix even in the season of good cheer, and if Christmas itself is part of the story, all the better. Every year a few authors tackle the tricky combination of homicide and holiday, and the Christmas mysteries this time around take readers from a modern New York City coffeehouse to a quaint pre-World War I inn, from Victorian London to medieval England. Here are four that fans of holiday-themed mysteries will want to look for – and if you leave a comment today, you’ll have a chance to win a free copy of one of them.

Mrs. Jeffries and the Yuletide Weddings is the twenty-sixth entry in Emily Brightwell’s popular series about a matronly housekeeper in Victorian England who happens to be the secret behind her boss’s awe-inspiring success as a Scotland Yard detective. When a middle-aged spinster is killed in what looks like a random attack, the Miss Marple of Victorian mysteries helps Inspector Witherspoon plow through the intrigue and lies, unearth long-buried secrets, get through the distraction of two Christmas weddings, and solve the crime.

Christmas is often deadly at the Pennyfoot Hotel in the years before WWI. In Decked with Folly, Kate Kingsbury’s fifth Christmas mystery in her long-running series, Cecily Sinclair Baxter is preparing her inn for a festive season when the body of a former Pennyfoot employee turns up in the duck pond. A body in the duck pond is bad news at any time of year, and it can certainly put a damper on holiday celebrations. Cecily sets out to clear the victim’s ex-wife, a Pennyfoot maid, and restore order in time for a properly cheerful Christmas.


Holiday Grind by Cleo Coyle also revolves around a seemingly random act of violence that turns out to be premeditated murder. Clare Cosi, owner of the Village Blend coffeehouse in New York, finds a volunteer Santa dead in the snow and refuses to go along with the police verdict of a mugging that went too far. When she starts probing Santa’s personal life, she puts herself in danger. Coyle (actually a husband and wife writing team) includes an expanded recipe section that will be a boon to anyone who desperately needs to gain 10 pounds fast.

For those who want a more serious mystery, Maureen Ash offers Murder for Christ’s Mass, fourth in her gracefully written Templar Knights series. The time is Christmas of 1201. Templar Bascot de Marins, who escaped after eight years of imprisonment by the Saracens in the Holy Land, is visiting Lincoln when an employee of the local mint is found murdered in a stone quarry. Because the sheriff is busy entertaining noble guests, Bascot is enlisted to investigate the crime, with help from his assistant and ward, a 13-year-old boy named Gianni whom he rescued from the brink of starvation. Ash uses the authentic settings of Lincoln castle and the surrounding town and populates them with characters based on real historical figures. She is exceptionally deft at weaving together historical details to recreate an era without hitting the reader over the head with the full weight of her research.

Tell me which of these holiday mysteries appeals to you, and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free copy. If you don’t win – well, you know the location of your nearest bookstore, I trust! Books make wonderful holiday gifts, for friends, family, and yourself.

Hibernate, Hibernate, Sleep to the Music

Sharon Wildwind

With apologies to Three Dog Night for co-opting one of their song titles, today’s blog is a paean to sleep.

This morning I didn’t get out of bed. When my husband rolled out at his usual time, I turned over and went back to sleep. At 11:30 he asked me if I was getting up. I mumbled something, which he took correctly to be a negative answer, and went away. I woke up at 3:05 this afternoon.

I’m not sick, and I’m not especially tired, though the past week has been full of pleasant and tiring activities: long, productive writing periods; movies; seeing a play; making quilts; and attending a sewing bee.

Basically, I’m a squirrel at heart. All fall, I run around gathering. I love September sales of back-to-school supplies. I love not only autumn colors outside, but that quilting stores have an impressive stock of fabrics in those same colors inside. Halloween and both Thanksgivings—Canadian and American—are my favorite holidays. Fall is also the time for reconnecting socially. Organizations have Annual General Meetings. Groups and clubs start their fall meeting schedule. Schools have home-comings and tail-gate parties.

Eventually, like a squirrel, I get tired and want to hibernate. No matter how many artificial environments we create for ourselves, human beings are still mammals.

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh (American writer and aviation pioneer, 1906-2001)

I think she was absolutely right; in the winter we need more sleep. In truth, we need more sleep all year around. Sleep deprivation—now epidemic in developed countries—has been linked to everything from the obesity epidemic, to increased accident rates, and poor vision in children.

My husband and I are sleep-information magpies. Our latest bright, shiny bauble of sleep information had to do with a new alarm clock.

The digital clock that had served us since we married suddenly began displaying random numbers at odd times. Like other disposable electronics we were told that it wasn’t worth repairing, so I set off to find a new clock. I found one with large, bright blue numerals. Let me emphasize two words: LARGE and BRIGHT.

When we plugged it in, we could have read a newspaper by the light it emitted. We had to close our bedroom blinds least low-flying aircraft mistook our apartment for the end of the airport runway. We tried draping it with layers of cloth, then towels, and finally settled for propping a 1/4”-thick piece of smoke-colored acrylic Plexiglas in front of it. That dimmed the output to where it was barely possible to sleep.

Then we read research which said that any light that can be sensed through closed eyelids disrupts the sleep cycle. Good-bye blue alarm clock. In fact, good-bye all illuminated clocks. Good-bye night light in the hall, because if that light seeps into your bedroom, that’s enough to disturb the sleep cycle.

If you need a night light to go to the bathroom safely at night, attach one of those small, round, push-on lights near the bottom of your bed. Put it in a position where you can reach it from bed, but where the light shines mostly on the floor. Wake up, reach down and push the light on, make your trip to the bathroom, get back in bed, reach down and turn the light off.

Also, good-bye running the air purifier at night. There is some evidence to suggest, contrary to the years of suggestions to create white noise for better sleep, it’s quiet that really promotes sleep.

When I did come out of hibernation at three this afternoon, I discovered that the “light snow sprinkles” forecast for the afternoon, had in fact, turned into a mini-blizzard.

I can’t think of a better reason for hibernating. Night, night.

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If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters.

~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis

Twain, The Comet, and Mystery

by Julia Buckley
I once blogged here about Mark Twain and his relationship to the mystery novel. Twain is on my mind again, because he was born on this day in 1835. His birth coincided with the appearance of Halley's Comet in the night sky, and Twain always predicted that, because he "came in with the comet," he would go out with the comet, as well. That prediction came true in April of 1910. So, to his own satisfaction, he arrived and departed with the comet. As Twain put it, both he and the celestial event were "unaccountable freaks."

It makes one wonder if Twain was a bit of a mystic, along with his many other talents.

In any case, because I am buried under a mound of research papers, I will share with you some of the information on that long-distant Twain blog. Hopefully it will be new to you! Perhaps his prediction may have been fed by Twain's love of the mysterious, which was well known to his intimates. He was offended, though, by some of the fictional detectives of his time and their pompous natures. He once wrote: "What a curious thing a ‘detective’ story is. And was there ever one that the author needn’t be ashamed of, except ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’"*

Twain once wrote a satire of the Sherlock Holmes stories called "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story." The story begins this way:

"It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of unnumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God."

This paragraph makes me laugh because it so highlights Twain's gift for parody and exaggeration. A side note is that the "solitary oesophagus" is a bird of Twain's own creation, and he was surprised that few readers ever asked him about the fictional creature.

In any case, many of Twain's works reference mystery or contain a mysterious element. One of my favorites is Huckleberry Finn's "murder," which he fakes for himself in order to escape detection from his father, The Widow Douglas, and pretty much anyone else who might come looking for him. Huck makes it look as though he's been horribly murdered with an axe, remembering to pull out some of his hairs and place them in the pig's blood that is carefully smeared on the weapon. Those are details painstakingly noted by a man who enjoyed a good crime story.

Twain's death was a sad loss to the world of literature. He penned his thoughts on the notion of passing while lying on his deathbed: "Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved."

*Notebook 30, TS, p. 32, quoted by F. R. Rogers, Simon Wheeler, Detective (New York: New York Public Library, 1963--qtd in Howard G. Baetzhold's Of Detectives and Their Derring-Do: The Genesis of Mark Twain's 'The Stolen White Elephant.')

* Hendrickson, Robert. American Literary Anecdotes. New York: Penguin, 1990.]

Going to Carolina in My Mind

Eileen L. McGrath oversees a marvelous collection of books at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A colleague of hers started Read North Carolina Novels as a website in about 2004. He envisioned the site serving as a place where readers could find out about novels set in North Carolina that were readily available—the kind of novels that would be in any airport bookstore.

From there, Eileen picks up the story:

When I assumed responsibility for the site in 2008, I had a different vision. I wanted a site that would be more inclusive—not just the widely distributed books, but novels that might be just as good but that had fewer publisher resources supporting them. I also wanted to showcase our collection by adding older novels in addition to just-published titles. It seemed like a good idea to make the site more interactive, so a blog seemed the way to go. Jenny McElroy, a talented graduated student here at UNC, converted the website to a blog. Jenny also wrote a lot of the reviews in 2008 and 2009.

We've been building the new Read North Carolina Novels site for about a year. As of the beginning of 2009 November, the blog has write ups for about 500 books. This is a fraction of the number of novels in the North Carolina Collection. I don't have an exact count on the number of novels that we have here (we've been in business since the 19th century), but it's in the range of 3,500-5,000 titles.We have almost all the novels set in North Carolina, but I would guess that there are hundreds that we've missed.

The criteria for being included in the collection is that it is a work of fiction, set in North Carolina, no matter where the author may be from or now resides.

We’re still finding our way through the process for adding new books to the collection. I try to post at least twice a week, two novels each, for a total of four novels a week. That would be about 200 books a year added to the list. That's a minimum, and that won't keep up with the need. Right now I have 20 novels in my office waiting to be written up.

In addition to the on-line information, the collection forms a reference library. We also lend books out of the collection. In general, we'll have circulating copies of newer novels, those published in 2000 or afterwards. For older novels, it's hit or miss if we'll have an extra copy to circulate. If someone is interested in a particular book and thinks it might be in our collection, she or he can certainly contact us.

We’ve learned several things from managing this collection.

First, North Carolina is an attractive setting for certain genres, particularly mystery and romance. A woman on the run often lands up in the North Carolina mountains or on our coast.

Second, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when an out-of-state novelist used North Carolina as a setting, the "local color" elements could be a bit too generic. Writers today seem better at getting the details right. I think a lot of authors, if they don’t live in North Carolina already, come here to do research before they write their books. Who could blame them; it’s a great place to visit.

Third, the past is an attractive setting for many authors. The Civil War era is still number one as an historic time period, but we get in a steady trickle of novels set in the colonial period. Just this year we've gotten in a couple of books that are set in the early 20th century and present that as an historic period. This last development would be a shock to my mother-in-law and others of her generation.

Finally, we have a strong literary tradition in North Carolina. We've always had a lot of authors relative to the size of the population. Also, as a state we're getting larger—we're now the 10th most populous state. So, we're an attractive setting to outsiders and we've got a large, active resident writing community.

Some, but not many, university libraries have state-focused collections. University collections tend to focus on faculty authors and authors whose works are taught in classes rather than casting a wider net that covers the whole state. Large public libraries often do lists like this, and almost every public library has a section for local authors or books with local settings. This website has a nice listing of sites.

Eileen’s contact information:

Eileen L. McGrath, Assistant Curator

North Carolina Collection

Campus Box 3930

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890

The North Carolina Collection houses a huge amount of research and information about the state. To find the book list, go to the above link and click on Find a North Carolina Novel to read.

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We must remember that North Carolina is more than a collection of regions and people. We are one state, one people, one family, bound by a common concern for each other.

~Michael F. Easley, Governor of North Carolina, 2001-2009