Ships and Boats

Sharon Wildwind

When I was nine, I knew how to conduct a meeting. Some fifty-plus years later it appears that I no longer have this skill.

In Girl Scouts, the patrol meeting rules were clear:

Patrol meeting starts at 4:00 and ends at 4:15
Refreshments to follow. (Always an incentive for finishing on time.) The troop leader will hold up her hand when there is five minutes left in the meeting.

We’re meeting for a reason
Yes, the bike-hike will be a lot of fun, but today we are discussing the cook-out and campfire. We will discuss the bike-hike at another meeting.

The troop leader sets the agenda
Your patrol will be in charge of the campfire entertainment on Saturday. You need to plan one interactive game and pick five songs for the sing-along.

There was a right way to behave
Raise your hand before speaking. The patrol leader will recognize you when it’s time for you to speak. Pay attention when other people are talking. Be polite. Everyone’s opinion deserves to be heard.

Everybody contributes
Here is a sign-up sheet for the campfire. Sign up for the task that you will do.

Prep work is needed
We will need some extra sit-upons for our guests and sharpened sticks for toasting marshmallows. Everyone is expected to show up on Saturday with one extra sit-upon and two sharpened sticks.

Last week I happened upon a video of a talk about what’s wrong with meetings today, and how to fix them. Since the person giving the talk is in his thirties and most of the audience looked to be younger, I was all set for a glimpse into the twenty-something/thirty-something world of business and meetings. I couldn’t wait to see how the new technology — Power Point, digital hook-ups, electronic conferencing, etc. — had moved meetings out of the scout hut and into the 21st century.

Boy, was I in for a disappointment.

Here’s the scoop on modern meetings:

Meetings are a power play. If you have the power, you can call a meeting. There is no need to have a purpose for the meeting. People are too busy to make or read agendas. Just wing it.

Meeting times aren’t even a guideline;they’re more of a hint. Wander in whenever, especially if you are the person who called the meeting. However, never finish on time. Otherwise people might have time to do some real work before the next meeting begins.

Call another meeting for the same time tomorrow. The same rules apply.

Bring your personal data assistant, your cell phone, and your laptop to the meeting. Answer all phone calls, text on your PDA, and surf the web during the meeting. Don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the meeting. It probably doesn’t concern you anyway.

Bring food and drink. Extra points if the food or its wrapper (preferably both) make a lot of noise while you eat it. Extra points also if the food is sloppy and/or reeks of garlic, cumin, or other spices.

Take all the detours you want. If two people want to spend an hour discussing a topic completely unrelated to and of no interest to the rest of the group, it’s their right to do this.

It’s gauche to embarrass people by expecting them to take responsibility for a project or meet a deadline. It’s equally gauche to expect people to do any work between meetings.

Not only don’t I understand the new rules, but I can’t figure out for the life of me how we got here. When did people’s time, to say nothing of their talent, become so disrespected that we think we have a right to waste both?

The video did, indeed, offer some tips for improving meetings:
Meet for a purpose.
Have an agenda.
Start and stop on time.
Have a timekeeper.
Set and enforce rules for behavior.
Treat people with respect.
Set aside topics that aren’t relevant to the purpose and agenda. They can be discussed later.
Assign tasks and deadlines and expect them to be met.
Expect that prep work be done outside of the meeting and reported on at the next meeting.

You know, those things sounded vaguely familiar. I wonder where I heard them before?

The saddest thing that the speaker said was that people who try to promote a meeting format based on rules and respect are likely to be either disciplined or fired or both.

The speaker did say two things that gave me hope:

Follow the people who ship.
Meaning, glom on to the people who get things done. Learn from them how they do it. No matter what the organizational chart says, people who ship the goods on time are the real heart of any business.

The real value of a meeting is remove barriers. Nothing happens until a project has a deadline, a budget, and one owner. Otherwise it is a poster of a boat.
It may look pretty, and we might want to hang it on our wall, but baby, that boat ain’t going nowhere.

~The two bolded quotes above are from Merlin Mann (Techie Guy) from his talk to Twitter employees on 2010 October 6.
The non-bolded comments are mine.

The Ignominious Hound

by Julia Buckley

When I was a kid, we had a family dog named Buffy. She was part Collie, part Beagle, and part Norwegian Elkhound. She was a lovely animal with a big, fluffy tail and minimal intelligence. The only person in our family who wasn't enthralled by Buffy's charms was my father, who saw her as a perpetual nuisance and a drain on money. Naturally, it was my father that Buffy loved above all, and she'd follow him around when he got home from work, panting and smiling, until he set his briefcase down and treated her to a full back massage, all the while grumbling the words "No good, mangy hound. Useless, no-good, worthless dog." Buffy was immune to the verbal abuse, but she knew authority and good petting. She loved my father, perhaps because she sensed that if there was one person in our house who would instantly sell her to traveling gypsies, it was he.

I never understood why my father didn't seem to return the dog's undying love. But flash forward about thirty-five years and meet the Beagle in the picture above. That's Simon. My son waged a campaign for a few years before we relented and got him this little fellow as a companion. Simon reminds me of Buffy in many ways. They share a Beagle heritage, and his brain power is often reminiscent of Buffy's low-wattage efforts.

Simon loves my sons with typical doggie devotion; he seems fond yet wary of my curmudgeonly husband. But Simon simply loves me, perhaps because he knows that I'm a hard sell in my older years. Like my father, I'm the one responsible for the dog's room and board, and while my sons walk him intermittently (read: when they feel like it), I have to be sure that the dog gets a healthy amount of fresh air and exercise. There are five pets in our family and my husband and children are content to rely upon the fact that I will keep all of them alive.

Simon and I had a rocky start to our alliance. We got him as a six-month-old pup, and we were assured that he was potty trained. When we returned home with him two days before Christmas, though, we found that this was not true, and that Simon preferred to make his deposits in the warm indoors rather than in the icy back yard. This fact significantly lessened the joy of my holidays that year. :)

Simon has spent years trying to get us to adapt to his indulgences--all of them rather gross experiences that he has when he follows his unusually long nose into trouble. Because he wouldn't leave our garbage alone, we had to start putting the can on a high chair. This worked for several years, but in his older age Simon is becoming either canny or desperate. He has found a way to tumble the kitchen garbage can off of its chair so that he can munch on its contents.

Unwilling to concede defeat, we began locking the kitchen garbage in the bathroom when we went to work and school each day. This worked for a while, but today, Saturday, I emptied all of the garbages in the morning, then went to drive my husband to work. Alas, I forgot to take the garbage with me. I returned home to find the Beagle slinking out of the kitchen with his patented guilty look. On the floor--and I mean all over the floor--was the evidence that he had been chewing coffee grounds and eggshells and empty meat trays which still held aromas dear to his heart.

"Simon!" I yelled. He trailed slowly into the kitchen, knowing that he was in trouble, and went right outside when I opened the door. Simon gets a lot of time-outs in the back yard, but I think he feels safer out there than he would in a room with my stewing anger.

Eventually, though, he barked at the door, as if to say that he'd had enough. My sons had been ordered to clean up after their dog, and for once they did it without complaint, obviously fearing that I was about to drive Simon to the pound.

Instead, I let him in and glared at him as he trotted past.

In our family, though, I am the one whom the dog worships. He lies at my feet when I type at the computer (as he is doing now); he waits for me at night before retiring, and we go upstairs together like an old married couple. We learned long ago that his upstairs basket (yes, he has two) must be near me, or he will simply get out in the night and stretch out near my side of the bed. When I leave he whines, and when I return he celebrates. Because I find him handy as a food-cleaner-upper, he regularly seeks snacks from me, and if he doesn't get them he growls in his throat until I meet his gaze, and then he jumps up and down as if to say, "Let's go get my food!"

The dog is often in a state of ignominy, at least with me. On more than one occasion he has come close to breaking my legs by running past me while I'm climbing or descending the stairs. He doesn't smell great, even after his bath, and he barks at every darn thing.

Still, I am used to him. When he finishes his doggie dreams, he'll get up on his sturdy little legs and start sighing at me to feed him or take him for a walk. And I'll do it, because someone has to, and he looks really cute when he's trotting down the street with his adventurous expression, peeking over his shoulder now and then to make sure I'm at the other end of the leash.

The Beauty of a Hurricane

Kathryn Casey (Guest Blogger)

I’d like to say before I go any further that I’m not advocating for hurricanes. I’ve lived through a handful over the years, and I’ve seen the flooding and destruction. I understand that people die in hurricanes, real people. I was in New Orleans as a reporter after Katrina,
and there wasn’t anything entertaining about the destruction. And I live in Houston. The bottom line is that I’m not suggesting anyone invite one home. In most instances, it’s not a recipe for a good time.

Not real hurricanes, that is, but there’s certainly a case to be made for fictional ones.

First, I have a confession to make. It’s not like this was purely a serendipitous discovery. It happened in early 2009, after I’d turned in the second book in my Sarah Armstrong mystery series. My heroine is a Texas Ranger/profiler, and in the first book, Singularity, I’d had Sarah hunt a serial killer. In the second, Blood Lines, she fought off a would-be killer stalking a pop star. The problem was what to do for book number three.

Fiction, of course, imitates life, and when I searched for my new plotline, Hurricane Ike’s march on Galveston and Houston was a very recent memory. The palm trees in my backyard were still stripped half bare from Ike’s 100 mile-per-hour winds, and the guestroom window’s shutters, the ones blown off in the storm, were yet to be replaced. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one day while walking my dog, Nelson, I thought, you know, a hurricane could be interesting.

In the end, a hurricane was exactly what I needed. It worked so well, in fact, that I named the book after my hurricane, calling it: The Killing Storm.

When the book opens, Hurricane Juanita is three days out, just entering the Gulf of Mexico, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Although I didn’t consciously plan all of this, in hindsight the approaching hurricane serves three functions. First: it imbues a sense of impending danger that fits nicely with the overall plot, the frantic hunt for a four-year-old boy kidnapped from a Houston park. Second: Juanita is a ticking clock. Sarah and all the characters understand that the boy is in the hands of a madman, and they know that if they don’t find him before the hurricane hits, it will be too late. Third: the deadly storm adds to the forces my protagonist has to conquer in her quest to save the lost child.

For those who haven’t lived through one, I can only say a hurricane is like being surrounded by the a gigantic thunderstorm on steroids, one that seems as if it will never end. Hurricane Ike took its time going over my house. Our garage door creaked as the changing pressure sucked the metal in and forced it out, and the sound of wind was so loud at times that we had to shout to be heard. Then, about halfway through the storm, all grew quiet, and my husband and I walked outside and stood on our front porch. The storm was projected to take twelve hours to pass, and we knew we had another six to go. Assessing the damage, we saw downed branches, fallen trees, and streets that had been turned into fast-moving rivers. We didn’t yet know how badly the rest of the city had suffered. The electricity had been out for hours, so all we had was our battery-operated radio, blaring warnings to hunker down and stay inside. Yet for this brief interlude, all was eerily calm. We were, of course, in the hurricane’s eye.

Moments later, the wind kicked back in, the rain again began to fall, and the brief glimpse of sunshine waned. The dark clouds returned, and we hurried inside, eager to stay safe and wait out the storm.


Kathryn Casey is the author of three mysteries and six true crime books. An award-winning journalist, her Web site is www.kathryncasey.com.

THE ELECTION IS OVER

by Sheila Connolly

No, I'm not going to write about politics, exactly.  I'm going to wallow in the blessed quiet now that we are not being bombarded by mean-spirited and mendacious ads every five minutes.  And robo-callers, who managed to crash parts of the phone system in Massachusetts the other day through sheer volume.  BTW, Massachusetts had near-record voter turnout, so maybe all those calls worked.

Clearly some people get very invested in politics, local or national (that is, not the ones who say "I don't vote because what difference does it make?").  I understand that, because I was part of a couple of political campaigns, nearly twenty years ago now.

I have to say that the U.S. Senate race for which I was a paid staffer provided some of the most exciting moments of my life, before or since.  I showed up in typical volunteer fashion, because I was between jobs and had free time, and because someone I knew was doing it and I respected her opinion.  I knew little about the candidate and her positions, but I liked the idea of working for a woman candidate.  I started out doing data entry--if you can believe it, there was only one young guy doing it when I arrived.  I did this for a couple of weeks and then told the senior staff that they were about to get overwhelmed.  They put me on staff.  In the few months I was there, we processed 60,000 contributions (and I got carpal tunnel).

At 40-something, I was one of the oldest members of the staff, after the candidate and the campaign manager.  The rest were eager, starry-eyed kids--but I learned that you need that kind of energy to run any campaign.  It became an ad hoc family--we celebrated small victories, and griped about the unfairness of it all when people said mean things about our candidate in the press.  There was a persistent flavor of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, "hey, let's put on a play!"  We were making it up as we went, and having a very good time.

On Election Day I woke up (around four a.m.) feeling like a kid at Christmas, eager to dive into the presents under the tree.  All things were still possible, and at campaign HQ we all believed that to our core.

We lost.  We lost for good reasons--our candidate wouldn't play ball with the city pols who wanted "walking around money" for their poll people.  We ran a good, honest campaign, but it wasn't quite good enough.  At least it was fair.

So I understand the excitement that surrounds elections.  People care--maybe for the wrong reasons, but they care enough to get involved and take action, and I applaud that.

And I'm going to tap into that in the next Orchard Series book I'm planning.  I want to look at local politics--and what would lead someone to kill for a campaign.  I think it's completely believable.

Murder to Mil-Spec: Challenging topic, good deed

Elizabeth Zelvin

I had already started work on a Christmas/Chanukah crime story, planning to submit it to Wolfmont Press for what I assumed would be the publisher’s fifth annual anthology of holiday crime stories to benefit Toys for Tots, when I learned that Wolfmont had a different agenda this year: creating an anthology of crime stories on military themes, to benefit a charity called Homes for Our Troops.

Any short story writer can write a holiday story, and nobody hesitates to contribute to a charity that gives toys to needy kids. A lot of writers, who, like me, had contributed to Wolfmont’s previous charitable anthologies sighed and capped their virtual pens, saying, “I can’t write a military story.” At first, I said the same. I thought I’d have to give Wolfmont a miss this year. And then, as so often happens after I say, “I can’t,” I got an idea.

I’ve since applied the technique for generating a story that I used on this occasion to other calls for submission on topics I don’t know much about. It’s simple enough: I said to myself, “I don’t know much about the military, but is there any aspect of the military that I do know something about?” The answer was, “Yes.” As a mental health and addictions professional who’s spent twenty-five years working with alcoholics and addicts in all walks of life, from celebrities and CEOs to the homeless, I know plenty about substance-abusing Vietnam vets and post-traumatic stress. And so my character, Larry, was born: an alcoholic Vietnam vet who works in a bar, is constantly on guard against his memories, avoids relationships, and thinks he has no future—and no choice but to go on exactly the way he is. I called the story “Choices.”

I’ve spent most of my life among people who are not particularly sympathetic to the military in general. On the other hand, just about everyone, regardless of political position, feels compassion for those who come home with severe disabilities. Homes for Our Troops addresses the dilemma of veterans who need housing that is accessible and adapted to their needs: doorways wide enough to fit a wheelchair through, for example.

The more I heard about Homes for Our Troops, the more I liked it. They go into a disabled veteran’s community and engage the people of that community in building a house for that vet. They supply the funds and special expertise, but everybody helps. It’s a lot like an old-fashioned barn raising. By the time the house is ready, the vet and his or her family know their neighbors and have become a warmly welcomed part of their community. Well worth the price of a $12 book of terrific short stories, don’t you think?

You can buy Murder to Mil-Spec at The Digital Bookshop in print and e-book formats, online at Amazon in print or Kindle, or online in print format at Barnes & Noble. The authors will also have copies to sign and sell as they appear around the country. For example, Barb Goffman and I will be reading from our stories at the public library in Reston, VA on December 7. The other talented authors, who have rung a dazzling variety of changes on the theme, include Terrie Farley Moran, Dorothy B. Francis, Big Jim Williams, Lina Zeldovich, Charles Schaeffer, Howard B. Carron, Brendan Dubois, Janis Patterson, S.M. Harding, and Diana Catt.

The Price of Beauty

Sandra Parshall

So here’s yet another long feature, this time in the December issue of Psychology Today, about research proving that beautiful people have an easier time getting ahead in the world.

Ho hum. What else is new?

Actually, I did come across something new in a sidebar. PT blogger Heidi Grant Halvorson reports on studies showing that beautiful women may be held back if the people deciding their fate are other women. Psychologist Maria Agthe looked into ratings of applicants for graduate scholarships and found that both males and females tended to give higher ratings to attractive members of the opposite sex – but the women responsible for judging applications penalized females who were beautiful. Halvorson points out that many ordinary-looking people don’t want gorgeous members of the same sex around to make them feel inferior.

This isn’t new information in the sense of being previously unheard of. We all instinctively recognize that reaction, don’t we? The desire not to make ourselves look bad by standing next to someone who outshines us. But I’ve never seen it presented as a studied, proven occurrence that can affect the course of educational and professional lives.

It’s just one more piece of proof that we’re at the mercy of our biology. Standards of female beauty are universal: youth, beautiful skin (a sign of good health), symmetrical features, and an hourglass figure (whether the culture values thinness or rounder figures, men want to see a waist). All these attributes indicate a woman is a good bet for passing on a man’s genes. A guy meeting an attractive woman for the first time probably isn’t consciously thinking I want her to have my children, but some primitive instinct is responding in exactly that way. Youth is all-important. Any older woman can tell you that past a certain age she became “invisible” to men. If she’s plain, she’s probably always felt that way. Although it’s dismaying to see proof that some women penalize others for being attractive, it’s hardly surprising that ordinary women don’t want to invite comparisons with beauties.

Even with other females trying to hold them back, though, attractive women often do better in their careers than equally talented and intelligent plain women. Good-looking men also tend to fare better than the ordinary or the ugly. As reported in Psychology Today, economist Daniel Hammermesh discovered that over the course of a career a handsome man will earn $250,000 more than his least attractive peer.

And yet.

When they’re looking for a passing romance, a fling, women may go for the best-looking guy at the bar. But when they have marriage and stability in mind, women don’t care as much about looks as they do about other factors that make a man a good mate. We’ve all seen beautiful women on the arms of ordinary or downright homely men. (Remember Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis?) What’s going on there? Simply stated, it’s the innate female desire for security. A plain man may become irresistible if he dresses in tailor-made suits and drives an expensive car. Those things spell status, and whether we like it or not, study after study has shown that women want to marry men who can offer them a stable, comfortable life.

Psychologist James McNulty at the University of Tennessee analyzed the relationships of various couples and found that the most supportive pairings were attractive women with less attractive husbands. In the least successful pairings, the husbands were more attractive than their wives. McNulty observed that a very attractive man may have trouble settling down and feeling satisfied with a single mate, and might resent missing “opportunities” with other women.

All this being true, it shouldn’t be surprising that some women in positions of authority will try to hold back other women, even the most capable and  talented, if they happen to be attractive. Still, it’s a sad thing to think about. It gives new meaning to that line from the old shampoo commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

The Case of the Hybrid Hibiscus

Sharon Wildwind

No, it’s not an Earl Stanley Gardner title. It’s a little side passion I’ve developed.

A while back I got bored with typed pages of notes, stapled in one corner. About this time I was making my first foray into bookbinding by learning to do simple pamphlet binding. Pamphlet binding requires simple computer manipulation of typed text, a sharp needle, embroidery thread, and, if you want to get fancy, a drop or two of Fray-Check for the ends of the thread.

Instead of typing my notes in a single column, I set up the page in a landscape, two-column format, type away and do some page manipulation so that the pages can be folded in the middle. Punch an odd number of holes in the fold, sew the pages together with the embroidery thread and Fray-Check the ends.

It was so cool and easy to make these little books that I decided it wouldn’t be any trouble at all to add a cover sheet of stiffer, colorful card stock. Then I started printing on the covers. And as long as I had those neat covers, it would be a minute’s work to make pockets on the inside. Maybe some embellishments on the cover? A little line drawing, a face molded out of paper clay, a few beads? You can see where this is leading? Anyone out there thinking the obsession word?

Well, okay, maybe.

In any case, every fall I collect the bits and pieces I’ve learned about writing during the past year and incorporate them into a document that started out being called Vision and Revision. I mean, how boring can you get?

A few years ago I started naming each year’s output in the style of a famous mystery writer. The first year it was Thyme Will Tell, incorporating the name of an herb into the title like Susan Wittig Albert does. Last year it was The Clue in the Printed Page, a nod to Nancy Drew titles.

This year because I had some wonderful red and white hibiscus card stock Earl Stanley Gardner got the nod with The Case of the Hybrid Hibiscus. Hibiscus because of the card-stock and Hybrid because of how many writers I've grafted together in one pamphlet.

I’d love to share my how-to book with you, but I can’t because, frankly, I've stolen almost everything in there from other writers, and that limits me to one copy, for personal use only. But I will share my index with you and the list of people from whom I’ve cribbed, which you are welcome to use as a guide o build your own how-to book.

Writing a Novel: Theme Statement to Final File Clean-up

Global View and Plot Layers (both modified from Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel workshop and manual

Brand, blurbs and Hooks (courtesy of Suzanne McMinn, Caroline Scott, and Kathy Lynch Carmichael)

Synopsis (from my favorite synopsis queen Beth Anderson)

Then I’ve got some stuff unique to the writing organization software that I use and a list of the templates I’ve set up inside that software. I've set up character, scene, and sequel templates.

Scene and Sequel (thanks to Sherry Lewis and her Dancing on Coals workshops)

Writing a Novel
Establish the skeleton (draft zero, the unfinished manuscript)
Add muscle to the story (first complete rewrite)
Allow emotions to take over (second complete rewrite)

Preliminary Editing
What backups to make and when to make them.
Using the writing organization software to make a bridge from writing to editing.
Find-word Edit (first editing pass)
The Nuts-and-Bolts of Book Killers (lots of people here)

Final content revision
What is this novel worth to you? (Getting outside readers)
Final content revision tips (thanks to Liz Loundbury)
Final formatting: what the publisher wants, the publisher gets

Building a submission package

Final File Clean-Up, Archival copies, and updating things like timelines so you can start the next book in the series.
----
Quote for the week:
It's a jungle out there and an author needs a good sharp machete.
~Pat Browning, mystery writer

Colorful card stock, drawing materials, and a little paper clay don't go amiss either. (Sharon's comment)

My Kindle Adventure

by Julia Buckley

When I decided to put my mystery novel Madeline Mann on Kindle, I was immediately thrust into the realities of the new and fascinating technological world. The decisions that once would have been made by my publisher (who orphaned the novel) were now going to have to be made by me.

For example, I couldn't use the publisher's original art. But I knew that I wanted Madeline, my character, to be on the front. So one day, while I was grading papers in the school library across from my new colleague, Valerie, I found myself assessing her for book cover potential. She was young and attractive. She taught speech; she had been in student productions, which meant she had dramatic talent.

"Valerie," I asked, "would you have any interest in posing for a book cover that's going to be on Kindle?"

You might ask: How awkward is it to approach a relative stranger to ask her to pose for a photograph you'd like for your personal use? Answer: very. Not only is there a potentially creepy element to it (read: stalker), but there's also the possibility that the person might find you strange when you explain that you just need to take some pictures in which they look vaguely as if they are in danger.

Luckily, Valerie found the whole thing intriguing and rather a lark. She said that she could tell her brand new husband to download the book and then she could surprise him with her own image.

So, along with Kelly, the art teacher I had asked to design the whole thing, we trudged out to the tree-lined lane in front of the school and Kelly started posing Valerie in different scenarios. We have a whole series of photos that involve Valerie looking mysterious, like this:


I had to decide between several really great photographs before I chose the one that you see above.

When I selected the one I liked, I approached Kelly, the artist. "There's just one thing," I said as she put away her expensive equipment. "Madeline is blonde. She actually dyes her hair in the story, and it's sort of important in the plot. And Valerie is a brunette. Is there any way you could make her blonde on the cover?"

"Sure," Kelly said. And that was it. Photoshop magic, and something entirely beyond me.

So Madeline Mann has now been launched online, thanks to the talent and collaborative spirit of my colleagues.

A Rose by Any Other Name

by guest blogger Leslie Wheeler

With all due respect to Shakespeare’s Juliet, who had good reason to proclaim to Romeo that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I beg to differ. 

What’s in a name?  A lot actually.

For me at least, a character can’t come to life until I’ve found just the right name for him or her.  The naming process is often fun: you start with the vague idea of a character and select a name which seems to fit that character, because of the associations it carries. Sometimes these associations are deeply personal, sometimes not.  When I can’t think of an appropriate name that belongs to someone I know or have known, I find those name-your-baby books helpful. Or if I’m really desperate, I’ll pick up the phone book.  Once I’ve got my name, I can begin the process of fleshing out the character.

In the past, I haven’t had to worry much about dreaming up place names, because my first two books are set at real places: Murder at Plimoth Plantation, at the Pilgrim village of the same name, and Murder at Gettysburg at the town in Pennsylvania.  My third book was supposed to be called Murder at Mystic Seaport, but then both the Seaport and my publisher decided the name needed to be changed “to protect the innocent” (the Seaport and my publisher) from the aspersions that would be cast on the Seaport if it were connected with a murder, albeit fictional.  So I was faced with the daunting prospect of re-naming not only the museum and the village of Mystic, but all the real-life restaurants, bars, and ships I’d mentioned in the book.  

I began my quest for a replacement name for Mystic by jotting several possibilities on a legal pad. But none satisfied me.  Then, on a long drive from Burlington, Vermont back to Boston, I had a “Eureka” moment.  Mystic would become Spouters Point (with no apostrophe, as in Harpers Ferry).  Readers of Moby Dick will know that the name comes from the Spouter’s Inn in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Ishmael spends the night on his way to Nantucket, and where he meets the native harpooner, Queequeg. 

From then on it was smooth sailing: Mystic Seaport became the Spouters Point Maritime Museum, the whaler Charles W. Morgan became the Susan Kilrain (after a woman who’d won the right to have a character named after her in my next book at a charity benefit auction), and so on until I hit another snag.

Mystic Seaport wasn’t the only real place name I’d used in the book.  There was the Mashantucket-Pequot-owned gambling casino of Foxwoods.  An important part of the book is devoted to Foxwoods and to the history of the tribe itself. Anxious to get permission to use the Foxwoods name, I contacted a lawyer for the tribe, who told me he would need to present my request before the tribal council.  I dutifully made my case, and by the time I was done, I’d sent the lawyer copies of every page in the manuscript where Foxwoods and/or the tribe were mentioned. 

Weeks passed and still no answer was forthcoming. “It could happen tomorrow, or it could be months down the road,” the lawyer told me.  Reluctantly, I decided to withdraw my request and change the name.  Foxwoods became Clambanks. I wasn’t finished, however.  When I contacted the “rights” person at my publisher to make sure I had done everything I was supposed to, I was told that I needed to change the name of the tribe as well.  Fortunately, I found a glossary of Algonquin words in the back of a book written by a seventeenth-century visitor to New England, and there found a name for my tribe: the Mashantucket Pequots became the Dottagucks.

The moral of the story: unless you’re a big-name author with a big-name publisher, you may have to fictionalize names of people, places, and institutions, as I did.  Once I got going, the process of re-naming wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought, but I still wish I could have avoided it. 

But back to the question with which I began: Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Yes and no. “No,” because I’d seen people’s faces light up when I told them I was writing a mystery set at Mystic Seaport.  Knowing and loving the Seaport, they were excited about the prospect of reading a book that takes place there. Now, of course, this doesn’t happen.  Instead, I get puzzled looks. “Where is Spouters Point?” people ask, assuming it’s a real place. This is the “yes” part, because it shows that at least I’ve managed to pique their curiosity with my new name. And their interest in the location of the village I’ve created gives me a chance to explain that Spouters Point is a fictionalized Mystic Seaport.  So, in a sense, I get to have it both ways.

Visit Leslie’s website at http://www.lesliewheeler.com.

FOLLOW YOUR DREAM

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I went to an Irish harp performance. I wouldn’t call it a concert, because it took place in a small community center with perhaps thirty people in the audience. It was sponsored by Cumann na Gaeilge (Friends of the Irish), the people from whom I take Irish language lessons.

It was a delightful event presented by a solo performer, Regina Delaney. She provided not only some lovely music but also a brief history of the harp in Ireland and the musicians who played it, and she played samples of music from every era, spanning over a thousand years. She also explained how her harp works (to be precise, it is a wire-strung lever harp; the levers are used to change the pitch of individual strings and thus the key of a song), and the charming terminology that the old harpers used.

In the middle there are two strings tuned to the same pitch, and historically in Ireland these have been called the “two sisters.” All the other strings were then defined in relation to those central strings (e.g., the “third string from the first sister”). I’m not much of a musician so I won’t even try to explain the intricacies of tuning or playing the thing. But it certainly sounds pretty. In fact, one interesting tidbit that Regina told us was that there is some inherent tonality in that kind of harp that is particularly soothing to humans. I’m willing to accept that (although beware if you do any online research, because the claims quickly drift into the realm of “woo-woo”).

But, believe it or not, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Regina Delaney is a fifty-something American-born woman, whose harp is nearly bigger than she is (and, yes, she carried it around by herself). She was originally from New Jersey, and has training in both nursing and engineering. She was holding down jobs in both fields at once as well as raising her children a decade or so ago when she happened to accompany a friend into a music store, and fell in love—with a harp.

The observant shopkeeper saw her interest and told her she could borrow it, take it home, get to know it. She did, and she never looked back—she completely changed her direction in the middle of her life. And her joy in her playing, and in sharing it with others, is still clear and strong. Her message is simple: follow your dream, do what you love. Does she make much money? No. We passed that hat at the event, to cover her gas money. Is she happy? I’d say yes. How can you go wrong nurturing a tradition that goes back over a millennium, and making other people happy, all at once?

And that’s what writers do. We use a different medium—words rather than musical notes—but we feel the same sense of passion and connectedness when we write, for ourselves or for others. We work within an historic framework that is far older than we are, and we are part of the continuum. For most of us, it’s not a profession, it's a dream.

You never know when you’ll stumble over your true passion, but when you do—embrace it!

(Now, aren't you glad I didn't write about politics?)