Focus and Be Happy: What Concentration Does for the Mind (And the Soul)

by Julia Buckley

People spend almost fifty percent of their time thinking about something other than what they're doing, according to this article in Science Daily. In addition, the magazine reports that the less people focus on the tasks at hand, the less happy they are. The study's conclusion: a wandering mind is not a happy one.

How might this experiment be skewed by a group of writers? Their minds undoubtedly wander a great deal of the time, but those minds are immersed in the act of creation. Is that the same thing as daydreaming or lacking concentration?

The study suggests that the only act which receives a person's full attention is the act of making love (although don't many people say that they enjoy fantasizing during sex?)

The notion that we would be happier if we focused on our tasks is an interesting one. It backs up Camus' existential idea that one need only embrace immediate needs and desires because nothing else ultimately matters.

In an age of multitasking, we have apparently trained ourselves to do our many tasks without giving them much thought. Perhaps by reclaiming our thoughts we can improve the quality of our thinking--but this is where science meets philosophy.

Ex Marks the Plot

by Ann Parker, guest blogger

Leave a comment to enter a drawing for a free book!

First, I’d like to thank Poe’s Deadly Daughters for the opportunity to post here as part of my virtual tour for Mercury's Rise, the latest in my Silver Rush historical mystery series, which is based in 1880s Colorado.

Second, I’d like to sing the praises of reference librarians and subject matter experts! Many’s the time I’ve hunted for specific information on a subject, only to be left howling in the vastness of the internet. Well, maybe not many times, but often enough to become very frustrated with certain topics.

Such as divorce.


Particularly, divorce in the nineteenth century U.S.

Specifically, divorce in 1880 in Colorado.

I have collected plenty of books that touch on or deal directly with the general topic, including Robert L. Griwsold’s Family and Divorce in California, 1850–1890; Thomas J. Schlereth’s Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life; Ellen K. Rothman’s Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America; Glenda Riley’s Divorce: An American Tradition and her Building and Breaking Families in the American West; as well as Ruth Rymer Miller’s PhD thesis Alimony and Divorce: An Historical-Comparative Study of Gender Conflict. I even haunted the law library in Denver some years ago and made copies of things like the Code of Civil Procedure and Session Laws of Colorado, 1879 (when there were changes to codes) and… and…

What the heck was I doing?? I’m no lawyer! Not even close! How do I interpret this stuff?

Plus, I was getting nervous about the particulars of "my case," that is, the case of my protagonist, Inez Stannert. Inez’s husband has been missing for well over a year. During this time, she remakes her life. She takes a lover. She runs a saloon with her husband’s business partner, and she runs it very well, and begins making other business deals "on the side." She sends her young son, not quite two, back East to live with her sister. Inez decides to divorce her vanished husband, grounds of desertion. In Mercury's Rise, her carefully laid plans are swept aside, as if no more substantial than as a house of cards, when her husband, Mark Stannert, returns.

I sat, surrounded by my books and references, staring at my computer, wondering: What now?
What would Inez’s lawyer advise? What would Inez think, feel? What would Mark do? What would happen to their child, their business, her reputation, her relationship with her lover, Reverend Sands.
 
It was at this point, while at the Malice Domestic conference, that I bid on (and won) a few hours of research assistance from research librarian Jeanne Munn Bracken (http://www.jeannemunnbracken.com/). I confessed my concerns about Inez and her future, and Jeanne put me in touch with Hendrik Hartog, Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, and Michael Grossberg, Sally M. Reahard Professor of History and Professor of Law at Indiana University. I was so relieved to find experts… experts at last!... who were willing to listen to and answer my questions. They agreed that the key issue was "fault," which would have to be central in any depiction of a couple going through a divorce during this time. Professor Grossberg added that, by the 1880s or so, maternal preference dominated the law and thus there would be a legal presumption in favor of giving custody to a mother. But that also meant that attacks on a woman’s character, virtue, parenting skills, and the like could be part of a bitter divorce.

Attacks on the wife’s virtue, you say? Her character? Parenting skills? Hmmmmm. The wheels in my mind began to turn….

Professor Hartog agreed with his colleague, adding, "In general most mothers of young children would get custody, but the claim had to be framed in terms of the misbehavior/abandonment of the husband. And misbehavior (which might be little more than having a job or choosing a different or no church to go to) by the wife might be enough to ensure her loss of custody, even of a child/infant of tender years."
 
As for Inez’s financial situation and business dealings, now that Mark has returned… I won’t say too much except to report Professor Hartog’s summation: "A tangled mess."
 
All in all, I owe much to researcher Jeanne and professors Hartog and Grossberg. The professors gave me some wonderful fodder for fiction, plus I added their excellent books to my tower of references: Hartog’s Man and Wife in America: A History, and Grossberg’s Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America.

Thus fortified, I was able to move forward at last, to plot and scheme poor Inez’s situation for Mercury's Rise and look into her future with something more certain than a crystal ball!
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Ann Parker is a California-based science/corporate writer by day and an historical mystery writer by night. Her award-winning Silver Rush series, featuring saloon-owner Inez Stannert, is set in 1880s Colorado, primarily in the silver-mining boomtown of Leadville. The latest in her series, Mercury's Rise, was released November 1. Publishers Weekly says, "Parker smoothly mixes the personal dramas and the detection in an installment that’s an easy jumping-on point for newcomers." Library Journal adds, "Parker’s depth of knowledge coupled with an all-too-human cast leaves us eager to see what Inez will do next. Encore!

Learn more about Ann and her books at http://www.annparker.net.

Leave a comment on this post to be eligible to win a Silver Rush mystery prize! Winner will be announced later this week. To see the rest of Ann’s blog tour, check out her News page.

Where Would I Be Without You?

by Sheila Connolly

As I mentioned a month or so ago, I scheduled another trip to Old Sturbridge Village (I swear they aren't paying me to say this!) to hear Bruce Irving and his sidekick Norm Abram speak. Bruce, formerly producer of This Old House, has recently published a book titled New England Icons, in which he combined lovely photographs by Greg Premru and short essays, seeking to define what elements characterize New England in our popular culture, with a little dash of "why." Norm has written the preface to it.

As I've said before, I write about New England because of that mental image that we share—and because of all those departed ancestors who keep calling to me (yes, Bruce has a chapter on cemeteries). I'll admit I fell under the spell long-distance before I was in my teens, and I haven't been disappointed in the times ( plural) that I've lived here. It feels like "home" to me.

I went to this event because I wanted to meet Norm Abram. However, it wasn't until I was sitting at the event (a nice luncheon of locally-sourced foods, assembled a mere day after OSV regained power after the big storm) that I realized the impact Norm has had on my life, and on my writing.

I've been a devotee of This Old House since its first season. Long before my husband and I bought a Victorian home, I had virtually memorized the original book, about the renovation of a Victorian home in Dorchester, MA. (That one was written by Bob Vila and Jane Davidson, but Norm shows up in a number of the photographs.) I've also watched New Yankee Workshop for years. I can't tell you how many useful details I've learned from watching both shows. Mind you, I'm not a carpenter—in fact, I'm a bit scared of power tools, and use our miter saw with trepidation—but at least I know which is what and what to do with it, thanks to Norm et al. I even bought a spokeshave (look it up), which I've used for fitting shingles.

Lest you think I'm straying too far from a literary theme, I have come to realize that a lot of what I learned about renovation comes from books. Like any good academic, I had to read up on a subject before I could tackle it directly. A book gives you an overview, tells you about the sequence of events that must occur, warns you about pitfalls, and shows you the final product you're aiming for (as an aside, I feel the same way about Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: she gives clear instructions, provides simple drawings, and tells you that if your sauce looks curdled, you can still fix it).

The television shows only reinforced the written instructions for me. In addition, I see now that each half-hour segment tells a story. The goals are set at the beginning (wire a room, pour a foundation, etc.); the tools and personnel are gathered; the work progresses, with a few detours and surprises (what, some idiot sawed through the major supporting beam?); and in the end there is a satisfactory resolution--and the owner has something tangible he or she can inhabit or sit on.

In addition, there has always been a subtext about the conflict between respecting the work of the past and introducing modern innovations. How much of the old do you keep? For example: In the early days of the colonies, wood was plentiful, especially compared to over-harvested England, where most of the colonists originated, and the builders went a little crazy with it. They built huge central fireplaces; no matter that most of the heat went up the chimney rather than warming the house, because they had wood to spare. It took a while before that first giddy exuberance was tempered, and fireplace design improved.

But today the practical and the romantic collide: most American homes, even the ones being built today, have fireplaces. We no longer need them for heat, but they call to us on some fundamental level. Even Norm admits that when he built his own house, he incorporated four fireplaces; the family uses only one of them, and the rest are a tribute to our shared colonial heritage. A house is not a home without a hearth (or four).

In the Orchard series I write about a colonial house built ca. 1760. Yes, it was built around a massive central chimney with multiple fireplaces (the brick piers in the basement are huge). Although the real house that I use for a model was modified in the 19th century, in the book I restored it to its original form—and my protagonist finds herself using the fireplace for its intended purpose when her furnace gives up the ghost during a blizzard. In the Museum mysteries, my heroine owns what was formerly a tiny carriage house, but when she bought it she made a point of installing a working fireplace for her own enjoyment. Obviously, consciously or sub-consciously I have absorbed the iconic nature of this architectural feature.

I couldn't have done it—refurbished houses or written about them—without Norm and all the other guys (and the occasional woman) on This Old House, so I offer my thanks to all of you.

What about you?  Do you preserve the old or embrace the new?


P.S. I did ask both men what was the most interesting thing the ever found in a house they were reworking. Sorry, no bodies, although they did find a carefully hidden bottle of laudanum.

Heaven in the Hamptons: Round Swamp Farm

Elizabeth Zelvin

An unassuming exterior

From the first pat on the shoulder from matriarch Carolyn Lester Snyder (“How are you today, honey?”) to the smile from sisters Dianna and Claire as they ring up my luscious purchases faster than the speed of light (“Put your basket right up here, honey”), the ladies of Round Swamp Farm in East Hampton, the best farm market and then some on Long Island or maybe anywhere, make their customers feel right at home.

Liz at Round Swamp Farm

When I told Carolyn I was blogging about her, she wouldn’t let me take her picture but insisted on snapping one of me.

The family has been on their land for more than three hundred years, and those babies everyone is cooing over are the twelfth generation of “farmers of land and sea.” The three or four next latest generations are the bustling, cheerful flock of mostly redheads who prepare, arrange, and sell the perfect fruits and vegetables, today’s catch of fish and seafood and corn picked only an hour or two ago, delectable baked goods, and ever increasing variety of delicious prepared dishes for summer people who are too blissed out to cook when they get back from the beach. Just walking in there makes me feel cheerful, even when it’s hours till mealtime and a chance to taste all this gorgeous food.

A sumptuous display inside

The impact of weather shows the produce is really home grown.

The Round Swamp folks don’t need a plug from me. Martha Stewart has featured the market on TV. Hillary Clinton wrote them a warm letter after she visited. One day I heard Carolyn telling whoever had answered the phone that she didn’t have time to talk to The New York Times about an article or interview. “We get all the business we need by word of mouth,” Carolyn told me. Word of mouth indeed. The phrase is apt, because I’m only one of many loyal customers—I keep wanting to say “visitors”—who can’t say enough about Round Swamp’s poems for the mouth: their lobster salad, their crabcakes, and their New England clam chowder, to name only a few of the perfect 10s and not to mention the cookies, muffins, and pies, which I spend a lot of energy resisting. Their breads are so good I’ve been known to freeze some for the winter, when they’re closed. Their quiche, their granola, and their cheese sticks are the best I’ve ever tasted. In the last couple of years, they’ve had great success with more ambitious main dishes, such as firepit barbecue pulled pork and buttermilk fried chicken breasts.

In the fall (they’re open through Thanksgiving weekend), it’s time for whipped sweet potatoes, pecan and pumpkin pies, ginger snaps, and split pea and pumpkin soups as well as the superb chowders. But what keeps folks like me coming back, even if I can only get there on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, when (especially between Memorial Day and Labor Day) there’s a line of shoppers that winds through the store and sometimes out the door, is the way Carolyn and her relatives and staff make me feel like part of the family. I love being called “honey.”

Why do we need stories?

Sandra Parshall

The next time you’re in the fiction section of a library or bookstore, take a minute to really see what’s around you. Each of those novels holds between its covers a distinct world that was created inside someone’s head.

Every year thousands of fictional worlds, inhabited by nonexistent people living out imaginary lives, are written, published, and sold. The human hunger for made-up stories is insatiable – and unique. No other animal feels a desire, a need, to live simultaneously in the real world and in a wild variety of alternate, imaginary worlds.

Why do people have such a strong compulsion to tell and to hear, to write and to read, fictional versions of human experience? Why isn’t reality enough?

Reading fiction is usually seen as an escape from reality – so much so that many parents worry about children who “read too much” and don’t spend enough time interacting with other kids. They fear that their children will be isolated and fail to develop the “people skills” necessary to succeed in society. A series of psychological studies done over the past few years, though, should set the parents’ minds at ease. In every study, frequent readers of fiction were shown to be more understanding of other people’s viewpoints, better at reading the moods of others, and more open to new experiences. They suffered less from loneliness and social isolation than people who read primarily nonfiction.

Fiction has social benefits even when it’s not in print form and bound between covers. In a 2010 study of pre-school children, a team of psychologists found that the more fictional stories the kids listened to, and the more fictional movies they saw, the better able they were to understand other people’s viewpoints and beliefs. Watching television, however, didn’t provide the same benefits. The psychologists theorize that TV shows are too simplistic and don’t challenge the mind and emotions the way more complex forms of fiction do.

We need stories in order to make sense of human life. While we’re immersed in a fictional world, we set aside our own beliefs and concerns and adopt the point of view of the protagonist. The two worst things we can say about any fictional person are “She/He didn’t seem real to me” and “I didn’t care about the character.” Most of us don’t read fiction out of mere curiosity, to watch characters we don’t care about move through a series of events we can never accept as real. We want to be pulled into the story. We want to lose ourselves in the fictional world. We want to understand it, however different it may be from our own experience. Understanding fictional events and people makes us more open-minded in the real world.

If you’d like to read details of studies done in this area, look for an article by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley in the November/December issue of Scientific American Mind. (You will not be able to read the entire article on the magazine’s website.)

If you’d like to test whether your immersion in fiction has sharpened your ability to read other people’s emotions, take this free online test:
http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/Faces/EyesTest.aspx

Come back afterward and tell me how you scored!


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Speaking of stories and books, December 3 is the second annual Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. Click on the link to read about it, then spread the word!

In Her Own Words

First, let’s backtrack to a week ago Monday. Hope you had a great Halloween and lots of left-over treats to enjoy. I happened on an Edgar Allen Poe-theme blog. Michelle Ward is a multi-media artist who loves EAP. Every year, she does Poe-theme decorations, including at one point constructing a miniature theater in which Poe and his raven perform. As one of Poe’s daughters, I couldn’t resist posting a link to Michelle’s Halloween blog.

* * * * *

Now forward to Friday, which is Remembrance Day north of the border and Veterans Day in the States. ROMVETS is a list for women who have served in the military and are writers. I asked some of my ROMVET sisters to contribute a short quote about what they will be thinking about on Friday. Here’s what they said, and links to their sites, in case you’d like to know more about what they are writing.

I thank God for the opportunity to serve, to give my children the freedom of choice. Diana, AGC(AW), United States Navy (Retired)

If I could do it all over again, I would without hesitation. Rogenna, United States Navy

I will never forget St Peter's Cave where the U.S. Army prayed on Christmas Eve before the Battle of the Bulge, Kim, United States Air Force

I was 24 years old when I got to Vietnam. Real cherry. Soon though, I was middle age. And when I left, I was 95 going on dead. Forty years later, I’m back in the world in body...missing in action in spirit and soul, Sharon, American Red Cross (Korea and Viet Nam)

Forty years out I still remember names and faces of the people I served with. Some links are never broken. Some friends are never forgotten, Sharon, U. S. Army
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Quote for the week
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity... Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ~General Dwight D. Eisenhower

November in Music and Pictures

by Julia Buckley



To get you in a proper mood for this lovely November day, I provide a musical backdrop and some recent pictures of fall.

Wander through my neighborhood and appreciate the sights while Simon and Garfunkel serenade you. :)

Happy November, Happy Fall, and Happy Daylight Savings!!

Like a Walk in the Park

by guest Janet Bolin

We lived on a hill, so although leaving home was all downhill, homecoming was the proverbial uphill battle. Maybe it was only a mile, but my legs were short. Starting out, the journey seemed impossible. So what did I do? Run?

Nope. To ignore that sense of a huge, invisible wall holding me back from ever reaching home, I made up games. If I passed that tree before the truck behind me reached the intersection, aliens couldn’t pick me up in their space ship.

If I kicked a pebble all the way home, I could keep it. Since part of my trip involved crossing bridges on wooden sidewalks with gaps between and beside the planks, I usually lost the pebble. Also, I had to stop every few feet and peer over the railing. The bottom of the valley was very far below me. I needed to examine the sky for those space ships, too.

Beyond the bridges, I had to stomp on every ice-covered puddle. Hearing the ice break and seeing those glass-like slices slithering away was very satisfying. Flinging icy water in over the tops of my boots—well, that couldn’t be helped, could it?

I never started running until I was almost home. Tired and relieved, I burst into the house, threw off my coat, mitts, and sopping boots, and joined the family.

It’s kind of like writing a book. Starting out, that blank screen is daunting. I’m sure I’ll never be able to push past that huge, invisible wall. So I make up rules, race the trucks, kick a few pebbles, peer into various abysses, dodge aliens, and break some ice.

And then, finally, I’m hurtling toward the end. I finish that first draft. I’m exhausted, relieved, a little surprised, and ready to re-join the human race—for a few hours, that is, until I begin the rewrites...

What do you do to make your journeys more interesting and (we hope) easier?

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Janet Bolin loves sewing, machine embroidery, knitting, and every sort of fiber art she can think of, but lives too far from stores that sell the supplies she needs, so she invented the Threadville Mystery Series.

Read excerpts from Dire Threads (in stores now) and Threaded for Trouble (coming in June, 2012.)

Connect with Janet on facebook and twitter.

Ireland Elects a Poet

by Sheila Connolly

Last week the Republic of Ireland elected Michael D. Higgins as President.

This doesn't mean quite as much as you might think. To give you some context, the nominal head of state is the popularly elected President of Ireland, this is a largely ceremonial position. The real political power being vested in the indirectly elected Taoiseach (prime minister, and if you're wondering, it's pronounced "tea-sock") who is the head of the government, plus the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and cabinet ministers. Legislative power is vested in the Oireachtas, the bicameral national parliament, which consists of Dáil Éireann, Seanad Éireann and the President of Ireland.

Okay, you can forget that now. The key phrase is "largely ceremonial position." In other words, the President of Ireland shows up for public events and makes nice speeches, but has no power. He (or she, for the past 14 years) is responsible for receiving foreign heads of state and making visits abroad to promote Irish interests.

Irish elections are fun to watch. Voters cast votes for multiple candidates in their order of preference. The votes are counted, and the candidates on the bottom of the heap are eliminated, and then another vote is held for the top contenders. Eventually someone ends up with a majority. This process takes a couple of days.

This time around, in the Presidential election Higgins won on the first ballot.

He's certainly qualified: he has long been a human rights activist, and the Associated Press called him "a left-wing idealist." But to keep this in perspective, let me add that his closest challenger, Sean Gallagher, is a reality TV celebrity. Another candidate was a former Irish Republican Army commander. There were seven candidates in all, including the first openly gay candidate.

Higgins is not only a poet, but also a lover of Irish arts, and Irish speaker, and president of the Galway United soccer club. He established the Irish-language TV station TG4, reinvigorated the Irish film industry, and has overseen investment in public museums. Martin Sheen calls him a "dear friend."

While the position may be toothless, the Presidency is still symbolically important, and Higgins looks forward to leading active discussions on issues facing young people, and the failure of the current Irish economic model.

I'm jealous. The presidential election in this country is a year away, and already we are being bombarded with vitriolic commercials all day long (I should mention that Ireland limits the time candidates may campaign to a few weeks). On one side we have a varying list of candidates who bounce up and down in the polls and take potshots at each other during debates. On the other we have an incumbent who is saddled with a lousy economy and a squabbling Congress that can't seem to get anything done.

What would it be like if we had someone who was eloquent and intelligent and politically aware representing us to the rest of the world? Leave all the tough policy stuff—the economy, wars, that kind of thing—to the wonks and think-tanks behind the scenes. I think we could use someone like Higgins, who can distill the essence of our problems into a few well-chosen words—and maybe inspire a majority of people to believe that there are solutions and to hope that they can find them before the whole mess blows up.

Outtakes

Elizabeth Zelvin

I don’t get it about outtakes. It’s been common knowledge for a long time that when movies are edited, a lot of the footage shot ends up, as the phrase goes, on the cutting room floor. With digital filming, I suppose that’s the virtual cutting room floor: material that’s omitted to make the finished product as artful as possible gets deleted. But when did they start taking these inferior snippets and palming them off on the public as outtakes? I imagine it happened when they started selling movies as DVDs for home consumption. DVDs were priced higher than the VHS tapes they superseded, so it made sense to give the viewers more bang for their buck. So they started making little feature films about how special effects were achieved, interviews with directors and actors and others associated with the movie, and similar ancillary material. They also started including deleted scenes, taking the filmmaker’s editorial decisions and reversing them, in effect stripping the art back out of the finished product.

In a stage play, the actors have only one shot to get each moment right in any particular night’s performance. If they flub a line, the audience hears it. If they slip on a banana peel or crack up when they’re supposed to deliver a joke deadpan, everyone in the theater knows they’ve made a mistake that can’t be retrieved or corrected. Not so in movies. Filming happens in little snippets, and each snippet can be repeated in take after take, until that moment is perfect visually and aurally, just as the director wants it.

One of the unsung arts in filmmaking is post production—the process of creating the look and sound of the material at the beginning and end of the film. It’s been a long time since moviegoers had to look at a simple scroll of titles and credits rolling down the screen. It’s worth paying attention to what happens before and after the movie itself, because the photography or animation and how it’s all put together can be incredibly creative. But in many films, all we get to see as the credits roll is, yep, outtakes: famous actors stepping out of character to repeat a bit of business—putting on a seatbelt, a passionate kiss, or whatever the moment is—over and over, with increasing hilarity, till they get it right.

I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t have the slightest interest in other people’s hilarity, no matter how famous the other people are. I enjoy the spectacle of people laughing best when I’m telling the joke. Sure, I laugh at other people’s jokes—when I’m included in the moment that produces them: for instance, in the audience when a comedian performs or being one of a group in which someone else tells a funny story. These in-joke outtakes exclude me completely. They’re only funny because they represent mistakes. Life is too short for me to spend it as a silent spectator to mistakes that are truly funny only to the participants, in this case, actors.

Maybe part of it is the current tendency to want audiences never to forget for a moment that the fictional characters we’re watching perform are really famous actors. I think that’s a terrible turn in the wrong direction. They do it in animated films too: we’re no longer free to enter the world of Cinderella or Grumpy or Aladdin’s genie without being constantly reminded that we’re hearing Cameron Diaz or Tom Hanks or Robin Williams perform. As a fiction writer and reader, I find that appalling. We’re meant to suspend disbelief and be enchanted and transported—not to feel good because we’re being permitted to watch “celebrities” perform.

Ah, celebrities—don’t get me started. I first declared that I had no desire to live a spectator life back when TV talk shows first became popular, long before the advent of reality TV. If a lively, witty conversation is going on, I want to join in. I can be lively and witty too. I love being on mystery panels for just that reason. Sure, I can enjoy the liveliness and wit of others. But I want my turn. But I digress.

Let’s get back to outtakes. If what they do with outtakes in the movies is really such a good idea, I have a modest proposal. When we writers submit our manuscripts to publishers, in addition to the carefully revised, critiqued, and well-honed novel itself, let’s include the discarded drafts, deleted adverbs, and rejected characters and plot twists as an appendix to or annotated version of the story. If we call them outtakes, maybe the publishers can charge an extra $5.99 for them.