Contrary Virtues

Sharon Wildwind

Around the 5th century in Europe an epic poem called Contest of the Soul proposed a list of seven heavenly virtues. Because each virtue had a direct opposite in one the seven deadly sins, they were sometimes referred to as the contrary virtues. If you’re not up on your virtues, or your sins, here’s a quick review: Chastity opposes Lust, Temperance opposes Gluttony, Charity opposes Greed, Diligence opposes Sloth, Patience opposes Wrath, Kindness opposes Envy, and Humility opposes Pride.

The world, especially the writer’s world, still needs contrary virtues. I am immensely grateful for the virtues that fellow writers have taught me as antidotes to pesky destructive patterns that keep popping up in my writing life like demented ground squirrels.

Sacred Anger

The writing world does not behave as I think it should. I have an endless idea list about how to make it perfect, but unfortunately the letter appointing me to be in charge seems to have gotten lost in the mail. Instead of seething inside, I’m learning to do some small action that, even if it doesn’t make the whole world better, makes my world better. Anger can be a dirty, polluting fuel or it can be cleaned up and used as an energy-efficient fuel. I choose fuel efficiency.

The Clarity of the Afternoon

I am often afraid. Being a writer seems too big, too scary, too tiring for little old me to cope. What I’ve had to learn is the difference between waking up in the middle of the night, sweating, with a pounding heart, convinced that I can’t do something, and sitting down in the middle of the afternoon to clarify why I can’t do something.

The middle of the night panic is an visceral response more often than not rooted in physical imbalance. I ate the wrong things, ate too close to going to bed, drank too much tea, didn’t exercise enough, etc. Or maybe it’s pesky hormones that surge for completely unfathomable reasons. It is something that requires a lot of self-love and nurturing, not a reason that I’m going to surrender to inevitable forces.

The clarity of the afternoon is the ability to look at a situation objectively and admit that, no, I can’t do that particular thing for a good reason. I don’t know enough. I’m ignoring something that needs to be acted upon. I’m listening to what “they say” in place of listening to my own good common sense. The timing isn’t right. I have to finish A before I can do B. I am not superwoman, but I am talented and smart and quite capable of doing whatever reasonable thing needs to be done to get on with getting on.

More than One Can Win

I am such a drama queen when I get jealous, and I get jealous a lot. Everyone other writer gets bigger, better contracts; more breaks; an easier ride; and a higher place on the totem pole. In the first place, I’m afraid of heights, so if I were sitting on the very top of the totem pole, I’d be terrified. In the second place, very little in life is a win-lose situation. They’re going to win, so I’m going to lose? Forget that rubbish. There are tons of ways for all of us to win, together, helping each other up the path. To paraphrase the social activist, Emma Goldman, if I can’t dance with you, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Swimming Deeper Replaces Worry

Being sensitive is what makes us creative. Being sensitive is what also makes us worry. A year before his death Henry Fonda made On Golden Pond, his second-to-last film, a movie that would win him an Oscar. I’ve read accounts that he still threw up before he went before the cameras. Yes, being sensitive brings all kinds of burdens, but part of being creative is that being sensitive also brings a sense of curiosity and a desire constantly to start another quest. It’s the doing in spite of the worry that makes us who we are.

Don’t be Nice. Be Honest—In a Nice Way, Of Course

Since you’re not doing anything right now, could you . . .? Actually, I am doing something, something very important. I’m pulling an imaginary world into being using twenty-six letters, ten numerals, and an assortment of punctuation marks. So for right now, get on with building your own world for a while. I care about you very much and I’m going to get back to you right after I finish writing.

When the Iceman Came

by Julia Buckley

My son is doing a project in conjunction with his reading of THE GREAT GATSBY, and one of his assignments was to come up with an artifact from the 1920's.  We finally settled on our ice door, which has long since been painted over and sealed off, but still bears testament to the fact that ice was once delivered from our very back porch into our extremely old pantry.  The fellow above, according to Houston Lifestyles online, was holding a 25 pound chip from a 100 pound block of ice--a common thing that these tough guys had to lug from house to house.  (Is this the origin of chip off the old block?  I always thought that was a lumberjack's term).

Anyway, the tool in the man's hand was referred to as a pair of ice tongs, and it kept his hands from freezing to the ice and allowed him to keep a good grip on the sometimes slippery substance.

Our ice door looks like this:

According to the Portage County Historical Society,

"A common sight in the years gone by was the iceman and his wagon (later his truck), making deliveries of blocks ice to his subscription customers. A sign was issued to each subscriber; was a two - sided placard indicating ice was needed or not. If ice was required, the iceman would cut a block of the required size with an ice pick, attach tongs to the block with a mighty stroke, and hoist the block onto his shoulder. Icemen were strong (Jim Thorpe, the great Indian football star was an iceman one summer), for they had to carry an average of fifty to one hundred fifty pounds of ice from the wagon to the icebox at each stop." We knew that our house was old when we bought it (at least 90 or 100 years), and once when we were adding insulation to walls we found that 1920s era newspapers had been stuffed into them to add warmth (and a fire hazard).  So it's interesting to have this other connection to an era gone by, especially since our freezer/refrigerator is still in the very pantry to which our ice door connects. The advent of refrigeration put the ice men out of business, but once they were an important part of every family's week.

A Bold Heroine in the Georgian Era

Our guest’s Lady Fan mysteries, set in Georgian England, feature the bright and perceptive Ottilia, once a lady's companion and now bride to Lord Francis Fanshawe. The first in the series, The Gilded Shroud, is followed this month by The Deathly Portent. Everyone who leaves a comment this weekend will be entered in a drawing for a free copy of the new book.

by Elizabeth Bailey

How can the female detective cope in the Georgian world?

The short answer is, she can’t, not on her own. Ottilia’s status as a lady of the genteel classes precludes her presence in a great many male-dominated domains, especially if she is unescorted. A female alone in a public place laid herself open both to annoyance and loss of reputation.

Ottilia flouts convention in that she investigates at all. Ladies did not commonly examine dead bodies and question anyone and everyone from upstairs or down as to their movements and motives. People are apt to remark upon these activities, which amuses Ottilia, but tends to put Francis on the defensive.


But Ottilia is not a woman who seeks notoriety by ignoring the rules from a spirit of rebellion. She does it for expedience when nothing else will do. Where she can, she will obey the dictates of society, even if the necessity chafes her. Indeed, she is unscrupulous in making demands upon her husband for assistance in order to get around the problems posed by the constraints of her sex.

Even in the real Georgian era, it is not inconceivable that a woman might absorb medical lore as Ottilia does from her brother, although she is barred from the profession herself. This gives her a solid advantage, but it is the only practical one. For the rest, she must rely on her intelligence, observational skills and her knack of falling easily into intimacy with strangers, whether high or low born.

There are advantages in the paucity of policing during these times, because Ottilia is unhampered by the authority network that your modern amateur sleuth must negotiate. She finds it relatively easy to bypass, or even to use the local authority for her own ends, and if she has to, she is determined enough to go head to head with anyone.

But Ottilia herself recognizes that she couldn’t conduct her investigations without Francis at her back. Apart from the clear usefulness of his sex, he is both companion and stalwart supporter, and is rapidly gaining his own foothold in the game of deduction.

As the writer, I’m familiar with the period from my historical romances, but crime has added new challenges in terms of juggling the freedoms and restrictions imposed by the age, which I have to say I enjoy tremendously. Perhaps it satisfies a little of the rebel in me who burned the bra along with Germaine Greer! To give a woman power at a time when this was socially denied is intensely satisfying.

I’m often asked why the Georgian era attracted me, and it stems purely from a teenage addiction to Georgette Heyer. I think I absorbed from her the idea of creating a flavour of the time in the prose style I use for my own historicals, rather than relying on contemporary dialogue to delineate the period.

It’s more a question of choosing a way of expressing something that feels right for the period. For example, rather than using the simple she liked I might use she favoured or she was partial to. I pick less colloquial language: hastened, whither, I am inclined to think, if you are minded, is it not, befriend, etc. Then when you add all the titles and the accents of the lower orders, it tends to hold together. I’m so used to writing in this way that I no longer consciously make these choices. It’s as though I turn on a Georgian-speak switch in my writing head.

Of course it still has to be readable and understandable to the modern ear. To use fully contemporary dialogue - as found in 18th century letters and diaries, for instance - would sound stilted today. You don’t want to echo the long-winded Victorians which can be tough on readers now, but you still want to evoke the era.

I like to think that Ottilia is as true to her time, despite its inconveniences, as it is possible to be without alienating a modern reader. As a writer, I find I have to tread a fine balance between what might, to a purist, be considered anachronistic and what serves to take a reader, replete with twenty-first century thinking and values, successfully on a journey into the past.
*****************************************
Elizabeth Bailey’s second novel in her Lady Fan Mystery Series, The Deathly Portent, comes out in April in the US and June in the UK. Leave a comment this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a free copy.

In The Deathly Portent, the blacksmith has been bludgeoned to death and the villagers blame the local witch, a girl with second sight. The Fanshawes have broken down on the road nearby and when Ottilia hears the news, she cajoles Francis into going to Witherley, where a full-blown investigation  leads her into personal danger before she can find out the perpetrator. More details at www.elizabethbailey.co.uk. Order the book at www.amazon.com/Deathly-Portent-Lady-Fan-Mystery/dp/0425245675.

Flown Again

by Sheila Connolly

My daughter has moved out of the family home—again. When she went off to college, I thought we had done our "empty nest" thing. Then after college she had no firm plans about her next step, so she moved in with us again (note: this is not the house or the town she grew up in). She found a job, made friends, and saved her money. But she's young (to me, under thirty seems young) and unencumbered, and I was happy to support her urge to fly. So a little over a week ago, she packed up her car (with 240,000 miles on it) and headed west for Urbana, to a new life.

And we've been dealing with the "empty nest" issue all over again. This time it feels more final, because when she was in college she was only two hours away, and we exchanged visits regularly. Urbana is about 18 hours away, so it's a little harder to drop in.

But that "empty" is relative, because when she filled up the car, there was a lot of stuff left over, and it's all sitting here where she left it.

What does one's "stuff" say about a person? If you were forensically-minded, you would look at the evidence and say: she likes clothes and books. Her taste in clothes turned out to be very classic and conservative, and I sometimes regret we are not the same size, because I'd be happy to wear some of them.

Ah, but then there are the books. Since she was working in a bookstore the books were kind of inevitable. She's also my daughter, so I'm forced to conclude that book-hoarding is hereditary.

What can you learn about someone's personality from what s/he reads? My daughter was a comparative literature major in college (which may explain why her career path is a bit muddy), and she also favored contemporary poetry. In addition, she would bring home from the bookstore a variety of ARCs and remaindered books that looked interesting, many of which I read. It's a mixed blessing: if I like the book, I feel reluctant to buy a "real" copy when it's finally issued because I already have it, albeit in a sometimes dilapidated form. And if I happen to run into the author at an event, s/he may wonder about me when I say I loved the book, when it came out only two days earlier—and also wonder why I'm not buying a signed copy direct from their very own hands. It's happened.

My daughter and I have had some spirited conversations about writing and books. She claimed that genre (e.g., romance and mysteries) are to be scorned, although I'm not sure how she would define "literature," or even a "good" book. She has never read any book I have written (that she would admit to, at least). Yet for all of that, she once texted me from New York to say she had just walked by Mary Higgins Clark on the street. What? How did she recognize her?

What we share is the inability to get rid of any book we have chosen. I know when I was her age, I reread a lot of books, partly because I couldn't afford new ones, and partly because I continued to derive something from a book each time I read it. I could do that more easily now because I manage to forget a lot about any book I read these days (my current benchmark for a good book is whether I remember it after I've put it down), but I don't do much re-reading because there are new books coming out all the time. So many books, so little time.

Someday my daughter may inherit the books I've collected, and they number in the thousands, I'm afraid. She could probably write a profile of me, based on those that I've kept: a science fiction phase; a smattering of feminist/women's fiction, mainly from the 70s; the requisite collection of classics, old and modern; and of course, a lot of mysteries, starting from the beginning.

When you visit someone's home for the first time, do you check out what books they have on their shelves? And what does that tell you?

Do Not Disturb, Miracle Going On

Elizabeth Zelvin

Let me start by telling you the nightmare I had last night. Not a metaphor—this is an authentic dream, which are why the details are a little surreal. I was working on a novel, and it was giving me trouble. About two thirds of the way through, I’d hit a stuck point. I had those twin feelings that every writer knows and dreads: I didn’t know what came next, and I had an awful feeling that everything I’d already written sucked.

I found myself sitting across from my first editor, the late Ruth Cavin, explaining my dilemma and asking for help. (This never happened in real life. Ruth was almost 90 when I started working with her, she used email, and we didn’t have that kind of back and forth editorial relationship. But in a dream....) She told me I had to go back to the beginning and plot the novel from beginning to end. I envisioned such an outline as a very large, long bone with a knob at each end. (I realize now that my unconscious may have gotten the bone from one I saw at the farmer’s market behind the Museum of Natural History last Sunday. An ostrich farm in New Jersey has a booth there every week.) Then, suddenly, I had the bone in my hand. I hurled it at her, screaming, “I don’t outline!”

In spite of being sure I couldn’t do it, I sat down with the incomplete manuscript, meaning at least to look at what I had so far and see if I could salvage anything or if a way to tell the story all the way through occurred to me. I comforted myself by thinking, “At least the first page is good. I know I can keep that, and I’ll go on from there.” But when I read the first page, I realized it sucked. The characters were bland, the dialogue didn’t present any conflict. And as I watched, the letters came off the page, became a jumble, and disintegrated before my eyes.

At a Mystery Writers of America event, I think it was the holiday party back in December, I got a freebie. It’s a glossy red cardboard sign of the kind with a hole near the top and a slit to the edge, meant to be hung on a doorknob. It has MWA’s logo, Edgar Allan Poe looking anxious, and it says, “Do Not Disturb: The writing is going well.” I hung it from the neck of the lamp by my computer screen, near my Poe finger puppet and the bobble head Poe I got at the Edgars one year. It gave me a lot of reassurance until a week ago, when I happened to notice that the other side, which faces out into the living room, says, “Do Not Disturb: The writing is not going well.”

MWA, social and professional home to many mystery writers, has put its finger on it: At any given time, the creative process is either a nightmare or a miracle. Those moments when we experience utter despair, when we want to throw everything we’ve written in the garbage and believe with all our hearts that we can never write another word worth keeping (Do not disturb: It’s a nightmare) have their compensation in the precious times when our fingers fly over the keyboard, a story that didn’t exist a moment before, words that will eventually make our readers laugh and cry, appear upon the screen. Don’t ask me a question, call me on the phone, or tell me dinner’s ready at such a moment. Do not disturb: It’s a miracle.

Getting Rid of Bad Memories

Sandra Parshall

If you could get a simple injection or pill that would erase your worst memories and leave everything else intact, would you do it?

Few things interest me more than the mystery of human memory, and I've dwelled on it a good bit in my writing. So I was fascinated by Jonah Lehrer’s article in Wired magazine about the latest efforts to find a cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

War veterans aren’t the only people who are crippled by PTSD. Survivors of rape, child molestation, violent muggings, fires, and natural disasters will never lead normal lives again if they can’t find a way to stop the past from poisoning the present. Few effective treatments exist to help these people, and at least one widely used approach, called critical incident stress debriefing (CISD), may have done more harm than good.

CISD has been endorsed and used for years by the Department of Defense, FEMA, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the Israeli Army. The basic premise is that forcing a victim or survivor to recall the trauma in deep detail as soon as possible after the experience will prevent the memory from festering into PTSD. This “treatment” has been used on thousands of people, including some affected by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, as Lehrer reports in his article, it rarely helps, and studies show it often increases emotional suffering by reinforcing the trauma. Now psychologists have begun recommending that CISD be discontinued.

The real answer to PTSD probably lies in the neurochemistry of our brains. Scitentists have established that memories, those snapshots of the past that we either cherish or fear, are nothing more than a collection of chemicals and neurons. They aren’t cemented in place, unchangeable, waiting for our consciousness to shine a light on them. Our brains have to reconstruct a memory each time it’s called up, a process called memory reconsolidation. Our present mood or circumstances can alter our memories and our reactions to them.

In most cases, as a person’s emotions settle down after a loss or a stressful event, the memories become less heartwrenching or frightening. They can also become less accurate, as our brains change details or do a wholesale rewrite. We’re not aware this is happening, so an eyewitness to a crime may give false testimony while sincerely believing that he or she is remembering things correctly. Two people with wildly different memories of the same event can have a heated argument over whose account is accurate, when it’s likely that neither is.

But back to PTSD. In the late 1990s, a young neuroscientist named Karim Nader began examining the chemistry of memory recall. If a memory must be reconstructed each time it is called up, would blocking the chemical rebuilding process during recall destroy the memory itself? His experiments with rats proved that it would, without affecting any other memories.

Nader’s discovery, like other breakthroughs in the history of science, was greeted with scorn by his colleagues. Nobody would listen. He was shunned at conferences and couldn’t get his findings published in journals. Infuriated by this cold reception, Nader pushed on, and by 2005 his work was being taken seriously. During the same period, neuroscientist Todd Sacktor of Columbia University discovered that a neuro protein called PKMzeta plays the key role in memory formation, and without it the brain loses its ability to reconstruct long-term memories. If the production of PKMzeta is blocked while a specific memory is recalled, the memory itself may vanish.

Although treatment of PTSD seems the logical use of this breakthrough, Sacktor believes the first to benefit will be people suffering from persistent, unexplained physical pain and drug addiction. In one case, the body’s memory of pain will be erased and the cycle broken. In the other, erasing the memory of pleasure associated with drugs may take away the desire for them.

How much farther will we go with it, though, when this treatment is available beyond the testing lab? We already edit and rewrite our memories, and all of us have probably suppressed a few bad memories. But what about the big, ugly one that won’t go away, the one that invades your dreams and makes you miserable each time it intrudes on the present? Would you pay to have that memory removed forever from your brain?

Sidetracked

Sharon Wildwind

I got sidetracked this week. I was doing research for another writer, rapidly flicking from site to site on a factoid mission when a book trailer stopped me cold. Yes, a book trailer.

I’d never heard the author’s name before. The title, while interesting, wasn’t a show-stopper. What attracted me to Where Good Ideas Come From, was the pleasure in watching an artist draw.

I am an artist, but not an illustrator. Because I think that having even

a minuscule sketching ability — mine certainly qualifies as minuscule — is a good thing, I’ve started doing a brief sketch in my journal first thing every day. This is Little Rosebud, one of our stuffed animals who posed for me one morning.

The guy who drew the trailer was a whiz. I assume it was a guy from brief glances of his hand holding dry-erase markers. And, yes, I deduced that a certain amount of digital jiggery-pokery was employed. Likely he drew at a much slower speed and the finished video was speeded up. The overall effect was wonderful. I was half-way into the 4-minute video before it even dawned on me that this might be a book trailer.

When the video finished, I immediately checked my local library catalog to see if they had the book. I put it on hold. Then I went looking for the author’s web site, found his blog, and bookmarked it so I’d get the RSS feed.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve picked up the book at the library and, after glancing through it, I am looking forward to reading it. But I also know that I made an effort to find this book because I’d fallen victim to the halo-effect.

A halo-effect is ascribing good qualities to something because it is associated with known (or suspected) other good qualities. For example, if half the packages of a given food contained the words “Make healthy food choices for your family,” and the other half, packages of identical food, did not contain those words, a majority of people would not only pick the package with the slogan, but they would rate the food in that package as healthier, more natural, and lower in calories. Note that nowhere in the slogan is a claim that that this particular food is a healthy choice. It simply exhorts the shopper that making healthy choices is a good idea.

What irritated me when I watched this video, and still does, is the lack of credits. After some further digging, I concluded that I’d stumbled upon a whole branch of video art, called illustrative storytelling. IS requires a white board, a couple of markers—usually black and red, a video camera, and lots of drawing talent.

Lots of companies are doing it. One company you find a lot of on YouTube is called RSA Animate, who I suspect might have done the Good Ideas video, but unfortunately I can’t be sure. There are no credits. None for the artist; none for the person who narrated the video. Not even a link I could follow back to the source.

I think that’s a shame. If you know who made this video, please let me know. I’d love to send both the artist and the narrator a fan letter.

---------

Quote for the week:

Drawing is risk. If risk is eliminated at any stage of the act it is no longer drawing.

~Lorne Coutts, Canadian artist

The Tale of Griswald

by Julia Buckley

Back when I posted my "Things I Love" list, you might remember that I mentioned an old Teddy Bear named Griswald, and suggested that his origins were very interesting.

They go back to about 1970, when I was six years old, and my mother, who was born in Paderborn, Germany, decided to go home to visit her family.  This was relatively traumatic for me, and I assume for my four other siblings, as well, because we had to make the one-hour drive to O'Hare Airport, watch our mother (who had been a permanent fixture for all of our lives) lift her suitcases and disappear through the boarding gate.  As I recall, you could accompany someone just about up to the doorway back then, and you could look at the plane as it taxied down the runway.  We watched my mother's Lufthansa ascend into the sky, and then we went home, feeling bereft.

My father kept our spirits up with his "fun" week plan, which included things like scrambled eggs for dinner (because all he could really make was scrambled eggs), and the help of a nice lady from our parish who made some meals and welcomed us when we arrived home from school.

But despite his efforts, I was thrilled when, a week later, all six of us piled back into the car and returned to O'Hare to pick up my mother.  We waited at the window and saw her plane land.  We watched expectantly as all the people made their way down the steps.  We wondered how my mother managed to not be among the first several to disembark.  Nor was she among the last who trailed slowly out.  She wasn't there at all.  When it finally dawned on me, I started to cry.  Then my sister started to cry.  And my poor father, who hadn't quite figured out why my mother wasn't on the plane, had to comfort five sad children who thought she was gone forever.

We went home again.  This was long before cell phones and easy communication between nations.  We had no idea where she was, and even my father looked worried.  The day turned to bitter night; I went to bed  without a tucking-in from my mother, and I cried myself to sleep.

In the meanwhile, my mother, whose flight had been diverted and who had been forced to board a different plane, ended up at O'Hare at midnight.  She called my father, who was frantic and wondering how he could claim her when he had a house full of sleeping children.  My mother told him that a kind janitor at O'Hare had volunteered to drive her home.  My dad didn't like the sound of this, either, but he grudgingly agreed and then waited at the window until a car pulled up (driven by a genuinely kindly janitor).  My weary mother arrived with her bags.  I suppose one of the first things my father told her was that her children's hearts had been broken when she didn't get off the plane; she was moved enough to come to my room at close to one in the morning and to wake me from a sound sleep.

"I'm home," she told me, and I smiled blearily at her.  And then she tucked Griswald into my arms.  That bear was the symbol of all good things--things found, and a mother's love, and toys from far away.  Later there would be Gummi Bears and marzipan and the traditional trinkets that we always got from Germany at birthdays and Christmas . . . but nothing could exceed the joy of Griswald, or of having my mother back at home.

Griswald wasn't just any bear.  He could talk.  If you leaned his fuzzy body backward and then straightened him again, he said "Baaa," which is the Teddy Bear version of growling, I guess.  He had a rich, beautiful voice, and I'm sure my family had to put up with endless bleatings as I tilted Griswald this way and that in the weeks that followed. I knew that this bear had traveled more than 4000 miles to be with me, and he and I have been dear friends ever since. I would never think of giving him away, and he did not become one of the multitude of toys with which my children played.  Griswald, I assured them, was too old and frail to be dragged about.

Poor Griswald is now mute with age, but he remains one of the primary symbols of love in my life, and he reigns in ancient splendor on the dresser in my bedroom.

When You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Anita Page (Guest Blogger)

About twenty years ago, my husband and I decided to write a mystery. We were both writers—he was a journalist and I’d published a few short stories in addition to working as a freelance journalist—so we knew something about putting one word in front of the other.

I was the avid mystery reader in the family, and assured him there wouldn’t be much of a leap between reading mysteries and writing one.

Scheduling was a problem since I was teaching and he was facing daily deadlines, but we would use our two-week vacation in the Smoky Mountains to plan the book—plenty of time, I thought. As I’m sure is obvious, I was in a state of oblivion, aka: When you don’t know what you don’t know.

The lodge in the Smokies, with its mountain views and wood fires, was the perfect place to write except that our room was the size of a large closet. When we explained the situation to Ginger, the innkeeper, she graciously gave us the use of a large sitting room where we could work undisturbed. She seemed unimpressed by the fact that we were writing a book, which surprised us since we were awfully impressed with ourselves the first morning we sat down with our spiral-bound notebooks and pens.

By the end of two weeks, we had a chunk of the book planned, not as much as I’d hoped, but enough to make a start. We would write alternate chapters, my husband from the point of view of the investigating journalist, I from the point of view of his artist girlfriend. We knew who the killer was and we knew his motive. We also knew the victim. The setting would be Jersey City, New Jersey, where my husband had worked years earlier. Jersey City in those days was a gritty town that probably set a world record for the number of crooked politicians per square foot—perfect for the crime we had in mind.

We continued to work on the book at home, and I think got to chapter five before we hit a wall. So here was my first lesson in writing a mystery: You’ve got to have a plot.

I’m happy to say I figured that out by the time I sat down, twenty years later, to write Damned If You Don’t. Fortunately crime doesn’t go out of style, so I was able to adapt the murder in the first book to the new one.

Lesson two: Never toss your old manuscripts. The new book was set in the Catskills, our home for nine years, and a place where lives are conveniently intertwined, as they tend to be in small towns. My protagonist this time was Hannah Fox, a community activist raised in the sixties on picket lines and peace marches, who takes on town hall when a friend’s land is targeted by an eminent domain scam that ends in murder.

I worked on the manuscript full time for two years, taking it through six or seven drafts, and then spent a year submitting to agents. (My favorite rejection was a terse, “No thanks,” a great improvement over: “Unfortunately, I don’t feel passionate enough, etc. etc.”) Eventually I sent the manuscript to L&L Dreamspell and was offered a contract. Lesson three: While writing mysteries is a great pleasure, it’s also very hard work that comes with no guarantee of success. I realize that’s not everyone’s idea of a good time, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing.

Anita Page’s first novel, Damned If You Don’t, is set in the Catskill Mountains where she worked as a journalist. Her short stories have appeared in journals, ezines, and anthologies. She received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story in 2010. Anita and her husband live in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley. She can be found online at Women of Mystery and anitapagewriter.blogspot.com.

Art and Writing

by Sheila Connolly

Recently my husband, my daughter and I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. My daughter had never been there, nor had my husband or I recently. But before we married my husband lived literally around the corner from the museum, and took advantage of their free evenings regularly. And in that same era I was an art history graduate student, so I was familiar with the collections for a different reason.

In my family we've all visited museums, singly and together, in this country and in other parts of the world, yet for some reason we've been remiss in enjoying our own local collections. Our loss!

It should not have surprised us that the MFA has undergone multiple major renovations in recent decades. I'm not sure anything is where it used to be, and without a map I would have been truly lost. We knew what we wanted to see—visiting old friends—but not how to get there. Needless to say we got lost a few times, and lost each other as well (note: always remind everyone to bring cell phones, set on vibrate!).

In a way for me it was like looking at a new museum, except I would recognize individual pieces along the way. But my memories also included seeing them from a different viewpoint (both physical and conceptual), and certainly over the intervening years, my taste and my perspective have changed.

In addition, I now often find myself looking at something (anything and everything!) in terms of how I could use it in writing, and this trip was no exception. No, I did not start plotting about how to stick a body in a mummy case, although there was a delightful set of four nesting sarcophagi. But there were two pieces that made me consider how to incorporate tension and emotion in writing.

The first was a simple Rembrandt oil portrait. I've always loved Rembrandt for the way his evolution as an artist is laid out in his pictures: early in his career he was producing clean, precise, commercial work, including a lot of "portraits for hire" (why does this sound familiar?), but as he grew older his style grew looser and more fluid. One of his late self-portraits hangs in the National Gallery in London, and one can stand very close to it and look at individual brushstrokes. I did, and was both moved by it and left wondering how when you step back, the clumps of paint come together to create a vivid and poignant image of an ageing, ordinary man. All the technique is right there to see, but the whole is so much greater.

The MFA portrait titled Old Man in Prayer is an early work, and extremely simple—no visible background, and even the man's clothes blend in, throwing all the focus on the face and one single hand laid across the man's chest. But the character in the face, and the immediacy of the hand, are extraordinary. If there is a (writing) lesson to be learned here, it's that simple can be very effective, as long as it's done brilliantly.

The other piece that struck me was a large fragmentary wall sculpture of a lion and bull locked in combat, an Assyrian work that dates from the 4th century BC. I'm not going to go into the details of symbolism, which are many and diverse, nor the details of execution (although I can still speak art-speak in a pinch). What I found most noteworthy was the tension in the piece. Two powerful figures are locked in combat, twisted together, equally matched. The lion, his teeth sunk deep in the haunch of the bull, seems to be staring at you, but the bull is by no means conquered.

For over two thousand years these two stone figures have fought in silence, and the message is as strong as it was in the beginning. We as mystery writers are always told to create and maintain conflict in our books, to keep the reader engaged—and reading. Here conflict is given physical form, the combatants tense as coiled springs, with no clear outcome. We're in the middle of the story, and we want to know what happens. And that's the key to story-telling.