Room for Something New

by Sheila Connolly

Last week I wrote about the obsolescence of things learned in the past. Now I want to look at learning new things.

There seems to be some scientific consensus that exercising one’s brain will keep it healthy and nimble.  I’ll vote for that (note that writing is the most recent of a long line of careers for me).  In addition, I’m interested in learning about skills that people don’t do anymore, because I find myself writing about the past, even though my books are set in the present.

Last weekend I went to Old Sturbridge Village for their annual Apple Days celebration (which of course I consider research for my Orchard Mysteries).  They have a nice collection of heirloom trees there, all untouched by chemicals, and they offer (among many things) a tasting each year, which is fun since most people don’t know these older trees exist, much less have a chance to try them.  I was pleased that I actually have some of the ones they shared this year, and I was so enamored of one variety (“Mother”) that I ordered one, that will arrive in the spring. That makes it my ninth apple tree (I have a very small orchard).

I did pass up the cider molasses making demonstration, because it promised to be a long slow process: build fire, hang cauldron of fresh apple juice over it, boil until thick, skimming off whatever crud floats to the toop.  End of recipe.

However, I was excited to learn how one shoots a musket (ca. 1816), which is useful information.  It involves measuring black powder (which looks more like small gravel than powder) into the barrel, stuffing down a wad of cloth to keep it there and contain the charge for just a bit (if you’re really shooting, you’d put a lead ball in next), then adding a dash of powder to the “pan,” then sharpening your flint so it will produce a spark, and finally you get to shoulder the thing and fire.  It’s very loud.  The process gave me a whole new appreciation of warfare, when each combatant had to go through this laborious process just to shoot a single bullet. (And also deal with misfires and erratic shots that go astray, no matter how good a marksman you were.)

And then I went on to the communal cider making display.  Actually that’s a misnomer:  it was an apple grinding event, powered by an ox, that created the mush that would then be placed between layers of rye grass in a giant press and squished to force out the juice, which was then transferred into barrels to ferment.  At that point the description gets even lovelier:  the biological detritus (like a few mouse carcasses, dead insects, leaves, stems and twigs) gets blown out the top bung-hole by the fermentation process, while the “lees” sink to the bottom of the barrel.  If you want to decant the drinkable part, take it from the middle! 

I learned that cider making really was a communal effort.  One entrepreneur owned the grinder and the press, and the good citizens would bring their apples (and their ox or horse for power) for processing; they would then pay the owner in barrels of cider.

After that I was fascinated to listen to a reenactor describe how to bake in a brick oven (build large fire early in the day, to heat the bricks, then remove the fire, shut the flue, and start adding what you want baked—the stuff that takes longest goes in first, toward the back, and you keep adding more items through the day).  The way to test the heat is to stick your hand in and see how long you can stand it:  10-12 seconds means it’s about 450 degrees. Anybody want to go back to the good old days?

I’ve been visiting OSV since I was a teenager.  I’m not sure what impression it made on me then, but it was enough to keep me coming back over the years, and I introduced my daughter to the place when she was just about the same age I was when I first saw it.  I don’t expect anyone to hand me a musket and tell me to shoot someone (or something), nor am I going to haul bushels of apples to a shared press.  But knowing how these things were done gives me a better understanding of life in earlier centuries. It’s a wonder anybody won a war, when the weaponry was so erratic and slow.  It’s a wonder anyone managed to cook anything (particularly in the summer, when the kitchen must have been blazing hot, not to mention infested with flies, attracted by the livestock just outside the door).  But wars were fought and people ate, so I guess it all worked out.

I love research. And to think I call this work! 

 

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Humorous vs funny

Elizabeth Zelvin

What’s the difference between a humorous mystery and one that’s funny? I know that many writers and, more important, agents disagree with me, but imho (in my humble opinion, as we say online), calling a manuscript humorous is the kiss of death. “I’m enclosing my humorous mystery manuscript, A Barrel of Deaths, in which my madcap protagonist, Corky Screwball, has a series of hilarious adventures as she tracks a murderer through the sewers of New York.” As an agent would say, not for me. The “humorous” label is like a laugh track on a TV sitcom. The obvious anxiety that the readership or audience won’t know it’s supposed to be funny unless they’re prompted is detrimental to genuine humor.

If I’m told a book is humorous, I expect to find a peppering of jokes—sometimes identified as jokes in the text—and a strained humor that may be expressed in excessive adjectives and adverbs, coyness about sexuality and strong language, an intrusive narrative voice that may overpower the characters’ voices, clichés produced as if the author has no idea they’re not fresh, and other devices by which some writers try too hard to be funny.

On the other hand, if a reader I trust tells me a book made her chuckle or laugh out loud, I’m willing to try it in the expectation of being pleased. Sense of humor being as individual as taste in books, I may not find it funny. But I won’t be unwilling to try it or braced against being distinctly unamused.

I’ve done so much purging of my bookshelves lately that it’s hard to find “humorous” passages I don’t find funny, but here’s an example. I’ve omitted the author’s identity (no one I know personally, but the book got good reviews) and character names.

I contained myself until we were in the car….Then I leaned forward and said, “You know who [that] is? He’s the kid who lives next door to…[t]he house where the murdered man was!”

Now here’s one of the differences between men and women. If they had been women, both of them would have turned around with their jaws dropped and their eyes stretched wide. They would have said, “No! You’ve got to be kidding!”

Being men, X said, “Huh,” and Y didn’t say anything at all….

X said, “God, it’s nearly one o’clock. We’re all gonna hate getting up in the morning.”

Sometimes men are just no fun.

In contrast, here’s a passage from the late Donald Westlake, a writer who wrote many very funny books in his distinguished career. I won’t try to find a passage I thought was a sidesplitter. As I said, what makes people laugh is idiosyncratic and varies from one reader to another. But here are the first two paragraphs of Get Real, Westlake’s posthumously published final novel. It features his series character Dortmunder, a likable crook to whom the unexpected inevitably happens as he proceeds from caper to caper. Note the simplicity of the language, the absence of cliché, the distinctive voice, and the effortless command of tone.

Dortmunder did not like to stand around on street corners. A slope-shouldered, glum-looking individual in clothing that hadn’t been designed by anybody, he knew what he looked like when he stood for a while in one place on a street corner, and what he looked like was a person loitering with intent. The particular intent, as any cop casting an eye over Dortmunder would immediately understand, was beside the point, and could be fine-tuned at the station; the first priority was to get this fellow in charge.

Which was why Dortmunder didn’t like standing around on street corners; he hated to give cops the feeling there was duty to be done. And yet, here he was, in the middle of a weekday morning in April, as obvious as a carbuncle in the pale glare of the weak spring sunshine, the near-beer equivalent of real sunshine as in, say, August, but still plenty bright enough to pick out a questionable detail as large as John Dortmunder, who happened to be waiting, in fact, for a cab.

Need I say more?

Is it a virtue or a vice?

by Sandra Parshall

“She’s generous to a fault.”

“He’s the bravest person I’ve ever known. He’s fearless!”

“He could sell ice to Eskimos.”

“I wish I had her self-confidence.”

“You couldn’t ask for a more loyal friend.”

We all know people like that. We’ve all said things like that. And we all know, consciously or not, that beyond a certain point those admirable traits can  become obnoxious, obsessive, or downright dangerous.

In her excellent Psychology Today article, Mary Loftus puts it succinctly: “The nature of a virtue is that a vice is almost always hidden inside.”

In fiction, writers tend to go with the extremes, because they make for more vivid characters who can move the plot. The “brave” and “fearless” person is less likely to be a firefighter or mountain climber than a criminal with a string of homicides to his credit. The “generous” person is a manipulator who doles out favors to ensnare others. The smooth talker is a corrupt politician. Loyalty, carried to extremes, can result in all kinds of bad acts. The blatantly self-confident person is a braggart who makes an ideal murder victim. (Come on, haven’t you ever wished you could bash somebody like that with the closest blunt object, or at least slap her silly to make her shut up about her marvelous accomplishments?)

Sometimes our “best” traits are also our worst flaws.

Loftus writes in her article about a recently published book, Fear Your Strength by Robert Kaiser and Robert Kaplan, that explores the danger of carrying an initially positive trait too far. As business consultants and executive coaches for a total of 50 years, they’ve seen everything. Name a strength, they say, and they’ll describe cases where it got out of control, doing damage and sometimes wrecking a career.

In his book Tipping Sacred Cows: Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues, Duke Corporate Education faculty member Jake Breeden warns that oldfashioned preconceived ideas of what is virtuous can lead to overwork, micro-managing and, ultimately, burnout. If you’re in management and force your values on those under your authority, you will stifle creativity and breed simmering resentment and unhappiness. Breeden compares extraverts to vampires in the workplace, sucking confidence and productivity out of others. Flexibility, in your own behavior and your expectations of others, can yield better results.

On the other hand, being constantly agreeable and bland, never making waves, won’t get you far in business. The more agreeable you are, the less money you’re likely to make. And an accommodating nature sets you up as prey to the fearless, thoroughly self-confident types who won’t hesitate to knock you down and stomp on you as they make their way to their destinations. However, nice guys appeal more to the average woman, and anyone of either gender who has an agreeable nature is more likely to be happy in life, with or without major professional success.

Many of these good folks gone wrong have become stereotypes in crime fiction. Readers recognize them almost immediately for what they are and can predict their behavior farther on in the story. If they unexpectedly show a better side, it feels jarring and unrealistic, because we don’t often see that kind of change in real life. The slow evolution of good trait to bad, the spiraling down of a single person’s nature, is usually reserved for literary fiction, where speed and pace aren’t as vital and the story isn’t driven by the plot. The most we’re likely to get in a crime story is a flashback, or glimpses through other people’s memories, of what a victim or villain was once like, along with an explanation of why he or she ended up going to extremes. Sometimes a single event brought about the change, and that life-altering experience is the key to solving the crime. We may get the same compressed picture of a protagonist’s evolution. 

As I write about this, my own characters keep popping into my mind as examples, although when I was creating them I certainly didn’t intend them to be stereotypes. I wanted all of them, including the villains, to be complex and, in the end, understandable. As both a reader and a writer, I think the best fictional people have aspects to their natures that are so familiar, so easily recognizable, that they make the characters’ more extreme behavior understandable.

Do you have people in your life who have carried virtues too far? Can you name memorable fictional characters who fit this description?

Imaging Yourself Successful? Don't

Sharon Wildwind

If you want to do something well, imagine yourself doing that thing well. If you want to be successful, visualize yourself as already being a success. Imagine every detail as perfect. Allow no room for the slightest imperfection in our dream.

Does this sound like every self-help book or guru you’ve ever read or heard? I offer another possibility. That kind of visualization isn’t a roadmap to success, it’s a dark and devious trap. Why?

Because most of us aren’t nearly creative enough with our imaginations. We turn our hopes for our big, bigger, biggest days into something no self-respecting Hollywood screen writer would write.

My vision is that I’m having lunch at a top New York restaurant — I like Italian, so how about Del Posto’s on 10th Avenue — with an editor from a big publishing house.

Between the Lobster Salad Oreganata and the Porcini Ravioli with Chestnuts she tells me how much she loves my work. She says I’m the author she’s been waiting years to find. By the Rare Wild Salmon over Perilla she waxes poetic about how she and I are going to build a fabulous career for me. As we linger over our Butterscotch Semifreddo, and designer expresso, she says she hopes I’m as excited as she is because she can’t wait to get started.

What’s wrong with imagining that?

It’s powered by the same infinite improbability drive as Zaphod Beeblebrox’s ship, Heart of Gold in the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Remember that device (temporarily) turned Ford Prefect into a penguin, and did bad things with a million-gallon vat of custard. It’s not something I want to mess around with.

Here’s what my imaginary afternoon would probably really be like.

It will be not just raining. but pouring. Maybe there is even a hurricane off the coast waiting to make landfall. Liz knows far better than me the likelihood of getting a cab during a NYC downpour, but I’m betting it’s not good. I arrive at the publisher’s office with damp, flat hair; mud splattered stockings, and squishy shoes.

My editor apologizes profusely, but an unexpected telephone conference has been scheduled in an hour and would it be okay if we go around the corner to a mom-and-pop Italian ristorante where we can be served quickly? Okay, so it’s still Italian, so I say fine.

Before the waitress hands us menus, my hostess tells her that we are in a hurry, so could we have green salad and the spaghetti special? I can get green salad and spaghetti in Calgary! I console myself with the thought there might be a gooey dessert later.

It turns out to be fascinating to watch how she can eat and talk at the same time. I’m eating, at least I think I’m eating because food is disappearing from my plates, but what I’m mostly doing is taking notes on napkins of all the things she’s telling me I have to do now.

No time for dessert, of course. It’s back through the rain to her office where she shakes my hand, says she’s looking forward to us building a working relationship, and do I mind telephone calls after 10:00 PM?

She hands me off to a second associate editor, who takes me to her tiny office and reviews my contract with me in excruciating detail. I’m not sure I understand half of what she’s telling me. Finally she hands me two copies of the contract, suggests that if I have any questions, I should get my entertainment lawyer to look at it before I sign. And please return the signed copies to her by next week.

Once more into the rain, dear friends. Back to the ristorante, I think, where the waitress recognizes me, finds a towel so I can dry my hair, and brings me something gooey and another cup of expresso. I sit by the window eating, drinking, and thinking that I don’t know an entertainment lawyer. I don’t even know if there is one in Calgary, and if there is, I bet he or she costs big bucks.

Somewhere between the wet wool, garlic, and coffee smells, as I watch through the window ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives in the rain, I realize I’m about to make one of the biggest decisions of my life and nothing, absolutely nothing I’ve every imagined came close to how wonderful, funny, and aggravating this afternoon has been.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t imagine good things happening to us in the future. I’m saying we need to build in enough high stakes, humor, and humanity to make what we imagine come as close to real life as possible. We’d do that for our characters, wouldn’t we? 

Quote for the week

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

~ Neil Armstrong, (1930 – 2012) naval aviator, test pilot, aerospace engineer, astronaut, and university professor

The Story Behind Clark Rockefeller

an interview with Julia Buckley

Since the now-notorious "Clark Rockefeller," aka Christian Gerhartsreiter, has begun to serve his life sentence in an American jail, I thought it might be timely to share and interview I did with his biographer Mark Seal, in 2011:

From the interview:

Mark Seal was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his new book, THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT.

Your publisher compares Clark Rockefeller to Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley, and a person in the book compares him to Swift’s Tom Jones, but he reminded me of another fictional character: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, who changed his name (from James Gatz) as a mere boy:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time . . . His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all . . . . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end,” in pursuit of “a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”

I thought of this every time I read accounts of people who felt Rockefeller was an egotist, or that he seemed desperate to appear not just like them, but better than them. Did the parallel ever occur to you in the years that you did this research?

Yes, you are absolutely on target. Gatsby, like Rockefeller, is about a man nobody truly knew, who hid behind façade of wealth and taste that really wasn’t really real. As you note, Gatsby was a boy named Jimmy Gatz from North Dakota without connections, money, or education. He invented himself as Gatsby, much the way Christian Gerhartsreiter did as Clark Rockefeller.

Throughout all of his identities, “Rockefeller” never seemed to do actual work, other than the task of manipulating other people, their homes and their money. So where did he get his impressive art collection—or, if it was fake, how did the art itself fool so many people?

It’s one of the big mysteries of the book, and everyone seems to have a different answer. Some say the art was loaned to him by a friend, others insist that he had the copies done by some unidentified copyist somewhere, someone else insisted that he possibly painted them himself (which I found difficult to believe, considering the quality of the paintings). His attorney told me the paintings were derivatives, worthless, really. But they were indeed done so well they fooled artists, art experts and galley owners.

How do you account for the fact that some very smart people were utterly bamboozled by Rockefeller, while others (including one notable woman who compared the story to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) said they never for a moment believed in him or his ridiculous persona. What might have accounted for the difference?

Of course, many who say that they knew now may not have been as vocal back then. So it’s difficult to say who really knew and who didn’t. He was extremely believable, at least in the beginning, and people are willing to believe things when they are said by some one who is seemingly educated, erudite and, most importantly, has a famous name.

To a certain extent, Rockefeller’s wife seemed to buy into his fiction because he filled a requirement in terms of her own aspirations. Do you think her ambition was the major reason that she never seemed to question all of the inconsistencies in her husband’s life?

She is a very smart, educated woman. I believe she was taken in for the same reasons as everyone else, and she insisted in the trial that she didn’t use his name for career advancement.

You met Clark Rockefeller. What was your own feeling after your meetings? Did you feel his charisma, or did he seem pathetic?

I was not able to interview him. The book is built on interviews I conducted with those who knew him, police reports, court transcripts, television and other media documents. And, of course, I was able to observe him day after day in the month-long trial.

Ah. If we viewed Rockefeller in terms of the Tragic Greek Hero, what do you think would have been the primary flaw that led to his downfall? After all, he managed to live his false lives for a very long time. Was it Clark Rockefeller who brought down Clark Rockefeller?

The flaw that led to his downfall is that he wanted it all: the $800,000 divorce settlement from his ex-wife and his daughter, even though his ex-wife was granted custody. He brought himself down by kidnapping his daughter.

Does Rockefeller embody a twisted version of The American Dream?

Yes, in the sense that he was like so many immigrants who came to this country: reinventing himself for the new world. However, in Clark’s case, somewhere along the line he forgot about facts and embraced a life of fiction.

Do any of Rockefeller’s friends visit him in prison?

Yes, several of them have said they visited him in prison.

Interesting! Were there people who testified on his behalf in court?

There were psychologists and psychiatrists who testified on his behalf.

Now that Christian Gerhartsreiter has been charged with murder, do you anticipate that he will be in jail for life, or do you think that he might charm a jury into acquitting him?

I wouldn’t want to second-guess a jury. But like everything about this case, I will be riveted to the trial and its outcome.

Mark Seal, thanks so much for letting me read this fascinating book and for answering some of my burning questions.

A journalist for thirty-five years, Mark Seal is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT: THE ASTONISHING RISE AND SPECTACULAR FALL OF A SERIAL IMPOSTOR, now on sale. Seal was a 2010 National Magazine Award finalist for his Vanity Fair profile of Clark Rockefeller.

He lives in Aspen, Colorado. View Seal's website at www.markseal.com

Do You Have To Like A Strong Woman Protagonist?

by Libby Fischer Hellman

There’s been a lot of discussion—well, there’s always a lot of discussion after Bouchercon—but in the circles I travel, some of the conversation has focused on female protagonists. The questions seem to be:

a. How kick-ass do women have to be and still maintain their credibility?

b. Are perky, sassy protagonists who don’t know a pistol from a revolver TSTL (too stupid to live)?

c. Ultimately, do we want our female protagonists to be saved by (of course) a dashing male cop, PI, CIA agent, or all of the above?

My answer to all the questions is—huh?

Actually, I’m reminded of the line in the song by Country Joe and the Fish all those years ago:

“And it’s one-two-three … what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.”

There was this movement in the 1960’s and beyond. They called it Women’s Liberation. Not to beat a dead horse, but it was a pretty powerful phenomenon. If you remember it, you’re probably too old. And if you heard about it from your mother, you may have rebelled against it simply because your mother held it dear (Hey, we all rebelled at some point or another).

But the bigger issue of that movement, Sheryl Sandberg and LEANING IN not withstanding, is that whatever a man could do, so could a woman. And that included writing crime fiction. Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, and Sue Grafton led the way. Since then, we’ve had hundreds of women writing crime fiction, and hundreds of female sleuths. You might even call the present the golden age of female sleuths.

So why argue about the type of sleuth we create? Isn’t it enough to have a host of characters we never had sixty years ago? Some sleuths will appeal to a certain corner of the reading public; others won’t. But isn’t there room for everyone? No matter what the sub-genre?

Ok. I’ll admit something. I’m not a big fan of cozies. I write dark. I can’t help myself. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the craft and talent that goes into a Julie Hyzy or a Roberta Isleib novel. The protagonists of those novels are determined, focused, and sometimes seriously funny.  And the Deborah Knotts, Rachel Goddards, and Gemma Jameses of our traditional mystery novelists are all strong, capable women.

Hopefully, mine are too. My PI Georgia Davis handles a Glock as easily as a knitting needle, and Frankie Pacelli, my latest protagonist in Havana Lost… well… (spoiler alert averted), evolves into a very different person than she was.  Still, that seems to rankle some readers. Some reviewers have said they’re “disturbed” by Frankie Pacelli’s transformation from a vulnerable girl to a powerful woman.

My response? She had to change.  When you lose the things you love most, it changes your life. One day the future looks clear and rosy, filled with possibility. The next day all hell lets loose and your dreams are destroyed. You see the world differently, and you act accordingly.

But that’s the way it goes. The women I write about react to their environment and what life throws at them, in many cases more fundamentally than men. They adapt. They try to make chicken salad out of chicken whatever. They might go to extremes to protect what they cherish, but, like other so-called “villains,” they are heroes in their own mind. So, for me, likeability isn’t the major issue. Survival is. How they deal with adversity.

In that sense Havana Lost is the noir version of my previous thriller, A Bitter Veil. Readers of Veil tend to love the fact that Anna is brave, courageous, and tolerant. A heroine. In Havana Lost, however, it's not so clear-cut.

That was no accident. The point of my so-called “Revolution Trilogy” (Set the Night on Fire, A Bitter Veil, and Havana Lost) is that extreme conflict turns some people into heroes, others into cowards. Revolution is not a tidy package. Revolutions are messy, chaotic, brutal.

But some of us are more resilient than others. Some bend, others break. Most muddle along, doing our best to cope with an unpredictable future. Bottom line: we don’t really  know how we’ll react to disaster until it strikes. Would you stay strong or go under? How much pain, danger and loss would it take to drive you to acts of which you’re not proud?

So, in a way, I am pleased people are disturbed by Frankie’s evolution. In my view that’s what thriller writing is all about. The unpredictable is more thrilling than the predictable.  Even if it means perhaps not liking a strong female character. That’s okay. We’ve worked for the privilege. We’ve earned it.

Thanks, Poe’s Daughters, for letting me vent. I hope you’ll give Havana Lost a look.


Libby Fischer Hellman is the author of several mystery/thriller series and standalone novels and is a past president of Sisters in Crime, an organization founded by Sara Paretsky tp promote equality for female crime fiction writers. Learn more about Libby and her work at www.libbyhellmann.com and www.facebook.com/authorlibbyfischerhellmann.

What We Think We Know

by Sheila Connolly

Once upon a time, we went to school to learn things.  We learned facts, we took tests about them, we filed them in whatever part of our brain keeps facts, and then we went on about our business.  We figured that once we’d learned something, that was that.

Wrong.

Somebody keeps changing the rules.

Once in another lifetime I was a biology major, so I knew something about science, or so I thought.  But there are a whole lot of things that nobody mentioned, like quarks.  According to Wikipedia (which also did not exist—I grew up with multiple volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica), “There are six types of quarks, known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.” I’m pretty sure I would have remembered those, had I ever learned about them, because the names are so funny.  But of course I didn’t, because no one discovered them until after I left high school. Oops.  I guess I haven’t needed them, unless I ever get to appear on Jeopardy.

Which I almost did once, but that’s a different story.  But almost every time I watch that show, I am reminded that whatever geography I once knew is now mostly incorrect.  Somebody keeps renaming countries, sometimes more than once.  And they keep moving the boundaries. (Oh, all right, the U.S. details haven’t changed a lot—I think I’m just geographically challenged.)

I was struck once again by the shifting (or do I mean shifty?) nature of facts while reading a recent publication about Stonehenge: Stonehenge: A New Understanding, by Mike Parker Pearson.  It’s a delightful scholarly book by someone who is intimately familiar with the archeology and really excited about his subject, and who writes well (these don’t always go together).

We’ve all heard of Stonehenge, right?  I’ve been there:  once back in the Dark Ages when one was permitted to wander freely amongst the stones and pat them affectionately (I’ve also visited the larger stone circle at nearby Avebury, close in time to the summer solstice, when people actually hug the stones); and once after all the regulations went into effect and now you can only walk along marked paths at a reverent distance.  This has something to do with preserving the past for the future, which I endorse, but it does change the experience.

We probably all think we know something about Stonehenge. Of course Stonehenge came up when I took Astronomy in college (all those alignments with sun or moon or various stars), and I’ve read a lot of books about the theories of who made Stonehenge and how and why.  The new book turns a whole lot of that on its ear.  While there have been many interesting, even convincing theories put forward, the author revises, redates, reinterprets and reassembles them, with the help of recent technologies.  Did I understand Stonehenge?  Only as well as past research allowed.  Now new research means I have to craft a new understanding.

It ain’t always easy.  It would be nice if there was a way to evaluate the data stored in our brain from time to time and say, “nope, never gonna need that file again” and toss it out so there’s room for something new, like social media vocabulary. But apparently I am unable to unlearn such useful things as song lyrics from the 1960s, for example, which are taking up a ridiculous amount of space in there—and I don’t even recall “learning” those lyrics, because as a serious, studious girl I rarely listened to popular music. 

Now I write books.  That means I’m supposed to remember a whole slew of characters that I’ve created—what they look like, how they think and speak, who they know.  I’m supposed to keep track of what their homes and their towns look like, and which way is north in these fictional places.  And now I have a lot of writer friends, and I’m supposed to remember who their characters are, and their book titles, and their agent’s name, and so on. Sometimes it feels like I’m squishing this into whatever empty corner of my brain that I can find—and sometimes I lose track of that information and can’t access those databases.  My apologies to any friends I have insulted recently by calling them by the wrong name or no name at all.

Is it even possible to “know” anything any more?

 

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Share the Road: Exerstriding in the Hamptons

Elizabeth Zelvin

This summer I discovered a new form of daily exercise: Exerstriding. Exerstriders are a special kind of walking poles that are designed to smash the myth of “no pain, no gain” and provide a full upper body workout and cardio or aerobic or whatever you call that kind of benefits while the user simply walks briskly and swings his or her arms naturally. The word “Nordic” sticks in my craw, nice Jewish girl that I am, but that’s what this kind of workout is called generically, and you’re more likely to have heard of Nordic track than of Exerstriders. They’re good not only for fitness but also for people with balance and mobility problems, so presumably you’re never too old to use them. I first heard about them through a friend with Parkinson’s and looked into them for another friend with the same debilitating disease. But once I’d watched the video that comes with the poles, I was hooked. I’ve been running for the past ten years (45 minutes or three miles a day in an attempt to combat the sedentary lifestyle of the computer-bound writer), but I’ve been having trouble with my feet, so I was thrilled to find an effective and enjoyable alternative.

Here I am at the end of Gerard Drive in Springs (the part of East Hampton that was cheap when Jackson Pollock bought his house there in the 1950s). It looks like nothing, doesn’t it? But at 45 minutes a day, it makes me sweat, burns calories, tones my muscles, and gets me outdoors.

Road signs in the Hamptons exhort motorists to “share the road,” which they do with varying degrees of good will or the contrary. This summer I shared the road with cars, motorcycles, bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, pedestrians (walkers, runners, and pushers of strollers, with and without dogs), deer, rabbits, wild turkeys, squirrels, and a single fox (if my two sightings were the same one).

Here are some of the beautiful roads I shared: Gerard Drive, the stunning peninsula I’ve blogged about before; the delightfully named Louse Point, across the mouth of Accabonac Harbor from the tip of Gerard; and Water Hole Road, where I sometimes start my run at my own front door.

Various removable tips on the Exerstriders allow me to walk on turf, dirt, loose gravel, wet sand, and even dry sand. This means I can do my striding on the beach if I want.

I have yet to meet another Exerstrider, though occasionally someone will stop and ask about the poles. More often, people make cracks about snow and skiing as they pass. I don’t care. When I’m 100 years old and still striding, I’ll have the last laugh.

In Defense of Young Women

By Sandra Parshall

Do you believe today’s teenage girls and young women are Too Stupid to Live, like the “heroines” of old-fashioned damsel-in-distress novels?

Does the very mention of a high school or college girl bring to mind the image of a dummy who spends all her time texting?

Apparently a lot of people, male and female, still think that way.

Recently I participated in a discussion that made me realize just how little respect young women receive from both men and other women. We were talking about those old damsels in distress, and I suggested that today’s young women are more savvy and sophisticated about the dangers around them than those of the past.

My statement was greeted with a chorus of “No!” One woman said, “They’re all too busy texting” – meaning, I assume, that they wouldn’t notice they were in peril until they were tied up and a rape was underway.

If they’re abducted or raped, it’s their own fault, because they’re not paying attention. Too Stupid to Live.

A lot of people in the room looked old enough to have teenage or young adult daughters – or granddaughters. I felt like asking them if they held such a low opinion of their own flesh and blood, and if so, who they blamed for the girls being idiots.

I didn’t get a chance to ask, which is probably just as well. I also didn’t get a chance to point out that the world is filled with teenage girls and young adult women who are smart, accomplished, and focused on achieving their goals in life. I didn’t get a chance to point out that almost 50% of both medical school and law school students are female, and nearly 80% of veterinary medicine students are female.

When one of these undeniably intelligent young women is raped and/or abducted and held prisoner, does it happen because she’s “too busy texting”? Is it her own fault?

Abduction and long-term imprisonment is an extremely rare crime, although publicity about three or four cases in recent years might make it appear to be something that happens every day. Each time someone is freed from such a situation, we start hearing the same question: Why didn’t she escape? Even when people are charitable enough not to blame a girl for being abducted from her home in the middle of the night or grabbed off the street and being forced into a vehicle, some want to hold her responsible for her continuing captivity. She should have found a way to escape.

Rape, unfortunately, does happen every day – many times a day, in every community. Victims are still reluctant to bring charges because they know they will have to prove it wasn’t their fault. They will have justify being in that place at that time. If a girl was drinking when she was raped, she can forget about receiving sympathy from any but the diehard bleeding hearts. She was “asking for it” – she had to know the minute she took the first sip in the company of a man or men that she was giving them permission to have sex with her, even if she lost consciousness. If a man put a date rape drug in her drink, that was her fault too, because she shouldn’t have been drinking in the first place. Who can blame the guys? We all know that men, and young men in particular, have no self-control when it comes to sex. It’s all up to the female. If she’s raped, it’s her fault, whatever the circumstances.

But the truth is that rape can happen to the most careful of women, of any age. Men who rape strangers often plan their crimes and stalk their victims. They know where and how to commit their crimes without getting caught. They are almost always bigger and stronger than their victims, they may carry deadly weapons, and they have the advantage of surprise. Men who rape estranged wives or girlfriends are all too often aided by police and courts that fail to enforce protection orders, then bring charges against women who dare to defend themselves with weapons.

I don’t believe today’s young women suffer from wholesale stupidity. I don’t believe they’re all as empty-headed as some older people insist they are. I believe a huge number are achieving great things despite growing up in a society that still places little value on women’s achievements and is still inclined to blame the victim when that victim is female.

Our young women deserve better – especially from other women.

Layers

Sharon Wildwind

Layering is like that children’s hand game: rock, paper, scissors. Paper wraps rock, rock smashes scissor, scissors cut paper. Something always beats out something else.

In art, there is a similar trilogy: watercolors, acrylics, and oil paint. As long as the artist sticks to one medium, it’s possible to pile layer upon layer of watercolors on watercolors; acrylics on acrylics; or oils on oils with beautiful results.

Mixed media is where the fun begins. Apply paint in the wrong order and it’s a disaster. Watercolors can be used under both acrylics and oil paint, but not over either one. Oil paint can be applied over acrylics, but not under them.

This past weekend, as I alternately read an art book about what paint layers to apply when and another writer’s first chapter, I realized there is a lot of similarities between layering on canvas and writing.

At the start of every story, we face the problem of what layer to put down first? The most common mistake is to cram in too much information, too many layers, at the beginning.

In Galaxy Quest,  Jason Nesmith is remarkably calm about being abducted by aliens. He assumes this is just another group of costumed fans, who happened to have built a terrific movie set. All he wants to know is, “Are there pages or do you want me to wing it?” meaning, is there a script he’s to work from or should he be prepared to improvise? Whichever it is, he’s prepared to roll with it.

Just like Jason knew fandom; mystery readers know the mystery world. All they need is a little orientation to roll with the story. The old journalism saw of who, what, when, where, and why is as good a place as any to start the story.

Who?

What is the protagonist’s name?

What is the first, most important detail that the reader needs to know about how the protagonist views the world?

What is his or her relationship to everyone else mentioned in the first chapter and their relationship to the protagonist in return? This is the best reason I know to limit the number of people in first chapters. If there is the protagonist and one other character, there are two relationships to contend with. The protagonist and two other characters, six relationships. The protagonist and three other characters, twelve relationships. You get my drift.

I’m not talking lots of back story here. Relationships can be identified quickly. “It had been months since he felt comfortable being in the same room as Grace. From the way she always sat as far away from him as she could, she was of the same opinion.” But try to do that for twelve relationships in one chapter and we have a problem.

When?

When are we?

Sometimes naming the seasons is helpful. It was really important to know at the beginning of Game of Thrones that winter was coming. In Red Wind, Raymond Chandler wrote that gorgeous paragraph about the hot, dry Santa Anas winds.

Where?

If the story takes place in a well known city, what expectations do readers bring to a story set in Los Angeles, London, or Lima, Peru? How can we play with those expectations?

Many writers never name their local. It’s simply a big city, a small town, a hard-scrabble ranch on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. Wherever it is, the reader need to be allowed to settle into that place in the first chapter.

What and Why are closely related

Why is the day the story starts different from every other day in the protagonist’s life?

What will happen today that’s the first step on a one-way journey to story’s end?

How does the protagonist feel about what’s going on?

What is the absolute minimum amount of information that will set the story’s context without degenerating into back story or flash backs?

A man walks into his office. His receptionist says a woman is waiting to see him. He turns around and recognizes his wife, whom he thought died five years ago. She’s had plastic surgery, but he recognizes her anyway. He takes her into his office and closes the door. The first words out of her mouth are, “I want my daughter.”

Bam, the reader is right there with them, in that room. This is not the time for side trips. The reader doesn’t need to know that they were married sixteen years; that the marriage was mostly happy; that they have one daughter, fourteen, who is away at school; that he started his business with the money from his wife’s life insurance policy; or that he’s just bought an engagement ring and planned to propose over the weekend.

What the reader wants more than anything else is to stay in the room with those two people and watch how they interact, what they say to one another, how they make it through this terribly bizarre situation. The other layers can come later.

Quote for the week (just in case you’ve never read Chander)

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.

~Raymond Chandler, Red Wind