Listening to Readers

by Sheila Connolly

Never assume you can’t learn something new, even when it’s about something you’ve been doing for years and think you know inside and out.

This past weekend I attended a group signing at a local independent bookstore.  Since I live in an area with plenty of outstanding writers, it was a great bunch of authors, but the event was not heavily attended (could it have been that football game down the highway a piece?).  On the plus side, those readers who did attend were serious about books and happy to talk to us.  From our side it was nice to have time to get into some serious discussion with our readers, when they didn’t feel that they had to hustle along and let the person behind get a signature.

To my surprise, I learned a couple of things.  First I spent some time talking with a local mystery buff, who has done a lot of personal research into the murder of Lizzie Borden’s parents, which took place not far from where we were.  She’s not a ghoul, but she’s been intrigued by the legal case, to the extent that she’s actually read the trial transcripts.  Her take:  based on the evidence presented, there’s no way Lizzie could have done the deeds, but there’s no way anyone else could have either.  I’d like to know more, if I can find the time.

But that wasn’t what struck me.  We got to talking about genre fiction versus what is loosely defined as “literature” and how they differ.  In a broad sense there is much overlap: there is a protagonist, and there are other people surrounding the protagonist, in one or another supporting role.  In mysteries, you add a murder to the mix, which generates a puzzle to be solved.

What was most interesting to me was how she saw the role of those secondary characters in a story.  In literature, they are there as figures who interact with the protagonist, and in doing so tell us something about that protagonist or stand on their own as interesting individuals, which tells us something different.  In genre, particularly in mysteries, and more particularly in cozy mysteries, these secondary characters take a more active part in the story. They are there as part of the local scene, but they have to earn the right to be there in the story by contributing a piece of information, whether it is an eye-witness account or a physical piece of evidence or an alibi for someone else.  They are players in the small drama.

In a different conversation I found myself discussing the place for “issues” in a cozy mystery.  The woman was talking about the time in her life when she was a nurse and had an extremely busy and stressful life, and when she got home at the end of the day all she wanted was entertainment, so she watched a lot of television sitcoms.

I can’t speak for all cozy writers, but I’m going to guess that many of us get frustrated now and then when we’re supposed to write “cute.’  You know what I mean:  nice professional young woman returns to her hometown to start or take over a small business, makes a lot of nice friends, flirts with the nice local detective, and solves a murder or two.  The conventions say we can’t include any sex, violence, or profanity.  Certainly we can’t insert anything like a cause or politics or religion.

But this woman in front of me was saying:  I come home and I don’t want to think.  I want to turn on the TV and be entertained.  She mentioned one example when by accident or design one network with a solid lineup of sitcoms scheduled issue-driven episodes back to back. This made the woman angry (to the extent that she still remembers the event, you’ll note).  She saw “real” problems all day, and she didn’t want to see them onscreen when she got home.  She wanted to forget them. And she buys cozies for the same reason.

Maybe people should stop looking down on cozies (come on, I know some of you do).  They fill a niche; they entertain and amuse people, and take them out of their own lives, just for a while.  And maybe it’s enough of a cause that we insure that whatever crime occurs is solved by the end of the book, and order is restored in the quaint village with all those lovable quirky people.  We cozy writers aren’t going to change the world, but we do make people happy. Isn’t that enough?

A New York Times bestseller!

Digging Up the Past

by Sheila Connolly

I do seem to be wallowing in the past lately, don’t I?  Maybe it’s because it’s fall, which is the ending of another year, despite the glories of the foliage.

This time it’s close to home, and the digging is literal.  We live in a Victorian house built around 1870.  It has a barn that once housed a horse and carriage, with a hayloft above (house and barn and what little lawn that’s left occupy a quarter-acre—not large), which suffered a fire in the 1950s and lost most of its interior, and with that its period charm.  The kitchen and the barn are connected by a ramshackle structure that I’m guessing was either the summer kitchen or the laundry room (or both) in the past.

It’s an odd space, cobbled together with salvaged materials from who knows what.  It has four doors, none of which match each other, and two windows, which also don’t match.  And it has lots of rot.

Since my government-employee husband was furloughed and had some free time, we decided this week would be a good time to rip out the floor in there and fix it.  Of course we found more rot than we expected—doesn’t everyone?  But I also found what to me was a treasure:  the house dump.  In one corner of the space, under the floor, was a heap of discarded, broken household items—and I was thrilled.

 

 

Okay, I may be crazy.  But I’ve done the genealogy of the house—who built it, who owned it, and who lived here before us.  Early in its life the household included as many as eight people—the owners (a young couple), five boarders, and an Irish serving girl.  I’m still trying to figure out where they put everybody (there was only one bathroom!).  Then the wife’s mother moved in:  the boarders left, and some improvements were made, like heat on the second floor.  The family we bought the house from moved in the week they got married in 1943.

I must have been an archeologist in a former life, because I see a heap of trash and I have to start rummaging through it.  What people throw away tells you a lot about how they lived.  The organic waste is long gone, and paper would have been burned, so what remains is mostly glass and china shards (and a lot of women’s shoes, for some reason).  Most of the glass was broken, except for more than fifty bottles that held patent medicines, vanilla extract, and ammonia (others have no labels or stampings in the glass).  Most have their original corks.  More than a dozen of the bottles contained Atwood’s Jaundice Tonic, a popular cure-all that contained a lot of alcohol.

 

 

What I have learned from my dump digging:

--      glass lamp globes were broken with alarming frequency (they’re thin and fragile)—I found many, both plain and fancy.

--      whoever was washing the dishes was pretty clumsy and broke a lot of pieces, both plates and serving dishes, as well as drinking glasses

--      Dinnerware was much smaller back in the day (plates, glasses, serving china), which says something about how our eating habits have changed.

 

--      There was no discarded clothing, but there was a surprising number of ladies' shoes.

 

 

I also found the remnants of at least four chamber pots, plus one intact one.  That explains at least part of how they managed with only the one bathroom.

There were also a few interesting objets that are harder to identify or explain.  Plus one fork and the remains of a wooden toothbrush, the bristles long gone.

What intrigues me is how all this ended up where it did, because there’s no outside access to that corner.  The board above it had a hole cut through it, with traces of lead around the edge, so I’m assuming there was a sink or drain there, with some sort of plumbing).  Was there a loose board, where they pitched anything that wouldn’t decay or burn?  Over what period?  Why there?

Not all the broken pieces were utilitarian.  Some were simply pretty things, and I kept finding myself apologizing to them for someone, now long dead, having been careless enough to break them.  A few bits I may be able to salvage, with the help of SuperGlue.

Why would I do that?  Because together they carry a story about how people lived in this house, and that makes me feel more connected to the past here.  And their trash is a lot more interesting than ours will be to future generations?

 

P.S. I did find one clue for dating:  there was a broken glass with "Thomas" etched on it.  The Thomas family lived in the house between 1897 and about 1906, which fits well.

 

One final note (unrelated save that it involves an old house--which will no double reveal a trash dump sometime soon):  my most recent Orchard Mystery, Golden Malicious, was a New York Times Mass Market Bestseller in its week of release.

 

 

 

 

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! 

 

AVAILABLE NOW!

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?

 

AVAILABLE NOW!

 

Friends

by Sheila Connolly

I just returned from the mystery mega-conference Bouchercon, which is a rather overwhelming experience—the estimate I heard was that there were 1,200 attendees scattered among multiple hotels in Albany, all trying to find their way through a convention center with little signage.

But I was happily surprised to find how many friends I have made over the past few years.  I think this was the first year I could actually introduce people to each other and remember both their names.  You'd think writers could keep names straight, but maybe we're too busy naming our characters to bother with the real people standing in front of us (if I snubbed anybody, I apologize).  Since writers so often labor alone, the broader writers and readers communities are important to us, and it's a pleasure to have meals or to attend panels with a whole array of people, both familiar and newly met.

But before the event I had been thinking about an advice column from a recent Boston Globe Sunday magazine, titled "Betrayed by a best friend," written by Robin Abrahams (AKA Miss Conduct).  Someone wrote to her to complain that she had been dumped by a friend of over twenty years, who suffers from a mental illness and, to put it kindly, had not been a very good friend at any time.

That's hard enough.  I'm sure we've all had friends who suddenly turned on us for no apparent reason, and there's no way to find out why since that friend is no longer on speaking terms with you.  But the rejectee seemed extraordinarily troubled by this rejection:  five years later she is still haunted by the betrayal, to the extent of having nightmares about the former friend at least once a week. This can't be healthy.

Miss Conduct wisely said: find a therapist.  The writer has to come to terms with what happened before she can move on, which she has so far failed to do (and five years seems like a long time to nurse the hurt). 

But what stuck in my mind was a more general comment Miss Conduct made:

We don't have a cultural bank of stories about friendship gone wrong.  We have stories (and songs and quality cable dramas) about bad parents, bad lovers, bad bosses.  Our culture doesn't offer up many templates for "bad friend" stories or songs about breaking up with your best buddy.

Why is that, I wonder?  In one way we have more "friends" than ever, if we use social media at all.  We've turned "friend" into a verb:  will you friend me?  On the other hand, that friendship is about a quarter of an inch (or 140 characters) deep. We probably know more about our friends' pets than we do about them.

Friendship takes work.  It takes time to meet face to face, and talk, and share.  And listen.  There should be give and take.  There should be sympathy and support in hard times, and applause for the good things that happen.  That kind of durable relationship doesn't happen quickly.

I feel very lucky that I have held on to a few friends for several decades—one from high school, a few from college.  We still get together from time to time, to catch up.  Even if we don't always approve of what they have done with their lives, they still hold shared memories, of the people we were when we met.  We don't want to lose that.

If a friend turns toxic, grieve and move on.  But cherish those who are true friends.

COMING NEXT WEEK!

Kittens on the Tracks

by Sheila Connolly

There is a rule in writing cozy or traditional mysteries:  don't kill animals. If you browse in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, you will quickly see that most cozies have a kitten or a puppy on the cover, and sometimes more than one.

It's kind of ironic, since cozies are murder mysteries, which means that at least one human person dies in each book, and sometimes more people as the killer attempts to cover his or her trail. Even children are fair game, now and then. The protagonist is often a target of violence, although we know by definition that s/he will survive, since most cozies are issued as series (I can't offhand recall an example where the series was not renewed by the publisher and the author, in a fit of pique, massacred the protagonist).

But I'd always regarded this rule as sort of an urban legend particular to publishing and other media.  Not so, I discovered recently while reading the newspaper.  In New York City, that paradigm of the Big City, power was cut on two subway lines to Brooklyn because…there were two kittens on the tracks.  Yes, part of the New York transit system was brought to its knees by a pair of curious felines.

Yes, of course they're adorable

The Associated Press provided many useful details.  The kittens were black (one) or white with gray stripes (the other).  No age or gender given.  The  woman who owned them reported to transit officials that they had escaped to the subway, and it took seven hours to rescue them (during which they were reported to have been seen "running dangerously close to the high-voltage third rail."

They were lured to safety with cat food provided by the owner, then removed from the subway tunnel in crates.  The transit authority provided passenger shuttles for those inconvenienced. No estimate of the costs of providing the service was given.

As a good cozy writer, I should have remembered that I was a party to a similar event in the Bay Area in California, a couple of decades ago:  there was a dog in the tunnel between two stops on the Richmond line.  It took an hour or two to persuade the dog to make an exit—apparently he thought it was a big game.

But it's comforting to know that there is still a sense of kindness in the world. Transit officials knew there would be a financial cost to them (ultimately passed on to the subway riders, no doubt) to save those two kittens, but isn't that far better than having them say, "forget it, those little buggers aren't worth that much—run 'em over"? 

It would be nice if the AP had added a final note:  was there applause and cheering when it was announced that the trails were once again kitten-free?

Addendum:  in my books, the closest I've come to attacking an animal was a woman who was aiming a two-by-four at a goat, but she stopped before she could make that swing. And all pets in the books, including the goats, are rescue animals.

Coming very, very soon!

Populated by: one cat (Lolly), one dog (Max), and two goats (Dorcas and Isabel).  And a bunch of humans.  Yes, there is a bunny in the story--briefly.

Where Are We?

by Sheila Connolly

A recent post on the editorial page of the Boston Globe had me scratching my head.

What first caught my eye was a big image of the book cover of Jamaica Plain, a book by Colin Campbell, set in (you guessed it) Jamaica Plain.  To put this in perspective, if you wanted to put a paid ad with an image that size in the paper, it would cost you big, big bucks.  This was free advertising.

Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of Boston, about four square miles, settled in sixteen-whatever. The opening line of the editorial reads "Colin Campbell has never set foot in Jamaica Plain, and it shows." The editor accuses Campbell of putting a raunchy nightclub in a sedate neighborhood, among other sins.  He's defending Jamaica Plain, and that's good.  He may also be a little miffed at Campbell for being an Englishman and writing about Boston.

I've met the author at a conference, and he's charming and funny and very clearly English—and I'm not talking snob English. He's writing fiction, about an English cop in Boston. Let me tell you:  I live a whole heck of a lot closer to Jamaica Plain than he does, and I couldn't find anything there if you paid me.  I think I've been there, but I'm not even sure.

Okay, I'm not the one writing about it. The real places I write about I usually (but not always) know pretty well.  I can tell you where the main streets and buildings are.  I can tell you how to take public transit, if there is any.  I can tell you what a blizzard or a drought looks like there, or what kinds of shops and homes line the streets.  I can usually tell you something about the history of the place and why it looks the way it does.

Why does it matter? 

I have heard it said that a writer has an unwritten contract with the reader, to be as accurate as possible about whatever he or she writes, be it geography or forensics or accents.  When you're writing about real places, how much do you owe the reader?  Can you insert a building where there is now an empty lot?  Can you rename major monuments?  Can you change the direction of the main streets? And how many people will know or care?

Apparently the Globe editor is defending his beloved town, and that's nice of him.  At the same time, he must like something about the book or he wouldn't have bothered to mention it at all (and provide all that nice free publicity).  Confession:  I own the book and have read it. I liked it, and I didn't wonder why the Jamaica Plain police station was here rather than there.  It was a good story.

That's the bottom line: just tell a good story.

(Much as I may like the guy and the book, I'm not going to give him any more free publicity.  If you want to find out more, look here.)

I'd much rather you looked at my book, Golden Malicious, coming October 1st. 

This is called Blatant SELF Promotion.

Women in Academia

by Sheila Connolly

After my post last week about The Battle of the Sexes and the status of women in the 1970s, it is ironic that the Harvard Magazine included in its most recent issue the results of a recent Harvard University study of faculty gender distribution at Harvard.

The authors report: "Women now hold nearly 23 percent of the tenured professorships in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, more than double their 10.7 percent share of 20 years earlier . . . 127 of the 557 senior faculty members during the 2012-2013 academic year."

It gets worse:  among junior faculty "the female proportion has fluctuated between roughly 30 percent and 40 percent for nearly two decades." Mind you, this is at a time when the proportion of women earning doctorates, a general requirement for senior academic status, across diverse fields, has been rising. In 2010 the Washington Post reported that women had passed men in receiving doctoral degrees.  And women hold a 3:2 majority on both undergraduate and graduate education.

Guess what:  Harvard admits that they don't do very well at recruiting women. Worse, they recognize that they trail far behind many of their peer institutions at every step of the process of attracting and keeping qualified women faculty. I'm sorry, but I don't think that's an accident:  if Harvard really wanted to recruit qualified women for their faculty, they could. I hate to say it, but this whole discussion sounds depressingly like it did when I was at Harvard in the 1970s.  Harvard doesn't want to change.

And if that isn't enough, the capper is another (tiny) article in the same issue of the publication, saying that The Committee of the Equality of Women at Harvard, founded in 1988, decided that "its goals had been achieved and it will dissolve this year." Uh-huh.

As a dues-paying member of the community of writers, where I know a lot of very smart, hardworking women, I refuse to say that we are any less intelligent and capable than our male counterparts.  Maybe we're just smart enough to realize being a writer and hanging out with kindred spirits

is a heck of a lot more fun that sitting through Harvard faculty meetings.

COMING OCTOBER 1ST

Touching the Past

by Sheila Connolly

A few weeks ago I bought a huge lot of antique cookware at a local auction.  When I walked into the preview, I saw the table full of implements, some familiar, some still unexplained, and I said, "I want that." I bid and I won, and I've been working my way through them ever since.

The biggest surprise has been the dozen or so choppers.  Today those of us who cook at home use knives almost exclusively.  Even forty-odd years ago, through today, chefs such as Julia Child have been instructing us on proper knife handling.  Just watch Iron Chef sometime.  I admit that, done well, that style of chopping is fast and efficient.  But what happened to the old ways?

My chopper collection presumes the use of a wooden bowl (how handy I got one of those at the auction too).  The curve of the choppers (all different, but all somewhat curved) fits nicely with the curve of the bowl; the wood helps hold the material to be chopped so it doesn't slide out of the way.  It's a peculiarly satisfying was to chop (once you've found your favorite chopper, and believe me, they all feel different). And one source I read said that women used to sit cradling the bowl on their lap while they chopped—given the size of my bowl, I can believe it.

But I think there is more to cooking implements than fads or fashions.  I think it's safe to say that home cooks (or their "help") no longer cook the way they did in 1900. 

In the Orchard Mysteries, I write about a colonial house in western Massachusetts, and the historical society in the real town owns a series of diaries written by the woman of the house, Olive Barton Warner (to whom I'm related through the Barton family), starting in 1880.  I have transcriptions of the first two, and they make fascinating reading because they capture the nature of farm life in the day.  Olive simply reports what she did from day to day, both chore and socializing.  Hers was a small family:  husband Eugene, and two daughters, Lula and Nettie.  Olive was forty when she started the series in 1880, and her daughters were young teenagers, still in school.  Eugene handled all the outside work; the women took care of the house. It's not clear whether they had any additional farm help—no one is ever mentioned—but there is a lot of sharing of work among neighbors.

What is relevant here is what Olive writes about cooking.  Just a few examples:

(January 13, 1880) I baked thirteen pies 7 pumpkin, 6 apple, made a quart apple sauce.  Eugene peared (sic) all my apples.

(February 13) I baked bread, and fourteen pies apple five, pumpkin five, & four mince. 

(February 26) Baked 13 pies, mince apple & pumpkin.  My last pumpkin.

(March 20) I and girls baked 6 pies, some bread, and two kinds of cake. 

This is just a random sample. Nowhere does Olive mention selling or giving away any of her baked goods (although she does talk about Eugene going into town to sell apples or potatoes), so I have to assume that these quantities were for household consumption.  I don't know how long any of these would keep, without refrigeration.  I did peek ahead, and she's still baking come summer. (And I couldn't resist sharing this note:  on May 10^th she and Eugene "took off their flannels".)

My point is, back in the day cooking involved a lot of chopping (I'm assuming some of the choppers, particularly the two-bladed ones, would have been used to "cut in" pastry for all those pie crusts). No fast foods, no short-cuts: it was all done by hand. I don't even want to think about how you cooked all those pies and bread in an oven back then, particularly in summer (early in the day, I presume!).

But what is so wonderful is that holding and using these implements puts me back in that time, and I can picture Olive and her girls busy in the kitchen (which I've seen more than once), and now I know how they did it.  To my mind, this is the best kind of research—the details that make things real.

And I think I'm going to keep using some of the choppers—they work really well.

Coming October 1

Fonts

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read that New York City will be changing the font on its street signs from Highway Gothic (which it has used since the beginning of city highways) to something called Clearview.

Per Wikipedia, "The FHWA Series fonts (often informally referred to as Highway Gothic) are a set of sans-serif typefaces developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration and used for road signage in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and New Zealand. The fonts were created to maximize legibility at a distance and at high speed."

 New York chose to use the font in all-caps mode (sometimes considered "shouting" in Internet parlance).  Now there is a federal mandate that requires that those signs in all capital letters must be replaced with mixed case (upper and lower) signage.

When Highway Gothic was first used, there was no formal testing of the readability of fonts.  At least there was a consistency to the appearance of road signs, not only locally but also nationally.

 But now science has caught up with fonts, and early researchers found that Clearview is 16 per cent easier to read than Highway Gothic. If you're going sixty on a highway, you'd have an extra 1-2 seconds to respond, or a few hundred feet. Clearview may have less personality, but it's more legible, particularly from a distance.

The old (left) and the new (right)

Would that publishers would think the same way.  Certainly publishers have used a variety of fonts over the years. I've always enjoyed the little notes on the front or back pages saying that a book was printed in Boldoni Bold or some such, even while not knowing what the heck they were talking about. At least the publisher was proud of its choice. But by and large, these days mass market paperbacks are published in something that looks pretty much like good old Times New Roman. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that to an average reader, it simply looks like "book" font.  They don't have to think about it.

But there's another twist (and please, editors and publishers, tell me if I'm wrong).  Mass market books, at least those from Berkley, are issued in a standard size and page length (check any Amazon listing)—304 pages (it was 288 pages for a long time).  This is because that size fits neatly, 48 to a box, and all boxes are the same size.

Now, the standard word count for my type of paperback—cozies—is anywhere between 65,000 and 80,000 words. This is a pretty wide range.  If you write long, as I sometimes do (topping out at 84,000 words), does the publisher change the page count? 

No. They change the font size and/or the line spacing, making it a bit harder to read. Now consider that most of our readers are women of middle-age or beyond, who may be having problems with aging eyes, and you wonder why the publisher is sacrificing ease of reading for shipping convenience.  Or driving readers to e-readers where the owner can adjust the font size onscreen.

Who wins?

Nobody Knows Where You Are

by Sheila Connolly

I've probably touched on the topic of childhood imagination and free play before, but not long ago the point was driven home again.

On my recent trip to Italy a group of us were talking about what we used to do for "play" as children, in the halcyon days of the nineteen-fifties.  Back then, parents weren't hovering over us or scheduling back to back activities to make sure we used every precious hour wisely (and in a way that would get us into a good college and assure our career path forever—ha!).  And back then we also had "recess" during which our teachers threw us out onto a sketchy playground and told us to have fun for half an hour.

We did.  When I was in elementary school, we had a "gang" of sorts (it was a small class, maybe thirty kids total, and our gang was five or six people, who I can still name today).  On the playground we often acted out what we'd seen recently on television, or more often, distilled it into the generic plot:  a bunch of guys rode horses and galloped around and shot at people (the bad guys, I hope), and the lone designated woman of the group stayed home and tidied up the ranch house.  That role was usually assigned to someone we didn't like very much but who really wanted to be part of our group.  (Sorry, Helen, if we scarred you for life.)

At home it was a different story.  We moved into a new house when I was seven, and there were few kids in that neighborhood (we didn't count the mildly retarded boy next door, who was best known for trying to run over his dog with a lawn mower, although he and I did once catch an opossum in a bucket together).  Luckily for me, one of my school friends lived immediately behind our home (immediately in this case was several hundred feet, through a partially wooded area), and for the three years we lived there we were fast friends.

And we had free rein, to go and do whatever we wanted to.  My friend was the last of four children in her family, several years younger than her nearest sibling, and I think her parents had kind of given up on the child-rearing thing.  If there is an antithesis of hovering, they fit the bill.  I had a younger sister, but she was too little and too prissy to join in our somewhat rough adventures, so basically it was the two of us. 

We roamed, we explored.  We investigated abandoned buildings, we went swimming in a creek, we even indulged in a little mild vandalism (don't tell). And what my college classmate said brought that all back:  nobody knew where we were.  Our parents could not have found us without bloodhounds. I admit that even at that age I wondered whether if I fell down and broke my neck, my friend would bother to tell anyone about it, or would just go on about her usual business. And this wasn't in some rural area—this was in a commuter suburb of Philadelphia, although there was still a lot of open space. It was only a couple of miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and once we walked that far.

The world is not like that today. It's a wonder that we haven't started embedding a tracking device in our children before they even leave the hospital when they're born (we do it for our pets, don't we?).  We panic when they're out of sight.  We hand off our precious darlings to other (vetted, respectable, trustworthy) parents, making sure they know they're in charge and on duty. We worry, about perverts and kidnappers and accidents.

I don't think my parents were careless or uncaring.  In retrospect, I'm honored that they trusted me, even at seven years old.  I earned that trust, mostly:  I usually told someone where I was going (if "out to play" or "to the woods" is a definition) and when I was told to be back by a certain time, I made sure I was (I had a watch early on).  But I had a lot of freedom, and the adventures we had in those short years are still among my most vivid memories.

Are we cheating our children?  Are we depriving them of creativity and independence?