Category Archives: historic fiction

Not this, not that, but ALL THE OTHER

At a friend’s house yesterday, we both admitted that we’re not up to much creatively these days. She, because of back surgery and a fairly recent retirement from a demanding job. Me? The book I guess. “It takes up energy even when I’m not doing much,” I lamented.

But then I gave her a rundown of the tasks I had completed on the day before. Just the one day. It shocked me how much there was to recite.

I’ll post at the end for my own sake. I don’t expect anyone (except maybe someone in the middle of self-publishing) to be interested.

The mood in my circle of friends is unanimously ebullient. There’s hope again. Relief and energy too. Many of us had no idea just how much dread and fear we were holding in our bodies. I feel like I can breathe again, I kept saying.

On my almost-weekly Tuesday call (the one that’s been going since Trump got elected), there’s been a need during the final moments of our half-hour together to find something positive to report. It’s often been so grim that it’s difficult to think of something.

How wonderful, then, to not need the flourish of positivity at the end of this week’s call. The entire half-hour was buoyed by optimism.

Here we go! Are you ready to pitch in? I just asked for 25 more addresses from #PostcardstoVoters but I want to do more.

His George Washington moment cemented his legacy

Now the boring book details:

Wrote a third person, short “about page” for blog like they recommend. Researched how to pin it to top of blog and nearly gave up (invariably the first three buttons I’m supposed to “just click” are not in evidence). But then when I finally figured it out, I promptly undid it because it left a huge white space below, making accessing the blog inconvenient.

Revised longer ABOUT. It was very dated.

Spent a couple hours scanning the proof copy of my book and making notes for HISTORY post (this time Hell Hole Swamp and George Whitefield got written up and posted in draft).

Waited anxiously for my designer to send the copy of book cover for Amazon that includes the bar code. I had to ask him to take D2D’s out because their barcode override button is broken. Then I had to ask for both versions of the cover to have wider images so that the white stripe would disappear. He didn’t answer right away and I thought he might not at all because there have been a lot of changes. He complained. I paid him more than 20% extra on Sunday so I perhaps should’ve been comfortable expecting him to get the Amazon cover correct but I wasn’t. (It arrived the next day).

Signed in to Twitter and Instagram on my laptop. Still have to do Facebook. Naturally this involves changing passwords. Learned that FB is taxing the ads that you post there (which everyone says to do to promote your book) and that you can avoid that tax by accessing your account through a laptop. I don’t actually know.

As I was pondering whether to offer some free ARCs (advanced reader copies), I was dismayed to learn that Amazon might be making it difficult for someone who did not purchase the book through them to post a review (it’s the whole reason you give ARCs away). Okay, so maybe skip them.

Then I learned that Amazon is running bots to prevent review-scams. There are some scams out there, but friends and family of a self-published author posting reviews is hardly one of them. I’ve seen threads where authors crow about getting their first non-acquaintance review, so maybe this isn’t happening to the degree that I read it is.

Definitively decided not to post to Barnes & Noble directly because of the apparent demand that that they be supplied with a Barnes & Noble-specific ISBN. What bullshit! And honestly, the threads about this are contradictory and confusing even in the Barnes & Noble frequently asked questions section. So at this point I just can’t be bothered.

To find without looking

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When walking on a beach or a forest trail, I am generally scouting the ground for two kinds of rocks: rocks with stripes or heart-shaped rocks. Invariably, a find feels like a gift.

This morning in Truro I wasn’t looking but found a heart-shaped rock anyway — one of the best I’ve ever come across.

This being the morning of opening statements in the election interference case against trump in Manhattan, I take the stone to mean something positive — a sign that justice might in fact be coming, coming for a nation starved for it.

The wind was bracing on the Cape this weekend but my time away with a friend was relaxing nonetheless. We snacked. Walked. Read. Wrote Postcards to Voters. Not a second of TV for two whole days!

On Saturday, I finished North Woods by Daniel Mason, a challenging and extraordinary read that I might put in the same category as The Overstory, in no small part because trees feature so centrally.

The novel takes place over several hundred years in Western Mass where one piece of property in the so-called North Woods is the connecting link between various sequential stories. There are twin girls undone by jealousy. A painter who loves another man and pays the price for that. A mother with a schizophrenic son, forever holding out hope that he will somehow straighten himself out even as he frantically wanders the land, believing his footsteps are stitching the ground and keeping it pieced together.

Chestnut trees come and go. An apple orchard is planted and then goes to ruin. Elm and hemlock suffer from blight or invasive insects and vanish. Mountain lions and passenger pigeons disappear too.

The haunting spirits of people who came before affect subsequent residents to a greater or lesser degree. As my husband said, “It’s essentially a ghost story.”

Yes. And perhaps the central ghost story is the one produced by the land itself. Earlier incarnations of nature haunt the landscape with what came before, producing a sense of profound loss.

Road near where my parents built a house

Because I grew up in Western Mass (sort of), I felt an especially strong connection to the setting. I could see those fields, those trail heads, the banks of snow.

Buffy and me. 1974? Jiminy Peak visible.

Since the Berkshires might be the only place that has ever felt like home to me, the stories made me miss the place. Or the feeling of the place. Or my youth. I guess it’s complicated even though it’s an old and widely-shared story.

And then, because the climate crisis has produced terrifying evidence of the planet’s warming, the descriptions of blizzards (so many blizzards!) caused an acute nostalgia for a vanishing world. Not just dying plants and creatures, but the disruption of seasons and the loss of habitability. In other words, the book prompts mourning not just for our particular past, but for humanity’s collective past.

I’ll be thinking about this story for a while.

Editing as whittling

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We are getting rain. The painters stayed home today, but yesterday as I sat upstairs in my writing chair, a man worked on a ladder directly out the window. He chatted on his phone, Spanish providing him privacy since I don’t know a word. But how I worried about him, scaling the ladder with one hand, or gripping the phone with his neck and shoulder while balancing two stories up!

In today’s blessed quiet, I’ve been editing, determined to get my word count below 140,000. Deb would scoff and maybe my paid editor would too. But a lower word count would be more appealing to the average agent. Or so I’ve heard.

Couple years back — before Covid so it feels like another lifetime — Deb visited and invited me as a guest to a writer’s conference where she was the keynote speaker. Talk at the table turned to word count.

“For a debut author, anything over 90,000 is a no-no,” one writer said. Others agreed. (Deb’s speech was amazing BTW — part humor, part wise advice).

Well, I’m not gonna even get down to 120,000, but you have to admit that our minds respond differently to 141,800 than to 139,800.

And I did it! Gonna keep going because I have a new appreciation for where I can carve. Mostly I’ll go to the Eliza chapters because she thinks too much and can be flowery in her speech. Snip. Snip.

Whose story is it?

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A placekeeping-post quoting NYTimes opinion piece which you may or may not be able to read in full here.

Pamela Paul starts by outlining the view that one should only write/create about one’s own experience and then continues below.

Back when the controversial Emmett Till painting was in the news, I started collecting quotes like these. Maybe later I’ll link to them. Don’t hold your breath.

It’s cold here. I planted creeping phlox and more pansies this weekend.

Yesterday was not a good day for a bunch of reasons. I’m glad to find myself fully rested this Monday morning, ready to get busy, reconsider things, forgive.

And speaking of points-of-view, it looks like Musk and twitter may reach a deal today. It’s widely believed that the libertarian billionaire will immediately replatform trump.