Nanowrimo 2012

 

Now that I’m (slowly) coming out of my sleep deficit for Nanowrimo, I wanted to post about my inaugural experience with it.

Nanowrimo is short for National Novel Writing Month, and it’s an initiative invented by Chris Baty, a wacky Berkeley guy. When I interviewed him for Oakland Magazine, he said, among many witty things, “In every group of friends, there’s someone who says, ‘Let’s dress up like donkeys and go down Market Street.’ I’m that guy.” After that, I knew I had to participate in Nanowrimo myself.

In essence, each November 1, thousands of people around the world drop everything and try to write a novel—well, at least 50,000 words—by Nov. 30.

There’s a supportive, cheerful website that fuels the whole endeavour, www.nanowrimo.org. You sign up for free, and once the month begins, you are able to update your word count (obsessively, in my case) in a display next to your name/photo. Your page includes a bar graph showing your progress and the expected progress, and your statistics show you the date you can expect to finish if you continue at the same rate. You can add buddies and track their progress too. You can attend local write-ins, where you meet up with other nanos and write together; I went to one with a group that wanted to talk rather than write, but I really liked the concept anyway. At the end of the month, you cut and paste your novel into a little text box, and within seconds your word count is verified and you’re announced a “winner.”

If you hit 50K words, that is.

And it’s….really….just not that….easy.

To hit 50K words in 30 days, you must write 1,667 words per day. That’s about six double-spaced pages. For me, six pages represents not just a good writing day, but a great writing day. And therefore, during November, you must have a great writing day every day. That’s hard.

Right away, I felt overwhelmed. By Day One, I was already behind. By Day Two, I was thousands of words behind. By Day Three, I thought, “I might not be able to do this.”

On either Day Four or Five, I invested in myself. I parked the children at a drop-in daycare center and hied myself to a café. There I worked for 1.5 hours, writing steadily, then walked down the length of the little strip mall to a taqueria, where I spent the next 1.5 hours, again writing steadily. In three hours, I wrote 5,000 words. That was enough to almost catch me up. Not quite, but enough to feel like I was in the running again.

My month continued like that. Days where my word count was abysmal, and then days when I would write hell for leather and almost catch up. “Almost” being the key word. I kept watching that darn diagonal line in my bar graph and trying to reach it.

I came up with a few strategies to up my word count:

1. If your sentences are excessively wordy, great! Don’t fix them. Plenty of time to do that on Draft 2. Just let them stand. Every word counts in Nanowrimo.

2. Find some kind of gimmick to up the word count. My novel is set in Ireland so I hit on the idea of including characters from some of the fantastic Irish ballads. Nancy Spain? Why yes, there she is on page 125, trying to hawk her ring. The Star of the County Down? That pretty lady appears too.

3. Try writing from another character’s point of view. All along, my novel was written first person. When I decided to write a few scenes from another character in third person, suddenly pages came pouring out of me, and I had a couple of 2K word days. I think those scenes enrich the book and they’ll stay.

By the last week of Nano, I was exuberant. I knew I could make it. I had to stay up to midnight to do it (my target bedtime is 9:30, wild life, right?) and I’m still reeling from that. But it was worth it. It was just one month out of the year, and I threw myself into a project with a zeal that has previously only come from doing writing retreats where I was by myself and someone else fed, sheltered and studio’d me.

Nanowrimo will certainly humble you if you can’t make space in your life to achieve that “ridiculous” (Chris Baty’s word) word count. A good friend’s father went into the hospital this November and she had to suspend her nano writing or I know she would have made it (yes, he’s fine!). It’s fun, zany, serious, debilitating, exhilarating, all-consuming. Thanks, Chris Baty, for a fantastic month.

What about you? Are you on board for next year?

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Literary Joke

The other day I was looking at a list of donors for a local school’s funding drive, and on one line by itself was this donor:

Magwitch.

I laughed with delight. I love finding literary jokes hidden in the real world. Magwitch of course is the character in Great Expectations who is a secret donor funding Pip’s education, although Pip believes it is Miss Havisham (sorry for the plot spoiler, but the book is 200 years old!)

I wish I’d thought of it.

Anyone have any literary jokes they’ve come across over the years?

Historical Novel Society conference

The Historical Novel Society conference takes place June 21-23 at St. Petersburgh, Florida. I'm excited to report I'll be participating in a panel titled "The Witchcraft Window: Scrying the Past." This panel will talk about witchcraft in fiction, and features Kathleen Kent (The Heretic's Daughter), Mary Sharratt (Daughters of the Witching Hill), Suzy Witten (The Afflicted Girls) and me (The Witch's Trinity).

Each of us has a slightly different take on witchcraft and already via emails we've had some thought-provoking conversations, so I think this will be an interesting panel. Some of us believe in witchcraft; some of us don't. Some of us see it as a feminist issue; some of us don't. Some of us descend from women accused of witchcraft; some of us don't. Come to find out which is witch....er, which!

Kathleen and Suzy's books look at the Salem hysteria, Mary's book is about the Pendle Witch trials in England in 1612, and my book is a fictional account of a woman accused in Germany in the early 1500s.

The link to the conference is here. It's for both readers and writers--and agents and editors will be there too. I attended in 2011 and met fantastic people, one of which is now a very close friend. It's a fun time to get together with people who love history and love reading: a powerful combination.


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Artwork based on Timberline photo

It' s been amazing how many little bits and drabs of information file in sporadically on the woman known as "Timberline," the Dodge City prostitute whose image adorns the book jacket of my novel Woman of Ill Fame.

When I asked Heyday Books to use her photograph for the book jacket, all I knew about her was what I just typed in the previous paragraph.

Over time, readers have contacted me with different little tidbits to add and/or directed me to other references that source her. That was how I learned her real name was Rose Vastine, and that she had tried to kill herself: both facts that I found shocking. She does not look like a Rose to me! And I was very upset to learn that such a strong-looking woman had succumbed to such despair. I learned that Timberline was her nickname because she was over six feet tall.

Recently someone named David Huerbin contacted me to let me know her full name was Rosanna (again: surprise!) and that her nickname arose because she would ferry whiskey and girls to men living in the mountains above the timberline. That seems more plausible to me. She somehow just doesn't look six foot in her image, and given that people were even less tall in the 1800s than today, I just found the other explanation hard to swallow.

Just like me, this person was intrigued by her image and in fact has created a piece of art based on her. With his permission, I am attaching it here. The letter next to her image is a "suicide letter" he created for her. This piece was showcased in The Basement Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2002. More later.


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The A/C Ratio and being thin as a playing card

I think I first heard this phrase from a buddy in my old writers group, author Kemble Scott.

The A/C Ratio is terribly important for writers. It is a part of everything they do. It's integral to productive work days.

A = Ass. And C=Chair.

It's monumental. It's cataclysmic. One has to actually SIT DOWN to write.

Sure, you can dictate while you breeze through your workout. You can certainly come up with devastatingly clever dialogue while standing talking to someone who is boring you. But at the end of the day, at some point: yes, you must sit.

I love this bit from Stephen Koch's The Modern Library's Writer's Workshop.

And you must sit down and write. It doesn't even really matter if you feel like writing. As Tom Wolfe says, "Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired."....Joyce Carole Oates agrees: "One must be pitiless about this matter of 'mood.' In a sense, the writing will create the mood....I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

Let's see if we can all improve our A/C Ratios in the upcoming weeks. I know I'm working on it.



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Three week class...and fun link

Oftentimes, we want to take a class but just can't commit to the weeks of work involved. So....how about a three-week class?

There are still a few spots in two of my online (wear PJs!) mediabistro classes: "How to Research and Write Historical Fiction" and "Nailing the First Pages of your Novel" July 16-Aug. 1. It is a mini-class as part of the online Literary Festival. Susan Orlean is our keynote speaker! We'll have two hour-long live chats on July 16 and 23 (historical class) and July 24 and 31 (first pages class). Info is here: http://www.mediabistro.com/literaryfestival/?c=bclftw

 And just so this post isn't completely self-serving, here's a link I recently discovered that I just LOVE. Make sure not to visit until you've got a good mug of coffee with you because you will probably be glued to your seat for hours cruising through the archives. It's a wonderful look at the past (my favorite place!), and with a tagline I find irresistible: "the past is a foreign country. This is your passport." I give you: Retronaut. 

Governor's mansion in Sacramento

David Nicolai, former director of the Pardee Home Museum in Oakland, California, now living as an ex-pat teaching English in China, recently came to visit. We took full opportunity of historical sites in the area and "geeked out historically." We visited three sites in two days: the first was the governor's mansion in Sacramento, now a museum and no longer a residence.

Governor George Pardee (1903-07) was the first to use this as a gubernatorial residence; it was initially built for another family. Of course, we were interested in this house given our interest in George! He brought his wife and four girls in from Oakland and installed them in the three-story mansion.

Over the years, time has taken a toll on the building despite its still-stellar exterior. You can only visit the first two floors, although the third is due to open soon from water-damage reconstruction. We toured the building with the belief it was to close on July 1; our tour guide reassured us that the museum had been given a temporary stay of execution, operating with reduced hours. Yay!

The coach house, too, is fantastic viewed from the outside. Note the horse head over the entrance, still original. Inside is a nice gift shop. This coach house is larger than many homes. Must've been nice for the horses.



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ONLINE summer literary festival

I love literary festivals...but it never occurred to me one could happen online. Luckily, the idea did strike someone at Mediabistro, and I'm excited to be teaching several classes for this cool concept.

I'm teaching "Nailing the First Pages of Your Novel" and "How to Research and Write Historical Fiction"--and there's a host of other classes. The festival takes place July 16 through August 1. Forget reading summer beach reads: WRITE one!

 Learn more here.

Sneak peek at Pixar campus

All my life, I've loved being around creative people. Last week, thanks to a freelance assignment, I gained access to the closed campus of Pixar Studios in Emeryville, California.

This was incredibly exciting to me. I love the playfulness and true drama of Pixar films, so yes, it was worth it to me to travel four hours round trip (and squeeze in a visit with a few old wonderful friends too) to be on campus for a few hours and watch a thirty-minute teaser clip of the new movie Brave.

Driving through the monumental front gates (and seeing each car ahead of me really get grilled; there is no such thing as being waved through here), I felt the thrill of being in a place where everybody is thinking story.

I parked (even that was exciting) and waited in line to enter the main building. In this photo, you can see that it contains an atrium with lots of light. That room was filled with hanging banners for Brave (set in old-world Scotland) and almost has a Hogwarts kind of feel. Backing up a bit, in the photo you can see the tiered seating of an outdoor amphitheater. For this visit it held a Stonehenge-like circle of stones, and across the meadow, a bunch of archery targets. Having not yet seen the film, I thought these were, respectively, permanent art and a recreation opportunity for staffers.

Waiting in line to enter the main building, the woman ahead of me chanted to her friends, "We're at Pixar! We're at Pixar!" I felt the same way but curbed myself, since I was alone and you never look healthy when chanting to yourself. Immediately inside, you're greeted by giant replicas of Scully, Woody, Buzz and other buddies from the oeuvre. There's also a glass case of trophies including six Oscars and a million other glinty pieces.

Security to enter the theater itself was much stricter than the airport. All cell phones had to be turned in to a sort of coat check for electronics, and when they look through your purse, it's not a cursory glance. They are moving things around and really looking. I had not thought of my Garmin nuvi ("Jack") as a person of interest, but I had to go back and add him to coat check too!

The director and producer made wonderful introductory remarks, the movie clip was delicious, and we were all escorted to another building for a lavish refreshments spread. This was held in an open-air patio reminiscent of the Standard Hotel's rooftop in L.A. A great view of the campus could be had from here: I saw one guy swimming lonely laps in the pool, and there is a volleyball court, basketball court, gym, and cafeteria: basically, Pixar is a village and no one need go home until their creativity lapses.

Thanks, Pixar, for the opportunity to visit this incredible facility. (Now, would you like to hire me?)

National Keep Your Chin Up Day for Writers

I originally wrote this post as an email to a Facebook acquaintance, who was clearly getting depressed about his inability to find a traditional publisher for his novel, but as it lengthened I thought it'd be worth posting here. I remember those dark days myself very clearly, and my heart goes out to anyone in this situation--because getting a novel published isn’t just something that would be cool for us; it’s something that validates how we see ourselves.

I remember that if I met someone new and identified myself as a writer, they’d invariably ask, “So have you published anything?” and then you have to embark on the Road to Apologia, why this is, and how hard you’ve tried, and you came close with that one agent, and you attended that conference and had a nice talk with that publisher, and how you keep trying and you…

Yes, it sucks.

So I’m appointing today National Keep Your Chin Up Day for Writers. I have a few thoughts to share that hopefully will serve as a bit of a pep talk.

1. Nearly every published writer I know (myself included) had about six novels under the bed when they finally got that offer. Count up your own manuscripts: two? Three? You may need to keep churning them out, because with each novel your craft improves. Writing is mysterious, and I do believe in innate talent, but as with everything single thing in this life, we get better with practice. So keep practicing.

It occurs to me that this bit of cheer may backfire, that a writer may say, “I can’t keep doing this to myself! I just finished my third book, and that’s IT. You’re telling me I have to write three more?!” Someone who really cares about their career will nod philosophically and take the long view that it’s worth it to keep working, keep improving, and finally get a publication contract for a book that’s your best effort.

And after all, you can’t force a book to sell. You can revise based on editorial feedback, you can try again; you can try multiple times! But at some point, you have to cut your losses and start the next project. Soon, the joy of creating a new world within your novel will ease your feelings of feeling frantic about the previous book. And with what you learned from the new novel, you may wish to launch another revision on the old. But at least you’ll have another fresher, better book to try to publish.

2. Joining a writers group really helps with the emotions of being unpublished. Kvetching together, sharing the anticipations as queries go out, consoling each other when rejections happen, cheering each other on to try again: that’s something that non-writers can’t really offer. They don’t “get” what’s so important about being published.

I heartily recommend finding a real-person writers group, but online works too. For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have just the group for you. It’s led by Tamim Ansary, it meets for free every Tuesday night, and there’s incredible camaraderie and support. Tamim’s an incredible mentor and generous critiquer (generous in terms of the thoughtfulness involved in his responses, not that he necessarily praises) and your writing will improve if you listen to him.

The other thing about joining a writers group is that suddenly the idea of being a writer becomes more real. It’s one thing to type away in your home, but when you’re sharing your work with other writers, equally serious about their craft as you, your idea of yourself as an author gains more weight, validity. It will seem more possible that you can do this successfully.

3. Keep reading books you love. It’s not escapism, it’s not a reason not to write. It’s research--because every single sentence you imbibe resides in you. The more you read, the more those different ways of constructing a sentence moil around in your head. You give your brain more options. You are tutoring yourself subconsciously.

4. “It only takes one person to say yes.” I’m sure you’ve heard that dozens of times, but it’s so true in the publishing industry. It doesn’t matter that 50 agents sent you form rejections, if one says, “I love it!” Your onus is to find the person most likely to say yes. Like I said in #3, keep reading…and when you find a book that’s similar to yours in tone or aesthetic, look at the Acknowledgments section to see if the author thanked their agent. That’s a good person to target.

Another good tactic is to subscribe to Publishers Marketplace (you can do it for $20 for one month, jam through the archives, and cancel, if money is an issue): you can see what’s selling right now to editors, and which agents are doing that selling. See an agent’s name several times, linked with books that are similar to yours? That’s another good person to target.

You can also look through those thick tomes of agent directories (or better yet, www.agentquery.com), but that doesn’t give you a feel for what the agent likes. Just knowing they represent historical fiction, for instance, doesn’t necessarily mean that they like books set in Colonial America. Look at the agent’s website and rifle through their client list. Can you get a sense of the agent’s personality through the books he/she has chosen to represent?

Keep your chin up. There’s a part of this process you can control, and you should: the rest of it is out of your hands. The best thing you can do is move to the next project, and let the current novel marinate. Mark your calendar for six months from now, and re-read it.

Is that chin in the air yet? Higher! Like Cora in Downton Abbey, let me see that plastic surgery scar! I offer you an e-hug and a rueful e-smile, because I’ve been there. Believe me, I’ve really, really been there… and I hope the Gods of Publishing will soon smile on you and your novel.

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Getting down at Downton

This is a post on Downton Abbey, because I’m in love with the screenwriting…and frankly I can’t stop thinking about the show.

Last year, someone told me I would love Downton Abbey, and that she’d watched each episode of Season 1 four times. Four times! I thought that was quite a ringing endorsement, but I still dragged my feet because I don’t watch much TV.

Then another friend recommended it again this year. I was inspired one evening to look for it on Netflix, but spelling it Dounton or whatever I was doing (Dontown?) yielded no results so I gave up.

A while passed before I tried again…and honestly, I’m so happy. Being a “late adopter” meant that I could watch all of Season 1, and then dive instantly in Season 2. I’m going to start watching Season 1 again--I don’t know if I’ll manage four viewings like my friend, but most definitely I want to go back “knowing what I know” and watch how things unfold.

Julian Fellowes is an incredible storyteller. I loved Gosford Park (and was influenced by it in my current novel-in-progress), and Downton Abbey is more of the same delectable upstairs/downstairs drama. So many of the things I find fascinating about the past are included in the show: the sinking of the Titanic, the 1918 flu.

And more recently I learned that the Crawley family is in part based on the Carnarvon family. SWOON. EXCITEMENT. The very name Carnarvon elicits a Pavlovian response in me: that sense of awe as I imagine that solitary candleflame flickering for the first time in centuries on pharaonic gold.

Lord Carnarvon was financier to Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. I’ve been obsessed with this discovery since I was a child. I remember on my wall I had taped up a kids funny pages article about it. My very first signed book was David Macauley’s Pyramid, and he signed it to me, “Greetings from the tomb.” I love ancient Egypt.

Howard Carter’s story is so compelling. He was told the Valley of the Kings was “exhausted,” and everyone considered him a fool for continuing to dig. He kept spending Lord Canarvon’s money, and this was to be his very last season as Carnarvon was withdrawing support. And then a staircase appeared in sand…and they dug…and they dug…and Howard Carter looked through a chink in the wall to the Treasury.

He was asked if he could see anything, and famously answered, “Yes, wonderful things.”

Ah, so pithy! How I love you, Howard Carter.

So, now knowing that Downton Abbey may show us a beautifully-filmed version of this moment…oh it’s making my heart race. There’s so much good stuff here: commoner Howard Carter’s gossiped-of romance with Carnarvon’s daughter Evelyn (a close match with the name Edith?) which had to be quashed, Carter’s illicit smuggling out of the country many antiquities, and… well, no plot spoilers but two words: mummy’s curse. I do hope we get to see this!

But even if we don’t, I know whatever Fellowes cooks up for us will be devoured with great gusto. (And don’t even get me started with the news that his next series will be about the Titanic. I was such a Titanicophile--that doesn’t look right--that watching James Cameron’s movie, I instantly noted that he had hired actors who looked like photographs of the actual crew members. The Titanic story is deep in my blood for some reason, and I was disappointed Downton Abbey only glossed over it. How extraordinary will it be when Fellowes actually focuses on it!)

I was marveling the other day that somehow with this gigantic cast of characters (looking at the most recent cast picture, I count 18, and that doesn’t include dear Bates or lost Lavinia) we understand each person’s story and care deeply about them. What a feat, to balance such a volume of stories.

My favorite character? Mrs. Patmore. Lesley Nicol is an incredible actress, with an expressive face. She so perfectly expresses the staunch demeanor of someone who knows her place, but can wiggle a little to assert herself. I will never forget her lost expression as she sat on the bed by herself, Anna having left her, to await her dreaded eye surgery.

There are a few things to quibble with. For instance, Matthew’s constant popping in from war (“The trenches? Oh, yes, I’ll go back in just a moment. But in the meantime, I’m terribly interested in my own love story, and I’ll surely avoid shellshock by holding onto this stuffed puppy”). For another, the lack of resonating emotion for very big events, like Lady Crawley’s miscarriage (of the very vaunted male heir!), or the in-house death of a diplomat. We go so quickly from thing to thing, and it’d be great to slow down just a little and digest these momentous plot twists.

But they are just quibbles. Downton Abbey is the best fun I’ve had with TV in quite a long time, and like I said at the top of this post, I’m thinking about it all the time. I can’t believe we have to wait (sob sob) until next January to see Season 3. I may just have to move to England to see it earlier.

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Storybook architecture

A reader emailed me recently. She had remembered my (long ago! dating to 2002) Montclarion column about Storybook architecture in Oakland. This style is near and dear to my heart. The article is not cached online, so I’m going to post it here on the blog, slightly rewritten from its original text.

Storybook is the style of architecture that makes you feel like you suddenly slipped into the Germanic forest of Hansel and Gretel, and are peeping at a quaint cottage in the clearing. The Montclair neighborhood boasts two wonderful public examples, pictured here.

At top is the firehouse on Moraga Road. Its roof is not supposed to be painted white to represent snow, but should rather shine with its original copper finish to represent flames –see them roaring up at either end of the building-- quite appropriate for a firehouse. Note the scalloped roofline, the heart above the entry, the tiny windows in the eaves: all illustrative of that olde worlde charm.

The other structure is the library on Mountain Boulevard. Its roofline was built to look like it was already sagging for centuries, although the library was quite new at the time of this photograph. You can see the clinker brickwork behind the bushes and its general homespun, European appeal.

I must credit the coffeetable book Storybook Style: American's Whimsical Homes of the '20s by local architect Arrol Gellner. It’s filled with gorgeous photos by Douglas Keister of many Bay Area buildings, including private residences in Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont and Alameda. In an email interview, Gellner told me that he thinks "Storybook Style homes, more than any other, represent the embodiment of the builder's personality, creativity and sense of humor. They're also a snapshot of an optimistic era when anything seemed possible, which no doubt appeals to people in these jaded times."

So what defines Storybook? Gellner calls it a "rambunctious evocation of medieval Europe" and sets the three criteria: an overstated rendition of medieval forms, use of artificial measures to make the building look extremely old, and the third, amorphous quality: "whimsy."

Storybook homes, at their most extreme, have crooked chimneys, lopsided walls, roofs that undulate like the wind making waves on a pond, misaligned shingles, askew shutters, clinker brick: all things to suggest antiquity, as if the very house is settling due to its age. Some homes have drawbridges (like Humphrey Bogart's Hollywood home) or streams with bucolic bridges over them, reminiscent of a pastoral Europe.

Gellner presents an interesting reason for why Storybook architecture arose. Even dating to the 1700s, people were fascinated by the Middle Ages (my dictionary says the Middle Ages ended in 1500, so the fascination began 200 years later). For instance, Marie Antoinette's famous "farm" at Versailles was her interpretation of a medieval countryside hamlet. The 1869 castle Neuschwanstein (which Disney later based his Sleeping Beauty castle on) is in essence fake, because it purports to look far older than it is.

Gellner points out that because Victorian style was so fussy, with its overwrought gingerbread detailings and interior doilies and tassles, people longed for a return to simpler times, like the society of a medieval town where goods were made by hand rather than in a factory. This was the basis of the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued craftsmanship. By the 1920s, people were ready for Storybook architecture, which allowed them to pretend they had stepped back in time. However, it seems to me that storybook architecture is a little fussy on its own, with turrets and eaves and different roof levels. Gellner says Storybook architecture relies on Craftsman ideals (like using natural materials, buildings of a small scale and architecture that appears organic to its setting) that were "recast in a rather more theatrical style."

And why theatrical? A major factor contributing to the rise of Storybook was the indomitable presence of Hollywood. By the 1920s, talking movies had created the first "stars" – people whose homes needed to reflect their unique standing in life. Moreover, there was a ready workforce that was used to creating fantasy sets – or was inspired by them – builders whose dials were already set on creative. Hollywood is indeed, as Gellner says, the "epicenter of Storybook style," although I did see at least 10 Oakland buildings featured in the book, as well as a handful from other Bay Area cities.

Another reason for this style? Men returning from WWI with memories of appealing European villages.

Sometimes entire housing tracts were built in Storybook style. Three are local, and were all based on designs by Oakland-based architect W. W. Dixon. One is Stonehenge in Alameda, another is Normandy Gardens in Oakland, and the third is on Oakland's Ross Street. This street was chosen because its electrical and phone cables had already been undergrounded by the time of the construction, and the street had pleasant light standards, rolled curbs and concrete pavement rather than asphalt. Part of the Ross Street tract, built by R.C. Hillen, was removed during freeway construction in the 1960s.

A few other streets host Storybook enclaves. One is 75th Avenue near MacArthur Boulevard. This stretch is called Holy Row, Gellner says, because at one point many of the homes were lived in by various church leaders. These homes were built in the early 1930s. Another street is the charming, tiny Veteran Way in the Dimond District, with three full-fledged Storybook homes and several "almosts."

Storybook architecture was gone by the late 1930s when Art Deco took over—a style that was also revivalist, looking in part to Egyptian motifs after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Unfortunately, there are few buildings left. Gellner told me "Sometimes we (he and photographer Keister) had to spend days just to find one good one. It was like finding a diamond buried in a sand dune." So Oakland should certainly appreciate its good fortune in having many structures!

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Timberline's True Name

--This is a reposting; I know there is renewed interest in Woman of Ill Fame and so I'm going to put this blog post up again.


This blog is currently about witchcraft persecutions, ancient and modern, but now and then I will dip into material regarding my first novel Woman of Ill Fame. The novel is about a Gold Rush prostitute in a dangerous, brand-new San Francisco.

A few days ago, someone was in my archives and saw my post about the real-life prostitute whose image is featured on the cover. All I knew was that her name was Timberline, she was a Dodge City prostitute, and her image is in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Well, the anonymous commenter wrote that her name was Rose Vastine.

That for one thing totally threw me. Although I fashioned my character based on this photograph and named her Nora, for some reason I had “felt” that this real woman’s name was Kate.

Secondly, the commenter wrote that she earned the name Timberline for being 6’2” in height. Another big surprise. In my mind, the nickname had dirty connotations!

Armed with her real name, I consulted Professor Google.

The first link I accessed made me gasp out loud in the café I was working in, and literally grab my forehead. According to Linda Wommack’s Ladies of the Tenderloin, “Timberline climbed up into the hills above Creede and shot herself not once, but six times.”

When you have spent so much time staring at someone’s photograph and constructing an entire novel around them, you develop a strange and intense connection to them. It was almost as upsetting as hearing this news about someone I knew…but not only was Timberline a stranger to me, but she died 150 years ago. Whatever sorrows she endured, they are dust now.

I dedicated the novel to two wonderful women the world lost at an early age, and on the second line dedicated it to “Timberline and the other girls of the line: I hope the world was kind to you.”

And here was evidence that the world had not been kind to her.

The link went on to say that Timberline did not die from that suicide attempt, but strangely enough, another link had her recovering from an “intended overdose.” Is it apocryphal that she tried to kill herself with such vastly different methods and survived both times? Whatever the truth is, she must have been an unhappy young woman.

Several sources have her living in Creede, Colorado, a silver mining camp 420 miles from the Dodge City that her photograph is labeled with. Sure enough, the website for Creede, Colorado mentions Timberline on its “About Creede” page. Bat Masterson too (whose biography the commenter mentions) lived in both cities, so maybe she hitched a ride with him.

If anyone has any more information on her, I’d most definitely love to know it.

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Germanic wood sculpture

Sculptor Stefanie Rocknak makes the incredible life-sized pieces you see here, inspired by the medieval art of Germany.

I was so taken with these images (seen in my alumni magazine, Colby: we both attended the same college) that I contacted Rocknak to rave. There's so much emotion captured in these faces and in their body language. I feel like I could stare at them for hours to try to figure out what their individual stories are.

There's something about these figures that is timeless and we see they are the same as us today...but deep in the wood is the darkness of their shortened, brutal lives. They lived in a world where superstition reigned, where food was scarce, and where they couldn't even use logs to warm their huts (only nobles could burn logs; peasants were reduced to whatever branches they could scrounge on the ground).

These sculptures visually show what I tried to convey with words in The Witch's Trinity. In fact, had I known of Rocknak's work in 2006, I would have begged and pleaded with my editor to have one of her pieces on the cover --or maybe even this triptych, which to me looks like the priest, Gude and Irmeltrud.

Check out Rocknak's artist statement on her website. I love her eclectic, whimsical look back at what fueled her work (like her brother's wooden robot, or a face she carved with her dad as a child), rather than some high-flung attempt to interpret her philosophy for others.

This image of her is from the Colby magazine article by Pat Sims. I love how the statue in the background is arching around to look at the camera too.

Nice review of Witch's Trinity

Many thanks to blogger and writer Susan Spann, who just posted a very nice review of The Witch's Trinity on her site, www.susanspann.com.

I met her at the Historical Novels Society conference this year in San Diego. I had a great time sitting with her at dinner and talking shop. One cool thing about her (among many) is that she is required to drink about five cups of coffee a day. I thought it was great to have a medical dictate to freely imbibe! She was a lot of fun, and now she has written a really nice review of my book, on top of buying multiple copies of my book. Many thanks, Susan!



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Suffrage Re-enactment Parade

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What a fine day we had, and how high were all the spirits! I loved wearing the purple "Votes For Women" sash and feeling like I was marching in the footsteps of my forebears (unfortunately, we were not able to recreate the exact path of the 1908 parade in Oakland, but close enough!)

Today, the 14th of October, is the 100th anniversary of the official tally for women getting the vote in California. HOORAY! (The polling date was the 10th, but back in 1911 it took four days for all the votes to be counted up and down the state--and in fact one of the reasons against woman's suffrage was the idea that it already took so long just to count MALE votes.)

Here's a photograph of me in my parade sash. I'm at far left, gesticulating, pushing a younger voter. I have many, many photos to post, but this will suffice for now. If you're a woman and you're not registered to vote, the ghosts of the past are shaking their fingers at you.


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Suffrage article about Governor Markham

I wrote this piece for the Oakland Heritage Alliance newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe (it appears three times a year, and always has great articles about Oakland history), visit www.oaklandheritage.org. Membership is affordable, and the subscription comes with it.

Gov. Markham sets back women's movement several decades
By Erika Mailman

Suffrage passed in California in 1911, nine years before it passed nationally. We can pat ourselves on the backs for being the sixth state to permit woman at the polls. Yet if not for the bullheadedness of an early governor, women could have been voting as early as 1893.

The villain? Governor Henry Harrison Markham, a Republican who served 1891-95.

Born in New York in 1840, he was educated at Wheeler Academy in Vermont. After graduation, he and his brothers moved to Wisconsin. There, he worked as a teacher before volunteering for a Wisconsin infantry regiment of the Union Army. He participated in Sherman’s famous march to the sea, including slogging through waist-deep swamp water, and sustained severe injuries at the Battle of Whippy.

After the war he returned to Wisconsin and studied law. In 1876, he married Mary Dana. They responded to a newspaper ad to buy 23 acres in Pasadena, in part to improve Henry’s ill health, and moved there with their young daughter in 1879.

Markham certainly sounds like a good guy: he volunteered for the school board and helped establish the local library. He was the first U.S. representative for California’s sixth congressional district, 1885-87, and won the campaign for governor thanks to his solid grip. “The victory was attributed partly to Henry’s manner of personally greeting thousands of voters who became well acquainted with the ‘Markham Glad-hand.’ It was his signature move—a firm, hearty handshake evoking sincerity,” wrote Lawrence P. Gooley. He took office in 1891.

In response to the state’s economic woes, he pushed for the 1894 Mid-Winter Exposition which indeed brought needed money and attention. Held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for six months, the fair’s legacy is the original De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Gardens.

A lovely anecdote about Markham shows his good heart. Out walking one day, he found a woman and child who had been evicted from their apartment. He secretly slipped a $100 bill into the keyhole and told the boy to go look again for the “key.” He left before his good deed was discovered.

All this makes it hard to conceive that this gentleman looked at the suffrage bill that had passed both the Senate and Assembly and summarily vetoed it.

Harder still to understand how he justified his decision to his wife and four daughters, Marie, Alice, Gertrude, and Hildreth. The family had no sons.

The discussion may actually have been easier than we might think, since it was doubtless conducted by mail, if at all. His fifth daughter Genevieve had died of typhoid fever six months after the family moved to Sacramento. Mary and the remaining daughters returned to Pasadena where they stayed until the end of his gubernatorial term three and a half years later.

It’s hard to enter the 1800s male mindset to determine why Governor Markham didn’t think that his closest circle deserved to vote. His wife had been formally educated at Rockford Seminary in Wisconsin (whose most famous graduate was Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Prize), and was a tireless volunteer for her Pasadena church and its causes. He had been raised with five brothers and four sisters, so surely the female gender was not a cipher to him.

He loved his daughters. I found an article that talked about an elaborate playhouse he built for them, which is still extant and now sits in a corner of the yard of Pacific Oaks Children’s School in Pasadena.

Yet it’s said he felt suffrage was unconstitutional. Trying to locate more information than that is difficult, and in fact one of my sources indicates that the bill may not have been for blanket suffrage, but rather for “school-suffrage,” so that women might vote at any school election and hold office.

This appears to have been a tactic to chip away at public sentiment; men might be more likely to grant power in an arena viewed as female anyway, and then armed with that success, women could then lobby for more. By 1904, 19 states permitted school-suffrage (in addition to the four states then granting full suffrage: Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming), while in a few other states women might vote on municipal bonds or questions of public expenditure.

According to the 1904 World Almanac prepared for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, other persons excluded from voting in California included “Chinese, idiots, insane, embezzlers of public moneys, convicted of infamous crime.” A footnote added, “Or a person unable to read the Constitution in English and to write his name.”

Markham did not run for a second term, and his grand three-story Pasadena mansion was torn down several decades after his 1923 death from stroke. His mansion had stood near today’s tourist mecca for Craftsman enthusiasts, the Greene & Green Gamble house, and homes owned by other titans of industry: Busch (beer), Wrigley (gum), Maxwell (coffee), Spalding (sporting goods) and others.

The issues around suffrage were complex, and not solely attributable to misogyny. As is endlessly the case with politics, financial interests played a huge role. Many feared women would promptly institute social reforms such as limiting hours that children might work, making factories and mills less profitable. They also predicted women would institute prohibition, not a farfetched fear since the Christian Women’s Temperance Movement was a stalwart suffrage crusader.

Indeed, when the issue of suffrage went (unsuccessfully) to a statewide referendum in 1896, the Liquor Dealers League urged its members, “See your neighbor in the same line of business as yourself, and have him be with you in this matter.” Still others felt suffrage would create an administrative nightmare: it already took nearly a week to count the male votes in the state.

Whatever Markham’s reasoning was, he set back the women’s movement in California by 18 years.

One final tidbit: my research yielded the fact that Gov. Markham has his own Facebook page, and six people like him. Hilarious!

Suffrage article by Elaine Elinson

I just stumbled across a suffrage piece by an old writers group friend, Elaine Elinson. She too is a Heyday author, and her nonfiction book Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California won a California book award.

She outlines here how Selina Solomons got San Franciscans to work for suffrage. She's a fantastic writer.

Sad discovery of woman possibly thought a witch

Friend Linda McCabe alerted me to this link, about the discovery of an 800-year-old corpse in Tuscany. Because seven nails were driven through her jaw, it's thought she was a witch, and this was a measure to keep her from rising from her grave. (But that seems spurious, as she was buried in consecrated ground.)

Thirteen nails were also found around her body, as if fastening her clothing to the ground. She was not in a coffin or shroud. Hm, seven and 13: both kind of "evil" numbers.

Another nearby corpse was buried with 17 dice. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italian, and women were prevented from playing dice in medieval times, so it's thought she too may be a victim of a witchcraft accusation.

Stories like this are always such sad mysteries. Were the nails driven before or after death? What were these women's stories? And how would they feel knowing their images are posted on some worldwide device that everyone can access, and see the horrible truth of their skulls displaying the violence of their treatment?

Here's the link.

Suffrage parade reenactment

Something is brewing in Oakland that I'm so excited about!

Individuals and groups are coming together to re-enact a suffrage parade that took place in Oakland in 1908-the FIRST suffrage parade in California! Suffrage didn't pass for another three years, in 1911...but women fought hard for decades to get it through.

We want to honor those women who struggled so valiantly to get us the right we take for granted today. Can you imagine if women couldn't vote now?!! Yet only 100 years ago it was the case all across the country with the exception of four states: Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

The parade takes place Sunday, Oct. 2. Gather at the Lakeside Park bandstand, march up Grand Avenue to the pergola, and return through the park. It's free.

If you want to spend money, buy a $10 commemorative sash, or donate to help defray expenses for things like street closure permit and the requisite police officers to monitor the event. Visit this website to learn more and to get your sash/donate.

Here is a photo of the 1908 parade. In the background is the (now gone) Masonic Temple at 12th and Washington. The woman on the right is mother to the woman in the center, which makes my heart swell. I somewhere also came across a photo of a woman pushing her child in the stroller. Women working together across the generations: beautiful.


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Free novel writing workshop this Saturday

Join local published novelist Erika Mailman for a free 2.5-hour
workshop on Writing Your Novel. Come with a notebook and a few
ideas. Erika will guide you through the process of brainstorming,
outlining and how to keep motivated over the long haul. You’ll
do two guided writing activities and leave with a solid idea
for a novel, the beginnings of an outline, and tips for
staying the course.

The workshop takes place 2-4:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 13,
at Booksmart bookstore, 80 E. Second St. in Morgan Hill.
Limited to seven people aged 15-99; please call Booksmart
to pre-register at 778-6467.

Erika Mailman is the author of two historical novels, Woman
of Ill Fame and The Witch’s Trinity. The Witch’s Trinity
was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book, which Khaled
Hosseini called “a gripping, well-told story of faith and
truth.” She has taught writing at the University of Arizona,
College of Alameda and currently teaches through
www.mediabistro.com.


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Historical Novels Society conference

Recently I attended the Historical Novels Society conference in San Diego, and can't say enough good things about it.

There was an amazing slate of authors, so many great panels that I had a hard time selecting which to attend (typically, four panels per hour), and a great collection of agents and editors who generously shared their insider look at the business.

The high point for me was meeting Heather Lazare, Crown editor, and Michelle Moran, Crown author. Heather's actually my editor (I was very happily assigned to her after Allison McCabe, my editor for The Witch's Trinity, left publishing) and I had never met her. It was fantastic to have that opportunity, and to meet Michelle as well, whose career I heartily admire, over delicious fish tacos.

I was also thrilled to meet Vanitha Sankaran. We share an agent and I was delighted to have been able to blurb her lovely debut WATERMARK. Vanitha did a great job presenting on the Marquee Names panel, and I sat next to her at the booksigning where she signed them hand over fist. Nice work, Vanitha!

I also enjoyed meeting fellow witchcraft authors Mary Sharatt and Suzy Witten, and Sarah Johnson, the guru behind the conference, and Richard Scott, the genie behind the conference, and Gillian Bagwell, who did a great job in a nighttime reading session with Diana Gabaldon and CC Humphreys, and Christopher Cevasco, who I sat next to at dinner, and seeing again fun and wry Christopher Gortner.

I had great conversations with many folks and apologies if I'm not remembering names. I loved talking to the publishing attorney who is very close to finding representation (and thanks for buying multiple copies of my book! hugely appreciative) and the woman who wrote the Goddess tarot. Many other great interactions; sorry if I'm forgetting anyone.

I learned so much that it would be impossible to blog it all, but here are a few highlights that stick in my mind:

• Sourcebooks editor Shana Drehs talked about cover art decisions, and said that most options for a single book she's ever seen was 124!
• Heather Lazare and Michelle Moran also talked about cover art for MADAME TUSSAUD and the many iterations it took to come up with something everyone could live with (I love that cover and would adore seeing the also-rans)
• Someone said it was integral to join Goodreads, and so I have!
• Persia Woolley told of a online seminar in how to use Facebook better as an author
• Someone spoke of the importance of being able to boil your novel down into a one-sentence pitch, and then a one-paragraph pitch. I do that with my mediabistro students, so it was confirming to hear that.
• Shana Drehs talked of the exponential growth of ebooks, with a huge jump just between November 2010 and January 2011
• She also said the point of writing is for the reader to feel "I'm awesome" while reading it. That generated a lot of reflection for me. How do we get a reader to feel like they're cool for reading our book?

The conference alternates between England and the U.S., so the next one will be held in London. Although I'd love to visit, it's far more likely my next foray will be the 2013 conference. Hope to see you there!

P.S. Amended later to add some more thoughts:

• It was great seeing Cecelia Holland get a standing ovation for her keynote address. She said something in that speech that really got me thinking: "We'll never know more about this particular moment than we do right now."
• Enjoyed speaking very briefly with Susanne Dunlap, Bethany Latham, Christy English, Susan Higginbotham, the two fabulous bloggers Heather of Maiden's Court and Allie of Hist Fic Chick and the nice aspiring author from the Crusades era who brought his dad (awww)
  
• And finally, wanted to say that while I was happily reassigned to Heather Lazare, it was with great angst that I "lost" Allison McCabe, an incredible editor who shares my love of all things morbid and dental, and made my book so much better than it was before.

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Visiting Chabot

A few weeks ago I visited Chabot College to talk about my novel Woman of Ill Fame with an English classroom where--gasp!--the wonderful instructor, Danielle Maze, had assigned it. Who ever woulda thought prostitute Nora Simms’s story would be thought of as a textbook?

The students asked really thoughtful questions and I enjoyed that challenge of being slightly put on the spot for things I didn’t instantly know the answer to.

I think the best question of the night was about craft: “Why did you choose to start the story the way you did? At the beginning you can’t tell right away what’s going on, and who’s involved, and you keep reading to have it unfold.”

That’s a great question. I don’t know what spurs the first moment of a novel. I do know a lot of advice says, “Start writing, and then you’ll probably discard the first 20 pages and begin where the story really starts.”

All I knew was, my novel had to start with Nora arriving in San Francisco, and it made sense that she’d use every last second to make money the best way she knew how. I hadn’t really thought of that beginning sex scene as cryptic, or that one is initially unsure what’s happening. I’d have to look at it again (that book was two babies ago!)…but the underlying question is more global than that: “how do we choose to relay information?”

Some writers might well have chosen to say, “Nora Simms lay on a rice bag, having sex with the galley mate as the ship docked” (which is the scene), but instead I chose a more subtle approach to keying the reader in to what was happening. It’s instinctual, and it’s just how people innately decide to write scenes. I never really think about different options for starting a scene; I just start. My mind knows what it wants to do, right or wrong. I’d be curious to know if other writers consider and abandon different approaches before starting.

Two other interesting things arose out of that classroom visit. One was that someone asked me to sign her book, but it was a library book. We laughed a bit for the idea that I could inscribe it, “Dear library patron…” In the end, I wasn’t enough of a scofflaw to sign the book on the title page, but I did write a little secret message at the back on my author photo page. So if you take Woman of Ill Fame out of the Oakland Public Library, you may happen to get that copy.

Another signing issue arose when someone handed me a book that I had previously signed! He must have bought it off Amazon. I had written, “Dear X, Good luck with your writing career!” so it was probably someone I briefly talked to about their writing aspirations. Unsure what to do, I chose the goofy route, crossed out the woman’s name and instead wrote the current man’s name, and wrote something silly in the margins around my original message.

I’m sure this has to have happened to other authors before since I’ve noticed something: most people open your book to the first page, not the title page, to be signed, making it likely they wouldn’t notice the book was already signed. Which actually makes better sense: it’s typically a page with more room for a message (sometimes completely blank), whereas the title page has many elements to contend with.

Anyway, it was fun to talk about (and think about) Nora Simms again. Thanks Chabot students and especially thanks to instructor Danielle Maze.


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Winter reading recommendations

Recommended Reading List

This time, I’m limiting the list to young adult books. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on… is it just me, or do YA and middle grade books have more inventive, memorable and inviting cover art than adult fiction typically does? It is so entertaining to visit this section of the bookstore, and hard to leave without dropping some serious dough.

Here’s a few I’ve really fallen in love with:

Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick

This book follows a young boy in a late 1700s, unnamed European city, who is servant to a magician who seems to have more than sleight-of-hand abilities. The also-unnamed Boy and a orphan girl who comes into his life try to help his master subvert a long-ago deal with the devil. Time is running out to save the magician’s soul…and the journey is magnificent.

The Agency series by Y.S. Lee

I jumped into this series with #2, because the cover art was just so inviting to me. A strong, young Victorian-era heroine? I’m IN! Mary Quinn works undercover for a women-run spy agency (could this be any better?) and has a half-Chinese heritage (yup, it just got better!). In this installment, she works (literally—she joins a construction crew, and the details of how big-scale construction worked in those days is fascinating) to figure out who pushed a body off the top of the in-progress British Parliament building. Loved it. Number 1 in the series is top of my TBR pile.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Not a new book, and several have followed in the series to complete a trilogy, but what can I say—I sometimes come to things late! As I did with the book above, I grabbed this one based on the incredible cover art. It’s set at a girls boarding school (I always love these stories, and wanted so badly when I was young to be sent away, or given a governess, or something literary), and the main character Gemma suffers visions and learns she is somehow linked to a former student at the school. That student was a member of a supernatural society and stakes get quickly dangerous, and Gemma learns disturbing information about her own mother. It’s a page-turner.

Enjoy the winter reading!

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Blogger author

Many thanks to historical author Brandy Purdy for blogging about Witch's Trinity! She's the author of several Tudor novels, including one to be released soon, The Tudor Throne. Here's her very kind post. Thanks, Brandy!



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My peeps!

A few weekends ago I had the true pleasure of meeting other Parsonses, at the Western Parsons Family Association. The group invited me to come speak about our ancestor in common, Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft in 1600s Massachusetts.

This group all descends from a Parsons who came west on a wagon train in 1853...and then ultimately from Cornet Joseph Parsons, the first in our line in America (the husband of Mary Bliss Parsons). They are very knowledgeable about their genealogy and came equipped with tomes of family history.

I so much enjoyed meeting this wonderful group of people, who have met up annually for years. They made me feel right at home and seemed genuinely interested in Mary's witchcraft travails. Each year they make quilt squares and Harriet Parsons lovingly sews them into a beautiful quilt. She brought about 10 of the most recent years' and they were incredible works of art.

Here is our group (I'm sitting on the stone wall in a red shirt), and a picture of the sheet cake we all devoured.

I hadn't thought about Mary Bliss Parsons for a while... my book came out in 2007 and since then we've had two children and moved twice and... well, she just hasn't been on my mind. But boning up to do the talk, and then responding to the questions they raised, again filled me with enthusiasm to go to Northampton, Ma. to visit the family home, now a museum, and research more about this intriguing ancestor of mine. Someday!


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Summer Reading Recommendations

My quarterly goal is to do a recommendations list. I did one in the fall, just a few posts below. Hope you will enjoy these summer books as much as I did.

Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharatt

This book is written with such lovely empathy that it radiates. Based on the details of the 1612 Pendle (England) witches trial, this novel follows Bess Southerns and her family as they scratch a living out of the hard soil. One source of income is doing “cunning” work: healing and magic. Which of course leads to trouble… imprisonment and the threat of execution.

I so sincerely don’t believe in witchcraft, and am so enraged at how even today (read my archives) people are still being tortured and killed for the accusation of witchcraft, that it’s a tough sell for me to accept a novel in which someone really does have powers. But Sharatt’s light touch allowed me to immerse myself in this world.

An interview with Katherine Howe, another witchcraft author, reveals a key point for me. Sharatt says of one of her real-life characters:

Her last recorded words before she was hanged were a passionate vindication of her grandmother's legacy as a healer.

Clearly, these women did believe in their cunning powers, whether or not they truly existed. Sharatt’s earnest and compassionate telling of their lives won over this initially hesitant reader, and I highly recommend this beautifully-told book.

The Children of Witches, by Sherri Smith.

Published in England and available here in the U.S. as a Kindle edition, this novel looks at the world of witchcraft in a medieval German town. Smith asked me for a blurb for her beautiful novel, and I gladly gave one.

The innkeeper’s son Manfred is somehow “not quite right” but has a lovely singing voice and gathers attention and fame for it. Unfortunately, once the spotlight shines on him, it displays other things, and suddenly a village is turned upside down. The priest gathers children to him and they begin pointing fingers. Soon, they run the village and even their own parents are afraid of them. No one will enter the marketplace during the hours that the children are freely roaming and looking for people to enact their spite upon.

It’s a terrifying look at what happens when the most power is handed to the people least able to wield it. With poetic language, this novel is quiet and haunting.

The Dark Lantern, by Gerri Brightwell

Set in Victorian London, one of my favorite historical fiction armchair destinations, this novel tells the tale of Jane, a maid who does that wonderfully appropriate thing of spying on her employers. We quickly learn all kinds of disquieting things about possible fraudulent heiresses, intruders impersonating the man of the house, and even the fact that our maid hides secrets herself.

I’ve never read such a realistic (and harrowing) description of housework of the era. The cinders from the fireplace, which embed themselves in the rug and endlessly need to be cleaned, became nearly a character themselves.

The lantern of the title has a sliding screen that can hide or reveal the candle inside, which provides a beautiful metaphor for the way the author gives brief, half-seen glimpses of truths before leaving us in the dark again. A compelling read very akin to Sarah Waters’ work.

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Witch's Trinity makes summer book list!

My dear friend and fabulous author Tamim Ansary was asked by the San Francisco Chronicle to pick one book to recommend for summer reading. He was kind enough to pick mine: here's the link.

I was thrilled that the Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie ran Tamim's pick as the top book in the list, and with a huge jpeg of my book cover. Thanks so much!

The Chronicle has been kind to Witch's Trinity: it was named a Notable Book in 2007. And as the sole newspaper in the Bay Area that is still running independently, it deserves kudos for standing strong.


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Shirley Jackson Awards

I'm happy to announce I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards which honor "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic."

Which means I'm embroiled in reading some wonderful books and some not-so-wonderful books, and open to recommendations. The book has to be have been published (or slated to be) this year.

The press release is here.

I'm also excited to see that Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle is going to be made into a film.


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Red Room

One of my favorite scary books when I was a kid was Scott Corbett's The Red Room Riddle. Fittingly, right now there's a wonderful website to check up on authors. It's Red Room: Where the Writers Are.

Within the site, authors can create blog posts. I wrote one recently about my experience of Halloween. Currently, Red Room is featuring me on their home page, linking directly to that post. Thanks so much, Red Room! This is a great site to learn more about writers and to find out event dates and the like.

Speaking of events, I'll be talking to the Mayflower Society in Pebble Beach, California, this Saturday the 14th. I'm particularly excited because I just read Nathaniel Philbrick's incredible book Mayflower, which shed a lot of light on what conditions were like in 1656 Massachusetts at the time of my ancestor's first witchcraft trial.

I think I'm going to buy multiple copies for my family members this holiday season... learning how the Pilgrims and Indians very nearly were able to cooperate (and did in fact live together fairly well for decades) and then how pressures from Puritans, self-interested individuals and general mistrust led to King Philip's War was nail-biting stuff. And I don't usually say that about nonfiction, especially nonfiction whose outcome I already know.

Philbrick's book basically gives the background for every skirmish of the war. "King Philip" was the mocking name given an Indian with apparently regal bearing... his war against the Europeans ultimately spelled the doom of his people--although it so easily could have gone the other way. Philbrick relates:

In the years before the war, Native Americans had constituted almost thirty percent of the population of New England. By 1680, they made up less than 15 percent.

Another shocking statistic is that in 2002, it was estimated that 10 percent of the American population descends from Mayflower passengers. Those Colonials did their best to propogate, having huge families. My ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons (not a Mayflower passenger, but a very early immigrant) did her part, birthing 14 children, nine of which lived to adulthood. A different world, no?


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I’ve blogged before about the passage in the Malleus Maleficarum (the witch hunting bible written by medieval German friars) in which witches gather up men’s stolen penises and store them in a bird’s nest. But recently another nuance to this story occurred to me. Bird’s nests usually contain eggs, right? Once again, witchcraft circles around the concepts of fertility and growth.

Here’s the actual quote:

Witches…sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many, and is a matter of common report.

A subsequent anecdote talks about a man who was a victim of penis theft. He approached a “known witch” for advice on what to do. She suggested he climb a certain tree and “take which he liked out a nest in which there were several members.” He (can we blame him?) tried to take a big one, and she said he couldn’t take that one since it belonged to the parish priest.

It’d be nice to insert here a platitude about how lucky we are not to live in the Middle Ages…except that “penis theft” is still happening, and people are still being killed for this absurd crime.

Google “penis theft” (or enter the term in the search box above to scan my archives) and blow your mind.

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Fall Reading Recommendations

As part of a literary community, I love the fact that I can recommend books written by people I know. I hope as the weather turns, you will sit by the window with a glass of warm apple cider and read each of these books (why not?).

1. The Widow's Husband by Tamim Ansary. I loved this book. A beautiful, literary look at Afghanistan in the 1800s, with tribal life lovingly rendered. Tamim is also the author of West of Kabul, East of New York, and the recently-released Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

2. Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran. I have to confess, this is still in my TBR pile...but I love Michelle's writing and so can confidently make the recommendation. Michelle does Egypt (and now Rome) like nobody else!

3. Flow Down Like Silver by Ki Longfellow. Another one I have yet to read but can wholly recommend on the basis of her previous novel The Secret Magdalene.

4. The Gatekeeper by Michelle Gagnon. Not available until next month, this thriller follows Kelly Jones in her third installment of serial killer trackdowns. Michelle is so personable in real life, you'd never guess her mind is so dark.

5. Exult by Joe Quirk. I loved this novel. Joe is amazing at action scenes that literally make your pulse race. His first novel The Ultimate Rush was well-named for that reason. Joe also writes nonfiction about the differences between the genders: Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women is a witty read.

6. Remedies by Kate Ledger. I went to grad school with Kate, who made me jog with her in Arizona's brutal heat. She's gotten great reviews for her debut novel, and I can't wait to read it.

7. The God Patent by Ransom Stephens. Could there be a better title? Ransom has published through scribd.com...and I also hear there's an audiobook in the works. That's the one I'll be buying; I'm a big car listener.

8. The Sower by Kemble Scott. This book got lots of noise (including NYT noise!) for Scott's alternative publishing method. His first novel, SoMa, was a finalist for the Lambda award.

All right, those oughta keep you busy for a while. And if you haven't read The Witch's Trinity, that would be a perfect fit for this time of year.

Happy reading!




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