Today I had a kind of breakthrough, which doesn’t happen often. I’m writing about it here so I will remember exactly what happened, and also to entertain readers who happen to wander by.

Two of the primary characters in Little Birds are pretty well established in my head (they are  Lily’s children, but you don’t know them), but a crucial third character — somebody entirely new — is missing.  This has been causing me some distress. Of course I did what all writers of fiction do in this all-too-common fix: I found a way to procrastinate and went out to run errands.

Driving home from errands, I decided to turn off the audiobook that was playing (dry, but interesting) and turn on my current music playlist, which is set to shuffle. The song that started took me by surprise because I forgot it was on the list:  Save the Last Dance for Me — the Drifters original recording.  

And suddenly I had that third missing character.   I don’t even know his name yet, but I can see him leaning against a wall, arms crossed, watching people dance.  Or maybe, just maybe, somebody has offered him a fiddle and he’s playing and watching the dance floor.

Where did this come from, you might be wondering.  I had to think about it to sort out the associations, but it ties into my own experiences while I was living in Vorarlberg in my early twenties.  I did a lot of dancing. There were dances, all the time. Simple weekend dances.  Big fancy dances for Mardi Gras or annual celebrations of one guild or another. Big or small they all featured local musicians and dancing. And lots of beer. And schnapps. You’re thinking ump-pa-pa, but no. That’s not what it’s like at all and I’m not sure I can make it clear how un-umpa this experience is, but I’m going to try.

Imagine  a lot of people crowded onto the dance floor, some proportion of them much the worse for beer, still cheerful as they bumbled along.  Some small portion — maybe fifteen percent — were there because they really liked dancing and were good at it. I was in that fifteen percent. 

This is a video from Helsinki, a polka dancing competition.  The music is scaled way way down, but I’m posting this here so you can see the dancing. You can hear the excitement in the audience, and hear them yodeling in appreciation. This captures part of what it’s like. 

In your imagination you have to speed this up some, and also imagine it is happening in a hazy smoky dance hall (ca 1980), and now imagine the dancers are just regular (and somewhat younger) in their nice-casual clothes. But they can dance. Speed it up again. If you’re good at this there’s a lot of improvising, double and triple steps, stamping, things I can’t really describe but I could do, and do well. If I had stayed there I’d probably weigh 120 and be able to carry a calf around, no problem. It’s exercise and cardio exercise all rolled into a single package that you WANT. And that’s the trick, of course. 

One of the chapters in Homestead was meant to capture what this kind of dance was like.  Now, today, while I was listening to Save the Last Dance I had a flashback to the dance I described in that chapter.  This is what happened in real life: Someone I didn’t know asked me to dance toward the end of the evening, when the musicians had had a couple shots of schnapps and they were just on a tear.  I had noticed this guy dancing and hoped he might come ask me, because watching him I knew that I would dance well with him. 

Here’s the thing, in this kind of dancing. If a guy who is strong and lithe and confident puts a hand on your waist and takes your other hand in his, and then he just takes off — and you can follow him — it’s the most exhilarating thing in the world. If you can follow him, and then assert yourself a little, and he responds to this … I’m going to say this but you won’t believe me. Better than the best sex.   To this day I remember the feel of the stranger’s arm muscles through his shirt.  I remember the way he smiled down at me, and winked. I remember he didn’t ask and I didn’t hesitate when the set ended, we just kept dancing.

I never saw him again, never learned anything about him, but we were absolutely in sync with each other in a way that is distinctly more than dancing.  There were a lot of unplanned pregnancies in Vorarlberg at this time (and maybe still are, but apparently this kind of dancing is out of favor, to which I say NO NO NO), and I am convinced that some large percentage of them happened after two people click like this on the dance floor.

Now I have to go figure out who this character is. While I interrogate him you can watch this Bruce Springsteen cover of Save the Last Dance. It gives me chills, because: well, nobody can do a song like this better.  After you watch this go look for his Tougher than the Rest. 

1796 Runaway advertisement for Oney Judge, a slave from George Washington’s presidential household in Philadelphia. Source: Wikipedia

If there’s one universal truth about writing fiction, this is probably it: happy, contented, well adjusted people don’t make for good storytelling. Conflict is what drives the story. Any serious researcher of family history will tell you that conflict is not hard to find, if you know where to look, but even more important: You also have to be open to unpleasant facts.

So for example: on my maternal grandfather’s line, which is unusually well documented, there were slaveholders. This was in Pennsylvania in the 18th century, when  it was not anything out of the ordinary for people to own slaves.  Example:   While George Washington served as our first president, he owned slaves. As Oney Judge could have testified.

In pursuing this subject in my own family history, I had to back up and start with another sordid fact.  I was able to do this with the help of the three volume  A history of Wilkes-Barré, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, from its first beginnings to the present time, Oscar Jewell Harvey, 1909 (online at archive.org, here). The three-volume set is carefully done and fully sourced, with lots of notes and footnotes. As any historical novelist will tell you, the footnotes are where they put all the interesting but maybe not directly relevant stuff. I have pulled whole characters out of footnotes.

This is where I found the detailed history of a large migration from Connecticut to Pennsylvania in 1753. It is an amazingly complicated story, and it reads like a shady real estate deal — which of course it was, as a couple thousand acres occupied by different Iroquois tribes were taken over by Connecticut land grabbers. They pulled this off by first writing a document (full text available from the US Gen-Web Project and online here) which starts like this:

ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT made and settled between us the subscribers, inhabitants of His Majesty’s English Colony of Connecticut in New England, being memorialists to the General Assembly of said Colony at their sessions in May last for the title of said Colony to a certain tract of land lying on Susquehanna River at or near a place called CHIWAUMUCK, an island in said river — and other subscribers hereunto — is as followeth,
viz.:

THAT WHEREAS we being desirous to enlarge His Majesty’s English settlements in North America, and further to spread Christianity, as also to promote our own temporal interest, do hereby each of us covenant and engage-for ourselves and for those we any of us represent by signing for them-each of us to pay to Mr. JOSEPH SKINNER SKINNER, JABEZ FITCH, Esq., ELIPHALET DYER, Esq., JOHN SMITH, ESQ., EZEKIEL PIERCE, Esq , Mr. LEMUEL SMITH and Capt. ROBERT DIXON (a committee by us nominated to repair to said place at Susquehanna, in order to view said tract of land and to purchase of the natives there inhabiting their title and interest to said tract of land; and to survey, lay out, and receive proper deeds or conveyances of said land to and for each of us in equal proportion), each one of us TWO SPANISH MILLED DOLLARS, before said committee’s going and setting out on said business […]

These Susquehanna masterminds set up a journeying committee, told them how much land to purchase and how much they could pay for it, and after some negotiation, also empowered the committee to engage new ‘subscribers’ along the way. They did indeed find new subscribers along the way near the Delaware Water Gap:

This committee secured at that time subscriptions from, and enrolled as members of the Company, the following-named men who then resided along or near the Delaware River in what are now the counties of Pike and Monroe: Daniel Shoemaker, Benjamin Shoemaker (at that time one of the Commissioners of the new county of Northampton), Abram Van Camp, John Panather, Solomon Jennings, John Atkins, James Hyndshaw, Joseph Skinner and Samuel and Aaron De Pui, or Depew.  

Benjamin Shoemaker or Schoonmacher (1718 – 1803) was my 6x great grandfather  (by way of his daughter Hannah, my 5x great grandmother). In October 1753 Benjamin subscribed $2 to the Journeying Committee  to enable him to have a share of the  purchase of lands from the Indians at Wyoming Valley.  

This scheme to buy the Wyoming Valley lands from the tribes of the Six Nations might have come off without a hitch, but two things got in the way: The Pennsylvania Colony got wind of the the fact that the Connecticut Colony was trying to usurp territories they considered their own and immediately started petitioning their governor to put a stop to it; and the French and Indian war got started. In the end, though, the Connecticut Susquehanna Company out-snuck the Pennsylvania Colony, and bought a good chunk of Pennsylvania from various Indian tribes after many days of negotiations with the Sachems, who came to Albany for that purpose. Great grandfather x6  was one of the men sent by the Susquehanna Company to the negotiations.

On Dec. 28, 1768 land was granted to settlers including Benjamin and one of his sons, Elijah. They moved there with their families about February 1769. At the same time subscribers from the Delaware River Valley also relocated to the Wyoming Valley, bringing along the Delaware Water Gap families, and more of my ancestors.

So these land-grabbers settle down in the Wyoming Valley and tend their crops and raise their families, and in time the Revolution comes along. Benjamin Shoemaker and his sons Daniel and Elijah volunteer and serve in the militia. If you’ve studied the Revolution in any depth you may be familiar with the Wyoming Valley massacre on July 3, 1778 (there’s a very succinct and yet thorough summary of the events of that day on Wikipedia, here).  Benjamin, Elijah and Daniel fought in this battle. Elijah was killed, but in a way which caused tremendous outcry against the British. 

History is all about back story, but I think I’ve covered enough of that now. You have a sense of the colonists who expanded westward, systematically divesting the native tribes of their lands. They worked hard once they got there, and the were willing to go to war to protect what they had acquired. Elijah Shoemaker was seen as a patriot at the time of his death, and is still seen that way today because he died in defense of his family and home. His father survived, and went on with his life. At this point in researching these ancestors, I came across a transcription of Benjamin’s last will and testament. It’s dated May 1773, and reads, in part:

“I leave to my grandson, Benjamin Schoonmaker, my negro Wiet and my wench Jin. I leave to my wife Janneke the use of one room in the west end of my house, and one cellar; also two bedsteads, with everything belonging thereto, and so much household goods as she has need of, and my negro wench Buta.”

Farmers in rural Pennsylvania who fought in the War for Independence owned slaves, and passed ownership of these human beings to their grandchildren.  Slavery in the north  isn’t widely acknowledged and certainly was never addressed while I was in school, but the history is there if you care to read about it. You might start with  Slavery in the North, which includes this summary about the situation in Pennsylvania:

The 1780 act that abolished slavery in Pennsylvania freed no slaves outright, and relics of slavery may have lingered in the state almost until the Civil War. There were 795 slaves in Pennsylvania in 1810, 211 in 1820, 403 or 386 in 1830 (the count was disputed), and 64 in 1840, the last year census worksheets in the northern states included a line for “slaves.”

Common sense tells you that there will have been bad guys in your family history, but what is harder to remember is this: We tend to romanticize those who fought in wars we consider just, which is something a serious family historian has to acknowledge and report.  Historical fiction is one way to make people aware of history otherwise so conveniently forgotten. I may never get around to writing a novel about the way my ancestors stole land out from under the Iroquois, or that they owned slaves. But I hope somebody, someday, will bring these times back into focus.

Most ephemera is unimportant in the greater scheme of things, but every once in awhile you run across something breathtaking.  I was looking at 19th century prescriptions and pharmacy labels when I found  this handwritten cablegram dated 1873 in the Library of Congress American Memory collection.

It reads:

The Western Union Telegraph Company.
To [Horatio Gates] Spafford
159 LaSalle St.  Chicago [law office of H. G. Spafford].
Received at Chicago, Ill., Dec. 2d, 5:40 AM, 1873.  

“Saved alone what shall I do.  Mrs Goodwin  Children  Willie Culver  lost go with Lorriaux  until answer reply . . . Paris. Spafford.”- 

The Library of Congress provided more detail of the tragedy:

Anna Spafford, 1873

Mrs. Anna Spafford was writing to her husband, a lawyer in Chicago, to notify him that the Ville du Havre had sunk, and she alone of their party had survived.  Lost were her friend Mrs. Daniel Goodwin, the Spafford daughters Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta, and a neighbor boy called Willie Culver. Mrs. Spafford had gone with Reverend Lorriaux (a French minister and a fellow survivor of shipwreck) to  Paris, where she waited for instructions on what to do.  

Wikipedia provides more information about the shipwreck and the Spafford family, which I excerpt and summarize:

On 15 November 1873, the Ville du Havre sailed from New York with 313 passengers and crew on board. A week into the voyage to France she collided with the iron clipper Loch Earn at about 2 am on Saturday, 22 November. At the time of the collision, Ville du Havre was proceeding under both steam and sail at about 12 knots.

The passengers were roused from sleep by the collision. Most went on deck to learn that the ship was sinking rapidly, broken almost in half.  Then, in the panic and chaos, the passengers found that the lifeboats had recently been painted and they were now stuck fast to the deck. Finally a few of them were yanked loose, and passengers fought desperately to be one of the few travelers to board those rescue boats. The main and mizzen masts collapsed, smashing two of the life boats and killing several people. It took 12 minutes for the ship to sink.

61 passengers and 26 of the crew were saved and taken on board the Loch Earn, while 226 passengers and crew perished. The Loch Earn, herself in danger of sinking, was subsequently rescued by the American cargo ship, Tremountain and all Ville du Havre passengers and crew were transferred to that ship. The Loch Earn, with its bow smashed in, commenced to sink as the bulkheads gave way, so she was abandoned at sea by her crew and sank shortly afterwards. 

Although Horatio Spafford was not a passenger on board the Ville du Havre, his wife (Anna) and four daughters were.  At the last moment Horatio was detained by real estate business, so Anna and the girls went on ahead for Paris. Anna was picked up unconscious, floating on a plank of wood, by the crew of the Loch Earn.

Nine days after the shipwreck Anna landed in Wales and cabled Horatio, Saved alone. What shall I do? Horatio immediately left Chicago to bring his wife home. On the Atlantic crossing, the captain of his ship called Horatio to his cabin to tell him that they were passing over the spot where his four daughters had died. He wrote to Rachel, his wife’s half-sister, “On Thursday last we passed over the spot where she went down, in mid-ocean, the waters three miles deep. But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe, folded, the dear lambs”. Horatio later wrote the famous hymn “It Is Well with My Soul” commemorating his daughters.

So that short, terse cablegram provides a door to a much larger, heartbreaking story.  It just so happens that there is a shipwreck in the beginning of Where the Light Enters (do not panic, nobody you know was on the ship that sunk). The temptation, when I come across something like this telegram, is to revisit the whole section of the novel to see if I can make it any more factually accurate. What does it means that the Ville du Havre was proceeding under both steam and sail at about 12 knots? 

But I will not pursue it. That’s my firm intention: to leave the matter of ships that sailed under sail and steam at the same time in the bin of unanswered questions. Because it’s not important. Nope. Makes no difference to me or my story.  

On the other hand, I will tuck this all away for consideration at a later date.

Edited to add this Youtube Video of the hymn written by Horatio Spafford. I am not at all religious, but this piece of music is very moving, given the history.

I think I will have to have it framed and hung right where I can see it when I look up from the screen.

If you put the space shuttle scene this early in the book, I’m not sure what Jack is going to do for the rest of the second act. Killing zombies is only going to hold the audience’s interest for ten or so pages at a go. I’ll have more observations as I get further in, but I will add that this is the best time travel scene I’ve ever read. A lot of authors have tried to describe the idea of a fourth dimensional space, but you nailed it here.

So I spent several months researching the self-publishing process and planning my own marketing and publication strategy. It turns out that there’s a lot of information on how to self-publish a book, and a lot of advice regarding marketing, social media, and so on—but there aren’t as many case studies showing how well these publication strategies work.

Which is why I’m giving you my own case study. Everything I’ve done so far, along with the costs and the results.

I’ll start with the most important statistic first: as of this writing, I’ve sold 167 ebooks and 118 paperbacks, and my royalties and earnings total $803.90.

Dieker has earned a total of $803.90 for her The Biographies of Ordinary People. She breaks down what she has paid for production, shipping, and marketing from multiple angles.  What she doesn’t include in her analysis: her time. The time it took to write the novel, and the many, many hours that went into organizing publication and marketing.  My guess is that if you could add all the time up she’d have earned something far below the minimum wage.

It was courageous of Dieker to self-publish, and in my opinion, even more courageous to write in such detail about the process. Certainly I’m thankful that she went to the trouble to actually analyzing how well the various (often highly priced) marketing strategies work.   

This game was designed in England and was originally published for the Great Exhibition by John Jaques & Sons. The outside of the box described the name as Happy Families while the inside of the box describes the name as Merry Families. Each quartet consists of four family members — a father, a mother, a son, and a daughter. The fathers are Mr. Daub the Painter, Mr. Dough the Baker, Mr. Pill the Doctor, Mr. Sand the Grocer, Mr. Saw the Carpenter, Mr. Snip the Barber, Mr. Stain the Dyer, Mr. Smut the Sweep, Mr. Thread the Tailor, and Mr. Tub the Brewer.

What I like about this is the art work:

Compare this game to more current editions of Old Maid:

So maybe I’m being overly picky here, but why are the modern illustrations for children’s card games garish and shoddily done? There are so many wonderful illustrators out there, is it just a matter of the manufacturer going with the cheapest options?

Irritating.

I went to look up Authors just to see if that game has had better treatment, and the answer is, as far as I can tell, no. There are multiple editions of the card game Authors. When I was a kid the deck was all dead white men, but there are now games called American Authors, Women Authors, Children’s Authors. Unfortunately it seems none of them are especially carefully or artistically done, as you can see by this example.

But there are great illustrators who do author portraits. Ryan Sheffield sells his work on Etsy, including his version of Emily Dickinson,  below.

Somebody like Ryan Sheffield should put together a modern version of Authors using original artwork. It would be a good idea to have some info about the author along with the titles of their work, of course.  

Would you be interested in a game of Authors like this?  I’m really curious.

Note: I don’t know Mr. Sheffield and he doesn’t know me. I just found his work on Etsy and my imagination took off.

This is a practical (and necessary) move. You may have read here or elsewhere that over a five year period, incomes for full time writers dropped about 28 percent.  As the cost of living has not dropped 28 percent, the difference has to be made up somewhere. This is something I have done, and can do, and I take great satisfaction in helping storytellers get started. So it’s a practical, necessary and logical move. 

If you know of anyone who might be interested in working with me, please point them in the direction of WRITE. 

From Saving Eliza. All Rights Reserved.

It is rush hour when Kate crosses the Indiana border into Illinois. The traffic is fierce, cars and trucks charging over the Sky Bridge like a pack of dogs jockeying for position, nosing each other from lane to lane. All the way up Stony Island houses crouch together like lepers, shedding shingles, asphalt siding peeling in long blackened strips. The heat shimmers above the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store, weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement; in the window of Larry’s Chicken Shack a hand-lettered sign announces that the air conditioning is in working order.

The heat has driven people out onto the street in search of a breeze. They move along in jittery waves, children and men bare-chested, younger women in shorts or bathing suits, their grandmothers in caftans that billow around them like  sails dappled in jewel colors:  emerald, sapphire, ruby, citrine, amethyst.

Cornell Drive swings around the Museum of Science and Industry and the traffic surges onto Lake Shore Drive, pulling Kate along. It is always at this point that she feels the thrill of coming home, her first view of the lake, slate blue under gathering clouds. A thunderstorm coming; she can taste it in the air already, bright and crackling on her tongue. When she turns on the radio again the voices that fill the car are pure Chicago: vowels shifted backward, consonants soft around the edges, as familiar as the outline of the Loop in front of her.

The traffic canters past Grant Park and Navy Pier. On the Oak Street beach somebody is flying a kite on the wings of the fledgling storm, a sulphur colored smudge against a charcoal sky. Kate rolls up the window at the first lashings of rain, and heads for home.

Have I ever mentioned that I love revenge plots?  This has to do with the fact that I have always  taken a peripheral position in just about everything; I’m never with the majority. If I try to be with the majority just for the sake of fitting in, I get heartburn. I am contrary by nature, and yes, I realize this is no big surprise to anybody who knows me or reads my work.  When I get fed up with watching the good guys lose or losing myself, a revenge fantasy is a balm. So for example: imagine a  stage with television cameras focused on two chairs. Dick Cheney is strapped to one of them, hooked up to a (fictional) truth drug, and I’m in the other much more comfortable chair, asking the questions that he must answer truthfully. 

But the revenge fantasy that came to me in the shower is about something in my own life, something personal. It’s so good that the very idea gives me gooseflesh. After all these years I could address something that struck me as unfair and unkind, and make it all come out differently. Not in a happily-ever-after way; I don’t think that would be possible. But there would be significant satisfaction in it, even so.

Basically this would be a novel about the person I might have been, if I had allowed my darker side to rule. But oh, it would be fun to write.

Does that sound like something you’d read, or something you’d run away from? Consider novels like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (the third book in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo series),  Different Class (Joanne Harris), or one of my favorite Stephen King short stories,  “Dolan’s Cadillac” — the audio recording is fantastic, if you have a chance to listen to  it.  And great revenge movies: too many to name.

There are, of course, darker revenge fantasies. Glenn Close, the Fatal Attraction bunny boiler, was seeking revenge and (I would argue) not unreasonably. She just went a little overboard.  

I don’t intend to go that far. Really. Or at least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Thoughts?