The Quest for Saints and Scoundrels

Pat Montella, the protagonist in my Possessed Mystery Series, mentions her gene pool quite a bit. Coming from a huge Italian family, researching her family tree was a survival tactic. I know because I resort to the same tactic when trying to keep straight my 32 first cousins and their families, and at least double that number of second cousins.

The knowledge also comes in handy as a functional database of hereditary health problems. It's an affirmation, too. Looking over my kin and our ancestors, I find good storytellers, musicians, science geeks, and kind, caring people.

Ancestral surprises are a recurring theme in of my Possessed novels. Pat found new branches on her family tree in both By Blood Possessed and Fear Itself. Other series characters like Miss Maggie and the Lees, were enlightened about their ancestors in Hang My Head and Cry and Poison to Purge Melancholy.

That's the intriguing thing about genealogy. Surprises are fairly common because so few of us know much about our families before our grand- or great-grandparents. For a writer, this can also be a great story fodder.

A month ago, I was amazed to learn that my family likely has heredity dwarfism in our DNA. Simply put, it's a pituitary growth deficiency, and sometimes it only affects parts of the body. I always knew we were short--my dad and his brother Charlie, at 5'4", were the tallest of their siblings. Their mother was 4'8". But this may explain why every dentist I've visited in the last 25 years has told me I have tiny teeth. One cousin said she could picture us coming from a race of court jesters. I'm not sure. If our progenitors told jokes as badly as our family does now, they would have been beheaded before they could procreate. Still, I can believe I come from a race of hammy actors who could sing, tell a yarn and do acrobatics.

I've read that amateur genealogists come in two flavors: those searching their family tree for famous or heroic kin, and those looking for scoundrels and black sheep. I'm not sure which I am. I think I'm simply in it for the stories.

If you've explored your family tree, what was your motive?

Peace,
Elena (short and proud of it)

Contest Results and Working in the Real World

First, I'm pleased to announce that 3 students aced Miss Maggie's Civil War quiz: Debra Eisert, Mary Chamberlain, and Helen Delano.  Since we only had 3 star pupils, I've decided they each should win a free book.  Look here for Contest 2 around the middle of February.

Working in the Real World

One of the first pieces of advice a novice writer hears from the pros is "Don't quit your day job."  So what did I do last month?  I quit my day job.

I've quit at least 4 jobs in my lifetime, yet all for non-writing-related reasons.  This last time was because the job was effecting my health.  Sometimes I've quit because I decided I can't work for people better suited to be the bad guys in my books.  If you've read By Blood Possessed or any of my short stories set in offices, you know how I feel about the bad guys of corporate America.

Still, I'm not by nature a quitter.  I've had a slew of other jobs, all temporary for one reason or another.  Altogether I've been a retail clerk, school teacher, National Park guide, receptionist, data processor, and done every ilk of accounting, filing and other administrative jobs.  Oh, and I've been a proofreader, too. My finest moment was proofreading a brochure for a sex therapy lecture given by Dr. Ruth herself.

My mother would say I still haven't settled down.  Me?  I think I'm the kind of writer who needs to glean experiences from different sources, then move on.  Though, frankly, the need to pay pills tends to make me wait until I'm laid off or the job makes me physically ill or disgusted enough to quit.

I wrote By Blood Possessed while I was unemployed.  Hang My Head and Cry was written mostly in the hiatuses between temp agency jobs.  Poison to Purge Melancholy came together in the idle months before I took my last job.  Book 4, Fear Itself, was written while employed, but at the time, I had a boss who understood that I have a vocation outside of office work.

At the moment, I'm not grieving over the loss of my job.  With all the snow this winter, and the fact that my home parking spot is off of an alley that never gets plowed, it's just as well I don't have a compelling reason leave the house.

Yet I know, eventually, I'll get out there and start looking for gainful employment again.  Not only do I have the need to pay bills, but this writer, anyway, can't write in a vacuum.  It's not simply a matter of needing to observe human nature--I can go sit in a mall food court or ride trains in and out of the city to do that.  The thing is, with each position I've had, I've been thrown in with a diverse group of individuals, from all walks of life.  Some love their jobs.  The majority, at best, only like their jobs.  All are there because they must be or lose their livelihoods, and for some, their healthcare.  All have different motives for needing to keep their jobs.  A workplace, for a writer, is an encyclopedia of human psychology.

So when I say "Don't quit your day job" to a novice writer, I'm not merely commenting on the reality of most writers not being able to make a living from published works.  I'm saying don't take yourself out of the real world.  Your writing will suffer.

Peace,
Elena

The Author As Cover Artist

One of the questions I'm always asked is some variation of "How much input do you have in the cover designs for your books?"

The short answer is, most authors have no say at all. Often we'll get a mock-up of the cover a couple of months before the book is published. By that time it's too late--they can fix a misspelling of the title or author's name, but the art is set.

I saw the cover for the hardback edition of BY BLOOD POSSESSED the day my first author's copy arrived. The cover design I'd been shown earlier--the design that went into the catalog--was very different from what ended up on the book. Thing was, my editor had specifically asked me to change the title to "something that tells the reader this is a mystery novel," and I'd driven myself insane until I'd come up with one. Good thing, because the cover art wasn't mysterious at all, just a person looking out of a window.

In HANG MY HEAD & CRY, the hardback design was much better, with a girl looking out through doorway to a dream image of a Civil War cannon. Problem was, the book wasn't about the Civil War and had no cannons in it.

Bella Rosa Books publishes the trade paperback reprints of the above novels, as well as my Christie short story companion, DAME AGATHA'S SHORTS. They do ask for my input and I think their covers are much more indicative of what you'll find inside. DAME AGATHA is, I think, an especially lovely cover and I've received many compliments on it (see photo above).

A few weeks ago, for the first time, I uploaded a previously published short story to the Amazon Kindle Store. I got to the part of the form that said "upload cover image." Whoa! I had to come up with a cover? My first few uploaded images weren't great (though they are suggestive of the story), but I've gotten creative since. Here are a few samples:

My software's primitive and my brain is more geared toward music than art, so I'm not thinking of a new career. But I'm having fun with it. And isn't fun exactly what the creative mind craves? Plus I get a real sense of satisfaction knowing that's my mirror, my locket, and that I took that photo.

So far, ten of my short stories are now available for Kindle, each for less than the price of a dollar hotdog at a Phillies game. Tell your friends to stock up.

Peace,
Elena

Perception of Truth

This past week I took a photography tour of the Bay of Fundy. Many of you know I'm a musician as well as a writer. Few know of my truly dismal talents in the visual arts. I can't even draw a convincing stick figure.

Still, I've been taking vacation photos since the age of six when my Dad gave me a Kodak Brownie. After college I bought myself a Minolta SLR, adding different lenses as I could afford them. I used that camera for 20 years, until they stopped making the light meter battery. Right now I've got a very unfancy Olympus digital whose limits are finally forcing me learn something about visual composition.

I took the tour mainly because it promised to visit all the kinds of natural places I love, not because I'm a serious amateur photog. Yet I did pick up some great tips from our guide, Lance Timmons (check out his cool portfolio at timmonsphotography.com). Beyond that though, he talked a bit about the perception of truth in a photo, which got me thinking how that applies to writing.

People assume photos are truthful little moments frozen in time. Or at least, snapshots used to be truthful, before Photoshop, right? Well, no. Photographers have always shown us only their interpretation of scenes. Before digital technology, they could manipulate photos in the darkroom during processing, or by posing what ends up looking like a spontaneous shot, or even simply by cropping out details so the viewer sees only what the photographer wants them to see. Regardless of the technology, a good photographer can sway the viewer's sympathies to each photo.

When I write historical fiction, I do my best to make the history factual, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not showing everything. For one thing, I'd have to do a decade of research for each chapter. Writers don't have that kind of luxury of time. Even if I did, I don't want to show that many details. Like a good photographer, I need to zoom in on the subject and crop everything else. Too many historical writers spend too many words showing off their research. Do we really need a minute description of 1860s ladies' undergarments in a book about the Civil War? No. It stops the story. Only show what's necessary to bring the era and the story to life.

Also like a photographer, the details I do show ought to sway the sympathy of the audience. In BY BLOOD POSSESSED, my goal wasn't to present the Civil War from a North or South point of view. I wanted to show how war, any war, effects families. In HANG MY HEAD AND CRY, I was aiming for a perspective of Reconstruction through the eyes of a nine year-old freed slave.

The above applies to any kind of writing, not just historicals. You have to look through a viewfinder at the world you're writing about. Move around, back up, zoom in, until you have in the frame only what the reader needs to understand the story. And even after you write it, chances are you'll need to do further cropping.

The photos with this blog are from my trip, taken with my dippy little Olympus digital (the rubber ducky is my first mate, Smee).

So maybe I learned something.

Peace,
Elena

English as a Second Language

I wasn't born a writer. In fact, English-wise, I was a B average. Oh, I could slap together a fairly coherent report in whatever subject. If you asked me now--now that I've been a teacher and seen incredibly incoherent writing from students--I guess maybe, even then, I could have been called a writer. But I didn't feel like one. Writing was a tool I used to get through school, and to concoct silly poems and stories during study hall. Now it's a tool to express myself. What do I do with it? I write silly poems and stories. And silly blogs.

Music is different. I remember, when I was in maybe third grade, my mom asked me why I sang all the time. I hadn't realized I did. By the time I was old enough for grade school chorus, I was already harmonizing with every song on the radio, every hymn in church, and with Muzak in department stores. Even if I never heard the song before. Music, I believe, was my first language. I have no idea why. My closest musical ancestor was an uncle who played accordion. Still, I have a brother who composes and two cousins who are singers, so it's in our DNA somewhere.

I put the kind of musicians I know in my novels--people like me who do other things to make a living. In HANG MY HEAD AND CRY, Theo is an aspiring anthropologist, but on the side he does church singing--services, weddings, funerals. POISON TO PURGE MELANCHOLY's main historical character is a fiddler and part-time music master. Series character Beth Ann plays clarinet in her school band. Actually, every science geek I know played in a school band or sang in choir. Not a coincidence. Early school music education feeds the brain in all kinds of ways.

A friend asked me this week if I'd ever do a mystery novel set in the music world. The short answer is, probably not. Musicians, when making music, don't have a murderous bone in them. Music is all about dialogue and communication, and something more--like a genuine meeting of souls. This is why the Arab/Jewish Orchestra can exist, and the Omagh Community Youth Choir of Northern Ireland, which includes kids from all different backgrounds with the aim of promoting peace.

If you'd like to hear some of the great music of these groups, and others from around the world, check out

http://www.playingforchange.com/

Peace, and harmony,
Elena

Healthcare Mayhem

No, I don't mean Cherry Ames.

Informal poll: How many fictional sleuths can you name who worry about their healthcare?

Think about all those "realistic" fictional detectives who are self-employed, down on their luck, and getting beat up/shot at/Mickey-Finned on a daily basis. Shouldn't their writers mention how these tough guys pay their healthcare bills? Aren't chronic concussions a pre-existing condition? Are the Sam Spades of the world even insurable?

In my Possessed Mystery Series, my protagonist Pat Montella doesn't worry about her healthcare; she has panic attacks over it. In book one, BY BLOOD POSSESSED, paramedics ask her if she wants to go to the hospital, she says no, not because she's feeling great, but because the hospital is in a different state than her insurer and she knows getting preapproval will be next to impossible.

Then she's laid off and her Cobra coverage runs out by book 2, HANG MY HEAD AND CRY. The plan she's forced to take up is the kind President Obama calls Acme Insurance--cheap, high deductibles, and doesn't cover much. By book 3, POISON TO PURGE MELANCHOLY, Pat's starting to have odd symptoms, which she ignores because she knows going to a doctor about them will cost more than she can afford. And ironically, her symptoms are caused in part by poor quality healthcare, bordering on medical negligence.

Fiction? Nope, research. Millions of Americans go through this breed of healthcare crap every day. All Pat's experiences are based on my own or on members of my family.

You want healthcare fiction? Listen to politicians who say we've got the best healthcare in the world and that the majority of Americans like the system as it stands. Now that's fiction.

And if you're a mystery writer and you don't want to deal with the reality of healthcare woes these days, better write historicals, or make your sleuth a U.S. Congressman.

Stay well,
Elena

Historical Soundbites

For Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me poster of quotations. I have a love-hate relationship with quotations.

On the hate side, I usually feel their wisdom is too glib. No situation in this complex, confusing world can be solved, or even made much better, with a few perfectly arranged words.

I also hate the lack of context. Regardless of the name under them, they all seem to exist only in the ether. But someone did say them, and that person had something definite on his or her mind at the time. For the same reason, I hate political soundbites, which are ripped from context and hurled at us during campaigns, in an effort to show the speaker in a negative light.
Probably my lifetime of being exposed to political ads is what has made me a bit suspicious of every quotation I meet.

Still, I said this was a love-hate relationship.

When I was doing Civil War research for my novel BY BLOOD POSSESSED, I read diaries and letters of the time. The historical voices of these documents gave life and authenticity to the voices I gave my characters. This helped me write period-sounding dialogue and narrative and, more importantly helped me fill the heads of my characters with period thoughts and motives.

Yet as I read, every once in a while, I was stuck by certain sentences or paragraphs that seemed to strike at the heart of the story I was writing. I began keeping a list of these quotes, at first only as a guide for myself, to keep me focused on the themes and mood of the novel.

As I got into the writing of the book and realized I'd need a way to separate the historic and present-day chapters, I hit on the idea of beginning each historic chapter with one of these quotes. I'd seen this done in other books--sometimes I had enjoyed reading quotes tacked onto chapters, sometimes I didn't. I now see that the quotes I enjoy are usually vitally linked to the story in some way, whereas the other quotes seem to be added as an afterthought--maybe simply to show off the research of the author.

I can look back now and understand what those quotes had in common. All expressed the horrors of the Civil War in a different way, many without intention. The blood-soaked violets from the battlefield that General McAllister sent home to his wife as a "relic to be prized," the picture and personal letter "out of a dead Yankees knapsack" that a Georgia soldier sent his sister as a "trophie"--these seem repulsive now (or they ought to), but at the time the writers of these words saw nothing wrong with war. They gloried in it, making it more horrible. On the other hand you had men like Lt. Colonel Horace Porter, who wrote,

"It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth."

In HANG MY HEAD AND CRY and POISON TO PURGE MELANCHOLY, I continued the practice of starting the historical chapters with quotes. A nice way to center myself, and to tie the books together.

Historical soundbites are very small windows--as if we're looking at the past through a funnel. Still, some can have a larger truth, beyond the context. All good quotations do. The wisdom of the words won't solve all life's problems, but they might make us think. And thinking is never a bad thing.

My favorite quote from my new poster?

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

--- Mother Teresa

And after that, I shouldn't even need to say

Peace,
Elena

Choosing the Setting-Hang My Head & Cry

The historical part of each of my first 3 books takes place near or at the end of a major American war. By Blood Possessed was set in 1864, after Virginia had already been torn apart by years of battles. I chose 1783 for Poison to Purge Melancholy, when America was first experiencing its newfound freedom. No one was quite sure what to do next and England, with all its trade embargoes, wasn't making the birth of our new nation easy. I suppose I settle into late and post-war eras for my stories because those times are rife with conflicting emotions and motives, and with people simply trying to reorganize their disrupted lives.

Few places and times were in as much upheaval as the post Civil War American South, where my second novel HANG MY HEAD & CRY was set. I chose early July of 1871. Here was America celebrating Independence Day only 5 years before the 1876 Centennial, yet with the strongest polarity of opinion about who should get what rights. Former Confederate soldiers who refused to take a loyalty oath lost their right to vote. Freed male slaves who were of age gained that right. Former politicians, other leaders of the Confederacy were forbidden to serve in any position where they were required to take an oath to defend the Constitution. Some of these vacancies in legislatures and local governing bodies were filled by former slaves. The white South saw their power slipping into the hands of the very people they'd held dominion over for so long. The hatred born of this overturn of power would have developed even if everyone had been the same race. The physical difference only served to build higher walls between the factions.

Women, of course, had no voting rights at all. Black women in particular were on the bottom rung of society's ladder. Most still worked at whatever jobs they'd done as slaves, for very little pay, while trying to hold together what families they had left. Many tried to find children traded before the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a writer, I'm a sucker for this sort of drama. Hatred, helplessness, frustration, vengeance, and pure stubborn heroic determination all make great mystery book fodder. Since the point of my Possessed series is to juxtapose historical conflict with modern day issues, a book set in this era was just asking to be written.

I should mention that in 1872, confederate soldiers and leaders were given their rights back, and after 1876, despite Rutherford Hayes' platform supporting black equality, his administration allowed the South to pass one loophole law after another to take voting and other rights away from former slaves. Took us until the 1960s to fix the damage with the Voting Rights Amendment, but, even now, every federal election has had reports of people trying to deny voters their rights.

Edmund Burke said "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." In the case of any kind of intolerance, though, simply knowing history isn't enough. You have to want to learn from it.

Peace, Elena