Happy Mabon! We welcome autumn in with a revival of the guest blog post. We’re starting off with a wonderful and informative blog from my friend and fellow writer Michelle Belanger. Enjoy the magic of the day and of the words below.
-Laurell
Tag: research
Writing Your First Novel; or Good Luck, all you November Writers
It’s November and most of us in America are getting ready for Thanksgiving at the end of the month, but about 300,000 people aren’t worried about cooking the perfect turkey, or the on-going family debate of raisins versus no raisins in the stuffing. They have a very different goal this month – to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s National Novel Writing Month, affectingly known as NaNoWriMo. These literary adventurers will either have a rough draft of their first novel by November 30, or at least a good sized chunk of it.
That’s approximately 1,700 words a day for the month. If you figure about a 12 point font, double spaced, that’s about three to four pages a day for 30 days. If the page is dialogue heavy there may be fewer words, but if it is description heavy then it may be more words per page. Like a lot of things in writing, it depends.
I applaud everyone who’s taken up the challenge. When I wrote my first novel, Nightseer, I wrote two pages a day, every day before work. I was in a cube farm in corporate America and I’d found that I was too exhausted by day’s end to do anything creative; so I got up early before work and did my two pages. Let me add that at that time I was not a morning person, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wanted to write my book badly enough to find a consistent time to write, because consistency is what it’s all about when you’re writing novels. I’d written short stories for years but never had the guts to tackle a book length project. I’d been writing since I was twelve, decided I wanted to be a writer at fourteen, started sending stories out and collecting my rejection slips at seventeen. I was twenty-one and had graduated college and landed my first job, but I still wanted to be writer. I knew that if I hoped to make a living as one I had to write novels, short stories weren’t going to pay enough, so I put my butt in a chair at least five days a week and did two pages every morning. Two pages didn’t seem like much at first, but doing two pages day after day meant in three hundred days I had six hundred pages and at the end of two years I had even more pages and a first draft. I honestly can’t remember how many pages the first draft was, but I know I’m one of those writers that writes long and cuts a lot, always have been, probably always will be. Other writer’s first drafts are far shorter than the finished manuscript, so their second drafts are all about adding stuff in, instead of cutting. I would do seven drafts of Nightseer before I sent it off to an agent, who sent it around to publishers. I would do another draft to editorial order, mostly the editor pointed out that I hadn’t described a single piece of clothing in the entire book. I added clothing description and more physical description at the editor’s request, and I never forgot again (some may say I’ve over compensated).
Here are the most valuable things I learned in the two years it took me to write my first novel, that would eventually sell and begin my career:
1. Don’t revise as you write first draft.
Why, or why not? Because the greatest danger to any first time novelist is getting bogged down and not finishing the first draft of the first novel. Write your word count a day and just keep adding to the growing pile of pages; if you stop to revise as you go, perfectionism will catch you and sink you. You certainly won’t make the word count per day if you try editing while writing the first draft, or I wouldn’t. Even after writing 40 books, I still have to be careful not to start editing too much during first draft, because I’ll get stuck too. Once you have a draft finished, you can polish in the second draft, that’s what subsequent drafts are for, polishing.
2. Don’t stop writing your first draft to do extra research.
I’m going to assume that you wouldn’t have sat down to write a book without some background, or interest in the topic, so you’ve done enough research to do a first draft. Wait on extra research until you have hundreds of pages beside your computer and a finished draft. Why wait? Because if you’re anything like most writers that I know, including myself, sending us to a library is a dangerous thing because we’re surrounded by BOOKS! We have good intentions of looking up only the specific topics we came to research, but it’s a library, it’s like Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders, and just like Aladdin if we touch the wrong treasure we’ll never get out alive, or at least not out in time to make our deadline. The internet is equally deadly for research, maybe more so, because it’s always at our fingertips. Do not do extra research until the first draft is finished unless the fact you need is absolutely essential to writing the current scene, but usually it’s not. Beware that research doesn’t become a procrastination tool. I still type all caps – NOTES; WHAT DOES FIFTEENTH CENTURY UNDERWEAR LOOK LIKE? or, NOTES; WHAT FOOD WOULD BE AT A MEDIEVAL WORLD BANQUET? These were both notes I had in my first novel, but I didn’t need to know the answers to get my heroine undressed for bed or to have her confront her sister over dinner. My second draft was just filling in the notes, and my third draft was where I started polishing the language. You might say my second draft was research questions only.
3. Do not get caught up in the perfect opening sentence in your first draft.
You can start the draft with gibberish for all it matters, because the important thing in a first draft is all those hundreds of pages after that first sentence; without them, the first sentence doesn’t matter a damn. What? you say, The first sentence is very important! You’re right, in fact it’s vital. Your first sentence, first paragraph, will sell the entire book to the right editor and to readers after it’s published. But I’ve seen too many writers get caught up in making the beginning of a book perfect, to the point where they polish the first chapter over and over, and never finish the book. A great first line may sell a book to an editor, but it won’t sell a few chapters to anyone. The day’s when editors would buy an unfinished manuscript from a first timer are decades past. To sell a book, you have to finish it first. Even today the opening lines/paragraph is often the last thing I revise, not the first. I’ll agonize over the first sentence, but only after the rest of the book is polished and singing.
4. Write your idea, and don’t worry if it’s good enough to sell.
Your ultimate goal is to sell, but if you start worrying about selling before you have ever finished a single book, you aren’t just putting the cart before the horse, you’re buying a saddle before you’ve taken riding lessons. I don’t know if your idea is good enough to sustain a book, let alone good enough to be your first selling novel, but I know you have to start somewhere, why not this idea? Maybe it’ll suck, but maybe it’ll be great, you’ll never find out if you don’t take the chance and write it.
5. Last piece of advice that helped me write my first five novels, all of which sold.
The 70/30 rule. I found that seventy percent of my first drafts were garbage, but thirty percent was gold, but I had to write all one hundred percent of the draft to get that thirty percent of shining gold because it was scattered among the seventy percent of unusable garbage. My garbage quotient has gotten lower as I’ve gained more practice as a writer, but it’s still a good rule of thumb if you’re one of the writers that writes long and then revises like I do.
Good luck all you November writers! Happy Hunting!
Missing Ireland
This week we had one of the hottest days of the summer so far, which means over 90F, very humid, and miserable for running outside, but I came downstairs with a jacket over my arm. I was convinced I’d need it. Why? Because the book I’m currently writing is partially set in Ireland and I’d have needed the jacket. In fact one of the working titles for the book is simply, The Irish Book. We actually flew to Ireland to research it. We were there for almost two weeks and then we flew to England to research another book. I’d never tried combining research on different books before; it was a little odd, especially because the book set in England isn’t the one I’m working on, or the one after that. It was especially jarring to have to take my head out of the Irish book, which I am currently writing, to a book so far down the road. It made sense to piggyback the research since the two countries were geographically so close, but as a writer it was harder than I thought it would be to try to juggle such different projects and different kinds of research.
The ferns in Ireland were almost as tall as I am.
England was having a heatwave while we were there: 70F with some days reaching 80F, unheard of there. Ireland ran between 40F to mid-60s. I don’t think it even reached 70F the entire time we were there. It rained, at least a little, every day in Ireland. The sun would come out and it would feel warm but if you stepped into the shade it was suddenly much cooler. We had to buy rain gear because our good rain coats were at home. It was wet, drizzly, and very autumn there every day. This was high summer, and the locals assured us this was summer weather for them. It was even a little sunnier and nicer on some days than typical for the season.
Lough Tay in the Wicklow Mountains.
Air conditioning didn’t work well the entire time we were traveling this trip, except for one room in England. In Dublin we left the windows open and ran fans, sometimes it was okay, but one night it was so hot and muggy in the room that it gave me a migraine. There are no screens on the windows, so if you sleep with them open to help with temperature you have to risk wildlife flying in, and if on a low enough floor, people maybe creeping in – not very comforting. In fact, when I first realized the window challenge I was quite unhappy with it, but once I was up and writing at the desk the damp and autumnal chill worked for me, worked for the book. One morning in Dublin I wrote 18 pages. The book was going well, and then we had to leave for England.
This is my fourth trip to England, to London, and I can finally say that I’m not a city girl, not even for London. Unfortunately all our business kept us in the city, and we only had one day to escape to Somerset, Glastonbury in particular, which is my favorite part of England. But I didn’t escape to the countryside until after I’d been a guest at my first European SF Convention, done an amazing 4 and half hour signing at Forbidden Planet, and finished the research for two books down the way. I’ll probably be blogging in more detail later about the convention and the signing. Thanks to everyone that helped make both a great experience! When work was done we could take a day to truly play, and we did, but one day didn’t make up for nearly three in the city. Though the research at the British Museum did its best to make up for anything and everything. Its my favorite museum on the planet to date, and the wonders on display take days to see. I felt very privileged that it was part of my job to roam about in such a magical place. There will be a blog just about the British Museum, but it will have to wait until this book is complete.
A tankard carved from amber. Just one treasure from the British Musuem.
I made notes and outlines for the book that will be set in England, but I was still trying to write on the Irish book. I’m not sure I wrote more than five pages at a sitting the entire time we were in Britain. Partly I was having to think of a different book altogether to do this research, and partly . . . a lot of things, but I only figured out one problem this week.
Do you remember where I said I wrote 18 pages in a morning in Dublin? When I hit that kind of page count the book is set and going well. Its very unusual for me to hit that high and then fade down to almost no pages. We were traveling, and that can make it challenging to write, and I was still making progress on the current book. We got home from Europe and I was making pages steadily, but never to the point I’d been in Dublin. Then, two weeks later we had DragonCon in Atlanta to attend, and though a wonderful and fun event, it was too soon after a month away from home. So tired, not even DragonCon could really fire me up. I enjoyed it, but not like usual. I wanted to be home for longer than two weeks. I have never been so tired of staying in hotels in my life. It ranked right up there with the 26 cities in 28 days tour of Narcissus in Chains in October of 2001. Yeah, not a great time to be flying. Hands down the hardest tour we’ve ever done.
This week Jonathon and I had to drive out of town and stay in yet another hotel, because of family illness. The family member is out of the hospital and back home, but it was serious, and accordingly stressful and scary. Normally, that kind of event derails me for days on a book, but not this time. I got up the next day and wrote ten pages. Yay! I did it again the next day, and the next, and the next. It’s not eighteen pages, but ten is a good daily page count. So I’m finally back into the swing of the book after nearly a month. I know I am, because I brought my jacket down to wear on a day that was so hot I didn’t need it. I brought the jacket downstairs with me because I was thinking about Ireland. I’d have needed the jacket there.
Stream in the Wicklow Mountains. Flower is a wild foxglove.
I’m missing Ireland because the book had settled into being written there. When a novel hits a certain productivity for me I need to stay put. I need to finish writing it where I am. Which means I should have stayed in Dublin with the rain, and the autumnal mist, and the trips to the mountains where everything was so green and lush, but not a tropical kind of lush. Ireland is different than I thought it would be in some ways, and in others exactly as I’d dreamed. Maybe if I wasn’t writing a book set there, and reading tons of books I bought there for more research, I wouldn’t be missing a country that I visited for less than two weeks; but all the above has combined and I’m homesick for a country that isn’t mine.
When I explained that to Jonathon he offered to bring a hose to my office, so I could have the constant rain. I said, thanks, but no thanks. *laughs*
When I type ‘The End’ on this manuscript I think this strange nostalgia for an alien land should pass, but I’m already making a list of things I didn’t get to see/experience in Ireland, so maybe not. It didn’t feel like home when I was there, Glastonbury, England feels more like home, but it’s not Glastonbury that keeps calling me back.
I have stood on the Hill of Kings and touched the Stone of Destiny at Tara! Amazing energy, amazing moment! I have walked inside Newgrange with its swirls and spirals, which is hundreds of years older than the Great Pyramids. We saw both on the same day, and it deserves a blog to itself soon. I have seen the mummies of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin, which was probably one of my favorite things we did there. I’ll talk more about St. Michan’s in a different blog. We walked around Dublin until we began to know the city and were able to find our way around. I kept mishearing St. Stephen’s Green, as St. Stephen’s Gallows, which gave the beautiful park in the middle of Dublin a very different meaning. I’ve seen Irish deer and watched two tiny, spotted, fawns play fight as if they already had a rack of horns atop their heads. I’ve seen lakes, forests, or what’s left of them, peat bogs, moors, and more streams and waterfalls than I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve stood on the cliffs above the Irish sea, and found caves there, and then watched the tide fill them back up and make them too dangerous to enter. I could not have written this book if I hadn’t gone, or I would have gotten it wrong, and every person who knew Ireland would have known I hadn’t walked the streets, eaten the food, drank in the pubs, listened to the stories, seen the people, touched the bullet holes in the post office. Ireland isn’t something you can fake. It’s not the travel ads on television. It has nothing to do with American St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not sure how to explain it all, but as I write the book I’m figuring it out, because part of why I write is to discover, to clarify, to understand, and finally to share the adventure.
Writing at DragonCon 2015
Dawn came in with pink, cotton candy clouds here in Atlanta today. The book I’m currently writing was too loud in my head for me to sleep in, so I took everything out to a less crowded part of the rooms, opened the drapes for the view and wrote. We’re here for DragonCon again, and for those who don’t know what it is, well . . . DragonCon is Geek Carnival, Stan Lee called it Geek Mardi Gras, but my husband, Jonathon, said later, “Any town can have Mardi Gras, but there’s only one Carnival.” He’s right, and for anyone that loves Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, whether it’s short stories, books, television, or movies, this is the place to get your geek on. They’re expecting 65,000 attendees, but it may run higher. Normally this is a break from the everyday routine for me, but this year it feels more like an interruption than a vacation. 
Me at my Q & A panel
We went to Ireland and Britain for a month, we got home two weeks ago, and now we’re at DragonCon. The research trip was fabulous and absolutely necessary to the new book I’m writing, because at least half the book is set in Ireland, which I’d never visited. I’ve had this book idea for a few years, but kept putting it off because of the amount of travel and research that was needed, and there was another book set in England that I kept putting off because I needed a second research trip for it. Two books that I kept shoving back down the creative que, because I didn’t want to take time out of my actual writing schedule to travel for the research, but finally my imagination said, “The Irish book is next. Get your ass to Ireland, its time.”
I’ve tried to argue with my muse in the past, and I’ve won. I have successfully talked my muse and myself out of writing books in a certain order, not this plot, but that plot. I’ve done it and the books themselves are good, but after I’d forced my muse to write a book that it wasn’t ready for my writing process would be fucked up for months. The closest to true writers block I’ve ever had is when I don’t write the book, or short story, that my muse says is next in the creative pipeline. I can force my muse into harness and make her help me write the book that is due, the book I think should be next, but once that book is in New York then she turns on me, or I turn on myself, or my imagination does. Whatever you want to call it, that thing that makes me a happy, working writer balks like a huge draft horse that you need to pull your wagon. The horse holds up its hoof and says, “I’m hurt, can’t you see that? I’m lame. You’ve forced me to work when I wasn’t ready, on a road that I wasn’t ready to walk on, and I hurt myself. See?”
No, my muse doesn’t come to me like a horse, or talk that directly to me, but the metaphore is accurate. Sometimes my muse pushes me from behind like the hand on a swing sending me higher and higher into the cloudless blue sky – those are days of gold and joy when the words flow like magic. But most often the muse pulls me along, or we work together picking our way through the rocky field of a book, while the plow blade catches on rocks, old tree roots, and other nameless debris. When it works well my muse and I are a great team. We work well together she and I, or he and I, though muses in mythology are traditionally female, so I usually say, she. I am not referring to real life muses, as in a person that inspires an artist to create, that’s an entirely different topic, and not the kind of muse I’m referencing. When I say, muse here, I mean that spark inside an artist that helps them create and finish a work. Lots of people get good ideas for stories, even great ideas, but very few actually write the story down, finish it, rewrite it until its ready to send to a publishing house and an editor, and then send it off. My muse doesn’t just inspire me, she helps me work, or maybe helps me be inspired day after day. Now, there are days when she doesn’t show up at work on time, but I’m still at my desk typing and eventually she hears the activity and comes to look over my shoulder. Sometimes she thinks, “Good enough, and sometimes she thinks, we can do better.” Ray Bradbury once said, “The muse cannot resist a working writer.” He’s right.
Normally DragonCon is something that refreshes me and my muse. We come to play, but this year the trip to Europe was so long and full of so much information that I haven’t finished processing all of it in my mind. I have a stack of research books that I found in Ireland that is probably taller than me if we could safely stack them atop each other. I need time in my office to write the front end of the book set here in America, as I read and go over my research notes and pictures from Ireland. I’ve never tried to do this much research at the same time I’m writing the book, but it seems to be working for this particular book. I have a process for each book and most of that is the same for each project, but every book is a little bit different, too. It’s like dating, people can take you to the same restaurant, but the experience is totally unique, because the person beside you is totally unique. From dinner table conversation to whether you’re both comfortable holding hands, or if there will be sex afterwards, or not. Books are like that, too, each one unique, though it all has to be researched, written, rewritten, edited, and published, so the process is the same, but different. Again, like dating, because if all dates were the same you’d sleep with them all, or marry them all, and you don’t. The difference with writing books as opposed to dating is that you have to cross the finish line with each book, so you have to come across, or get engaged, or walk down the aisle, or whatever you feel is “finished”. On a real life date you can have dinner, shake hands, and go home alone, because that’s all you want to do, but with a book – I have to find a way to like my own book enough to want to do a hell of a lot more than just shake hands at the end.
For me, even a day off from a book when it’s going well can derail me for a week, or more. I was so tired when we all finally went to sleep last night here at DragonCon, but I woke early with the book demanding to be written. I wanted to finish the scene I’d been working on yesterday, which I did. It is the first time I’ve ever worked successfully at DragonCon, because like I said, it’s usually a welcome break, but not this year. This year my head is full of Ireland and everything we saw, did, and learned there. I keep thinking about all the research books. Some I absolutely need to read before I get to the second part of the book, but others maybe useful, or may just be more information that doesn’t directly impact the book I’m writing. There is even a third kind of research that never makes it visibly onto the page, but is important to have in my head, because it helps me write this book better. I can’t explain the difference in the types of reading, or research, but I know it is different, and I know that sometimes the difference is slim, but incredibly important to me as a writer.
Now I’m in the room alone with all my loves out doing different things. They are enjoying being in costume, getting their pictures taken, or visiting with friends that involves panels, parties, LARPing, and other things that I don’t really do, or understand. I’m in something cool and bed worthy with the lights down low so I can look out at the spectacular view of nighttime Atlanta from the room’s desk. Its a great view to write to, and that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got headphones in listening to the same music that I’ve been listening to at home as I write the book. (I always pick music for a book and listen to it until I burn myself out on it. It can take me years to be able to listen to an album, or artist again, and sometimes the music is so wedded to a particular book that I’m never able to listen to it for simple enjoyment again.) The moment that music comes on my muse and I are ready to go, because that is the music for this book. Some writers work better to silence, but for me, I need music most of the time. One thing I am doing differently is writing on my iPad. I wrote most of Dead Ice, the last Anita Blake novel, on my iPad because we weren’t home for the winter last year, so my main desk top wasn’t with me. It was the first book mostly written on the iPad, and now this book is also being written mostly on it, because I knew I would be traveling a lot while I wrote it, and I thought that keeping the same computer would help. It has, and its reminded me that I wrote most of my early books on some of the first portable computers. It was how I could write at restaurants, or playgrounds, when my daughter was little. It’s helping me a great deal to write on the same instrument on planes, in hotels, everywhere. Same music, same computer, same book, the continuity is helping me a lot.
I tried to go down and play with my people tonight, but the crowds got to me. Too many moving parts, too many things to keep track of, its just too much chaos tonight, so I kissed them good-bye and went back to the room. My security has me tucked in for the night, and I am content with that. I got plenty of attention today at the signing and panel. It was great seeing everyone, and thanks for everyone who stood in line for hours for the signing. You guys rock!
So at one of the biggest geek parties of the year I’m sitting in a darkened room by myself typing. The book is thunderous in my head, and I’m hoping to get another chapter done tonight, before my people get back from their panels, parties, and costume fun. I’m just not in the mindset to play, I need to work – I want to work. But then if I didn’t actually enjoy being alone in a room with just my imaginary friends and me, I wouldn’t be a writer, and I certainly wouldn’t be a Best Selling novelist with over forty books to my credit. I’ve been trying to learn to play, and I’m better at it than I was when I started, but in the end writing is my play. I think I forgot that for awhile, and I got confused with deadlines that were punishing, so that I began to see the writing as a punishment and not a reward. If you do anything too long and too hard, you can take the joy of it, and I did that to myself and my muse. We worked in harness far past our ability to plow a straight line and take care of ourselves. Now, I’m remembering that books are my play, whether its reading them, or writing them. My muse and I sit in the darkened room together, we are writing, and we are content.
A few of my favorite things . . . from Ireland and England
A month long trip to Ireland and England and the most asked question since we returned to family and friends in the states is this: What was your favorite part? I’ve answered it differently, by simply throwing out whatever first comes to mind like a word association.
What was your favorite part of the trip?
The Wicklow Mountains in Ireland.
One of the many waterfalls we saw in Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains.
What was your favorite part?
Writing in Dublin. (I wrote better there than anywhere else.)
What was your favorite?
Introducing Spike and Genevieve to pate in Dublin. They have dubbed it smooth, creamy, spreadable meat butter.
Your favorite?
Eating at Gordon Ramsey’s flagship restaurant, Restaurant Gordon Ramsey, in London. It has three Michelin stars and now I know why. An amazing experience and will likely get a blog of its own later.
Favorite?
British Museum. Jonathon summed it up, “Every little emperor’s dream of avarice.” It was beyond amazing. It will also be getting it’s own blog later.
Fav?
Glastonbury Abbey, where the calling of crows led me to my first ever badger sett hidden under a huge oak tree. It turns out I followed the birds in the wrong end of the path. If I’d come in the proper way there was a sign to tell me the badgers were there, but honestly I prefer having found it the way I did. I followed the birds trying to see what they were fussing about, and then suddenly, badgers! I often find the most magical moments are the unplanned ones.
?
That moment when I stood in a town I’d never known about, at a ruin I’d never heard about, and knew that my muse had been right. This was the place to put the monster. My imagination had whispered the name of this place to me when, to my knowledge, I had never known it even existed. I haven’t had that happen since the ninth Anita Blake novel, Obsidian Butterfly, when Edward insisted he lived in New Mexico, even though I’d never visited the state. I remember arguing with him, “I created you, how can you live somewhere I know nothing about?” I lost that argument, because he was absolutely right and I knew it the moment I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque. He still lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ireland took me longer to get my research feet under me, and I’ll be blogging in more detail about that process later, but once I got into the swing of things it was like that moment in New Mexico – this was it. I know where the monster is, where the bodies are buried, where the crime will happen, and who Anita follows to Ireland.
Are the above really my favorite moments of the trip? Yes and no. They are some of my favorite moments, but not all of them. I’ll be blogging about more highlights and moments of inspiration, craziness, research, and sheer happy accidents over the next few weeks, but this gives you a taste of the trip. Yes, I have been deliberately vague about where the Irish book, as I called it for a long time, is set, because I’m not ready to share exact locations yet. I have a book to finish writing and it feels like if I give too much detail now on the blog that it will derail some of the energy that is driving the book forward. I need to be immersed in the fictional version of the town, countryside, ruins, etc . . . before I discuss the reality too much. In fact, I have pages yet to write today, a scene to complete, a fight to finish, but first, the reality of dogs and breakfast for them and myself and then back to my fictional world where dogs never interrupt and breakfast rarely seems to happen.
Going, going, gone . . . at the end of August!
Sign out front of the British Libarary commerating the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Totally seperate from the British Library, except for Alice, I had an amazing interactive theater experience here in London: Alice Underground is a fun, nightmarish, carnival ride of a play that ends at the end of the month, so if you hesitate you will miss it! It is a grownup version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, complete with a full bar served briefly before the show and after the show until, I believe, 2AM. Please check their website to confirm the time. If you get a token for a drink during the mad tea party it will be alcoholic, so it’s not for the kiddies. It’s really too scary for young children, and older children are okay, but it’s really designed for adults to rediscover their own sense of fun, and I don’t know about you, but when I’m having to be mum, I can’t relax and play and be mum. They even encourage you to dress in red and black to match the themes, which we totally forgot about it in our rush to make our ticket time. Though if you dress for a nightclub, please wear shoes you can walk in, run in, and go over topsy-turvy floors in, because you move from room to room following the cast members, and it’s a funhouse, or a madhouse, to walk through, so be prepared. Also, you will likely get wet, not soaked, but wet enough that silk might be a bad idea.
Magna Carta is on display at the British Library to celebrate it’s 800 year anniversary! What the heck do you buy someone for their 800th anniversary? I don’t know, but give yourself a once in a life time present and go see this exhibit. Unless you think you’ll be around the next time it goes on public display, if so wait for another thousand years and see it then, but for the rest of us mere mortals, this is it! I’m a history geek, but I learned a lot about Magna Carta that I didn’t know. If you’re a theater buff it might be worth it just to see the oldest known Shakespearian film in existence is a small section of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s stage production of King John. The film was shot in 1899, and for that alone was amazing to me. Plus it was interesting to see one of the leading actors of the day doing one of the roles he made famous. Did you know that Britain almost offered America the Magna Carta if we would join the allies for World War II? I didn’t. The plan was scraped, obviously, but that’s just one of the juicy bits of trivia in the exhibit. I love knowing that putting your likeness on merchandise was part of the publicity of the day in the 1700s. I’m barely skimming the surface, but seeing the Magna Carta, or should I say, Magna Cartas, in person was truly something not to be missed. (Yes, I did say, plural for Magna Carta. If you want to know what I meant, go see for yourself; and if you must, Google it, but if you look it up on line, you still owe it to yourself to see this exhibit before it’s gone.)
Ireland Here We Come!
Blog – Irish trip & research
I wrote this blog before we left for research, but security issues being what they are, I’m going to be posting some of the blogs out of order. It’s a shame a few bad apples spoil things, but there it is.
I’m sitting in my office, just after dawn. The sky is still all light and shining with the blue color only now fighting its way through all that LIGHT! The air feels cool and calm, the day stretching ahead full of promise and possibilities, and yet . . . but . . . There’s always an, and yet, or a but, or so it seems of late.
We are supposed to be getting on a plane for Ireland today, yes you read that right. We are headed to the Emerald Isle. We’ll see you all in London in August, but we’re leaving early for research. The book I’m currently working on is mostly set in Ireland, and because I’ve never, ever been there I’d put off this story for years. Wait, I kept telling it, and it waited. Don’t push, I said, and it didn’t push. Other ideas pushed hard and fast and paid no attention to my orders, or my requests, or even my pleading with them, because they were ready to be born, so I wrote them as they clamored to be written. Story ideas for me are like baby birds in a nest, the loudest voice and tallest held mouth gets the worm, and will fledge first, but unlike real life where the tiniest nestling can starve and die while it’s bolder siblings thrive, ideas don’t die for me. They live, they wait, and they bide their time.
This book has found it’s time. It’s eager, excited, demanding to be written, and the damn thing is set in Ireland. It’s set in a specific part of the country that I have never seen or even read about before the book decided it was set mostly there. I’ve only had this happen once before and that was with my book, Obsidian Butterfly. It is set in New Mexico, which I’d never visited. My character, Edward, insisted that he lived in New Mexico. In fact he insisted he lived somewhere between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. I argued with him. “You’re a fictional character. I made you up. You cannot possibly live in a place that I’ve never seen or even read about. You’re part of me, how can you go some place I’ve never been?”
When I stepped off the plane in New Mexico and saw those low, black mountains, that desolate, near alien landscape, I said, “Well, son of a bitch, you do live here.”
I have no idea how Edward, alias U. S. Marshal Ted Forrester, decided he lived in a place I’d never seen or read much about. He’s always been a character that went off on his own, and then would come back and tell me what he was doing, and some of what he had done. He keeps his secrets, even from me. Which is a very peculiar feeling for a writer, since I’m supposed to be making him up as I go, but somehow he has enough life of his own that he tells me what he’s doing, and surprises the hell out of me, a lot.
I should have known that Edward would be in a book that was insisting on being set in a part of the world I had never seen. I can’t say I haven’t read much about Ireland, because I have been a serious lover of this section of the world for a long time. I’ve read the myths and folklore of Ireland, Scotland, England, and though I know they are part of England now, Cornwall, Wales, and almost every part of these myth-ridden islands. I was a serious Anglophile in my teens and dreamed of visiting all of it someday, though I don’t think I ever believed I’d manage it. Traveling to such far off places was for other people, not for girls living in the middle of farm country, raised below poverty level, so it turned out. I knew we didn’t have money, but I never felt poor in the sense that the word, “poverty”, makes me think. I never felt impoverished, I just knew we didn’t have money. I’m not sure anyone I ever knew as a young child ever traveled out of the country for anything except military service.
I’ve been to England twice. I’ve seen Rome and Milan in Italy. I’ve been to Paris and found it as romantic as advertised, which I didn’t think possible. Admittedly, I was with Jonathon and almost anywhere I go with him is romantic. But we both really enjoyed Paris and look forward to going back and taking Genevieve and Spike with us. I could live for a few months in Rome, or Paris, but strangely didn’t enjoy London all that much. What captured me in England was the countryside. Glastonbury, Avebury, and all the Salisbury Plain area spoke to our heart.
The closest we came to Ireland on that trip was seeing it from the air. I remember thinking, wow, it’s so green. This time we get to see all that verdant green in person. I’m so excited, and a little intimidated. First by the flight, because I’m terrified of flying, and second, by trying to write about a country I’ve never seen before. There’s always a pressure to get it right on paper. I’ve already started making contacts with people I need to help me with researching the book I’m writing, the book you’ll read next summer, and research in England for a book after that. Though both of these books are Anita Blake books, I’ve also had Merry Gentry whispering around in my head, or rather other characters from her books. Merry is silent, content with her new babies and trying to find happiness after grief. But her world is moving around in my head as I look over the books on Ireland that I used for research in her stories. This trip might make the Merry fans get the next story sooner, might, I don’t know yet. All I know for certain is the two books I am absolutely researching while I travel across the pond.
New Blog – images from the weekend
Sasquatch enjoying the summer weather with me this lovely weekend.
Jon and I had a couples’ day out Saturday at Asymmetrical Solutions. We took their, Basics of Tactical Shooting. Eight hours in the Missouri heat was grueling, but worth it. We learned an amazing amount. The picture is my Springfield Range Officer getting it’s well deserved & needed cleaning.
We managed to eat healthy this weekend, even fixed our lunch ahead for the tactical class. Roast turkey and a salad of heirloom tomatoes, carrots, colored bell peppers, and fresh leaf lettuce.
