Monthly Archives: December 2017
THE BED WAS WARM
Woke up this morning to temperatures that would not rise to see minus 1, Fahrenheit.
The bed was warm but I couldn’t stay in bed forever. My husband, after scanning the weather reports, informed me that it is warmer in Greenland, Iceland, Siberia and Antarctica. Granted, it is summer in Antarctica, but, really . . .
The furniture is cold till I sit for awhile and release some body heat into the cushions. Throws cover me from top to bottom. I need gloves to read.
Only the cat is warm. He sleeps on the heat register and blocks the heat from the wood stove in the basement from rising any farther than his fur. It’s his job and he takes it seriously.
It will be like this for at least a week.
Readers are prepared for this eventuality. It is the same eventuality as being laid up with a cold, as I am right now. And, following so closely on the heels of Christmas, we must certainly have gotten new stockpiles of books to keep us going. I received two gift certificates for my e-reader, a book of cat cartoons and cat short stories from the New Yorker, a Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter mystery in French, and, from the library, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. That should be enough for now, but if the weather cold and the viral cold continue then, by gum, I’ll have to dip into an older pile of books.
Perish the thought that I should write something while waiting for my brain to warm up. My blood has become sluggish, the synapses in my brain have gone on holiday. I’ve become like molasses in January before January. Dulled and stupefied by internal and external attacks on my well-being I have hunkered down to await warmer muses.
It is possible that a thought worthy of being written down will actually worm its way into my mind during this period of hunkering. I wouldn’t say nay if I had one, I wouldn’t resist it, but I haven’t much hope. Those mercurial Muses enjoy more temperate environments, not fevered minds in frozen bodies.
It is the practice in Iceland to give books on Christmas Eve and then spend Christmas day reading. It’s not a bad idea.
But then it is warmer in Iceland than it is here.
Warm wishes for a Happy New Year to all.
Happy reading and productive writing.
Forgeries and Hoaxes
I took a busman’s holiday today. I’m starting to plot my second book and, needing to get a blog post out, I gave myself permission to noodle around online, seeking useful info for my plot and a blog at the same time. My next set of murders involves forging medieval manuscripts. So it’s perfectly legit for me to find out how to do that, right? Just because I enjoy it doesn’t mean I’m not working.
I had great hopes of a news story on NPR yesterday. Seems the French police arrested the CEO of Aristophil, a Paris dealer in manuscripts, who has collected billions of Euros from investors for “shares” in his portfolio of assets. But alas! for my murders. These manuscripts seem to be perfectly real. The police claim it was the investment management that was shady — a giant Ponzi scheme. In any case, the court is having the collection sold at auction, so if you’d like to bid on the manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, you’ll soon have the chance. [Breaking news! The French government has stepped in to declare the Sade manuscript a national treasure. It’s out of the auction. Sorry.]
It turns out that the University of Delaware’s Library possesses a special collection devoted entirely to forged manuscripts. It was the gift of Frank Tober, a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project. His interest in the subject began with the chemical methods of detecting fraud, but twisty subjects lead to twisty trains of thought. Before he was done, Tober had branched out into counterfeiting, the forgery of artwork and furniture, hoaxes, and imaginary books and libraries.
At first I thought the pickings were slim for me in the Tober collection: it has only one forged illuminated manuscript. It always pays to keep digging, though. The Tober manuscript is one of hundreds produced about a century ago by the “Spanish Forger,” whose work still lurks in museum collections today, although many have been identified. And the art market always adapts. The Spanish Forger’s work is now eminently collectible. And probably easier to forge than the original manuscripts. (Plot idea here?)
Of course, when you are surfing the web, diversions and byways are legion. Searching for forgeries naturally brought me to hoaxes. I was thrilled to find a “Museum of Hoaxes,” right in San Diego, where I will be visiting in another week or so. Well, almost there. Only a hundred miles away. I could visit! And the web site kindly gave directions:
We’re based in San Diego, California. If you’re in the downtown area, get on i-5 north and keep driving until you see a giant floating jackalope off to your right. You can’t miss it! If you reach LA, you’ve gone too far.
Oh, boy! I’ll just… Wait a minute. Just drive north? Till you see a floating jackalope?
Maybe I’m not really competent to write about forgeries, far less spot them.
The “museum” is, of course, just a web site. I would have tumbled to that eventually, when I scrolled down to the “Staff” section:
Alex
Curator Pretending to be in Charge of a MuseumBoo
Deputy Curator in Charge of Fire, Electricity, Dead Pigeons, Insane Hamsters, Frog Skeletons, Poltergeists, and Medical Curiosities of All Kinds
I seem to have wandered far from my serious and entirely justified research project. And it’s lunch time. I’ll leave the rest for another day.
Writing off December
You may notice that I didn’t say writing “in” December? The only thing I’ll be writing this month will be this blog post, addresses on envelopes for Christmas cards, and checks as gifts. I don’t even need to sign my photo Christmas cards—our names come pre-printed.
As luck would have it, this poem (mostly) popped out of my mouth while I was in the basement bedroom sewing Christmas presents. I believe this is the first poem I have written since grade school, over fifty years ago. And that one was better than this one.
I apologize in advance—the use of “poem” in reference to what is written below is hyperbole at its best/worst. I blame the poem and my willingness to post it to our esteemed blog on the stress I have been under as a result of December and Christmas.
Wonderful Time
Most wonderful time of the year. Kids must behave and adults gear Up. Up. And up. Photos to scour for cards and calendars. Hurry before Snapfish wants more of your dollars.
Envelopes to address. Stamps to buy. Cookies to bake and apple pie. Presents to make. Who spends time crafting presents anymore? No one! That is what Amazon is for.
Who gets what? How much? Oh, to heck with it. Everyone gets a gift certificate. Secrets to keep. A tree to cut and lights to string. Decorations. Carols to sing.
Parties to attend and surprises to hatch.
Parties to plan and Hallmark movies to watch.
Do not forget
The Hallmark movie drinking game,
Carrots to leave for reindeer tame.
Stockings filled by Santa before milk and cookie, Smiles of children at presents placed under the tree, Make it worthwhile. Christmas night all is calm, the gifts put away. We’ll do it all over, come what may.
Writing While Sick
Heidi here. I’m in book jail, and I’m not writing fast enough. I was already not writing fast enough when I came down with the flu. The words dried up completely. Here are my four tried-and-sometimes-true methods for making the deadline anyway.
- The filing method: shuffle paper (or electrons.) Look through all those appended notes for corrections and improvements. Organize them. You may use pretty-colored file folders to do this. If you get lucky, some sentence will click and you find yourself writing instead of amending.
- The copy editing method: You’re going to have to weed those adverbs eventually. Start the line-by-line read-through. The upside of this method is the same as for Number One. Some connection will appear that sets you to churning out words for elsewhere in your book. If worst comes to worst, you end up with fewer adverbs and cleaner prose.
- The jig-saw method. Bring up on your screen all the hopeless dreck you’ve generated while trying to get your current chapter right. Clip out the substantive bits that simply must be in the final version or the plot won’t work. Dump them in a new file. Try to make them fit with each other. This method works the way physical jig-saw puzzles do: each sentence — even each phrase — that meets your eye might just fit over here… or over here… or…. And you’re just going to do one more piece before you stop. Really.
- The butt-on-chair method. For those of us raised as New England Puritans, this is Number One, not Number Four. If you were a serious writer and a virtuous person, you would simply ignore your illness, sit down and write. The result would be War and Peace or the Iliad, at least. On account of your will power, you see. The fact that this is a total crock never penetrates the Puritan mind. Neither does the fact that if you try it, you succeed only by using methods 1, 2 or 3.
You’re going to be sick no matter what you do. But if you can bring yourself to put your hands on that keyboard, and something does click, for some blessed number of minutes, you’ll forget to feel sick.
Holiday tip: check out The Harvard Book Store’s Holiday Hundred
Eleanor Ingbretson
Karen Whalen
llandrigan
Heidi Wilson
Mike M
Thursday Night Writes 