In Memoriam: The Pike Library Association

Small town libraries are closing. Even after cutting hours because of lack of funds some still can’t find a way to stay open. A few people complain, but the fact is that so many more people couldn’t care less if one of the pillars of society fails.

But it’s not the fault of the libraries. They aren’t the failures. Society is failing. Demographics are changing and interests are devolving.

Not to get into it too deeply, but if you are aware that your small local library has closed, you’re probably not the problem. The problem is that, seemingly, the majority of the population doesn’t read anymore

My own little, tiny, library in Pike, New Hampshire (a little, tiny town), that I’d been proud to be on the board of for more than twenty years, has just closed its doors. It did get by on the donation the town made to it, and to the three other libraries in Haverhill, NH, but just barely. It kept up-to-date books that its dwindling number of patrons liked to read, it had the best collection of children’s classics in town, and it was friendly. But it was doomed.

One hundred years ago Pike was a bustling, small town. Its whetstone factory was the largest in the world, producing sharpening stones for all sorts of purposes. The sharpening stone that my father, an engraver, used way back when, was probably a Pike sharpening stone.

Newspaper articles from the turn of the (previous) century said that the whetstone company employed over 100 people in downtown Pike, and more outside of town. Another article described Pike as:

“a little village of more than 500 inhabitants. There is a fine department store, whetstone mill, sawmill, box factory, wheelwright and blacksmith shop, grist mill, hotel, livery stable, a good hall and schoolhouse. The village has long distance telephone, telegraph, and six (!!!) mails a day.”

Pike had everything a small town should have, and then, just to put the icing on the cake, it got a library.

Over the years, things happened to this former bustling village. Artificial abrasives were invented which changed the course of the whetstone factory. Less customers meant unemployment for its workers, which led to an exodus of the former employees and their families. Schools closed. The auxilary mills folded or moved away. Obviously there was no need for a livery stable or blacksmith any more, and those workers and their families moved on.

Yesterday, literally, all that was left of the town proper were the library, the post office, and the ruins of the whetstone factory. Today it’s just the post office, the ruins and an empty building.

The Pike library starved to death. Or maybe, like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis, it died of a broken heart. Take your pick, both are equally miserable endings.

Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis, can be found at most libraries.

(my thanks to Robert Fillion and his publication ‘Early Pike and Whetstone Works,’ 1994, Woodsville, NH, for the excerpts of newspaper articles, circa 1900.)

IT’S FOOT STUBBING TIME!

I’ve discovered the biggest boon to writers ever. A broken toe!

What’s the most difficult thing that writer’s face? It’s their own procrastination, I’m sure. Listen to ourselves: “Oh, I should sit down and write, oh, yes, I’ll sit right down and write after I scrub the bathroom, I’ll sit down and write after I make this call, I’ll sit down and write when the timer goes off, when the sun goes down, when the moon comes up.”

When hell freezes over could be more likely if procrastination has taken hold. I’ve spent whole days away from writing, doing anything else I could think of.

But, what if ones toe becomes broken (not on purpose, mind you, but because of an accident or even stupidity), and one is forced to sit down? (It doesn’t necessarily have to be through stupidity, I’m only writing from my own experience.) One does have to sit down a lot when something like that happens.

Of course there are many things you can do sitting down, you don’t have to write. You can read. Ah, but if you read. What happens then? When I’m reading a book that I genuinely enjoy, one that speaks to my genre, and has characters I can identify with, I drift away into an inward looking mode. The creative juices flow and the muses are tap, tap, tapping. I’m visiting my story, my plot and my characters in my mind. The book falls by the way/chairside, and I head over to my laptop. Now, of necessity, I must grab something nearby, hoist myself up and hobble off to my laptop, but the result is the same. Once seated I can get into the nitty-gritty of the problem that had banished me to procrastinationhood.

There was a sticky area in my cozy under revision (before I ran my flip-flopped bare toe into the wheel of the grocery cart), one that had driven me into a an outwardly delightful, but inwardly frustrating procrastination of several days duration. But because of the broken phalange I’ve been sitting more and reading more. I’ve been led into daydreams and back into a groove. I’ve beaten the inertia.

But, aren’t there less painful ways to achieve that desire to sit down and write?

Look on the bright side, oh ye of broken toe, six to eight weeks is a lot of revision and reading time.

REVISION IS AN EIGHT LETTER WORD . . and that equals two four letter words.

The dictionary says that to revise means to reconsider and alter, and I guess that that is what I’ve been doing.

(Have I ever mentioned Jasper Fforde in any of my posts? (I can hear groaning and moaning. What? I’ve mentioned him before? Too often? Sorry). In one of his Thursday Next books he goes into a long riff about the use of ‘that that’. Totally hilarious. But not to digress from an unsavory topic to a more pleasant one. Oh, no. Never that.)

I find myself revising my cozy- again. This time there’s a plan. I will go over it twice, perfect the first page and write a log-line. Then I will pitch it to whoever is (un)fortunate enough to be in my sights at the Maine Crime Writer’s Crime Bake in November.

That’s two revisions by November. The beginning of November. I think I can do it.

A long time ago I submitted to this post a triangle which delineated the hierarchy of revision. I thought it was a great plan. I need to dig it out and put it to good use. I need to put a lot of ideas to good use. I need help.

At our last Thursday evening’s group therapy, writer’s weekly critique, admonition, encouragement and jam and cookie session, the most horrible plan I had ever heard of, in regard to revision, was put forth. I didn’t say so at the time, but I was horror struck. This revision entailed putting aside your first (second, third, fourth, whatever) draft, let it rest, and then rewrite it without availing yourself of the benefit of whatever written draft you had just written! Rewrite blindly from scratch! Have you ever? One would have to be mad.

Maybe this works for some writers. I’m willing to bet they’re short story writers. And I bet that that (!!!) method wasn’t one of the levels on the hierarchy of revision triangle.

I’d be willing to try it on a short story. A short short story. Maybe flash fiction. An e-mail that disappeared before one’s very eyes, before send was hit, now that’s the place to try it. Actually, that has happened, and I think the resulting e-mail was worded a lot better than the first.

So, there are methods and there are methods, and they all lead to some form of madness. As the Cheshire Cat once said to Alice when she remarked she didn’t want to go among mad people:

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad,” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Here is where I am now. In the middle of a muddle of revision.

COUNTESS FOR A DAY

Actually it was only for a few hours last Friday evening when I participated in a Murder Mystery Dinner as a fund raiser for our library; the Haverhill Library. Strange things can happen when one is a trustee, and this was one of them.

I really didn’t want to be the countess for even a few hours. But they promised me a tiara, and that swayed me, only to find out it was cardboard and had Happy New Year 2015 written on it in faded silver ink. What a blow to my psyche.

Then I found out that my job description had me shimmying up fishing line and climbing into a cabin’s porthole to find this cardboard tiara. Really? I don’t think so. Especially after that particular cabin’s resident had recently been found dead.

That I shimmied up fishing line and squeezed my bod through a porthole was told to the audience as a done deal at the end of the evening. Fiction is wonderful. I never could have done those things in real life. In fact the general age of the participants forbade a whole lot of physical activity, with the possible exception of the young jewel thief. The main job of the actors, in case you’ve never participated in one of these things, was to go from table to table and regale the attendees with clues. I must have done a good job as no one suspected me at the end.

Now that those few hours that I agonized over before hand are done I can look back and say that in retrospect it was a fun evening. Most things were either fun or deeply regretted in retrospect. I’m reminded of Edith Piaf’s song, Je Ne Regrette Rien (I don’t regret anything). How is that possible? I don’t think she was a psychopath. They’re the only ones who never look back and are sorry for anything they’ve done. I guess her song was  literally licensed to make it seem she never did anything really wrong, or only maybe wrong but fun. Fiction again. Certainly I regret things, and it’s a great theme in a book. My characters regret lots of things they’ve done in their past lives, it makes it easier for readers to identify with them.

Do psychopaths read cozies? That’s a thought. What’s in it for them? If there’s no regret for what has been done then there’s seldom a turning point for the better for our characters, or our readers, and that’s rather important in a cozy, and not so important to a psychopath. Of course not all literature revolves around regret, but it’s a theme most writers can identify with being, as it is, a daily occurrence in most lives (I wish I hadn’t eaten that, I wish I hadn’t said that, I wish I hadn’t done that, etc.). And when you add a change because of regret it rounds out a character.

Do I regret being a countess for those few hours? Certainly not. I easily caught up on all the sleep I lost beforehand. And I thank Gloria B. profoundly for the loan of her real tiara to wear instead of the cardboard one.

What if I discovered that instead of being a diehard pantser I have a plotter hidden deep within me? It may not be a 100% conversion—it may even be an aberrant experience.

How did this come about? As Heidi posted on April 30, our moderator gave our writing group the vague details of a plot created by a plot generator and assigned us the task of developing a plot. Say what??

I dragged out my books on plots. Lots of information on what a plot is but no guidelines on how to construct a plot outline that would have been useful for this exercise. Whenever required in the past, I’ve created my plots after I’ve written my story or book—never before. Lacking a better idea, I simply started writing my plot using the outline format in my Word document, writing until I reached an acceptable end to the story. (I knew the panster in me was attempting to sneak through when I ended the plot with dialogue.)

“Begin at the beginning,”…”and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” (Lewis Carroll in “Alice in Wonderland.”)

I was surprised when the members of my group offered constructive ideas just from the two-plus pages of plot outline I submitted. Their comments came in handy when our next assignment was to write the story derived from our plot. Initially I was stymied—until I realized I had enough details in my plot that writing the story would be a breeze. A gentle one, not a hurricane.

First I updated my plot outline with the input from my writing group. That done, I saved my outline to a new Word document and started converting the plot outline to verse, line by line. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy! Shocking! Thrilling!

Is this all it takes to convert a pantser to a plotter? The jury is still out as I haven’t finished the story or submitted it to my writing group.

Epiphany: creating an outline is hard work but it appears if it is done correctly, the writing itself isn’t. I know what you’re thinking, one outline and she thinks she’s an expert at plotting. If only that were the case. But I am excited to apply this experience to other projects that I have in the works.

__________________________

RIP Susannah Mushatt Jones, the oldest person in the world, who passed away yesterday in New York at the age of 116. How did she manage to live so long? Bacon and sleep!! I’ve been looking for an excuse to eat more bacon. And sleeping more shouldn’t be an issue. If I can manage to do both—such a hardship—I might be looking at 55 more years. That’s certainly enough time to finish, and publish, at least one novel.

BROWSING AMONG BOOKS

. . .was what I was doing the other day. I pulled down a dusty old thing I’d bought years ago because printed on the front of the brown linen bound book was a wood cut of a cottage covered in snow. It reminded me of a wood cut I’d made in shop class, lo these many years ago. that ended up in my Junior High School yearbook. Maybe I shouldda stuck to wood cuts!

The book, The Furnishing of a Modest Home, by Fred Hamilton Daniels, was published in 1908 and is in wonderful condition. Plenty of photos of stark mission and/or arts and crafts style rooms and examples of things that made them cozy. Not.

Those were the days of no cushioning on anything. Hard edges, chairs, lighting. Harder horsehair stuffed divans. Nowhere to settle in with a good book. The paintings were nice. Other décor, also. But the author’s choice to include a newspaper clipping from that turn of the century intrigued me. The article is called, “A PRETTY ORNAMENT”, and it’s from a write in column on decorating your home. Let me know what you think.

Dear Sisters- Here are directions for making a very pretty as well as useful ornament where your Thanksgiving turkey feet could be brought into use. I have one, which I have had for 13 years, and just as good and perfect as the day I fixed them. Get one nice turkey foot and leg, up to the first joint. Wash it nicely and allow to dry a little while over the stove or on the kitchen mantel. Now take a grape box cover and cover with black or red velvet or satin as one may fancy. Cut the satin or velvet about half inch larger than box cover, then notch or cut little slits, and stick the velvet or satin, whichever the case may be, down on the wrong side with some glue. This will quickly dry. Then get a small thermometer and prick a little hole to correspond with the thermometer and sew through the board with heavy silk to match in color with velvet or satin. Now, take your turkey foot and give it two or three coats of gold paint (this preserves the foot). Covering all parts with the gold paint, arrange the foot nicely and claws so it will look nice. The next day it will be ready to mount.

The writer of that bit of home décor goes on with directions on how to mount this monstrosity, adding at the end:

Every one that sees mine admires it so much. Very nice for a dining room but mine hangs on my parlor door. Wish someone would try it and report. I think it would repay them for their trouble.

The author of the book was not in favor of this piece de resistance I’m glad to say.

I noticed that my computer program automatically put the accent aigu on the e in décor (voila), but refused to add the appropriate accents to piece de resistance. Why is that, I wonder?

Anyway, I have absolutely no point to make in this recounting of the previous turn of the century’s signature household accoutrements except to say that if that woman, who signed her column as Shut in No. 1 (which temporarily guilted me for citing her idea in a negative way), had had something to read while reclining on a more comfortable piece of furniture than those pictured in this particular book, then I would have had nothing to write about today.

Let’s hear it for gold encrusted turkey feet.