World enough and time

by Sheila Connolly

"Had we but world enough and time…"  Andrew Marvell began his poem, To His Coy Mistress, with that line, in the mid-17th century, and while the rest of the poem wanders off happily into ramblings about fleshly love, that first line is lovely, and sticks in my mind (with a lot of other assorted stuff).


But lately, being limited in my mobility, which in turn limits the range of my activities, my take on time has changed. As I’ve said here before, I’ve been doing a lot more reading. The past week I’ve torn though The Dirt on Clean, by Katherine Ashenburg (which I bought when it came out in 2008 and have only just arrived at), and I’ve started Christopher Kimball’s Fannie’s Last Supper, which was published last year.


On the surface these would seem to be very different books, but both have made me consider how people in any culture choose to spend their time. Perhaps “choose” is too limiting a term, because for a long time most people did whatever they had to do to survive, which consisted mainly of hunting or growing food, procreating, and dying early. No doubt there was little discussion about how to best use leisure time—because there wasn’t any.


Ashenburg addresses attitudes toward personal hygiene, and how different cultures perceived cleanliness over history. Indoor plumbing has been around for a long time (the Romans did a pretty good job with that, as did some religious orders like the Cistercians in the Middle Ages), but its perceived importance has fluctuated widely. At times people thought bathing was evil, and changed their clothing rarely. But the pendulum swung and now many people are obsessed with both personal odors and germs. Have you looked at the range of settings on a new washer? It takes a degree in computer science to figure out how to program one for a simple load. And if you’re supposed to treat each kind of fabric, each color, separately—how much time are you spending at it?


Kimball’s book is interesting because the author takes it upon himself to recreate a (high-end) meal based upon the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cookbook from 1896. This involved twelve courses, each incredibly elaborate, all cooked on an authentic cast-iron stove. The author, clearly passionate about both cooking and the Victorian era, also includes a wealth of peripheral detail (who knew that Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix existed before 1900?).


Admittedly this event does not represent the way most people in the country approached making a meal; instead it captures a particular moment in urban, upper-middle-class fashion. In this rarified niche, It took well over two hours to consume such a meal, and that was with servants presenting each course and clearing away the detritus from the prior one. More servants operated below stairs, chopping, peeling, simmering, etc., etc., to create individual dishes designed to impress and delight—and to disappear within minutes, to be followed by the cleanup (imagine all those dishes!). It didn’t last, though. Servants became harder and harder to find, so the woman of the house began to assume a greater role in shopping and cooking, and then there were all those wonderful time-saving machines and packaged foods that came along in short order.


But for all of that, domestic service was a way to enter American culture. For a time a lot of cooks and maids were Irish, and that included my father’s mother, two of her sisters, and two of my father’s father’s sisters, all of whom arrived in New York shortly after 1900. The house I live in now, which in 1910 housed five or six unrelated people in addition to the owners, also had a servant who was Irish—her room was in the unheated attic. By 1920 there was no servant.


Modern perceptions of time, particularly “free” time, keep changing. Take reading (please!). These days it is a luxury to sit down and immerse yourself in a book, to lose yourself in an alternate universe or a wealth of factual information, purely for your own pleasure. The recent and continuing evolution of the ebook is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because books are now available instantly, in a form that can be carried anywhere; it’s a curse because readers now snatch minutes here and there to read a paragraph or a page, before we’re interrupted by something else. Children, teenagers, twenty-somethings reduce their lives to 140-character tweets in an endless stream.


Does this change how we read, and how we write books? Will the rising generation have the attention span of a gnat?  Must we as writers make our stories bigger, brighter, faster, just to keep them fresh in an intermittent reader’s mind? There are those who say that we mystery writers must put the body in the first chapter, and add a hook to the end of each chapter, to keep our readers engaged. We’re happy that they’re reading at all, but how must we adapt to keep them reading?

BETRAYAL

by Sheila Connolly


We’ve been together for a long time. Oh, things were a little unsteady at the beginning, when we were just getting to know each other, but we worked through that together. We went along smoothly for years. We did things together, traveled to wonderful places, went hiking, skiing, ice-skating. We enjoyed each other’s company. More important, we trusted each other, and you supported me in whatever I wanted to do. You were always there for me.

Then you betrayed me. I never saw it coming. I thought we understood each other, respected each other. I never asked you to do anything that wasn’t right for you. I accepted your limitations. I believed that you were strong and dependable. I was wrong.

And now I don’t trust you. How can I? My faith is shattered, and I don’t know how to rebuild the trust that I’ve lost. I know, you’re still there, waiting for me. Even I can see you don’t look good—you’ve lost weight, and your skin has lost its color. But you brought it on yourself, letting me down when I needed you. You’re going to have to earn my trust again, one day at a time.

I’m talking about my leg.

Funny how one little accident can make you reconsider a whole lot of things. One minute you’re going about your business; the next, you’re on the floor, wondering what the heck happened.

You get to consider all sorts of unexpected things. Like the sound of a breaking bone. We read thrillers where people pummel each other, accompanied by the snap, crackle, pop, and crunch of breaking bones. Now I have firsthand experience.

You learn interesting details about health care systems, and that’s before you get the bills.

You find out how your body reacts to anesthesia (I’ve had no side effects, even with morphine) and heavy-duty drugs (extremely boring—I fall asleep).

You realize that you’re a lot clumsier and less flexible than you used to be, and you have to readjust your mental image of yourself as lithe and supple (well, that was kind of overdue anyway).

You discover just how many things are difficult to do while balancing on one leg and holding on to something to support yourself with one hand. I’ll leave that to your imagination, but suffice it to say, you reconsider your clothing options. Stretchy is good; elastic is your friend.

You realize how many horror stories there are on the Internet about your particular problem, and you devoutly hope that it’s only the whiners who post.

You realize the garden isn’t going to get planted this year because it’s hard to dig with only one usable leg (I refuse to till the whole patch sitting down!).

You realize how many steps there are in the world, and how hard it is to get up and down them. That includes your own home.

You realize you need to ask for help, and you need to thank people for helping you, even while you resent your lack of independence. Most people are happy to help.

You realized how much worse things could have been. Bones heal, life goes on. Things will go back to normal—won’t they?


Can you win back my trust, dear leg? Only time will tell.

WEB WITHDRAWAL

by Sheila Connolly


If all goes as planned, when you read this I will be in County Cork, Ireland, where my grandfather was born, doing research for a new and yet unnamed mystery series.  I shrewdly set most of the series in a small pub in a small town, so much of this research will consist of sitting in pubs and listening to people talk--how they sound, and what they talk about.  I hope some of them will even talk to me, and if I've very lucky, I'll persuade a pub owner to show me how things work (like how to pull a proper pint of Guinness).


But the problem with traveling these days is keeping in touch with the cyberworld.  I'll be gone for two weeks, and in that time my email inbox will fill to overflowing, and my provider will send me nasty messages and simply jettison anything else that comes in.  Not good.


I remember the first time I left the country.  I was all of 21, and my mother was convinced she'd never see me again.  She made me promise to send her a telegram from the airport to let her know I'd landed safely.  I did, but the country's telegraph workers were on strike at the time, so she got the telegram a couple of weeks later.  (I was a starving student, so placing a phone call was out of the question.)

Fast forward a decade or two, and the Internet had blossomed everywhere.  The trick was to find a place with a terminal you could afford.  I tend to travel to out-of-the-way places, so I can't rely on the generosity of large hotels.  As a result, I have logged on to machines in places like a converted 18th-century gaol (Ireland again) and a couple of public libraries.  About the same time, disposable cell phones made their debut, so you could pick one up in the airport and at least be able to communicate within a country (no, my own won't work in Ireland--I did check).  I gather now that finding a working pay phone anywhere in the world is becoming increasingly unlikely--everyone has a cell phone.  Guess what:  I've "rented" a cell phone from my regular provider, and I don't even have to change the number (which is good because heaven help me if I have to remember one more number for anything).


But that's still not Internet access.  Why does it matter?  Recently one of my colleagues on this blog described how we get an endorphin rush from receiving emails.  Maybe we used to get the same feeling from a personal letter--remember those?--but emails are constant and immediate. We're hooked. 


As writers we follow a lot of loops and blogs.  As a baseline we use them for support--we writers are often solitary souls, and we need someone out there who understands and who will assure us that we aren't crazy, and we'll work out that plot point and make that deadline, and some wonderful publisher will have faith in you and buy it.  And so on.  The problem is, there are a lot of writers, and they're all needy.  So that means a lot of emails, even if you're on digest.


I'll be gone two weeks.  How will I survive without my daily, even hourly, dose of emails?  What important events and announcements will I miss?  Will anyone miss me?  Trust me, I've already checked out the free WiFi location closest to where I'm staying (which is a charming cottage with views, a hot tub, DVD player--but no Internet!), and plan to have some long lunches in their restaurant, trying to keep ahead of the rising tide.


But this is as close to a vacation as I've come in the past five years.  For my husband (who has graciously agreed to accompany me), it's been even longer. We're looking forward to some down time. I've been to Ireland more than once, and I know that the pace of things is simply slower there.  In my experience, outside of the cities it's a very soothing place, perfect for restoring mental equilibrium and regaining a more balanced perspective.


And I'll come back to a thousand emails.  But maybe by then I won't care.


How long can you survive without the Internet?

BORDERS FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

By Sheila Connolly


This week Borders officially filed for bankruptcy, to no one’s great surprise, claiming debts well in access of a billion dollars and owing money to a lot of publishers. They plan to close 200 of their 642 stores. Lo, how the mighty are fallen!

As both writers and readers, we live in interesting times. When I was young (in another millennium), my mother and my grandmother were avid readers, although they leaned toward historical fiction, mainly featuring royalty. But there were always books around the house, including a few that I probably wasn't meant to find, much less read.


My grandmother, widowed and keeping company with a gentleman friend, regarded a stroll to Doubleday's in Manhattan as a pleasant after-dinner excursion, and usually came home with a new hardcover, which she was likely to pass on to my mother. In the suburbs, we made occasional forays to Brentano's at the shiny new mall that opened up in the 1960s. As a less satisfying alternative, the all-purpose store in the middle of town that sold primarily gifts and cards and candy and newspapers, had a couple of racks of paperbacks, right up front in the store. When I was in middle school, Scholastic Books would show up every few weeks and set up racks of books, most of which cost about thirty-five cents, and I still have some of them. So there were always books in my life.


Now we're living in the midst of an electronic revolution, watching the shift from physical books to digital ones. Kindle, Nook and their brethren are multiplying like mushrooms, and their share of the market is growing by leaps and bounds. Publishers are struggling to revise contracts to include language that reflects what they know right now and what they think might happen over the life of the contract. Writers are taking back electronic rights and posting their own books, both out-of-print and never-published, as digital books, and reaping the benefits directly.



We've seen closings of long-treasured and well-respected independent bookstores over the last couple of years, because the owners just couldn't afford to stay open. And now we're seeing the implosion of the giants. Is there any business model for selling books that works? I know I wouldn't want to be a bookseller now, no matter how much I love books.


I have an unusual perspective, because my daughter works at a place that bills itself as the largest independent bookstore in New England. It's a great place, with thousands and thousands of books on shelve 10 feet high, and I'm there a lot. But it's been run by the same family since its founding over 50 years ago, and the current generation just isn't that interested any more. They want to sell the store--but what they're selling is the stock, the name, and the goodwill. The family wants to hold on to ownership of the land and the building (in a prime location), although they would offer any buyer advantageous rates for a long-term lease. It's been on the market since last fall, but so far no takers. Will there be? Should there be? How do you place a value on goodwill in this day and age? They had a sale over the past couple of weeks, and the sizeable parking lot was filled with people jockeying for any open spacesBbut I've also been there on days when it was all but empty. They have a loyal following and great name recognitionBbut is that enough to keep the store in business?



At the same time, libraries are struggling to hold a small slice of municipal budgets, cutting staff, hours, and acquisitions. How can we stand to lose both bookstores and libraries?



Any reader among you knows that reading is an addiction. We can't survive without words in front of us. I've been known to read decades-old magazines I found stuffed under chair cushions in rustic vacation cottages when all else failed. Cereal boxes. Operating manuals. We need our fix, and we need it regularly.



Are pixels on a screen the same? They're still the same words, put together by the same people, only in a form that is infinitely more portable and adjustable. And you'll never run out of books, as long as you're near a computer or a wireless connection. All that is good. But what we lose is the serendipity of browsing: the pleasure of wandering through well-stocked aisles, picking up whatever appeals to us for any number of reasons, leafing through the pages, and deciding to give it a try. Will that change how we all read?



Will Borders survive? It’s not clear at the moment. But its woes have sent a seismic ripple through the publishing and reading world.  Where will you turn for your books now?

GETTING IT TOGETHER

by Sheila Connolly


I've been following through on my New Year's resolution to get better organized (I'll wait while you applaud). The most tangible evidence of this is the reduction of the number of bankers boxes labeled "Miscellaneous" that have been cluttering our laughingly labeled office.



A couple of the boxes contain financial and tax information, so I can be excused for hanging on to those. A couple more contain drafts of my books--sometimes more than one draft per book. What I think I'm ever going to do with these I do not know. I seem to be saving them so that I can point out to my editor that several copy editors seems to have contradicted themselves and each other on more than one occasion. I firmly believe they do it just to drive us nuts. Every time I think I've mastered a rule of punctuation or capitalization, they change it again.


All right, someday I'll have a nice ceremonial bonfire of all those defunct manuscripts, but at least they're tidy and labeled. What I find hardest to deal with is the truly miscellaneous items: newspaper clippings that look interesting or may relate very distantly to something that I'm curious about (and may want to use in a book someday); book reviews of books I might like to read someday; email correspondence from friends, acquaintances, and strangers; and a lot of printouts about all aspects of publishing, from writing a book through sending a query through promoting yourself and your book to reading a royalty statement.


These last make up the largest component of my multiple miscellany boxes, but I have to say that going through them has been like conducting my own personal archeology. My first observation: wow, I've learned a lot! My second: how outdated some of these sound now, and how quickly the publishing business has changed! I'm talking five years or less since I got serious about writing and started collecting information I thought would be helpful to me eventually. Mostly I clipped it or printed it out and stuck it in one of those boxes, and now here I am marveling at how useless that information really is.


It's both fun and sad to read comments and recommendations from people I didn't know then but I now count as friends. It's like we all grew up together. It's amusing to see the excitement at wonderful new means of communicating, like GoodReads and MySpace. It's hard to recall that there was no Facebook then, at least for the post-college crowd. It does give me some perspective: in hindsight I can watch the writers stampede from one "hot new thing" to the next. Now we know there's always going to be something else new right around the corner.


I've found a few treasures too. Like the obituary of the 103-year-old man named Nelson McNutt (really) who made a pass at me--a memory I treasure. Mixed in among the business items are things like my daughter's last high school report card (boy, did she slack off the last semester of her senior year!), and a twenty-year-old Christmas card from my late father, who for years worked with a local printer to design completely wacky and idiosyncratic cards that the 800 people on his mailing list looked forward to each year. They're a little hard to explain, but suffice it to say they involved golf, gophers and synthetic plaid fabrics.


Sometimes I like to imagine some dedicated biographer looking at the gems I have saved and arriving at piercing insights as to my character and the brilliance of my prose. I lump with that my off-the-wall idea of writing a biography of my grandmother (who lived a very interesting life) based solely on her checkbooks--hich of course I still have in the attic (I have every canceled check I ever wrote too).


I have filled two bankers boxes with paper to be recycled--proof that it is possible to get rid of those things that have outlived their usefulness. Unfortunately I've still got a lot left, but I'm working on it. Please cheer for me.To be recycled!

OF TWO MINDS

by Sheila Connolly


Lately I've been thinking about schizophrenia, a medical illness that by conservative estimates affects about one percent of the world population, which translates to at least two million Americans. The World Health Organization has called schizophrenia one of the most debilitating human diseases. So why am I interested? I don't mean to poach on Liz Zelvin's territory, but as a writer, a lot of the symptoms sound awfully familiar to me.



–delusions: strange beliefs not based in reality

–hallucinations: perceiving sensations that aren't real, including hearing voices

–disorganization: talking in sentences that do not make sense

–writing excessively but without meaning



We as writers spend a lot of time alone, staring at a piece of paper or a computer monitor, trying to string words together in some meaningful and coherent way. A lot of writers joke to each other about listening to the voices in their head when they write. Are we hallucinating?



Or take delusions. Mystery writers kill people–on paper. We are required to make these murders feel as real as possible (all those nice gory details about blood spatter and the like) to convince our readers. Otherwise they will write nasty emails telling us what we got wrong. So in effect, we are deliberately inducing a schizophrenic state, creating convincing alternative realities in our heads.



What about disorganization? When confronted with that blank page/screen, a lot of writers just start setting down whatever comes to them. Nora Roberts famously has called this a "vomit draft" because it just spews out. No way that is going to be organized or even logical. And that "writing excessively without meaning"–that's why we cringe when we start editing. It's no fun looking at your own words and asking your cat, why did I say that? What the heck did I mean?



There are other troubling aspects of schizophrenia that may also apply to writers:


–withdrawal from family, friends, and social activities ("but I have a deadline! I don't have time to talk to you!")


–forgetting or losing things (why am I standing in the kitchen?)


–poor hygiene and grooming (hey, these yoga pants are really comfortable, and the UPS delivery guy isn't going to care whether I've brushed my hair today)



Even more disturbing is the fact that a person who is suffering from schizophrenia may not even know it. Isn't reality whatever we perceive it to be?



Is it worse if you know you're schizophrenic? Years ago I knew a graduate student who had been given that diagnosis. When he was on his medications, he was a really nice guy. When he decided he was just fine and didn't need the meds, he was arrested for smashing car windshields with a crowbar. Do you think he believed that smashing windows was normal and reasonable behavior? But how do you know when you've slipped over the line?



Which leads to the question, where do writers fit in this spectrum? We deliberately set out to create stand-alone realities in our imagination. We have to fully believe in those realities in order to make them convincing to other people. And we do this over and over, building little mini-universes where we create the population and the rules. Does this make us abnormal?



Or does the fact that we share these characteristics with other people, and can not only talk about them but can laugh at them–and at ourselves–mean that we're normal?

Working Hours

by Sheila Connolly


Like many areas of the country, Massachusetts is digging out from another blizzard or nor'easter or whatever we're calling it this week, the second within a month. Save your pity for all those other states which are totally unprepared to deal with more than an inch of snow. We Yankees are used to it.
Cats nap, er...cat naps?But blizzards make me glad I'm a writer. I can sit at home in my grubbies and labor over the Work in Progress (or these days, more often two WIPs). If the power goes out? I've got edits to do–on paper. I can outline the next book–on paper. Or (gasp!) I could read a book. I have plenty of flashlights, plus a 1900 oil lamp that works, so I won't be left in the dark, and there are plenty of books waiting for me.
But... Over the past few years, when my days have been my own, my daily activities not dictated by bosses or train schedules, I have learned a lot about how my brain works–or doesn't work.
My father was a morning person, up early and out of the house by the time I got up (and I finished his pot of tea and read the paper he left). My mother? No way. She was a night owl, and prying her out of bed in the morning was a monumental effort, one which I often abandoned as hopeless. I ended up walking to school in the rain a lot.My mother's mother was a morning person. She would be up, showered, fully dressed and sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea before anyone else in the household stumbled down the stairs. My mother's second husband was also a morning person. He was involved in building power plants for a time, so he followed construction schedules (and he also liked to go out for breakfast and hang out with the other morning people, while my mother slept on...).


All in all, I was very aware of diurnal or circadian rhythms from an early age. If there's a genetic component to daily patterns, the odds were good that I would be a morning person, and so it happened. Once I wake up (thank you, hungry cats), my brain starts churning, and I write mental lists of all the things I'm supposed to be doing during the day, and all the things I've put off, and all the things that will need to be done in the next week or month or year. Forget about going back to sleep–it's not happening.


But over the last few years, I've learned more about how my brain works. First and foremost, I know I'm most creative in the morning, so that's when I write (after I've cleared emails and read my favorite blogs and all that stuff). Ideas comes, details click, words flow. I take a short lunch break, then I'm back at it, until...sometime in the afternoon something shuts down. My brain turns to sludge, the flow dries up. Nothing is happening upstairs.


It's like a mini-episode of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Decreased energy and concentration; carbohydrate cravings (those cookies are calling to me); increased sleep (I've started taking naps, which I never used to do). But it's gone the next morning. Maybe I need a new word for it, like ADD (Afternoon Affective Disorder).


Of course, sometimes the outside world doesn't allow me the luxury of slipping into a zombie state. There are edits and copyedits, and they come with deadlines. The publisher wants that manuscript by a fixed date, because there's this whole production queue waiting for it, even if the pub date is still over a year away. As a result, I jealously hoard that precious early-day time, saving it for the new book, the short story, the emails about important details for which I have to communicate coherently to other people. By late afternoon, I read the incoming emails but usually put them aside for more intelligent thought. And I read.


I know there are writers who are reluctant to read other people's work while they're working on something of their own, for fear that their style will be compromised. Not me. There are writers whose work I love, and I dearly wish some of their style would rub off on me, but so far no luck. There are other books that I read and say, I'd never do that. But maybe I need to clear my head of my own words in order to focus on someone else's, because late afternoon is my best reading time. Maybe I'm less analytical then, and more easily drawn into a story.


What about you? When do you work best? When can't you string together a coherent sentence for love or money?