The Lovely Summer Continues

Heading into the middle of August, I'm pleased to report that the weather in Lambertville could not be nicer. Not, that is, from my point of view. I like it cool, dry, and partly cloudy. I'm sitting at the dining room table right now with all the fans off, a gentle natural breeze wafting through from the front of the house to the back. The temperature in here is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. Harold has gone to work, all our summer house guests have been and gone, and while I miss them, it's nice to have the house to myself.

Now you may say, all right, then, why aren't you working on BUCKER DUDLEY? At least two readers have expressed the desire to read Episode Four, which you promised to put up for them on Kindle for 99 cents a shot. I guess I'll get to that in a little while. Right now Polly is in a half-burnt store in Toronto (called, at the time, York) in her moose-hide Indian Maiden outfit, trying to sell the storekeeper three rabbits she snared in the woods, while avoiding the eye of her archenemy, Cousin Arthur Garnett. The next scene I have to write involves a frantic chase through the streets of the town. I have to think up the 1812 equivalent of a phone booth so that she can change into the sailor boy outfit of Bucker Dudley and escape her evil cousin's clutches. But I'm feeling too languid right now to do this.

Instead I'm thinking about the coming fall, and what I might feel like wearing when the weather gets even cooler and drier. (And also how we're going to survive the next hurricane and ten-day power outage, and whether we need an automatic gas generator, but that isn't fun to think about.)

What's really fun to think about is clothing. Flying in the face of common sense, I just sent away for some plaid wool stuff to make a suit with. The plaid has a six-inch repeat, so that if I ever finish the thing and wear it out of the house I'm going to look like a Scottish Sherman tank grinding down the street. I don't care. Autumn is for plaid. Plaid is for autumn. Hey, I already have a pair of boots to go with the suit.

Okay, back to work now.

Kate Gallison

It's New! A Crunchy, Whole-grain Serial

A few years ago I whiled away a great deal of time reading stories about the War of 1812, which, by the way, we are still in the bicentennial of, seeing as how that war didn't end until 1814. The conflict fascinated me because it was the Americans fighting the Canadians. My forebears were Canadians. We weren't told much about the War of 1812 in American public schools, other than vague references to Manifest Destiny, which as near as I can tell is the notion that God wanted the White Americans to have everything.

But I didn't come here to discuss politics. I want to talk about serials.

The result of my studies of the War of 1812 was the meticulously researched BUCKER DUDLEY, a long, rambling historical novel about a young orphan girl who dresses as a boy and goes to sea, a common trope or meme in the age of sail (is it a trope or a meme? What's the difference? Do I care?). Polly is caught up in the war, sees action, has astonishing adventures and at last finds true love and her place in the world. I thought it would be great if it could come out for the bicentennial.

The New York publishing community was profoundly uninterested in this book.

Well, shucks, my friends all liked it, my sister liked it, and I liked it. But, alas, it was commercially dead. I put the manuscript in the bottom desk drawer, along with the sixties mad housewife novel and the high school reminiscence I wrote before I got into crime writing. Then last year about this time the New York publishing community started talking about online serials. Like Charles Dickens, you know, how he published his works in pieces in magazines, how everyone flocked to the newsstand to catch up on the latest installment. Once again the serial is hot. (Stephen King tried that without noticeable success a few years ago, but he was just ahead of his time. Right?) Amazon is doing it now. It must be commercially viable.

BUCKER DUDLEY is a natural, I said to myself.

My agent sent me an email saying that St. Martin's Press wanted to offer serials, and was I interested? I said I was, but somehow he never got back to me. Then Amazon put out a call for proposals. I responded with a description of my project. They replied with a request that I send my submission through my agent. By that time I had no agent. I thought, who needs your silly bureaucratic tinkering with my story, anyway? I can put sections of BUCKER DUDLEY up myself.

So I did. The third of five episodes went up on Kindle this week. But I'm not doing it right, as it turns out. The knowing ones are working out rules for success in this endeavor. As I find out what these are I thought I'd share them with you, along with links to various online articles that I should have read before I set out to do this. Who knows? Maybe you'd like to write serial fiction too. Anyway I'll tell you some more about it next week. Meanwhile here are some links:

A WSJ article by Alexandra Alter, "The Return of the Serial Novel"

The Amazon invitation to submit a proposal for a serial novel

Plympton, a site that publishes serial fiction for reading online

Jane Friedman's post on Experimenting with Serials for Fun and Profit

Sarah Kessler's article for Fast Company Amazon Changed Reading, Now it Could Change Writing, on how analytics may change what you write about (I should live so long. Hardly anybody reads my work)

And, of course, links to the first three episodes of BUCKER DUDLEY:

• POLLY AT SEA, where she ships out on a man'o'war, dressed as a boy,
  and fights in a famous battle,
• POLLY AT SACKETS, where she serves as a lady's maid to a young woman of ill repute, and they encounter what passes for Society on the Northwest frontier, and
• POLLY AMONG THE INDIANS, where she goes to live with the Mohawks and begins to discover the secret of her parentage.

Kate Gallison
image by Mike Licht

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A nice lady interviewed me the other day and wanted to know what I might have liked to be if I weren't a writer. When I was ten years old, I said, I wanted to be a ballerina. And there are a number of other choices I feel I would like to have made, now that I'm grown up: opera singer, movie director. But I have no noticeable physical grace, no voice, and no Hollywood connections.

The one thing I never wanted to grow up to do was anything that involved making a lot of money. I don't know why that is. I like spending money; I like having money. But there always seemed to me to be something nasty about making money.

Being a ballerina is the anti-rich person choice. Dancers have even less chance than writers of ever making a buck. All the dancers I ever knew were broke all the time. But I tell you what. A great dancer, or even a moderately good dancer, has something that no amount of money can ever buy, and that's the ability to create fantastic, ephemeral beauty just by showing up and moving around. Mere rich people can't do that. It's not even a gift. It's an ability dearly bought with hours of arduous daily practice.

Some years ago Harold and I attended Celtic Week at the Ashokan music camp in the wild woods of New York State. He took his famous Irish fiddle, of course, and I brought my English concertina, which I play about as clumsily as I dance. There was dancing. There were serious dancers. Several of them put on a show on the last evening. I was particularly struck by one, a dark-haired girl doing charming things with a red chiffon scarf. She looked like the queen of the world.

Next day I ran into her in the parking lot as we were packing up to go. We chatted, and she revealed that she had no way to get home to New York City and no money for a cab. I was stunned. "I could never do that," I said, by which I meant go somewhere for the sake of art and create ecstatic beauty with no way to get home again.

She thought I was criticizing her for her lifestyle, but it wasn't that at all. I was dumb with admiration. Dancers. They're like butterflies. Seriously, would you sooner be a dancer or a hedge fund manager?

And speaking of ephemeral beauty, Amazon is offering the first episode of BUCKER DUDLEY, which I put up on Kindle this week, for free to Kindle owners. If you don't have a Kindle, leave a halfway cogent comment on this or another of my blog posts over the next couple of weeks and I'll put your name in the hat for the drawing. I'm going to be giving away a Kindle.

Kate Gallison

Poetic License

Some years ago as I was working on on a historical novel – I think it was Bucker Dudley – I realized suddenly that I was too deep into the thing. I truly felt that if I didn't get every single detail right not only would it throw the reader out of the story, it would throw me out of the story, like stepping on a crack and breaking your mother's back. That moment in Somewhere in Time comes to mind, when Christopher Reeves pulls the modern dime out of his his historically correct vest pocket and throws himself back into the late twentieth century, leaving behind the woman he loves.

It wasn't even the fear of suffering public shame. (That's when you get fifty or sixty letters from readers pointing out how you messed up, along with several snarky Amazon reviews.) It was this conviction I had that my portrayal of the environment of a story had to be so perfect that anyone who happened to be transported to that time and place could use it for a map.

Sick, right? First of all none of us are ever going back there. There's no such thing as a time machine. Secondly, the environment of a story exists in the service of the story, and not the other way around. All that's required is that the historical details be plausible. What, after all, is Truth?

It was Harold who reminded me of the convention of Poetic License. So I whipped up an authentic Poetic License and posted it over my desk.

Now I am able to invent bogus historical details without fear or shame. When at a gathering of historians no less an authority than Professor Paul Israel, the world's foremost Edison scholar, gently pointed out to me that there was no such thing as the portable film strip hole punch I had described in The Edge of Ruin, I was able to smile. Because the hole punch served the story.

Kate Gallison

Perhaps you're thinking, "She's gone mad"

Those of you who have been following my personal blog (kategallison.blogspot.com) for the past couple of weeks have doubtless noticed that I have embarked on a long rant about the War of 1812, the one we fought for two years against Britain. Perhaps you're asking yourselves, "What is she thinking? Here she has a new book coming out scarcely six weeks from now under the name of Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame. It's about early twentieth-century Hollywood, not the War of 1812."

This is true. It's also true that under the name of Kate Gallison I'm hard at work writing a suspense novel, set in the present day, which has nothing to do with the War of 1812 either.

And yet. The story of Bucker Dudley, the girl who dressed as a boy and went to sea on a merchant ship, only to find herself pressed to serve on board the British frigate HMS Macedonian, is still rattling around in my head. I think it's worth pulling together. This is the tale I was telling my friend Donna Murray some years ago as she drove us to Pittsburgh to the Festival of Mystery. At a certain point in the story she became so enthralled that she nearly ran the car off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So it has a certain narrative force.

And I'm still fascinated with that war, the last armed conflict we had with the British.

I tuned in to BBC news the other day and saw two talking heads discussing economic conditions in California, which they said were not good and prefigured the general ruin of the United States. I thought I saw one of them smirk, like a spiteful cousin at the Thanksgiving table who hears that you've just lost your job. Yes, we fought them, two hundred years ago, a war between cousins. Some of it was glorious, most of it was kind of pathetic. I know a lot of stories about it, and I want to tell some of them, even though there are forty things I'm supposed to be doing instead, including publicizing Irene Fleming and The Brink of Fame. I just want to.

Or it may be that I've gone mad. Bwahaha.

Kate Gallison