Strained Credulity

One of the annoying aspects of modern life, especially around the time of the holidays, is the proliferation of signs in shop windows urging us to Believe.

In what? I ask myself. There's a particularly gooey one in the window of a local real estate agency. Believe, it says, in red letters with sparkles and curlicues. In the future of riverside real estate, I guess. Or in the benevolence of your fellow man. Parked nearby is a Florida geezer car covered with cranky bumper stickers. Hilary Lies! says one of them. Well, of course she does. Is she not a politician? Are not her lips moving? They all lie. So what?

That an angry old white man from Florida would not understand this seems sort of pathetic to me. Grow up, old man. It's the way of the world. Forty years or so ago I was married to a man who wasn't Harold. One day about the time of the breakup I realized that it was futile to converse with him, because all he would say was whatever he wanted me to believe. Most people in public life are the same way. After they talk to you, you know nothing you didn't know before except what they want you to think.

If you want Truth, you have to dig for it. It helps to have a solid education. Children should be taught what facts are all about, and to trust their own informed judgment. It helps even more to have trustworthy, hard-working journalists uncovering the things we need to know. An enlightened populace is supposed to be running this country, after all.

Belief is charming, but it's important to know what's real. Once when I was little my sister and I played a game where we blindfolded ourselves and walked around in my grandmother's front yard. I walked into a large elm tree. I had a bump on my head for days. Yet another useful lesson.

Instead of a sign that says Believe, I would post one that says Keep Your Eyes Open. Or even, Study. It may not be as much fun as Believing. It's certainly more work. But for getting through life successfully, it's a lot more effective.

So this is my wish for you for the holidays, and for the coming year: May you study hard and learn things you never knew before. May your eyes always be open. May you find the Truth. May it be nothing you can't stand to hear.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Christmas at Corwin C

It's raining in Lambertville this morning, looking like another warm day today. Our Christmas tree is up. The tree is modest this year, not too tall, rather slim. I like them slim some years. They remind me of my first Christmas at Douglass, in the dorm called Corwin C, where we put up a downright scrawny tree and draped it all over with junk jewelry. In those days people didn't steal your stuff if you put it out in public. Maybe it rained. We were very merry. There were, as I recall, sixteen girls in the dorm.

No boys. Douglass was a women's college in those days, not an appendix of Rutgers • the State University. Sixteen girls, six of them Jewish, four of them Theater Arts majors (an overlapping set), one anti-Semite, one Chinese Jamaican, one married woman whose husband was at school on the West Coast, one budding beauty queen who together with her roommate played the baritone ukulele and sang close harmony, and one girl who used to weep and scream at her mother on the phone, a pay phone in the downstairs hall right outside where I was trying to sleep.

But the screaming girl didn't last until Christmas. She was a pretty little thing. I used to listen to her shouting at her poor mother and think, that's amazing. If I shouted at my mother like that God would turn me to stone. She went home for Thanksgiving and never came back.

For those of you who are younger than I am, and that would be nearly everybody at this point, a few words about what dorm life was like in those days. There were rules. No men in the rooms. Or, you could have a man in your room, but you had to holler first—MAN COMING UP, or something like that—and keep your door open, and everyone had to have two feet on the floor at all times. We had an eleven o'clock curfew. You could sign out overnight to a relative's house, or the house of a fellow student's parents. You could lie about that, though I never had occasion to. Douglass was on an honor system. That meant if you messed up you had to turn yourself in, and if your sisters messed up you had to rat them out.

The building itself was pre-war, high-ceilinged, steam-heated, sparsely wired, anciently plumbed. You could make tea out of the water that came from the hot tap but it tasted funny. You could get the heat to come on a bit higher by wrapping ice in a washcloth and putting in on the thermostat. If anything terrible happened in the night there was a whistle for you to stand on the doorstep and blow. It would summon two watchmen, one tall and skinny, the other short and fat, with their eyes rolling around in their heads, wondering what was up. They did not go about armed. There was no need to.

At set intervals—Once a week? Once a month? I can't recall—we had house meetings. One of the senior girls was house chairman. I want to call her Ellen Silverman, but that can't be right, that was Spenser's girlfriend. Anyway, her name was something like that, and she would call a meeting. At eleven o'clock we would all be in the living room in our jammies and bathrobes, with our hair up in curlers and stuff on our faces, for the meeting. All I remember from those meetings is a lot of giggling. There must have been serious business discussed but it escapes my memory.

The one meeting I remember is the Christmas party. Somewhere we got hold of good things to eat and drink. No alcohol, though, because it was against the rules. Marilyn Rockafellow (She would go on to become Miss New Jersey that year, but that's another story) and her roommate, a talented girl whose name escapes me, sang songs the roommate had made up. We all sang Christmas carols. The Jewish girls joined in, because they were good sports. Then we sang Hanukkah songs.

The party wasn't about the birth of Our Lord, anyway. It was about the music, and the camaraderie, and the beauty of life and youth.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Binge-reading Robert B. Parker

A short while ago somebody donated a pile of Robert B. Parker's Spenser paperbacks to the Lambertville Free Public Library. As occasionally happens, the library director brought them home to read before putting them in the collection or in the book sale. The stack is now on the table in our living room. Harold has read them all, and I am reading them, obsessively, perhaps in an unhealthy way. You know how it goes. There are probably quizzes on Facebook to find out how bad you're being. Is this activity interfering with your normal activities? Are your social interactions suffering? Do you find yourself growing distant from loved ones? That sort of thing.

Woman Reading by a Window by David Alison 

By way of interacting in a healthy way with my loved one, as opposed to ignoring him while my nose was stuck in a book, I went for a walk with Harold today and asked him what he thought was so compelling about Robert B. Parker's writing. Lots of things, we agreed. They move along at a brisk pace. The recipes are good. Spenser always makes something tasty to eat in the course of rescuing some beautiful woman or other. Harold himself tried to replicate one of his concoctions, something involving broccoli and pasta. But my favorite thing is the violence. Before the end of every one of these books, retired boxer-turned-private eye Spencer beats the living crap out of some bad guy. Sometimes he pounds him to a jelly and then his friend Hawk shoots him. It's extremely satisfying.

So I've read about five of these in the last two days or so. It's true that I had a tummy ache part of the time. But not all the time. And it isn't as though I had nothing to do. I should be writing Christmas cards and buying presents, to say nothing of working on my book. But I only have three more Spenser novels to go before I can let Harold take the collection back to the library.

Okay, here's the thing. I'm studying these books for technique. That's why I'm reading them. When I get all finished I will have many handy tips on how to write riveting and compelling crime stories. It isn't a vice. It's a professional exercise.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Roads of Terror

Yesterday fifteen or twenty of the girls from my class in high school met for the annual holiday party at Carpaccio's in Middlesex. I was happy to see them all. Most of us are still on our feet, which is an achievement in itself at our age, and all of us are still finding fun in life. The food was great as always. I passed up the cheesecake—all three flavors—and even the lemon sorbet, which came packed in the peel of an actual lemon, because after eating a full serving of tortellini in some kind of cream sauce I was stuffed.

Breaking with tradition, we had a lunch party instead of a dinner party. For some of us, driving at night is becoming difficult. For me, driving at all in that part of the world is enormously stressful. Those ladies are used to it, since most of them stayed around the old home town after graduation. But I'm used to Lambertville. Here I go as far as the store and back and that's pretty much it, except for the odd excursion to Flemington to see the doctor, or worse, to the far side of Princeton to see the endodontist.

What I mostly hate about driving in north central Jersey is the circles. The Somerville Circle is one of those circles of Hell that Dante used to write about. I will bear any burden, follow any route, to avoid the Somerville Circle. Before I leave on these trips to go see my old girlfriends I always sit down with several paper maps and an online direction service and plot a route that will let me avoid 1) the Somerville Circle and 2) any left turn across traffic. Don't ask me why. It might have something to do with an accident I had many years ago where a fellow ran into the driver's side door of my old Mazda. Man, that was two or three cars in the past. The cars come and go, but the psychological damage remains.

So I got busy and plotted a route this morning that would take me straight to Carpaccio's (it's on Route 28) without encountering any circles or otherwise hair-raising intersections and without going on the dreaded Route 22, where all the gung-ho drivers race along bumper to bumper. And my plan worked fine. Since it was daylight, I was able to see all the street signs. New Jersey roads are marked much better than, say, Pennsylvania roads. I came rolling up to the restaurant about the time that everybody else did, partied down, and had a fine time.

Then it was time to go home.

Do you think I could retrace my route, even with it written out in front of me in indelible marker on fluorescent pink sticky notes? I got lost three times. Once I found myself barreling along on Route 22, racing toward New York City. Hey, at least the sun wasn't right in my eyes anymore. That was my first clue that I wasn't headed west, by the way. Then I found myself—you guessed it!—staring into the maelstrom of the dreaded Somerville Circle.

Somehow I got through that without getting honked at or ploughed into. But I missed the way to Route 202, got lost again, found myself in one of those housing developments where you have to slow down to 15 miles an hour to keep from breaking an axle on the speed bumps, knowing that Route 202 was right over that way, only there wasn't a way there from where I was…

Well, you get the picture. Finally I got home. At this point I figure I have two choices: either I never go back there again, which would be too bad, because I would miss those ladies, or I make a point of going to Somerville, Bound Brook, and Middlesex once a week and just driving all over the place until I get used to it. Maybe I'll do that. Gas is cheap right now.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

How to Make Kate's Little Scones

One or two people have asked me for my recipe for scones. I bring these to church for coffee hour, and they go pretty fast. Here it is:

Scones

Preheat the oven to 425 F.

Mix together, in a food processor, if you like, or with a whisk:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Add:

3/4 stick cold unsalted butter, cut in pieces

Cut in the butter with two knives, a pastry blender, or a few pulses of the food processor, doing that thing you do that coats the fat with flour but doesn't mix it to a paste, just as for biscuits, soda bread, or pie crust, until the largest pieces of butter are the size of peas.

Stir in:

1/2 cup dried currants or raisins

Mix together in another bowl:

1 large egg
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon grated orange rind, if you like

Mix into the dry ingredients just until moistened. Gather into a ball and knead against the bowl 5 times or so, until the dough holds together. Turn onto a floured surface. Roll out until about 3/4 of an inch thick. Slice across and across until you have wedges the size of 2 or 3 bites.

Place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake util the tops ares golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes.

And there you have it. Tasty scones. Enjoy with butter or Devonshire cream, strawberry jam, and tea.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

I'm Just Wild About Scrivener

First of all, I must mention that the version of Scrivener I'm running is version 2.6, and I'm running it on a Mac, whose operating system is OS X, version 10.9.5. If you have a PC, it may be that some of the features I find so enthralling are not available to you. Or maybe they are. I have no way of knowing.

Scrivener is available for download at the Literature and Latte site. You can try it out for thirty days and see whether you like it. If you do, it can be yours forever (or until your computer is obsolete; make that six months) for only $45.00.

I don't even know three-quarters of the bells and whistles on this product. The tutorial that comes with it is very good, but to tell you the truth I didn't go through it all the way. Instead I jumped on and began to write my historical spy thriller. I found it to be wonderful for that, because you can keep notes on each character—with pictures—in the sidebar that runs down the left hand side, along with notes on all the locations you're using, timelines, and links to anything you might want to link to for quick reference. You can enter a date when you'd like to be finished, and the number of words long you'd like your work to be, and it shows you how many words you have to write every day, with a thermometer that turns green when you're nearly there.

All this is beyond swell. But the feature I just discovered—dictation!—is the swellest of all.

Did you ever see one of those forties movies with a famous writer as a main character? Do you remember how he was not only rich (he was always a man) but how he had a cute young stenographer taking down his deathless prose while he loafed and invited his muse with his feet up on the desk, chewing the end of a pencil for effect? No carpal tunnel syndrome for that boy. He had a servant. And now I do too. I could even put my feet on the dining room table here and balance the laptop on my lap, dictating into the built-in microphone, if I weren't afraid of dropping the laptop, and even more afraid of disgracing myself by putting my feet on the dining room table. My word, what my grandmother would have had to say about that.

For me the practical effect of being able to dictate the work straight into the computer is to double my productivity in terms of word count. I can talk two or three times as fast as I can type. You can say "period" and "comma," too, and it puts in periods and commas. You have to watch the words as they appear on the screen, of course, and make sure they are the words you meant to go there. My bad guy is named "Ratz," for instance, and Scrivener wanted to say "rats" the first couple of times. But the third time Scrivener got it right. So it follows what you do, and the corrections you make, and adjusts to your style.

You do have to remember to turn off the dictation function if you have to answer the phone. Yesterday I got a call from one of my sons. We chatted happily for awhile, and when I returned to work there was a long passage in the middle of the manuscript, which went something like this:

Sure Thursday Ashley well… Give yourself so but will let you today to do some sort of deal was okay Melissa yeah I got that yes okay no that's okay cause she was the mortgage Time is usually easily around dinnertime subclasses and his friends want to do something the middle of the night off I'm sure over here for dinner so I hope you come pick you up and you're out there soon see you tomorrow coming to some extent we have to go to choir practice right at quarter quarter something also six we can eat we will disburse all just you okay okay Wilfong
Tediously noticed right so so chocolate
Great if that's okay anyway I will hurry because they're pretty well trichinosis
Hey Neil would've been very bad okay good night okay okay see them yes yes good good great okey-dokey see you then bye-bye okay

…so you probably don't want to use Scrivener's dictation function to write the minutes of your next meeting, or for much of anything else unless you have your eye on the screen at all times and your fingers on the keyboard ready to make occasional corrections. ("Tediously noticed right so so chocolate?" What was that about?)

© 2015 Kate Gallison

When is an Historical Novel Like a Movie Adaptation?

Writing an historical novel is much like making a book into a movie. There are three ways to make a book-length piece of fiction into a film.

First way, you can replicate the book as closely as possible, sometimes scene for scene. The Harry Potter films come to mind. Gone With the Wind. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, although even those movies left out large chunks of narrative. The books these movies were made from had a huge and demanding fan base. Watching the movie had better be pretty much like reading the book, or else.

The most spectacular failure in an effort of this kind, to my eye, was Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film, Greed. Von Stroheim followed the book it was made from, Frank Norris's McTeague, not only scene for scene but line for line, often putting a paragraph of Norris's text up on the screen to accompany his visual expression of it. No wonder the studio bosses took it away from him and chopped it to pieces. Setting aside the cost overruns, it was just too long for anyone to sit and watch. It's true that there are respected critics out there who believe Greed to be the greatest movie ever made. I don't think it's even a movie.

A book-length work of fiction is a different art form from a movie. The second way to approach making a book into a movie is to be respectful of that difference and also be respectful of the book, of the spirit of the book, that is, not the words, and to express that spirit cinematically. A good short story, like Brokeback Mountain, makes a better movie than a whole book, because there's less stuff in it. Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage was a huge book. The Hollywood movie that was made from it took just a segment of it and made a thumping good movie. Same with East of Eden.

The third approach is to take the book title and write whatever you feel like. You hardly even have to read the book to do this. Just make stuff up. Sometimes it's fine. Depends on what you're working with. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex is a good example.

The problems of writing a historical novel are similar. The material you're working with may be bigger than what you're trying to do.

The first way to approach your historical novel is to put in everything you can find out about the place and time you're working with. All the famous characters, all the historical events, hardly anything truly fictional, like those terrific books from the English writers about the Tudors and the Elizabethans. Or you can write about a big handful of fictional characters experiencing different aspects of the reality of your historical period, like John Dos Passos in USA. You can get lost in this sort of thing, like von Stroheim in Frank Norris's work, and find yourself tracking down the buttons on the underwear your people would have worn when you should be blocking out swaths of dramatic action. But maybe that's okay, if you have what it takes to pull off a huge saga. (Like a loyal fan base, a supportive publisher, and thirty more years of productive life.)

The second way to do it is to respect the period, express the spirit of the period as you understand it, but put your own characters in your book, with their own drama. Get the details right, but find a segment of the universe that you can work with. Then go ahead and shamelessly write fiction.

Or you might use the third approach, which is not respectable but might be fun. Pick a period, pick a historical figure, put her in all the wrong clothes and tell bald-faced lies about her. Only make sure her heirs aren't going to sue you.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Assorted Thoughts

Well, here it is Friday morning, and I suddenly remember that I'm supposed to have written a blog post. I guess I'll talk about whatever has been on my mind for the past week.

Tomorrow night we set the clocks back. Fall is here for certain in Lambertville, the Halloween capital of pretty much everywhere. Gorgeous displays bedeck the yards of Union Street, Dolores Dragan's being the most spectacular. The leaves have turned, many have fallen. Everett was out yesterday with a big gas leaf-blower, blowing the leaves from the funeral home sidewalk into the street. The wind blew them all back again. Some things are hardly worth doing, though a good Halloween display is forever.

Speaking of the weather, last night I showed up late at the monthly meeting of the Zoning Board of Adjustment, having totally forgotten about it due to my absorption in Sunday's episode of The Good Wife. (You can see these on CBS.com if you're willing to wait until Monday or later.) Luckily I didn't hold them up. Only one case was before the Zoning Board, that of a local electrician who sells generators. He needed permission to put an apartment over his place of business. I was kind of tickled to see him waxing nostalgic over Hurricane Sandy. We haven't had a hurricane since then, or any other major power outage that I can recall, so the traffic in generators has fallen off dramatically. Alan would like to see another good hurricane.

Change is in the air, if not hurricanes. Change of time, change of season. Last night I dreamed we were selling the house. A hot-shot real estate agent was showing me all around Lambertville in my dream, offering me other houses, big old Victorian palaces with English gardens. These days you can't get a doghouse in Lambertville for much under a million dollars, so I was eagerly awaiting the realtor's assessment of what our little hovel was worth, and thinking, we could move here, we could move there. Then I thought, wait, this is my house. Why would I want to leave it? And I woke up.

So you see, I'm perfectly happy with my life. I like my house, even though the neighbors are given to noisy drama. I have no generators to sell if the apocalypse comes, so I won't wish for it. I'm sorry the cat died, poor little booger, but they don't live forever, and now we can go traveling without feeling bad about leaving the cat. Because we don't live forever, either.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

What to do with Apples

There's nothing murderous I want to talk about today, so I thought I might give you my recipe for Apple Crisp. Apples are in season here in the Delaware Valley. A trip to the Homestead Farm Market, Sansone's, Solebury Orchards in Pennsylvania, or even Terhune's, a slightly longer drive, will get you crispy apples at the peak of flavor ripeness, right off the tree.

But wherever you are, local fruit is best. Here's what I'm doing tonight with the Empire apples I bought at Solebury Orchards. (The Honeycrisp apples are for eating out of hand.)

Apple Crisp

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Take 8 medium apples, tart and crisp, your favorite variety for cooking.

Peel and core the apples. Cut them into one-inch chunks and spread them in an unbuttered two-quart baking dish.

Mix the dry ingredients of the topping together. You can do this in a food processor, and then process the butter too, but if you do you must be careful not to overprocess the butter.

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

Cut a quarter-pound stick of butter into small pieces and mix it in. This is the only step in the recipe that requires nice judgement. If you make biscuits or pie crust you know the drill: cut the butter into the flour mixture using two knives or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. The idea is to coat the little lumps of fat with flour but not to get it all pasty. If you're using a food processor, a couple of pulses or so should do the job.

Spread the flour mixture over the apples. Knock the baking dish on the counter to settle the crumbs. Bake until the apples are tender, 50 to 55 minutes. (Macintosh apples cook more quickly.)

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Striking Gold

Yesterday was the 105th birthday of James Wilson Marshall.

Who was he? you say. And why should I care?

James Wilson Marshall

As you may or may not know, I am the senior docent at the James Wilson Marshall house, the headquarters of the Lambertville Historical Society. Nearly every Saturday between Shad Fest (the last weekend in April, or Malice Domestic weekend, for those of you who follow the mystery fiction circuit) and House Tour Sunday (October 18 this year, sometimes later) I can be found at the Marshall House between one and four in the afternoon, shooting the breeze about James Wilson Marshall, the California Gold Rush, Lambertville history, and whatever other topic the visiting tourists feel like discussing. So I'm sort of an expert on Mr. Marshall. Who was he, then? Mainly he was the man who discovered the first gold in California, back in 1848. You've heard of Sutter's mill. Marshall was building the mill for Sutter when he found the gold.

John Sutter

You probably didn't know that it was a Jersey boy who started the California gold rush. Little James came to Lambertville (then known as Coryell's Ferry) at the age of six, in 1816, when his father built the house on Bridge Street and set up to be a wheelwright and wagon maker. When he was fifteen he had a bit of unpleasantness with the old man that caused him to leave the house, vowing never to return while his father lived. When he was 24 his father died, and he came home to help his mother sell the business, since he hadn't learned it himself and there were no other sons. Then he went west, moving by stages to California, which was part of Mexico. Long story short, he fell in with Captain John Sutter, the Swiss national who became a Mexican citizen in order to buy obscene quantities of land from the Mexicans. After the war with Mexico Captain Sutter sent James Marshall and a crew into the hills to build the mill, and there he found the gold in the river. He changed the course of American history.

I've been writing historical fiction for a number of years now. People ask me sometimes why I don't write about the gold rush. Here's the thing. I've read a lot about it, I continue to read a lot about it, and I have yet to find anybody involved in those times and events that I like well enough to sit down with for the six or eight months it takes to write a book. Some of these people I actively detest. Captain John Sutter comes to mind. To begin with, he abandoned his wife and five children in Switzerland, leaving them in debt, taking enough money with him to buy a big piece of of California, and proceeded to enslave all the Indians he found on his newly-purchased land. He bought and sold little Indian children. After the gold was discovered, the rough, tough forty-niner claim jumpers ran him off his holdings. He lost everything, and it couldn't happen to a nicer fella, in my opinion.

John Charles Frémont

Marshall was a better person than John Sutter, though he drank all the time and had trouble getting along with other people. It's said that children liked him. It's said that he risked his own life defending the Indians from attacks by rampaging forty-niners. So he may have been a good guy, but I'm sorry, I can't warm up to a habitual drunkard.

Jessie Frémont

John Charles Frémont to me is the most interesting figure in the California gold rush days, intrepid explorer, impetuous military man, failed politician. Some of the deeds he did as a military man were so base that the rumor of them later disqualified him for public office. He made a huge fortune in the gold rush by virtue of owning seventy acres of gold-rich land and sharing the proceeds with the men he set to digging on it, but eventually his workers figured out that they didn't have to give him a share at all. I think I like him because his wife loved him so. He married Senator Thomas Hart Benton's daughter Jessie. She followed him to California, sailing to Panama, crossing the isthmus through fever-ridden jungles, sailing up the west coast to San Francisco to be with her man.

The stories are worth telling. I just don't want to tell them, not right now, when I'm deeply in love with other historical figures, people in other times that I'm working into a novel. Maybe I'll write about the gold rush later, when I finish the spy thriller.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

How Much Food is Too Much?

“…I pounded some lamb steaks I'd bought for lamb cutlets. Dipped them in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs. When they were what Julia Child calls nicely coated I put them aside and peeled four potatoes. I cut them into little egg-shaped oblongs, which took awhile, and started them cooking in a little oil, rolling them around to get them brown all over. I also started the cutlets in another pan. When the potatoes were evenly browned I covered them, turned down the heat and left them to cook through. When the cutlets had browned, I poured off the fat, added some Chablis and some fresh mint, covered them and let them cook… I took the lamb cutlets out of the pan and cooked down the wine. I shut off the heat, put in a lump of unsalted butter, swirled it through the wine essence and poured it over the cutlets."

The crime novel this recipe came from was not something of Diane Mott Davidson's, not even a cozy. It was Promised Land, by Robert B. Parker, and it won the Edgar best novel award for 1977. It looks like a perfectly good recipe, if you don't mind fried food. I wouldn't do that to a good piece of lamb, myself, but that's neither here nor there. The question is, what place, if any, does a cooking recipe have in a crime novel?

I'm thinking, it depends on the novel. For a noir novel the recipe would have to be something doomed and despairing. Beans out of a can, maybe, or a dreadful stew of some kind. Stewed road kill. For a detective story, if your detective cooks, like Spencer, you can describe something quite delicious. If your detective doesn't cook, maybe you want to draw the cloak of charity over his or her activities in the kitchen. I once put a recipe in a Mother Grey book that I got out of a Polly Pigtails comic book long ago, involving crushed potato chips, tuna fish, and canned mushroom soup; Mother Grey doesn't cook. (Notice how I used the Oxford comma in that sentence, where Robert B. Parker didn't. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since 1977, and fashions in punctuation have changed.)

I can see by the covers and the titles that a lot of cozy mysteries include food, with recipes, presumably, though I blush to confess that I don't read them. Would you put a recipe in a classic thriller or mystery in the modern day, or would it stop the action? Rex Stout's stories about Nero Wolfe always featured marvelous food, but not detailed recipes for preparing it. Menus, rather. That would be one way to go. Or send your protagonist to a great restaurant and have him order what you would like to have yourself, if only you had the money. Readers like sensuous treats. Sometimes they even like to go on vicarious alcoholic binges. What do you think about it? Food or no food with your crime? (Maybe fava beans and a nice Chianti.)

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Writing Exercise

Here's an exercise for you. Think of a thing that appears every day in your life, and then write down all the memories that you can associate with it. Or the first few.

I'm going to do "Refrigerator."

For me the refrigerator has many associations. We'll start with Crystal Lake. We had a big refrigerator in our house there. In the winter of 1949-1950, one of the coldest on record, my mother went on a business trip with my father. She had just come through a radical mastectomy and needed cheering up, so he took her to New Orleans for the month of February. While they were gone a friend of theirs, a widow, moved in with my sister and me along with her two sons, boys about our age. Boys in the house! Neat! Mrs. Houlberg made us hot cocoa every morning for breakfast, and squeezed us fresh orange juice, too, until the refrigerator went on the fritz. It wouldn't stop chilling. The oranges froze. I can still remember the look on that dear lady's face when she took the rock-hard oranges out of the fridge. How was the problem solved? I don't know. I was just a kid. The frozen oranges were probably simply tolerated until my parents came home, and then we just moved to Plainfield and left the refrigerator behind.

That's one refrigerator story. Then there's my Canadian grandmother's ice box. A man came around every couple of days with a big block of ice to keep it cold, and in the meantime a pan underneath had to be emptied of melting water, usually by me. When my mother got a new electric refrigerator (where were we living then? I can't remember) she gave the old one to Granny. How they got it up to Canada I don't know. Things like that just happened when we were little. Entire households of furniture were whisked thousands of miles across country as if by magic. One small refrigerator with a tiny ice compartment for ice and frozen food could hardly have presented a problem to the moving elves. You know what I wonder? I wonder whether the march of electric refrigerators didn't tear a little hole in the social fabric. No more ice man. That's one person you don't interact with anymore. Add to that the disappearance of the bread man, the milkman, the Fuller Brush man, and the knife grinder, and pretty soon you're all by yourself in this wicked world.

When first we moved to Plainfield, having left Crystal Lake, the refrigerator in our apartment was amazing. It used to make loud noises and walk across the floor. It ran on gas. I don't know whether you can still get a gas refrigerator, but this one was a doozy. We would be sitting at the kitchen table having supper when the thing would start up, chugga-chugga, and begin to stagger across the linoleum. The noise it made evoked a make-and-break boat engine, so that my father would spout nautical lingo at us while we ate. He had been in the Navy, you know. Also he was very witty. I wish I could remember exactly what it was that he said.

Many years later, after the collapse of my first marriage, I took an apartment in Trenton whose landlords furnished it with a castoff refrigerator refurbished by Goodwill. Why not? They weren't paying the electric bill. It was the seventies, I was reinventing myself as a Hippie, and so I painted this antiquated refrigerator bordello purple and stuck Peter Max white doves all over the door. That was the year that the water in Trenton all ran out of the reservoir and back into the Delaware River, you may recall, due to the malicious actions of a disgruntled water department employee. What water you could get out of the taps wasn't fit to drink. I knew that, but nevertheless I had a cup of coffee at a coffee shop on Hanover Street, not thinking until later that their coffee maker might not heat the water long enough to sterilize it. Within weeks I had a full-blown case of Type A Hepatitis.

I understand that people get sent to the hospital for that, but not me. Nobody told me to go, and I couldn't afford it in any case. There's nothing you can do for Hepatitis A anyway besides rest and maintain a good diet. I lay on the sofa and watched TV, stumbling out to the kitchen from time to time to feed myself. The first thing that happened was that the refrigerator died.

So I called the landlords, and they had another second-hand refrigerator trucked over from the Goodwill. But the guys who delivered it refused to take the old one away, simply pushing it into the middle of the kitchen floor and leaving it there. I was quite unfit to do anything about it for a month and a half, during which time it sat in the middle of my kitchen floor, horribly purple, growing more and more stinky while I lay on the sofa. So much for my dream of the artistic life.

It's possible to make other associations with refrigerators, ones not associated with my personal affairs. I could meditate on the invention of refrigeration itself, surely a revolution in food storage. And again, a small tear in the social fabric, for it is no longer necessary to go the market every day and talk to the butcher and the grocer. Or I could discuss refrigerators in the movies. 9 1/2 Weeks. Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger standing in front of the refrigerator doing lewd things with the food.

If you want to you can do the exercise, and if you like what you come up with, send it to me to run on the blog. Try one of the following: Front door, Automobile, Dog, Dining table, Kitchen sink. Or something else entirely. Pick an object and riff on it. See what shakes out.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

When to Stop Collecting Things

Many years ago, so long ago that I've forgotten his name, so long ago that he called all the women in the office his "girls," though we ranged in age from thirty-something to sixty-something, I had a boss who collected tape cassettes of old radio shows. He was interesting in other ways, too. His five-minute rant on why he never ate chicken was breathtaking, and if I could remember it I would repeat it to you; it had to do with the quantity and toxicity of the chemicals the poor birds were stuffed with before they were offered for human consumption. The radio shows were particularly interesting to me, as a nostalgic child of the forties. They were harder to find in those days than they are now.

So when I came upon a source of them somehow—it might have been in Yankee Magazine, there was no internet—I naturally offered to pass on the information to Mr. Whatzisname. He smilingly declined. "Last year I turned fifty," he said. "I don't collect things anymore."

At the time I was not yet fifty, not even forty, and I collected things very happily whenever I had the money and the space. Sweaters. Dishes. Puppets. Musical instruments that I hadn't time to learn to play. The idea that collecting must come to an end in every life went over me like a bucket of ice water. It seemed tragic. I felt sorry for him.

Now I am no longer thirty, nor yet forty, nor even fifty or sixty, and I look at all the stuff I have collected over the years and think, not only is it time to stop, but it's time to get rid of a lot of it. Not the sweaters, of course. The moths take care of that. I can scarcely keep up with replacing what they spoil. Or the dishes. We have to eat off of something, and who wants to use the same old dishes day after day? But maybe the puppets. I haven't performed with puppets in almost thirty years.

My sister once bought me a set of Pelham puppets depicting Henry the Eighth and all his wives, collectible puppets whose strings are too short to make them good performers. At one time I was going to fit them up with longer strings and put on a show. I will not do that now. First of all I don't feel like it, and secondly it would ruin their monetary value. I can just hear the dealers on Antiques Road Show telling one of my descendants how much they would be worth, if only Great-Granny hadn't boogered up the strings.

In fact I would sell them today if I had a buyer. I have their boxes and certificates and everything. Furthermore I no longer think it's tragic to stop collecting what fascinated you once, not even tragic to lose interest in the passions of your youth. Not as long as you have new passions. I might have a passion for a stark and tidy living space, one where everything has a place and occupies it, preferably out of sight. I might go clean the kitchen now. Or I might put my feet up and listen to something from my record collection, which I will never weed, no matter how old I get.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

A Visit to Ringing Rocks

This week I suspended thriller-writing operations to entertain visiting family from Ottawa. We spent a lot of time eating, because that's what I like to do best, but we also went for walks and hit a tourist spot or two. One of the more interesting places to visit in the Lambertville area is a county park in Pennsylvania called Ringing Rocks, so named because of the curious property of the rocks to ring like iron when struck. A beautiful and not exhaustingly long hiking trail passes by the rock field and leads to a waterfall and a cliff that overhangs a gorge.

The rock field is a terminal moraine left behind by a glacier at the end of the last ice age. Nobody knows why these particular rocks ring like that. If you're young and spry it's fun to hop from rock to rock. We neglected to bring a hammer with us, but many tourists have brought hammers with them over the years and banged on the rocks until cup-like depressions formed in them. Members of the Sierra Club would faint at the very notion of vandalizing a natural formation in this way, but, hey, what do you want? It's Pennsylvania.

We were pleased to find a simulated rescue operation in progress. We had noticed a heavy rescue truck from Virginia in the parking lot, and a pile of large, brightly-colored backpacks beside the trail as we approached the waterfall. When we came to the end of the hiking trail we found a group of men standing on the cliff. They had strung up a zip line leading deep into the gorge, and when they saw us, they promised to give us a show. "We're going to rescue a kid," one of them said jovially, in a thick Virginia accent. You could tell it was just for practice, first of all because nobody seemed upset, and secondly because they had come so far. If a real accident victim had to wait for a bunch of guys to drive a truck up from Virginia there wouldn't be much left of him by the time they got here.

How I cursed myself for having lost the camera before we left the house. All I had was my cheap old IPhone, with no zoom function.

If I were any sort of journalist I would have asked the guys why they came here when there were so many cliffs and gorges in Virginia, whether they were training the locals or simply working out, and a number of other questions that didn't occur to me until just now. I have a confession to make. I am terrified of heights and declivities. Standing by the side of a gorge, and especially watching my beloved relatives teetering on the edge, causes me to feel a nearly intolerable degree of terror. The only thing worse is the presence of small children. So when another family with two small children showed up, and the five-year-old took the three-year-old's hand and skipped up to the edge, I had to leave or start screaming. Luckily they went away again. The rescue began in earnest. Slowly the rescuer and the simulated accident victim in a Stokes basket (a real kid) worked their way back up the zip line to the waiting men on the cliff.

So that was the visit to Ringing Rocks. The gorge is lovely. You should go there. Bring a good camera and a small ecologically approved hammer.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

When Protagonists Wimp Out

They aren't your children. Really they're not. Not unless you run your family like a Dickensian orphanage, where the little dears are sent out to make a buck for you, and if they return empty-handed they are sent to bed without supper.

No. Your protagonists are characters who must do work. In the case of Belinda Zorn, heroine (or so I thought) of this thriller I'm trying to write, the work to be done is simply to smash a ring of German spies in 1915 New York City. This calls for certain qualities. First of all, she has to be brave, athletic, and clever. Quick-thinking. Active. She had two jobs, basically: defeating the spy ring and making the readers like her. Instead I find her drooping around, falling in love with one of the spies, dropping the ball, bursting into tears for hardly any reason. Ineffective. Unlikeable.

This has got to stop!! For the last time, Belinda, pull your socks up and get to work. Other women would love to have your job, you know. I can think of three or four. Today is your last chance. After that you will be mercilessly replaced. They don't tell us to kill our darlings for nothing, you know.

Kate Gallison

Murder Mystery by Committee

At ten in the morning last Sunday a panel called "What If" took place at Deadly Ink, a small conference in New Brunswick for writers and readers of crime fiction. The "What If" panel was one of those where the panelists and the audience make up a whole murder mystery out of nothing, starting by inventing a detective and ending with the solution to the mystery.

I've been to a few of these things over the years, with a lot of bright, famous, witty people on the panels, and I don't recall any of those other panels working quite as well as this one did. Maybe it was the moderator, E. F. Watkins. Maybe it was the panelists, Annette Dashofy, Jane Kelly, the inimitable Brad Parks, and our own Sheila York. Maybe it was the audience members who offered suggestions and plot points, among them Annamaria Alfieri. But when they were finished, all these folks had outlined a good story. It was not a cozy, everyone agreed, although no animals were harmed that we know of.

We began with the detective. Professional or amateur? Amateur, everyone said. A librarian, said Paula Lanier. (I think Paula took the picture above, though I'm not sure. A lot of great panel pictures have been flying around.) A corporate librarian in a drug company, I suggested, figuring that a drug company was an excellent place for evil and chicanery of every sort. (Nobody remembered Jersey Monkey, so that was all right.) And everyone assumed that the librarian detective must be a woman. So they called her Sheila.

Good. The crime? Murder. The victim? The company's C.E.O. The reason for Sheila the librarian to investigate? They were having an affair, and she is a suspect. The means of death? An embolism caused by an injection of air from a hypodermic needle. Roberta Rogow insisted that hypodermic needles were passé. So, okay, the needle, found at the crime scene, came from a museum-type display case in the corporate library. Someone was trying to frame Sheila. Now for the suspects: the victim's wife, their son, the son's wife, and a failed litigant in a suit against the drug company.

And so it went. In the process of putting the story together the panelists and audience members made choices, accepting or rejecting various plot elements according to their own personal tastes and value systems as well as what they perceived to be the generally accepted norms of readers. Annamaria refused to entertain any plot idea that involved harm, or remote threat of harm, to a child. Brad Parks had to point out that as an adulterer the C.E.O. would fall so low in the readers' estimation that no one would care that he was dead. But his wife is sick, someone said. Ah, he said. John Edwards. It was held to be important for the reader to care about the victim. And so a long discussion ensued to figure out how to make the affair okay from the standpoint of the wife.

If you want to know whodunnit, I'll tell you in the comments later. I think the point I'm trying to make is that the character of the writer—the writer's moral nature—infuses the work. What was so delightful and refreshing about this panel, at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning when all of us had been partying until, say, midnight the night before, was the sweetness of character they showed as they crafted the story. It made me want to read their books. (Of course I've already read Sheila's books. And Annamaria's. Great stuff.)

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Today we go to Deadly Ink

Not all of us, just Annamaria Alfieri, Sheila York, and me. We plan to wear our official tee shirts and act like big shots as members of the famous Crime Writers' Chronicle. Everybody else there will be a big shot, too, each in his or her own way; the other writers because they write, the fans because without them we would have no readers (a sad state of affairs), and Debby Buchanan (a bit of both writer and fan), because she put the whole shebang together.

The Deadly Ink conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency New Brunswick, and will be running all weekend. There's still time to pick up a ticket and show up. If you plan to go, here's when we will be on panels, and what panels we will be on:

Annamaria will be on Location, Location, Location at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, and will moderate the Q & A With some Real "Characters" at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon.

Sheila will be on the Pros vs Amateurs panel at 9:00 Saturday morning, will moderate Ripped from the Headlines at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, and will be on the What If? panel at 10:00 Sunday morning and the Q & A With some Real "Characters" at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon.

I will be on the Jersey Girls/Boys panel on Friday evening, probably still stuffing myself with Deadly Desserts, and on the Short and Sweet (or Sour) panel at nine on Saturday morning, talking about short stories.

And of course we will be wandering around the conference at other times, perfectly willing to talk to friends, acquaintances, and strangers. You will know us by our CWC tee shirts. All the famous people will be wearing them.

To find out more, visit the Deadly Ink web site.

Kate Gallison

Bienvenue a L'Hermione

L'Hermione came to Castine, Maine, last week, and we were there to meet it, along with a mob of other interested souls. It's a replica of the French Frigate that carried Lafayette to this country to bring George Washington the good will and material help of the French in our struggle for independence from Britain. The ship visited a number of historic U. S. ports on its tour. Castine was to be the last before moving on to Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.

We arrived at Castine in a school bus, the shuttle from Bucksport that off-loaded on the main street after a half-hour ride down the peninsula on country roads. The scene was very like Lambertville on Shad Festival weekend, the vendors, the crowd, except for the signs on the vendor tents proclaiming that ici on parle Francais. I fixed myself up with an ice cream cone and a can of Moxie. Then we went to find a spot to wait for the Great Ship to come in.

It was a long time coming. A fog bank rolled in and rolled out again, rolled in, rolled out. Kayakers gathered in the harbor. Small sailing boats moved here and there, though the air seemed too still to propel them. Dimly in the mist we could see shapes that might have been tall ships appear and disappear. At last it was unmistakable, bigger than any of the boats around it.

Outside the harbor, the frigate fired a twenty-one gun salute.

Then it was joined by a tugboat and came in with the sails furled.

The sailors, all in period costume, worked furiously in the rigging.

The crowd was very pleased to see her tied up at the dock.

To find out all about this remarkable ship and its journey, have a look at the web site: www.hermione2015.com/

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Twenty-first Century Summertime

Summertime
And the livin' is somewhat difficult
Fish are struggling feebly to the surface
And the cotton is maybe up to your ankles

Oh, your daddy's got five dollars in his pocket on a good day
And your ma is kind of plain
So howl, little baby, cry all you want
Things can only get worse.

Kate Gallison (and her wacky cousins from Maine)
with apologies to George Gershwin

Where to Hide Out

I'm in a good place right now.

As I may have mentioned, I'm trying to write a spy thriller, which is a genre outside of my usual field of expertise. I like to read them, but I've never written one. They need to be highly structured before they can actually thrill. This is a lot of work.

And it's all on spec. Nobody has asked me to do this. I haven't even got an agent, and if I did I would have nothing fit to show her yet.

The way to get things written, as we all know, is basically to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. One of the reasons this is working for me right now is sensory deprivation. I quit the TV. We have no TV anymore. My Facebook presence is limited by the number of funny cat videos I can actually absorb. I watch movies only in my living room when we have guests over and get out the projector. As a result my main form of entertainment is making up stuff to go in this book.

And the dreams I have at night. Very vivid dreams, sometimes quite disturbing. I lost a good friend a few weeks ago, and when something as bad as that happens what I usually do is sleep a lot, lose myself in another time period, and write. So here I am, happy as a clam, completely split off from reality. Here's a picture of the model room of the New York Yacht Club, which has hardly changed since 1915. I might as well be there, sitting comfortably in one of those leather chairs, except that I don't think they let women do that.

Also I have new tools. Scrivener, for example, is turning out to be the most wonderful thing, especially for a historical work with a lot of real people in it. Instead of fumbling around amongst a whole file folder of documents looking for my World War I Sabotage timeline, and trying to remember what I named the file, I can simply scroll down the left-hand sidebar of Scrivener and there it is. Together with character notes and Wikipedia entries for Franz von Papen, Karl Boy-Ed, Guy Gaunt, and any number of other folks who were active on the New York espionage scene in 1915. As well as my fictional characters, of course.

Scrivener does wonderful tricks with the word count. You can set a target count for every session. You can set a target count for every scene. You can figure out beforehand where the plot points are supposed to go, mathematically. You want structure? This is structure.

You should try it. You get to play with it free for thirty days. So many bells and whistles! (A great mode for writing screenplays, too.) So far I've written six thousand words on the first draft, and going like a house afire.

© 2015 Kate Gallison