Rudolf Bing and Mrs. Glaser

Mrs. Glaser was my home room teacher in 11th grade. She was the first person ever to give me career advice. I remember her fondly for taking the trouble to do that, and also for her accent; she came from somewhere in the South, and instead of losing her native way of speaking after many years in New Jersey she elaborated on it and polished it up for effect, much of it comic. "Roo-een," she used to say. "We are facing roo-een."

Rudolf Bing

Anyway, she perceived that I was facing roo-een instead of the wild success that my talents should have made possible for me, and so she called me up to her desk one day and gave me advice. It was useful advice. If I had been a more success-prone person I would have followed it. As I did not, and in my small way suffered roo-een as a result, I will now pass it on to you. Perhaps you can do something with it.

"Rudolf Bing decided when he was twenty years old that he would become the manager of the Metropolitan Opera by the time he was thirty," she said. "World War II was the only thing that got in his way." She took a piece of paper and drew a straight line with an arrow on the end. There was Bing. There was the Metropolitan Opera. He went straight for it.

"He focused on one thing," she said. "You are focusing on too many things." She drew a number of zig-zags. "Acting. Drawing. Writing." I nodded. Yes. All these things were good. Clearly, however, I could see that Rudolf Bing was outpacing me. "Choose one thing," she said. "Focus on that." I nodded. I never forgot the talk or the diagram. But I never focused all that well, either, and I never caught up to Rudolf.

So there you have it. Monomania is the way to success in life. Unless it isn't. Some say that in the modern economy you have to be nimble and willing to try a number of things. Would you like fries with that?

Kate Gallison

The Other Side of My Story

Today I want you to meet Carlo Pisacane, Duke of San Giovanni, Italian patriot, one of the first socialist thinkers and writers, and my ancestor.

Frequent readers of this blog have heard me go on rhapsodically about my Sicilian heritage and brag that, while I am not the coal miner’s daughter, I am the coal miner’s granddaughter. You have also met my grandfather on my mother’s side—Gennaro Pisacane, grower of a fig tree in New Jersey and guardian angel of my early childhood. Shortly before he died, he told me that there was a statue of his grandfather in Rome. I pictured something that looked like Caesar in a toga.

Carlo, who was either Gennaro’s grandfather or great-grandfather, was something akin to an Italian Patrick Henry, a patriot famous within the country, but unknown outside of it. A poem about him, La Spigolatrice di Sapri by Luigi Mercantini was translated as The Gleaner of Sapri by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem is written as a first person account by a woman who saw a boat carrying revolutionaries coming to free her people.

Carlo Pisacane was born in Naples of an impoverished noble family, words that equally apply to Gennaro. Carlo attended The Nunziatella military academy and served in the Neapolitan army. He became imbued with the ideas and ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini and devoted the rest of his short life to bringing to a unified Italy a liberal, classless, anti-authoritarian society with freedom and justice for all.

After a brief stay in England and France, where he served in the French army in Algeria, he returned to Italy to take part in the 1848 revolution and the ephemeral Roman Republic. Mazzini proposed an expedition aimed at overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy in the Kingdom of Naples. Pisacane, a son of that part of the peninsula, volunteered to lead the expedition. Their thought was that even a small invading force would inspire an insurrection among the oppressed and impoverished underclass. On the 25^th of June 1857, the Cagliari sailed from Genoa carrying Pisacane and twenty-two other, like-minded revolutionaries. En route to the south, they stopped at the island of Ponza the Bay of Naples and freed 300 political prisoners who joined them.

Unlike Garibaldi who came a few years later, Pisacane was more of writer and thinker than a military leader. He and his men landed at Sapri on the Bay of Policastro, 120 miles south of Naples. The uprising he had hoped for did not take place. In the Cilento hills near the town of Padula, they were overwhelmed. Some say Carlo was stabbed by locals who mistook him for a gypsy out to steal their food. Others say that, in the face of being taken by the Bourbon Militia, he turned his pistol on himself. He was not quite 39 years old.

He had by then published three books, all about freedom and the greater social good. My favorite quote from him: “Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free.”

Here are the last lines of the poem as translated by Longfellow:

"They were three hundred and they would not fly,
They seemed three thousand, and they wished to die,
But wished to die with weapons in their hand....
... they were three hundred, they were young and strong,

And they are dead!"

“Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime... John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.” Volume V, book 1 of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (published in 1862):

Annamaria Alfieri

How I Cured My Ailing Main Character

Donna Huston Murray, author of Cured, offers us another post today, reposted from her web site at www.donnahustonmurray.com.

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The ride from Philadelphia to Ithaca, NY, feels especially long in bad weather. I spent the time with a yellow tablet in my lap playing with names for a Pennsylvania farmer’s daughter who would become a cop. As the main character of my new suspense series, I might need to live with the name for years to come—if I should be so lucky. Before my husband and I arrived at the Thomas Farm B&B, the birth certificate read, “Lauren Beck.” Who she was remained to be seen.

For November games Hench usually spirits me up to the press box where he does radio for the University of Pennsylvania football. That day, rather than cramming into the booth with the guys, I was invited into Cornell’s adjacent VIP lounge. There I laid about as low as an antelope in a lion den until I heard a woman talking about a recipe for pumpkin-pecan pie. With Thanksgiving coming I couldn’t resist. As usual, the recipe did me no good whatsoever–unless you count meeting the prototype for my new alter-ego.

After being cured of an illness that had her in and out of an iron lung for several years, Carol Brentlinger gave sky-diving a go–about forty-three times. She fed sharks underwater, and, as a colonel in the Commemorative Air Force, flew retired WWI bombers for fun. Her bravery awed me. What a fabulous heroine she would be!

Sadly, my then agent disagreed, and sadly she was more right than wrong. Readers ride on a character’s emotional coattails. Since Lauren Version One feared nothing, the tension I was working so hard to inject into CURED went unnoticed. I didn’t have a suspense novel, I had a grocery list.

For longer than I care to admit, I struggled to change Lauren’s personality, nearly reverse it, morph her into more of a wimp like me. For my seven previous novels the main character was me, and that had worked. However, I cannot carry a gun or bring off a swear word convincingly. I’ve seen the faces.

An author’s goal, among other things, is to sound like yourself. Finding my voice the first time took several years; but when I did, it was like receiving a lifetime railway pass. I could climb on the Ginger Barnes Main Line Mystery train and write without concern for the physicality of getting from here to there. Or, put another way, it was like touch-typing. Try changing that. Not easy.

Lauren was now both insecure and strong. She sounded like Carol Brentlinger one minute and Ginger Barnes the next. I stopped, wrote another book, then returned. What was happening to Lauren was also happening to me. We were emerging from difficulties together, feeling vulnerable but able to gather enough confidence to bypass the New York publishers and declare our independence. And yet the verbal merge remained incomplete. My daughter, who happens to teach creative writing, recommended that Lauren and I sit down with a glass of wine.

“Who are you?” I asked over my share of merlot, and finally–finally–Lauren told me.

Donna Huston Murray

Two Untimely Deaths

Marilyn Meredith has guested for us before. The occasion is the release of Raging Water, to be reviewed next month, her 12th mystery featuring Tempe Crabtree, Deputy Sheriff in the mountain community of Bear Creek. Marilyn is a fellow police procedural author of the cozy persuasion, never shortchanging on suspense or surprise.

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One Sunday morning while we were getting ready for Sunday School our pastor received a call from a deputy asking for information about one of the members because she’d died. This woman was a bit odd, eccentric, lived on social security disability and hypochondriac, but was only in her late forties.

Even though she faithfully attended the church services, none of us knew any family members to contact though she had spoken about having a daughter. The pastor suggested the deputy visit her best friend who lived in a nearby low-income housing complex. When he went there, he found that woman dead too. She had no family at all.
Because the deputies in our county are also deputy coroners, they can pronounce someone dead without a doctor or autopsy.

What those of us who knew these women found unusual was the fact that both died the same night. Both were found sitting up. Pain medication was missing from the first woman’s house. None of this was investigated mainly because no one cared. Some family did turn up to claim the few possessions but didn’t ask any questions about the woman’s death.

When I started thinking about what I would write for my next Deputy Tempe Crabtree, I decided to write a different version and outcome in honor of these two women’s mysterious deaths.

Marilyn Meredith

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Deputy Tempe Crabtree’s investigation of the murder of two close friends is complicated when relentless rain turns Bear Creek into a raging river. Homes are inundated and a mud slide blocks the only road out of Bear Creek stranding many—including the murderer.

The book can be found in all the usual places and also on the publisher’s website.

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Contest: The person who leaves comments on the most blogs will have his/her name used for a character in my next book—can choose if you want it in a Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery or a Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel.

Bio: Marilyn Meredith is the author of over thirty published novels, including the award winning Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, the latest Raging Water from Mundania Press. Writing as F. M. Meredith, her latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel us No Bells, the forth from Oak Tree Press. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, three chapters of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. Visit her at http://fictionforyou.com and follow her blog at http://marilymeredith.blogspot.com/

I know there are some people who like to read a series in order, but let me reassure you that every book is complete. Though the characters grow through each book, the crime is always solved. Here is the order of the books for anyone who wants to know: Deadly Trail, Deadly Omen, Unequally Yoked, Intervention, Wing Beat, Calling the Dead, Judgment Fire, Kindred Spirits, Dispel the Mist, Invisible Path, Bears With Us, Raging Water.

How Not to Spend Money While Shopping

Too tight.

I went out to the stores today, looking for a long top that would cover my behind in these pants, which are nice pants but too tight through the middle for someone of my particular shape and size. With a long, baggy top, they look great. Naturally anything I bought to wear with them would have to harmonize in color and texture. Right? And be long. Tunic-length.

First thing I did was to buy a pair of chinos that fit better than these pants, so that I have something to wear with my normal shirts. These pants are made to resemble leggings. You've seen them on the young girls, no doubt. On the young girls they look fine. You've also seen them on the not so young girls, and you may have thought, why is she wearing that? She looks as if she waded in paint up to her waist and then forgot to get dressed, and furthermore she ought to lose twenty pounds. Not a flattering look. But, as I say, if one wears a long top one can sort of rock it.

I went into a small store that looked as if it might have something that would work and described my requirements to the store owner, who was sitting behind the cash register wishing somebody would come in and actually buy something.

"We haven't any tunics," he said. "Tunics are for spring."

A rack of long knitted tops caught my eye. "These are nice," I said.

"They're all cotton."

"I like cotton." I held the greeny-gray one up to these pants, and the color was wrong – that is, almost the same, neither matching nor contrasting in a good way.

The storekeeper chuckled. "I had a woman come in here last week," he said. "She was your age. Or, no, she was probably older than you. She had a book her mother had made up for her, divided in four, three months for each section. Every section had samples of material in the colors for that season. In the spring you wear this. In the fall you wear that. She hadn't updated it in sixty years. Some of those colors don't even exist anymore."

Pantone Colors for Fall 2012

As I stood there wondering how a color could cease to exist, he decribed how some faceless dictator at Pantone issued yearly edicts three years in advance – this is what color the cars will be, this is what color the clothing will be, these are the colors that will no longer exist. I was reminded of the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, who had the incredible hubris to insist that Vogue Magazine (or whatever they called it) had invented the color blue.

I liked the idea of that old lady's book. Maybe I'll make one myself and take it with me shopping. I reject the notion of obsolete colors (except, perhaps, for harvest gold refrigerators and avocado stoves). Fall is the season for brown clan plaids! When I walk into a store looking for a nice fall outfit and some clerk tells me that brown clan plaids are so last-century, I'll walk right out again, waving my little book. Think of the money I'll save.

Kate Gallison