The Dear Old Days of Scholastic Book Club

Because my father was in the military and then had trouble adjusting to civilian life, I attended 10 schools in 12 years. I was the new kid more often than I liked. There were two things that got me through all the moving: English teachers and the Scholastic Book Club.

I liked English teachers and they liked me. Many were willing to loan me books other than the ones that were assigned and none of them thought it was weird that I was so enamored of literature. Each of those English teachers participated in the Scholastic Book Club.

For those of you who may have not known the joys of SBC, let me enumerate them. One day you would walk into class and you would receive a newspaper that was filled with books that could be bought very cheaply. I remember buying Carol and On Your Toes, Susie. But I bought many more books than that. I don’t remember my parents ever telling me I couldn’t have books. I would look at the newspaper again and again and debate what the best selections might be. There would be a deadline for handing in choices and money but I never dawdled.

Then there was the toe-curling day that the books actually arrived. When I was in the ninth grade, my English teacher was a proud member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) who had a wonderfully Dickensian name that I’m dying to share, but probably should not. Let’s just call her Mrs. Dickens (with apologies to poor Catherine Hogarth).

Scholastic Book Club days were usually also Reader’s Digest days. We would read selections from The Reader’s Digest and Mrs. Dickens would unpack the boxes of books. I had a very difficult time looking anywhere but at those boxes. How could “Humor in Uniform” possibly compete with the worlds and words contained in all those books?

Mrs. Dickens seemed to have a terrible time getting the orders together and she kept talking about her favorite bits in Reader’s Digest. I became very concerned that class would end and I would have to wait until the next day to get my books. When the bell rang, I thought I would cry. When I checked out the faces of my classmates I saw several people who looked hideously disappointed.

I didn’t enjoy the rest of my day and was determined to get my books before I left school. When the last bell rang, I made my way back to the Dickens classroom. She was still there fussing over the book orders.

“Could I have my books, please?” I was determined to be polite even though I wanted to take ALL the books and flee.

She looked at me and sighed but I was used to that.

She put my order together and handed me the books. I felt an enormous sense of relief and elation.

“I can’t wait to read these this summer!”

“This summer? This summer?“ she cried. “Why do you need them NOOOOW?”

Some people just don’t understand.

Stephanie Patterson

Lambertville Noir

The last time I ventured into the City I grabbed a handrail in the train station that was covered with City germs (or perhaps with traveler germs) and contracted a case of bronchitis that took me all winter to shake off. Nevertheless, a meeting of the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America took place on Wednesday evening that I absolutely could not miss, featuring a presentation on noir films by the charming Scott Adlerberg. It was also an opportunity to hobnob with some beloved friends I hadn't seen in a while. Also a chance to dine at the Salmagundi Club, a wonderful old brownstone mansion on a stretch of Fifth Avenue that used to be very tony a hundred or so years ago. So it was worth the risk of encountering a few pathogens.

As I expected, I had a swell time. The Boeuf Bourguignon was delicious, the apple tart sublime, the friends in good health and cooking happily along with their writing careers. The presentation was entertaining and enlightening. We saw little scenes from Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Touch of Evil, and other swell movies. Directors who came to Hollywood to get away from the Nazis were responsible for much of the bleak pessimism that informs the Noir worldview. Europeans, you know. They have this attitude. And of course Orson Welles.

Thanks to Sheila York, who shepherded me on and off the unfamiliar subway, I happily caught the 10:11 train back to the Hamilton station, only to discover that in Hamilton it was raining.

Now began the truly noir part of the evening. I can barely see to drive on a clear night, let alone when rain is falling. I think it's these glasses. Anyway, I got out of the parking deck and onto Route 295 pretty much by memory. From there I was safe enough, traveling ten miles under the speed limit in the slow lane, until I got off onto 29 and turned north for Lambertville. On 29 the rain was joined by drifting clouds of fog. By then it was after midnight. Hardly anyone was out. Deer are a constant hazard on that road, so I was looking out for them, even though I understood that if they were there I probably couldn't see them. If those puppies got in my way they would be dead meat. Then I came to a sign that said, "Road Flooded." The road wasn't blocked off, so I knew the flooding wouldn't be catastrophic, but I slowed down a little more.

I drove through puddles. For those of you who don't know that stretch of road, there is a stone wall on one side of it and a canal on the other side deep enough to swallow a Toyota with a blind old lady in it. Suddenly another car came around a curve toward me, frantically flashing its lights.

What was I to think? I didn't have my brights on, having turned them down when I saw the lights of the other car coming. I thought, there's a herd of deer on the road, or a tree down, or a wall of water. Or a policeman. But why would I fear a policeman? I was cold sober, I was not a kid, and I was doing thirty-five miles an hour on a forty-five mile an hour road. I slowed down a little more, hypervigilant, and drove on.

I had almost reached the city limits of Lambertville when the lights of another car appeared behind me. I speeded up a bit so as not to be in its way and moved to the right as soon as we reached the four-lane stretch of the highway. The other car exploded with emergency lights. A cop! He was after me! I pulled over as far as I could and fished for my paperwork while he sat in his cop car checking my license plate for wants and warrants.

"Can I see your license and registration?" And so it went. He claimed to have stopped me because he clocked me at twenty-seven miles an hour, which is too slow. "There wasn't anybody behind me," I said. "I thought it would be okay." I refrained from mentioning that I seem to be too blind to drive at night, for fear he would yank my license and force me to walk the rest of the way home.

"Driving too slow is as dangerous as driving too fast," he said. I said, "Thank you, officer." We parted cordially. I knew he was just looking for drunks and stoners.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

The Princess of Zanzibar

Every once in while my research uncovers a person that I wish I had room for in my story.   I can not find a role for Sayyida Salme, later known as Emily Ruete, so I am going to tell you about her here.  Her real life is far too filled with acts of rebellion to fit nicely into fiction.

Salme was the 36^th and last child of Seyyid Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar.  Her mother was one of the sultan’s concubines.  Keep this in mind: Salme was born into a culture where upper class girls like her were kept under lock and key and guarded by eunuchs.

She grew up in Bet il Mtoni palace, overlooking the harbor of Zanzibar, which later became the site of the shortest war in history—more about which here:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search?q=shortest+war

Despite the circumstances of her birth, Salme got around.  Her brother taught her to ride and shoot, and she taught herself to read, something girls never learned in that time and place.  This was all before she turned twelve, when she was declared of age.  At that point her father died and left her with a house on her own plantation and 5429 British pounds.  Eventually, she would inherit three more plantations from her mother. 

Imagine the wealth of a father who could thus endow his 36^th child and still leave the heir to his throne rich as Croesus.  Who exactly that heir turned out to be became the subject of the family dust up that led to the aforementioned war.  Salme’s brother Majid was on the throne.  But another brother, Khalid Barghash took over in a coup.  Salme, then fifteen, favored Majid, but since she could read and write and was just a girl, she was strong armed into acting as secretary for the usurper.    Majid was seriously displeased.  And he had the upper hand, since he was favored by the Brits.  His Majesty’s Royal Navy made short work of Khalid Barghash, as reported at the link above.  For two years, Salme retired to some of her nearby real estate.  But then Majid relented, and she was allowed to relocate back to town, fatefully moving in next door to a German Merchant—one Rudolf Heinrich Ruete.  Heinrich soon began really enjoying his Arabian nights.

As luck would have it, her liaison with her neighbor resulted in her becoming pregnant.   Majid was seriously displeased.  Salme absconded to Aden aboard a British frigate.  The upstanding Heinrich followed.  There she converted to Christianity, and they were married.  Their baby boy died on their way to Germany.  They settled in Hamburg and were blessed with two more sons and a daughter.

When Heinrich died in a tram accident, Salme was left to fend for herself.  One way she supported herself was with the publication of her Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, first in German and later translated into English.

Salme lived to be 79, dying in Germany of pneumonia.

After thoughts:

Reportedly, no less a personage than Otto Von Bismarck, during the scramble for Africa, offered to install one her sons as Sultan of Zanzibar.

In 1934, in the face of the rise of Nazism, Salme’s son Rudolph Said-Ruete, renounced his German citizenship, settled in London, and became a subject of the King.

Caveat:  My interest in this story is admittedly superficial, but there are some real conflicts in what I have learned—the most serious of which involve the dates of all these events.   Salme is reported as born in 1844.  She was married in 1867.  Her book was first published in 1886.  All of which makes perfect sense in terms of the sequence of her events.  But the conflict between Majid and Khalid Barghash took place in 1896, when Salme was 52 years old.   There is the possibility for a PhD dissertation in African studies for the scholar who wants to sort all this out.  Sadly, that scholar will not be...

Annamaria Alfieri

On The Road Again

I met Jenny last year at the Book House, Albany's great independent bookstore when she was promoting her first novel, Cover of Snow, in the company of a bunch of mystery authors doing the same. I had no inkling that when she left the store, she, her husband and two children were getting in their SUV and heading West on her self-plotted and self-financed National Book Tour. On this April 26th, Jenny was back at the Book House solo to read from her second suspense thriller, Ruin Falls, now a member of Sisters In Crime/Upstate Chapter, having relocated with her family from New Jersey to Phoenicia, NY. Afterward, they all piled into their SUV again and headed out for Seattle on the Milchman National Book Tour, with her publisher Random House's blessings.

Robert Knightly

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Last year when my debut novel came out, my husband and I did the only logical thing. We rented out our house, traded in two cars for an SUV that could handle Denver in February, and withdrew the kids from first and third grades in order to car-school them.

OK, maybe it wasn’t all that logical.

But when you finally get published, after a thirteen year journey/struggle/battle, and you know that the only thing harder than breaking in is building a lasting career as an author, then you might just figure that you have to give this thing your all.

And given a certain amount of flexibility—i.e., your husband works in IT and is the most supportive guy in the world, and your children are still young enough to find it cool to spend 24/7 with their parents—you might also figure that grassroots efforts have helped launch businesses for ages, and why not get out there, introducing yourself and your work, one bookstore, one library, one reader at a time?

There was an event I did in Goshen, Indiana when exactly one person showed up. And he didn’t buy a copy of my book—something that always makes me upset for the bookseller who is going to all the trouble of hosting an event. But it turned out okay. The attendee bought a novel by a different author, which I recommended. And he told me that he wasn’t buying my book because he’d already read it, which was what led him to drive three hours to meet me in Goshen.

That evening became what I call a moment of the heart.

Did it make economical cents to drive to Goshen? Of course not. But it made a different kind of sense. The kind that says we write books because we want to connect with people. Getting to meet them face-to-face is a privilege and an honor.

Of course we also meet people in other ways these days. Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn have expanded my world in ways I couldn’t have envisioned. Especially not back when I began trying to get published…and there wasn’t any such thing as Facebook.

It was queries on cotton resume paper and ream boxes for mailing manuscripts. Last month I gave a talk at a college and when I used the phrase ream box I was met with blank faces.

I’ve aged out of something, I guess. But I also wonder if a new age might be coming.

An awareness that we all hurry too fast and try to do too much at one time. There’s slow food now, and maybe there should be slow reading. Slow book tours anyway. Something is lost when we cease investing in the moment and the development of relationships. Lost in our connections, and maybe lost in our writing, too.

I don’t want to be too blithe about any of this. There are only so many hours in a day, and writers are tasked with doing so much now that it can be impossible to keep up. Not everyone—not anyone really—can take seven months out of their lives to try to start a career.

But you don’t have to. In fact, I think seven days of this approach can add a dimension to your career, and even your life.

The first question I am usually asked when I speak about “the world’s longest book tour” is whether it was worth it. I answer that it depends on what worth it means. Judging a book tour by book sales makes little sense. By the time you’ve paid for gas, accommodations in some cases, and a bite to eat, you’d be hard-pressed to sell enough books to recoup expenses.

I could point again to the moment of the heart, but there’s another more tangible gain, which I call the ripple effect. What if I meet a bookseller who continues to hand-sell my books for months after I am there? What if there’s an attendee who doesn’t read what I write, but has a friend who does? Or one who’s a columnist for a major newspaper? What if a book club shows up just for fun? All of these things and more happened while I was out on the road.

As writers we are casting the stones of our stories into a massive sea. The more ripples we can get started, the bigger our chances for success.

My debut novel landed on multiple regional bestseller lists, and exceeded publisher expectations in other ways. When my second novel came out, my publisher decided to set up the first leg of the tour. That’s right—I’m now doing it all over again.

This time a fellow author decided to come along for the first 1000 miles of the ride, in the backseat with the kids sleeping against her. If Bob Knightly is kind enough to have me back to the blog, I will describe just what that was like.

Is all of this worth it? Please continue to follow along. Let me know what you think.

Jenny Milchman

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Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New York State. Her debut novel, Cover of Snow, published by Ballantine in 2013, was chosen as an Indie Next and Target Emerging Authors Pick, won the Mary Higgins Clark award and has been nominated for a Barry. Her second novel, Ruin Falls, came out in April.

Your Reader and Your Story

Many readers deal daily with backbreaking issues—emotional hunger, decline of income, reduced leisure time, lost loves, marriage/family/relationship breakdown. Worries about the planet, war, espionage, terrorism, cyberwarfare—a zillion fears of the "What Ifs " that lurk around the corner.

In make-believe pages men and women seek comfort, solace—a little while of feel-good-ness.

Readers sense the almost-close-to-touch dangers—to self, family, home, loved ones, the soil, the air, the gifts from the sea, birds, insects, animals, the human unborns.

Book business people sense an increased hunger for stories that make the reader feel a little more loved, safer. A happy ending, defeat of evils, triumph of love and forgiveness, a kiss from the printed word.

Many readers of our stories are not highly educated, professional types, people with lives of ease and comfort, with stable relationships, big nest eggs safe in bank vaults. Man face daily despair, medical problems, impending loss of sense and memory, in self or loved ones.

Round-the-clock TV noise that clamors with crime, loss, fear—drives many to grab hold of a book or tablet of words—a few minutes of comfort, an injection of happiness and negation of the human lot of loneliness.

A storyteller shares, briefly, his craft of make-believe—to comfort other human beings. Allows the reader to inhabit another life, find solace—if only for minutes.

Writers share their within worlds. Tellers of stories travel to a place few others know, then give that gift back.

A recent post in the Dorothy L Digest caught my eye: "Writers need a thick skin and a thin skin. A thick skin to survive rejection, oblivion and all the other insults and injuries that come with the territory. A thin skin because we have to be super-sensitive in order to feel our characters' … miseries, empathize with them."

In today's global spin there is an almost divine impulse in the creation and exchange of fiction. A very heavy burden and exchange between a writer and a reader.

As writers of stories we may well ask, are we up to the challenge?

Thelma J. Straw