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Trip of a Lifetime

I've written before of the influence Nancy Drew has had on my reading and writing. She also whet my taste for travel through the adventures she had over the years, both in the United States and abroad. Nancy traveled to fascinating-sounding places like Moon Lake and Shadow Ranch early on in the series, but in the 1960s, Harriet Adams decided to take Nancy further afield: Kenya, Scotland, Peru, France, and Turkey.

In the years since I first read those books I have been lucky enough to travel to three of those countries, namely Scotland, France, and Turkey. Peru and Kenya are still on my last. In a book called The Mysterious Mannequin, Nancy heads off to Istanbul, thanks to a coded message in a Turkish rug and the mysterious mannequin of the title. While in Istanbul she visits the famous Grand Bazaar and the Great Cistern. It all sounded so exciting and mysterious when I was a kid.

Recently I followed in Nancy's footsteps. I flew to Istanbul with friends as part of a tour, and we visited the sites that Nancy saw. For me, the most important site in Istanbul was the church of Hagia Sophia  (Holy Wisdom), or Ayasofya as it is known in Turkish. This famous church has a long history, but the church that stands today was inaugurated in December 537 AD by the Emperor Justinian. It later became a mosque, and these days it is a museum. Standing in Hagia Sophia was a thrill for I felt surrounded by nearly 1,500 years of history.

We also visited Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque. Both of them are impressive, but for me Hagia Sophia soars above them, with its magnificent dome that has stood for fifteen centuries. Inside Hagia Sophia there is a place where there is a set of circles on the floor, called the Omphalion. This is where the Emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire were crowned. I stood there and gazed at it, imagining Justinian and his successors in that spot. The center and largest circle in the group is the coronation spot.

Long ago, when I first read The Mysterious Mannequin and was fascinated by Istanbul, I never imagined that I would travel there or that I would actually see these amazing sites. Now that I have, I'm thinking that I might have to devise my own fictional adventure set in Istanbul.

Smoosh and Scatter

By Catriona

I was at a wedding on Saturday, the second American wedding I've been to, and I think I'm getting the hang of it now - fewer kilts and more sunshine for a start. 

That's the first notable difference between a Scottish wedding and a California one.  It was outside! You couldn't hold a Scottish wedding outside because it's raining. (I just clicked over to Weather Underground to check and yes: 6pm, Monday 9th June, 58F, light rain.)

But at the Butterfly and Iris Garden in the Placer County hills on Saturday, the sun shone and fans and parasols were provided.  As well as pashminas for later in case anyone not dancing like a disco dervish started feeling chilly. I didn't need one.

Then there are the tinkle-sticks. ?????  A wand with a bell and ribbons for the guests to shake as the newlyweds walk down the aisle.  Only I thought the Best Woman said "tickle-stick" as she handed mine to me and so I goosed a groomsman with it. But only under his arm so it was okay.

And there doesn't seem to be a scatter at California weddings. This is where one of the happy couple throws a bag of coins up in the air for children to fall on like little hot, over-dressed piranhas. They were my favourite bit of a wedding when I was wee, even though the local parish church was halfway up a steep hill and you needed some skills to stop the money rolling to the bottom and into the sea.

But there's the cowbell here that we don't have. A cowbell gets passed round the guests during the reception and every time someone rings it the newlyweds have to find each other and kiss.  I'm not sure Scots could cope with as many PDAs as this produces.

And we don't do the cake smoosh either.  I knew about it, so on Saturday when the groom took a handful of wedding cake and custard-pied the bride, I wasn't horrified. My husband, who watches fewer rom-coms, on the other hand . . . "Ooh, it's all starting to kick off now," he said. 'Did you *see* that?!"

Yes, I suppose, to be completely honest, I have to admit that Scotland's dysfunctional drinking culture probably results in more wedding-day punch-ups than you get here in CA. This is probably why the cowbell and cake-smoosh will never take on over there. I could see some feisty Scottish bride, well-refreshed, reacting to yet another kiss or the ruination of her make-up with a swift right hook. 

Nothing of that sort happened on Saturday. It was beautiful from start to finish and I was honoured to be there. 

I'm going to leave off now by sending this - my favourite wedding poem - to Robin and Irina. It's by a Scottish poet, Janet Paisley, who wrote it for her son and it gets me every time.  I can't imagine how Janet managed to read it out at her child's wedding without sobbing and blowing nose bubbles.

With These Rings

You are fresh words

on the old stone of time

 

Here silence honours you,

here now the earth turns,

the sun beats, the rain sings.

 

You are not adrift

among the wheeling constellations

but held by the hoop of love.

 

Ancient as the ring of standing stones,

prophetic as a ring around the moon,

marriage is.

 

Wear your vows well

when laughter is the wine between you

 

or when night lies like a bolster

down the middle of your bed

 

May the cold shoulder of the hill

always afford you shelter.

May the sun always seek you

however dark the place.

 

We who are wordless

know thorns have roses.

 

And when you go from this day

the burnished stars go with you.

 

When you go forward from this day,

the love that grew you

grows with you

 

and marriage is struck,

iron on stone, hand in hand.

By the Time I Get (Back from) Phoenix

by Charlaine Harris

By the time you read this, I’ll be returning from Phoenix ComicCon. Most of my professional traveling for the year will be done, and I can actually put my suitcases away until late August, when I leave for the UK for FantasyCon in York. That’ll be really nice. After that I have a speech at Books in the Basin in Midland, Texas, in October, and Bouchercon in California in November. Now I’m weighing the events I want to attend next year, and I already have a few lined up. Planning my travel is a constant balancing act.

I know a lot of people who travel more than I do for work, people who are on the road over half of the year. Some of them try to find something fun to see or do everywhere they go, and some make the process as painless as possible by holing up in a hotel room and staying private. I sympathize with both attitudes. When I first started being on the road a lot, I felt like a failure if I didn’t take advantage of being in a new city. I had to see at least something that made me realize I wasn’t home any longer. But usually signing trips are so quick – you land, go to the hotel, go to the venue, go back to the hotel, go to the airport – that there’s really hardly any time to sightsee.

Now that I’m older, I tend to let the travel roll over me while I look straight ahead at what comes next. It’s like having blinders on, I suppose. This minimizes the wear and tear on me, but it does make tours seem curiously homogenized. I remember cities by their hotels! The Heathman in Portland, the Four Seasons in Seattle, the Adolphus in Dallas . . . and all points in between. There are certainly worse things than having to stay in luxury hotels across America!

I do wonder how many more years of traveling I have in me. I feel a little more reluctant every time I leave, arthritis makes me uncomfortable, and I regret the work slowdown. I am not as productive when I’m on the road. I know plenty of writers who manage to keep to their work schedule, but I’m not one of the happy band. I can see the day coming when I’ll just say, “Naaaah. I don’t think so.”

Until that time . . . did I put in my charger cord? Did I replace the Bandaid in my bathroom bag? Are the batteries in my little flashlight still good?

 Charlaine Harris

A Young Spy, A Time Jumper and The Best Writing Book Ever

 

from Mary

 

I'm filling in for Kris today with a few book recommendations. With the first two, I continue my quest for the ultimate Femme Fatale kick-@** protagonist. The third book is non-fiction <gasp> and about writing <double-gasp>, two areas I don't normally associate with pleasure reading.

 

 

ETIQUETTE & ESPIONAGE by Gail Carriger is about a precocious girl who isn't interested in the things most privileged young ladies in turn-of-the-century Britain are, like her older sisters and her mother. They love fancy balls and being perfectly well-behaved. Sophronia likes to get into trouble and dismantle things and make strange usage of their resultant bits and bobs. Her mother fears nothing can help change Sophronia, that no respectable girls' school will accept her.

When she tells a friend her worries, the lady friend recommends a special school that might be just the ticket for Sophronia.To the mother's amazement, Sophronia is accepted at Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. There, lessons in manners and feminine ways are taught alongside those that accomplish the Academy's real objective - to train girls how to spy and gather information in well-to-do circles. Naturally, for that, they also need lessons for things like handling a knife or how to fight while wearing long dresses with several underskirts.

This was a fun read with a little Steampunk and a little supernatural. Gail Carriger also writes the Parasol Protectorate series set in the same world.

 

 

I love to find excellent new (to me) authors. Jodi Taylor is one such terrific writer. Her book JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER is first in The Chronicles of St. Mary's series.

 

 

St. Mary's Institute of Historical Research might sound like a boring place to work. However young Dr. Madeline Maxwell, expert in Ancient History, can tell on her first visit there that something mysterious is going on. She's right. She discovers that the off-limits Hawking building is where time-travel pods are kept. The historians at St. Mary's use them to observe historical moments of importance, not to interact or interfere with them.

At least, that's the plan. Luckily, the travel teams are very intelligent and good at improvising when unplanned events happen.

 

 

A SYMPHONY OF ECHOES continues the adventures of St. Mary's, also a great read. Both books combine history, mystery, adventure, a little romance, and a lot of humor. I listened to the audiobook versions and highly recommend them.

 

Over the years, I've bought just about every how-to book on writing there is. Last week, I think I finally found The One, the one that, had it been available thirty years ago, would've saved me tons of money on all the rest. It was on sale, the author well-known and respected, so I gave it a try.

 

 

THIS IS IT. Trust me. Author James Scott Bell knows what he's talking about here. WRITE YOUR NOVEL FROM THE MIDDLE is the book that would've saved me many many hours of wondering and agonizing over what to do next. It's a simple approach anyone can use. The book is short. It's written in a fun engaging way that puts readers at ease. If you're a novelist who never gets stuck and can write straight from page one to the end, laughing merrily all the way, then you don't need this book. Everybody else will find it helpful and a must have for your writing library.

 

If you have a favorite writing book, or time-travel or steampunk with a kickin' protagonist, I hope you'll share in the comments below. All enablers welcome. :)

 

Have a great weekend, everybody!

 

 

 

 

I Do it, too! Yes, I do!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I love Laura Benedict. I do.  And after reading this, there's another reason. What she's confessing to? I do it, too.

I say: it's EDUCATIONAL for an author. It helps me understand how a really good writer works, what thricks they use, how they misdirect, and how they surprise us.

Hank, you're saying, that sounds like you--no, it couldn't be.

Yup. I do. (Not always. But sometimes.)  We'll let Laura explain.  (And watch for her wonderful new BLISS HOUSE. See more below...and a giveaway, too!  But hey--don't read the end first! Unless you really must...)

 

Spoiler Alert! Confessions of a Last Page Peeker

                            by Laura Benedict

In nearly every area of my life, I am appallingly honest. But when it comes to occasionally peeking at the end of a novel, I have become a cheating cheater worthy of a tabloid tv show.

I picked up this shocking habit late in my relationship with books. It used to be that every book I touched was special to me. They were places where I could escape into knowledge, or just plain escape, and I willingly let myself be led to the ending, blindfolded as it were. I trusted the writer implicitly, and there was that whole thing where it just felt wrong to me to cheat. I felt I had a contract with the writer, and I didn’t want to be the one to break it.

 While I can’t pinpoint the exact book where my perfidy began, I suspect it was one of the first few Harry Potter novels. My daughter was just old enough for me to read them to her, and I wanted to make sure there was nothing ahead that she couldn’t handle. At the time I was also learning to write, and had begun reviewing books for newspapers. I was looking at books for structure and style. Soon the quantity of books and the way I was reading made them seem much less mysterious and special. Checking out the final chapters became just part of the job. (Isn’t that true of so many things we gain intimate knowledge of? Expertise can make us unappreciative, and sometimes careless.) All the while, though, I felt guilty for breaking that imagined contract.

But eventually--as is the case so often of our sins—I got comfortable with the habit, and I stopped worrying about it so much. Finally I emerged from my children’s childhoods and the writing of several novels of my own with a healthier reverence for books. I have come full circle to appreciate the effort and heart every writer puts into every book, and I am able to glimpse the mystery again.

Now there are only two types of books that will make me skip ahead to the final pages or chapters. Let’s look at them through the lens of relationships, shall we? Because, as I said above, a book is a kind of contractual relationship between its writer and the reader.

A book that you’re drawn to from the beginning is like an exciting lover.

 

(Photo by DJ Hoogerdijk)

 

There’s the initial flirtation and seduction, the flaming passion in the middle…but sometimes the tension is so high that you absolutely MUST KNOW if he’s going to be a good husband before you get to the end. Does he have a criminal record? A crazy ex-wife? Financial stability? Is he really worth the final investment? You’re excited. You’re pretty certain it will all work out. But you just have to know!

So you skip around the final few chapters looking for absent or dead characters or big developments. Who, indeed, is present on the final page? If the answers please you, you can go right back to that turning point and settle in for a happily-ever-after (even if it has a downer of an ending, if it works with the story, then that’s okay, too).

Sometimes you pick up a book that’s like a friendship you’re not really into. You’ve met briefly and have heard extravagantly wonderful things about this person, and so you have lunch. The conversation is vaguely interesting, and you find you have a few things in common. So you have lunch again. This time lunch seems to take forever, and it’s incredibly boring. But you’re still hopeful because just about everyone you know is wild about this person. Before you make another lunch date, you call a few of those enthusiastic friends and compare notes, find out what’s really behind all that praise.

 

 

(Photo by Cristiano Betta)

 

This kind of book practically screams to have its ending explored way ahead of time. Getting there is not going to be any fun, and do you really want to be on the bandwagon just because everyone you know is there already? Life is too short.

I don’t want to give the impression that I skip ahead on all or even many of the books I read. Or that it’s always appropriate.

If I find a book that’s just enjoyable, I’ll read it straight through without peeking. Most of the books I read fall into this category. If I required every book to have the intensity of a marriageable lover, I would end up reading darned few books. And there are many, many good books out there.

Lastly there is the book whose contract I could never bring myself to break. This is the book whose coming I have awaited for months or years. When that sort of book is in my hands, I want to savor every single word. I would never look ahead because it would cruelly shorten my journey to its end. And isn’t that the highest compliment we can pay a book?

 

 

 

(Photo by kmcquain)

 

Do tell: Are you a cheating cheater full of complicated rationalizations explanations like me? Or are you faithful to the end?

 

HANK: I look! I do! I see what names are stll there, all that. Everything, I confess. How about you? (And hey, if you read the last pages of my new book TRUTH BE TOLD?  Or THE WRONG GIRL? You still won't know the real ending. So there.

But Femmes, let's confess. How do you feel about his? A copy of BLISS HOUSE to one lucky commenter! 

 

Laura Benedict’s latest dark suspense novel is BLISS HOUSE (Pegasus Crime), praised as “Eerie, seductive, and suspenseful,” by Edgar award-winning author, Meg Gardiner. Laura is also the author of DEVIL’S OVEN, a modern Frankenstein tale, and CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS and ISABELLA MOON, both originally published by Ballantine Books. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, PANK, and numerous anthologies like Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (Oceanview), and Slices of Flesh (Dark Moon Books).

 

A Cincinnati, Ohio native, Laura grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and claims both as hometowns. She currently lives with her family in the southern wilds of a Midwestern state, surrounded by bobcats, coyotes, and other less picturesque predators.

 

A Day at the Zoo

by Donna Andrews

I used to attend Mayhem in the Midlands every Memorial Day weekend.  Since the demise of that lovely convention, I've missed spending time in Omaha.  So I went back this year with a few friends and had a lovely time--especially during my visit to the Henry Doorly Zoo.

Because Dr. Montgomery Blake, grandfather of my series protagonist, is a world-famous zoologist and owner of a small private zoo, I take an interest in zoos. Although Caerphilly's zoo is a lot smaller than Omaha's, I like to think they have a few things in common--like having habitats instead of cages. And since the Caerphilly Zoo exists only in my imagination, I can stock it with any animals I choose.

Let there be meerkats! And bongos. And spider and squirrel monkeys. And--

Wait.  I'll show you.  Here are a few of the photos I took from my visit.

Monkeys!

The monkeys live on a faux banyan tree in the middle of a lagoon. They don't swim, so the lagoon is their cage.  But they can travel from the main island to smaller islands via a rope bridge.

 

Oh, to be as agile as the monkeys!

And their faces are incredibly expressive.

 

I kept looking for emus.  I could have sworn the zoo had emus, but I was having a hard time finding them. I came across the Cape Thick-Knees (although it was sitting so I can't testify to the shape of its knees).

 

I saw peacocks.

White swans, battling the koi for the food the visitors throw.

Black swans, also battling the koi.

Ducks and geese galore.

Wait--is that an emu over there?

No, it's an ostrich. And that was as close as I got to emus.  Ah, well.  I have a plan to get some emu photos.  More on that later.

Meanwhile I did see camels.  Meg's grandfather's zoo has camels.

I think Dr. Blake's zoo needs some cute baby camels.

Peccaries. 

And warty pigs

A sleeping bobcat

A sleeping cheetah. Well, he was sleeping, and doesn't look happy to have been awakened. 

The bongo

The silverback gorillas

And, of course, the meerkats. You've got to have meerkats in a proper zoo, right?

A lovely day at the zoo, but I keep thinking of animals I didn't get to see.  There's always next year.  And for that matter, there's always the National Zoo, which is a lot closer. Any suggestions on what animals I should look for on my next zoo visit?