My Weblog

Family Mysteries, or, The Joys of Genealogy

I can't pinpoint when my interest in history first began, particularly my interest in the history of my family. I do remember as a teenager meeting one of my paternal grandfather's cousins who shared with the work she had done on the James family. By the time that happened, though, I already had the bug for history, particularly English history. I began to wonder what my roots were. Where did the people on both sides of my family come from? I knew some things, but not enough. From the vantage of adulthood, of course I now wish I had talked to my grandparents and gleaned as much as possible from them. But I didn't.

Several years ago I gave myself a membership to Ancestry.com as a birthday present. Slowly I began to enter the information I had and to build a family tree. I discovered that I could build on the work of other members who made their trees public, and that led me down interesting pathways. Of course, you really have to be careful about what you accept and add to your own tree. For example, one tree from a distant relative showed an ancestor, an Englishwoman, born in Kansas in 1450. Um, no. I can't imagine how that happened, and now I know not to trust the information from the person's tree.

On the James side, for the longest time the furthest back we knew was David James, my four-times-great-grandfather, who was born in 1790 in South Carolina. He it was who emigrated westward at some point with his wife and child(ren), first to Georgia, then to Tennessee, and finally to Mississippi where they settled permanently in 1831. Thanks to the work of others (most of which seems reliable) I have been able to dig further into the past. No surprise, really, that the Jameses originated in England... or that they were farmers, generation after generation. The real surprise was that some of them were of the landed gentry in medieval England. At some point I want to go back to England and dig further into local records to verify some of this for myself.

The two family "mysteries" I've discovered both come from my mother's side. My mother's maternal great-grandfather immigrated from Sweden in 1869. As the story came down to me, he came with six brothers, but I have no idea of their names or where they ended up. I knew my grandmother's maiden name was Tunburg. Well, turns out that Andrew Tunburg started out as Anders Johansson or Jonasson. Not sure which. From the research I've done, I understand why he did. I found numerous Anders Johanssons/Jonassons immigrating from Sweden around the same time. I doubt I'll ever be able to go any further with that.

The other mystery involves my mother's paternal roots. Her father's parents lived in Carroll County, Tennessee, and my mother was born there. Her grandmother, Elizabeth Spellings, was the granddaughter of Gideon Spellings, Sr. Thanks to findagrave.com, I found his burial site, along with a portrait of him and a picture of his grave. The interesting thing is that evidently Gideon insisted on being buried by himself (he was married twice; his second wife was the grandmother of Elizabeth), and he apparently said, "I am not fit to be buried with decent people." What on earth had he done in life to cause him to say such a thing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a mystery I would love to solve. Perhaps it had to do with the divorce (he died in 1879), but who knows? Sometimes family mysteries are best left unsolved....

Except in my books, where I love unearthing family secrets that have caused problems in the present day for my characters. I'll have to ponder Gideon's story and see if I can figure out a reason why he insisted on being buried alone...

 

 

Welcome New Femme Alexia Gordon!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Welcome to our new Femme! We’re so pleased to have the wonderful Alexia Gordon join us—she’ll be here on third Tuesdays! She’s the author of the Gethsemane Brown Mysteries from Henery Press—and the first one, Murder in G Major, won the 2017 Lefty Award for Best Debut Novel and 2016 Agatha Award. The second, Death in D Minor, is available now Her main character in these paranormal cozies is Gethsemane Brown, an African-American musician and expat to an Irish village who solves murders and must get used to living with a snarky ghost.

And she’s a medical doctor. Welcome, Alexia!

HANK: So, writers always moan about how much time there isn't. But you are a medical doctor as well as an author. That is an off-the-charts degree of difficulty. I'm sure people have asked--do you sleep?

ALEXIA: Yes, I sleep. I'm a nightowl so staying up late is easy for me. Getting up in the morning is another story.

HANK: Before we get to the book part of your life--do you have a specialty? What's your medical life like? Did this part of your life turn out the way you expected? Did you always want to be a doctor?

ALEXIA: I'm Board-certified in Family Medicine. I practiced traditional primary care medicine for about 15 years--coughs, earaches, diabetes, hypertension--and didn't have the energy or time to do anything else. When my all-work, no-life lifestyle became unsustainable, I transitioned into the administrative side of medicine. Now I have fairly regular, or, at least, predictable hours and the energy to fill my free time with creative pursuits like writing, art, and music.

I've wanted to be a doctor since the seventh grade but I'd probably choose a different specialty if I had to do it all over again. I'm drawn to the investigative aspect of medicine, using clues (signs and symptoms) to solve a puzzle (make a diagnosis) so I'd probably choose pathology or toxicology.

HANK: Where was mystery reading/writing in your life while you were in med school? And afterward?

ALEXIA: Reading and writing for pleasure went dormant during medical school and residency. Medicine is a jealous mistress and wouldn't let me divide my attention. I picked up my book and pen again after I changed my career path and reclaimed some balance in my life.

HANK: Where did Gethsemane Brown come from? Did you always "know" her?

ALEXIA: Gethsemane Brown sprang from one of the movie-style daydreams always playing in my head. I live in my head (I'm an extremely introverted INTJ) and entertain myself by visualizing stories in my mind. Gethsemane sprang from the story of a musician stranded in Ireland who wins money in a pub open-mike contest.

HANK: (I am INTJ too! But getting more E, interestingly, as I get older. Hmm.) When did you first decide--hey. I'm going to do this? What decisions did you have to make?

ALEXIA: Once I decided to transition from clinical to administrative medicine it was, hey, now I have time to do this. The only real decision was whether to write on my own or to commit myself to formal instruction. I decided, wisely, to commit to Southern Methodist University's Writer's Path program.

Lightning round: In what city do you live?

Lake Forest, IL

What was your favorite book as a child?

Alice in Wonderland

What's the best movie you've ever seen?

Too many to choose. Among the best: Casablanca, The Day the Earth Stood Still (original with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal), Laura, Harold and Maude, Hidden Figures, Rogue One, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Pizza or chocolate?

Dessert pizza with chocolate toppings

Hobby?

Embroidery, Art Collecting

One thing about you people might not know.

I survived three winters in Alaska

What are you working on right now?

Gethsemane Brown book 3, A Killing in C Sharp

HANK:  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir--of course! Wait, Alaska? But we'll hear lots more from Alexia--please welcome her (and her wonderful books) to the Femmes!

Here be dragons

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

Every so often, someone will write in suggesting—or demanding--that in future books I include a map of my imaginary town of Caerphilly and a floor plan of the house in which Meg and Michael live. They explain that maps and floor plans would make it so much easier for them to visualize the action.

I sort of get it. A lot of the books I've loved over the years have featured maps and floor plans, everything from the map of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings to the map of the Hundred Acre Wood in the Winnie the Pooh books.

But I'm not planning on mapping and floor planning my world. There are two reasons why.

Reason #1 is that in order to to this, I'd have to reread every book In the series and fuss over every description I've ever written of the town and the house. I'd have to come up with my best effort at being comprehensive and consistent. It would take a hell of a long time, and I'd rather be writing.

Reason #2? That will take a little longer to explain.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time exploring the woods behind my house. It was a small woods on Park Service land, and had been allowed to become rather overgrown. To me it was the Hundred Acre Wood, Mirkwood, Sherwood Forest, and Castlecombe, all rolled into one. (If Castlecombe doesn't ring a bell, you need to read Norman Dale's The Casket and the Sword.)

I spent many happy hours in those woods. I had a lookout tree, and a fallen tree that served as my hideout. And beyond a certain point, the vines and brush grew so thick that although I tried several times, I could never completely cross the woods.

I had many adventures there—sometimes in the company of real friends and more often with imaginary ones. I buried treasures there or unearthed them. I conducted guerilla warefare on horseback against evil oppressors. I robbed the rich to feed the poor. I tracked fleeing evildoers to their lairs. When combined with an active imagination, the woods were a neverending source of wonder and delight.

Then one afternoon I headed back to the woods for a little adventure only to discover that while I'd been at school my kingdom had been ruined. Apparently a phone line ran through the center of the woods—who knew?--and as part of its effort to improve service, the telephone company didn't just cut down the trees than overhung their lines—they clear-cut vegetation for some yards on either side of the lines.

The impenetrable forest was gone, reduced to a fringe of trees on either side of a wide, rough-cut meadow with a line of telephone poles marching down the middle of it.

The brush grew back, but it never became impenetrable again—at least not while I was still young enough to lose myself in it. There were other woods nearby, but they weren't my woods. I think I'm still mourning that woods.

So if something in me balks at the notion of pinning down every square inch of Meg's world on graph paper, I'm not going to ignore that feeling. If I'd mapped Caerphilly County when I'd first visited it, would I have felt free to add the Caerphilly Zoo and the secret tunnet whose location I'm not going to disclose in case you haven't read that book yet What happens if I come up with a working floor plan for Meg and Michael's house and then realize I'd like to add some feature that . . . just won't fit.

Sorry, lovers of maps and floor plans. I promise, I will never write a plot whose solution hinges upon what room was diagonally across from what other room, or how long it takes to get from point A to point B. And in return, I hope you'll let me keep those maps and floorplans in my head. Because my ability to spin future story webs depends on keeping a few spaces clear of anything other than question marks and the odd inscription warning “here be dragons!”

 

 

Shannon Baker & Jess Lourey -- the Double Booked Tour

Posted by Kris Neri of the Femmes Fatales

Today the Femmes welcome once again authors Shannon Baker and Jess Lourey...

Thank you, Kris, for inviting me (Shannon Baker) and Jess Lourey back on our second Lourey/Baker Double Booked Blog Tour. We love hanging out with all the Femmes, and not just because you have the best snacks, though Jess had enough stuffed in her pockets after we left here last year to take us to the end of our tour. (Jess here—damn you! You know I can’t resist string cheese.)

This time around, Jess is tickled pink to introduce a new addition to her wildly funny Murder by the Month series with March of Crime, released September 7. I’m wiggly with excitement about the next Kate Fox mystery, Dark Signal, now available for pre-order and releasing Oct. 17^th.  Forge is releasing a .99 Kate Fox short story September 17^th, but at the time of this writing, I don’t have a link, so I’ll put it in the comments.

Between me and Jess, we’ve published more than 20 books, and that’s mostly because Jess is lapping me every year, and she started before me. We’ve been in this business for a long time, so we know how insane it is. Jess, does the craziness of the writing industry ever get to you?

Jess: Only if I think about it. I remember my first Bouchercon. It was Madison 2006. May Day had just released, and I found myself sitting in the bar next to another author Who Shall Not Be Named. I asked him when I could expect to start making a living writing. He told me I could expect to hit it big in five books or five years, whichever came first. (It’s hard to type through the maniacal laughter I’m currently overtaken by.) Eleven years and fourteen books later and writing novels is still an expensive hobby for me, albeit one I’ll never give up on. What’s your story, Baker?

Shannon: Kate Fox hit the shelves for the first time in 2016 and I jumped on a ride that went faster than I’d ever gone with a book. Then, like the Tilt-a-Wheel, it tipped up and down, and around. At the time of writing this, I haven’t seen a royalty statement yet, so I have only my 3 A.M. imaginings about how that book faired in the world. Can you say “anxiety?”

Jess, how do you deal with the lunacy of a writing career?

Jess: Currently, red wine and saltines. You?

Shannon: Because the anxiety was like arsenic building up in my system, and I’d spent far too much emotional energy on fear, I’ve finally decided to consciously uncouple (thank you, Gwenyth Paltrow, for my favorite phrase) from negativity.  I’ve always believed in certain truths but let myself forget them.

First of all, I’d forgotten that my journey is my own. We all know how difficult and ego bashing a writing career can be. You feel good about something, then look around and see all of your friends doing it better, getting the awards, contracts, appearances, etc, etc, and suddenly, you feel like a big, fat failure.  So I need to remind myself to keep my eyes in my own lane and run my own race.

Jess: So true, and such a good lesson, one that I need to keep learning over and over again. I will admit that I was only jealous for 4 seconds after I heard about your big Forge contract, Shannon, and then I switched right over to thrilled for you. For me, it also helps that writing is not my career. I would love it to be, and I’m working toward that, but in the meanwhile, I’m a tenured writing professor, and the steady hours and paycheck keep me sane.

Shannon: Cheers. Another big component of the happiness game for me is to remind myself what I want in my life. My whole life, not just writing. I love hiking, cycling, sitting by the pool with my favorite guy, walking our dog. Other bits and pieces make for a complete life and it’s important to prioritize and balance. To look at my world with love, not fear.

Jess: Dude, you are being very Zen, and I have to believe you smuggled some Colorado edibles to Arizona. In any case, you are my new cult leader because I am picking up everything you’re putting down. It’s important to live a big full life. I’ve also found it helpful to take stock of the mental health benefits writing gives me, even though it’s not paying the bills. Writing keeps me sane, it clears out the junk in my head, and it organizes my stories and my self. That’s priceless, as witnessed by how wound I get if I’ve gone too long without writing. (Shameless plug: my only nonfiction book, Rewrite Your Life, walks readers through the steps of transforming personal experience into fiction.((Shannon here: I read this book and did the exercises and holy improved writing, Batman, it made a big difference in my current work in progress))) So I write, and I heal, and I play.

Shannon: Yes. Play. I must always remember to not take myself so seriously.

Jess: Me, too. (surreptitiously returning the mini bag of Doritos to the Femmes’ snack bowl.)

We are each giving away three books on the Lourey/Baker Double-Booked Tour. For every comment you make along our tour stop, you’ll get another entry in the contest. Tell us how you cope with crazy.

September 2 Mysterious Musings

September 5 Janice Hardy

September 7 The Creative Penn

September 9 Write to Done

September 12 Wicked Cozy Writers

September 20 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Blog

September 21 There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room

September 22 Femmes Fatales

September 24 Writer Unboxed

September 25 Dru’s Book Musings

September 27 Do Some Damage

October 3 Terry Ambrose

October 12 Jungle Red Writers

Jess Lourey (rhymes with "dowry") is best known for her critically-acclaimed Murder-by-Month mysteries, which have earned multiple starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, the latter calling her writing "a splendid mix of humor and suspense." She is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology, a recipient of The Loft's Excellence in Teaching fellowship, a regular Psychology Today blogger, and a sought-after workshop leader and keynote speaker who delivered the 2016 "Rewrite Your Life" TEDx Talk. March of Crime, the 11th book in her humorous mystery series, releases September 2017. You can find out more at www.jessicalourey.com

Shannon Baker is the author of the Kate Fox mystery series (Tor/Forge). Set in the isolated cattle country of the Nebraska Sandhills, Kirkus says, “Baker serves up a ballsy heroine, a colorful backdrop, and a surprising ending.” She also writes the Nora Abbott mystery series (Midnight Ink), featuring Hopi Indian mysticism and environmental issues. Shannon makes her home in Tucson where she enjoys cocktails by the pool, breathtaking sunsets, a crazy Weimeraner, and killing people (in the pages of her books). She was voted Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer’s 2014 and 2017 Writer of the Year. Visit Shannon at www.Shannon-Baker.com

 

 

 

 

An Endless Summer

by Toni L.P. Kelner

Fall is here. Days are getting shorter and nights are getting colder. So if you are already missing the lazy, crazy days of summer, here's a reminder. The Mystery Writers of America has just re-released the MWA Presents anthology A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime, edited by Jeffery Deaver, as an ebook and a trade paperback.

This is the debut offering of the MWA Presents: Classics program, which is going to be great. MWA will be bringing out more of the out-of-print MWA anthologies -- and there are decades of good reading in those books. (If you want to be alerted as more are released, sign up for the MWA Classics Newsletter.)

As a mystery reader and long-time MWA member, I'd be excited about this anyway, but I'm particularly chuffed because one of my own stories is included: "Old Dog Days." I reread it before publication, and happily, I'm still satisfied with it. But when I went to look at my notes I realized that the story of how it came to be published is longer than the story itself, and involves more than one summer.

In spring of 1997, my then-agent Joan Brandt had an interesting idea for my next book. At that point, I'd just finished with the Laura Fleming series, and she suggested I write a series of interlocked short stories, each of which stood alone but together would make up an uber mystery set in my fictional mill town of Byerly, NC. I thought it would be nifty to do a story for each month of the year, and wrote four month's worth for her to include while submitting the proposal. "Old Dog Days" was August's story.

Unfortunately, the book never sold. So in June of 1998, I bowed to the fact that the project was dead, and submitted "Old Dog Days" to a magazine. It was rejected. I submitted it to another magazine in July of 1998. It was rejected again. I sat on it a while, then submitted it to yet another magazine December of 1999. I don't remember getting a reply at all. (That third magazine has disappeared, by the way. I'm sure it wasn't because they neglected to reply to me, but...) Finally, in March of 2001, I heard about the call for stories for A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime, realized the story fit the parameters, and sent it in. They accepted it!

The book came out in February of 2003, and now here we are, over 14 years later, bringing out new editions. Some summers last longer than others.

 

A New Life Phase

In my early twenties, I saw earning my Air Force commission and entering on active duty in the military, buying a house, adopting a dog, getting married, and having children as huge life transitions. And they were. Until a couple of years ago, I never considered becoming an empty nester as one of those life transitions. But it is.

It's the biggest one of all, in some ways. Last week (as I write this), we dropped both our girls at the University of Alabama. (Roll, Tide!) The elder is starting her junior year and the younger her freshman year, making me and my hub empty nesters. I've seen this day coming since we took Lily to UA two years ago, and I've been dreading it ever since. "Dread" may be too extreme a word, but thinking about it has made me tear up for many long months.

I'm a writer--duh--and I lead a solitary professional life unless I'm teaching at a conference or some such. My hub works full-time. The girls were a large part of my daily human interaction. (Yes, I can make plans to meet friends from lunches or hikes, but it's not organic--it's got to be pre-planned and involves getting in the car. I will certainly do it, but it's not an intrinsic part of every day life.) I miss them. I miss having their friends in and out of the house. I miss Ellen getting all the right answers on Jeopardy! each evening, and Lily enthusing about a play she's recently seen. I miss silliness and hugs and even teen girl drama. I get some of it via the phone or text, but that's not the same.

 

 

 

It's only been a week, and I know I'll adjust, but at the moment I'm sad. I'm not writing. I've been overcome with a manic drive to clean the entire house, wash all the linens, renovate, and paint. I'm going with it for the moment. (Anyone who's handy with a paint brush, come on over.)

Everyone tells me this new phase of life will be great, wonderful, better than what came before. We'll see. I suspect that as with supporting oneself, entering a marriage or becoming a parent, it's a life phase that requires adjustment. I'm taking one day at a time, trusting that all of my empty nester friends can't be wrong about the benefits of this new phase of life. In the meantime, please pass the Haagen-Dazs and a paint brush.

All words of wisdom and support welcomed. What life transitions were surprisingly hard for you?

PS: Three weeks have passed since I wrote this post, and I'm coping. The house is clean, the paint and the new baseboards I installed look great (I'm never doing baseboards again), and I'm back to working on QUEENS OF HART'S LANDING. I still miss the girls, but I've got to admit there are one or two small benefits to being an empty nester. :-)

 

On writing with a cold

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

Bah, humbug. I woke up this morning with a cold. More accurately, with the realization that a week and a half of “is it allergy or am I coming down with a cold?” had finally ticked over into definite cold territory.

Writing isn't going to be fun today.

Note that I said “isn't going to be.” I will be writing. I may not manage my usual quota, and what I do write may need more revision than usual. And I will whine to my friends at regular intervals during the day about how I don't want to be doing this.

But I will be doing it.

Some writers enjoy the process of writing while others get more joy out of having written. Often I'm in the first camp, but that's not happening today. So I'd damn well better write enough to put myself in the latter.

By way of encouraging myself, I'll share the techniques I might be using to get myself moving on this very less-than-optimal writing day.

1. I'm going to get myself back into the zone by rereading some of the parts I recently wrote, tweaking them as I go. Not the whole manuscript, because I'm well over 200 pages into this book, and rereading the whole thing would be more like procrastination. Say the last 20 or 30 pages.

2. I'm going to give myself a break today when I can't immediately come up with the perfect word. If, for example, I'm setting a scene out at Meg's grandfather's zoo and want to mention, in passing, a monkey with an amusing name, I won't spend an hour deciding on just the right monkey species. I'll just insert [amusingly named monkey]. Or take a quick glance at Wikipedia's list of monkey species, grab the first promising one I find—the northern pig-tailed macaque, perhaps, or the purple-faced langur—and roll with that until revision time.

3. I'm going to use my “what needs to happen” technique—which means instead of just starting a scene, before launching into it I will make a list of the things that need to happen in this scene. For example: “Meg has to tell the chief about the curious incident with the calabash tree, Meg has to learn from the chief that the albino is alibied, and I need to sneak in a mention of lemmings in a way that makes it look like a humorous aside instead of a clue.” Especially on a day when my brain is fuzzier than usual, this will help me keep on point.

4. I am going to remind myself—several times, if necessary—that every book I have written looked, at about this stage of its life, like utter crap. This doesn't mean I won't occasionally mutter. “It's all crap—and much too short!” But time spent bemoaning the crapitude of what you've written doesn't get words on the page (or screen). So when my inner editor snarls “But it's all crap,” I will answer, “Shut up and let me write today's quota of crap.” Good books are not written, they are rewritten; optimally by a writer who has waved goodbye to her cold.

There you have it. My plan for this less-than-optimal writing day. Other writing tips always welcome. Likewise cold management tips. And if you feel like saying “Oh, poor you!” I will probably eat that up today.

 

Hurricanes I Have Known

The recent weather events with Harvey and Irma have brought back many memories of my own experiences with hurricanes from my years in Houston. Before I lived through Alicia in Houston in 1983, my only experience that I could recall was with Camille in 1969. I lived in north central Mississippi, and other than thunderstorms and rain, I don't recall that we had any terrifying weather. Unlike what the Gulf Coast in Mississippi experienced.

There were so many stories from Camille -- horror stories about the destruction and loss of life, as well as stories of seeming miracles when people survived against the odds from such a terrible storm. One of my cousins worked for the telephone company at the time, and he was one of many sent down to help get the lines up and running again. He came home with sad stories of what he saw. A few years later, when we vacationed on the coast, the signs of Camille's presences were still evident. Recovery from storms like that take many years.

I was a callow graduate student when Alicia hit, and I was house-sitting for my major professor and her husband. They were in Canada for a last few weeks of respite before the academic year started again. My mother called and begged me to come home, but I refused. I had a responsibility, the care of the house and two elderly cats, and I wouldn't leave. In hindsight, I probably should have listened to my mother... I spent a terrifying night in a hallway full of bookshelves, with two cats staring at me and listening to the wind. The next morning I discovered that a large tree had fallen close to the house, next to the bedroom where I slept. I was thankful that I'd had the foresight to move and that the tree had missed the house.

I look back at my naivety from the vantage point of middle age and realize how lucky I was. I have been through two disastrous hurricanes (Alicia and Ike) and a monstrous tropical storm (Alison). I made it through them all without having my house flooded or any other significant damage. I was extraordinarily lucky, and so many weren't. Hurricanes are terrifying events, and even though you have sufficient warning that one could strike, there is a surreal quality to the whole thing. Evacuation is an option for some, of course, but the logistics of evacuating a metropolitan area like that of Houston are mind-boggling. To put things in perspective, the whole population of Mississippi is smaller than that of the Houston metro area. We would have to evacuate the whole state twice, at least, to compare to Houston. It's impossible, unless you start a couple of months in advance, and even then I'm not sure it would work.

Until scientists come up with a powerful cooling ray to bring down the water temperature in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico (not to mention the Pacific), we have to take each storm as it comes and do our best, before and after. The keyword here, as always, is compassion, not criticism, for those who have lost so much in these storms.

With Salt & Sauce (and Seagulls)

Femmes and Friends, you've caught me on the hop today. After a weekend at Bloody Scotland, I got up at the crack of dawn and hit the road for Yorkshire, en route to London. Just about to flake out completely (in a lovely hotel on a moor), I remembered tomorrow is my day to blog. 

My eyes are closing and my brain is mush. But, as luck would have it, last week I wrote a sort of blog - actually a newspaper article - and, since I'm guessing the overlap between Femmes Fatales readers and Scotsman newspaper subscribers is slim, I'm linking to it here.

It's writing-adjacent: a character in HOUSE.TREE.PERSON / WEIGHT OF ANGELS inherited a fish and chip shop in a wee Scottish town and so I've written about my favourite Scottish chippies.

Bon Appetit!

 

Scotsman article: click here

 

 

 

Breathing

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

My productivity took a hit this week, thanks to Hurricane Irma. No, I wasn't in the storm's path—I'm in Virginia, not Florida. But thanks to my involvement in the mystery community, I knew plenty of people who were in harm's way—just as I had earlier this season with Harvey.

Since I am quick enough to complain when Facebook does something annoying or downright unethical, I should acknowlege that it was great to have Facebook available to keep up with people. Facebook and email and the Internet generally. There was a time when it would have taken weeks to find out that everyone you knew was safe, or worse, to learn that someone had been killed or injured or suffered a catastrophic loss.

But thanks to the Internet , I know that my cousin Debbie and her husband, who live in North Fort Myers, are okay in Biloxi, MS, where they waited out the storm. Better, friends have checked their house which appears to be okay. No idea when they will be able to go home, but they're safe.

Thanks to the Internet, I can also breathe easily about my fellow Femme Fatale Elaine Viets. She and her husband, Don, and their two cats are staying with a friend farther inland. They don't know how soon they can go home, and they don't yet know how their condo fared, but they're safe. And both families' cats are getting along. I even think there may be pizza. Whew!

I was relieved to hear that Jonathan Hayes and his cat Petey, stayed dry. They rode out the storm's assault on Naples in Jonathan's office which, since he's a forensic pathologist, was next door to the morgue. I still wish he'd tried to execute the helpful hint of writing his phone number on the inside of Petey's ear with a Sharpie, in case the cat got loose—the account of that adventure would have been epic. Having followed the progress of his house and garden on Facebook, I'm dreading the moment when he shares what happened to those beautiful creations—but he and Petey are safe.

J. D. Rhoades is still waiting for high tide on the North Carolina Coast. My cousins in Atlanta probably aren't having much fun right now. Nancy Cohen had only minor damage in Fort Lauderdale. Erin Mitchell came through fine and is out taking pictures of the damage in her neighborhood. Oline Cogdill's fine, though without power. Still waiting to hear from friends in Orlando and Charleston. Any number of friends still haven't heard from parents or grandparents in Florida, or have heard that they have no power or are still in shelters. And over in Houston, friends like Julie Wray Herman and Kay Kendall remind me that the rebuilding there has barely begun. Is it any wonder I'm finding it hard to concentrate on writing?

But write I will, and not just because I have a deadline—although a deadline, like the prospect of being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. Writing is also a refuge. When I lose myself in writing, I can forget, for a little while, the stresses of the day. I can't turn on my friends' power or undo the wind and water damage to their homes or offer them a hot meal or a place to cool off. But I can do my job and write.

I can also let the rollercoaster emotions of the last few weeks inform my work. Unlike my heroine, I've never been held at gunpoint by a murderer. Never seen anyone seriously injured, much less killed. But when I get to the darker parts of my books—because even my books have to have a little darkness in them, if only to let the light moments shine by contrast—I can draw on my hurricane experience. Waiting to hear that friends come through—or for that matter, my own experience of sitting up all night wondering if the next falling tree would come through my roof. And the stories I see coming out of the hurricane of bravery, of sacrifice, of generosity—I hope those will inform my work, too.

If that sounds calculated—it's really not. That's how the writer brain works. How we see the world. We rejoice and despair pretty much like everyone else, but inside, some part of us is always taking notes. Always saying, “Oooh—I can use this.” Or sometimes “Dammit--people need to know about this!”

So I find myself hoping that throughout all the places where Irma and Harvey have caused such suffering and loss, my writer friends—present and future—are taking those mental notes. Keeping their eyes and ears and hearts open. Turning hardship and heartache into inspiration. I'm looking forward to reading some of the books that I know they're already planning.