Just in time for Christmas, Silent in the Sanctuary is set for a December release in the UK! My mother, who Googles my name just as much as you would expect a fond parent to do, found this link to the British publisher: http://www.mirabooks.co.uk/pages/category.asp?category=historical%20fiction So, if you're in the UK, do consider a nice purple copy of SITS for a few folks on your Christmas list!
I blame my friend Suzanne. She brought this blog to my attention, and I suspect it's going to become an obsession. Living Oprah follows the day-to-day life of a woman who is spending a year endeavoring to "live her best life", as defined by Oprah. She's buying the things Oprah recommends, reading the books Oprah suggests, seeing the movies Oprah praises. Personally, I have a love-meh relationship with Oprah. (Honestly, you can't actually HATE her, can you?) I greatly admire the success she's built, and I applaud her philanthropy. I love the fact that she pushes people to do better, to be better, to live better. I just have a huge issue with her interview technique and the fact that she is far too impressed by celebrity, her own and other people's. Of course, I forgave all of that happily the first time I sipped Marie-Belle hot chocolate at her suggestion in a winter issue of "O". I am very interested to see how the Living Oprah project turns out. I suspect it will be an extremely worthwhile--and costly--experiment. http://www.livingoprah.com/
Recently I was reading the memoir of Daphne du Maurier, Myself When Young. Although Rebecca is one of my all-time, take-it-with-me-to-a-desert-island books, I confess I knew very little about du Maurier herself except that she rented a home called Menabilly in Cornwall that served as a model for Manderley. I was surprised to find that she came from a theatrical family--one closely associated with J.M. Barrie. (Wendy Moira Angela Darling was named in part for du Maurier's elder sister, Angela.)
It was a quick, interesting read, covering her life from birth until she met and married Frederick "Boy" Browning, the English general played by Dirk Bogarde in A Bridge Too Far, THE definitive WWII movie in my opinion. But the most interesting bit was this passage: The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued iwth a desire to mould, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape. So true.
Yes, BERRYING. I blame my friend, Talaya. Her family owns the oldest continuously-operating farm in Virginia. They have dairy cattle and soybeans, and my first visit to the farm was when I discovered that sometimes goats don't always smell very nice. (Sometimes they're lovely. It depends on the direction of the wind.) Anyway, it's berry time at the farm, and Talaya and her family--seriously the nicest people I have ever known; ask her father for the shirt off his back and he'd throw in the trousers too and her mother would add a bowl of homemade potato salad and a cobbler--invited us to come and pick berries. That doesn't mean rows and rows of neatly planted, thornless canes heavy with rich, ripe berries just waiting to drop into my pail. Oh, no. These are hard-core, SERIOUS berries. They grow on the oldest canes of some severely thorny blackberry bushes frequented by deer, bears, and perhaps mastodons. (Okay, maybe just deer.) You have to FIGHT for these berries, and the beginning of that fight is scaling the fence. It was also 90 degrees--way too hot for jeans--and I got slashed lightly about the thighs so it looks like I was mauled by a very tiny panther.
My mother brought her camera to secure evidence for my husband that I actually did something outdoorsy. (He's traveling on business in upstate New York right now, where the nights are cool and the cherries are ripe, he tells me.) But right after this picture was taken my mother dropped her camera onto the road, said a few very bad words, and fell off the fence. So we don't have pictures of the rest of the excursion. And Mom's fine, I promise.
If so, wander over to A Year in Europe and help yourself to the podcasts put up by Scott and Sheryl, a California couple who did what so many of us only dream of doing--they took a year off to travel Europe, soaking up culture, eating fabulous food, and podcasting it all for the rest of us. They recently posted their "decompression" podcast. It took them a year to process their trip abroad and wrap up their final thoughts, so if you subscribe now, you'll get the full experience. (The odd side effect of listening to their meanderings through Europe is that I actually feel like we're friends, and when I hear about a little town in Italy or a retail street in Germany I think, "Oh, Scott and Sheryl were there," as if I know them. That's a little disturbing.) http://www.ayearineurope.com/
I know, it isn't soup weather, but I promise these scones would go equally well with a nice salad or some paper-thin salty ham. I just threw them together one evening when I didn't have anything in the house except a few dry ingredients and a box of soup. The scones were by far the better part of the meal. They are loosely based on the divine Whole Wheat Cherry Scones in The Skinny.
Whole Wheat Cheddar Scones
2 cups white flour (I used King Arthur White Wheat)
1 cup whole wheat flour (King Arthur again)
1 T baking powder
salt (I want to say a heaping teaspoon)
1/4 t dry mustard (Why I had a tin of Coleman's lying around I cannot imagine, but I'm sure it's Nigella's fault somehow)
palmful of dried onions (The true sign of desperate pantry cooking. I wanted fresh chives of course, but FORGOT there were some growing in the garden. So I used these dehydrated monstrosities instead, and they were actually fine. If you want a measurement, let's say a teaspoon and a half.)
two eggs
1/2 cup milk (Okay, that's a lie. It's more like 3/4 cup. It depends on your flour. Start with 1/2 and keep adding until the consistency is right. You'll want a little more milk for brushing the tops of the scones, and sour milk is excellent for baking.)
5 T butter
shredded Cheddar (A nice, sharp Cheddar, please. Two or three big palmsful.)
All of this will be much better if your ingredients are at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 450. Mix the dry ingredients, cut in the butter until the mixture is crumbly. Add the cheese and toss to coat the cheese in the flour. Then whisk together the eggs and milk and stir into the flour mixture. Bring the dough together without overworking. Turn onto a floured board and pat into a circle. Cut into eight equal wedges. Place onto parchment-lined baking sheet, brush with milk. Bake for 10-15 minutes. YUM.
If you are, then have lunch with me! Copperfield's Books in Sebastopol is hosting a literary luncheon with me at the Starlight Wine Bar and Restaurant on Sunday, August 3, at 1pm. I'll sign books and we'll chat about Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary, and maybe I'll give a few hints about Silent on the Moor! You can find Copperfield's here: http://www.copperfields.net/nextmonth
So yesterday was spent marking up Silent on the Moor. Or, more accurately, marking up the copy that has been very nicely edited by the good folks in Toronto. I always dread doing it, but it's less of an ordeal than I like to believe. It just takes some preparation. In order to spread out properly, I have to work in bed. (Hardship, right?) I make things nicer with a cup of tea and a candle and an ipod loaded with music I listened to when I wrote the book. I claim this is to get me in the correct headspace, but really it's to block out dog noise. Then I have to collect my resources--edited manuscript, red pen--a nice, juicy rollerball, Strunk and White's Elements of Style for quick reference, the laptop for more in-depth grammar and usage questions, copies of my previous books for continuity questions, a volume of Shakespeare, a notebook, and the handout on proofreader's marks because without that it all looks like Mandarin to me.
When I first get the edited manuscript, I scurry through it with post-its, flagging each page that is marked. You might think this is so I will know precisely where I have to work later, but it isn't. It's so I know whether my baby has been treated gently by the powers-that-be. Luckily, this manuscript was barely touched--maybe forty pages or so were flagged out of more than six hundred. A few of those were questions about wording; several were correcting my "furthers" to "farthers". (The editor was right every time.) And many were places where I violate house style flagrantly. (I am extremely fond of the Oxford comma and refuse to omit it, although my publisher's preference is to leave it out. I also don't approve of semi-colons in dialogue or adding another 's' to a proper name ending in 's' when making a possessive. These are all debatable points and completely a matter of preference. My publisher very generously indulges my quirks.)
The process is simple--if I agree with the editor's correction, I leave it alone. If I disagree, I can either write "stet" which means "no, I meant to do this, leave it alone, really", or I can rewrite it altogether, thwarting us both. Some of these are a matter of grammar or consistency, but some are purely subject to whim. There are places where I deliberately choose a specific word because of pacing or rhythm, whether it is correct or not. And then there are times when I take the editor's suggestion because I am profoundly disturbed at what I wrote in the first place. "I took her shoulders in mine"? What the hell is that? I mean, picture it. Are Julia and Portia doing some bizarre, NBA-style chest bump? This editor substituted the phrase "I took her shoulders in my hands", and I am extremely grateful she did. So, SOTM is one step further (Farther? Just kidding!) along in the journey towards your bookstore.
I eat pretty well--no white food, for starters. (New Doctor misheard this as "no white people food" and promptly asked, "What the hell is white people food?" I worry about him.) I generally steer clear of white flour, sugar, potatoes, rice, and pasta. I never buy those things to keep in the house, and if I have a choice when I'm eating out, I don't chose them. I like my vegetables and fruits fresh and in season and my meats organic and grass-fed. I don't eat very much packaged food, and in our house, canned soup is generally referred to as "Cream of Crap". (Don't get me started on high fructose corn syrup either...)
But I would happily wolf down anything Pioneer Woman put in front of me, and I don't care how many canned soups or packages of pre-shredded cheese it took to do it. I couldn't explain why, but somehow everything she cooks looks insanely delicious, and I never manage to read her blog without stopping at the refrigerator when I'm done. You've been warned. http://thepioneerwoman.com/
From time to time, I am asked about my research methods. Since I have a history degree, there are people who assume I go to important archives and handle authentic and antique documents. (These are probably the same people who imagine I wear sensible shoes and understand opera.) The truth is much more mundane. I make no secret of my affection for Google, and as a writer who has researched and written books before the advent of the internet, let me just say, GOD BLESS AL GORE. (That is of course tongue in cheek. I know Al Gore didn't invent the internet. It was invented at DARPA as a means of inter-facility communication by the defense researchers there. Want to know how I know that? The internet.)
Anyway, the point is, I use lots of different sources for research, but right now I'm going to let you in on one that I haven't told anyone else. Are you ready? Eyewitness books. I'm not kidding. The Eyewitness children's books, published by the same fine folks at Dorling-Kindersley who put out the magnificently colorful travel guides, are insanely useful. They are my starting point when I am researching a topic I know less than nothing about. They are well-written, thoughtfully presented, and they have loads of further resources, both in bibliography and at their website. (It makes perfect sense if you think about it. When you're approaching a new subject, you are a child, for all intents and purposes. Reading a children's book can give you a very quick introduction, as well as pointing the direction to further, more grown-up research.)And although Eyewitness does not have a book about the Victorians, I did find loads of similar things in the children's section of museum bookshops in England.
The only drawback to shopping in the children's section of the bookstore is that occasionally children will be loitering nearby. Remember, it is wrong to kick them, even if they snatch the last copy of whatever book you were eyeing.
And on a side note, a very happy Bastille Day to the French visitors to the Blog A Go-Go!
