If only I had known...

I guess I've been wasting my time. Candy Moulton has compiled all the research I need in one convenient book called Everyday Life Among the American Indians: 1800 to 1900 (Writer's Guide to Everyday Life Series). Here's the publisher's blurb:

"The Everyday Life series helps writers, students and researchers save valuable time and bring richness and historical accuracy to their work. Each guide describes the food, clothes, customs, slang, occupations, religions, politics and other historical details that are so often difficult to find."

Gee, Wally, that's real neat! Instead of going to dozens of primary and secondary sources to find out how one particular clan of the Great Osage tribe lived at a particular time and in a particular place, I can just go to Moulton's table of contents, find the chapter on food, clothing, and shelter, and I'm good to go! Why bother with fictive kinship ties among Comanche bands and non-native traders in 1811 when I can just look up "Trade" (9 pages to sum up 500 tribes) in the "Government and War" section. Yee-hah!

I thought we were past this kind of stereotypical generalization of American Indian peoples. Guess not. Can you imagine a book called Everyday Life Among the Whites, 1800 to 1900?

I'm confident that readers can tell difference between the veneer of authenticity and actual authenticity. If I'm wrong, I'm wasting a whole lot of time.

Blogger's Note: My wife says this post is elitist and just plain "rude." What did Ms. Moulton ever do to me? Well, I suppose my better half has a point. As usual.

I'm sorry. Mea culpa. Wait, Latin phrases are also elitist. Okay, I guess my point is this: Moulton's book tries to do writers a service. However, because she is limited to a single book, she cannot even scratch the surface of the complexity and richness of American Indian cultures. My critique probably stems from my own insecurities about my own inability to truly represent that complexity and richness in fictional form.

At least someone is making sense

Rather than write another uninspired post full of self-indulgent musings, I'm just going to provide a link to something useful for writers. A shout-out to my good friend Mo-La for bringing it to my attention.

Childhood's End

The passing of Arthur C. Clarke caused much grief in the Fogelberg family. I credit the author for feeding my teenage appetite for books. My dad has many bookshelves filled with nothing but sci-fi paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. I grew up on Clarke and Asimov, and I think both authors encouraged my habit of devouring a couple books a week. In a sense, they turned me into a diehard booklover, and by extension, a writer. Sci-fi writers take a lot of flack, but there's good stuff out there. And anything that encourages young folks to make reading a habit is good.

When I first learned about Clarke's death, I told a friend that I had read "about 50" of his books. I just did a quick count using an incomplete bibliography and it's actually more like 17. Childhood's End is still my favorite.

It's all about story

In the last two days, three people have mentioned to me that they a) don't like history because it's boring, and b) love to read history when it's done by telling good stories. Every time I hear this, I want to punch the people who designed history curriculum for junior high and high schools. To me, history is nothing BUT stories. How can history be boring? It's the sum total of human existence.

My wife, bless her history-hating soul, wants to see the The Other Boleyn Girl. Not because she's fascinated by Henry VIII, but because she loves stories of love and betrayal involving powerful and privileged people. In other words, top-down history like they used to teach before the advent of the New Social History. Now, there's nothing wrong with history from the bottom up, but it's often presented anonymously, without focusing on individuals. Census records and statistics rule. Poor people were too busy suffering to keep good diaries, it seems.

Hogwash. Historians just need to dig deeper (though I must admit, some are). And if we can't find the sources to write full biographies, let's just make them up. Historical fiction can fill in the gaps. What I'd like to see is the equivalent of David McCullough's John Adams about an eighteenth-century half Comanche, half Hispanic girl who confronts the mixed race turmoil of the early fur trade era. Now, that would be a great story.

Speaking of which, I've just finished chapter four.

The Ideal Writing Venue

I don't read much Stephen King, but I did find his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft to be fairly interesting and useful. It's been a couple years since I read it, and the one thing that has stuck with me is his realization that idealized writing environments do not facilitate writing. If I remember correctly, he claims that he can only write well when he's in a decidedly unromantic place, such as a tight nook next to the laundry room or some such place. It's noisy, full of distractions, and uncomfortable.

He's right, of course. My ideal writing venue would probably be a log cabin in the mountains with big windows and a view of a lake bordered by snowy peaks. Or perhaps a room in a B&B overlooking the ocean near Monterey, California. The only problem is that if I had access to such a place, or places, I'd spend my time hiking or sitting on the beach.

In the real world, I write whenever I get a chance. That means during my son's basketball practice, during lunch in a museum overrun by fourth-graders, and on the bus.

And like good fiction, the reason these places work is because they create tension. There are multiple distractions, time limits, noise and foul smells. And all that forces me to concentrate, to focus, and to realize that writing is important enough to squeeze into a busy, chaotic, and full life. But not important enough to impinge on it.

Novel update: Well into chapter 4. I'm really enjoying the process of developing characters in these first chapters, especially the female ones which are turning out to more decisive and strong than the male characters.

To hell with revision

All two of you who read this blog on a regular basis will note that the progress meter has been stuck at 9,500 words for some time now. However, that doesn't mean I haven't been working. I've been revising. Ah yes, revision. A friend has told me to resist the temptation to tweak the text at risk of impeding the story's inertia. And he's absolutely correct. However, I went back through my first three chapters to fix fundamental timeline inconsistencies and not to worry over style, tone, or to proofread.

Okay, I just lied a little bit right there. If there's a 12-step program for habitual revisionists (or is it "revisers?"), someone tell me where to sign up. I made the mistake of printing the entire mss out and did a, gasp, line edit. And while I did fix my timeline problems, I also fixed words here and there, rewrote sentences, played with some dialogue, and, you get my meaning.

But I'm fully aware of the dangers. Too much of this and I'll doom myself the 13 circle of hell, reserved for people who tell all their friends "I always thought I had a book in me" but never actually wrote it. To get there you have to travel on a road paved with outdated volumes of the Writer's Market. And the bookstores in this particular level of everlasting perdition will only carry books by authors who are less talented than you, but had better work ethics.

I better end with that. Blogging, I've discovered, is almost as bad as revising.

The Calculus of Coffee

Coffee shops are overrated as creative zones for wanna-be authors, but I've discovered that they're ideal venues for more practical activities. I used to write in a cozy home office outfitted with cable internet and a comfortable bed for creative rejuvenation. But then we had kid number two (the product of too much rejuvenation, I suppose). He didn't annex my space until several dozen well-meaning relatives bought him every Thomas & Friends train accessory known to man. Summarily railroaded out of my office, I set up shop in the garage. A good concept, but unworkable during the winter when its ambient temperature dips below the level necessary for basic sentence construction.

That's when I hawked a dozen or so of those wooden trains for enough green to buy 67 espresso drinks. Thirty-eight mochas and one disgusting skinny latte later, I've written something like 9,180 words (241.58 words per mocha). By my calculations, it will take 621 mochas to complete a 150,000 epic novel (and it will be epic, nay, a tour de force). At $4 per drink, that's a $2,484 investment with a lot of downside risk.

Now, I'm no eavesdropper, but I can't help but overhear the conversations of other coffee shop customers. And they're not writers. Here's a review of the conversations I've, ahem, overheard, in just the last week:
1) Landlord discussing rental contract with tenant
2) Real estate agent discussing foreclosure rate with banker
3) Different landlord discussing rental contract with tenants
4) Two elderly women making a list of people to pray for
5) Job applicant being interviewed on his cell phone
6) Boyfriend breaking up with girlfriend

A quick summation reveals a startling truth. Measured in real dollars and/or happiness, five of the six conversations have the potential to out-perform my investment. Maybe six, if the boyfriend made a good decision.