Picture Day Friday: Remains of the Day Setting

Dyrham Park, near Bath, was the setting for the Merchant Ivory film Remains of the Day.


[Photo courtesy of Brendan May @bmay.]

Five Tools for World Building in Historical Fiction

Right around the time of the Romance Writers of America's annual conference in July, I came across a two-part article on world-building for historical fiction novels by author Tim Weed for The Grub Daily.

I read the article over and over again, thought about it a lot, tweeted about it, then thought about blogging about it, then promptly forgot about it. Then suddenly last night, when I was wondering whatever I am going to blog about tomorrow, it flashed in my inward eye (misquoting Wordsworth) and was deemed perfect for today's offering.

I am going to very briefly summarize the article's five main points below. However, I urge you to read the article in its entirety here and here.

Vivid Descriptions of Nature
We instinctively recognize natural landscapes, whether or not we've spent a significant of time communing with nature and whether or not the landscape is deeply familiar or completely foreign. As a result, they always elicits deep emotional responses.

Accurate Portrayal of Recognizable Human Emotions
Evoke plausible and vivid emotional states for your characters that ring true to us and they will come alive for us, and through the characters, hook us into the story.

Incorporating the Exotic
Provide us with a vicarious experience of the unfamiliar. Make us see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, touch it, sense it.

Defamiliarization
Show a different way to see the same situation or person. Show something that is "familiar, even clichéd, in a compelling new light. In the process, it makes us wake up and pay attention."

Use Period Details—But Sparingly
Don't fall into the temptation of an infodump. All your research doesn't have to be unloaded into your story. You want to add it delicately like a strong spice in your dish. The nuances are where the beauty is, not in the actual description. "Remember: period details must make sense given what's happening in the story and the point of view character's emotional state."

Summation
"Vivid, concrete, specific detail is the lifeblood, the gods' nectar, of fiction."

Big Fat Book Update

Well, I had hoped to report back on progress. But what I'm actually reporting is lack thereof.

Towards the beginning of the month, I'd written about signing up to do the Big Fat Book read-a-long for the month of August. The readers were tasked with reading complex books of greater than 500 pages in length.

I chose The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, a 543-page tome which results in 25 hours of unabridged audio recording on 21 CDs.

I waited and waited for the books to arrive from the library. I had put holds on the books in July but it was past mid-August by the time the books arrived. I had requested the audiobook on CD as well as a paperback copy. Given that this was to be my first foray in audiobook territory, I thought to back up my listening to the book with my reading the book. I was told that there were dozens of characters in this book—in fact, track two on the first CD goes through the list for minutes on end—and so thought the reading would help me keep track of the characters better as well as the complexities of the plot.

After the books arrived, I had to jigger a listening setup. I commandeered an ancient, barely alive laptop to be the CD player and loaded up the first CD. I installed an updated Windows Media Player, which didn't work. So I found an HP CD-playing software to run on my HP machine. That worked. Then I had to hunt around for a proper headset, one which didn't fall out of my ears or slip on the hair when that hair's sweaty from exercise. I ended up with my daughter's hot pink ones. As it is, I wasn't aiming to look chic while exercising while half asleep at six o'clock, so cushioned hot pink ear muffs were it. I then had to figure out a way to hide this whole setup from inquisitive little sticky fingers, but still accessible from the exercise bike.

In the meantime, family had arrived for an extended visit, which involved lots of cooking and going places. I also had multiple book editing projects land on my desk. You can tell where this is going right? Right.

By the end of the month, I have ended up listening to three hours of the book. Twenty-two more to go. I'm going to keep up the BFB project till I'm all done. However, it's not going to be a month-long project as originally envisioned by Sunita.

New RITA & Golden Heart Contest Guidelines by Romance Writers of America

The Romance Writers of America has published their new 2015 RITA & Golden Heart contest rules for published authors and unpublished writers, respectively. Some of the highlights for the RITAs, include:

1. Entrants are required to judge. Entrants will not judge in a category in which they are entered. Judges will be allowed to opt out of two categories.

2. Only the first 2000 entries are accepted.

3. A book may not be entered in more than one category, but there's is no limit to the number of eligible books that may be entered for an author in the same category.

4. Categories with fewer than 50 entries will not be judged.
[Given the currently defined categories, this is not something that will come to pass.]

5. Preliminary-round scores will be determined using a trimmed mean: the highest and lowest scores will be discarded and the remaining three scores will be averaged.

6. The top scoring 4% of each category’s entries will advance to the final round, excepting that no category will have fewer than 4 finalists or more than 10 finalists.
[Finally, a sensible solution to this year's comical situation wherein there were 17 finalists in the Historical category.]

7. The Contemporary category has books set from 1950 to present date and is to be subdivided thusly: short (40,000–56,000 words), mid-length (56,000–84,000 words), long (more than 84,000 words).

8. The Historical category has books set in time periods prior to 1950 and is to be subdivided thusly: short(40,000–89,000 words) and long (more than 89,000 words).
[While size works well to demarcate groups in the Contemporary category, time periods would work better in Historicals. There are far more books set in the extended Regency period (1800–1837) than are set in other time periods. Expecting those other books to compete with the Regencies is not feasible.]

9. There are no New Adult or Stories with Romantic Elements categories.
[I don't know enough about New Adult to judge—I'd put them in contemporaries—but the SwRE is a serious loss to the contest; some of Romance's best books are written in this category.]

Picture Day Friday: Anne Hathaway's Cottage

2014 TBR Reading Challenge: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

As part of Wendy Crutcher's 2014 TBR Challenge, here are my comments on The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

This is a true memoir as opposed to an autobiography of whine. Some people write their memoirs as a reporting on what happened to their lives: usually sad, humiliating, and/or disgusting. They do not enter into their own feelings about these events so much. A true memoir, on the other hand, is all about the intensely intimate, the person's feelings in reaction to or in anticipation of events. And in Joan Didion's hands, the memoir is elevated to an art form in the sparseness of her prose, her unflinching honesty in her thoughts and actions, and an in-depth examination of her feelings then and now to events preceding and succeeding The Event.

The inciting event: "At approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death."

The secondary inciting event: "Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five night unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center's singer Division, [...] where what had seemed a case of December flue sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock."

Quintana, after a long illness with relapses, eventually recovered and came home. Dunne never did.

In the days following Dunne's death, while Didion had to maintain a strong front, "I remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling things," she suffered from a sense of unreality and tacit denials. "I found myself wondering [in New York City], with no sense of illogic, if it [John's death] has also happened in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?)" and "How could he come back if they took his organs [at the autopsy], how could he come back if he had no shoes?"

The day after the funeral in March, which was as public a declaration of death as any, she took herself in hand and allowed herself to think about what she needed to do to start the next phase of her life. "Cleaning up my office could be a step toward the first day of the rest of my life." Despite this decision, in the quotidian, her sense of reality remained fluid. "I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believe that what had happened remained reversible." Episcopalians say at the graveside: "In the midst of life we are in death," and this was so true for Didion.

There are refrains that like ostinatos in music come up again and again throughout the narrative.
"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."
"You sit down to dinner. And then—gone."
"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Posthumously, she recognizes that there were conversations with and actions on Dunne's part that revealed that perhaps on some deep subconscious level he had some knowledge of his impending death. Gawain of the medieval prose-poem Chanson de Roland when asked, "Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?" replies, "I tell you that I shall not live two days." Didion keeps discovering bits and pieces of their recent past where she should've listened closely and understood what Dunne was trying to tell her. She doesn't beat herself up about it, but it is with a sense of regret that she acknowledges her lack of attentiveness.

Her meditation on grief is aching in its sense of catching her by surprise by its intensity and its longevity. "We do not expect to be literally crazy, [...believing] that their husband is about to return. We imagine initially that we will eventually recover, that grief will lessen. What can never be anticipated is the unending loss, the space that is always empty beside you," the unending succession of memories...

Didion talks a lot about what she calls a "vortex effect," where a memory is triggered by a glance at a place or a song or a smell. She starts avoiding places in order to prevent disappearing down rabbit holes and the painful return to reality.

Her husband features in these trips down memory lane far, far more than her daughter, and it's mostly when her daughter was a little girl, not other ages. This struck me as very curious. Did she feel detachment towards her daughter because she was so attached to her husband? She comes across as an unemotional person on the whole, which is not to say that she doesn't feel things intensely. On the contrary. This book goes to show that what is not apparent on the surface is very deeply felt, and it is profoundly private. This is what makes this book so powerful: In her most difficult time of grieving, she volunteers this look into her most private self to a society that considers mourning as wallowing in self-pity. That took tremendous courage.

Towards the end of the book, she writes that she does not want to finish this account, because she's afraid that she'll then have to face up to her sense of John alive as becoming "more remote, softened, transmuted into whatever best serves" her future life without him. "I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. When we mourn our losses, we also mourn ourselves. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."