The HEA Cafe

but suddenly I find myself the mother of a 12-year old.  Yup, 12 years ago this very minute, I was riding shot-gun while my DH tried to get me into Vancouver before the baby made his appearance.  It’s a long story, filled with prolapsed cords, highway construction and a weeklong stay in the hospital, but it got me to thinking about the old cliche.

And holy cow has it been a busy 12 years.  We’ve moved 4 times, met the most amazing people, lost one grandparent, one dog and countless rats/gerbils/hamsters.  We’ve learned how to juggle hockey, soccer, swimming, piano, taekwondo and baseball while dragging a laptop around so I could finish just one more scene.

12 years ago, the idea of being a published author was still a mere pipe dream; heck, I didn’t even know what POV was back then!  And yes, okay, sometimes I still struggle with that! LOL 12 years ago, all I had were a few ratty old notebooks with REALLY bad poetry scribbled in them.  12 years ago, I’d never heard of RWA, Linda Lael Miller or Julie Garwood.

12 years ago a galley was a kitchen, an ARC was a large wooden boat, and the word synopsis had never crossed my lips.  Now I talk about these things in every day conversation and while most of my face-to-face friends have no idea what I’m talking about, I know you all do.

It’s been a wild 12 years and all I can do is hope the next 12 are just as wild.  Happy birthday, Thomas!!   

Oh, and before I go, I need to plug my new book, THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER, which will hit shelves on April 1st!  Yay!!!

I usually save my whining for my personal blog over at another site, but when I was trying to think about what to write today, all I could think about was how I haven’t had hot water in my house since February 20.  I’ll spare you the details, but we have a leak that’s resulting in the entire house having to be re-piped, an on-going effort.

Now, if I was writing erotic romance, hunky plumbers would show up at my door with tool kits…

But this is the real world.  I’m getting “competent” over “hunky”, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  In fact, when it comes to plumbing, electric, carpentry or brain surgery I’ll take “competent” over “hunky” any day.

Anyway, it’s made me think about bathrooms and plumbing–a lot–especially since I write historicals.  Many of my books are shipboard romances, and the intricacies of taking care of business in the past, especially in the small confines of a ship, fascinate me.

Sailors use to have two ways they’d relieve themselves:  They would urinate into large tubs, because hey, liquid is liquid, and if you need to put out a fire in a hurry, it’s better than using the drinking water.  The other bathroom needs were taken care of by hanging onto lifelines with your backside dangling over the bow of the ship, at the ship’s head, which gave rise to bathrooms aboard ship being called the “head”.

In her book Rough Medicine–Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail Joan Druett makes a point that other writers of naval medicine have made:  One of the biggest problems in the age of sail was constipation.  Combine bad food, not enough roughage or water, and then being told that you’re going to hang over the side to go while cold waves are jumping up at you…well, it’s not hard to understand why this was a continuing issue.

Now, I’ve got two sons, a husband, and four brothers, so “potty humor” has been a huge part of my life.  I sometimes wonder if I think about this stuff more than other historical writers, but it niggles at me.  If I’ve got a woman disguised as a man aboard ship, how’s she doing her stuff?  What happens when she menstruates?  I had to change the plot of one of my novels to a scenario where the heroine wasn’t bunking down with the boys for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was she couldn’t hang her butt out on the lifelines.   In another novel my heroine had a cunningly carved gourd funnel she kept pinned inside her trousers so she could stand up like the guys.  And if you want your own disposable funnel for being able to stand and deliver, I recommend these.

And then there’s the daily bathing thing.  Forget about it.  Most people were content to wash the important parts and not immerse their entire body in hot water on a daily basis, with good reason.  It was hard to get hot water, hard to fill a tub, hard to empty the tub. Plus, we always think to ourselves, “Euwww!  I could never live in the past ’cause they all smell awful!”  Well, yeah, they did, but you get used to it.  Seriously, your olfactory glands adjust.  That’s why you can’t smell yourself like other people smell you.  And if you think about it, our modern life with its smells of carbon exhaust and overly perfumed air might smell pretty rank to someone from 200 years ago more used to the fresh smell of manure.
Anyway, the plumbers assure me we’ll have hot water again.  Maybe by the end of the week.  So I’m optimistic.  In the meantime, I’ll keep writing about pirates and privateers and asking myself the really important questions.

         It’s a question that is often asked. Where do writers get ideas? For me, they are everywhere. The challenge becomes to write them down if only on a scrap of paper towel before I forget them. (Where do lost ideas go? Does another author, quicker and with more memory storage get them?)
          When I think of how many ideas are floating around, I think of my father-in-law.
          Farming seemed a noble thing to do so he and his brother left Exeter, Ontario. The brother settled in the grain belt of Saskatchewan and my father-in-law found an abandoned farm in the desert of eastern Alberta and got possession by driving school bus to pay off back taxes.
          Farming may have sounded noble, but his heart wasn’t in it. All his life, he remained a frustrated inventor. There had to be a better, more efficient, quicker way to do everything and he would spend hours adjusting and experimenting while one of his sons gnashed his teeth wanting nothing more than to get on with the job of seeding or harvesting the crop or whatever was on the seasonal agenda.
          His philosophy was why buy new when anything could be repaired with a piece of haywire?  His fix-it bent drove many of his sons to tearing at their hair when the new combine sat idle in the yard while their father insisted he could not only fix the old one but make it run better than the new. And maybe he could but with winter hovering on the horizon, the sons wanted only to get the crop off.
Not that his efforts were in vain. He came up with some nifty ideas. Why waste time forking off hay? He rigged up a sling to pull the load off the wagon.
We bought the family farm and on trips around the yards I would often find myself staring as some maze of wire and belts. Upon questioning my father-in-law or one of his sons, I would be told it was how he pulled the pump, or created an automatic waterer (long before one could go to the nearest farm store and buy one), or that how he figured out a machine to bunch the bales for easier pick up. Any number of things.
          I suppose being a farmer and having to do the actual physical work required in order to survive, he never had the time to pursue all his ideas.
It’s the same with a writer. I see story possibilities everywhere I look—the headlines about a baby girl abandoned, the reunion of old lovers who lost track of each other, the report of a man who rescued a woman trapped in a car—I could go on and on. There are too many ideas. Not enough time.
What amazes me is how a great idea will wed another great idea and the two of them breed and reproduce until there are hundreds of ideas forming a story.
I can’t say exactly how it begins. It’s almost magical. It’s like Robert Frost says as he describes the dawning of a poem.
‘It begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds or it doesn’t and comes to nothing.’
Now in case somebody was hoping for a list of ways to get ideas, here goes:
1.     Talk to people. Everybody has the germ of a story idea in their lives. Sometimes a whole lot of germs. J
2.     Read newspapers, magazines and yes, even those unbelievable shockers at the check out counter have great story starters—depending on your genre you might or might not be able to use “My mother was an alien.”
3.     Read non-fiction books. I am currently sifting my way through a book written about the Depression in Canada called Ten Lost Years. It’s full of vignettes of people who lived through it and you can believe there are story ideas marrying and reproducing like rabbits as I read it.
4.     Brainstorm, alone or with friends.
 
I’d love to hear both how ideas attack you and how you keep track of them.
 
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
  - Howard Aiken