The HEA Cafe

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I love the Fourth of July, and always have.  When I was a youngster we would hope that Dad made a summer business trip to Wisconsin, where he could buy legal fireworks and bring them home to Minnesota, much to Mom’s dismay.  But there’s something about loud, noisy explosions that just make the holiday come alive (provided you don’t blow your fingers off–how many times did I hear that every summer?).

Our nation’s love of pyrotechnics to celebrate Independence Day goes back to our Founding Fathers, and John Adams, who said in a letter to his wife Abigail, “The day will be the most memorable in America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival…it ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade…bonfires and illuminations (fireworks) from one end of this continent to the other, from this day forward, forevermore.”

And speaking of John Adams, he’s who I want blurbing my next book.  I’m reading Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty (highly recommended) and ran across a line that made me grin real hard:

“But they didn’t lead a retired life…John Adams, so accustomed to having Abigail run everything, took to reading romance novels, much to his wife’s amazement, and continued to rely on her to manage their finances.”

I’d love to know what he was reading!
Fireworks and illuminations on July 4th make me think of my own writing of historical romance, and the serendipitous moments that fall into your lap. I realized that if my WIP’s current action is set around autumn 1814, I might be able to work in the burning of Washington and the battle of Fort McHenry. Sure enough, my dates coincided and suddenly I had a whole new scene referencing the rockets’ red glare from the poem “Defence of Fort McHenry”, better known to us as The Star Spangled Banner, by Francis Scott Key.

So if you’re one of the millions of Americans celebrating your nation’s independence and the beginnings of our growth as a beacon of democracy and freedom to the world, don’t forget to remember the men and women who made this all possible then, as well as the men and women who defend our shores today.  Remember, some of them, like you (and like John Adams) are romance readers!

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When I was a little girl I loved pirate stories, especially tales of Ann Bonny and Mary Read. The idea of women pirates who fought their way across the Carribean for booty and plunder fascinated me, just as these tales fascinated English readers in 1724 who bought Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. Sales were no doubt assisted by the book’s woodcuts of Ann and Mary as bosom baring babes in breeches.
So when it came time to research my own novels, I was thrilled to find that Bonny and Read were not alone. There have always been women who went to sea to make new lives for themselves, as pirates, sailors, warriors, and in the navy. In her comprehensive study Bold in Her Breeches, Jo Stanley calls these women “transgressive rovers”, women who operate outside society’s rules.

When “Calico Jack” Rackham’s black hulled sloop was attacked off of Jamaica in 1720, the two pirates who put up the fiercest resistance with cutlass, pistol and raw language were Ann Bonny and Mary Read, fighting at each other’s backs even as their male shipmates ran away.

In She Captains, Joan Druett says that Ann Bonny had joined “Calico Jack” as his lover, but became part of the crew. She never pretended not to be a woman. Mary Read, on the other hand, was a transvestite who dressed as a man and went to sea, first as a British seaman, later as a pirate with Calico Jack’s crew.

The story goes that Ann took a liking to the handsome “lad”, Jack got jealous, and Mary revealed her sex to avoid problems. A friendship formed between the women that lasted until they were brought to trial in Jamaica. While Ann was Jack’s lover, Mary took an unnamed young pirate as her paramour.

Both women “pled their bellies” during their trial, claiming they couldn’t be hanged because they were pregnant.
Mary refused to testify against her lover, but Ann was angry with Jack’s poor performance when they were captured, according to the court records: “She was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”

Mary died in prison of a fever, but Ann’s fate is unknown. There’s no record of her being hanged, so she may have gone on to live an interesting, if less public life, elsewhere.

In this article I focused on the “bad girls”, the pirates and buccaneers. But there are plenty of women who went to sea to serve alongside their husbands aboard whalers, or as fisherwomen, or as “seamen” and sailors. There are well documented cases of women fighting for Britain during the Napoleonic wars, many of them serving with distinction before their sex was revealed and they had to leave the Royal Navy or the Marines. Sometimes the woman was only found out after dying in battle, bravely fighting alongside the other Jack Tars.

While the United States has a less colorful history of women’s naval exploits, it’s worth noting that the Flying Cloud was
navigated by Eleanor Creesy in the 1850’s when it broke all records on the New York to San Francisco voyage around Cape Horn.
If you wish to read more about seafaring women, here are some recommended books:

She Captains–Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett
Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women by David Cordingly
The Pirate Queen–In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea by Barbara Sjoholm
Bold in her Breeches–Women Pirates Across the Ages by Jo Stanley
Flying Cloud–The True Story of America’s Most Famous Clipper Ship and the Woman Who Guided Her by David Shaw

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Everything I know about writing I learned from my dog, Yofi. Oh sure, her lovemaking scenes involve more buttsniffing than mine, and there was that disaster where her hero was distracted by a can opener while he was disarming a bomb, but overall, I can learn a lot from her.

For example:

Stay focused.
When she’s in the backyard hunting moles, Yofi can stand still forever, not an eyelid twitching, not a hair moving. She has her eyes on the prize, and she will do whatever it takes to get it. When she makes her move, her muscles explode into action as she begins digging furiously.
She’s not distracted by laundry or other books or rejection letters from publishers. She’s going to get that mole, and that’s all that matters.

Be a big dog in a little package.
Sure, we snicker at wiener dogs, but as dachshund owners know, inside, they’re Rottweilers. They’re willing to take on all comers, and they don’t back down. They don’t let their size keep them from doing what needs to be done. Remember, it’s not the dog in the fight, it’s the fight in the dog.
Same thing with writing. Don’t be intimidated by writers who make the NYT list or blog about their world book tours. You can be a big dog, even if you’re writing for a small publisher. You just have to put all of your fight into it, and believe in your heart that you’re a Rottweiler.

When you’re not working, relax.
When Yofi isn’t trying to save the world from moles, she doesn’t obsess over them. She puts them behind her, and makes sleeping an art form. She saves her energy for what’s important. She takes time to sniff…well, not the roses, but you get the idea.

Characterization.
I admit, dachshunds don’t have to work that hard at characterization because they’re so darn adorable. It’s not like they’re cats or something.
But even when it comes naturally, it’s important to remember that you need to pick out the details to make the character come alive–how he stands, how he laughs, what he enjoys and doesn’t enjoy, whether his tail wags and his ears perk up when he sees the heroine, that sort of thing.

Set goals.
One evening I heard the dog barking in an especially frantic manner, and then quiet. I knew this meant there was another animal about, so I rushed out into the yard. Sure enough, she had her jaws clamped around the tail of an armadillo that outweighed her and was armored as well. But Yofi wasn’t letting go. She dug in all of her 12 ½ pounds and held on for dear life while the armadillo scrabbled at the ground. I finally got them separated with a broom and the ‘dillo scampered off to safety, but that dog was as proud as if she’d just won Westminster.
She set her goal and she achieved it. She was going to capture that invader, even if the whole world thought she was too small to make it happen.
Do you have days when you think you’ll never finish the book? Clamp your jaws down and don’t let go.

So my muse inspires me as she lies on her bed in my office. Sometimes when I get stuck, I ask myself, “What would the dog do?” Usually the answer isn’t at all helpful–licking yourself really doesn’t replace conflict resolution, but sometimes she leads me in the right direction. All I have to remember is that if it’s a dog’s life, it could be one we would be wise to learn from.

I’m not as far along as I’d like with my WIP (Work in Progress) because I sent a partial to my agent, and he sent back a note saying, essentially, “Kill the backstory and start with someone bleeding.”

When I saw this I slapped myself upside the head and said “D’oh!” because it took me back some years to when I worked in news. I’ve been a news reporter, radio news anchor, radio news director and producer of the local TV news. There’s a nasty little saying in broadcasting: “If it bleeds, it leads.” This means if you have a shooting, horrific accident or tornado, it goes at the top of the newscast. In a newspaper, it’s called “Over the fold”.

There’s a reason for this: You want to grab peoples’ attention and hold it. A story about the proposed tax hike is important to everyone in the county, but it’s a snoozefest–unless you can tie it to some poor schlub who’s going to lose the little hardscrabble piece of land his family’s owned since they settled it before the Civil War. That’s exciting! That grabs attention! It tugs at your heart-strings!

It’s just like the first and most basic rule of newsgathering: “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is.” Get the reader’s attention by showing them something they’re not expecting. The ordinary isn’t news, the out-of-the-ordinary is news. One of my best journalism professors would snidely scrawl “So what?” in red ink across my news stories if all the facts were correct, but the story was b-o-r-i-n-g.

And he was right. It’s the same thing with writing your novel. “Make someone bleed!” is good advice. Don’t get sucked into loading your backstory up front because your reader 1. Likely doesn’t need as much information as you think she needs and 2. You can work it into the story down the road. Make the reader ask “What? How did she get onto a pirate ship? How’s she going to stay alive on a pirate ship? Is that guy going to die?”

They’ll keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. You can always insert details of her terrible childhood later. Think about all the exciting books you’ve read, the ones that kept you up past your bedtime ‘cause you had to find out what happened next–if you can hook ‘em at the beginning and keep the excitement rolling, the reader will stay along for the full ride.

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.