The HEA Cafe

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.

I have an appointment this afternoon to join another member of our library foundation board at a framing shop. I’ve served on the Alachua County (Florida) Library District Foundation board for years, and our purpose is to raise one million dollars for our library endowment fund.

So why am I going to a frame shop? Because one of my tasks on the board was to oversee renovation of our meeting room at the Headquarters Library. The space was industrial and utilitarian, and what we wanted was a board room–a place that made people feel when they walked in that it was more than functional, it was attractive. Attractive rooms make people more relaxed, and we hope that translates into not only a nice meeting space for us, but also a room that will help potential donors see our organization as successful and worthy of bequests.

At the frame shop I’ll have to weigh in with my opinion on matting, framing the art for our board room, the lighting, the colors in the board room, etc. These details make the difference between something that makes someone respond positively, and something that jars their sensibilities.

This doesn’t come naturally to me, in decorating or in writing. At home, I’d hire a professional. In my writing, I write myself notes. I can be pounding away at a tense scene full of luscious dialog and I’ll have to stop and write in brackets [SOUNDS! SMELLS! SIGHT!] to remind myself to go back and fill in the details that make a scene work.

See, I know what it looks like in my head. You, the reader, may not. Not until I add all the little things that make a scene well rounded, that contribute to your understanding of who the characters are and what’s motivating them.

This is also useful when you don’t want to interrupt the flow of the story with details that absolutely, positively can be filled in later. I do this most with clothing. Unless there’s a pivotal plot point revolving around a piece of clothing (like the neckerchief that hides the lack of an “Adam’s apple” in a cross-dressing story), I can go back and fill it in later. So my first rough draft has things like “She studied her [BALL GOWN] in the mirror while debating whether or not to wear the [JEWELRY, SHAWL?] and thought about what she had say to him tonight…”

Clearly, what matters here in the big picture is what she’s going to say to him tonight. But the details! The reader wants to know what she’s wearing, and it makes a difference. Is it demure? Sexy? Finely tailored or hastily altered? All of these details make a difference, but you don’t necessarily need to agonize over them right away–you can revisit them later.

It’s not the devil in the details, it’s the beauty of your writing. If there’s a devil in this mix, it’s allowing yourself to get slowed down by the details. Just remember to go back and revisit them, and the details will help the reader respond positively to your story,

Does writing make you cry?

Not because you’re banging your head against the keyboard in frustration, but because what you’re writing wrenches at you.  It should.  When you’re writing an emotionally draining scene, especially the “black moment”,  you should be feel it.

Remember Joan Wilder at the beginning of “Romancing the Stone”?  She was sobbing her way through a box of tissues while typing the end of her novel, and I laughed, but I totally understood it.  If you’re not affected by your own writing, can you expect your readers to feel the emotion coming off the page?  I was writing a scene yesterday that ended with the hero crying, and by the end of the scene, I was blowing my nose too.

I suspect for some writers it is a purely mechanical process, but I’m pleased by the number of authors who confess that they too have “Joan Wilder” moments.  I always wondered if I was just odd. After all, I’m a sucker for cheap sentimentality.  Hallmark card commercials make my eyes misty.  Give me a scene in a movie with a dying dog and music in a minor key, and I’m plowing through the tissues.

On a totally different note, you might also “feel the burn” when crafting a good sensual scene.  At least, you might feel it before you’re in the 15th reading for edits.  Some writers have to set the mood for themselves with candles, soft lighting, utter isolation.  Others can hammer them out with screaming kids running in asking for snacks.  Every writer’s different, but I know that for me, I have to be feeling something if I want my reader to be feeling something.  I wrote a scene in Captain Sinister’s Lady that still gets to me, where a young man has to leave his adoptive family because racism in his antebellum town make it impossible for him to have a decent life.  It wasn’t easy to write it.  But I took the tissues and got to work, and when I was done, I blew my nose and said, “Hey!  That’s not half bad!”

So when you’re writing those key emotional scenes, ask yourself if you’re investing enough of yourself into it–are you feeling sad over your characters, or aroused, or elated, or happy?  If not, maybe you need to give it a second look.

I like reading books about pirates.  I like writing books about pirates.  But let’s face it, pirates are people who rob other people for a living.  This is a problem for me when I’m trying to write a pirate hero.  Would I write a bank robber hero?  Not very likely.  So why are we willing to accept pirate heroes?

Part of it is the romance of piracy.  Running away to sea, answering to no one but your shipmates, living life for the moment rather than the future, all good things.  Who would you rather spend an evening drinking with, Long John Silver or the guy who owns the tavern?  Plus the pirates get to dress with more flair than the shopkeeper.

As romance writers we work around this by making our pirates tragic, or funny, or on a mission, or in disguise, but unless you’re really tricky, it all comes back to him taking what isn’t his, and that’s theft.

You can avoid this issue, to a degree, by making your pirates privateers instead.  The difference between a pirate and a privateer is that a privateer has a license to steal.  Literally.  Governments would issue “letters of marque” to sea captains, authorizing them to stop-and-rob enemy ships.

The legal line between piracy and privateering could shift around, and many famous pirates were also privateers, and vice versa, Sir Henry Morgan and William Kidd both had letters of marque, but were also charged with piracy by England.   In the early 19th Century, Mexico and South American countries breaking away from Spain issued letters of marque to captains of all backgrounds who would agree to harass Spanish shipping.  Many of these sea rovers were little more than pirates, but it was in the interest of the rebelling countries to harass Spain, even if the privateer captains were neglectful about making sure the government issuing the letter of marque got its cut of the booty.

In the United States, the US Merchant Marine proudly includes privateers among its founders, pointing out, rightly, that in its earliest days the US only had merchant ships that could be put into action, not a standing navy. In the War of 1812 there were 23 USN ships in service, and 517 privateers.  Becoming a privateer was a favorite “get rich quick” plan for merchant captains, though naturally it carried a high risk.  The ships you attacked were likely to fight back, and if you were captured, the enemy nation might not wish to honor the letter of marque. John Paul Jones was a hero to the US, a pirate to the British.

All European and US governments engaged in privateering (they got a cut of the take) well into the 19th century, however, the US did not sign the 1856 Declaration of Paris that ended European use of privateers.  The Confederate States of America issued letters of marque to allow Southern privateers to harass US shipping during the Civil War and while we don’t issue letters of marque in the US today, it’s still possible.  Section 8 of the United States constitution says that Congress has the power “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water”.

It would make for an interesting contemporary romance–a bold, swashbuckling adventurer, perhaps a former Special Forces operative, is issued a letter of marque and reprisal to go hunt down terrorists.

I’m not going to write that one, but it’s an interesting idea.  In the meantime, I’ll go back to working on my pirate and privateer historicals, ‘cause who doesn’t like to read about pirates?  I know I do.

Autumn comes late to Florida, indeed, in some parts of the state it doesn’t arrive at all. But in North Florida we’re now in our autumn/winter season, or as we like to say, “The season when you can open the windows again”.

I find this switch from the heat and humidity of the summer to the more temperate days of a Florida winter stirs my creative juices. I’m once again able to sit out on my screen porch beyond 9:00 in the morning, enjoying the butterflies hovering over my butterfly-friendly container garden. The days are energizing, and this is felt throughout the community. This is the time of year when we have outdoor art shows and music festivals. The summer is simply too hot and too wet. This is also the time when the farmers’ market begins to bloom with winter flowers, like mums and pansies, and winter greens. It’s salad time at the market, ’cause once again, the summer is too hot and wet to grow much besides corn and tomatoes.

Those of you preparing for a northern winter (or a southern summer down in Australia) have my sympathy. As I told someone on my annual winter trek to the frozen north, “The only good thing about traveling up here in February is having a return ticket that says ‘Florida’.” This is our payoff for the 100F temps and 98% humidity, the hurricanes and mosquitoes, the droughts and wildfires.  I like to take my notebook computer out with me these days, finding that being away from my desk and enjoying the sunshine can get me through some rough writing patches. I enjoy feeling the change of seasons, and as a writer I like how it makes me feel different, more creative, more willing to try something a bit different. I hope that whatever season you’re experiencing now, you enjoy it to its fullest.