The HEA Cafe

Chicago Blog #1
What do you think the invention was that made Chicago the hub of all trade, all railroads in America? Why did all rail-lines lead to Chicago, just as in ancient times all roads led to Rome?
 

In the early 19th century, Chicago on Lake Michigan and St. Louis on the Mississippi River were competing to be the major inland trading center of the expanding United States.  The question was would America’s heartland send everything by rail to Chicago to be loaded onto ships and then to New York via the Great Lakes? Or would everything be sent to St. Louis, put on ships and then sent down the Mississippi River to New Orleans?
 

A warehouse man in Buffalo, New York, Joseph Dart was the man whom you’ve never heard of, but who made Chicago the hub.  He did this by inventing something you’ve probably never thought about very much–unless you’re born on a farm.  Dart invented the grain elevator in 1842.
 

Since I grew up in Illinois and also lived for nearly 20 years in Iowa, I am acquainted with grain elevators.  They are those tall metal buildings near the railroad in small farming communities all over the Midwest.  When I was in college I was visiting a girlfriend whose family (the Browns) were farmers and I actually worked with the mother as she helped her husband harvest crops one fall. The men are in the fields with the combines, harvesting the corn.  Usually their wives drive the grain truck back and forth between the field and the grain elevator in town.  When we would arrive at the grain elevator with another full truckload of grain, Mrs. Brown would drive onto a special plate (or plates) which would weigh the grain (subtracting the weight of the truck) and the bottom of the heavy-duty grain truck would open in the grain would pour out into a grate below. Then it would be lifted up into the elevator.
 

Now what’s the big deal about grain elevators?  The big deal is that St. Louis kept the old system of sacking grain and then shipping the sacks down the river on barges.  But Chicago built grain elevators on the lakefront so that farmers at first could just drive their loaded wagons to the elevator and not have to bag it first or wait for longshoremen to load the bags onto barges.  As soon as the railroads saw that the grain elevator took out the laborious and time-consuming sacking of grain and loading of grain bags, they built the railway lines to Chicago, not St. Louis.  Have you ever heard of Joseph Dart?  Is he even listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica?  No.
 

The effect of his invention in 1842 caused many other American financial institutions to be born.  I will be talking about those on Thursday.
My source is Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon, 1999.

When I volunteered to blog on the 11^th of each month at the HEA Café, it didn’t dawn on me—at that time—that my first blog would be on 9/11. For those of us in North America and in many other countries on this planet, it’s a somber day of reflection and remembrance of the innocents and heroes who lost their lives.

So let’s talk about heroes because this is, after all, the HEA Café.  

Heroes come in all shapes, sizes, genders, race, religions, philosophies and—when you write science fiction romance as I do—species. The firefighters, EMTS and law enforcement officers who took the stairs of the Twin Towers in New York City that day, the military personnel who rushed into the burning Pentagon offices and the flight crew and passengers on the hijacked jets were of no one belief, no one race. And not a one of them, I’m sure, woke up that morning thinking this was the day to play the hero. Their parts were unscripted. There were no first drafts, no cut-and-paste edits to smooth over the rough parts. And the plot was clearly not written by a romance author because the happy endings were few.

But they were heroes, and at times I think it’s the heroism, more than the tragedy, that continues keeps our interest about that day and the days afterwards. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For years, the romance novel industry has written about police, firefighter and military heroes—both male and female.  We’ve written about their fears, their failings, their rewards, their loves. We’ve chronicled emergency room doctors and nurses, and civilian and military flight crews. The books of Suzanne Brockmann, Linda Howard, Lindsay McKenna, Cindy Dees and others brought us in to the lives of “trained” heroes. Unsuspecting heroes are found books by authors too numerous to list.

And more romance authors than you might be aware of not only write about heroes but are military veterans themselves. The impressive list (along with some terrific Then and Now photos) can be found on the RomVets site: http://www.romvets.com/   This doesn’t include authors, like Lynda Sandoval and Candace Sams,  who’ve worked in law enforcement, or fire and rescue (if someone knows of a site for that, please let me know).

The unexpected challenge of the moment that creates the hero is something that drives many bestsellers. We saw it in real life, on television on September 11, 2001 and if anything, you’d think such stark reality—and with a real lack of happy endings—would have put a serious dent in the desire to be part of the hero business. But military and law enforcement applications rose after 9/11.

I think that says a lot about the human spirit.

I think it also shows the reason why we authors crave happy endings for our heroes. We write about men and women who are pushed beyond their limits, and we want them to succeed. More than succeed, we want them to be rewarded. So we pen happy endings for our heroes. They may be down and dinged-up a bit but they rise, and hope and love rises with them. In a world where happy endings are never a guarantee, we can at least offer a positive outcome in the pages of a book. This police officer, this EMT, this military chaplain, this starship commander will succeed, find love and continue on making the world—or the galaxy—a little better place.

And the world being a better place is something that’s good for everyone.

So as we pass through another remembrance of 9/11 and get back to our regularly scheduled lives—and books—take a moment now and then to think about heroes. The ones we’ve lost. The ones we’ve read about. The ones that are still here. The ones that patrol our streets, staff our emergency rooms, pilot the jets overhead. The ones that run into burning buildings. The ones that stand on foreign soil.

I’ll keep putting them in my books if you’ll keep holding them in your hearts and prayers.  

Every time you hear on the news about people running away from a crazed gunman, remember that someone’s son or daughter in a police uniform is running toward that crazed gunman.

– from What Cops Would Like You To Know, author unknown, posted on various law enforcement sites on the Internet

Namaste, ~Linnea

Linnea Sinclair
www.linneasinclair.com
www.myspace.com/linneasinclair
RITA© Award Winning SF Romance
Bantam Spectra 2005:  FINDERS KEEPERS, GABRIEL’S GHOST, AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS
2007: GAMES OF COMMAND, THE DOWN HOME ZOMBIE BLUES, SHADES OF DARK

Hello everyone!

Just a quick reminder that we have some upcoming workshops booked at the Café. Workshops are held in the third week of the month and they’re free. They can be held all on one day, or on specific days, or broken down into Monday to Friday lectures - the format is up to the presenter. We have two booked already for this fall:
During the week of September 17, Sierra Donovan will be teaching ON (AND OFF) THE AIR: AN INSIDE LOOK AT RADIO.

During the week of October 15, Renee Russell will be teaching FACTUAL FICTION: Using Genealogical Resources To Create Accurate Historicals.

You can find out more about both authors by clicking through to their bios on the sidebar and visiting their website. Here’s hoping both of them will stop by in advance to update us on the schedule for their workshops.

See you here!

We’ll be starting to feature individual authors at the HEA Cafe in September of this year. There are so many of us and we were all just too polite to leap in , so now we have booked days. There’s a calendar in the sidebar that you can check for the daily featured author: these dates are perpetual, so you can visit with each author each month.

This doesn’t replace our Shameless Self Promotion week - the first week of the month - or our workshop week - the third week of the month - or just general chatter in the cafe. I’m thinking it’s going to get busy around here, so you’d best snag a good table early and get your mug filled up by one of our cute cabana boys before the line gets too long.

We’ll start Guest Author Days on September 1. See you here!

Claire

Good Morning everyone,

As many of you know, RWA (Romance Writer’s of America) held their national conference in Dallas last week.  So this week, I’d like to ask those who attended a few questions for those who couldn’t attend for whatever reason.

1.  What’s your strongest memory of the event?  Paint it in words for us.

2.  What piece of knowledge did you pick up that you think we all HAVE to know to succeed in our writing careers?

3.  What was the funniest thing that happened at the event?

4.  What Marketing trends did you hear about?

5.  Would you go the the conference next year?  Why or why not?