Diary

I’ve recently taking up running again after a twenty-five year break. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped–something having to do with small children, a full-time job, and a nasty bout of viral pneumonia that sidelined me for months.

I suppose the biggest psychological factor was that I never really enjoyed running all that much. It was more about wanting to be on the other side of it, to spend the rest of my day having done it, rather than actually wanting to go out and have the experience. I ran so slowly I called it “going out for a trudge” because I didn’t think that even the rather laconic term “jogging” applied to what I did. Running itself was always about no more than getting to the end.

It’s been interesting to see how different it is now. Twenty-five years is enough time to watch a lot of things happen to one’s body, plenty of time to realize that there are nothing but bad reasons at my age to wait one more day, week, or month to get started on something good for me. And so I did. I got out a pair of trail shoes I’d bought a few years ago because they looked cute with jeans, and went down to my local YMCA for a course entitled “Running 101.”

My partner wondered aloud why anyone would need a class to learn to run. but having been a sturdy, athletic boy growing up in rural America, he figured it out for himself, like most kids do. I was an overweight pre-teen in the 1950s and no one cared if I could complete a fifty-yard dash, or do ten sit-ups, for that matter. After all, someone has to come in last. And yes, those are both things I remember not being able to do, although admittedly I didn’t get the point of bothering to try. Is PE over yet? That was the only question I had.

With my cute shoes on, I and my classmates headed out for a twenty-minute run on the first day of class. I was left in the dust by a group of people most of whom are about half my age, and by the time the twenty-minute run/walk was over, I was the last to finish of those who ran (some started out walking). The operative word, however, is “finish,” not “last.” Four weeks later, I’m just behind the fast group and running more than 5K in every class.
I don’t know what to attribute being better at it now than then. Maybe it’s that this time I feel more investment in taking control of the quality of my life rather than putting it off until later. I don’t really have a goal other than living in the best body I can. Ironically, the one goal it never would have occurred to me to set–to enjoy the sport–might actually be realized too.

One thing my previous experience with running taught me (other than the fact that I could indeed do it, if not happily or well) was to make analogies from running to the other tasks I face. The 10K (6.2 miles) organized run was just gathering steam in the 1980s, and I ran quite a few of those. Even today, more than two decades after my last one, I still find myself thinking, “this is like the mile 2 mark,” or 4, or 6. Each marker went with a state of mind and body that correlates to getting any kind of big project done.

Like writing a novel. I often ask myself, “so where am I in this process?” and think I am at 3K or 5K, or blissfully, at 6.15, with only the last few steps to go. But I’ve noticed this time around there’s another analogy as well between writing and running.

Every run has its own pattern. For me the first few minutes are the hardest. Every time I wonder whether I have it in me that day. By ten minutes, I’m feeling tired, and I’m still wondering the same thing. Then everything starts to click, and I can go for quite a while at a pretty good clip without feeling as if I need to stop. Now and again, I reach a point where I think “this is hard,” but most of the time I can power through it. If not, I stop, but usually not for more than a few seconds. Take that pattern, stretch it out over a year or more and–well, what do you know?–sounds just like writing a novel.

I’ve been in the huffing and puffing stage for a while with my novel-in-progress. I just could not hit stride and I’ve been dallying by the wayside trying to regroup. Now, however, I have my second wind and I’m off again. I’ll finish later in the fall than I had first thought, but the road ahead looks clear.

If this were a 10K, where would I be? Probably about mile 4, with 2.2 to go. A time to be both discouraged at how much lies ahead, and excited that I really am, once again, on the route and making it to the finish.

“To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”   Although philosopher Hannah Arendt wasn’t speaking of novelists in particular, her words seem quite apt, because writers’ imaginations go visiting every time we pull up a chair in front of our computer.

Like the other visits in life, sometimes we wish we could put it off for another day, and sometimes we anticipate it eagerly.  In the yearlong visit that constitutes the writing of my fourth novel, I know something about both attitudes.  For the last week or so, I’ve been putting off paying a call on my main character, who has just arrived in Granada and is going to have to create a new life for herself there.  However, this morning I woke up, ready to knock on her door.

A burst of energy and ideas drove me through the five pages I needed to set the scene and introduce the new characters she will have to contend with. Nevertheless, I’m still a long way from blazing through the next chapter.  It takes a while for scenes and people to come to life for me, but I am starting to get to the point–and this is a very good sign–where I so completely can’t wait to see what happens next that I have to force myself to stay in bed until the clock says 6AM. Not until then, not even 5:59, can I get up and rush to the computer and see what pours out onto the screen.

Having reach page 400 with this latest push this morning, I’m facing what is both a predicament and a blessing.  On the one hand, I don’t think it’s possible to get everything that needs to happen into the next 100 pages, at which point I will reach my arbitrarily imposed maximum length of 500 pages.  I’m worried that a manuscript longer than that may be more difficult for my agent to market, although I know both from personal experience as a reader and from what others have told me, that lovers of historical fiction are more likely to think greater length is a good thing than are fans of many other genres.

On the other hand, much as I love to write, it’s wonderful to have 400 polished pages behind me, and to know that the end is, if not exactly in sight, close enough to catch the scent when the wind is right.  It is interesting how this particular point in a novel has always brought a bit of a stall to my momentum, as if something about being able to acknowledge the end will come makes it harder to cope with how far away it is.  Years ago, I used to run 10Ks, and this is like being around the 7K mark. I think I can make it, but it’s awfully hard right now, which is the only time that counts, and I don’t want to think of how much lies ahead.  But just like with a footrace, it can only be done one step at a time, or in this case, one sentence at a time.

Gotta go now–visiting hours will be over soon and I have a young woman in Granada who’s expecting me.

Check it out–start to finish!  I’ve been working for the last month with Patricia Maas and Gabriel Porras of Blue Jay Technologies to revamp this website to make it more interactive, informative, useful, and fun.  Many pages are new, and most of those I’ve retained have changed a little or a lot. Hope you enjoy the visit, and let me know what you think at lacauthor@gmail.com.

I’m procrastinating.  I’ve come to a big turning point in my novel in progress and I’m doing everything else I can think of today except write–which accounts for the sudden urge to post something in this diary.

Everything about writing a novel is demanding, but some things are harder than others.  Hands down, the most difficult part for me is the opening chapter, because I don’t know the characters all that well, and I don’t yet feel as if I live in their house, in their town, in their era.

As a novel progresses there are other places that present a similar challenge. I’ve written and revised into marketable quality more than 350 pages of the book, but I have now reached the point where my main character has just arrived in a new city with an entirely new set of characters, and furthermore, by the end of this chapter, I’ll be jumping forward in time 5 years and she’ll go to another new town with another new set of characters.  It’s almost like starting from scratch except that I know my protagonist now, and all I have to do is supply the people and the situation, and she’ll take over and tell my fingers what to type.

All I have to do?  Sounds like a lot to me. Even minor characters need names, personalities and motivations, and places need to be thoroughly imagined–although fortunately, I learned recently, readers don’t necessarily want detailed physical descriptions of every last person and place because they prefer to imagine for themselves.

Luckily for me, before I left off writing, I made notes for this new section, including the main elements of the plot and the characters I would need to carry the plan out.  I took a look at these notes–less than a page total–and started thinking, “this is going to be good!”  Still, I’ve got the blank page heebie jeebies today, and I’m just going to let them stick around for a while until they get bored and check out of my brain.

it won’t take long for that. It’s an exciting world I’m writing about, with a main character I care deeply for.  I can’t wait to see what’s really going to happen.  It’s usually far different and better than the notes, and the only way to find out is to start writing.

Some famous writers cultivate an image of reckless disregard for their bodies.  Some are just plain weird, maladjusted, or out of touch with life in the real world.  And some, of course, are best described by all of the above.

I know a lot of writers, and I can attest to how basically normal most of us are. We have to be.  We function in an environment that has myriad ways to sap our energy and undermine our egos, and we have to be able to float on top of it all, at least most of the time.

I have been writing for publication for 11 years now (17 YA and 4 adult trade titles).  I pulled out a calculator to figure out how many pages of conventionally published writing they all add up to, and I’m astonished that it comes out to somewhere around 4000-4300 pages in books alone, not to mention book reviews, this diary, and other things I’ve written.  Interestingly, that comes out, using the low figure, to roughly 365 pages a year, or 1 published page a day for 11 years.

I’m not crowing here. I have been more fortunate in getting published than many of the

talented and committed writers I know.  I’m just thinking that this puts me in a pretty good position to comment on how to stay in writing for the long haul, without sacrificing health or sanity (at least I hope most people would agree I haven’t lost the latter).

I’m 300 pages into my novel in progress, and I am trying to learn from how wiggy I’ve gotten in the past, so I can avoid it this time. I’m a professor with summers off, a mixed blessing because the structure of going to work and interacting with a variety of people is good for me. People with different commitments and obligations might have to adjust the details, but I think the principle I’m sharing here is sound for everyone.

In brief, the problem with many writers, especially those who do it for a living, is that we think everything else we do is taking us away from our writing.  We don’t like that, so we devalue other things and try to do as little of them as possible when we’re hot in the middle of a project.  This is a mistake.

This summer I am telling myself that writing is only one of several good uses of my time, and it is inappropriate to be writing when I should be doing something else. I have a sign near my computer that has a list of 5 things:

Writing

Book Promotion

Exercise

Life Maintenance

R&R

Every one of those things is a valid and necessary part of my day.  I plan every day around ensuring that I put in at least an hour on each. Then I fill up the rest of my time with a mix of all of them, in whatever way works that day.

I’m not talking about the 8-hour standard workday, but the whole 12 hours from the time I get up (around 6AM) to the time I call a halt to everything but an evening with my sweetheart (around 6PM). On most days the majority of my time overall is taken up with writing, but as I get more invested in the other things on the list,  I often spend more than the minimum on them, and I still have a lot of time to write.

I ask myself a couple of times each day whether I’m doing a good mix of the 5 types of things, and if I’m not, I tell myself “it’s not writing time now.”

Haven’t exercised?  Do it!  Haven’t taken a shower or gone to the store? Do it. Haven’t stopped just to do something fun? Do it!

I’m having a great summer, and interestingly, I don’t think my writing productivity has dropped overall.  I’m still on track to finish novel #4 this fall, and I think I could have finished it only a few weeks earlier at most if I had done nothing else. And I feel great–not at all like that stringy-haired, unwashed, antisocial creature with a backache I vaguely remember from summers past.

Writing a novel is such a huge undertaking that writers run the gamut of emotions many times over during the process.  I’m sure as the remaining months go by in which I finish up my work in progress, THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD, I will have times when I have doubts not just about what I have written but about whether I am capable of making the book as good as I want it to be.  I’ll be amazed by surprises the characters have in store, and saddened and angered by some of the things that must happen to them. (I’d like to keep them all safe and happy, but that’s not the nature of either real or fictional lives.)

I’ve talked in the past in this diary about how writing can be so intimidating that I get scared to open the manuscript file on my computer.  It’s hard to “go there” sometimes because the work is so intense and it takes so much out of me. Once I am into it again, I become so compulsive that my life patterns get more out of whack than I want them to.  I can’t seem to stop writing, and when I make myself leave the computer, I can’t stop thinking about my book.

I took three weeks off in June to go to Spain and Portugal to research my novel in

progress, and when I returned, family obligations kept me away from my desk for another week.  But now I’ve been back on the job for a few days, and to my surprise, I wasn’t hesitant to dive back in.  In fact, I couldn’t wait.  I already have the first seventy-five pages revised to include material from my travels and other improvements that come from knowing the characters better and seeing more clearly where the story is going.

I already sense the first signals I’m getting weird and compulsive about my novel in progress, but I don’t care.  Writing is what I most love to do.  And as I said, writers run the gamut of emotions.  Right now, I am relishing the fact that I LOVE THIS BOOK!  I love the characters, I love the setting, I love the history, I love the message, I love the story.

Hang in there, I tell myself. Charge forward!  This can be the best work you’ve ever done.  Everything is there.  All it takes is me.  The computer is glowing.  I have a book to write.

I’ve written in this diary in the past about how important travel is to getting the details right in historical fiction. It’s exciting to see how accurately I have portrayed some locations just from researching photographs and descriptions of places, and there is also blessed relief in realizing how much embarrassment I may have avoided by being able to correct what was blatantly wrong.

I’ve also been reminded daily on this trip through Spain and Portugal researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD (my novel in progress) that a lot of the value in travel isn’t to confirm or correct details but to discover what simply wasn’t knowable without direct experiences of places or chances to talk with local people.  About Sagres, for example, I would probably never have known how much of a factor the wind is in everyday life on the southwest tip of Portugal.  The hotel clerk told me, “people who live here think something’s wrong when the wind stops blowing.”  Just the three days I spent in the area convinced me that the wind needs to be a dominant part of my description of the place.

Yesterday in Arevalo, north of Madrid, where Isabella (of “Ferdinand and Isabella” fame) spent her childhood, I understood for the first time what Isabella’s mother was up against when she was declared mad and sent away to live in seclusion with her small children in a town so small it isn’t even mentioned in the Michelin Guide and can barely be found on their map.

It was the equivalent of being sent to live in a palace on Alcatraz, a place whose very remoteness and inaccessibility made it a prison even though she lived in luxury.  If she wasn’t mad when she went to live there, it’s hard to see how she could have avoided madness afterwards– or perhaps even why she would have wanted to, since there must be some solace in detaching from such a reality.  I didn’t have a detailed plot for this part of the story until I understood what life would be like in Arevalo. Now I see so clearly how my protagonist Aya fits into the place that she seems like part of its true history.

And then there are places like Sevilla and Granada, which are wonderful places to visit, but the reality is that with few exceptions, like Granada’s Alhambra Palace, there not much in the urban landscape that hasn’t been rebuilt since the fifteenth century, when my novel is set. The synagogues and mosques are gone and even the churches have gone from medieval to baroque and beyond in their styles.  Aya may have sat in the Seville cathedral but none of the decorations that dominate the experience today would have been there.  Likewise, taking a boat ride along the Guadalquivir River, I saw a number of amazing modern bridges with stunning archtecture, but had nothing resembling Aya’s experience coming up the same river.

I’m not complaining—I am lucky to be here and having a rich experience—but it’s turned out to be hard to find my story in many of the places I have visited, unlike in Venice, Greece, or France, where I traveled for the first three novels. This is due in large part to the fact that the Reconquista so thoroughly and deliberately reshaped Spain. I was told that if I wanted to know what Granada was like under the Muslim Caliphate I should go to Marrakesh. Sounds good to me—next time!

I went on high school dates with James Bond.

Well, not exactly. The first movies made from Ian Fleming’s Cold War-inspired spy novels came out when I was in high school, and I suppose the date who paid my admission and bought the popcorn thought I was only with him.

Looking back now I can see how important movies like “From Russia with Love” and “Goldfinger” were in adding wanderlust to the general–well, what can I say?–lustiness of my teenage years.

Even when James Bond movies went from the right kind of silly to just plain silly, I saw every one over the decades, first with boyfriends and then with my own children. Even when they were wincingly awful, at the very least I was exposed to some fabulous places I wanted to visit some day. Many years later I planned a side trip in Italy to include a stop at the Italian ski resort at Cortina d’Ampezzo just because I loved the way the town looked nestled in under the peaks of the Dolomites in “For Your Eyes Only.”

Except it didn’t look like that.  The street scenes didn’t match the actual streets, and the big action sequence obviously had been shot on a set and later merged with a backdrop filmed on location. I was really disappointed, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Presumably it would be hard to find a florist willing to have a motorcycle crash through the window of his or her shop, even to help James Bond make a point about how he can fend off the bad guys without breaking a sweat.

I thought about this yesterday as I took stock of the area of Portugal just west of Lisbon, the first stop in my research trip for novel number four.  Though I do the most thorough research I can on the settings of every scene, sometimes the imagination is, well, a bit too imaginary.

Sometimes every last little bit of accuracy doesn’t matter all that much. Though the typical reader might not know or care whether the ocean is visible from a particular hilltop, or what kind of trees or wildflowers grow in a specific valley, I care about all that down to the last detail, even though I know that in the end, I may choose plausibility over the exact facts I uncover.

But not always.  The first days of my research trip to Portugal and Spain  have been an odd combination of “uh oh,” “ah hah,” and “oh well,” an amalgam of things I have to rewrite because they are simply wrong, things that can be made much clearer and vivid in detail, and things that are not exactly the way I pictured but don’t really need to be changed.

An example of the first is how Aya, the heroine of the novel, arrives at the palace of Sintra. Plain and simple, I had the look and layout of the entrance to the palace wrong. Easily fixed.  An example of the second is my realization that this part of Portugal resembles the Pacific Northwest more than the Mediterranean climate I imagined.  That matters a lot.  Aya lives in a thick forest, and she would move around far differently than I thought. Many scenes will have to be adjusted, but I will be able to make the book far more vivid as a result of having visited the places where the novel is set.

Probably the most common reaction I have had is a shrug of the shoulders.  The Sintra palace garden isn’t exactly the way I pictured it, but I need certain details to be the way I have them, and because the inaccuracy is irrelevant, I’m sticking with my version.

Historical novelists, at least the ones I know, approach their work with integrity.  Our job is to fill out observable and recorded fact with what could have been. We don’t make it all up. We embellish with our imaginations, change what we must when we uncover important new information, and leave alone what works when there is no relevant issue at stake.  The facts make our books “smart reads,” but the characters and story make them “good reads.”  I’m going for the best of both!

A lookover by a booklover.  Say that four times fast!

I’m happy to announce that such an overview is exactly what will be happening at San Diego State University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in November 2010, when I teach a mini course entitled “Forgotten Females.”

I first learned about the Osher Institute when I was asked by author and PBS host Kathi Diamant to give a talk to the SDSU Osher book club, who read THE FOUR SEASONS a few months back.  I had so much fun with this lively and well informed group (of course it helped that they really liked the book!) that when the director of the institute, Rebecca Lawrence, asked me if I would like to join their faculty, I jumped at the opportunity.

I’ve spent so much time teaching and writing about women who have not received appropriate and sufficient attention for their  accomplishments that I have a backlog of things I’d really like to talk about.  I came up with a four-part class, now listed in the calendar section of this website, that will focus on music and science, as well as two historical eras, the ancient and medieval worlds. There are female political and military leaders as well as mathematicians, physicists, poets and scholars whose names and accomplishments have been by and large pushed to the margins of history, but even the women who stuck to traditional roles often played a larger role in the economic success and social stability of their cultures than has been acknowledged.

Interested?  Check out the SDSU Osher website and sign up!  And if you don’t live in the area, check out the Extended Studies department at a local university.  Chances are there’s an Osher Institute there too.

In the San Diego area there is also an Osher Institute at UCSD, and if you check my calendar you will see I am giving a talk there this fall as well.

Osher’s purpose is to promote lifelong learning, and the only rule to be a member is that you must be at least fifty-five years old.  You are supposed to be retired or semi-retired, but when I bemoaned that this would make me ineligible (if you count my writing I have two full-time jobs!), I was told that basically, no one asks.

Take a look at Osher.  I bet, like me, you’ll want to sign up for just about everything.

A few weeks ago a high school friend put out a message on Facebook, asking if anyone might by chance be available to be a last-minute replacement for her daughter on a trip to the Middle East.  When it turned out that I would be done with spring semester in time to meet her for five days in Cairo at the tail end of her trip, she threw in the frequent flyer miles for the airfare and the extra bed in the hotel, and I was hooked (and booked)!  Now, just about a month after I first heard she wanted a companion, I am already home reacquainting myself with the experience of ten time zones’ worth of jet lag.

I went prepared to be dazzled by the pyramids, the Nile and the Egyptian Museum, and indeed I was, but as usual, it is the unexpected things that make the most lasting impression.  One of these is so relevant to my writing that I want to share it here.

We took the Cairo metro several times during our stay (we should be so lucky as to have a subway so clean, orderly and modern in our own cities!), and for the first few rides, the experience was typical. Men, women, and children shared the cars we rode in, and though most people minded their own business, the men, to put it politely, checked us out far more extensively than seemed warranted.  Then we noticed a sign for a women-only car and decided to hop aboard next time.

The experience was extraordinary.  While people in the rest of the cars traveled through Cairo quietly wrapped up in their own private worlds and ignoring each other as much as possible (well, except for the stares), the women’s car was lively with conversation and laughter.  When women looked at the two of us, they often did so with a smile.  It was so pleasant and wonderful to be there, part of an instant community of people who, though strangers, know something about each other through the common experience of being a woman.

I understand there is some controversy among the people of Cairo about whether there should be such cars, but I won’t go into the various arguments here.  What sticks with me about the experience is how well it illustrates the underlying point of all my fiction.  There’s a richness in women’s lives that only comes out when they are among themselves.  Though I wish we lived in a world of greater equality of the sexes, there is something precious about the space women carve out for themselves in male-dominated societies.

There’s an analogy to be drawn between the paucity of information about the daily lives of women in the past and the women in those subway cars in Cairo. For centuries men have been the arbiters of what was (and is) important to record and remember about their societies, and the result is that almost everything about the world of women goes unnoticed.  Men concentrate on the activities important to them, i.e. the cars in which they are riding. All the while, out of sight and perhaps out of mind, women rattle along on the same train, making another world with just each other. We always have, and we are very good at it.

That’s what I want my books to convey, and I am grateful for those cars full of women for giving me such a beautiful image to keep in mind as I try to bring characters to life from cultures that missed the train altogether when it came to valuing what the women were thinking, doing, and contributing.

PS–I didn’t take the photo included here, because I figured out that many Egyptian women really would rather not have their picture taken by strangers. This is a shot I found online.