The Frugal New Englander Tackles Packages

When I was a little girl, my mother, who had grown up close to poverty and never forgot it, used to save old packages--envelopes, boxes, mailers. And, she reused them. Those days are gone, and for very good reasons. I speak from experience.

My least favorite package comes from the clothing company that sends a cotton shirt in a plastic bag inside a package whose interior sides are covered in sticky film treated so that it doesn't respond to the plastic bag. This would be fine except the entire parcel has to be torn open to get at the shirt inside, and there's no way to use the packaging to return said item in case it doesn't fit. And, of course, it doesn't fit.

Next comes the paper book package with the bubble-wrap lining. I dislike this one because I can't recycle it after I manage to tear it open. But this is still better than the spongy parcel stuffed with shredded paper, which spills all over the porch before I even get it inside the house and then leaves a trail to the kitchen. The parcel barely survived an unknown encounter and is bleeding all over the kitchen table. But it is fully recyclable.

Next up is the cardboard book package for a single book. This sounds ideal--hard to damage in transit, fully recyclable, reusable, solid protective cover. But it requires a wrestler to get it open. This I manage because I make bread the old fashioned way, with lots of kneading, so I have muscles still, and I use them on this package. The book arrives undamaged, not counting the flight across the kitchen and crash into the wall as it springs loose from its cardboard prison.

Of course, I appreciate the large cardboard boxes that arrive with no more than three books inside and enough bubble wrap for forty piled in on top, leaving the books free to slide around over thousands of miles until arriving on my porch. As a frugal New Englander, I waste several minutes trying to decide if I should save the bubble wrap for later use. I do not save it because it takes up too much room. My horror of clutter beats out my distaste of waste.

Least expected is the large manila envelope designed to hold up to ten pages of typed paper stuffed with at least two books. The four-inch tear in one side holds long enough for the parcel to make it to my front porch, where the postman slides it to the edge. I'm grateful it's not raining.

Mixed in among all these parcels arriving in various states of disintegration or protected against the most determined opener, I receive a large white envelope with a glassine window. Inside is a catalog for a company selling trinkets from whom I've never purchased a thing. The back page is torn and dirty, with a large boot print across it. Safely tucked into the envelope, the catalog arrives in my mailbox with a note of apology from the post office.

I hardly know what to make of this reverence for a store catalog as I sweep up the stuffing from yet another damaged parcel. After some thought, I wonder if the man at the post office is related to my mother. Probably not. But perhaps he's a New Englander? Yes, for sure.

Balance in the Writing Life

In the middle of my years in graduate school I found myself drowning in research. I loved what I was doing, studying several aspects of India, but I was definitely doing too much of it. I sat up at my desk in the library one afternoon thinking, I need to do something different.

I have often attended concerts when I needed to relax, after giving up playing a musical instrument for many years. But wanting to do something different isn't exactly the same as needing a vacation, though I probably needed one of those too. What I was sensing was the need for variety. Like many other writers, I can write twelve to eighteen hours a day for a few days in order to meet a deadline, but then I need to do something different. I need balance. I need a counterweight to writing, something to balance the activities of my life.

A good writer friend manages to write at least one book a year along with short stories and run a professional design business. But she also knits--a lot. She produces beautiful work for adults and children, and gives the creations away to members of her large extended family. Another writer friend gardens as well as any professional. Other writer friends are master chefs, painters, finished carpenters, and singers. It seems that the professional writers I know are also fully competent in other creative areas. For me it's photography.

My interest in photography is one of the reasons I made my series character Anita Ray a photographer. But writing about photography in a mystery novel is still writing. I need to step outside of the writing part of my life, and I do this by focusing on my work with a camera or someone else's. 

This month, my colleagues and I on the Matz Gallery Committee for our local library hung a juried exhibit of 23 three photographs by 21 artists. Arranging the photos on the gallery walls had a similar feel to arranging the narrative in a novel or short story. Some things worked together in a scene and others did not. We arranged, and rearranged, the photographs, until we had three walls of artwork we were happy with.

Finding this kind of balance between areas of creativity helps me replenish what I need for writing. I have just sent in the final, edited copy of the fourth Anita Ray novel. When Krishna Calls will be out in 2016, and I already have ideas for the fifth in the series. But between finishing one book and starting another, I need a break that is both creative and restful. I find that in working with photography, either as the artist or, in this case, as  a member of a team of curators.

Writing every day . . . including holidays

For the last year or so I've been doing library and other events, talking about my two mystery series and the life of a writer. I expect and get the usual questions. How do you write? With a computer or a typewriter or pen and paper? Do you write every day? Even on holidays? Where do you get your ideas? Do you have an agent? These and other questions come so often and so predictably that I barely think about the answers, but this weekend I found myself thinking about one in particular. Do you write every day? What exactly does that mean, to write every day? And what does it mean to the non-writer in the audience asking the question? Does it mean the same thing?

This is Memorial Day and a holiday on Monday for those with jobs that require someone to show up at

an office or worksite. But I'm a writer, and I work at home. I have a ten-second commute from the kitchen to my desk in the next room. Do I have to show up?

Every year, on the day before Memorial Day and Fourth of July, I pull out my great-grandmother's flag and promise myself I will hang it up on the porch in honor of those who fought to defend our country. Sometimes I forget and the flag sits on the chair in my bedroom until late at night, when I put it away, gnashing my teeth. But today, in 2015, I remembered, and got the flag up there soon after nine o'clock. The flag has 39 stars, and my mother recalled watching my great-grandmother sew on the last star when she was a little girl, before World War I. The flag is fragile, so I don't put it out on windy or stormy days.

Getting the flag up this year bodes well for my working memory because it's the first on my list of things to do today. Writing this blog is the second.

This blog fulfills the requirement of writing every day, but what about the days when I never write a word, in a blog or story or novel? What else counts as "writing every day"?

At the beginning of a new work I make a list of the main characters I think will appear in the novel, usually about four or five, not including the series and support characters. When I have my list, I think about names and pull out naming books as well as lists of names I've developed over the years. The characters start to take shape in my imagination and I jot down physical or psychological characteristics that intrigue me. Is this writing?

When I was first starting out, years ago, I was well aware of my weaknesses. I could capture the emotional content of a character, and depict the behavior of children, but I doubted my abilities in writing dialogue. With that in mind, I read writers who could carry an entire story in dialogue, and read them to see how they did it? Is that writing?

I have published thirteen short stories featuring Anita Ray, the Indian-American photographer sleuth in my India series. After a particularly successful panel, a member of the audience will ask where they can buy a copy of the stories. All the stories were published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine or Level Best Books anthologies, so I have the rights to them if I want to compile them for a book of my own. I've looked at the stories and considered possible arrangements, and searched among my own photographs for a cover image. Is that writing?

The fourth book in the Anita Ray series will be coming out in spring 2016. I've just finished reviewing the copy-edited manuscript, accepting the corrections of my editor and adding a few things here and there. Is that writing?

One of my longstanding habits is to clean off the top of my desk after I finish a story or novel. This means going through all the papers and books and notes that accumulate while I'm composing, keeping some, returning the borrowed items, and filing the rest. If I didn't do this, I'd have my own stand-up desk, situating my computer atop stacks of paper two-feet thick. Is this writing?

When I was in graduate school, working on my dissertation, a colleague used to call all this "other"

work "fussing." He likened it to a dog circling a spot on the floor before it falls down in a heap to sleep. Perhaps. But whatever it is I'm doing when I'm not composing on my computer, it feels necessary in order to get the project finished and out the door (or into cyberspace) to my editor. All the activities I engage in may not be what someone else would consider writing, but I wouldn't be able to finish a project without them.

So, on this glorious Memorial Day, I will be writing in some way. And I hope you will also be doing something you love.

Posterity or . . .

In an earlier post I talked about clearing out old mss that I was pretty sure wouldn't be published. I asked readers to let me know what they did with their mss that were moldering in a drawer or on a disk. One replied that she was saving them for posterity. This was one comment I hadn't thought of.

Like any other writer, I love opening the box from the publisher that contains the first copies of my new

book. The books sit there, pristine, perfect, and full of promise. Surely this book is the one that others will find special, brilliant, ground-breaking--if you're a writer, you recognize the fantasy. Each step in the writing/publishing process triggers the standard dreams. After my heart settles down and my feet touch the ground again, I'm just happy to know that libraries will be buying my book and standing them up on a shelf, for readers to find and, I hope, enjoy. That's the only posterity I've thought about. After that, I assume it's over for me, and I take my place in the graveyard. I even find it hard to continue after the last sentence, but I'll keep at it.

When the Houghton Library of Harvard University announced that it was acquiring John Updike's papers soon after his death, I thought, of course. He's a famous writer, perhaps the most important American writer of his generation, and a graduate of Harvard University (Class of 54). Learning how he composed and shaped his fiction and nonfiction would certainly be interesting to young writers and literary scholars. But my papers? Would a library actually want them? I don't think so, but I'm beginning to wonder if my perspective is the exception.

Over the years I have read the juvenilia of writers I have admired, but you only have to do this once, with one writer, to glean the important lesson. The early writings will show both promise and ineptness, and often throw the reader back in her chair as she marvels at how far the writer had to travel to reach his or her current heights. My reactions to early, youthful writings of later prominent voices are similar to my feelings about first novels. I might enjoy them, but I privately hope that the writer improves with experience. I have a number of favorite mystery writers who did just that.

Perhaps my lack of interest in leaving work behind for others to study and evaluate comes from an innate desire to be known for the best I can do, and not for my failures. Is it ego or vanity? Possibly one or the other, or both. Is it fear of having my old notes and unpublished mss leading to eternal humiliation? Probably. Is it laziness in not wanting to spend time organizing this old, rejected pile of material in some system that can facilitate the transfer of ownership to someone else? Definitely. Laziness for sure plays a role.

Perhaps the lack of interest in posterity has to do with a lack of ambition. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to give up privacy and freedom to move through my life, in and out of stores or restaurants, without being noticed. I don't want strangers becoming my "best new friend." One of the staff at the post office (yes, the one I wrote about recently) stood at the counter when John Updike walked in to mail something. She had waited on him before, but this time she was so flustered that she forgot several steps in the process and had to redo everything after he left. Embarrassing. For her, of course. And for a shy man, like John Updike, even more so.

I will never face these problems, and I don't want to. I have what I regard as a perfect life, and after I'm gone, my departure will make room for someone else. If anyone wants to know something about me after I'm gone, read the books.

A Writer's Habits--To Save or not to Save

Over the years I have accumulated a number of manuscripts that will never be published. Sometimes the story just doesn’t work, or the ms has been turned down so many times that I give up on it. For a long time I saved these old mss, thinking that one day I would use a part in another story. After reading a mystery novel by Julian Symons (and I can no longer remember which one), however, I have changed my practices.

A prolific writer with many interests in fiction and nonfiction and one of my favorite writers, Symons

wrote 29 mystery novels; 33 works of nonfiction; including biography, autobiography, history, and criticism; 2 collections of poetry; 9 collections of short fiction; and edited 8 collections of fiction or nonfiction. His history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, is a classic and an original perspective on the genre. But in addition to his many mysteries, I remember him for something that was probably not meant to be memorable.

In a mystery novel about an architect (I apologize for not being able to identify the title), Symons describes everything in the novel in terms of angles, sharp corners, flat planes, stark floors and ceilings, and the like. There is no softness, warmth, or curving in this story, except for one character. As I recall, the character was named something like Uncle Puffer, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the description of this sweet, warm-hearted, soft and round-shouldered fellow with the lopsided smile was the antithesis of everything else in the novel. I mentioned this to another writer, and we both jumped on the only explanation. At some point Symons had written a description of a character, not found a use for it at the time, and kept it. He popped it into this particular novel, where it stood out like a glass of milk at a sports bar.

Symons was a great writer who came up with stories and ideas that will continue to entertain and surprise readers. But he taught me something unexpected in that novel. Everything in a piece of fiction has to belong, has to have its organic place in the story. This description of Uncle Puffer, as I’ve named him, did not fit, and the dissonance between that description and the rest of the novel is what I remember. Perhaps this is a case of failing to “kill your darlings,” as Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, and many other writers have advised. Perhaps Symons merely didn’t want to waste a fine character description—and it was vivid—but either way, he should have left it out.

I have interpreted this reading experience differently from what might have been expected. If I write a novel or short story and later feel that it doesn’t work, I might keep the plot or the title, but the rest of it goes. I don’t keep passages to rework into something new. When I write a story I believe the experience has to be fresh for me or it won’t feel fresh and new to the reader. As hard as it is, and it’s actually not as hard as I thought it would be, I toss any ms that didn’t work. I delete it from my computer, and I recycle the printed pages. When I begin a new ms, I want a fresh start every time.