I had my thoughts about Gypsies or Rom peoples. This haunting simple video puts faces from a huge family spanning decades to captivating vocals and music. Watch a little and dream of a very different culture.
Blog Archives
Everywhere a flood myth
I was recently cajoled, bamboozled, shanghaied, flattered into leading two Sunday morning studies of the Noah story. Not that I know much about the Old Testament, but my bamboozler presented as the ultimate argument: “We know you can tell stories.”…
Fears for a new book
I’ve done a treatment for my third novel, more than 1000 words, done research (many pages, multiple documents), a character sketch, a “plot sequence.” Even sketched out the first chapter and have a first line. So . . . let’s…
Our lives as fiction
Don’t you sometimes feel that the standard disclaimer for historical fiction could also be true of Life?: This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of…
Helen Keller, farsighted activist
I stumbled on this letter from Helen Keller. Knocked my socks off. “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a…
The Six and Twenty Book Club
One of the pleasures of promoting your book is meeting book clubs. Many have remarkable histories. For example, the Six and Twenty Club of Wilmington, Ohio, has been meeting regularly since 1898. Here is a photograph of the club in…
Down with the hyphenates!
My next novel deals with, among other things, the raging prejudice against the pestilent “hyphenates” during World War I. And what were hyphenates? German-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Polish-Americans. Those folks. Particularly the first group, spurred by the lurid posters you see here.…
Posted in Third novel
Migraines and the Kaiser
The peculiarities of migraines are constantly amazing. There I was this morning at the reference desk of the Knoxville Public Library, asking where I could find an illustrated history of Prussia, since a couple chapters of my next novel will…
Posted in WWWS
You add the vampires
Lots of free, good-hearted advice comes your way as a writer, as in: “I have a great story. Let me tell it to you and you write it.” Or “You’re writing about X. Be sure to put in Y.” My…
German shepherds & novel research
My first published creative pieces were short stories that warped in some way from my own life. I didn’t realize the generative power of research and assumed that for historical fiction, you read sources and took notes, rather as for…
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