Two years ago I started writing “The Stories that Follow You Home” also known as “The Istoriaphile’s Corner.” It’s been fun to write about stories so full of thought and meaning that they ‘ve found a home in my soul. Still, I have to admit that’s not the reason I started this blog. I began this because (deep breath) I wrote a book. A bit more than two years ago, I decided to write a story about a pair of constantly squabbling sisters. This was something I knew about because my sis and I fought all the way through childhood and I wanted to see what it takes for a pair of warring siblings to cooperate and appreciate each other. I called my book The Plucky Orflings and it’s taken me almost as long to finish as it took me and my sis to stop fighting but now it’s ready for an agent to look at it. The problem is, I learned, that having a manuscript isn’t enough for an aspiring writer now. To get published, you need a built-in audience. Publishers and agents don’t take many chances on the books that they send to market these days. Between e-books and e-booksellers,…
For most people believe plays are just another form of entertainment. An audience goes to a theatre and pays for the actors to entertain them. If the performance is acceptable, the company is praised with applause. That’s a fairly simple transaction but it’s also a limiting one. Theatre, great theatre does more than make people happy, it makes them think. This would upset the audiences who only want to be entertained, if many of them hadn’t learned to watch a play while ignoring what it has to say. Then, a play like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” appears with meaning that can’t be ignored and the world turns upside down. The world of Europe in the 1800’s could safely be described as belonging to men. Males held most of the money and power and almost all of the “good” jobs. (Even a monarch like Queen Victoria had substantially limited power.) Women were expected to be decorative, passive guests in mens’ lives. Enter Nora Helmer, a little woman with a big, serious secret. Years ago when her father was ill and her husband close to death, she took matters in her own hands. She illegally borrowed the money needed to heal her…
I still remember the first time I saw it. I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three. Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book. A book full of someone else’s words. I wasn’t aware people did that. Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can’t safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear. A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully. We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages. I bought the used book, partly because I love the story and partly because I was curious about the previous owner’s additions. The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else’s coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story. I wanted to decipher the code. I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they…
Once upon a time a woman named Mary decided to write a play. A war was going on at that time and many people were sad so Mary wanted to make them laugh. Now Mary knew something about writing and she’d written plays before but she had a hard time writing this comedy. Not only is it hard to make people laugh when they’re sad, it’s hard to find time to write when you’re raising three boys and freelancing to bring in a paycheck. (Mary’s other plays had not been successful.) So in the evenings, when her boys were asleep, Mary scribbled away at her story. It was an unusual tale about a gentle man named Elwood who turns his conventional town upside down when he insists his best friend is a Celtic spirit, or pooka. A pooka that looks like a rabbit. A six-foot-three, tie-wearing rabbit. Mary spent the next two years perfecting her play. She read it aloud to anyone who would listen and rewrote it at least 50 times. (Plays are as tricky as chemistry experiments; one mistake can make the whole thing explode.) Eventually, a producer read her play, and liked it enough to have it performed…
Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line. My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue. So, I never thought I’d be blocked as a troll for telling the truth. But then I reckoned without the World’s Largest Book Pusher. WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force. First I was a regular patron, then a “1-click” shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy. I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money. Then Sandra Worth’s Love & War had to appear. Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses. Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise. This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players. Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife. “Tomorrow we give battle. Lest I…