Writers Retreats

I have been quite remiss in posting lately, so apologies for that. The day job, writing, home life, etc. have taken most of my energy.

But this past weekend I took some much needed "me" time and attended the annual retreat of the Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America chapter. It's always held at Punderson State Park southeast of Cleveland, and it almost always involves an insane amount of food, wine, and laughter. Occasionally, there is even writing, I had a super productive weekend, writing 4,400 words on my second book at the retreat. Another 10,000 words later, I played hooky from the day job and finished it.

Anyway, as some of my cabinmates and I walked up to the Punderson Manor House for a hike, one of them said she was interested in knowing more about the house. Strangely, they all looked at me.

I am so predictable.

Punderson Lake

The land on which the Manor House sits was originally settled by Lemuel Punderson, who moved west from New Haven, Connecticut in 1806. Punderson constructed a number of dams on the lake in order to use the water for a grist mill. He married Sybil Hickok in October 1808, and in addition to operating a mill and a distillery, they reportedly also used the property as a recreational area for friends and family.

Wales Hotel.  Source: C& E Interurban Historical Society.

Punderson died of malaria in 1822 at the age of 40, and Sybil in 1872. The Punderson estate owned the land, but not the water rights to the lake, so the lake continued to be used by the public for recreation. In 1887, James E. Wales constructed a hotel (imaginatively called the Wales Hotel), which served as a resort destination for twenty years.

William and Ocie Cleveland.
Photo taken by author in the lobby of Punderson Manor.

In or around 1902, William B. Cleveland, a descendant of the founder of our fair city, Moses Cleaveland, began purchasing pieces of land around the lake, owning most of it by 1910. Cleveland had been a frequent visitor to the Wales Hotel as a child, and wished to create a hunting and fishing estate. In 1904, he built a house on the site of the present manor for his much younger bride, Ocie Coppedge,

Apparently not content to own all the land around the lake, Cleveland bought and demolished the Wales Hotel, then in 1907 he successfully sued to purchase the water rights to the lake, then subsequently acquired the last remaining parcel from Ella Punderson. The resulting 505 acre property eventually included a dog kennel, called Lakefield Farm and Kennels, a dog food factory, a herd of buffalo, angora goats, and a six bedroom houseboat,

Cleveland died of cancer in Cleveland Heights in 1929, at the age of 67. (Ocie, twenty years his junior, married again three years later, and died in 1974.) In 1929 (or possibly earlier, depending on which history you read), the property was sold to Karl Long of Chicago, who wanted to build an English tudor mansion for his family. Long defaulted on the mortgage, which was held by the Cleveland family, and the partially constructed mansion and the property reverted back to the Clevelands.

Punderson Manor, November 2014

Ocie Coppedge Cleveland Bikkelhaupt owned the property until 1948, when she sold it to the State of Ohio.  The State completed Karl Long's mansion in 1956, and did extensive renovations and additions in 1965 (opening as Punderson State Park Lodge in 1966) and again from 1979 to 1983.

I wish I knew when this guy was added to the house. 

But quite apart from the history, which is probably fascinating only to history geeks like me, Punderson Manor is actually famous in certain circles, because it is reportedly haunted.

Guests and employees of the company which manages the manor have reported a number of spooky occurrences, including hearing children's laughter in empty rooms, cold hallways accompanied by a woman dressed in Civil War era clothing, a ghostly lumberjack hanging by his neck from a rope descended from the ceiling, a woman held down on her bed by invisible hands, pictures dropping off the wall, doors opening and closing,

Considering I am wildly averse to scary stuff, I was glad that I didn't read all of these stories before I settled into the Manor's library to write with friends. It was cold in there, but I attribute that to our failure to notice that we could turn on the heater. (I stole these pics from the uber-talented Miranda Liasson, who somehow managed to avoid being in any of them.)





Should you ever get a chance to go on a writers' retreat, I can't recommend it highly enough. Good times, good friends, good (or at least productive) writing, and even a hike or two under a splendid autumn sky.

Sources:
The history of Punderson is a surprisingly unclear one, with a certain amount of embellishment, accusation, and a few court cases thrown in. These are the sites from which I gleaned most of the information for this post:

http://parks.ohiodnr.gov/punderson#history
http://www.punderson.com/History.htm
http://friendsofpunderson.com/PDF/HistoryProgramPunderson.pdf
Findagrave.com
Ancestry.com
http://geauganews.com/the-history-of-punderson-manor-state-park-lodge/
http://www.ohiostateparklodges.com/media-announcements/the-haunted-history-of-ohios-punderson-manor-state-park-lodge/
http://www.deadohio.com/punderson.htm

Dream a Little Dream

This morning I woke up after a dream--I dreamed today was Thanksgiving, and I had NO food and a houseful of people. My son had a dream as well; he told me that he dreamed about "an epic bed" which featured a mattress in a bath tub, floating on water. His dreams are always more colorful than mine.

I have always been fascinated by dreams, although not in a hugely analytic way--I prefer not to spend a lot of time in my own head (or my kid's), thank you. It's just interesting to me how they can give insight to one's true feelings. Years ago, I tried to keep a dream journal, with limited success. My dreams are so ephemeral, I usually forget them within moments, even with a handy notebook by the bed. Other times, my notes were completely unintelligible.

I do remember some of my dreams. The--ahem--erotic dreams and anxiety dreams are usually the most memorable. I am not entirely sure what the former are supposed to signify, but they are fun. The latter, much less enjoyable, let me know that something in my life is freaking me out more than I thought. Some days I have to try very hard to figure out what it is--I adore Thanksgiving, especially when I'm cooking, so today's dream was obviously about something else, probably to do with the day job.

I like to use dreams in my novels too, as they are wonderful literary devices. They are ways to get deeper inside a character's head, to weave in backstory, to break the rules a bit. When you come across dreams in my books, that's what they are: devices.

I am not a particularly deep thinker--what you see is usually what you get with me. I always hated literary criticism classes in college, where the professor took apart books page by page to search for the hidden meanings. Sometimes there just aren't any, at least not intentional ones. There's a 2011 Paris Review article that pops up on Facebook every now and then--Julia Quinn, one of my favorite romance authors, is the latest to mention it. It describes a high school kid in 1963 who, tired of searching for symbolism in English class, wondered what authors really thought. So Bruce McAllister sent a survey to 150 novelists to ask them. Half of them responded, some in tremendous detail. I can't do justice to the questions or their responses here, so go read the article.

But I digress.

Do you remember your dreams? What's your most memorable one? Literary criticism--yea or nay?

In Praise of Deadlines

As you all know, given how loudly I shouted it from the rooftops, I recently signed a contract for my first book. This week I received a flurry of emails from the publisher and my editor, with tons of business-related stuff, marketing tips, and--ta da!--my first round of edits.

I have been told by published writer friends that the moment you sign that first contract you're no longer writing on your own timeline. You can't just write whenever you feel like it any more. Once you sign, you have--cue dramatic music--deadlines.

I have to admit I actually like deadlines, since I am fundamentally lazy. If I know that someone is waiting on me to do something, I will do it. If no one particularly cares when I do something, I will often put it off--especially if it's icky or hard--until someone does care. This is not, perhaps, my finest trait.

So when my editor gave me a deadline, I was very happy. First, because it was a reasonable one--she doesn't want my edits next week, she wants them next month. Second, because it will motivate me to do what needs to be done, in a timely fashion. Hopefully I will not wait until the night before the deadline to finish...

The other good thing about deadlines is they make me do things I don't particularly want to do, inevitably allowing me to discover they weren't as bad as I feared (most of the time, anyway). I was terrified to open that document with the edits. What if she hated my book? What if she wants me to change everything? The more rational side of my brain told me she didn't hate it--if she had, she would have rejected it and I would not be writing this post--and that she wouldn't want to change everything. But I was nervous, so I waited hours before I opened it. But once I did, of course, I discovered her changes only made the book better.

What do you think about deadlines? Do they motivate you? Annoy you? Tell us your best (or worst) deadline story!

Taking Time

A friend of mine posted on Facebook this week, "Some days I just don't feel like writing a novel." I can relate. It's days like these, when I am exhausted in mind, body, and spirit, that inspiration, not to mention motivation, utterly fails to make an appearance. Frustrating on days when I am due to write not just one but two blog posts.

This week has been an interesting one.  My husband has been out of the country for three weeks. Work has been insane since I was out of town at a conference last week. This week, when I've had to work, parent, as well as do both his household jobs and mine, all I want to do is curl up in bed with a glass of wine and a book. For an entire day. (Maybe I should make it a bottle?) Thinking of something to write about has fallen near the bottom of the to-do list. 

In addition, this week I received my very first rejection from an editor. I'm okay with it, I truly am, but even though I suspected it was coming, it stung. On the other hand, I also got a request for a full this week--thanks entirely to the kindness and generosity of a lovely person whom I have never met but who believes in me anyway. I now have to get off my ass and finish the last few pages of edits and send it off before she changes her mind. Refer above to the comments regarding exhaustion. But it's good. 

Some days no one feels like writing a novel, or working, or mowing the lawn, or doing the laundry. The hardest thing about writing, at least for me, isn't finding inspiration or doing the actual writing--it's the management of everything else in my life. It's carving out time for myself, to take care of myself, and I am spectacularly bad at that. 

So I am resolved to take some time for myself today. The house is clean enough, the laundry is--mostly--done. Might have to do something about the lawn, but I'll call that exercise.

How do you take time for yourself?

End of Year Reflections

“Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.”
― Dave Barry

So it's that time of year again. I don't particularly like resolutions, since I usually blow them off, but I do like to reflect on the year past. This holiday season I have been thinking a lot about time.  Time is a slippery thing. You can have too little of it, of course. For example, I didn't have enough time (or energy) to write for this blog in the last two months (sorry!). You can have too much of it: 13 hours in the car to and from my in-laws' house in Missouri is way too much time. You can waste time (two words: Candy Crush), or you can spend it wisely, doing things you value.

You can run out of time, too. My mother-in-law is 81 and in good health, but more than once this past week she hinted at her own mortality. She made sure my son had her recipe for Gingersnaps, and she gave me a pile of old photos she said she wouldn't need any more. We spent the afternoon happily going over each one, identifying all the people in them, so that the information wouldn't be lost.

I should say that she's been doing this sort of thing for a couple of years now--all the grandkids received recipe boxes last year, and books of family history a year or two before that. Her mother lived to age 96, so I certainly hope we will be enjoying her snappy wit for many more years to come. But all this talk about time and the past put me in a reflective mood, and gave me a new determination to do the things I want to do before time runs out for me, too.

This past year was great for me in many ways. Everyone I love is reasonably healthy and happy. My day job has been very successful--I am busier than I have ever been. I had a marvelous vacation in Italy with my family. My writing has received some marvelous strokes--I won two contests, and had two requests, which I will send out next week, since I have finally finished the darn synopsis. I was elected Co-Secretary of my RWA chapter. (This kind of amazes me. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that anyone actually remembers who I am, let alone will vote for me.) I joined a critique group of fabulous lady writers, which promises to be fun and rewarding on several levels.

2013 may be hard to top, but I will try. I will send out my queries and finish writing my second book. (Which may require trashing the 32K words I have already written, but that's probably the subject of another post.) I will attend the NEORWA conference in May and present a pitch to an agent (this is major--the very thought scares the crap out of me). I will post here more regularly this year. Maybe. I will upload that pile of old photos into Ancestry.com. And exercise. I should probably exercise.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Reality in Historical Romance

One of the blogs I follow is Hearts Through History, which features some marvelous posts on history in general, as well as historical romance in particular.  A recent post by Merry Farmer caught my eye, about historical body image. The concept of skinny, as she notes, is purely a 20th century notion, but most heroines in historical romance are portrayed as the young skinny girls of our current reality, rather than the curvy young women their real-life counterparts actually were.  Take a look at this piece of "genteel erotica" from 1886 and you'll see what I mean:

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1886-female-bathers-No4-nude.jpg

Anyway, Merry's blog led me to another I hadn't seen before: Rakes, Rogues, & Romance by Nancy Goodman. How real, she asked in a recent post, do we want our romance? Do we read it purely to escape the reality of our not particularly romantic lives, or do we want something else?

Personally, I like some realism. I want to see the heroine lift her skirts a bit to step over the disgusting muck that filled London streets prior to the end of the 19th century. I want her to wrinkle her nose when she gets a whiff of the Thames as the wind shifts. I want to see the household staff wash off the windows, again, the soot that constantly covers them. In my mind, such snippets of historical fact add much to the setting, but don't detract from the romance.

Perhaps it is my advancing age, but I am a bit tired of the virginal teen heroine, who loses her maidenhead to the more worldly but gentle hero and almost always has an earth-moving orgasm on the first try. (No comment on the realism of that.) I have read many romances which feature this type of heroine, and have enjoyed them, but nowadays I find I like my heroines grittier, with more life experience before the first page. To me, they are much more real, and these are the heroines I like to write about.

However, as in most things in life, balance is important. I do understand the need to read as an escape from reality--it is very often that impulse which leads me to pick up a book. I read a lot of different types of fiction, but I open a romance when I want to be assured of a happy ending. It isn't always very realistic, but it is usually immensely satisfying.

So if you read romance, how do you feel about realism? How much is too much?

Inspiration, Italian Style

So I spent the last two weeks in Italy. It was one of those trip-of-a-lifetime sorts of vacations, where we packed in just about every major tourist site, and quite a few minor ones. My husband is a classicist, so there was a heavy emphasis on Roman ruins--Colosseum, Forum, Villa Adriana, Pompeii, Herculaneum, etc.--but we also spent some time in Venice and Florence.

I visited Italy once before, in college. I had an unpleasant experience there and so cut my trip short. Perhaps as a result, I have never had any particular interest in Italy, other than the food, anyway. In getting ready for this trip, though, an idea for a story stuck itself into my head, and so while I was there I spent a lot of time taking crazy pictures that might at some point be inspiring,

Mt. Vesuvius

or useful,

Scale model of ancient Rome

or just amusing.

I have no idea what this is, but there were about a dozen of them in a row, holding up display cases at the Naples Museum.

I have written about inspiration before--for some reason I find the topic endlessly fascinating. I think the interesting thing about this trip, is that I didn't find it particularly inspiring, although I expected to. Instead my sojourn in Italy was more about taking it all in--soaking up atmosphere, smelling the particular odors of each place we visited (for as Eleanor Lavish said, every city does indeed have its own smell), tasting the food, feeling the unrelenting heat of the Italian sun, and washing off the dust of ruins built nearly 2,000 years before.  I spent more time than I ever have looking at things through a writer's eyes.

Perhaps that is a kind of inspiration too.

Germinating the idea seed

 

When I first started writing one of the many things that made me nervous was that I would run out of things to write about. The fear that I had only one story in me made me hang on for far too long to a manuscript that should have been stuffed under the bed.

I recently committed myself to finishing one manuscript before I can work on the next. Perversely, I now have tons of ideas gathering in my brain, each rather desperate to be turned into the next book. Or the one after that. Almost everywhere I go I find a new idea to plant in my head, and I have to rush home and open a new book in WriteWay to get it down before I forget it. At the same time, I have to stop myself from jumping on the Internet to do research. It's very distracting.

Famous authors are always asked in interviews where they get their ideas.  I used to think that was an interesting question, but now I know it doesn't really matter. Ideas are everywhere. It's how a writer nurtures them that counts.

So I am not going to ask how you get your ideas. Instead I'll ask: what is the first thing you do to make that idea seed grow?

Writing Contests

This post is sort of an update of a piece I wrote last year over on New Kids on the Writers Block, when I was in a contest frenzy. I've been in contest mode this spring as well, serving as a category coordinator and a backup judge for the Cleveland Rocks Romance Contest, and as a judge for another RWA chapter contest. Serving as Category Coordinator was a ton of work but both fun and instructive--I certainly have a new respect for the amount of effort that goes into organizing a quality contest, and NEORWA's contest certainly does rock.

I have also entered three contests this spring. I sent off my last entry just last night, feverishly editing and polishing until nearly 11 pm, just an hour before the deadline (apparently I thrive on deadlines, which encourages my tendency toward procrastination more than you might think). I submitted the same work to each. The first entry was pretty weak, since no eyes but mine had ever looked at it. The judges were kind; they gave me decent scores and pointed out some "duh" moments in the manuscript.  The second entry was more polished than the first--still waiting on that one--and the third entry was better still. (I hope; my eyes were crossing near the end and I probably made some huge mistake.)  Keep your fingers crossed for me, please!

Contests are wonderful ways to get your manuscript in front of unbiased judges, although you do, admittedly, have to pay for the privilege. Most contests include some combination of published and not-yet-published authors in the first round; the best contests train their judges. The benefits of a contest are tangible--you receive objective, generally constructive criticism,  as well as pats on the back for the things you do well. If you have submitted a work you've just started and want to get some feedback, contests are wonderful tools. If you are a finalist, your work is reviewed by an agent or editor who is actively acquiring manuscripts. If you win, you seldom gain much in a material sense, but you receive bragging rights and sometimes even a request for a full or partial manuscript from an editor/agent. A contest win can even lead to a book contract, although I suspect that happens infrequently.

Just as an aside, if you are interested in entering a contest or two, check out Stephie Smith's contest chart first--there is so much good information I can't even imagine how much work it must be to maintain it.  It has a romance bent, but there are more general contests listed as well. Alexa Bourne also teaches a wonderful class on the ins and outs of contests. She has one coming up in August; check out her website. Her Killer Openings class is great too.

Before you enter, know that there are downsides to contests too, at least in my opinion. First, the costs can add up if you enter too many, and the return on investment probably isn't that great. Second, I think that being a contest junkie can give you a fabulous first 25 pages, but the rest of your MS can suffer from a lack of attention. (This is certainly true for me. The first five chapters of my current WIP have been edited to death, but I haven't even touched the end yet.) Finally, as with any criticism of your writing, you need to take the judges' comments with a grain of salt. Some of them, as painful as it will be to admit it, are spot on and if you take the judge's advice your writing will be better. Other comments will make you wonder whether the judge was commenting on the right entry. Still others will make a valid point, but you will disagree with varying degrees of outrage.

In my opinion, contests have great merit, but I tend to look at them as a bit of a gamble: it's important to know when to quit. I am done with contests for the time being, but I am interested to hear from you. Do you enter contests? If not, why not? What have been your experiences?  And have you ever sold a book as a result?

Marin

Hello!

Yes, I've taken the plunge, and have started my own blog. I have been part of a group blog (New Kids on the Writer's Block) for a year or so, but have been feeling the need to spread my wings a bit, so here I am.  I am a new writer with no published work to my credit, unless you count a few law-related articles (which I don't). Since I started writing seriously about two years ago, I have spent more time learning about how to write than actually writing, but I figure everyone needs to start somewhere.

I write historical romance set in Victorian England.  My husband told me the other day that he thinks I like research more than writing.  It is true I love exploring the little factoids that bring history to life, but I love the writing part too--it's just a lot harder.

This blog explores my writing journey, including those little historical detours that fascinate and distract me. Thanks for joining me for the ride.