By the numbers

 

Never, ever trust me on a number.   If I tell you that something happened on a certain date, I've probably have inverted a number.  Jamestown, for instance: was it settled in 1619 or 1691? Was the Magna Carta signed in 1215 or 1521?  Right now the teacher I teach New Mexico history to 6th, no, 7th graders is quaking in her boots because she just realized how much misinformation I put out.  If I'm lucky, my students will manage to forget everything I mis-teach.)   If the number isn't a date, but a quantity or a price, I've probably added or subtracted a 0.  If I was a realtor I'd probably get in trouble for accepting a check for twenty thousand to pay for a two hundred thousand dollar house.   Once (a number I can count to with some assurance of getting it right) my husband asked me to buy fertilizer for the back lawn.  The guy at the store insisted I tell him how big my lawn was.  I prevaricated.  He suggested I guess. So I did.  I guessed that my small suburban yard was a hundred yards by thirty yards.  We didn't need to buy fertilizer again for 8 years - and when we did you can bet my husband didn't send me to buy it.   Good thing that was pre 9/11, or I would have had fed agents stalking my garage and wondering if I was building a bomb.I want to talk numbers with you, beginning with the fact that I have a love/hate relationship with them.  But even though I'm awful with numbers, I'm fascinated by them, especially when they are related to statistics or standings or one kind or another.  After every race I've ever run I've studied the results, trying to analyze my performance.  Even with my limited mathematical powers I know that if I was 2,347th out of 5,328 overall, I was middle of the pack.  But I still wonder how I placed among women 50-55 who were named Jennifer and happened to have three sons. Race statistics are never specific enough.  I have won 1st in my age category.  I did it once, during a 5K for Alzheimer's. Ironically I don't remember what my time was.   So here are some recent statistics for my books. Code: Elephants on the Moon is currently #877,464 among books in the paid Kindle store. The Bent Reed is 1,368,709th and On Fledgling Wings is 1,006,140th.  I have no idea how many books there are in total. For all I know, the Bent Reed might be the worst selling book on Amazon, but I suspect there are many more underneath it.  There are currently 12 reviews on Amazon for Code: Elephants, 5 for The Bent Reed, and 2 for Fledgling. They average in the 4s, a number I am both proud of and grateful for.  A more experience writing friend tells me that the "magic" number of reviews is 20; when a book gets that  many, the good folks at Amazon pay attention a little differently to the title.  I'm not sure what that all means, but if you've read any of my books and and liked it, would you help me attain 20 reviews? To sweeten the deal, I'm going to be offering a little incentive. Check back here soon to see what.

Magical Moments, Magical things

 

 

They say the best things in life are free, and I'm inclined to believe it, especially after a day like last Sunday, or a gift like the last one that came in the mail.

Sunday at the Bohnhoff house means family dinner.  Usually my 93 year old mother in law, my oldest son, his wife, and their two and a half year old daughter join my husband and me. During the summer we eat out on our shady, east-facing back porch. The granddaughter goes back and forth between the dinner table and the swing set. My husband gets out the T ball stand and we watch a little batting practice. But as we ate last Sunday, we watched the sky darken with rumbling, boiling clouds.

The skies opened up just after dessert, drenching the thirsty lawn and cooling the air. After a while the rain lessened and a glorious double rainbow filled the eastern sky. Wanting to get a better view, I scooped up my granddaughter and headed out to the street. Once we were there, I realized that the gutters were running - something that doesn't happen often here in the desert. I put my grand daughter down and showed her how a leaf placed in the water would zip away, and we ended up spending the next ten or fifteen minutes hunkered down in the gutter, me sending leaf boats downstream to a little girl who squealed with delight as she pulled them back out. The experience was free, and perhaps one of the richest and most precious of the summer. I hope she will remember the day long after I have passed from this life.

The gift I got a few weeks ago wasn't entirely free for my husband's cousin Ross. I'm not sure how much he paid for it, but I'm sure it wasn't much. And yet, it is among my most priceless treasures.

I'd sent Ross an announcement when my youngest son graduated from West Point this spring. Enclosed with the announcement was a paper asking no gifts except the gift of prayer for my son and those he would soon be leading.  Instead of honoring my request entirely, Ross sent a package with this magic wand and a letter explaining why he sent it.  You can bet I'll be holding on to this magic wand. It will be in a prominent place if and when my son is deployed.


Here's the letter Ross sent. Here's wishing you some magical moments.

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Adventures in research

 

 

By Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA (A Young Woman Reading by Gustave Courbet) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I love being a writer.I love thinking about characters - who they are, how their backgrounds affect their decisions, how they will react to different circumstances, and how their reactions will affect their futures. I love thinking about plot - how the actions of one character creates a cascading domino affect, and where that affect leads, and what the whole ripple of actions means in the grand scheme of human experience. I love beginning a story and watching how it grows and changes and sometimes becomes something very different than the concept I had begun with. I love editing and deciding what to leave in and what to take out. But perhaps my favorite part of writing is researching.

I would probably be "researching" even if I wasn't writing: I just couldn't call it that. If I wasn't a writer, what I'd be doing would be called reading widely and deeply, and I'd have no excuse for why I do it except that I'm interested.

My research, like my writing, usually begins with a question or a topic. Swan Song, the book I intend to publish this fall, began with the question 'What if the Beowulf manuscript we know is just the first time a much older story was written down?' That led to 'What does it mean that Grendel the monster is called a son of Cain?"  Those questions led to hundreds of hours of research on Beowulf, on Neanderthals, and a variety of related topics. I was lucky that I was working on a masters at the time, and that the NMSU library sent interlibrary loan books and scanned academic journal articles for its distance students.

Even though I've completed the manuscript, the topic still interests me, so I'm still "researching."  Lately I found an excellent, informative B.A. Major Thesis entitled Female Characters in Beowulf posted  on the internet. It was written by Petra Pochazkova, a student at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. How I love living in the internet age!


Not all my research is online. Last fall my colleague Patrice Locke Lewis and I went to the ruins of Fort Craig, a 150 year old fort that saw action in the Civil War. Questions began circulating in my mind. What would it have been like to live at the fort in its heyday? Who was here? Ms. Lewis and I then proceeded south, to Las Cruces, where we visited a number of places including COAS, perhaps the greatest used book store in the southwest. I bought a stack of books related to the era and I began researching. Right now, I'm reading I Married a Soldier, a 1960s reprint of an 1890s memoir of a woman who accompanied her husband to his duty stations in New Mexico and Texas during the 1850s - 1870s. The reading is interesting, and I hope adds authenticity to the book I plan to begin writing this fall.


So here I sit, dividing my time between the Paleolithic period, the Anglo-Saxon era and the Civil War. Reading musty old books, academic papers, and flickering screens. Sometimes I have to put the research aside and reenter the present world, where meals need to be cooked, clothes washed, paychecks earned. But even as I take the car in to be serviced or sweep the front porch, a part of my mind is off on an adventure a thousand years or a thousand miles away.