50,000 Words and Lots of Paint Dribbles
On November 1, 2018 November 1, 2018 By Sarah AngletonIn Art, Writing13 Comments
In 1508 Pope Julius II decided the Sistine Chapel with its blue, star-spangled ceiling was in need of a little interior punching up, and he knew just the artist for the job. Already the thirty-three-year-old sculptor Michelangelo was hard at work on the Pope's marble tomb and it was only grudgingly that he accepted the new commission.
Not known for painting, the artist had made a name for himself producing marble masterpieces like Pietà and David, carefully detailing human anatomy and capturing subtle expressions of emotion like no one else. He hadn't really had a great deal of experience with painting, and none with frescoes.
I bet this young Michelangelo wondered from time to time if he could really be a ninja. photo credit: Gonmi Tortuga Ninja via photopin (license)
There are some theories about why the pope may have approached this unlikely choice to spruce up the chapel ceiling. Perhaps Pope Julius, not especially happy with his tomb-in-progress anyway, decided it might be tempting fate for his tomb to be built while he was still alive and so wished to redirect the artist's efforts. It's possible, too, that some of Michelangelo's biggest rivals on the art scene encouraged the choice, suspecting the sculptor would fail spectacularly when forced to work in such a different medium.
Obviously that notion backfired. Though he claimed to have despised every moment of it, Michelangelo bent and stretched and painted his heart out above his head. Over the years he worked on the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo sealed his reputation as one of the greatest painters in history, and got quite a bit of paint on his face.
I mean for a non-painter, it's not too bad. By By Aaron Logan, from http://www.lightmatter.net/gallery/italy/4_G & Talmoryair [CC BY 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons
I share this story today, on November 1, because this is the day when a lot of artists throughout the world are stepping out to create something new. Today is the kickoff for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), that time of year when otherwise sane people from all walks of life, sit down at their computers (or typewriters, or notebooks) and attempt to scribble out a minimum of 50,000 words that will hopefully become the rough draft of a novel.
Some of these folks, like me, have written novels before, and though 50,000 words in a month can be a pretty tall order, they may not find the experience too overwhelming. However many other NaNo writers aren't quite sure what they've gotten themselves into. They have regular day jobs and responsibilities that have nothing to do with writing, and the experience can seem pretty uncomfortable and messy.
But they have these great ideas that've been tickling the backs of their minds for years just looking for an opportunity to jump onto a page and into the world.
These are the writers I think are the most exciting part of NaNoWriMo, and the reason that year after year, more and more people join in the agony fun. Not everyone will finish. Even some of the more seasoned writers won't make it to the end of 50,000 poorly written words. Those that do will find the hard work has only just begun.
But that's okay. Even Michelangelo took a break in 1510 from painting the chapel ceiling. When he returned to the work, it was with a new eye and a somewhat altered style, and that is when he produced many of the most iconic scenes, including The Creation of Adam.
This kind of iconic image is probably worth a little agony and a few paint dribbles on your face. Michelangelo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
He was still in agony and struggled with the work, writing in a poem to a friend (because Michelangelo was also not a poet, who wrote quite a bit of poetry), "My painting is dead. . .I am not in the right place—I am not a painter."
In this next thirty days, I suspect a lot of NaNo writers, experienced or not, will utter similar words. They may hit walls when they feel overwhelmed and exhausted by a creative effort that pushes them outside their usual spheres.
When they do, and when I do, I hope we remember that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was painted by a man who claimed he was not a painter and who suffered a lot of cricks in his neck and had a lot of paint on his face. But this amazing work is imbued with the exquisite textural depth perhaps only a sculptor could have produced and that millions of people have literally looked up to.
I hope we remember that no one would ever tell our stories the way we will tell them. Whether you've written twenty-seven novels or work as a full-time accountant but have one really great idea for a book, know that even when you think your writing is dead, you're not in the right place, and you have paint dribbling onto your face, your words might offer a perspective and textural depth the world has never yet seen.
Happy NaNoWriMo!
Commas and Em Dashes
On June 14, 2018 June 14, 2018 By Sarah AngletonIn Books, Writing13 Comments
Good Thursday morning to you all! This post isn't really a post. It's really just an explanation of why I am not posting this week…Because I'm editing!
This is not my novel. This is a picture from Pixabay. No sneak peeks! Unless perhaps you are the kind of person who likes to review books. If that's the case, we should talk.
Or rather, I'm carefully following 98.9% of the advice offered by a much more talented editor than me, one who doesn't fling commas around willy-nilly, use inappropriate ellipses, and who knows her way around an em dash. I cringe to think what she would do with that last sentence.
So, what am I editing? Thank you for asking. I'm editing a book. To be precise, I'm editing my book, a (an? you can see why I need help) historical novel that will be published in early September, when it will immediately climb to the bestseller lists because of its prodigious use of em dashes. Also mummies. Did I mention it has mummies? And murder. Maybe a little bit of mayhem, too. And even a hint of romance.
I'm No Mozart
On June 7, 2018 June 7, 2018 By Sarah AngletonIn Music, Writing9 Comments
We're in full on summer mode here. My kids have been out of school for almost two weeks and in that time we've gone swimming several times, spent a day at Six Flags, hosted visiting relatives, gotten too much sun, caught fireflies, climbed boulders, picnicked alongside a babbling creek, played with friends, and stayed up too late. It's been a busy, fun couple of weeks, but it hasn't left a lot of time for blogging.
I'm going to be honest here. In between loading the cooler, packing and unpacking the car, and keeping up with the mounds of laundry produced by so much summer fun, I have given very few moments of thought to this week's blog topic. Frankly, I haven't come up with much because I've been preoccupied. And why do today what can be put off until tomorrow, right?
Why yes, I did find my blog topic in a random meme on Facebook. What? I looked into it.
I figure if Mozart could manage to write the overture to Don Giovanni the night before its scheduled premiere in Prague, surely I can rattle off a post at the last minute.
According to somewhat well documented legend, Mozart went out for a drink the evening of October 28, 1787, where he encountered someone who reminded him that his opera collaboration with Italian poet Lorenzo da Ponte still lacked an overture. Mozart, who surely knew this already, allegedly pointed to his head and responded, "It's all in here."
Apparently it was, because the composer returned to his boarding house where he enlisted the help of his wife to regale him with stories and keep him awake while he worked. By 7 o'clock the next morning, the copyist set to work and the evening of October 29, 1787, the orchestra sight read the overture in front of the audience. The talented musicians knocked it out of the park and the audience went wild, because Mozart. He tweaked the piece a little for later performances, but there's no question Mozart demonstrated that procrastination and greatness can coexist.
Of course I'm pretty sure this post won't go down in history as a great example of the best that history/humor blogs have to offer. If I had allowed myself more time, I could have written something much better, more humorous, more thoughtful, or more profound. It might even be already composed more or less entirely in my head, but I'm no Mozart. And I'd rather get back to the pool.
A Most Inestimable Piece of Balderdash
On June 1, 2017 June 1, 2017 By Sarah AngletonIn Books, Writing10 Comments
In 1834, not long after submitting to the Southern Literary Messenger the disturbing story "Berenice," in which a man yanks the teeth from his wife's corpse only to discover that she wasn't quite dead after all, Edgar Allan Poe sent something equally disturbing to the magazine. What he offered was a harsh critical review of the book Confessions of a Poet by Laughton Osborn, who may have been somewhat less cheerful than his name suggests.
In the beginning of his book, Osborn (publishing anonymously) claimed he would commit suicide upon completion of the work and that as he began the book, he placed a loaded pistol on the table beside him for that purpose. Poe astutely pointed out that even were he to work quickly, the poet would not likely complete a book in less than thirty days. By then the powder in the load would no longer be usable and the world might be unfortunately subjected to a sequel of Confessions.
I have pretty thick skin, but this is not a man I'd want to have leaving a review for my book. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Even for a man known for writing dark words, that's pretty heartless. A few months later, Poe was charged with writing a review for a novel by well connected New York journalist Theodore S. Fay titled Norman Leslie. Poe called the book a "most inestimable ­piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly or villainously insulted."
It wasn't long before Poe earned something of a reputation as a literary critic, that reputation being mostly that he was an insufferable jerk. Of course, today Poe is far more well-known than either Osborn or Fay, and there were a few authors whose work he actually appreciated.
One of those was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who Poe wrote about in a review of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an old Manse for Godey's Lady's Book in 1847. There Poe claimed Hawthorne was unoriginal, peculiar, and "infinitely too fond of allegory," but possessed "the purest style, the finest taste…the most delicate humor…the most consummate ingenuity." That's about as high praise as anyone might be able to expect, I think, from the author of a story about getting a man drunk and burying him alive behind a brick wall.
But in the same review, Poe also states that it's not for him to say whether Hawthorne, or any other author, has impressed his readers. And he's right. Because ultimately the people who read a work, the majority of whom probably don't write harsh critical reviews for a living, get to decide whether or not they enjoyed it.
I have to assume that Poe would find the state of book reviews today pretty irritating, full of flattery and lacking (hopefully) in the suggestion that the author's suicide would be preferable to a sequel. But I think it's kind of great that in this era of Amazon and social media, the book reviews that matter most are the simple ones in which readers tell other readers the gist of what they thought.
And reviews really do matter, not only because word of mouth and recommendations are the way most people figure out what to add to their pile of books to read, but also because the fairies that live inside our computers give the numbers of reviews a great deal of weight when determining what to present to the next reader to come along in search of a book.
Sample review: "Five Stars…This book has absolutely given new life to my furniture!"
I've been very fortunate so far. My book Launching Sheep & Other Stories from the Intersection of History and Nonsense has been out for about three weeks and in that time it has received ten reviews on Amazon and several on Goodreads. As a bonus, not one has called it a "most inestimable ­piece of balderdash." Yet.
I am so grateful for all those who have added Launching Sheep to their pile of books to be read (both real and virtual), for those who have already flipped through it, and to the folks who have actually even read it and are already using it to prop up the wobbly ends of their sofas. And I am overwhelmingly grateful to the people who have taken the time to offer their thoughts, especially on Amazon where the computer fairies are particularly nosy.
If you have read the book, and think it might be worth someone else's time, would you please consider leaving a review? It really doesn't have to be long and pretentious, or cleverly harsh. Just a simple sentence or two about what you liked or didn't like is all it takes. If you genuinely don't have the time or inclination, though it might briefly occur to me that you're unoriginal, peculiar, and infinitely too fond of allegory, I promise I will still think you're a lovely person, and I really am delighted you were interested enough to read it at all.
One Brick at a Time: The Greatest Book on Earth
On May 9, 2017 May 9, 2017 By Sarah AngletonIn Books, History, Writing16 Comments
I don't usually post on Tuesdays. But today is a special day, because five years ago, on May 9, 2012, I posted for the first time in this space as the Practical Historian. I didn't really know what the blog would be about back then. I mean, I had a vague notion that since I write historical fiction, I should probably blog about history, but that was all I knew.
Five years of blogging means I deserve a cupcake, right?
I was also a little scared, because I never liked history all that much. That is, until I started to research it as a storyteller. When I did that, I began to discover all of these weird and wonderful moments that make up the story of this world full of weird and wonderful people.
But right away I had a problem. You see, I'm not a historian. And I certainly never wanted to claim to be one, so I decided to take a very lighthearted approach to the subject, and to do my best along the way not to claim any authority I had no right to claim. I started to slowly build up the blog one brick at a time until it took on a distinctive, if somewhat unusual, shape.
What I ended up with was a blog that was a little bit history and a little bit me, one that was kind of funny, and sort of smart, and occasionally silly. And then all you readers started to show up, and you turned out to be funny and smart and occasionally silly, too.
Week after week, I found myself laying down bricks, and more and more of you followed along to see what I was up to, winding through history with me, with really no rhyme or reason at all to the path, and usually ending up somewhere surprising.
It's like what the fine citizens of New York found themselves doing one sunny afternoon when a few of them noticed a poorly dressed gentleman laying bricks. When I say he was laying bricks, I don't mean he was a mason busy with a construction project. Instead, this man was laying a brick here and then moving down the walkway to lay another one there, lined up just so. Whatever he was doing, he did it with precision, and in complete silence. The crowd that soon gathered found him fascinating, and as the man walked on, placing his bricks, they followed.
They followed him around the block and straight into Barnum's American Museum where many of them purchased a ticket and continued their pursuit through the unusual displays they found there. As the crowd became distracted by the wonders and oddities in P.T. Barnum's museum, the curious man and his bricks slipped out the back to continue on the path, where he picked up and replaced each precisely set brick as he came to it.
P. T. Barnum, the publicist I would hire, if only I could. By unattributed – Harvard Library, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Earlier in the day, the man had asked Barnum for a handout and what the great showman and even greater salesman offered instead was a job. Directed by Barnum, the man's nonsensical bricklaying drew a crowd so large that after a few days, the police forced him to stop because traffic couldn't get through. And many of the people who flocked to observe the brick man, paid to follow him into the museum. That's some clever marketing by a man who called his own circus, "The Greatest Show on Earth," and got us all to go along with it.
Now, if you've been reading this blog for the last month or so, you may have seen that as I approached this big blogiversary, the way I decided to celebrate was to publish a collection of some of my favorite posts from the past five years. If you've enjoyed the blog, I think you'll enjoy the book (which features much better editing and a lovely cover). And if not, then maybe you know someone who would.
Available today from Amazon and anyone else who sells books. I think there are still a few others.
So, I want to ask you for a favor. If you have appreciated the blog at any point over the last five years, would you be willing to share this post, or tell someone about the book, or mention it on Facebook, or give it a shout out on your blog, or send out a Tweet, or pin it, or Snapchat it to your grandma, or whatever the cool kids are doing these days?
Because as much as I love to write and as proud as I am of the blog and the book, I'm no P.T. Barnum and promotion scares me silly. I'll do my best, but I'm pretty sure I will never be bold enough to call this the Greatest Book on Earth (if you feel so compelled, please feel free). And I sure would be grateful if you could lay down a few bricks along your path.
Thank you so much for five years. You are, without doubt, the Greatest Blog Readers on Earth.
If you're into Twitter, here are a couple of ready-to-place bricks you can use:
A quirky collection about history and family life and all the funny bits. #LaunchingSheep https://ctt.ec/7WXaq+
History meets modern day family life in this funny and heartwarming collection. #LaunchingSheep https://ctt.ec/UjzVD+
A Paper Book Smack Dab in the Middle of Nowhere
On April 20, 2017 April 20, 2017 By Sarah AngletonIn Books, History, Writing14 Comments
The intersection of State Route 206 and Morton Hill Road in Sullivan County, New York, could legitimately be considered the middle of nowhere. It's a few miles north of Roscoe, New York, which sports a population of around 550 people, excellent fly fishing opportunities, and an allegedly haunted castle. But it's Roscoe's northerly neighbor, at that intersection in the middle of nowhere that might be the most interesting thing about the area.
Because that's where, sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the town of Agloe, New York was imagined into existence by Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Company. On their map of New York State, Lindberg and Alpers chose to set a trap for potential copyright infringers; and so right there in the middle of nowhere, where no one would ever have a reason to go, the mapmakers placed a dot they decided to label Agloe.
Agloe is an anagram of the initials of Lindberg and Alpers, a good name, I think, for a dot in the middle of nowhere. By OpenStreetMap contributors (OpenStreetMap) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Copyright infringement was a big problem in the mapmaking industry at the time (before GPS and the worldwide fleet of mapmaking Google cameras mounted on cars, boats, snowmobiles, and camels), and "paper towns" (because they exist only on paper) weren't uncommon. And you can bet Lindberg and Alpers were glad they'd included Agloe when Rand McNally produced a New York State map a few years later that included the name of their made up town.
The problem was that Rand McNally's lawyers had a pretty tight defense, because at some point along the way, a New York State couple saw the name Agloe on a map and decided to honor the little vanished town by naming their business in that approximate location the Agloe General Store. Rand McNally claimed that their cartographers had visited the site, discovered the business, and concluded that this was one tiny New York hamlet that most certainly existed.
Still, the "town" and the business were in the middle of nowhere at the intersection of lightly traveled roads and, not surprisingly, the Agloe General Store didn't last too long. Today, you can still visit Agloe, though you'll have to plan your route to the intersection rather than the town since Google Maps removed the name in 2014. Once there you'll find a nice sign welcoming visitors to the former site of the Agloe General Store and the made-up town it legitimized. You won't find much else.
Author John Green thought the concept of paper towns was pretty cool, too, and Agloe features prominently in his novel.
I find the concept of paper towns fascinating, and as a writer, I particularly love the story of Agloe, which is an example of something invented on paper and imagined into actual existence.
That's what writers do, or at least that's what we try to do. We think and imagine and plan (and copyright), and eventually we produce a book, our imagination on paper, and we hope that someone will read it and will find that it has meaning in the real world.
In some ways, I've found blogging to be that way, too. Every week (and much more often than that for some), we write our posts and float our dots out there into the blogosphere, a place that can sometimes feel like the middle of nowhere. But then, if we keep at it, along come readers, many of whom are floating their own dots out into the virtual world and we begin to find meaning in one another's work.
But writing in the middle of nowhere in the blogosphere doesn't always feel tangible. I've been at this for a while now, and have been fortunate to have interacted with many gifted writers and amazing people in this space. On May 9 I will have been blogging as the Practical Historian for five years, and I continue to love doing it. To celebrate this milestone, I am releasing a tangible collection, (on paper, but also in e-formats) of some of my favorite posts and essays on history, life, and nonsense.
A whole box full of highly meaningful paper books that really do exist.
If you're interested, the book is available to preorder pretty much wherever you like to order books (and yes, on Amazon, too) and I promise that even though you can't actually hold this paper (or electronic) book in your hands quite yet, I just received a shipment of honest to goodness copies. I'm not convinced you'll find any great meaning in it, but it's a fun book that really does exist. And it's waiting for you just up ahead at that intersection in the middle of nowhere, not far from the haunted castle.
Crime Doesn't Pay. Neither Does Poetry.
On November 3, 2016 By Sarah AngletonIn History, Writing11 Comments
July 26, 1875 wasn't a great day for John Shine. The man who would later become a US Marshal and a California state senator, at the time, worked as a stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo. That day, only a few miles outside of Calaveras County, he encountered a man standing in his path. He wore a flour sack over his head and he held a shotgun leveled at Shine's chest.
In a commanding voice, the flour sack asked politely for Shine to throw down the locked strong box, and happily reminded his accomplices hiding behind the boulders with nothing but their deadly shotgun barrels showing, to shoot the driver should he refuse to comply. Shine didn't need to be asked twice. He threw down the box.
The fictional Black Bart was an "unruly and wild villain" with a thick black beard and messy black curls. The real Black Bart was your kindly old gentleman neighbor.[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The gentlemanly outlaw allowed the stagecoach to move on down the trail. Only later, when Shine returned to the scene, did he realize that the flour sack's accomplices were nothing more than well positioned sticks.
This was most likely the first stagecoach robbery committed by the outlaw who would come to be known as Black Bart. Named (by himself) after a dime novel villain, Black Bart would go on to pull close to twenty-five robberies of Wells Fargo stagecoaches, netting himself a total of around $18,000. The sum was a small drop in the big bucket of about $415,000 Wells Fargo lost to stagecoach robberies over a fifteen year period.
But Black Bart set himself apart. He always worked by himself, never rode a horse, and refused to behave in an ungentlemanly manner. Not once did he fire a shot or steal so much as a dime from a passenger.
And on at least two occasions, he even wrote poetry:
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat
And everlasting sorrow
Yet come what will, I'll try it once,
My conditions can't be worse
But if there's money in that box,
It's munny in my purse.
And there was this one:
I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches
But on my corns too long you've tread,
You fine-haired sons-of…
Well, you get the idea.
The robber signed both poems as "Black Bart, the P o 8." Get it? Because he's a po-eight! I assume that's the idea anyway. He was also pretty great with a license plate. And that, it turns out is a good thing because in November of 1883, Black Bart's reign of crime came to an end.
During what became his final robbery, Black Bart took fire and a bullet grazed his hand. He managed to escape, stemming the bleeding with a handkerchief that bore a laundry mark. Then, somewhere along the way, he dropped the handkerchief.
The 19th century version of the armored car. By PRA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Because Wells Fargo detectives are evidently well versed in every crime drama ever, they conducted an extensive search and traced the handkerchief to a laundry in San Francisco where they learned that it belonged to Charles Bowles, a mild-mannered, gray-haired gentleman who lived a quiet, but elegant life in a boarding house nearby. Mr. Bowles was sentenced to six years in prison for his string of robberies.
The moral of the story, obviously, is that the only way to make money writing poetry is to also rob a stagecoach, and even then, only if you don't get caught. And that, my friends, is why you should stick to writing novels. It just so happens it's National Novel Writing Month. So you better get started. These days, a good stagecoach robbery is a hard thing to pull off.