Tag Archives: devil’s Cold Dish

Families

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As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Mistakes and more

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One of the pitfalls of writing historical fiction is the danger of making mistakes. It could be simple mistakes. In A Devil’s cold dish, I refer to a stack of hay as a bale. Balers were not invented until the early 1800s, a fact I knew. But I was trying to expand my synonyms from stack and pile and all the other words. A reader called on it immediately.

Then there was the mystery where I had Rees rewarding Hannibal with oats a few times. I immediately got pushback from a reader who accused me of giving the poor (fictional) horse colic.

These are somewhat trivial errors. More serious mistakes involve easily confirmed facts that somehow the writer (me) got wrong. In Murder on Principle, I refer to Jefferson’s opponent as John Quincy Adams. He is actually the son of the correct candidate, John Adams. This is a case of temporary forgetfulness. I knew it was John Adams but made the mistake once and it was repeated. No one else caught it, not the agent nor the editor. That was left to a reader who wrote a really harsh review.

This is what makes writing historical fiction so challenging; everything must be triple checked and even then it is all too easy to make a mistake.

Believe me, someone will know.

I must add, however, that sometimes the reader who is so sure of their facts, is wrong. I used the term ‘cracker’ in one of my books and a reader wrote a gotcha review. I, however, had done my research and had a copy of a letter written in 1763 by a British official using that exact term.

The passage of time always creates an undiscovered country.

Copy edits on The Devil’s Cold Dish

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Copy edits on “The Devil’s Cold Dish ” have arrived. The finished manuscript is due back to Minotaur on January 5.

What are copy edits? Mainly spelling, grammar – those little things that slip through. It is also my last chance to review the finished manuscript. Line edits, which come first, detect problems with the plot or timeline. More substantive changes can be made during the line edit phase. Copy edits are not the creative part but they help make the manuscript a finished product. Everyone knows how annoying typos are and the copy edits are designed to prevent them as much as possible.

The timing proves something else: when one is a writer you are always on duty – even over the holidays.

Devil’s Cold Dish – contracts and edits

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I am happy to announce that I received both the contracts and the edits for the Devil’s Cold Dish.

devils

The contracts have been signed and  put  in the mail.

I am still working on the edits but they are almost done. These are line edits; i.e. the editor goes over the manuscript and comments/questions items. This is when the editor has the author correct the manuscript – are there too many repetitions of the same information? Does the plot need some changes? Too many characters?

I enjoy this part of the editing because it makes me think of the manuscript and the story in a new way. Confusing sections are clarified and sometimes I take the opportunity to expand on something. this is my chance to look at the story with fresh eyes – for good or ill since I can either think this book is good or terrible.

The next time I see the manuscript I will be working on copy edits which I don’t like at all. This is grammatical mistakes, any double periods I haven’t caught. If I haven’t paid close enough attention to the time line, I can be sure the copy editor will pick it up.