All Behind the Book essays

Fiction

Behind the Book: Real estate, relationships make for a rollicking read

Behind the Book by Janelle Brown
When I sold my first novel, in early 2007, my agent asked me if I had a second book in the works, just in case a publisher was interested in a two-book deal. "Not exactly," I said, "but I’ve always wanted to do something about real estate and relationships." Within a matter of days, this fragment of an idea—not even a complete sentence—would become my new marching orders: "Janelle Brown will deliver a novel about real estate and relationships by October 1, 2009," my contract instructed me. No pressure.
 
Fortunately, I had lots to say on the subject. The year 2007 was the apex of the real estate boom in Los Angeles, and I was watching my friends and acquaintances buy and sell houses in a frenzy, mortgaging their lives away for a tiny Spanish casita or a sprawling mid-century ranch or a modernist duplex. A real estate junkie myself—by the time I was 30 years old I’d already bought a home, sold it and bought another one—I was fascinated with the passion that people invest in the homes that they buy (or just lust after): The lure of home ownership somehow trumps all other rational thought, becoming in the process a sinkhole for dreams and expectations, self-identity and a whole lot of delusion.  
 
The real estate insanity in Los Angeles was breathtaking: I watched as my own home increased in value almost 30% in three years. As the cost of a modest two-bedroom, 1200 square foot home in central Los Angeles approached a million dollars, I observed how much people were investing—both financially and emotionally—into even the most rudimentary home. And that, in turn, put incredible pressure on the couples who were buying them: With so much on the table, even a solid-seeming marriage could quickly show the strain.
 
I began my book thinking that I would write about a couple attempting—and failing—to buy a house in this environment. But by the time I’d written 50 pages, the real estate crash was visible on the horizon; 100 pages in, and the stock market went into freefall. Instead of obsessing over the homes they wanted to buy, the people I knew were starting to worry about how to save their homes (not to mention their jobs). It became clear to me that the more interesting story to write would be about a couple trying to hang on to their home—and everything that it represents to them, all that hope and identity and delusion. (After all, there’s a lot more plot to be wrung from dreams realized and lost than from dreams that are never realized at all). So I threw away almost everything I’d done up to that point, and started again.
 
I live in Los Feliz, a Los Angeles neighborhood packed with both successful and aspiring writers, directors, musicians and other creatives. For the newly refocused novel, I drew heavily on the stories I was hearing every day. This Is Where We Live ended up being the story of Claudia and Jeremy, an artsy married couple who purchase their first home at the apex of the boom, only to be threatened by foreclosure when their adjustable rate mortgage unexpectedly adjusts.
 
The recession hits them hard. Claudia, an aspiring director, watches her first film fail; Jeremy toils at a no-growth job at a t-shirt company in order to finance his stalling music career. Their threatened home—a bungalow in Mount Washington whose modest size belies the inflated price they paid for it—suddenly comes to represent everything they desire and fear. For Jeremy, who has been revisited by his wild (and wildly successful) artist ex-girlfriend, the house is an anchor, tethering him to a responsible adulthood he no longer finds particularly appealing. And for Claudia, the home embodies everything that she has struggled to achieve—namely, love and success and stability—and that now seems about to disappear at any minute. As the couple works to save their home, they realize that the foundation of their marriage is in no better shape than their bank account. 
 
It’s a challenge to write about the moment that the world is currently living – you don’t yet have the context that an author writing 10 or 20 or 50 years down the line might have. But what you do have is the immediacy of experience, the ability to really document things as they happen. Verisimilitude. I like to think of This Is Where We Live as a record of a particular moment in time.
 
And, hopefully, a rollicking good read to boot.
 
Photo credit: C. Silver

 

When I sold my first novel, in early 2007, my agent asked me if I had a second book in the works, just in case a publisher was interested in a two-book deal. "Not exactly," I said, "but I've always wanted to do something about…
FictionShort Stories

Behind the Book: The discreet charm of the undead

Behind the Book by Michael Sims

“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.

“Vampires?”

“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.

“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.

The whole project was fun, but the best part was merging the two channels of my career: writing about nature and editing anthologies of fiction. After two collections of Victorian and Edwardian crime stories, this was my first venture into supernatural tales. I planned to include the stories that mark the moment when European writers turned folklore into a mythology of aristocratic decadence and the betrayal of innocence. In the vampire Bible, this collection would be Genesis.

To make this work I realized I had to write a natural history of vampires. So cousin Fritz is coming back from the grave to drink the blood of his widow— This idea did not come out of nowhere. Which natural phenomena were misinterpreted as supernatural evidence of vampires?

First, what can we say about vampires?

1) They’re dead.
2) Despite this considerable obstacle, they’re coming back from the grave.
3) So therefore they’re not really, exactly, precisely dead—not, you know, totally dead dead.
4) They vant to drink your blood.

All the rest varies. Some vampires are very pale, but then so is Taylor Swift, and she’s not a vampire. Probably. Some flee from a cross the way Superman dodges kryptonite, but others could march into a Baptist revival and not blink an eye. Many have a serious case of death breath, but clearly some sparkly tousled young boy vamps do not, or moody teenage girls would not be so eager to kiss them.

Death now is sanitized. How often do you see a dead body except on CSI? But until the last century this wasn’t the case. Often a vigil was held over the dear departed before the corpse—in those days before embalming—was hustled off to the grave. Traitors and murders were executed in public and their bodies left hanging on a gibbet. Rival religious factions might dig up each other’s dead and feed them to their dogs. Back then practically everybody could have whispered, “I see dead people.”

Often they saw corpses again after burial. Cemeteries were overcrowded, bodies stacked and spilling out, causing rampant disease, as well as insomnia-inspiring glimpses of your deceased Aunt Inga. People had strong ideas about what was normal in the grave, but like most of our ideas they had very little basis in reality. Any variation from this mythical norm was weighed as possible evidence of vampirism, in a thoughtful analysis reminiscent of this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

What if you saw blood around a corpse’s lips? Often bodies were buried upside down, and because they were buried soon after death the blood pooled at the lowest points, which included the mouth. What about skin that seems to be glowing with life? Decomposition can cause skin to look flushed again after it loses its outer layer. What if you knew someone who couldn’t take sunlight? Perhaps he had porphyria, some kinds of which cause light sensitivity. What if dead hands looked like claws? Skin pulls away from the nails, making them look longer. The list goes on and on.

The most important thing I learned—feel free to take notes—is how to predict who might come back as a vampire. The list includes murderers, their victims, battlefield dead, the drowned, stroke victims, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, and people who talk to themselves. And alcoholics. And grumpy people. And don’t forget women of ill repute. Oh, and redheads.

Michael Sims collects tales of the vampires throughout literature in the anthology Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. He has brown hair.

 

 

“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.

“Vampires?”

“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.

“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.

The whole project was fun, but the best…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Listening Man

Behind the Book by bookpagedev
Tony Hillerman once inscribed a book to me with these words:

“For Rosemary – Who qualifies for the ‘Listening Woman’ title I once used.

–Tony Hillerman”

That inscription ranks with the most cherished compliments I have received in my life. But much as I love to know that he valued me as a good listener, I have to admit, it was easy to listen to Tony Hillerman. In fact, it was a breeze.

Like so many other people who came to know and love Tony Hillerman and his work, I first met him at a book-signing event. Working on assignment for a newspaper, I figured that while the occasion and the man would become indelible memories for me, I would be sure to fade into a sea of media faces in the mystery writer’s recollection.

I soon discovered that I was, as Tony would put it, “dead wrong.” I could not know then that I would have the privilege of co-editing The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime with this man.
 
When I was putting together my first book, The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers (G.K. Hall, 1994), Tony was on my wish list of interviewees. It seemed a long shot but nevertheless I sat down and wrote a letter beginning, “Dear Mr. Hillerman . . .”
 
To my delight, I received an immediate reply, inviting me to interview the author in his home on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arriving at his door after the long trip from Boston, Massachusetts, I again referred to the author as “Mr. Hillerman” as I greeted him.
 
“Well, Ms. Herbert, you can call me Tony,” he said, smiling. “But do you know, I appreciate that you called me ‘Mr. Hillerman.’ It was one of the things that made me remember you from that time you interviewed me in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I find that politeness refreshing.”
 
For my part, I found it intensely stimulating to hear Tony talk about his life and work in an interview that lasted for hours, during which he even showed me a manuscript in progress and asked my opinion of a proposed plot twist. Although Tony would have shrugged off any extolling of his own importance, I felt not just trusted but honored to be privy to that secret in his plot.
 
When Oxford University Press asked me to find an important American mystery writer to co-edit The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories with me, Tony leapt to mind. But I wondered if he could make time for the project. So I offered to do all the groundwork and to write all the essays introducing each story and author. I told him all he would have to do is decide on the final contents and write a preface.
 
Tony told me, “That’s not fair. I insist on writing my share of the essays. And I’ll do the preface, too.”
 
And he was true to his word.
 
More recently, when I approached Oxford University Press to put together an anthology that would begin where Dorothy L. Sayers’ landmark 1928 anthology, The Omnibus of Crime, left off, Tony readily agreed to edit it with me. And so we launched into selecting stories to represent three quarters of a century of developments in our beloved genre.
 
We both knew it was a tall order to walk in the footsteps of Dorothy L. Sayers, but we were absolutely game to give it a try. To honor Sayers, we decided to call our book A New Omnibus of Crime. But while, like her volume, ours would be packed with stories that have crime at their hearts, our Omnibus was destined to speed at a faster pace than Sayers’, and to showcase crime writing in profoundly changing times.
 
As Tony wrote in his “Preface” to our book, Sayers’ The Omnibus of Crime “was and is a masterwork and a treasure. But, as Bob Dylan musically warned us, ‘The times they are a-changin’.
 
“And so has crime and the nature of mystery and detective fiction. . . . Therefore after seventy-five years which have included global warfare, the rise and fall of nations, the advent of space flight, motorized roller skates, crack cocaine, political correctness, and all sorts of other innovations, Rosemary Herbert and I feel the time is ripe for another look at what has become the most read form of printed literature on the planet.”
 
“How’s that for a start, Rosemary?” Tony asked me after reading those paragraphs to me out loud. Am I stealing anything you want to say in your ‘Introduction’?”
 
We were sitting side-by-side at two computers in his home office. I read him the opening words of my piece. It was clear we were working in tandem, without stealing one another’s thunder. And I was not just listening to Tony. He was listening to me.
 
When we turned back to our computer screens, Tony proved himself to be just as polite to Sayers as I had once been to him.
 
“With Miss Sayers,” he wrote, “and readers of today and tomorrow—in mind, we put together A New Omnibus of Crime. We think it does a fair job of representing the strengths of the crime writing genre in our time. Like her book, we hope it will also stand the test of time.”
 
While Tony is not here to celebrate the paperback release of our book, I’m proud to attest that his taste, his love and knowledge of the genre, and his voice are all alive in the book that was my very great joy to co-edit with him.
 
Rosemary Herbert co-edited A New Omnibus of Crime and The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories with Tony Hillerman, and served as editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, all published by Oxford University Press. Her forthcoming mystery novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery will be published by Down East Books in October.

Tony Hillerman created the celebrated Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries, set in New Mexico. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.  

Tony Hillerman once inscribed a book to me with these words:
“For Rosemary – Who qualifies for the ‘Listening Woman’ title I once used.
–Tony Hillerman”

That inscription ranks with the most cherished compliments I have received in my life. But much as I…

The haunting situation my character and I share

Behind the Book by Katie Williams

As an author, you’re often asked where you came up with the characters in your stories. This is, I suppose, a polite way of saying, “Did you just go ahead and write about yourself then?” My answer to this question is that while Evie, the main character in my novel The Space Between Trees, is not me, we have some things in common—lonely teen years, insatiable curiosity and the kind of mouth that tends to get a girl into trouble. But the thing Evie and I have most in common is a situation.

Now, our situations aren’t strictly identical. Unlike Evie, I didn’t witness a childhood friend’s body being pulled out of the woods, and I didn’t lie to that dead girl’s father, didn’t become friends with her best friend, didn’t start a chain of events that led to trouble . . . big trouble. But I did know a girl who was murdered by a serial killer, and my curiosity about her death led me to obsess about her well into adulthood.

Holly was murdered when she was 18 years old, stabbed by a serial killer who broke into her brother’s apartment. I was 11 at the time of Holly’s death, and with seven years between us, we weren’t friends, though our parents were. When Holly and I were thrown together at a spaghetti dinner or choir concert, she was kind to me in the way that older girls can be kind to younger ones—smiling but not beaming, asking questions but not misguided adult ones like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It doesn’t seem quite right to say that I knew Holly, more that I knew of her.

 

My father cast Holly as the lead in the school musicals he directed, so most of the times I saw her, Holly was onstage—feathers tucked into her braids as Tiger Lily in Peter Pan; with dangling, black legs as the eponymous spider in Charlotte’s Web; wearing a swirling skirt as Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel; and in a shiny Pink Ladies jacket as Sandy in Grease. Our town was a small one, and most families there attended the school plays. I felt lucky to have a connection to Holly. It was a brag, a shiny badge I could keep hidden under my jacket. In elementary school, I’d flash it to whichever kids I wanted to impress: “Holly Tarr, who stars in all the musicals, I know her.”

The first time I saw Holly, I was five and waiting for her big entrance. She was 12 and playing Tiger Lily in Peter Pan. Holly had been named often and admiringly in my father’s dinner table stories—“the girl with talent” and “the girl who refused to wear the Indian headdress.” It was opening night, and the middle-school auditorium was full. My mother, seated next to me, had gotten us a bag of Peanut M&M’s. I discovered that if I closed my eyes and placed a candy on my tongue, I could correctly guess its color. When I made my mother try this trick, she couldn’t do it. They probably used slightly different ingredients for the different colored dyes, she explained, and since I was young, my tongue was still good enough to tell the dyes apart, while hers wasn’t anymore. I remember thinking: This is what it is like to be young. Holly came onstage just then, braids swinging, hand batting in front of her mouth to make a war cry. I gotta crow.

When I try to evoke Holly now, the image that comes first is her yearbook photo—the one all the newspapers ran after her murder. In it, she wears a turtleneck sweater and has a little tidal wave of bangs, as was the style in Michigan 1989. She smiles a smile that is, now that I think about it, not unlike my own, a big grin with the cheeks trumping the eyes. If I concentrate on the memory: a quickening. There is a live girl behind the still girl in the photo; she has lined eyes, a sweep of dark hair and is dressed all in black. The last time I saw Holly was in the same auditorium where I first saw her. This time, she sat in the audience, and I was the one onstage. She and her father had come to see the middle-school play Happy Haunting, in which I played a mummy. It was six months before her death.

“You did a good job,” she told me after the show.

The auditorium had emptied but for our fathers, who were talking to each other, and the two of us. I was skeptical of Holly’s praise. The mummy was a lowly role; I had only sung in a group with the rest of the chorus; I didn’t see how anyone could tell what type of job I’d done.

She added, “You have a very expressive face.”

It was the perfect compliment because, as a self-conscious preteen, it was one of the few things I could have believed in, the expressiveness of my face.

That is the only memory I have of Holly offstage and out of costume. That compliment, the only specific sentences I can recall her speaking that weren’t lines from a show. If I had known her better, I might be able to mourn her better. She wouldn’t flicker in my mind, protean, from role to role to role—Indian princess to literate spider to murder victim. My memory would hold her fast in her true form, that of a teenage girl, a real person. But instead, I imagine, I write.

And so I have The Space Between Trees and Evie to tell you a version of Holly’s story, and mine.

 

As an author, you’re often asked where you came up with the characters in your stories. This is, I suppose, a polite way of saying, “Did you just go ahead and write about yourself then?” My answer to this question is that while Evie, the…

Middle Grade

Afghan culture and politics for a young audience

Behind the Book by N.H. Senzai
I didn’t want to write Shooting Kabul, really, I didn’t. I resisted it for many years. Why? Because it deals with many sensitive and personal issues—9-11, the war on terror, Islam, Afghan culture and politics, coupled with my husband’s family history and his escape from Kabul, Afghanistan. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, the story kept niggling the back of my mind. So finally, I was compelled to tell it. After much thought I decided to write a fictionalized account of my husband’s story while explaining the complexities and nuances of Afghan culture and politics in a way that could be understood by young and old alike.
 
My protagonist, Fadi, flees Kabul with his family and as they are escaping, his six-year-old sister, Mariam, is left behind. After Fadi ends up a refugee in Fremont, California, finding her becomes his mission in life. Adjusting to life in the United States isn’t easy for Fadi’s family, and as the events of September 11th unfold, the prospects of locating Mariam in war-torn Afghanistan seem slim. Desperate, Fadi tries every harebrained scheme he can think of. When a photography competition with a grand prize trip to India is announced, Fadi sees his chance to return to Afghanistan and find his sister. 
 
My husband’s father was a professor at Kabul University in the late 1970s. Like Fadi’s father, he too received a Ph.D. in agriculture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and set up a communist puppet government, intellectuals like him were forced to make a decision: join the regime, go to prison and be tortured, or flee the country. Like my husband’s father, Fadi’s father is forced to make a similar decision. Although their escapes occurred at different times and took different routes, both embarked on a perilous journey that brought them to the United States.
 
For thousands of years, Afghanistan has been a battleground for outsiders. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan came with their armies, as did the British and the Soviets. All attempted to conquer and occupy, yet failed. There are lessons to be learned as the United States currently contemplates its role in this country. It is a land still ravaged by war and ethnic tensions between various groups—Pukhtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and others. Despite these trials, Afghans remain a strong and proud people.
 
Shooting Kabul ends on a hopeful note with the election of President Karzai. By the end of 2001, the Taliban had been forced to the fringes of the country and a new hope had reawakened in the country. Unfortunately, nearly a decade later, the Taliban have surged again. The government in Kabul today, under Karzai, with U.S. backing, continues to emphasize a central government in Kabul while neglecting the rest of the country. This does not bode well for Afghans who want nothing more than the basic necessities—clean water, employment, education and security. It saddens me that Afghanistan is yet again at a crossroads, with its people caught at the center of indecision and conflict. They are a people with a resilient and long history, desiring peace for their children and respect from the outside world. But I, like others, still have hope—hope that peace, security and prosperity will come . . . sooner rather than later.
 
Author photo by Sylvia Fife.
 
I didn’t want to write Shooting Kabul, really, I didn’t. I resisted it for many years. Why? Because it deals with many sensitive and personal issues—9-11, the war on terror, Islam, Afghan culture and politics, coupled with my husband’s family history and his escape from…

Are you ready for grilling season? Steven Raichlen shares his top tips

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

Grilling guru Steven Raichlen's best-selling cookbooks have been teaching readers how to get the most out of barbecue for years. In Planet Barbecue! (read our review here) he travels around the world to learn how other countries hone their grilling skills. Here he shares a few extra tips to get you on the right track.

Tune up your grill
Charcoal grill owners will want to scrape out any old ash and spray the vents with WD-40. Gas grill owners should make sure the burner tubes are free of cobwebs and spiders. Replace the igniter batteries if the grill won’t light. If you smell gas, brush the hoses and couplings with a leak detection liquid (made of equal parts water and dish soap)—bubbles will show any leaks.

Buy a second grill
Gas grills are convenient, but when it comes to smoking, you can’t beat charcoal. Join the more than 30 percent of Americans who own more than one grill. Use the gas grill on busy weeknights and fire up the charcoal grill on the weekends, when there is plenty of time to smoke low and slow.

Load up on fuel
 Always keep an extra bag of charcoal or an extra tank of propane on hand. To take if up a notch, if you normally grill with charcoal briquettes, try natural lump charcoal because it burns cleaner. If you normally use natural lump charcoal, graduate up to wood (like oak or hickory) for a richer smoke flavor. 

Ready your rubs 
Prepare a few extra batches of Raichlen’s Basic Barbecue “Four Four” Rub (equal parts salt, pepper, paprika, and brown sugar) at the start of the season, so you always have some on hand for an impromptu grill session.

Gather your tools
 Make sure you have the three essential tools: a long-handled grill brush; spring-loaded tongs; and an instant-read meat thermometer.  Other more specialized cool tools that come in handy include a wood chip soaker, rib rack, cedar grilling planks, beer can chicken roaster, and a set of flat skewers for authentic shish kebabs. 

Learn the lingo
•  Grilling means to cook small, tender, and quick cooking foods directly over a hot fire.    
•  Barbecue is cooked next to, not directly over, the fire, at a low temperature for a long time in fragrant clouds of wood smoke.    
•  Indirect grilling is also done next to, not directly over, the fire, with or without wood smoke, at a higher temperature. 
 
•  Spit-roasting is what you do on the rotisserie. 
 

Review the basics

 

•  The surest way to burn or undercook food on the grill is to overcrowd the grate. Remember to leave 1 inch between each item and leave 1/3 of your grate [or grilling space] open.   That way, if flare-ups occur, there is a safety zone to move the food to and dodge the flames. 

 

•  Steaks, chops, chicken, pork shoulders, and briskets will taste best if they rest for a few minutes before serving. This allows the meat to “relax,” which makes it more tender and succulent. Loosely tent with foil to hold in the heat. 
 

Barbecuing on a budget? Try these tips:

 
 

•  Stay home and fire up your grill. Simply commit to grilling at home and automatically save money—especially when entertaining a group. Grilling at home is also healthier for you and more fun. 

 
 

•  True barbecue is the original budget food. The low, slow heat of the smoker breaks down tough meat, making cheap cuts like brisket and ribs supernaturally flavorful. 

 
 

•  Save leftover charcoal for next time. If there is charcoal left over, cover the grill, closing the top and bottom vents to put out the fire. Use the remaining charcoal for a future grill session.    

 
 

•  Inexpensive steaks, like skirt and hanger, have a lot more flavor than costlier cuts, like filet mignon. Tenderize these cuts by flash grilling over high heat and slicing the meat thinly across the grain.    

 
 

•  Choose the less-expensive dark meat pieces of a chicken. Dark meat, like thighs and legs, are better marbled, richer tasting, and less prone to drying out when exposed to the high, dry heat of the fire than pricier white meat pieces.  95 percent of the world’s grill masters prefer dark meat.

 
 
•  Expensive sirloin and kobe may have the prestige, but chuck delivers more flavor when making a burger. Choose chuck that is at least 15 percent fat and your burgers will be jucier. And try making an inside-cheeseburger by grating sharp cheddar, pepper jack, or blue cheese directly into ground meat; it melts as the meat cooks, producing an exceptionally moist burger.
 
 

•  Grill dark oily fish like sardines, Spanish mackerel, or kingfish as an inexpensive seafood alternative. The omega-3 fatty fish oils are great for your health and keep the fish from drying out on the grill.

 
 

•  Smoke whole briskets, beef clods (shoulders), pork shoulders, whole turkeys, and racks of spareribs. This yields more meat for the money, much less work is required, and everyone loves the primal pleasure of cutting into a communal size roast. 

 
 

•  Cook the whole meal on the grill. appetizer, main course, vegetable side dishes, and even dessert. It saves on fuel, clean-up, and wear and tear in the kitchen. And don’t forget, if something tastes good baked, fried, or sautéed, it probably tastes better grilled!

 
 

 

Grilling guru Steven Raichlen's best-selling cookbooks have been teaching readers how to get the most out of barbecue for years. In Planet Barbecue! (read our review here) he travels around the world to learn how other countries hone their grilling skills. Here he shares a…

Fiction

Behind the book: How I found ‘Percival’s Planet’

Behind the Book by Michael Byers
With Pluto so much in the news lately, you’d be justified in thinking Percival’s Planet a cynical effort to capitalize on a popular story. But honestly it isn’t! I began the book long before Pluto was demoted from planetary status. In fact, in its early stages, Percival’s Planet had nothing to do with Pluto whatsoever.

I’d intended to write a novel about my grandparents. My grandmother Margaret struggled all her life with mental illness; her marriage to my grandfather Paul was turbulent, lasting only long enough to produce my mother and my uncle. In a revisionary spirit I wanted to rewrite their marriage so it didn’t end—so that it outlasted its difficulties.
 
But as I wrote my grandfather’s story, I found it—despite everything—boring. I couldn’t find a way to make his time at law school exciting. His courtship and marriage lay flat. So I put the book down and wrote another novel about something else entirely (Long for This World, 2003). Still, my grandparents’ story remained intriguing to me, so when I finished Long for This World, I returned to that previous attempt.
 
When I did, I remembered that in the late 1920s at Harvard (during the period in which my grandfather was studying law there), something peculiar was happening. Astronomers attached to Lowell Observatory were looking for Planet X—the world that would eventually be called Pluto. Evidently at some point during my research into the period for the previous version I’d come across this fact and stored it away for later use. Now I thought, All right, what if my grandfather hadn’t been in the law school, but had instead been an astronomer? What if he had been along to assist on the Planet X search? What might have happened then?

In this way, unexpectedly, the book evolved from being about my grandparents to being about the search for Planet X—which was eventually discovered at Lowell Observatory, in 1930, by the high-school educated Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh.
 
In bringing Clyde Tombaugh into the novel—to eventually become its central character—I read what I could find of Clyde’s own accounts of his life. I was particularly interested in how Clyde depicted his experiences as a 1920s-era farmboy making telescopes in his spare time, and in how he described his time at Lowell Observatory conducting the photographic search for Planet X. As a novelist, of course, my attention fastened on the interesting gaps in his own account. What did it feel like to make a perfect 9-inch mirror in the middle of a lonely Kansas farmyard? What did he think when his crucial oat field was ruined by hail, destroying his college fund and diverting the course of his life forever? What must it have been like to receive a letter from the eminent V.M. Slipher, inviting him to come to Lowell Observatory on a trial basis? What must Clyde have felt, arriving as a young man in Flagstaff, Arizona, to meet Slipher at the Flagstaff train depot, and to climb into the astronomer’s Model T on a snowy afternoon? And, finally, what must he have felt having actually found the long-sought Planet X?
 
My most fruitful research occurred at Lowell Observatory itself. There, I handled not only the Pluto telescope but Clyde Tombaugh’s own observational journals, filled out in ink in his meticulous blue handwriting. Turning those ruled pages, I understood who Clyde had been—and why he was the perfect man to find Planet X. Anxious to please, afraid of being fired, studied in the painstaking work of building a telescope from scratch alone—only Clyde could have done such a thorough, uncomplaining job of the Planet X search. Only Clyde could have spent almost a year staring at hundreds of massively populated starfield plates—then finish by spotting the infinitesimal flyspeck of Planet X. The more I learned, the more it seemed to me it should have been impossible for Clyde to find Planet X, and at some point it struck me that it was as though Lowell Observatory had sent the boy out on a snipe hunt—and he came back, all earnest and pleased, with an actual snipe.  

As I was writing, Pluto suddenly entered the news by being demoted from planetary status. At first I thought this was the end of any hopes for the novel. Who wants to read a book about a planet that doesn’t exist anymore? But I saw, to my surprise, that people really cared about Pluto—the runt planet at the end of the solar system. Who knew? "Save Pluto" organizations cropped up overnight. I, too, think Pluto’s planetary status is a fitting monument to Clyde Tombaugh’s work, and I hope the book gives him the recognition he deserves for his industry and dedication, and that it captures, at least a little, the experience of discovering a new world.
 
And, yes, I still haven’t really written about my grandparents.
 
Maybe next time!

 

With Pluto so much in the news lately, you'd be justified in thinking Percival's Planet a cynical effort to capitalize on a popular story. But honestly it isn't! I began the book long before Pluto was demoted from planetary status. In fact, in its early…
Fiction

The dark corners of research that inspired ‘Room’

Behind the Book by Emma Donoghue

I always knew I wanted my novel Room to work on two levels: as a universal, almost fairy-tale story about love between mother and son, and as a totally realistic child’s-eye account of being raised in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11. To get the second bit right, I didn’t just read up on experiences similar to the one in my story—the roughly half-dozen young women who have survived lengthy, secret confinement, mostly famously in Austria and the U.S. but also in Belgium, Japan and Russia. I followed my nose in many directions to understand, as deeply as I could, every aspect of what Ma and Jack might go through, both inside and outside their prison.

Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

For my previous historical novels, I’ve mostly worked in university libraries; this time, my library was the Internet. That made the research pretty visceral—videos of dungeons on YouTube—and also gave it a moment-by-moment, one-headline-followed-by-the-next quality: sad stories gathering a few more dreadful details every day, until they fade from the public view. Many of my sources were not ‘expert opinions’ but the raw reactions of people all over the world who rush onto message boards. Listening in gave me insight into what such cases mean to those who hear about them: how they trigger empathy as well as voyeurism, judgment as well as revulsion. And also what such unsought celebrity—being put on a pedestal, and knocked off it too—might do to a survivor like Ma.

The worst topic was something I really needed to figure out: exactly what children can and can’t survive. I found a site called Feral Children and forced myself to read through all its cases of children raised in confined or abusive settings. In the first week I kept bursting into tears, eyes locked in horror on my screen. The story of Jack and Ma is really not that bad compared with many I read; there are cases of children neglected, starved or tortured over long periods, often by their own parents or guardians, that I try not to think about anymore because they make me shake.

But I also came across much more heartening material about what psychologists call resilience: the power to get through things that might destroy someone else. I read academic papers on the kind of family model that could allow Ma and Jack to endure both their prison and its aftermath. I studied unassisted birth, women having babies in concentration camps and raising their kids in jails all over the world, what it’s like for children conceived through rape, and the long-term effects of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.

I talked to a friend who breastfed her kid till the age of five. I looked up pop hits of the early 2000s to find out what songs would be lingering in Ma’s head. I checked out police slang, sexual-assault evidence-collection guidelines, the protocols of expensive psychiatric clinics, treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.

I picked my brother-in-law’s brains on the matter of how Old Nick could have created a secure prison from a garden shed, and tracked down the most high-tech glass available for the skylight, the kind that looks transparent but is criss-crossed with unbreakable mesh. I designed Room on a home-decor website, figuring out how to fit all the furniture in.

Finally, the pleasantest research I did was playing with and listening to my children. My son Finn was five while I was writing the book. I analysed his quirky grammar, noted his obsessions, even asked for his help with ‘the book about Jack and the bad guy’: for one scene, he let me roll him up in a rug to see if he could wriggle out. Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it did one good thing for me: it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

 
Research comes in many forms, and there’s nothing dry-and-dusty about it. I picture it as the process of sinking deeper and deeper into the water before I kick off and start to swim.

 

—

Emma Donoghue is the author, most recently, of Room, which is longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize. Born in Ireland, Donoghue now resides in Canada with her partner and their children.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Emma Donoghue for Room.

I always knew I wanted my novel Room to work on two levels: as a universal, almost fairy-tale story about love between mother and son, and as a totally realistic child’s-eye account of being raised in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11.…

Behind the Book: YA author investigates an American hate group

Behind the Book by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

This book began several years ago during a trip to Tennessee when I saw a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

At the time, I knew several things about Forrest: How the former slave trader and plantation owner rose to the rank of general during the Civil War. How his daring exploits earned him a reputation as a brilliant cavalryman and natural military genius. How he was both ruthless and insubordinate.

I also knew this: In 1867, the Confederate general reputedly became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary group dedicated to the restoration and maintenance of white supremacy.

Throughout American history, we can find many stories that reveal a darker side to the character of our nation. So what do we do about the dark side?

That statue made me think about the Southern white men who joined the KKK. It made me think about the violence they inflicted on tens of thousands of freed people and whites sympathetic to the plight of the former slaves.

And it made me wonder why.

In my search to answer that question, I found the stories of the Klansmen who feared that they would suffer personal loss if the former slaves had the same rights and privileges as whites. These Klansmen donned robes and hoods and carried guns and whips in order to terrorize—and punish—black Americans who dared to vote, attend school, buy land, choose their own employers or worship as they pleased.

I found the stories of freed people such as Anne Ulrich Evans and her husband and children, who slept on their cabin floor to shield themselves from the Klansmen’s bullets; Hannah Tutson, who refused to give up her land to her white neighbors and was brutally whipped; Henry Lipscomb, who was determined to vote, saying, “A man can kill me, but he can’t scare me”; Elias Hill, a crippled preacher who was whipped for preaching; Jim Williams, who was murdered because he was determined to protect his community. I also read about white schoolteachers such as William Luke, whose last words were “I have only sought to educate the negro.”

Over 140 years have passed since the formation of the first KKK. In 2006, I attended a Klan Congress. (The KKK no longer calls it a rally.) I wanted to know: How does the present-day Ku Klux Klan compare to the Reconstruction-era Klan? How are they alike? In what ways are they different? What sort of men and women join the KKK today? What are their goals? What compass guides their lives?

The three-day Congress was held in Arkansas, deep in the Ozark mountains. When I arrived, I met ordinary men and women, some who had traveled from far parts of the United States to attend.

The Congress opened with a tour of the National Office, where I saw the membership room, the recruiting room, the souvenir room, the publishing room, where they print their pamphlets, and the media room, where Klan leaders broadcast an internet television show and air shortwave radio programs.

That first night, the National Director called for a revival in America. A recruiter from Arkansas spoke, saying, among other things, “God is a God of segregation” and “The God that made the races made them to stay separate."

Throughout the weekend, other members spoke about the “threat” (as they called it) that Jews, homosexuality, racial integration, nonwhites and public schools posed to America. The speakers claimed that God intended America for white people only.

On the second day, I watched as men and boys wrapped a tall cross in kerosene-soaked rags, covered it in burlap, and then carefully stood the cross on end.

On the last day, I attended a Sunday church service, held on-site. In his sermon, the National Director of the Klan called the invasion of America by nonwhites a “national calamity." After speaking again about the “threats" and “dangers” to America, he called the work of the Klan a “holy mission."

At the end of the service, as Celtic music played, one by one or in family groups, the Klansmen and women stood in front of the altar. Facing the congregation, they stretched out a right arm in a straight-armed salute and dedicated themselves to their race, their God and their country. They and the congregants shouted, “White Power.”

That night, the Congress ended with the pageantry of fully robed Klansmen and a tall cross burning against the night sky.

This book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K., is about a time in history when the actions of many people—our country’s leaders and ordinary people—didn’t live up to our nation’s creed and the words of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Throughout American history, we can find many stories that reveal a darker side to the character of our nation. We can also find stories that instill pride, courage and hope.

So what do we do about the dark side?

We shine a light on it. That’s how we release its power.

I hope this book is such a light.

This book began several years ago during a trip to Tennessee when I saw a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

At the time, I knew several things about Forrest: How the former slave trader and plantation owner rose to the rank of general during the…

Fiction

A disappearing act

Behind the Book by Rick Bass

Nashville Chrome is a fictional treatment of the lives of the Browns, a 1950s country music trio whose sudden success was as inexplicable and meteoric as their subsequent disappearance.

They were once the biggest thing in country music—the first group ever to have number one hits in both country and pop charts and the Beatles’ most admired American group. They were confidants of Johnny Cash and the closest friends and mentors to a young Elvis Presley. The key to the Browns’ success was a mysterious “tempered harmony” that could come only from shared bloodlines. The smoothness of their sound helped usher in the more commercial Nashville music industry.

As fascinating as their story is, I was struck most by the question of why the Browns, and not any other group or individual, emerged out of that time and place and almost singlehandedly altered the course of American music. So stark and dramatic was their success that it seemed their sound might as well have come from a venthole in the earth—as when the earth’s plates slide over rifts of volcanic activity—and that from that hotspot, new life and land was formed. Was their own genetic drift that random?

But that question proved unanswerable, and so I decided to focus on a new heart of inquiry, less scientific and less metaphysical: wondering not so much why fame had chosen the Browns, but rather, how they each dealt with it after it went away.

This book is far less an environmental parable than any I’ve ever undertaken, and yet in thinking about the parallels in this story—the creation, as if from a garden of innocence, of something amazing, and then the bittersweetness of the wonderful thing’s slow going away—there seems to be a larger metaphor for our times. The success of the Browns’ sound came in part from a taming of the old Appalachian nasal caterwaul—rough and raw as a cob—that rendered a new, smooth, chrome-like sound more accessible, and more marketable. I wonder if part of the book’s unspoken, haunting regret—like the Browns’ sound itself—comes from a subconscious awareness of some of the costs and losses involved in this trade.

As cultural spokespersons for the 1950s, the Browns hold intriguing clues to how we once were as a country: a product of our landscape and our fears and hungers, and of complicated circumstances that could no more hold steady than could a river stop in mid-flow. For a little while, the Browns changed the world—but just because they changed it did not mean they controlled it, or that the world was obliged to stop for them. Of the two sisters, one realized this, and retreated to anonymity with grace, while the other—Maxine, the oldest—burns, and waits still for that river to return. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m grateful to the Browns for living it.

RICK BASS is the award-winning writer of many works of nonfiction and fiction. His new novel, Nashville Chrome, considers the sudden rise and fall of the country music trio The Browns.

 

Nashville Chrome is a fictional treatment of the lives of the Browns, a 1950s country music trio whose sudden success was as inexplicable and meteoric as their subsequent disappearance.

They were once the biggest thing in country music—the first group ever…

Fiction

Behind the Book: Where author and characters meet

Behind the Book by Ruiyan Xu

Raymond Carver once said: “You are not your characters, but your characters are you.” Sometimes readers will ask whether I have a favorite among the three protagonists of my novel, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; they will tell me that they adored one of the characters, disliked another, and felt exasperated by the third (but different readers take different sides); and they will assume there’s one character who reflects my autobiography most accurately, to whom I’ve given most of my own experiences. “Nope,” I’ll shake my head, “I made them up.” But the truth is, that’s not entirely accurate.

When I started writing stories as a child, I never wrote about me—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I wrote stories about men and women falling out of love long before I ever fell in love myself. I wrote stories set in times and places I’d never been. During my last semester of college, I was feeling adrift, unsure of where I was going or what I wanted to do. What I started writing then, and what I kept writing the next eight years, were the stories of three characters who, on the surface, were nothing like me.
 
Why did I start writing about Li Jing, a thirty-something Shanghainese financier who gets brain damaged in a terrible accident and loses the ability to speak Chinese? I didn’t resemble Li Jing’s wife Meiling either; she is a woman defined by her role as a wife and mother, who, in the aftermath of Li Jing’s accident, must try to keep her husband’s business afloat and her family together. As for Rosalyn Neal, an American divorcee who comes to Shanghai to conduct medical research into Li Jing’s case? I had never even contemplated medical school, nor was I anywhere close to being married, much less divorced. Each of these three characters were a decade older than me, full of experiences and concerns and losses I couldn’t have possibly known about. But as I wrote about them, I realized that though the exteriors of their lives diverged sharply from my own, each of them, strangely, embodied a piece of me.
 
At the beginning of the book, when Li Jing wakes up in the hospital, he is horrified to find that he can no longer speak any Chinese. Li Jing’s loss—the loss of a language, but also of all the other things that language affects, including relationships, memories, and the ability to work—happens in an instant. But for me, the same kind of loss happened over the course of years and decades. I moved from China to America at the age of 10, and when I arrived, I didn’t speak any English. Eight years later, when I went back to Shanghai to visit family, it was Chinese that I struggled with. With the deterioration of my Chinese, I lost more than just words and sentences; my relationships with members of my extended family were weakened because it was hard to communicate, and I felt alienated and estranged from the very city I grew up in. Li Jing’s frustrations and pains, once he is robbed of his tongue, gave me an outlet to explore my own history, the process of losing a language, and what else you lose when you can no longer speak to the ones you love.
 
For Meiling, her husband’s accident and its aftermath means making drastic changes to her own life. Not only does she have to work with the hospital and Rosalyn to manage Li Jing’s care, she must also provide some stability to their young son. look after her elderly father-in-law, and keep Li Jing’s business running. Her life becomes impossibly busy, but her relationship with her husband deteriorates after a series of miscommunications. Meiling had always been an observer, keeping life at a bit of a distance. Her husband’s accident spurs her into action, but her sense of remove never quite leaves her. She keeps watching her husband, keeps judging him, and never allows herself to express her emotions or ask him about his. Her reaction to the crisis . . . well, let’s just say it doesn’t sound entirely unfamiliar to me. And as a writer, I must admit to that sometimes I feel as though I’m watching the proceedings instead of participating in them.
 
When Dr. Rosalyn Neal comes to Shanghai for the first time, she is simultaneously isolated by clamor of the city and seduced by its beauty. Soon, she falls in with a crowd of hard-drinking expats, allows herself to leave her painful divorce behind, and develops an unprofessional relationship with her patient. It is as if in traveling halfway around the world she can throw off her troubles and give herself a momentary escape from her “real” life. Unfortunately, before the book is over, she will realize that even when we are far from home, we cannot escape who we are. In portraying Shanghai through Rosalyn’s eyes, I was able to express what I saw when I went back to Shanghai as an adult. The city I returned to was very different from the city I had grown up in; this new Shanghai was full of nightclubs and bars, dazzling and sophisticated. Rosalyn loses her head in the city, the way we all can when we’re in a different place, when we want to create new versions of ourselves. But the thing is, you can’t ever really run away from yourself. It always catches up with you sooner or later.
 
I am not my characters—my life is nothing like theirs, and what happened to them haven’t happened to me. But where they come from, how they feel, who they are—all of those things come from me, and they’re not entirely invented. I look back at what I’ve written—from decades-old stories to new drafts, and now I think: ah, there I am. Writing has a way of not letting you run away from yourself, and your characters have a way of reminding you that they are, after all, you.
 
Ruiyan Xu lives in Brooklyn. The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is her debut novel.

Raymond Carver once said: “You are not your characters, but your characters are you.” Sometimes readers will ask whether I have a favorite among the three protagonists of my novel, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; they will tell me that they adored one…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Searching for a giant in the family tree

Behind the Book by Kathleen Kent

One of the benefits of writing a novel based on a well-documented historical figure is the wealth of material available to help with character development. My first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, was based on Martha Carrier, my grandmother back nine generations—an accused witch hanged in 1692 who Cotton Mather referred to as The Queen of Hell—and the stories my family had been passing down for 300 years.

There were court transcripts, depositions, arrest warrants and contemporary essays detailing some of Martha’s deeds (or misdeeds in the eyes of her accusers) chronicled by the magistrates, neighbors and family who knew her, all of which I was able to use in creating the narrative.

It was quite a different experience developing the character of Thomas Carrier, Martha’s husband, for my second novel, The Wolves of Andover. In Massachusetts there were only a few tax records that I could find, and a petition by him following the witch trials that he be compensated for his wife’s unjust death. And yet, Thomas was a man who Carrier family legend claimed had lived to 109 years of age, was seven feet tall, and was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England. I had grown up hearing stories of Thomas from my grandparents, but I had assumed for a long time that these tales were like the proverbial fish stories: stories that had grown in size over time.

While researching The Wolves of Andover, I was able to substantiate his age and height. The New England Journal of 1735 reported that Thomas, at that time living in Colchester, Connecticut, had died at age 109; was over seven feet tall with a full head of hair; and had walked several miles with a bag of grain over his back a few days before his death. The Journal reported that he was still, at that advanced age, “fleet of foot.” When I travelled to Connecticut to visit his gravesite, I marveled at the numbers carved into the headstone: AE 109 Yrs. According to the local stories, two coffins had to be fitted together to bury him.

Proof of his being one of the two executioners of King Charles I may never be substantiated. It is widely believed that the official executioner at the time refused absolutely to cut off the head of an anointed king, and that Cromwell at the last minute had to find two willing axmen. This story, in the form of local gossip, seemed to follow Thomas throughout his life, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut. According to a Connecticut historian I spoke to while doing research, Thomas even gained a reputation in Colchester as a ferocious Indian fighter, continuing to protect the homes he had built for himself and family well past 70 years of age.

In the past few years I have spoken to fellow descendants, from different branches of the Carrier line, who heard the same stories I was told, not only of Martha and the witch trials, but of Thomas, who was the giant who killed a king.

Here’s what I was able to establish through research: He never abandoned his family during the witch trials and helped rally his neighbors to raise funds to free some of the children accused of witchcraft from prison. He kept his farm going in Andover until 1711, when he was compensated by the Crown for his wife’s death, and then he left for Colchester, with all his surviving children and grandchildren. There he built three homes and a blacksmith forge, and the bag of grain he was carrying the few days before he died was for an ailing widower in the neighboring town of Glastonbury.

Sometimes, though, it’s what is not in the historical records that gives an intriguing glimpse at a character’s inner life or purpose. Thomas, who was 48 years old when he married Martha, never married again after her death—a highly unusual and even scandalous position for a single male in Puritan society. As the writer of the story, I got to make the call as to his reasons for never again taking a wife. I believe it was because Martha Carrier, his wife, was a remarkable woman, a woman he stood by no matter what, a woman whom he appreciated for her independent nature, with whom he was able to share his darkest secrets, a woman who was irreplaceable. As much fun as it was to write a story about Thomas’ adventures in England and the mystery surrounding his work for Cromwell, it was even more satisfying to pay homage to the love story of these two remarkable people.

Kathleen Kent is a New England writer with a fascinating family tree. The Wolves of Andover is her second novel, and a prequel to her bestselling debut, The Heretic’s Daughter.
Middle Grade

Behind the book: From NASA to novel

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

By Kristin Tubb

Growing up, I once told my father that I wanted to “own NASA.” Monetary and logistical issues aside, this seemed like an excellent career path to pursue. Space shuttles! Space stations! And, well . . . Space!

It was with much regret that I left this dream behind, and focused instead on the more realistic dream of studying to become an Aerospace Engineer at Auburn University. Alas, this was not to be my calling, either, as I consistently fell asleep during my classes and while reading my textbooks. (I took this as a sign. Rightfully so.)

Many years and numerous job changes later, I found myself nodding eagerly when editor Kathryn Knight at Dalmatian Press asked me to write an elementary-school-age activity book about space.

“It’ll be the universe, in 64 pages,” she said. I might’ve squealed.

The piecing together of the universe began. Constellations and black holes and meteors. When I reached the topic of comets, I started with the one comet I knew: Halley’s Comet. Within minutes of researching Halley’s Comet, I discovered that it travelled so close to our planet in the spring of 1910, Earth actually passed through the comet’s tail. People who lived in that time knew that Halley’s Comet was approaching, knew that Earth would pass through its tail, but no one knew—not exactly—what to expect. People began prophesying the end of days. And with that sniff of fear, out came the con artists.

Lead umbrellas. Gas masks. Trips to the moon. And comet pills, selling in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a dollar per. All of these items were hawked in the spring of 1910 by con artists and snake oil salesmen looking to turn a quick buck. Looking to cash in on fear. Reading those words—comet pills—I knew it was a novel I’d like to write.

I finished the book for Dalmatian Press (titled Space: An A+ Workbook), and started researching the fear that led up to May 18 and 19, 1910—the days that Earth was in the tail of Halley’s Comet. The event has been called the world’s first case of mass hysteria; it was the first time there was ample enough media to alert most of the world’s population to this kind of event. (And by media, we’re talking newspapers. Radios weren’t yet widely in use.)

Headlines read “Hey! Look Out! The Comet’s Tail is Coming Fast” and “Whole Science World Waits Comet’s Tail As It Sweeps Earth” and “Earth Ready to Enter Tail of Comet.” But despite the fact that the world’s top scientists promised that no danger would befall Earth, the citizens of our dear planet believed what they wanted to believe.

Farmers refused to plant or tend to their crops. People donated all their belongings to their churches in penance. Rumors started that being submerged in water would keep you safe, and rentals of U-boats and submarines soared.

Yet knowing all of these fantastic (and true!) details, I still needed a backdrop for my main character, Hope McDaniels. Why would she want to sell comet pills? It’s difficult to write a character who is a con artist and still manage to make her likeable. I needed Hope to be desperate.

Since the story took place in 1910, I started researching vaudeville as a possible career for 13-year-old Hope. (It was plausible she’d have a career at 13. In 1910, most children studied to around age 11 before leaving school to find work.) Vaudevillans had a grueling schedule—many of them didn’t even own a home or rent an apartment, they travelled so much. They lived in sleeper cars and boarding houses and performed the same act four times a day, every day, except for days on the rails.

 
That was it. Hope hated travelling on the vaudeville circuit, and she saw the opportunity to leave blazing toward her in the nighttime sky. Others were cashing in on the fear of the comet—why shouldn’t she?

Writing Selling Hope was a rare opportunity to combine my interests in space, live entertainment and history. The research was, in some parts, so funny, so breathtaking, so scary and so touching that you can guarantee I never fell asleep over those books.

(And for the record: writing history for kids? Much better than owning NASA.)

Selling Hope is Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s second work of historical fiction for young readers. Her debut novel, Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different, tells the story of families in Tennessee’s historic Cades Cove who were displaced by the opening of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Tubb and her family live near Nashville.
 

By Kristin Tubb

Growing up, I once told my father that I wanted to “own NASA.” Monetary and logistical issues aside, this seemed like an excellent career path to pursue. Space shuttles! Space stations! And, well . . .…

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