Why My Character Can't Carry Her Phone in Her Pocket

Yesterday I had lunch at one of my favorite pizza restaurants: Portland's Old Town Pizza (which is reputedly haunted!). I sat across from a telephone similar to one my In the Shadow of Blackbirds protagonist uses in the novel's 1918 setting:

I took the picture to demonstrate why you won't catch my heroine texting her friends or searching for her phone in her pocket. She and her classmates would never get in trouble for bringing phones to school, because that would entail ripping large wooden boxes off walls or sneaking in candlestick telephones that are far from being wireless.

One of the advantages of writing historical fiction set in the fairly recent past—as opposed to say the Middle Ages—is that I often stumble upon items like this phone in everyday places, and I can explore how these contraptions look and feel. Here's another historical device that appears in the novel...found in my good friend's Victorian home she's renting:

Although it looks like elevator controls, it's actually a push-button light switch from the late 1800s. My characters wouldn't be flipping on light switches like we do in modern homes, so I always need to make sure I phrase things the right way when writing scenes involving the technology of the day.

I'm still not sharing the names of these characters who are talking into giant, boxy wall telephones and pushing light-switch buttons. You'll need to wait until I post the official synopsis before learning more about this WWI-era protagonist of mine and the ghost in her life. For now, I'll just leave these little breadcrumbs of information about the novel's historical world. The bigger and better revelations are yet to come...

Fighting for a War That Was So Awful, It Caused Grown-Ups to Believe in Fairies

I'm planning to remain somewhat secretive about the plot of In the Shadow of Blackbirds until the book sells, but I'll divulge the setting for the sake of this post: WWI America.

Don't know much about WWI?  You're not alone.  For some reason, that particular war gets buried in our collective history beneath most other major American conflicts.  As you may have read, the last surviving American WWI veteran, Frank Buckles, just passed away. He was troubled that Washington, D.C., has never erected a national memorial for WWI. A website dedicated to his cause, www.wwimemorial.org, states the following:

"...while the later conflicts of the 20th century—World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—rightfully have national memorials on the National Mall, there is no such memorial to 'the Great War,' even though more Americans gave their lives in World War I than in Korea or Vietnam."

Elsie Wright with a "fairy."

How did I personally become interested in this forgotten war? When I was around twelve years old, I saw a Ripley's Believe It or Not episode about the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917 two English girls, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, claimed to have photographed fairies near their home. Grown-ups believed them—including photography experts and Sherlock Holmes's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—and the girls became famous. The narrator of Ripley's, Jack Palance, explained that the reason adults believed the fairies were real was because WWI was so horrifying. I wondered exactly how atrocious the era had been if grown, educated people were convinced fairies genuinely frolicked in the English countryside.

I later learned about the boom in Spiritualism during the early 1900s, which also came about because of the horrors of WWI. Long story short, I dove deep inside the history and came up with In the Shadow of Blackbirds, a ghostly vision of WWI America, as seen through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl.

If you find yourself rooting for Frank Buckles's dream of honoring the thousands of Americans who lost their lives in the war that was so awful, it caused grown-ups to believe in fairies, head to www.wwimemorial.org. If you want to learn more about the Cottingley Fairy photographs, you can visit sites such as www.cottingley.net/fairies.shtml.

And, of course, if you want to keep up-to-date with my adventures of bringing In the Shadow of Blackbirds to a bookstore near you, follow along at this blog, Twitter, Facebook, or my mailing list.

History, sexypants-style

I recently learned about the impending closure of the Broadway show Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. The title suggests the musical is another case of vampires attacking a historical figure, but it's actually a show that attempts to make history—a subject notoriously known for its dullness to most Americans—exciting, sexy, and relatable by portraying the seventh president as a rock star.

I've never seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, but I love the concept. Die-hard Jackson buffs probably cringe at the idea of the guy belting out emo rock tunes in "sexypants," but I think the modernized take is a brilliant way to lure the history-hesitant masses into a lesson about the past.

I'm all for public education, but let's face it: high school history textbooks are boring and watered down. So many bizarre and intriguing footnotes to history don't ever get mentioned, and juicy tidbits about historical leaders, rebels, and everyday folk get edited out. My love affair with the past started with novels, classic movies, biographies, historical sites, and Disneyland (yes, Disneyland), but even I HATED memorizing and spitting out dates and names for tests.

I tip my hat to anyone who can create a clever way to bring history to life. It's unfortunate Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson's Broadway run was such a short one (the economy is said to be the culprit), and I hope it finds welcoming off-Broadway homes in the future.

I'm trying my own hand at using a unique way of resurrecting a bygone era in my novel-in-progress, which is another reason why I appreciate the efforts of others. When my agent first chatted with me about Blackbirds, she told me she didn't feel like she was reading historical fiction, which she meant as a compliment. My goal all along has been to tie the story to modern events, and the time period I chose to write about is such a bizarre one that I've found it easy to portray the history as science fiction. We'll see if the final result will go anywhere, but I'm having fun in the process.

Here's to digging up the past with alternative shovels!