Tribute to a Terrific Mother-in-Law

Edith Caroline Schmitt Camp, 1926-2019.

My mother-in-law died early Wednesday morning. She was 92 and had lived a good life until dementia set in. Although her family and friends will miss her, Mom’s new life in heaven is a time to rejoice, not a time to weep.

Mom and Dad were married for 64 years before Dad’s death in 2012. After that, her health gradually declined.

I knew her for just over 40 years.

It isn’t unusual to hear people complain about their mothers-in-law, and mother-in-law jokes are common. But Mom and I had a good relationship. She never criticized me, at least in my hearing, and I think she was happy with her son’s choice. For my part, I respected and appreciated her.

Mom was a strong Christian woman who was active in her church until age and circumstances intervened. She worked hard all her life and made it a priority to raise her children to be respectful and to internalize her Christian values.

Thank you, Mom, for giving me a good husband and for being a worthy role model for my children.

You will be missed here.

But it’s your time to celebrate.

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The photo shows Mom soaking up the rays outside the nursing home in Lebanon, Missouri on July 16, 2013.

The Pitfalls of a Good Title

A good title is a pitfall for the reader, which makes it a windfall for the writer.

I recently finished reading a book of short stories by Irish writer Maeve Binchy. She was a new author to me, but the BookBub description made Chestnut Street sound interesting. And the fact that they were short stories meant I could read them one at a time and squeeze them in between more important matters.

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, I would finish a story and be immediately intrigued by the title of the next one. I suppose I could have avoided the problem by not turning the page, but that isn’t in my nature. I like to move to the page I will start on next rather than ending with the last one. I’m not sure why, but it seems more hopeful and less stagnant that way. So I saw the title and read on.

To give you some idea of the allure created by Maeve’s short story titles, they include “A Problem of My Own,” “The Cure for Sleeplessness,” “Taxi Men Are Invisible,” “The Lottery of the Birds,” and—my favorite—“The Wrong Caption.”

I always struggle to find the right title for my books, and I fail miserably at times. I sent a book about a riverboat accident to my beta readers with the working title “Tragedy at Dawn,” and one girl said it sounded like a Magic Treehouse book. She was right, and I eventually came up with “Dark Waters,” which is much better. But good titles are hard to find.

They don’t have to be complicated, however. Maeve Binchy’s short story collection is titled simply Chestnut Street. Each short story is about a different character, but they all either live on or have a connection to Chestnut Street in Dublin. I’m assuming it’s a fictional street, but I don’t actually know because I haven’t been there—yet. But the title draws upon the common denominator, so it works for that book.

An interesting title can’t turn a bad book or story into a good one. I continued reading Chestnut Street because Maeve Binchy is a masterful storyteller, not because—or at least not just because—I wanted to see what the titles had to do with the stories. Still, it is the titles that kept me reading when other priorities told me to put the book down and return to it later.

If you are looking for a good read, try Chestnut Street. After all, don’t you want to know what the wrong caption said?

Just make sure you don’t have anything important to do.

Kudos to Scholastic, Inc.

My church’s school had a Scholastic Book Fair this week, and I didn’t participate. Since it coincided with the science fair, they stuck the book fair in a room I had no reason to walk by. Without a reminder, I simply forgot. And that’s too bad.

I’m a big fan of Scholastic, Inc. Over its long life, it was inevitable that it would make a few decisions I don’t agree with (see my January 25, 2016 blog post), but it’s impossible to overemphasize all the good Scholastic has done to promote literacy among children and encourage a lifelong love of reading.

When I was a child, I couldn’t get enough to read. Yes, DeTour Village had a school library, but the selection was very limited. The closest public library was sixty miles away at Sault St. Marie (Michigan), and we made the trip every two weeks. The Soo library allowed patrons to check out only six books at a time, and I had them read within the first three days. The bigger problem, however, was that the Soo wasn’t very large, and neither was its library. So it wasn’t long before I had to check out books that I had already read several times.

Daddy was a small-town minister and Mama was a small-town teacher, so their salaries were also small. Since they saved Mama’s earnings for travel and our college education, there wasn’t much left for reading material. But they did encourage us to purchase books through the monthly Scholastic Book Club flyers at school. We could only buy one book at a time, and I don’t remember if we were allowed to purchase every month or were limited to several times a year. In either event, those books were my most precious possessions.

I still remember three of them: On Your Toes, Suzie by Lee Wyndham, Sensible Kate by Doris Gates, and Ellen Tebbits by Beverly Cleary. Unfortunately, Ellen Tebbits is the only one of the three that is still in print.

My support for Scholastic didn’t stop when I grew up. When I had children, I bought Scholastic books for them. And I continue to patronize school book fairs.

The photo shows some of the many Scholastic books I’ve purchased in recent years. I don’t know the breakdown between books that came from Amazon or brick and mortar bookstores and those I purchased at Scholastic book fairs, but many fit within the latter category.

I have always appreciated Scholastic’s efforts to support schools and encourage reading.

So kudos to Scholastic.

Telling History Through Story

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I managed the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog for six years before IWC closed its doors at the end of 2018. The idea was that all IWC members would contribute posts, and some did. However, there were also many gaps where we would have missed our weekly publishing schedule unless I came up with something. The blog missed fewer than a half dozen posts during those six years because I filled in the slots. Some were fairly generic posts, such as quotes from writing masters or recommendations for craft books, but others were more substantive. Although all posts are still available in the blog archives, I have decided to resurrect some of my substantive posts and reprint them here from time to time. I’ll start with one that may explain why I write middle-grade historical novels. “Telling History Through Story” appeared on the IWC blog on July 2, 2014.

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Telling History Through Story

When I was a child, I hated history. Well, hated may be too strong a word. It’s probably more accurate to say that history bored me. But I loved reading, and I loved stories.

I also loved what I used to call the “blue true books.” They were biographies of famous Americans that concentrated on the childhood years, and they had a blue cloth cover at that time. As the picture shows, the cover has changed over the years, and the series now has an official name: “Childhood of Famous Americans.” I’m guessing that many of the incidents in them are pure fiction, at least for the earlier books that would have been harder to research.

But I learned something about history because it was told as an engaging story.

These days I enjoy history in most forms, but I still prefer it as story. My library contains an ever-increasing number of memoirs and autobiographies and first-person accounts of historical events. When those primary sources aren’t available, or when they need supplementing, I turn to well-written biographies and other secondary sources. And I still read the “blue true books” when I come across them at used book sales or museum book stores.

Even as an adult, I learn best when history is told as story. That’s a good lesson for authors who write history as either fiction or non-fiction. If you want to capture the attention of a reluctant audience, use story. Don’t just write about the 4^th of July—write about people who lived it.

One other caveat. Even when writing fiction, the story must be historically realistic. Not every detail needs to be accurate, but it must be true-to-life.

I recently heard about a novel set at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. It sounded interesting, so I went on Amazon and read the reviews. They said it was well told but historically inaccurate. The author had the Americans liberating the camp instead of the Soviets. So even though it might have been an engaging story, I didn’t buy it.

But as long as you keep the important details intact, you can broaden your audience by telling history through story.