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.

Finding the Right Agent

I’ve spent the past few days researching agents for Dark Waters, a middle-grade novel that takes place in 1850. This isn’t the first book I’ve submitted to agents, and it won’t be the last, so why don’t I just use the same list as last time?

Several reasons. First, it is always good to expand the search, especially since I haven’t yet found an agent I click with and who clicks with me. Second, agents move from one agency to another, and a letter sent to their former employer ends up in the wastebasket. Third, even if they are at the same agencies as before, their wish lists can change over time, the submission guidelines may change, or a particular agent may close (or reopen) the submission process. Then there is the possibility of finding someone new. Independent agents who are just starting out rarely have the right connections, but new agents with established agencies can draw on existing relationships and expertise. And sometimes I come across someone I simply didn’t know about before.

So what do I look for when searching for an agent? I need to know which age groups and genres the agent is interested in and which ones the agent won’t consider. Some concrete descriptions of what he or she is looking for can be useful as well (e.g., character or plot driven, importance of humor). I also appreciate information I can use to judge the agent’s personality. That’s important because the agent-client relationship is just that, and if we can’t connect with each other, the relationship won’t work.

One thing I don’t like is the lack of creativity that many agents show when they describe the types of books they are looking for. It isn’t helpful for an agent to tell me that he or she is looking for strong voices; fresh, creative, imaginative, or inventive plots; well-crafted stories; or memorable characters. Those are givens. All agents want them whether they say it or not. And most writers think that’s what they are providing, even if they aren’t. If everything else is a good match, I may submit to that agent anyway, but if there is another decent choice within the agency, I’ll send my query to that person, instead.

When an agency has two or more agents who match my criteria, another question arises. Often, one is experienced and another is still building his or her book. So do I submit to the veteran agent or the hungry one? That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer, so I usually ignore it and pick the person who feels like the better fit.

No amount of research guarantees that I will find an agent. In fact, I’ve gone through this process several times before with no success. And sometimes no research is necessary. I have a friend who sold his first book after an agent approached him. But researching before submitting is the most effective route to a good author-agent relationship.

So I’ll keep it up as long as I need to.

Agent or Reader: Whose Opinion Counts Most?

After several rewrites of the opening scene of my Civil War manuscript, Learning to Surrender, I decided to begin with action: my protagonist and her family ran for shelter as Union shells fell around them. Then I paid for an agent critique of the first two pages, and she didn’t like the scene. She told me that action isn’t always the best place to start and she wanted to know more about the characters and the situation first. So I revised the opening paragraphs to do that and started the action a page and a half into the book.

Then I gave the manuscript to my middle-grade beta readers. My first question was, “Did the beginning of the story make you want to continue reading?” Six beta readers answered “yes.” However, it was clear from their comments that they were referring to the entire chapter (which included the action scene) and not just the first page and a half. But a fourth-grade beta reader answered the question with a “no,” stating that “It was boring and too random.”

Yes, I realize that we are talking about one agent and one reader, and everybody has different tastes. Still, what am I supposed to do? Do I listen to an agent who comes from the group of people who can get my book published or a fourth-grade reader from my target audience?

I’m going to try to find a middle ground where I begin with the action but weave in more information about my characters and the situation while the action is going on. And hopefully it will be a better opening than either of the two previous attempts. But the underlying question remains. Should I write for potential agents/publishers or for my readers? And I’m not alone. Most writers face the same dilemma.

I want to sell my books but not my soul. I need agents and publishers to accomplish the first, so I can’t ignore their criticisms and suggestions. But I won’t put my readers second, either.

It’s a quandary.

Travel Records

Regular readers of this blog know that Roland and I love to travel. We have already booked international trips for this year and next and are currently planning our vacation for the year after that (2021). We even think we know where we want to go in 2022.

Roland gave me a map for Christmas to track our joint travels. Actually, he was honest enough to put both of our names on it as recipients. It’s hard to see in this size, but the red pins are places we have already been, the blue flags are for our next trip (or actually the next two, since we have two booked), and the green pins mark just of few of the other places we would like to go.

Saturday we braved the snow and went to the Chicago Travel and Adventure Show. While there, we expanded our list of places we’d like to visit, although we haven’t put them on the map yet.

Unless I’m specifically traveling to research a book, I don’t write about the places I visit. Vacation travel is for fun and relaxation, although our definitions may be different than yours. My idea of fun is a trip that expands my mind, and my relaxation comes from walking and history rather than lying on a beach.

Even though our vacations don’t show up in books or articles, I do keep a record of them by taking pictures and describing the highlights in emails to family and friends. After all, everyone wants to remember the good times.

And travel is always a good time.