Lemonade from Pandemic Lemons: Here Come the Ebooks!

Although hardcover publishing for my next book is delayed until June 2021, Speaking Volumes has created an ebook of The Long Shadow, my 1850 Vermont adventure novel. A new cover accompanies the publication, and I love it! 

It's wonderful to be able to share more of my work via ebook versons now. And there will be other novels soon to come.

Finding Prime Resources for Historical Fiction/Mysteries

Some of the best historical resources seem to arrive here by chance: a letter postmarked nearby in the 1800s (I have three from the postmaster of West Waterford to his son, located at a postcard show), a local inventor's identity (the "improved egg case" opened up research into Edward Everett Bishop of Waterford, Vermont), or a photo album that suddenly surfaces as a gift to a local group (thank you, Jamie Ide, on behalf of the Waterford VT Historical Society!).

Last Tuesday evening, that Muse of Historical Research -- to the Greeks, that would be Clio -- tapped my shoulder during a virtual panel of mystery authors "at" the Tewksbury (Massachusetts) Public Library. Tewksbury is one town east of Lowell, the marvelous center of fabric mill invention that anchored the Northern profits from Southern enslavement. As of 1840, there were 32 mills in the city. Readers of Katherine Paterson's historical fiction may have pictured the lives that the "mill girls" led there (see Lyddie); those who've pursued history tourism in New England may have visited the remarkable National Park that now embraces some of the remaining mill structures and stewards their history. American freedoms, gender roles, Labor as a force in politics, all these and more can be embraced in the history in Lowell.

But I hadn't known about Tewksbury. One of the people attending the author panel mentioned "the old library" and the librarian moderating the panel sent me a link to some photos that reminded me of the libraries I haunted in the 1950s and 1960s.

The "old" Tewksbury Public Library.

Then, of course, I began to explore what this urban library offers in the way of historical collections, and here's what I found in the town public history collection there:

Tewksbury History Topics

• Anne Sullivan and the Tewksbury Hospital
• Captain John Trull (Tewksbury Minuteman)
• King Philip's War
• Lowell Mill Girls and Women
• Merrimack River
• Mico Kaufman (local sculptor)
• Tewkesbury, England (Town namesake)
• Town Anniversaries (including 200th Anniversary Time Capsule)
• Tewksbury State Hospital (State Almshouse)

Link to online historical patient registers
Visit the Public Health Museum at Tewksbury Hospital

• Town of Tewksbury Annual Reports (1878 - present)
•  Wamesit Indians

Any one of these could slip into the books I'm writing, set in Vermont in the 1850s and 1860s, when Vermonters still saw Massachusetts as the place where the War of Independence began, rather than a traffic nightmare or a set of distant museums and restaurants. I also discovered that Tewksbury was struck by a devastating tornado in 1857 -- something that may go directly into Book 4 of my Winds of Freedom series.

Most of all, I get the sense that Clio the Muse is always ready to alert me to "something old, something new" to learn. You know, I used to feel a little guilty that I took the writing path, instead of going boldly abroad for adventures. But it occurs to me now -- every time I find another prime resource like the Tewksbury Public Library, I'm having an awesome adventure. Just wait and see what comes up in the next couple of novels I've got rolling! (Don't you love being able to share the adventure, too?)

Learning from Common Core Standards While Revising CHARLIE'S PLACE

This Vermont home is like the one I picture for Charlie's new friend John.

Yesterday and today have been revision days for one of my books in progress, Charlie's Place -- the third-grader story set at Ben Thresher's Mill in Barnet, Vermont, underway with co-author and teacher Sue Haven Tester. In addition to tightening the story and making the action as clear as possible, I've been following Sue's suggestion to wrestle with making the book's vocabulary more varied and rich. Along with this is the skill of embedding more challenging words in multiple ways in the text, so readers become familiar with their usage in varied context.

Today's adults looking back fondly at Grade 3 may be surprised at the actions that third graders are expected to take as they read new material in school. This is part of what I see as the improvements we're invited to make in teaching, and therefore also in the books we write for the kids to enjoy: The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a teacher-led and state-by-state adopted set of goals to work toward, one after another, so that our graduating high school seniors can tackle life at an adult level. So, here's what third graders need to be doing with the story they're reading (in addition to enjoying it!):

Assess.
Critique.
Formulate.
Hypothesize.
Cite evidence.
Develop logical arguments.

Today I took great pleasure in reshaping this paragraph to develop text with more depth, including several ideas that Sue contributed:

Charlie looked way up at that boy’s face and worried. The boy made clown-like faces. He pushed close to John and said more things. John covered his ears. John said No! Charlie got angry. The mean boy was scaring John. Charlie hit the massive boy. Stop! No!

But I also paid attention to this passage, weaving back into the text some special terms I'd introduced earlier:

There was water everywhere, with pieces of wood floating in it. It was too dark to see the turbine or the penstock, but the little bit of light flickered on the moving water. Was Old Ben shining a flashlight while he repaired the turbine? No, nobody could fix things in the cellar with this much water, not even Old Ben. The stairs kept shaking. Now Charlie felt scared. 

And it was also a good day to outline the nonfiction material for the end of the book, where (me being me) I suggested a timeline to organize the information and investigations that readers might add to their experience of the story. 

Have you guessed yet from the way the text paragraphs here are written? Charlie is deaf ... at age eight, in about 1956 in Vermont. Things were very different then. I'm enjoying painting in the details, along with things that haven't changed at all, like the chest-quivering sensation of thunder, the comfort of morning pancakes with Grandma, and the satisfaction that comes from being as brave as possible, in a scary situation. Know what I mean?