Dispatches from the Writing Life #5: Incremental Progress (again)

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This week I realized that to properly revise chapter three, I needed to make some additions to chapter two. So, I’ve been reading more about the role of the YMCA in World War I to more fully explain what was expected of Jane Grant during her overseas posting and how she delivered on those expectations. That means I’ve been toggling between those two chapters to add context and additional details to sharpen the descriptions of Jane’s experiences.

I’ve made progress that seems incremental, especially when I look at how much—or little, really—the word count in each of the chapters has increased. Keeping an eye on the word count is important because I don’t want the manuscript to get bloated. Telling Jane’s story doesn’t require a Big Book in terms of the number of words and pages.

The 1918 poster below features the artwork of Neysa McMein, who also went overseas during the war to entertain the troops. She and Jane were friends.

What I’m Reading

I’m more than halfway through Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness. It had a strong start, but now I find it very uneven. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up.

I’m almost done with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. Stein has died and Toklas, in her grief, is trying to carry out her wishes for her unpublished work and trying to protect her reputation as a pathbreaking author. I really like this book.

Wednesday night’s Vanity Fair Zoom book discussion was fascinating. I can’t wait to find out what the 2027 novel will be.

What I’m Watching

Nothing new in the rotation of Starfleet Academy (Paramount+), Grace and The Game (BritBox), All Creatures (PBS), and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix). Down to one episode left of both The Game and All Creatures. It kind of seems like The Lincoln Lawyer may never end, but I’m only at the halfway point. Last week’s Starfleet was one of the better episodes, and I hope this week’s can at least match it.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I finished my review of the book proposal for an academic press and submitted it before the deadline. So yay me, and yay for the press that will be getting a good book—if that’s how the rest of the process works out.

The weekly bowling took place, the usual two games. Once again it was two pretty mediocre games for me. But this week’s bright spot was that twice in one game I picked up a spare from a split. That was quite astonishing.

A couple of days after I switched out my winter walking boots for regular sneakers (thanks to warmer temperatures and nearly snow-free streets) to take my daily walks, winter sent about 6 inches of snow as a reminder that it’s still, well, winter. Not that I actually packed away the boots for the season….

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for next week: Are chapters two and three finally revised? Are the winter walking boots still out?

Dispatches from the Writing Life #4: Valentine’s Day Edition

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Today is Valentine’s Day, so it’s perhaps fitting that in chapter three of my book about Jane Grant, she meets Harold Ross. He becomes her first husband, and together they create The New Yorker. But that comes later.

In this chapter, Jane is overseas with the YMCA in 1918-1919 doing war work. Both adventurous and practical, she couldn’t wait to get to France. She knew that a few female journalists had managed, despite military restrictions, to get across the Atlantic and file stories about World War I. But the New York Times wouldn’t send her as a reporter, so she applied to one of the government-sanctioned service organizations that hired women for clerical work, nursing, and entertainment. Jane figured she was qualified for two out of those three, and she believed that whatever her posting entailed, it would somehow further her career.

[Jane Grant, c. 1918-1919, Jane Grant papers, University of Oregon]

The Y sent Jane to Tours, France, but her friend and colleague from the Times, Alexander Woollcott, pulled strings to get her to Paris. He had been in the army since 1917, and now, as a sergeant, he worked in Paris on the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces’ Stars and Stripes. Jane easily fell in with that newspaper crowd, and it was Woollcott who introduced her to Ross, editor of the publication. It was not love at first sight, but the attraction was strong enough to induce Ross to take a job in New York City after the war to be near Jane.

This chapter revision is ongoing. There is less to weed out, and more to weave in.

What I’m Reading

I started a novel, The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy. Good so far. I read her first, The Turner House, back in 2016, and I noted this on Goodreads: This is a lovely, lovely novel. Set in contemporary Detroit, it tells the tale of a large family still dealing with the death of the patriarch and with the rapid decline of the matriarch. The fate of the family home, which has fallen into considerable disrepair, is a point of contention among the 13 siblings. And there’s a haint. Wonderful.

I’m continuing with Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade and Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake. I can’t renew the Stein biography, so I have to make sure that takes precedence during my reading time. I’m pretty sure the only thing of Stein’s I’ve read is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and probably only selections from it, a long, long time ago. I doubt that I would have much patience for her modern, experimental work.

I finally finished Vanity Fair, and I’m very glad. I’m participating in a Zoom book discussion this coming Wednesday night.

What I’m Watching

Starfleet Academy (Paramount+), Grace (BritBox), All Creatures (PBS), and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) remain in rotation. I still like Grace the best—good storylines and an efficient use of the 90-minute format. I also started The Game, also on BritBox, which has more thriller elements than I like, but the acting is good and there are only four episodes, so I think I can see it through.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I made progress on my review of a book proposal for an academic press, so I remain on track to meet the deadline.

The weekly bowling took place, the usual two games. Overall, I rolled pretty mediocre. But there was a bright spot: I made three spares in a row, which I kind thought might be referred to as a chicken. It made sense to me since three strikes in a row is a turkey, and I figured a chicken was the next bird down, size-wise. When I finally remembered to look it up, I learned to my absolute delight that three spares in a row are called a sparrow. Perfection!

Happy Valentine’s Day! (to those who celebrate)

Thanks for reading. Check back next week to see how far the chapter three revisions have progressed.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #3: In Which There is Progress

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I finished revisions on chapter two. Finally, progress.

The challenge was to take two rough chapters and combine them into one. I find it difficult to jettison material (though I safely store it in a scrap file, just in case), whether it’s from primary or secondary sources, because it interested me enough to include it in the first draft.

But what interests me doesn’t always serve the story. The story I need to tell in this chapter is about Jane Grant’s first years of working at the New York Times. She was in her 20s and still harbored hopes of a singing career. Jane viewed the job at the Times as a means to an end, a way to support herself while she went out on auditions and took on performing gigs. Key to the chapter is how and why Jane became a journalist.

Now that I have that all set up, I’m getting ready to move on to the third chapter, which highlights another pivotal point in Jane’s life: working overseas for the YMCA during World War I. A lot of revisions will go into this, too, because I also spread these events over two draft chapters. Does the story require all of that material, all of those pages? That’s what I’m going to be working through. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of recent practice.

What I’m Reading

Many of the books on my library hold list come from reading Nancy Bekofske’s blog The Literate Quilter. She reviews a variety of fiction and nonfiction, even poetry. It’s a great way to keep up with forthcoming and recent publications.

I finished Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde and liked it well enough, especially the behind-the-scenes stories of how museums acquire collections. Lunde is also very good at delving into the characters of these museum men. But because of my own particular interests, I found myself more drawn to the women who, in this telling, existed on the periphery of these events.

I started Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade. The first sentences of the prologue are stunning: “She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation….” There is Stein, fully alive, confident in her importance. Moreover, a casual look at the notes section of the book reveals an impressive amount of archival sources and ample citations for quotes and other information found in the text. Wade also discusses some of the process of her research in her acknowledgements. These are the kinds of things I regularly look at in nonfiction books.

I continue to read Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress. Consider these first sentences: “Her water broke. Mary, the family cook, helped her into bed. Besides Mary, Olive Rankin was alone on the ranch situated in Grant Creek Valley, some six thousand feet above Missoula, Montana.” And the beginning of the third paragraph: “Between contractions, Olive tried to focus on the wildflowers painting the mountainsides. White yarrow and purple lupine.” It’s all very evocative, but my first thought was, “How do we know?” The notes section doesn’t provide an answer. The information may have come from a previous biography of Rankin written by the late Norma Smith and published in 2002. Or Rinehart may have imagined the scene, leaning into creative nonfiction. I always prefer a sharp delineation between fact and imagination.

I’m still reading Vanity Fair. Still. But I’m closing in on the end.

What I’m Watching

The final episodes of Shetland and Bookish were both good, though I like the Shetland series more than Bookish. Maybe it’s because of a familiarity with the characters. But Bookish seemed a bit tentative about where it was going and what it wants to be. Still, I’m willing to watch the next season.

My ambivalence about Starfleet Academy continues. All Creatures Great and Small remains a good comfort watch, though I wish the female characters had better storylines.

New seasons of Grace (BritBox) and The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) have moved into my rotation. I appreciate that Grace solves one crime per 90-minute episode. The Lincoln Lawyer is going to be a tense season, with Mickey Haller in jail awaiting his murder trial.

I also saw Agatha and the Truth of Murder (Prime), a re-imagining of what happened during Agatha Christie’s disappearance in the 1920s. I liked it.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I was asked by an academic press to review a book proposal, and I need to finish that before the end of February. This is not the kind of deadline that can be elastic. It’s not fair to keep a hopeful author waiting any longer than necessary.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate. May your favorite team win. And happy Olympics viewing, too.

Thanks for reading. Find out next week how chapter three is coming along.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #2: Revisionland

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I spent all week revising a chapter of Invisible Me, and I haven’t finished yet. Writing is always about revising, so I know how important this part is. And it’s only the first revision. There will likely be more.

This one is going particularly slow because I’m actually cutting and condensing material from two draft chapters to turn them into a single sparkling one. And I’m still thinking a lot about style, which is now something I look at very closely when I’m reading a work of nonfiction.

It took about the first half of the week to get a sense of where this new chapter needed to go and how to get it there. My goal is to have it finished at the end of this coming week.

After that, I know I will have a day or two of feeling optimistic that the rest of the chapter revisions will proceed more smoothly and quickly. Then, of course…. Sigh.

What I’m Reading

I’m almost finished with Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde. I started Lorissa Rinehart’s Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress. Rankin is one of my favorite women in American history, and I was happy to see this new biography.

I’m still reading Vanity Fair.

I forgot to mention that I read and loved Palaver, the new novel by Bryan Washington about a mother and her son.

In addition to books, which I prefer to read in the pages-between-two-covers form, I do read a variety of online things, including Pamela Toler’s History in the Margins for its explorations of those almost hidden corners. I especially liked her recent piece about the 20th-century artist Neysa McMein, who also happened to be a friend of Jane Grant.

Every morning, I read Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson’s daily explanation of current events.

What I’m Watching

I’m one episode in on Netflix’s Seven Dials, an Agatha Christie mystery. Good so far.

This week’s penultimate episode of Shetland ended with a couple of big yikes. I kind of saw one coming, but not the other. So it’s pins and needles until Thursday, when the finale airs.

I watched Eleanor the Great on Netflix. The performances were wonderful, especially June Squibb in the title role, but the plot resolution was too convenient.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I gave a zoom talk to the Baltimore Civil War Round Table about Dr. Mary Walker, the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor, about her medical work during the Civil War. My book, Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War, was published back in 2020, and it’s nice to know there is continuing interest in her story.

I met with my monthly women’s biography round table of the Biographers International Organization. I’ve been with this wonderful group for a few years, and every month we talk about our writing and give each other advice and encouragement. We all focus on “unknown” or “once known” women in history, so we all very much get each other.

Daily exercising has been limited to the portable elliptical machine because of the brutally cold weather. Wisconsin escaped the big snow that blanketed other parts of the country but got socked with below-zero temperatures that brought ever colder windchills. That’s finally started to ease up.

No sewing this week, though I continue to stare at the in-progress project that’s sitting on the machine, and I think about returning to it. I’m feeling some positive can-do vibes because of the return of Marie Hill, the best sewing instructor on YouTube. I found her channel, My Bucolic Life, a few years ago, and it encouraged me to get back into sewing. There are over 200 excellent tutorials on her channel.

The weekly bowling outing was fun, though I still struggle to break 100. So, no, I’m not a good bowler.

(Not me bowling. She may actually be a good bowler.)

Thanks for reading! Check back next week to find out what kind of progress I’ve made on the revisions. I know, I know, it’s very exciting.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #1

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Welcome to the first in a weekly (I hope) series that charts the progress of my current writing project, Invisible Me: Jane Grant and The New Yorker.

Since I have no deadline for finishing this book, the pace of progress is up to me. I’ve set goals throughout and meeting them has been greatly aided by three very supportive online writing communities. I envision this weekly series as adding another layer of accountability and cultivating another community (all of you).

I’ve been working on Invisible Me for a few years. Writing nonfiction history requires lots of time-consuming research and lots of writing, through multiple drafts. For this project, I’ve already made two major research trips, tracked down digitized online collections, and read dozens of published sources. Then I wrote an extremely bloated and somewhat blurry first draft.

After I finished, I wrote a book proposal so I could query literary agents for representation. The proposal, basically a sales pitch for the book, forced me to focus on the contours of the story, to make sure that Jane comes across as a multi-faceted person with plans and dreams, failures and successes, who has historical importance. During this past week, the last queries went out, and now I’m waiting to hear back from the agents. Or not. Many agents now don’t have the time to even send a rejection email, so if I don’t receive a response in a few weeks or a few months, it means they’ve passed. Or not. It’s fair game to nudge them once or twice before giving up.

While in agent-waiting mode, I’ll read through those first draft chapters to assess the scope of writing work ahead, to start a second, bloat-free draft. I may set an initial goal of completing one chapter per month.

Writing occupies part, but certainly not all, of my day. It’s the work part of my day. Luckily, since I’ve retired from academia, I set my own hours. I also read a lot and watch shows on various streaming services.

What I’m Reading

I recently finished a couple of nonfiction books about spies: The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young and Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor by Christine Kuehn. Both are good, and Kuehn’s book especially packs a lot of yikes moments.

In two blissful sittings I read Maddie Ballard’s compact memoir, Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary. I recently returned to sewing after a thirty-some year hiatus, and I loved how Ballard wrote about garment construction and identity and relationships. It’s beautiful.

And now I’m a few chapters into Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism by Darrin Lunde, not at all the usual kind of book I pick up. But I’m a big fan of museums, and he presents an interesting story.

On the fiction front, I recently read Ann Cleeve’s The Killing Stone, a new Jimmy Perez story. I’m a big fan of Shetland (see below) and was happy that Cleeve brought back one of my favorite detectives, even if he’s not on Shetland anymore. I absolutely loved Sacrament, Susan Straight’s marvelous novel about nurses at a California hospital during Covid. And I continue reading (or sometimes plodding through) Vanity Fair, the 19th century classic by William Makepeace Thackeray. I’m sticking with it for an online book discussion next month. In previous years, this group has read Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, so there’s a definite vibe to these selections.

What I’m Watching

BritBox recently debuted Season 10 of Shetland, and I’m eagerly keeping up with all the episodes. Perez has moved on, but his replacement, Ruth Calder, has great chemistry with Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. I’m already looking forward to Season 11.

On PBS, there’s a new season of All Creatures Great and Small and a new mystery series called Bookish. And Paramount+ launched Starfleet Academy, the latest addition to the Star Trek universe, and it’s okay so far.

I keep meaning to watch the final episode of Stranger Things on Netflix but haven’t been in the right mood yet. I find Young Sheldon and Mom (neither of which I watched on network t.v.) reliably good, and I revisit The West Wing and The Closer from time to time.

What Else I’m Doing

Daily exercising (a portable elliptical machine is essential during winter), sewing (very sporadically lately), thrifting (one of my favorite pastimes that sometimes is related to what I’m sewing), bowling (once a week as extra exercise that’s also a fun outing).

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. Hope you check back next week to see what kind of progress I’ve made.