Blown Away

I saw A Steady Rain on Thursday evening.

It stars, as you undoubtedly know, Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. They filled the seats. They are A-list actors.

Last week in previews A Steady Rain became the highest grossing non-musical play in Broadway history based on a comparative week's receipts because, let's face it, of Hugh and Dan.

It blew me away. I didn't get to spend my hour and a half (no intermission) watching Hugh and Dan. I got to spend it with two stressed-out, over-worked Chicago cops named Denny and Joey whose lives and decisions were thrown in my face.

Hugh Who? Dan Who?

It was all Denny and Joey.

I rarely -- if ever -- get sucked into a play. Movies, yes, I'm fair game for those. Books, absolutely. But plays, while I love them, not so much. Maybe it's due to my bad eyesight. I can never get close enough to see what's really going on.

I had a good seat Thursday night -- and that helped. But it was, frankly, the actors who drew me in, who made me forget who I thought I'd come to see, and who became those cops.

Pretty amazing.

Well worth the trip, research aside. But in the aftermath, I discovered that subliminally I did some research as well -- about intensity and focus and motivation. Things that will help me not just on George, but on all the heroes to come.

There is talk that it may go to London next year -- with Dan and Hugh -- they hope. I'd be interested to see how Londoners (and those further north, from, say, Lincolnshire, who live with C.A.T.S -- like, um, Sid) react.

It's a very American play, for all that Hugh and Dan are not. The sensibilities are American and the cops are definitely American. It will be interesting to hear what people think. Maybe they will only go for Hugh and Dan and that's all they'll see.

I hope not.

Counting the Minutes

I spent the day walking miles around the Metropolitan Museum of Art wondering if George might do that, too. Don't think so, but who knows? I think he enjoyed the armor exhibit as a boy.

And now I'm back at my friends' house and counting the minutes until we head out to our Ethiopian dinner, followed by the evening with Hugh and Dan.

Kate Walker just sent me an email telling me to do lots of good intensive research. No fear, I wrote back. Will be paying deep and unrelenting attention, believe me.

Reporting back tomorrow, I hope.

Over at Tote Bags 'n' Blogs

I have begun blogging again once a month at Tote Bags 'n' Blogs -- and the 22nd of the month is "my" day.

So you can stop over there and visit me if you want. I'm talking about the up side of research. In this case the very very very up side -- which entails a trip to New York City tomorrow.

I'm working on George's book, so I'm going to be prowling around Columbia University and, I hope, meeting with a physicist to ground George a bit (not that George isn't grounded. Dear heavens, he's as grounded as they come).

And then I'm going to a play.

Kate Walker wants to go to the play with me. She's been machinating and muttering because she's trying to figure out how to get across the pond and do away with Nancy the cat slayer and take her place (Nancy is coming with me).

Thursday I am going to see A Steady Rain on Broadway. Have you heard of it?

It's a two-man production -- over-lapping monologues, I hear. Stark, disturbing, tough -- about two Chicago cops and the night that changed their lives and their friendship.

Two Chicago cops played by Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig.

Do you think I'll even blink?

Now you see why Kate wants to come along.

I sent her a clipping last week that said they are considering bringing it to London. So she may get a chance to see it there. Hope so.

In the meantime, I'lll be enjoying it on her behalf -- and anyone else who wants me to enjoy it on theirs as well.

When I get back we'll celebrate with a Hugh and Dan contest, so keep an eye out starting October 1st.

Sadly you won't win either Hugh or Dan, but you'll get a chance to win a couple of DVDs starring you know who and some good books and other treats.

Check back!

Learning to Sail

If you've noticed my absence (and I sort of hope you have), it's because of the looming deadline and the basic need to learn to sail in order to reach it.

My characters have sailed before, as I've said, thanks largely to Peggy Nicholson who has taken them (and me) by the hand and sailed us through all sorts of seas and manuevers.

But Peggy isn't around to help this time. Her friend (and mine, but more hers) Antoinette Stockenberg has done a brilliant job of providing me with a boat and advice, but I haven't felt as if I should be asking Antoinette to answer every question.

So I've been trying to figure it out myself. I have a CD now that is teaching me how to sail. I have a couple of terrific books on sailing that I've mined for detail. And the internet, bless it, has introduced me to a variety of sites and message boards that are answering almost every question I've thought to ask.

The issue isn't really sailing. The issue is Demetrios and Anny's relationship. But it's played out against a sailing backdrop at this point in the book. And the relationship has to be integral to the environment. They have to support each other.

So I'm working on that. I'm also working on recipes using sea bass and saints who have feast days in late May and I'm so looking forward to Santorini where I've got a house I know and family I'm familiar with and every other minute won't be spent trying to figure out the appropriate telling detail -- I'll just know it instinctively.

Still, the challenge keeps the story fresh. And I'm learning tons.

I just wish I could learn how not to get seasick!

What you always wanted to know about passport control . . .

... but were afraid to ask.

Or in my case, had no idea who to ask. But I needed to know so I didn't end up with a plot in which Demetrios or Anny got arrested for entering a country illegally.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem because ordinarily when you send your characters on commercial flights or regularly scheduled public transportation between two countries, it's understood that they do what they're supposed to do (unless you're writing a thriller in which case they might very well not).

But when they're hopping on and off a private sailboat, you want to know -- or at least I do -- that they are not breaking laws that are going to complicate the plot somewhere down the road when the customs and immigration people turn up.

So . . . I went searching.

And I found the Schengen Agreement.

The Schengen Agreement is going to solve all my plot problems. Or at least all the ones that would have occurred if customs and immigration had shown up.

They won't because of the Schengen Agreement which was first enacted in 1985 among five countries in Europe who created a common border of immigration and within it travel was conducted as if it were a single country. More countries joined this pact, which is not, interestingly enough, coterminous with the EU (some EU countries, like the UK and Ireland are not in it and other non-EU countries, like Norway and Iceland, are in it). There are 25 countries currently participating in this agreement.

The dark blue countries on the map above are Schengen participating countries. The purple countries who have either opted-out, like UK and Ireland, or they are, like Bulgaria, Cyprus and Romania, working on their own external border controls. When they are on a par with the others in the pact, apparently they, too, will be admitted to the Schengen Agreement.

Demetrios and Anny are thrilled to learn about the Schengen Agreement. They had no idea starring in a book would be so educational.

While they are not deeply into political science, Anny at least has certain governmental responsibilities that would make her aware of this (pity she didn't tell me). In any case, they are glad it exists because it's going to make grocery shopping much easier.

I'm delighted because they are complicating their own lives quite enough in this book. They don't need the help of a passel of government bureacracies!

In fact, chances are you will never find mention of customs and immigration issues in this book. As long as they don't have to comply with any border control, there's no need to.

But just between us -- those of you who read this blog will have the straight "behind the book" stuff.

You will now know about the Schengen Agreement.

And every time Anny and Demetrios stop to buy groceries or have a meal or walk around a village, you can nod sagely and say to yourselves, "And they can do that because of the Schengen Agreement."

See? You learn something new every day.

Research help!

Miss me?

I got caught up in taking care of Ellie and Henry last week. And when I wasn't doing that, I was hard at work on Demetrios and Anny.

The interminable (or so it seemed) chapter two finally ended (after 7500+ words) and I was able to move into -- and straight through -- chapter three in a couple of days.

I came home on Saturday and made the wonderful discovery that being stuck in the Minneapolis-St Paul airport for almost 5 hours had no downside at all. The food court has counters with electrical strips running along the back and there is an outlet for every seat.

So I bought my personal pizza and a nice cup of tea and set up the laptop (with its wonky battery I despaired of being able to do much work) and got almost 1500 words done before I had to catch my next flight.

Right now Mpls-St Paul (MSP) is at the top of my favorite airports list. If I could figure out who to write a fan letter to for all those electrical hookups, I'd do it in a minute. If you know, tell me.

And now I'm in chapter four. Which requires sailing knowledge. Not a ton, but more than I have. And my sailing friend -- at least the one I usually consult -- Peggy Nicholson who wrote Run So Far, one of my favorite Harlequin Presents of all time, is up to her eyeballs in work of her own right now.

I've put out feelers to my other sailing friend, Antoinette Stockenberg, and I hope she can answer.

But in case she can't, if any of you have sailing in the Mediterranean knowledge, can I please pick your brain?

I need to get Demetrios from Cannes to Santorini realistically. The internet is letting me down.

So if you can come to my rescue, I'd be much obliged. So would Demetrios, who has assured his brother Theo that it won't be a problem.

Well, he didn't think it would be. Neither did I.

I'm still hopeful that it won't be!

I'll bore you with Ellie and Henry pix another day. Right now I have to do the stuff I can do in chapter four without the particular details I'm going to need before the final draft.

First off, I need to find a sailboat.

Saved by research

When people ask me what the best part of writing is, I always say, "Research."

For the uninitiated, those who hear the word research and immediately think of hours spent in high school or college poring over dusty tomes and making notes on 3" x 5" cards, let me assure you that that's not what I mean at all.

Well, occasionally there might be dusty tomes. There are rarely (at least in my research) 3" x 5" cards. Mostly there is the chance to learn -- and often very interesting people to learn from.

The dusty tomes have their place. As does the internet. Research is vastly easier in the internet age than it was when libraries had a finite number of books and an even more finite number of hours during which you could use them.

With the internet open 24/7, it's much easier to learn -- as I did last night -- which plants flower in Manhattan Beach in the summertime. It's also useful to check on the flow of traffic, to pore over Google Earth maps and decide where my hero might want to live and what's nearby.

It will even help me with some of the things I need to know about lawyers. But not enough.

And that's where real live people come in handy.

The Prof's cousin is a lawyer. A very patient lawyer. A lawyer who doesn't mind (or if she does, she hides it well, which is probably one thing that makes her a good lawyer) being asked questions about lawyers.

And a good thing, too, as if I hadn't asked questions, I'd have alienated the entire legal profession with this book. As it is, she has saved Christo from being disbarred more times than I can count. One of her emails a couple of days ago said plaintively, "Are you trying to get him disbarred on page one?"

Well, no, I wasn't. How was I do know he couldn't do what I wanted him to do? It didn't seem 'improper' to me.

Color me wrong.

Why am I just discovering this now, you ask? I asked the same question a few days ago myself.

Well, because in this book's previous incarnation, while Christo was a lawyer, much of the action did not take place in a lawyerly realm. It took place elsewhere. On the beach, in the house, in Brazil.

It still takes place there, but not so much. Now there is a workplace involved (at the editor's request). Thus there are clients. And where there are clients, there are cases, lawsuits, details that have to be right. Or else.

There is life beyond this romance and it's in the workplace because that's where the editor wants it. I don't think it's a bad idea. But I understand far more clearly now why I didn't put it there in the first place -- I know damn all about being a lawyer.

So it's a good thing we have a lawyer in the family -- even the very extended family.

This is, I am learning, part of the reason these revisions are taking so long. It's like I've had to go to law school to write the damn book. Interesting to be sure, but not exactly what I'd planned to do over Christmas vacation.

The thing is, you will probably not notice it when you read Christo's story -- because, hopefully, I will have got it right.

You would primarily notice if I got it wrong. Then you would be throwing the book across the room and saying, "I'll never read that woman's stuff again. She can't be bothered to do the research."

Well, I can. And I have. And I hope it's right now. But I will surely hear about it if it's not.

I just need to go away now and get back to work so I can get this out of here sometime in the next few days. And then I may need to explain to the editor why some things take longer than others.

Filling the memory bank

I wrote a blog piece that will be going live in the morning on July 29 for Tote Bags 'n' Blogs about writers using everything that they experience, witness, glimpse, taste, touch, feel in their books.

Some of those things we set about experiencing deliberately. For example, I specifically watched a professional sand castle building make a life-sized Nissan truck out of sand because he did the same work my hero was going to do.

I spent a day on a Lake Union houseboat asking every question I could think of and taking photos galore so I could write Seb and Neely's story.

I'm going to Cannes in October to do research for Demetrios's book.

But some of what I write about -- most, in fact -- comes out of filtering my characters' lives through my own experiences, my own memories, feelings, worries, relationships. You name it, if it's happened, it's fair game -- which may be why people tend to shy away from writers.

"You're not writing about me, are you?" they say.

No. I'm not. But you might have been with me when I experienced something. You might have seen the same things I did, felt the same way, been upset or delighted or worried just as I was. Such experiences are universal. It's the way readers and writers connect.

How do I know which experiences, feelings, relationships, worries, joys, and family stories will become a part of some book?

I don't.

It's the serendipitous bit of just being alive and living life to the fullest. It's the unexpectedness of experiences that often make them memorable. Yesterday, for example, my sister and I discovered that there were family connections across the river in Grant County, Wisconsin. And so we went exploring there.

We found two of the tiny communities we were looking for. We prowled through three cemeteries. We found the grave of Hannibal Thomas who has, in my estimation, the most genealogically helpful tombstone on record. It gives his birth parish in Cornwall. It gives the date of his birth, the date of his death, his exact age, and tells the date and place to which he emigrated. You can't ask for much more than that.

Not far away we ran across a one-room school with two see-saws, a slide, a tether ball and two outhouses. Right around the bend we happened on an Amish Sunday gathering and knew we'd seen their school.

The kids were as delighted to see us as we were to see them. We got waved at -- and waved back to -- a dozen or more little Amish boys resplendent in their black trousers, pristine white shirts and black vests as they played in the yard. We saw well over twenty buggies lined up in the lane and in the yard.

Will Hannibal make it into a book? Will the school house or the Amish boys or that line of buggies?

I don't know. But the memories are there. The details are emblazoned on my brain. I doubt they'll make it into Christo's book.

But down the road, time will tell.

We've got one more day and a half of "Sister Camp." So far it's been a blast.

Mads on Monday

Over on the Pink Heart blog, I've got a Male on Monday slot today.

You know what that means: the onerous task of researching potential heroes.

Ah well, somebody's got to do it.

And ever since I saw him in Casino Royale, I've been looking for a hero to be Mads Mikkelsen (who was a great villain in CR). I haven't found one yet (I don't think). But I'm still looking.

And in the meantime, I decided to share him with the Pink Heart readers.



I already shared him with Michelle Styles who cast him in one of her Victorian historicals.

Which one, Michelle? And when is it coming out? I can hardly wait to read it.

Anyway, I promised the Pink Heart readers that I'd put up a few more photos over here. So that's why Mads is here (if he needed another reason).

Enjoy. Each pic is worth 1000 words, you know. Consider that I wrote a lot today. And even more on the Pink Heart blog. And there are a lot of good pix there.