Thursday, September 29, 2016

Historical Fiction Notes: The Art Forger

Suggested alternate title: The Selfie Painter. A decent story that unintentionally sheds much light into the narcissistic trends of contemporary American women.
Shakespeare had been a marvelous beginning to my new Kindle reading experience, and I was eager to read more for my research.

For my next book, however, I decided to go a completely different route, and try something contemporary. After all, I intend to be a contemporary writer, since I can be no other kind, and it behooves me to some degree to keep abreast of certain trends and fashions, if not to imitate them, but at lest be aware of them.

As it happens, the Kindle provides one with plenty of suggestions for current fiction by means of the splash page when the device is inactive. Moreover it is always handy with "suggestions for you" when you are on your own library page.

When I saw The Art Forger, a recent work of fiction by B.A. Shapiro,  listed among the suggestions for me, I knew immediately that this was the next book I wanted to read.

It happens that I had actually seen the author speak, three and half years ago as part of the Tucson Book Festival while I was visiting my aunt and uncle in March 2013. My Aunt Marie suggested I would enjoy the festival, which takes place annually on the University of Arizona campus, and I readily accepted the suggestion, driving over there one day while I was in town. I wrote a blog post about it at the time.

The author, B.A. Shapiro, was speaking in three-woman panel of authors on the subject of the writing of historical fiction. Her novel takes place in the present day, which it has flashbacks to a hundred years in the past in the world of the French community of artists associated with Degas. For this and other reasons, Shapiro was compelled to do much historical research for the book, and in the talk I saw, she was giving pointers to other people.

Given the irony that I was now living in Arizona, and was in the midst of pursuing my own historical fiction project, it seemed like the perfect thing to do, to pay homage to that original roundabout inspiration, and that chapter of my life, by reading Shapiro's book.

The book is an imaginative and entirely fictional story based on the real-life unsolved art theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston in 1990.

The protagonist is a young woman, a talented artist, who is secretly hired to make a reproduction of one of the stolen paintings. The painting she is hired to reproduce is a fictional work of Edward Degas.

The story has the feel of a page-turner, detective story. It does not purport to offer a solution to actual theft. Instead it explores a fictional relationship (via fictional letters and journals) between the real Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edward Degas, to explain the origin of the fictional Degas work.

Thus in considering the story as historical fiction, we have truly fictional historical fiction. By this I mean that the history within the story entirely outside of reality. There is no grounds to suppose that any relationship existed between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edward Degas. It is all imagined. Pretty much the only thing that is real is the theft.

I make this distinction between the project I am undertaking is definitely not of this kind of historical fiction. Instead it is intended to be the kind of historical fiction that hews as closely as possible to known fact, and which fictionalizes only when necessary to (1) bring color to the narrative of characters by actions, thoughts and dialogues; and more significance, (2) explain by conjecture the motives and relationships between characters

Shaprio wanted to write a compelling page turner. I have a completely different objective, which is to bring to life personages of history such as to shed light on history itself, so as to bring a new and fresh interpretation to known people and events. I am not historian, but a storyteller. So I must fictionalize.

All my "history" must be fact, as solidly as possible. I feel at liberty to fill in gaps, but I don't want to pave over fact with fiction. If something is unknown, then I can make a conjecture in that gap. But I must know that it is not known. I must determine as much where fact and history leave off, so that I can cantilever fact into a hypothetical situation that brings light into the dark and unknown places in a way that is plausible.

For example, before I knew the address of William Harriman's business at 95 Thames Street, I was formulated possible fictional locations, because I didn't know that in fact it was known. Once I did find out this fact, it was incumbent upon me to hew to this fact in the story. This is not a burden but a joy since it turns out that reality furnishes far more interesting twists and turns that my imagination could conjure. But this requires diligent research to find out where fact ends and the blankness of the unknown begins. Only at that edge can I begin to fill in the gap with conjecture.

I consider myself in this way to have the same kind of task as a prosecutor at a trial, who must furnish a hypothetical scenario of a crime based on known evidence. In this case, we expect the prosecutor to fill in the gaps of motive by conjecture if necessary, to build a case. But the evidence itself must be fact, and we must know when we are in the realm of conjecture.

All of this is extremely important for me, for reasons I cannot explain at the moment, not the least of which is to furnish something as near to history as possible.

All historical movies are historical fiction in this way. We never know "exactly what happened." A movie about Abraham Lincoln, for example, cannot duplicate his exact words and his exact movements. It must necessarily fictionalize (Lincoln will be a character in the Harriman story, most certainly).

As for Shapiro's novel itself, like I said, it was a good page-turner. But reading it reminded me of how little reward I find in reading most contemporary fiction. Among other things, the heroine was completely empty and unsympathetic to me. Despite the interesting plot, I really didn't care what happened to the protagonist. I didn't buy at all that she was a real person, let alone a real artist.

"It's the same woman in every book," I told Red, in reference to the trends of contemporary fiction that I had exposed myself to over the last few years.

"She's always young, pretty, smart, talented more intelligent than all the men around her. She's hip and self-aware about it in everything she does. And completely self-absorbed. She begins the story by swearing off relationships altogether, but in the end, she has fantastic sex. She is worldly and well traveled. She inspires jealously in other women. She hangs around with cool people and does cool things. The world is her oyster. Men are at her feet. Everything she does is meant to elucidate the response---aren't I so awesome? She has no true frailties or weaknesses that give one traction to see her a s real person. She's the perfect model for the narcissistic and vacuous young young women of the Facebook generation trolling for likes with her selfies."

Red unfortunately knew exactly what I meant, even though she couldn't remember details of the book from when she read it a couple years back.

Even in the subject matter of the book---a fictional painting of nude woman in a bath, we get a hint towards the selfie obsession of modern young women. In the end, the world revolves around me. In that way  the novel is a more informative about our times without a meta awareness of this importance. But isn't literature always that way?

That's what sells right now I guess. At least it makes for an easy read. It took three weeks to read Moll Flanders. I didn't want to go any faster than that. I got through The Art Forger in two days. Like I said, a good page turner. Shapiro can tell a good story, and as a creative mind to make up history out of whole cloth. I did not regret reading it, and I would read another of her books, but my time is so freaking precious.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Historical Fiction Notes: As You Like It


Walter Deverell, The Mock Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind, 1853

Before I proceeded any further into my Harriman research, I decided that it was absolutely necessary to read the Shakespeare play that is so critical to the Harriman family saga, namely As You Like It.

To wit, I had done much research about the play itself, but hadn't bothered yet to read it end-to-end!

I knew I could download a version on Kindle for free, and could thus read it on my iPhone 5S, but that didn't seem appropriate. It was around that time, after having finished the paperback of Moll Flanders, that I decided it was worth while to acquire a new Kindle device--a new step for me. I did a bit of research, and discovered the model I wanted: the Kindle Paperwhite. Having made up mind, and ruminated a bit to make sure, I went on Amazon.com and within a few moments, I had purchased the device with one-click and received an email that it was on its way.

At the time I was absorbed with much work with my job, and when the package arrived from Amazon a few days later, laid on the front door step of our house here in Fountain Hills, I didn't even open it fully, but put the handsome box on my bookshelf, to be retrieved and opened as some kind of present to myself when I had enough free time to savor its existence.

Once I was ready to start using, and had configured it via the Wi-Fi network to link my Amazon account, the first thing I purchased and downloaded was a copy of the Shakespeare play. It seemed like an auspicious way to start.

To be specific, I was not reading the play for the purpose of acquiring direct historical background for the story, as it had none to offer. Nor was I reading it as an example of historical fiction, since it is a whimsical tale with no direct historical context. The necessary historical research about the play itself had already been done, most importantly in discovering that it had been performed regularly at the Drury Lane Theatre in London during the time frame of the story.

But the play itself was certainly important. How could it not be?

But what could it offer? Answering this question would be part of the pure fun of reading it.

Summary of the story: a benevolent duke is overthrown and exiled to the forest by the new duke, his cruel brother. The overthrown duke's daughter is eventually exiled to the forest as well. Out in the forest, a community of exiles and misfits forms, as a refuge from persecution. There is deception of identity and gender, as well as much whimsy. Multiple couples wind up falling in love, and after much wooing and humor, all the couples are married in a mass ceremony at the end. The former duke is restored.

Of course part of the importance of the play for the Harriman saga is that here we find the origin of the name Orlando (and later, by extension, Roland).

But perhaps the most important element of the play that relates the story at large is the forest itself, namely Arden. Of course this is going to be the name of the Harriman estate in the Catskills. The name is taken directly from the forest of the play. A little web research about the play tells me that the name Arden in Shakespeare possibly refers to the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, which was the theater of many critical battles in the Second World War, among other things.

What stuck out most in reading the story was the direct contrast between civilization and the wilderness. The narrative of the play is direct progression from the former to the latter. The civilized world is corrupt. Justice and love are thwarted. As the story moves to the wilderness, both justice and love are restored and allowed to flourish.

This contrast---the city versus the forest---is extremely important to Edward Harriman. He was the great railroad baron who was also the close friend and patron of John Muir. Likewise one has the contrast between the city Harriman life of the 20th century and the simultaneous private seclusion of the Arden retreat in the Catskills. There was certainly an alteration and combination of the two realms, and it goes to a prominent and significant theme of "embodying the duality" and the rule of Always be on both sides. Or perhaps more appropriately here, Have a foot in both worlds.

It is fascinating that all of this was set down so literally in the Georgian era of the late 19th century. Edward Harriman built Arden around the turn of the 20th century, over a century after Rosamund Holmes urged her sister to name her son after the character Orlando. The play and its themes obviously had an important conscious legacy within the family itself, one that stretched over two centuries.

The city vs. wilderness theme is not intended to be the main theme of the Harriman saga, but it can obviously be a canvas on which to cast the other themes of the story, even from the earliest days. How this all plays out, I haven't yet figured. I'm not sure I'll know until I begin the actual writing, or even until after it's done.

There is plenty more Shakespeare I intend to read even as part of this project, a including most, if not all of his histories. After all, who is a better role model at fictionalizing history into pleasing artistic narrative than the Bard himself? I read Milton and Chaucer, and loved them, but my direct knowledge of Shakespeare is frighteningly small. Wouldn't it be cool to say I read all of Shakespeare's plays on Kindle?

As for the Kindle device itself, I absolutely love it. No more reading off my little iPhone. With my new device, I've already ripped through half a dozen other books in the last few weeks, which surpasses my reading over the entire last year.

One tweak to my routine that has helped is that I have adopted the habit of taking out my contact lenses earlier in the evening than bedtime. This allows me to forgo the use of reading glasses, which have put a strain on my eyes---one of the main reasons that reading books ceased to be a pleasure.

Back in Portland, moreover, in our little apartment hovering above the traffic of East Burnside, I had a difficult time feeling relaxed enough to read at leisure. I never even had a proper chair, and rarely felt in the mood to sit and absorb myself in a book.

Here in our new home in Fountain Hills, reading has become my primary leisure evening activity. We live up away from the city, in a quiet desert neighborhood behind a mountain range that separates our community from the lights and sprawl of Scottsdale and the Phoenix Valley. There are no streetlights up here, and at night, on our back patio, one can sit under the unbroken canopy of stars and moonlight, with the mountains silhouetted against the horizon.

Lately t has become nightly delight to go outside after sunset and sit beside the pool in my zero gravity chair, with the little LED-lit rectangle of the Kindle cradled in my lap, and the magnificent black dome of the stars overhead.


It feels as if an entire part of my soul, long neglected, has sprung back to life. I have never ceased devouring news off the web----that every-refreshing newspaper. But now I feel literate again.

Historical Fiction Notes: Moll Flanders


Flanders edging made at Kantcentrum in Bruges, Belgium. (source)


Reading Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities as background for the Harriman project was a nice start, if nothing else for the inspiration of exposing myself to a master storyteller.

But as I mentioned, Dickens was writing quite anachronistically to Georgian London, and so for my next book, I wanted to tackle something that wasn't written long after the time period, but perhaps could give me a more direct account of how people lived in the Eighteenth Century.

I could have gone directly for something written in the 1770s-1790s, but for reasons I will elaborate, I decided instead to tackle the reading of Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. This book, rather being written long after the Georgian era, was written well before it, in the early Eighteenth Century (during the so-called Augustan era), and was set over many decades in the Seventeenth Century, in rural England, London, and colonial America.

It seemed like a good balance to leap backwards before the era I was concerned with. Moreover, I already had an old paperback copy of Moll Flanders. It is among my few books that have traveled with me over the last four years, even while I was driving around the country in the Bimmer. I have been intending to read it all this time., and there is something quite satisfying in finally getting around to reading a book that has been in your possession and on your list for such a long time.

The copy I possess, a Signet classics edition, bears the attached price label of Sven and Ole's Bookshop in New Ulm, Minnesota, which is where I acquired it for a paltry dollar or two in the second week of July 2012.

It was brutally hot day. An enormous heat wave had engulfed the Middle West for the last ten days. I had just driven from New York to Omaha to attend the wedding of my friends Greg and Caitlin at th end of June. The heat wave had struck right as left my friend Adam and Marie's place in Brooklyn, and I wound up blowing my radiator in the Bronx and being laid up for three days in New Jersey getting it fixed. As it was I had to make a mad dash across the country just to reach Nebraska in time. The heat was so intense that when I stopped in Iowa City to tour the campus there, as is my habit, I went from the refuge of one air conditioned building to another, as if island hopping. I pulled up at the restaurant in Omaha right in time for the end of the rehearsal dinner, and devoured the remnants of the meal that my host had set aside for me.

After the wedding in Omaha, I was released from the pleasant social obligation and had leisure again. I had decided to enjoy the height of summer by meandering slowly north up into the lake country of South Dakota and into Minnesota. The heat gave an extra vibrancy to the trip, especially without air conditioning in the Bimmer. Everywhere I went in daylight hours, I had to make sure to park in a shaded area so that my steering wheel would not be too hot to touch when I returned.

That day in New Ulm, which is a nice little town with a charming main street, I found sheltered parking and made a tour of the downtown. I was happy to find the air conditioned bookshop as a chance to duck in from the heat.

At the time, I was in the midst of finishing reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I had come to greatly enjoy, to say the least, It had been slow going reading it at first, making my way through his antiquated prose, but somehow towards the middle of the book I became engrossed it and could barely put it down. At night in my various campsites, when the dishes of the meal would cleaned and JetBoil stove put away, I would look forward to the nightly ritual of taking out my contact lenses, settling down into my cheap green Wal-Mart folding chair, and reading a chapter or two until the light grew too dark.

Of course the well-known subject matter of the story greatly resonated with me, as I was in the midst of a long era of years of wandering around the country on my own, and feeling a bit like a castaway at times while I was camping. I even wound up going off onto my own wilderness island, with a camping excursion on Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior, completed isolated from civilization for several days and sitting alone a deserted rocky beach.

As I approached the end of the book, I had gotten used to the style of prose and, hooked on the story, my reading pace quickened drastically. I began to mourn the approaching end, as one days, even the story grew more compelling during Crusoe's return to England. I remember turning the last page while seated in that chair at my campsite at the state park next to Lake Bemidji, near the source of the Mississippi River, and feeling a sense of ecstasy of the moment, in both time and place.

It was all so beautiful, and one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life.  Thus I had eagerly sought Moll Flanders in that bookstore in Minnesota with the intention of picking up with Defoe's other famous work. Eager to keep my momentum, I had begun reading it right away after finishing Robinson Crusoe

I got about fifty pages into the story, and was enjoying it, but circumstances of my own voyage at the time interrupted my reading, and with the momentum broken, the book wound up languishing in my possessions, even as I traveled further around the country in my car, to Burning Man, sthen pending a winter in California, and going up to Oregon again, where I wound up staying.

When we moved into the apartment on East Burnside in early 2015, it found a place in the growing stack of my books there as well, almost taunting me in my failed attempt to read it, as books do. Then just last month, when we moved out of that apartment, it got packed up again, this time sealed with tape in cardboard box, and put into the ReloCube with our other possessions, bound for a new destination a thousand miles away.

The next week, after I got back from my family vacation in Colorado, it got unpacked in our near home down here in Arizona, our house in the hills overlooking the Verde River valley. Here at least, there was finally a proper bookcase to put it on, and it found a temporary resting place next to my other accumulated paperbacks on the top shelf of the plywood set that was left in the garage of her house.

But it didn't stay there for long, Even as I was finishing A Tale of Two Cities, I knew what my next book would be, and I marched right over to the shelf in the corner of my office room and pulled down the copy I bought in New Ulm in 2012. I knew approximately where in the story I had left off, with the protagonist still a teenage girl in the country home where she was raised, being wooed by two brothers simultaneously. But I chose to start from the fresh beginning.

As in the case with Robinson Crusoe, it was slow going at first, as I took time getting used to Defoe's Augustan prose. Among other things, there are no chapters in his books. The story is told without formal breaks in one long narrative.

And the story is thick. The narrative follows the title character's life from her earliest memories up to the point of her "writing the story" when she is well advanced in age, at least sixty years old. The book was actually published as being the real memoirs of a notorious woman under a pseudonym.


Characters come and go rather quickly. Just when you get used to a particular locale, you are whisked elsewhere, and all the troubles and pleasures of one era of her life fade into memory. Among them are many husbands and even children, most of which she loses track of. The modern reader would be struck by how little importance is given the account of offspring in that era. Then I had a couple children by by husband. One died, etc.

Of course I was reading the book not only for the pure experience, but with research in mind about the time period. Specifically I became fascinated in several issues, among them were descriptions of:

1. the houses she was in (result: they weren't a lot of details at all)
2. the clothes people wore (result: very few details here as well)
3. what people ate (result: very few details here as well)
4. how people traveled about (here the story yielded some fruit, in the manner of describing certain conveyances).

Overall, as in the case with Dickens, I found it amazing how little of certain details were furnished by the author, and how much that it doesn't really matter, since so much is actually created and filled in by the imagination of the reader based soley on the narrative of the characters

This was especially true in the early part of the story, but curiously in the latter part of the book, when the title character, having advanced beyond her prime marrying years, and having no husband, is reduced to becoming a petty criminal in London. Here we begin to find more elaborate descriptions of specific locales, with street names. As in Dickens, we get a description of Old Bailey, which will definitely be of the locales in the Harriman narrative (given that we have William Harriman's actual words of testimony spoken there).

We learn that gentlemen carried periwigs, snuffboxes, and swords (and might be robbed of them). We learn how much they cost. We learn that pocket watches were very common among people of all classes at the time.

We learn that the Mall in St. James Park was, like a now, a place people strolled on Sunday.  We learn that it was possible for people to hire carriages for a week long tour of the country, and we even learn how much it cost.

The information about how much things cost, and what amounted to a good income, and good savings, was highly valuable. Of course the story takes place a century before the Harriman narrative picks up, but unlike our era of paper fiat money, prices back then were extremely stable over the course of time.

We learn about the process of transportation of criminals to the New World, a sentence that bestowed on one of the men who stole property from William Harriman. A little further research on the web while I was reading the book revealed that the sentence of "transportation" was very common. It was mostly to Virginia and Maryland (and sometimes to other colonies such as Pennsylvania and the Carolinas). It was continued right up to the Revolution. One source I found on the web discussed it as one of the great overlooked features of American history, greatly underplayed in magnitude, even at the time, out of shame, by writers such as Jefferson. Most Americans now associate this historical phenomenon with Australia, but this is historically inaccurate, overall. A lot of forgotten history in there, but in Defoe it is front and center in importance.

I found myself looking up many specific terms to get background to the story, for example,  Flemish lace (highly prized contraband during the Dutch wars of the Seventeenth Century).  Towards the latter part of the book, the gold mine of such little random details seemed to get richer and richer, right as I found myself accelerating my pace of reading, just as I had with Robinson Crusoe. I was devouring details of research while absorbing the story for pleasure. Can there be a richer experience of reading literature than this?

I made a point of reading some of the last few pages of the book while sitting in the same green folding chair that I used while camping across the country. As I write this, the chair is sitting out on the back patio by our pool, and affords a splendid view out towards Mount McDowell. After many years of wandering, I feel like I am finally at rest. And the copy of Moll Flanders is back on the bookshelf in my office, but now it has the place of honor that a finished classic piece of literature has in my mind, when I see the spine.

Defoe, by the way, was fascinating individual. He was highly involved in politics of his time, and was a supporter of the Glorious Revolution, among other things. He didn't really start writing until his Fifties. Now that's information I can really use!

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Historical Fiction Notes: A Tale of Two Cities


Temple Bar in 1870, approximately a decade after Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. (source)


The first work that I decided to read, as part of my general strategy of background research to the time period of my own work, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I'd actually never read this before all the way through, although I knew the overall story and part of plot from screen adaptations.

The idea came to me as "aha" inspiration one afternoon when I was vacationing with my family at the YMCA camp near Estes Park last month, and within ten minutes I had purchased a version for Kindle and had downloaded to my iPhone. I spent the the next two days pleasantly launching through it while sitting on the porch of the lodge, swiping through the pages.

It seemed a rather obvious choice, since the time frame of the story (1775 to 1793) covers nearly exactly the London years of the Harriman story. Also Dickens is well known for his detailed descriptions. I figured I would be richly inspired in how to portray details of London life at the time.

This, however, was not the case, as I soon realized. First of all, Dickens did not live in that time. He began writing novels in the 1830s, and he wrote A Tale of Two Cities in the late 1850s, as one of his last works. So he was writing about a London that was almost eight decades in the past.

In many ways this was a great gift to realize this, since that put little ol' me in the same company as the master, since we were both writing about a historical London that we didn't have direct access to. It would be interesting to see how he handled the same situation.

As it happens, he mostly didn't handle it at all. I read in a preface that critics said the book should really be called "A Tale of One and Half Cities," since Dickens didn't know Paris much at all, and his descriptions of Parisian geography are rather scant. But the same is true of his London in that story.  One will search in vain in the story for details of everyday life in London---things such as what people ate, what they wore, what their dwellings looked like, etc. He simply doesn't furnish much of that at all.

Instead, not surprisingly, his stories are character-driven to an extreme. This itself was a great realization, since it shows that one doesn't really need to furnish a great deal of minute detail, so long as the story and character are compelling enough.Even the London of that era is left to one's imagination, to create in one's mind.

In motion picture terms, however, this puts a great burden on the art director, costumer, et, c., to make things "accurate." It was always the intention of Thor and I to do as much of this work ourselves as possible. So Dickens didn't give me much to go on, but at least it confirmed that story and character are always supreme. One needn't supply too much detail unless it pertains directly to the story itself.

The one exception where Dickens truly goes into minute descriptive detail regarding a London locale is in the case of Tellson's Bank. Here Dickens elaborates in his more usual fashion regarding the old banking house where Jarvis Lorry works.
Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven!—
I suspect Dickens himself felt constrained by the necessity of composing anachronistic description of his own city. But in the case of Tellson's bank, the idea was that it hadn't changed in many years. Constancy over generations used to be one of the hallmarks of good banking establishments, o so one could suppose that he could simply describe a bank of his own era, and it would serve pretty accurately as one from eighty years in the past.

Banks and bankers are very important in the Harriman story, as it turns out. So the descriptions he furnishes here turned out to be worth reading the story by itself.

But aside from this example,  probably the best result of reading this classic novel was simply the experience of indulging in a masterpiece of storytelling. It didn't hit me until the middle of Book the Third (the last act, so to speak), when I realized how much of the story had been prefigured and set-up through earlier actions which seemed disconnected at the time I read them. I can't overestimate the inspiration this had on me, and made me extremely satisfied and grateful that I had started my side-research with this book. There could be no better example to follow in this regard.

A tough act to follow, but a nice burden to have!

Strategies on Historical Fiction Writing

My Harriman project, which after years of deliberation, field research and study, seems to be taking shape rather nicely. For years i struggled with finding the right entry point into the entire story. The key turned out to be focus on Edward Harriman (1848-1909), since so much is known about him, and this in turn led me to my current strategy of telling the story as a family epic that begins with the earliest known ancestors of his line, which puts the story in the London in the middle of the 18th century.

The recent research that fleshed out many details of this era has been pleasing to undertake. I have developed an idea regarding creativity that when one is following the right path, things seem to "fall into place," as they have in this case, rather startlingly.

Actually this philosophy was suggested to me years ago by my mentor and friend Kim Stafford, who relayed advice given to him on the nature of writing, to the effect that when you're on the right path, "friendly animals" come up to help you. At least I think that was Kim. That was long ago.

This experience of "amazing coincidence," and of things locking into place, has especially been the experience all along with this project, from the days over ten  years ago when Thor and I began it, almost innocently, one afternoon in his house in Fort Collins.

All that innocence seems a long time ago, and yet here I am still working on, and now feeling as if I'm breaking into a sprint after a long stagnation.

But now I've come to point of actually composing the story.  A couple notes: despite all of my strivings to portray history at its most clear, this is a work of historical fiction. There is no escaping this. Although I am endeavoring to make this as factual as possible in historical detail, it is a fact that I will necessarily need to conjecture situations, conversations, and interactions, etc. not only to fill in plot gaps of the story (i.e., to supply conjectures of cause and effect) but moreover to give the story "color" and bring the characters to life.

Since I'm starting in London over two hundred years ago,  I was eager to supply the story with factual details of the time, even if I had to insert them into characters lives by conjecture. I decided the next phase in the research would necessarily involve some reading of materials relating to that time.






Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Iowa in Recent Presidential Elections

Iowa population by census (source). Notice how the number has no changed much over he last fifty years.  The shifts in voting patterns can't be chalked up to new arrivals or drastic demographic shifts.





1960 2,757,537
5.2%
1970 2,824,376
2.4%
1980 2,913,808
3.2%
1990 2,776,755
−4.7%
2000 2,926,324
5.4%
2010 3,046,355
4.1%


2012 (source)

Democratic Barack Obama Joe Biden 822,544 51.99% 6

Republican Mitt Romney Paul Ryan 730,617 46.18% 0

Libertarian Gary Johnson Jim Gray 12,926 0.82% 0



2008


2008 (source)

Democratic Barack Obama 828,940 53.93% 7

Republican John McCain 682,379 44.39% 0

Peace and Freedom Ralph Nader 8,014 0.52% 0

N/A Write-ins 6,737 0.44% 0

Libertarian Bob Barr 4,590 0.30% 0

 

2004


2004 (source)


Republican George W. Bush Richard Cheney 751,957 49.90% 7

Democratic John Kerry John Edwards 741,898 49.23% 0

Independent Ralph Nader Peter Camejo 5,973 0.40% 0

Libertarian Michael Badnarik Richard Campagna 2,992 0.20% 0

2000



2000 (source)

Democratic Al Gore 638,517 48.54% 7

Republican George W. Bush 634,373 48.22% 0

Green Ralph Nader 29,374 2.23% 0

Reform Pat Buchanan 5,731 0.44% 0

Libertarian Harry Browne 3,209 0.24% 0


1996


1996 (source)


Democratic Bill Clinton (incumbent) Al Gore 620,258 50.26% 7

Republican Robert Dole Jack Kemp 492,644 39.92% 0

Reform Ross Perot James Campbell 105,159 8.52% 0

Green Ralph Nader Anne Goeke[1][3] 6,550 0.53% 0


1992


1992 (source)

Democratic Bill Clinton 586,353 43.29% 7

Republican George H.W. Bush 504,891 37.27% 0

Independent Ross Perot 253,468 18.71% 0

Natural Law Dr. John Hagelin 3,079 0.23% 0

1988

1988 (source)

Democratic Michael Dukakis 670,557 54.71% 8

Republican George H.W. Bush 545,355 44.50% 0

Independent Lyndon LaRouche 3,526 0.29% 0

Libertarian Ron Paul 2,494 0.20% 0

1984


1984 (source)


Republican Ronald Reagan 703,088 53.27% 8

Democratic Walter Mondale 605,620 45.89% 0

Independent Lyndon LaRouche 6,248 0.47% 0

Libertarian David Bergland 1,844 0.14% 0

1980 

(source)

RRonald ReaganGeorge BushRepublican 676,026 51.31%8
DJames CarterWalter MondaleDemocrat 508,672 38.60%0
IJohn AndersonPatrick LuceyNom. Petition 115,633 8.78%0

1976 

(source)

RGerald FordRobert DoleRepublican 632,863 49.47%8
DJames CarterWalter MondaleDemocrat 619,931 48.46%0
IEugene McCarthy-Nom. Petition 20,051 1.57%

1972 

(source)

RRichard NixonSpiro AgnewRepublican 706,207 57.61%8
DGeorge McGovernR. Sargent ShriverDemocrat 496,206 40.48%0
IJohn SchmitzThomas AndersonAmerican Ind. 22,056 1.80%0

1968 

 (source)

RRichard NixonSpiro AgnewRepublican 619,106 53.01%9
DHubert HumphreyEdmund MuskieDemocrat 476,699 40.82%0
IGeorge WallaceS. Marvin GriffinAmerican Ind. 66,422 5.69%0

1964

 (source)

DLyndon JohnsonHubert HumphreyDemocrat 733,030 61.88%9
RBarry GoldwaterWilliam MillerRepublican 449,148 37.92%0

1960

(source)

RRichard NixonHenry LodgeRepublican 722,381 56.71%10
DJohn KennedyLyndon JohnsonDemocrat 550,565 43.22%0