So here goes:

Today I sent my Canadian and U.S. publishers suggestions for the cover art for THE SHADOW QUEEN. (Wow: it’s really happening.)

This took all morning—during which there was an earthquake!—and entailed poking around in my old files.

It was moving opening up a file of the original images I had used for building my characters years ago. I’m in the process of “building” characters for The Next Novel (the Young Adult about Josephine’s daughter Hortense), and it was a pleasant reminder of how helpful it can be to scout out character images on the Net. (I used Morgue File.) 

Here is the image I selected for Claude (Claudette), heroine of THE SHADOW QUEEN: 

I KNOW: it’s a guy, but something in his look spoke to me of Claude, who is a masculine woman.

And then later I found a Rossetti painting that struck me as Claude at court:

I was shocked to see how much alike these two images were — compare their eyes, eye brows, nose, lips. Amazing.

This Sargent painting is my image of Claude at the end of her life: triumphant! 

In a few weeks I will get the copy edit of THE SHADOW QUEEN. It will be entirely edited in Word. (With every novel the technology changes, in large part because I am such a slow writer.)

Then, after, I will plunge into writing the first draft of The Next Novel.

Juggling two historical periods is a bit of a challenge. I’m not having much luck making room on my shelves for new books.

The rest, in brief:

•The advance praise for THE SHADOW QUEEN—that is “blurbs”—has been fantastic.

•I’m reading Jane Austen in preparation for The Next Novel. More on dear Jane later. 

•Both my husband and I are sick with colds only a few days in advance of a trip to New York. (Grrrr.) 

•I began looking through the two boxes of the letters I wrote to my parents, found in their attic after my father died. I read through all of 1969: what a slice.

Lost in Memory Lane indeed. 

I’m getting ready to pack up my winter office in Mexico and return to Canada. This entails going through piles of papers, journals stacked up, bills.

Instead of attending to that last stack, I’m quickly posting here from a page I tore off from  Bookmarks Magazine (Nov/Dec 2011: note the year!), regarding an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Question from Bookmarks: What is the most challenging—and rewarding—aspect of writing?

Eugenides: The hardest thing is getting it right. And the most rewarding thing. What I mean it, there’s only one task when writing a book: to seize the reader’s attention and hold it as long as you can. To do that, you have to make your story both compelling and credible, you have to sand down the rough edges … 

Getting it right is so hard, and takes so many drafts. I’m pleased to say that finally The Next Novel not only went off (to be copy-edited), but it has a tentative publication date (March 18, 2014) and a title:

THE SHADOW QUEEN

It has also has been sent out to writers for quotes if they like it. I am absolutely thrilled that so far three have sent in glowing — glowing! — blurbs. 

I not the sort of writer who ever thinks I’ve gotten it “right,” so I’m relieved, I confess, that writers I very much respect have been so swept away.

Frankly, it makes me teary! 

My father died recently, my mother many years before. I was with my mother when she died, and with my father in his last hours.

My mother had the good fortune to die at home, under Hospice care. My sister Robin and her partner Betsy came prepared with a bag of rose pedals.

In the dead of night, I was reading “Wild Swans” by Edna St. Vincent Millay to my mother when she breathed her last. It was a poem she had pointed out to me many decades before, when I was a teen. “It’s about death,” she’d told me.

I ran to tell my sister and Betsy, and then our poor grief-stricken father. Soon, Robin and Betsy set to work, cleansing my mother’s body. This was something they had done before for friends who had died. They dressed Mother in a lovely nightgown and sprinkled her all over with rose pedals. She looked beautiful, and at peace.

On news of our father’s death in the small hours of the morning, Robin and Betsy went immediately to the hospital. My sister insisted that she join the nurses in that ancient ritual: cleansing the body. “She does that,” Betsy assured the nurses, who were taken aback.

I recently read a beautifully touching article in the Huffington Post, Inside a Home Funeral, on the ritual of cleansing the body. As the writer said, he entered “a holy space.” My sister and Betsy are very special people, both strong and tender. I’m strong and tender, but not in that way—and I admire them greatly for it.

Too, their practice of helping to cleanse the body of a loved one has reminded me how it must have been in ancient times.

I was surprised not to be able to find any ancient images of a body being cleansed. It was certainly an important practice. From a website on funeral customs:

“Certain Jewish customs were adopted by the Church as “pious practices” (as distinguished from articles of faith) because of their association with the burial of their Divine Founder. An instance of this is the ceremonious cleansing of the body after death. St. Chrysostom writes of this as being “hallowed in the person of our Lord” (whose body was washed as soon as it was taken from the Cross). To the Christians this Jewish custom (the special obligation of a son to his father’s body) signified that the dead, freed from the stain of sin by the Sacraments, might be received into Heaven “where no unclean thing may enter.”   

“The charitable St. Martin took particular care to search out the dead bodies of the poor and destitute, and we are told, “Never failed of washing them with fair water.”

A very good book on the history of Western death rituals is The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes  Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years, by Philippe Aries.

The first warning of trouble came while we were there: my father had had a fall and was in the hospital, but he was okay.

My father and I were close: I usually called him every day, but it had been difficult to call from the beach because the Net connection was so poor. I’d begun to use my international cell phone (when I could get a signal), which sends a call from the southern coast of Mexico, to London, England, to Oakland, California. The miracle of modern-day communication!

“I’m in the hospital!” he said, dismayed, and then he was overtaken by pain and there was nothing more I could say except “I love you!” I didn’t know then that these were my last words to him … at least words he could hear and understand. 

 And then, no sooner back home and unpacked than we got the call: he was dying. I flew to California to camp at Motel 6 and sit by his bedside with my family in the Kaiser hospital in Hayward. “Comfort Care” were the instructions on the white board: and that’s exactly what he got. Excellent comfort. (Such great nurses there.) 

My dear 95-year-old dad passed away peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of January 31. I wept in Motel 6 and on the airplane back to San Miguel. 

Getting back to work is its own form of comfort, that and working on the memorial and mailings and all the busyness of death. 

I knew that at 68 myself, I was lucky have a surviving parent, especially a dad who was so perpetually cheerful. He lived in the beautiful home I’d grown up in the Berkeley hills.

He was a ham radio operator all his life, and his ham radio buddies made a last call to W6UMP (my dad) and wished him well in his new life. 

And so, if I’m a bit slow posting here now, it has a lot to do with catching up on my work and helping to prepare for my dad’s memorial (which is going to be wonderful, I know). 

What I have done:  

• Continued to update the facts regarding Hortense’s life into Aeon Timeline (in preparation for the outline: alarmingly overdue!)

• Made a final draft of my NET PROMOTION FOR WRITERS AND OTHER LUDDITES in connection with the workshop I will be giving on Sunday the 17th. I plan to publish this as an INK e-book soon. For the time being, if you email me with Luddites or some such in the subject line, I will send it to you free. Basically, it’s Everything I Know and then some.  

• Sent in the “final” draft of IN THE SERVICE OF THE SHADOW QUEEN. Bar a few tweaks, it will likely go into copy editing now. I’d always been a little perplexed about the dedication. I had thought of dedicating it to my dad, but I’d dedicated a book to him before. But even so, two of the characters in this novel are so very much like him. And so: without a doubt, the dedication now reads:

In memory of my father, Robert Zentner

(1917 — 2013)

whose lovable eccentricities are reflected

in several of the characters in this novel.

(Cover of Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, an excellent and motivating book on writing. “Send!”)

I dreamt last night that I was tilling new ground. It was hard going, shovel-load by shovel-load, turning the hard, caked earth. Slowly, I worked the edges, moving toward the centre. I thought: it’s hard clots; I will have to break it down further. I will have to add mulch. 

I woke realizing that that was a perfect metaphor for what I’m doing now, preparing the ground for writing about Hortense. 

Of course I then got completely distracted by another sort of digging: revision of this website. There’s nothing quite like HMTL to get one’s brain in a knot.

And now: getting ready to leave for the beach for two weeks, taking my thick stack of plot index cards with me. And my computer, of course, with the amazing Mac plot software Aeon Timeline on it. (More on that later.) 

So: off to clear the desk and finish packing. I leave you with this:

I especially love #10: Creativity is subtraction. What do you think? 

I recommended Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. I’m using his system now to help me see the shape of the two YA’s I’m writing, and I used it last year, as well, to find my way out of the maze of The Next Novel. His book is irreverent, far-from-literary, but it gives you plot basics with a good dash of humour. Plus, it’s short and to the point. 

Another author recommended “The Hero’s Journey”,  a fantastic on-line site—here—based on the great book by Volger, The Writer’s Journey.

Both these books are written for scriptwriters. My own conviction is that scriptwriters are story-specialists, and that novelists can learn a great deal from them. 

I just sent out a special newsletter offering a chance to win one (or more than one!) of these books. It’s not to late to enter: here.

I have two blog mentions you might enjoy. One: what I have to say on Advice to Writers blog. (“Persevere!”)

And another, a charming article by novelist Randy Susan Myers for Beyond the Margins (a great blog): “Writers Wearing Costumes, Baking Cookies & Other Mad Men Tricks.” I bet you can guess which author will be the one wearing a costume. 

And last, I love this photo a Twitter friend sent of her Trilogy in the Serbian edition.

I especially love how well-thumbed the books look: clearly read and reread. 

Back to work! I’m delightfully lost in the Land of Research. (See this blog post on my discoveries.) 

The first takes place largely in the boarding school Hortense was placed in at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, run by Madame Campan. 

I’ve been to Saint-Germain-en-Laye many, many times over the years, but it has been almost two decades since I’ve been there to research the Napoleonic era. Now I have the advantage of the Net, and (with perseverance) have found a bounty of information. 

This is what I’ve gleaned so far:

On July 31, 1794, Campan opened her school—”National Institution of Saint-Germain”—on rue de Poissy. In the spring of the following year, on May 25, she rented Hôtel de Rohan on 42, rue de l’Unité—now 42, rue des Ursulines—opening it there on July 1, 1795. Two months later, on September 1, Josephine enrols Hortense and possibly her niece Emily there. 

What I long for, however, are images, and this was the first image of the Hôtel de Rohan I was able to find:

(Link here.)

The French government provides all sorts of information on historical sites. This one is a treasure of information and images:

Here is a map detail from the mid-18th century:

And another one from 1820:

The inner courtyard (mid-19th century):

The basin in the entry:

You can see it filled with plants here:

And here’s a detail of the staircase:

The former Hôtel de Rohan is now, of course, an apartment block (and, I gather, a guitar school). I hope to get in to see it on my next research trip to France, but for now, these images help a great deal. 

Nancy Russell suggested Johnny Depp for Napoleon. Sister-out-law Wendy Milne said that a number of women would be happy if Depp played Napoleon, and according to Lee LaFont, he is short enough. 

Nancy Russell also suggested Angelina Jolie for Josephine.

Paul Headrick suggested I use pull to get the role of Josephine myself. (I’m told that “Snerk!” is not a word, but I bet you know what I mean.)

Fran Murphy suggested “smoldering beauty” Sophie LaFont as Josephine. (Sophie, I can feel you blushing and smoldering from here!)

Marnie Mackay suggested Brad Pitt and felt that Johnny Depp was a bit too cute. Brad can do anything, she notes, and he might also be short. 

Sue Lievers would like to see her daughter Jordy as Josephine. 
Jordy, an actor, studied French for six years and lived in Paris.

Interior designer Bonnie Sachs suggested that David Straithern would make a wonderful Napoleon (unless he’s too old, she noted). 

Novelist Roberta Rich suggests Jessica Chastain (above) for Josephine, but conceded that Napoleon was more of a challenge. (Yes!)

Another novelist, Lauren Davis, suggests Thomas Hardy (above) for Napoleon.

Debbie Pollock’s picks for Napoleon are Brad Pitt (Brad again!), Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pine, Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey, John Stamos and Eric Bana—with Patrick Dempsey the favourite (above). 

For Josephine, she suggests Emily Blunt, Jennifer Connelly, Kate Winslet, Julia Stiles, Hilary Swank and Natalie Portman, with favour going to the ever-graceful Kate Winslet (above), a suggestion son Chet Gulland seconds.

Soon-to-be-son-in-law Bruce Sudds suggests the great character actor Toni Colette for Josephine (such eyes!), and another great actor Ed Norton for Napoleon (below). Thumbs up from Chet on that one too. 

Victoria Sorenson (shown below, before attending a ball at Versailles) is a direct descendent of Josephine. She has had wide theatrical experience and would love a chance to audition for a role. 

Ivy in Germany  would like to see Astrid Berges-Frisbey as the young, grown-up Hortense (a lovely suggestion, I think) … 

and could very well imagine Olivia Williams (below) as “late” Joséphine.

Marie suggests either Marion Cotillard or Charlize Theron for Josephine (below) …

and Joe Pesci or Javier Bardem (who is 5’7″) as Napoleon. 

Stephen Solomans has cast Kevin Spacey and maybe Giovanni Ribisi as the younger Napoleon. (I am struck by how much alike they look.)

Joanne Zomers feels that Helena Bonham Carter (above) would make a fine Josephine. “And how about the producer Kelsey Grammer as Napoleon?”

Now there’s a thought!

Fiction

Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr was a first novel published in 1978, yet it won the National Book Award. This doesn’t happen often for first novels. It is easy to see why it won, for it is a marvel, one of those novels that delights on every level: sentence by sentence, character by character. I especially enjoyed it because it is set in Ibarra, a small town in central Mexico, in a landscape not unlike the region we live in during the winter. It’s a novel I look forward to passing on to friends. Ten stars! 

Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I very much enjoyed this novel. Lovely sentences. Curiously, I read it on my iTouch, tiny screen by tiny screen, and that seemed right for this reflective novel. 

Canada by Richard Ford. I love the hypnotic, sad texture of Ford’s prose. Here’s a lovely article on Ford and his work. 

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. In a word: incredible. 

The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson. A jewel of a novel: I gave it a rave review in the Toronto Globe & Mail (here). 

The Headmaster’s Wager by Vincent Lam. An epic story of a Chinese man, the headmaster of an English school in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. A fascinating and horrifying snapshot of the life of a civilian in those years of war and turmoil, a man who is himself an immigrant in a country occupied by Americans. A complex love story, a heart-rending family saga … all told in spare, perfect prose. 

Web of Angels by Lilian Nattel. Set in Christie Pits area of Toronto—where the author lives—and about a woman who is “multiple” as a result of child abuse. It’s a brave novel about the child porn industry—which is huge—its victims and the DID (dissociative identity disorder) that results. A difficult and important book dealing with a horrific subject, but full of hope and love. Enlightening.

Non-fiction

I’ve been reading quite a few books on e-book publishing. I’ve noted the best ones here. Also, as always, books on writing, listed here.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I loved this! It made me want to hike, and I’m hardly even much of a walker. 

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. Laugh-out-loud funny and wise. I want every woman I know to read this!