Daily life: Chesapeake watermen research
"When I was writing Trumpets in the West in the middle of India, with scarcely any reference-books, I discovered just in time that the stage-coaches in 1686 carried no outside passengers. It meant rewriting a complete chapter. Probably no child would ever have noticed the mistake, and perhaps no History teacher would have minded. . . . Similarly a whole chapter of Thunder of Valmy had to be rewritten when I discovered by chance that a certain morning at Versailles in May, 1789, had been grey and drizzly, not sunny as I had first pictured it. What does it matter, a pedantic detail like that? Just as much, or as little, as the workmanship which old-time sculptors and carvers put into figures so far from the ground that no human eye would ever appreciate it."
--Geoffrey Trease: Tales Out of School.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 26 September 2009. Mentoring: An exchange between my apprentice and me.
"I'll be visiting a friend around noon tomorrow, so I won't be very available, Sir."
"Very available?"
"Well, I'm always available to you, Sir. I'm just not always very available."
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 reason to love the U.S. government (Prison City research).
#1 reason to love the U.S. government: free government documents on the Web.
As you may recall, I had the notion of placing my protagonist's estate next to the coast of Calvert Cliffs State Park, but I wasn't able to figure out whether this was a plausible location, because I wasn't sure whether the depth of water next to the beach was suitable for a wharf or pier.
Well, my dears, here is what I was able to find online over the weekend:
A nautical chart showing the depth of water along the park's coast, prepared by the federal government's Office of Coast Survey.
A nautical chart by the same government body, showing the depth of water along the park's coast in 1908.
The 1908 chart also shows:
* The location of the oyster bars (i.e. where oystermen would be sailing).
* The location and length of piers.
* The names of towns.
* The location of rivers and marshland.
* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).
* The location of houses.
What I already had (but needed to examine more closely) was the U.S. Geological Survey's map of the area in 1904, showing:
* The names of towns.
* The location of rivers and marshland.
* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).
* The location of houses.
* The topography.
Taken together, these two maps are like a gift from the gods. They tell me that a house existed right about where I was planning to place my protagonist's estate, close to what is now the park beach. The two maps differ slightly on where the house was located, which gives me wiggle room to place the house where I want, but they both show that a road led up to the house.
(Understand, I could have placed an imaginary house there regardless, but the actual existence of a house there tells me that the terrain was suitable for such a house location. That's what I was trying to determine.)
Oh, and all that information I mentioned above? I also have it for Hoopers Island. I now know exactly where on the island my imaginary boarding school is located (next to the appropriately named Richland Cove, on a peninsula of land that has virtually disappeared, so I needn't feel guilty about not having visited it), I know exactly where my second protagonist would encounter marshland during his walk across the upper island (more or less where I encountered it, as it turns out), I know where the roads through the upper island were located in 1910 (almost exactly where they are today), I know the location in 1910 of the nearby Back Creek (whose exact boundaries have shifted slightly over the years), and I know where some of the watermen are going to engage in a firefight with rival watermen (in the part of Hoopers Island called Gunners, of course).
As icing on the cake, I found online various maps by the Maryland Geological Survey, showing shoreline changes in Maryland between 1848 and now. This will help me to correlate modern maps of Dorchester County and Calvert County with turn-of-the-century maps. One of those maps reveals, by the way, that the cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park didn't exist in 1848 - it's a product of shoreline erosion since that time. No wonder the cove has no name. However, judging from the turn-of-the-century maps, the cove did exist by the 1910s.
I also downloaded from Google Books a copy of the 1916 edition of the United States Coast Pilot - published by the U.S. Department of Commerce - which includes deliciously detailed passages like this:
"Tar Bay is a shallow bay between Barren Island and the northern end of Hooper Island. A very narrow, crooked channel leads from Chesapeake Bay across Tar Bay northward of Barren Island, and through Fishing Creek into the northern end of Honga River. It has a depth of about 4 feet, is marked by two lights and by bush stakes, and is considerably used by small local craft, but local knowledge is necessary to follow it. The lights form a range for the approach, and in entering the first is left to starboard and the second to port. Fishing Creek [the creek between Hoopers Island and the mainland] is crossed by a drawbridge."
Getting back to the plausibility of anchorage in the unnamed cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park: the answer is "just barely." Bugeyes and skipjacks - the Chesapeake-style boats that I'm planning to have in that part of the story - are shallow-draft boats (i.e. they don't go far down into the water), so I think I can get away with having them anchor there, especially since the water next to Hoopers Island - where I know that boats anchored in the 1910s - seems comparable. (I say "seems" because the Office of Coast Survey didn't provide exact figures on its 1910 map, darn them.) And there existed piers further up the coast in Calvert County, as well as a fishing station at Flag Ponds, on the coastline just north of Calvert Cliffs State Park (not to mention a nice long oyster bar in between). Just to be safe, I'll give the Calvert Cliffs cove a pier.
"I want the U.S. government to spend all my tax money on projects like this," I told my apprentice after I'd downloaded all this. I mean, really, this wealth of free information at government Websites is public service at its best.
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 sign that it's time to stop gathering research material.
The revised version of my historical note for Master and Servant is 2600 words long.
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: Starting into my writing season.
I do not, alas, have the ability to turn my Muse instantly on and off, so I'm spending this week easing into my writing season: I'm reading the online fiction and e-books I've accumulated for the last couple of months, I'm sorting my computer files, I'm de-cluttering my study, and I'm catching up on phone calls to friends and family and on correspondence I can't put off till next year.
Vital correspondence and Daily Life entries left aside, I'm doing my best to avoid reading nonfiction. Sooner or later, my Muse will notice that I'm reading only fiction and then, beaming, he'll pay me a visit.
And not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned. I've missed him.
Meanwhile, my penchant for downloading has reached the point of no return: I now have 1% space left on my hard drive. So I'm trying to figure out easy ways to purge files.
*** 29 September 2009. Simplicity: Purging my hard drive.
As of the beginning of this evening, I had 1.7 GB free on my 56 GB hard drive. I needed 8 GB free, just to be able to defragment the drive.
I managed to get 1 GB free by going through my "To Read" folder and getting rid of files I obviously don't need. Then I scrutinized my Videos folder and concluded that I could get rid of another 8 GB by moving my full-length movies over to my laptop.
The question is where I'll find room on my laptop; I only have 4 GB free there.
Darn it, I need a way to save files onto DVDs.
*** 30 September 2009. Writing: Slugging away at the Prison City lighthouse research.
Spent today undertaking the dull but necessary work of skimming the period nonfiction works on lighthouses that I downloaded last week. I only have three e-texts left; then I can start on the period novels about lighthouses.
The most interesting publication I read was a 1908-9 magazine called "The Master, Mate, and Pilot," which was filled (among other things) with items like this:
"Popular novels and magazines are said to be the favorite reading of light-house keepers. Naturally these worthy men would go in for light literature. (Gaze steadily at this paragraph for twenty-three seconds and a joke will appear.)"
'Tis nice to see that bad jokes are a perennial favorite.
There's still no sign of my Muse, but I'm not impatient. I have a friend coming to see me on Tuesday, and the Sunday after that I'm scheduled to go to Dorchester County with Spiralred; I'd hate either event to occur when my Muse was champing at the bit.
*** 2 October 2009. Writing: The play Fishing Gone (Prison City Research).
Doug and I went to see a play about Chesapeake watermen at the Smithsonian last night, "Fishing Gone." The most interesting aspect of it was the actress, a native Baltimorean who now lives on Tangier Island (a Chesapeake island in Virginia) and who played herself. The play was framed around her giving us, the audience, a tour of the island. "The boat back to the mainland leaves at 4:00, not 4:01," she said sternly.
The playwright, Roger Vaugn, has good maritime writing credits, but I blinked when I got to the part in the play where a character was saying (unless I misheard him, always a possibility) that skipjacks were brought to the Chesapeake by New England fishermen and were the first boats that were powerful enough to dredge with. (Skipjacks were actually invented about eighty years after New England fishermen invaded the Chesapeake, they weren't the first dredge boats, and they were smaller than the first dredge boats.)
The other aspect of the play that bothered me was that there were a fair number of "dumb yokel" jokes in it - jokes that played upon the idea of the Tangier watermen not knowing as much as the audience did. In fact, the plotline revolved around better educated characters lecturing one of the watermen until he sees the light. Even a line about the tourists and watermen learning from each other couldn't disguise the fact that, in the play, the watermen were the ones who did all the learning.
"So basically what you're saying is that the play was a wash," my apprentice concluded after I'd given my report. He summed it up nicely.
*** 3 October 2009. Writing: Rugby, watermen's dialect, and steamboats (Prison City research).
I spent today trying futilely to find the videos I downloaded several months ago, showing rugby mauls. (You gotta love a sport where one of the official moves is called a maul.) I think I accidentally deleted the videos, darn it. But I went through the rest of my material on rugby history and did a corresponding brush-up on the football scene in Master and Servant.
Yesterday - despite my earlier conviction that I was done with library research for this year - I accompanied Doug to the Hyattsville Library and did another run on its Maryland Room (which, I may not have mentioned, is a reference room, so I can't borrow the books there). My eyes really weren't up for lengthy reading - and anyway, the library closed ninety minutes after we got there - but I wanted to skim Varley Lang's Follow the Water (1961), which was written by a teacher-turned-waterman. It turned out to provide evidence that, fifty years ago, watermen's dialect was essentially the same as it is today. Since Varley Lang became a waterman in the fifties, when watermen were still alive who had been following the water back in the 1910s, this is pretty clear evidence that the dialect hasn't changed much over a century's time. Larry Chowning, who fictionalizes interview material from watermen who lived back in the 1910s, implicitly offers the same evidence. This is good, because I can't find any turn-of-the-century books that quote watermen. In fact, as far as I can tell, Follow the Water was the first book specifically about watermen. (A factoid: Mr. Lang was a consultant for Katharine Paterson's Newbery-award-winning children's novel from 1980, Jacob Have I Loved, which is set on an imaginary island in the Chesapeake Bay.)
By "watermen's dialect," I'm referring simply to the traditional Chesapeake dialect. I'm sure that it varies from place to place, but its general features seem to be the same, no matter which location I look at - for example, a relative lack of complex sentence structures, and a tendency to drop the pronoun or article at the beginning of the sentence.
Oh, and a tendency for men to call other men "honey." I'm rather taken with that.
I also glanced through David Holly's Tidewater by Steamboat and some other books on steamboat history. I'd been having the worst problems finding information on steamboat history online, but Mr. Holly's book provided me with just what I needed: a layout of a steamboat's decks. That, and his description of what sounds could be heard on a steamboat, are enough to let me write that steamboat scene.
Because I was reading under a deadline, I kept sending Doug off to make photocopies for me. He finally joked, "Do I get credit in your book?"
"You're already in the acknowledgments," I assured him.
*** 4 October 2009. Writing: Playing around with EPUB e-books.
EPUB, as you may recall, is an open-source format for e-books; its creators want it to be the MP3 of the e-book world. Well, they seem to be succeeding. Everyone is jumping on the EPUB bandwagon these days: iPod (via Stanza), Barnes & Noble's e-book reader, Sony Reader, and Google Books. Only Amazon is left out in the cold. (Ha. That's what happens to businesses that try to conquer the world with a proprietary e-book format.)
So I experimented around, and I determined that I can use Calibre to convert a bunch of HTML and jpg files into a single EPUB book. Neat. This means that, next year, I can release all of my fiction works in a package edition, in two formats: EPUB and zipped HTML.
I have to say that, the more I look at EPUB, the more I like it. It has nearly all the advantages of HTML, combined with the advantage of built-in packaging of several files. Depending on the e-reader, you can also take advantage of features like a contents sidebar and bookmarks.
The reason I didn't initially like EPUB was because some publishers are using it to try to replicate the look of printed books. That just won't work. EPUB is basically a variation on HTML; if you try to do stuff like justify the text and include paragraph indents, the results are just as bad as if you tried to do that to an HTML document. (I don't want to tell you what a quarter-inch paragraph indent looks like when the reader is viewing an EPUB e-book in 28-point type, as I do. Just double-space between the paragraphs, please.) Treated as it is meant to be - an electronic document - EPUB is a perfectly nice format.
Because of EPUB's newfound popularity, I might eventually be able to find place to sell EPUB e-books besides Lulu.com. And I sure hope that Google Books's decision to provide EPUB downloads for some of its public domain books means that it will eventually support the EPUB format in its Publishing Partners program.
By the way, after looking at what files make up EPUB, I became curious, because the contents of an EPUB file (.opf and .xml) look awfully like the contents of a DAISY file (.opf, .xml, .ncx, and .smil) - DAISY being the text/audio e-book format used for the blind. So I checked, and sure enough: the DAISY Consortium is in charge of standards for the EPUB format. I'm not sure about all the implications for this, but I'm betting that it at least means that the DAISY Consortium is making sure that EPUB remains accessible to the blind.
*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Preparing my domain for next year; plus, novel-reading related to Prison City.
Since my Muse is still on vacation, I spent three hours today (so far) on Website layout. I think my new publishing plans - getting all of my fiction ready for publication/posting before the publishing season begins - is a good one, because it lets me do all the needed Website layout at once (other than minor tweaks when I put promised fiction online). There's a lot of layout to do; those three hours were spent on Darkling Plain alone . . . and I haven't even made the changes yet to reflect next year's publications in that series.
Doing Web layout is like eating candy to me, so I haven't felt any urges to go online. In fact, the idea of going on several times a week (as I did last winter) is beginning to seem . . . well, weird.
Meanwhile, I continue to read fiction in the hopes that my Muse will get the idea. Right now, I'm reading Katharine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, which I suspect I wouldn't have liked if I'd tried to read it as a kid (it was published when I was junior in high school), because it's heavy on exposition, and so far (five chapters in) not much has happened plotwise. But as someone who has just spent a whole summer on Chesapeake research, I'm impressed with how well Ms. Paterson mastered her subject matter; through her novel, I can really feel what it's like to live on a bay island.
Darn it, this is demoralizing; I'm not that good an author.
[Later: Finished reading the novel. Oh, man. I was in tears by the end.]
I must go; Doug just came in and said, "I tried. I really tried."
I waited patiently for him to finish.
"I tried not to make the eggplant lasagna as decadent as last time. . . ."
I'm off to eat decadent lasagna.
*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Speaking of demoralizing . . .
A very-not-worksafe passage from Poisontaster's A Kept Boy, with names changed in order to prevent spoilers.
o--o--o
"Can you come while being fucked?"
The effort to string together that many words is monumental . . . but worth it for the way the deeply-furrowed, blown-pupil look on Brian's face transforms into breathtaking head-thrown, sealed-lid, open-mouthed blissfulness, transcending the heated pearl-stripe of come and clench of Brian's body around him.
In you. I'm in you, Hank thinks, driving hard. Inside you. Always inside you.
The orgasm, when it comes, is like sliding on ice off a cliff's edge; an almost peaceful equilibrium point of utter, perfect stillness followed by the drowning, crashing crush, consciousness compacted into the liquid spill of his body into Brian's.
Mundane humanity returns too much later, Hank's back twinging as he goes from locked-rigid to noodle-limp, exhaustion licking him with black, greedy tongues.
o--o--o
Now, this is why I rarely write graphic sex scenes. I can't write sex that well. (*Goes offstage to whimper quietly.*)
*** 6 October 2009. Writing: 1910s watermen's dialect (Prison City research).
Still no sign of my Muse. I'm feeding him Marion Zimmer Bradley, whom I haven't read since the 1990s. She makes for good light reading.
Doug wanted to do something special today, so we went to the library. (I love a man who considers going to the library to be a special outing.) My eyes are in that early-fall transitional period when I can't read standard-sized print for long, but I can read it for a short time, so I browsed through Hyattsville's Maryland Room.
I stumbled across a treasure, one I'd ignored before because of its silly title: They Live by the Wind: The Lore and Romance of the Last Sailing Workboats: The Garand Banks Schooners, the Square-Rigged Training Ships, the Chesapeake Oysterboats, the Fishing Sloops of the Bahamas. Since the author, Wendell P. Bradley, died before finishing his manuscript, I'm going to guess that his publisher was responsible for that monstrosity of a title.
At any rate, beyond the awful title was pay dirt. The Chesapeake section of the book was written between 1953 and 1966. The author, who lived on Tilghman Island, describes life there. The centerpiece of his account is a passage recreating a day he spent sailing with "the oldest active captain on the Bay," who captained "the last gaff topsail sloop on the Bay." Captain Will Jones was eighty-four years old at the time and had followed the water since he was eighteen.
Bradley's experiences cover the same time period as Varley Lang's in Follow the Water (1961), and the book also overlaps in content with Randall S. Peffer's Watermen (1979). All three authors give essentially the same impression of Tilghman Island watermen, which - as a history writer and journalist - delights me. I love the evidence of multiple witnesses.
I am happy to report that the dialect of "the oldest active captain on the Bay" turns out to be essentially the same as today's Eastern Shore dialect. Mind you, he could have changed his manner of speech to fit with the times, or his speech could have been misreported, but I've now got three authors - Bradley, Lang, and Larry S. Chowning - who have all recounted watermen who were alive in the 1910s as using the same dialect in later years as is in use today. (Possibly four. I wasn't paying attention to ages when I read Mr. Peffer's Watermen.) It would be nice to turn up a 1910s document that actually quotes Eastern Shore dialect, but that would take me far too much digging to unearth.
Besides, I want my Muse to show up and make use of all this research, darn it.
*** 7 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer.
As you may recall, I recently ran out of room on my 56-gigabyte desktop computer; I was down to less than a gigabyte of space. I need to free up at least nine gigabytes, so that I can defragment my disk.
After sorting a lot of unsorted computer files into their proper folders, I've managed to identify the sources of my space problem.
The problem doesn't lie with the files in my To Read folder (though that folder sure needs some weeding). Nor does it lie, surprisingly enough, with images. (I tend to collect public domain artwork a lot, for the sake of my booktrailers.)
The problem lies with videos, music, and PDF files from Google Books and the Internet Archive.
I can resolve the last problem easily enough: many of those e-texts can be replaced with EPUB or plain-text files from Google Books and the Internet Archive (or simply ditched altogether). The videos are a bigger problem. A heck of a lot of those videos are for research for my Prison City and Triad series; I can't discard them till I've finished my research for those series, which will likely be years from now. Nor can I afford to buy an external CD or DVD drive.
So I'm just going to have to systematically go through my hard drive to get rid of files I'm no longer using. I've already freed up nearly two gigabytes that way. So I've only got six gigabytes to go.
*** 9 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer, Part 2.
I woke up this morning with the sharp realization: I don't need more storage space. I need fewer electronic belongings.
Mind you, I'd still love to have external storage space for my movies; a single movie takes up a third of a gigabtye on my hard drive. But for the rest of my files, the problem isn't that they're too big; the problem is that I have too many of them.
So my lack of external storage space is a blessing; it forces me to decide what I really need.
*** 9 October 2009. Writing: Turning over the slate.
I've been in a mild depression since my writing season began, nearly two weeks ago; my Muse has been nowhere in sight, and I haven't been terribly interested in the activities I've been doing in the meantime. (Also, I've been dealing with medical bureaucracy, which is enough to drive me to comfort activities.)
In past years, I would have resolved my depression by going online. One hour online is like a hit of cocaine to me. This year, I told myself firmly that I just needed to keep reading fiction, and sooner or later my Muse would turn up.
He's here.
"Seventeen hundred words!" I chirped at my apprentice this evening.
"I thought you were going down for a nap," he replied, confused.
"I did! I woke up again!" Then, as he remained silent, I felt compelled to explain, "Seventeen hundred words only took me an hour. I know that seventeen hundred words would be a twenty-four-hour marathon for you."
"Seventeen hundred words?" said my apprentice, incredulous. (He's quite capable of writing at a rate of one sentence per hour.)
Actually, I'll know I'm back in full form when I begin producing 3000 words a day, that being my average last winter. Right now, I'm still groping my way back to a decent style, but switching from reading Marion Zimmer Bradley to reading Evangeline Walton should help. (I'm about to reread her Viking novel, The Cross and the Sword.)
At any rate, my depression is gone. Did I mention that I only feel really alive when I'm writing stories?
By the way, "turning over the slate" is a reference to the double-sided slate that hangs from a nail on my study door. On one side, the slate is blank. On the other side is written the words, "Muse in. Do not disturb." I turn the slate over when I'm entering into a writing session, so that Doug will know not to interrupt me.
However, I can't turn my slate over entirely yet. I've received word from Spiralred that our trip to Dorchester County will take place as planned this Sunday. Plus, I have a few of those yucky health matters to get done. But at least I won't have to do all that in the midst of gloom.
*** 12 October 2009. Writing: My Muse moveth.
A day in Dorchester (which I'll write about in a separate entry) seems to have woken up my Muse: I wrote five thousand words today, despite the fact that I'm having to go to bed early in order to attend a wellness clinic tomorrow morning.
This is my total wordage for the 2008-9 seasons:
o--o--o
Summer total: 29,935.
Winter total: 178,100. Winter total average: 29,683/month, 3,124/day of the days on which I wrote. Wrote 57 days, an average of 9.5 days per month.
Total for 2008-9: 208,035 (139% of 150,000; 58% of 360,000).
o--o--o
My goal for 2008-9 was 150,000 words: thirty thousand words a month for the five months of my composing season. (Because of my mother's death, I was delayed a month in starting my composing season last year.) I more than exceeded that goal.
This year my goal is sixty thousand words a month for six months, for a total of 360,000 words. Since I don't plan to spend 72 days online this winter (that's the awful total for my online time last winter; note that it exceeds the number of days I spent writing), I'm hopeful that a goal of two thousand words a day will be achievable, since I average three thousand words a day on the days when I write; if I write on two-thirds of the days this winter, I'll achieve my goal. As an extra cushion, my summer total for this year was 16,660 words, so I've already completed 5% of this year's goal.
Setting aside the math and getting back to content: I've finished the Hoopers Island watermen chapter, though it's going to have to be heavily rewritten. Just in time; the Hoopers Island books I borrowed are due next week. Tomorrow I've got the wellness clinic and the delayed visit from my local friend. Then I'll get to work on the shantyboat chapter. The Calvert County watermen chapters are going to be the hardest to write, because I have much less information to work with. Though I do still hope that I can persuade Doug to revisit the Calvert Cliffs State Park next March.
Meanwhile, I'm immersing myself in watermen's dialect by rereading Randall S. Peffer's Watermen, which is well worth revisiting.
--Geoffrey Trease: Tales Out of School.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 26 September 2009. Mentoring: An exchange between my apprentice and me.
"I'll be visiting a friend around noon tomorrow, so I won't be very available, Sir."
"Very available?"
"Well, I'm always available to you, Sir. I'm just not always very available."
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 reason to love the U.S. government (Prison City research).
#1 reason to love the U.S. government: free government documents on the Web.
As you may recall, I had the notion of placing my protagonist's estate next to the coast of Calvert Cliffs State Park, but I wasn't able to figure out whether this was a plausible location, because I wasn't sure whether the depth of water next to the beach was suitable for a wharf or pier.
Well, my dears, here is what I was able to find online over the weekend:
A nautical chart showing the depth of water along the park's coast, prepared by the federal government's Office of Coast Survey.
A nautical chart by the same government body, showing the depth of water along the park's coast in 1908.
The 1908 chart also shows:
* The location of the oyster bars (i.e. where oystermen would be sailing).
* The location and length of piers.
* The names of towns.
* The location of rivers and marshland.
* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).
* The location of houses.
What I already had (but needed to examine more closely) was the U.S. Geological Survey's map of the area in 1904, showing:
* The names of towns.
* The location of rivers and marshland.
* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).
* The location of houses.
* The topography.
Taken together, these two maps are like a gift from the gods. They tell me that a house existed right about where I was planning to place my protagonist's estate, close to what is now the park beach. The two maps differ slightly on where the house was located, which gives me wiggle room to place the house where I want, but they both show that a road led up to the house.
(Understand, I could have placed an imaginary house there regardless, but the actual existence of a house there tells me that the terrain was suitable for such a house location. That's what I was trying to determine.)
Oh, and all that information I mentioned above? I also have it for Hoopers Island. I now know exactly where on the island my imaginary boarding school is located (next to the appropriately named Richland Cove, on a peninsula of land that has virtually disappeared, so I needn't feel guilty about not having visited it), I know exactly where my second protagonist would encounter marshland during his walk across the upper island (more or less where I encountered it, as it turns out), I know where the roads through the upper island were located in 1910 (almost exactly where they are today), I know the location in 1910 of the nearby Back Creek (whose exact boundaries have shifted slightly over the years), and I know where some of the watermen are going to engage in a firefight with rival watermen (in the part of Hoopers Island called Gunners, of course).
As icing on the cake, I found online various maps by the Maryland Geological Survey, showing shoreline changes in Maryland between 1848 and now. This will help me to correlate modern maps of Dorchester County and Calvert County with turn-of-the-century maps. One of those maps reveals, by the way, that the cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park didn't exist in 1848 - it's a product of shoreline erosion since that time. No wonder the cove has no name. However, judging from the turn-of-the-century maps, the cove did exist by the 1910s.
I also downloaded from Google Books a copy of the 1916 edition of the United States Coast Pilot - published by the U.S. Department of Commerce - which includes deliciously detailed passages like this:
"Tar Bay is a shallow bay between Barren Island and the northern end of Hooper Island. A very narrow, crooked channel leads from Chesapeake Bay across Tar Bay northward of Barren Island, and through Fishing Creek into the northern end of Honga River. It has a depth of about 4 feet, is marked by two lights and by bush stakes, and is considerably used by small local craft, but local knowledge is necessary to follow it. The lights form a range for the approach, and in entering the first is left to starboard and the second to port. Fishing Creek [the creek between Hoopers Island and the mainland] is crossed by a drawbridge."
Getting back to the plausibility of anchorage in the unnamed cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park: the answer is "just barely." Bugeyes and skipjacks - the Chesapeake-style boats that I'm planning to have in that part of the story - are shallow-draft boats (i.e. they don't go far down into the water), so I think I can get away with having them anchor there, especially since the water next to Hoopers Island - where I know that boats anchored in the 1910s - seems comparable. (I say "seems" because the Office of Coast Survey didn't provide exact figures on its 1910 map, darn them.) And there existed piers further up the coast in Calvert County, as well as a fishing station at Flag Ponds, on the coastline just north of Calvert Cliffs State Park (not to mention a nice long oyster bar in between). Just to be safe, I'll give the Calvert Cliffs cove a pier.
"I want the U.S. government to spend all my tax money on projects like this," I told my apprentice after I'd downloaded all this. I mean, really, this wealth of free information at government Websites is public service at its best.
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 sign that it's time to stop gathering research material.
The revised version of my historical note for Master and Servant is 2600 words long.
*** 28 September 2009. Writing: Starting into my writing season.
I do not, alas, have the ability to turn my Muse instantly on and off, so I'm spending this week easing into my writing season: I'm reading the online fiction and e-books I've accumulated for the last couple of months, I'm sorting my computer files, I'm de-cluttering my study, and I'm catching up on phone calls to friends and family and on correspondence I can't put off till next year.
Vital correspondence and Daily Life entries left aside, I'm doing my best to avoid reading nonfiction. Sooner or later, my Muse will notice that I'm reading only fiction and then, beaming, he'll pay me a visit.
And not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned. I've missed him.
Meanwhile, my penchant for downloading has reached the point of no return: I now have 1% space left on my hard drive. So I'm trying to figure out easy ways to purge files.
*** 29 September 2009. Simplicity: Purging my hard drive.
As of the beginning of this evening, I had 1.7 GB free on my 56 GB hard drive. I needed 8 GB free, just to be able to defragment the drive.
I managed to get 1 GB free by going through my "To Read" folder and getting rid of files I obviously don't need. Then I scrutinized my Videos folder and concluded that I could get rid of another 8 GB by moving my full-length movies over to my laptop.
The question is where I'll find room on my laptop; I only have 4 GB free there.
Darn it, I need a way to save files onto DVDs.
*** 30 September 2009. Writing: Slugging away at the Prison City lighthouse research.
Spent today undertaking the dull but necessary work of skimming the period nonfiction works on lighthouses that I downloaded last week. I only have three e-texts left; then I can start on the period novels about lighthouses.
The most interesting publication I read was a 1908-9 magazine called "The Master, Mate, and Pilot," which was filled (among other things) with items like this:
"Popular novels and magazines are said to be the favorite reading of light-house keepers. Naturally these worthy men would go in for light literature. (Gaze steadily at this paragraph for twenty-three seconds and a joke will appear.)"
'Tis nice to see that bad jokes are a perennial favorite.
There's still no sign of my Muse, but I'm not impatient. I have a friend coming to see me on Tuesday, and the Sunday after that I'm scheduled to go to Dorchester County with Spiralred; I'd hate either event to occur when my Muse was champing at the bit.
*** 2 October 2009. Writing: The play Fishing Gone (Prison City Research).
Doug and I went to see a play about Chesapeake watermen at the Smithsonian last night, "Fishing Gone." The most interesting aspect of it was the actress, a native Baltimorean who now lives on Tangier Island (a Chesapeake island in Virginia) and who played herself. The play was framed around her giving us, the audience, a tour of the island. "The boat back to the mainland leaves at 4:00, not 4:01," she said sternly.
The playwright, Roger Vaugn, has good maritime writing credits, but I blinked when I got to the part in the play where a character was saying (unless I misheard him, always a possibility) that skipjacks were brought to the Chesapeake by New England fishermen and were the first boats that were powerful enough to dredge with. (Skipjacks were actually invented about eighty years after New England fishermen invaded the Chesapeake, they weren't the first dredge boats, and they were smaller than the first dredge boats.)
The other aspect of the play that bothered me was that there were a fair number of "dumb yokel" jokes in it - jokes that played upon the idea of the Tangier watermen not knowing as much as the audience did. In fact, the plotline revolved around better educated characters lecturing one of the watermen until he sees the light. Even a line about the tourists and watermen learning from each other couldn't disguise the fact that, in the play, the watermen were the ones who did all the learning.
"So basically what you're saying is that the play was a wash," my apprentice concluded after I'd given my report. He summed it up nicely.
*** 3 October 2009. Writing: Rugby, watermen's dialect, and steamboats (Prison City research).
I spent today trying futilely to find the videos I downloaded several months ago, showing rugby mauls. (You gotta love a sport where one of the official moves is called a maul.) I think I accidentally deleted the videos, darn it. But I went through the rest of my material on rugby history and did a corresponding brush-up on the football scene in Master and Servant.
Yesterday - despite my earlier conviction that I was done with library research for this year - I accompanied Doug to the Hyattsville Library and did another run on its Maryland Room (which, I may not have mentioned, is a reference room, so I can't borrow the books there). My eyes really weren't up for lengthy reading - and anyway, the library closed ninety minutes after we got there - but I wanted to skim Varley Lang's Follow the Water (1961), which was written by a teacher-turned-waterman. It turned out to provide evidence that, fifty years ago, watermen's dialect was essentially the same as it is today. Since Varley Lang became a waterman in the fifties, when watermen were still alive who had been following the water back in the 1910s, this is pretty clear evidence that the dialect hasn't changed much over a century's time. Larry Chowning, who fictionalizes interview material from watermen who lived back in the 1910s, implicitly offers the same evidence. This is good, because I can't find any turn-of-the-century books that quote watermen. In fact, as far as I can tell, Follow the Water was the first book specifically about watermen. (A factoid: Mr. Lang was a consultant for Katharine Paterson's Newbery-award-winning children's novel from 1980, Jacob Have I Loved, which is set on an imaginary island in the Chesapeake Bay.)
By "watermen's dialect," I'm referring simply to the traditional Chesapeake dialect. I'm sure that it varies from place to place, but its general features seem to be the same, no matter which location I look at - for example, a relative lack of complex sentence structures, and a tendency to drop the pronoun or article at the beginning of the sentence.
Oh, and a tendency for men to call other men "honey." I'm rather taken with that.
I also glanced through David Holly's Tidewater by Steamboat and some other books on steamboat history. I'd been having the worst problems finding information on steamboat history online, but Mr. Holly's book provided me with just what I needed: a layout of a steamboat's decks. That, and his description of what sounds could be heard on a steamboat, are enough to let me write that steamboat scene.
Because I was reading under a deadline, I kept sending Doug off to make photocopies for me. He finally joked, "Do I get credit in your book?"
"You're already in the acknowledgments," I assured him.
*** 4 October 2009. Writing: Playing around with EPUB e-books.
EPUB, as you may recall, is an open-source format for e-books; its creators want it to be the MP3 of the e-book world. Well, they seem to be succeeding. Everyone is jumping on the EPUB bandwagon these days: iPod (via Stanza), Barnes & Noble's e-book reader, Sony Reader, and Google Books. Only Amazon is left out in the cold. (Ha. That's what happens to businesses that try to conquer the world with a proprietary e-book format.)
So I experimented around, and I determined that I can use Calibre to convert a bunch of HTML and jpg files into a single EPUB book. Neat. This means that, next year, I can release all of my fiction works in a package edition, in two formats: EPUB and zipped HTML.
I have to say that, the more I look at EPUB, the more I like it. It has nearly all the advantages of HTML, combined with the advantage of built-in packaging of several files. Depending on the e-reader, you can also take advantage of features like a contents sidebar and bookmarks.
The reason I didn't initially like EPUB was because some publishers are using it to try to replicate the look of printed books. That just won't work. EPUB is basically a variation on HTML; if you try to do stuff like justify the text and include paragraph indents, the results are just as bad as if you tried to do that to an HTML document. (I don't want to tell you what a quarter-inch paragraph indent looks like when the reader is viewing an EPUB e-book in 28-point type, as I do. Just double-space between the paragraphs, please.) Treated as it is meant to be - an electronic document - EPUB is a perfectly nice format.
Because of EPUB's newfound popularity, I might eventually be able to find place to sell EPUB e-books besides Lulu.com. And I sure hope that Google Books's decision to provide EPUB downloads for some of its public domain books means that it will eventually support the EPUB format in its Publishing Partners program.
By the way, after looking at what files make up EPUB, I became curious, because the contents of an EPUB file (.opf and .xml) look awfully like the contents of a DAISY file (.opf, .xml, .ncx, and .smil) - DAISY being the text/audio e-book format used for the blind. So I checked, and sure enough: the DAISY Consortium is in charge of standards for the EPUB format. I'm not sure about all the implications for this, but I'm betting that it at least means that the DAISY Consortium is making sure that EPUB remains accessible to the blind.
*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Preparing my domain for next year; plus, novel-reading related to Prison City.
Since my Muse is still on vacation, I spent three hours today (so far) on Website layout. I think my new publishing plans - getting all of my fiction ready for publication/posting before the publishing season begins - is a good one, because it lets me do all the needed Website layout at once (other than minor tweaks when I put promised fiction online). There's a lot of layout to do; those three hours were spent on Darkling Plain alone . . . and I haven't even made the changes yet to reflect next year's publications in that series.
Doing Web layout is like eating candy to me, so I haven't felt any urges to go online. In fact, the idea of going on several times a week (as I did last winter) is beginning to seem . . . well, weird.
Meanwhile, I continue to read fiction in the hopes that my Muse will get the idea. Right now, I'm reading Katharine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, which I suspect I wouldn't have liked if I'd tried to read it as a kid (it was published when I was junior in high school), because it's heavy on exposition, and so far (five chapters in) not much has happened plotwise. But as someone who has just spent a whole summer on Chesapeake research, I'm impressed with how well Ms. Paterson mastered her subject matter; through her novel, I can really feel what it's like to live on a bay island.
Darn it, this is demoralizing; I'm not that good an author.
[Later: Finished reading the novel. Oh, man. I was in tears by the end.]
I must go; Doug just came in and said, "I tried. I really tried."
I waited patiently for him to finish.
"I tried not to make the eggplant lasagna as decadent as last time. . . ."
I'm off to eat decadent lasagna.
*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Speaking of demoralizing . . .
A very-not-worksafe passage from Poisontaster's A Kept Boy, with names changed in order to prevent spoilers.
"Can you come while being fucked?"
The effort to string together that many words is monumental . . . but worth it for the way the deeply-furrowed, blown-pupil look on Brian's face transforms into breathtaking head-thrown, sealed-lid, open-mouthed blissfulness, transcending the heated pearl-stripe of come and clench of Brian's body around him.
In you. I'm in you, Hank thinks, driving hard. Inside you. Always inside you.
The orgasm, when it comes, is like sliding on ice off a cliff's edge; an almost peaceful equilibrium point of utter, perfect stillness followed by the drowning, crashing crush, consciousness compacted into the liquid spill of his body into Brian's.
Mundane humanity returns too much later, Hank's back twinging as he goes from locked-rigid to noodle-limp, exhaustion licking him with black, greedy tongues.
Now, this is why I rarely write graphic sex scenes. I can't write sex that well. (*Goes offstage to whimper quietly.*)
*** 6 October 2009. Writing: 1910s watermen's dialect (Prison City research).
Still no sign of my Muse. I'm feeding him Marion Zimmer Bradley, whom I haven't read since the 1990s. She makes for good light reading.
Doug wanted to do something special today, so we went to the library. (I love a man who considers going to the library to be a special outing.) My eyes are in that early-fall transitional period when I can't read standard-sized print for long, but I can read it for a short time, so I browsed through Hyattsville's Maryland Room.
I stumbled across a treasure, one I'd ignored before because of its silly title: They Live by the Wind: The Lore and Romance of the Last Sailing Workboats: The Garand Banks Schooners, the Square-Rigged Training Ships, the Chesapeake Oysterboats, the Fishing Sloops of the Bahamas. Since the author, Wendell P. Bradley, died before finishing his manuscript, I'm going to guess that his publisher was responsible for that monstrosity of a title.
At any rate, beyond the awful title was pay dirt. The Chesapeake section of the book was written between 1953 and 1966. The author, who lived on Tilghman Island, describes life there. The centerpiece of his account is a passage recreating a day he spent sailing with "the oldest active captain on the Bay," who captained "the last gaff topsail sloop on the Bay." Captain Will Jones was eighty-four years old at the time and had followed the water since he was eighteen.
Bradley's experiences cover the same time period as Varley Lang's in Follow the Water (1961), and the book also overlaps in content with Randall S. Peffer's Watermen (1979). All three authors give essentially the same impression of Tilghman Island watermen, which - as a history writer and journalist - delights me. I love the evidence of multiple witnesses.
I am happy to report that the dialect of "the oldest active captain on the Bay" turns out to be essentially the same as today's Eastern Shore dialect. Mind you, he could have changed his manner of speech to fit with the times, or his speech could have been misreported, but I've now got three authors - Bradley, Lang, and Larry S. Chowning - who have all recounted watermen who were alive in the 1910s as using the same dialect in later years as is in use today. (Possibly four. I wasn't paying attention to ages when I read Mr. Peffer's Watermen.) It would be nice to turn up a 1910s document that actually quotes Eastern Shore dialect, but that would take me far too much digging to unearth.
Besides, I want my Muse to show up and make use of all this research, darn it.
*** 7 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer.
As you may recall, I recently ran out of room on my 56-gigabyte desktop computer; I was down to less than a gigabyte of space. I need to free up at least nine gigabytes, so that I can defragment my disk.
After sorting a lot of unsorted computer files into their proper folders, I've managed to identify the sources of my space problem.
The problem doesn't lie with the files in my To Read folder (though that folder sure needs some weeding). Nor does it lie, surprisingly enough, with images. (I tend to collect public domain artwork a lot, for the sake of my booktrailers.)
The problem lies with videos, music, and PDF files from Google Books and the Internet Archive.
I can resolve the last problem easily enough: many of those e-texts can be replaced with EPUB or plain-text files from Google Books and the Internet Archive (or simply ditched altogether). The videos are a bigger problem. A heck of a lot of those videos are for research for my Prison City and Triad series; I can't discard them till I've finished my research for those series, which will likely be years from now. Nor can I afford to buy an external CD or DVD drive.
So I'm just going to have to systematically go through my hard drive to get rid of files I'm no longer using. I've already freed up nearly two gigabytes that way. So I've only got six gigabytes to go.
*** 9 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer, Part 2.
I woke up this morning with the sharp realization: I don't need more storage space. I need fewer electronic belongings.
Mind you, I'd still love to have external storage space for my movies; a single movie takes up a third of a gigabtye on my hard drive. But for the rest of my files, the problem isn't that they're too big; the problem is that I have too many of them.
So my lack of external storage space is a blessing; it forces me to decide what I really need.
*** 9 October 2009. Writing: Turning over the slate.
I've been in a mild depression since my writing season began, nearly two weeks ago; my Muse has been nowhere in sight, and I haven't been terribly interested in the activities I've been doing in the meantime. (Also, I've been dealing with medical bureaucracy, which is enough to drive me to comfort activities.)
In past years, I would have resolved my depression by going online. One hour online is like a hit of cocaine to me. This year, I told myself firmly that I just needed to keep reading fiction, and sooner or later my Muse would turn up.
He's here.
"Seventeen hundred words!" I chirped at my apprentice this evening.
"I thought you were going down for a nap," he replied, confused.
"I did! I woke up again!" Then, as he remained silent, I felt compelled to explain, "Seventeen hundred words only took me an hour. I know that seventeen hundred words would be a twenty-four-hour marathon for you."
"Seventeen hundred words?" said my apprentice, incredulous. (He's quite capable of writing at a rate of one sentence per hour.)
Actually, I'll know I'm back in full form when I begin producing 3000 words a day, that being my average last winter. Right now, I'm still groping my way back to a decent style, but switching from reading Marion Zimmer Bradley to reading Evangeline Walton should help. (I'm about to reread her Viking novel, The Cross and the Sword.)
At any rate, my depression is gone. Did I mention that I only feel really alive when I'm writing stories?
By the way, "turning over the slate" is a reference to the double-sided slate that hangs from a nail on my study door. On one side, the slate is blank. On the other side is written the words, "Muse in. Do not disturb." I turn the slate over when I'm entering into a writing session, so that Doug will know not to interrupt me.
However, I can't turn my slate over entirely yet. I've received word from Spiralred that our trip to Dorchester County will take place as planned this Sunday. Plus, I have a few of those yucky health matters to get done. But at least I won't have to do all that in the midst of gloom.
*** 12 October 2009. Writing: My Muse moveth.
A day in Dorchester (which I'll write about in a separate entry) seems to have woken up my Muse: I wrote five thousand words today, despite the fact that I'm having to go to bed early in order to attend a wellness clinic tomorrow morning.
This is my total wordage for the 2008-9 seasons:
Summer total: 29,935.
Winter total: 178,100. Winter total average: 29,683/month, 3,124/day of the days on which I wrote. Wrote 57 days, an average of 9.5 days per month.
Total for 2008-9: 208,035 (139% of 150,000; 58% of 360,000).
My goal for 2008-9 was 150,000 words: thirty thousand words a month for the five months of my composing season. (Because of my mother's death, I was delayed a month in starting my composing season last year.) I more than exceeded that goal.
This year my goal is sixty thousand words a month for six months, for a total of 360,000 words. Since I don't plan to spend 72 days online this winter (that's the awful total for my online time last winter; note that it exceeds the number of days I spent writing), I'm hopeful that a goal of two thousand words a day will be achievable, since I average three thousand words a day on the days when I write; if I write on two-thirds of the days this winter, I'll achieve my goal. As an extra cushion, my summer total for this year was 16,660 words, so I've already completed 5% of this year's goal.
Setting aside the math and getting back to content: I've finished the Hoopers Island watermen chapter, though it's going to have to be heavily rewritten. Just in time; the Hoopers Island books I borrowed are due next week. Tomorrow I've got the wellness clinic and the delayed visit from my local friend. Then I'll get to work on the shantyboat chapter. The Calvert County watermen chapters are going to be the hardest to write, because I have much less information to work with. Though I do still hope that I can persuade Doug to revisit the Calvert Cliffs State Park next March.
Meanwhile, I'm immersing myself in watermen's dialect by rereading Randall S. Peffer's Watermen, which is well worth revisiting.
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