¿Qué pasa?

Wondering where I've been all month?

I've been working on a couple of blog posts. One is a transcribed document about the English and Flynn (Flin) families in colonial South Carolina. Another is about some very cool 17th-cenutry Irish maps, recently digitized and available online. I'm still pondering over some of the (owner) names on the County Westmeath maps, names that don't match up with my genealogical research.

Then I put everything aside to get ready for another trip. I spent last weekend visiting Quakers in Mexico.

When I got back, all my free time — and sleep time, and eating time — was confiscated by these six little cuties! Feral, unweaned... Did you know kittens don't automatically know how to drink from a bottle, much less lap up milk or formula? Did you know they have to be fed every few hours, day and night? Ay-yi-yi!

Now you know what I've been up to.

Irish names

As I fill in servants and supporting characters in my history-based fiction, I want to avoid stereotypical Irish names like Patrick or Moira. What were the given names of people who really lived in early modern Ireland?

I started with a primary source, the "Sufferings" of the Quakers in Moate Monthly Meeting — and immediately ran into the great dilemma of this type of research: who was Irish and who was English? Centuries of English colonization or "plantations" (preceded by Viking and Norman settlements), along with intermarriage, left a mixed populace. The question of whether a man was Irish or English might be restated as: "Which generation of English was he?"

The prefixes O' and Mac served as a guide as I scanned the indices of my reference books. MacLysaght also claims Crowe, Maloney, Brady, Cock and Spencer as Irish surnames. The best source for other surnames turned out to be The Grand Juries of County Westmeath, containing an appendix of family genealogies that takes up most of the book.

Given names for men

The most common are Daniel, Hugh, George, Edmond or Edmund, Sean, Thomas or Tom, and James. There were also several mentions of Torlogh or Turlough, Robert, Con or Conn, John, Eoin, Owen, Kevin, Brian or Bryan, Keadagh or Kedagh, Terence, and Donall, Donel, Donal.

More names: Denis, Fergal, Art, Redmond, Egan, Beare, Rory, Peadar, William, Michael, Ernie, Eamon or Eamonn, Dermot, Edward, Eddie, Antony, Anthony, Lucius, Jimmy, Cormac, Stephen, Henry, Raymond, Ramsey, Joe or Joseph, Martin, Frank, Art, Arthur, Seamus, Conor, Feagh, Charles, Cahir, High, Jeremiah, Patrick, Paddy, Colm, Allen, Neil, Neill, Shane, Abraham, Nial, Aghery, Christopher, Theobald, Nangle, Phelim, Mallachy, Maurice, Richard, George, Morgan, Conla, David, Hubert, Hume, Francis, Breasal, Thadeus, Garrett, Nathaniel, Peyton, Whitney, Francis, Logan, Theobald, Walter, Peter, and Cuthbert.

I primarily wanted early modern Ireland names, but Grand Juries also provides interesting ancient names with their Roman equivalents; you can see how they morphed into more modern names.

Duachus Galach, Duach, Errnin, Eogan (Owen), Fergusius, Feargna (Fergnaus), Achaius (Eochy Tiorm), Aodh Finn, Brenain, Cathalan, Arten, Orgaille (Orgallius), Brefny, Cu-Conachi (Constantine), Mac-nahighe or Macnahighe (Nicholaus), Tiernan, Godfrey (Godfridus), Maolsachlin (Mallachy), Giolla-Joso (Gelasius), Giola-Josa-Ruadh (Gelasius), Cathal (Cathaldus or Carolus), Donogh, Murketagh, Awly, Fergall, Andach, Morough, Matha (Mathew), Matthias, Rufus, Manus, Maolmordha, Philip, Cuconacht, Cormac, Mahon, Carbrey, and Fedlim (Phelim).

The names in Modern Ireland are more recent and possibly anglicized. They continue many of the names already listed, plus Justin, Connor, Frank, Oliver, Malcolm, Michael, Heber, Louis, Nevil, Samuel, Flann, Murrough, Mairtin, Feargus, Tomas, Cahir, Jeremiah, Sylvester, Ernest, and Philip.

Given names for women

By far, the most common name I found was Katharine, Catherine, Kate. Mary and Mary Anne also showed up several times.

Other names were Maud, Bernadette, Patricia, Rossa, Patsy, Nuala, Grace, Kitty, Dorcas, Genet, Margaret, Jane, Elizabeth, Susannah, Diana, Louisa, Ruth, Jane, Eleanor, Bridget, Sarah, Margaret, and Anne.

More ancient: Fedelonia, Indearva, Ranalt, Winifred, and Finguola (Penelope).

More modern (in addition to the names above, still in use): Deidre.

You'll notice I included nicknames and spelling variants. Here's a great resource on nicknames and how some names changed.

Bookhunting season 2013

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of bookhunting, signings and getting ready for spring open house at the bookshop.

I traveled to the Chatham County Library for the first time in a year. This time I hit their bag-sale day and brought back four bags of books — a wide variety, from an unusual vintage photograph of the USS Barker to true crime to English castles. Then I headed south by memory and map, enjoying the beautiful spring day with trees and azaleas blooming. I fumbled around Fayetteville (who knew it was a big city?) looking for the Barnes & Noble, where a friend met me for lunch. After food and catching up we wandered around the bookstore, but I didn't find what I was looking for, especially since I wasn't sure what it was.

The next weekend local author Carolyn Nelson signed books at the shop. Worried about sharing my sore throat, I hid behind the counter most of the day. Fortunately, Carolyn had visitors and friends to keep her company.

I recuperated in time for the annual St. Francis book sale, one of my favourites . Since it was the first day of the sale, I focused on the old and rare book room (one of my earliest posts) and only bought a small box full of books, including H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Winslow Homer (black Americana from the Civil War and Reconstruction).

I'd planned to go back Saturday for bag-sale day, to stock the shop with "beach reads" from their wealth of trade paperbacks. Friday night, however, the phone rang. It was the Quaker network — which is a wonderful thing. Jamestown Friends Meeting was having a yard sale early the next morning. Now, I'm not a fan of yard sales, and I'm not a fan of early. But a mutual friend was downsizing, and she might have donated her books to the sale.

So the next morning, bright and early (more early than bright!), I switched destinations from Greensboro to Jamestown (both cities named for Quakers, by the way). I found books and more books, got hugs, bought coffee, and was southern sweet-talked into a freshly baked pecan tart. It turned out to be a most pleasant trip.

This week, after final preparations for the spring sale and open house at the bookshop, I drove down to Asheboro to ask Jeffery Deaver to sign a few books. He spoke about his writing life at the Friends of the Library annual meeting.

He started writing at age 11, but went on to other careers, including law. He began writing during his long daily commute, but threw his first two books away!

Stories like that inspire me to keep writing. Have you heard stories from published authors that keep you going?

I met Jeffery Deaver at Writers' Police Academy 2010, when he'd just started the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche. Now that it's out, I wanted him to sign my copy. He also signed a couple of his previous works for the bookshop.

Where did everybody sleep?

If the Clibborns of 17th-century Moate, Ireland, had from 4 to 10 regular servants, in addition to 7 to 9 children (counting an orphaned nephew and niece) — where did everybody sleep?

Although John Clibborn's house was called the Castle, it was a tower house that didn't have as many rooms as we might imagine. Let me describe the layout for you — the rooms and arrangement are real; who slept in which room is fiction in progress.

Main Floor

The main or ground floor has a dining room (where the Moate Quakers probably worshiped), a sitting room, and a kitchen. A small room off the kitchen is called the servants' quarters; the cook likely slept there. Although there might not have been the great differences in hierarchy among servants that we see in shows like Downton Abbey (set 200 years later), I don’t know if the cook would have shared the closet-sized space with the kitchen wench. The girl probably slept on the kitchen floor in front of the fire. The bottom of the two-story round tower (hidden by a tree on the left in this picture) served as a dairy or pantry, similar to a root cellar.

The First Floor

The first floor (second floor to Americans) has four bedrooms: one above the dining room to the west (the window on the right), one off the stairway, one at the end of the hall (window on the far left), and a round room at the top of the tower that can only be accessed through the other bedroom. (I wanted very badly for the heroine of the second book to live in the tower room, so I wrote the story that way.)

17th-century bedroom exhibit - National Museum of Ireland

My novel sets John Clibborn and his wife in the west room. I imagine their bedroom as something like this 17th-century exhibit at the National Museum of Ireland, with the addition of curtains on the bed and a rug or two. (Do I see stacks of rushes on the floor? I think not!)

For the first book, the bedroom at the end of the hall is the nursery and the tower room is for the older girls. In the second book, all the girls live in these two rooms.

The Clibborns had such a reputation for hospitality that I made the room off the stairs a guest room. In the real life, however, guests may have bunked in rooms with the family.

Guests aren't the only ones who slept with family. In poorer households, according to MacLysaght, family and guests slept together on the floor. In wealthier households, according to Pepys' Diary, the chamber maid slept in the bedroom with her master and mistress. That gives new meaning to one of Pepys' diary entries (I can’t find the exact quote): The wench up early. Dallied in bed with the wife a while. That concept of no privacy is so alien to our culture! At least they had curtains on the bed.

The Top Floor

The second floor (or third) has the same pattern, except without the tower. So that's three bedrooms on the top floor. While it was common for siblings to share rooms, the older children must have been separated by sex. So I imagine the boys on the top floor, with their youthful energy to take them up and down that extra flight of stairs. Perhaps the steward had to share a bedroom with the footmen, unless the junior servants slept on the floor in the boys' rooms.

Settle bed

Servants' beds (or children's) could be pulled out from under the main bed. Another hideaway sleeping spot was the settle bed, which served as sofa-bench during the day and folded out into a mattress-holding frame at night. For this novel, I put a settle bed in the Englishes' cottage instead of the Castle.

So the house servants were scattered throughout the house, not in some separate wing. I presume field hands slept in their own cottages each night. But what about the permanent outdoor servants?

Remember the bawn, the walled courtyard on the east side of the Castle?  I forgot about the house-sized room at the far end from the kitchen door. It’s substantial (the current owner of the Castle uses it as her shop. Vague memory tells me the inside of the bawn is like a stable, but the large room could house several servants, including the gardener and the stable hands.

Authorpreneur: The Lure of the Pro-Blogosphere

What a year it's been! (And this is just the writing part.)

In March 2012, I was struggling financially with a part-time library job, a one-year-old bookstore that hadn't got off the ground yet, and growing bills. I was also struggling with a historical novel about my family. My big dream was to finish and publish it, but I'd put it aside for medical reasons. I'd recovered enough to write again, but had trouble getting back into the story.

Somehow I ran across Ana Hoffman's blog, Traffic Generation Cafe. The concept that a real person could make a living from blogging felt like a light turned on in my head. I wanted to write again, and I needed money. I began to hear the siren song of the pro-blogosphere.

In April, Robert Lee Brewer offered a month-long Platform Challenge for writers. I "knew" Robert through his involvement with Writer's Digest, and I'd heard all year that a writer needs a platform — a public face that shows one's expertise — even before the book is finished. It sounded like the perfect opportunity to learn about the world of online marketing while promoting my future book.

10% Off, No Min at Writers Digest Shop. Use coupon code writersdigest10w during checkout. Expires 06/30/2013. --- Look, this is what probloggers do. It's called an affiliate ad.

The whirlwind continued offline in May at the annual Quakers Uniting In Publications conference. Not only did I attend as a representative for a church-affiliated publisher, I co-led the panel on bookselling. My experience as a bookseller? A whopping one year, during one of the most difficult years ever for the printed book. With the help of the other panelists, we all left with a few refreshing drops of optimism.

Meanwhile, the April Platform Challenge participants had formed a community through our guided social media experience. Still thrumming with energy, we started a website (among other endeavours) and called ourselves Wordsmith Studio.

Summer rushed by with a freelance copyediting job, attained through a connection I'd made at the conference. After that I resumed brainstorming, thinking about blogging, reading other people's blogs, and trying to get back into writing through exercises and prompts.

November arrived in a hurry, and with it, National Novel Writing Month. Our local NaNoWriMo group has formed a year-round community through facebook, and I wanted to participate just to see them all in person again. However, my novel had already been through two NaNoWriMos; it needed thoughtful revision, not fast word count. I tried to be a NaNo rebel and wrote anything: blog posts, articles, free writes. I enjoyed the scribbling frenzy at the write-ins, but didn't meet the word count goal. On the bright side, my writing "muscles" warmed up and a few blog posts appeared.

In January 2013, Ana introduced me to Danny Iny. He gave out awesome ideas in his webinar about earning full-time income with an online audience business. The siren song got louder. Soft background music pleaded with me to finish the novel first. As I considered problogging, I made a small goal: just 300 words a day as I completely rewrote the draft novel.

Then, the song turned into a roar. Danny and his helpers launched the Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt in March. How could I resist? A list of tasks to improve my online presence, new skills to learn, new people to meet — would it be like the April Platform Challenge?

The Scavenger Hunt was fun; the challenge list could be used as a checklist. Some of the participants were really nice and connected through facebook. We all hated Tumblr. I even learned how to make a video! But no, it wasn't the same. The list was long and the competition high. Plus... I got a great, short-term freelance offer and found myself with FOUR jobs that month.

When Wordsmith Studio called for submissions to celebrate our one-year anniversary, I thought: My blog has about the same followers or traffic as last April. I just had to throw in the towel on the Scavenger Hunt. I simply don't have time to build a new website or all these things that probloggers are supposed to do. What could I possibly write about when I haven't succeeded? The song melted into a screech.

Silly me. I was measuring success by numbers.

Remember that little goal I had, to write every day? Last week, I finished draft number three. I finished the major rewrite of my novel!

Having short, attainable goals, and an incentive, was key. 

Now I need new goals for editing: not word count, maybe a certain number of scenes per week, with room for researching historical details and reading writing-craft books. I also need an occasional free day, for when I'm working three jobs or spending the weekend with family.

I think my new mantra for the next couple of months will be:

WRITE. EDIT. READ. CREATE.

I'll have to measure what I can do in a week, but the current goal is to do one of those, every day.

Does this mean leaving the blogosphere behind? Not necessarily, just putting priorities in order. Look what I've learned this year!

- Ana taught me that people can and do make money online. If that's the goal, they have to adapt to changing audiences and technology.
- Robert taught us how to walk with babysteps first, like adding "share" buttons to a blog and planning with an editorial calendar.
- Being a speaker at a conference taught me that if you know a little, you'll know a lot more after you teach it.
- NaNoWriMo taught me that sometimes the community you build is worth more than what you did.
- Danny taught me to focus in on my audience. For example, if my readers are romantic history buffs, why would I blog for other writers? (Still working on that one.)
- The Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt, combined with FOUR part-time jobs last month, taught me... I can't do it all.
- and I learned from reading Joanna Penn's blog (and talking to a friend) that I'm not in this for the love of money. I've been trying all these things because I've been hungry to create something. The learning itself can be a high.

Best of all, I learned — from bloggers, tweeps, facebook writer buddies, journaling, thinking and reading Bible verses — to keep first things first.

WRITE. THE. BOOK.

The authorpreneurs that I know and follow, like Joanna Penn and CJ Lyons, already have a slew of published books in addition to their online businesses. Some bestselling, big-name authors (James Patterson, Umberto Eco) don't blog. They're too busy cranking out books. My favorite author, Elizabeth Peters, doesn't even have e-mail.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Thanks for reading this post that ran much longer than I anticipated. It's part of Wordsmith Studio's one-year celebration! Janice Sheridan summed up our April Platform Challenge experience with splashy poetic prose in "Platform Diving." To join the party, follow the confetti and clinking glasses to Wordsmith Studio. Next up: Sopphey Vance invites us home. You can take off your coat and put on your bunny slippers for Living On My Own.

StellarCon 37

We interrupt our normally scheduled historical posts to jump ahead to the 23rd century. And Victorian-era science fiction. And a galaxy far, far, away, and — pretty much any era went at StellarCon 37. I even saw a few Disney princesses and superheroes.


Tannery Books' humble booth — just sci-fi and fantasy today.














<— the view from my seat







Fashions from the past. This booth offered more than just corsets; I was told the leather face masks are all the rage for fighting zombies.












More steampunk garb.  —>
See that little dragon on her shoulder? Why, yes, it is moving!

<— This lady's costume was her first sewing project in leather. Good job!














(Not that I would ever condone juvenile smoking) Isn't he just the picture of coolness?









My awesome assistant for the day, Jim Bowen, creates more characters for his portable role-playing game. They were quite popular with our younger customers.







































A few familiar faces from the present era. And Firefly.





Um... we're not quite sure which world she's from, but her costume's very flattering. 

And now back to the future: the Klingon recruiting station.

Argh! You didn't volunteer fast enough! Where is your honor!

Most awesome candid shot of the day!

 

I'm not the least bit nervous.
Just breathe in ... breathe out ...

Authorpreneur: Motivation for March

This month's reading from great authorpreneur blogs has been filled with motivation and challenges, both for writing and for working your writing business.

Writing Inspiration

January — pitiful!

The 5-minute video How to Write More and Create A Daily Writing Habit, by Joanna Penn, kicked my butt! I was already jotting my word count on a calendar, but life is busy. Besides, I'm grappling with difficult scenes and plot holes, so — why not just write a blog post instead? Right? Most days were blank, and I just couldn't seem to get going.

February — tradupled!

After watching Joanna's video in mid-February, I set a new goal for 300 words a day, Monday through Saturday, to earn a purple checkmark. If I didn't make that word count, the punishment was a black X! That may not sound like many words, but this novel has already been through two NaNoWriMos and word count is not my primary goal. I'm filling in gaping plot holes and smoothing transitions: fixing problems with my draft, but it's still more writing than revising.

Just like earning a "green day" during NaNoWriMo, those purple checks are a huge motivator for me! To earn them, I wrote at bedtime when I was tired, or in the morning when I had no idea where the story was going next. (The dreaded black X's represent one migraine and two overtime, multi-job days.)

Hopefully I'll keep this momentum going through March. Thanks, Joanna!

Online Marketing

Call me crazy, but I signed up for the Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt. Danny Iny and his team have put the fun into online marketing with this challenging contest. It started Feb. 22, but you still have four more weeks if you want to give it a try. (If you sign up, please mention my username, Bibliotraveler — I'll get extra points). The challenges vary from simple tweets and comments to tasks that stretch your (new) skills, like creating an introduction video.

If you want to make your blog more user-friendly and professional, Tom Ewer offers insights on improving old content with A Simple Checklist for Editing and Optimizing Old Blog Posts. For example, search traffic brings lots of visitors to my blog for last year's post about men's colonial clothing. I went back and added a link to the post about women's colonial clothing. Now history buffs will have an easier time finding related content.  

For more improvements to your website, visit Lorelle VanFossen's list of Blog Exercises.

CJ Lyons's eye-opening post explains how you're not just an indy author, you run a Global Publishing Empire.

Better grab a cup of tea or coffee and a notepad for Mauro D'Andrea's massive post, 101 Experts Share Their Tips for Online Success.

Here's wishing you a productive and creative March. I'm off to hunt scavengers and write 300 words!