A year ago I went to Paris on a week-long research trip. My goal was to look at eighteenth-century impotence trials, part of the Série Z at the Archives Nationales. I planned to compare them with English impotence trials that I had already examined.

French historians and archive workers had been occupying part of the building to protest Sarkozy's proposed (rightwing) museum.

There were the standard research problems, of course. The handwriting was unusually terrible. The boxes were unsorted and contained few, if any, impotence trials, which were challenging to find. But the biggest difficulty was entirely unexpected. Série Z closed for maintenance every second day during that week.*  This mystified the counter-staff as much as me. Each time, they were unaware of the closure.

Previously, my research method had been to transcribe notes by hand, then review them afterwards. To the growing number of historians who prefer to take photographs of archival documents, this seems a bit quaint. On this rapidly passing trip with its two fruitless days, I certainly did not have the luxury of time. Instead, I photographed the trial records like mad, writing brief outlines of the cases. Each night I organised the photos and turned them into pdf files, hopeful about the possibilities for my new use of photography. I thought how nice it would be to have images of the documents to hand.

But a year on, I’ve realised a key problem in this system: much of my work in archives is tied to physical memory. Looking back at my notes over the years, I can remember the way in which documents looked or smelled at the time. More importantly, I can remember where to find specific points in my notes. I recall in detail the stories from the English trial records, but the French ones only fleetingly, even though I have since read through the files a couple times. It has become clear to me that I need another French research trip – this time simply to sit in my office transcribing the files stored on my computer – if my knowledge of the trial records is ever to become potent.

How do you internalise your material when doing research?

*Admittedly, this allowed me to have leisurely lunches and sightsee, so all was not in vain.

Lisa Smith is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. She writes on gender, family, and health care in England and France (ca. 1600-1800).

On Star Trek (and by this, children, I mean the real Star Trek—the one captained by James T. Kirk, and with cheesy special effects and constant violation of the Prime Directive), a lot of strange things happen (I’m referring to the strange things that the producers intended to happen, not the accidental ones). The audience has to understand these strange things to make sense of the story. But there are no footnotes in a television show, and a voice-over to explain what’s going on would be even more intrusive than mid-60’s hairstyles and encounters with space-hippies.

So how to explain?

Enter Captain Kirk. He’s got the smarts to run a spaceship but doesn’t know a whole lot about the new lives and new civilizations that he encounters. Luckily, he has Mr. Spock, who patiently explains and theorizes about these mysteries to his captain, and hence to the audience. Kirk isn’t stupid—he’s just a military man whose interests lie elsewhere.

Writers of historical fiction face a similar problem. My Princess Anna of Anna of Byzantium wouldn’t think, “Wow, the palace I live in is huge!” But I want my readers to know that it is. Ariadne of Dark of the Moon wouldn’t question the human sacrifice that her religion demands every spring. But I want my reader to picture Anna in a huge palace, and Ariadne being a prime player in the sacrifice. So they need someone to explain to: a slave from a distant part of the empire in the first case, Prince Theseus in the second.

It’s been said that there are only two plots: A stranger comes to town, and Someone takes a journey (some have said that this is really one plot, but from two points of view). I doubt that this is true, but the device is a common one. I wonder if the need for a stranger in town is so the person whose POV informs the story can either explain things to the stranger or be the one who receives an explanation.

By Beth Dunn

Was George Handel and a buttered muffin inadvertently responsible for the creation of the British Museum?

Well, probably not.

But honestly? I wouldn’t rule it out, either.

So you know the British Museum. First public secular museum, established in 1753 when Sir Hans Sloane passed away and left his absurdly large and varied collection of rare books, antiquities, and just downright oddities to the British Crown.

Sloane was a wildly successful London doctor, one who counted Samuel Pepys and Queen Anne among his patients, and who had amassed a cabinet of curiosities so large that he had to buy the house next door just to give him enough shelf space for it all.

Distinguished visitors would come from all over to peer at his whatnots, to marvel at his whoosits.

Then he passed away and left it all to the nation, who responded with characteristic ingratitude, a great deal of Parliamentary wrangling, and no small amount political corruption that eventually resulted in the creation of the British Museum.

What’s odd about this story is that it is hardly possible to research the early days of the British Museum without coming across the following story with what one can’t help but notice is alarming frequency:

Sloane’s house was visited by numerous people. Among them was the composer Handel, who is said to have outraged his host by placing a buttered muffin on one of his rare books.

For the life of me, I cannot stop thinking about that damn buttered muffin.

What kind of muffin was it? Was it more extravagantly buttered than most? Exactly what sort of baked good was called a muffin back in the 18th century, anyway?

Was Handel some sort of countrified rube, who simply thought that rare books made excellent substitutes for plates and saucers, or was he trying to make some kind of point? What book was it?

Was it this near catastrophe that convinced Sloane that his collection needed the protection of the British Crown, once he himself was no longer around to protect his books from the menace of butter-laden muffins, crumpets, and scones?

Even more intriguingly, is there in some dim and dusty corner of the British Library (where all the books of the British Museum eventually found a home) an old, rare book with one very faded, but barely discernable circular grease stain on it?

These are the sorts of questions that leads one to investigate, late at night and into the early morning hours, the history of the English Muffin, and to discover (to one’s great delight) that the muffin was in fact a highly fashionable foodstuff in the 18th century.

Which would explain why it was being served to distinguished visitors to what one has to assume was one of the more exclusive drawing rooms in London at the time.

Muffins were huge. They were a tremendous fad, catching on among the snacking classes with such fervor that scores of muffin factories soon popped up all over London. Jane Austen even mentioned muffins in her novel Persuasion, and not merely as a particularly apt way of describing the hot, buttery Captain Wentworth.

Did Sloane realize the peril his collection might be in, if left open to the slings and arrows of outrageous baked goods?

Or was Handel just a bit of a jerk?

Hard to say.

But in the midst of this deeply appealing line of research, I suddenly remembered another buttered muffin story, this time about one of the American founding families. I got very excited for a few minutes, imagining that the tale of the buttered muffin was some sort of universal flood story, found in one form or another in all known cultures, varying only in the shape and size of the muffin, or in the amount of butter involved.

Alas, it was a more prosaic tale that that. Something about a young lad who was named after Benjamin Franklin, and who took it upon himself to instruct First Lady Dolley Madison in the art of properly buttering your muffin. If you’ll excuse the expression.

‘Why, you must tear him open, and put butter inside and stick holes in his back! And then pat him and squeeze him and the juice will run out!’

Which seems a very sensible way to eat a buttered muffin, if you ask me.

What’s truly excellent about this story is that it is a reminiscence of Thomas Jefferson’s great-granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Harrison. And that the story took place at Monticello.

Buttered muffins. Present at the creation of so many great things.

Perhaps now you, like me, wish to know just how Thomas Jefferson ate his muffins.

Very well, I shall tell you.

To a quart of flour put two table spoonsfull of yeast. Mix . . . the flour up with water so thin that the dough will stick to the table. Our cook takes it up and throws it down until it will no longer stick [to the table?] she puts it to rise until morning. In the morning she works the dough over . . . the first thing and makes it into little cakes like biscuit and sets them aside until it is time to back them. You know muffins are backed in a gridle [before?] in the [fire?] hearth of the stove not inside. They bake very quickly. The second plate full is put on the fire when breakfast is sent in and they are ready by the time the first are eaten.

Who’s hungry?

Beth Dunn is a novelist, blogger, and geek. She writes at An Accomplished Young Lady, and gets pretty worked up sometimes about baked goods.

Image by foonus

some of my book shelves

by Stephanie Cowell

1848 Lady Book with old pressed flowers

I have been accumulating research books or, when they are very rare, consulting them since I first began to write historical novels. In the late 1980s when I began we still had many used book shops in New York City with wood shelves too high to reach but by ladder, shelves often sagging with the weight of books and with that definite smell of wood, dust, old paper, old bindings. Each new book was an enchanted encounter.

I have published five historical novels and have more in draft than I’m willing to admit. Each began with a history book: a rare volume on Elizabethan London printed about 1894 with a red binding which I found I don’t recall where, a biography with fragile pages of a 17th century English archbishop which was waiting for me in a very small shop for very little money. A small book with leather covers and gilt-edged pages by Marcus Aurelius discovered in a cold, empty New England book barn where there were tens of thousands of books and the footsteps of one lone browser…me. The original 1665 book on the early microscope by Robert Hooke (Micrographia) in the New York City Arents Collection and one of the thirteen extant copies of Shakespeare’s 1609 sonnets perused and almost wept over at Yale. (Was this WS’s own copy perhaps?) And the rather astonishing heavy Victorian Godey’s Lady Book printed in 1848 and given to me by a friend, between whose pages I found a sheath of very dry flowers and leaves, almost colorless. (Who pressed them there and tiptoed away?)

I bought more books by catalog in the 1990s: newer books but on rare subjects such as a history of English workhouses, the Glastonbury Tor. In my travels I bought books. On my trip home from England I brought twenty-seven books. That was before the planes weighed your luggage or perhaps the weight allowance was higher. (I think I gasped with delight when I found a map of Elizabethan London.)

Then came the fabulous internet and every book I ever dreamed of waiting in some shop in Arkansas or the Cotswolds for me. I ordered How Shakespeare Spent the Day. I ordered an old book on the daily lives of French artists. And now my husband has given me a Kindle and I have found to my extreme delight a number of books on 1860’s Florence published in that time and all for free. One has a list of banks and food shops of the period and where you can hire a donkey cart.

And when I finish a historical novel, what happens to the books? Well, I give some away sometimes. I truly recall giving several away which I had used for my Monet novel so do not understand why a huge pile of them still weigh down the top of a file cabinet in the den. My books on the Brownings are scattered all over the house but my English history books are mostly in one whole shelf. Sometimes I wander from room to room touching the book spines. I hear the books murmuring softly, “And when will you write me? There is a story waiting within my pages! What are you doing researching that other book in the next room…I know all about you, you see!”

And I tell them, “Perhaps 2012 will be a good year for your story!” I know they are patient books though they do grumble in their dusty way and that they know in their inky souls that I truly love them and that I will come back.

Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

One factor that draws many people to historical fiction—and Civil War reenactments, the Society for Medieval Anachronism, Renaissance Faires, etc.—is curiosity about how it felt to live at a different time. I share this curiosity; I love to be so immersed in a former time that I’m startled to look up from a book’s pages and find myself in the twenty-first century. I first experienced this when reading Lucile Morrison’s The Lost Queen of Egypt, and then with Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter and Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

Part of my fascination is the evocation of the time—the houses the characters lived in, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the games they played. But what really draws me in is the feeling that I’m sharing the characters’ emotions.

Avoiding anachronism in emotion is one of an author’s most difficult feats. How, we wonder, could parents of the past have survived the death of one-third of their children? How could a teenager have accepted without question that she was to marry a man many years her senior, who had been chosen for her by someone else? If the character is horrified, we’re not being true to the time. But if we present a child’s death or an arranged marriage to an unpleasant old man matter-of-factly, we risk jarring the reader at our character’s perceived callousness.

I try to come up with a situation analogous to one today and have my characters react appropriately for that. For example, until modern medicine improved infant mortality rates, parents might react to the death of a child the way most Western people would react to the death of a pet: you’d be sad, you’d probably cry, you’d tell your friends, you’d never forget that pet, you might keep its collar in a special place—but you would move on, in a way that the parent of a dead child could rarely manage to do today.

I think of an arranged marriage as being similar to having parents choose a teenager’s high school. The teen might have some say, and if she really, really hated the idea of a particular school and another one was available, the parents might yield to her wishes. But they might not, and that wouldn’t be child abuse.

Here’s how I handled my main character’s reaction in my work in progress to hearing that an acquaintance had lost her husband and children to an illness several years earlier. She thinks: “Not unusual, but sad nonetheless. No wonder the woman had an air of bitterness about her.” I hope that reminds my reader that this kind of loss was common, while preserving my narrator’s humanity.

By Beth Dunn

At first glance, the tale of Charles Dickens’ rise to fame and fortune would seem to be one of unhalting advances towards the pinnacle of success that he had achieved by the end of his life. But even the mighty Boz suffered from serious doubts about his skills as a novelist, and his ability to support himself purely by the labor of his pen.

And what do writers do when we think the well has run dry?

We panic.

Charles Dickens had already seen early success — and lots of it — as the author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, and Barnaby Rudge, along with assorted other bits and pieces.

Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend still lay ahead of him, though of course he couldn’t know that.

All he knew was that he had a large and constantly growing family to support, and he was suffering increasingly frustrating bouts of writers block. In the midst of writing Dombey and Son (never heard of it? there’s a reason for that), Dickens was so uncertain of his future prospects as a novelist that he took on a job he almost certainly knew he would hate from the start — editor in chief of The Daily News.

Oh, sure, he had been an editor and contributor to various journals from time to time. And he had started his writing career as a sort of beat reporter in Parliament, winning the job largely on the merits of his impressive skills at taking notes by shorthand. And he had always been a crusader against what he recognized as the vast social injustices of the day, which the Daily News promised to rail against until Something Was Done.

On paper, it seemed like the perfect fit. The fledgling newspaper’s financial backers wanted a prominent editor who would drive up sales and help their new project compete against the very popular — and very right-wing — Morning Chronicle. And Dickens, who was suffering a serious bout of nerves, wanted a steady paycheck.

You know, in case this whole writing thing didn’t pan out.

Within a matter of days, he knew he had made a dreadful mistake.

Eventually, he convinced his best friend (John Foster, who did have a background in journalism) to take over as editor. Dickens had almost from the start hated the daily grind of the paper, hated the pressure, hated being pulled in so many different directions by so many competing interests, hated the corruption of the press in general, of which he was now a part.

So he quit, after only a few weeks.

But the experience was not without its upsides.

First, Dickens had realized that his occasional bouts of writers block were largely due to his absence from the city streets of London. He’d been traveling abroad with his family in recent months, and the quiet countryside was doing nothing for his concentration. When he was free to prowl London’s dark and sooty streets at night, he was in his element again at last, and he was back to his old prolific self.

Second, he had finally found decent occupation for his father, a bit of an unrepentant sponge and perennial debtor on whom Dickens would later base his Mr. Micawber. John Dickens had been installed as head of the newsroom at the Daily News, and had taken to it, quite to everyone’s surprise, extraordinarily well. He showed up, he managed people, he got the job done. It was really quite remarkable, and even his son acknowledged that he’d finally found his niche.

And finally, perhaps most importantly, Charles Dickens had learned the lesson that so many writers have to learn the hard way.

We’re just not really fit for much else, when it comes right down to it.

So we had better just get down to it.

Beth Dunn is a novelist, blogger, and geek. She writes at An Accomplished Young Lady, and makes a habit of reading far too much into the life stories of her 19th century literary heroes. 

So, how’d everyone do on their goals this week?  My goal for the week was to work through some of the structural issues that I was having with this next book.  I’m happy to report that the issues are resolved–and I’m feeling very good about how things are looking.  What I’m less happy to report is that I didn’t get as much writing as I had planned in this week because of a fatal miscalculation…I forgot that I was leaving for a conference on Wednesday in Ann Arbor.  I also forgot that I had two presentations to prep: one for the conference, and one here at the Vanderbilt Medical School.

How it’s possible to forget these things, I just don’t know.  Especially since I am a calendar and organizational fiend.  But I’ll give myself a break since it’s the craziest time of the semester.  It’s probably an accomplishment enough to still be standing right now.

Both of the talks seemed to go well.  But I’m very, very eager to get back to work on the book.  Not sure that I’ll hit that crazy deadline of December 7 that I gave myself…but I do know that I don’t want this to linger much longer.  I was reminded last night as I sat down for a writing session that you’ve just got to stay with it every day.  I didn’t think that I had even 15 minutes of energy in me, but as soon as I got the courage to open Scrivener and start writing the words and ideas just flowed.  As every writer will tell you, there is no secret to writing.  Just do it.  Au travail!

How about everyone else?  Did you meet YOUR goals?

By Holly Tucker

Q: What if all of the writers out there talked shop here on Mondays?  What if we also each  jotted down our weekly writing goals in the comments?    

A:  Only great things!

Every Monday, I share my writing accountability goals by email with my writing group.  It occurs to me that much of what I write to them, I could also share publicly here.  In fact, it might even be a great way for the many writers who are regular W&M readers to get to know each other and to provide welcome encouragement and support.

Here, I’m in the process of working on my next book–which has required tons of work when it comes to structure.  My goal this week is think through a few missing narrative connections and to finish up the new chapter descriptions.  Next up after that will be to put the finishing touches on the sample chapter…with the goal of getting the proposal out by December 7.

Call me superstitious, but I won’t say much specific about the topic just yet–other than that the book will be the same type of deeply researched, nonfiction-that-reads-like-a-novel as Blood Work, this time with a focus on science in the French Revolution.

But what I can say right now is that book proposals are a lot of work.  I’m on my third, no fourth, iteration of this project.  The process was the same, in fact, for Blood Work.  Each version of the proposal brought me closer to where I needed to be.  But it was not until the fourth round of revisions that I knew that I had nailed it.

It’s been a long process–but I feel it in my gut that I’m almost there with this new one.  I just keep telling myself that every hour, every day spent hammering out the details now will make my work later much easier.  And from past experience, I know this to be entirely true.

Awhile back, I shared a bit about my research flow. More to come.  I’ll also write more in detail another time about how my writing days are structured (and I write every day…ok, ok, mostly every day). But the one thing that I consistently do at every stage of book writing is to READ.

I spend a bit of time each morning studying other narrative history books. My focus as I read depends on what is preoccupying me in regard to my own writing at that moment. Sometimes it’s voice. Sometimes it’s narrative detailing.  Other times, character development.

And when I’m trying to wrangle my own structure (like now), I outline other books so I can figure out what makes them so good. I just finished up plotting out Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook and, right now, I’m taking apart Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic.  Both are historical writers whom I respect very much and have the good fortune of meeting in person.  My own book will look very different than theirs, of course. But it is incredibly helpful to think through all the different (and successful) ways that other writers craft their nonfiction stories.

At every stage of my writing, I also read a lot about craft. Recently, I’ve been alternating between two books.  The first is StoryCraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, by Jack Hart. The second, Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction by James Stewart.  Both have great sections on structure.  But Stewart’s is especially interesting because he walks his readers through his process for structuring several long-form articles, which are reprinted in the back of the book.  I think my writing group and I are going to read the articles together and take things apart on our own over the next couple of weeks.

A special gem of the week was David Dobbs’ excellent interview with Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  David and Deborah Blum are leading a session on structure and longform nonfiction at the upcoming Science Online meeting.  You can bet I’ll bet there!

Looks like all of us, everywhere, battle the same beasts.  And why any writer who is serious about their craft will tell you this is damn hard work.

SO, what project are YOU working on and what do YOU want to accomplish this week?  Let’s see if we can create a supportive writerly community on Wonders & Marvels!

Image:  Amelita Galli-Curci types a letter (ca. 1920).  Library of Congress.

I occasionally get questions from readers of my historical fiction asking why I deviated from the real story of the Minotaur or the Odyssey. By “the real story,” what they mean is a familiar telling. But the version that my questioners think is the authentic tale is just one in a long line of tellings of a myth or legend, and my books are merely the most recent addition to that line.

Myths were told orally, most of them for centuries, before someone wrote them down. What that writer set down on paper (or clay, or parchment) was only one version, neither more nor less authentic than any other version that either didn’t get written down or whose written form has been lost. Usually the same basic story elements persist from one telling to another, but sometimes they are drastically altered. Look, for example, at three different (ancient) endings to the Odyssey, all found in ancient written sources of equal “authenticity”:

• Odysseus ruled in Ithaca until the end of his days
• being sick of the sea, he walked inland until someone didn’t recognize the oar over his shoulder and asked, “What are you doing with that winnowing-fan?”
• he sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and never returned

or the two descriptions of Ariadne’s fate after she was abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus after he killed her brother, the Minotaur:

• she hanged herself
• she married Dionysus/Bacchus and became immortal

or three levels of Helen’s culpability in the Trojan War:

• she went willingly to Troy with Paris
• she  was abducted by Paris and went to Troy against her will
• she hid out virtuously in Egypt, while a phantom double went to Troy.

If the ancients didn’t find one version more true, more original than the others, why do modern readers?

In my young-adult novel King of Ithaka, Telemachos is indignant that bards change the details of stories. He is told, “Nobody expects a poet to tell the truth. It’s a better story this way.” This is even more true when a writer is retelling story that was fictional to begin with. What “authentic” story am I deviating from if I create a centaur sidekick for Telemachos, if I have Ariadne choose willingly to stay on Naxos, if my Minotaur in Dark of the Moon is no monster but a horribly deformed man? I’m not changing the “real” story. I’m making a new one, just as the other tellers before me have done.

They were Washington Irving and Walter Scott, although even they hardly knew it yet.

At the time, Washington Irving was just another struggling American expat, desperately trying to beat the post-war economic slump and save the floundering family business abroad. He had always been a lousy student, despite having (eventually) passed the bar, and though he now gamely embarked on a crash course in bookkeeping and business, it would not be enough to save the business from bankruptcy.

And he knew it.

He’d been living on the residual fame of his earlier literary success for years now, having achieved some fame and notoriety as the barely pseudonymous author of A History of New York, the book that gave us the words Knickerbocker and Gotham as synonyms for New York. Following that, he had served as the editor of a reasonably successful American literary journal, mostly confining himself to pirating and reprinting works from England before they were published in America, and writing sentimental biographies of the naval heroes of the War of 1812.

It was hack work, but he didn’t honestly have much else to do. And he needed the money.

When his brother Peter’s shipping business in Liverpool starting circling the drain, he tried to help. He wasn’t much good at it, though, which was depressing, and he took to brief respites of travel during which he might forget his troubles and scribble down half-formed bits of ideas in his journal.

The writing wasn’t coming easy for him these days, either.

A friend had given him a letter of introduction to Walter Scott, who was living about twenty miles southeast of Edinburgh, and who had expressed himself an admirer of Irving’s History of New York. Irving set out for Edinburgh, determined to make the man’s acquaintance if he could.

Scott was not yet Sir Walter Scott. He had not yet published Ivanhoe, or Rob Roy, or Kenilworth. He was widely acclaimed as a Romantic poet, though, and it was in this role that Irving knew him. Admired him. Okay, he idolized him. Irving disliked Coleridge, disliked Wordsworth, disliked Shelley. But Scott, he adored.

So he appears on Scott’s doorstep, letter in hand, heart pounding, waiting to see if his idol will deign to see him.

He does more than that. Scott insists that Irving join him and his family for breakfast, then keeps him as a close companion for the next three or four days, introducing him to his daughters, showing him the local landscape, and going over with him the drafts of Rob Roy that he was finalizing at the time.

The incident of the rainstorm, the thicket, and the tartan cape was one that Irving would retell over and over throughout his life. He always felt that Scott had taken him under his wing — literally and figuratively — from that time on, and counted his friendship as among the most important and influential in his life.

More immediately, Irving took heart — and inspiration — from his visit with Scott.

His mood improved, and he finally decided that he would earn his living as a writer, or not at all.

In short, he got down to the business of his life.

Several weeks later, Irving’s writer’s block crumbled into dust. He stayed up all night and into the next morning, setting down in nearly final draft form the story that would become known as Rip Van Winkle. Shortly thereafter, he began work on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 

Both men would eventually become the literary heroes of their respective countries, inspiring and influencing countless writers and readers who followed in their wake.

Charles Dickens was a big Irving fan, and admitted that he was inspired by the Christmas stories in Irving’s Sketches when he wrote A Christmas Carol.  Mark Twain would later claim — disparagingly — that Scott’s writings formed the foundation of the character of the American South, so widely were they read there.

Scott would receive his baronetcy, and Irving would be hailed as the first true American man of letters, his warm, graceful home in New York’s Hudson River Valley becoming nearly as famous as he was.

But they both always remembered their first meeting in the summer of 1817, how instinctively and immediately they became friends, and how much they valued each other’s company and support throughout all the long, complicated years ahead.

Beth Dunn is a blogger, novelist, and geek. She writes at An Accomplished Young Lady, travels frequently to the Hudson River Valley, and presents herself unapologetically on the doorsteps of her literary heroes from time to time, quite often with absolutely marvelous results.