Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Karen Odden and A DANGEROUS DUET

RHYS BOWEN: Karen Odden is someone I meet when I'm around the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale. A fellow historical mystery writer, in fact I discovered that I had blurbed her first adult book. So when I was last at the Pen with her, she told me about some fascinating research in London and I invited her to visit Jungle Reds. Welcome Karen:


KAREN ODDEN:  
Back in December, when I read the blog entry on this site by Edith Maxwell (Maddie Day) about her new mystery series set on Cape Cod, I felt something in my chest soften. Perhaps because I’m still a new author, it’s a relief to hear that even established, successful writers find that their projects can start as one thing and end up as something utterly different.

My second adult novel, A Dangerous Duet, began life as a young adult mystery called “The Phrenologist’s Daughter,” about a young woman named Nell who watches her father read the scalps of gullible older women for money. Someday I’m going to put phrenology into a novel because I think it’s the wackiest pseudo-science ever. It reached its zenith in the 1840s in England, and its practitioners believed that the bumps on your skull could reveal something indelible about your character. So the bump you have just in front of your left ear? It reflects your propensity for thieving. Little did you know.




The problem is, I couldn’t come up with a plot that I felt “worked” for a YA. My heroine Nell’s more interesting con-man phrenologist father kept taking over. Besides, I heard from my agent that YA historical mysteries simply weren’t selling.

This was in 2012. Then suddenly, in May, my father died in a car accident. This was a painful time for many reasons, not least because my father and I had never been close. He was at heart rather a loner, enjoying his solitary travels with his excellent camera, his collections of model cars and planes in our basement, and perhaps most of all, his music. He had been an exceptional pianist, and I’d grown up listening to him play the baby grand in our living room. Sometimes I’d lie underneath the instrument, on the goldenrod shag carpet (it was the 70s), and watch his feet in their Hush Puppies move among the three pedals. Unwilling to travel as much as a symphony position would require, he found ways to use his talent to earn money locally: he played weddings and funerals and Sunday masses at a beautiful gothic church in Rochester, and taught piano lessons to students who were, I gathered, largely lacking in talent and apathetic. I took lessons as well for a few years. But I was lacking in talent and apathetic, and eventually I quit, much to our mutual relief.

But my father, and pianos, were on my mind, and a new idea began to form in my head, about a young woman pianist in Victorian London. And somewhere around this time, my husband had a work trip to London, and I was able to tag along. With only the faintest sketch of an idea in my head, I visited two places. The first was the Royal Academy of Music, where there was—to my delight—an exhibit about Victorian music and music halls. There was also a class roster that showed “Frances Elizabeth Dickens,” in scratchy script, fourth from the bottom on a yellow page. I knew a little about Charles’s older sister from research I had done in preparation for writing the introduction for Barnes and Noble’s edition of Hard Times. A talented pianist, Fanny had attended the Royal Academy in the 1820s but had to drop out after a few years because her parents could no longer afford tuition. (Mr. Dickens was a notorious spendthrift and was thrown into debtor’s prison. Hence Charles’s infamous stint in the bootblack factory at age 12.) Later, she was able to return, paying her way by serving as an instructor to the younger children.





But what would a young woman pianist do if she couldn’t afford tuition for even those first few years and wanted it desperately? Truth be told, there weren’t many employment options in the 1840s for a young woman from a middle-class family. She could go out as a governess, or a teacher, or perhaps a nurse. Or perhaps she could find a way to use her talent to earn money … perhaps serve as an accompanist in a music hall … I felt the stirrings of sincere curiosity about this idea. But music halls weren’t established by the dozens in London until about 1870, so I would need to move my story forward thirty years. (Phrenology was debunked by then. Yes, I felt some wry amusement at having done all that research for naught!)


The second place I visited in London was Wilton’s Music Hall. I discovered that music halls often featured a wide range of performers from musicians to German knife throwers to trapeze artists. The performances tended to be bawdy, political, humorous, profane and satirical—a profound swerve away from the middle-class values promoted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice (est. 1802). The modern-day equivalent of the music hall program would be closer to a series of Saturday Night Live skits than a polished Broadway show.

Wilton’s is the last Victorian music hall standing, I believe, that still puts on a wide variety of critically acclaimed shows. It has served as a set for movies, perhaps most famously in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes ostensibly takes Jude Law’s Watson out to celebrate his engagement, and the stag party devolves into a mad chase scene with an acrobatic Cossack assassin.



Located on Graces Alley in Whitechapel (infamous for the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888), Wilton’s was assembled piecemeal in the 1850s from four separate houses plus a back “yard” area. I reached the doors—there are a pair of them—and turned. From where I stood, I could see the Tower Bridge and hear the slapping of the water against the boats. Some seagulls cawed hollowly, and my throat tightened. Inside, I smelled the warm tang of beer and caught my toe on a nail that stood up from a worn floorboard. (Such an omen!) Downstairs, I found floors that met unevenly, plaster peeling off the bricks, and the smell of rust.

                                    

Back upstairs, on the main floor, I peered through a window at the back of the music hall and saw a lovely U-shaped room, painted in shades of blue and green, with turned pillars and a stage up front. (Below is a view from the stage. For more information, see www.wiltons.org.uk. They have an excellent blog about the history of the place as well as their current and upcoming events.)

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As I stood at the back of the auditorium, gazing toward the stage, an image came as clearly as if it were a still from a movie: my heroine Nell (dressed as a male performer … because men were paid twice as much as women) seated at a piano, in an alcove at stage right. And as I drafted the first three chapters the next day, on the plane ride home, an entire cast of characters began to emerge, including a magician who had stolen his hat from a police constable and a violinist with a bitter grudge against the world

Those chapters changed too, ultimately. But when I reread them, now that they’re in print, it’s with a sense of profound gratitude that in London, I was able to find the physical bits and pieces that beckoned a premise into being, and that steered me in a direction I had no idea I was going.

 RHYS: Thank you, Karen. I'm looking forward to reading A Dangerous Duet. 
And dear Reds, have you ever got inspiration for a story from a place you visited? Have you visited a site that absolutely spoke to you? 




50 comments:

  1. What an interesting story, Karen. I’m looking forward to reading your book and meeting Nell . . . .

    I can’t say that I’ve ever had the thrill of being in a place that spoke to me, but I can readily see how having such an intense connection with a place could help a writer spin a special tale . . . .

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    1. Yes, Joan, it *was* intense--that's the word. I think that even though we are, as a culture, so visually oriented, and reading is one of the main ways I obtain information about the world, I feel as though touch and smell connect us in a vital and different way. They say that evolutionarily, our olfactory sense is the one that is most closely allied to memory (it has to do with early mammals who had to search for food and would go out at night for safety; so they had to remember where the food source was and find it by smell ... in contrast to birds who would see and dive for food; no memory required ... that's a tidbit from my vertebrates course at college!) and maybe that's why smells are so evocative, makes us feel as if we're connected to something old and historical. When I was writing my dissertation on Victorian railway disasters (which I plundered for book #1, A Lady in the Smoke) I went to the railway museum in Leeds. (I was in London at a conference on railways and met the nicest people--mostly men wearing socks and ties with trains on them; one of the curators of the museum even gave me a "get in free" card.) I couldn't get over it ... there were hangar-sized rooms with Victorian railway locomotives and the tenders (which hold the coal, behind the locomotive), fancy first-class coaches with velvet seats and gilt, metal brakes, and switches, not to mention all kinds of information about crashes. It was, as you say, intense to see it all up close. The locomotives were enormous! Thanks for writing in :)

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    2. This is fascinating, Karen. I'm going to look up A Lady in the Smoke!

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  2. Karen, I love this story - and that we share the morphing of books! I'm off to order A Dangerous Duet.

    I live in the town where my historical series is set, and I get inspiration (and ideas) all the time walking amid the former mill buildings, checking out carriage houses nestled behind homes that were standing when my Quaker midwife bicycled around town in the late 1880s, listening to the river flowing right through downtown which powered the mills.

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    1. YES! And I think walking the streets was a vital part of that trip to London--street walking the way you do it, not the other way! (Wink.) Not just so I could find out the "practical" aspects--how long would it take for Nell to walk from Mayfair to Soho, for example--but to discover what Nell would see along the way ... like the architect John Nash's white pillars on Regent Street, which I found were not marble, but merely plaster painted to look like it. To me it became a symbol of the arbitrary, and artificial division between Mayfair and Soho. But I never would have found that without the walking. :)

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    2. I am halfway through A Lady in the Smoke and loving!

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    3. Oh I'm so glad!!! I loved that book ... but talk about morphing ... I rewrote that book at least seven times. In its original version the trainwreck didn't happen until chapter 8. Hmmm. (I had to write my way into the story.) Anyway, I am so glad you're enjoying it. Please let me know what you think when you're finished--I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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  3. I will tell you I was holding my breath reading this! How incredible your trip was! I am definitely looking for your book!
    I love your story about your father and the piano. My father was a very quiet man, who loved music. He played the piano and the French horn.

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    1. Thanks, Deb. :) Yes, my father's relationship to music wasn't really something I understood until long after I'd left home. He didn't play any other instruments, like your father, but he did sing--I still remember going to see him perform in Camelot (the musical) which was put on at the outdoor theater in Rochester. What I later realized was that he grew up with juvenile-onset diabetes (or what they now call Type 1, I guess). His two older brothers (only a year apart in age) played football and other sports together, and my father (four years younger) really couldn't; he was sort of the child prodigy at the piano. But I think about that family dynamic--Jerry and Vic had each other for company; my father had the piano. As a result, I think music became a language, or a way of interacting that was perhaps even as important as speech or physical contact. Does that make sense?

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    2. That absolutely makes sense. Music was his childhood friend.

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    3. Yes. And I didn't realize how important it must have been until his funeral, when my sister and I got up to speak, partly because there really wasn't anyone else; my father had no friends to do it. I might not even have thought recognized the absence except that the following month we went to my husband's Uncle Paul's funeral, and there were four men who got up and gave eulogies. The contrast struck me. Makes me grateful for the friendships I have--and yet there's a part of me that feels like my father didn't know what he missed. That's a different kind of sadness.

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  4. What a fabulous essay… Thank you! You almost bring tears to my eyes… The power of knowing that you’re having a good idea is unmatchable, isn’t it? You simply have to be at the right place at the right time… Whenever that is. And your mind has to be open to it. Then somehow, when you open the door, things start falling into place. That must have been such an exciting plane ride home!

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    1. Haha! Yes, it was an exciting plane ride home. Except my husband sitting next to me was sort of like, "Um, hello?" But what you said about "your mind has to be open to it" is spot on. When I was younger, and first beginning to write, I felt like I had to be much more certain about things, get my ducks in a row., drive straight on--partly because I was afraid if I didn't drive down that path, I'd never get to the finish line. But with two published books (and a bunch of languishing manuscripts), I've become more confident that I'll reach the finish line without driving straight. So now there's more fluidity to the process, more openness, as you say, more curiosity, a willingness to let the universe give me ideas and resources. It's a much easier way to write ... and to go through life! Arg. That sounds like a platitude! But it's sort of true, right?

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    2. Completely true! Its powerfully present, that's what it is! xoxo

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  5. Karen welcome, this is fascinating! I totally understand how the process of finding the right story for an idea can take a while (like years!) And what a great feeling it must have been to have those 3 chapters pour out, and characters take the stage. Did you need to return to England to get more details?

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    1. I didn't, actually, for that book. But I'd love to go back! My next book is about a young woman painter at the Slade Art School (est. 1871) whose ne'er-do-well older brother Edwin, an art forger and restorer, is murdered on the same night that a rare and expensive French painting (that was supposed to be auctioned the following week) vanishes from his studio. While I worked at Christie's auction house in NYC back in the 1990s and love museums, I don't know much about being an art student. I feel like I'd love to go to the Slade, spend some time around painters!

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  6. Congratulations, Karen! I love the story of how the story shifted around you. Glad you were able to find the piceces that made it "click."

    Mary/Liz

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    1. Thanks, Mary! Right now I'm in the middle of the next book, and I'm still sort of waiting for the pieces to click. Trying to keep my faith in the process ... :)

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  7. I agree with Hank -- the quality of your writing in the essay fills me with a great anticipation for reading A Dangerous Duet! Can't wait.

    I have never had the experience of seeing a place and being immediately inspired to create a story about it, but I do love reading about yours!. Your enthusiasm about the place, and your well-chosen words, allowed me to visualize it perfectly.

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    1. Thanks, Susan! :) I'm glad you could see it. Sometimes it's hard to know if what's in my head is getting on the page.

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  8. Fascinating "how it came about" story! Looking forward to reading the finished product.

    New Orleans. I've published several short stories set in NOLA and have one on the back burner.

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    1. Oh gosh, I love New Orleans, though I've only been once! The closest I came for years were movies. (Do you remember THE BIG EASY with Dennis Quaid?) My friend Diana got married there at the same time my sister happened to be at law school at Tulane, so we stayed for several days to visit. We went on a swamp tour where we held baby alligators ... and just walking the streets in the French Quarter was worth a whole afternoon. Part of the magic for me was that it doesn't feel like anywhere else in the US. And the coffee and beignets!!! Those alone are worth a plane ride.

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    2. LOVE The Big Easy. One of my all time fave movies. It really captured NOLA.

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    3. Yes, didn't it? They did a great job with the soundtrack. And Dennis Quaid is pretty easy on the eyes, too. :)

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  9. Karren, I'm so glad you shared your essay with us! A Dangerous Duet is now on the TBR list (at the top!)

    I have two places that have "spoken to me" in a way that I have not been able to ignore.

    The first is Sterling, Scotland. I was in Scotland, Bellshill, outside of Glascoe, to meet my former in-laws for the first time and to introduce them to my 15 month old son. We were there on the day of the Royal Wedding (Diana and Charles). My Scottish husband wanted nothing to do with sitting in front of the television so he borrowed a car from the neighbor and we drove off the see the countryside.

    We stopped in Sterling and I do not have words to explain the almost instant attraction I experienced. I was ready to stay for life, send the husband back to CA to close up our life, and move to Sterling for good!

    The second place is a little town in Marin county just north of San Francisco. I have the beginnings of a series and I have morphed this place into the setting for the main character's home town.

    I wonder how it is that a place can reach out to us and become alive. Fascinating!

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    1. I'm wondering which little town in Marin and whether I'll show up as a character in your book, Lyda!

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    2. Oh, Lyda, I'm right there with you about Scotland. My daughter graduated last June and instead of a party, she wanted a trip; so we all went to Scotland for two weeks. My cousin is a vet in Edinburgh, so we began there, and then went southwest, where we stayed in an honest-to-god CASTLE. We felt like characters out of Downton Abbey. Then we headed north to the Isle of Skye and then back east. Being from Arizona, where the joke is there are two colors--sand and wet sand--the green landscape was almost a perpetual surprise. On the Isle of Skye we hiked up to the Old Man of Storr and I felt like I was in a different world, something medieval or even older. We didn't make it to Glascoe or Sterling, but I'll put them on my list for when we go back!

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    3. Rhys- I would love to have you "drop in"! I can easily transport you to the fictional town of Santa Regina. Just take a stroll through Novato and let me know where you see yourself fitting in. The Director of the newly refurbished Playhouse? The Coordinator of the summer Music on the Green Series? A regular at Marvin's? Take your pick!

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  10. Such a compelling character, and story. Nice to make your acquaintance, Karen. The Reds always have such great recommendations for us.

    Places as inspiration? Not yet!

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    1. Nice to hear from you, Karen! :) Thanks for reading!

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  11. Congratulations on your new book, Karen. Clearly you have discovered the great secret of the stage--that the things the audience can see from the seats is only the polished, professionally constructed facade. Backstage is where the drama really happens. Onstage the beautiful blonde soprano in the tight sparkly dress sings with the voice of an angel. Backstage, that same soprano breaks the zipper on that sparkly dress and cusses with the vocabulary of a sailor as I stitch her back in. We show people are not always what we seem, but sometimes--when we get it just right--the magic is very real. There's no place like it.

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    1. YES! I love the idea of the stage/backstage. It's such an apt metaphor for people. In the simplest terms, many of us tend to put our "shiny" parts out front--and behind is the messier stuff--the unevenness in our psychic floors, the rust of old hurts and traumas, as it were. But if we think of it in terms of narrative, the backstage--the backstory--is what I seek in real life, with people I love, and also try to provide in my books. For example, in DUET, Jack Drummond's father Nick seems to be an utterly unredeemable character--he's a vicious, bitter drunk. But later in the novel, Nell asks Jack how on earth he can feel any love for this man--and Jack tells her a story that shows that his father came by his bitterness honestly. That's the stuff that fascinates me ... the backstory (backstage) that makes a group of actions or behaviors (what's on stage) psychologically coherent--and brings out our empathy and compassion. As one of my fave authors, Brene Brown, says: It's hard to hate people up close. P.S. And while I don't have a beautiful blonde soprano, I DO have Amalie ... and I think you're going to appreciate her! :)

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    2. What? No blonde soprano? All sopranos are blonde. It's in the rule book! I look forward to reading your DUET.

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    3. Haha!! Someone's got to make a red-headed soprano ... actually, Jenny Lind was a redhead, wasn't she? At least she is in the movie Greatest Showman ...

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  12. Loved reading about this, Karen, because it's the same for me, the way research leads to plot ideas which lead to more research which lead to.... I DO love the phrenology and hope you saved all your research and out-takes.

    Absolutely places--especially houses!--have inspired my stories. The Victorian ark my husband and I bid on (we were overbid thank goodness) is in Never Tell a Lie. Trips to Beaufort SC inspired to You'll Never Know, Dear.

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    1. Yes--research leads to plot which leads to research which leads to. Exactly! Ok, so question for you: what is a Victorian ark? Is it a kind of house?

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  13. A place that really had an impact on me was the Port Arthur Penal Colony Open Air Museum in Tasmania. It seemed to be literally drenched in history, both from the convicts point of view and the Warden and guards as well. It was deemed inescapable because of its location on the Tasmin peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water and sharks. Part of it is in ruins, part intact. Two years after we visited, there was an incredibly tragic shooting there.

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    1. Wow, that sounds like a spot that evokes a sense of every kind of danger: isolation, sharks, drowning. Peninsulas make me feel wary simply because there's only ever one way back out, and if it's blocked, the peninsula becomes an island. Have you set a book there?

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  14. Karen, welcome to Jungle Reds! I am adding your book to my list. I come from a musical family, My aunt trained to become a concert pianist then she changed direction and became a folk singer. Someone in my great grandmother's family played the piano for the Royal family, according to family legend.

    I love to read historical fiction. I have been inspired to write stories from places I have visited. I visited an Elizabethean house in the Cotswolds that belonged to the same family since 1500s! And I saw the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from the outside.

    Diana

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  15. Thanks, Diana! The Palace was one of our stops in Edinburgh this past summer. The inside was beautiful but my favorite part was the ruins just outside--the stone arches against the blue sky. (Yes, we were lucky with the weather!) Thank you for reading and replying :)

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  16. Hi Karen! I loved your essay and will be putting your book on my TBR list! My inspiration for my first novel was very similar to yours--I came across a place while visiting England and just knew I had to set a story there. The UK--especially London--has been talking to me ever since!

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    1. Well, that's very tantalizing! What was the place?? And yes, I do think London speaks! :)

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  17. Since I found your post here fascinating, Karen, I can only imagine how much I will enjoy A Dangerous Duet. Visiting the music hall must have been a great experience. Congratulations on the book! I'm going now to put it on my wish list.

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    1. Thanks, Kathy! I'm so gratified at the number of people who read my post and connected with it :)

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  18. I hope readers today will take away an important lesson - it's not always the first (or second, or third) iteration of the story that is the right one. You have to keep working and working the idea and characters until the true form is finally revealed. In other words, aspiring authors - don't give up after the first go!

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    1. Gosh, YES! I remember once when I was feeling discouraged, my daughter (who rock climbs competitively) told me, "Mom, maybe you need to think about it like I think of climbing. We count on falling at least twenty or thirty times each practice." I smiled ... but she right in the sense that if I adjusted my expectations, I'd have an easier time accepting the need for various "iterations," as you say. At the moment, I am working on book #3, about a young woman painter at the Slade School in London 1875, and I have realized (kicking and screaming) that I need to pitch out the last 30,000 words. Three readers I trust have gently pointed out that the current ending doesn't match the first 2/3 of the book. ARG. But I know they're right. Sigh! But better to figure this out now than later, right?

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  19. What a fabulous essay, Karen. I am now eager to read your book. You remind me that writing really is a journey and inspiration is always just around the corner.

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    1. Thank you, Jenn, for reading my essay and for reaching out. So often when I'm writing I can feel like I'm in a vacuum, or outer space. (Hellooooo ...?) This has a been a lovely day, with so many Jungle Reds readers/writers having been so enthusiastic and affirming.

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