Friday, November 4, 2022

Karen Odden writes on Headlines and Regrets

RHYS BOWEN: It's my pleasure today to be introducing not only a good writer, but a friend. Karen is one of the people I look forward to hanging out with when I'm at my winter home in Arizona. I love that she is passionate about history and about bringing it to life. But I' m interested to know that this story , UNDER A  VEILED MOON, has a more personal side to it. Welcome Karen: 




KAREN ODDEN: Only recently did I recognize that every book I’ve written has its origins in two distinct places. The first is some odd piece of history about Victorian London; the second is a deeply personal concern, something I’m wrestling with in my own head and heart. And this novel – Under a Veiled Moon – my fifth (!), and the second in the Inspector Corravan series, is no different.

The mystery plot was inspired by what was called “the worst maritime disaster ever to befall Victorian London” – and it was truly horrifying. On the night of September 3, 1878, a small wooden pleasure steamship, the Princess Alice, traveling on the Thames River, was rammed by a 900-ton iron-hulled coal ship. The Princess Alice sank within minutes, and of the approximately 650 passengers on the boat, over 500 drowned – many of them women (their crinoline skirts were an absolute deadweight, as you can imagine) and children, all floundering in the darkness. The additional difficulty was that the Princess was one of a fleet of steamships – akin to our hop-on-hop-off tour buses – with no passenger manifest, so no one even knew who was on the boat! With bodies scattered along both shores, families were frantic, and the disaster roused tremendous anxiety about travel on the Thames. Was it truly an accident? If not, who caused it? In my book, early clues point to Irish extremists, and when the newspapers start trumpeting that story, it’s a horrible mess for my protagonist Inspector Michael Corravan to unravel.

At age thirty-one, Michael, a former thief from seedy Whitechapel (where Jack the Ripper committed his crimes), is an inspector at Scotland Yard, although he has been temporarily assigned to Acting Superintendent at Wapping River Police. As the book begins, on a Sunday, he goes to visit his adoptive family, the Doyles, for tea, and he sees the smashed window at Ma Doyle’s shop. Then he walks upstairs to their living quarters and finds the nineteen-year-old twins, Elsie and Colin, fighting, though when he asks what’s the matter, they both mutter, “Nothing.” And later, when he tries to talk to Colin about what’s wrong, he’s brushed aside in a way Colin never would have done back when Michael was living with them. What happened to the easy trust and affection they once shared? Michael senses Colin is upset about something, but what?

This book evolved in part from my thinking about how I have accidentally hurt people I love when I was too young, too clueless, too overwhelmed, or too preoccupied to see how my behavior might affect them. It also came from thinking about regret – a feeling that makes me wince uncomfortably and ask questions such as, How can I make amends, years later? What can I learn from my regret? Surely there must be something, right?

I explore some of this through Michael, who only belatedly understands how he once hurt Colin. When Michael was eighteen, he was bare-knuckles boxing for a man named O’Hagan and winning. One night, O’Hagan told him to throw a match because he wasn’t making any money on him anymore – no one would bet against his quick hands. When Michael ignored him and beat his opponent, O’Hagan furiously threw him out. That might have been the end of it, but when the police raid the boxing hall the next night, O’Hagan assumed Michael ratted him out, and he vows to kill him. Ma Doyle ran to the docks where Michael worked, handed him a bag of clothes and some food and a bit of money, and told him, “Get out of Whitechapel.” Michael fled across the Thames to save his life, ending up in Lambeth, where he joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable. But he left behind young Colin, age eight, who idolized him. For months, no one told Colin why Michael left – and he believed Michael left without a second thought. This shaped Colin in some profound ways … and years later, Michael still has no idea. When he does realize it, he’s filled with regret, but is it too late to make amends?

This series began with Down a Dark River, with Michael investigating a series of beautiful young murdered women who are placed in boats and sent floating down the Thames – acts of vengeance by a man whose daughter experiences a brutal injustice in a court of law. If that novel was about failures of empathy, abuses of power, and revenge, this novel is largely about regret. What can it do for us? How do we make amends? And because I’m a mom, I wonder, how do I teach my children that regret isn’t something that we should bury or simply feel ashamed of; that it can be useful, to help steer us toward a   better path, toward being a better person?

 

Question for readers: How do you think about regret, and do you think it helps you? Do you feel regret has helped you learn and grow?

 (And the last pic is of my office, where I work and stare out of the window!)

BIO: Karen received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University and subsequently taught at UW-Milwaukee. After writing her dissertation on Victorian literature and history, she leaned on her research to writer her mysteries, all of which are set in 1870s London. Her first novel, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today bestseller, and A Dangerous Duet and A Trace of Deceit have won awards for historical fiction and mystery. Under a Veiled Moon, her fifth mystery and the second book in the Inspector Corravan series, is available in hardback, e-book, and audiobook. A member of the Sisters in Crime National Board and a writing group instructor, Karen lives in Arizona with her family, and you can reach her at www.karenodden.com.

50 comments:

  1. Regrets make you think and if it is a positive regret, then you'll learn something from it. Actually you will learn from negative regrets as well.

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    1. I agree, Dru. I hadn't thought about positive regret as opposed to negative regret. Thank you for that. :)

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  2. So many congratulations, Karen! I can't wait to read the new book.

    I think regrets can teach us what to cherish and how to be kind. I like the idea of living so one doesn't end up with regrets, but we all make mistakes. As you say, making amends is so important.

    (Also, I'm worried about regular first commenter Joan...)

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    1. Edith, I’m also worried about Joan
      Danielle

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    2. As I posted yesterday--though there was no reason for you all to go back and look--I had already emailed her as soon as I saw she was not there for two days. She is helping with a family situation, and she'll be back soon. I told her we all missed her, and were sending love.

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    3. I love that your community is so close that you notice someone's absence and reach out. I'm sure she appreciates your concern!

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    4. And, yes, Edith. I think regret can teach us what to cherish and how to be kind. Kindness feels really important, and I have become very mindful in recent years of the people I cherish. Thank you for sharing. And HAPPY 70th!!!! (I did see that on FB, right??)

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    5. Thanks for the update on Joan, Hank. I wish her family well.

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    6. You did, Karen O - thanks so much!

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  3. KAREN: Congratulations on your new book! That maritime disaster is a real tragedy.

    Regrets. Sure, I have some, but the decisions I did/did not make have made me a stronger and hopefully better person.

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    1. Thanks, Grace, for sharing. Yes - at the end of the novel, Michael Corravan thinks of his regrets as the weight in his chest, which is heavy and hurts to carry, but also acts as ballast to steady the ship and help him steer going forward. (He's a boat guy, so that's what he comes up with.) :)

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  4. Welcome and congratulations on the new book Karen! I would be surprised if we all don't have regrets tucked away. I was not smart when I was a teenager and have things I would have liked to change... It's a great idea to use regrets to propel the story!

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    1. Thank you! I agree. I did some really foolish things as a teen, too. But it seems in some ways that the world is less accepting. I had a friend recently whose son did something foolish (but not dangerous) and is paying a very heavy price, including police, and all -- what seems to me to be really disproportionately punitive. Not saying there shouldn't be consequences, but kids do dumb things because they're kids and they're still learning. So I feel like the flip side to healthy regret should be some forgiveness from others and from the universe. I think regret -- remembering we've all made mistakes -- can sometimes help us find forgiveness.

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  5. Congratulations on Under a Veiled Moon, Karen.
    Your post about what brought this story to life is very interesting.

    I lived my biggest regret fifty years ago and decided then and there that I would live in a way not having to feel regrets again. So far, I have succeeded.
    Danielle

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    1. I'm glad to hear that, Danielle. It sounds like you are very mindful about how you live, which (to my mind) is so admirable.

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  6. Congratulations Karen! I definitely have regrets, but I try to be gentle with my younger self. She did the best she could under the circumstances and here I am, with the gift of another new day.

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    1. Thank you for that lovely thought. Yes, I think that gentleness and forgiveness toward ourselves is important to our own emotional and mental health -- and I think if we can be gentle and forgiving toward ourselves, we can offer it to others. In my experience, other people sense when they can confide in us and find some ease, that we'll understand and not judge. With most of my friends, we make mistakes and have regrets and we don't need anyone to "fix" anything but it's really helpful to hear "I understand." Thank you for reminding me about the gift of another new day. :)

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  7. Children have a way of constructing scenarios that center on themselves, don't they? And unless they choose to share how that scenario affects how they feel, it's very hard to know why they may act certain ways. What a great pivot on which to hang a story, Karen. So much built-in conflict.

    Regrets are like worries, not especially helpful, and a massive drain of energy. We make mistakes--we are human. Self forgiveness is much more useful; you can't change the past, and it's nearly impossible to change others' emotional reactions. Usually, the best we can do is to learn from our errors and try not to make the same mistakes in the future.

    Still no Joan this morning. Worrisome.

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    1. Karen, you said that very well and I have to agree with you!

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    2. Thank you, Karen! I always appreciate your thoughtful replies on my posts. Yes, children have a way of constructing scenarios that center on them ... it's narcissistic, but it's developmentally normal, too, until kids develop the larger frames of reference, beyond self and family, that enable them to make sense of the world. Every so often my kids will show me a strange way that they made sense of something as a child -- like when my young son quit hockey, and I thought he was just bored, or maybe something happened with his coach. He wouldn't say anything other than that he didn't want to go. Recently (he's now 18, not 5), he admitted he was scared of the Zamboni. It came out of the huge doors one day when he was one of the last ones on the ice and he was afraid the driver didn't see him. It's not the same as regret, but it does hint at the ways kids make sense of things. Anyway, thank you for commenting, nice to "see" you here again. :)

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  8. I like that your story plots include larger issues we all deal with in life. I think regrets are often something we come to understand as we age when we have more time to think about our friends and family. In our teens - up to our early 60's, we are often too busy to think about our past. The problem for me is the people I'd like to go back and rewrite history with, are my parents and my in-laws who have passed.

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    1. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, I have some of that too. My father-in-law died of ALS years ago now, and I still regret that we didn't spend more time together, get the kids over to their house more, before he started to get sick. He adored them, and they adored him. Someone said above that the live so they don't have regrets -- and that kind of mindfulness, making deliberate choices about how we spend our time, and who we spend it with, is something I learned from that experience. But it's hard when we can't make amends. I wish you peace.

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  9. I so agree! I think if we pretend not to feel regret, if we disavow it, we sometimes hurt ourselves and others more. Thank you for loving the book, Liz. And I had such a nice time chatting with you and Mally. ♥️

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  10. Congratulations on the new books, Karen. I read Down a Dark River and thoroughly enjoyed it, so it's good to see Michael Corrivan make a return appearance.

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    1. Thank you, Gigi, for reading Down a Dark River! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I'm crossing fingers that Crooked Lane offers me a contract for Corravan #3 ... I have this great idea about women con artists, based on the Forty Elephants (a real all-women's thieving gang based in Elephant and Castle, the neighborhood in Lambeth that was known for thievery in 1870s London). I think they'd make an excellent adversary for Corravan ... :)

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  11. How does the song go? "Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention."

    I can tell everyone they will not regret picking up the Michael Corrivan mysteries. They have a wonderful blend of a clear, unflinching view of the evils and inequities of the Victorian period, and the caring and humane people working to make things better.

    I can also say you won't regret going to see Karen if she is coming to your town! She was in Southern Maine and I got to hear her talk about her research, and let me tell you, it is both wildly entertaining and deeply fascinating.

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    1. Julia, you are blessed that you got to hear Karen talk about her research. Yesterday I got to see a virtual conversation with captions on Facebook between two of the Jungle Reds (Debs and Rhys). Hope that I can catch a virtual event for Karen with captions on FB.

      Diana

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    2. Thank you for your kind words, Julia. It was so lovely of you to come see me ... and in a wild rainstorm, no less! For those who weren't there -- I had never met Julia, but I reached out to see if she might come for my library talk, and I was so honored that she said she would. A small group of us were able to visit at this cute bookstore across the street beforehand, and Julia was as funny and charming as people told me she was. ♥️

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    3. And Diana -- I have done a few virtual events, and now I'm wondering if the Poisoned Pen or Warwick's in San Diego have the close captioning option. I need to look into this! Thank you for mentioning it!

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  12. Regrets? Most certainly. But as Grace said, those do help to make us stronger as long as we learn from those mistakes. (Which, honestly, is easier said than done!)

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    1. Yes - I agree. I cringe sometimes at my mistakes, but if I can get over that, I do learn from them! And by the end of UAVM, Michael Corravan realizes that his regrets are sometimes heavy in chest ... but they are the ballast that steadies the ship and helps him steer going forward. He's a boat guy, so that's where he goes with it. :)

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  13. Congratulations on your new novel, Karen! I love historical mysteries. I have been meaning to ask you about your last name ODDEN. Is it Scandinavian? It is an unusual name.

    I have questions about your novels. I'll answer the question about Regrets first.

    Trying to think if I have regrets. I often joke about my "Irish" temper. I do get frustrated and lose my temper. As I get older, I often recognize the triggers and I try to head that off by communicating as clearly as I can.

    Regrets? Yes, I really feel bad about not being aware of how horrid this family nanny was to a family member. Actually there were two and both were horrid. One of them once bragged to me about how they "forced" the child to obey when we went out to lunch, This was the same person who lied to my family about her child wanting to learn Sign Language (not true) and I was trying to be polite.

    She told me this "forcing to obey" story at lunch and I just left! I forgot about it. I deeply regret that I did not recognize right away the damage done by these horrid nannies. This happened years ago. The child is now an adult and I tried hard to make sure that person always knew that I have their back.

    As a teenager. I am sure that I hurt a lot of people. I tried to make amends. I had PTSD from the horrid years (a few) at that awful school where deaf children of Hearing parents were treated as second class citizens.

    Now that I am an adult, I try to be kind. Even if I do not like someone, I try to be polite.

    Questions about your books:

    1) Why a man (Inspector Michael) instead of a woman detective? I asked because now I am accustomed to seeing many women detectives.

    2). What inspired you to pick Victorian literature for your PhD ?

    3). Did your decision to have your mysteries set in the Victorian era have a connection to your PhD disseration?

    Many more but I think three are enough questions for now.

    So excited to read your new Inspector Michael (Corrovan ?) novel.

    Diana

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    1. Hi, Diana! Yes, Odden is Norwegian. It's my husband's name, which I took when we got married. Everyone mispronounces it (Odd-en) instead of Odin at first. I tell them to remember it like Odin, the Norse god, who pulled one eye out of his head in exchange for power. LOL.

      I am truly sorry for those experiences in your past, with the two nannies, that sound very painful. And as someone else mentioned above, and I seconded, I think we all make mistakes as teens and young people ... but I think we have to be gentle and forgiving with ourselves there. We're young and our frames of reference are still so undeveloped and uninformed. It's only later we begin to understand the world in different ways, to understand our effect in the world, and the ways our own worldviews shape our interactions. Sometimes we don't know how to respond or stand up for others. And we learn ... and I know you are a kind person.

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    2. As for your questions -- these are really good ones. Thank you for asking. I'll do my best to answer.
      1. My first 3 books all had young women amateur sleuths, drawn into an investigation because someone they love is murdered or injured; and I took as my starting points 3 different aspects of Victorian culture -- railway disasters and sabotage schemes; music halls and thieving rings; the underbelly of the art and auction world. But, in a sharp departure, the inspiration for Down a Dark River (Corravan #1) came from an article I read about the injustice and the law in the contemporary US, of all places. There was a case of a young woman jaywalking across a quiet street; she was hit by a speeding car, driven by a wealthy man who was drunk, and put in the hospital for a long time. She was awarded a piddly $2000 in damages ... and in the aftermath, her father threatened the judge's daughter. This pulled me up short -- for I realized that the father was trying to get the judge to understand what it was to almost lose a child. This got me thinking about how failures of empathy, how disavowing someone else's pain, leads to a kind of rage and a yearning for revenge ... but it's not "eye for an eye" revenge ... I think of the father's act as a last-ditch howl for understanding and empathy from someone who wasn't giving it willingly. Anyway, I decided I wanted to write a book about failures of empathy and revenge, and set it in Victorian England. But I wasn't an hour into writing it before I realized I could not do this with a young woman amateur sleuth. The judges, lawyers, fraudulent witnesses, jurors, etc. were all men, and I needed a man. (First and last time I may say that in my life. LOL) Inspector Michael Corravan came into being because I needed him.

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    3. 2. When I was at NYU for my graduate work, there was a very strong core group of 4 Victorian literature professors, and I took several courses with them. Because of my own work in therapy and my own reading around in literature about psychology, I became curious about where the idea of "trauma" came from, where the idea of PTSD had its roots. I began to wonder if it didn't begin with Victorian railway disasters -- because there were many of them, and this was the first time medical and legal men and popular writers were obsessing over injuries that were in part psychosomatic. Hundreds of people, including Charles Dickens, were crawling away from railway crashes, seemingly fine, but then they would have belated and terrible symptoms in the coming weeks -- tremors, memory loss, ringing in the ears, changes in blood pressure, jitters, and nightmares. (Charles Dickens crawled out of the Staplehurst disaster in 1865 ... and died 5 years to the day afterward, never fully recovering.) We'd call this PTSD, but they didn't have that diagnosis back then. Under existing medical jurisprudence, victims could only sue the railways for "organic" injury (attached to an organ, like the heart, or a limb). So sympathetic medical men said these symptoms came from an injury called "Railway spine." They posited that the shaking of the carriage caused small cuts in the spine, which led to symptoms all over the body. It was a theory (and not based in fact) ... but the medical men and legal men and novelists and newspapers were all talking about railway accidents and injuries in the same way. They even borrowed phrases and tropes from each other, creating a web of language that Freud would draw on to develop his ideas about "hysteria" in the 1890s, WWI doctors would use to talk about "shell shock," and later theorists would use to discuss "PTSD." So that was what I wrote my dissertation about.

      3. This experience absolutely shaped my novels. After I failed to get a job as a professor, I kept my toe in the period by writing introductions to Victorian novels in the Barnes & Noble Classics Series, and editing for the academic journal, Victorian Literature and Culture. At last, when I decided to revive my old dream of writing a novel, I thought, what do I know about that not everyone has seen before? So for A LADY IN THE SMOKE, I put Lady Elizabeth Fraser and her poor laudanum addicted mother on a train in 1874 London and ran it off the rails. And I have hunkered down in 1870s London ever since.
      Thank you for asking these questions and for reading my books -- I truly appreciate your interest and your support all these years. ♥️♥️

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  14. Definitely have regrets. I sometimes wonder if regret is a soul sucker. Does it really help to relive poor decisions that can't be changed, however trivial they may be? I do not regret adding Michael Corravan to my roster of book boyfriends!

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    1. All these comments about regret are really giving me food for thought. I think I have come around to thinking about healthy regret and unhealthy regret. The latter just locks us down and makes us feel bad. The healthy regret is predicated in part, I think, on believing that our mistakes are forgivable. The universe is not so relentless, and the people around us are kind enough, that we can regret and learn and use what we learn. At the end of Under a Veiled Moon, Michael comes to the conclusion that regret may weigh heavily in his heart, but it also serves as ballast to keep the ship straight, to help him stay steady and steer forward properly. He's a boat guy. And I am thrilled that you have added him to your list of book boyfriends. I love him, myself. :)

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  15. Hi Karen. I can't wait to read Under a Veiled Moon. I loved Down a Dark River. As far as regrets, they are part of who I am and I don't regret them (ha!). Instead, we've called a truce.

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    1. I love the idea of a truce!!!! And thank you for reading Down a Dark River and loving it. That means a lot, coming from you!

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  16. Karen, so interesting! For many of us, as different as every book is that we write, stand back and you can see the same themes, over and over. Regret is a great one. For me it's the question: Who can you trust. And I guess instead of historic incidents, it's always about a *house* (not a broader setting). BIG congrats on your new book. It'll be going into my TBR pile shortly.

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    1. Thank you, Hallie!
      I remember reading somewhere that every author has only one story that they write over and over. I'm not sure it's as simple as that (I guess I'd like to think it isn't!) but I do believe we all have governing internal dramas, our baggage we carry, and our relationship to it is complicated. For Michael Corravan, as a result of his early experiences in Whitechapel, he likes to be the rescuer, he's comfortable in that role, which is great (him being a policeman and all) but his motivation to do it is partly because he does NOT like being vulnerable, or of being reminded of a time in his past when he was weak and hungry and alone. Always being the rescuer is a great defense against that ... but in each book he walks around that same old tree, renegotiating his relationship to his desire to rescue. I think the way many of us walk around the same tree over and over is interesting. Anyway -- thank you for adding my book to your TBR stack, and I hope you enjoy it!

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  18. Hi, Karen. Congratulations on your new book. I apologize for not having read your books yet, but you are one of the authors I'm most trying to get to. I've heard such wonderful praise for your writing.

    On regrets. Julia already took my opening line, but I do think there's truth in it. Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I think that's how many of us have been guided to view the regrets issue. Yes, of course I've had some regrets (but then doesn't everyone), and I'm certainly not going to dwell on them. That's what we've been conditioned to make ourselves think about regrets, regrets as something we should sweep under the rug. However, you have me considering that maybe I've been too hasty to ignore regret. Maybe I should be examining it a bit more closely, still not dwelling on it, to see if patterns of behavior exist that might need changing.

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    1. Hi Kathy, thank you! I know ... we all have huge TBR stacks ... and it keeps growing ... like a sourdough start or something. :)
      I feel that all the comments today are helping me nuance my thoughts about regret. At the end of UAVM (not a spoiler) Michael comes to see that regret has value ... it can weigh heavily upon the heart, but it can also serve as ballast, something that steadies us, helps us steer forward (he's a boat guy, that's where he goes). And while I still cringe over some of my mistakes, I try (as someone above said) to be gentle with myself, and remind myself that I was doing the best I could at the time. And making amends, when we can, helps. Thanks for commenting, and when you get to UAVM, I'd love to hear what you think of it. :)

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  19. Hi Karen, and congratulations on the book! It's so nice to "meet" you here! I have Down a Dark River (what a fabulous title) on the top of my to-read pile, and have started A Dangerous Duet on my Kindle. The 1880's is such a fascinating period and I can't wait to explore more through your books. I was just reading a piece on Victorian fashion--it's hard to imagine how women wore such heavy and restrictive clothes, restraint both physical and psychological.

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    1. Hi Deborah, yes -- that 1870s-'80s period is absolutely fascinating. There's no end to the peculiar research tidbits I find. Thank you for adding some to your TBR stack. To be honest, I consider A Dangerous Duet my least "finished" book as my editor left partway through, although it was a plot that called out to me after I read about Fanny Dickens (Charles's older sister, a true prodigy, she was studying with one of Beethoven's students) who was forced to leave her study at the Royal Academy of Music because she couldn't afford tuition. I feel as though Down a Dark River is a step forward in terms of pacing and character ... but readers like different things. I hope you enjoy one or both -- and thanks for giving them a try! I will keep my eye out for your next appearance at the Poisoned Pen; that's my home turf. :)

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  20. Hank, thank you for checking on Joan. My first thought upon reading today's post was “Where is Joan?”! Karen I have read both of your Michael Corravan books and loved them. Hope you are busy writing book number 3.

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    1. Thank you, Susan! I'm so pleased you've read both books and loved them -- that's wonderful to hear! Makes me happy. ♥️♥️

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  21. That post was from Susan in Williamsbug, not sure why I am anonymous today.

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