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| What my desk looks like this week |
The randomness of my thinking today has to do with what I
have been up to. This past Friday, I
began in earnest to research a new novel, set in a brand new place, with brand
new people.
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| Another part of the forest |
The second of my British East Africa series, The Idol of Mombasa (Tolliver2), is sold and awaiting a pub date—sometime
next year. I have a decent second draft
of The Blasphemer, Tolliver3, which I
have put aside until I of M is
finalized. So I have picked up a new
story that has been haunting my imagination for about a year now.
Because I write historicals, getting the time, place, and
characters sufficiently vivid in my mind takes a lot of research, something
some writers find daunting or boring or both.
Not so I. Once I have amassed some source materials,
either at home or on my special, privileged shelf at the splendid New York
Public Library, I dive in and before I know it a torrent of story ideas is
pouring into my head. It’s an exciting
period for me. But it has its
drawbacks. I tend to lose track of time
and to neglect my everyday to-do list. I
work with such abandon that when I pick up my head, I find it’s getting dark
when it feels like it must be 11 AM.
With this going on for the past few days, I have been too
immersed to study up and write any of the blog topics I have had in mind to post
here. Hence these ramblings.
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| I live right under the "8" in "8th Street" |
This morning I tried to leave off the creation compulsion for
a few hours and go to visit David. I got
the car out of the garage and started for the Lincoln Tunnel at about 9:30. As I approached Fifth Avenue along East Ninth
Street, I saw a purple line painted down the center. Yikes!
The Gay Pride Parade. I had
forgotten it would be today. We have so
much to celebrate this week after the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality. This year, the annual ritual, which started
out as a protest of inequality, was bound to be even grander than usual. As in past years, the march was to start at
noon, come south, and spill onto my local streets. The revels, I knew from experience, would go
on until the wee hours of tomorrow morning.
Even if I could find a way west to New Jersey this morning, I would not
be able to drive home until well after midnight.
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| This year's NYC Grand Marshalls |
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| Huzzah! Hooray! But not a place to pass through with a car! |
At any rate, my way across Fifth Avenue was already blocked
by police barricades. I took the car
back to the garage and came home.
Other than that one
attempt to escape the vise grip of the new story, about the only things I have done
in the past four days were to “attend” a one-hour webinar about book marketing and
to post once in while on Facebook, which gave me the illusion of being in someway
still connected to real friends. As
opposed to my whole new set of fictional ones.
Here is where the computer as an unreliable eyewitness comes into this
stream of unconsciousness.
On Thursday, which is TBT (Throw-back Thursday) on Facebook,
I posted a few photos from a trip David and I took to Malta in 2010. Now you likely have read in posts here on MIE
that although eyewitness accounts are given great weight by jurors, such
reports are in point of fact very unreliable.
People can make mistakes. You
might have thought computers would be more likely to know spew out facts. That is where you would be wrong.
Tell me. Are these
two pictures of the same person?
The top photo is David on a ferry between two Maltese
islands. The second one is my friend and
fellow mystery writer Jeff Markowitz.
The main thing these two men have ever had in common is a hilarious
wit. Not something that shows in a photo. But Facebook’s algorithm labeled my photo of
David as one of Jeff. And Facebook told
the world that in 2010, I had traveled to Malta with Jeff Markowitz. No matter how hard I try, I cannot convince Facebook
to retract its false testimony.
Carol Markowitz, Jeff’s darling wife, being a reliable human
eyewitness, can look at a picture of my husband and recognize that he is not
her husband. Thanks to that, no
marriages have been ruined in this process.
Annamaria - Monday
