Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "enola-holmes"

The idea was nothing if not high concept: give Sherlock Holmes a kid sister who can show him a thing or two. The research was vast but exhilarating. The writing was a challenge but a delight. Why, then, when I finished the initial Enola Holmes manuscript, did I tremble like a first-time author as I sent it in to my agent? I was an old hand at this stuff; I knew how to process criticism and shrug off rejection. So why was I feeling so uncharacteristically vulnerable regarding Enola?

That question went unanswered for a while. My agent and my editor greeted Enola with enthusiasm, so I forgot my vapours and got busy writing the second book in the series. But sometime after publication, when readers started asking about the hows and the whenceforths, I realized, with a shock, that Enola was entirely too much like me, Nancy, age awkward, lonely fourteen.

Of course all fiction writers extrapolate from their own lives. But I had exposed way more of my tender underbelly than I realized when I wrote Enola. The Case of the Missing Marquess, in particular, shows a remarkable number of parallels:

Like Enola, I had two older brothers I hardly knew. Both were off to college before I reached puberty.

Like Enola, I was a scrawny, bony, gawky tree-climbing tomboy with hair that needed to be washed.

Like Enola, I was solitary and bookish.

Like Enola, I was raised by Victorians. Actually, my parents were born in 1906 and 1909, but they might as well have been Victorians.

Like Enola, I was a tardy arrival in my parents’ lives. My mother was forty when she had me. Forty was a lot older back then than it is now.

Like Enola’s mother, mine was an artist. Actually, she made a good living doing pet portraits in oils, but what she loved to paint (like Enola’s mother) was delicate watercolor flowers. And when she had painted, say, a rose in bloom, it breathed sunlight and summer breezes from the paper. Her talent was extraordinary.

Also like Enola’s mother, mine was an individualist. I recently realized that in all my life to date – I am now on Medicare – I have never met anyone else even remotely like my mother. That’s how one-of-a-kind she was.

Finally, my mother, like Enola’s mother, “ran away” when I was fourteen. No, not literally, which was why I did not suspect I was writing about myself when I created Enola. My mother’s body remained in residence, but somehow the better part of her seemed to have gone elsewhere. In retrospect, I realize that in all likelihood Mom was having problems with menopause. But of course, in my strait-laced family, no one said so. And there was something else my parents were not telling me: Mom had cancer. I dare say that her health problems preoccupied her a bit and caused her to lose interest in me.

Unlike Enola’s mother, mine did not die. She beat the cancer. But then I went away to college, and then Dad died and Mom moved to Florida, still “gone elsewhere,” and she never did come back. She had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia for the last decades of her life.

Whew.

So it’s no wonder that Enola Holmes and I formed an instant bond. It’s no wonder that, the moment I needed her, she sprang out of my unconscious mind complete with a name, a physique and a personality. But it is a wonder that I could write about her for so long without realizing that her loneliness was my own and her heartache an expression of the long-forgotten heartache of my teenage years.

No wonder I felt more than a twinge of apprehension when I sent her off to the big city – not London, but New York. Does anybody else out there think that editors and agents take on somewhat of a parental role to authors? If so, I wasn’t aware of it until just now, thinking about Enola and understanding at last why I felt so apprehensive as I packed her off: I was afraid Mummy might not love her = me.

Isn’t it wonderful that Enola’s story has a happy ending? To all of the many readers who love Enola Holmes, let it be known: she loves you, too.

My self-description “Last seen wandering vaguely” applies many times over to my career as a fiction writer. Indeed, more than careering, I have careened, the literary equivalent of a runaway banana truck, through publishers and genres. Sure, a lot of authors change genres from time to time, but usually as a business decision, or at least that’s what they tell me.

I can speak only for myself in saying business had very little to do with it.

Mythic fantasy, for instance. That’s how I started, as a youngster, writing one heroic fantasy novel after another. Selling the books was very nice indeed, but I was writing because I desperately needed to do it, unconsciously striving to pull myself out of depression and put myself together as a viable person. My paired heroes, such as Hal and Alan in THE SILVER SUN, were me and me, not yet one integrated person. The imaginary landscape where they battled with evil was my psyche, and their quest, ultimately, was to heal me.

Given the way I started, my wonderful agent, the late, great Virginia Kidd, fully expected me to continue writing one successful fantasy after another until I nailed a Lifetime Achievement award. But after the first decade or so, I felt better and wanted to turn my vision outward, toward the real world. Also, I had realized that, duh, I was female, not Hal plus Alan. (You can see me struggling toward this epiphany of the obvious in WINGS OF FLAME.) Trying for a compromise with Virginia, I continued to write fantasy, but made it contemporary fantasy (set in the real world) with female protagonists. Examples: LARQUE ON THE WING, FAIR PERIL, THE HEX WITCH OF SELDOM.

These novels of “magical realism” got rave reviews, honors and awards, but not much by way of sales.

Fine with me. I felt more than ready to move on.

I was, in fact, ready to have a happy childhood. (It’s never too late.) I bought a horse and started writing horse books for kids. These took place in the real world, as realistic as I could possibly make it. I ended up writing horse books that were more than just “horse books.” Within a few years they started getting older in tone, turning into YA and neglecting to include a horse. Instead, they more often dealt with problems of identity, deception, and crime.

One of these YA novels, TOUGHING IT, startled me very much by winning an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

I did not believe I wrote mystery or ever could.

The next year, LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER won another Edgar in the juvenile category.

The sensible career move for me, at this point, would have been to start writing mystery, yes?

No, ma’am. That would have been way too logical. Instead, I reverted to literary fantasy via two Arthurian novels, I AM MORDRED and I AM MORGAN LE FAY.

See what I mean about the careening career? The wacky truth seemed to be that, at any given time, I could write something, but not always what would seem called for. Even I couldn’t predict what was going to blort out of me next. Some perverse personal daemon seemed to dictate my course far more than the marketplace did. Several books and several years passed before I finally achieved mystery with the help of Conan Doyle via the Enola Holmes series. Two of the Enolas were nominated for Edgars. Neither won. But they’ve been a worldwide success, whereas my earlier Edgar winners faded into obscurity. Go figure.

Over the past few years, any number of people have urged me to write more Enola Holmes novels, and I wish I could, but I can’t. Not anymore. That particular genie is out of the bottle.

Instead, I am writing psychological suspense spotlighting middle-aged women rescuing abducted children. DARK LIE, a humdinger if I do say so myself, is already out there, and DRAWN INTO DARKNESS is to be released in November, 2013. I have no idea why I wrote them or what’s coming next.

In other words, I’m a wordcrafter on wheels careening along just fine. See ya later.

You want to know the truth? When I get a brilliant book idea, write it as if my head were on fire, and send in what I think is a masterpiece, usually it won’t sell. In this way I’ve written books about a pregnant man, about the gillygaloo bird laying cubical eggs and weeping itself into a puddle of self pity, about feral cats in search of Tyger tyger burning bright, and angels with angle-wings (type of butterfly), and a swamp Sasquatch, and twins separated by faerie, and – and many more; can you understand why I don’t want to remember them all?

I mention this lest anyone be disappointed with the rather uninspired way the Enola Holmes books came about.

They started out being business as usual. For a decade I’d worked closely with a savvy editor at Penguin, starting with I AM MORDRED and I AM MORGAN LE FAY, after which I suggested the Rowan Hood series – five books, five years. But it was barely finished when my editor phoned me and said, approximately, “Nancy, what I want you to do for me next is a series set in darkest London at the time of Jack the Ripper. Children’s lit is getting darker and darker. I’d have you do Jack the Ripper only somebody else already is.”

Whaaaat? I’d never been to England, let alone London, I’d never written straight historical fiction, I felt no fondness for Jack the Ripper, and I had to remind myself seriously that this editor had guided me well so far.

Because of that, I knew I ought to give the idea some thought.

So I thought: as a child, I’d read my family’s King Arthur book to shreds; hence I AM MORDRED and I AM MORGAN LE FAY. I’d read the Robin Hood book to tatters; hence Rowan Hood. Now, had I compulsively read anything set in Victorian London?

Well, I had all but memorized my mother’s complete set of Sherlock Holmes.

Huh.

Still doubtful, I checked dates; was Jack the Ripper contemporary with Sherlock Holmes? Yes, I had a handle on the right era. So, regarding possible book premises, feminist that I am I thought: how about “daughter of Sherlock Holmes?”

But I didn’t think it more than a nanosecond before shaking my head. Sherlock Holmes, veritable Victorian monk of a bachelor, with a daughter, or any child? Inconceivable.

Okay, maybe "little sister of Sherlock Holmes?

A fiction premise began to form. I counted backwards and decided on the year of Enola’s birth. By now she was Enola, a name with which I’d been familiar for all the years I’d lived in Pennsylvania. There was a railroad town called Enola along the Susquehanna River, named after the founder’s mother. Curious about the moniker, I’d discovered that backwards it spelled “alone.” The Victorians sometimes gave their girls strangely melancholy names such as Perdita (“lost”) and Dolores (“sad”). Oscar Wilde’s sister was names Isola, “the isolated one.” Go figure.

I’ve always been a loner, so Enola began to take shape in my heart and mind as an extension of myself. Her provenance pointed toward a mystery series, and I’d won a couple of Edgar awards seemingly by mistake, so I decided to give mystery a try. But not murder mystery. This was supposed to be a children’s series, and anyway I had always preferred stories about missing persons.

I dove into research. Blast my mother for giving away her Annotated Sherlock Holmes books to someone else; those suckers are expensive. But I managed to find a first volume, which was all I needed, el cheapo. It affirmed what I had always thought: Conan Doyle's chronology is so messed up I couldn't do it any further harm. THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES blessedly included a map of London in the 1880s. I internalized the map by drawing and labeling it. After that, I researched every which way, but I especially needed visual reference. John Thomson’s VICTORIAN LONDON STREET LIFE IN HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS proved invaluable. So did coloring books from Dover Publications, whether dissecting Victorian houses (I had to be careful; these were different in England than in America), Victorian costume, Victorian hotels or Victorian flowers. Also, I sent away for videos of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, and I learned how to use the VCR player so I could watch them over and over, pausing to take notes on details of setting.

Before I could possibly finish all the research I needed, I had to write the first volume of the Enola Holmes series. I was very, very nervous about sending it in, even though I’d found out so much of London was destroyed during World War II that nobody would know I was fudging it. I was relieved that my editor liked the book, but I was joking when I suggested calling it The Case of the Missing Marquess, shades of Perry Mason. Duh. Never lock yourself into alliterative titles. Also, after the first book, the editor expected a code or cipher in each one. Ouch! Like Enola, I didn’t like ciphers, but I learned to.

So I was hobbled in ways, making the books parlous difficult to write. Each had three plots: Enola finding her mother, Enola finding a missing person, and Enola fooling her brothers. And I’m not a plotter; I’m a character-driven writer! I soooo did not write the Enola Holmes books as if my head were on fire. Usually, writing them felt more as if my head were being used to break rocks.

Writing volume two before the first one was published, I strove for that Darkest London setting, as I was originally directed. That’s why THE CASE OF THE LEFT-HANDED LADY is grimmer than the others. But by the time I got to volume three, THE CASE OF THE BIZARRE BOUQUETS, sales had boosted my confidence and Enola had taken over. Completely. She wanted to dress up. She no longer cared about Darkest London and she no longer cared that she was supposed to be for children. Vocabulary restrictions be hanged! Onward and upward, Excelsior!

Considering all the research I had done, I wanted to write maybe twenty Enola Holmes books, but she disagreed. She wanted character arc and resolution, not the usual slow death of most series. Necessarily I listened to her, and each of the books got better than the last. My only regret is that I didn’t find out until too late that Florence Nightingale owned seventy-six white Persian cats. (THE CASE OF THE CRYPTIC CRINOLINE.) What feline fun Enola and I could have had with them!

I love Enola; how can I not love Enola? In many ways she is a fictional incarnation of me. Yet I can’t help feeling irony: here am I, capital-F feminist, standing on the shoulders of a misogynist, namely Conan Doyle? Annoying. Even more annoying: One of my critics has been unkind enough to suggest that authors shouldn’t ride on the coattails of existing works, but should write their own stories, dammit.

Well, I did, dammit. And I still do. And some of them actually get published and do well. Nevertheless, I remain most gratified and truly honoured to have made the acquaintance of Enola Holmes.

Back in the 1990s, although I had changed genres several times, I swore I didn’t write mystery and never could, not me. Mystery as I knew it was plotty and artificial, lavished with red herrings like ornaments on a Christmas tree. (Brief, dreadful visual of tree decorated w/ red herrings, suppressed.) Also it trivialized the loss of human life. So I wasn’t going there, thank you. As a writer I like to challenge myself, BUT. (Voice of Meatloaf: “I will do anything to get published, but I WON’T DO THAT.”)

However, one boring summer, feeling the urge to try something new, I decided to write a book for people who don’t care to read. Let’s make guns for pacifists, grow cattle for vegetarians, roll spitballs for teachers? Ah, but the marketing did make sense after all, because those teachers would thrust my product upon the reluctant readers, who were predominantly teenage boys. In order to seduce them (in a nonsexual way), my protagonist would have to be a male teen who was BAD. Ideally, he should be inner-city, but having never lived in a city, I didn’t think I could pull that off. However, I’d been in contact with a rather scary family living in an isolated, ramshackle trailer on the flood plain of the Susquehanna river. Tuff could live there. (Already my tough boy’s nickname was Tuff.)

And what would Tuff do? I knew he had to grab the reader from the first sentence and never let go. No problem: my kids had told me about one of their high-school classmates who had been riding his dirt bike when he ran into a trap somebody had set. A cable strung across a wooded trail at neck height had crushed his windpipe and killed him. I found this so disturbing and just plain mean that I needed to write about it. I couldn’t kill off Tuff, of course, but I could kill off his brother and Tuff could be right there on the bike behind him. Tuff would have a very, very hard time dealing with his brother’s death. Because he was “tough,” rather than grieving he would seek revenge. He would nearly kill an innocent man.

I wrote TOUGHING IT in first person viewpoint using Tuff’s voice. His mother was drunk as usual and unsupportive when he told her about his brother’s death. He had no father. His approximate stepfather was abusive. He ran away from home. By the time I got to Chapter Five of the novel, writing from my gut, I began to wonder whether the story was so sad and depressing that no reader, reluctant or otherwise, would be able to stand it. So I pulled back, trying to lighten up. I managed to finish the manuscript on a positive note.

Then, as is my rule, I put it aside for a while. But one day my daughter, fourteen years old at the time, wandered into my office complaining of nothing to do. I handed her the print backup of the manuscript. “Here, read this.”

Rather to my surprise she did so. Two hours later she returned. “Mom, the beginning is okay, but the ending is, like, lame. You never said who did the murder.”

To which I retorted, “It’s not a murder mystery. It’s about Tuff’s grieving process.”

“Whatever.” She meandered off.

The truth was, if the four stages of grief are denial, anger, depression and acceptance, I had pretty much skipped denial and depression. But in due time I finished (I thought) TOUGHING IT and sent it in. The first editor who saw it rejected it, but one of the nice things about being agented is they always tell you why they declined. The editor said that the manuscript was very strong through Chapter Five, but at that point the author had evidently chickened out. Also, the author needed to solve the murder mystery. If the author did these things, the editor would be interested in seeing the book again.

Well. Guess who should have listened to her gut. And her daughter.

I had utterly no idea who had killed Tuff’s brother. In the real-life case I was trying to exorcise, no one was ever prosecuted. In the book, I had turned the cable into a shotgun rigged by a trip wire, because Tuff wanted to have his revenge in kind, and it’s easier/more believable to tote a gun around than a cable. By the way, I am still ticked off at whoever in the pub house changed “triggers” to “trigger’s.” A double barreled shotgun has two triggers, for gosh sake.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I still needed a murderer. So I called my brother Ben, ex-cop, and he told me the guys growing marijuana in the state forest land on top of the mountain did it. I didn’t even know they were there before he told me. He also explained how to rig up the shotgun trap. This is why TOUGHING IT is dedicated to Ben.

Duly revised, it was eventually accepted by the same wise editor, and upon publication it became an ALA/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA/YALSA Recommended Book for the Reluctant Young Adult Reader, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Better yet, I heard this from an English teacher: one of her students, a boy who had never read a novel in his life, finished TOUGHING IT in a day, then demanded, “Youse got any more books by this here lady?”

These honors, and good reviews, and the good news from the teacher, pleased me enormously, but I hope you will not think I suffer from an enlarged head if I say they did not surprise me. I mean, TOUGHING IT was my twentieth published novel, and I’d heard nice things about my books before. But I WAS surprised – indeed, astonished – when I received word that this book for reluctant readers was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. I was nonplussed, dumbfounded, and astounded, because I knew I didn’t write mystery.

My agent encouraged me to attend the award ceremony, a very dressy affair in New York City, if only for the sake of mingling, and she convinced me by promising to go with me. But I felt sure I could not possibly win. For something to wear, I borrowed from my daughter the long black standby she wore when playing violin solos. I enjoyed the trip to New York, and hobnobbing with my agent, and the parties, and how nice everybody at the Edgars was to me, and the dinner, European style, salad served at the end.

As for receiving the award, I was stunned. I went up to the podium and dithered. I had no speech prepared, because I did not write mystery. My agent informed me, “Now you do,” but I still didn’t believe her.

Not until I won another one the next year, for LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER.

Then I got serious, wrote some short stories for the mystery magazines, and eventually wrote the ENOLA HOLMES series, thanks to the two Edgars I won by mistake. But I haven’t received any since I began writing mystery.

Ever since I was a small child, I have suffered from a psychological condition neglected by Freud, forcing me to label it myself: Crayon Envy. My older brothers, presumably, possessed fully realized crayons in their formative years, but I was left with nothing but a box of stubs, causing me feelings of frustration and inferiority. I repressed these emotions into adulthood, but they painfully resurfaced when I bought my children their first crayons. As the kids scribbled, I struggled not to snatch Colors Incarnate In Wax away from them. Those were of course Crayola crayons, the best, and my Crayon Envy sharpened into Crayola Envy that drew me into buying boxes of 24, then 48, then the extravagant 64. But any satisfaction I gained was merely vicarious; the crayons were for my offSpringers. My maternal protection of the children’s self-actualization trumped my own fulfillment until, after years of feeling conflicted, I came to a powerful realization: If I were ever to resolve my issues, I needed to provide myself with a pristine box of shiny, pointy Crayola crayons.

And coloring books. I forgot to mention, my mother wouldn’t let me have coloring books. She didn’t believe in them. So my first coloring book of my very own, featuring mandalas, I bought for myself on the Internet.

After that my fixation rapidly escalated. I bought myself lots of coloring books, plus crayons to the max, specifically Crayola’s box of 120 with a Mr. Crayon orange plastic sharpener thrown in. Oh, sure, I fooled around with Twistables and markers, but nothing else did it for me like the Big Box of Crayola.

I might have been on my second Big Box when I started to write about Enola Holmes. Or rather, when I started preparing to write about Enola Holmes. What daunted me, overwhelmed me, and, to tell the truth, nearly made me drop the whole thing, was the enormous amount of research I faced. I had to write from the point of view of a girl in 1880, * gasp, choke.* I had never previously written historical novels, for the exact and precise reason that research scares me.

Fortuitously, at this crux I happened across The Victorian House Coloring Book, illustrated by Daniel Lewis, written and researched by Kristin Helberg.

Researched? Yes. Every picture was accompanied by detailed notes. That wonderful book took me, room by room, through what eventually became Ferndell Hall, Enola’s ancestral home. Her bedroom is in the coloring book. Mrs. Lane’s kitchen is in there, too. And the parlor, and the porch, and the library; all of these are where Crayola helped me connect with Enola. Coloring, say, fire screens and silk lampshades enabled me to internalize Victorian decor and the pastimes of Victorian ladies much better than reading could. Also, by coloring furniture and other structures, I better understood how things worked. Why the bathroom and the water closet were two separate places. How pictures were hung. What washstands were for. All sorts of things.

So far, so good, supplemented by other research, but what was I to do when Enola went to London?

Enter Tom Tierney’s coloring books of Victorian fashions for men, women, and children. I hadn’t realized how truly ridiculous Sherlock’s “deerstalker” hat was until I colored one. Also thoroughly researched, Tierney’s books included scholarly introductions and helpful notes. “The most popular colors for corsets were white, black, yellow, blue, and lavender.” Now, where else would I have learned that? “Preferred colors for ladies’ riding habits were brown, dark green, bronze-green, or black.” Bronze-green! I would never have thought of such a wondrous hue by myself. And who knew that real kidskin gloves were yellow?

Altogether, in the course of writing the Enola Holmes mystery novels, I colored three different books of Victorian architecture and another three of Victorian costume. Oh, yes, and one, most helpful, about the Victorian language of flowers.

It’s too bad I couldn’t find coloring books on Victorian Rookeries (slums), Victorian Street Entertainers (dancing bears) and Victorian Social Evils (hookers), but I made do. What I really needed, and never found, was a coloring book or a book with illustrations or even something on the Internet about barouches, broughams, chaises, gigs, landaus, phaetons, traps, dog carts, carriages, and cabs, none of which were drawn by dogs; all were horse-drawn vehicles. I would have enjoyed coloring the horses, too.

“Enjoy” is what the Enola/Crayola connection was all about. Who knew I could enjoy research? The first rule of fiction writing is “Show, don’t tell,” meaning that the novelist should create a visual experience for the reader. Therefore, the writer requires a thorough visual understanding of the subject matter. How better to acquire it, intimately and in concrete detail, than with a college-level coloring book and a quality set of crayons – or colored pencils, if preferred?

Besides which: Hey Mom, lookie what I did!