Strangely Quiet

All is quiet and strange here in South Brooklyn after the storm.  I woke today to find our street untouched but for a few broken tree limbs.  Then I walked our neighborhood to find enormous trees overturned, Red Hook boarded and broken, trapped under water, and the toxic Gowanus canal overflowing.

Today I feel very fortunate.  We live on the waterfront, tucked in between the New York harbor and that canal.  It is a wonder that the ground slopes just right, to leave us elevated enough to reside in "Zone B", to escape what so much of this city has not.

Our offices are uncharacteristically silent and unreachable. Water has filled the subway tunnels. So the underground veins of New York City, it's lifeline, are empty.  There is no coming or going.  There is no timeframe for repair because there is no precedent.

My window looks out towards the harbor. In the distance I can see downtown Manhattan. Tonight, it is  completely dark.  

I am thinking of those who have lost so much.

Dreaming Still

So maybe, these weeks, I've been dreaming. Desperate to avoid news coverage, all the election shouting and slinging and an unimaginable tragedy on the Upper West Side.  

And it's possible I've been walking through my days with a singular focus, a steady determination to finish each task and move on to the next one without looking around me at all.  

And maybe it's been a bit like holding my ears, shaking my head, and la-la-la-ing, as I've needed to retreat, retreat, and ignore.

Now a Sandy storm is raging, wake up, Melissa, wake up. 

But before I do. Look. This statue in the Boston Commons.  And the famous Little Miss M fluttering through her living room. And, in a way, me.  Lighter and free-er and less worried and more like someone I used to be.

In Love with 'Humans of New York'

I'll never know how this site escaped me for so long but Humans of New York is my latest obsession.

This site, for me, IS New York City.  Photographer Brandon Stanton sees my city exactly as I see it. Heart-swelling. Pulsing. Complex. Alive.

There are a million places to go in New York and, yet, when people visit, I never know where to take them.    Maybe that's because the heart of New York is, above all else, its people. Brandon figured that out.

I am IN LOVE with this video. Such a romantic, perfect tribute to the city I love.  I hope you'll click on it (it won't let me share it here.)

Guest Post: Let Setting Emerge From Character

The lovely and talented Laurel Garver is taking over the blog today!   She's going to talk about one of my favorite topics, setting, and how she worked with it in her novel Never Gone.  

Setting is a key element of my novel, Never Gone, about a teen who is grieving the death of her British father, and must somehow build a life with her workaholic American mother. Danielle’s trip from the US to England becomes a catalyst for her to get to the bottom of family secrets. Setting also undergirds the story flow, as one of my reviewers on Amazon picked up: "From the sky-scrapers of New York, to the hills of England, Garver brings you on a lyrical journey that rolls with highs and lows, full of valleys of tenderness."

Thanks, Melissa, for the opportunity to talk about how I chose some of my settings and used a mix of research and imagination to bring them to the page.

The opening of Never Gone is set in New York City. Why not Philadelphia, since you live there?

My story decisions usually develop out of the characters, rather than the other way around. As I got to know my protagonist Dani’s parents, Graham and Grace, it became clear that no other place would work for them. Grace is a driven advertising executive who would never settle for working outside Madison Avenue. Making a living as a professional photographer—which is Graham’s career—requires proximity to the most potential purchasers of this kind of service, like ad agencies.
Honestly, though, New York City is only two hours away, and we have friends there who’ve been a great help answering my questions about family life in the city. I did five trips (combined with family fun) to chose Dani’s neighborhoods and gather sensory details.

How much are your New York locations real, and how much a fabrication?

Dani’s homes in Park Slope Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are based on real buildings. I was able to find real estate listings for her UWS high rise, including floor plans, which I adapted slightly.
Dani’s school Rexford Academy is a fabrication based roughly on a private school on 91st, though I place it in the West 70s. Her church is riff on All Angels in the Upper West Side, mixed with several Anglican/Episcopal churches I’ve visited in the US and Britain.

I think it’s important to make your fabrications realistic by drawing details from real places.

A majority Never Gone takes place in a rural English village, Ashmede. How did you choose the location? How real are your British settings?

I wanted the time that Dani spent in her late father’s hometown to challenge her strong identification with him. The setting had to be a big contrast from her very American, very urban home, so her dad is not only foreign, but rural.

I’d originally planned to set the story in the Cotswolds in the southwest near Wales, where I lived for a semester in college. But while I was researching and drafting, friends invited us to visit them in Durham, which is up north. When I discovered that folks from northern Britain face deep prejudice in the south, it made Graham’s back story even more compelling. He’d have a hard time breaking into photography in London because of his accent, and would more easily find work in the US. Americans don’t understand or really even hear regional differences among British dialects.

So that visit turned into a major research trip. I invented Ashmede (a popular name for streets, but no village bears it) from places I visited then, and a North Yorkshire village I stayed in during spring break as a student. Durham Cathedral, a real location I fell in love with on my research trip, is the backdrop for several chapters. I also set a chapter at Kings Cross Station, where all the northbound trains leave London. It worked nicely on a couple of levels, including Dani’s love of Harry Potter.

What advice would you give other writers about setting?

Remember that where you come from shapes who you are. Start with your character and do your best to follow logically where such a person would come from and where he or she would naturally chose to go from there.

Second, there is no substitute for real, on-the-ground research. Even if you choose to invent a town like I did, you need authentic details from that geographic area. What is the weather like? What unique topographical features (mountains, forests, deserts, etc.) affect daily life? What is local cuisine and how does it taste? How does the area typically smell and sound? Is the culture informal and inviting or uptight and suspicious? What do the locals do for fun? What slang expressions are typical? You can’t get any of that information from Google street view.
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Laurel Garver is the author of the Never Gone, a young adult novel about a grieving teen who believes her dead father has returned as a ghost to help her reconcile with her estranged mother.

Add it on Goodreads. It is available at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, CreateSpace.

(Not Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: Something Inside Me Stirs Enough

I saw this little girl the other day and when I took this photograph it felt like stealing. I don't know. Look at her. She's stars and hearts and purple and sparkle.  All the things you can not possibly take.

It reminded me of something I wrote a while ago. A manuscript that lost its way.  The moment you fall in love with something you can not keep.

I wake up in the window, tucked in the corner of the sill, like a house plant you forget to water. The glass has become a pillow, the only place I can actually rest my head and sleep.  My cat curls up on the old blue shed across the way, in someone else's yard, under a canopy of bare trees and electrical wires.  I call him mine but, of course, he isn't.  He belongs to a stranger.  I haven't known him until now, until I stopped attending school, stopped spending afternoons in practice rooms and evenings with Graca as I played and she paced.

But now I see that he is there each day unless it rains.  He is fat, which means he's well-fed by this stranger, and he bunches himself up on the same spot of sun for hours. He has claimed it and I have claimed him.  Something inside me stirs enough to feel as though I've fallen in love. 

I place my hand against the glass, try to feel the winter cold in my palm.  I wonder if he is as numb to the cold as my hand is, how he endures such long hours in frigid temperatures, if the swelling sun is enough to keep him warm. 

Obligations

I enjoy reading and owning physical cookbooks.  I can spend hours in a bookstore running my fingers across glossy photographs of food, thumbing through pages of measurements and ingredients.  I also enjoy the small stories that come with them. Sometimes I crave the story more than the food.

Ina Garten, whose recipes have never failed me, wrote at the beginning of Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? about dinner parties:

Your friends have come to see you -- not to critique your cooking skills.  I'm asked all the time, "How many hors d'oeuvres do I need to make before dinner?"  

"None," is my answer.

I think of this often.  Not only when it comes to cooking but when it comes to life.  Sometimes I ask too much of myself. I invent obligations. In sorting through what matters, sometimes I fail to see what doesn't.

Lucky

I wanted to share some photos from my birthday.  At the very last minute, we escaped for a few hours to the legendary town of Sleepy Hollow because I wanted to see the foliage.  Then Tyler surprised me with dinner and jazz at Smoke.  

I walked a blue-sky day with someone I love. I closed my eyes and was moved by the sound of music. I continue to feel lucky.