I only wrote it, you don't expect me to know what's in it, do you?

Since I put the first word of Emily's adventures on paper, I have been surprised at what I find when I reread. I never thought Emily was me, but I found that she was often dealing with the same problems I was and that writing seemed to be a way for me to work through those problems. I started Emily when my mother had the fists stages of her terminal illness. Emily had just lost her husband. Emily dealt with it by moving to Europe for two years, I took long monthly train rides to Boston.

When I compiled 17 of the 50 or so Emily stories into a collection I discovered two other things. There is a lot of Sherlock Holmes in there and many real historical figures.

I'm not going to list the famous people. I have plans for them later. Emily grew up in Cambridge among many famous men and a few famous women. To her they were friends and neighbors. When she moved to Washington she wouldn't have though twice about the famous people she met there. She was quite used to moving in those circles.

I'm not keen on real historical people being the stars of their own book. The problem for me shows up in The Dante Club, a wonderful mystery about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his friends translating Dante into English. The author Matthew Pearl gets all the factual things right and probably all of those little nagging things that tell you who the character is. But his picture of Oliver Wendell Holmes and my picture of OWH are very different. Every time he brought his Holmes on the stage I cringed. Both interpretations are perfectly valid and in accordance with the historical record. In this case Holmes was a secondary character, but if he had been the star of the book, I would never have finished it.

Now the other Holmes: besides the title, The Case Book of Emily Lawrence, there are many references to the Conan Doyle's works. The first Emily story is set in 1859 and the first Holmes story wasn't published until 1887 so Emily herself would have known nothing of him until she was 35. Nevertheless, I had read every one of the stores except The Valley of Fear which I can't read for political reasons. How could references not creep into my work? It is possible that Emily met either Conan Doyle or Holmes himself when she was in London in 1891.
I have not found all of the references myself.

I have spent about twice as much time this week being a writer than I usually do. One expects a writer to write and maybe to read a little.

Writing? Very little of my time was spent actually putting new words into a document.  I wrote two paragraphs on a new Iccarus story. Maybe 200 words. I didn't write a blog or even work on an unfinished one.

Reading? Well, I read 71 pages of A Vile Justice by Lauren Haney.

So what did I work so hard at?

I read and scored the first ten pages of ten novels for a contest. Some were really good. Some needed work. Every one showed promise. I hope I have been able to convey that to the authors.

I read two submissions to my critique group, several book chapters each, just under 10,000 words.

Read a novel by a friend and author in order to write a comment for the back cover of the book. Watch for Requiem in Red by Kaye George.

Read a short story for another writer friend, Edith Maxwell. She writes several series, but this one is about a New England Quaker midwife, set in the 1880s. I love these stories. She is about to submit this one to an anthology. 4290 words.
I reread my critique group's comments on my submission to see which of their changes should be incorporated and how. Need to do more work on this.

Malice Domestic requested a list of this year's publications. So I emailed my editor to see when The Case Book of Emily Lawrence will be out. Sometime in April, so it will count for this year's conference. I also have a short story in this year's Malice anthology.

My daughter's book was due out on Friday so I spent some time tracking it down. Look for From the Deep (Weird Romance) by Elizabeth Inglee-Richards. I don't have a Kindle so I can't read the published version. OK, I read the draft before she submitted it.

I feel like I read about a gazillion emails. But I do that every week.

Best week ever!