This morning I found the original outline (55 pages worth) of Emeralds Included.

My first concept was unrecognizable from the finished book—different characters, different subplots, different everything. There was stuff about an accident in a roller-skating competition and about a retired judge suffering from memory problems. All pretty groan-inducing.

My editor, Marjorie Braman, had entered comments. On page 15, she said, “So far, you don’t have a lot of plot.” And later, “Not sure if this is going anywhere.” Yet further on, she simply asked, “Necessary?”

Even the titles I was considering I now think are awful:

Blues and Greens
Memories are Made of This
A Matter of Judgment
Kiss, Please

The thing is, drafts two–three-four–five–still looked a lot different from the final version.

Writing a novel is like a hike through different landscapes. It reminds me of my one notable athletic exploit, climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. (I had to be pushed the last 500 feet.)

The rain forest at the start of the climb gives you no idea of the alpine meadows coming up, let alone of the steep slope with the loose stones near the summit. To get to your destination, you just have to say goodbye to one zone and keep on going into the next.

People too are unrecognizable from one stage to the next. Here’s my granddad James B. Woodman at one, sixteen, and seventy-five years of age.

Photo credit: Woodman family collection

So. Happy New Year, all, and good luck on the project you have going, whatever stage it’s at–or whatever stage you’re at.

My Christmas dinner centerpiece was pretty simple: a parrot figurine pulling a sled with some bonbons on it.

Somehow the parrot got separated from the bonbons and started wandering among the place settings.

Which reminded me of Mr. Ganguly, Jana’s pet parrot.

I wrote dozens of scenes that didn’t make it into the Jana Bibi series. Here’s one (trimmed) about Jana acting as fortune-teller in her parlor.

A Scientist comes into the Salon

The sign identifying “Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes” was on
the wall near the gate, touched up with fresh paint. Jana, dressed in a red peasant skirt and jacket, was at her table in the salon, and Mr. Ganguly was on his perch, alert and poised.

Who would walk through the door today? A lovesick schoolgirl? A
writer waiting to hear if his short story had been accepted by the
Illustrated Weekly of India?

The bell tinkled, and in came the first customer of the season.
Jana detected nervousness in the young man with tortoise-shell
glasses and the unruly black hair. She bid him namasté and invited him to
sit down.

“I can’t tell you my name,” the man said, “because I don’t want it known that I am here.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Jana said, taken aback. “Are you on the
run from the law?”

“No, no,” the young man forced himself to laugh. “I am a
scientist. For the government.”

“Goodness,” Jana said. “You must be fearfully brilliant.”

A smile passed over the young man’s face, to be replaced by a
grimace of worry.

“Not brilliant enough,” he said. “And not up to the task ahead
of me!”

“Which is?”

“Convincing my superiors that a catastrophe is in the making.”

“And is it?” Jana asked.

“Yes. A massive earthquake here in the Himalayas. One hundred percent probability. Tectonic plates are grinding their way toward collision. Mountain peaks are being pushed upward! Even as we sit here, the Jolly Grant House is rising.”

“Surely not,” Jana said, although, already, she didn’t feel as
solid in her chair.

“Ah, but yes. An imperceptible amount today, but this much in a
year.” He held his fingers a centimeter apart, then said, “Think of what
that means in a century!” and indicated a spread of a yard.

“What?” screeched Mr. Ganguly.

“Now you’ve got him worried, too,” Jana said.

“He should be worried,” said the young man.

“But,” said Jana. “How can I be of any help to you in writing
this report?”

“I’ve decided,” the scientist said, “that at the end of my
report, I will include the opinions of astrologers, tea leaf readers, and
other such practitioners. Those who predict the future–such as your good
self.”

By now, Jana felt confused. “But surely, those opinions won’t have any
credence, will they? Haven’t you got to pile up the report with statistics
and graphs and words with Greek roots?”

“Ah, yes,” said the young man. “I will have to talk about
confidence intervals. But I will end by going straight to the heart of
belief.”

“And how is that done?”

“Refer to tradition. Appeal to emotion.”

“Well, fine, let’s go ahead, then,” Jana said. “We’ll use Mr.
Ganguly’s favorite technique, which is picking a card from among the Hindu
gods and goddesses.”

She took her brand new pack of cards from the sideboard,
shuffled them, dealt out ten, and spread them across the table face down,
the red and gold backs looking like little soldiers in parade uniform.

Mr. Ganguly hopped down from his perch, then marched back and
forth across the table, appearing to be in the throes of indecision.
Finally, he picked a card and, with a theatrical bow, handed it to the young
scientist.

Glancing at it quickly, the man laid it on the table face up.

“Aha! It is just as I keep saying, the big earthquake is 100% certain. And
even your parrot agrees. He has chosen Ravana—He of the Deafening Roar. The
king of Lanka, the demon who kidnapped Sita.”

He turned to the parrot. “What do you think, my avian friend?
Will we soon be shook to our very foundations?”

“All shook up!” Mr. Ganguly said, sagely.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes the first line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between.

In New Hampshire, you can often take a day trip to that foreign country and do things the way they do them there. You can dance traditional square and contra dances on the scuffed wooden floors of grange buildings or squirm through lectures in the back-breaking pews of village meeting houses.

On Sunday, I played in a Scottish concert given by the Strathspey & Reel Society of New Hampshire on the stage of the Franklin (New Hampshire) Opera House.

Photo credit Betsy Woodman

Over many years, the auditorium had been taken over for use as town offices, until a group of citizens decided to revive it as a venue for arts and entertainment. Last weekend, it was also used for a “festival of trees,” which created a colorful holiday setting for our show.

Photo credit Evelyn Roberts

As I went up and down the creaking flights of stairs, explored the warren of rooms in the basement, and helped rearrange chairs on the stage, I was moved by a feeling of going back in time.

My grandmother, Ethel Everett, was one of the fifteen students–-ten girls and five boys–to receive her high school diploma on that stage, in 1901. According to the Franklin Journal-Transcript (oh, browsing through that is really time travel), she was the class secretary and got an award for “highest rank for two years.”

For some reason, after high school she did an additional year of college prep, before going on to be a German language major at Wellesley College. This was years before women got the vote in this country.

Ethel Everett, age 14, Berry Photographers, Turners Falls, MA

After college, Ethel returned to Franklin to find a young doctor, James B. Woodman, very busy with his country practice–setting bones broken in factory accidents, doing emergency surgery by kerosene lantern in isolated farmhouses, and using what little tools medicine could offer to combat tuberculosis, smallpox, diphtheria, measles, and typhoid.

I’m wondering if their romance started at the Franklin Unitarian Society, where both took part in an amateur theatrical in 1907. (They’re on the right, center and back rows.)

“A Case of Suspension,” Currier Studio, Franklin, NH

Anyway, they married in 1910, and took off on their wedding trip in Dr. Jim’s Pope-Hartford. (My dad always said that my grandfather drove too fast, and I can believe it from this photo.)

Photo credit Woodman Family Collection

Early during their marriage, my grandmother would accompany my granddad on some of his rounds and even assist in surgery. I can just see them skidding into a farm yard now, and leaping out of the car with bags of medical supplies.

As I was saying, the past is a different country.

As I’ve mentioned, my mother conquered the personal computer in her sixties, when few in her age group dared get close to such a terrifying machine. What if they hit the wrong button and it blew up? But my mother wanted to learn.

It must be said that learning was the family religion. Once I joked to my mom, “Well, if I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich?”

She looked utterly shocked. “But think how much you’ve learned!” she said.

There is something really rejuvenating about learning, whether you’re exploring new territory or deepening a field of knowledge.

Foreign languages are a favorite among my sisters. Jane has worked hard on French and Spanish; Lee on Arabic. Just for fun.

A school friend of mine also got into Spanish and did the pilgrimage of Santiago (“El Camino”)–twice. Two other pals learned Italian, one to communicate with her daughter’s in-laws and the other to have an even more glorious time viewing Italian Renaissance art work.

I get my “Hindipod101 word of the day” via email every morning.

During his seventies and eighties, my dad took oil painting lessons, improving greatly from one year to the next.

He painted Mt. Kearsarge in New Hampshire about as frequently as Monet painted lily pads.

Neighbors’ houses were another favorite–as were outhouses.

He also captured several friends in oils. Here you see him with his portrait of Henry (“Skip”) Powers, of Andover, NH.

Skip’s comment was “Hey, he even makes an old guy like me look pretty good.”

Probably because it was a labor of love.

Google “the book is dead, long live the book” and you come up with 178 million results, which suggests that the thought is not highly original. Still, has anyone asked preschoolers what they think about the subject?

I went to a birthday party on Saturday for a pair of three-year-olds, one of whom was my granddaughter, Clara. Mercifully for her parents, the party was held at the other kid’s house. I must say, both sets of parents went all out to give three generations of guests a good time.

For the adults, the board groaned with glazed ham and spinach frittata and salad and fruit and free-flowing prosecco punch. The kids got their choice of chocolate or vanilla cake or cookies that looked like miniature green-eggs-and-ham. Helium balloons floated all over the place, and there were banners and paper hats and other classic birthday party stuff.

In addition, two themes tied the decorations and the entertainment together: books and cars.

Spread across the lawn, like cheese and dessert stations at a fancy buffet, were tables with tubs of children’s books, identified by type or by author: ABC books, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, etc.

There were also collections of cars of many types and sizes. Inside, toy cars decorated the gifts and the windowsills. Outside, cardboard box cars served as the vehicles for a race.

A blow-up plastic bus provided a tent for introverts who wanted a little privacy (in order to read, of course.)

An honest-to-God truck filled with straw bales contained more tubs of books, so a child could sit on top of the straw and be read to by one of the many willing adults standing around for just that purpose.

Any time a kid threatened to get out of control, a grown-up would start reading the kid’s favorite book aloud and presto, crisis averted! Who knew that books were such good weapons of mass distraction?

If these children love books when they grow up as much as they do now, we don’t have to worry about the death of the book for a while. Maybe the car will go first.

Halloween is almost here! Pumpkins are proliferating on front porches and ghosts and skeletons are swaying from trees. I can’t wait to see the kids in their costumes coming to the door. I’m sure there will be lots of Annas and Elsas, the princess sisters from Walt Disney’s 2013 animated blockbuster, Frozen.

Clara, however, has decided to be Winnie the Pooh.

Last year, she insisted weeks in advance of Halloween that she’d be a pig.

Many years ago, my son and her dad, Ben, then aged four, announced that he wanted to go trick-or-treating as “an evil clown.” I recently asked if he remembered why.

“Not sure,” he wrote back. “I probably just wanted to be a clown but knew the point of Halloween is to be scary. So…evil clown. Of course, evil clowns have since become a Hollywood trope. And clown fears are very common–something about the way the painted face on top of a real face doesn’t move in a natural way–it’s been described as tied to our fear/suspicion of the ‘uncanny valley.’ So maybe I was on to something.”

Uncanny valley? Thanks to those years of Woodstock School Bible classes, my first thought was, “Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

The term “uncanny valley” comes out not out of Psalms, however, but from aesthetic theory and robotics. In the 1970s, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori found that as robots become more life-like, at first people’s comfort level with them goes up—but then, it takes a sudden dip, not to rise again until the resemblance to a human is truly convincing. That dip on the graph is the “uncanny valley,” and recent research suggests that encountering it makes your brain work overtime. Neurons fire like crazy trying to figure out what’s going on.

CNN writer and producer Elizabeth Landau writes, “The uncanny valley effect could have to do with uncertainty about whether a robotic character is truly alive or dead, and even play into our deep-seated fears of death.” (Hm. Back to Psalm 23 after all?)

Come to think of it, the relation of living creatures, fabricated ones, and intermediate almost-life forms isn’t a new theme in the arts. Take the story of Pinocchio (1883), the wooden doll who wanted to be a real boy. Or the ballet Coppélia, which premiered in 1870.

In Coppélia, a young village woman, Swanhilde, is distraught because her fiancé is infatuated with a life-size mechanical doll. (And you thought you had problems.) In one scene, Swanhilde, trying to win back her misguided man, pretends to be the doll coming to life. Stiff and expressionless, she jerks and staggers around the stage, bumping into other dancers.

The device is good comedy, but it’s also surprisingly tension-provoking, surely giving the poor old brain neurons quite a challenge. You know you’re seeing a human dancer pretending to be a puppet, but it sure looks like a mechanical doll acting like a mechanical doll!

Back to Anna and Elsa of Frozen. Those two girls with their enormous (and somewhat crossed) almond-shaped eyes make me uneasy. Too realistic or not enough? I find those cartoon eyes creepy. Five-year-olds obviously don’t, however, which makes me wonder if I tumble into the uncanny valley more quickly than they do. I guess I’ll have to see the film to try to figure that one out.

One thing I do know—my precious evil clown didn’t provoke any anxiety in me at all. He didn’t succeed at looking very evil—just incredibly cute.

The motto of the class of 1899 at Mt. Holyoke College was:

“Leave all resultings:
Doe ye nexte thynge.”

These lines came from a religious poem of the era; it was widely reprinted in anthologies. “Doe ye nexte thynge” became a cliché, and a “Doe Ye Nexte Thynge” charitable society was formed in New York City.

I generally see the poem identified as anonymous, although a Mrs. George A.Paull gets the credit in at least one book.

I like the word “resultings,” although I’m not sure what it means. Unfortunate results, perhaps? An invention that doesn’t work, blurry photographs, a clunker of an essay, a shopping mistake that hangs reproachfully in your closet?

Maybe not. Resultings could mean successes, too: the book that came together after many difficult drafts. The portrait that captured a person’s spirit. The thriving business. Beautiful gardens, diplomas, certificates of awards.

Anyway. Whatever past failures and successes sit there staring you in the face, the poem says to leave them behind and “doe ye nexte thynge.”

The Mt. Holyoke students who chose the motto were about to go out into the world; they were too young to be leaving too many baggage-y resultings on the pavement.

However, as one gets older, more and more resultings accumulate. Does that sometimes make it more difficult to decide what the next thing will be?

I loved it when my mother decided, back in the early 1980s, that her next thing would be to become computer-literate. She was just past her sixtieth birthday. Her interest in computers was surprising and impressed the rest of us a lot; plus, she was demonstrating a lot of feistiness and purpose in this pursuit.

She wasn’t a college graduate and, according to the self-deprecating manners she’d learned early on, she would often describe herself as dumb, not good in math, etc., etc. Right.

With her brother, she went to a computer course at the nearby community college. It was completely mystifying to both of them; he dropped out, but she gritted her teeth and went to every single class.

Then she decided she would buy one of the darned machines and keep track of her finances on it. Few people owned a computer in those days–I worked in software and I didn’t have one. In the sixty-and-over age group, a computer owner was as rare as hen’s teeth, especially among females.

At her request, I flew from Massachusetts to Florida to help with this purchase. There was one choice of store–Radio Shack, and we ended up with their hottest new machine–the TRS-80 Model 4. It had 64K of memory–these days that would be equivalent to a short email. We splurged on TWO slots for floppy disks (and they really were floppy.)

Photo credit: Rama, Wikipedia Commons

On to software, where we went all out. For her spreadsheet, she bought the original Visicalc. No drop-down menus, no point-and-click; you had to learn a bunch of codes to get around, and to put in the formulas one quivering green letter or digit at a time.

For the word processor, she hesitated between Tandy’s Scripsit and Super-Scripsit. Super-Scripsit cost a lot more, because you could do bold and underline text. Those features sounded like good things to have, so after a lot of deliberation, we sprung for Super.

The printer was a behemoth that sounded like a machine gun; the set-up instructions told us that it required an exactly level surface. My dad ran around looking for a carpenter’s level, and then we made numerous anxious adjustments to the table to make sure it wouldn’t be a hair out of whack.

With Super-Scripsit came a dozen or so cassette tapes with instruction. Over the next few weeks, my mom listened doggedly to them all, learning to use Ctrl-O and Ctrl-S and all those other keyboard sequences you had to know. She mastered the spreadsheet, abandoning the pretense of not being good with numbers.

Boy, did she become a celebrity in her condo community. The lady with the computer–that was cocktail party conversation for months.

My dad was completely awed at her new-found prowess. He never wanted to learn anything more about computing than leveling the table. In the last year of his life, he typed his first and only email, which was to my son, Ben. “Dear B, this is aggravating labor.”

Over the years, my mom went on to computers that had cursors and mice and color and sound. They all required unlearning most of what she’d learned and replacing it with new skills. She left some more resultings behind. Well, that’s life.

My own next thing after age 60, and after earning my living dealing with facts and figures for a couple of decades, was to let my imagination grab the reins. The result was the fictional Jana Bibi series.

What’s your next thing? Pack up your resultings, and go for it!

Saturday night, I was honored and delighted to be the visiting author at Elizabeth Berg’s “Writing Matters” series, held at the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, IL. 150 people came–the museum folks had to scurry around for extra chairs!

Photo credit Debby Preiser

Elizabeth (below, right) kicked off, and then Caroline Swain (center) gave a lovely statement of why reading was important to her. Caroline’s mom, Rashmi, (right) comes from Mussoorie, which provided the model for my fictional town of Hamara Nagar (Our Town) in the Jana Bibi series. Talk about coincidences!

Photo credit Betsy Woodman

I read excerpts from Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes and Emeralds Included and then we had a Q & A. I do love surprise questions!

Photo credit Debby Preiser

The conversations continued during the signing.

Photo credit Paul Buchbinder

A man from India came up and told me I was Indian in an earlier life–what better compliment to the books? I was really moved.

Food from Whole Foods and from volunteers set a new standard for book events. Luckily for me, someone brought me a plate before the samosas ran out.

Photo credit Paul Buchbinder

Jason of the Book Table in Oak Park was selling the books and boy, were they flying right out of there!

Photo credit Betsy Woodman

Actor and playwright Arlene Malinowski was a perfect Madame Claire Voyante, fortune-teller extraordinaire.

Photo credit Paul Buchbinder

Thank you, Elizabeth, thank you, Jason, thank you, Hemingway Museum, thank you, Arlene, thank you Bill Young, thank you Ina, Michele, Abbie, Caroline, Debby, Paul, and everyone else who contributed to this magical evening. My son Ben as a toddler would stand up in his crib and cry, “I love EVERYBUTTY!” That’s how I feel.

“What a curious human quirk,” say gemologists Fred and Charlotte Ward, “to credit tiny jewels born deep in the earth with supernatural powers.” Especially when it comes to emeralds.

Perhaps, say the Wards, we are bewitched by emeralds because green is the “most restful color on the visual spectrum, the hue most available to the human eye.”

In theaters and tv and radio studios, there’s often a “green room” where performers calm their nerves before making an appearance.

This summer, I got to sit in the green room at the New Hampshire Public Radio headquarters in Concord, and it really was soothing, although to tell you the truth, I can’t remember if the furnishings were green! Anyway, the conversation that day with Virginia Prescott of Word of Mouth was fun.

Come to thing of it, I had a lot of fun this summer. At the Friends of Woodstock School reunion in Baltimore in July, I got to see a lot of old pals, chat about our days in India, and also sign a few books.

Back home in New Hampshire, I enjoyed an evening of reading and signing at Gibson’s Bookstore–they’ve been in business since 1898, but now are in fabulous new digs.

Small world department–Peg Aldrich, the woman standing in the picture (and a New Hampshire resident) is a cousin of Woodstock School friend Carol Aldrich. Really, all the world’s connected.

More adventures are coming up. If you’re going to be in Milwaukee on Friday, September 12, please check out the WMTJ-TV show “The Morning Blend” at 9:00 AM. I’m looking forward to talking to hosts Molly Fay and Tiffany Ogle. (Wonder if they have a green room.) Then it’s on to Boswell Book Company at 2:00 PM for a reading and signing of Emeralds Included. Come along!

The following night, I’m speaking at Writing Matters, Elizabeth Berg’s wonderful series in Oak Park, IL. Indian food, fortune-telling, and more. Join us!

I want to take a course in draftsmanship.

While writing the Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes books, I made a lot of scribbly drawings, such as this early attempt to picture the Jolly Grant House–Jana’s “Indo-Scottish Nostalgic” style dwelling.

I took more pains with the ground floor and the upstairs (i.e. I got out a ruler.)

Sally Brady, a writing teacher of mine, used to explain why she needed to write: “How can I know what I think until I see what I write?” I’m now adding to that, “How can I know what I imagine until I see what I draw?”

But of course, I’m leaving something out: bringing a story to life is the joint effort of the writer and reader. Probably readers have mental images of the Jolly Grant House that are way better than anything I could sketch.

(I still want to learn to draw better, however.)

By the way–if any of you are in Milwaukee on September 12 or in the Chicago area on September 13, I’d love to see you at my events: Boswell’s bookstore in Milwaukee and the Writing Matters evening in Oak Park, IL.

Also in Milwaukee on September 12: I’ll make an appearance some time after 8:30 AM on the Morning Blend, the wake-up show at NBC affiliate WTMJ television. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and tune in!