The Story Behind a Family Photo

            One of the treasures I picked up at the Wallace family reunion last month was a print of the photograph that accompanies this post. It’s a picture of my father (standing, second from right) and his brothers and sisters (with the exception of Uncle Tom, who had died earlier) gathered together for the first time in almost 40 years. The occasion was the funeral of their mother in the spring of 1961.

            There’s a story here, and a few observations as well.

            My father was one of 10 children born to William Sumner Wallace and Mary (DeArmond) Wallace of Blount County, Tennessee, just south of Knoxville. It was a large family, but not uncommonly so by the standards of their time. William’s father, Theophilus Wallace, had been an officer in the Union army during the Civil War, and John DeArmond, Mary’s father, was one of the soldiers who served under him. William was born in 1869, and Mary in 1876. They married in 1895.

A Large Family Scatters

            They settled on a farm outside Maryville TN and raised their 10 children there. The children were born over a period of 20 years, and seven of them stayed in the area as adults. The oldest, Hugh, (standing, far left) moved to California shortly after World War I and raised chickens in Orange County. My father followed him to California in 1929, and a third son, Roy, (seated, far right) moved to Florida.

            William Sumner Wallace died broke in 1937, when the country was still in the Great Depression. My father and Uncle Hugh had enough money between them to pay for one train ticket, so they pooled their funds and sent Hugh to the funeral. My father wouldn’t make it back to Tennessee for another 24 years — when his mother died at the age of 85.

            Living today, when air travel is easy and relatively affordable, we forget what it was like back then. When family members moved from one part of the country to another, there was a real chance they might not see each other again. So when all of William and Mary’s surviving children got together again for the funeral, it was a big deal. And they did what people used to do back then, when something happened that was a big deal. They hired a professional photographer to document it.

Too Important for Amateurs

            That was hardly an extravagance. Sure, they could have gotten someone with a Kodak Brownie to snap a few shots, but it would have been a few days before the prints came back from the drugstore, and if anything went wrong, everyone would have been scattered. And no amateur would have been able to arrange the people so well and get them all to look good at the same time. Whatever it cost (and it probably wasn’t much), it was worth the money.

            The name of the photographer isn’t on my print, so I don’t know who it was. I’m pretty sure it was a man and that he used a large camera on a tripod, probably producing a negative of 4x5 inches or 8x10 inches. He probably knew his business well enough that he didn’t have to take more than one or two shots to get it right.

            All the people in the photo are gone now, and those gathered for the family reunion last month were largely their children, most of whom are collecting Social Security or getting close to it. And because a half-century ago, our parents went to the trouble and expense to get a photo that would endure, we have a priceless image of all of them in their prime.

THE WALLACE CHILDREN, with order of birth following name: Standing, from left, Hugh (#1), Margaret (#10), Helen (#3), Clarence (#7), and Clyde (#4). Seated, from left: Mary Lois (#9), John (#6), Grace (#8), and Roy (#5).

How Important Is a Book Title?

            My friend and sometime marketing guru John Bakalian was visiting us a few weeks ago, and the topic of discussion turned to book titles. John suggested that perhaps for my next mystery novel, I should research the bestseller lists to find out what words appear most frequently in the titles. Then, he said, I should come up with a title that uses the most common words, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the book.

            The problem with that, I countered, is that James Patterson could call one of his books Scrubbing Linoleum Floors, and it would sell a million copies. Authors and books sell books — not titles and covers, though they can help at the margins.

            (On an impulse, I decided to try out John’s theory by coming up with a title that would meet his criteria, Death Lust for Sex, and doing a search for it on Amazon. Nothing turned up, and I won’t be using it myself, so feel free to appropriate it if you’re so inclined.)

Part of the Filtering Process

            Ideally, of course, a title should be catchy and memorable and capture the spirit of the book. Three good examples would be Gone With The Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. On the other hand, you have to remember that The Great Gatsby was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s worst title, but his best book.

            In the mystery genre, in which I work, a book title is probably first of all the beginning of the potential reader’s filtering process. Mystery readers tend to favor certain subgroups of books, and titles can help them sort things out. A book called Dead Meat, with a cover illustration of a meat cleaver dripping blood, is probably going to appeal to the hard-boiled action crowd, while The Ellsmere Manor Murders, with a pastoral image on the cover, would likely appeal to readers of classic British mysteries.

            When I’m browsing, either in a bookstore or online, a title that catches my eye (and not many do) will likely lead me to look at the cover, then the dust-jacket blurb. Those three things, along with a glance at the first page to check for fundamental writing competence, will typically lead me to a decision. The title, then, is part of the filtering process, not the deal clincher.

Which Comes First?

            Another interesting question — and the answer varies from author to author — is which comes first, the title or the book? In the case of my first two mysteries, I had a title in place before I started writing.

            Book one, The McHenry Inheritance, had a title that suggests a legal conflict and characters of considerable wealth. Since my mysteries are more traditional than hard-boiled, I felt that was a good choice.

            The second book, Wash Her Guilt Away, takes its name from a famous Oliver Goldsmith Poem. I’d like to believe it suggests a quest for redemption, a strong female character, and an emphasis on personal moral responsibility, rather than corporate or organized crime.

            With the third book, it’s different. I’m well into writing it now, but haven’t yet decided on the right title. I’ve come up with four candidates, and at the moment I’m liking the fourth one. They’re all good titles, in my view, but each conveys a different feel, and there’s the problem.

            At times like this, I envy Sue Grafton. All she has to do is come up with one word to match a letter of the alphabet. Maybe that’s why she picked that title format.

Fishing Days: Fall River

            The first time I went fishing on Fall River, I thoroughly embarrassed myself. It was June of 1984, and I had been trying fly fishing for only two years. Linda and I went out with a guide named Carl Jaeger, and it probably wasn’t very long before he realized he would be earning his money that day.

            To call Fall River a difficult stream would be understating the case, and a novice angler who’s all thumbs has no chance. After an unproductive morning (despite a good insect hatch and plenty of rising fish), Carl tactfully suggested that we take a long lunch break and do a bit of practice casting. In a short time, he pinpointed my critical problems, and that was the beginning of my path to becoming reasonably competent at the sport.

            Over the next few years, I went out with Carl several times, generally with respectable results. But five years later, in the spring of 1989, I finally had my breakout day.

You Could Look It Up

            At the beginning of the year, I had become editor of the newspaper, and had been working at an insanely intense level for four months. I knew from the outset that that would be the case, so early in the year, I blocked out a week of vacation to go fishing at Hat Creek, with a day on Fall River with Carl. That day was Wednesday May 17, 1989.

            Weather in that country at that time of year can be a crapshoot, so I was holding my breath. It could be wintry, summery, changeable, or something between the three. It ended up being a wonderfully sunny day — not too hot, and with no wind to speak of. Sometimes, on a bluebird day like that, the fish go to the bottom and refuse to feed. Not so on this day. They were hungry all day long, and there was rarely more than a brief interval (30-45 minutes) that we weren’t getting action.

            A couple of hours into the day, I sensed that this might be something special. I hadn’t brought a camera, so I have no pictures, but I began keeping track in my head, and at the end of the day, before driving off, I wrote down a list of fish caught in a notebook I kept in the VW camper. That yellowed piece of paper was still in my desk when I looked just now.

Knowing When to Quit

            It shows that we landed 21 trout that day, 15 of which were 14 inches or longer (and they were fat and scrappy). And for every one we landed and released, there were probably two that got away. It was the kind of day you always imagine you’re going to have when you set out on a fishing trip — before reality intrudes.

            A little after six o’clock, Carl took me to a place he called “The Office,” where there were usually a few large fish feeding along the bank in a tight current. It took a near-perfect cast to have a chance of catching one, but he thought I might be able to make it. I did, and hooked and landed a 17-inch rainbow. (A slightly fictionalized version of that fish appears in my mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away.)

            After taking the hook out and letting the fish go, Carl turned to me and said, “You probably won’t make a better cast or catch a better fish. What do you say we call it a day and head back?” And though there was at least an hour and a half of fishing light left, I agreed. In doing that, I learned a valuable lesson. A good fisherman, like a good athlete, has to know when it’s time to quit, and because I stopped then, I’ll remember that last fish to my final breath.

           

There Has to Be an Algorithm for That

            Once upon a time I thought I had Amazon figured out, but upon further review, it turned out I had simply gotten lucky a couple of times and jumped to a conclusion.

            It had to do with the question of free promotions for my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. The book was published in late July of 2012, and in the first six months, I ran free promotions on a variety of days, mostly weekdays, with not much success. I defined success then, as I do now, with 100 or more downloads on a free promotion day, the premise being that reaching that many potential new readers is worth whatever loss is taken in paid sales.

            Because it was my first book, strong free-promotion results were critical to getting it into the hands of an audience beyond my circle of friends. I felt there had to be a way of reckoning the best days for putting the book out there on the free list.

A Gambler’s Lucky Streak

            In late February of 2013, I put the book out on a Sunday and had a really good response — more than 200 downloads. Doubling up, I offered it again on a Sunday in early March and got a staggering 473 downloads, by far the best day ever. “Aha!” I said to myself. “Sunday’s the day.” I offered it another Sunday in March and again got more than 200 downloads.

            As matters turned out, I was like the guy at the roulette wheel who bets red three times in a row and wins each time — then thinks he’ll win on red every time and loses his shirt.

            When the next promotion period came up in April, I confidently put the book out again on a Sunday and received fewer than 100 downloads. I kept going with Sundays for another six months, and though I had a couple of days that barely topped 100, there was nothing remotely resembling the success I’d had in February and March. For want of a better explanation, I chalked up the slowdown in downloads to the book’s having been on the market for some time and having been repeatedly seen by people looking for freebies.

Let’s Try This Again

            On April 30 my second mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, went up on Amazon, and I had five free promotional days to use before July 28. I offered it free the first Saturday in May, and it got more than 150 downloads. I figured I could crack 200 by offering it on a Sunday, and, bypassing Mother’s Day, put it up free on Sunday May 18.

            Fewer than 100 people downloaded it.

            Scratching my head, I came back three weeks later, on Sunday June 8, and this time moved just short of 200 copies. I concluded that Sunday in May was an aberration, so did another free promotion Sunday July 13. I barely topped 50 downloads, even though the book finished at #33 on the free crime fiction list that day.

            The take-home message from all this is that there is no message. I’m coming to believe that unless a book is by an established author or is highly searchable, books and readers on Amazon are like random molecules bouncing around in a large, enclosed space. When and where they collide is a matter of chance as much as anything else. And the success of a free book promotion on any given Sunday in March could depend on what the weather’s like in most of the country and what’s good on TV that day.

The Flawed First Novel

            Show me the aspiring author who hasn’t, at some point in the writing of that first novel, imagined it being instantly recognized by the critics and selling like hotcakes with the general public. I don’t believe such an author exists.

            The fantasy is as universal as it is elusive. The author who writes the occasional first-book best seller is like the guy on unemployment who wins the lottery. Sure, it in fact can be done, but the odds are beyond astronomical — Fifty Shades of Grey notwithstanding.

            Then there are the authors (think Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison and Margaret Mitchell) whose first novels were terrific and are still read today, but who never wrote anything of consequence afterwards. I have a little theory about that, and it begins by imagining that To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, and Gone With the Wind weren’t their first novels, but rather their third.

The Path to the Masterpiece

            Suppose they had written their masterpieces after first producing a couple of good but flawed books, from which they learned a great deal about themselves and the craft or writing. That’s the curve for most good authors, and I would submit that it’s a beneficial thing in a number of ways.

            For starters, publishing a flawed book (and nearly every book is flawed) teaches an author the value of realizing that at some point you have to say, “This is as good as I can get it. It’s time to let go and move on to the next one.” Like any artist or craftsman, an author wants to get the work right, but right is a relative term. Bad Shakespeare is still better than almost anybody else’s best.

            Having a sense of perspective is essential to avoiding writer’s block and demented perfectionism. When your first book is a hugely successful masterpiece, you probably feel (I’ve never had the pleasure myself) that the second one has to be at least as good, which can be setting the bar too high. If the third book is the masterpiece, you know there are two others out there that were worse, and that knowledge is likely to make the writing of book number four a lot less daunting.

Working on a Series

            I write mystery novels, which by definition aren’t going to be masterpieces, but I see some of these factors at work. The first book in my Quill Gordon series, The McHenry Inheritance, was flawed, and I probably see the flaws more than most. But it told a pretty good story in a brisk fashion, and I felt it accomplished four things a first book in a series has to do: Establish a character, a premise, a tone, and a style.

            Doing just that much wore me out, but showing myself I could do those things freed me to concentrate on other elements of fiction in the second book, Wash Her Guilt Away. In it I tried to focus on improving three things: character development, dialogue, and atmosphere. Some of the feedback I’m getting suggests I met with some success.

            In the third book (still untitled), which I’ve just begun to write, my three goals are: Create a more intricate plot, create a stronger sense of the community in which the action occurs, and create more of a backstory for my protagonist. If nothing sidetracks the effort, the book should be out in the second half of next year, and we’ll see how I did. The way I look at it, every book I write should be better than the one before. Until I write one that isn’t.

A Press Release for My Book

            The purpose of a press release is to pique the news media’s interest in a story so they’ll cover it, and also to frame the story in a way that helps them ask questions and write about it accurately. Following is a press release for my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away.

            SANTA CRUZ, CA — Ever had one of those vacations where it rained every day, and then someone got murdered? That’s what happens to Quill Gordon, the gentleman detective who makes his second appearance in Wash Her Guilt Away, a new mystery novel by Michael Wallace, former editor of the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian.

            Taking its title from a well known poem by 18^th Century Irish-English writer Oliver Goldsmith, Wash Her Guilt Away attempts to recreate the spirit of the English country-house mysteries of the 1920s and 30s in contemporary America. It also features a locked-room mystery, where the victim is found strangled in a cabin securely locked from the inside and surrounded by snow, with no footprints leading in or out.

            “Almost nobody does the English country house weekend in America today,” Wallace said, “so I had to come up with an equivalent. The guests are paying visitors at a remote lodge in Northern California, and because the weather is so horrible, they’re thrown together in a way that sexual tensions begin to simmer, eventually boiling over.

            “The brooding atmosphere and the presence of a coven of witches practicing in the area add to the surreal nature of the crime. But in the end, the book is really a meditation on love, infidelity, and the secrets people keep from each other.”

            The first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, was published in July 2012. It has been steadily downloaded as a Kindle e-book since publication, and has sold another few hundred copies in local bookstores and through Amazon’s print-on-demand service. It has been generally well received, earning an average rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars from readers on Amazon.

            “It would appear that the first book created a modest base of fans for the series, and early sales for Wash Her Guilt Away are considerably higher than those for The McHenry Inheritance during the comparable time period,” Wallace said. “It’s beginning to look as if Quill Gordon and his adventures have some growth potential — both in a literary and commercial sense.”

            Gordon, the protagonist in the series, is a former college basketball star and stockbroker who made a modest fortune in the market and was able to quit working in his thirties. He is a skilled fly fisherman, and frequently travels to the small mountain communities where the stories occur.

            “The stories are very much in the classical tradition of mysteries where the crime grows organically out of a situation and the characters of the people involved in it,” Wallace said. “Gordon is an outsider who becomes drawn into the community he’s visiting through the crime that has been committed, and his becoming more a part of that community is part of the story. And because he travels a lot, each book can be set in a new location, with all new characters and issues.”

            Wallace is currently working on a third Quill Gordon mystery, which he hopes to have completed and published in the second half of 2015.

            Both The McHenry Inheritance and Wash Her Guilt Away are available at Crossroads Books in Watsonville and Bookshop Santa Cruz, as well as on Amazon.

LINKS:

Quill Gordon mystery website: http://www.quillgordonmystery.com

Wash Her Guilt Away video: http://youtu.be/m1Hqg11YJ0o

Wash Her Guilt Away on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K1DOV56

The McHenry Inheritance on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008OAODZ6

Fishing Days: Silver Creek

Second in an occasional series on memorable fishing days

            By the fall of 1986 I had been fly fishing for more than four years and had developed a certain level of proficiency, having caught decent fish in a number of famous trout streams: Armstrong’s Spring Creek, Hat Creek, Firehole River, Fall River, Henry’s Fork, among others.

            In October of that year Linda and I took a week-long vacation to Sun Valley, Idaho. It was the rump season there — the summer crowd had gone and the snows had not yet come to bring on the ski crowd. We stayed at the Sun Valley Lodge, got a good rate, and had the place almost entirely to ourselves.

            As fate would have it, we caught a beautiful Indian summer week. Early morning temperatures were in the low 30s or high 20s, but they gave way to sunny, cloudless days in the 70s. We took a couple of day trips from Sun Valley, one to the Sawtooth Mountains and another to Craters of the Moon National Monument. And of course there was some fishing.

Alone on a Legendary Stream

            A couple of afternoons I went out on the Big Wood River near the town of Ketchum, pulling off the road at a turnout and fishing my way upstream or downstream. I caught a few good fish there, but it wasn’t my real destination. The reason for going to Sun Valley was to fish Silver Creek.

            Silver Creek is a desert spring creek that rolls slowly and gently through the more arid regions south of Sun Valley. The Nature Conservancy has acquired a considerable parcel of land surrounding it and maintains it as a sanctuary for fly fishermen, bird watchers and nature lovers in general. It is full of large native trout who play hard to get.

            In the years since its fame has grown and it is no doubt more heavily fished now than it was then. But that October I just about had it all to myself. Linda and I went out there two days, and during that time there was only one other fisherman working on the stream. He stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his.

A Fish to Remember

            On Friday, our last day in Sun Valley, we went down there for a final day of fishing. We got sandwiches from the grocery store for lunch and left early in the day. I caught and released two trout, but I remember them well, because I had to work for them and do everything right to get them to take my fly.

            The first fish took a nymph, Hare’s Ear of Pheasant Tail, under the surface. I was working with a nymph most of the day because there was no regular insect hatch taking place on the surface.

            Late in the afternoon I was wading the creek. It was hard work because of the weeds, but the cool water provided some relief from the relentless sun. I had a nymph on the line when I noticed a fish rising to flies downstream from me. Standing in waist-deep water, I snipped off the nymph and put on a #16 dry fly that seemed to match what was in the air at the time.

            I made two bad casts without spooking the fish, but on the third one, I put the fly right over him on a clean drift. He was a lovely rainbow, and he took it. After a good fight, I had him to net — all 16 inches. I took a quick photo then released him, but to this day that fish holds a unique distinction in my angling career.

            He’s the only trout I’ve ever caught using a Quill Gordon fly.