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Come to the Heart Side
U R2 awesome, Valentine!
Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Star Wars that much, but when I was writing A Night to Remember, my kids were deep into it, so I took all their love for a galaxy far, far away and gave it to Kayla. (They are still deep into it, actually: Kid #2 is currently spending her snow day making a TIE fighter-shaped* Valentine’s box.) And in my quest to help Gabe find the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for her, I went on a deep dive into the world of Star Wars-themed romance. Does your beloved want a poster showing Han and Leia sort of declaring their love for each other? A mug telling them that “Yoda one for me”? Or, my personal favorite, a shadowbox with a Darth Vader Lego minifigure enjoining them to “Come to the Heart Side”? It might be too late to make it happen this year, but next year will be here before you know it!
The truth is, Valentine’s Day was much more exciting when I was younger. I always wondered if some handsome admirer would come out of the woodwork to surprise me with a dozen roses and, I don’t know, the Cardigans blasting on a boombox. Nowadays, I’m more likely to spend the holiday despairing over all the candy and plastic and squishy animals that come pouring out of my kids’ backpacks. But however you choose to celebrate, Yoda and I both hope that a happy Valentine’s Day you will have!
* These are the bad guys’ spaceships, which look a little like spools of thread lying on their sides. Who knew?
Fun Fact of the Month
I recently learned that the word “muscle” comes from the Latin word “musculus”, meaning “little mouse”. According to Classic Human Anatomy: “Apparently, anatomists of ancient times thought that the shape of a muscle rippling beneath the skin during movement looked like a little mouse moving under a piece of cloth.” Eek! I dare you not to think about that when you meet your next muscly book boyfriend!
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Is time travel possible? (Spoiler alert: sort of!)
Do you know your keyboard shortcuts? You probably do. I’m guessing this is the kind of thing that everyone knows – like the fact that the little arrow on your gas gauge points to the side of the car the tank is on – but I somehow missed. It wasn’t until I took a graphic design class, in my 30s, that I learned that Ctrl + S (Command-S on a Mac) means save, Ctrl + C means copy, Ctrl + V means paste, and so on.
Which brings me to Ctrl + Z: undo. I use this bad boy a lot. It’s such a lifesaver! Cat step on your keyboard and now half of one paragraph is smooshed into the middle of the one above it? Ctrl + Z! You sneezed and the photograph you were trying to subtly edit now looks like a fiery hellscape? Ctrl + Z! What it really seems to mean is, “I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but let’s pretend it never did.”
After full days spent computering, I often wish I had an “undo” button in real life. Wouldn’t it be helpful in social situations?* Splash spaghetti sauce on your work blouse? Ctrl + Z! Blurt out “Goddammit!” when you drop your hymnal in church? Ctrl + Z! Cough up phlegm in front of your crush? Ctrl + Z! It’s like the Omega 13 device in Galaxy Quest**: it sends you back in time 13 seconds – just long enough to fix a single mistake.
Ctrl + Z, of course, can fix tons of mistakes, one right after the other, depending on the program. And when I told my daughter this, her eyes got all big and she whispered, “It’s like time travel. For serious.” Yes, my child, it is. But stay home – and away from your poor crush – if you’re sick.
* On a related note, has anyone else ever wondered why the Harry Potter characters don’t just zap each other with that memory-erasing charm all the time? Is it against wizarding law? Frowned upon? How would anyone catch you?
** If you haven’t seen this movie, go watch it immediately. I’ll wait right here.
Fun Fact of the Month
Cows, I learned recently, have social lives that seem better suited to a middle-school cafeteria than a meadow. There are boss cows and lead cows (who determine when it’s time to go back to the barn; confusingly, they are not the same as boss cows, who like to stick to the middle of the crowd); babysitting cows and public servant cows (who you can visit for all your grooming needs). In large herds, cows can also form triangular relationships: Cow A dominates Cow B, Cow B dominates Cow C, and Cow C dominates Cow A. Doesn’t that sound exhausting? And yet they manage to look so peaceful!
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Sense, Sensibility, and Sunshine
Why Emma Thompson is a genius
Who’s your favorite underrated Jane Austen hero? We all love Mr. Darcy, of course; I would marry Mr. Knightley in an instant (sorry, actual husband); and who could forget Frederick Wentworth’s letter to Anne at the end of Persuasion? But is anyone out there losing their minds over Edmund from Mansfield Park? Or Henry from Northanger Abbey?
My favorite unsung hero is Colonel Brandon from Sense and Sensibility, not just because I love a good age-gap romance (I do), or because I love years of unrequited pining (also yes), but because Emma Thompson is a genius. In the book, Brandon is somber and serious; a steady, compassionate presence who is ready to console the headstrong Marianne when she’s disappointed by the assholish Willoughby. But we get hardly any scenes between them. No proposal, even! They’re just happily hitched at the end. That’s it!
But in the 1995 movie (which Thompson wrote the screenplay for), all this is fleshed out: there are stolen glances! He helps her out of a carriage! He lends her a knife! He rescues her from the rain, which we all know to be deadly. Best of all, he reads to her in the garden and gently flirts with her, which makes me lose my fucking mind every time (enjoy; I also have a burning crush on Alan Rickman, as you may have guessed). And their wedding is one of the most joyful moments I have ever seen on film.
Like Emma Thompson (and, of course, director Ang Lee, and everyone who worked on the project), I wanted to give these characters their due. My upcoming book, And the Rest is History, is an extremely loose adaptation of their story, and as much indebted to the movie as to the novel. It stars Allison (25, not – eep! – 17, like Marianne), who, as Austen says of her character, is “generous, amiable, interesting… everything but prudent”. She falls in love with Tom (34), who is much more animated than Brandon, but similarly compassionate and oppressed by a tragedy in his past. I wouldn’t call it grumpy/sunshine – Tom, like Brandon, isn’t mean to anyone – but rather… cloudy/sunshine. Is that a thing? I suppose it will be, if I ever finish this book! Stay tuned!
Fun Fact of the Month
Emma Thompson ended up marrying Greg Wise, the actor who plays the assholish Willoughby in the movie. Apparently, after hours of being lashed by a rain machine, Kate Winslet, who plays Marianne, developed hypothermia, and Greg and Emma warmed her up. “Little did I know,” Kate said in an interview with the cast, “that they were flirting over my…” “Nearly dead body,” Greg supplied. Which just goes to show that rain is deadly, not only to women in eighteenth-century novels, and we would all be well advised to stay inside with our embroidery!
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Say you’ve been glued to a screen all day – maybe you’ve been writing, editing, and proofreading a novel and discovering, at the last minute, that it’s “door jamb”, not “door jam”; maybe you’ve been designing a book cover and wondering if your spine decoration looks like the female reproductive system; maybe you’ve been working at your day job and trying to explain to a German, in German, why dangling modifiers are a no-no in English – and you decide to take a break and go outside. You want to read a book on your patio, but your patio is covered with dog toys and detritus from children’s potion-making experiments and dead leaves. So you decide to clean your patio. You notice a few mosquitoes, but shrug it off. It’s true that you’re wearing a dress. It’s also true that mosquitoes love you. But you’ve already started cleaning, so why stop to put on bug spray?
ALWAYS STOP TO PUT ON BUG SPRAY. If you don’t, you’ll get FORTY-SIX mosquito bites, your legs will look like you have some kind of pox, and you’ll be so itchy that you’ll be whimpering about it to uninterested family members for days.
My patio looks much better, though, I’ve got to say.
Fun Fact of the Month
jamb (n): an upright piece or surface forming the side of an opening (like for a door, window, or fireplace)
jam (n): the stuff you smear on toast
Let’s hope I’ve learned my lesson.
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And the Rest is History is out now!
And the Rest is History, my second book ever and the second book in the Kentwood Chronicles series, is out now!
I started writing this book a year ago with nothing more than deep affection for my two characters and a rough sketch of the historical mystery I wanted them to solve. In my debut, A Night to Remember, I gave Tom the last name Matuschek, which is a reference to “Matuschek and Sons”, the shop in The Shop Around the Corner, which takes place in Budapest. So when I decided to write a whole book about my sexy Hungarian professor, I had to learn a little of his language, which was SO HARD that last night I actually had an anxiety dream about trying to teach it to a roomful of undergraduates! How do you say “Open your books” in Hungarian? I didn’t know in my dream, but now I think it’s nyissátok ki a könyveiteket. Correct me if I’m wrong!
I also dove into the history of German immigration to the Midwest and Great Plains, learned about a fascinating folk healing tradition, and read about the real-life women who fought corporate greed in turn-of-the-century Missouri. But most importantly, I poured my heart and soul into the love story of Tom and Allison. Are they Colonel Brandon and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility? Yes and no. He’s grieving; she’s impulsive. She dates the wrong dude; he waits in the wings until she sees the light. They talk and fight and fall in love, and I still – still! – get teary thinking about their happy ending. Szeretlek means
“I love you”. I know I’m right about that one.
A huge thank you to my reviewers!
I’d like to give a huge köszönöm szépen (thank you very much!) to everyone who read and reviewed my book! I am normally a happy writer: I make myself laugh, I fall in love with my leading men (and then have to convince my husband that he’s still my favorite), I hardly ever have trouble getting my characters out of the jams I get them into. But when it comes time to publish, I turn into an insecure bundle of nerves and want to drown my sorrows in a bottle of whiskey like a stereotypical tortured artist. I am enormously relieved when anyone writes something nice, so thank you, thank you, thank you if you did!
Fun Fact of the Month
This time I thought I’d tell you a few fun facts about me! Like Allison, the protagonist of And the Rest is History, I speak fluent German (trust me, it’s SO MUCH easier than Hungarian), I fell in love with a professor (not my professor, and he wasn’t a professor when we met!), and I used to eat popcorn for dinner sometimes. Tom is aghast when Allison confesses that she does the same, but I’m on her side. Popcorn is perfectly healthy, as long as you don’t drown it in butter, and if you add a cheese stick and an apple, that’s a meal. No kindergartner is going to tell you different.
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Boy. Girl. Elevator. Blackout.
What happens when you get trapped in an elevator with a guy you can’t stand – and then the lights go out?
… is the tagline of a little novella I’m working on, which will be free to my newsletter subscribers! As you probably don’t recall, at the beginning of And the Rest is History, Tom accidentally sends Allison an email that was meant for a couple of his graduate students. In it, he tells them that he’s heard they both dated a certain undergraduate over the summer. But both dudes will be teaching assistants for a class she’s taking in the fall, so all romantic relationships are now strictly forbidden. This prompts Allison to tease Tom about being a stern professor… and the rest is history.
Alone in the Elevator is about that undergraduate and one of her grad student beaus. Six years after their supposed summer of love, Jack and Beth bump into each other at a history conference. Beth hates Jack for not actually dating her (the rumors weren’t true, unfortunately). Jack hates himself for not throwing caution – and university policy – to the wind and banging her on a stack of battered library books like he desperately wanted to. And then they get stuck in an elevator together. In a blackout.
I’m sure you can see where this is going! But how do we get there? Can I convince you that even though Jack felt he had to do the Right Thing and leave undergrad Beth alone, he’s been pining for her for years? Will you believe that Beth, who I describe as “reflexively combative” (I love a fractious FMC), can develop a soft spot for the guy she always thought was ignoring her? I could do it in 400 pages. Can I do it in 90? Wait and see!
Fun Fact of the Month
Elevators are safer than you think. Yes, you could accidentally share one with a murderer. Yes, they’re always going to feel like a metal coffin. But if you’re in one and the power goes out? Chances are the building’s generator will kick the lights back on and the elevator will gently descend to the next floor and politely open its doors for you. You won’t plunge to your death. You won’t have to scramble out of that hatch at the top (it’s above the drop ceiling, FYI). You probably won’t even have to call any hot firefighters.
Did I learn a lot about elevators while researching my little novella? I did! Did I ignore all of these comforting but boring facts while trying to terrify my characters into each other’s arms? Maybe!
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Food and family and…
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?”
“Uh, no. Probably not. We’re immigrants, so we don’t really understand Thanksgiving. Our table would always include American standbys like pickled herring and beets.”
I don’t care what Tom, your Hungarian book boyfriend, says – his experience has to be more typical than not, right? Until my Swedish great-grandmother died, our table would always include lingonberries instead of cranberries (with the world’s most brain-meltingly delicious marzipan for dessert, and let’s be honest, breakfast the next day). I once had a real Proustian petite-madeleine moment when I found lingonberry jam in a Whole Foods for probably $35. (In case you weren’t as pretentious an undergraduate as I was, I’m referring to the moment in Remembrance of Things Past when the narrator eats a fancy little cookie and is suddenly overwhelmed with memories of his childhood. It’s like cookie-fueled time travel. See also: Ratatouille, when the restaurant critic eats… ratatouille.) Nowadays, my Cuban brother-in-law often contributes yucca, fried plantains, and congrí to our holiday meal; my Taiwanese sister-in-law likes to keep us on our toes by offering us fish-lip soup or pork-blood cake. Thirty years from now, I bet those dishes are going to make me melt like marzipan does now.
The point is, we all understand Thanksgiving, don’t we? It’s not about the tenuous pilgrim/Indian connection; it’s not about cooking the same five dishes the same way forever and never letting anyone new in. It’s about sharing a meal with your people, regardless of whether they prefer beets to sweet potatoes or fish lips to turkey. As a former Russian T.A. of mine once said, “Give beets a chance.”
And if you’ve read my book, you know that Thanksgiving is also about stealing away for some sexy time with that Hungarian boyfriend. I refer you to chapter 22 of And the Rest is History. Here’s a refresher:
“I figure we have about 15 minutes before anyone bothers us,” I find myself saying. “During that time, I want you to do anything you want to me.”
I’m standing, panting slightly, with my back against the door; I consider pounding more alcohol but decide not to move. His breathing quickens too as the silence throbs between us. I’m expecting him to calmly explain that this is not what we agreed on when he asks, “Does that door lock?”
Fun Fact of the Month
The pilgrims, of course, weren’t eating sweet potatoes with marshmallows either. No, they were eating eels at the first Thanksgiving. That’s right: slippery, slimy, fascinating eels. You can read about how delighted they were when Tisquantum, who you remember from elementary school as Squanto, squished them out of river mud with his feet. So of course this abundant and apparently delicious food made its way onto their holiday table – along with passenger pigeons, swans, and deer. Yum!
