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By Leslie, April 26, 2010 12:35 pm

My husband and I just completed circumnavigating the globe to avoid the effects of a volcano while enjoying a vacation in Greece. You know the one. Over the past week, I’ve spent several days in the airports of various countries and the waiting rooms of those airports, in transit. Most times an airport is an airport is an airport – until it’s not. And then it’s as if the world was tilted slightly and viewed through the lens of a fun house mirror. Things that looks familiar are strange and the strange are very odd, indeed. But what is the strangest are the things that are the most familiar, yet different in one or two key ways.

I sat in a starkly fluorescent transit room in the David Ben Gurion Airport watching a bank of rumpled and flat-faced security personnel observe my husband’s very American demands to check our baggage through to Athens. We were not at home and familiar rules just do not apply. And while I knew that, my gut expected the familiar.

No, we were not threatened and we were not doing anything unusual, by our standards – but by theirs, who knows? I may never know exactly what he said that finally made them see that those bags, yes those, were ours and should be on this plane, with us. It sounds so simple and I am certain they were reasonable people. We all spoke english – of a sort – but in no way did we share any experiences, other than those that made us human. It was chilling.

And exhilarating, because I realized that this could be what a time traveler would experience. My fingers itched to start typing.

There is a sense that things are similar and the rules known – up to a point- and you do not know where that point is. Then you hit it, and your world view tumbles.  Almost as if the rules of society can be visualized as an irregular surface and you as a time traveler, or world traveler, edge along in the dark assuming the people are essentially thinking the same thoughts and seeing the same things, but there is an abyss in the road and everybody can see it, except you, of course.

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By Leslie, April 18, 2010 10:55 pm

That is my office view today (hehe). It’s from our room in the W Hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong where we are currently treed on our way to Athens, Greece. Don’t ask, it has to do with my husband, a Rovi Corp event and his overwhelming drive to master a volcano.

Anyway, this travel debacle has placed a most amazing opportunity within twitching distance of my writerly fingers. Hong Kong! South China Seas! Clipper Ships! Okay, maybe not so many Clipper ships but museums and, what may be more important, this view: Victoria Harbor and Hong Kong. That blue is amazing. It’s not blue, it’s aqua. Can you imagine what it was like when the harbor was filled with junks and clippers?

Sigh.

Now…I am going to have a fun afternoon writing a short backstory about how in 1848 Hong Kong a clipper ship officer met, maybe loved, just a little bit, and then left a beautiful Macanese whore named Margetta.

This was before he met a certain lady from 1991.

Gotta make the most of it, we’re on the last flight into Athens via Beijing and TelAviv tomorrow!

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By Leslie, March 28, 2010 8:30 am

Family of Ducks by MissConstrue

The Sydney Ducks were a notorious gang that terrorized San Francisco in 1849 through 1851. The Committee of Vigilance was formed to attack this mighty foe. At least that’s the pravda.  I have used the Ducks in my story, not as the Big Bad (in the Buffy-speak) but as spice, like that hint of lemon in a wonderful pound cake of evilness.

So, in my background reading about Gold Rush San Francisco I tumbled onto Robert Senkewicz’s very interesting book Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco. Now, Herbert Asbury in The Barbary Coast
makes it clear that his sources identify much of the bad in the years around 1849 and 1850 San Francisco flapping out of the infamous Ducks. So do most of the primary first accounts etc. Senkewicz’s is the first account I have found that suggests the Ducks were scapegoats. Bah! you say, one source against all those others…well, the thing is Senkewicz has some data, and I am data-driven. Always have been.

The 1852 state census figures list residents in San Francisco with a previous address in Australia. From this, the calculated sex ratio was ~150 males to 100 females, where the figure for California overall was 1,214 per 100. (pp 79. Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco).  I am quoting Senkewicz’s book, but the primary references check out.

So most of the immigrants from Australia actually came with families in contrast to the gold-crazed Americans. He also suggests that since most of the Ducks were of Irish descent, and we all know how much we “Americans” loved the Irish, this is the origin of the bias. There were a number of nasty events that the fine people of San Francisco needed to hang on, or just hang somebody for during those early gold rush years: corrupt land deals, overstocked warehouses, fires, the list goes on. Most of the Chinese were already in the mines so that really left the Ducks and the Hispanics.

So, does this mean I am thrown back into rewrite-land? Yes, No, Maybe. I like this new information because it brings added depth to my story.  Where I had thought of the Ducks as a gang of bad guys, now I can think of them differently and in more complex ways.  I think I need to send a note to Dr. Senkewicz too and see if he has any more useful details.

Research!  Wow!

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By Leslie, February 27, 2010 2:16 pm

Oh My God….I have truly died and gone to heaven.

Have you heard of the Veridian Digital Library? No? Well, then sit next to me, my pretty. Well I guess it actually is the California Digital Newspaper Collection powered by the Veridian Digital Library but really… who the hell cares?

They have  most of the  major newspapers in California going back and I mean waaaaaaay back.  I was able to download PDF files of the Alta California, one of the San Francisco papers, for all of 1850. Really. What amazing reading that is! Even if I were not writing a book I could totally lose myself in these papers.

The California Star and Ledger, the Placer Times check it out…..Really.

Too cool, much too cool.

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By Leslie, December 29, 2009 8:01 am

This lady rocks!

She was a petite, golden-haired, Amherst graduate who followed her physician husband to gold rush California in 1848.  Poor hubby had the ague, or some such thing, and could not stand the damp climate (and the wild decadence) of San Francisco so in the summer of 1851 they headed off to Rich Bar, a not so aptly named gold field.

The time frame is exactly perfect for  my story!  Yay!

Dame Shirley is the pen name of one Louisa Amelia Penn Smith Clappe,  her letters to her sister Molly, back in Massachusetts, were published in The Pioneer, a California literary magazine. The letters are funny and written in the ornate style that was prevalent in educated people’s writing in the mid 19th century.  They are a fun peep into one woman’s view of life in the sierra gold fields and are a great resource.

Google has recently put the 1922 version of the Thomas C. Russell annotation of the letters online and also available on the Gutenberg project. This link is on my San Francisco sources page but is so valuable and such a fun read that Dame Shirley gets her own post.

Go Dame!