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Ok, So You Want to Be a Fiction Writer, But Are You Any Good?

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PROLOGUE
Mid-April 2010, Paris
In the gray spring rain, he stood in the Place d’Alma staring down at the tunnel where she had vanished from his life on the last night of August 1997. He came here whenever he was in Paris. He counted the pillars until he reached number thirteen, the one that had taken her life. Tears formed behind his eyes, as they always did in this place. But he refused to let them overflow. Instead, he took a long breath of fresh rain mixed with the exhaust of cars speeding through the tunnel.
When the big black Mercedes had entered its skid that horrible night, his last living link to Deborah had been taken from him. Diana and Deborah, West Heath girls, friends forever. Deborah had been dead since 1994, but he had lost her long before she had become his wife just two years after Diana had married the Prince of Wales in 1981. How many nights had he spent talking to Diana about his marriage, about her marriage, about his guilt over Deborah, and about the impossibility of being in love? Too many to count. He ached to tell her now how empty his life had become without either of them.
He stared down the long, gray tunnel, wondering as always, what she had felt as she had slipped away from everyone who loved her. Had she struggled against it, as Deborah had? Or had her torn and broken heart quietly accepted its fate? No, he doubted that. She’d have fought to stay with her boys. Diana hadn’t gone into death quietly. That January, she’d had a warning of what was coming. She’d recorded a video tape naming her assassins and had given it to someone in America for safekeeping. But she would never tell him who it was. Too dangerous, she always insisted. If you had it, they’d come after you, too. Leave it alone, Nicholas. The tape is safer out of England.
His phone abruptly interrupted with a text message from his assistant. He was late for a meeting of the Burnham Trust at the Trust’s Paris headquarters, and everyone was waiting. Well, they could wait. All day and all night if he wanted. He was the Eighteenth Duke of Burnham and the second richest man in England after the Duke of Westminster, and he’d be late if he decided to be. He hadn’t wanted to be a duke, but having been forced into the job, he was going to enjoy every possible perk.
As soon as the news of Diana’s death had reached him, he’d vowed to find her tape and make it public. No luck for the last thirteen years, but his latest operative had just come up with a stellar lead at last. It was so stellar that not only was he pretty sure he was going to find the tape, he was also going to have the opportunity to unload the decaying family seat in Kent and exact his well-deserved revenge upon his father, the Seventeenth Duke.

Hever Castle as the Model for fictional Burnham Abbey


Tunnel, Place d”Alma, Paris


Diana’s Funeral


West Heath School for Girls

Diana, Princess of Wales, and Me or How I Nearly Wound Up in A Russian Gulag as A Political Prisoner

/in /by

Life as a stay-at-home mother of three children, five and under, was an endlessly demanding job. I had always been a hard worker and an over achiever, but child/care 24/7 was the most exhausting challenge yet. There were days when, as much as I loved my three little ones, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get up at sun rise and keep going. I had never been so tired in my life. And I had a sinus infection that lasted for three and a half years. One unhelpful and terrifying male doc said I needed to be tested for HIV. The woman doc whom I went to for testing and whose children were the same ages as mine couldn’t stop laughing when I told her why I was there. Honestly, it wasn’t very funny.
I became fascinated with Princess Diana in that period. I’m not sure why. There were probably a lot of reasons for my fixation. First, I loved her clothes. Whether in her early Laura Ashley mode or in her shoulder-padded Power Suit mode in the 1980’s, she was gorgeous. She was the IT Girl of Style.
Second, she delighted in mothering just the way that I did. In the pictures of her with William and Harry, who were only a few years older than my children, her love shines off the page. Granted when she played games with them in their nursery, she’d had a full night’s sleep because her nanny was on call, but even my sleep-deprived brain could connect with another mother who loved her children the way I loved mine.
Third, she and I had entered into similar marriages. My husband’s job was to our marriage what Camilla Parker Bowles was to Diana’s. The third party to my marriage was a corporation whereas for Diana it was the Other Woman; but the result was the same. And Diana had married a man who wanted a wife and children from Central Casting to be available only for photo ops. And so had I.
Fourth, Diana went through a very public divorce with a man determined to wound and humiliate. One of my few consolations on those terrifying days when I left the Family Law Courthouse threatened with the loss of my children and so emotionally upset that I was afraid to drive, was that at least the venom that had just been spit in my face wasn’t going to be heard around the world. For Diana, it was a very different story.
I didn’t lose my children. I would have if I hadn’t been a lawyer. Oddly enough, the role that sat most uncomfortably on my heart was the one that saved the people I loved most from being lost to me. But that victory came at a heavy price. During that marriage, I had done the thing I had wanted to do all my life: I had written a novel. After a lot of tries, I even got an agent in New York. In those early dark days of my divorce, my little book traveled from editor to editor at major publishing houses. Some did not like it. Some liked it but would not buy it. It was called Summers’ Child, a title that another writer would use for her own very successful novel some years later. (I had copyrighted my manuscript, and I knew she hadn’t done her homework before using my title.)
But when my husband found out that I had written a novel that was not succeeding with New York publishers, he dragged me down to the Family Law Courthouse and accused me in public of being a no-account deadbeat who was trying to live off child and temporary spousal support. He argued that I was trained as a lawyer, and so I had to go back to work as a lawyer. Even though I hadn’t done any work as a lawyer for eight years and hadn’t the foggiest idea, anymore, how to even sigh on to a legal research service.
Family Law Court, at least in those days, was a terrifying hell of illegality. I had graduated second in my class from law school, and I knew how unconstitutional the various rulings from that court were. The family law court operated at that time as if the Right to Privacy did not exist. At one point, I actually thought they were going to send me to involuntary psycho therapy to force me to withdraw my accurate and true statements that my husband had abused me and the children. I felt as if I’d wound up in a Russian Gulag as a political prisoner for not Speaking the Party Line.
I knew how to challenge these outrageous family law court rulings in higher courts. But the problem was I had to play the Family Law Court game or lose those dearest to me. It would do me no good to take my case to the United States Supreme Court only to be reunited with my children by my victory there when they were adults. So even though the Thirteenth Amendment abolished involuntary servitude, the state of California said I had to go back to work as a lawyer. And I did. In my living room, where I wrote appellate briefs and remained close to my children. But who I really was born to be was quietly dying, day by day.


Southern Mother At Large in California or You have a WHAT in that Suitcase?

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In the end, I drifted up the road from Richmond to another, smaller firm in Washington, D.C. where my creative bent found a home. Not long after I arrived at New Firm, the Most Important Partner came into my office one day to congratulate me on a memo I had written for him that the Florida Legislature had then adopted at a statute for the benefit of one of the firm’s clients. He was a very happy Most Important Partner. The client was a Very Happy Important Big Bucks Client. And the firm sure could bill for that one! Redeemed at last.
But finding a home as a lawyer wasn’t as fulfilling as I had thought it would be. It was all still paper and stale conference rooms and working trips on air planes. And business suits, starched shirts, and floppy bows. So I struck out for California (on an airplane, not in a covered wagon) and motherhood.
By 1991, I had three children, ages five, three, and newborn. I had hired a college girl as afternoon help three days a week because I just could not keep up with the demands of the mother job, which was a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week affair. I had no family to give me a break. Babysitters didn’t want three kids or a newborn. And the kids’ dad had parked us in a ritzy part of town where moms had Hispanic nannies. (And went back to Work. To avoid the tough job of Mother, I was convinced.) So no one needed a Mothers’ Day Out Program. (Except me, apparently.)
Mothering, I soon discovered, was an endlessly creative job. My artistic self smocked tiny dresses for my daughter, rompers for the boys. I marched clowns and balloons, cupcakes, and teddy bears across their tummies. I looped ribbon into “frou frous” and sewed them onto my daughter’s dresses and hats. I made tiny linen and velvet suits and vests for the boys. I made doll wardrobes and Halloween costumes. (Think my daughter as Pooh and my first son as Piglet when I was pregnant with Number Three.) I made matching velveteen mother-daughter-son outfits for Christmas. And I used a gallon milk jug and fake fur to create a dead wringer for a Coldstream Guards hat. (For my daughter, not the two boys.)
Of course, this activity was not a California Mother Thing at all. California Mothers (the ones without nannies) wore yoga pants and stuffed their children into knit rompers from Mervyns and Gymboree. My activities were so unusual that I had to smuggle a “pleater,” the device consisting of rows of tiny needles that prepares fabric for smocking, back from Tennessee in my suitcase. I ordered smocking patterns and laces and tiny French hand sewing needles from Georgia and Florida and Virginia and Texas.
And naturally I didn’t send my California children to school in these artworks that only a Southern Mother could love. No, as soon as my daughter could pull the OshKoshs off the hangers and put them on, one leg at a time, the dresses hung in the closet quietly waiting for Sunday, like the Good Girls they were.
But, of course, Sunday came. And again, I behaved as a Southern Mother would. CHURCH. Being Episcopalian, we had no duty (Thank, God) to proselytize the California Mothers and their offspring. I could quietly dress my little ones in their smocked and French handsewn best and shuffle us all off to Sunday School (which, true to Southern Mother Form I taught) and CHURCH. (Where I provided stickers and crayons and paper and tiny coloring books to keep the small troops quiet through the boring (to them and sometimes to me, true confessions) service. One interesting Sunday, my small daughter pointed out we were almost the only people there under fifty. Everyone else was at BRUNCH in their yoga pants and knit rompers, California Style.
But I was a Southern Mother. I didn’t know any better.
Being creative as a mother wasn’t just about their clothes. No, it was far deeper and more fun and more substantive than that. Southerners love stories and are born storytellers. I told stories about the South and about their grandfather the FBI agent and their great-great-grandfather the Civil War solider (for the Union!). I read and read and read and read. We loved Thomas the Tank Engine (we called him “Thomas Tanken”), Madeline, Good Night Moon, the Runaway Bunny, Winnie the Pooh, any alphabet book ever written, and all forms of Nursery Rhymes. We watched Sesame Street, talked about “Bee Bo,” “Oscar the Grouch,” “Cookie Monster” and “Count One Count.” (My daughter’s name for him which I thought much better than the original.)
We went to Disney moves, although my daughter wisely decided she did not want to be a Disney princess like her California counterparts, who would ditch their knit rompers for princess gowns, tiaras, and scepters to wear to the park. My daughter, on the other hand, put on her Coldstream Guards costume for outings and marched beside her little brothers’ stroller.
We ate fish sticks and tater tots for supper with plenty of ketchup. We had pillow fights and said prayers at bedtime. (Always the Lord’s Prayer because Now I Lay Me had terrified me as a child because it talked about dying.) We waded in the Pacific on days that never seemed to end because of the stifling heat. (The kids’ dad, who worked in air conditioned comfort, said we didn’t need to be cool.) And we promised every time that we wouldn’t go in the water in our clothes. But we always did. In short, the four of us laughed and created and played and had fun, Southern Mother style, in the foreign country of California. We made few friends, although we tried. But we had each other.

Somewhat skimpy ribbon frou frou on dress


Bee Bo!

Thomas Tanken!

A Smocked dress


Her costume looked like this!


 

A pleater.


 

Don’t Change the Words or the Spell Will Be Broken or When is a Lawyer Like a Wizard?

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After my first terrifying experience as a “trial lawyer,” in October 1981, I devoutly prayed each night I wouldn’t be sent back to court any time soon to sit behind a counsel table. Of course, if you stop and think about it, sending a one-day old lawyer with no trial experience into the lion’s den of superior court to oppose an injunction was an especially rotten and unreasonable thing to do. I had, after all, taken a job with A BIG FIRM to learn from highly talented and experienced attorneys. Imagine what I would have learned that October afternoon by watching the Firm’s Tallest Partner in action, instead of being fed to the wolves myself.
But even in 1986, hiding out in San Diego, holding my crying infant night and day, a world away from the east coast and that first job, and with the vague feeling I was running away from something I could not name, I was still looking back on those baby lawyer days and blaming myself. Shouldn’t have.
After the year rolled over into 1982, (did I mention they made me and me alone, work on Thanksgiving Day?) my old nemesis Legal Aid reared its head. THE FIRM expected baby lawyers to take on Legal Aid clients pro bono, and I was happy to sign up for mine. I actually thought lawyers could change the world by helping poor people back then. Wrong again.
My client was a twenty-year-old highly attractive African American woman who wanted a divorce. She’d been married a year, no kids, no money. In theory a slam-dunk legal proceeding. Her major drawback was she liked to sit in my office for hours spinning obvious yarns about abuse at the hands of her soon-to-be ex. I wondered if the lawyer-client privilege allowed me to tell her I didn’t believe a word she said.
Legal Aid helpfully sent along THE FORMS that I was supposed to file to ask for her divorce. Now, by this time, I had begun to suspect that law was not about language so much as about filling in blanks. I spent a lot of my time drafting “Interrogatories” which are questions one side in litigation poses to the other to figure out what their evidence is going to be at trial. The art of drafting Interrogatories basically consisted of copying the forms from the book, inserting the correct gendered pronouns, and sending these linguistic wonders to the typing pool. (And yes, we had an overnight typing pool that took over when the secretaries went home.)
But as I worked on the Legal Aid forms, asking for my client’s divorce, I saw better ways to say what needed to be said. I had, after all, a Masters in English and had worked on my Ph.D. I had been a technical editor. I had taught writing. Wouldn’t I be the one to know if there was a better way to say it? Apparently not.
I crafted the divorce documents and had them filed with the court where they would percolate for six months until the State of Virginia decided to free my client of her improvident marriage decision. I never expected to get anything back other than a piece of paper saying my client was a free woman. So imagine my dismay and horror, when after three months, I was personally summoned to the judge’s chambers one afternoon.
His Honor, sans robes, sat at his desk, the court file for my client’s case in front of him. I sat on the other side, in my man-tailored lawyer suit, starched blouse, floppy bow, and one-inch heeled pumps. I could see red marks that looked like blood trails all over the top paper in the file on His Honor’s desk. It was the pleading I had filed.
After ten seconds, I surmised a couple of things. One, His Honor hated me. No clue why. But he did. Two, he hadn’t called me in to thank me for volunteering for Legal Aid.
For the next hour, His Honor spat out a monologue about how THE FORMS were sacrosanct and NOT A WORD COULD BE CHANGED. According to His Honor, the words I had substituted in place of the SACRED TEXT made my pleadings totally inadequate, and my client could not get a divorce. He made it clear he had nothing but contempt for BIG FIRM ASSOCIATES who were trying to be Legal Aid volunteers. In his view, we should stick to representing only BIG BUCK CLIENTS because that was all we were good for. I didn’t have to read His Honor’s bio to figure out he’d never darkened the door of a BIG FIRM before going on the bench.
My punishment was to have my pleadings declared null and void, and I was sentenced to the ignominy of slinking back to my office and drafting new ones, this time inserting only my client’s name, her gender pronoun, and the correct dates into the text. After having these prepared in overnight secretarial, a winged-foot firm messenger deposited these linguistic gems in the courthouse. And my client would now have to wait another six months for singlehood because of my incompetence.  The first three percolating months with the WRONG WORDS didn’t count.
So what had I learned so far about being a lawyer? A couple of things. First, being sent to court to oppose injunctions was like being Daniel cast into the Fiery Furnace. Except no angel came down to get between me and the judge who said my client was lying. Major slip up in heaven that day.
Two, lawyers, whom I had thought practiced law, were actually practioners of black magic, wearing black man-tailored suits instead of wizard robes, but pretty much doing the same thing that wizards do: casting spells for dissolution of marriage using spells set out WORD FOR WORD AND NOT TO BE CHANGED in THE SACRED BOOK OF FORMS. Yep, being a lawyer was not what I’d expected. And creative? Well, law school said lawyers were creative, but so far I wasn’t seeing it.
Next time: My Head on a Pike or THE MEMO WE CAN’T BILL THE CLIENT FOR!!!! 

More Baby Lawyer Adventures or Death by Courtroom

/in /by

I began law school at the University of Tennessee in the summer of 1978. I had no idea what lawyers actually did, but liberal arts grads all around me were turning into them, so I figured I could, too. My then husband, like me an English major with a graduate degree and no teaching job, was happy to see me darken the legal doors of learning.
I came out in 1981, number two in my class, and still without much of an idea of what lawyers did. For three years I had done what I excelled at – read, memorize, and regurgitate facts – but I had never been inside a courtroom or taken a deposition or even seen a real live client. I had done one mock oral argument in moot court my first year with sweaty hands, a dry mouth, and a heart slamming in my chest. That was the entire extent of my “practical training” in law school. (Think medical school where you memorize the symptoms of every disease on earth but never see a body, dead or alive.)
At first being a lawyer wasn’t so bad. I’d accepted a job with a Big Firm in Virginia where I had family, and they paid me to study for the bar all summer, sitting in the apartment they rented for me and my husband. I watched the ducks swim on the pond out back and re-memorized all the law I’d learned in three years of law school. This time, Virginia style.
On the day before Princess Diana married Prince Charles, I drove to Roanoke where I stayed in the hotel room The Firm paid for. Next morning, I put on my lawyer suit, went to the Civic Center, and sat at a long table where I took the Virginia Bar under the watchful eye of the Bar Examiners IN PERSON. They sat on a dias above us and watched us spill our brains into blue books for two, very long days. (Weren’t they bored to death?) At night, I ate room service and watched the royal wedding.
Perhaps the fate of that marriage was a metaphor for the fate of my Big Firm career.
On my thirty-first birthday in August, I put on my lawyer suit again – this time supposedly for good – and took my place in my tiny office at The Firm in the litigation section. Until the Bar Examiners certified me as “passed,” I could not sign pleadings or take depositions or appear in court as anything except a clerk. And that was just fine with me. I wrote research memoranda that, as one senior lawyer observed, he could actually follow and understand. What a concept!
But my luck ran out in October. The day after I passed the bar, I was sent to court with the Firm’s Tallest Partner (I am five feet two), to oppose an injunction that Legal Aid was seeking against one of Our Most Powerful Clients. The Firm’s Tallest Partner was only there to watch me; I was the performing bear that afternoon. Of course, it was not a major matter (or they wouldn’t have sent newly-minted lawyer me); but, as far as I was concerned, it was The End of The World.
I didn’t even know which table to stand behind in the courtroom. And what questions to ask my witness? OMG. No CLUE. I used up at least three of my nine lives that afternoon, standing mute behind the defendant’s table, listening to the judge tell me he didn’t believe my witness. (While I wondered what the witness had actually said and what to say to a judge who says your witness is lying.)
A couple of miserable hours later, the Firm’s Tallest Partner, who had watched me demonstrate total incompetence in that courtroom, walked me back to The Firm in a steady downpour, with no umbrellas. My client had been enjoined, big time. Or small time, really; but it didn’t feel that way to me. It was my own personal Trail of Tears. The Firm’s Tallest Partner had nothing to say to me on the way back. I wondered if I’d offered to throw myself in the James River, if he would have given me a push.
Never mind that I had been a successful English graduate student, teaching three sections of freshman composition per semester. Never mind that I could take kids from writing C themes to A themes and have them laughing all the way. (Beware the flying commas!) Never mind that I could recite the Rules of Evidence backward and forward, and I actually understood Constitutional Law, including the dreaded Commerce Clause. Law on the hoof was a very different animal than in the classroom, my home turf. Teaching colleagues had always said they could stand in the hallway and know which class was mine because that was the room that the laughter was coming out of. Judges don’t laugh. Killer creative comedic timing is a useless skill before THEIR HONORS.
So for the next two years, I struggled to figure out the alien world I had landed in by mistake. Next time: More Baby Lawyer Adventures or The Judge who Taught Me Why You Never Change the Words and Still to Come: the Female Partner Who wore HATS and Ate Associates for Breakfast and High Tea
Below:  the James River

More Adventures of Elvis the Conch Shell or Argument, What is It Good For?

/in /by

Last week, I told you about Elvis the conch shell living in my ear. The doctor called Elvis an ear infection, but – as I told you last week – I know the sound of the sea when I hear it. Anyway, Elvis has mostly left my ear, but likes to come back every morning to check the fit of his jumpsuit before he heads for Vegas. Annoying, but better than having him full time in my ear. Bye, bye, Elvis. Leave the building for good. Thanks.
Now, as I told you last week, according to Louise Hay, whom I admire, Elvis took up residence in my ear because of the presence of arguing in my life. And, as I was quick to conclude, she can’t be right because my three children have grown up and found their own nests. And we didn’t argue much, anyway, when they lived here. And I can’t argue with my two Golden Retrievers. I mean, I could try; but they’d only lick me and love me to death in response. So it wouldn’t work.
But then I remembered what I do for a living. Truth to tell, I’m a professional arguer. My work life is just one big argument. Still, that doesn’t seem like the kind of raucous noise that would invite Elvis in. In fact, my job is largely silent, except for keyboard keys clicking.
So what do I do for a living? Well, when I meet people, I often say I’m a legal writer. That’s closer to the truth than saying, “I’m a lawyer” like the irritating guy at the end of “TMZ” every night. But I am an attorney, licensed in no less than two states and the District of Columbia. Conclusion: this chick is good at bar exams.
I’m an appellate attorney which means you have to be a bona fide loser to meet me. Sorry clients. You know who you are. If you lose your case in the trial court because your flashy flamboyant trial attorney failed to charm the jury, I am the next stop on your legal “to do” list.
Now, while I admit to a preference for flashy and flamboyant in my personal wardrobe, my work wardrobe is one black suit which I wear to the court of appeal once every two or three years for oral argument. (Although next time, I swear, I’m wearing the red suit and six inch heels.) The rest of the time, I sit at my computer surrounded by Goldens, writing scholarly, unbrief “briefs.” And these tomes of legal wisdom, gentle readers, are my “arguments.” I tell the court of appeal in polite terms how the trial court screwed the pooch and why my client simply must have a new trial. I put these gems of legal scholarship between Gamma green cardstock covers and ship them off to the court of appeal by FedEx ground. Each one is a fascinating, page-turning tale of legal woe. But the clerk of the court NEVER calls to say, WHAT A GREAT READ! (Although the guy at FedEx who copies, binds, and reads them, sees my potential as a fiction writer.) No, the clerk only calls when I forgot to sign some tacky service page. SIGH!
Several months after I launch my green guided missel into the office of opposing counsel, he or she fires back his or her own lemon-yellow hand grenade, asserting the trial court was brilliant in every way and made not one single mistake in the entire month-long trial. In fact, according to opposing counsel, His Honor is an unbiased saint, and twelve smarter, unbiased jurors could not possibly have been found on the planet. Appellant is just the sorest of losers. Twenty days later, I lob back a chicly neutral Bristol-tan reply brief that says, ever so politely, opposing counsel clearly graduated dead last in his class. He or she does not know what he is talking about.
After that, sometimes I put on my suit, go to court, and stand behind the too-high-for-short-people podium for an oral argument that lasts all of fifteen minutes. But rarely. I mean, after all that writing, who has anything new to say? And the court of appeal will offer to lynch me if I bore them with what I’ve already said.
So, upon reflection, I do have argument in my life. But not the loud kind that would invite Elvis for a week-long sleepover in my ear under Louise Hay’s view of the Universe.
While the stately, professional arguing I do for a living has a purpose – it lets disappointed litigants air their grievances in a safe, controlled environment which is kind of like releasing compressed air to clean a keyboard – I don’t have much use for argument in my personal life. Maybe that’s because I got “argued out” as a child. My parents went at it 24/7. They saw each other – or one of us – and automatically launched an attack. No wonder I grew up thinking being a champion arguer was a badge of honor. Not to mention survival. But no one ever persuaded anyone to change his or her mind. It was all just word bullets fired into our most vulnerable emotional places.
So when my own three children entered my life, I couldn’t bring myself to surround them with the hurtful, constant criticism and argument that was the only way my parents could relate to their children. I mean, when you love someone with all your heart, do you really care if they turned over their soda by accident or forgot to put the toilet seat down, or wanted an extra cookie? (Who doesn’t want an extra cookie?) Looking back, the stuff my parents thought was make or break makes me laugh because it wasn’t all that important. For example, one of my father’s favorite rants was I’d never graduate from any school whatsoever because I couldn’t spell. (Didn’t anyone tell him how English got its spelling rules? Printer’s misspellings!) But enter spell check! And I have three (count them three) post graduate degrees. Cum laude. Guess I showed him I could graduate. Over and over and over again.
But the most interesting thing about arguing is that when I let go of the rope and fail to respond, my opponent has no ammunition to continue the fight. Really, it is the funniest thing to watch in the whole world. Try it. You will die laughing inside when tough guy stares at you with nothing else to say. It is so much fun, you won’t even be tempted to argue back. Silence has enormous power.  Said by a professional arguer!