It's Cold Here on Cape Cod

The design temperature for this part of world (the coldest temperature that a heating system should be designed for when the system is running continuously to maintain a 70 ºF indoor temperature) is 16 ºF. Right now at noon, it’s 20 ºF outside. It was 18 ºF this morning without the wind chill (which meant it felt like 10 ºF outside). It should exceed 16 ºF 99% of the time in a normal weather year. So the heating system should be designed to accomplish that. If it’s not running its little heart out at 16 ºF, then either the system is oversized or the setting on the thermostat is set to less than 70 ºF. If the system is oversized it might be able to keep the house at 70 ºF on those very, very rare days when the temperature drops below the design temperature, but much of the time the system will be cycling and running less efficiently. (So maybe I’ll go turn the thermostat up just a bit.)

Maybe you don’t want to know all this, and maybe you don’t want to know that the reason this old house is really dry in cold weather is that there are all sorts of drafts and breezes blowing in through all the cracks and holes in the shell. And you might not realize that as that cold outside air warms, its relative humidity goes down!

What I’m really interested in is the roll that the temperature inside a house plays in a crime story or a mystery. When I see the covers of romance novels with pictures of bare chested men and almost naked women and the stories are set in castles or mansions, they better be in warm climates or hot weather. They wouldn’t be standing around like that in stone castle or a Addams Family mansion in the winter. Their hands would be trembling from the cold!

I cannot think of any novel I have ever read in which the temperature inside the building played a significant role in the story. Perhaps I am forgetting. I would welcome input on this. Authors paint word pictures of skies and forests, kitchens and living room, laboratories and gymnasiums, but I don’t remember any descriptions of thermally uncomfortable spaces in a house. Dante talked about the “hottest places in hell” ‘are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality’ as JFK used to cite. Dante didn’t actually write that. There are a bunch of warm and cozy places in the Harry Potter stories like the Three Broomsticks, the Gryffindor common room, and the Great Hall. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods was cozy, and the Fraser cabin in the Outlander series has plenty of warmth and coziness.

There are books set in cold places like the Arctic and Greenland and Iceland. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden is the first in a trilogy called Winternight which includes a demon called Frost who claims unprotected souls I the night. And then there is classic winter tale from Stephen King – The Shining.  I think I’m going to leave this there.

Point of View

It all depends on your point of view, they say. You can look at a glass and see if it’s half empty or half full or the wrong size container for the amount of liquid - as an engineer might say. The team that wins a game will be elated. The team that loses will be depressed.

In writing fiction, the point of view is a powerful tool that allows the writer to take the reader inside a character’s head, to see the scene through that character’s eyes and thoughts. Some authors are skilled at taking the reader in and out of different character’s minds, so much so that the reader barely notices and just goes along for the ride. Sometimes, if it is not skillfully done, the switching of points of view can make the reader nauseous like a childish videographer who pans rapidly around a scene.

A careful manipulation of points of view can allow the reader to see the same event from different points of view. In a crime novel that can be particularly telling as the scheme unravels before the readers eyes. The scene can even be seen through the eyes of the killer. Strict first person narration restricts the telling of the tale to the point of view of the narrator alone because, as much as we might like to, we really can’t go inside other people’s heads and know what they are thinking

In the book that I am working on now, I mapped out which characters I was going to use for the points of view before I began. Then I can write a scene in that character’s voice and thoughts and reactions. At the same time I am keeping the time line continuous so I won’t go back and describe what else might have been happening at the same time from a different character’s point of view. It’s the manipulation of all these writing tools that make the process enjoyable for both the writer and the reader.

Getting There

Of course the question is: where?  "If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there," said Yogi.  When you go someplace on vacation, you're just going to come back again, so why spend the time going?  In order to make progress, you have to know where you're starting and where you want to end up.  Do you have to make progress every day to be a success?  When I go to bed at night, I have to be wiser or richer or smarter or more beautiful or . . . what . . . than I was the day before?  And who is going to evaluate that progress?

Me.  Because it is inbred that I need to make progress every day.  When you look at a thermometer, you can evaluate if the temperature is going up or down.  You can measure the temperature.  When you look at a bank account, you can easily evaluate if the pile is getting bigger or smaller.  When you count the number of steps you take in a day, you can quickly (and constantly) tell if you are moving toward your goal.  (If you walk backwards, does it deduct steps?)

So we need a life scale, a life thermometer.  I suppose that's why there are all those "places to see before you die" or "bucket lists" or travel stickers on the suitcase.  I am convinced that most of us just want to live through the day, eat or sleep, laugh occasionally, get up the next morning and do it all over again.  "Write a 250 word essay on buying apples."  There's a goal.  "Write a 500 page novel."  "File your taxes by April 15th."  "Lose twenty-seven pounds."  "Bench press a hundred pounds."  Add up all these short term goals and pretty soon you have a life.  But do we want it to just be measured in days, months or years?

I don't know about you, but I'm still working on where I'm going.

The Plumber and the War

My great Uncle Cedric (Cedric Marshall Fox) was a very interesting chap.  He served in the first World War, wrote poetry and music and plays, and might have been a lawyer (although he never practiced law).  This is one of his poems:

The pipes of the palace got leaky

Cedric Marshall Fox

And the king for a plumber sent

The plumber was smart and cheeky,

And with ominous smile he went.

For a year he kept plumbing, that plumber,

And perhaps he is plumbing still,

But you never saw a man dumber

Than the king when he saw his bill.

That king was in deadly strife

With another king near by.

At a dreadful cost of life

And drain on his treasury.

But he forthwith stop that war

T’was the best thing he could do;

For couldn’t raise money for

The war and the plumber too!

www.paulhraymer.com

First entry in the Commonplace Book

                  An old fashioned scrap book

A Commonplace Book is a place to put word stuff.  (A scrap book is different.  But this is a great old scrap book.)  My grandmother used to keep all sorts of notes and thoughts and memos and cute little ditties in varies books and diaries.  My plan is to keep this more focused.

I thought it might be interesting to define some of the steps in creating my latest novel.  But who knows what is interesting these days.  "I am sitting on the patio!"  People take lots of pictures of the food they are eating.  Imagine if you had to buy film to take pictures like that.  Then you'd have to pay to get it developed and then pay to get it printed and then find a way to turn it into an electronic image.  What a world!

I am writing this on January 20, 2017, the day Donald J. Trump is being inaugurated as President of a country where lots of people don't know who won the Civil War or who the first President was.