Now that I’m publishing my first novel—a work of historical fiction set in 1930s and 1940s colonized Malaysia, called The Storm We Made, about an unlikely female spy and the impact of her actions on her three children—I’m facing familiar questions about my research process. The questions seem innocuous enough, and well within the realm of reasonable questions to ask of an author of historical fiction. Friends and well-meaning readers want to know which authors’ research processes I mirrored, whose methods I preferred, whose I found cumbersome. An easy question, a throwaway—something I should have no problem answering. They want to visualize my process. Did I scour old Malaysian newspapers, stain my fingers black? Did I lock myself up studying ancient and fragile tapes to understand what people wore at the time? Did I interview thousands of survivors? And even though it seems simple enough to answer, I admit—I am defensive, crushed by the specificity of their questions, terrified to confront the very simple truth.
Because the answer, I’m afraid to whisper, is I did none of those things.
Beside Scotland’s Crathes Castle, beyond the ornately sculpted hedgerows and formal gardens, is a simple grass field edged with willow and alder trees. Beneath this pasture, known as Warren Field, are 12 sunken pits carved 10 millennia ago by Stone Age hunter-gatherers. For decades, their purpose was unknown.
But to Vincent Gaffney, a professor at the University of Bradford, in northern England, the pits formed something distinctly cosmic: a clear curve from right to left, bent to the horizon—a pit for each of the 12 moons in the lunar year. As each moon arrived, Gaffney hypothesized in 2013, perhaps the people of Warren Field lit a fire in the corresponding pit or placed a marker in front of it, denoting which month they were in. The dugouts were a permanent way to mark each moon—and, he suspected, to account for the difference between lunar and solar years.
Old people have falls. I had only just turned 52 one week before the September evening I collapsed. But the year from 51 to 52 had been a remarkably bad one. I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding. I sent applications to other publications and got thoughtful rejections. I sent more applications, and they went unanswered. I made an appeal for paid subscriptions at a newsletter I’d been writing. Its revenue flattened out at about 20 percent of my share of our living expenses. The household finances began to drain.
I picked up an adjunct gig, teaching a writing class on Zoom, three straight hours a shot, and the anxiety of filling the time — of giving the students what they were paying for — gathered into a lump in my upper torso until I couldn’t stand the taste of the herbal tea that was supposed to relax me and give me something to do with my hands on-camera. My shoulder locked up. I got pins and needles in my arm.
“The Waters” is a thought-provoking and readable exploration of eccentricity and of all different kinds of love — familial love, romantic love, love of knowledge, love of animals and love of one’s own environment, even when it is a difficult place to live.
Thirteen Ways To Kill Lullabelle Rock is smart, pacy and intelligent. It is even, despite the harum-scarum murders, surprisingly moving. Most importantly, it is the opposite of po-faced. There are comic set-pieces and clever one-liners (her car provides inspirational quotes like “Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken”). In many ways it would be an excellent series of half-hour films. Despite the rather shaky nature of the character Lullabelle’s thespian skills, it would be a Kind Hearts And Coronets challenge for an ambitious young actress.