Five Places to Go Before...A Volcano Erupts (Again)

A ticking time bomb is a fabulously useful element for increasing the page-turning factor in your novel. For the Novel Travelist, a ticking time bomb can come in the form of a location or setting that won't be around forever. I hereby inaugurate the "Five Places to Go Before..." series, featuring threatened locations around the globe.

In this first post of the series, the threat is a volcanic eruption. Each of these sites lies beneath an active volcano, one predicted to erupt again in the near future...

Pasto, Columbia

The Las Lajas Sanctuary is a spectacular cathedral built into the side of a gloriously green mountain. But it might not be around forever, because Mt. Galeras sits right above it. See this architectural wonder in person before it is destroyed!

Las Lajas Sanctuary, Pasto, Columbia

Saint Pierre, Caribbean

Once known as "The Paris of the Caribbean," St. Pierre has already been completely obliterated once by Mount Pelee. Much of the old city has been rebuilt, so come see this lovely French community before it is gone once again.

Saint Pierre, Caribbean

 Pompeii and Herculaneum, Italy

Of course, this list would not be complete without the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum - the ticking time bomb in my novel, The Vesuvius Isotope. Another eruption of Mount Vesuvius is long overdue, and these priceless sites might not survive the next one. I love the image in this fresco from Pompeii showing Mount Vesuvius covered in green - sort of like Mount Pelee above...yikes!

Fresco of Mount Vesuvius From Pompeii

Shimbara, Japan

This glistening white castle is just one of a series of similarly constructed beautiful castles in Japan - but it might be the one most in danger. Looming above the castle is the active Mount Unzen, just one of Japan's dangerous volcanoes.

Shimbara Castle, Japan

 Seattle, Washington

Although quite a distance from Mount Rainier, Seattle lies in the path of destruction should the volcano erupt with sufficient force. It is expected that lava flow from a major eruption would pour right into the downtown area. And then, you'd be confined to the space needle replica in Las Vegas. The horror! See the real one when you can.

Seattle, Washington

The impending eruption of Mount Vesuvius lends a ticking time bomb to the action in The Vesuvius Isotope, the best-selling debut novel by Kristen Elise. Buy The Vesuvius Isotope on Amazon.

When her Nobel laureate husband is murdered, biologist Katrina Stone can no longer ignore the secrecy that increasingly pervaded his behavior in recent weeks. Her search for answers leads to a two-thousand-year-old medical mystery and the esoteric life of one of history’s most enigmatic women. Following the trail forged by her late husband, Katrina must separate truth from legend as she chases medicine from ancient Italy and Egypt to a clandestine modern-day war. Her quest will reveal a legacy of greed and murder and resurrect an ancient plague, introducing it into the twenty-first century.

Kristen Elise, Ph.D. is a drug discovery biologist. She lives in San Diego, California, with her husband, stepson, and three canine children. 

Building the Future in a Novel

The not so far future as shown in the film Elysium.

From Contributor Lance Charnes

With Google, Flickr, YouTube and all the rest, you can get a pretty good idea of what other places look like now, and what they used to look like (see this post for my experiment in remote location scouting). But there’s one thing you can’t get yet: what places will look like in the future. Or can you?

South, my latest thriller, is set in Southern California and the

American Southwest in 2032. In my version of the future, the local, state and Federal governments have been starved of money; what little government spending survives is entirely devoted to the military and police. The elimination of most regulations, taxes and the social safety net have brought back the pre-Progressive Era, pre-New Deal America of 1890, except with the Internet and drones. In this new Gilded Age, the wealthy live extremely well, while the other 90%+ of the population are poor and hopeless. (If any of this sounds familiar, that’s exactly the point.)


So what does this look like, exactly?


Two of my own decisions complicated the world-building process.

• First, the story is set only twenty years from now. You can get away with almost anything if you project out fifty or a hundred years in the future (such as J.D. Robb’s …In Death series, or William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy). But twenty years? That’s practically tomorrow. So whatever I did had to use the people who are alive today, and technology that (at the most extreme) exists in the labs today. 
• It’s been said that the future comes slowly to the poor. My main protagonist, Luis, and his family are poor. He spends most of his time in the poor areas (where 90% of the population lives). So he (and we) will be seeing twenty years of devolution, not progress. 

Let’s look at one of South’s locations to see how this worked out.

Today’s Santa Ana is the seat of Orange County, California. Over 78% of its 324,000 people are Latino, mostly working-class. The city isn’t rich by any means. Still, it has a vibrant downtown arts district, a bustling Latino commercial area, and all those government jobs…most of which have gone away in South’s scenario.

We all know what American urban decay looks like: a blossoming of liquor stores, no new development, empty storefronts, peeling paint, chain-link fences, and so on. Those exist already off the main streets in Santa Ana. However, this is so familiar that I knew I had to push the place’s future poverty to the next level – to the Third World. Since this is all seen in passing as Luis is going about his business, I could add in only the most emblematic features of a future Third World Santa Ana.

• Street markets. When you can’t afford the rent for fixed storefronts, when your grocery stores go bust or move out, you set up a pipe stall and a couple tarps and keep selling. Street markets like these are omnipresent outside the developed world. Right now they’re affectations in the U.S. (the yuppie “farmer’s market”); in South’s world, they’re necessities. 
• Surgical masks. If you don’t have regulations, you have pollution and constant epidemics. Surgical masks are a common fashion accessory in many parts of the developing world. I saw a lot of them just recently in both Hong Kong and Tokyo – both part of the developed world – and they’re ubiquitous in China. 
• Advertising overload. Poor people don’t get to have aesthetic standards for their public areas. It’s hard enough to control billboards and outside advertising now; imagine how hard it is when city and county governments don’t have any money or people. It was interesting to see that even in the ratty parts of Hong Kong, ads covered every square inch of available space. Of course, the state of the art in advertising delivery will keep marching on even (or especially) when people don’t have any money to buy things. 

Street Markets in Honduras

Advertising Overload

Surgical Masks throughout China

Here’s an excerpt that shows how this goes together on Santa Ana’s 17th Street:

The car drove eastbound on 17th, crashing over potholes and busted pavement, Pitbull rapping on the oldies feed. The pipe-stall-and-tarp jumbles of street markets in the parking lots of failed strip malls added back some of the color lost from the faded signs and bleached paint. Vidboards flashed splashy moving ads for booze and cigarettes and guns. Gray smoke and smog hid the hills in the distance. Luis was glad for the car’s A/C so he didn’t have to smell the place.

Another excerpt, with ICE Special Agent McGinley driving Luis down Fourth Street toward downtown Santa Ana:

“Well, I just found out this morning, but I ain’t first on their mailing list, if you know what I mean.” He stopped to let a mixed group of Latino women and kids—faces half-covered by grubby surgical masks—cross the road on their way to a street market set up in front of a dead gas station. “Let me tell you how this works…”

Other indicators of change:

• Business mix. Modern-day slums attract certain types of businesses: liquor stores, pawn shops, payday loan outlets, bodegas, dive bars, the worst possible fast food. What kinds of similarly exploitative businesses might be common in South’s world? Tire rentals (it’s already happening). Slate (tablet PC) rentals. Overpriced Internet cafes. Storefront clinics run by unlicensed doctors. 
• Tuk-tuks and pedicabs. Mass transit is just a memory in Orange County by 2032, but cars are expensive to own and operate. How do people get around? The same way they do in the developing world: tuk-tuks, pedicabs, and microbuses. They’re cheap, easy to maintain, and don’t take a lot of skill to operate. 

Tuks-Tuks

McGinley and Luis continue their drive into downtown:

Luis tried to find a way to sit that didn’t hurt and kept his face turned away from McGinley. He watched the busy sidewalk as the car nosed through the tuk-tuks and pedicabs jamming Fourth Street in Santa Ana’s Latino business district. “Someone else already made a play for her. Not the FBI.”

Later:

[McGinley] threaded through the northbound traffic on Main, heading away from downtown and La Paloma into patchy low-rise commercial buildings and a blight of vidboards, pawn shops, tire- and slate-rental stores and payday lenders. The gold late-afternoon light didn’t make the area any more attractive. “Do you know a Jorge Casillas?”

It wasn’t hard to find precedents for the world of 2032 in South; what was hard was resisting the temptation to overdescribe it. Because we’re so familiar with this type of cityscape – we see it on the news every night, or in our own blighted neighborhoods – readers need only a little prompting to fill in the details themselves. The excerpts I’ve included are South’s most extensive descriptions of the Santa Ana of 2032, yet readers have commented on the realism of the settings.

If you know the politics and economics of your future world, you can find an example of how they turned out somewhere on Earth, and there’ll be pictures on Google. Once again, the interwebs come to a writer’s rescue.

Lance Charnes is an emergency manager and former Air Force intelligence officer. He’s the author of the international thriller Doha 12 and the near-future thriller South. He tweets (@lcharnes) about scuba diving, shipwrecks, archaeology and art crime, among other things.

Google vs. Feet On Location

Philadelphia's 30th Street Station - The setting for a scene in DOHA 12 by Lance Charnes

I met a great Author, Lance Charnes, who conducted a fascinating experiment perfect for Novel Travelist. He mentally built Philadelphia's 30th Street Station via google and then compared his accuracy during a trip to Philadelphia. 


Building 30th Street Station By Lance Charnes

In my international thriller Doha 12, assassins follow our heroes Jake Eldar and Miriam Schaffer to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. There, the bad guys launch an ill-prepared attempt to kill Jake and Miriam, which devolves into a three-way shoot-out running the length of the terminal. This is one of the major set-piece scenes, and because the place is so familiar to a large number of people in the Philly metro area, I wanted to get the setting right.

One problem: like most indie writers, I’m not working on an advance. All travel and research is completely on my own dime. I needed to do as much research as I could for free, since I had no idea when or if I’d ever get to Philadelphia to check out the place in person.

Interior of 30th Street Station - View from Stairs

Whenever I select a setting for a scene, I try to harvest as many high-quality pictures as I can from as many angles as possible. Google Images is perfect for this; put in your search term, and you get back a flood of photos from all manner of sources, including Flickr, newspapers, TV, and so on. If you do this, keep crawling through the results; the farther in you get, the more offbeat the sources. 

• Train enthusiast websites had close-up pictures of the Amtrak information desk and board, and shots of the arrival platforms. 
• An advertising firm showed an ad placement it had done in the main hall. 
• Someone thought to take a snap of a women’s restroom. 
• Another traveler had been there at Christmas (the shoot-out happens in early December), so I got much-needed pictures of the decorations, including the giant, perfectly conical tree at the east end of the concourse.

At the end of this process, I had a big collection of still photos, but no good idea about the layout of the place. I’d found only one small, blurry floorplan on the Amtrak site. From that and basic photointerpretation skills (I used to be in intel), I constructed a reasonable plan for the concourse; everything else was a guess.

I had lots of random still photos, but no clear idea of the layout.

Next, I turned to video. YouTube offered up 23,000 hits on “Philadelphia 30th street station.” Here’s where the weird diversity of the Internet truly came into play. There were tons of trainspotting videos; after digging through these, I found the one I needed, an end-to-end video taken in a NJ Transit commuter train going from Cherry Hill (NJ) Station to 30th Street – exactly the route our heroes take. I found videos taken by people walking through the concourse (note to future videographers: whip pans are lousy to watch), waiting for pickup outside, a flash mob dancing in the concourse, and a guided tour of the station at Christmas courtesy of a Philly yoga enthusiast. I plowed through a lot of truly awful video (too dark/too bright/out of focus/taken during an earthquake), keeping the links for the ones that were the most helpful.

The videos showed me: 

• How people move through the space
• What you can see from where
• Some of the ambient sounds (note to future videographers: shut up and let the location speak for itself). 

I still didn’t have a good floorplan, though. I used the videos to refine the less-than-wonderful one I’d been able to scratch together, then forged ahead and wrote the scene.

A couple months passed. During an editing session, I decided to see if anything new had surfaced on the web. Lo and behold, the website Metro Jacksonville (Florida!) had posted an essay on the Amtrak Keystone Corridor train service, holding it up as an example for Jacksonville transit. The post included a reproduction of 30th Street’s visitor directory. Not only was it a clear, accurate floorplan, but it told which vendors were in each of the commercial spaces. Eureka!

It also showed that beyond the concourse, my cobbled-together floorplan was mostly wrong.

I dragged this treasure into Photoshop and did some measuring. The real concourse is 135’ wide by 290’ long. The map concourse was 177 pixels wide by 352 pixels long. With a bit of fudging, I was able to lay down a 9’ (three-stride) grid on the map concourse. I could finally measure distances and sizes throughout the terminal, time out how long it would take my characters to move from place to place, estimate how far they could shoot and what they could hide behind. I rewrote the scene using this new information and hoped it was good enough.

Fast-forward to October 2011. Through a series of circumstances I won’t bore you with, I got to go to D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. A few days before Halloween, I found myself standing in the concourse of the real 30th Street Station.

First, it’s a tremendously strange feeling to finally be in a place you’ve known only through photos. (Going to the Parthenon felt exactly the same way: damn, it really looks like the pictures.) Secondly, it’s very strange to go someplace you’ve never been and know exactly where everything is. I spent the next ninety minutes roaming the station, taking pictures and making notes. I traced the steps my characters ran, took cover behind the obstacles they used, checked the sightlines, confirmed which windows would get hit by the missed shots. I have no doubt I’m now on some Amtrak Police watchlist for all the suspicious things I did that morning. What kind of law-abiding citizen takes pictures while crouched behind a bench?

Statue - Great for my hero to hide behind.

The upshot? I had to make only minor adjustments to the action. What I’d pasted together off the Internet turned out to be about 95% right. The other 5% involved the passage of time and the tricks camera play: signs and trash cans had moved, some of the stores had changed out, the half-walls around the stairs leading to the tracks were lower than they looked (or I’d been measuring them against short people). I took notes and made these tweaks when I got home without causing another rewrite.

I also used this research method for some of Doha 12’s other settings, such as the Manhattan Diamond District, Central Park East’s Temple Emanu-El, and Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. It worked time and again. Still, there are limits. Photo lighting isn’t always normal lighting; some places are darker or lighter in real life. You can’t feel the air temperature (chilly in the station), and until online Smell-o-Vision happens, you can’t get the ambient smells (cleaners and donuts in the station). This wasn’t a major drawback in my case. However, if your scene is set in a Kolkata meat market, the missing information may be crucial.

The take-home lesson: just because you don’t have an advance doesn’t mean you can’t accurately describe a setting in your writing. Another bonus: you can surf for hours and call it “research.”
________________________________________

Lance Charnes is an emergency manager and former Air Force intelligence officer. He’s the author of the international thriller Doha 12 and the upcoming near-future thriller South. He tweets (@lcharnes) about scuba diving, shipwrecks, marine archaeology and art crime, among other things.

Murder in the Spa

Who opens a thriller with a scene at a spa? This girl, I suppose. And I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise, given that my last novel, through no conscious choice of my own, ended up opening on a nude beach. It's funny how settings (and characters, for that matter) just barge right in and novel-bomb one's latest piece of writing without even so much as an introductory handshake.

This time, it's the spa. Specifically, it's the Spa: The one around which the town of Spa, Belgium sprang up (pun fully intended.) The one from which all other spas take their universal nomenclature.

The word "spa" is thought to descend, as so many things do, from ancient Rome. These healing waters in the mountains of Belgium, once visited by the likes of Pliny the Elder, birthed the Latin phrase Sanus Per Aquam, meaning "health through water." How lovely. Follow the acronym and you get the word "SPA."

Other famous visitors to these therapeutic springs included Peter the Great, Charles II, and everyone's favorite head-hunter, Henry VIII. The natural elixir bursting forth from the underground here is rich in calcium, sodium, magnesium, iron, and bicarbonate (a.k.a. baking soda.) So its healing properties are not a myth: we realize today that each of these minerals is essential.

Indeed, from their discovery in Roman times, to the development of the city of Spa in the 15th century, to today, these waters are where people go to detox and rejuvenate. They are recommended for anemia, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory disorders, rheumatism, gynecological disorders, mental fatigue and stress. And they always have been.

Perhaps Henry VIII should have spent more time here.

So what does all of this have to do with a thriller? Well, I'm sure you can imagine all sorts of possibilities. Drowning in the mineral baths (duh). Strangulation during an overzealous deep tissue massage. Being thrown from the top of the mountain or a drop of arsenic in your mineral water. But you'd be dead wrong.

You see, the protagonist of The Queenmakers is a healer. Having recently discovered The Vesuvius Isotope, Katrina Stone has now built a pharmaceutical empire around the therapeutic properties of natural elements. And so, in pursuit of science and medicine, she must visit the spa of Spa.

Ah, the hardships of field research.

The Queenmakers is the forth-coming sequel to The Vesuvius Isotope. Look for it in Fall 2014. 
Buy The Vesuvius Isotope on Amazon.

When her Nobel laureate husband is murdered, biologist Katrina Stone can no longer ignore the secrecy that increasingly pervaded his behavior in recent weeks. Her search for answers leads to a two-thousand-year-old medical mystery and the esoteric life of one of history’s most enigmatic women. Following the trail forged by her late husband, Katrina must separate truth from legend as she chases medicine from ancient Italy and Egypt to a clandestine modern-day war. Her quest will reveal a legacy of greed and murder and resurrect an ancient plague, introducing it into the twenty-first century.

Kristen Elise, Ph.D. is a drug discovery biologist and the author of The Vesuvius Isotope. She lives in San Diego, California, with her husband, stepson, and three canine children. 

Food Inspiration to Influence a Novel

Bonn Germany - A city of inspirational food and music

Over the summer, I put a post on noveltravelist describing the trip that inspired my latest novel, Words In The Windowsill. I noted in that post, that writing the novel afforded me the opportunity to revisit my old journals and photos from that trip. Looking back, I quickly realized that along with the history and music which propels the plot of my story, so much of what inspired me had to do with foods of the regions we visited.

So I’d like to share a bit more with you today about Bonn, Germany along with some inspirational foods I ate while there. Some I even tried for the first time on that inspirational journey.

In some cases, connections were made! For instance, my novel takes place in Europe, in countries that have borders that are really close. It was amazing to see similarities to the recipes of my Italian heritage. Although the countries are different and the people speak different languages, some of the recipes are incredibly similar. I am including recipes for some of these as well. They are seriously worth trying!

Beethoven's House

Bonn, Germany was the capitol of Western Germany until 1990. It is the home to major universities and museums as well as Beethoven Haus, the birthplace of master composer, Beethoven. I reference this home quite a bit in my novel. In Bonn, there is a lot to see and do, even if you are not a music buff, as I am.

When I arrived in Germany, I was so bent on

Beethoven's personal pianos!
Oh, the music that emerged from these.

seeing the home of Beethoven I didn’t realize what more there could be to do. I reference Beethoven’s home quite a bit in my novel. The photo to the right, shows two of Beethoven’s piano’s from inside the home. The Beethoven Haus property also features gardens as well as a concert hall. It is glorious! 

Another aspect of Germany which meant a lot to me was the preponderance of musicians and artists in the towns. There were artists painting and selling their work along the streets. 

Street musicians

But while in Bonn, it is also worth noting a small eatery we visited, where rice pudding was served in a little cup with every meal ordered. I wish I could remember the name of the establishment, as I would love to know if it is still in existence.

Anyway, their homemade rice pudding was very creamy and not baked. It reminded me of the rice pudding my Italian Great Aunt Connie made. Growing up, I just assumed that hers was Italian Rice Pudding, but perhaps a better way to refer to it would be European Rice Pudding.
When I returned home, I asked my mother about Aunt Connie’s rice pudding recipe. With the exception of egg, the recipe below is very similar to the one from my family heritage. 

Aunt Connie's Rice Pudding Recipe

And below, is the German one:

Milchreis (German Rice Pudding)

(Courtesy food.com)

Ingredients:
1 cup short grain white rice
1/4 cup sugar
3 cups milk
1 cup cream
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 inches piece vanilla beans, split open ( or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)

Directions :
-Mix the rice, sugar and salt in a large saucepan. 

-Stir in the milk and cream, and add the whole piece of vanilla bean. 

-Place over medium heat and bring to a boil, stirring often.
-Reduce heat and simmer the rice for 30 minutes, or until soft and milk/cream mixture becomes thick. 

-Stir often.
-Scratch out vanilla seeds and stir into pudding. Discard vanilla bean pod.
-Serve warm with cinnamon and sugar or fruit compote, or both.

My travel journal with great food notes and restaurant names

Another restaurant we visited in Germany was called “Caroline And Hans”. Here is what I wrote in my journal:

“Today we had some free time in Germany. Jenny and I had lunch at the cutest restaurant called Christine and Hans. The owners were the cooks and servers, and kept bringing out everything on the menu. We had a caraway soup, and zucchini soup, along with several different salads, and a plate of meats and cheeses.”

The service they gave us made a serious impression on me. The foods were absolutely delicious, and served up in a very homey atmosphere with special attention to detail. Christine and Hans were there to cook and serve the food. I got the feeling that the service we received was typical of their everyday business. Christine came out of the kitchen to seat us, and told us about everything on their menu. She told us how everything was prepared. Here are a few recipes that remind me of the foods I ate during my visit to the restaurant.

When writing Words In The Windowsill, I took my experience at Christine and Hans and molded it to create a fictitious youth hostel where the foods are laid out in a comforting way and remind my main character (also named Hans-strictly a coincidence!) of his past.

Try some of these recipes, similar to the ones served up by Christine and Hans:

Caraway Sour Cream Soup (Courtesy Taste Of Home)

8 Servings, Prep/Total Time: 20 min.
Ingredients:
2 medium onions, diced
1 cup diced celery
1 cup diced carrots
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1 cup (8 ounces) sour cream
1/2 cup milk
Salt and pepper to taste 

Directions:
-In a large saucepan, saute onions, celery, carrots and caraway in butter until vegetables are tender. 

-Remove from the heat; stir in flour until well blended. Gradually stir in broth. 

-Return to the heat; bring to a boil. 

-Cook and stir for 2 minutes. 

-Reduce heat; simmer for 10 minutes. 

-Combine sour cream and milk; add about 1 cup broth mixture. Return all to the pan; heat through (do not boil).
Season with salt and pepper. Yield: 6-8 servings.


German Zucchini Soup (Courtesy of dollopofcream.com)
Serves 3 - 4 

Ingredients:

1 tbsp. olive oil
1/4 c. butter
2 onions, roughly chopped
4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 tsp. kosher salt or 1/4 tsp. regular salt
1/8 – 1/4 tsp. black pepper, to taste
2 1/4 c. zucchini, shredded
2 c. vegetable or chicken stock
1/2 c. white wine
1/2 c. plain yogurt, preferably high fat
fresh basil, chopped

Directions:
-Heat thick saucepan over medium-low heat. 

-Melt butter and olive oil in pan. 

-Add onion and sauté. 

-Turn heat down to cook slowly. 

-After 5 minutes, throw in the garlic, salt and pepper. 

-Fry until onion is almost transparent, about 10 minutes. The onion will glisten and look almost soupy.
-Add zucchini and stock. Bring to a boil. Simmer for 12 minutes, uncovered.
-Stir in the wine. 

-Whir it all together with an immersion blender or regular blender until it’s creamy. 

-Return to heat. 

-Stir in yogurt and about half of the basil. 

-Heat gently, but don’t let it boil, for fear it will curdle.

Ladle into serving bowls. Place a few bits of basil on top. Serve.

It has been years since I took that trip. As I was writing Words In The Windowsill, my impressions from that trip came through in the prose. My familial connection to the rice pudding, and the service and homey atmosphere of Christine and Hans show up as I describe the fabled youth hostel and Fiddler’s Inn of my novel’s portrayal of 1820’s Vienna.

My next post will include more connections and findings, but from Vienna, Austria.

I would love to hear from you! How have you been inspired by experiences abroad? How might you use those experiences to craft a novel or story?

Contributor Susan Nystoriak is a music educator and writer from Upstate New York, and is a travel enthusiast. When not teaching her students, she spends time with her family and working on her writing projects. Connect with her on Twitter @smnystoriak, or on the web at smnystoriak.wordpress.com.

Verbal Sketching

Getty Center, photo by me

I find comfort in museums. Many people find comfort in nature, a return to their primal instincts. Me, I'm at peace in a room filled with paintings and statues from the past. Museums hold the best of humanity. Whenever I'm disappointed in the human species, I go to a museum and I'm wonderfully reminded of the greatness and beauty that human's can accomplish. 

Currently at the Getty Center (Los Angeles) is a great show about the negative space in drawings. The Poetry in Paper runs until October 20, 2013. The curator, Stephanie Schrader, did something very unique with this exhibition. Instead of detailed labels for each drawing, she wrote a Haiku poem describing the piece. The union of past greatness with modern elegance made me laugh, gasp, smile and term the phrase verbal sketching.

Here are some examples:

I've sat in the Capitoline Gallery in Rome several times. I've sketched, I've written, I've hidden from the rain amongst the halls of broken statues. The words "Antiquity looms," captures the mood perfectly.

I love this haiku because it teases the drawing with regards to the negative space. "No chair but not a drop spills," made me giggle like a child who wants to point at the drawing and enter a discussion regarding elementary physics. 

This haiku really captured the idea of verbal sketching for me. Walking along the foggy moors of Scotland, where the air is so thick a castle may lay hidden, undiscovered, only a short distance away, remains a strong memory with me. Yet I've never written a description of those moments. But here, the "Blank expanses" are the endless moors, that at first appear blank. The "Fog dense as citadel walls," is absolutely true, except it is a wall one can wonder through blindly, then a creature jostles near and quickens your heartbeat until you learn it is only a sheep with a blue splotch of paint upon it's white wool. Then the sheep vanishes as suddenly as it appeared. As you get closer to the discovery of a castle, you find yourself surrounded by the structures of a medieval city on the banks of a Loch - an "Old city shrouded" - with battlements poking their heads above the fog as it sinks lower, pouring over your feet and pulling you toward the water's edge. 17 Syllables captures my entire paragraph. That's why haiku is AWESOME. (5, 7, 5, that's all you need.)

This sketch could have been so many haikus because the expression on the old woman's face is in my opinion, rather flexible. Who doesn't love the phrase "Wrinkles of red chalk?" That's just fabulous. That's why haiku is fun. It forces you to bring together multiple concepts in a few words. 

This haiku captures not only the description of the environment, but the attitude and character of the subject which I wouldn't have thought about without the haiku. At first glance, I thought, "That's a nice figure drawing." End of story. I walked away. Then I went back and read the haiku and suddenly an entire person burst forth in my head. This is wealthy young man, accustomed to his spoils and leisures, but soon, his elegant supports will fall out from under him (notice the negative space below him) and he will be forced to discover what skills he can master for his own survival. 

So when wondering a museum, or sitting at a cafe, if you don't have a sketchbook or notebook handy, doodle a haiku on a napkin. It will force your mind to capture a moment, a memory, in a verbal sketch.

Old Travel - New Story

GUEST POST by Susan Nystoriak - Her blog, S. M. NYSTORIAK'S WRITER'S BLOCK is excellent!

I would like to introduce you to a new Novel Travelist I've recently had the pleasure to meet. Susan Nystoriak is working on her second book, but was recently inspired by old travel. Take it away Susan!

How my 20th Century Trip inspired a

21st Century Novel, about a

19th Century Secret...

My name is Susan Nystoriak, and I am a Novel Travelist, in retrograde.

Allow me to explain. This fantastic website is all about connecting travel and locations to novels. Most times, an idea for a novel comes, and the author completes the research to give the book authenticity. An author may have to travel to different locations during the research phase. In my case, however, the travel came first. My latest novel, WORDS IN THE WINDOWSILL got its start way back in 1994, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

In the summer of ‘94, I was a recent college graduate, and was frantically looking for a job in my career field, Music Education. I had taken a few interviews, and was anxiously awaiting the outcomes. Months prior, a friend and I had planned a trip to Europe for that summer, and I was glad, because waiting patiently for a job offer was a real challenge! The trip was a much needed escape.

Two of the many places we visited were Bonn, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. The entire trip was glorious, but it was these two destinations that became the seeds for my latest novel.   Here are a couple highlights from the trip: 

Beethoven Haus in Bonn, Germany

In Bonn, Germany, a visit to Beethoven Haus was a major thrill for me. I saw the pink façade of that building and fantasized about what it must have been like in the time of Beethoven. As a musician, I knew a lot about Beethoven’s contribution to history, so it was very exciting to see one of his homes.  Also, the overall feel of the place made an impression on me. The twentieth century Germany that I was visiting seemed like a throwback to an earlier, simpler time. The cobblestone streets, the gingerbread style buildings, and the general old world charm created a feeling of being swept back in time (See below, Rothensburg. This is a borrowed picture-Bing images. Mine came out a bit too grainy).

Rothensburg, Germany - Old World Charm

Vienna was equally delightful, as we visited Schoenbrunn Palace, and stayed at the former Schoenbrunn guest house. (Below, more borrowed pictures: Britannica. I am not a great photographer, it seems!) 

Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria

Again, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was back in the 1800’s. The stylized buildings and streets were the same as they had been all those years ago, and I felt a deep connection to it. I speak about inspiration and my connection to old Europe in another blog post, here: Inspiration - It's a Magical Thing

In both of these two places, I experienced people steeped in tradition. From the buildings and streets, to the recipes they cooked, I felt I was a part of a centuries-old culture that was still holding strong. And that was nice, in stark contrast to the ways of home.

I kept a journal of my month long trip and filed everything away for safe keeping. Pictures, newspapers, recipes, coins, transportation passes…I wanted to be able to revisit the experience later on in my life.  

Returning from that trip, I had a new outlook on things. For one thing, the world seemed much smaller than it did before. For another, I had been offered a job while in Germany, which was a relief to me!  But twenty years later, I remained moved by what I experienced on that trip, and I just had to write about it.

My old maps and notes - Now two decades old, but just as inspirational

Flash Forward:  Twenty Years Later:  I dug out all of my treasures that were tucked away for safe keeping (Picture above - my actual stuff!), and remembered. I remembered the feeling of being fresh out of college, traveling abroad. I recalled the busy airports and bus terminals, cab drivers that had to be spoken to, learning how to pack for such a trip, everything came back to me. And when I revisited the old journal, I smiled. I had made notes, drawn sketches, talked about foods we tried for the first time, and recipes. I had written about others who I had met on that trip from all over this small world.

As a result, this past October, I began plotting and planning out a novel. 

Those seeds that were planted during my time in Europe had lay relatively dormant until recently, but were beginning to germinate. And a few months later, WORDS IN THE WINDOWSILL became the product. Here is a little blurb about it: 

Grad student and self-proclaimed “Ladies Man” Hans Meyer has the world at his piano-playing fingertips. All he has left to do is write his thesis. But when his research takes him two centuries back in time, Hans stumbles upon a secret that will change history, and turn this 21st century cad into a gentleman.

During the story, 25 year old Hans discovers an unknown symphony, and goes back in time to Vienna, where he takes part in living history. In some ways, when I spent my time in Bonn and Vienna, I felt the same way. I know that is why I was driven to base my character's travels as I did. For those memories to have stayed with me all this time really speaks volumes to me; I couldn't have predicted the impact that trip had on me back then, but here we are.

So, you see, I am a Novel Travelist, but in retrograde. My travel came first, long before I ever realized I would write about it. And I am so glad I found this website. It is a wealth of information for any novelist needing to find information or contacts to help them along the way. Thank you, Sara, for allowing me to do this guest post.

What past trips still speak to you? Is there a novel in that old trip?

Guest Blogger:

Susan Nystoriak was born and raised in the Adirondack's of Northern New York State.  A classically trained musician, she has been fortunate to always have the arts as a prominent part of her life.  She has been a music educator for the past twenty years, and has begun to fortify her other creative outlet; writing.  Still a country girl, Susan still resides in the Adirondack's with her husband, two children and a dog.  Whenever possible, she enjoys planning trips for her family. You can read more from Susan at her WRITER'S BLOCK blog: http://smnystoriak.wordpress.com/