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.

A Few Jane Austen Questions

I'm writing an historical fiction novel in the style of Jane Austen, in the period of Austen, 1802, BUT set in Ireland.

During this writing challenge, I've been reading all of Austen's works, letters, unfinished works, unpublished works, etc. It's been fascinating to watch her grow as a writer, but also fascinating to realize how bloody good she was in her youth. 

If you've never heard of, or read Lady Susan, one of Austen's earliest unpublished novels, I highly recommend it. It's an epistolary novel, meaning it's composed entirely of letters, and the lead character is quite a scandalous lady of her time. Hand-written correspondence has all but disappeared in the modern lexicon of life, so the delight of reading letters is ten fold increased today. Hence, my hypothesis as to why Lady Susan is making a comeback on bookshelves. Reading someone else's letter is a voyeuristic occupation. It allows the outside reader in on a secret. And this book, with a beautiful, charming lady seducing men many years her junior and carrying on an affair with a married man, is full of salacious secrets. The letters from the jealous wives of the seduced men are equally as intriguing. 

This brings me to an observation about all of Jane's writings - the fact that women had little or no power over their fate. Lady Susan is her only character, in any of her books that even attempts to live life for her own happiness, and not to please others. She can not be happy if oppressed by the rules of society, so she defies every rule.

But she is always the Belle of the ball, despite her reputation. Why? Because women, the jealous wives, have no power. In the land of Austen, good morals always win the day; but if an opposite horse ever had it chance at the blue ribbon, it was Lady Susan.

Women in the regency era, 1790's - 1820's, were always at the mercy of either a good marriage or an inheritance. If neither were in a woman's future, she may be forced into service as a governess. The stakes for a low-income, young, unmarried lady are great, it's either marriage or servitude. This situation is exactly why Austen's books are so enjoyable; a lady's merits overrule her income. A rich husband is always found for the lady of high moral character. The books offer hope to all the penniless gentlemans' daughters of the past and the present. The reader is instantly rooting for the underdog.  

Now the question - as it pertains to my own Irish set Austen novel. If my young sisters each have £20,000, like Miss Crawford in Mansfield Park, are they allowed to marry beneath their rank? Knowing that women at this time have little choice in their fate, is it believable that a wealthy Anglo-Irish lady may choose to marry a working doctor? Is it believable at this time, in 1802, that a young lady may wish to find a greater purpose in her life than to simply sip tea with her morning callers, which is any well-bred ladys' fate as she fends off one fortune hunting suitor after another? 

What's your opinion?

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. 

Maui Travel Guides

As writers are are always doing research, sometimes part of that research involves traveling. If you are like me, you especially love researching places you are going to visit.

One of my favorite places to visit in the world is Hawaii. I visited the island of Oahu on my first trip to Hawaii. This time I was planning on visiting Maui and maybe island hop to one of the nearby island of Lana’i.

For my research, I combed through every Hawaii guidebook I could get my hands on. I found Frommer's and Fodor's Hawaii guides to be good if you want a summary of all the major islands in Hawaii. However, if you are looking for a more detailed guide of a specific island, and maybe find some "hidden" gems along the way, I would go with the Hawaii Revealed series. Unlike Frommer’s and Fodor’s, The Hawaii Revealed series dedicates a book to each major island (e.g. Hawaii ‘Big Island’, Oahu, Maui, and Kauai).

Since this trip was to Maui, I found the Frommer’s and Fodor’s guidebooks to be too bulky and limited in their information. Also the Maui Revealed book came highly recommended on Amazon and Tripadvisor. I had used Maui Revealed before for my first very short (48 hours) visit to Maui. This time I had planned to use my Maul Revealed book to its fullest. To my utter delight, the Hawaii Revealed people also released an e-book application version of the guidebook. The app is available for both the Android and iPhones.

The Maul Revealed e-book app is basically the whole Maui Revealed book in a custom digital format. I’m am a person who still prefers to hold a physical book when I’m reading, but when I am traveling and I have to deal with airline weight restrictions, e-books are my new best friends. For $7.99, I can have the whole Maul Revealed e-book on my smartphone, and I don’t have to worry about carrying two extra pounds of weight in my luggage.

This e-book app is the best that I have seen so far, and you do not need to be connected to the internet to access the application since the whole book (~200mb) is downloaded onto your smart device. All the information in the book is in the e-book app. The only time you need the internet is if you want to visit linked websites or find the map location of certain sites using Google maps. I found this very useful when I was trying to find directions from my location to a specific site mentioned in the guidebook.

The opening page of the e-book is a large map of Maui. With just a pinch of your fingers, you can zoom into the map for a more detailed map of the region you need. You can also pinpoint a location and the app will provide you a list of what beaches, restaurants, accommodations, and activities that are close by.

In the bottom left of the opening screen there is a “locate me” icon. If you’re on the island, the app can pinpoint where you are. At the Bottom right the Favorites Icon stores all your selected “favorites” all in one place. The top left corner has the search function and you can click that to get the general index or search for a specific place.

The top right corner is the "Contents" icon, and this will take you to the contents of the guide. The contents are not organized exactly like the book’s table of contents. Instead it looks to be organized by most popular things and “Sights, Dining, and Beaches” are the first three things listed in the contents. Each of the subjects are organized very easily by region (West Maui, Central Maui, South Maui, Hana Highway, Haleakala & Upcountry, and Offshore Islands). Each region is further broken down by things available in that location. The accommodations and dining sections can also be organized by type, price, rating, alphabetically, or location, which is really handy when people tell me the name of a restaurant and I’m not sure where it is located.

All you really need to travel in Maui is this application. You have great information about the island’s history, great recommendations for dining, activities, and lodgings all in one "book". What I like best about this guidebook is the honest reviews. Not all vendor or locations have glowing reviews. I like that the author will honestly tell you if a specific beach isn’t great and has lots of seaweed, or if a restaurant is overpriced for the things they serve. 

One-Ton Chips definitely something not found in the mainland.

However, if you want a bit more local flavor to your trip or your novel is set on the island and you want more authenticity to your character's life, another guidebook that I recommend is Local Girl’s Guide to Maui by Donna Bender. I had stumbled upon this guide just by reading random threads on Tripadvisor. Being someone who prefers eating at more “local” eateries because they generally taste better and are cheaper, and in Maui a lot of your budget expense will go towards food.

For $10 you can get the Local Girl’s Guide in a pdf, or for $25 you can get a printed hard copy. You can also get the pdf and print it out yourself.  I elected for a pdf download that I kept on my phone.

Local Girl’s Guide to Maui is compiled by “Local Girl” Donna Bender. Her guide is great if you're looking for a quick breakdown of local eateries and grocery stores. The guide also has sections for recommended beaches, shopping, hiking, and snorkeling. But I mainly ended up using the guide for food, groceries, and shopping locations.

My attempt at making Hula Pie.

Another perk about the Local Guide are the simple local recipes Donna shares in her guides. During my stay in Maui, I made Hula Pie according to Donna’s easy to follow recipe. Although I did have to figure out how to make my own Oreo cookie crust, the pie turned out amazing thanks to Roselani’s Macadamia nut ice cream. So if you wanted to have a character make a Pineapple Cosmo or a Kona Swizzle, the Local Guide can tell you how it’s made.

A slice of Hula Pie.

While I was on Maui, I made friends with a few of the locals and I asked for a few dining recommendations. Pretty much all of the local restaurants recommended by the locals could be found in Donna’s guide. If you want to support local markets and stores on Maui, this guide is the way to go. Donna also has a local guide available for Oahu as well, called Local Girl’s Guide to Oahu.

Additionally, Donna is very approachable and easy to contact either by email or through her facebook page. I had a few questions about parking in Maui since our group had two cars, and Donna quickly answered my e-mails and gave me some great tips for parking that managed to save us a bit of money when it came to parking in Lahaina and Ka’anapali.

I used to travel with at least two guidebooks, but now all my books are on my phone or on my Kindle reader. Armed with these two digital guidebooks, I was able to travel comfortably throughout Maui and get quick reviews of restaurants I stumbled upon on my adventures. This trip also taught me the importance of e-books to a Novel Travelist looking to travel light.

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.

The Buried Books of Herculaneum: Part 8

...approximately 400 scrolls had been opened and read, with approximately one in ten of those written in Latin as opposed to Greek. This fact, in agreement with popular ancient Roman culture, suggested that a still-buried Latin library probably existed within the house. If so, it is still there...

Part 7 of this series continues the story of the excavations of Herculaneum, as we seek to unravel the answer to the Novel Travelist mystery: Why was the Villa dei Papyri never fully excavated?

Here, at last, we conclude this story.

***SPOILER ALERT***

This true Buried Books of Herculaneum mystery is detailed in fiction in The Vesuvius Isotope. Inevitably, in presenting the answers to this Novel Travelist Mystery, I also give away some of the punch lines of the novel. Readers interested in The Vesuvius Isotope are encouraged to stop reading here until they have completed the novel. You may order your copy on Amazon (print or Kindle version,) BarnesandNoble.com (Nook version) or Kobo.com (Kobo version.) Or purchase a SIGNED copy at www.kristenelisephd.com.

And without further delay, please consider yourself forewarned that from this point forward, there are spoilers.

*****

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decades of our new millennium, the Villa dei Papiri excavations have been reopened and halted again several times. There have been three predominant obstacles in the way.

The first is the constant flooding and poisonous gases of the ancient ruins, which lie several feet below sea level. It seems modern technology can extract thirty-three trapped miners from beneath several meters of pure rock, but has not entirely found a solution to these conundrums. I suspect that this issue is only secondary to the others below.

Villa dei Papiri, floor plan of Carlo Weber, ~1750

The second hurdle to completing the excavations is the location of the Villa dei Papiri, which is - quite mysteriously - now contested. The first map of the villa was generated in the 1700s by Carlo Weber. Weber’s contemporaries were amazed at its accuracy and detail, and the exact locations of each room within the villa were undisputed for two hundred years. Until today.

The most recent effort to excavate the Villa dei Papiri was initiated in the 1990s. Following the reliable maps of Karl Weber, an excavation crew bored into the belvedere, or pavilion, first described by Weber’s men in the 1700s. It was during this excavation that the crew discovered that Weber had only identified the uppermost story of the building. In fact, there were three levels to the sprawling villa.

Then the modern crew changed their minds. Weber’s original map of the villa was declared erroneous. The tunnels were filled back in, and the Villa dei Papiri has been inaccessible ever since.

Resina, Italy, provence of Ercolano

The third - and largest - obstacle is the modern town of Ercolano, which now sits directly on top of the ruins of Herculaneum. Ercolano happens to be Italian crime territory.

The town is the hub of camorra, the Naples Mafia. But unlike Sicilian Mafia which is largely centralized, camorra operates as a loosely tied network of families or clans. Because there is no centralization, the individual members of the camorra network – much like those of al Qaeda – are much more difficult to flush out and prosecute.

The landowners of Ercolano - mostly camorra bosses - repeatedly block the excavations of Herculaneum, demanding exorbitant sums of money for even a cursory, non-disruptive, dig.

The tension between camorra and the government has been increasing dramatically since 2010. That was when a new, massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius was predicted to occur within the next eight years. This eruption could destroy the ruins of Herculaneum and the Villa dei Papiri forever.

The situation is becoming desperate. Many of the buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as many of the major historical sites of Naples, have begun to crumble. Some of this is attributable to natural wear-and-tear, and some not.

On February 15, 2013, a corruption probe into the most recent excavation of Herculaneum was announced. This had been the dig that revealed the second and third stories of the Villa dei Papiri, just before the maps of Karl Weber were declared erroneous and the excavation halted.

Two weeks later, arson destroyed a prominent Naples museum. Camorra was highly suspected. No charges were ever filed. For story and video, click here.

On March 18, 2013, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera ran a report detailing the crumbling of more than 200 Naples churches.  For story and images, click here.

And so the rift continues between archeologists, the Italian government, and the ubiquitous camorra. But there is hope.  On February 16, 2013, just one day after the corruption probe was announced, restoration of some of the fragile sites of Pompeii was initiated.

With hope, we may one day be able to read the priceless Buried Books of Herculaneum.

"The Villa of the Papyri is unfinished business." - Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened

This blog post explores a non-fictional theme or locale that is incorporated in The Vesuvius Isotope, a new 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 and the author of The Vesuvius Isotope. She lives in San Diego, California, with her husband, stepson, and three canine children.