Who inspires you? By Rita Karnopp

Recently I read through some interviews I did way back when – and I found these three questions and answers worth sharing.

If you were to start your writing career over tomorrow, what would you do differently?  Wow… I would have taken my first book to two published writers, or paid an editor, to go through it and tell me what needed to be changed.  I would have learned from those mistakes rewritten that first book, before starting my second book.  Then I would have repeated the process.  Why?  I wrote ten books before an editor touched my work.  I could have saved myself a lot of work had I learned early on what mistakes I was making, so I didn’t repeat them in each book.

What authors -you know personally- have inspired your writing? I must say Kat Martin has been and incredible inspiration and support.  She believed in me and my writing.  Stella Cameron has given me sound advice as well as been a great source of inspiration and support.  Also writer BJ Daniels is very inspirational, a Montana author who exudes confidence and a direction in her writing career.

What authors - you don’t know personally - have inspired your writing? I drew great inspiration from Cassie Edwards and Sheryl Henke, Dean Koontz and Lisa Jackson.

When the Stock Market was 800 by Karla Stover

                                                          My Stock Market Experience

     I started working at Merrill Lynch as a B-wire (business wire) clerk on July 26, 1965. The market was 800. Of those early years, the job I most remember was retyping business news that came daily from New York via an old telegraph machine onto a silk screen, attaching the silk screen to the silkscreen machine (a messy process involving lots of India ink) running paper copies off, and distributing the info to the men. I say, “men” because though Merrill Lynch hired Washington State’s first female stock broker, that momentous occasion wasn’t until the 1980s.

     Three months after I started, I was promoted to wire operator, which meant I was entering orders. The brokers wrote up their buy and sell tickets and walked them back to me. I sat in front of a machine, typed the orders on a ticket tape, and fed the tape into the machine. One man put many of his clients into Coeur d' Alene Mining and that's how I learned to spell Coeur d' Alene. The tapes were put in a bag at the end of the day and the bag was saved for a month in case someone received a confirmation of their trade and disputed it. If I made a mistake, my office had to pay for whatever it cost to make things good. I had a couple of problems during this period in my career: one was that we were on the second floor and the bathroom was on the third and the other was that it was hard to get a potty break. Many times, I sat at the machine from 6:00, when the market opened here on the wet coast, until 3:00 when I left for the day, with no break at all.

     I also operated the switchboard which was in the reception area in an L off the
boardroom. We had approximately a dozen lines and sometimes they were all in use. When that happened and someone wanted to make a call, I waited for someone else to hang up, then leaned over the counter and shouted, “Mr. _______, I have an open line now.” And I'd plug him in.

    I was very young when I started and afraid to go into the building, take the elevator up, unlock the office door, and go in by myself, especially after mass-murderer, Richard Speck was all over
the news. My husband and I carpooled so he came in with me every morning and checked all the
closets. When I was promoted to bookkeeper and started later, I was a happy camper.

     Looking back, some of the things I experienced seem hard to believe. One morning one of the
brokers came up and asked, “If I would like to go up to the roof and help him erect something.” I
turned beet-red and he added, “Like a flagpole.” A couple of years later, he shot himself in the head at a local gun range. One of the men killed his wife; he said his gun went off when he was cleaning it. One man drank, and when he was on a binge and drinking too much he’d get arrested and held overnight. When that happened, he’d call in orders from the pokey to whomever was in the office and available to take them. I coped with everything except the lunch issue: the secretaries had an hour for lunch but we in bookkeeping were only give 30 minutes. I pitched a fit over that.

     All in all, my career at Merrill was a mixed blessing, and I was sure glad to retire. Many, many
of the people I worked with over the years left the firm and went to other brokerage houses in town. I
stuck it out so my 401k would continue to grow, but with a little imagination, you can figure out what
I did during the 30 minutes of my last day.

PS: One day in the mid-1970s, when I was the manager of the bookkeeping department, one of my employees left the office at noon and never returned. She'd met several college guys who were sailing San Francisco that afternoon and she decided to go with them.  She later called me from a ship-to-shore radio and asked if I'd hold her job open until she returned.

    

 

      

           

          

THE LURE OF THE PAST by Juliet Waldron

I love the study of history so much that I’ve always wanted to share that love with others. Like many before me, this longing leads to a desire to write historical novels, the kind which can pull the reader  into another (and often quite unfamiliar) mindset.  The first part of the job is research, a stage I often find easier than the actual work of writing, plotting and character creation. I often read all through and then around subjects, ones which are sometimes rather distant from my original focus.   A used bookstore with a stash of non-fiction can be a dangerous place for my pocketbook. My favorite finds are the sort with long bibliographies, appendices and a high reliance upon original source.

Recently, I picked up “Champlain’s Dream,” by historian David Hackett Fischer, an account of the earliest days of French Canada.  Champlain, a pragmatic, thoughtful French explorer of the early 1600’s, had emerged from the bloody violence of France’s religious wars with an open mind . He'd  made it his life’s work to induce people of varied backgrounds to cooperate for the common good. His belief in humankind, whatever their national origin or religion, allowed him to approach the Indigenous Sauvage with an attitude of respect and interest not shared by many Europeans of the time.

A dream is ordinarily an ephemeral thing. But here, because Champlain recounted his experience 400 + years ago in the forests near the lake now named for him, is one of his. With a war party of sixty Indians, he and two other Frenchmen traveled into the forbidden territory of the Iroquois, with who the Algonquins were eternally at war.  They traveled at night, and every morning, as they drew closer to the “Eastern Gate,” of the Iroquois, guarded the Mohawk, the chiefs asked Champlain “if he had dreamed about their enemies.” For many days, he did not.  Then, one morning, about 11 a.m., he awoke and called the Indians to him. At last, as they’d seemed to expect, the white captain had dreamed.

“I dreamed I saw in the lake near a mountain, our enemies, the Iroquois drowning before our eyes. I wanted to rescue them, but our Indian allies told me that we should let them all die, for they were worth nothing.”

David Hackett Fischer then adds: “The Indians recognized the place in Champlain’s dream as a site that lay just ahead, and they were much relieved…To Champlain’s Indian allies, dreams not only revealed the future. They controlled it.”

A few days later, the Mohawk encountered European firearms in battle for the first time. Surprised by the stunning sight of a man in armor and two sharpshooters wielding long-distance, deadly weapons stationed amid Algonquin ranks, they were defeated. Champlain’s dream, seen by his allies as prophecy, was a true one.

This is the sort of primary source tidbit that writers love, the kind which reveals a vital difference between the mental world of European and Amerindian. It also tells us something about Champlain.  There he was, with two white companions amid a war party upon whose goodwill their survival depended. They were moving through a gigantic, primal forest toward a dangerous objective. We learn that he stumbled into another kind of consciousness, one which transcended his usual understanding of linear time.  The chiefs were now confident of the battles before them and pleased that their new friend had dreamed so positively. Champlain, though he does not speak of it, must have been privately amazed by this rationally inexplicable experience. 

~Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

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