As I edit my historical fiction manuscript I am noticing  that almost every male character smokes tobacco. It pops up quite a lot in the story. One person is blowing smoke rings, the other is stamping out his cigarette, someone else is filling his pipe, the other is puffing away at a Cuban cigar. They smoke as much as they drink. Which is actually true, if what I read in the diaries from the time period are accurate. One in particular, written by a surgeon from New York City dated 1895-98 Notes Collected in the Adirondacks (2010) includes multiple references to smoking or, as he liked to call it, "burning tobacco".  Dr. Arpad Gerster, the author of the diaries, mentions his tobacco habit quite often and with no feelings of remorse or guilt. It is all pleasure for him. After a ten mile hike in the Adirondack woods he sits down and lights up.

Our attitudes about smoking have changed quite dramatically over the past century, even over the last thirty years. My students are always amazed when I talk about my own professors who smoked during class when I attended college in New York state back in the 1980s. I had one in particular that I remember fondly, she was my political science professor and she smoked Virgina Slims. I counted once in class, she smoked five during the lecture.

She would light one up and take a deep drag from it in the middle lecturing. She would then proceed to talk without exhaling. Tiny wisps of smoke would escape from her mouth and I was mesmerized. A long piece of ash would dangle precariously at the end of the cig and we'd all wait with bated breath to see if it would fall off before she had a chance to flick it into an ashtray that sat on her podium. Needless to say, I did fairly well in that class, and enjoyed it very much. I may not be able to recite the Federalist Papers but I damn well know what they're about. I credit her panache and ability to captivate her audience for that as much as her lectures. Smoking was all part of the package.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau



In The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley, one of the characters laments that The Fates had turned their backs on him, even after all his planning (land speculation) and toil... his air-castles were crumbling to ruins about him. The passage struck a chord and I decided to use Thoreau's quote above, and another I found in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) about castles in the air to title my next novel in the Durant family saga.

The title Castles in the Air seemed apt for me because my writing and research journey is something of a pursuit of a dream.  If anyone had asked me three years ago what my passions and hobbies were, I'd have said hiking, swimming, and travel. I wouldn't have said writing historical fiction.

 So what happened these past three years that made me step outside my comfort zone and take up this tremendous challenge and research?

My imagination got the better of me, and took over.
 It went into overdrive one summer while I was vacationing at a cabin in the Adirondack woods, which came with a folk legend of what happened there. I imagined all kinds of drama, secret love affairs, and pleasant times spent over a century ago. 

I wanted to tell that story – my own Cabin in the Air. And while trying to separate fact and legend, I discovered a much bigger story, one that fascinated me. The more I learned, the bigger and more complex it became, until it dawned on me what I was building was more of a castle than a cabin.

As I pursue my own castle in the air I think I may have reinvented myself and become more human in the process. I think it's worth the effort. A study done in the 1990s by Kyung Hee Kim found children in the United States lose their creativity as they age. It found that children in kindergarten were more likely to test higher in divergent thinking (a measure of creativity) than those in upper grades. Dubbed the 'creativity crisis', this study points out that loss of creativity has nothing to do with one's IQ. Yet the loss of creativity as one ages may have more to do with the fact that school age children need to conform in order to do well in school. The problem with conformity is we lose our ability to think outside the box, to re-imagine our world, to come up with solutions.

All of this leads back to the title: Castles in the Air. Twain used the term sardonically to describe a character in the novel that got involved in one bad economic scheme after another.  Thoreau uses it to say, “bully for you for trying, just make sure you have the steps in place to achieve your dreams”. I like it because it reflects how I feel about starting a writing career in the middle of my life. And to me it expresses what the characters in my novel were trying to achieve as well: works of art that would be admired and not forgotten.
I hope to do them justice.