Tap dancing and I have a love-hate relationship. It started long ago, when I was a wee thing, no more than six years old.  Mom enrolled me in tap class. I thought it was great fun but apparently I bugged my teacher. When the other girls heel, toe, shuffled right, I shuffled left. If they turned one way, I went the other way. My failure to conform (which was probably just a small girl's inability to understand right and left) got me kicked out of class.  A tap dance reject before I finished first grade!  Oh, the pain. Oh, the horror. Wipe the tears from your eyes and stick with me.  It gets easier. . . .
    The thing is, I still think tap is cool. It's one of the few original American art forms, along with the blues and jazz. It shares with the blues and jazz it has its roots in Africa and in American slavery.  The first "tap" dancer (the word wasn't applied to the dance until the 20th c.), William Henry Lane, danced his way to fame and fortune in the 1840s. He combined Irish clog dancing with African Gioba dancing, threw in some other stuff (there's whole books on this) and won over America with his explosive new dance style. He traveled the country in Minstrel shows, the first black performer to do so, and won more dance contests than anyone else.  He was hugely famous and they named before you knew it there was an entire dance style called "Juba Dancing" and Lane became Master Juba.  Unfortunately, Juba died of exhaustion and malnutrition (historians think) in the 1850s. This seemed immensely unfair so I revived him for my first novel, The Lincoln Special. I meant for Juba to be a supporting  character, but he got bigger and bigger. By the time I got to the second novel in my Kate Warne series Juba was carrying the book. Metaphorically of course.
    So I'm back to tap dancing. Only with words, not shoe (which is good because words respect non-conformity). Lately I've been tap dancing my way through this darn book launch. Friday I was trying to build a template for my email list and discovered I need a banner. Crap. Another darn thing to learn. SO this morning I made a banner. BY MYSELF.  Is it the best banner ever?  Probably not. Is it mine? All mine?  Yep.  Now I gotta tap dance back to the darn email template and figure that out. After I finish my this blog. Tap, tap, tap.  
   If you haven't already done so, please sign up for my email list.  I swear I won't spam you with "buy my book" crap. I will send you weekly historical tidbits, and the occasional publishing update and offers of free stuff. Right now if you sign up for the email list you get a free link to the first chapter of The Lincoln Special. 
   Thanks for reading!

I'm tired this morning. I couldn't get to sleep last night. Instead I laid in bed with my head whirling around, images and words competing with that high whining buzz that is the soundtrack for sleeplessness.  And I did it to myself.
   I've written thousands and thousands of words for articles, newspaper columns book reviews, encyclopedia entries and monographs (books). Writing doesn't freak me out. Then what's my problem, you ask.  It's this self publishing thing. You see, for my entire writing career every word I ever wrote was handled by someone else after I wrote it. Heck, I barely had to edit a document. Just write it and send it a publisher or editor.  And now I've decided to be my own publishing company.  It's thrilling. Thrillingly terrifying. Like walking through a dark wood, chased by a mean witch, worried about Lions, Tigers and Bears.  Oh My!
   I spent yesterday afternoon working on my self-publishing check list. Start a limited liability corporation? Check. It's Writing Wench Press. Create author pages at Goodreads, Facebook, Amazon and Pinterest?  Check.  Hire cover designer? Check. Edit manuscript one more time?  Check.  Find reviews? Where? Format novel? Huh? Buy ISBNs and bar codes? Nope! (Seems terribly real). There's more.  My checklist is 7 pages long.Some of it I understand, some of it I don't. It's scary.
   Then why do it? Because my whole life I've handed over my words, my ideas to a publisher and I've had little control over what happens next and been paid the tiniest of money. I'm tired of writing stuff people don't really read and I'm tired of not having control and I'm tired of working hard for tiny money. I don't care about money very much. I have everything I need and I like my job. I know people with more money than me. They don't seem any happier for it. Quite the opposite in fact. Mostly, I made a promise to myself a couple of years ago to re-invent myself. To become a better version of me, one truer to who I am and less responsive to what other people expect. Part of that pledge was a promise to myself to keep learning new things.
   Learning new things, trying new things, going new places, it's all terrifying. But it's in those spaces where I've taken chances (like leaving Bozeman and moving to So. Cal) that I've found who I'm supposed to be. So I push on. Like Dorothy and her friends. There was a lion in the woods and he scared Dorothy and the Tin Man. Then it turned out he wasn't so scary. So they sang a song and skipped away from the fear. That's what I'm going to do. And the poppies?  Well they're in front of me somewhere, but like Dorothy, I'll fall down and then get up again. As many times as it takes to get where I need to go.
   I think women my age are good at this.I know some astounding women and they inspire me very day. I think women are better at reinvention than men (I could be wrong though) because we have to be. Are you a re-inventor? Do you find things you're afraid of and then do them anyway? Why don't you share a little in the comments below.  Spread the Love!
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No, I'm not going to talk about the gross unicorn frappe thing! And how it pairs well with a pack of Virginia Slims.  Calm down. I was thinking about Unicorns in the shower this morning (but not in an icky way so you don't have to scrub your mind-- or has that ship already sailed?).  There's a really helpful book about writing and self publishing by a guy named Johnny Truant that I've been using to get ready for my novel's release.  In the book Johnny tells this story about how he wanted to write a western with his writing partner Sean Platt. Seab said NO WAY because if they wrote a western they'd have to do research on stuff like: What color is the smoke in a gunfight?  Sean had no desire to do any darn research.  He just wanted to write.  Johnny figured they could put their main cowboy character on a Unicorn, thus establishing that nothing in their western universe was subject to reality. Thus a series of Unicorn Westerns was born.
   I gotta admit, I totally admire the idea.  But it's not me.  I totally dig research. I love it it like it was a cuddly puppy. Oh, research, have I told you lately that I love you?  
    So the cool thing about writing a series of historical novels set in the Civil War featuring Kate Warne,the first female Pinkerton detective, is that I can use stuff I already know (cause I've been a history professor longer than I care to admit), research more stuff and make the rest up.  And it turns out I love making stuff up almost as much as I love research.
    Kate Warne's life is perfect for this balance of fact and fiction. Historians who care about this sort of thing argue about her knowable stuff. The questions they ask include: what was her real name? Was she Allan Pinkerton's mistress? Was she an important spy or just a token girl?  There's more, but my point is that there's a ton of stuff we don't know about her, which means I was free to indulge in my fascination with antebellum circuses, theaters and the other cultural spaces where society's oddballs hang out. I could write about famous circus men like Dan Rice and that perennial fave, P. T. Barnum (go see my Pinterst page for fun stuff about both of them).  Along the way I still had to get the color of the smoke right. Which is cool. It turns out that a lot of people are fascinated with historical details.
   When writing the first book, Lincoln Special, I most surely over-researched. I have city maps of Washington and DC, menus from Baltimore hotels and too many details about ladies clothing. It turns out I didn't need most of the information. I'd write it and then realize it was an "information dump" and delete it. Too many historically accurate details ruin the story telling. Readers don't want to know every piece of clothing Kate put on every morning, nor do they care about the exact route she took to cross the city. Nor how exactly one harnessed a horse to a gig or a shay or a barouche.
    What I've learned over the past two years is that historical novels need to get the smoke right, but they need unicorns too.  Because if we wanted reality we'd turn on the news.  Oh, right. Never mind!     

   At first glance the photo above my appear to be a young, male Civil War soldier if you look closely you'll see that what you're really seeing is a photograph of Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton Detective. Note the fine bone structure, smooth skin and tiny waist. Kate Warne has been largely lost to history (tho there was a mediocre one-season television show featuring her on Canadian BBC), in part because what she did was secret and in part because she was female. I'm about to publish my first in a series of novels about Kate and her Civil War adventures, The Lincoln Special (see the Writing Wench section at my web page www.peglamphier.com).  Over the next couple of months, as I lead up to my Launch Date (sometime in June) I'll blog about Kate and other characters in the novels.
   I'm going to do a lot better job keeping current on this blog. Here's my story, which you may judge B. S. or not.Two years ago I launched this blog with the idea that as I learned to write fiction I'd blog about it. It turns out that learning to write fiction while working two professor jobs and writing novels and setting up a publishing business is JUST TOO MUCH, specially if you want to occasionally cook a meal, do a load of laundry and talk to the husband.  I have to got to work or I can't buy dog food and pay my mortgage and there's no use blogging about writing if I'm not writing, so I had to do that to. So something had to give.  I've got four novels in various states of readiness now and the first one is Almost ready to publish so it's time to Start Over. 
    Starting over is something most of us have way to much experience with. It can be stressful, but it can also be a huge and exciting adventure. In the nineteenth century women were supposed to be submissive, passive, domestic. They were supposed to avoid the public sphere like a femininity-killing plague. Kate Warne (and lots of other women, some by choice and some not) took a look at those rules and said Bite Me. I mean, probably not literally, but you get the idea.  If she could become the first professional female detective in America and work as a spy to keep President Lincoln safe, then think what the rest of us could accomplish if we were just a tiny bit braver.  If we started over more time.
See you on the other side,
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    I'm just gonna say it.  Writing is like ditch digging.  It's not sitting around in a puffy poet shirt having great thoughts while sipping tea made from flower petals and unicorn spit.  This is the good news and the bad news and I'll tell you why. 
    Ditch digging is hard.  Look at those guys in the picture.  They're dirty and they smell bad.  They've got sweat in their butt cracks and gravel in their shoes.  It's not pretty.  Neither is writing. 
    The good news is, almost anyone can dig a ditch.  Or at least, anyone with a good work ethic and a couple of basic tools..  The trick to writing, like ditch digging, is to just DO IT.  You've probably seen this advice in every single writing blog and vlog you've ever looked it, and there's a reason.  Here it is: The world is FULL of people who talk a lot of writing, but don't actually write much. 
    Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not a hater.  But I have to tell you, the "I'm talking about writing and not doing it" writer drives me a little bit crazy.  OK.  More than a little bit.  And maybe I'm already a little bit crazy.  So . . . crazier.  There!  Satisfied? 
   I'm a professional academic (which sounds more grown up and cool than it actually is).  That means I am SURROUNDED by the "Talk A Lot of Writing" writer.  Professors specialize in this shit. Fake or wannabe writers come in at least three flavors--there's probably more but who cares? 
    First, there's the "I've got a great idea, but I'm just teaching too much to write," writer.  These people think they need "release time," like fewer classes to teach (while cashing the same sized check) or a sabbatical (which is a fancy way of saying a vacation paid for by your taxes).  They don't seem to notice that the world is FULL of people who work for a living (at real jobs, not tenured professor jobs) and still write books.  They also never seem to produce anything, even when they get release time. 
     The second type of "Talk a Lot of Writing" writer is the one that likes to write proposals and grants for their writing, and then send emails about those grants and proposals, which then end up about the only writing they do.  Other fake writers love this type of writer because they validate their lameness. 
    These first two are fake writing types almost exclusive to the weird and dystopic world which is Academe.  The third flavor is more common in the real world-- the "I just don't have time to write" writer (also related to the "I don't have time to read" person).  This person who doesn't have time to write can describe every episode of Breaking Bad and posts pictures of their cats or kids on Facebook 3 times a day. 
     It's all BULL SHIT! Writers write.  Professional academics should be, by definition, writers, but a LOT of them are not. And if they can't do it, its no surprise a lot of other people can't do it either. Why?  Because writing is HARD.  It's lonely.  It's freaking scary.  It's laboring in the dark, sweat in your metaphorical butt crack, work. 
    "Well, hell Peg," I hear you say.  Then why would I do it? 
    Because it's also fun.  It's fun to make a story out of nothing.  Creativity is fun too.  But you know the real reason you do it?  Because you can't help yourself Dammit!  There's a story or book idea in your head and the only way to get it out is to write the darn thing.  And here's what the "Talk a Lot of Writing" fake writers don't know: the personal reward for writing are far greater than the rewards for not writing.