What I’m Working On

What I’m Working On

by Cathy Day Mrs. Cole Porter Writing

I’ve been “tagged” in the Next Big Thing Blog Hop (this meme-type thing that’s been making the rounds) by writer/editor Jill Talbot (who was tagged by Barrelhouse editor Tom McAllister, who was tagged by writer Katherine Hill, etc.).

I have never met Jill Talbot IRL, but we like to talk about the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction. She edited the anthology Metawritings and was kind enough to include me.

(I think she’d like that I describe my WIP as “nonfictional fiction.”)

Here are her excellent answers to the 10 Blog Hop questions.

And here are mine.

What is your working title of your book (or story)? 

Mrs. Cole Porter

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

Cole Porter and I share the same hometown, Peru, Indiana.

What genre does your book fall under? 

I like to think of it as nonfictional fiction. A biographical novel.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Well, Cole and Linda have already been played by Cary Grant and Alexis Smith (Night and Day, 1946) as well as Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd (De-Lovely, 2004).

Whoever plays Linda in an adaptation of my book would have to be able to play her both old and young. I’m going to go with Laura Linney, who’s already played a similar character in The House of Mirth.

Don’t you think she’d make a great Linda?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

“During the Gilded Age, poor, beautiful, and naïve Linda Lee marries the playboy son of a robber baron, a high-profile match she survives by learning important skills which she brings to her second marriage—to a talented but unknown gay composer from Indiana named Cole Porter.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

If by this question you mean, do I have an agent? then yes, I have an agent, the amazing Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Still working on the first draft.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

It’s got an outer and inner frame, and there’s a bit of archival detective work going on, a bit like A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

Maybe it’s also a bit like Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone, which I read this summer and loved to death.

This isn’t a novel, but it definitely inspired me: Coco Before Chanel. A possible backup title to my book might be Linda Before Cole. Or Cole Because of Linda Before Cole.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

There’s a little-discussed anecdote in every Cole Porter biography: he blew up his wife’s mansion in the Berkshires when she passed away. Not only that, he moved his bachelor’s cottage onto the foundation and expanded it to the mansion that’s there today.

His biographers all say Cole did this out of grief. I have other ideas.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?”

In the course of doing research for the novel, I discovered that 86 volumes of her personal scrapbooks were held at Harvard. I’ve made two research trips to the Houghton Library to study them.

And now I’m tagging four more writers. I wanted to keep it local; these are all writers who live within an hour of my house in Muncie, Indiana. You can read about the books they’re working on next week!

Ashley Ford

Michael Meyerhofer

Sal Pane

Kelsey Timmerman

What I’m Working On

What I’m Working On

by Cathy Day Mrs. Cole Porter Writing
Before she was Mrs. Cole Porter, she was Mrs. Edward Thomas

I’ve been “tagged” in the Next Big Thing Blog Hop (this meme-type thing that’s been making the rounds) by writer/editor Jill Talbot (who was tagged by Barrelhouse editor Tom McAllister, who was tagged by writer Katherine Hill, etc.).

I have never met Jill Talbot IRL, but we like to talk about the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction. She edited the anthology Metawritings and was kind enough to include me.

(I think she’d like that I describe my WIP as “nonfictional fiction.”)

Here are her excellent answers to the 10 Blog Hop questions.

And here are mine.

What is your working title of your book (or story)? 

Mrs. Cole Porter

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

Cole Porter and I share the same hometown, Peru, Indiana.

What genre does your book fall under? 

I like to think of it as nonfictional fiction. A biographical novel.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Well, Cole and Linda have already been played by Cary Grant and Alexis Smith (Night and Day, 1946) as well as Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd (De-Lovely, 2004).

Whoever plays Linda in an adaptation of my book would have to be able to play her both old and young. I’m going to go with Laura Linney, who’s already played a similar character in The House of Mirth.

Don’t you think she’d make a great Linda?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

“During the Gilded Age, poor, beautiful, and naïve Linda Lee marries the playboy son of a robber baron, a high-profile match she survives by learning important skills which she brings to her second marriage—to a talented but unknown gay composer from Indiana named Cole Porter.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

If by this question you mean, do I have an agent? then yes, I have an agent, the amazing Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Still working on the first draft.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

It’s got an outer and inner frame, and there’s a bit of archival detective work going on, a bit like A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

Maybe it’s also a bit like Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone, which I read this summer and loved to death.

This isn’t a novel, but it definitely inspired me: Coco Before Chanel. A possible backup title to my book might be Linda Before Cole. Or Cole Because of Linda Before Cole.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

There’s a little-discussed anecdote in every Cole Porter biography: he blew up his wife’s mansion in the Berkshires when she passed away. Not only that, he moved his bachelor’s cottage onto the foundation and expanded it to the mansion that’s there today.

His biographers all say Cole did this out of grief. I have other ideas.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?”

In the course of doing research for the novel, I discovered that 86 volumes of her personal scrapbooks were held at Harvard. I’ve made two research trips to the Houghton Library to study them.

And now I’m tagging four more writers. I wanted to keep it local; these are all writers who live within an hour of my house in Muncie, Indiana. You can read about the books they’re working on next week!

Ashley Ford

Michael Meyerhofer

Sal Pane

Kelsey Timmerman

Why I’m Watching Downton Abbey

by Cathy Day Writing

Because I’m working on a Big Thing, a work in progress that’s partially set in the Gilded Age and the Edwardian Era.

Because I need to time travel. I’ve been reading lots of biographies, histories, and fiction of and about the period. Sometimes I feel like Christopher Reeve’s character in Somewhere in Time, trying to will myself into the past. When I was writing The Circus in Winter, I practiced this same technique, immersing myself in movies and books and old-timey objects. (You wonder why the background of my blog looks like upholstery? Now you know…) In a period drama like Downton Abbey, the past is recreated with painterly precision, and I can study the brushstrokes.

Because Laura Linney introduces each episode. For episode 2, she reminds us of the limited options available to unmarried girls of modest means and how the typewriter changed lives. For episode 3, Linney discusses fashions in the context of social change, reminding us that “sometimes the engine of change doesn’t roar. It just quietly sits down to dinner.” The best historical fiction (on the screen or on the page) dramatizes individual lives taking place amid abstract “eras” and “movements.”

Because it stars Elizabeth McGovern as Cora, the Countess of Grantham. If, like me, you’ve spent the last few years reading biographies of Gilded Age women, then watching McGovern is like seeing two women at once: Consuelo Vanderbilt, the real person Cora is based on, and Evelyn Nesbit, the real person turned into a fictional character by E.L. Doctorow and played by McGovern in the movie Ragtime. Cora Crawley is no Evelyn Nesbitt, that’s for sure, but Cora, the heiress-auctioned-to-an-Earl, gets the happy ending Consuelo, the heiress-auctioned-to-a-Duke, never got. For further reading, I highly recommend Paula Uruburu’s American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, (here’s a trailer for the book) and Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age.

Because of Maggie Smith. Period.

Because I love downstairs, too. The lives of the servants are just as interesting as the lives of those they serve. I hope the Bates and Anna story ends more happily than the end of Remains of the Day.

Because it’s a participatory event. On Sunday nights, I follow the live tweets of @edwardian_era, also known as Evangeline Holland, “Historian, Foodie, Novelist, Vintage Fashionista, and Edwardian enthusiast,” who blogs at Edwardian Promenade, a site that’s been an indispensible resource to me. Watching the show + following her twitter stream of info nuggets provides an intertextual, “Pop-Up Video” experience. When the Earl teases his mother about consulting the “stud book,” @edwardian_era tweets “stud book = Debrett’s” and includes a link to the Wikipedia entry, where I learn that it was the British equivalent of The Social Register. Bingo! How lucky is this? This show airs just as I’m writing about the period, and experts on the period are sharing their expertise as they watch the show. Wow.

Because relationships are inherently suspenseful. As Katie Roiphe says in her book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, “Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel most of us are living in.”

Because-I don’t know. I don’t know why I love period dramas. I asked my Facebook friends about this, and a friend suggested: “Women had much less power yet many women (myself included) can’t get enough of costume dramas. Is it that we relate, primarily, to the upper classes and imagine a life in which we had leisure, servants, beautiful clothes and went to balls, as a way to indulge our romantic selves, and then we can pull back, turn off the TV, and regain our authority?”

I don’t know. Maybe.

But I think it’s because of something like this: Downton and Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes was asked, “What’s our fascination with turn-of-the-20th-century life about?” and he said:

“It’s almost our world. When you look at something going on in 1640, you don’t see a connection. But when you look at 1900, you see our world but apparently a simpler form of it where somehow everyone knows the rules, whereas we increasingly have a sense that none of us know the rules. And we’re in a slight state of social chaos. And it seems beguiling to watch an ordered world where everyone knew what they were doing.”

Or as Richard Drew at The Atlantic says: “For me, Downton Abbey is as complex and fascinating a study of the early 20th century as, Mad Men is of the 1960’s.”

And the last (and best) reason why I’m watching Downton Abbey: Because it’s helping me “get inside” my character, a young woman of that time and cultural milieu. In other words, I get to watch great public television and call it “research.”