More Burne-Jones Mystery

I'm still plugging away at the Burne-Jones "Spes/Hope" mystery. I've uncovered more on that front, a similar photogravure (but uncolored) in the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in England and another as part of a portfolio of 81 photogravures by the Berlin Photographic Company (1890) was sold at auction at Sotheby's in 1998.

There's one watercolour left unaccounted which I'd like to see because so far the coloring is different on the oil in Boston, watercolor in New Zealand and my piece. It's supposedly in the Victoria Gallery in Australia but doesn't come up in their collection database.

Also, there's a whole lot more back story about Mary or Maria Casssavetti Zambaco, the model for Spes, the Greek goddess of hope. Burne-Jones painted her in a number of pieces, Cupid and Psyche, The Beguiling of Merlin, Spes, and Circe Pouring Poison into a Vial and Awaiting the Arrival of Ulysses, which some critics say may represent the suicide pact she wnated Burne Jones to make with her as she showed him a vial with enough laudenum in it to kill them both as they stood at the edge of the regent canal.  He declined, she tried to jump into the canal, and their friends, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning heard them as Burne-Jones grabbbed Mary and wrestled her to the cobblestones. The local constables were called and  Burne-Jones left the scene to faint not too far away. This is only one incident in their rather chaotic affair.
Spes was one of his more compassionate paintings of her, and perhaps had to do with the fact she was married just as Burne-Jones was. The Beguiling of Merlin seems to symbolically place the blame on her, as if he had no choice but to be smitten. But he also painted her in softer paintings, such as Love Among the Ruins.

At this point all pertinent info and a photo has been sent to a Pre-Raphaelite expert, curator and art dealer in England who used to work for Sotheby's so we'll see.  If he doesn't bother to reply, I'll know it's a common piece.  If he does - well, we'll just take it form there.  Any information will be awesome to me, just to know what it is.  I don't imagine I'll be able to trace it's travels form Britian to South Carolina, but it would be very cool if I could.

Researching Your Novel

I couldn't quote the statistics but I'm curious to find out how many hours authors spend researching their novel behind the scenes.  Even when we draw on personal history and experiences, if we go into the past we often end up researching things which happened during our childhood but we didn't pay attention to.  We were kids.  It didn't matter.  I've discovered that about half my published novel, Shaman Circus, and maybe even more for my two WIPs, Shaman Exile and Fireworks: Interference Equation involves a ton of research, many hours.  When I first started writing novels 29 years ago, I had to run to the lbirary, request inter-library loans on books unavailable locally, and write letters to experts.  I also trolled used books stores and bought many volumes which related to the storylines of my books. Maybe that's why my house is full of books and I never finished my first three novels. 

 I like a lot of back story for my characters in addition to a variety of locations. So I need to do lots of research even on the places I've lived.
 It's so much easier now with the internet what with online historic news and town histories as well as immediate answers through e-mails with experts.  And wow, I wish I had places like Amazon and Abe Books to locate the books with the necesssary info instead of always hunting used book stores in person to find such resources.
But even in 2910, rresearch takes hours and hours, sometimes entire days. But it's fun and the payoff is huge.
In the past year or so, I've researched a lot on my father's French Canadian family because I was never told much.  He died when I was very young and even though I spent a lot of time at his aunt's, who raised him, his family didn't tell us many stories. As kids, my sister, cousins and I had to eavesdrop on  conversations between the adults instead.

 So while I broke my recent writing drought yesterday with over 2,200 words for chapter 26 of Fireworks: Interference Equation, only two of those hours was spent on writing. I've tallied it up and so far for Chapter 26, I've spent 12 hours doing research for two hours of writing. Wow that's an eye-opener. I never tracked it time-wise before.   

This chapter, number 26, takes place in a flashback to Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire, a strange promintory which hulks out over the Atlantic, part of the mere18 miles of New Hampshire coastline.  Boars Head, known to geologists as a  lenticular moraine or drumlin deposited years ago by a glacier, has a long, often spectacular history, some of it plesant, much of it not. Howling storms, fires and other natural disasters have assaulted the cliff-top community which has witnessed much on the shale of North Beach or Rocky Beach below on one side and the sand of Hampton Beach on the other. John Greenleaf Whitter wrote poetry here. 

It's been a part of my life ever since I can remember as we swam below its cliff's or hunted seaglass on the rocks below. The shale side was once the launch spot for whalers and  the last resting spot of The Glendon, a three-masted schooner. In 1896, when in danger of splitting in half during a snowstorm, The Glendon was pulled ashore with ropes shot by guns, by people from Hampton Village. All crew were rescued. Up until recently remainders of the ship could be seen rotting away on shore. 

To find the info for just this chapter, I consulted Babelfish to translate French, went to a site to translate a large Roman Numeral into Arabic numbers so I could know the date on an old pamphlet.  Read three historic newspapers online, read and printed out about five different sites on this part of New Hampshire and on Prince Edward Island. Printed out a couple of sites on The Glendon, which I already knew about from a book of postcards of Hampton and Hampton Beach. I viewed 30 or 40 images to get the lay of the land since the 1500's when it was first settled, printed out a number of sites on the Port La Joye settlement on Prince Edward Island, one of the first settlements of the French Canadian seamen, and got sidetracked by videos of the Feb. 2010 fire which took out five blocks of oceanside property at Hampton Beach..  I also used about five books I have in my library, one on shipbuilding in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, another one from the shipbuilding museum there which has photos of whaling boats launched from my beach, books on Hampton and Rye Beach and one on New Hampshire.

Whew - that was a lot of work.  But well worth the time. 

So how do other writers out there conduct their research and what would be the ratio between hours spent on research and hours spent writing? Have you ever kept track of the hours and the resultant word count?  How many authors research the histories of their ancestors for their characters and books? 

I know Brian K. Ladd in my writers' group puts in probably five times as much research as I do because he goes into all the various linguistic aspects of individual words.  

So I'm wondering how other authors view research too. I'd be curious to see how other authors conduct their research and how many hours the figure they spend.  

Social Media - The Fun, The Work and The PayOffs

I was inspired to write this posat after reading a post by author Karen Gowen on her Coming Down the Mountain blog about what she likes about social media.  My comment was so long I realized I needed to address this topic in my blog as well from a whole different perspective.
As a small press publisher for years, I'm so thankful the internet is available to advertise for free. When I published my magazine The Howling, over 14 years ago, we had to print posters and advertised on a grass roots level. Among stories, poetry and art, Fissure featured local music reviews and the night clubs and musicians spread the word like wild fire. But it still can't match what the internet has done for my current magazine, Fissure which went international in one issue.
While I was writing my first novel, I used Myspace a good bit to talk about the books I was publishing with my small press, Shadow Archer Press. It was an incredible free way to get the word out and I sold a good many books because of that one site.
Then everyone switched to Facebook. I took a long time, but now find it helps to send folks to my blog. I don't write long on there but use it to link up. Twitter is helpful too, but less so. I use it more to keep tabs on what other folks are doing, as well as to invite folks to my blog.
I do find blogger harder to navigate as far as finding bloggers with the same interests because I find the search feature aren't user friendly.  But I like the ease of posting photos and writing at length.
For readers and writers, I love Goodreads because it's such an easy way to find books in your fields and then read honest reviews.  Plus it's easy to network and hold conversations. 
WEBS is also another great tool.  It's what I use for my personal website Gail Gray Studios and the servier I use for the Shadow Archer Press website, (you can build and keep a  free website forever, or pay to have your own domain name and more features)
 When I discovered Clicky through is a web analysis site which tracks how often, where by country and site your traffic comes from in real time.  It offers graphs and all kinds of detailed info so you can target your market.  It helps me fine tune my chapbook release announcments, discover what works on my end as far as content and even more importantly, which social media networks people currently use the most.  And  let's face it.  People jog from one social site to another in trends, just like they try out new restaurants.  Clicky helps me stay aware of which sites I need to focus my energies at any given time, whether it be Myspace, Faceobok, Twitter ot Blogs.  And it's free.!