It’s that time of year — when it’s too warm for the furnace to turn on and too cold to wear less than three sweatshirts. It’s also raining and has been doing so for the past 2 days. Pretty soon mold will be growing on the north side of us — unless it doesn’t grow on people who are shivering. It’s somehow colder now than when it’s -20 in the middle of winter. No damp to speak of when it’s -20. Then even the snow squeaks.

If I were wearing a pair of mittens along with the three sweatshirts, that might be an excuse for not getting anything done on Spence.

Sadly, that’s not the excuse.

In fact there is no excuse other than that I can’t think what he’s going to do next. I am intending to send him skipping ahead this afternoon — off to the land of palm trees where I hope he will finally get his act together and DO SOMETHING. Which I should have done yesterday but somehow didn’t.

Why is that? It’s not a matter of waiting for inspiration. If I’d waited for inspiration on any of the other 50 odd books, I would be still waiting. It’s not a matter of inspiration, really. It is, however, a matter of the well running dry. Sometimes you just have to have patience, to wait (dithering) while it fills again. Which brings us back to rising damp. Moisture is accruing on the story walls, but other than that, um, there’s not much there.

But what there is is what I’ve got. So I’m going to go sit with the well and watch the damp rise –and do what I can with it. Maybe I’ll find inspiration in it. But what I’m really looking for is the thread of the story.

Writing is easy and fun for me. Not.

The fiendish Kate Walker has ‘tagged’ me to come up with six weird things about myself. And my response to that is, “Only six?”

So, all right. Here are six:
1) I correspond with a cat. (Kate knows this. He’s her cat. Or she’s his human. His name is Sid and he’s quite the most eloquent correspondent I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with. He’s also gorgeous — and he doesn’t even need (or have) a towel. See Hugh-in-the-towel.

2) I don’t know that I think capping deodorant bottles during a summer while I was in college is exactly weird. But I did it. And I also got fired from the job for ‘not being suited to the line of work.’ For which all I can say is, “Thank God.” I was glad not to have found my calling on the assembly line at Max Factor.

3) Oh, heck, why not stick in the gunslinger? My gg-grandpa was apparently, according to a cousin, “a gunman.” Once she asked him how many men he’d killed and he said, “About 40.” It strikes me that someone should remember his name if he was responsible for 40 men dying. But he’s a pretty elusive feller. And the fact that is weird, according to my sister, is that I actually find him interesting. She finds him appalling.

4) I love Iowa. Now 3 million or so other people (minus my mother) also love Iowa enough to live here (which is where we live during the school year). But some people find that weird. When you tell them you live in Iowa, they blink and say, “Ohio? Idaho?” No. Iowa. I.O.W.A. Land of green grass and green trees and green crops and blue skies and friendly people. One of the world’s best kept secrets because it’s NOT dramatic. No one sets movies in Iowa — except, of course, Field of Dreams, which I was in, by the way. But I love Iowa — even the winters. So my mother thinks I’m weird. Of course I also love Montana, where we like to be the rest of the year — which she thinks is also weird.

5) I love Lincolnshire. It’s a lot like Iowa. With one very steep hill.

6. I like to mow lawns. No, truly. I do. I am not much of a gardener. I try, but plants see me coming and they die at the sight. But lawns . . . yes, I do like cutting that grass. It looks so orderly when you get finished. I’m not big into Order. But in lawns I think it’s a virtue and I like to do my part in establishing it. But I’m not obsessive about it. I also like that for at least 6 months of the year it’s either too cold to grow or under a foot of snow. This is perhaps the Iowa farmer in me — who knew I even had such a recessive gene? — but I remember going around the Century Farm (one that’s been in a family at least 100 years) that belongs to a cousin out in Bremer County and him saying, “I love plowing. I love looking back at all those neat, orderly rows.” I knew what he meant. It’s pretty recessive in me, but apparently it’s there.

Okay, that’s six. I’m saving the rest for another day.

And who can I tag? How about Anne Frasier? She may have done it already, having been tagged by someone else. But if so she can just link to it. Anne? How about it?

Writing books and digging up (not literally) dead relatives have a surprising amount in common.

For one thing, the characters — and the dead relatives — are not often much active help. As a writer — and as a genealogist — I propose things; I theorize — and then I have to see if it works, if it flows in my fiction, and in my genealogical research, I have to find the documents, the evidence to back it up.

You know you’re on the right track in writing, if things start to move easily, if one thing leads quickly to another. Then you know you’ve hit a vein (writing appears to have a lot in common with mining, too. Great-grandpa would be pleased). In genealogy, a theory opens up a notion to be explored and you move from there.

Ideally, of course, you just go straight back. Your mother leads to your grandmother who leads to her mother who leads to hers, and so on. But at some point there is a “brick wall.” There is a mother who was, presumably, found under a rock. She has no discernible parents. She has no siblings. She just is . . . er, was.

Then what? You move sideways. In family — looking for cousins, looking for possible aunts and uncles. You move sideways in terms of parishes. If there aren’t any Hockens in this parish, well, how about the one over there? Then, of course, you will find five. All called Mary. Been there, done that. And then your brick wall turns into a bog and you spend the next few months figuring out which, if any, is your Mary.

And if that doesn’t work you do what I’m currently embarking on right now — both in my writing and in my genealogy. I’m skipping ahead.

I’m jumping over a generation and trying to find out if the Thomas Hocken who had a bunch of kids in the 1750s is the grandfather of the one born 30 years later. I should be looking for the younger Thomas’s father — and believe me, I have. But I can’t identify him yet. From the looks of the names of the elder Thomas’s kids, he could definitely be grandpa — which would make one of those kids the father of my Thomas.

The question is: which? (if any, goes without saying).

I need to start looking at parish registers that haven’t been transcribed. I need to read the fine print — or in this case, the crabbed faded, mouldering, white-on-black filmed handwriting that makes my eyes hurt. I need to figure out if one of those kids could have left son or nephew Thomas some pittance in a will. I need to look at deeds and indentures and heaven knows what else to see if I can make that connection.

It’s much the same thing I’m doing with Spence. He stood around in the park so long I finally kicked him out. I took away his scotch bottle and I said, “Let’s go.”

He said, “Where?”

I said, “There.” And pointed several thousand miles away.

“How –?” he began.

But I cut him off. “I don’t know. Clearly you don’t know. But we can’t stay here forever. We have a deadline to meet. So we’re just going to skip ahead a little bit. I see something out there that I know is solid. So we’re going there and start again. We’ll figure out the missing bits later on.”

“We will?”

“One way or another,” I assure him.

Sometimes you just need to do something, even if it’s wrong. Disproving is as useful as proving. Writing stuff you throw out invariably leads to stuff you keep. If the solid ground sinks this time, at least I won’t try going there again. And if it holds us, we just might be able to look back and see the bridge we’ve been missing up til now.

So we’re moving on now, all of us — me and Spence and 4th g-grandpa Thomas — jumping into the unknown, trusting that we’ll land on something solid and can work out way back and make the connections.

We’ve got to do something — then we’ll figure out how it works.