Suspense Your Disbelief

I realize I’m not exactly in a prime position to write this post, seeing as I haven’t, well, had a book bought yet. But since I’ve been noting, and referencing, and whining–just a little, I hope–across the country about getting news from NY, I figured maybe I should explain things a bit.

And then I had the key, meteoric thrill of receiving a few emails from readers–people I’ve never met before–asking questions about my book. Like, when they could buy it. I don’t know if I can explain why that is such a thrill, but if you’ve ever had the experience of having an unpublished book, you will understand.

Unpublished books feel…not quite real. Stephen King says in ON WRITING that they’re a circle unclosed.

All that work we put into creating them–forget about trying to get them out there one day–and then they sit, unread, while we wait on the vagaries of the publishing world. So when someone writes and essentially says, I believe that your book exists and I would like to buy it–it makes not just that book, but we, the writers, feel real.

And I want to answer your question. I don’t suppose I have any great industry secrets to offer, and if I did I’d be good at keeping them quiet anyway, but you don’t want secrets, do you? You just want the real truth about how a book is published today.

Before I give you the nutshell I’ve learned over the last few years, let me refer you to an upcoming event in that writing series I co-host. The editors, agents, and publishers at this panel will know much more than I do about this topic. After all, I only have my own idiosyncratic experiences to share, and believe me when I say that I hope all of you don’t go through it as I have, but have a far, far smoother, and easier time.

Anyway, so let’s assume you have an agent. If you don’t have one, take heart. Take heart, go to writing conferences or pitch workshops, make some personal contacts, improve your craft, make sure someone other than your Great Aunt Netta loves your book, and then one day, you will have an agent.

After that happens, the two of you will work on revising your novel and making sure it is submission ready. Sometimes, if your agent is big enough, or doesn’t feel her strongest skills are in editing, her assistant or intern will help in the revision process.

So, now let’s assume your manuscript (ms) is submission ready. Your agent will draw up a list of editors to go to. Some agents submit to everyone at once (say, 20 editors or so), but this seems to be the exception. Most agents go in rounds. They will sub to five or six or seven editors and wait for responses. If the responses are passes, they will contain feedback about why the book was passed on.

I have found this to be a very complicated issue. At first glance, it seems simple. Good books are bought so if yours (mine, ouch) was not bought, then it must not be good, or at least not good enough.

But this simply isn’t true. For one thing, you can get passes that could easily have been offers. This happens when the editor your agent went to wants to buy the book and now must pass it around the office for other reads. If the other editors don’t like the ms as much as the first one did, an offer won’t be made.

But as everyone knows, writing is very, very subjective. How hard it must be to get 2, 3, or more people all to agree that a book is wonderful.

To further complicate matters, there are marketing considerations, and the difficulty in predicting what will sell. No one (or at least not me) is suggesting these concerns shouldn’t weigh heavily in deciding which books should be acquired. If a book doesn’t sell well, then the publishing house will have trouble staying solvent and have to publish fewer books or make other compromises.

Problem is, as the great William Goldman says, Nobody knows.

What will sell, that is.

There are exceptions, of course, which is why you’ll see celebrity bios in deals everywhere, and why certain books receive a pre-emptive offer (pre-empt) as soon as the agent goes out with them.

But you, debut novelist, and me–well, it’s a lot harder to tell if our books will sell or not. Which is why I’ve gotten crazy reasons for passing, reasons that contradict themselves, or focus on a detail that should clearly not have to do with how readers will receive a book.

For example, in the ms that’s on sub now, there is one scene where a character does something that I knew full well, while writing, would be controversial. I think the character is in a tough enough position–and this is demonstrated well enough–that whether you agree or disagree with the course she takes, it will provide ample food for thought and discussion. Book club members can wrangle over it over food and wine. Have fun with even. Would you? Would I? And indeed, some editors referred to the scene as a highlight in the book. But one editor rejected it because of it.

Now if everyone had said the same thing, then I would’ve had a no-brainer. Remove the scene. I like it and believe in it, but it doesn’t work for others.

Once upon a time as a writer, I might have struggled with that, but not for long, and not anymore. Nobody knows, but the editors know a lot better than we writers most of the time, and I’m lucky to receive their wisdom.

But what do you do when the editors themselves don’t agree?

You wait to find the one person who believes in that scene–and your book–as much as you and your agent do. Who can convince the other readers at editorial to agree with her vision. And convince the marketing people to take a chance, because, say it with me, Nobody knows.

Except me. Except us. We know that we haven’t written the most perfect book in the world or anything like it. Just a story good enough that it has captured some people’s interest.

One day I hope mine will capture yours. Thank you so much, everyone who has written, and made that possibility feel just a little more real.

I just can’t wait to get on the road again.

It’s really true. As much fun as we had, staying with family for a month in Oregon, for me there’s always been a draw–a real pull–to being on the road. It’s one of the only things that can truly distract me from hoping for news about my novel.

I remember as a child my family would take route 3 out of NYC to get home, and as we got off at the exit, there was a sign, pointing one way to our town, and one way to Paterson. I would play this game with my dad where I’d tell him that they’d switched the signs, and he’d say, “Well, I always wanted to see Paterson.”

With all due respect to the people who live there, it strikes me as funny now that my hunger for new, novel places would extend to Paterson, NJ.

The places we’ll hit along this route–camping in Spokane, WA; seeing the glaciers of Glacier National Park, which are tragically due to vanish by 2030; the infamous Fargo, ND; a lake in the middle of national forest in MN where we can kayak and even take the kids tubing from a motor boat at the safe speed of 5 or 10 mph; and from then on into uncharted territories in Ottawa, before being back in the familiar lands of Montreal, Vermont, and Boston–promise a little more exotica than Paterson probably would’ve offered in the end.

But the excitement I felt as a child to get there isn’t any different at all.

Emerging writer Karyne Corum returns to Suspense Your Disbelief with this exciting final installment in her Citizen’s Police Academy series. Find out why police departments have changed their procedures ever since Columbine. And how Karyne now knows what to do in one of the most dangerous situation citizens are ever faced with.

The warm spring night quietly settled around us, and cast shadows into the corners. I sweated in long sleeves, a bulletproof vest and face mask, my weapon clasped in nervous hands. I was waiting for the word to come down that our exercise was about to go “live”.

My three teammates shuffled restlessly next to me, occasionally giving a nervous laugh or re-checking the modified Glock 9mm we all carried. Although the guns fired hard plastic pellets instead of bullets, they were, for all purposes, exact duplicates of the real thing.

The weapon felt cool and heavy in my grip. I shifted it back and forth, hoping that it would provide the protection tonight that I needed it to. I thought back to the first time I held one like it, during that now long ago second class in the Metuchen Citizen’s Police Academy, and was mildly amazed at how comfortable I had gotten, in such a short time, with something so deadly.

I don’t like guns. I may write about them, I may even enjoy action movies full of them, but in real life they scare the crap out of me. I’m a mom, and a relatively peaceful person, and yet, I’ve discovered that I possess a strange fascination for guns. There is something about the feel of something so powerful and lethal in your hands. It was just one of the many revelations I had experienced through this amazing program.

I and a team of three fellow “officers” were about to enter the darkened, twisting hallways and deserted classrooms of a local high school. There, hidden amongst the commonplace clutter of education and teenage angst, were several individuals whose job it was to show us the meaning of fear.

I considered just how badly those pellets would sting. I gave thought to why it was that every year, police officers use demos like this one to train for a real life “active shooter” situation.

At Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, after a brief exchange of fire between the first responding officers and one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, the officers stopped – as they had been trained to do – to wait for a SWAT team. When the team arrived, forty-five minutes later, ten of the thirteen people killed that day were dead. Because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn’t wait. They didn’t have any intention besides murdering as many of their classmates as they could. It was as shocking as it was unheard of.

From that moment on, police departments began to drastically change their tactics. A new line of thought emerged with brutal clarity: In a mass shooting, a gunman kills a person every fifteen seconds. Now, responding officers are trained to rush toward the gunfire, stepping over the wounded and dying if necessary, to stop the gunman – the active shooter – first.

“We’re live! Go!”

We moved on down the hall, half crouching, weapons at the ready. Straight ahead a door stood half-open and to its right a murky hallway led away from us. Brains raced even as ears strained to hear any signs of oncoming danger.

Ping! Ping! Shots ricocheted ahead of us off the wooden door frame.

I instantly flattened myself to the wall, finger tensed on the trigger.

After a moment spent collecting my senses, I edged forward, ready to fire or be fired upon. Around me, the rest of the team stayed close, until our lead “officer” pushed the door open and a series of shots pelted the door frame, scattering among us like beads on a marble floor. I felt a sharp burning sting in my upper right thigh and dazedly realized that I’d been hit.

The last words the Captain had said resonated in my head, “Every time you feel a pellet, remember, that would have been a bullet.”

My hand involuntarily crept down and felt, through thin cotton, rapidly swelling skin. Fear made my stomach pitch and roll.

We began to race forward, hearing more shots, knowing we had to find the gunman. I scrambled past a doorway, unable to see in the dark whether it was open, and shots chased after me. By the time we had made it to a pitch black classroom, we were all sweating, cursing, and some of us were stinging with pain.

Shots zoomed through space from the far right corner; my team fired back. I dropped to my knees and crawled toward where I was certain the shooter had to be. By the time I got there, my Glock in front of me, the shooter stood and dropped his weapon. “I’m out!” After another ferocious volley of shots, he was followed by the second shooter in the opposite corner.

Those words were the automatic cease fire for the scenario. As I slowly made my way back to base, my thigh throbbed, my breath came in pants, and sweat clung damply to my back underneath the vest. Recalling how many shots I had felt ping off the front of me, I was extremely glad to have had it on.

I thought how grateful I was that this hadn’t been real. Before this I thought I knew something about what a police officer might experience. I’d read so many books, seen so many movies, even met police officers who’d shared their real life stories.

None of that penetrated the way those plastic pellets did. None of those made me feel fear.

I walked away with a bruise and a welt; in real life, I may not have walked away at all.

This experience, so generously granted by the Captain, police officers and civilian volunteers of the Metuchen Citizen’s Police Academy, has profoundly enhanced my respect and understanding of just what fears, and foes, police officers must face on a daily basis. It will not only assist me in my writing, but it will forever give me a new appreciation for the difficult and dangerous job performed by such extraordinary individuals.

Karyne Corum is the married mother of one preschooler. She lives in Central New Jersey, and has been telling stories since she was a little girl–only now they get her into a lot more trouble. Fortunately, she can write her way out of most of it. Her many jobs prior to accepting the inevitable include actor, security guard, executive assistant and massage therapist. She is currently at work on her first full length novel, which keeps her up at night almost as much as her four-year old son does.

Lelia Taylor once owned an independent bookstore, and now blogs about her former life at Buried Under Books. Since Lelia’s bookstore used to specialize in mystery, sci fi, fantasy, and horror, she is committed to spreading the word about great genre books, and I recommend visiting her blog regularly to find new reads. Today she shares with authors her tips for working with bookstore owners and getting your book on their shelves.

Those Pesky Perils of Promotion
These days, even authors with the big houses have to do much of their own promotion. They might get some financial backing for tours and they do have the advantage of having their upcoming books in catalogs but, when the books actually come out, they still need to remind booksellers and the rest of the world that they’re available. Writers who are self-published or who are with small independent publishers have to work at it even harder but no author, not even the big names, can ignore the need for promotion at some level.

So, dear author, now that your pride and joy, your baby, is out, how can you approach the mean and cranky bookseller and talk her into carrying it?

Do:
Please, get my name right, not when you first call because it’s weird—I blame my mother for this—and I don’t expect you to know how to say it when we’ve never met but, after that first call, at least try to get it right or ask me. I promise I won’t be offended if you ask.
Don’t:
I’m continually amazed by how many people can carry on a lengthy email conversation with me and never notice how I spell my name. And if this bothers me, think about folks with so-called “normal” names that get misspelled, like Terry for Teri or Patty for Patti. The misspellings of my name have included Lila, Lela, Layla, Lee, and Lily. Can you come up with another one? That and $1.50 might get you a Coke (that sounded much better when you could say “That and 50 cents’ll buy a cuppa coffee”).

Do:
Know something about the booksellers before you make that first approach; not doing so makes them feel that you don’t know or care what will make them a good partner. Over the years, we’ve had many authors make the mistake of asking us to carry their books when those books don’t “fit” our store. You may have gotten our name and address from a source that doesn’t describe who we are, but a little bit of online research would show you that we specialize in mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror so we’re unlikely to carry your memoir or study of bugs (unless they’re very large and come from a distant galaxy far, far away).
Don’t:
More distressing, though, is the number of finished books that authors have taken the trouble to send to us, which we aren’t going to put on our shelves. That’s an awful waste of your money for the book itself as well as the shipping cost.

Do:
Include information about the book: title, ISBN, publisher, how it’s distributed, ordering terms if distribution is limited, retail price, number of pages, binding, the release date if it’s not out yet, and a brief synopsis of the story. I shouldn’t have to search the net for this information.
Don’t:
Get in an argument about POD. Print on demand is just a printing technology but, to some booksellers, the term is almost like a bad word and has come to mean self-published even though it is frequently used by traditional publishers. Unfortunately, if a particular store owner or manager thinks that POD is always a bad thing, you’re unlikely to change his mind. In the long run, you’ll be better off if you just accept his ignorance and move on down the road.

Do:
Speaking of self-publishing, there are many pros and cons, but most independent bookstores are willing to work with a local author. As long as you and the bookseller are both willing to acknowledge that there might be some “issues”, you should be able to work things out, and this doesn’t have to be to your disadvantage. Compromises can include selling on consignment, providing the books directly to the seller at a reasonable discount, agreeing to reduce the retail price if it’s unreasonably high, your publicizing that the book can be purchased at her store, your agreeing to meet with a book club, or even setting up a group signing (which is almost always more appealing to a seller than a single self-published author event).
Don’t:
Some authors set up their own publishing company but don’t publish anything except their own books. It may look better to have it published by Books Galore Publications than by a well-known subsidy press, but it’s still self-publishing. When the bookseller asks you who your publisher is, don’t wiggle around the truth. If he’s against self-publishing, your ruse isn’t going to work because it’ll only take him a few minutes of online research to figure it out and he’ll be tres annoyed that you tried to hide it. If he isn’t against it, you’ve done no harm by being honest and may have actually helped your case because you haven’t annoyed him.

Do:
Order some of your own supply of books through a local independent if you can work out a deal that’s favorable to you. We always offered to do this at a cost to the author just a little more than what it cost us to get the books so we made a small profit (our only real added expense being occasional shipping charges). Doing this accomplishes several things. First, it drives up your sales figures which is always a good thing. Second, if you’re with a royalty-paying company, those royalties will be increased while, if you order your copies directly from the publisher, you probably won’t get any. Third, it builds good will with the bookseller.
Don’t:
Don’t let the cold shoulder get you down. If you’re like every other author I ever met, you’ve experienced rejection and you’ve survived it, maybe many times on your way to holding that finished book in your hands. You and I might start out by annoying each other, but you know what? We need each other. And you can keep a private,(very private) list of those booksellers who have really yanked your chain—said list to be viewed with great amusement when you become famous and can pick out a few for your own brand of rightbackatcha.

Do:
Remember, that after all is said and done, the phone calls, and emails, and snail mails, and more than a little of what will seem like begging and pleading, will be well worth it. Every sale I’ve ever made as a bookseller has made me smile, has made me feel really good, and I don’t mean because of the financial transaction. Every shelf that displays your book is going to make you smile and feel really, really good. So follow these tips and enjoy.

Once upon a time, Lelia Taylor took the quixotic leap and left Corporate America with its benefits and every-other-week paycheck for the nonexistent financial power of co-owning and running an independent bookstore. No one ever accused her of making a brilliant decision back then, especially after the current recession shut the store down, but she sure has had a good time along the way—and has never been sorry. Indie booksellers are peculiar that way.

Boy, with the silence from NY on my novel, and the travelogue entries, you could–I could–almost forget that Suspense Your Disbelief is mostly about writing and getting the word out about authors. Stacy Juba is one author who’s appeared here, and today she does me the favor of featuring a few of my words on her terrific blog.

Stacy had a great idea for a writers forum, where she asks the question, What were you (or one of your characters) doing 25 years ago today?

Here’s what I said in reply. The other posts make fun reading too!

My husband was asleep when we crossed into Idaho. A sign announced that we were also entering Pacific time. The kids could call their uncles and say, “We’re in your time zone now!” We were getting excited about arriving, but we didn’t know what adventures awaited us first.

The drive on route 12 through the Clearwater National Forest went through the densest wilderness we’d seen yet. My husband woke up and we began to wonder when (if?) we would ever emerge into something resembling a town. Eye-stunning beauty saved us from anxiety. We didn’t really want to emerge.

But every great journey reaches its end–that’s one of the things we’ve learned on this trip–and this one terminated in, well, nothing resembling a town, but the loveliest lodge we’d stayed at, right on that eponymous river.

River Dance was like nothing I’ve ever experienced…a combination of  summer camp plus luxury…and good food instead of soggy grilled cheese and bug juice. (Actually, I loved camp food, but I was 13.)

The minute we got there, we were treated to a tour of our spacious, two story log cabin–the kids loved the sleeping loft, while my hubby and I ogled the private hot tub on the deck). Next, we were asked what we wanted to do.

Do? You mean besides sit in said hot tub and gaze at the sparkling river? But when the options included a lesson on baking over a real outdoor fire–just like Ma did it–and a whitewater rafting trip even our non-swimmers could handle, we decided to get active.

What followed were two days of pure fun. That night we ate the carrot cake our leader showed the kids how to bake in a spider over a fire, right after a meal of European specialties fixed by our Czech hosts.

These included homemade stuffed peppers one night and prime rib the other.  Plus parmesan mashed potatoes. Salads were made up of a dozen  fruits, nuts, and vegetables, with dressing made with local berries. And there were appetizers fresh out of the oven–these too creative to be described. Let’s just say the kids never liked green beans so much as when they were served mozzarella stick-style with a teriyaki dipping sauce.

The rafting trip was another odyssey–I think my four year old may grow up to be a guide. The kids’ faces when we hit rapids were studies in bliss and excitement, but the guide made everything feel safe with her expert rowing and watchful eye. She served up lunch while we swam at one of Idaho’s white powder river beaches. Freezing water, homemade cookies. Then we followed an eagle the whole way down river.

And that hot tub did feel good.

Back in South Dakota, we stopped at a car museum for my son and a re-creation of an 1880s town for my daughter who is into all things old-fashioned. The kids got to lock themselves into a jail cell and even drove a real buggy with mules guided by the most colorful wagon driver west of the Mississippi (we noted the river upon crossing…what a history and geography and geology lesson this trip is).

But oh, did we love Montana. It helped that we could not buy a bad meal here. In the town of Broadus, literally a pair of crossed roads, we stopped at an unassuming cafe decorated with every imaginable kind of pig trinket and statuette. I had the best, freshest spinach and bacon salad I’ve ever eaten, homemade chicken and dumplings, spaghetti and meatballs for the kids, and a monster cookie that took the monster out of all of us.

In Livingston we had the kids’ first fancy meal out of the trip, at a farm to table restaurant where a mint clogged mojito wiped the last of the road dust off me.

And the day after a somewhat ill-fated night of camping–a freight train woke us every hour on the hour, so close we felt its vibration in addition to hearing the air horn, and the temperature dropped into the 30s–a community co-op woke us up with strong coffee and healthy treats.

Lest I sound like all I care about is the food (it’s really not ALL) Montana also offered some of the most striking scenery of the trip so far. We didn’t think it could get any bigger or more majestic. Our eyes are simply saturated with beauty. Here it’s roads so long the prospect of running out of gas is scary–in addition to food, I go in for the fearsome, the dramas in real life–and mountains that are suddenly snow topped after our blistering days in the heat.

From here we go into Idaho and enter the time zone we’ll be in for the duration. Gaining hours has been just one more plus of driving west, although I suspect little bodies are getting tired out as we take advantage of later nights.

And still no news on the sub.

So then it was on to South Dakota, a state I’d never been to but which, just coincidentally, happened to be the setting for the latest Reacher novel I’d devoured.

That took place in winter, and this was summer, and the difference seemed vast. Heat altogether different from any I’d felt in NJ. In NJ the heat can be sickly, oppressive, but South Dakota’s heat was punishing. It felt deadly. When we stopped in Badlands National Park–viewing a herd of buffalo amidst the otherworldly rock formations–the prospect of a hike seemed dangerous. If you ran out of water in this heat, you’d die.

Well, I am making it sound far more dramatic than it was, given that this is a family vacation. We experienced the worst of the heat from the car, getting jaw-gaping views while we were at it.

Which brings me to another aspect of this trip, the are-you-totally-crazy-to-drive-cross-country-with-a-kindergartener-and-a-preschooler one. Just how stir crazy would they get? So far they really haven’t. There’s the requisite silliness at the end of a day we allow to get too long, of course. But for the most part the country is entertainment enough.

(Well, that combined with the three digits worth of car toys we bought at this toy store prior to leaving.)

When things threaten to erupt, we put on music and that usually puts a mood on simmer.

The truth is having all of us in a car, experiencing the sights of a lifetime has been amazing. I feel like I could keep going for a long, long time.

We wound up in a fantastic lodge in the Black Hills, the temperature dropping with every foot of altitude we gained. The kids could hike and climb here, summit-ing one of those spectacular columns of rock, and dip their feet into the most frigid water I’ve ever felt.

The only bad note is that I really haven’t been able to put down the submission of my novel. I go to sleep and wake up with it. The excitement of our trip is at odds with the complete lack of excitement from NY. I guess the only similarity is that I have no idea what will happen with it, just like every day on the road is a total unknown.

Next stop Montana.

After leaving the first Laura Ingalls Wilder site in Walnut Grove, MN, we drove a few hot and dusty miles up the road to a private farm that just happens to sit on the property where the Ingalls’ built their dugout on Plum Creek. You put $4 in a little box and can tour such sites as the plum thickets, the flat table rocks, the scoop of earth where the dugout used to be, and of course, the creek.

There’s a bridge to cross over to see the points of history–fiction come to life–but we decided to wade in and see how the creek felt. Cool and refreshing, with a rushing current that wasn’t too strong for two young not-yet-swimmers. The joy on my daughter’s face, and in her ringing laugh, as the water pushed her along had to be quieted once one other small group of tourists appeared.

We all could’ve played there for hours, but then my daughter had her own Laura moment.

While I was helping my son in, the current took her over to a deeper area by a tree. As the water rose, she reached to hold on to a branch. It snapped off in her hand…and then she really started to get scared.

I was right there and so could put the don’t-panic lesson I’ve tried to instill for both kids to use right there and then as I made my way to her. But she was frightened enough that the part in ON THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK where Laura must hold to a fallen log to keep from drowning came even more vividly to life for her.

Scary or not, since this episode came to a safe, fast conclusion, I think it was almost a high point of the day. “Now I can really play Laura!” kind of thing. Helped along by the handmade rag dolls we bought at the store, of course.

There are other places where fiction can be toured and places once stored only in our imagination become physical reality. Mystery lover Marlyn Beebe went to Prince Edward Island and saw Green Gables this summer.

Do you have any such spots to add?

Off to South Dakota tomorrow! Another state none of us in the family has ever been in…

Remember the books? Or at least the TV show?

This series is one of the first I remember reading and simultaneously composing a story in my head about three little girls in pioneer times–girls decidedly *not* named Laura, Mary, and Carrie–telling them to myself as I walked, drove in the car, or in general had any spare moment of downtime. And only on Monday nights was I allowed to stay up till the unorthodox hour of 8:30 to watch the show with my parents. I can still hear the theme song as that wagon bounced over the prairie with Karen Grassle holding down her bonnet.

It was the Best Editor in the World who first told me you could visit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house and other Little House spots, which she learned on her own cross country journey, from NJ to Alaska, where she earned an MFA before the program became low-res.

(More on my thoughts about MFA programs when I’m not traveling across the great plains and encountering internet vacuums).

We aren’t going quite as far as Alaska (though I’d like to someday–maybe with a book in hand and bookstores to visit, or even an MFA class to say hello to) but the Laura Ingalls Wilder experience is definitely going to be a highlight of our trip. After all, I have a just turned seven year old who is already up to book five in the series and is as into “old-fashioned” as I was, in some odd display of genetic linkage.

(When I was about the same age I objected to my poor mother getting a food processor since chopping by hand was more life on the prairie-like).

The actual town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota is our first stop. It is hot and dry when we arrive. A few hours earlier, we had a surprisingly good lunch in a town with a population of fifteen that boasts three businesses, including our lunch stop. The cook is a master of frying and I had a German version of a hamburger, made with local beef, Swiss cheese, and some mustard-sauerkraut concoction that added exactly the right touch.

The kids really need to stretch by the time we pull into town, and what an array of options for stretching there are! The first thing they do is climb into a real, actual wagon. They can sit on the seat and look out, just like Laura and Mary did when they left the Big Woods! (This appeals more to my daughter than my son, who is more interested in determining the differences between wagon and car wheels, and incidentally discovers the very twentieth century foam they have wrapped around the frame in the wagon cover).

But the rest of the museum is decidedly authentic. There’s a little church with a pump piano. Ma and Pa apparently decided to settle in Walnut Grove because there was a church and a school to be had. Although Pa helped build the church, so I’m not quite straight on all my historical details. There’s also a little one room schoolhouse, a recreation of a pioneer cabin AND a dugout. Many of the displays are hands-on–and say so–encouraging the children to rub clothes on a washboard, don dresses and sunbonnets, and stir pots on a cook stove.

There’s even a four foot tall horse (not real) on which the kids can practice their mount and dismount.

It’s a great place to spend some hours off the road–rich in history, and fun, and able to bring the stories to life in ways that will captivate kids who know them. There’s a cafe with homey specialties (which we didn’t get to try) and a gift shop with toys you’ll never see anywhere else (and which should keep the kids engaged for another thirty + hours in the car).

However, the Minnesota heat is staggering. I’ve never felt anything like it, and the small, close buildings they’ve set up do nothing to lower the temperature. Which is why when we finally pile back into the car again and move on up the road to check out Plum Creek–the actual site where the Ingalls family all lived in their own dugout) we have a beyond nice experience waiting.

I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I can get back on the net.

Oh, and that second night of camping in Wisconsin? Let’s just say that between mosquitoes that enter the kids’ mouths and ears, and a fantastic, healthy, but–between the bugs and the heat, largely wasted–take out dinner hastily consumed in the car as my husband tries to throw together the tent–not all camp outs are blissful.

And maybe they shouldn’t be. That’s what we’re learning here on the road. There are high points where being together as a family feels like the only thing we’d ever need, everything that is essential contained in one snug space. And when it’s not so special–when the kids are engulfed by biting insects and rising to the occasion without panic or even complaint, or squabbles erupt and we have all the time in the world to really work them through–well, that’s when we see what we’re capable of as a family.

That’s when we know who we are.