I recently entertained some visitors from Colorado who, after a brief encounter with a local food service establishment, mentioned that they found New Englanders to be sarcastic. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said disingenuously.

New Englanders are a strange mix of propriety, humorous subtext, and open aggression, especially in the face of anything they find pretentious or dishonest. Growing up in New England, I came to discover that you can get along pretty well by resorting to your Emily Post or Miss Manners, but that when people really began to like you, they will mock and tease you mercilessly. If a person is always polite to you, it is never a good sign.

Now that The Lace Reader has been sold in many countries around the world, I am beginning to interact with the various translators and I’m finding that 95% of their questions deal with sarcasm, self-effacing humor, and mocking understatements. Making translatable sense out of tongue-in-cheek remarks is challenging enough but even more so when a culture is devoid of multi-generational taunting. Do cultures like that really exist? If so, what do they do at family gatherings?

My first wake-up call from my muse always comes at 3 AM. It doesn’t matter what time zone I’m in, the muse makes the adjustment far more easily than I. It’s never 2:55 or 3:01. It’s 3 AM to the minute. My muse is precise if tricky. By the time I reach for my pen and notebook, whatever she had to say has usually evaporated and I am left with half-sentence scribblings in my notebook that are impossible to decipher in the morning. To the best of my abilities as translator, last night’s scrawls say something about vacuum repair and blueberry scones.

Since I am always wide awake after my muse makes her nightly call, I have taken to meditating during that time. Eventually I begin to doze again, dreaming  of vacations and uninterrupted sleep and writing “The End” on a finished manuscript.

At 7AM, I begin my morning ritual which includes several stanzas of a poem entitled: “123 get up!”  It usually works by about 7:45 which gives me exactly fifteen minutes to brew my coffee and make my morning commute four doors down the hallway to my office.

And then I sit and wait for my muse to arrive.  Night traveler that she is,  she often keeps me waiting for quite a while.  She usually wanders in at about ten, walking like a bride, and sits on the arm of my chair, and, for a few precious hours, dictates to me as if I’m her personal stenographer, then disappears as quickly as she came, leaving me to interpret the morning’s ramblings, which are at least typed and therefore have less to do with vacuums and scones and seem to apply (at least in part) to my current writing project.

For quite some time, I have been fascinated by the Hero’s Journey or the monomyth. Most stories that follow this pattern have a decidedly male orientation: a lone individual acts heroically and saves the day. I wondered if there might be an alternate form, a feminine Hero’s Journey. So I began to look at stories that featured female protagonists to see if they offered something different. What I found surprised me. Most of these women were either killed off or were ultimately rescued from their plight by male heros. Unsatisfied, I wondered if I could write a Hero’s Journey for women where the strong but wounded heroine must find a way to save herself.

With this in mind, I began to expose myself to archetypal images that resonated with female sensibilities. During this time, I had a dream that I saw something prophetic by looking through a piece of lace. This dream made such an impression on me, it seemed so vivid and real, that I felt that I must at least entertain the idea of using lace as the central image of the book. Soon after that, I found connections to other iconic feminine symbols: water, moon, tides, birth, etc..

As I began to write the novel, my characters’ stories unfolded in ways that surprised me. I began to realize that the heroine’s journey is often a collaborative one. When Towner’s story begins, she is very much alone. Her journey is about healing and learning to trust both herself and others.