Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Part One of Origins of the short story, Madam Sibyl’s First Client
Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1337:
Brief Check-in:
Today is the first day that I’m going starting my new regime of walking for a short amount of time frequently, in order to get back up to my regular schedule. This is also the first day I will try putting on the Voltaren cream four times a day to see whether or not that helps with the general pain in my left knee and finger. I was able to sleep well last night, even though when I woke and went to the bathroom, my knee hurt, but once I got back into bed and got myself situated, the pain didn’t keep me awake. In fact, it was only my husband getting up to get his shower that woke me at 5:30. Usually I am awake before then and the first one up. Today I have cleaned, done my first 14 minute walk today (hope to do at least 2 more of these throughout the day), and my husband is doing the very last chore we need to get done before the remodel starts, he is taking all our old apple devices (phones, ipods, tablets, desk computers, and laptops) to the AppleStore for recycling or refurbishing. I think there are a few really ancient machines up in the attic that aren’t apple products, but there is no rush to do anything about them.
You may notice that I have made the subtitle for this background post on origins of Madam Sibyl’s First Client, “Part One” This is because after writing over 600 words yesterday draft, I realized that I obviously had much more to say than I could do in one post. In fact, I think this might be a three part post (smile). So today I will add a little more to yesterday’s draft and get it up. Then I will start working on part two, which hopefully I will put up tomorrow.
Part One: Where did I get the idea to make my protagonist a pretend clairvoyant?
I have recounted before that I actually came up with the idea for the Victorian San Francisco mystery series in the late 1970s while I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation. This research primarily rested on a detailed analysis of the 1880 manuscript census, where I created and analyzed a data base for those women who worked in the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon in that year.
In my research I also looked at as many primary sources as I could, which back in the 1970s were not all that easy to find. This meant you had to go to libraries and historical societies to look directly at what primary sources they had collected, like diaries, letters, newspapers, business directories, etc in order to get access to this material. (Now a lot of this material, like newspapers have been digitized and can be accessed on line, resources I use heavily when doing research for my mysteries now.)
However, at the time, one of the difficulties I discovered was that often these institutions tended to put the letters, diaries, etc penned by women in folders under the names of their fathers, brothers and husbands, as if they had no separate identity from the men in their lives. Here reference librarians who happened to know what folders to look in were terribly important, but I often only had a few days to at an institution (I lived in San Diego, which was simply too small a city to study in 1882, so I depended on short research trips to the other cities.)
However, there were a few sources that had been scanned and put on microfilm, and fortunately the federal manuscript census I was using one of these, and I was able to buy it, otherwise it would have been impossible to do the work I did. As it was, I spent a better part of 2 years reading and coding the information from that census, which then university staff put onto punch cards, which were turned into huge tape disks. At that point the material was available for me to access using a basic software program, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to analyze. Lots of very tedious, focused work, where I found myself fantasizing how I could turn the facts of the women who I was turning into numbers (codes for marital status, age, place of birth, occupation, who they lived with, information on their parents, etc) into stories.
So, if you ever wonder why I have the servants in the O’Farrell Street Boarding house be live in servants, its because I know precisely that eighty percent of the women in these three cities who worked as general domestics, lived in their place of employment. Or when I decided to make one of the characters in Maids Of Misfortune, Mr Wong, a Chinese male, it was because I knew that over half of the servants who worked in a household with multiple servants in San Francisco in 1882, worked with a male, and the majority of these male servants were Chinese.
But I digress...The purpose of this post is to look at why I came up with the idea of my series protagonist being a pretend clairvoyant, and it didn’t come from reading the manuscript census, but from reading copies of the San Francisco Chronicle, on micro film, in some library.
I don’t believe there was any index for this material, or that I was looking for anything in particular, I was just seeing what the newspapers of this period were like. And I was very surprised to find in the midst of what we would call personal ads, which were often on the front page, were a list of people, primarily women, who were advertising their services as fortunetellers, clairvoyants, astrologers, palm readers, and trance mediums.
I was simply blown away by the idea of women doing this job advertising so prominently in the newspapers. At the time, I had a vague knowledge that Spiritualism (the idea that people could communicate with the dead) was an important part of a number of religious and reform movements that emerged in the mid 19th century, and of course in the 1970s was a period of New Age beliefs that had roots in very old religious and mysticism (remember the Age of Aquarius), including astrology. An old high school friend of my husband’s had recently shown up at our door telling us about a new movement she had joined that believed they could communicate with Ascended Masters.
So I guess what I really found interesting, was how often something I thought was unique to my own experience and generation (civil rights movement, feminism, even New Age philosophy) had its origins a hundred years or more earlier.
As a result, over the next ten years as I slowly started to come up with the idea of writing a mystery series that would illustrate the kinds of occupations women held in the late nineteenth century and was determining what occupation to give my amateur sleuth, I remembered those ads and began to think the possibility of making Annie a pretend clairvoyant.
But why I came to that decision is for part two.
If you enjoy my daily posts and would like to subscribe for free or become a patron (where you will get the pleasure of giving me the resources to spend more time writing and less time marketing) click the little button below. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!
I admire your dedication to the research of us working women that you did!
Wow, 2 years of research! You’re dedication paid off well, the series is great.