Book trivia for the new year

Like a lot of people, I am a fan of trivia. I find it difficult to skip a book, article, or web site filled with interesting, if otherwise unimportant, details and facts. There is something particularly appealing about information that is intended to be read but not necessarily remembered.

So it was with considerable interest that I recently read one blogger's annual reading roundup. Among other things, the reviewer listed the shortest book she had read in 2018 and the longest. The longest, I am happy to say, was The Memory Tree.

TMT, as I sometimes call it, is my longest book too. At 140,000 words, it is slightly longer than River Rising (139K) and Indian Paintbrush (128K) and nearly double the length of The Journey (77K), my shortest work. For those keeping count, 140,000 words is about 650 print pages or more than half a million keystrokes on a MacBook Air.

As a writer, I am usually too busy to notice or dwell on such statistics. When one attempts to sell books in a competitive marketplace, one tends to focus more on sales, borrows, and subscribers. Not so this week. Instead of running the numbers in anticipation of tax season, I took a more imaginative look at my thirteen novels and learned a few things. Some might make fodder for a round of trivia.

Among other things, I learned, or perhaps rediscovered, that I like putting twins in my stories. In addition to Ginny and Katie Smith, the protagonists of The Mirror, there are Cody and Caitlin of the Carson Chronicles series, Edith and Lucy Green of The Show, and Kurt and Karl Schmidt of Mercer Street. Even Mike Hayes, a major character in The Mirror, is a twin who lost his brother as a child.

I also like employing many points of view, though this was not always the case. In The Journey, only two characters, Shelly Preston and her older self, Michelle Richardson, provide their insights. In Indian Paintbrush, readers hear directly from ten different characters -- the original Carson family and three significant others from the past.

Among the characters with their own chapters, thirty-one are male (including repeats) and forty-two female. The youngest are the Carson twins, age 17. The oldest is Katherine Kobayashi Saito, who is eighty years old in The Show. Seven are journalists, six are teachers, five are librarians, and more than a dozen are high school or college students. Two male characters, including Ron Rasmussen, a Navy seaman in Hannah's Moon, are active or retired military.

Readers who like romantic and family themes may appreciate that there are ten engagements (three for Grace Vandenberg Smith alone) in my novels, eight marriages, and several pregnancies. Two toddlers, Hannah Rasmussen and Lizzie Wagner, get star billing in Hannah's Moon and Mercer Street. Joel Smith evolves from a two-year-old boy to a 43-year-old grandfather in the Northwest Passage series.

Not all of my characters are fictional. Some are very real people cast in fictional roles. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt appear in Mercer Street, while Marilyn Monroe (Class of '59), Mark Twain (River Rising), Bob Hope, Orson Welles, and Rita Hayworth (Indian Paintbrush) interact with a few of my protagonists in later books.

California is by far my most popular setting. Eight books are set, at least partially, in the Golden State, followed by five in Washington and four in Oregon. At least one chapter is set in thirty-two other states, the District of Columbia, France, and Mexico. One book, The Mirror, is set entirely within one state -- Washington. Three books -- September Sky, Hannah's Moon, and The Memory Tree -- feature chapters set at sea.

On occasion, I am asked how long it takes to produce a book. The answer varies with the work. I needed nearly ten months to research, write, and revise Mercer Street, but only three months to create The Show.

I intend to take most of 2019 creating the fourth book in the Carson Chronicles series. Research for the novel, set in Boulder, Colorado, in the autumn of 1962, is already under way.