Jack the Ripper in St Louis -- and a Contest!

Note: "Fedora Amis" is a long-time friend of mine. I read Jack the Ripper in St. Louis a while back and loved it! You will, too. Here we learn about Fedora and her love for all things old and cool! -- Joanna

 By Fedora Amis

Ads from the past...

Call me strange, but I like to read newspaper advertisements--from 1897.  For a mere three cents, I can paper shop to my heart’s content.  A fine pair of Storm Queen winter boots cost $1.37.  I could buy a living room sofa for $7.75 or have my hernia repaired for under $20.

With no Truth in Advertising laws,  companies offered miracle products. One boasted it would cure a cold in a single day.  Dr. Dromgule’s Female Bitters promised to cure any and every female complaint. These nostrums didn’t really cure anything, but the consumer would feel better after taking a big swig. Most contained equal amounts of molasses, water and whiskey.

Fedora Amis loves reading and writing about the past.

Recipes for cosmetics...

Before Revlon and Maybelline, ladies had to make their own cosmetics. Here are two recipes--which I beg you never to use.

     For women’s hair: Was no oftener than every three weeks using egg yolk and cold water.

     For men’s baldness: Rub scalp with parafin. Stay away from fire.

     For the lady’s  face: Wash face seldom, and then with milk or salad oil.  Sleep with cloth soaked in strong lead lotion laid across the nose.   

     Thank heavens we now know that lead collects in the body.  Lead poisoning leads to pain, confusion, headache, seizures, coma and death. Suffering for beauty may be one thing--but this is definitely going too far.

Dangers lurked...

With no pure food or drug laws, candy makers used arsenic to color their confections green Morphine was the key ingredient used to calm tots in Winslow’s Baby Syrup and Kopp’s Baby Friend. I’ll bet it worked wonders on fussy babies--and opened many to lives of addiction. Drugstores sold paregoric and other opiates over the counter--as they did a variety of poisons.

The late Victorian era was a time when the earliest child labor laws reduced the working day for children under twelve years of age to a mere 10 hours a day. Smoke from coal-fired factories so blackened the air that buildings near the riverfront had to use artificial light at high noon even on a sunny day.  Local streets were flowing or rutted mud for three-fourths of every year. Shopgirls made 6 cents an hour. Trousers were called “unwhisperables.” Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, invented cornflakes in 1896 because he believed that a bland diet would reduce unhealthy sexual desire. 

I revel in the delicious irony of those times. Atlanta druggist John Pemberton cooked up a blend of cocaine and Kola nut in 1886. He called it the great National Temperance Drink. Substitute addiction to cocaine for addiction to liquor--what a concept! That’s why I love to read old newspapers.

I like nothing better than to discover odd bits of pop culture from the 19th century and to use them in writing my humorous Victorian whodunits

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

"Fedora Amis," author of Jack the Ripper in St. Louis, is the winner of the Mayhaven Award for fiction, now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine booksellers.

Visit Fedora's website at Fedoraamis.com and follow her on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/Fedoraamisauthor

Also online is a new interview   http://stlsinc.blogspot.com/

CONTEST:

Fedora has kindly agreed to give away one copy of Jack the Ripper in St. Louis to a lucky commenter. Add your comment and we'll choose a winner! 

DEADLINE: 

You have until Sunday, September 8 at midnight to make a comment. We'll choose one lucky commenter at random. The winner will be announced on Monday, September 9.

Things That'll Keep You Unpublished

Probably the LAST thing I should be doing with my time today is writing a blog post. Nevertheless, I am compelled to share what I'm learning.

See, I'm judging a contest for writers, new and hopeful authors. There's a wonderful set of criteria which guides me. Very helpful. Very insightful. But mainly, I'm calling upon what I've learned over the past five years.

And I'm using up far too much time doing this...except...except...it comes at an important juncture in my own career. I have two novels under my belt, and my third has been accepted but for the final edits. So reading these submissions, I can certainly see how my own skills have improved.

Here's what I'm seeing in these entries, problems that I believe will keep the books from seeing publication unless they are corrected:

1. Lack of specificity. Instead of having your protagonist say, "I went to college with her," tell me which college. MIT is very different from University of Illinois. A tiny specific tells the reader LOTS about your protagonist.

2. Simple grammatical mistakes. Common on, people. Learn to use a comma. All right, I still have trouble with "that" versus "which," but I keep looking up the difference and trying to get it right. And it's a subtle difference, one that may even go the way of "who" versus "whom," because proper usage almost becomes, uh, snotty. BUT...the major rules for comma usage are golden. Check this out, if you are unclear: http://www.eslbee.com/sentences.htm

3. Tighten up. I'm going to wear out my strike-through function. Here's an example of a sentence that needs to go on a diet: "I thought the words to myself." Uh, we only think to ourselves unless we are suffering from multiple personality disorder. Here's another: "Unexpectedly, I threw up my hands because I was startled by the surprise." ARRRGHHH. (I can't even start to fix that one!)

4. Delete the word "was" and write cleaner, clearer sentences. "I was tired, lonely from the long drive, and feeling sleepy as I pulled into town." How about "Tired, lonely, and sleepy from the 13-hour drive, I pulled into town." What I'm discovering is a real need for people to improve their technical ability, their basic repertoire of sentence structures. (Yes, "was" can be used perfectly. When you want to show that the subject was acted upon, then "was" does a brilliant job.)

5. Simple spelling and usage errors. I just looked up the spelling of "repertoire." That's part of my job. I always look up "lay" and "lie" because they are confusing. That's also part of the job. See, it's not just about writing--it's about knowing what my faults are as a writer and working to improve.

Okay, back to the judging.

PS I've re-read this and corrected it twice since originally writing it. That's another problem with beginning writers: They think their job is done once they have a first draft. (Sad to say, I'll probably find other corrections to make once this goes up. Still, the point is that you can't knock it out fast and walk away!)