How do we get to a place we've never been to and neither has our readers? We writers have it drummed into us to "write what you know." This was probably why I initially decided to write The Merry Life of Charles Parker: the basic plot was about people I knew. I took a few events from my family history and started building a plot. 

At first I just had a couple events in the life of a twelve-year-old. I needed to get beyond that. I had to feel comfortable in the Fifties because it was something I did not know. I was born two decades too late to remember any of it -- and I didn't start taking notes until well into the Eighties! 

Google was great for finding old ads like the one above. There is an anecdote in my novel concerning a doctor and smoking. I got it from my late grandmother. We would be shocked by such a thing today -- that's another neat thing about the march of history; how fast some things change and how soon we become scandalized by our own actions from just a few years ago. We don't remember the past right. We put it through soft focus. For this reason I envy some of my writer pals who work on earlier periods. Hey, who remembers when coffee first came to England? Yeah. Nobody. You can fudge that. Mmm. Fudge and coffee. Anyhoo, if I have jets flying a few months too early, you can bet I'll hear about it. (Well, actually . . .) Poetic license, right?

But for whom is the book written? To people who remember the Fifties because they lived through it or people under 40? And are historical factoids the reason you read a novel? There's Wikipedia for that, no? Surely, one reads my novel for similar reasons to why I wrote it: the story of a kid whose mother gets remarried on the QT is interesting. We want to know about this kid and how he deals with shame. 

People lived with shame in America? Yep. What was that like? Well, let me tell you. Here's a story about it. And it's a story about courage. Perseverance. Survival. The story is starting to sound a little like Huck Finn.