Hobby Me This

Some of you sharp-eyed readers will notice that this is an old blog, and you’re right. I apologize, but to be honest I’m not yet back up to my fighting weight after a pair of life-threatening surgeries and I didn’t want to desert you all completely. Please bear with me this month and next month I’ll have something fresh for you. Thank you.

by Janis Patterson

Mention hobbies/crafts and people generally think of needlecraft, or scrapbooking, or making things, or painting either on canvas or cloth or wood, or… the subject is endless, as everyone who has ever visited a Michael’s or Hobby Lobby knows.

I’m different. Still. My hobby is Ancient Egypt. Studying, visiting, crafting, writing about… anything that concerns Ancient Egypt. I’ve been that way since childhood. By the age of nine I had read every book the Dallas Public Library system had or could borrow on the subject of Egyptology. (Although in the interest of full disclosure I will admit that when I was nine there were a lot fewer books on Egyptology!) I met the man who would become my husband through Egyptology and it was in the moonlit English garden of the Mena House Hotel at the foot of the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids!) that he proposed to me. The North Texas Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt was founded in the den where I now sit. Through this mania I have been fortunate enough to meet almost every Egyptologist of note in the last 30 or so years and am blessed to call several of them dear personal friends.

So how does this little bit of personal history aid my writing? Aid? Reshape and re-form is more like it. On my first trip to Egypt back in ’92 (before I even met my husband-to-be) my mother and I took a cheap tour to Egypt. It was like returning to a place I loved, even though I had never been there before. I took conspicuous note and pictures and wrote several stories about Egypt then and now. Some didn’t sell (trad pubbing only back then, when others decided what writers should write) but one did – a big time-travel romance called PASSION’S CHOICE. Thanks to the dictates of my then publisher it was what was considered at the time a ‘dirty’ book. Nowadays – meh. Time came the rights finally came back to me and I wanted to rewrite and take out the naughty bits, but the story was so tightly constructed it couldn’t be done, so I left it the way it was. By then I was self-publishing and decided just to let it ride.

Fast forward a couple of years, a marriage to a man as Egypt-obsessed as I, a couple of trips over there and then in ’10 we were on a group tour with some others from our ARCE chapter and on the way back to Luxor from the quarry at Geb el-Silsila the bus stopped on a whim at the necropolis of El Kab.

Out of such tiny incidents all kinds of things grow.

The necropolis is huge, but the centerpiece are four beautifully decorated tombs. They have been open since the Middle Ages, but the colors are still vivid and the statues of the deceased ones still alarmingly lifelike. In one of the tombs there is a painted graffito in a language no one could identify. Two of the scholars on our tour put their heads together and decided it was a debased form of Ancient Phoenician. Cool! I actually knew people who could read Ancient Phoenician! (Actually, years later the late great Eugene Cruz-Uribe (I think) did translate it, as it was proved to be a dialect of Ancient Egypt written in a weird form of demotic.)

Anyway, those lovely tombs gave me an idea and after a while I was working on the story of THE EGYPTIAN FILE, a modern romantic adventure. The only thing was I couldn’t remember in which tomb the graffito was, so, as a member of the EEF listserv, I put the question out. There’s a saying that when you ask five Egyptologists a question, you get eight answers and a fistfight. Not quite that bad, but I did get some very passionate answers.

Two of them were super special. One was from Jane Akshar, an Egyptologist and hotelier, and the other was Dr. Dirk Huyge, Curator of the Art and History Collection of the Brussels Royal Museum and Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to El Kab. They were both very helpful and both of them became dear friends. I named them both as ‘researchers in residence’ in the acknowledgements, because there are all kinds of little details you can’t find on the internet, such as how long it takes to get from Beni Suef to Luxor by train.

And that started something. Jane and I corresponded regularly and she, in another life an IT specialist, became not only a dear friend but my web-maven and looked after my website. Dirk was fascinated by the process of writing – and totally tickled to being in a book – so one day in early January 2015 he and I were chatting by email and he said, we’re going to the dig in March, why don’t you and your husband join us?

My jaw dropped. Civilians never get to stay in dig houses. Never. I told him I’d talk to the hubby and let him know. We were in budget mode and trips to Egypt are expensive, so the rest of the afternoon I tried to anticipate his objections and how to counter them. Finally he came home from work and I said, “Dirk wants us to come stay at the dig house and I think…” I got no further, because he said, “When do we leave?” That was January 5th, and on March 15th we were in Egypt. We got to stay close to a week in the dig house, sandwiched in between our dear friend Dr. Salima Ikram and a BBC film crew.

The result was a lovely little murder mystery called A KILLING AT EL KAB. It’s still one of my favorite books. And last September we took a Nile cruise for two weeks. I was just going to enjoy… I wasn’t going to work or anything. The Husband laughed and bought me a (refurbished) MacBookAir for a travel computer so I could do a trip diary… which I did and you can find on my website if you dig a little. He does know me… I came home with about half a new book, A FIRSTCLASS KILLING, set on a luxurious Nile cruise boat. So far it’s great fun!

So perhaps Ancient Egypt isn’t a ‘classic’ hobby, but it’s mine. I do needlepoint some Ancient Egyptian design pillow covers, and at the moment am working on a broad collar necklace with colored beads and opaque cabochons, but it is the land and the time itself which are my real hobby. And I love it!

The thing I am trying to tell you is that you can never tell from where a story will come. I never thought to write a book set in Ancient Egypt… and now I’ve written several. Don’t ever overlook something you love as fodder for a book. Look at all the needlework/knitting/whatever books there are. Or baking. Or singing. Or… well, you get the idea. When you can combine two passions the outcome just has to be something special.