Mom would have been 100 years old this summer. The year she was born, Calvin Coolidge was president, having taken that office on the death of Warren G. Harding. Seventeen presidents later, Mom was still hanging in there. We hoped she would make it to that centenary celebration. We were planning a hell of a party! But she didn’t. Her mind and wit were still sharp—her body was wearing out.

Though Mom didn’t get a 100^th birthday party, Aunt Flo did. Mom was the baby of the family and Aunt Flo was seven years older. They were the only two siblings remaining of six brothers and sisters. That year, plans were in the works for a big celebration down in Texas. Mom wanted to go but she hesitated. She was on oxygen then, requiring an oxygen concentrator and all the stuff that goes with it. The thought of traveling, let alone flying, was daunting. She told Aunt Flo she wouldn’t be there.

I finally called my brother and said, I don’t want Mom to regret not seeing her sister one more time. He agreed. We bought the tickets and told Mom she was going. He flew with her, and I met them at the airport. Money spent and lots of logistics to deal with. But the look on Aunt Flo’s face when her baby sister walked into the room was worth all the effort. I have pictures!

When we celebrated Mom’s 90^th birthday, we had several tables displaying photos of Mom at various stages of her life. I recall sitting on the floor in the basement, going through photo albums. I found pictures that I could tell were taken in the 1930s, based on the clothing and hairstyles the people in the photos were wearing, as well as the cars in the background.  hairstyles and autos. But I didn’t recognize any of those people and no one had written anything on the back to identify them. People, write stuff on the back of your pictures!

I found plenty of photos of Mom, though. It was a treat to see her as a little girl and a young bride. Since Mom passed, we did it again, going through albums, slides and framed photos all over the house. One find was a tintype from 1892. I’d never seen it before. According to the note from Aunt Flo written on the back, the woman in the photo was my great-grandmother and the two children with her were my grandmother, at age six, and her younger brother, who would have been three years old. My grandmother’s sister, a baby at the time, is not pictured. It’s only the second photo I’ve seen of my great-grandmother, who died that same year at the age of 30.

During our recent labors to clear out Mom’s house, we discovered a video of Mom and Dad’s 50^th anniversary and we watched it before taking it to be digitized. What a treat it was to see aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends who were still alive then—and now no longer with us.

Those of us who write fiction create families in our books and stories. Jeri Howard isn’t just a lone private eye who has an office and a home in Oakland. She has a father, a mother, and a brother. Each in turn has been featured in books—her father in Till The Old Men Die, her mother in Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean, which also features appearances from cousins on the maternal side of things. And Jeri searches for her missing brother in Cold Trail. Jeri’s grandmother is a major character in Bit Player, which touches on her experiences working as an actress in Hollywood in 1941, just before the start of World War II. Aunts and cousins show up in that one, as well.

I also write a historical mystery series set in the early 1950s, featuring Zephyrette Jill McLeod, who lives at home in Alameda, California with her father, mother, and siblings. In my Kay Dexter series, featuring a geriatric care manager, Kay Dexter lives just down the street from her elderly mother.

So family pictures inhabit our fiction as well as our real lives. With words we photograph these people and enable our readers to see them. It makes our stories so much better.

I don’t consider myself a pack rat. Others may differ. Well, maybe I will admit to pack rat tendencies. But not the whole rat. I don’t have empty plastic yogurt tubs and months’ old stacks of newspaper cluttering up my home. I really do try to recycle and reuse, and throw out, if need be.

I am, however, a paper magnet. It’s a tendency acquired early in my writing career. I spot something in the newspaper or a magazine, clip it out and set it aside, thinking I might use that someday, in a story or a novel.

And I have. Here’s where recycling comes in. Back in 2005, I clipped a short article from the San Francisco Chronicle. The story concerned a stash of old wallets found in the rafters of a barracks at Camp Roberts, in central California. It’s a California National Guard base now, but during World War II it was an Army training base. The contents of the wallets dated back to that era, the 1940s. The theory was that the wallets had been stolen, all valuables removed, and the wallets then disposed of in the rafters. I was so intrigued by the story I kept it pinned to my bulletin board. And indeed, I did use the story in a Jeri Howard novel—Bit Player.

I started writing in the ancient times before computers and the internet, so I would stash all these clippings and assorted notes in file folders. Some of those folders date back decades and are still hanging around in file boxes, taking up space in my office. I really would like to purge that paper. But I am reluctant to get rid of anything that I might use someday. I know, I know, the mantra of a pack rat.

These days, with the internet, I can save the article onto my computer, or at least the URL. Saves paper and space, that’s for sure. I can even use my iPhone to scan documents. I have file folders of clippings and notes awaiting such action. Then maybe I can throw out all that paper and free up some space in my office.

There’s another kind of throwing out. I’ve excised scenes from novels and told myself the finished work is better for it. At times, though, I reuse a scene. In the Jeri Howard novel Nobody’s Child, Jeri gets shoved off a BART platform in San Francisco. That scene originally appeared in an early version of Till the Old Men Die. I really like the excitement of the scene, with Jeri’s narrow escape from an onrushing BART train. Too good not to reuse.

I also recycle and reuse characters. An earlier unpublished novel had a character named Lowell Rhine. He was a shifty character. I liked the name, so I recycled it in Cold Trail, using the moniker for a somewhat shady lawyer. As for that unpublished novel, and another lurking in my files, I have some recycling and reusing in mind.

Frequently characters who appear in my books wind up in other books. History professor Lindsay Page first appeared in the Jeri Howard novel Witness to Evil. Later she had her own book, my standalone novel What You Wish For. After attending my 50^th high school reunion, I wrote a novella, But Not Forgotten, about a semi-retired reporter named Maggie Constable, who attends her reunion, determined to solve a long-ago mystery. I like Maggie a lot, so she appeared in my most recent Jeri Howard book, The Things We Keep. Maggie is going to have a book of her own, as soon as I can get around to it.

And yes, I did write a short story about a pack rat. Entitled Pack Rat. I’m not as bad as the guy in the story. Really.

My work-in-progress is a historical novel. It’s a first draft and I’m working on it in fits and starts, given the interruptions that life throws at me.

Lately I’ve been thinking about transitions. Now, the dictionary describes a transition as the process or period of changing from one state or condition to another. That could mean transitioning from one place to another. Or in the case of a character, looking at how that person is changing internally or emotionally.

Both these definitions are appropriate in terms of the novel. My protagonist does have some internal and emotional changes in store. But right now, she’s changing from one location to another. So, I need to move her, and two other characters across the landscape from point A to point B—and not take forever doing it.

The book takes place in the late 1870s. My protagonist, Catriona, is the daughter of an officer in the frontier army. In the early chapters of the book, she leaves Fort Garland, Colorado, heading to New Mexico to join her father at Fort Stanton, his new post. With her are two companions, a young woman named Martha and a man named Eusebio. I’ve been writing scenes describing these three people on the road to Santa Fe, where they will make a stop before heading farther south again and arriving at their destination.

Agonizing over minutiae is part of my writing process. On the other hand, describing the journey is useful information to help me visualize what I’m writing about and want to convey to readers.

So lately, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about the route, which doesn’t always follow the asphalt roads of the present day. These people are traveling on dirt roads and trails, which sometimes cross streams by going through the water rather than clip-clopping over a convenient bridge. I’m visualizing the terrain, which involves mountains, rivers and high plains. And pondering how many miles a horse-drawn wagon can cover in a day, given the terrain and the condition of those roads.

After mulling it over, chewing on it, and examining it every which way, I finally decided to get on with it. Readers don’t need to follow along on every dusty mile of that journey, taking in the sights during the day, cooking over a campfire, and sleeping under the stars at night. One day and one night, that’s really all that’s needed to give the appropriate information.

Besides, I want my characters to get to their destination so I can move along with the plot.

Jump ahead, already.

I’ve done this with other books, of course. When I was writing Witness to Evil, a Jeri Howard novel, I had Jeri down in Bakersfield. She was stumped and so was I. What happens next? I jumped ahead and put Jeri on the freeway, heading to Los Angeles. Next think I knew, after finding clues and interviewing people in LA, she was on the road again, this time to San Luis Obispo and then Fresno, before returning to Bakersfield with lots of fresh clues. And me, lots of new chapters.

I also write the Jill McLeod series, featuring my sleuthing Zephyrette back in the early 1950s. Much of the action in those books takes place aboard the train known as the California Zephyr. And I must work within the framework of the train schedule. When writing the first book, Death Rides the Zephyr, I had timetables all around me. Not just the timetable for the train passengers, but the timetable that showed the work rotation of the crew, which was different. Again, it wasn’t necessary to write about every mile of that train journey. It was enough to give readers a glimpse of the changing scenery and the feel of the train rocking along the rails. After a long day seeing to the passengers’ needs, Jill is entitled to go to bed in her Zephyrette’s compartment and wake up the next morning, miles down the track and ready for a plate of railroad French toast in the dining car.

As I write this, I’m living in a hotel, with my cats, because new flooring is being installed in my condo—finally! It has been six months since the great condo flood upended my life. I never thought it would take this long, but it has. Now I can see that light glimmering at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Soon my cats and I can come home!

A change of scene can be valuable when writing, in a couple of ways. I’m in this hotel room, supposedly with no distractions, unless I count the cats walking over the keyboard. But they do that at home. Surely I can focus on the book I’ve been writing (or neglecting, of late).

Changing location works in other ways. Case in point, Witness to Evil, the seventh Jeri Howard novel. The first half of the book is set in Paris, while the latter half takes place in Bakersfield, California. Talk about a change in scene! I did location research in both places, though a second trip to Bakersfield was a lot easier, since all I had to do was get on the freeway and drive.

At some point during the writing process, I found myself staring at a virtual brick wall. What happens next? I didn’t know. What I did know was Jeri had to go to Los Angeles to follow a lead. So, I put her on highway 99, headed south. Following one lead led to another and yet another. I wrote six chapters in rapid succession, taking Jeri from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo to Fresno. When Jeri and I got back to Bakersfield, I had a clearer picture of where I was headed with that book, and where I needed to fill in information and clues.

I had another change of scene in the early stages of writing Death Above the Line. It’s the fourth book in the historical series featuring my sleuthing Zephyrette, Jill McLeod. She’s accustomed to working aboard the sleek silver streamliner known as the California Zephyr, as it makes daily runs between the Bay Area and Chicago. However, in this novel, she’s been roped into playing a Zephyrette in a film noir. In the first draft, I had Jill reporting for duty at a movie studio located in the waterfront district of Oakland. It’s an area I’m familiar with, having worked there in one of my day jobs.

But the location just wasn’t working. I had to make a change. I moved my movie studio to Niles. It’s part of Fremont now, but at the time I’m writing about, 1953, it was a separate township at the mouth of a canyon carved by Alameda Creek. And it has a movie-making history. The town was the western site of Essanay Studios, which made silent films there from 1912 to 1916. That’s where Charlie Chaplin filmed The Tramp.

I put my fictional studio in an old warehouse near the historical Niles train station. The change of scene worked. Since I’ve been to Niles many times, riding the historic train there and having afternoon tea at a favorite shop, I was able to visualize my characters moving in and out of the building, walking the familiar streets.

Another change of scene occurred when I was writing the first book in my series featuring geriatric care manager Kay Dexter, titled The Sacrificial Daughter. I use actual locations for my other books. For this series, however, I decided to use a fictional town set in a fictional county in the Northern California Sierra Nevada. Both the town and the county are called Rocoso, a Spanish word for rocky. This was definitely a change of scene, in several ways. A fictional setting allows me to make up the way a place looks, as well as its history, culture and inhabitants. Another way it works is that I borrowed a great deal of the location and terrain from a real place, picking up a real Colorado town and moving aspects of it to Northern California.

Whether it’s Bakersfield, Niles, or Rocoso, a change of scene invigorates my writing.

I’m thinking about undergarments.

Lest you think that’s peculiar, I’m a writer, working on a historical novel. And thinking about what my characters wear.

More about the undies later. Let’s talk about what goes over them.

My long-running Jeri Howard series is contemporary, set in the present day. Jeri is a private investigator. I was a woman in my thirties when I began the series, but I’m aging faster than Jeri is. As an investigator, Jeri wears comfortable clothing, usually pants, though in Where the Bodies Are Buried, she dresses up in a business suit and low heels to go undercover as a legal secretary.

Most often she wears comfortable shoes, since she may need to walk distances as she tails a suspect on a city street. She certainly doesn’t want to stand out in a crowd when she has to duck into a doorway or a coffee shop to avoid being seen. In Cold Trail, she hikes over the hills in a regional park, following a lead.

So, Jeri dresses a lot like I do. I favor casual and comfortable. My wardrobe consists of a lot of T-shirts and stretchy pants. As I write this, my feet are ensconced in warm comfy slippers.

I’ve never felt the need to detail Jeri’s undergarments, though I do mention at one point that she sleeps in an oversize T-shirt.

Then I started a new series, set in the early 1950s, featuring Jill McLeod, a Zephyrette on the California Zephyr, the sleek streamliner train that ran between San Francisco and Chicago from 1949-1970. The current Amtrak version is a successor to that passenger train. Jill is a train hostess, the only female crew member. Her job is to walk through the train from time to time, keeping an eye on the passengers and what they need. While she’s on duty, Jill wears a uniform. It’s teal blue, with a skirt and jacket worn over a white shirt, and a military-style cap. When Jill is off-duty, however, she dresses in the styles common at that time. It’s the era of full skirts and dresses with waists, and Jill’s hair is styled in the popular poodle cut.

Speaking of undies, that was the era of girdles and bullet bras. I’ve never written about Jill’s undergarments, but in one book I have her climbing into her berth in a pair of comfortable pajamas.

On to the historical novel—and more about undies. The book I’m working on is set in the late 1870s. I am currently obsessed with researching what people wore. I bought a book called Clothing Through American History: The Civil War through the Gilded Age, 1861-1899. I found a sidebar titled “The Layers of a Proper Lady’s Toilette.” It describes nine layers and 25 pounds of clothing to make up the proper undies for a lady, and goes from stockings to drawers, to chemise, petticoat and corset. We won’t even talk about the damn bustle.

How in the hell did women function when confined in this cage of fabric and metal? I suspect we could have another blog post on how women’s fashions interfered with their lives as well as their movement. And not just in the nineteenth century, and earlier. Remember when it was scandalous for women to wear pants? And when many women, my mother included, strapped themselves into girdles?

We will draw a veil over those bell bottoms I wore, just about the same time I bought those platform heels and fell through a door. Jeri would never do that, at least I don’t think so.

I’m not sure the protagonist in my historical novel wears all that clothing, though. Things were different on the western frontier, where farm wives sewed weights into the hems of their skirts to keep them from blowing up and showing off their undergarments. In the late nineteenth century, women did in fact wear split or divided skirts for riding horses, something I’ve eagerly adopted for my protagonist, since she’s traveling in the first part of the novel, sometimes on a wagon seat and sometimes astride her own horse.

I haven’t decided what to do about her undies. She’s independent enough to push against societal norms. Will that extend to foregoing a corset? I guess I’ll find out.