So a funny thing happened on my way to Wiscon. I mentioned that my flight was oversold and I volunteered to go on a later flight, right? The airline gave me a food voucher so I wandered over to the nearest kiosk. As I was standing in line, a woman said, “Mary Robinette Kowal!”

I turned, in some surprise. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place her so I cleverly said, “Um… yes!”

“I’m [editor]. I just had lunch with your agent.”

My jaw dropped. She’d spotted my name on my luggage tag as we were standing in line. And this, my friends, is a good reason to have a distinctive name.

We realize that we’d actually met at World Fantasy last year and ridden back on the same train. This time we did not have the same destination, so running into her was totally random. She was on her way with her boyfriend to spend the weekend with his family. And then she said, “Your manuscript is one of the ones in my bag. It’s sort of Jane Austeny, isn’t it?”

“Jane Austen with magic!” I said.

“What could go wrong with that combination?”

“Well, lots of things go wrong. Chaos ensues. And then matrimony.”

She laughed.

So the lessons learned today are:

1. Volunteer to be bumped
2. Distinctive name is good.
3. Have the elevator pitch ready.

I mean, now I’ve got a free round-trip ticket from the airline and had the bonus of making a connection with an editor right before she reads my manuscript. I think that’s worth the price of being late to WisCon.

When I was in high school on the debate team, and then again in college, my coaches emphasized the importance of finding primary sources. My debate partner and I had that particular lesson hammered home when we lost a round because we had relied on a secondary source, a newspaper article. It was reliable, the Wall Street Journal, but our opponents had gone back to the primary source — the study quoted in the article — and was able to produce two different quotes that showed ours was out of context and in fact represented the opposite of what we had presented it as. It was humiliating.

So, when I’m researching now for a show or a story, I’ll follow the bibliography trail back as far as I can trying to find my way back to the primary source. This has lead to everything from realizing that in fact we had picked the wrong sacred tree for a show set in India, to discovering that a historical character in a story had a death in the family during the period I was writing about them. That moment of discovery is wonderful and leads to richer stories.

Now, it’s not always possible to get primary sources, but a whole slew of reliable secondary sources will often do the trick.

But my favorite of all sources is called, “the expert witness.”

For instance: I’ve been trying to find out what fake cherries would have been made out of for millinary purposes. I have a scene in which Jane is trimming a bonnet. It’s a small detail, but I wanted to know. I checked online first, because it’s easy. Then I headed to the library. Loads of stuff on period hats and how they were trimmed, but nothing on what artificial cherries were made of. It was very frustrating.

This meant it was time to contact an expert witness since I had exhausted my other availble avenues. I wrote to Mr. Keith Dansey at Hat Works Museum and explained my question.

He just wrote back and has given me permission to excerpt his answer here.

We do have at least one hat in our display collection trimmed with imitation red currants, not precisely the same fruit, to be sure, and dated 1920 somewhat later than the period you have focused on. These are made of glass and possibly exemplify a millinery tradition encompassing the early 19th century.

Additionally, an 18th century German chemist by the name of J. Strasser developed a method if making imitation gems from ‘paste’ which is a lead glass compound. Possibly imitation fruits might be made from this. On the basis of this flimsy evidence, my money would be on some kind of glass. Other malleable materials, say, wax or plaster present with obvious problems.

His flimsy evidence beats anything else I’ve got. So now, not only do I have my answer for the scene I’m writing, I have a great detail for a later scene in which the hat reappears. It gets thrown to the ground on a marble floor. I’ve got glass cherries on it. Making a cherry crack on impact is the perfect accent to the emotion of the moment. I’m delighted on so many levels.

Expert witnesses are wonderful.

This is the story that I was working on as we were driving across country. I just submitted it to the writer’s group I’m auditioning for and thought that you all might want to read it too. The password is the same as for Shades of Milk and Honey. If you don’t have that and are interested in reading, drop me a line and I’ll give it to you. I do this so that, by controlling access, I can say that it’s never been published. So far, I think there are ten of you reading.

The post labled, “The Bride Replete” is about half of my current story in progress. I wanted to show it to some folks who were helping with my chemistry question to give them some context, so I posted it password protected. If you were reading Shades of Milk and Honey, it uses the same password as that.

If you are curious, I’m happy to give you the password, but realize that it is raw text and cuts off mid-sentence.

I just finished Shades of Milk and Honey. I’ll let it sit for a bit before starting the revisions. And for those of you who have been reading along, I’ll post a chapter a day for you. Thanks for reading along!

Off to do some celebrating now.

So, I’ve added two new things to the website, plus some back end and minor revamping. First, you might notice little “Share This” buttons at the bottom of posts. These are for those of you who use things like technorati or like to email articles to other folks. I think they are fairly self explanatory once you click on them.

The other is that I can now group posts in a series, for instance, my Shades of Milk and Honey posts are all collected together now. At the end of each chapter, you’ll see a table of contents showing all the other chapters. Handy, eh? (By the way, While I was at it, I un-protected the first three chapters. If you want to read the rest, it’s not too late to ask me for the password.)

Are there any other things that you really wish the site had or did?