



Hot cross buns are traditionally served on Good Friday, but they are good any time. This recipe will make 2 1/2 dozen buns.
2 packages active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 cup warm milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup softened butter or margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
6 1/2 to 7 cups all-purpose flour
4 eggs
1/2 cup dried currents
1/2 cup raisins
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
2 Tablespoons water
1 egg yolk
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
1 recipe Icing (below)
Have the water and milk at 110-115 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Add the warm milk sugar, butter, vanilla, salt, nutmeg, and 3 cups of the flour. Beat until smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating the mixture well after each addition. Stir in the dried fruit and enough flour to make a soft dough.
Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 6 to 8 minutes. Place in a greased bowl and turn over to grease the top. Cover with a damp towel or plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 hour.
Punch the dough down and shape into 30 balls.
Place on greased baking sheets.
Using a sharp knife, cut a cross or X on the top of each roll.
Cover again and let rise until doubled, about 30 minutes.
Beat the water and egg yolk together and brush over the rolls.
Bake at 375-degrees F. for 12 to 15 minutes.
Cool on wire racks.
Drizzle icing over the top of each roll following the lines of the cut cross.
ICING: Combine 1 cup confectioners’ sugar, 4 teaspoons milk or cream, a dash of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract. Stir until smooth. Adjust sugar and milk to make a mixture, which flows easily.
Any writer can tell you that the most frequently asked question they hear is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Writers get their ideas the same as everyone else does. Ideas just come to us. The difference is that writers learn to brainstorm and embellish on the original idea until it’s a plausible idea for a book.
I used to reply with a quip, such as one of these:
“I subscribe to Idea Monthly.”
“I close myself in a dark closet, chant a mantra, and don’t come out until a complete story has come to me.”
“I remember everything everyone tells me and I use it.”
“Little green men come to me and night and whisper plots in my ear.”
“There’s a warehouse on the outskirts of Tulsa….”
The problem with answering like that is that—people take me seriously!
Many of my ideas come from hearing a song, watching a movie, reading a book, or from my research. Something will catch my attention, and I’ll think “what if”? Then I play with the notion until I turn it into a story.
From the original concept, I develop the characters first. Exactly what kind of person will fit this role or this scene or this setting? Then I create the other lead character with built in conflict and an opposing goal. I start a binder. The members of my RWA chapter who saw my binder at our retreat have started calling it The Binder of Wonder. Okay, I confess to being a tad obsessive about things now and then.
Photos:
Top one is the binder at the beginning of the process—one page of notes only
Second one is my current binder on my desk
Third one is my desk with the story in progress spread all over – can you find Hugh?
Each book gets its own three-ring binder. Into the binder goes a character grid I’ve created by combining other charts into one that works for me, and a character fact sheet, which isn’t about physical appearance at all, but lists of words that describe them and mostly information about their past. Then as I go along I add dividers to separate the material I collect: Research on their occupation or a locale, names I will use, a map, society and etiquette, a brainstormed list of 25 Things That Could Happen, photos of people who resemble my characters. My current hero is Hugh Jackman, but his photo isn’t inside the binder; it’s over my desk. Duh.
I accumulate historical facts, dates in history, weather, a calendar of the year, on which I record my events as they take place, photos of places, houses, scenery, and a style sheet, which records all the characters and place names I use in the book.
The original idea, that little glimmer of a spark, is most often one thought I write down on one sheet of paper – and then tweak and tweak and tweak. Starting with my first book, here are a few:
— Heaven Can Wait originated as taking a girl who knew nothing of the outside world from a sequestered environment and flinging her into a completely alien culture. That theme still fascinates me, and I have more ideas for others.
— Rain Shadow developed from the desire to do a sequel to Heaven Can Wait, using the previous hero’s brother as the hero, and needing an exact opposite to pair him with. Thus the gun-toting Wild West character of Rain Shadow developed.
— Land of Dreams came from my fascination with and empathy for the children who rode the orphan trains, and, as a result of the many diaries I’d read. So many of the children suffered in their new environments nearly as much as they had on the streets of New York, often being sexually abused or used as servants, and many thinking they’d been adopted into families, only to find out years later that they hadn’t. I wanted to give some of those kids a good home. And Too Tall Thea was a character burning for a story and someone to love her.
— Saint or Sinner sprang from my passion for watching late night westerns. There’s an old black and white flick with Joanne Woodward where this guy comes back from the war and builds a church. She’s just a kid he tries to reform, but I thought…what if this fellow had a life after death experience and came back a changed man…and there was a woman who didn’t believe he’d changed?
— Badlands Bride actually started out as merely a title I’d saved for years. I needed a story to go with that great title. The idea of having an unprepared reporter go west disguised as a mail-order bride popped into my head, and I decided to send her to the badlands and use that title. I love the underdog characters, you may have noticed. She’s desperate for her father’s approval.
— A Husband By Any Other Name came from the Bible story of the prodigal son. One son runs away, squanders his inheritance and comes back to his father’s welcoming arms. The brother who stayed home and worked doesn’t think that’s too fair, even though he surely loved his brother. Seeing the father plan a feast and roast the fatted calf irks him. I further complicated that story by having the brother who stays home marry the fiancée of the brother who went away. Did I mention he pretends to be the brother who went away?
— The Truth About Toby: I’ve always been a bit fascinated with dream interpretations, I guess. I had originally titled the book Dream A Little Dream For Me, because the hero is helping the heroine with precognitive dreams. Austin came to me first, a reclusive, tortured hero who simply wants to forget the horrors of his past. And for him I created Shaine, the woman he can’t resist, who needs him to remember it all. And then the eds told me that dream title would never fly. A month after my book came SEP’s masterpiece.
— The Mistaken Widow is a historical version of the movie, “Mrs. Winterbourne, where Ricky Lake pretends to be Brenden Frasier’s sister-in-law. As soon as I saw the film, I started picturing it in a historical scenario. My story has a bit more twists and turns, however.
— The Doctor’s Wife came from watching a talk show where the female guest told her story. She came from the “trash family” in a little town. I felt so sorry for her and her story was so sad that I sat and cried. Often when I’m moved by someone’s real life story, I want to write one that turns out better. It’s like I can fix the world one book at a time or something. The real person in this case was ridiculed and teased by the other children. Her family was so poor that she wore her brother’s underwear. Her mother gave birth to more than one baby and made the daughter go bury them. One particular time, she secretly gave the baby away. This was one of those reunion shows, and they brought out the sister whose life she saved so many years ago and they were reunited with hugs and tears. Bizarre story, eh? Once again truth is stranger than fiction. Well I changed all that and had the baby be my heroine’s and had her hide it to keep it safe. But that’s where the idea was conceived.
and on and on…..up to the book I’m working on now:
— Her Make-Believe Husband started out as one little thought. I wanted a child to get letters from a made-up father. And then the made-up father to show up. It took me months of hashing out the idea and coming up with things and then having to chuck them because they wouldn’t work and then setting it aside time after time. Finally one time when I went back to it, something clicked and the idea all fell together. I am loving this story so much — and who wouldn’t with Hugh Jackman as the hero, eh?
So anyway, ideas come from anywhere and everywhere: TV shows, the newspaper, songs, other books. I’ve never found that warehouse outside Tulsa, dag-nabbit, so I do most of the dirty work on my own. Actually, the ideas are the fun part, the part that never runs out. Carrying out the work is the hard part. There are a lot of people who call themselves writers and who come up with ideas, but there are far fewer who actually do the work and get it all in publishable story form on paper!
Ask another writer and she will most likely have a completely different explanation of where stories come from – but I’ll bet she won’t know about the warehouse outside Tulsa.
Before the Civil War, most businesses were small with only a few dozen employees, and a clerk was most often a young fellow starting out in a business by keeping records and transcribing letters. The 1870s and 1880s brought the growth of corporations and trusts and employment for tens of thousands of workers. Management and labor divisions were created, and paperwork flourished. None of my research showed this, but I couldn’t help wondering if the growth in record keeping was also partly due to the influx of former slaves suddenly being on payrolls.
The idea behind the typewriter applied Johann Gutenberg’s concept of movable type developed for the printing press to a machine for individual use. Descriptions of such mechanical writing machines date as far back as the early eighteenth century. In 1714, a patent something like a typewriter was granted to a man named Henry Mill in England, but no example of Mills’ invention survives.
In 1829, William Burt from Detroit, Michigan patented his typographer which had characters arranged on a rotating frame. However, Burt’s machine, and many of those that followed it, were cumbersome, hard to use, unreliable and often took longer to produce a letter than writing it by hand.
The typewriter began at Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1868. A local publisher-politician-philosopher named Christopher Latham Sholes and his fellow workers spent hours tinkering on a machine to automatically number the pages in books. Someone suggested a similar device to print the entire alphabet. An article from Scientific American was passed around and a machine that printed the alphabet resulted. It even had the QWERTY keyboard we still use today. The prototype was eventually sent to Washington as the required Patent Model.
Sholes licensed his patent to famous gun maker Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York. In 1874, the Remington Model 1, the first commercial typewriter, was placed on the market. No more than 5,000 were sold, but the invention founded a worldwide industry and brought mechanization to time-consuming office work. The original still exists, locked in a vault at the Smithsonian. Probably a couple hundred or so survived time, and those are valued from $1000 for a black model to $5000 for an ornately decorated model on a treadle stand.
Remington and his sons were already in the sewing machine business, as well, and in fact the early typewriter models with stands look like sewing machines with the same iron scrollwork. The Remington type writing machine was first displayed to the public at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 along with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Heinz Ketchup, the Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo, precursor to the electric light, and Hires Root Beer.
The Franklin Typewriter was a make popular around the turn of the century. Its type bars stood erect at the front of the machine and swung down to the platen. Its radical semi-circular keyboard characterized this down strike machine. Many survive today.
Other models were created and patented over the years, some which struck the back of the paper to print. Some had two complete sets of letters – uppercase and lowercase. Funny that double-keyboard promoters thought it was confusing to have to press two keys when you wanted capitals. The Smith family of Smith Premier later became Smith-Corona. It was the longest-lived name in the typewriter business.
After this practical invention became widely available, typing became a more specialized skill, requiring training other than that of a company manager moving through the ranks. New positions developed in the forms of stenographers, file clerks and typists, and the jobs were quickly seen as women’s work. In 1881 the Young Women’s Christian Association (YMCA) offered typing training.
Based on Sholes’ mechanical typewriter, the first electric typewriter was built by Thomas Alva Edison in the United States in 1872, but the widespread use of electric typewriters was not common until the 1950s. The electronic typewriter, a typewriter with an electronic “memory” capable of storing text, first appeared in 1978.
So there’s everything you always wanted to know about typewriters, but didn’t think to ask. I always enjoy learning that something I thought was a more recent discovery had actually been around for far longer.
Milestones:
1714 The first patent for a ‘writing machine’ was given to Henry Mill of England
1829 William Burt of the US patented his typographer machine
1868 Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule patent type writing machine
1872 Thomas Alva Edison builds first electric typewriter
1873 Remington & Sons mass produces the Sholes & Glidden typewriter
1978 Olivetti Company and the Casio Company develop electronic typewriter
I did my first writing on a Smith-Corona portable. When I think back on the changes I make by using White Out – what a nightmare. But it was easier than writing by hand, and the finished pages were far easier to read. When I got an IBM Selectric, I thought I had hit the big time. No more White Out because it had an eraser tape! Whoo hoo! We didn’t realize that those were the dinosaurs of the inventions to come, did we? Hey, they were better than anything we’d known previously.
Author and friend Victoria Alexander collects old typewriters, and she has some really awesome specimens in her office. Will anyone else admit to having written or typed letters on a standard typewriter? Do you remember the strikers getting crossed when you went too fast?
I’ll bet you didn’t know that the second week of January is Universal Letter Writing Week. Sadly, letter writing is a lost art. When I was young I had two pen pals, one in Japan and the other in Missouri. I often exchanged letters with my cousins. I still remember the excitement of seeing those envelopes with the postmarks and opening the stationary to recognize familiar handwriting.
How many of you have letters tucked away for safekeeping? Love notes from your husband or the letters your grandfather or father wrote to your grandmother or mother during the war? Letters your child penned when she was just learning to write cursive? I have letters my grandmother wrote to me during the last years of her life, and I treasure them.
Who will have one of your letters to cherish? Do you think you could take time between now and next week to write a letter or two?
Here are some ideas:
– Write a letter to your son (or daughter), letting him know what wonderful memories you have of him growing up.
– Write a letter to your grandchild and tell him how you felt the first time you saw him or held him in your arms. Tell him how proud you are of his accomplishments in school or band or on the soccer field.
– Write a letter of appreciation to your chiropractor or other doctor, thanking him for a better quality of life. Also send one to the person who recommended the doctor to you.
– Write a letter to a friend who has done something special for you or who always makes you feel special and appreciated.
– Write a letter to an author whose books have given you many hours of reading pleasure. (I can’t stress enough how dear these letters are!)
– Write a letter to your child’s teacher, letting her know how much you appreciate her thoughtfulness and concern for your child.
– If you have a living parent, write a letter, reminiscing about a time when that person made you feel loved or took the time to teach you how to do something.
A friendly or personal letter normally has five parts.
First is the HEADING, if you want to include your address or if you have printed stationary. Don’t worry about a heading this week, since the point is to write with your own hand and not have it look like a business letter or an email! Do include the date at the top, so the recipient can look at it years from now without having to wonder.
Your GREETING, which is something like, Dear Mom, Hi Kelly, or My Sweet Daughter will end with a comma. Skip a line.
The BODY of your letter is the main text, which you will divide into indented paragraphs. Our purpose is to get our message across, not to be perfect or impress anyone, so keep your words natural and heartfelt. Skip a line or two after the body before you sign your name,
The COMPLIMENTARY CLOSE comes next. For a teacher or doctor, you can use In appreciation, or With warm regards. For a family member or close friend you’ll want to say All my love, simply Love, or perhaps Thinking of you. Follow it with a comma. Skip three spaces before your signature.
Your SIGNATURE is your first or first and last name, depending of course on your relationship to the recipient.
If you think of something you want to add once you’ve finished, skip a line and add a postscript. Begin it with P.S. and end it with your initials.
For inspiration, here are a few quotes from the letters of Jane Austin:
“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” — letter of December 24, 1798
[To her sister Cassandra, on the birth of a son to one of their sisters-in-law:]
“I give you joy of our new nephew, and hope if he ever comes to be hanged it will not be till we are too old to care about it.” — letter of April 25, 1811
[On another of their nephews, then about three years old:]
“I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manner, until a few years have turned him into an ungovernable, ungracious fellow.” — letter of October 27 1798
“Next week [I] shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.” — letter of October 27 1798
“I could no more write a [historical] romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.” — letter of April 1st 1816
“I have read [Byron’s] The Corsair, mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do.” — letter of March 5, 1814
[On the appearance of a second printing of Sense and Sensibility:]
“Since I wrote last, my 2nd edit. has stared me in the face. […] I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it.” — letter of November 6th 1813
“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.” — letter of June 15, 1808
[On buying a “sprig” for her sister’s hat:] “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What do you think on that subject?” — letter of June 11 1799
“I learnt from Mrs. Tickars’s young lady, to my high amusement, that the stays [corsets] now are not made to force the bosom up at all; that was a very unbecoming, unnatural fashion.” — letter of September 15 1813
“You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.” — letter December 24 1798
“I shall not tell you anything more of Wm. Digweed’s china, as your silence on the subject makes you unworthy of it.” — letter of December 27, 1808
“I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.” — letter of May 31 1811
“Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end.” — letter of January 21 1801
Now, your letter certainly doesn’t have to compare to those of Jane Austin! On the contrary. Your friend or doctor would wonder what had come over you.
Do you have someone in mind who deserves a note of thanks or appreciation? Do you think you can pull yourself into the mood in time to mail your letter for Universal Letter Writing Week in a few days? Someone will be glad you did.