Penny shrugged. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s made that mistake before.”
“One of the things I’m trying to do now is to learn from my mistakes. When I mess up, I want to do more than own the error —I want to understand what I missed and figure out how to avoid repeating it going forward.”
“A good goal.”
“It’s a process,” he said with a sigh. “No one’s perfect. Definitely not me.”
His willingness to share was welcome. “If everyone put in the effort more often to learn from their mistakes, the world would be a better place.”
“Which ties into something else that Mabel was right about —my divorce.”
Penny felt a jolt —he was ready to go there? “How so?”
He paused. “You don’t mind me talking about this?”
“Not at all. I want to know.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “When my wife and I met, she’d recently broken up with her long-time boyfriend and I was ready for something serious. We hit it off right away. Four months after we met, we got married.”
“That was fast.”
“At the time I thought, ‘Fast is fine. When you know, you know.’ And for the first year, fast worked. Her upbringing was very different from mine —she’s old money, I’m no money —and I wanted to understand everything I could about her, so I was eager to dive into her world. My first book had been well received and she was happy to introduce me to her crowd as her ‘rising young novelist’ husband.”
“All of that sounds exciting.”
“Fast-paced, fun, glamorous —it was all of that. But at the same time, I was feeling the pull of my next book.”
“Your historical novel,The Reckoning.”
“My agent was after me to finish it. Just as importantly, I wanted to get to it, too.”
“So what happened?”
“Well,” he said, “I got into it. I stepped back from the social scene and started researching and writing.”
“Historical novels can require a lot of research.”
“Extensive research. But I was up for that. I love learning new stuff.”
“You found a new world to explore.”
“For my first book, which was set in the near future, all I needed to do was read a bunch of research papers about cutting-edge scientific discoveries and imagine what might happen next. My second book was different. I was setting the novel in an actual era that actually existed. The details had to be right, and getting historical details right isn’t easy. In ways large and small, life in the American West in 1873 was extremely different from the life we lead now.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay.” He rubbed his hands together, clearly enthused by the topic. “Take something obvious, like travel. Today we have airplanes, trains, buses, cars, good roads — and most of us use them. But back in 1873, travel was difficult, slow, and dangerous. Most roads were bad. To get somewhere, people had to walk, or get a ride on a horse or wagon or carriage. Trains were relatively new and expensive. As a result, most people alive in 1873 never traveled far from where they were born.”
“So for your novel about a journey by covered wagon across the American West….”
“I needed to understand the physical realities of a covered wagon — what it looked like, what was in it, what it felt like,what it smelled like. But more than that, I needed to get into my characters’ heads and understand how they viewed their world. For them, making that journey wasmomentous. Nearly everything they experienced was new and different. The people they met, the terrain they crossed, the wildlife they encountered, the weather and altitudes they endured —all of that was exotic and unfamiliar. Every day brought something strange, exhilarating, frightening, life-changing.”
“New challenges every day,” Penny said.
“The difficulties were relentless. Plus, they were on their own. If something went wrong, no one was coming to the rescue.”
“Meanwhile, compared to today….”
“The world we live in is profoundly different. Travel for most of us is easier, safer, more available, more affordable, more predictable….”
