It’s hard to believe, but I had a book come out on November 1st! You can get it anywhere good books are sold, but if you buy it from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, it will be signed by none other than Jean Schulz!
Working with Jeannie on the book was a very special experience. I get to work with her quite a bit developing exhibitions for the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, and for Snoopy Museum Tokyo, and she’s always happy to pitch in with research — connecting me to contacts, making ID’s in photos, and sharing memories. But this was different. We got to reflect on Sparky as an entire person together and dig into various parts of his life and personality we’ve not done a lot about at the museum for whatever reasons.
The book is almost like a visit to the Schulz Museum — 100 Objects from the museum’s collections are featured in gorgeous detailed photos, and a bit of history is shared about each, often with other supporting images of other objects that help tell the story. We also asked 50 contributors, from cartoonists, celebrities, politicians, friends, and members of the Schulz family, to share their own stories and remembrances related to these objects.
Interior spread from 100 Objects
All of us are very proud of the book, and I hope you will like it, too. It’s out just in time for the holiday gift-giving season, so if you know someone who loves Peanuts (and who doesn’t?), this is something a little different and totally new they will love. If you do buy a copy, be sure to rate and review it wherever you bought it, as it helps other fans find the book. Thank you!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
What I love about working in museums is that there’s actually a lot of variety in the work. So, what can a ‘typical’ week as a museum curator look like? Meetings, duh, but let’s skip them. Lots of research as well this week. We get a few research requests every day. Some are easy, some are not so easy, and some we need to use a lot of creativity to get an answer. I also did some fun stuff, of course.
Back Into the Recording Studio
I read and recorded scripts for more history videos since our last ones have been a big hit. If you’d like to check those out, they are now live on Vimeo:
A replica medieval Irish reliquary was given to my organization’s founder during his visit to his native Ireland in 1947: https://vimeo.com/181851600
Poking around the dark corners of our recording studio, I found this gem. If your sound engineer is good enough to have worked at Opryland, they’re good enough for me:
More filming
The videos have been a big hit among administration, so we’re doing more! Here, one of our staff photographers is getting the goods on a crowd favorite artifact.
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Anything but typical.
These are just a couple things I did this week that wasn’t looking through folders filled with papers and staring at my scanner waiting for it to decide to cooperate. And I wouldn’t trade it for just about anything.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
Thinking of migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
Are you crazy?
I’m the age that we learned typing on electric typewriters. We certainly had computer classes as well, just not so many computers in the building we could just learn to type on them willy-nilly.
Number Munchers on an Apple IIE.
They were for serious stuff like Number Munchers and, be still my heart, Oregon Trail. I went on from my public school education to not become an IT whiz, though I’m sometimes mistaken for one, being a big white nerd who wears glasses. And knowing “things.” I, however, am not good with technology. So, when I wanted a new site for myself and my writing, I found a good free solution: WordPress.com. It was basically free. But then I found out it had a lot of limitations, like not being able to do Google Analytics, and mailing list integration and other boring stuff I’m learning about and wanting to do.
How I migrated from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
So, I found out I’d need to buy new hosting. I went to BlueHost and with a coupon or two managed to get 3 years of hosting for not much money. They’re one of the good ones specifically for the WordPress.org platform. I followed their tutorial and at least one other on youtube to get things going and got stuck. Big time stuck. Everything seemed to be in limbo except my homepage image. I tried a couple things to get my content back and … nothing. I could tell I was making it worse. So, I got some help. Lucky for me, my city has a public tech lab where there are volunteer mentors. The thing is, they’re busy, so to schedule time with a mentor, I’d need to wait a couple weeks.
I followed their tutorial and at least one other on youtube to get things going and got stuck. Big time stuck. Everything seemed to be in limbo except my homepage image. I tried a couple things to get my content back and … nothing. I could tell I was making it worse. So, I got some help. Lucky for me, my city has a public tech lab where there are volunteer mentors. The thing is, they’re busy, so to schedule time with a mentor, I’d need to wait a couple weeks.
A couple weeks of toe-tapping and VOILA, my mentor from Do Space in Omaha gets me back on the straight and narrow in about 5 minutes and shows me where I strayed and fixed me up. Then he showed me a few more cool things I can now do with my improved platform. “This looks way more professional,” he said.
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DIY Website Migration: Not So Bad
Thank you to the couple people who noticed things went wrong and missed me (it was very encouraging), and thank you to anyone who comes back. Remember: ASK FOR HELP when you’ve no idea what you’re doing. But don’t be afraid to dive in and try. I got 97% there with only the confidence to give it a shot and knowing the University of Youtube could be all the education I needed. It was close.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I’ve never been one of those ‘New Year, New Me’ people. You want to make a change? Do it. Do it now. Do it later, if you must, but don’t wait on the calendar to change. Calendars go, changing with a precision I understand about as clearly as my earliest ancestors watching the fiery sky ball go up and down.
Calendar for Success
2016 was a toughy.
Some good, some bad, some tough. Some really bad. It was also the first year I’ve tracked my writing. I’ve been writing off and on for years, but I’ve set a goal to be able to support my family with my writing in the future, and step one was to see just how much I can do. My daily schedule has more demands than ever since I became a father half-way through 2015, my partner and I moved in together, and she was unemployed, then unevenly employed, and now full-time employed, but on a different schedule than I am. So, when I’m home, I’m home alone with our son. It’s impossible to write with a computer on one knee and a toddler on the other. These aren’t complaints, just acknowledging what I have to plan around to be better this coming year.
2016’s goals? A review.
So many writing podcasts….
Going into 2016, I knew I wanted to write novels and non-fiction too, like so many others, (I have for years). But from what I learned I wasn’t sure …. how. So this year, I listened to *all* the writing podcasts (seriously, there are so many and many of them are great!), lurked and read lots on kboards and lots of different facebook groups as well. I think I’ve got down what I need to do, but there’s still the doing. At least I have encouragement from my partner (check her out!)
I wrote quite a bit last year at the holidays, and I could hit 1000 words each day without too much trouble. It felt doable that first week, so I set 1000 words per day as my initial goal. It didn’t last long. I cut it back to 500 words per day, net on projects. No adding in journal writing, or blogging, etc. 500 words on fiction and/or nonfiction projects. That’s been more doable with the very little time I have available. But consistency has been a long way off, but I tally that up to how inconsistent my home-life “schedule” has been.
From my word tracker.
I did a little better hitting that 500 words/day goal, achieving just over 85,000 words in 2016. Yes, that’s not even half of my annual goal, but you know hitting it nearly every other day (statistically) is a big win for me. I’ve never measured my words before, I wasn’t sure what to go by, so this feels really good.
So, where did those words go? Well, another big win for me was publishing my first piece of fiction in the flash fiction series Mondays are Murder with Akashic Books. So, only 1000 words, but still — I’m proud of it. The other 85,000 words? Another small portion went into a non-fiction book I’ll be publishing soon. It’s the journal of a young teacher in western New York in 1887. It was a fun project, and I’ll have more about it soon in my facebook group.
A cover idea for my upcoming nonfiction book. What do you think? Leave a comment!
I also worked on two different historical series — one is a mystery series set in 1930s Denver with a private investigator who is a veteran of the WWI air corps. The other is more of a thriller series set in the 1910s, featuring a female magazine writer who becomes the guardian of her young nephew and goes on adventures. These have been tons of fun to write and once I’m ready to launch you’ll be the first to know.
I was also short of my reading goals this year as well, but I tracked them better than before, but I definitely missed a few books somewhere in the late summer/ early fall and forward.
I read 28 of 30 books I was hoping to read this year. I remember setting the goal of 30 books last year and thinking that was doable. I was close! There were a few (maybe a lot) of DNF books too — too long-winded usually, or narrators/ protagonists I couldn’t spend the amount of time with I’d need to to get through the book. So these are just the *finished* books, not every one I cracked open.
What about 2017?
Well, I think I’ll try to read the same number of books and shoot for 30 again. But, I need to write more. A lot more, but instead of trying for a higher daily word count, I’m going to aim for consistency. I also need to hit *publish* on a few things. It looks more and more likely that I’ll be doing just that on my first non-fiction book very soon. Details to follow, of course. Until then, why not be my friend on Goodreads?
Remember the post IN THE MUSEUM: A JFK AUTOGRAPH MYSTERY? Well, the video produced out of that work is now live, and apparently has been for a while, but I missed it.
Anyway, the gist of the video: A very young, not yet famous John F. Kennedy signed a copy of his book Why England Slept to Father Edward J. Flanagan, founder of Boys Town. We’re not sure when/ how/ where that happened, but it did. I do have a photo of a very young JFK signing a copy of this book to Spencer Tracy dressed as a priest on a movie shoot. Given the timing, Tracy could have been in the middle of shooting the sequel to the movie Boys Town, Men of Boys Town. Maybe, Spencer had JFK sign a copy to Fr. Flanagan. No word from the Tracy estate that he had a signed copy too. Fr. Flanagan was out to California for some shooting at different times, but we don’t know for sure when, so he may be just out of shot on this too. Who knows.
So, this video was a lot of fun to work on with our in-house writers, videographers, and editing people. Our organization is pretty big and focused on child care, so getting to use these amazing resources toward history and the museum, in particular, was a real treat.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
No, you did not. UNLESS your name is Linda F. and your AOL email address starts with JDC. Thank you, Linda and everyone else that entered to win A Front Page Affair.
Linda, please get in touch! I’ve tried emailing you and it appears you’re not seeing those emails (probably because I have words like “You’ve Won!” in there.)
Not every day in the museum involves solving mysteries surrounding JFK, tracking holy relics and appearing on TV. Some days, you’re working on exhibits about hearing aids.
These hearing aids are built into a pair of glasses. I wear glasses every day and these would be awful, even tiring to wear they’re so heavy.
And no, there’s no big reveal like these were found at Area 51 or were bequeathed to Elvis from Sasquatch. These are simply one evolutionary step in our current technology that helps so many people around the world hear.
Days like these may not sound very exciting, but every day is different and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I admit, it doesn’t look like much, but the cameraman’s tone stung. This book is a treasure at the museum where I’m curator. But with a book collector’s eye, yes it’s in tough shape. But what a story behind it!
Someone somewhere in our large organization decided to create and promote some short videos about fascinating objects in our collections. They needed a list of suggested artifacts and this one was high on our list.
In 1940, a young John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard was published as Why England Slept. Not long after that, an autographed copy from the young man from a prominent family was given to Father Edward J. Flanagan, of Boys Town fame. Father Flanagan was one of the most famous Catholics in the United States in 1940, just two years following the film that earned Spencer Tracy his second Oscar.
Circa 1940 signature of John F. Kennedy
We’re still not 100% sure how the book came to have been gifted to Father Flanagan, but he and young Jack Kennedy’s sister Eunice Schriverserved on a committee studying juvenile delinquency around that time, and that was the best guess according to long-time staff at the museum.
Then I found this November 1940 photo online at the JFK Presidential Library of young JFK signing the book for Spencer Tracy. Father Flanagan wasn’t the only priest played by Tracy, but he did play him twice. First in 1938 in Boys Town, and a little-known sequel Men of Boys Town in 1940.
It makes sense if this was on the set of Men of Boys Town with Tracy reprising his role as Father Flanagan. Did young Jack Kennedy sign a copy for Father at the same time as Tracy’s? Someone on staff asked if JFK made it out to Father Flanagan, giving it to Tracy!
Nothing turns up in our archives of correspondence between Tracy and Flanagan about the book, but there’s a decent probability Father Flanagan was on set at Men of Boys Town, so he could be just out of frame in this photo! We’ll probably never know.
We do know that we’ll have a nice video telling the fascinating story behind this particular book and the strange and roundabout way it came to the museum.
Radha Vatsal is a scholar and a talented storyteller, evident in her strong historical mystery debut, A Front Page Affair, just released this summer.
Capability Weeks (“Kitty” to her friends) and her father (a well-to-do, self-made mogul) live well in 1915 New York City. Kitty, a young addition to the New York Sentinel‘s Ladies Page, covers a July 4th society soiree and becomes tied to a murder and what looks like a plot to endanger the delicate international balance.
Kitty Weeks (and supporting cast) are wonderful. She’s young and privileged and begins to recognize what that has meant in her life throughout this story. I don’t go for that combination in a hero much, but Kitty’s introspection and awareness redeem her (to me at least). A hero who can throw money at their problems and make them go away is not much of a hero. Kitty also works not only externally but internally as well, to find solutions, being creative and brave throughout.
Radha Vatsal has sentences in this book that are heavy with history. It’s hard to write historical novels without ‘info dumping’ on readers. It’s a challenge to weave historical information, foreign to modern readers, and achieve a native harmony so readers glide along, learning without being jarred by the thrills and not the history.
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RECOMMENDED
Get in on this new series straight away. You’ll enjoy this plucky young hero as she matures during a time of great change in our nation and our world. Strong historical research sunk deep below the surface pushes this debut novel to the top of my recommendation list this month. For a work of fiction, there’s a fantastic ‘Further Reading’ and ‘Selected References and Sources’ pages. Old historian habits die hard.
About the Author: Benjamin Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
No, you did not. UNLESS your name is Linda F. and your AOL email address starts with JDC. Thank you, Linda and everyone else that entered to win A Front Page Affair.
Not every day in the museum involves 
“That’s it?!”
It makes sense if this was on the set of Men of Boys Town with Tracy reprising his role as Father Flanagan. Did young Jack Kennedy sign a copy for Father at the same time as Tracy’s? Someone on staff asked if JFK made it out to Father Flanagan, giving it to Tracy!
