Setting and Sports Romances

So I am an unabashed baseball fan. A Yankees fan, even. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and roll your eyes.

I think in a lot of ways, baseball is an ideal sport for me. It’s polite and gentlemanly in its way, but it’s tense and exciting, too. It’s orderly and statistical, but it’s also unpredictable. Fans are smart and passionate. The whole history of the sport is riddled with triumph and heartbreak, with cheating and honesty, with colorful characters, villains, and heroes.

Sounds kind of like a romance novel, doesn’t it?

I think that my writing a baseball romance was an inevitability. Beyond the obvious intersection of my interests here, a sports romance has one other key element: setting. I love a vivid setting in a novel, one that lives and breathes as much as the characters do. I want to know what everything looks like, smells like, feels like. I love nitty-gritty details. That was something I was conscious of as I wrote. The novel takes place in New York City primarily—my two heroes are both players for the same fictional MLB team—but it also takes place in stadiums, on fields, in locker rooms.

As a writer, I like to have a clear picture of the setting, so I draw maps and diagrams. I knew which parts of the stadium were where: the distance from the locker room to the field, the locations of the executive offices, the parking lot. My fictional stadium is magically located roughly where Ebbets Field once stood, which I never say in the book, but I knew which roads the characters would have to drive on to get to Manhattan. I did a ton of research, too, to get the cadence of speech right—how do baseball players talk to each other? how do sportscasters talk about baseball—and to make sure all my terminology was right. I watched documentaries, I read several books, I listened to baseball podcasts, and, of course, I watched a ton of games. (Not a hardship, by the way!) Immersing myself in the world of baseball was really key to my creating what I thought was a convincing setting. And hopefully, it’s a setting in the same way New York is a setting, so that the reader sees it as color and detail and not as an overwhelming amount of information!

Kate McMurray is a NYC-based writer, editor, and baseball fanatic. She writes m/m romances and reads lots of books. She also likes crafts and plays the violin and lives in Brooklyn in an apartment over an ice cream parlor. Kate’s baseball novel, Out in the Field, is available now.

Website: www.katemcmurray.com
Twitter: @katemcmwriter

A little bit of history

I come by my love of history genetically.

My mother is what I think of as an amateur historian. She’s more than just a buff, but she doesn’t have a history degree. She also was always trying to get us kids to participate in her hobbies, which meant that we got dragged to all manner of cultural events—operas, classical music concerts, museums, dry movies we didn’t want to see, historic villages, battle reenactments. I chafed at a lot of these things as a kid, but at some point I kind of got into and learned to appreciate them, too.

My mother’s particular interest is in American military history (which makes sense given that I had an ancestor in every major American war). When I was a teenager, she was particularly interested in the Civil War. We visited battlefields and cemeteries, we sat through the Ken Burns documentary a few times, she passed me a bunch of books to read, and we even wound up at the centennial celebration for Grant’s Tomb in 1997. I’d say this is probably where my interest in Victorian/Gilded Age America comes from.

I moved to New York City almost ten years ago, and developed a kind of obsessive interest in the history of the place I call home. Part of that was timing; the city was still reeling from 9/11 when I moved to Manhattan, and it was hard not to be conscious of history. But New York is a very forward-looking city, which seems to be constantly trying to make itself bigger and better and shinier, so it’s not as in touch with its past as some other places. (Boston, for example; you can’t walk more than a block without tripping over a plaque or a monument.) So you have to dig for it a little. But history is there if you go looking. Which I like to do.

The inspiration for Across the East River Bridge comes from that place. I knew almost nothing about Brooklyn when I moved here in 2006, but that was easily rectified. I took historical walking tours and did a lot of wandering. I visited historic sites and got lost in Green-Wood Cemetery. I read a lot about Brooklyn in the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly just before it was incorporated into the rest of the city. There’s a lot of really fascinating history there. Plus, one of the great things about Brooklyn is that you can walk by a row of old brownstones that still have the original gas lamps out front, and it feels a little like taking a walk back in time.

The Brill House, the fictional museum in Across the East River Bridge, is (fictionally) located on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights, which is also where Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims is (actually) located. Plymouth Church was Henry Ward Beecher’s pulpit, and Beecher was involved in a scandal that is linked to the events of my novel. The two main characters of the story, Finn and Troy, live in the present day and study history. They end up working together to solve the mystery of a murder that took place in 1878. The murder victims are also fictional, but, as we see through journal entries, they interacted with a lot of real historical figures. Most prominent in the novel is Victoria Woodhull, who was a women’s rights advocate—and kind of a troublemaker—who lived at this time. Woodhull was the first to publicize details of an affair Beecher had with one of his parishioners, which is the connection there, but Woodhull was also an advocate for free love and, to a point, sexual liberation. (She was also the first woman to run for president. Seriously, she’s a fascinating figure.)

So, Across the East River Bridge is my possibly nerdy little tribute to the history of Brooklyn. It’s also a ghost story and a mystery and a love story. It’s... complicated. But it was a ton of fun to write, so I hope you enjoy it, too.

You can buy the book here. Or you can check out the Special Features page which has historical background, suggested reading, and a bunch of photos.

Kate McMurray
www.katemcmurray.com
@katemcmwriter

New Release: Across the East River Bridge

My new m/m paranormal/mystery/historical novel, Across the East River Bridge is available today. I'm pretty excited about the book; in a way, it's a kind of love letter to Brooklyn, where I've lived for the last five years. It's about two rival historians who, through circumstance, end up working together on a 140 year old murder mystery. Troy curates a small museum that he thinks is haunted by the ghosts of the murder victims. When Finn comes to him to ask for help with a different research project, Troy talks him into helping with the investigation. The two men pore over newspapers, records, and journal entries to piece together clues. Then the ghosts raise the stakes.

Buy the book here!

You can also check out the book trailer!

And here's an excerpt:

Troy grabbed a small notebook from his desk. “Let’s go.”

He led Finn down the hall. Finn took a moment to check Troy out again; looking at him certainly stirred something in Finn. Troy had always been classically handsome, but whether it was his good looks or their long history together that got Finn’s blood pumping, it was hard to say. Probably a little of both. Finn found that frustrating; this would be so much easier if he could just get the information he needed and leave without having to think about all of this.

“We’re setting up exhibits on the first, second, and third floors. The fourth floor is the library, and the fifth floor is mostly storage. The third floor has a portrait gallery of famous residents of Victorian Brooklyn and a gallery of mediocre landscapes by Brooklyn artists, mostly the cast-offs of the main KCHS museum. Do you care about those?”

“Not especially.”

Troy nodded and continued walking toward a stairwell. He mounted the first step and said, “I want to add a photography gallery, but I’m still sorting through several boxes of prints from the KCHS archive. I’ll keep an eye out for Ms. Woodhull.”

“Thanks. What’s on the second floor?”

Troy smiled. “This is the real highlight of the museum, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve recreated what a building like this would have looked like in the 1870s. A lot of this furniture was in storage at the KCHS or other museums in the city, waiting for a home. Some of the pieces are really extraordinary.”

When they got to the second floor, Finn followed Troy into what looked like a bedroom. There was a grandiose four-poster bed off to the side with heavy green damask draped all around it. The bed was made of oak, Finn guessed, as was the ornate chest of drawers on the other side of the room.

“The building was originally constructed in 1868,” Troy said, flipping through pages in his notebook. “It was intended to be a single-family residence according to the plan, but from very early on, before 1872 at least, the owner rented out rooms on the upper floors. My guess is he needed the income from the boarders. At any rate, this was the master bedroom. It’s been many other things over the years, too, and this whole building was converted into apartments in the sixties, but this is our best guess for how the room would have looked when the first owner lived here. We had some floor plans and even a fuzzy photograph.”

Finn wondered if he should be taking notes. “You’ve had to do a lot of work on this room.”

“Yeah, in its last incarnation, this was a studio apartment with a kitchen and everything. We took out the kitchen. It’s been kind of fun, watching this house devolve into its original form. Like backward time-lapse photography.” Troy walked over to the bed and ran a finger up one of the posts. “The house is said to be haunted too.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’ve seen enough weird stuff that I can’t stay completely skeptical, let’s just say. There have been a number of documented ghostly occurrences here. A woman who lived here briefly in the forties kept a journal detailing her encounters with the spirits. Most of it’s classic haunted-house stuff. Strange noises, cold blasts of air, doors suddenly slamming shut. Interestingly, almost every account of paranormal activity here indicates that the ghosts are two men.”

“Okay.” Finn had run into many ghost stories over the years he’d been working as a researcher and thought most of the stories were pure nonsense. He humored Troy, though, who seemed to be enjoying himself. “Do you know anything about who the ghosts might be?”

“No one has ever specified, but I have a guess.” Troy’s eyes practically sparkled with excitement.

“Did the previous owners know?”

“No, but I don’t think they bothered to find out.”

Troy enjoyed drawing things like this out, Finn knew. He held out a hand and motioned for Troy to keep talking. “What’s your guess?”

“The first owner of this house was Theodore Cummings Brill. He was the youngest son of a large and moderately wealthy family. He and another man, George Washington Cutler, were found dead in this very bedroom in 1878.”

A shiver went up Finn’s spine. Someone had died in the room in which he was standing. “So that’s who you think is haunting this house?”

“Yes. The facts fit, given when the sightings started.” Troy walked closer to Finn. “I’m working on digging up causes of death. There was a story in the Times, but it was vague, saying only that the circumstances of their deaths were unusual. I’ve been piecing together other evidence, though.”

“And you have a theory. You always have a theory.”

“Suicide. Possibly murder-suicide, but I’m pretty sure they both took their own lives. Because they were gay.”

Finn rolled his eyes. “You always think everyone was gay. You bought that horseshit about Lincoln being gay. Sometimes there’s a simpler and much less biased explanation. What makes you think murder-suicide?”

“I can’t remember offhand. Something I read, a contemporary account of the crime, I think. It makes more sense than any other theory of the crime I’ve seen.” Troy rocked on his heels. “Some of the flooring is original. If you squint, you can still see the blood stains in the wood paneling on the floor.”

Finn shivered again. “Show me something else.” He left the room.

Troy’s shoes squeaked on the floor as he caught up to Finn. “The theory has merits.” He led Finn across the hall to another room. It had an elaborate sofa and a couple of chairs, everything Rococo revival. It was not a style Finn especially liked, but he knew it was popular in the 1870s. The upholstery on all of the pieces was beautiful, almost like new, except for a chaise longue in the corner that looked faded and worn.

Finn bent to take a closer look at the scrollwork on the sofa. Troy said, “This is the parlor. The furniture is mostly from the 1850s, but we had everything reupholstered, save for the chaise, obviously. The upholstery on the other pieces had disintegrated, but, I don’t know, I kind of like the old faded quality on the chaise. What do you think?”

“I agree. It looks kind of…soft and homey.” Finn meant it. He bet that chaise would be an excellent place to take a nap. Of course, thinking about that made Finn think about beds, and he had a sudden flash of Troy, hovering over him, naked. That certainly got his blood pumping. He coughed, trying to keep his body’s reaction to the memory at bay. He reminded himself that he didn’t like Troy much.

Where or When? Let's Talk About Setting

As a reader, I love a really well-drawn setting with lots of nitty-gritty details, a setting that is just as key an element of a story as the characters. So I decided to talk a little about setting today.

First, a cautionary tale: I read a novel once that took place partly in my hometown in suburban New Jersey. I was probably sixteen when I read it, and I remember at first feeling proud and excited to see the name of my town—which pretty much nobody has heard of—so prominently displayed in a book. But then it became clear that the author had never actually been there, because the town in the novel bore little resemblance to the actual town where I lived. Had he just thrown a dart at a map?

Writing setting can be tricky. Do you choose a fictional place, which requires making up a lot of detail, or do you choose somewhere real and risk getting a few details wrong?

I've lived in New York City for almost a decade, which maybe doesn't make me an expert, but has given me enough frame of reference to set a story here and get most of the details right. It means that I'm also easily distracted when others get the details wrong, especially in movies. (There's a certain superhero movie, for example, that includes a dramatic scene on an elevated subway train that… goes through midtown. Although NYC has a few elevated subway tracks, you won't find any below 125th Street in Manhattan.)

I normally write stories that take place in real locations, and I like writing about New York in particular, but for The Boy Next Door, I chose to set the novel in the fictional town of Greenbriar, Connecticut. This gives me free reign to make things up—streets, parks, even the bar that's the main hangout of most of the residents of the town. I wanted the town to seem like a real place, though, and it's based somewhat on the little town I grew up in, both in terms of geography and the types of people who inhabit the town. I also grounded it in Western Connecticut geography. I have family there and spent summers there as a teenager, so it's an area I know pretty well. The characters namecheck a few real places—the Danbury Mall, the Brookfield Y—so the reader has a sense of about where this fictional town is located.

Writing about real places takes some research, but even if you can't get to the place, the internet has a wealth of information. (Google Street View is an amazing tool, for example.) Making up a town makes the research easier, but requires a lot of imagination. I personally like to draw maps and little sketches.

What do you think? How do you feel about setting? If you're a writer, what little tricks do you use to help get the details right? If you're a reader, what kinds of settings do you like (made up, real, historical, fantastical, etc.)?

Kate McMurray
www.katemcmurray.com
@katemcmwriter