Too many Parkers

29,459 / 90,000 (32.7%)

I'm amazed I could get any words at all tonight, the weekend I've had. The Pirate Festival yesterday, church this morning and Six Flags this afternoon. My aches have aches, and the rum is gone. (Make your own jokes, I'm tired.)

But I picked up the new CD from Three Pints Gone, which seems to be a group that conspires to inspire me. Last year's sea chanties inspired the final sequence of THE COLD ONES, believe it or not, and this year's collection includes several songs that seem designed for YELLOW ROSES. Playing them helped me get through the first of the flashback sequences.

Not much to be changed here, just language and cleaning it up. I did note that I named Colin's adoptive parents Parker, which is a bad move since Det. Parker is such a major character in the NU series. So I switched it to Massey. I knew a Massey once.

Other research:

• Diptheria was quite common at the turn of the last century. In the 1700s it was rumored to have killed as many as 80 percent of the children in some small European towns, but it was still quite virulent until the vaccine in 1923. But there was still no treatment until sulfa drugs were widely available after World War I. In the time period of the YR flashbacks, it was still killing 15,000 people a year.

• The telephone was invented in the last decades of the 1800s, but would not have been widely available by 1910. Certainly a poor family like the Parkers - er, Masseys - would not have one, and perhaps would not have one for decades after. Mama Alice's line still bugs me - it would be expected that they wouldn't have a phone, right? But the reader is going to think of phones first, and the line sort of makes sense. I think that qualifies under the "insane nitpicks I will let my (eventual) editor decide for me." Otherwise, I will nitpick myself to death.