Because of a feature called “Google Alert,” I can track my books  through the webverse. This can be rewarding (finding good reviews or references to my work), or this can be shocking (finding “torrent” and other sites that offer stolen versions of my books) and sometimes it can be maddening.

Often when I wish to comment on an entry or thank a blogger for a good review, I find I’m not allowed to post because the initial “code” numbers and letters aren’t visible. No technocrat, I haven’t found a way around this barrier.

More frustrating is when I can’t post in response to an error. I was a daily newspaper reporter back when celebrity scandals weren’t Page One material and reporters needed to get every word right. So egregious misstatements more than annoy me; they scream for correction.

Today, I found a site of a reader/writer who’s sampled her first Irene Adler novel, starting with the second, The Adventuress (previously Good Morning, Irene).

http://melannen.dreamwidth.org/79796.html?thread=696244

says a lot of great things about the book, but in reviewing the next book, also says:

“Remember where I was annoyed that Irene Norton in the Carole Nelson Douglas series is a soprano, rather than a contralto?”

The fact is that I knew Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had  described Irene Adler as both a “contralto” and a “prima donna” in error. Like all writers, he was busy 12/7, and didn’t know that contraltos don’t play leading roles in opera, but are usually nursemaids or gypsy fortune tellers or the like.

The issue of Irene finding “suitable” leading roles for her voice is one I addressed through all eight novels. She sings a “trouser role” (plays a man) in one short story. I searched the operatic canon for the few leading roles she as a contralto might stretch to perform. Even the “reviewers” in the novels have trouble categorizing her, and I recall one fiction reviewer used the term “dark soprano.”  But the author and Irene herself never call her a soprano. She has a “difficult to categorize” voice that limits her operatic options.

No one should be “annoyed” by my efforts to make realistic as many details of Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” story that introduced Irene Adler . . . while embroidering around the original structure to create a new slant on the characters and story.

The first writer whose biography I remember reading was Louisa May Alcott. That makes sense. Little Women was one of my favorite childhood books, along with the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, the stories of Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans, and the plays of Oscar Wilde. Was I going to be a weird kid, do you think?

What I remember most about Louisa’s life was how often she wrote sick, laughing at herself as–with hurting head and hands–she scratched out page after page of longhand words. No typewriters in her era, just endless longhand. The more popular her work became, the more she paid in pain for her efforts and profits. A recent PBS biography suggested that she suffered from lupus, which can cause  bitterly painful joints.

The lesson I learned from Louisa May Alcott was that laughter flowed from those weary hands, and that the most magical aspect of writing is that it takes the writer away from the mundane as much as it can transport the reader. Deep in the heart of writing, I’ll realize a crick in my neck has escalated into a full-blown migraine, or that a foot has fallen asleep (hopefully not the intended readers), or that my husband has become a wizard while I wasn’t looking, because he announced he was going to the grocery store just two minutes ago and he’s already back with an unseemly number of full bags.

Sports people call it “playing hurt.” The adrenaline of the game dulls pain. The mind can “play hurt” too, which I was reminded of this fall and winter when a series of wicked monthly colds punctuated my writing schedule. Still, I made my deadlines. And my travails reminded me of readers who write to tell me that my books “take them away” from the chronic pain or troubles in their lives.

A story is its own magical form of transport and it will accept aboard as many weary, tired, or hurting passengers as care to book passage.