Author Archives: Murderati Members

The Social Network

This is being touted as “the film that defines a generation”.

Well, SPOILER, but I don’t think so. On the other hand, I think we could have a great conversation about it – what is is, what it could have been, what really does define Facebook and all these other – whatever they are.

And I really would like to have that conversation. At conferences I have seen the most godawfully insipid presentations on Twitter, Facebook, blogging, RSS feeds, etc. I think we can do better.

The movie is pretty brilliant for the first hour. It’s fascinating to see what Facebook started off as. As presented by the movie I read it as a nerd’s revenge on “social clubs”, which I gather is Harvard’s version of frats and sororities.

Okay, look, I went to Berkeley. Frats and sororities were the low end of the totem pole. Being in a frat meant you were suspected of fucking sheep, and at least at the time, that was not completely without reason. And doing sorority rush was cause for massive group intervention every bit as dire as would be learning that a friend’s boyfriend was battering her.

But for someone as misogynistic and socially pathetic as the movie portrays the character of Zuckerberg…. I can see that frats – I mean social clubs – that got hot girls bused into the frat – I mean social club – as entertainment – would incite a nerd’s jealousy and revenge.

On the other hand, there was also the homoerotic undercurrent of Jesse Eisenberg (who I thought was brilliant, btw, wonderful performance) having his first look at the classic erotica fantasy of the Winklevoss twins, in all their 6’5” preppie cutness. Talk about visual imagery: after that I didn’t ever really buy that anyone female had anything to do with anything, motivation-wise.

(By the way, did EVERYONE in college have hot prep jock twins? Serious question, because for all these years I thought that was just me, only to find now that it’s just a college cliché. And yes, the movie did inspire me to Facebook them, and no further will I go on THAT train of thought.)

Anyway, in the movie, Zuckerberg, the ultimate social outcast, creates (the formerly known as) The Facebook as sort of an online social status meter. And the app is complete when a random conversation makes Zuckerberg realize the missing element: the relationship status button. Because the only thing you really care about in college is if someone is single. Or for some people – taken and looking anyway is fine, too.

That was probably the high point of the movie for me because it made me understand what made Facebook – at least originally – a killer app.

From there the movie declined, for me, rapidly, because I thought the filmmakers, and I mean by that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher (although I can definitely see the fingerprints of producer Mike DeLuca here), who have done such brilliant and emotionally unnerving work elsewhere, never took the trouble to define and portray what the Facebook experience actually IS, at its core.

Okay, well, it’s a biopic. Biopics by nature are unsatisfying – I think because no one can ever fully define a human being. Except in fiction, of course – you CAN define a character. Even the biopics I really love, like Walk The Line, tend to dissolve into soap opera melodrama in the end. I’m always left with an unsatisfied feeling, and this was absolutely true of TSN.

And I guess the filmmakers were most interested in the corporate and legal aspects of the story. But what I wanted was a movie about Facebook.

Why is it Facebook that has taken over the online world? What makes it more addicting than – MySpace, I guess, for example, or the Ning networks or online bulletin boards? Has Facebook become its own Internet within the Internet? Or is Twitter really where it’s at, but not enough people have figured Twitter out to tip it over into critical mass?

Personally I was a little ahead of the curve on the online addiction thing – I burned out all my obsession on an online message board before FB even existed, and of course then the obligatory blogging thing that we all do, and by the time Facebook came along I was politely interested but not rabid the way newbies to internet addiction are.

But I do get some basic things about why Facebook.

First, it’s brilliant that it’s so plain, visually. You don’t have to spend any time setting up a look for your page – in fact, you can’t – so there’s no competition or feelings of inadequacy, there, and no reason to put it off. You can just be up and running.

There may be feelings of inadequacy about numbers of friends, I don’t know. I bet that was a big deal when FB was just on the campuses. But as authors, we have “friends” come to us. We have thousands of them (in fact I am now in the not fun process of having to convert my “friends” over to a fan page – you would think by now FB would have designed an automatic way to do that).

The other obvious thing about FB is that it became the place to be, therefore you can find almost anyone you want from your entire life on it, no matter how long ago you fell out of touch, and message them without having to explain why you are – because everyone else is doing it. (You do get a sense from the movie of how in a business sense that kind of coverage happened, even though the movie only deals with the college phase of FB).

I have not done much on FB to track down people from my past, but I’ve seen in other people what an addiction that is. And for me, the connectivity is great. I like keeping up with real friends – I like getting random updates about what they’re doing. Of course the dark side of that is – that’s no substitute for a relationship. There’s a song about social networking that says something like “and we’ll get together one of these days”, with the clear implication that people just never do anymore, now that there’s FB.

I love the update feature of FB because it’s like having a mini-blog without any of the things that make blogging such an exhausting time suck. Promotionally, it’s great for authors because it requires so much less energy than a blog. You can get a fun thread of conversation going with just a random off-the-wall comment. I have to cop to being extremely judgmental about what people end up posting – the level of inanity is truly off the charts. If a writer can’t come up with something halfway interesting or witty or amusing… But when you have time, if you have time, you can punish those inane time-wasters in your own head by quietly removing them from your news feed.

Anyway, I have no idea of the figures on this but I would venture to guess that you can reach more people in far less time by doing your blogging on FB. But I can’t really say because Murderati has a large audience compared to most blogs, and so does my own blog. I could never use FB as a substitute for my blog, but I have a specific niche – my blog is more a product than a journal. For other people who are not getting the same kind of blog traffic and who hate blogging anyway, I would think FB is a great and maybe sanity-preserving alternative.

And then obviously, FB is “dating” heaven – I think it must have completely replaced singles sites by now. And that is the point I guess the movie was trying to make – that what made FB a killer app is that it allowed people to hook up on line from within a network of friends, which makes it seem less skeevy. Not that skeeviness isn’t happening left and right, it’s just the perception.

(It’s always sex and war that drives entrepreneurial innovation, right?)

So those are the basics that I see driving the phenomenon, but what I really want is to hear what everyone else thinks.

The 64 million dollar essay question is:

– Define the Facebook experience – for you and/or for the world. (Come on, it’s Saturday, you’re only going to spend it on FB anyway.)

But if that’s too overwhelming – here are some softer ones:

– Give us your review of The Social Network.

– Tell us some great biopics and prove me wrong on this genre.

Hope everyone had a good week!

– Alex

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

“We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” —Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Department briefing, Fe. 12, 2002

As absurd as this statement sounds, I wish I had written it. It’s brilliant, in it’s own, Gertrude Stein sort of way.

It gets me thinking about my responsibility as an author. When I read a book, I trust the author to guide me through an unfamiliar world. I expect the author to be the authority on his subject. And doesn’t that seem appropriate: author = authority?

So when I catch a mistake in a book or when I see inconsistencies in a film, I begin to feel uneasy. I lose that comfortable feeling one gets when one is thoroughly immersed in a story. At that point I usually move on to something else.

I remember when I wrote a documentary about the International Space Station for the Discovery Channel. I had written a line about a meteor crater on Earth and the video editor found a crater image and dropped it in. We didn’t know the image was wrong until the Discovery Channel contacted us, having received e:mails from a dozen angry viewers. The network made our producer re-cut the piece, drop in the correct crater image, and re-deliver it at his own expense. It kinda came back to me—as the writer/researcher I was expected to have caught the discrepancy before it went in.

Beat has a few inaccuracies that got past my research readers, making it through to publication. The errors amount to a few freeway directions and a geographical mix-up or two, things you wouldn’t notice unless you were a San Francisco local. But, damn it, I’m writing my books for the locals. I’m writing them for the specialists. I’m writing them for the cops that walk the beat. I want people to read the work and say, “Yes, this is authentic. I trust this author, I trust this guide.”

The inaccuracies aren’t so terrible, and I can correct them in the second printing. But it drives me nuts, and it fuels the manic attitude I have about research.

Most everyone here knows the pleasure I get from doing what I like to call “boots on the ground research.” Sometimes I call it “method research,” or “wallowing-in-research” or “embedded research.” Others have simply referred to my process as “going native.”

And yes, it is true that I was five months late delivering BEAT because I was lost in the Land of Research, and Brett Battles had to pull me back from the brink and point me in the direction of my manuscript. So I understand that I can go a little overboard. At the same time, I can’t write what I don’t know, so if I’m gonna write it, I better know it.

I recently spoke at a Road Scholar event called “The Scene of the Crime” and I chose to discuss how research authenticates an author’s work.

In preparing for the event I identified seven steps in my researching process:

Internet Research

Book Research

Interviewing Specialists

Boots on the Ground

Novels and Memoirs

Personal Knowledge

Specialist Readers

1. Internet Research

The Internet is a great place to start. Basic research used to be much more difficult in college, when I’d spend eight-hours digging through dusty periodicals in the university library. In some ways it was fun, like a treasure hunt. But it was a godawful waste of time. Now one fucking keyword delivers a million links and a million points of view. In BEAT, many critical story ideas began as a basic Internet search. I was introduced to the organizations Children of the Night and S.A.G.E. (Standing Against Global Exploitation, which I fictionalized as R.A.G.E., or Rallying Against Global Exploitation). This discovery emerged as a crucial subplot in the novel. I also learned about the network of underground rivers running through San Francisco, and I learned that some of them actually rise up into the basements of existing buildings. This gave me the entry point to my climactic action sequence. I love the Internet. The Internet is my friend.

2. Book Research

Books provide a vital bridge from ignorance to elocution. I don’t really feel comfortable in a subject until I’ve read a book or two. I’ll give a couple examples: When I was researching this little known subject called…SPACE…you know, for that Discovery Channel project…I needed to interview astronauts and cosmonauts and program managers and a host of other really bright folks. NASA had sent me this giant binder of PR material which served only to confuse me. Too many bits of information. I remember struggling through an interview with some brilliant scientist when he paused and said, “You really need to get up to speed on this.” “Yes,” I said, pleading, “Tell me how!” He suggested I read a book called “Dragonfly,” about the Mir Space Station, which detailed the development of Mir and the relationship between NASA and the Russians. I read the book and, sure enough, the next time I talked to the man I was up to speed. The book TOLD ME A STORY, and I remember stories. It put all those little bits of information into context. And I love context.

Similarly, when I wrote Boulevard I did not get “boots on the ground” access to the LAPD. Fortunately, an L.A. Times journalist named Miles Corwin had spent a year with the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division and he documented the experience in his book, “Homicide Special.” The book became my bible and it let me observe the nuances of life in this elite homicide unit. It gave an authenticity to my novel that cops recognized as true.

3. Interviews

I believe we’re about three degrees of separation from everyone we need to interview for our projects. Case in point—recently I needed a good contact in a European police department. It seems like an obscure request. How would I meet someone, and how would I find someone willing to give me the straight scoop and not some sanitized, Media Relations version of the truth? While doing research for Beat I met an FBI agent who provided great information for the book. I asked if he knew any policemen in Europe and he referred me to a friend of his who works as a diplomat in the Dutch Consulate in Washington, D.C. That gentleman, in turn, referred me to a friend of his who not only works in a European police department, but is also a homicide detective and—get this—a published crime novelist and TV writer. The perfect catch. Three degrees of separation. I met with him recently and he agreed to act as my consultant and to read drafts of my next book when I’m ready.

4. Boots on the Ground

This is my favorite. I just jump right in. Steps one, two and three usually lead me to an opportunity. If I’m researching the coroner’s office, I’ll get an opportunity to witness an autopsy. If I’m researching the San Francisco Police Department I’ll get the opportunity to walk the North Beach beat, to ride shotgun in a radio car, to visit a crime scene. Once I was researching the background for a protagonist in a short story and suddenly I found myself in the back woods of Alabama, dressed in camo, on a turkey hunt. And I’m a vegetarian. Thank God we didn’t find any turkey. Another research opportunity placed me in the Navajo Indian Reservation eating peyote with the local medicine man. Boots on the Ground is where I live, it’s where it all comes together. It’s where all the really good anecdotes are born.

5. Novels and Memoirs

I separate this category from “book research” because it serves a slightly different purpose. In book research I’m looking for specific details. In novels and memoirs I’m looking for the essence of a thing. I’m looking for the mindset. If I were writing a piece set in Germany in World War II I’d probably read Rebecca Cantrell’s “A Trace of Smoke,” “The Diary of Ann Frank,” and memoirs of people who lived through that time. For Boulevard I read “What Cops Know” to get inside the heads of police officers. I read memoirs of cops who had careers in the Chicago Police Department, the LAPD and the NYPD. I let the rhythm of their voices influence me. I let the parameters of their world define the parameters of mine. For Beat I read a book called “Sex Work,” a series of memoirs by working prostitutes. I also watched TV documentaries about addiction and addictive behavior. The documentaries were like visual memoirs. All these tools served to fix my thoughts in the realism of the world I would write.

6. Personal Knowledge

This is what the writer brings to the table without having to do extensive research. By now many of us already have a working knowledge of police procedure, so we only have to delve into our memories to write the scenes. If you’ve studied karate all your life then your action-hero protagonist reaps the benefits. If I had a green thumb I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time researching Abbey Reed’s gardening techniques. In Boulevard and Beat I captured the world of sexual addiction and the Twelve Step process with such accuracy because I’ve been there. I wrote what I knew and the accuracy showed. A person who had a career as a medical examiner feels very comfortable writing a series around a medical examiner. But writing from personal knowledge alone restricts our ability to grow or to represent characters or points of view very different from our own.

7. Specialist Readers

And, finally, when all the research is done and the story has been written and rewritten, I turn back to a few of the specialists I’ve interviewed and I ask them to read the book for accuracy. This is where the rubber meets the road. I remember when I gave an early draft of Boulevard to a police officer and asked him to correct anything and everything that seemed inaccurate or seemed stupidly out-of-place. When he was done he said, “The knife on page nine should be 9 inches instead of 6.” And that was it. So, all the book-reading and interviewing and embedding seemed to have paid off. However, another officer who read the book as an ARC caught a number of jurisdictional inconsistencies that, fortunately, I had time to correct before the book went to print. That’s why it’s important to go to more than one specialist for that final read-through.

I can do all these steps simultaneously, and I can keep it up, at a slower pace, even as I delve into writing the book. And, as Barbossa said in the Pirates of the Caribbean, “Argh, they’re really more guidelines than rules.”

But they lead to great places. They take the unknowns we don’t know we don’t know and turn them into knowns we know we should know.

I’m sorry if I’ve been absent from the comments this past couple weeks – I’m in full launch mode. And today I’m traveling, so I’ll check in on the comments as the opportunities allow. Thanks!

Reining in The Beast

By Brett Battles

Each book I write has it’s own personality. I’m not talking about the theme or the plot or the way it is told. I’m talking about the physical process of writing it.

Some are like your friend that you like spending a lot of time with. You get along. You have fun. Sometimes you make a wrong turn when you’re on a road trip, but you always get to where you’re going.

Some are like that friend who you are always making plans with but more times than not they cancel before you get together. Your relationship takes a long time to solidify. Occasionally it never does.

And some are just beasts.

In fact, I would venture to guess that most authors would say the majority of books they work on fall into this last category. These are the books that you are fighting with constantly, that you’re trying to tame, or at the very least rein in enough to get down on paper.

For me, I’ve experienced all of them, and sometimes all three in the same manuscript.

My first published book, THE CLEANER, was the good friend you like to spend time with. Of course, being my first novel, I didn’t have a contract yet so had the luxury of time, so I could afford to meander wherever I felt like going.

Then came my second novel, THE DECEIVED. Of every book I have ever written, published or unpublished, this was the one that was my biggest beast. Largely this was due to the well known phenomenon of the “second book” syndrome. By second book, I don’t necessary mean the second book an author writes. I’m talking about the second book he or she creates once they have been published. This usually is the first book you write where you’ve got a contract. And a contract means your publisher has expectations…like it you’ll finish within a certain time frame. And we’re not talking about a date in the distant future affording you that luxury you had with your previous book(s). This is a deadline that’s barreling down on you. In additon you have the added pressure of not wanting to screw up. For me, this, this meant I must have rewritten the last 100 pages of that book three times. When I was finally done, I was SO relieved.

My third, SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, was a little bit of both the good friend and the beast. But because it went a lot smoother than book 2 went, I was basically happy.

The fourth book I wrote (again this is post publishing, I have three unpublished manuscripts on my computer somewhere) was a breeze for the most part. That book, THE SILENCED, will be out next March. The hardest part of that one was that I broke up with my girlfriend of the time in the middle of it. Not fun for either of us, I’m sure. Of course, in a way, that just made me focus more. But, even then, I don’t think I would ever call THE SILENCED a bear. In truth, it came really easy to me, and I’m very pleased with the final version.

Number five is a standalone called NO RETURN that’s actually all down, too. (It will be coming out in the future, publisher hasn’t set the date yet.) That was the quickest book I had written to that date (from zero words to a draft polished enough to submit to my publisher). It also seemed to flow right through my fingertips. A good friend again. Not a beast.

Number six I wrote at the beginning of this past summer. It’s a YA book that my agent is showing around right now. That was probably the most fun book I have ever had writing. I loved the experience, the characters, the story. A good friend, indeed.

So based on this, when I started my latest adult novel in September – the first in what I hope might be a new series – it was natural to think that with my recent track record this one would be a breeze. After all, the last three I had written had gone extremely smoothly. Why shouldn’t this one, too?

Why, indeed?

I wish I knew the answer, because it hasn’t.

It. Has. Been. A. Beast.

As of Monday, I have restarted this novel for the fifth time. The first time I probably got about 20 pages in before turning back. No biggie, that happens. Take 2, another 20, maybe 30, and I think I was able to salvage much of the first take. Take 3: 81 pages, mostly new material. Take 4: 103 pages, mostly new material. Take 5 (current version): as of this writing on Tuesday night, 41 pages, almost entirely new material.

That is one, big, fat, UGH! If I could have strung all that new material together I’d be well over 200 pages by this point!

Now, I am using a lot of the same setting. And the characters are all pretty much still there, though they have changed greatly (especially in my latest version). I’ve also used scenes that are similar in each. Unfortunately they are not similar enough to recycle what I had. I think I’m getting closer now, hoping, in fact, that Version 5 will be the base for a full draft. (Dear God, please let it be so.)

Am I frustrated? A bit, but not as much as you might think. I take the view that I can’t afford to ever get too frustrated. That would only cripple me from doing the task I need to perform. If a story’s not working, it just means I need to take a closer look at it, or it could even mean it’s not the story I should write. Either way, I gotta keep moving forward. To be overwhelmed by frustration (or anything for that matter) is not an option. (This goes for the editing phase, too.)

So I’ll get up tomorrow morning (I’m writing this on Tuesday night), and I’ll put my fingers on my keyboard and tap away until I’ve hopefully reached my goal for the day (went way above on Monday, went way under Tuesday.) And I hope when I reach that 80 to 100 page mark I don’t get the same “crap, this isn’t working” feeling I got on takes 1, 2, 3 and 4. I don’t think I will this time, but I didn’t think that on the previous versions, either.

It’ll all depend on whether I can rein in the beast or not.

So do your stories have personalities? How would you describe them?

Fun Is Good, Part I: The Badass Factor

by J.D. Rhoades

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?

If you never did, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good.

-Dr. Seuss

There are a lot of things that go into making a great book: plot, pacing, characterization, dialogue, etc. Today, I’d like to talk about another, often-overlooked factor: fun.

Not a lot of people talk about what makes a book fun to read. That’s probably because it’s such a hard thing to quantify. But if a book is fun to read, people will keep coming back to it, and they’ll anxiously await the next one.

For purposes of these posts, I’m not just talking about books being funny. Certainly a book that makes you laugh is fun. But there are some “serious” works that are just a sheer hoot to read and/or watch. In my next few posts, I’ll be talking about some of the things that make a book or movie fun (to me at least).

First, we’ll talk about one of my favorites: the badass factor.

From Beowulf to Jack Reacher, we do love our badasses, those unstoppable, unkillable guys and gals who take a licking and keep on kicking, right up till the end when l they either triumph, or in the case of badass villains, go down with their guns (and sometimes themselves) blazing.

One of the things, for example, that makes Jonathan Maberry’s zombie-driven thriller PATIENT ZERO so much fun is that its main character, Joe Ledger, is a serious badass, and he knows it. It’s right there in the book’s dynamite first line: “When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.”

That passage illustrates one of the things that makes a bad-ass a bad-ass (and thus adds to the fun): an extraordinary self-assurance, born of an uber-competence in the fields of crushing enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentation of their women. Robert Crais’ Joe Pike, for example, adds a huge fun factor to the Elvis Cole books by simply being the absolute best at disposing of bad guys without hardly breaking a sweat or even taking off his shades. And the books featuring Pike (there’s a new one out-YAY!) are, yes, serious fun.

The writer should be warned, though. There’s a very fine line between the type of confidence that tickles the reader’s fun center and the kind that stimulates the eye-rolling nerve.

Another form of bad-assery is the Sheer Stubborn Endurance kind, exemplfied by Bruce Willis’ John McClain in the frst DIE HARD movie. Blown up, burned, feet cut to ribbons, he just keeps coming after the bad guys. Another example: Inigo Montoya in THE PRINCESS BRIDE, who, though badly wounded, gets up, raises his sword, and delivers his signature line, over and over, until he finally does in the man who killed his father, after this classic exchange:

Inigo Montoya: Offer me anything I ask for.

Count Rugen: Anything you want…

Inigo Montoya (runs Rugen through): I want my father back, you son of a bitch.

Which brings us to the Badass Moments, in which a character’s true awesomeness is exhibited, often through a single line or gesture. Example: the moment in the first episode of the TV series FIREFLY when Captain Mal Reynolds comes striding up the ship’s cargo ramp into the middle of a tense standoff, sees one of his people being held hostage, draws, shoots the hostage taker dead without breaking stride, and moves on to getting the ship flying.

Another type of Badass Moment comes when someone who’d previously been the hunted turns into the lion and starts whomping the snot out of bad guys right and left. Example: the moment in ALIENS when the hangar door opens to reveal Ripley, driving that giant exoskeleton and snarling “GET away from her, you BITCH!”

Rule of thumb: Any moment that makes you want to leap up, pump your fist in the air and holler ‘Hell YEAH!” increases the fun factor exponentially.

LORD OF THE RINGS, (the book version) is fun, in large part, because it’s chock full o’badasses and badass moments, like: Aragorn standing on the walls of the surrounded Helm’s Deep and telling the million or so nasties teeming about below him that no one’s ever taken that fortress and that the ridiculously outnumbered defenders will let them live if they run away now; Theodens’ pre-charge speech and the Ride of the Rohirrim, and my favorite, when Eowyn, after being warned by the Nazgul that no man can kill him, whips off her helmet and gives her “No man am I” speech (a Badass Moment if there ever was one). And let’s face it, when it comes to Sheer Stubborn Endurance badassery, the name’s Gamgee. Sam Gamgee.

So tell me: who are your favorite badasses? And for future posts: what makes a book not just good, but FUN?

Next time: The Audacity Factor, or Oh, No, He Did NOT Just Do That!

Should I pull the plug?

by Tess Gerritsen

Last week, I flew out of town for a speaking engagement. For four days, while I was away, I didn’t check my email. The morning after I came home, still groggy from fatigue, I booted up my computer and stared at a hundred new emails in my in-box. Only a few were from friends or family, a few were from my agent and editor, but the vast majority were from people I’d never met. Some of them were very nice emails telling me they liked my books. Others asked for signed books for their charity auctions, or for signed photographs (I seem to get a lot of these requests from Russia), or for advice on how to get published or get an agent, or whether I’d come to speak at their library/school/luncheon/etc. There were emails asking for online interviews or to set up lunch dates so they could tell me the needs of their favorite charity. There were emails asking for money. And there were a few from people who were angry that I had insulted old people or obese people or their favorite dog breed in my latest novel, and they would never read another one of my books. Facing that long list of emails, I felt a sense of overwhelming exhaustion because each one of these emails needed to be read. Each one needed a response (and I do try to respond to every single one.) And if I put it off for a day or two, I’d just end up with fifty new messages waiting for me. Meanwhile, there’s a book I still have to write, a husband who’s irritated that I’m not downstairs for breakfast, and a stack of snail-mail that needs to be attended to.

Which is why I’m thinking about shutting down my public email access, unplugging my internet, and hiding in a cave.

Other authors have told me they’re astonished that I’m still accessible to the public by email. They shut down their public email addresses ages ago because they didn’t want to deal with the nasty messages. One author has her husband read all her emails first, and he deletes anything that might be upsetting. If you’re a public person, you will certainly get those messages. Sometimes they’re upsetting enough to screw up your writing brain for the day, as you obsess over how lousy a writer you really are.

Then there’s the dilemma of how to graciously respond to all the requests for your time and attention. You want to be polite. You want to be understanding. But sometimes I’m really bad at saying no, and I’ll fret over just how to word my response without sounding like a jerk.

The truth is, staying in contact with lots and lots of people is not just distracting — it’s work. While I do have a Twitter account, I tweet only once or twice a week, and usually only about the TV show, “Rizzoli & Isles.” I have a Facebook account, but I’ll post only occasionally, usually about publishing news or events. And that’s about it for my online social life. In fact, it’s a lot like my real social life. I like hiding out in my office. I like eating popcorn by myself on the couch, in front of the TV. With the phone unplugged.

I just watched “The Social Network,” a terrific film about the founders of Facebook. I came home thinking that there’s something wrong with me, because I don’t understand the overwhelming popularity of Facebook. Yes, I do use it. I appreciate its ingenious design. But I never imagined that people would want to stay so obsessively connected with each other.

Because most of the time, I just want to be left alone.

In the recent Time Magazine article about Jonathan Franzen, I came across a description of his workspace:

Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”

Most people who read this probably think: “Wow, Franzen is a total weirdo.” I read it and think: “How do I keep the superglue from getting into the rest of my computer?”

I think Franzen has a point. All this social networking is getting in the way of our writing. It’s distracting us. It’s sucking up our time. Yet we’re made to feel obligated to do it, for marketing, for success. Every author’s been told she must have a website. Every author must blog. If you drop out of the chatter you’ll be forgotten, and no one will buy your books. If you neglect to blog, tweet, and continually post on Facebook, you are doomed to die penniless and unread.

Yet I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore. I’m mulling over the consequences of getting unplugged so I can devote more time to what got me here in the first place: writing books. Not answering emails. Or taking on more speaking gigs. Or tweeting and Facebooking.

So here are some questions I’d like to address to other authors:

Do you still have a public email address?

Do you answer your own emails?

If you went private, why?

Are you getting more writing done as a result?

Those people

by Pari

I’ve been thinking about stereotypes and generalizations. We’re taught that they’re evil, to be avoided. But let’s be honest. We use them every day to categorize our world. They provide a necessary shorthand, without which we’d be mentally paralyzed.

But how do we know when we’re using stereotypes and generalizations in the negative? I’m not talking about the obvious, easy examples. We know they’re bad. It’s the subtle everyday ones that interest me. The thing about them is that they’re frequently only negative in the eyes of the beholder.

Here’s an example: In one of my books (it’d give too much away to name it) two kids, who’d been abandoned by their birth mother, end up being the bad guys. A few months after the book was published I received an angry email from a reader.

“Adoption has such stigma and challenges already,” she wrote me. “Why did you perpetuate the myth that these kids are problem children in their new homes?”

Short answer? I didn’t.

Longer answer? I wasn’t saying what the reader chose to read into that particular plot point. I know good parents can have rotten children. I knew it at the time I wrote the book too. But the woman my protag cared about didn’t deserve these kids and I didn’t want them to be of her blood.

And now there’s my WIP. It’s a YA novel. The protag is a freshman in high school. She’s a tall girl who has already earned her black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She knows how to take care of herself and is self-confident until kicked in the gut with problems no one should have to face. During her first week at a new girls’ school, the only student who offers her a glimmer of friendship is a “little person.”

Why did I choose to have the tallest kid in the class befriend the smallest? Because that’s how it came out. Both these girls experience being different in a real, physical – visual — way. And that informs who they are and their immediate gravitation toward each other.

And yet . . . I can already see the nasty-grams because the little person in this book isn’t a charmer. The comments won’t come necessarily from “little people” either. With my Sasha books, especially the last one where I reveal some of Sasha’s own nasty prejudices, I’ve received comments from non-Jews who didn’t like her attitude.

Why is it that people take offense at certain stereotypes and generalizations and not at others? I can guarantee that no one will refuse to buy my future book because the blonde is a bitch. Tall people won’t be pissed that my protag doesn’t always act admirably. Martial artists won’t put me in a choke hold when they see me.

So what gives?

Questions for today:

Can you give an example in your own work where something you wrote with one intention became a hot button for someone else?
Should writers care about those potential hot-buttons? Does it compromise art to consider them?
What are some of the stereotypes and generalizations we use daily?
What are some less common examples that drive you batty?

Enjoy the video below. It’s a happy stereotype buster:

Precision in the Wunderkammer

By Cornelia Read

I don’t often review books any more. I know too many people who write them, I don’t want to damn anyone with inadvertant faint praise, nor forget to write about anyone. I know how often my own feelings get dinged if I read a friend’s list of random “great reads” when I’m not on it, which is petulant and lame on my part but hey, I just don’t want to bruise anyone else’s tender feelings.

So when I comment on books directly, these days, I try to talk about the ones that are really, really good, and I try to talk about books by people I haven’t actually met. There are VERY few people I will buy in hardcover who aren’t actual friends (I want to buy friends’ books in hard cover because I like to think I’m adding a couple of bucks to their coffers–and I like to do that sometimes even if they’re already richer than god. Just saying.)

Charlaine Harris, Denise Mina, Mary Karr, Alan Furst, and William Gibson are on this list right now. I will go without food and electricity in order to wallow in these people’s words.

The book I’m on the verge of finishing, just at the moment, happens to be William Gibson’s zero history. I have loved his work since I first scored a ratty paperback of Neuromancer back in Syracuse, which is, like, when Pteradactyls were still gliding up the Mohawk Valley, practically. Uphill both ways, in the snow. He was a godsend, and it still just thrills me to the bottom of my tiny black heart that someone so goddamn sublimely and lapidarily SMART can be a bestseller.

If you have worries about civilzation or anything, pick up this book. Mr. Gibson, as always, affirms my belief that the tribe of those who care about what matters, about subtlety, about elegance and grace and precision on the page, is alive and goddamn well. Hosanna.

I think that on a paragraph level (though he succeeds mightily in both more macro and micro ways than that), his work is also illustration of what precision can do for a writer. Sometimes I think a list of three things can define space, in a fictional world. Especially if there’s a frisson of not-same-ness among them.

I’m trying to figure out how to word this properly, since I’m writing about wording things properly, so my fuzziness is kind of annoying the hell out of me, but it’s a little like apposition, only deeper.

Here’s a definition of apposition:

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to define or modify the other. When this device is used, the two elements are said to be in apposition. For example, in the phrase “my friend Alice,” the name “Alice” is in apposition to “my friend.”

More traditionally, appositions were called by their Latin name appositio, although the English form is now more commonly used. It is derived from Latin: ad (“near”) and positio (“placement”).

Apposition is a figure of speech of the scheme type, and often results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being) in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorter descriptive phrases. This makes them often function as hyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence. For example, in the phrase: “My wife, a nurse by training,…,” it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification “a nurse by training.”

Okay, not exactly apposition, since I’m talking about actual objects, here, and their difference when suspended Calderesque-ly near one another is what makes this work–maybe it’s more like opposition? Fuck it, I’m just going to quote the man so you see what I mean. This is a description of one of the character’s rooms at a gorgeously byzantine private-club hotel in London (also, hyperbatons? What an immensely fabulous word…):

“Which room is Heidi in?” Hollis asked him.

“Next to yours.”

“Good,” said Hollis, with more enthusiasm than she felt. That would be the one with the yellow chaise longue. She’d never understood the theme. Not that she understood the theme of her own, but she sensed it had one. The room with the yellow chaise longue seemed to be about spies, sad ones, in some very British sense, and seedy political scandal. And reflexology.

Hollis’s own room features what her friend and former bandmate Inchmale has named the “Piblokto Madness bed.”

[I]ts massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastical-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head….

Piblokto Madness itself?

“Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to Vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio.

The whole thing is like a Viking barrow of word-riches: “gutta-percha” and wunderkammer,

boiler suits and “specialized apprehender gloves.”

One gets the sense that for Gibson, as for one of the characters, “Reading, [Milgrim’s] therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.” God knows it was mine, and reading this is like falling face first into a lovely glowing pile of what I believe Jay McInerney once called “pink Peruvian flake.” If such a drug held traces of frankincense and psilocybin.

And the apposition of the archaic and the po-mo makes it all fresher and wittier:

Heidi shrugged out of her leather jacket, tossed it aside, and pulled her black t-shirt off, revealing an olive-drab bra that looked as combat-ready as any bra Hollis had ever seen.

“Nice bra.”

“Israeli,” said Heidi. She looked around, taking in the contents of the room. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The wallpaper’s like Hendrix’s pants.”

And you totally know what the stripes on those pants look like, even though God help me if I could Google up a rendition that matched what I see in my head.

Meanwhile, I totally want Milgrim’s therapist, in Basel:

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ namesake obelisk, started out like magical pets. Pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel said, less intelligent than goldfish.

What makes this stuff go deep, makes it be so eminently satisfying and right-on, is the precision. Every image is carved and faceted out of something translucent, hard, exact. Briolettes of rock crystal:

…Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly….

…A cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened….

…She’d favored artboys, of any stripe, and unfortunately the dodgy hybrids as well, artboy-businessmen, with personalities as demanding as ambitiously crossbred dogs….

It’s like Saki without the veneer of archness. And when a writer does this well, you get both a clear movie of the textured world in which the choreography is unfolding, and tremendous depth of perception into character, as in this description of a pickup truck with “cartel-grade” armor:

Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. They were too narrow for the insertion of any kind of pry bar, he’d said, too narrow even for “the jaws of life,” an expression Milgrim was infamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

Or Hollis’s brief flash on previous conversations with her lover:

[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.

I love that. I love this book. Buy it.

Give me a paragraph that rocked your world recently, O dearest ‘Ratis…

Does It Matter?

Zoë Sharp

fiction fik’shen, n an invented or false story; a falsehood; romance; the novel or story-telling as a branch of literature; a supposition, for the sake of argument, that a possibility, however unlikely, is a fact (law).

We lie for a living. We make up stuff out of our heads and write it down in such a way that we hope whoever reads our words comes halfway to believing it’s true. Or at least that it could be true.

Maybe.

OK, on Weird World perhaps.

Playing fast and loose with the truth is all part of what we do. I’m as guilty as the rest. I take fake things and dump them in real places, and take real things and dump them in fake places. Sometimes I take real things and dump them somewhere else that’s real, but just not where they belong. Sometimes, I don’t even realise I’m doing it until a long time afterwards.

When I wrote my first novel, KILLER INSTINCT, I invented a tumble-down hotel, The Adelphi, which was revamped to become a nightclub where much of the action takes place. I describe it on the opening page:

‘The New Adelphi was a nightclub that had risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the old Adelphi, a crumbling Victorian seaside hotel on the promenade in Morecambe. It had a slightly faded air of decayed gentility about it, like an ageing bit-part film actress, hiding her propensity for the gin bottle under paste jewellery and heavy make-up.’

Entirely fictitious. And yet, I was doing a photoshoot in an entirely different northern town some years later – and I’m talking probably a decade here – when I came across this boarded-up old building. And it was just so right for the book, that it was a spooky experience. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for the Adelphi on Morecambe’s seafront, but it was so close it might as well have been.

And then, in HARD KNOCKS, I wanted a big spooky manor house in the middle of a forest in Germany. I invented the place – the little village of Einsbaden, where my equally invented Einsbaden Manor would be located – but I wanted to anchor the place in some kind of reality. I still have a cutting in the HK file of Wannsee, the house where senior Nazi officials gathered to discuss Hitler’s Final Solution. It was the right imposing shape, with a dark past, and it had a flat roof, which lent itself to all kinds of plot points. I had no qualms about removing it from its real location and transplanting it to mine.

I know writers who have no difficulties with using real things in real places, even for the most grisly scenes, but I’m always reluctant to do that. I remember the story about a TV writer who used the registration number of his own car for the murderer’s vehicle in one of his own screenplays. Obviously, he had no objections to this. But then he sold the car…

I remember another author who needed to have her main protag’s vehicle registration in the story, and she deliberately invented a combination of numbers and letters that could not exist, so could never have been given to anybody and cause problems further down the line.

The reason this has been on my mind lately is because I’ve just been off scouting locations for something I’m writing. How far do I go towards keeping it real? And does it matter if it’s not?

I wanted a particular type of mid-terrace house. They don’t exist in the location I wanted to use, but they are more common a few streets away. Moving my protag’s house by a couple of streets is no problem, especially as I only suggest the area, not an exact street name.

I wanted to be able to walk along the river between points A and B. Google Earth shows you can do it. Reality shows it’s gated and securitied up the wazoo, to the point where bending the rules would be counterproductive. Fortunately, an alternative route happens to fit in with the plot much better, as it allows my protag to see something there that will help them later. And there’s the odd burst of humour that I’m sure I’ll manage to slip in somewhere, if it’s appropriate:

Of course, to find this funny you have to look closely at the sign on the wall of the building:

I know these are small details, but ones I feel it’s important to get right. I know most people understand the definition of fiction, but nevertheless I like to blend fact and fantasy and hope that they can’t really see the join.

However, later in the story requires a big public location where lapses in security allow Bad Things to happen. I could use a genuine location, but I’d rather not, and I’m not quite sure why that is. Am I hoping that, by the time the reader reaches this point in the story, they’ll be invested enough in the characters to make the jump from reality to fantasy without a hitch? Or am I just squeamish?

After all, my characters are invented, but the tools they use are not. I’ve occasionally extrapolated something that’s available now and taken it to the next step, as I did with a computer program in FIRST DROP, but I don’t invent new types of aircraft or weaponry – I use what’s already available. Trust me, there’s more than enough out there!

I try not to make unnecessary mistakes with geography, too. I’m still grateful to an eagle-eyed copyeditor who spotted the fact I’d got Charlie Fox riding the wrong way up a one-way street in Manhattan. Not that she wouldn’t be prepared to do that, if the occasion demanded, but it didn’t. When I needed to have Charlie driving from Boston to Houston, I worked out the entire route – carefully avoiding taking her through the middle of NYC.

But still, I’m happy to make up an entire village, or housing estate, if I feel it fits in better with the story I want to tell.

So, my question this week is, how far are you prepared to go in inventing places and objects for your work, and does it matter to you as a reader if you’re mentally following a character through familiar territory, and they suddenly take a turning into a street that isn’t there? Do you notice? Do you care?

This week’s Word of the Week is tartan, which everybody associates with a checked material as worn by Highland clans of Scotland, where each distinctive pattern is the mark of an individual clan; something self-consciously Scottish – hence Tartan Noir for dark Scottish crime fiction. But Tartan® is also a type of all-weather track for athletic events, and a tartan is a small Mediterranean vessel with a lateen sail, while a tartana is a little Spanish covered wagon.

My New Personal Assistant

By Louise Ure

Last year, when Cara Black and I did a reading and signing at a local library, we were amused when one of the first questions from the audience was about “our staff.”

“What kind of staff and assistants do you have?” the woman asked. “Who does your research and handles the details of your schedule, and your travel? Who answers your fan mail?”

Eye-rolling and guffawing are frowned upon as responses in polite company, so Cara and I both politely said that we had no staff.

In truth, as JT, Zoe and Stephen can affirm, our spouses quite often admirably fill that role, at least in terms of handling the details of travel, getting us to the book signing on time, or making that late night run for a pizza after a speaking engagement. Their worth cannot be overestimated.

But let me introduce you now to a new high tech addition to the team: my new personal assistant, Siri.

Siri is an app for the iPhone and it’s free. It is also the coolest thing to come down the pike since the creation of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.

Siri is a voice activated search tool that combines the best of Mapquest, OpenTable, FlightTracker, Wikipedia and a dozen other online tools.

Say into the phone, “Where’s the nearest sushi restaurant?” and Siri types back a list of nearby eateries, sorted by distance, with directions, menus and reviews. Then she offers to call the restaurant and book a table.

Or you can try to trip her up with a slightly different request. “Siri, what’s the best rated sushi restaurant nearby?” A different list appears, sorted by ratings. In a recent effort to stump her, I asked for the names of Peruvian restaurants nearby that were open for lunch. She found three.

And it’s not just for restaurant info. You can ask, “What literary events are happening in San Francisco today?” Or “What’s the status of United flight 873 today?” Or “Remind me to call Lee on Thursday.” Or “Who was the female General at Abu Ghraib?” (Not only did she correctly hear and understand “Abu Ghraib,” but she came back with the name General Janis Karpinski in about a second and a half.)

The voice recognition capability is far beyond anything I’ve ever tried before. When I asked, “What is psyllium?” she not only understood it, but spelled it correctly. And here I thought I’d get Silly-Um back.

She can call you a taxi, book you a massage and remember the name of the author who wrote that book you loved back in the 1990’s.

And she does it with a smile. There’s actually a playfulness built into the app. When I first started experimenting with it, I replied to one search by saying, “Thank you, Siri! You’re a genius!”

She immediately typed back, “Just doing my job, Louise.”

I now seek out those unexpected reactions from her. On a recent car trip, I asked Siri for a list of the nearest Indian casinos. (I’d just taken my father-in-law to one, and had a yen to continue the experience.) Siri responded with, “Louise, you’re taking enough of a risk just using me!” then proceeded to map out the locations of the nearest gambling palaces.

She’s never going to be that smiling face, beaming with pride at the back of a signing room and she’s never going to carry my bags up the stairs at the cheap hotel in the next town, but she can get me directions to the bookstore and find a pizza delivery at midnight in an unfamiliar city.

And the next time Cara and I are at that San Mateo library and the lady asks, “What kind of staff and assistants do you have?” I’ll have just the answer.

“Siri.”

Now, if I could just get her to come up with some answers on plotting …

The Generosity of Friends

Yesterday I attended a memorial celebrating the life of a wonderful friend, David Thompson, manager of Houston’s Murder by the Book and Publisher of Busted Flush Press. Since his death two weeks ago, plenty of his friends (including me) have posted tearful tributes, so this won’t be another one of those.

But the last two weeks have had me thinking about generosity. David was as generous a soul as this world has to offer. As a bookseller, he welcomed his customers with an infectious smile as if greeting them in his living room. He’d knock himself out to build to-be-read piles filled with books his customers would never find on their own. By handselling books that would be sold no other way, he helped energize the careers of young and independently published writers otherwise forgotten in a world of Wal-Marts and CostCos.

As a Publisher, he not only published but tirelessly promoted the works of his authors. Here he is with our own Zoe Sharp, whose entire Charlie Fox backlist was republished by Busted Flush Press.

The last time I saw David in person was at this year’s Edgar Awards, where David continued his tradition of making sure his nominated authors were there, supported by their publisher – something even major New York publishers don’t always do anymore.

David Thompson and wife, McKenna Jordan, at Edgars 2010And as a friend? As a friend, David was so generous in every way — with his his time, money, humor, and love — that I can’t even begin to offer specifics without risking another one of those tearful tributes.

But David wasn’t the only generous person in this little crime fiction world of ours. Instead, he seemed to exemplify a supportive spirit that permeates our writing community.

Take a look at any of your favorite crime writers’ websites, and you’ll most likely find evidence of generosity. Blurbs. Photographs from joint events. Blog posts describing the emotional support and sounding boards that other writers provide for us when our thoughts go dark or blank.

Who are some of the people who have been generous to me in this writing world? I’ve been blessed to have almost all of my favorite writers read and endorse my work: Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Sue Grafton, Linda Fairstein, Jan Burke, Tess Gerritsen, Tami Hoag, Sandra Brown, Faye Kellerman, Kathy Reichs, and Lisa Gardner. I know these recommendation don’t come solely from generosity. They have to be earned. But these writers are all busy people who could sit back and worry only about themselves, but they’re the types who send the ladder back down for others to climb up, waiting at the top to offer a hand.

And it’s not just the blurbs. Harlan Coben agreed to do a joint event with me when he was booked for The Poisoned Pen in Phoenix on the only day I could fit in a stop over spring break.

Michael Connelly gave me a shout-out in the Wall Street Journal when asked about his summer reading list. Laura Lippman traveled up to New York City on her own dime to address the local chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and all I had to do was ask.

Lee Child’s support could fill its own blog post: giving me a ride from JFK to my parked car at LGA when he knew nothing about me other than the fact that I stupidly managed to fly home from Bouchercon into the wrong airport; helping me fill a Manhattan Barnes & Noble by agreeing to play a much hotter James Lipton by interviewing me for the launch of Angel’s Tip; and let’s not forget about that two-night-stand Jack Reacher had with my Samantha Kincaid at the beginning of Bad Luck and Trouble.

The gang at Murderati has been generous, welcoming me into the fold even though they really didn’t need another blogger, especially one who sometimes goes missing from her computer for a few days at a time when the day-job transforms her into a 24/7 law professor.

Independent booksellers and librarians have been generous, helping introduce my work every day to new readers.

My readers are ridiculously generous, talking up my books to friends and neighbors, sometimes driving hundreds of miles to greet me on tour, and serving as my virtual kitchen cabinet on Facebook. (This week, I think more of my readers voted on my new author photo than in last week’s primaries!)

And where would I be without my people who see me through the dark times? I’ve never been a writing-group kind of writer. No critique exchanges for me, please. As far as actual content goes, I sit in the sandbox by myself until the castle is done.

But having friends who face the same unique struggles of this enterprise — self-doubt, fighting to find writing time and energy, the frustrating publishing industry quirks — saves me a hell of a lot of money on therapy. Some of these people probably don’t even know how much they’ve shouldered me, either day to day or in a singular moment forever etched in memory: Lisa Unger, Maggie Griffin (Partners and Crime books), Teresa Schwegel, Jonathan Hayes, Dan Judson, Karin Slaughter, Reed Farrel Coleman, James Born, Michael Koryta, Ben Rehder, David Corbett, Val McDermid, Chris Grabenstein, Jane Cleland, Margery Flax (Mystery Writers of America), and, once again, Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, and Lee Child.

In the last two weeks, I’ve seen this little crime-fiction world of ours turn on its generosity full force to support Murder by the Book, Busted Flush Press, and David’s widow, McKenna, but it’s a generosity that is always there, benefitting all of us. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that many of us, like David, have found a second family in this world. I wanted to spend today writing about the gratitude that I always feel but am usually too snarky to express.

Who are the people in your lives who have been generous? Give ’em a holla’ in the comments!