Author Archives: Murderati Members

A Time to Write

I made someone cry last week.

I didn’t mean to. I went to speak to the Yosemite Romance Writers last Saturday and I gave a variation on my workshop “Breaking Rules to Break In or Break Out” which is about shucking the so-called “rules” that we allow others to impose on our creativity. (Many of these “rules” apply to romance only, but some are cross-genre—such as never write a prologue or don’t use flashbacks. For those Murderati readers who are going to the RWA conference in Orlando, Toni, JT and I will be joined by Random House editor Shauna Summers to present this workshop on Saturday afternoon.)

Inevitably, when I open the floor to questions, one question is always asked: how do I find the time to write while being a wife and mother to five kids.

Writing has always been extremely important in my life. When I hit thirty, I realized I wasn’t completely happy, but didn’t know why. Then it hit me: I’d stopped writing when I got married. I went from writing almost every day to writing a couple days a month. Or less.

So I started writing again. Every day. It wasn’t easy. I had to make sacrifices, and so did my husband. I gave up television to make the time to write. Three hours every night, after the kids were in bed, I sat at the computer and wrote. Every night. (Except one night a week as a compromise to my husband who didn’t like the new schedule.) I couldn’t write during the day because I had a full-time job. I couldn’t write in the evenings because I had children to care for who hadn’t seen me all day. So nine to midnight was my writing time.

Now, I write full time. Anyone who works from home knows that working from home is still WORKING. But many who don’t work from home think that it’s easy for us to “just” do one thing—make calls for a church rummage sale, volunteer at the school, coach the kids soccer team, pick up the dry cleaning, run elderly mom to the doctor—the list goes on.

I think I’m more sensitive to this because I’ve been on both sides. I worked full-time outside of the house—thirteen years as a consultant in the California State Legislature. Yet I was the one who took the kids to the doctor; if someone was sick I stayed home; I had to leave exactly at five to get the kids before the school or day care closed at six; I made dinner, gave baths, did the laundry, made lunches, and got the kids ready for school in the morning.

Just because now I work from home (the emphasis on WORK) doesn’t mean that I suddenly have all this free time and can add more to my full plate.

It wasn’t easy to get to this point. I told the group that each one of them had to learn to say “NO.” Whether they work full-time or are a SAHM, whether they are married or not, have kids or not, have elderly parents or not, they need to understand that if they want to write—if writing fulfills them, completes them, is something they love to do and makes them happy—they have to make sacrifices to find the time to write.

But what do you do when your spouse or family ridicules your dream? What do you do when they are passive-aggressive, letting you “do your little thing” without understanding that the way the talk about it demoralizes you?

It’s worse for stay-at-home-moms. I’ve talked to women who love being a wife and mother and keeping a house, but they also have a hobby or dream of their own. Yet they have no support from their families for their “little hobby.” Whoever said that when we become a wife and mother that suddenly our personal pleasures are not important? We already put everyone else’s needs before our own, can’t we do whatever we want with that sliver of time left over for us? We make sacrifices for our families, and there’s no reason our families can’t make sacrifices for us. Because in the end, a happier mother means a happier family.

And this is when one of the writers—a SAHM of two–got teary-eyed. She tried not to, and I tried to be positive, but what got to her (and me) was that she had no support for her dream.

A good friend of mine, a SAHM-turned-successful published author, emailed me a couple weeks ago because she’d gotten to a crisis point in her career. She was juggling multiple contracts, was late on her current book, and had a husband and three kids who expected her to do everything she did before she sold, as well as now being the major breadwinner in the household. Her husband had always been supportive of her writing—before and after she sold—but at the same time expected a certain level of accessibility. Ditto her kids. And she was trying to do it all because of mommy guilt. Her boys play baseball and I asked her how many games she missed. One. And she felt awful about it. She admitted that, while they understand she has to write and meet deadlines and can’t do everything she used to, her family still expects it and she feels bad when she can’t do everything. It’s the unspoken sighs and passive-aggressive guilt families heap on their loved ones.

I helped my friend come up with a strategy for managing her schedule, all stuff she knew she had to do but when it comes from the outside, it seems more doable (it helps that I’ve gone through everything she was going through.) And I offered advice: don’t sweat the small stuff. Do what you can, but both your stories and your family will suffer if you don’t cut back on commitments.

I, too, go to almost every sporting event, drama performance, art show, and other events for my kids, but sometimes I can’t make it. I tell the kids I’ll take them on one field trip during the year, but not the three or four they go on. (Hence this last week I went to the zoo, and then to six flags—though I was just a driver on the latter and spent eight hours at Starbucks writing.) I do what I can, not because I have to but because I want to. I enjoy my children, and my kids know that. Just because I have to say no to something doesn’t mean that I love writing more than them—it means that mom has a job and there are some things I can’t do.

It may sound like I’m dissing men, but I’m not. I know there are a lot of dads out there who are active in their kids lives. I know there are a lot of husbands who are supportive of their wives dreams. And sometimes it isn’t the spouse, but parents or siblings or children who are undermining the writer. It’s sometimes hard for people to unconditionally support someone else’s dream—especially when we don’t share it or understand it.

But it isn’t lost on me that in all the speakers I’ve listened to over the last few years, I have never heard a male author asked, “How do you find the time to write, while also being a husband and father?”

On a completely different note, I posted my original short story “Ghostly Vengeance” to my Seven Deadly Sins website. It’s a ghost story that takes place between ORIGINAL SIN and CARNAL SIN. I’ll be posting additional bonus content to this site over the next month in anticipation of the release of CARNAL SIN on June 22.

I’ll leave with one of my favorite quotes by Edward Everett Hale, which pretty much sums up my life motto and seems appropriate:

I am only one,

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything,

But still I can do something.

And because I cannot do everything,

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Do you have a favorite inspirational quote or advice that someone has given you that helps you get through the tough times when everyone seems to be dead-set against your dream?

Faire Time

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Well, convention season has kicked into high gear. If one were looking to avoid writing, just for example, one could jet off to – Romantic Times, Book Expo America, Mayhem in the Midlands, American Library Association, Thrillerfest, RWA National… to mingle, network, party with hundreds of favorite and soon-to be-favorite authors, librarians, booksellers, DLers, 4MAers, MWAers, ITWers, Sisters, and readers.

Authors are strongly advised to go to conventions and festivals to build their careers. There is no question that the networking is gold. And except for having to continuously “sparkle”, as Margaret Maron puts it, it’s so easy to network at these things. All you have to do is relax and walk around and just run into the people you need to run into. Really, it works. Reviewers, booksellers, your publicist, the author whose incredible book you were reading just the night before, extraordinary friends you haven’t seen in ten years – they’re all there in a very contained space and you will drift into them if you just go with the flow.

Some people call that work. But what it really is, is magic. What it is – is Faire Time.

I learned the concept of Faire Time, or Festival Time, over the years of my interestingly misspent youth, hanging out at the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire –a month-long semi-historical recreation of life in an Elizabethan village, except with sex and drugs and overpriced irresistible craftish – stuff.

(Wait, what am I saying? Of course they had all of that going on in those real Elizabethan villages, too…)

I’ll be lazy. Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about festivals:

Among many religions, a feast or festival is a set of celebrations in honour of God or gods.

Hmm, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A set of celebrations in honor of gods – and goddesses. Take a look at the guest of honor lists for any of the above- mentioned conventions. Gods and goddesses of the mystery/literary world? You betcha.

What else?

Festivals, of many types, serve to meet specific social needs and duties, as well as to provide entertainment. These times of celebration offer a sense of belonging for religious, social, or geographical groups. Modern festivals that focus on cultural or ethnic topics seek to inform members of their traditions. In past times, festivals were times when the elderly shared stories and transferred certain knowledge to the next generation. Historic feasts often provided a means for unity among families and for people to find mates.

Now, does that sound like a convention or what?

Maybe it’s that first, religious purpose of festivals but I do notice this unifying principle of “Faire Time” or “Festival Time” in full force at conventions. There is an element of the sacred about a festival – it is out of the ordinary, out of simple chronological time, out of chronos – into kairos (again, from Wikipedia): “a time in between”, a moment of undetermined period of time in which “something” special happens.

And here’s an interesting bit:

In rhetoric kairos is a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved.

Synchronicity and opportunity happen with such regularity at these convention things that they’re really more the rule than the exception.

It is my absolute conviction that much more important career business gets done at conventions and festivals than anywhere else because it is being done in Faire Time – a suspended moment of opportunity.

And that is not even mentioning the creative and personal inspiration of being in that state of suspended time with so many passionate worshippers of the book. By the end of a convention I will always know the next right step to take, professionally and creatively, just as clearly as if it has been spoken to me. All it takes it to ask the question.

And one of my favorite things about conventions these days is running into aspiring authors who I met and connected with at previous conventions – only to find that they’re now published or about to be. It reaffirms my whole faith in the process.

As many of you have witnessed, I love the total debauchery of these gatherings, but I’m never unaware of something also sacred under all that revelry.

I’m sure that all of us have stories of improbable connections and synchronicities at festivals, and I’d love to hear them today.

– Alex

ON LOSS, ON ART

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

We’ve experienced some loss here recently. It was hard for all of us to learn that Louise’s wonderful, talented, charming husband Bruce had died. I think we’re all experiencing that same kind of shock after hearing about Cornelia’s father, who died from suicide last week. We’re all thinking about them, and caring about them, during this very painful time.

Cornelia’s post about her father brought instant memories of my own father, who took his life twenty-five years ago. I was twenty years old.

I want to be careful not to detract from their losses by rattling on about my own ancient history. But, in many ways, it’s never ancient history. Although things are easier, I still live with this loss every day. Last night I woke from a dream that I was certain was real. I dreamed that, after many years thinking my father had died, I discovered he was alive and well, having faked his death and assumed a new identity. I dreamed that we were close again, that I had forgiven him for disappearing and making us think he had killed himself. I sat for twenty minutes awake in bed before I realized that I had it all wrong.

Everything that has happened in my life since the day he died has been influenced by that moment. Every sentence I’ve written flows from that place of wonder and anger and passion and curiosity and pain.

I’ve always written stories and by the time I was twenty I was in the middle of writing my first screenplay. A crucial relationship in the story involved the eighteen-year old protagonist and his estranged father. The father didn’t know how to love his son.

So, while I’m writing this screenplay, my dad up and kills himself. He accomplished this using Demerol, which he had easy access to. He was a doctor.

My writing changed instantly. Suddenly I had feelings and questions and an anger that needed to be communicated. Feelings so strong they couldn’t be buried in immature writing. The writing would have to mature if I was going to be heard.

When my parents divorced I was just fourteen years old. I was in shock for a year, thinking things were just hunky-dory. And then—Wham!—it hit me. Hard. I had wild fits of anger, punched walls until my knuckles bled, kicked boulders, screamed epithets into the sky.

Remembering this, I knew my father’s suicide would hit me harder. This time I wasn’t going to be caught off-guard. So I dove in, writing, writing, writing. I wrote whether I had something to say or not. Most of it was free-verse poetry, not my forte. But it tapped the emotions, the anger, the grief. I also explored my father’s last days, trying to get a handle on why he did what he did. I went to the hotel room where he ended his life, where he spent a long three days and nights before committing the act. I sat on the bed where he was found. I stared into the bathroom mirror, as I imagined him doing, hour after hour.

I wrote my first short story at this point, called “Yahrzeit Candle.” It was about a little Jewish boy who wakes up one morning to find his father sitting in front of this ominous candle in the living room. When the boy goes to the candle the smoke from the flame gets in his eyes and he is suddenly overwhelmed by memories of his grandfather. He doesn’t realize it yet, but his grandfather has died, and his father is engaged in the seven-day ritual of Yarhzeit. But the father, seemingly hypnotized, never leaves the candle, and the boy sees his daddy falling apart, bit by bit, day after day. The boy comes to believe that the candle is causing his daddy’s pain and he decides to snuff it out. But, as he gets closer, the smoke fills his eyes and the memories force him back into his father’s arms and the two finally connect, father and son, and they rock back and forth in their bear hug and the flame finally flickers out on its own.

It was my first short story and I hadn’t even really considered myself a writer yet. I submitted it to two national contests and won both. I sent it to Elie Wiesel and he sent back a note saying it was “Shining, evocative and penetrating.” I don’t think I could’ve written that story if I hadn’t gone through the trauma of my father’s death. I don’t think I could have written anything “evocative.”

I also wrote a screenplay for a short film. It was really just a ten-page poem, a description of visuals without dialogue, representing the relationship between my father and I from my birth to his death. I had to enroll in film school, and it would take another five years before I had the skills to do it, but eventually I made “Meditations on a Suicide.” I needed the help of dozens of professionals, and I didn’t have a dime to pay anyone. They all worked for free. Everything was donated. The budget would have probably been around thirty thousand dollars, but it cost me just about nothing, except for what I managed to cash-advance on my credit cards and the cash donations I received from people who believed in the project. It all came through at the eleventh hour. A film that should not have come together was somehow made, and I can’t help but think that my dad was there helping it along, getting people to make the right decisions, making sure I got what I needed to realize the vision in my head. The film went on to garner awards and accolades, at least as much as it could for being a short, black-and-white, 16mm student film. The process forced me to reach deep inside myself to do something I hadn’t known I could do. I don’t think I would have accomplished it if my father hadn’t been at my side.

The film was supposed to be my catharsis. That’s how I saw it. But in the process of making the film I became desensitized to the subject matter and I found that I was directing what felt like a fictional story. In a sense, it was. I mean, how do you whittle down a twenty-year relationship into a twenty-minute film?

Every time I think I’m over it, it reappears.

A good friend of mine whom I met when I made the film (twenty years ago) told me, after reading Boulevard, that he felt I was still dealing with my father’s suicide. Of course I am.

The anger has gradually subsided, although it has never really gone away. I’m mostly sad and upset that my children will never know their grandfather. He was a pediatrician, he loved children. It would have been great to call him up in the middle of the night as the kids were growing up, ask for advice on how to crack a fever or soothe a sore throat.

But he did leave me with something. A reason to tell stories. Through his own story, his pain and suffering. His suicide took me by the shoulders and said, “Wake the fuck up. Look around. What have you got to say about this?”

As Mr. Hemmingway once wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterwards some are stronger in the broken places.”

THANK YOU, MRS. B

Two weeks ago I did something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time. It’s something I’ve thought about over the years. Something I NEEDED to do.

Thankfully I was added in this by the mother of a friend I grew up with. Some of you will recall that in March I went back to my home town and spoke to the writer’s group there. One of the officers of the group was said mother. She keyed into one of the things I mentioned in my talk, and not long ago, she sent me a note with the information I needed (unsolicited).

See, when I look back at my K-12 education (5 to 18 years old for those of you not familiar with the U.S. system), I can pick out a hand full of teachers who meant a lot to me. And out of that handful there are two who really stand out, and one that gets honorable mention.

Of the two standouts, one was my high school drama teacher. He treated me like an adult, and encouraged me in things I never thought I’d do. I’ve been lucky over the years to stay in contact with him, so he knows how important he’s been in my life.

But the other teacher I haven’t talked to since I left elementary school for junior high. (Another primer: elementary school here is grades K, 1-6 – basically 5 to 11 – junior high for me was grades 6 – 7, and high school grades 9 – 12.)

The person I’m talking about was my 5^th grade teacher, Mrs. B. She may have been the youngest teacher at our school. And though the hormones hadn’t quite kicked in with us 10 year old, we all knew she was pretty hot. (It was amazing how many fathers who had never attended a parent-teacher meeting before always seemed to make it for ones with Mrs. B.) But what was important to me about Mrs. B. was that she was always, always encouraging.

The mother I mentioned above had a daughter a couple years older than me who had also had Mrs. B. This daughter apparently had the habit of doodling cartoons and other drawings in the margins of tests and homework. Instead of chastising her and telling her to stop it (like apparently some later teachers did), Mrs. B. complimented her on them, and even asked if she could keep some for her own collection. To this day, that girl remembers this.

My most vivid memory of Mrs. B. was that everyday after lunch she would sit us on the floor on these great carpets she had, get into her rocking chair, and read to us for a half hour. This was my favorite time of day. Hearing the stories meant so much to me. And on those few days when she couldn’t do this for us…well, those were not my favorite.

It was right about this time, in fifth grade, that I told myself, and several of my friends, that I was going to be an Author. And I know part of why I felt confident about that choice was because of Mrs. B.

All these years I’ve been wanting to tell her just how much she meant to me. To let her know that I thought of her often, and that she was one of the best teachers I’d ever had. Well, in that note from my friend’s mom was Mrs. B.’s phone number.

Because of travel, I wasn’t able to call for several weeks. In a way, I was thankful for that. I was a little nervous to call her. Would she remember me? How would she react? I think I kind of reverted to school boy.

Finally, I pulled out the number and called. No answer, just voicemail. But I wasn’t going to leave a message, so I hung up. I found excuses not to call for the rest of the day, my fear creeping up again, but then, just about 24 hours later, I redialed her number.

Now know that – as is my way when faced with similar situations – that I had played out in my head multiple ways of reintroducing myself. I was going through them again as I pressed the connect button.

But then, before the phone had even rung in my ear, someone on the other end picked up.

“Brett Battles?” a familiar, if a bit older, voice said. I could hear her smile in her voice.

It took me a second to realize that she had caller ID, and that all the intros I had practiced were unnecessary.

Of course she remembered me. I think she probably remembers most of her kids.

We talked for probably twenty minutes, me and my fifth grade teacher. It was an amazing conversation, and I got to tell her all the things that I so wanted to say. And you know what? She’s just as wonderful today as she was then.

She said she’d seen my picture in the local paper about my books, and that I hadn’t changed at all. I said I probably wasn’t shaving back then. She asked about my family, and was interested in hearing about my life. We talked about the other kids in my class. And she wanted me to call her by her first name, something I told her was just not going to happen. And finally we exchanged contact information with a promise not to loose touch, and hung up.

The purpose of calling her was because I wanted her to know the affect that she had on me, and no doubt most of her other students. I wanted her to know the truth, to get that feedback, even decades later. I’m pretty sure she felt really good at the end. And she should have. She was a fantastic teacher.

But what I didn’t expect was that I would feel so good. I rode a cloud from the moment I heard her voice until I fell asleep that night. I still rode it in the days after. It wasn’t that I felt good with myself for calling her, it was more I was reminded about how great it was that she and my other wonderful teachers had been part of my life. I am who I am today in large part because of these people. And the work they’ve done, and the goals they’ve achieved live through me, and their other students.

Thank you Mrs. B. and Mr. K. and all the others. Thank you more than I can ever express.

All right, Murderati peeps, time to name your favorite teacher and tells us why they mean so much to you. I expect all of you to respond to this one. We should have a boat load of comments.

Let’s share and celebrate these people who molded us and guided us and helped us on our way.

____________________________________________________________________________

Also I wanted to mention that next Tuesday marks the release of the third Quinn book, SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, in paperback…AND the release of Rob’s latest, DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN! Two great paperbacks, perfect for the beach or the plane or wherever you may be!

TL;DR

by J.D. Rhoades

The other day, I was having an e-mail conversation with a friend. As we often do, we got to talking about books. She was deep into Hilary Mantel’s 2006 book, A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY. “It’s a commitment,” she said, alluding to the book’s 768-page length, “but you don’t care.”

Which got me to thinking. I’ve noticed recently that I have a much shorter attention span than I used to when it comes to books. I think twice before taking on a massive work, and will often pass it over in favor of something shorter. It took me forever, for example, to “commit” to Neal Stephenson’s CRYPTONOMICON, even though I loved it when I finally did read it. And the third volume of his Baroque Cycle is sitting on the bookshelf, waiting for me to get up the gumption to take it on. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see it as a chore. I LOVE Neal Stephenson. I just get to about Page 300 of any book, see a few hundred pages to go, and start feeling antsy. I feel the pressure of the TBR pile building up in the back of my head. And this is from someone who used to regularly sit down and devour the entire LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy every couple of years, and then finish off with a dessert of THE SILMARILLION.

It seems I’m not alone. In a recent article I read on Slate, writer Nicholas Carr notes:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

And the culprit, for Mr. Carr, is easy to find: that bad old Internet. The article, in fact, is titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and Carr suggests that spending a lot of time on the Web is trashing our attention spans:

[W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

After all, the ‘net is the home of the acronym used to dismiss an overly verbose or lengthy article, comment, or blog post: “TL; DR”.

Which stands, in case you didn’t know, for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.”

On the other hand, this article suggests that that worry is not only overblown, but cliched:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label…Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.“

So, maybe it’s not the tech. Maybe it’s the stuff I’ve gotten used to reading. For the past few years, my reading has skewed towards noir, pulp, and hardboiled. That’s the stuff I like, and it tends to be short, simple, and fast-moving. Not coincidentally, that’s how I like to write as well. So it takes some adjustment to settle down into something more long and discursive, something that takes its time getting to where it’s going.

Or maybe it’s just life in general. With a family, a day job, four pets, and an incurable writing habit, I’ve gotten used to a faster, more breakneck (almost literally) pace.

How about you? Are you finding it harder or more daunting to tackle long works? If so, why do you think it is? Any ideas for overcoming it?

Oh, Canada!

In the short time I’ve been a member of the Murderati gang, I’ve watched my fellow bloggers’ lives overturned by the vicissitudes of life, and I cannot post today without thinking of Cornelia and the recent tragedy in her family, and of Louise and the terrible loss she so recently suffered. And then there is Rob, who has known the recent joy of watching his book turned into a TV pilot. Life is unpredictable and sad and painful and triumphant, and there is no way to predict what will happen around the corner.

Which has made me decide to write about something that’s utterly lacking in sturm und drang. So I’m going to blog about Canada.

Canada is fresh in my mind, as I’ve just returned from the Canterbury Tales Literary Festival in St. John, New Brunswick. Living in the state of Maine, right on the border, I’m privileged to meet many Canadians during the summer months, and I’ve made the crossing to visit our northern neighbor a number of times. Every time I visit, my impression of Canadians as basically nice, well-behaved, polite people is invariably reinforced. It’s the land where people actually wait for the Walk signal to flash before they’ll cross the street. Even when there’s no traffic coming in any direction. And because they seem to follow the rules, it made me follow the rules as well (even though my rush-rush personality had me ready to dash across the street no matter what that darn traffic signal said.)

This recent visit also gave me the chance to check in on the Canadian publishing scene, and discover how different it is from the U.S. One thing that had always impressed me was how the Canadian bestseller list is sometimes so different from ours. I’d noticed that theirs is heavily weighted toward literary novels. I assumed that Canadians were simply more literate readers, not as prone as Americans are to lunge for the latest crass entertainment. I pictured Canada as a nation of intellectuals who turned up their noses at genre, and instead reached for the difficult read, the books that would stretch their minds and enrich their souls.

Ha. It’s not so simple as all that.

Based on several conversations I had with people familiar with the Canadian publishing world, I discovered something that stunned me, coming from ultra-capitalist, money-is-everything America. And that is: many Canadian publishers are subsidized by their government. They have a myriad number of small presses which could otherwise never survive without those subsidies, and their government has chosen to subsidize literary fiction which would otherwise not have a chance of making it on the market. Popular fiction is left to sink or swim on its own because it is, after all, popular and therefore more likely to turn a profit without any help. Subsidized literary fiction also gets more of a subsidized marketing push, and since marketing dollars result in better public awareness of a title, those literary novels have a sales advantage.

Hence the more literary slant of the Canadian bestseller lists.

In some ways, this is a good thing. It directs the public toward books they would normally not read. It brings otherwise unknown authors into the public eye. And since I love discovering new literary fiction, I think it’s about time that not all the titles on bookstore front tables featured vampires, zombies, and serial killers. It’s sort of the National Public Television philosophy of “let’s give the public what we know is good for them.”

On the other hand, it rubs my populist nature the wrong way because I also love genre fiction. I love romance and horror and SF, and I’d feel more than a little miffed that my taste in fiction is considered unworthy.

Another characteristic that sets Canada apart from the U.S. is the difference in scale. In Canada (with a population of 33 million), if a hardcover title sells 5,000 copies, it’s considered a bestseller. If it sells 750 copies, it’s considered a successful publication. Needless to say, it’s almost impossible for a Canadian writer to make a living at his craft, if he only sells in his home country. With the exception of a few rare authors such as Margaret Atwood, whose Canadian sales alone might support her, most Canadian authors need to be able to sell to markets outside Canada to earn a living. Linwood Barclay, one of Canada’s most successful genre writers, no doubt earns most of his income outside his home country.

Another thing I learned is how under-appreciated Canadians feel, despite their many contributions to the literary world. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know that Joy Fielding, Vincent Lam, William Gibson, and Alice Munro were Canadians. In my typical American arrogance, I just assumed they were Americans. (Which is something that irritates Canadians no end.)

One of the best parts about attending literary festivals is the chance to meet other authors, and in St. John, I was very happy indeed to hear readings by some truly gifted authors, including Kathy-Diane Leveille (LET THE SHADOWS FALL BEHIND YOU) and Robert Rayner, whose searing YA novel SCAB had the audience on the edges of their seats. These authors deserve a far wider audience. In Canada, where there seems to be far deeper support for such authors, they at least have the chance of being heard.

God fucking damn it.

By Cornelia Read

It’s quarter to two in the morning, and I’m lying in bed in a guest room at my Aunt Julie’s house in Vermont.

Just after midnight, I got the news that my father killed himself yesterday afternoon.

He struggled with mental illness for decades, and he owned nine guns. There is an awful sense of inevitability about all of this.

I am blessed that he and I had become friends again, over the last several years. He’d ceased all communication with me for twelve years before that, and I know his suicide would have been immeasurably harder for me to face had we not made peace with one another.

My heart goes out to my stepmother and to my half sister, who just turned seventeen.

Frederick Harvey Read, I will goddamn miss you.

Requiescat in pace.

Me and Dad on Bandicoot off Seawanhaka, circa 1967

Tracking The Changes

by Zoë Sharp

Do you remember those Larson Far Side cartoons you could get – and probably still can, for that matter? The ones with the kid at the back of the classroom, holding up his hand and saying to the teacher, “Please sir, may I be excused? My brain is full.”

That’s me at the moment.

Or, more likely, that my brain is completely empty. It has all leached out of my ears like something from a Tarantino-directed episode of C.S.I.

I’ve been tackling rewrites.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with rewrites. In some ways I love them because I know that what comes out of the other end of this process will be much better than the raw material that went in. Everything benefits from editing. I’m sure you will agree that there are currently a lot of books out there on the shelves that would have benefited from quite a bit more of it than they eventually received.

And in other ways, I hate rewrites because I’d much rather get something right the first time than have to go back and fiddle with it later. I rewrite while I’m still writing. I go back and sweat and worry and adjust and realign as I’m working on my first draft, with the aim that by the time I’ve finished, it shouldn’t need totally rewriting in order to make a reasonable book.

(Please note I said “shouldn’t,” rather than “doesn’t”, though.)

But, inevitably, when someone reads the book with a detailed and critical eye, they’re going to bring up points you missed, discover plot-holes you could lose a family car into, and ask questions you either forgot to answer, or have no clue what the answer should be even if you’d remembered.

I know there is no set method for writing a novel, no ultimate textbook. The best you can hope for is anecdotal evidence of things that might have worked for somebody else, somewhere else, at some other time.

So, here’s some more, for what they might be worth!

When I received my rewrites for the next Charlie Fox novel, they arrived in the from of a two-page report of general points about the story. This, I’m told by my editor, is surprisingly short – some of the ones she does can run for page after page. She tells me the book is in remarkably good shape, with no structural problems – it’s just a case of expanding on certain elements and improving others.

I come away from the meeting feeling a teensy bit smug.

The rest of the comments, typos or other alterations arrive as a Track Changes document in Word. Confession time – I don’t write in Microsoft Word. I have it on my computer, and I know roughly how it works, but I’m still using Lotus Word Pro, and have been ever since I dragged myself into the latter half of the twentieth century and finally junked my old DOS-based word processing package.

And despite her encouraging remarks, when I open up the document I find she’s made 141 actual comments in the text, as well as numerous small corrections or alterations.

Gulp.

The smug feeling evaporates rapidly.

My first move is dictated by my workload in other directions. Shortly after getting the rewrites back, we leave for a week-long 1250-mile work trip that takes us from the East Midlands way up into the north of Scotland. Although I can manage to work on the laptop in the car, I’m finding that I suffer from car-sickness much more easily than I used to, and I’m now restricted to motorways only. (And when I’m in the passenger seat only!) Unfortunately, there are not many motorways in the far north of Scotland. (Did see a beautiful eagle, though, which if I’d had my eyes on a computer screen I would have missed, so every cloud…)

I take my summary of the book with me, which runs to 34 pages, broken down into chapters, with the time-break between each chapter clearly marked. I read through the comments whenever I have a spare moment on the trip, writing down the changes I need to make as notes alongside each chapter in the summary.

One of these changes involves inserting a definite timeline for events of the plot. I work this out carefully using the time-breaks I’ve recorded on the summary, and get Andy – whose mathematical abilities far outstrip my own – to check it. I have not forgotten that, left to my own devices, I managed to have a nine-day week in THIRD STRIKE. Fortunately, that error was caught in time by an eagle-eyed copyeditor.

By the time we get home, the summary is three-quarters covered in pencilled scrawl, and I think I’ve addressed all the points my editor has raised, even if it’s only to double-check my facts when it comes to kidnap negotiation techniques and assure her that they’re correct!

Now things get probably more awkward than they need to be. I sit at home with a flatscreen hooked up to my laptop, with the Track Changes document open in Word on one screen, and My Original open in Word Pro on the other. I toggle between the two, making alterations on the MO doc, and deleting the comments on the TC doc as I’ve dealt with them. I know, I know, there are probably hundreds of easier ways of doing this, but I need a certain amount of separation or my head implodes.

As a first pass, I correct minor errors and typos. That gets rid of all the red bits of underlining and about twenty comments. Then I start on the more serious changes, ticking them off the summary and deleting them from the TC doc as I go.

Where I’m thinking about making a change, but I’m not completely convinced about it, I leave myself a mark in the text I can search on later. For ease this is usually just an asterisk or a dollar sign. For instance, my editor suggested that a couple of the peripheral characters might be too unsympathetic and I should think about softening them up a little. As I came across areas of the narrative where there was the opportunity to do this, I left myself marks I could come back to. In the end, I decided to modify one character, but leave the other as moody as I’d originally envisaged him. I only put the rewrites in today, so time will tell if she feels this works or not!

As with any method (I assume) there’s still a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing up and down the typescript, but I’ve found this more or less works for me.

Of course, if anyone has any better suggestions, I’m all ears…

This week’s Word of the Week is scrivener’s palsy, which, quite simply, is the olde worlde name for writer’s cramp.

I’m all over the place today (another long work trip – but lots of writing time in the car!) so please excuse me if I’m a little erratic at answering comments, but I’ll get there…

I Need A Hero

By Louise Ure

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here at Murderati about the attempted murder I had seen from my living room window. Two men practically succeeded in killing two others with long, black metal poles, breaking limbs, smashing faces and leaving blood and teeth all over the sidewalk. “Russian gangs,” the detective told me afterward.

Many of you – more worldly and less naive than I am, perhaps – were concerned about both my safety and mental health after witnessing such a thing. The good news is that I am taking more precautions when I leave and return to the house, and I haven’t felt any lingering PTSD effects yet at all.

Then I spotted a little write up about the crime in our free neighborhood newspaper:

“Robbery: False Imprisonment

A man and two of his friends were at the man’s home when two men, one of whom the victim knew as an acquaintance, dropped by for a visit.

After about an hour, one of the two visitors pulled out a handgun and ordered the three victims to the floor.

After tying up the victims with zip-ties, the suspects robbed them and fled.

The victims were able to free themselves and called 9-1-1. While one victim stayed at the house, the other two went looking for the suspects. At X Avenue and Y Street (one block away from where they were robbed), the victims discovered the suspects’ vehicle and waited for them.

When the suspects returned, a fight ensued and the victims were able to retrieve some property, as well as disarming the man with a gun.

When officers arrived at the fight scene, they located the two suspects, one of whom was 28 years of age and the other 36, and took them into custody. Both of the suspects were injured, one critically. They were transported to the hospital for treatment. The victims only had minor injuries.”

WTF? If the address, date and hour of the crime had not been the same, I would not have recognized this as the attack I witnessed. Yes, they were all Russian immigrants. But the ones with the metal poles are the ones the police are referring to as “the victims?” And my victims were actually robbers?

And what’s this about “disarming the suspect?” Oh, yeah, he “disarmed” him all right – he practically smashed every bone in the guy’s arms – but I sure didn’t see a gun.

It got me thinking, not only about the unreliability of eye-witnesses, but how a villain can turn into a hero and vice versa, in the blink of an eye.

I think that newspaper write up missed a few things. Like the rage these supposed victims flew into and the mortal harm they were willing to inflict to take revenge for the loss of their property. Like the inhuman look on Victim One’s face (the guy I had been calling “Assailant Number One” in my call to 9-1-1) and his willingness to continue attacking the man pinned in the gutter even after I yelled down that the cops were on their way. And how they ran before the police arrived.

I don’t think there are any good guys in this story, just two sets of bad guys. I’ve read a few books like that – in fact I have a few friends who write them – and while I love them, I always feel like washing my hands or taking a walk afterward.

Like the classic 1980’s Bonnie Tyler song … I need a hero, not just a victim or an everyman/everywoman who can play as nasty as the bad guys.

How about you guys? Do you need a hero in your books?

P.S. On a separate and much, much sadder note, I lost my sweet dog, Cisco, to cancer this week. I’m glad that he and Bruce are together again but oh, sweet Jesus, it’s quiet around here.

The Day I Accidentally Walked 20 Miles

by Alafair Burke

This has been a joyous week for me, thanks to a visit from one of my BFF’s who recently left New York (boo!) for an academic position elsewhere. It has also been an active week. See, here’s the thing about people who know and love New York, but who are limited to occasional visits: They have a tendency to pack a month’s worth of their favorite routines into a single day. And, thanks to my friend’s kamakaze fly-by, I had the pleasure of living one of those days.

We didn’t set out to walk twenty miles. The morning began simply enough with a morning stroll with my french bullog, the Duffer.

We walked through the west village to the river up through the Meatpacking District, then back over through Chelsea to my place near Union Square. We picked up Starbucks and Bagel Bobs along the way. Stopped in Washington Square Park to snack.

But then we dropped off the Duffer and realized it was still only ten in the morning on what we’d sworn would be a true no-work day. Soon enough, my friend’s friend happened to call. He needed someone to help carry a new art acquisition from a Chelsea Gallery to his loft in the fashion district. Off we went, back to Chelsea.

By the time we finished moving the canvas, it was time for lunch. Back to the Meatpacking District. Bloody mary and a dozen oysters outside = yummy. Pitstop to the Apple Store for my handy, dandy, and completely unnecessary iPad. Woot!

Next on the route was SoHo, requiring a stroll down from the Meatpacking District through the west village. In SoHo, we hit six different furniture stores, researching the perfect pull-out sofa. Turns out, there’s no such thing.

Suddenly it was five-thirty. Back to the apartment for a quick shower before catching our Broadway play, Next Fall (marvelous, by the way). Small post-theater snack and glass of wine at the lovely Aureole. Subway back to Union Square. Still hungry. One a.m. stop at the late-night taco truck for corn tortillas and Horchata. By the time I checked my Bodybugg, we had logged just over twenty miles!

I went to bed exhausted. And really, really full. And incredibly inspired.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my need to walk away from the keyboard and free my brain when I really need big-picture creative inspiration. Based on my near-marathon city walk, I now believe those walks away from the desk should always be through the city I now love and write about.

Among the various quotidian details, all inspired by my long walk, that you’ll likely find scattered through my next novel:

The New York foodie’s never-ending search for the best food trucks:

The chess-game culture of Washington Square Park:

The way a texting New York pedestrian will slam into another human being and then scream at that person for being in the way:

The Highline, an elevated park with a uniquely Manhattan blend of industrial chic and actual nature:

The Standard Hotel, whose floor-to-ceiling windows above the Highline have proven irrestible to exhibitionists:

And, not sure this will make the book, but I did learn that there is a chair called the “Do Hit Chair.” Price: $8,000, or $15,000 if beaten by the actual artist. I’m not making that up.

Best of all, I somehow came home with a major plot point magically worked through. A day of friendship, a plot development, new energy about the urban landscape of my books, and three thousand calories burned to-boot. I’d say my hooky day turned out to be productive after all.

Has a play day ever turned into inspiration for you?