The Art of Reinvention

by Alexandra Sokoloff

(I’m in Australia, teaching an all-day Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop today, or maybe that’s tomorrow, so I’ll try to comment tomorrow, or yesterday, or whatever! — Alex, jetlagged…)

 

A couple of weeks ago I was driving home from a “Noir at the Bar” reading here in L.A., and my favorite radio station was playing a live recording of a Sting concert at the Hollywood Bowl I’d actually been in the audience for, years ago. I always love that multidimensional feeling; it was like being in a time machine taking me back to a night I remember very well, because I’d just sold my first screenplay that month, a huge kick-start to what turned into an eleven-year screenwriting career. Now, when you’re outside the film business, a break like that feels like shattering some enormous, impenetrable glass dome atop the mythical business they call “the movies”, a dome that you’ve been circling for years, trying to figure out the entry point.  A familiar feeling for any of us who have ever experienced circling the glass dome of publishing, I imagine!

And it was a great synchronicity, being transported back to that time and that feeling… because I’ve just now broken into e publishing with the launch of my new direct-to-e thriller Huntress Moon and am feeling the same kind of exhilaration of shattering a barrier to a whole new and exciting level of my career.  It reminded me how life is a spiral like that. You come back to the exact same points of life, but hopefully you’re constantly moving UP the spiral, taking all your knowledge of that pivotal threshold with you and ascending to a both a higher and a deeper level.

It also reminded me that as writers, we are constantly reinventing ourselves. I would say “having to reinvent ourselves” but that sounds scary and ominous. Oh well, okay, let’s be real. We are constantly HAVING to reinvent ourselves.

I started out as a theater person, from the time I was a kid, really, but after college I quickly switched my ambitions and focus to screenwriting, because I was aware of the practical need to, you know, eat.  Knowing nothing about the film business, I moved to L.A. just figuring I would figure it out. And the fact is, I did pretty much just that – I got the classic entry level job into movies, a script reader for various production companies, learned the business and the craft of film writing by reading and reporting on hundreds of scripts in a very short amount of time, wrote my own script with a writing partner, got an agent by using what I’d learned as a script reader, and sold the script to Fox in a bidding war.

Now, the trouble with being a screenwriter, and with Hollywood in general, is that you get caught up in the fact that you’ve MADE IT in a profession that all the naysayers (you know the ones I mean) always told you you would never MAKE IT in, and you’re making great money for doing what you love and the people you’re working with are wildly talented and interesting, and it’s all so exciting and non-stop that it becomes very hard to see when things are not quite working out the way you envisioned.  Screenwriters have very little power over their work; the potential movies you work on are very very seldom made, and most of them don’t look like any movie you would want your name on anyway once the script has been through the process very aptly named “development hell.” Cut to ten years later and I had become so creatively miserable, without really knowing it, that it was affecting every other area of my life. And when a movie I’d written that I was truly passionate about fell through when we lost our director to another movie, I snapped. I just wasn’t going to go through that whole thing again.

And that’s how I wrote my first novel, The Harrowing.  And all the naysayers started up again, a lot of them inside my own head. “You’ll never make a living in publishing. At least in screenwriting you’re writing AND getting paid…”  (insert any profession, you know the drill….) But I knew I had to do something else, so I did, and the book got written, and it got sold, and suddenly a whole other glass dome had been shattered and I was on the rollercoaster of a whole new career, to mix a couple of metaphors. And I was lucky to make the shift when I did, because changes in the film industry have made a screenwriting career exponentially more difficult and creatively frustrating than it was when I started in the business.

But now I had to learn a whole different business and figure out a whole different way of making a living at writing. (NOT making a living was not an option – I’ve been writing professionally for so long I have no other marketable job skills). And publishing is a different way of making a living.

When you start out as an author – well, when I started out as an author, in 2006, people advised that we put our entire first book advance back into promotion. Because that’s how important the lift-off factor is in traditional publishing. I was a total newbie, and got completely obsessed with trying everything there was to try in marketing, all the things I imagine all the authors here have been doing or preparing to do with varying degrees of terror: website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, blog, grog, blog tours, book tours – oh right, and writing that second book. (If you want a bloodcurdling glimpse into how it was, I’ve blogged about it here: Marketing =Madness).

Well, I made a good launch with The Harrowing – nominations for Stoker and Anthony Awards, significant recognition as a new and interesting female horror writer… but nothing like the brass ring, bestseller status. But I wrote more good books and got more recognition and also figured out how to create multiple income streams in my writing life –like teaching my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop, that I started on my blog and developed into an e workbook (doing the workshops for free at conferences until I was in demand, and then starting to pick and choose my venues and going only where people would pay me, which also turned into self-perpetuating and well-paying promotion, as well as a personally rewarding avocation).

I’m a big believer in diversifying your writing career in the same way that you diversify a financial portfolio; the money is erratic in a writing career, often cyclical, and it’s a huge mistake to think you’ll earn the same income every year – I’ve seen way too many talented screenwriters and authors crash and burn by making that assumption. Invest wisely when you have the money and always keep a cushion for the lean years, because believe me, there are going to be lean years.

But still, I wasn’t published for long before I started getting that uncomfortable feeling again.  This time it didn’t take as long for me to figure out that I had to try something different – again. (Watching the publishing industry starting to crumble before my eyes with the rise of e readers and self-publishing was a pretty good clue…)

I truly believe we are in the midst of the biggest revolution since the invention of the printing press. E books, ereaders – it is ALL good news for us as writers, because we have so many more choices now. Look, I know it’s hard enough to just get through the day doing the writing you have to do and the promotion you have to do on top of that. You may be just learning the ropes of traditional publishing and here I am suggesting that you add learning the ropes of e publishing, to boot. Don’t panic! Do what you need to do at whatever step you are on in your career. But if you do find you’re not getting picked up by an agent when you know –  and enough credible people have told you – that you’ve got a great book… or you’re not making enough of a living with your traditionally published book(s)… or you are getting a nagging feeling that your publisher is not getting enough of your books out there to be bought and read in the first place… or Barnes & Noble goes bankrupt or something – there is a whole other miraculous option for you now.

In a time of diminishing publisher advances and massive bookstore closures, I and many of my traditionally published author friends who started out in publishing at the same time as I did have recently had the surreal experience of making more money in the first few weeks of an e publishing book launch as we ever got for a traditional advance. We can put a book out as soon as we finish it, rather than waiting a year and a half to two years for the publishing process to grind through its cycle. 

Given the choice between a traditional publishing deal for Huntress Moon and the tens of thousands of new readers that I was able to reach in just three days of a free Amazon promotion, plus having the force of the Amazon marketing machine behind the book (which is now an Amazon bestseller that is outselling a staggering number of high-profile traditionally published books that have a Big Six publisher behind them)…

Well, it’s a no-brainer to me.

I guess what I’m trying to say to you is: Be aware. Be aware if a small voice in your head or your gut or wherever those small voices come from tells you that you need to do something different. Be aware of the incredible sea changes taking place in publishing because of the e publishing revolution, and the incredible opportunities that are there for you.  Be aware that you can always, always reinvent yourself.

We’re writers. We make things up. 

Including ourselves.

– Alex

Aloha

By PD Martin

Yes, I AM blogging from Hawaii today 🙂

I’m currently on a girls’ trip with my daughter, mother and sister. But I want to devote this blog not to the trip per se, but to motherhood.

In some ways, it took becoming a mother for me to really appreciate my mother. She sacrificed lots of things for us girls, and was a single-parent for most of our lives, following a divorce when I was eight years old. She worked incredibly hard and saved hard to give us the basics early on, then later on a few splurges.

This trip would definitely count as a HUGE splurge. She brought my sister to Hawaii for her 40th birthday in 2008, and then a couple of years later my daughter and me, but this time for my 40th birthday. Then last year Mum really wanted to go again, but I knew it wasn’t going to be financially possible for me; so I said Grace and I couldn’t come. A few weeks later, she offered to pay for airfares and accommodation if we could come up with the spending money. Pretty good offer, huh?

Then, around April/May this year the same thing happened. Mum wanted to go to Hawaii again, but we couldn’t afford it. So she decided to dip into her retirement savings – again!

We have all been completely spoiled with these trips to Hawaii, and can’t believe how lucky we are. 

Like I said, being a mum yourself makes you realise how much work goes into motherhood, and how much love. Not to mention the worry! But that’s a whole other blog.

When I was thinking about this blog, there was one other occasion that came to mind. When I was 22, I’d fairly recently split up with my boyfriend and he’d started seeing someone new. We’d managed to stay pretty much out of each other’s paths despite living around the corner, but then there was a birthday party coming up of the mutual friend we met through.

I was feeling insecure and second best – a feeling many people experience after a separation, particularly when another person comes on the scene.

Anyway, my Mum took me shopping and bought me a fancy leather jacket. I walked into that party feeling strong, way cool, confident and like a million bucks…thanks to my mum.

Don’t mums rock? What’s your best mum story?  I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a great mother in your life.

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

by Gar Anthony Haywood

I rode my bike yesterday.  It’s a thirty-plus-year-old Peugeot 12-speed roadie like this one . . .

. . . that, by modern standards, is heavy and insufficiently geared, but it gets the job done for a twice-a-week, amateur cyclist like me.  I usually ride down to the Arroyo Seco and, sometimes, around the Rose Bowl beyond once or twice, but today I really pushed myself for no good reason I can think of.  I rode round-trip from the home the family and I are renting in Alhambra up to La Canada Flintridge, a total of roughly 20 miles, and I did it in the 90-degree heat much of L.A. has been baking in for the last two weeks or so.

Crazy, right?  Especially for an old goat like me?

But I made it, and it was fun.  It was a challenge that required me to push beyond the point of exhaustion — or the point at which the will to go on was seriously on the wane — a number of times.

I do this sort of thing regularly at the gym.  I predetermine what weight training exercises I’m going to do, how many sets of how many reps each, and then I do it, come hell or high water.  I force myself to work harder than it’s often comfortable to work.  I don’t quit, I don’t whine.  (And I don’t grunt like a dwarf trying to heave a submarine out of dry dock, either, as some muscleheads are wont to do.)  All I do is get it done.

Usually, what I’m thinking about as I shove, pull or push that weight stack this way or that, is writing.  Specifically, what I’m thinking is that this same dynamic, working hard as hell to achieve a given goal even when the going is damn tough — when everything inside you is screaming, “Stop, please, no more!  We don’t need this crap!” — should work for me, the writer, as well as it does for me, the physical fitness freak.

But it generally doesn’t.

Bust your ass in the gym and invariably, you see results.  Muscle growth, fat loss, an increase in strength and stamina.  It’s simple math: Do this, get that.  But bust your ass with that same level of commitment and determination behind your desk and, well . . .  Maybe something good will happen, and maybe it won’t.

It doesn’t seem fair.

The natural reaction to this inequity is to work harder still at your craft.  Write more, write better, write smarter.  Put even more effort into marketing your work.  Sleep six hours a night instead of eight.  That should do the trick, right?

Not necessarily.

Just as genetics ultimately limits what gains all your blood, sweat and tears in the weight room can earn you physically, so do things like talent, and timing, and luck have a similar effect on what you are able to accomplish as a professional author.  Working harder than all your peers guarantees you nothing.

This all makes for a great argument to do something else with one’s life.  Something less fickle and more likely to pay off.  Something your poor parents, or husband or wife, would be relieved to see you finally do.

Except that we don’t find something else to do.  We just keep on pushing, fighting, scratching to get the words out.  To write something people in great numbers will want to read.  Because the sports analogy that really fits the writer’s life is not one about weight training, but — to bring this post full circle — cycling.  Cycling is primarily a test of endurance, not strength.  How far can you go without giving up?  How many back-breaking hills can you climb before hitting the brakes and turning back for home?

And your reward for the ride?  Forward progress.  Each mile gets you one step closer to the next.  You ride for the certain knowledge, the unassailable fact that — despite any evidence there may be to the contrary — you’re not as far away from your destination in this minute as you were the minute before.  You’re not standing still or, worse, regressing.  You’re on the move, headed toward that place you want to be.

Will you ever actually get there?  The answer to that question may lie just over the next big, imposing, twenty-percent grade on the horizon.

And you’ll never top that grade if you quit pedaling.

Questions for the class: How do you use physical exercise to motivate you in a chosen endeavor?

Alison Gaylin

By Tania Carver

It’s Wildcard Tuesday again and here’s another interview by Martyn, the male half of Tania. Edgar-nominated crime novelist Alison Gaylin has long been a favourite writer of mine. Entertainment journalist by day and crime writer by night, she’s writing some of the best PI novels around. We first met at Bouchercon in Baltimore in 2008 when we shared a panel and immediately hit it off. In San Francisco Bouchercon in 2010 we both took the title roles in a reading of Declan Hughes’ play about Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, ‘I Can’t Get Started’. She was great. If you’ve already read her you’ll know how good she is. If you haven’t, (and why not?) here she is . . .

And She Was, the first in the Brenna Spector series, came out in February. It’s a fantastic book, I loved it and it’s been a thoroughly deserved bestseller too. Can you fill us in on the background to it?

Firstly, thank you Martyn! That means a lot, seeing as I’m a huge fan of both you and your darkly seductive alter ego, Tania Carver. The book’s success has been really satisfying for me, especially since it was such a long time coming. I signed a three-book deal back in 2008 based, not on a manuscript, but an idea for one. The book itself didn’t come out til February of this year. I’m always a big rewriter (is this a word? My spell check says no. Anyway….) I rewrite a lot. But I think I worked harder and did more revising on this book — both in proposal form and the manuscript — than any of my others.

Brenna Spector herself must be one of the most interesting and engaging characters in contemporary crime fiction. She’s also got a very memorable affliction (geddit?). Where did she come from – and what came first, the character or the affliction? Or were both things the same?

The affliction came first. Back in 2007, I saw a magazine article about someone with hyperthymestic syndrome — perfect autobiographical memory. So, as opposed to someone with photographic memory (ie The 39 Steps) this is a person who remembers every day of their entire life in perfect visceral detail, with all five senses. After reading the article, I thought, “Man that sounds awful!” And then, as I often think when I read about something particularly horrifying, “Hmmm… Maybe I can write about it.” The thing that fascinates me the most about this disorder, which is very rare, is not so much the ability to remember — but the inability to forget. What a tragic burden, to carry every mistake you’ve ever made, forever in your mind…

In creating Brenna, I thought about how that disorder would affect not just a detective’s career, but her interpersonal relationships, and I sort of took it from there.

 

Your background is in journalism, particularly in the entertainment industry. How did you go from that to writing crime novels? And what made you want to write crime novels in particular?

I have my masters in journalism and my undergraduate degree in theater, so writing for entertainment magazines was a career I naturally fell into. But my interest in crime came first. I’ve always loved reading crime books — both true crime and crime fiction. It goes back to what I was saying about liking to write about things I find distasteful. In a way, it’s an opposite form of escape. Instead of going into an idealized world (as you might with a romance novel or a fantasy) you take a trip to the darker side, and then you come back to reality thinking, “Hey, this isn’t so bad.” I love writing crime because you can take very basic human emotions — envy, guilt, the desire for vengeance etc. — and magnify them until they’re terrifying. And hey…. that’s kind of true of writing for celebrity magazines too when I think about it.

And in one of your previous novels, Trashed, the heroine is working for a Hollywood celeb tabloid, using underhand means to get stories and going dumpster diving. Is this autobiographical in any way? (And could you explain what dumpster diving is to those of us who’ve never had to do it for a living?)

Ha! Yes. Outside of the murder stuff, and the fact it’s set in present day, TRASHED is pretty autobiographical I’m embarrassed to say…  One of my first jobs out of college was as a reporter for The Star. This was before its current glossy incarnation, when it was a down-and-dirty tabloid whose competition was the National Enquirer. Publicists refused to talk to us, celebs spit on us and slammed doors in our faces. So we had to resort to getting our information in other ways…. Posing as extras on the set of movies or cater waiters at weddings, crashing parties, hanging around the waiting rooms of plastic surgery wards, chatting up bouncers and yes, Dumpster diving… which means sifting through celebrity garbage cans in search of… I have no idea. A story? This was many years ago, Martyn. Anyway, a lot of that real-life experience found its way into TRASHED.

And have you any salacious Hollywood gossip you can pass along? Just between ourselves, obviously.

Hmmm…Oh, I know! What best-selling, darkly seductive female author is really a 6’2″ dude and his wife?

You missed out handsome. Now Lee Child gave what I think is the best description of your work: ‘A perfect blend of ice-cold suspense and warmhearted good humour. I’m not sure how she does it but believe me she does it.’ You seem to be able to combine dark, noirish plots with such a deft light touch without compromising on either. How do you manage it?

Oh thank you so much! I think it’s just the way I look at the world in general. Most of the time, I try to see the goodness in people and the humor in dark situations. It’s a survival tool more than anything else.  As for fiction, I think pure darkness loses its impact when it’s portrayed as such. You want to distance yourself, and I’m not big on writing that distances me. If I’m going to be involved and scared and everything else, I have to care. 

Is it true you have terrible taste in music?

 Absolutely, positively NOT. I have the best taste in music I know. And no, you cannot see my iPod… 

I’m not surprised. And finally, what next? More Brenna hopefully.

Yes! I’m finishing up revisions on INTO THE DARK — the sequel to AND SHE WAS, which will be out next February. I also just sold my first YA mystery, REALITY ENDS HERE — about a 14-year-old girl who’s on TV’s longest running reality show along with her six-year-old, sextuplet half-siblings, and whose life takes a dark turn when receives a gift, on camera, from her presumed dead dad. It was sold to PocketStar/ Simon and Schuster and it’s got lots of celebrity stuff and humor and murder in it.

And here’s an action shot of that play reading in San Francisco. I’m the tall one, obviously. Seated: Mark Billingham, Christa Faust, Brett Battles, Megan Abbott and Declan himself.

Thanks Alison, it’s been a blast, as always.

And here’s a link to Alison’s Amazon page. Here.

Better Never Stops

By Tania Carver

As I’m sure you’re aware – unless you’ve been living in a cave or recently crashed down on Mars – the Olympics have been on. And not just any old Olympics, the LONDON Olympics. Now, I realise this is a blog about crime writing and not sport but bear with me because I want to write about the Olympics. (And not just because watching them has taken the place of crime writing for the last fortnight. Honest. I’ve been working. Really.)

Now I’m not normally a fan of athletics, or much sport really, with the exception of football (or soccer as it’s incorrectly known in the colonies) and have a lifelong, if somewhat misplaced, passion for my hometown team Newcastle United. But I now live in (or rather near) London and this was something else. This was going to be a huge event in my adoptive hometown. Having said that, as it drew nearer I found myself getting less and less excited about the games. It seemed like it was going to be one huge corporate free for all, all branding and tax-avoidance, with the actual spirit of it ignored and forgotten. Plus construction costs were spiralling. The games bankrupted Greece and it looked like it was going to do the same for us. Then I decided I wanted to be on holiday when the games were on. Or at least just get out of London and stay out. I’d gone from being enthusiastic to indifferent to adversarial.   

And then I saw the opening ceremony.

Danny Boyle, a film director who I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you about, was in charge, along with writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. And they managed to do something that was both a spectacular and awesome spectacle and a personal, heart-warming and life-affirming performance piece. And it made me feel something else. Something I have never, ever felt. Proud of being British.

As I said, I’m from Newcastle. It’s a city on the border of England and Scotland and often feels like it belongs to neither one country nor the other. The major roads stop a hundred miles south and don’t start up again until they’re over the border. Growing up there in the seventies as I did made you feel very isolated and disenfranchised from the rest of the country which is totally London-centric. And that’s why the popular concept of being English or being British never seemed to reach Newcastle.

I should add that all of this was, in hindsight, great for the formation of a writer. The perpetual outsider, the observer, the non-participant. Brilliant. But not at the time. Not when you have to grow up and experience that.

But now I live just outside London (interestingly, with that observer perspective again – near it but not of it) and that’s where the Olympics were being held. And that opening ceremony – which I watched under duress, expecting a huge, embarrassing car crash of an event – was wonderful. Cynicism just dropped away – and that is a hell of an admission for me, steeped in the stuff, to make – and I loved it. Because as I said, it made me proud to be British.

So why – and how – did it do that? I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And I’ve reached the conclusion that the ceremony represented the kind of Britain I believe in. That I recognised and want to be – and hope I am – part of. It spoke of the things that our country should be most proud of – children’s literature and literature in general, the fantastic popular culture we have, especially the musical diversity, our multicultural make up.  The trades unions who fought for the rights of working people. The sufferagettes. And our NHS, the best free health service in the world. It was an unashamedly liberal, left wing ceremony and it was fantastic.

There were dissenting voices, all from the right. The Daily Mail, a far-right tabloid (in fact the only British paper to have supported Hitler) wrote a hideously racist piece denouncing one section of the ceremony showing a white woman married to a black man and their mixed race children as unbelievable, saying no intelligent, middle aged white woman would do that. The fact that Jessica Ennis, a British athlete of mixed race parentage won gold in the heptathlon flung their remarks right back in their faces. It was described as ‘multicultural crap’ by one Conservative MP. When Mo Farah, a Somalian asylum seeker who settled in our country and is now a UK citizen won two golds and spoke of his pride at being British the Conservative MP retreated.

So yes. Proud at being British. Or at least proud to identify myself as standing for the same things that the ceremony portrayed. And, judging by the hugely positive response and the viewing figures, I wasn’t alone in thinking that. I took to Twitter straight after the ceremony to see what others thought. And everyone – with the exception of those previously mentioned dissenters – were as positive and uncynical as me. The interesting thing was the response from my friends in America. Nobody, even friends that I thought I was so similar to, got it. And that made me, perversely, even more proud and even a bit unique.

I tried to find the opening ceremony online but could only find this. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. And yes, it really is her:

And then the games started. As I said earlier, I’m not that interested in sports that don’t involve a football. But I got drawn in, watching the cycling, then the running then . . . everything. Even things I didn’t understand like dressage, which seems to involve making a horse dance mincingly to music, or tae kwon do which largely consists of one person trying to kick another one in the face. On Saturday night, I sat with family and friends cheering at the TV as Mo Farar (my new hero) won gold for Britain in the 5,000 metres. Yes, cheering.

And after all the events I would watch the interviews with both the winners and losers. And, being a writer, I was trying to find some kind of similarity or common ground with the process of competing with the process of writing. At first I didn’t think there was any. Or at least nothing I could find. But that didn’t stop me looking. And gradually some similarities began to emerge.

As writers, we sit in a room and write. Yes, I know, most of that time is spent staring at the wall, or making coffee, or on Twitter, but essentially we are writing. Athletes are training to compete against others and against themselves. To be the best they can. Writers should be doing the same in their own way. We have to better our last effort. We have to be constantly moving forward. We should never be happy with what we have achieved (or at least not for very long) and we should always be striving to do better.

Another comparable thing I found was that the camaraderie among athletes seems to be very similar to that among crime writers. One of us does well, it reflects well on all of us. One of us wins something, the rest respond by trying to raise their game. They seem to genuinely like each other and whatever rivalry exists, even between citizens of different countries, is a healthy one.

The one glaring difference is with the idea of competition. Athletes are there to win. And they do that by finishing first. Writing is very different in that respect. To quote from Trevor Griffiths in his play ‘Comedians’ (one of my favourite plays of all time), ‘We work through applause, not for it.’ And also, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being famous. But be good first. Because you can never be good later.’ Those lines are like my mission statement as a writer.

Last year at this time, London was being torn apart by riots. Whether you believed the rioters had a point or not, we saw, in the carnage, destruction, assault and even murder humanity at its worse and most base. We saw kids disenfranchised and disillusioned hitting out with undirected rage and anger. For the last two weeks we have seen kids, a lot of them from the same backgrounds as the rioters of a year ago, being given an outlet, a focus. A goal. And a chance to be the best they can be.

So by the time you read this, the Olympics will be over. What the legacy will be, I don’t know. Whether it has bankrupted the country I couldn’t say either. Will we all be fitter, more positive people as a result? Or will we go back to the same cynical state we were in before? I don’t know. But for two weeks in August 2012, there was a palpable, but rare, sense of hope. Of belief. Let’s hope we haven’t seen the last of it.

If you want to read more, Tim Adams in The Guardian says it a lot more eloquently than me. 

THE THINGS WE DO WE NEVER THOUGHT WE’D DO

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

 

Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Heath Ledger, Notorious B.I.G., Tupak Shakur, Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Jim Morrison, River Phoenix, Buddy Holly, Aaliyah, John Lennon, Reggie Lewis, Ritchie Valens, Bob Marley, Jim Croce, Bruce Lee, Charlie Parker, John Belushi, Martin Luther King, Rudolph Valentino, Eva Peron, Alexander the Great, King Tut and Jesus Christ.

They all died too young. They died in the prime of their lives. They became icons and heros for the things they did during their short stay on planet Earth.

But if any of them had been allowed to live deep into old age, would they have retained that sheen of heroism? Would Sid Vicious be doing late night infomercials selling CD sets of classic rock, like Roger Daltry? Did Roger see that one coming? Makes me wonder about that lyric of his, “Hope I die before I get old…”

Remember how pissed off Jim Morrison got when his band members sold “Light My Fire” to Muzak for a car commercial? This was long before Eric Clapton did those fucking beer commercials. We called that “selling out,” back in the day. Now it’s called “a diversified portfolio.”

If Jim Morrison hadn’t died young, would he have lived long enough to embarrass his younger self? Even though he died drunk and fat, he still died a rock star. He didn’t go out selling used cars.

I bet David Lee Roth thought he’d be a rock star forever, and then he became DJ “Diamond” Dave doing Top Forty Faves.

Sometimes it’s best to die young, if you really care about leaving a legacy behind.

Of course, you have to have a huge impact doing something first or else dying young is just really pathetically sad. So, to become an icon, one must first capture the attention of the world, and then suddenly, tragically, die. Young.

If one continues to live, one must constantly reinvent oneself in order to recapture the attention of the world. Like Madonna. She’s fighting it all the way to the grave. If she dies suddenly her obit will still say that she died in her prime.

And there’s nothing worse than watching our great icons not-die, instead drifting into oblivion, or drug-addiction (sans overdose), or hoarding or, finally, reality TV.

I find it terribly difficult to watch Howard Stern and Steve Tyler clown-up for what is essentially a new wave of The Gong Show remakes. We know they’re only doing it for the almighty dollar, which makes it seem like our heros can be bought and sold. I think Jimi Hendrix thanks God every day for taking his life before American Idol came knocking. Would he have resisted? We’ll never know.

It all just makes me think about the things we do that we never thought we’d do when we were young. And they’re not bad things, necessarily, just different things. Sometimes they actually prove our growth as human beings.

Like, I never thought I’d be a fan of Mariachi music. I mean, really. I grew up on rock and then had a healthy education of classical and jazz. When my younger son, Noah, began violin lessons I was excited about someday hearing him play in a string quartet. But, no, his music teacher put him into a Mariachi band (really?) and he’s hooked. So, now I hang out at the local church or crash the Quinceanera in hopes of catching a blast of trumpets and strumming guitarrons.

I also never thought I’d fall out of shape. That’s another way of dying young, I suppose. Elvis didn’t die quite young enough, so he bloated up. Like Orson Welles. Their bodies were saying, “Give up already! You’ve gone on ten years longer than you should have. Don’t you want to be an icon?”

I think it’s interesting that we remember Elvis young and thin, while our image of Orson Welles is quite the opposite (“We will sell no wine before its time”).

Since I haven’t done anything iconic yet I can afford to fall out of shape and work my way back into shape again before I make an impact on American society. I still have the opportunity to die young (well, relatively) and/or bloat up for ten years before bursting a liver.

Or maybe I’ll age gracefully after having a solid career in the arts. Like Jimmy Stewart or Bob Hope or Elmore Leonard or Michael Connelly. That’s classy, but not quite as dramatic as hearing the sirens approach Chateau Marmont after John Belushi’s demise.

And don’t you think it’s kind of weird that Elton John and David Bowie are still around, all mellow and out-of-touch, after the fuss they made when they were young? They could have been truly iconic, but they missed their chance. I mean, geez, Elton’s got a high-end retail clothing store in Caesar’s Palace. And he’s been knighted, for godsakes.  By the Queen of England.  Did he see that coming? He could have been the Pinball Wizard forever, if only he’d died young.

I just hope I live long enough to get my own page on Wikipedia. Then I’ll know I’ve made a difference.

Or maybe I should just forget all this nonsense and finish my book.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

What’s In A Name?

Zoë Sharp

How influenced are you by the author’s name on the cover of a book? I’m not talking about the latest bestseller, or those authors you pre-order before you even know the title. I’m talking about new-to-you names. People you’ve never heard of before.

I had the pleasure of interviewing fellow crime author Jaden Terrell for my WildCard Tuesday slot at Murderati this week. Jaden’s real name is Elizabeth―and I’m not letting any cats out of bags with that, as she talks about it on the blog. As an alternative, she chose Jaden from a list of baby names used for both boys and girls. It actually means ‘bravery, fighter and believer’, so it’s a great choice for a writer as well as being non-gender specific.

Elizabeth, as Jaden points out, is a very feminine name, and potential readers instantly pigeonholed her as a cosy writer because of it. I wonder if people did the same thing to Queen Elizabeth I of England when she rode out to make her famous speech at Tilbury before the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada?

Hmm, maybe not.

Still, with publishing these days seen as much from a marketing-the-author point of view as marketing the book itself, possibly alienating a large section of your possible readers before they’ve even picked up your novel might be seen as unwise.

When I first started writing my Charlie Fox crime thriller series, it never occurred to me that anyone would take my name—or my gender, for that matter—into account. Surely, I thought in my naivety, it’s the book that counts. People either like your voice, or they don’t. They like your characters, or they don’t. They like your stories, your eye on life, your descriptive narrative, or they don’t.

But time and again in the eleven years since I was first published in fiction, I’ve heard opinion voiced such as these:

“Oh, women can’t write thrillers.”

“My husband won’t read female authors.”

“What can a woman possibly write with authority about cars/guns/fight scenes?”

Now, I have always hated being told I can’t do something based on nothing more than the fact I have lumps in the front of my shirt. But, on the other hand, I don’t want to be given artificial prominence (if you’ll pardon the phrase) for the same reason, either.

(Great this, isn’t it? Want one? Find them here.)

I recall having a bit of a verbal set-to in the bar at CrimeFest last year with a particular author who was campaigning for positive discrimination for ‘us wimmin’ and seemed totally taken aback that I would not welcome or accept such help.

OK, so I’d be very upset (think the same kind of ‘very upset’ as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible I, right before he blew up the aquarium) if I thought I’d been excluded from some prize shortlist, for example, solely on the grounds that one of the judges didn’t like—or somehow disapproved of—female crime thriller writers. But then again I’d be equally annoyed if I thought I’d been included purely because the judging panel felt they needed a token women to round out the numbers. If my work doesn’t stand on its own merits, why would I want such consolation praise?

When I first looked at expanding my repertoire outside the current Charlie Fox series, it was suggested that I might need to use a different pen-name. My first inclination was to plump for something non-gender specific. Not initials, necessarily, but a perhaps name like Jaden which doesn’t give any immediate clues.

After the confusion that the name ‘Zoë’ frequently causes—not to mention the irritating extraneous ‘e’ that people often graft onto the end of ‘Sharp’ like some mutant extra limb—the prospect of a more simple name was quite appealing.

And something short because—as PD Martin pointed out in her comment—it takes up less space on the cover and therefore can be writ larger if necessary. And possibly something that placed me differently on the shelves.

But now I rather think I’ve changed my mind. (Female prerogative, perhaps?)

Some of the comments on Jaden’s post vocalised why.

You see, I don’t really want to succeed in my chosen profession by pretending to be something I’m not—i.e. a man, or at the very least some androgynous entity. Yes, I can shoot, and sail, and ride a motorcycle, and strip an engine. But that doesn’t make me a bloke in a skirt, as this pic perhaps demonstrates.

If, as Jaden mentioned, I was writing a first-person male character, maybe that would be different. I loved Robert B Parker’s books, but the Sunny Randall ones were my least favourite, and I think that had a lot to do with the first-person female protag/male author combination.

But Charlie as a character spoke to me in first-person, so that’s how I wrote her. Other characters are talking to me in close-third, so that’s how I’m writing them. And if I’m going the ‘digital original’ route—a wonderful description for which I can thank ex-Murderato colleague, Rob Gregory Browne—then sticking with my existing name is a positive advantage.

Providing I describe the book clearly, so readers know if it’s part of the Charlie Fox series, a new standalone, a supernatural thriller or the first of a trilogy, does it matter?

What do you think, ‘Ratis? Should authors make their gender plain? Does it matter? Do you find yourself leaning towards reading more male writers, or more female writers? And should authors write under different names if they’re crossing different genres or different series, even?

This week’s Word of the week is cavillation, meaning a trifling objection, from cavil, to make petty objections or to quibble.

Serving the Genre, Respecting the Genre, Transcending the Genre

By David Corbett

Starting tomorrow, I begin my second class through Chuck Palahniuk’s online writing university, Litreactor. This one is titled The Character of Crime.

The class deals with the importance of knowing your subgenre in order to better understand reader expectations so you can not only meet those expectations but exceed them.

I also stress the need to create characters with sufficient depth and complexity so your story has a chance to achieve not just popular but critical success.

There is still room for four more students in the class, so if you’re interested, sign up now.

I realize I seem to be harping on the same theme as two weeks ago  – the potential for greatness in the crime genre. My apologies if I seem a bore. Two weeks back I was inspired by Don Winslow’s marvelous talk at the Book Passage Mystery Conference. This time I’m just restating my fundamental belief that this is a great genre that owes apologies to no one.

Either way, I find myself returning to a debate we often have in this particular corner of the literary world:

What does it mean to serve the genre, to respect the genre, and to transcend the genre?

I’m normally one of those people who finds the phrase “transcend the genre” more than a little patronizing. It’s so often used to describe the works of literary writers who go slumming in the Naked City to make a few bucks – and who often not only don’t “transcend” the genre, they fail to respect or even understand it.

Literary writers often think of genre conventions as mere formula, and automatically recoil. This is, to my mind, exactly the wrong way to look at it.

Rather, if you’re going to try your hand at a genre and not just wander in as some kind of snooty tourist, you need to know what makes the thing work, and why. Anything less simply reveals your arrogance and ignorance – and it’s been my experience that arrogance and ignorance all too often go neatly hand in glove.

But by saying we need to serve or respect the genre, I’m not saying that we can’t expand our usual understanding of what a crime story can do.

One thing I’ll emphasize in the class: The difference between a good crime story and a great one often lies in seeing in its subtlest, most far-reaching or most profound terms the underlying thematic premise of the particular subgenre you choose.

The detective genre, for example, is fundamentally about: How can we determine the truth?

This idea is as subtle and as vast as you care to make it. It’s no accident, for example, that Chinatown is based on the oldest detective story in the Western canon – Oedipus the King – or that it resonates with the same theme: the intrinsic danger in presuming the truth can be known.

And in Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson doesn’t just solve the crime and overcome his fear of heights, he tracks Freud’s understanding of male sexuality, from the pleasure principle (Babs) to romantic idealization (Madeline) to the reality principle (Judy) – with tragic results, as in Chinatown, due to a fundamental lack of knowledge.

At the heart of every detective story lies a mystery – something that baffles our usual understanding of things – and there is nothing confining the limits of that mystery except the reach of your own imagination.

The crime subgenre, which is more about the battle between police and criminals than about solving a mystery, fundamentally addresses the balance between individual freedom and social conformity.

A world run by criminals would be a Hobbesian state of nature, with no rules, the war of all against all, and ultimate power residing with those who possess money and weapons. A world run by the police would be – you guessed it – a police state, with everyone guilty of something, and paranoia and suspicion underlying every act.

Every society seeks a balance between these two polarities, and the crime story is a great vehicle for exploring what it would mean to move the goal posts in one direction or the other.

You can also ask fundamental questions such as what makes a given act a crime, or to whom do you owe your loyalty, and answer them in as ingenious a fashion as you please. Two great Boston crime writers, Dennis Lehane and Chuck Hogan, do this brilliantly in such books as Mystic River and Prince of Thieves.

Crime stories that feature the criminal as hero – like The Thomas Crowne Affair  – often ask us to reconsider the value of the creative individual in a society defined by compromise, mediocrity, and conformity.

The criminal in such stories is often devoted to excellence – and risk – in a way that others in the society are not. In a very fundamental way, the criminal in such stories is a stand-in for the artist, whose role is every bit as challenging, enigmatic, potentially disturbing – even revolutionary. (It’s no great surprise that real revolutionaries are often described as terrorists or criminals by those hoping to trivialize their political aims.)

Other stories with criminal heroes, like The Winter of Frankie Machine, Goodfellas or In Bruges, achieve greatness by forcing the criminal hero to perform a moral accounting of his entire life.

The thriller, which combines elements of the detective story with the horror story, pits the seeker of the truth against relentless pressure and danger. It shares certain traits with the epic and myth, and like those ancient types of stories it can be expanded to show the individual hero, through great sacrifice and personal transformation, redeeming or redefining the society in which he or she lives.

In other words, the genre is perfectly capable of delivering big themes and great art, and it doesn’t need interlopers to pull it off.

This is something I’ll continue to hammer away at here, in my classes, and in my own work. I love the crime genre. I think more than any other form of story it represents our current mythology on how we live. And if you see it in that context, you can achieve something truly original and meaningful and profound.

* * * * *

So, Murderateros – What crime stories do you think have that spark of greatness?

When was the last time you had to defend crime stories against the snoots?

What themes in the crime story affect you most deeply?

Note: I’ll be traveling again today, and won’t be able to check comments until this evening when I get home on the west coast. Don’t let that stop you from chiming in, though. This community is more than capable of having a rousing discussion without me as room monitor.

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: I was visiting the east coast this week, and on Saturday had the chance to visit with former Murderati regular Cornelia Read and her beau, the actor Peter Riegert. Peter shared a clip from a former student, the beautiful and gifted and quite tall Storm Large (her real name, interestingly enough). It’s a number from her one-woman show and I can’t get it out of my head.

WARNING: This track has quite explicit language and a perspective on sex and womanhood some may find offensive. If you think you might fall into that camp, by all means skip it. But if you’re up for it, this is one of the wittiest, raunchiest, most wryly ironic and unapologetically non-PC performances you’re likely to see in quite some time. (Real catchy tune, too.)

Hardboiled Hero, Softboiled Heart ― Jaden Terrell’s Jared McKean mysteries

Zoë Sharp

I’m delighted to welcome to Murderati the talented Jaden Terrell, author of the Tennessee PI Jared McKean books. Her debut was RACING THE DEVIL, published in January this year. Book two in the series, A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT, is hot off the press now!

Zoë Sharp: For people not yet familiar with Jared, how would you describe him?

Jaden Terrell: At 36, Jared is divorced from a woman he’s still in love with and coming to terms with his unjust termination from Nashville’s Murder Squad. He’s loyal and stubborn, an animal lover and horse whisperer with a soft spot for kids and for women in jeopardy. He’s the guy who will move your furniture three years after you break up. And did I mention that he’s hot?

ZS: What made you want to write crime, and what was your path to publication?

JT: When I started writing, I thought I’d write epic fantasy trilogies like J.R.R. Tolkien. Then I saw an ad for the St. Martin’s Press First Private Detective Novel Contest and thought, “I’ve always wanted to write a mystery. I think I’ll try it.” I received the submission guidelines six weeks before the deadline and turned it in right under the wire. Of course, it didn’t win, but the judge sent me an encouraging note saying my work was publishable but that she’d gone with something more cleverly wordsmithed. By which I’m sure she meant “edited.” In the process, I fell in love with Jared and knew I wanted to write more about him. I took the looooooong path to publication. The short version is, a friend of mine published the first book, which later came to be RACING THE DEVIL, through iUniverse for me as a gift. After a long learning curve and an extensive edit, it was eventually picked up by a micro-press called Night Shadows Press. Shortly after that, I met my agent, Jill Marr, at the Killer Nashville conference and signed A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT, the second book in the series, with her. Within a few months, she sold that book to Martin and Judith Shepard of The Permanent Press. They asked to see RACING THE DEVIL, and after reading it in one weekend, asked if I could get the rights back from Night Shadows. I could, and The Permanent Press contracted for that one as well. Basically, my path to publication was writing the same book over and over until I finally got it right!

One of the things that draws me to crime fiction is that, in real life, justice isn’t always served, and often we’re left with questions that will never be answered. When I was 18, my father was killed, supposedly by his own hand. The more we learned, the more likely it seemed that his new wife was the one who pulled the trigger. We’ll never know for sure, and if it’s true, we’ll never know why. But in a mystery, the killer is always revealed and punished, and you always find out the “why.”

ZS: Wow, that makes my own catalyst for writing crime seem very mild by comparison! You have said that when Jared McKean first introduced himself to you inside your head, you immediately abandoned the feisty female detective you were writing at the time to give him a series of his own. What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing across gender for you?

JT: Well, it wasn’t exactly immediate. I argued with him about it at first, but he waited me out. One of the advantages of writing a male character is that, even though we have some things in common, he’s clearly separate from me. One of the problems I had with the feisty female detective was that she was either so different from me that I couldn’t identify with her, or so much like me that I couldn’t make her plunge into dangerous situations (“What? Are you crazy? You go in the basement, and I’m just going to lock all the doors in this car and dial 911.”). But I’ve always had a lot of male friends, and I immediately understood Jared and his need to be a hero, even if he couldn’t articulate it to himself. There’s only one disadvantage I can think of, which is that some people, once they know I’m a woman, can’t stop looking for all the ways I got him wrong. One woman gave me a list of things that men don’t do, say, feel, or understand. The very next book I read was by John Sandford—a man’s man if there ever was one—and he did every single one of the things on the list. Once I was told, “Men don’t know what a doily is. They’d call it a coaster.”

I said, “Men call things what they are—and every southern man knows what a doily is!” But the next time I was out with my husband, I happened to see one, and I said, “Honey, what would you call that?”

He looked puzzled and said, “It’s a doily. Well, I guess you could call it a . . . what is it? . . . A coaster, but that’s not exactly right.”

As my husband says, “Men are not monolithic.”

ZS: I know my name has caused me problems in the past—nobody has any idea how to cope with the umlaut over the ‘ë’—but you have also been through a name change. What’s the story behind that?

JT: When my friend published the first book for me, we used my real name, Elizabeth—a very feminine name. Booksellers would try to hand-sell it to readers they knew would like it, and the readers would point to the name and say, “No, look, it says Elizabeth. I don’t read cosies.” Nothing anyone could say would convince the reader that it was a gritty detective novel. On the other hand, people who picked it up because it said Elizabeth were looking for a cosy and were disappointed that it wasn’t one. I was completely missing my market. It doesn’t help that I look like a kindergarten teacher. My real name and a typical head shot would completely misrepresent the book. I found Jaden in the unisex section of a baby name book. [I didn’t even know there were such things! I must get one—ZS] Loved it. My agent loved it. We found an ambiguous but dramatic-looking photo to complete the image. And the funny thing is, people like this book much better by Jaden than they did by Elizabeth.

ZS: Did Jared McKean arrive fully formed, with his Down syndrome son, horse-riding abilities, and complicated relationship with his ex-wife, or did you discover his backstory slowly?

JT: I knew a few things about him—that he had horses and that he had a leather bomber jacket that had belonged to his father in the Vietnam War. I worked the rest of it out over a couple of days. It started out as a methodical process of discovery—what did I know, love, or do that he might also know, love, or do? I had a red belt in Tae Kwan Do, so he has a black belt. I gave him my 12-year-old Akita and my elderly quarter horse (he’s 32 now). I gave him a son with Down syndrome because I taught special ed. for twelve years, and I knew that having a child with a disability would give him depth and make him more than just a typical tough guy. I had recently lost a close friend to AIDS, so I gave him a friend with the disease. I thought it would be interesting to have a tough guy from the Bible Belt torn between what he’s always been taught about homosexuality and the fact that his best friend is gay. It quickly became clear that Jared’s defining characteristic is he never, ever lets go of what he loves. Once I knew that about him, everything else fell into place. There’s a lot I don’t know about him though. Early on, when I was asking all these questions, trying to figure out who he was, I asked if he had any siblings other than his older brother Randall. I got the sudden sense that he didn’t know, but that there was something unresolved in that area. When I started to write book three, there it was.

(ZS: and just in case you were wondering, Jaden has sent me a pic of Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Wadau, who she swears IS Jared McKean. And having seen him and read the book, I could second that …)

ZS: A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT is full of nice dialogue between McKean and the other characters. I particularly liked a snippet of this conversation between McKean and his former police partner, Frank Campanella:

I leaned forward, put my hands flat on his desk, and said, “Frank, I need to see that file.”

His eyebrows bunched together, wild silver bristles that made him look like a disgruntled badger. “I just told you, I don’t have it.”

“But you could get it.”

“Sure, if I wanted to spend my golden years saying, ‘Welcome to Walmart.’ ”

Do you have a file called ‘Nice Lines’ which you add stuff like this to?

JT: I wish I did. Sometimes I get ambitious and decide I’ll carry a notebook around and write down all those fantastic lines that pop into my head at odd times. It usually lasts about two days, and then I lose the notebook.

ZS: I lost a notebook like that while I was in NYC a few years ago. I’ve no idea what anybody might make of it if they found it! How did the storyline form for A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT, with its black magic overtones and which delves into the Goth subculture? Is this a subject that’s always interested you?

JT: In 1996, a group of teenagers inspired by a vampire role-playing game murdered the parents of one member of the group. Their leader claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire and had crossed the line from playing the game to living it. There were several other “vampire” murders around that time, and I was both appalled by the violence and intrigued by how someone so clearly evil and disturbed could exert so much control over others. I’ve been a role player since college, (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, and yes, VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE), and so I wanted to explore the line between gamers—people playing a game about vampires—and people who are playing at being vampires. I’ve also always been interested in magic and the occult, not in practicing it, but in what draws people to it, what they expect from it. There’s a line between dark and light, and it’s the line that I wanted to explore.  

ZS: What’s next for Jared McKean?

JT: In the third book, his former partner on the Murder Squad asks him to come and identify the body of a young Asian woman found in the dumpster behind Jared’s office. In her hand, she was holding a picture of Jared’s father taken during the war in Vietnam. There’s a Vietnamese woman and two small children in the picture, and Jared’s office phone number is scrawled on the back. The book will take him into the world of human trafficking, and secrets from his father’s past will come back to haunt him.

ZS: And what’s next for Jaden Terrell? You are one of the contributors to NOW WRITE! MYSTERIES and also have an online writing course on your website. More how-to books? Teaching? Or do you fancy going with a standalone novel?

JT: Everything! I love to teach and hope to start teaching workshops soon, and I have a how-to book in the works. The third Jared McKean book is in the revision stage, and the fourth is in the research and planning stage. There’s also a standalone thriller that I hope to finish sometime in 2013.

ZS: What question do you always hope to be asked in these interviews, but never are?

JT: What does it feel like to be so ravishingly beautiful and obscenely wealthy?

ZS: LOL. Good answer! Jaden, thank you so much for stopping by. Lastly, what’s your favourite word or phrase? And your least-favourite word or phrase?

JT: My favorite word is skulduggery. My least favorite word is one I can’t say in public. It starts with a “c.”

Intrigued by Jaden’s work? Here’s the skinny on A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT:

At thirty-six, private detective Jared McKean is coming to terms with his unjust dismissal from the Nashville murder squad and an unwanted divorce from a woman he still loves. Jared is a natural horseman and horse rescuer whose son has Down syndrome, whose best friend has AIDS, and whose teenaged nephew, Josh, has fallen under the influence of a dangerous fringe of the Goth subculture.

 When the fringe group’s leader—a mind-manipulating sociopath who considers himself a vampire—is found butchered and posed across a pentagram, Josh is the number one suspect. Jared will need all his skills as a private investigator and former homicide detective to match wits with the most terrifying killer he has ever seen. When he learns that his nephew is next on the killer’s list, Jared will risk his reputation, his family, and his life in a desperate attempt to save the boy he loves like a son.

Read The First Ten Pages

ZS: So, over to you Murderatos. Questions for Jaden? And what are your favourite and least-favourite words?

Another man’s gold

by Pari

Saturday yard sale. Card tables covered with the detritus of excess — too many impulse buys — no way to make order of any of it:

  Dick & Jane refrigerator magnets
  only-once used complete fondue set (with cans of “eco-flame”)
  the weird wrought iron candelabra given as a wedding gift and so ugly the people who bought it must’ve been feeling hostile that day
  the outgrown silvery flapper dress that was worn for Halloween
  the rollerblades, black with purple trim, bought with the hope of exercise
  boxes of books , hardcover and paperbacks, read and reread

“How much?”
“Would you take a dime for that?”
“Does it work?”
“Are all the pieces in this puzzle?”
“Do you have anything old?”
“What’s this?”
“It doesn’t look like sterling.”

We sit under a 50+ year old Ponderosa pine, its shade enough to drop the temperature 10 degrees compared to the eye-scorching sunlight just three feet away.

Cars pass
Slow down
Swerve to the wrong side of the road.

“You got any furniture?”
“How long you going to stay open?”
“You moving?”

Hours drag . ..  8 am, 9 am, noon . . . The Tabu-scented candle begins to melt, its strong sweet ‘n’ spicy smell evoking visions of lime green leisure suits and bad haircuts.

A car stops.

“You’ve got good books.”
“Really? I’ll take it.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Found it.”

Conversations pass the time and amuse:

An Afghani man shakes his head, his thick slicked down gray hair not moving even a millimeter. In a thick accent (though he’s been in the country since 1991), he says, “The years go by too quickly. Yesterday I was thirteen, today I’m fifty-eight.”

He walks away with nothing, but turns to my kids. “Always listen to your parents. Always! Do what they say. They know best.” He pauses. “Your parents are the only ones who’ll tell you the truth. Young men will lie. They’re all crooks.”

My kids smile politely.

A woman in a long Indian cotton skirt, braless too — as groovy as they come — brown hair hanging down past her waist:  “Oh my God! I can’t believe you’ve got this. You’ve just saved me having to figure out how to make helmets for my Transformer costumes.”

She leaves with four complete sets of bright red Tae Kwon Do protective gear and a custom-made wood and silver hair pin and ten books and a ring.

A neighbor stops by.  “Your signs are too small.”

He puts out bigger ones from his own past sales. More people come.

Most leave with small purchases:

  A pack of playing cards from Russia
  A box of clunky old computer keyboards
  A bag of multi-colored plastic beads . . .

Tonight: Sushi!

______
My question to you:
What did you do last weekend?