Proof

By Allison Brennan

I’m deep into reading the page proofs for IF I SHOULD DIE, book three in the Lucy Kincaid series. I really love this final stage of the publication process–at least the final stage on my end. I see the book as it’s going to be printed. It’s the last time I can make changes–ensuring the copyedit changes were made correctly, double checking the timeline, tweaking words and phrases. No major changes can be made at this point, but I often find the little errors–repetitive words or phrases, for example.

I also read most of my book out loud during this final stage, so it takes me longer to go through the proofs than most authors. Reading out loud helps me make sure the rhythm is right, especially in dialogue. To me, an author’s voice has as much to do with the rhythm of the story as with anything else. It has to feel right, or I’ll tweak it. There’s nothing I can explain or map out–I just know my rhythm is off when the story doesn’t sound right. It’s ironic, because I’m a very visual storyteller–meaning, I *see* the story unfold, I don’t hear it. I write what my POV character sees and feels. When I revise, I’m looking for for the visual story structure. But this final stage is all about story rhythm.

Which made me think about all the writing guidelines and story structure. I’m a big fan of Christopher Vogler, and have a well-worn copy of THE WRITER’S JOURNEY. I’ve never used the hero’s journey to plot or structure a novel, but I have see the hero’s journey in all my books … after the fact. So I can identify when my protagonist crosses the threshold. I know when I hit the midpoint of the story–and at that point whether my book is on the long or short side. Once I hit the third act, I feel the momentum of the story.

When I read the book in its near-final form, I see all that laid out, and it feels almost magical because I didn’t plan it that way. I remember when I first read Vogler. I had already sold my first book, and someone recommended it to me. I was reading it while doing stress tests during my last pregnancy–one hour of doing basically nothing. I saw how my debut novel followed the hero’s journey and it stunned me. But it shouldn’t, because in the introduction Vogler says:

“All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams and movies. They are known collectively as The Hero’s Journey.” He goes on to quote Joseph Campbell who “exposed for the first time the pattern that lies behind every story ever told.” And the key for me, that “all storytelling, consciously or not, follows the ancient patterns of myth. … The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer is unaware of them.”

I believe this is true, whether you plot or don’t plot; whether you consciously assess the hero’s journey as you write or don’t see it until the end of the story.

That’s why I love the final page proofs. I can see the structure of my story clearly for the first time, and each and every book follows the hero’s journey. Not rigidly–because the hero’s journey is as flexible and diverse as people. It’s not a formula, but a guideline into the human psyche in how we perceive stories. And that’s why it always marvels me that the hero’s journey is always there at the end.

But the steps of the journey are not the only “tests” of whether a book is good or not. Sol Stein wrote that the first page was the most important. If a reader picks up a book in the bookstore, reads the first page, then turns the page, they are more likely to buy the book. If they don’t turn the page, they almost always put the book back on the shelf.

Agent Noah Lukeman has a writing book called THE FIRST FIVE PAGES–and you guessed it, he claims they are the most important in any book. Many agents and editors say they know whether a book is good after the first five pages. Some give the author more time if the writing is there, but many don’t go beyond the beginning.

The Campaign for the American Reader has the “Page 69” test. They quote from John Sutherland’s HOW TO READ A NOVEL:

“Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works. Rule One, then: browse powerfully and read page 69.”

There’s also the midpoint of the book. For me, the midpoint is just as important as the turning points at the end of each “act.” Some claim that at the midpoint, the protagonist hits rock bottom (or near rock bottom) where it doesn’t seem like it can get any worse, or a false victory, where everything seems to be going great (but of course, it’s not.) In police procedures, the midpoint is often where the protagonist thinks they’ve figured out the crime, identified the suspect, made an arrest, and all is right in the world. Case closed … then right after something happens and she releases she has NOTHING, and is worse off than at the beginning.

Of course, there are infinite variations and ideas for the midpoint–like one main character is at the all-time high, while the other is at the all-time low.

And then there are the readers who have to read the end of the book FIRST. (Yes, I know some of these insane people, they drive me crazy. But there are more of them out there than you think!)

All these “tests” — first lines, first pages, page 69, the midpoint, the ending — are supposed to help the reader decide whether they should read the book.

Ironically, I don’t use any of them.

When writing this blog, I looked at the “tests” in my proofs for IF I SHOULD DIE. The midpoint is critical–during the midpoint chapter, my hero Sean Rogan learns some important information about the villain, but he doesn’t know how it all fits. At the end of the chapter, he gets a warning from an unknown source (who may be a good guy or a bad guy or neutral) that the bad guys know what flight his girlfriend, Lucy Kincaid, is going to be on. That tip completely changes their plans and sets into motion a series of events that go from bad to worse.

All my midpoints tend to have story changing elements. In my debut novel THE PREY, one of the main characters is murdered and that changes the motivation of the hero. In SEE NO EVIL, the prime suspect ends up dead.

The Page 69 test in DIE gives the reader part of a barroom conversation that offers up more questions for my hero and heroine than answers. My first three pages are the prologue which is one of the creepiest prologues I’ve written–a guy treks into an abandoned mine to visit the frozen body of the woman he loves. Chapter One begins with Sean and Lucy in bed right after morning sex while on vacation in the Adirondack mountains when they smell smoke. I remember in my first draft, it took six or seven pages to get to the smoke, and I knew as soon as I started editing that it was way too long–even though the six pages were interesting, there was no action. By the end of page two, we know that Sean’s helping a family friend who has been the victim of sabotage while getting a new resort ready to open, that this isn’t supposed to be a big case because Sean and Lucy are expecting to enjoy a well-deserved vacation before Lucy starts her training at Quantico. And then–well, it definitely doesn’t go as planned. 🙂

Apply one of these tests to a book you’re reading now and share with us–avoiding spoilers if possible (or at least identify them!)

The Muse, When She Want to Dance, You Dance

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

The title sounds better when said in a Jamaican accent. I don’t know why, but it does.

Lately I’ve been sitting down to write and I stare at the current scene and instead of moving forward I look at the people in the cafe and I think something completely off-track, I think about how everyone has an orifice or two in their body that leads to the inside of their body which allows them to consume solids and liquids and evacuate liquids or semi-solids (gross) and they walk around like this doesn’t bother them, like it’s normal to have these holes in their bodies, and for some reason their bodies don’t cave in around the holes, they stretch and compress and the holes remain, and the people act as if nothing about this seems odd and, I don’t know, if it were me I’D GO MAD.

After which time I focus on the page and re-read the sentence I wrote and discover it looks strangely dyslexic and I delete and start over again.

Where has my mind been lately?

I don’t remember writing like this when I was under deadline. On deadline I move forward confidently with the fear of legal consequences guiding my hand.

Even as I sit here now, at another favorite cafe, I stare at the fish in the aquarium, not because I’m lost or have nothing to do, but because the fish are staring at me, and I find this disturbing. I do not know what it is they want nor why they’ve chosen me as their target.

Am I just finding excuses not to write?

Why is writing my favorite and least favorite thing to do in the world? How can light be a particle and a wave at the same time?

Whatever’s going on in my head, it’s all good for the book, I tell myself. And then I think that the book has been outlined and I’m forty-thousand words in. I know the book I’m writing and there is no place for catostrophic abstract nonsense.

But is it really abstract, when the tilt of the earth’s axis adjusts a degree every ten thousand years and the resulting Ice Age could destroy us before we’ve gained a foothold on planets capable of sustaining human life? WHY IS THAT FISH STILL STARING AT ME?

I think it’s a stalling tactic. I don’t want to dive into my writing each day for fear that the best I can do might not be good enough. It’s a common trap. The fear of failure. When I was working a full-time job I had the excuse that there simply wasn’t enough time to produce good work. Therefore, if my work was lacking in any way I could simply point to the fact that I had been rushed.

I’m not rushed now. I’ve been working on this book for a very long time. I don’t know exactly how long, and I’m not going to run the numbers.

When I’ve talked about this before people have sent emails saying they hope I get past my writer’s block. But I’m not blocked. I know the story, I’ve written my outline, I’m ready for action. What slows me is that I want every paragraph to represent my very best work. And why shouldn’t it? I’ve done all this background stuff so that I can concentrate on writing a “finished” scene. And that’s where I stop. That’s when I get the fear. With all the time in the world, with the outline, with the research books by my side…will my best be good enough?

It’s so much easier to do ANYTHING else. I could clean the apartment, because I know the apartment CAN be cleaned. I can write a blog, because I know I can finish my blog. I could do some terrible, menial day job, five days a week, hating it every step of the way, and I could do it well because I know I can do it well.

Most things I do don’t require that I do my absolute very best. The problem is that I expect that from my writing.

And that’s scary.

Fortunately, this week, a beautiful woman whispered in my ear. “I’ve got some words for you,” she said. “Would you like to dance?”

The muse, when she want to dance, you dance.

I’ve had three good days so far. My knees were a little weak at first, and I’d forgotten how to lead, but she’s helped me along.

The best piece of advice she’s given me is this…”Don’t think. Write.”

And look…the fish are staring at someone else for once. Maybe now I can get a little work done.

The Stick and The Carrot

Zoë Sharp

The humble donkey is the beast of burden across the globe. It ambles along on impossibly dainty feet, while carrying outrageous loads apparently without complaint.

And always, it seems, there’s a man on the animal’s back with a stick.

I’m not suggesting that the man beats the donkey, although I’m sure that happens with depressing regularity. But the stick is still there and the implication is clear – go faster, work harder, or this is going to hurt.

I think I know how that feels.

The most depressing job I ever had was a brief stint selling display advertising for the local paper. Classifieds were a different section. People want to place classified adverts. They do so specifically because they want to sell something, or buy something. All the classified sales people had to do was sit by the phone and wait for calls.

Display advertising is different. Display advertising is the stuff that gets in the way of the stories people are trying to read at the front of the paper. Unless it’s by chance, their eye skims over the ad without ever taking any of it in. And, I admit, if you work for a New York ad agency you probably have some very scientific ways of making people look at those ads, but I didn’t have those skills.

Nobody wants to spend money on advertising. They know that half that money is wasted – they just don’t know which half. They practically hid under the desk when they saw you coming, or told their secretaries to fob off your phone calls. So, persuading small businesses, week after week, to lay out cash for adverts that ultimately ended up lining the cat litter tray or the bottom of the budgie’s cage, was not my best choice of career. (I did mention it was a very BRIEF stint, didn’t I?)

But what has this got to do with the donkey and the man with the stick? Well, in my case, the display ad sales people were the donkeys, and the stick was being wielded by the advertising manager.

We were given weekly targets of how much advertising we had to sell, and we never seemed to be able to quite make those targets. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that if we’d worked it out we would have discovered that he was trying to get us to sell more ads than it was actually possible to fit into the paper, and if we’d ever managed it we would have caused a major glitch in the space/time continuum.

After six months, the job started to stress me out so much that I even developed a heart murmur. (I’ve never been very good at the high-pressure sell. I can’t even do it with my own books.)

The whole experience was all stick and no carrot.

I’ve discovered over the years that I will go a long way and work my little wot-nots off for a bit of encouragement and a thank you. That is far more important to me than getting paid – I’d rather do a good job than a quick job.

Which possibly explains why I am not a lot more wealthy than I am ;-]

The world of being a published writer can involve a lot of stick, and only being shown the occasional distant slightly out-of-focus photographs of something that might be some kind of root vegetable, but it’s in black and white so you can’t be sure if it isn’t a parsnip.

Things are tough for authors at the moment. If you’re not topping the bestseller lists, you’re being cut loose. It’s a big stick world, and sometimes it feels like we’re the donkeys.

And I know it’s been slowing me down, weighting me down, miring me down. I could feel it. My enjoyment of the whole business of actually writing was ebbing away. It had little to do with success or failure – it was to do with job satisfaction. People can be at the top of their field and still not really enjoy what they’re doing.

When I came back from the States in March, having witnessed the explosion in e-readers, with the idea that I would put the backlist Charlie Fox books out in e-format, starting with a short story e-thology, some people told me I was mad to contemplate tackling the whole conversion process myself.

“Writers should write,” I was told. “Leave that to the experts.”

I’ve never been very good at taking advice, especially when it concerns things I can’t or shouldn’t do.

So Andy and I, with help from my web guru, set about learning how to code and convert. Sadly, a lot of conversion work seems to be carried out by people who don’t love books, and the reading experience is spoilt by silly mistakes and bad bits of coding that slip through.

Producing an eBook is not just about the conversion process, though. It’s about EVERYTHING connected to a book, from the front cover to the wording of the copyright page. If that all sounds like a lot of work, it is.

But I found it was a LOT of fun, too.

FOX FIVE: a Charlie Fox short story collection went live on August 8^th, and yesterday the first of the backlist went up, too – KILLER INSTINCT: Charlie Fox book one. So, for all those people who wanted to read the series right from the very beginning, now they can. As soon as all the backlist is up on Amazon, we’ll start coding for other reader formats, too.

I resisted the urge to rewrite the book – difficult tho’ that urge was to resist – but did take the opportunity to reinsert two backstory scenes that never made the final book. These explain a little more about Charlie’s military career and the start of her relationship with Sean Meyer. (I didn’t quite appreciate at that stage how important that relationship was going to be, or how integral to the character, hence the original cut.)

Getting KILLER INSTINCT ready for e-publication has been a fascinating experience. Not only was there a fabulous new cover by Jane Hudson at NuDesign I was very fortunate in that Lee Child generously allowed me to use the Foreword he wrote for the Busted Flush trade paperback edition last year. I added my own Afterword from the same edition, together with tasters from the other books in the series, including an excerpt from the next one, RIOT ACT, which is undergoing conversion as we speak. And finally, I joined forces with our former ‘Rati, Brett Battles.

Brett very kindly gave me an excerpt from his Jonathan Quinn novella, BECOMING QUINN, to include at the back of KILLER INSTINCT. In return, an excerpt from KILLER INSTINCT will be going in the back of Brett’s next Logan Harper novel. This is the kind of cross-pollination that not only gives people a nice added extra, but will hopefully also introduce the readers of both of us to something new they might enjoy.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me a small amount of proud-parent BSP at this point:

‘Susie Hollins may have been no great shakes as a karaoke singer, but I didn’t think that was enough reason for anyone to want to kill her.’

Charlie Fox makes a living teaching self-defence to women in a quiet northern English city. It makes best use of the deadly skills she picked up after being kicked out of army Special Forces training for reasons she prefers not to go into. So, when Susie Hollins is found dead hours after she foolishly takes on Charlie at the New Adelphi Club, Charlie knows it’s only a matter of time before the police come calling. What they don’t tell her is that Hollins is the latest victim of a homicidal rapist stalking the local area.

Charlie finds herself drawn closer to the crime when the New Adelphi’s enigmatic owner, Marc Quinn, offers her a job working security at the club. Viewed as an outsider by the existing all-male team, her suspicion that there’s a link between the club and a serial killer doesn’t exactly endear her to anyone. Charlie has always taught her students that it’s better to run than to stand and fight, But, when the killer starts taking a very personal interest, it’s clear he isn’t going to give her that option . . .

‘Charlie looks like a made-for-TV model, with her red hair and motorcycle leathers, but Sharp means business. The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie’s skills are both formidable and for real.’ Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

OK, I’m done now.

This whole thing has proved a huge carrot for me. Getting reacquainted with Charlie at this early point in her history has reminded me why I started writing about her in the first place, and why I can’t wait to get back on with the next book.

Suddenly, writing is fun again, like starting to exercise and stretch muscles that had started to atrophy. I needed a boost, and this has provided it. Getting the short stories out there in FOX FIVE allowed people who’d vaguely heard about Charlie to try a selection of short pieces about her without investing time in a whole book. The 50 free review copies I offered in my last blog were all snapped up within hours. The reviews so far have been great. And if anyone would like a review copy of KILLER INSTINCT, they only have to email me . . . authorzoesharp [at] gmail [dot] com.

This whole experience has, one might say, re-kindled my enthusiasm.

So, ‘Rati, have you faced a time when you were absolutely fed up with what you were doing, and what did you do about it? Or, if you’re still in that situation, what are you going to do about it?

Finally, I thought I’d introduce a new section about what I’m reading on my sparkly new Kindle at the moment.

I’ve just finished LITTLE ELVISES by Timothy Hallinan. The book is the second to feature Junior Bender – and how can you not LOVE that name? – Tim’s Los Angeles burglar who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.

The ‘Little Elvises’ of the title were Philadelphia teenagers plucked off the city’s stoops in the 1960s by a mobbed-up record producer named Vinnie DiGaudio and turned into pallid imitations of the boy from Tupelo until their fourteen-year-old fans got tired of them and moved on to the next one. When Vinnie is in the cops’ sights for a murder, Junior is brought in, unwillingly, to prove Vinnie’s innocence. Unless, of course, Vinnie did it.

But one way or another, Vinnie – a gangster whose product was innocence – has made a central mistake. Some things never go away. And that’s what drives the plot of LITTLE ELVISES.

This book was enormous fun. Very wittily written, it’s refreshing in that Junior (sorry, Tim – I can’t bring myself to call him Bender) is far from a hapless comedy PI. He has smarts, both street and of mouth. I shall definitely be seeking out the first book in this series, CRASHED.

And I’ve just started reading Wayne D Dundee’s THE SKINTIGHT SHROUD, a Joe Hannibal mystery. When someone starts turning blue movies bright red with the blood of murdered porn stars, Joe Hannibal is called behind the scenes to prevent more killings. His investigation takes him places that are both shocking and dangerous and in no time at all he finds himself at odds with the mob, the police, a savage local pimp, and in the arms of another man’s woman.

As the case hurtles toward a startling, blood-spattered climax, Hannibal will experience pleasure -and pain-like he has never known before. His life will hang in the balance more than once before the last dirty secret is exposed and the final desperate killer is cut down. Intriguing so far . . .

This week’s Word of the Week is karmageddon, which is, like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s, like, a serious bummer, man.

Structure and Function

by Jonathan Hayes

A song’s structure is readily apparent in minutes, unlike, say, that of a movie or a book, where it slowly heaves into view over the course of hours or even days. Pop songs are almost instantly comprehensible because of their repeating structures: intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/instrumental break/verse/chorus/outro.

With music, though, the immediate legibility that makes the songs accessible can also make them facile and disposable – what I like about most of the music I love is that each time I listen to it, I hear something new there. Indeed, I might not like it much at all the first time I hear it. Really well made pop music – U2, say, or the Beatles, or the Beach Boys – keeps rewarding the listener, but most has a pretty short expiration date. And that’s okay: one of the things I like about pop is that it is definitively of its era, sometimes going so far as to define that era.

I listen to a lot of music – indeed, I got my start as a professional writer by writing a montly music column – and can usually find something to enjoy in everything, but most of what I listen to generally falls under the rubric of alternative or indie rock (with a healthy dose of everything else, particularly electronic music, dance music and modern classical music). I posted my five favourite songs of 2010 on my blog; for me the clear #1 was “Helicopter”, by the Athens, Georgia band Deerhunter:

Now I grew up in a classical music family; at some point I pretty much stopped listening to lyrics, because I tend tend to find them both similar and facile. I listen for melody, but even more for texture and timbre, and I thought “Helicopter” was just magnificent – that point at the 0:31 second mark when the song suddenly opens into an infinite ocean of space and possibility just blows me away. How is it possible for something to be so exquisite?

For all its radiant beauty, “Helicopter” is lyrically a grim thing. The song is inspired by (or inspired, I’m not sure of the order) a narrative by the transgressive (do we still use that word? is it still possible to transgress in 2011?) writer Dennis Cooper about a 14 year old boy who becomes a male prostitute in Russia; for a while he’s feted and sought after, but eventually his moment passes, and he’s routinely abused and raped. Finally, an embarrassment to the powerful men who once desired him, he’s taken by helicopter over a remote forest in northern Russia and thrown out. (This is probably one of the reasons I don’t listen to lyrics much.)

I love all four of Deerhunter’s albums, and their various singles, and collect their cover versions of other artists’ songs – I’ve not been as excited about a band in years. But I saw them live for the first time last night, and they were astonishing. Their songs share my obsession with texture and sound colour – they tend to the psychedelic, a post-Phil Spector wall of sound, welling chords from the two guitars meshing into thick waves of melody and noise, digitally processed, shaped and augmented. Their song structures are generally fairly classical, but they often smear the verses into the choruses, and use odd time signatures and unexpected tempo changes.

When they play live, they rework the song structures aggressively. A somewhat trite pop song turns into punk thrash, the singer’s voice drowned out by fast, grinding guitars. And the fast songs get split wide open, the instrumental breaks stretching out to swallow the last verses. For me, the highlight was a transcendent moment when they snapped the spine of “Nothing Ever Happened” open into an roaring two-guitar symphony, and then laid Patti Smith’s “Horses” on top. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and, when the song coalesced again and its original structure reemerged, I had tears in my eyes.

(I’m grinning now because I know that if you watched that entire video, some of you might have tears in your eyes of a different sort, but trust me: it was transcendent last night!)

I really admired their willingness and ability to play with time-tested structure; it’s not something genre writers in particular often do. Part of the stricture of genre is that there are certain conventions of the form that must be satisfied for the story even to qualify as belonging to a particular genre. Indeed, before we even reach the level of genre, the vast majority of stories hew to a classic three act structure, breezily summarized as “get your characters up a tree, throw some rocks at them, then get them back down”.

The problem is that stories, and genre stories in particular, have a certain narrative sameness. And the corollary of that is that, for the experienced reader, these similarities make books blur together, make them predictable. Similarly, I think most of us have gone to the movies, and found that what we’ve just seen was decent, but pretty much the same as the last 20 films we’d seen.

What this sometimes leads to is “forced twists” – events inorganic to the story, placed by the author just to cobble up a little surprise. Personally, I hate it when the killer turns out to be – gasp! – the detective’s brother or what have you. In Precious Blood, I quite deliberately set out to write a forensic thriller with a direct linear narrative, a serial killer story where the case progressed as cases have always progressed in the hundreds of murders I’ve worked on: methodical police work, a little intuition, a little luck, eventually the different elements coming together like ice floes to form solid footing. (A note: I’ve never worked a case where the killer turned out to be the lead detective’s brother. Not that it couldn’t happen, but you’re going to have to work pretty damn hard to convince me.) For most readers, Precious Blood worked as a strong, unusually vivid procedural, but some felt it needed more twists.

I’d chosen a serial killer story for my first novel not just because the story came to me cut almost in whole cloth, but also because the serial murderer brings his own instant ticking clock, allowing me to focus on the mechanics of character and scene and dialogue. With A Hard Death, the sequel, I expanded the number of characters and points of view, and rather than having one protagonist and one antagonist locked in life-or-death pursuit and combat, I put Jenner in a town seething with bad people. I think of A Hard Death as following in a noir tradition; Jenner finds himself in a world of festering moral decay, and while he is ultimately infected by this amorality, he’s not consumed by it (which would be the true noir outcome).

Precious Blood, since it gave me a way of dealing abstractly and somewhat discreetly with some of my post-9/11 experiences, is a deeply personal book, and I love it, but I think that A Hard Death is the stronger of the two, at least at the narrative level, and readers seem to agree. I don’t think it’s simply because of the increased complexity of the story, and the broader vista of its setting; I think that with each book you write, you understand the mechanics of story better. At least, I damn well hope so.

At the end of the day, genre fiction is a bit like reggae: there may be certain formal criteria for making a song a “reggae song”, but within that rubric, there’s a huge range of possibilities, from the stadium pop of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” to the drek pop of Ace of Base’s “The Sign” to Burning Spear’s mesmerizing “Marcus Garvey” and its dub version, “The Ghost”. There is life even in the most familiar formula, and it’s up to the writer to tap that; the art of genre is to transcend its formal limitations.

And of course there’s plenty of room to mess with the structure of a story/novel – I’m just not well-read enough to know who’s doing it well in crime fiction. In, uh, “literary” fiction, three books I have loved did just that:

Georges Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual bases its narrative structure on a physical structure – an apartment building – with each chapter built around the inhabitants of a particular unit, the stories gradually interlocking to become a woven narrative (Perec is also famous for A Void, a book written entirely without the letter E; I think the more astonishing achievement was that of Perec’s translator, who took the French original, Un Nul, and converted it into similarly E-less English.)

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad dedicates different chapters to different points of view, each chapter taking place at a different time and place; over the course of the book, recurring characters (not always immediately identifiable from their previous appearances) help the reader construct the core narrative. It’s a beautifully written book, and one of its most beautifully written chapters takes the form of a Powerpoint presentation.

David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest I liked more than loved, in part because DFW insists on punctuating his narrative with voluminous foot notes; the print book is over a thousand pages long (at least, it feels like it), and flipping back and forth is a royal pain in the ass. If you’re going to read this book, for crying out loud, read it on an eReader!

I’m sure there are some really strong crime fiction authors using unusual structure in their work. Anyone care to recommend something a bit different, and help me out of the shadow of my ignorance?

Disappearing Women

by Tess Gerritsen

Now that I’m in my fifties, I’m noticing more and more what generations of women have complained about: that right around this age, we start to disappear in the eyes of the world. As we grow gray we become invisible, dismissed and ignored. No wonder there’s a spike in suicides as women pass the frightening threshold of fifty. Invisibility happens to us all, whether we were once fashion models, prom queens, or hot actresses. (With the possible exception of Betty White.) When we lose the dewy glow of reproductive fitness, suddenly society thinks we are no longer worth the attention. Yet men in their fifties still get plenty of attention, both in real life and in the movies. Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sean Connery, were alll playing sexy action heroes in their fifties. Silver-haired men, at their peak of political or financial power, are considered hot catches and Hollywood producers don’t bat an eye at the thought of casting a 50-year-old film hero with a 30-year-old heroine. But a celluloid romance between a young man and an older woman? Well, that’s got to be an outrageous comedy, right? A story that no one would really believe, like Harold and Maude. Because while fiftyish men can be sexy as hell, a fiftyish woman is just, well, somebody’s boring mother.

Life is so unfair.

It’s unfair in crime fiction as well, where you don’t find many sexy, kickass heroines in their fifties. Which strikes me as surprising, considering how many authors are women in their fifties. You’ll find plenty of fictional heroines in their twenties, thirties, and forties. But then women vanish as heroines until they suddenly pop back into view on the far end of the age spectrum as sharp-eyed, inquisitive Miss Marples in their seventies. And these older heroines are often objects of amusement or even ridicule, the troublesome old biddies who solve mysteries only because they can’t mind their own business.

I try to remember any older heroines in the books I’ve been reading. The only recent one who comes to mind is the narrator in Alice LaPlante’s TURN OF MIND (a terrific novel by the way). Alas, although that heroine is tough, smart, and determined, she also has Alzheimer’s disease. Not exactly the sexy heroine I’m looking for.

I confess, I too have been guilty of ignoring the fifty-year-old heroine. Part of it was my desire to meet the demands of the fiction market. People want to read about sexy heroines, don’t they? And if I want to sell film rights, wouldn’t a younger heroine be more attractive to Hollywood? Years ago, I wrote a book that featured a number of senior citizens (LIFE SUPPORT), and one of the discouraging comments I got from my then-Hollywood agent was a dubious: “Gee, there are an awful lot of old people in this story, aren’t there?”

When I started my writing career, it made sense for me to focus on young heroines, because I could identify with them. As I got older, so did my heroines. They matured into their thirties and then their forties, just as I did. But suddenly I hit fifty, and my heroines didn’t cross that line with me. They stayed frozen at forty-something, the oldest age that I believed the marketplace would still accept them as romantic heroines. I certainly know that women can be sexy at all ages; I just didn’t have any faith that readers would think so. Or that they’d accept a 50+ woman as an action hero.

Then, a few years ago, I came across an article about martial arts master Bow Sim Mark. Now in her seventies, Master Mark is credited with bringing Chinese martial arts to Boston, where she still teaches at the studio she founded. How cool, I thought. Here’s an older woman who really can kick ass. And swing a sword. And even take down a Navy Seal. If a woman like this exists in real life, why couldn’t I put her in a novel?

So I did. In THE SILENT GIRL, the character of Iris Fang is a 55-year-old martial arts master who not only swings swords and takes down bad guys, she’s also sexy. So sexy, in fact, that Detective Barry Frost, who’s two decades younger, develops a wild crush on her. Unlikely, you say?

No more unlikely than a real 70-year-old female martial arts master. Or a 98-year-old woman who just earned her tenth-degree black belt in judo.

As I scan popular fiction and film, I find that on the rare occasions when an older woman does play action hero, it’s a real crowd pleaser. In the movie RED, about retired CIA agents called back to action, the scene everyone seems to love best is Helen Mirren grabbing a gun and shooting up the place. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two, the audience whooped in delight when staid Professor McGonagall went wand to wand in a fierce duel with Snape, and when mad mama Molly Weasley finished off evil Bellatrix LeStrange. Call it hot flash fury; these women are forces to be reckoned with. They may be silver-haired but they’re also capable, powerful, and ready to fight.

We all know such women exist in real life. Now it’s time we start seeing more of them in fiction.

(I am in Australia on book tour so won’t be able to respond to comments. But I’m looking forward to reading what you all have to say!)

I’m sorry . . .

by Pari

A couple of months after I’d signed up for Netflix streaming this summer, my kids started watching old episodes of Nanny 911. I find the show strangely addicting. Families with screaming, violent, ill-behaved children – with stressed, angry, despairing and/or clueless parents – receive a week-long visit from a no-nonsense older Mary Poppins and in short order almost all becomes right with the world.

It’s a lovely formula.

What strikes me in these episodes is how little emphasis is placed on saying “I’m sorry.” That’s certainly not how I was raised. Back when I was a whippersnapper, an apology was often the only goal of any “learning moment.” And those learning moments often came after a back-handed slap or belted spanking.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“No!”

“Say it now!”

“No!”

“No dinner for you until you apologize.”

“I’m not hungry!”

Commence slamming of doors, sobbing . . .

Then, after years and years of always fighting to be in the right, of not giving an inch, something changed. I’m not sure quite when, but sometime in my early 20s, I realized an uttered “I’m sorry,” like golden glittery fairy dust, could cast its magic to diffuse pressure or deflect negative energy off of my back.

Apologizing became easy . . . second nature. Convenient.

Lately I’ve noticed how often I apologize and the many those apologies can take:

expedient apologies
spoken for quick response so that I can get on with whatever needs to be done: “I’m sorry you don’t like peas. Eat them anyway.”

social apologies
“Oh. I’m sorry.” These, like the ones above, are meant to help a group function. Women often use them in work situations to move a project forward rather than getting locked in a contest of wills, or, as is often the case – pissing matches.

irritated apologies
often in the form of defense –“I’m sorry you don’t like fiction.”

implied apologies
“Oh. Really? I didn’t know that.” Often these have an air of, “gee, I was too dumb to spot that fact.”

Sympathetic apologies
“I’m so sorry this has happened to you.”

heart-wrenching sincere apologies
there’s no stock example for these since they are sincere and utterly unique each time they’re spoken.

Here’s the light bulb that went off in my brain the other day: I think that when people get into the habit of apologizing quickly and often, there’s an unhealthy side-effect. They create an unexpected mythology about themselves. They start to believe they’re broken, that there’s a fundamental error deep inside.

Constant apologizers embrace ambient guilt without even realizing it. They become the kids that turn every time the lifeguard blows a whistle, even if they’re sitting on the grass innocently eating mustard-slathered hot dogs.

Right now, of course, I’m examining how I’ve used apologies and apologizing in my life. By writing about it today, I am not seeking sympathy. Instead, I’d love to discuss this topic with the ‘Rati community.

QUESTIONS:
Have you ever thought about the role of apologizing in your own life?
Are there other kinds of apologies than those I mentioned? What are they?
Do you buy into the idea that too much apologizing can morph into an unintended sense of guilt?

THE RELUCTANT EXHIBITIONIST

by Gar Anthony Haywood

When I was just a wee lad, fully expecting to become a published author before my eighteenth birthday (I was only off by about a decade), I used to do all my writing in my mother’s kitchen. I’d set my Smith-Corona electric up on the counter, plug that bad boy in, and hammer away at one sci-fi short story after another, working as my mother toiled over a hot stove making breakfast, lunch or dinner for a family of five. I don’t know how either of us ever got anything accomplished, but we managed to co-exist in that little kitchen quite nicely, even if her cooking was always exceptional and my writing uniformly unpublishable.

Every now and then, however, Barbara Jean Haywood would break the unspoken peace accord we’d reached to evict me from the room, the meal of the moment requiring more uncluttered counter space than my typewriter and scattered manuscript pages would allow. On these occasions I’d grudgingly move to the dining room, where the light and ambiance were nowhere near as conducive to my flow, and issue a dire warning:

“One day,” I’d tell my mother, “I’m going to be a famous author. And when I’m asked if my parents encouraged me to write, I’m going to tell people how you used to throw me and my typewriter out of the kitchen every time I tried.”

We both used to get a big kick out of that.

I never made good on my threat, of course. In her own way, before she passed eighteen years ago, my mother was just as responsible for my becoming a published author as my father (more on him at a later date), and I will always be thankful I had such an incredible woman in my life. Still, for all her pride in my work, my mother never quite understood my fascination with genre, and in fact pestered me constantly to write non-fiction instead. Specifically, she wanted me to write about our family. Its highs, its lows, its ugly warts.

I had zero interest.

First, because I was always certain there was no “there” there. Contrary to what my mother thought, the trials and tribulations of the Haywood clan, even extended out to our Lugo/Bordenave cousins, would not have made for much more than a mildly amusing read. We had our moments of high drama and hilarity, sure, but for the most part — and I feel incredibly blessed to be able to say this — much of the heart-rending tragedy that most bestselling family sagas are made of — sudden death, serious illness, financial hardship — was absent from our lives. None of us were famous or wealthy, or particularly inclined toward a life of crime. In short, we were a multi-cultural Brady Bunch with an edge, and it was beyond me how any author could make an engrossing book out of that.

Second, writing was a release for me, a way to escape my somewhat sheltered and — if not exactly unhappy — occasionally uncomfortable existence, and it could only serve that purpose if I was writing fiction. Stories of my own invention whose outcome was entirely within my control.

My third and primary disincentive for writing about me and mine, however, was that I didn’t want to air our dirty laundry — no matter how innocuous it may have seemed by most standards — in public.

And that’s the whole point of a good autobiography, isn’t it? Telling all the stories about yourself and the people you care about that most reveal your greatest strengths and weaknesses? Your brightest and darkest hours? All the good stuff alone won’t do; you’ve got to offer up the dirt, too. The lies and betrayals; the extra-marital affairs and disastrous, bumbling, humiliating mistakes. The promises broken and dark secrets kept. And last but not least, the author’s true, inner-most feelings about it all, regardless of who might get hurt in the revealing.

No thanks, Mom, I thought. I’ll pass.

So that whole “keeping a journal” thing we writers are supposed to do? I never bothered with it. I always found the concept rather self-indulgent: “My thoughts and life experiences are so extraordinary, I must write them down for posterity.” I understood the value of keeping a journal as a technical exercise; any activity that requires one to write every day can’t be bad. But self-reflection? Who needed it? Growing up, my focus was rarely if ever on what was real; it was instead on what could be. The worlds and people I could create to do my own bidding. Why waste time writing about an actual, ordinary day when you could write about a fictional, exciting one instead?

(I must admit that I was clueless about the therapeutic potential of keeping a journal, which obviously cannot be denied. In the absence of a good therapist — and I’ve been lucky enough to know a few — writing a daily journal requires a level of introspection that can sometimes be as curative as it is revelatory.)

Needless to say, since those early days in my mother’s kitchen, I’ve learned to better appreciate stories taken from real people’s lives, and the incredible courage it often takes to write them. History was never my favorite subject in school — in what possible way could things that happened to others in years past be relevant to my present or future? — but as most adults eventually do, I’ve come to understand history’s import and, yes, its myriad connections to my own existence. I’ve even come around to reading — and thoroughly enjoying — a history tome or two.

And yet the business of writing about my private life, aside from those experiences that relate to my writing, remains a difficult chore for me, and I continue to wonder why anyone should care to read about it. The theory behind social networking as a marketing tool is that the more readers know about you as a person, the more curious they’re likely to be about what you write, but I remain unconvinced that this is true. I think what really breeds such curiosity is not the baring of an author’s soul, but a consistent production of smart/funny/thought-provoking material via every platform one decides to take advantage of. What you choose to write about is almost irrelevant.

Certainly, establishing one’s credentials as a decent, compassionate human being who’s suffered pain and loss like all the rest of us can’t hurt an author’s chances of building a substantial readership. Readers may not need to like the people they read but most prefer to think those people are real and not imaginary, and maybe even deserving of their patronage in some small way. But how much personal information is enough to create that connection and how much is too much? In order to win readers over in large numbers, is it really incumbent upon a writer to treat them like members of his most intimate family?

For instance, if I based my next Murderati post on my divorce from my first wife, delving into the depths of depression that experience put me through, while making only the slightest effort to draw a connection between it and my writing at the time, would that make you any more or less inclined to read me? Would knowing the details of how alcohol and crack cocaine have fucked with my family over the years somehow enhance your interest in my fiction?

As a reader, it’s never worked that way for me. I’ve always put the writing before the writer, caring very little to know the life stories of the people I read. Lawrence Block, Martin Cruz Smith, Elmore Leonard . . . Ask me one question about their private lives and I’d only be able to shrug. I don’t know what injustices they’ve suffered and I don’t give a damn. That’s their business. What they write and how well they write it is mine.

But I fear I’m a dying breed. In this age of Facebook and Twitter, in which sharing all you have to share with perfect strangers is rapidly becoming the whole point of the online exercise, it may no longer be enough for a reader to be simply that: a reader. Maybe now, potential fans expect more from the reader/author contract than just a good read. They expect — they demand — a ticket to his inner circle, as well.

For writers capable of opening their lives up to that kind of public scrutiny, at least on occasion — especially those who can do it as effortlessly and brilliantly as my fellow ‘Rati Stephen Jay Schwartz and David Corbett have in recent weeks here — lending such added value to their fiction will not be too much to ask, and they’ll reap the benefits of their candor. But for others like me, hopeless introverts who can’t so much as crack the window onto their personal lives without feeling naked, that task will be all but impossible.

Were she here, my mother would no doubt be disappointed to see I’m as reluctant as ever to tell my family’s stories.

But I suspect she’d read my next book anyway.

Questions for the class: For the readers among you, how much do you need to know about an author’s personal life before he or she strikes you as worthy of a read? And authors, where do you draw the line between what you’re comfortable sharing with your readers and what you aren’t?

My Anti-Playlist

By Cornelia Read

I am pretty much a fiend for music. I no longer listen to it when I write fiction, but that’s because I’m so sucked in by lyrics (good or bad) that I can’t delve into the world on the other side of my keyboard if there are tunes playing. My brain just can’t let go. This led, long ago, to my sister nicknaming me “bitch at the switch,” because I am such a control freak about what’s playing on the radio/stereo in cars.

I just cannot abide sucky music, and there’s a lot of it out there. Especially on the radio.

I’ve gotten pretty spoiled, what with being able to transmit tunes off my iPhone onto my car radio over the last couple of years with the aid of this little black plastic lollypop thing I bought at Walgreen’s for twenty-five bucks, since I don’t have an MP3 hookup-linky-thingie to plug into direct.

But that splendid little objet wasn’t my first foray into bitch-at-the-switchness…let’s just say I’ve been an early adopter of musical-control-freak technology since all we control freaks had was the AM dial (mix tapes, mix CDs, and now *sigh of bliss* iTunes. Even Sirius radio is not enough for me, sorry.)

I blame two things for this:

Driving cross-country in a 1967 Ford Country Squire wagon with my mom at the wheel the summer that STUPID “Sundown” song was playing over and over again on every AM station from Salinas through Newark.
Having my maternal grandparents play nothing but the former muzak station out of New York known as WPAT–“beautiful music for beautiful people”–nonstop in their Lincoln every time I spent any vacation time with them.
Andrew Lloyd Weber. More on him later.

Oh, wait. That’s three things.

Shucky darn.

This all comes to mind because I drove to NYC a while back and my Walgreen’s lollipop thing doesn’t work when FM stations 88.1 through 88.7 are actually transmitting, so driving through Worcester, Hartford, New Haven, and the environs of Greater New York forces me to listen to the few CDs I have left or to actual radio stations.

Yes, I suppose I could listen to nothing at all, but that is just not an option for me. Especially on a five-hour road trip I’ve done several dozen times. I think I might end up bashing my head through the steering wheel in sheer desperation. I need a soundtrack.

But if I HAVE to listen to radio-that-is-not-programmed-by-me, there are certain songs I will avoid like the proverbial plague. These have been, to my mind, SO overplayed for the last several decades that I’m amazed more people don’t light their radios on fire. Seriously.

Here are my bottom ten–the songs that you’d have to totally Clockwork Orange me with the eyeball clamps and everything before I’d deign to listen to them from start to finish:

1. “Sundown,” Gordon Lightfoot.

Dude, I would creep around your back stairs just to duct-tape your mouth shut, so I never had to hear this stupid damn song ever again. And I think I know why your girlfriend is messing around on you. She would like you to stop singing. Forever. This reached #1 on the Billboard charts. And was simultaneously #1 in Canada. And tortured me for 3000 miles in the back seat of an unconditioned station wagon in the summer of 1974.

Ewwwwwwww.

2. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” also Gordon Lightfoot.

Have I mentioned duct tape? I’m very sorry that this ship sank and everything, but I would like to put all recordings of this fucking song in a leaky dinghy, then push it out to sea and shoot at the damn thing until it sinks. Blech. Blech, blech, blech.

Ptui.

3. “Riders on the Storm,” The Doors.

I think when your grocery store starts playing a song to let you know they’re about to turn on the lettuce misters in the produce department, it should officially be banned from airplay on actual radio stations. Especially when it’s raining.

4. Like a Virgin/Material Girl/Papa Don’t Preach. Ma-fucking-Donna.

I hate these songs. Hate. Like, to the point where I wish I could claw out my own ears level of not-enjoyment. I have felt that way since I first heard each of them on the radio, and don’t even get me started on having to watch the videos of them on MTV, back in the day. They make my skin crawl. They make my eyes itch. They make me break out in bad, bad Tourette’s episodes.

YUCK.

5. “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I’ve Got Love in my Tummy,” Ohio Express

What, have these guys been hanging out in the back room of a bear bar? Ewwww. Twee, twee, twee, ptui. Double ptui. Triple.

6. “Just a Smalltown Girl/Don’t Stop Believin'” Journey

Okay, I must confess that there is a great deal of Journey that I actually LIKE. Which is probably because I listened to their album Evolution over and over again in this very cute surfer boy’s car in California the first time I ever did mushrooms. But these two songs are anathema to me, and they’re the ones that get played over and over and over again. I mean, seriously, you want a Journey song for the closing number on the final episode of the Sopranos, and you pick one of these? Gag me with the Garden State Parkway.

7. “The Gambler,” Kenny Rogers

You got to know when to fold up, and when to stop playing a really annoying song on the radio. I wish this train would just keep going, gambler and all, until I never have to hear about it again. In fact, the next time this comes on the radio, I would like to walk away. I would like to run.

8. “Ramblin’ Man,” The Allman Brothers

If you must play Allmans on the radio, please limit yourself to “Whipping Post,” “One Way Out,” or “Statesboro Blues.” These are brilliant songs. This one is just, basically, the anthem of those who refuse to pay child support. And lame.

9. Most country music apres Tammy Wynette, except for The Dixie Chicks and maybe some Roseanne Cash.

Really, I love me some good twangy pedal steel and a good shit-kickin’ beat, but “Achy Breaky Big Mistake-y” is enough to make me take a cricket bat to the speakers in my car doors. It’s like being force-fed a cocktail of grenadine, maple syrup, and ipecac.

10. Andrew Lloyd Weber. All of him.

I was tortured with Evita in my teens–long story–suffice it to say I saw the damn thing three times on Broadway against my will (matinee, Lupone-less, each time.) And then there was the endless night of Phantom when I first moved to Colorado… not to mention Cats.

If I am bad in this existence, my afterlife will consist of an eternity on a desert island with Andrew Lloyd and an accordion. Please GOD don’t make me listen to him in the meantime. Please. Please please please.

Okay, so if these ten things were permanently expurgated from the playlists of the world, I would be a happy woman. What ten songs would you Ratis like done away with? SPILL…

Those Magic Moments…

by JT Ellison

Don’t you love having epiphanies?

Those lightning bolt moments of awareness, enlightenment, insight that alters your consciousness, your actions, even the course of your life?

I’ve been on the road a lot over the past two months. Florida, New York, Florida again, Colorado (where I am now) and then to Florida once more, then on to St. Louis for Bouchercon. Six roundtrips in two months – for me, that’s a lot of on the road time. A lot of out of the groove, snatching time to write, long stretches without Internet access, and even, blessedly, some downtime. I have been writing the whole time, and I’ve also been sick. Those of you who saw me in New York got to witness that first hand, and now I’m catching another little summer chest cold. Ugh.

But along these crazy paths, I’ve gotten time to do some thinking. About my work, and my life. About what I want to be doing, and where I want things to go. And with that kind of Jack Handy deep thoughts come the epiphanies.

The first was along a darkened road in Florida. This one was so hand to forehead smackingly obvious that I felt like a true idiot when I figured it out.

I’ve been blogging for many years now. First weekly, then bi-monthly here, and also infrequently on my own blog, Tao of JT. I’m sure every blogger in the world who also writes novels has the same issue—you tend to think every moment spent away from your novel is a moment lost. But it’s something we need to do. Each and every moment in the real world can be mined for blog material. At least that’s my thinking. I’m always examining moments and situations and wondering, “How can I turn this into my Murderati blog?”

I went through this when I first joined Twitter. I started thinking in 140 character updates – how can I share this experience in 140 characters or less, make it relatable and also funny? Thankfully, I trained my mind away from that, because it’s just too easy to get lost in that kind of thinking.

Blogging, Twitter, Facebook – the sharing of information we find important, but the vast majorities of others don’t.

I’ve always viewed these extraneous activities are relatively unhealthy endeavors. Outside of blogging, which has taught me the discipline of deadlines and getting butt in chair to write, even if it is non-fiction.

My epiphany was thus: I’m a novelist, damn it. I shouldn’t be mining my moments for blog material. I need to be using those little vignettes in my fiction.

Ding. Dingdingdingdingdingdingding!

I think I knew this unconsciously, because so many of my vignettes do get poured into my fiction. But realizing I was thinking in terms of what to blog instead of what to write was revelatory for me. And of course, my first reaction was I must stop blogging.

We at Murderati have seen a rash of authors having this revelation lately. The more we focus on our fiction, the more books we can produce, and in the current environment, which is undeniably rough, the more good books you can write, the better off you are.

Since I’m prone to the drastics sometimes, I forced myself to take a step back, and talked myself off that particular ledge. At least for now. Instead, I have been working very hard to reprogram myself to think in terms of fiction instead of non-fiction. To separate what is story, and what is information. What is narrative, and what is insight.

The second epiphany was during the writing of a book I’m working on. I’ve always said writer’s block is your story’s way of telling you you’re going in the wrong direction. I hit a point in the story that just didn’t feel genuine. Something was very wrong. I started trying to talk it out – to Randy, to my parents. I’d just decided to go ahead and call my agent and get his take when it hit me. The part I was concerned about wasn’t the issue, it was 15,000 words earlier – an action the heroine takes that is … well… I don’t want to be too hard on myself, but the course of events was just plain STUPID. As in stoopid, stupid.

When I saw that, the path to the next act became very clear. Phew.

The third epiphany came early last week, when I sat down to a beautiful long clear writing day and got exactly jack shit done.

I was so mortified with myself that I figured I needed a public tongue-lashing. I wrote a blog and detailed all the things I had done instead of creating – and the responses gave me an interesting thought.

Sometimes, I need a little external motivation. I know people think I write fast, but as we’ve discussed, I am a bulimic writer – I gorge on words during marathon writing session instead of doing a good job of the daily grind. Take one look at my travel schedule and you see how that’s playing out for me. It’s cacophonous. My good habits have been broken. I need to reset, majorly.

I used to be able to do the daily grind. Before conferences and promotions and book tours – all the things that have to happen if you want to get your name out there.

I am a writer. My JOB is writing. So damn it, writing is what I’m going to do, even if I have to publicly report in what I’ve done that day to get myself back on track.

So if you’re interested in that daily grind, I’m writing it up on Tao of JT. I’m posting at 5pm each weekday, just a little snippet of what I’ve done that day – the good, the bad, the ugly. I of course have been feeling a little guilty about this – as I went into last week looking at ways to cut back my non-fiction writing, and instead seem to have quadrupled it. But I know myself, and I know what I need.

The fourth epiphany came just this morning, as I was reading through my RSS feeds. It isn’t exactly a revelation to you that I try to follow a minimalist lifestyle. I am working on finding my inner zen, because the more serene I am, the more serene my surroundings, the better I work, and the happier my family is. This journey has been fraught with setbacks, but I finally feel like I’m making progress. This morning, I was re-reading “30 Lessons from 30 Years” by Joshua Millburn of The Minimalists, and his number 10 slapped me across the face.

10. Finding your passion is important. My passion is writing….

My passion is writing.

Ding. Again.

My passion is writing. Writing. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, the manipulation of words to convey meaning, emotion and story is my passion.

I don’t need to feel guilty about blogging. That isn’t necessarily time away from writing. It IS writing. It’s all writing. Every time I put my fingers to the keyboard, I’m creating.

Duh.

Sometimes I feel so new to this game. I imagine my more experienced colleagues are reading this and laughing behind their hands at my naïveté. But hey, we all have to have our own realizations. No one can tell you exactly how to climb the mountains. They can just wave when they climb back down and tell you how exhilarating it is when you reach that zenith.

So, ‘Rati, tell me – Have you had any epiphanies lately?

Wine of the Week: Layer Cake Primitivo Super yummy!!!

Back to my roots

By PD Martin

Today I want to talk about the amazing feeling of going back to my roots. I’m not talking about my literal roots (i.e. my birth place or the birth place of my family), rather I mean my creative birth place. The time and place when I first decided I wanted to write. Here’s a hint:

What about now?

Recognise it?

Or now?

Yep, you got it! Paris.

On Monday we arrived back from a three-week holiday. Our main ‘objective’ was my sister-in-law’s wedding in Ireland, but we also had a glorious five-day stopover. It was around March this year when my husband told me that he’d finally found a great deal to Ireland that would save us loads of money…“but do you mind going via Paris?” he said with a grin on his face. Needless to say, I was one happy woman!

So how and why is Paris my creative birth place?

I mentioned in my first Murderati blog that while I was into reading and creative writing in my primary school years, once I got to high school I ended up focusing on science and maths — maths, applied maths, physics and chemistry were my elective subjects. As a complete contrast, my other subject was physical education, with my main project on dancing. You see, I had danced pretty much all my life, and loved it. Anyway, while studying psychology and criminology at university, I was also taking lots of dance classes, around 30 hours a week at one stage, and also did acting and singing lessons. Over the next couple of years dancing petered out and singing took over. I finished my psychology degree and started studying music. Then I took time off from school and worked a bit before travelling.

I was 21 years old when I took off on the typical Aussie pilgrimage…backpacking around Europe. I went with my boyfriend for four months and it was on this trip that my creative spark burned brightly. My boyfriend at the time was (and still is) a photographer and he was also a gifted artist. So it was natural that we’d hit many of the artistic hotspots, including Paris. What can I say, I fell in love immediately. Was it the incredibly impressive buildings? The many artists who had been born or studied in Paris? The ambience of the place? The history of the place? The answer is, of course, all of these things and so much more. Coming from Australia, all our buildings and architecture is relatively new (like North America). And there’s something about the sense of history that oozes from every inch of Paris (and Europe) that’s inspiring and exhilarating. It drives me to create. And that feeling was there again on this visit. I mean, look at this:

But back to my first visit to Paris…Within a few days in Paris, I wanted to write. I wanted to write my own lyrics for songs, I wanted to write poems, I even wanted to write a book. I tracked down an English bookstore in Paris and bought their one and only book on creative writing. I can’t remember the name of it, but it was quite large (a university text book rather than a mass market paperback) and of course being an English book in a French-speaking country it came with a high price tag. But it was worth it.

A couple of days later, I found myself in the magical Rodin gardens. My boyfriend was drawing the amazing sculptures (like many other budding artists around us) and I was writing in a newly acquired notebook, with my creative writing text book at my side. We spent hours there (twenty years ago!) and so this trip I had to go back to the Rodin museum and gardens.

There didn’t seem to be quite as many people sketching the sculptures as last time, or perhaps my memory has simply amplified the numbers I remember from my first visit. But the whole place still triggered that creative impulse.

Then there’s the food. Let’s just say, I ate a LOT of baguettes in five days, some not-so-nice French wine and some gorgeous French wine, loads of cheese (yummy and so much cheaper than here in Oz) and a few treats from gorgeous patisseries. I have a major sweet tooth, and passing shops like this sent my heart racing!

From this particular place I tried the Opera cake and it was divine.

The ambience of the restaurant and café culture is stunning, and we also did the pre-requisite visit to the Louvre. To me, every part of Paris is inspiring.

Now I’m back, safe and sound, although still a little jet lagged and with an annoying cold. But who cares…I was in Paris!

I’d like to say I can launch back into my writing, the creative spark burning incredibly brightly. But unfortunately, I’ve got two ghost-writing gigs on the go, and two corporate jobs. But while I’m doing those the subconscious will no doubt be ticking over, ready when I return to my new book again. And then I’ll be channelling Paris!

PS The wedding was fabulous too, and Grace was the perfect flower girl!

PPS I forgot to say…Paris is also where my husband proposed to me, 13 years ago!