In Praise of Foolery (Or: Cartoons Can Save Your Life)

David Corbett

I’m what’s prosaically referred to as a lapsed Catholic (think laissez-faire agnostic with sloppy Buddhist hankerings). So I’m not sure how the Mass begins anymore, but last time I attended Sunday services, the first exchange between the priest and the congregation quoted the 43^rd Psalm:

I will go to the altar of God

To God, the joy of my youth

Or, for those who gaze back longingly at the Latin Liturgy:

Introibo ad altáre Dei

Ad Deum qui laetíficat juventútem meam

I puzzled over this line when I first heard it, wondering why God evoked—or might even be equated with—the happiness of childhood. And I assumed it meant that beholding the sacred is much the same as the sense of astonishment that characterizes our earliest perceptions, that sense of boundless wonder, both inviting and frightening in its mystery.

But if I’m perfectly honest, the joy of my youth was largely defined by cartoons.

Of particular influence was the inimitable Michigan J. Frog:

(YouTube won’t let me embed the video, but to watch the full cartoon, click here.)

Among all the cartoons I watched as a kid, this one stuck with me more than most, because of its cosmic punch line: Every silver lining has a cloud. Somehow, even at the wee age of whatever, I was already an ironist.

My oldest brother, who ultimately became a research psychologist—excuse me: Human Factors Engineer (ahem)—for the Defense Department, said it was “frightening” to observe how much of my personality was formed by Rocky & Bullwinkle:

I’m not sure how “frightening” I was—or am—but I’m a little stunned at how unfunny that cartoon clip is. (I included this particular one because it has two characters named for my original and current hometowns, Columbus and Vallejo—again, that little noodge of irony).

As I grew up I put aside childish things—yeah, right—until college, when I discovered you can indeed learn a lot from Lydia:

Groucho, Chico and Harpo reacquainted me with the daring face-slap of the absurd, the mad grand fun of chaos—the sanity of craziness—and did so in a way that Duchamps and Breton and Artaud couldn’t touch. I realized that in the eternal bout between scholar and clown—I mean, come on, is it even fair?

Later, I’d become entranced with The Simpsons, of course, the best satire ever to appear on TV:

But I don’t think I ever quite understood the full, life-affirming, soul-saving necessity of cartoons until I met my late wife Terri.

Terri left home at the age of fifteen for reasons too personal to disclose here, but as she was big sis, and big sis was basically mom, her younger brother and sister trailed along, and she supported them all by working as a piece-rate seamstress, the same trade as her beloved Italian grandmother.

But Terri’s brother John was troubled, and when he unwisely dropped a tab of acid at age sixteen it caused a psychotic break. His incipient schizophrenia came on full-blown, and as the only responsible adult in the family anyone could locate, Terri had to go to Herrick to approve treatment. The doctors wanted to give John electroshock, and trusting them, she gave her consent—resulting in her little brother’s now being not just schizophrenic but brain-damaged.

This threw Terri into an emotional tailspin she would spend the next ten years trying to pull out of. And John’s schizophrenia didn’t drop out of the sky. The term “schizophrenogenic mother” has fallen on hard times, diagnostically speaking—no point blaming the primary caregiver for the patient’s illness—or, as one researcher put it:

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother” was popular in the psychiatric literature. Research later confirmed that the mother who could cause schizophrenia in her offspring did not exist. Such a blame-levelling concept, which had no basis in scientific fact, may have caused a great deal of harm.

All of this is true, I suppose. But Terri said when she read the diagnostic description in a textbook she suffered an epiphany: That’s Mom. (I had the same experience when I saw the DSM précis for Borderline Personality Disorder and thought it read like my mother’s bio, but I digress.)

I don’t mean to hammer Terri’s mom. She had her own broken soul and deserves as much compassion as anyone. But what Terri found familiar in the diagnostic description was the pendulum swing between distant and judgmental on the one hand, and overly involved, even intrusive and oblivious to boundaries on the other. Nothing was ever quite what it seemed, words often meant nothing, and emotional ambiguity was coin of the realm. “I love you” could be rendered with such indifference or even jealousy that it was easier just to wait, watch and live in a shadow state of denial—until that was no longer possible, as became the case when Terri, at age eighteen, had to deal with the guilt being the one who’d approved John’s destructive “treatment.”

Terri’s ten-year emotional deep freeze only thawed after intensive therapy, aided by—you’re way ahead of me—cartoons.

You never have to guess what a cartoon is feeling. No ambiguity here. When Bugs is happy, he’s reeeeeaaaalllly happy. When Sylvester the Cat is sad, the slobbering tears can’t come fast enough. And when Yosemite Sam (or Riff-Raff Sam, as in the above clip) is mad, well, you get it.

Through this ingenious if unorthodox psychoanalytic technique, Terri got back in touch with her emotions. And it gave her a marvelously goofy quality. One day, puzzling over the curious fit of a real-life PI with a closet cartoon character, she confronted me with: “What you need is a moxie moll. What are you doing with a goonybird like me?”

And I thought: God save me from moxie molls.

To the horror of her more uptight lawyer friends, we spent one of her birthdays roasting weinies and eating frosted animal cookies. “David didn’t take you out to someplace nice?” one woman asked. Terri almost bounced: “Nope. It was so cool.”

Don’t get me wrong, Terri was as down-to-earth a person as I’ve ever met, congenitally practical in the way only Italian women can be. And she was smart—she didn’t just sofa-surf cartoons, she read Nietzsche and Toni Morrison and Edna St. Vincent Millay. (I led her astray, turning her on to Robert B. Parker and John Harvey.) But cartoons saved her life.

Not surprisingly, her favorite movie was Roger Rabbit:

Terri was an estate planning and probate lawyer, married to a man who, like Eddie, has a short fuse, so you can imagine how much she enjoyed that ending. And I sometimes wonder if that scene weren’t a reasonable facsimile of the world Terri inhabited most days, at least until ovarian cancer made foolery a bit less fun. Still, even as death crept closer, she retained a pretty good sense of humor, despite the fear, the disintegration of her body and her hope, the dementia. Cartoons couldn’t save her then.

She loved life like no one I’ve ever met, which made seeing her lose her life so young feel so cruel. She was the bravest, kindest, silliest, smartest, most fundamentally honest person I’ve ever known. She remains my hero. I hope, in some small way, I live up to her example.

But there’s a coda, and it involves a caramel-colored pound poodle named Bugsy. (Please excuse the small image; Squarespace and I are having our issues over photos.)

We adopted him and soon discovered he was, to quote Groucho, “the most glorious creature under the sun.” He looked like a Paddington bear. I have friends who still talk about him glowingly–he was that kind of dog. He bounced. He buried his ball in a blanket so he could pretend it was hidden, then dig it up. His stubby tail wagged like a hummingbird. He was the closest thing to a living cartoon I’ve ever known.

Bugsy survived Terri by five years, and was as clownishly sweet as she was right up until the end. The circumstances of his passing eerily mimicked hers, so much so I wrote about it in the following poem, and I add it here not to crank the sad into maudlin, but to add a final and appropriate touch of wonder. These two incomparable beings returned to me the joy of my youth. I’m grateful.

Scathed

Same disease, same lousy luck.

Dogs get cancer, who knew?

Worse, poor guy’s resistant to his chemo,

like you were, all that muck rattling in his lungs.

And it’s that time of year, so close

to the five-year mark of your death.

To be fair it’s not so terrible. Not yet.

Credit the steroids, I suppose.

Got the appetite of a hobo,

still fetches his ball some, nuzzles my hand,

but his hair’s going, each breath brings a cough.

As for me, in five years I’ve learned to let go.

I get it, the finger-snap of life, drinking

from the dharma’s clear, cold well

or whatever Buddhist bullshit applies.

I recall your take on such things.

Phooey, to be brief.

I wonder if that’s changed,

where you are. If anywhere.

I remember the last place you were too well—

tube jammed up your nose, down your throat

into your gut to pump out the shit-brown sludge

that would rot your insides if not drained away.

Belly like a watermelon, your gaze a howl—

you wandered the cancer ward day and night,

bed to chair to hallway to bathroom to bed again,

tidal surge of morphine in your veins,

the doctors baffled by your pain.

Vomiting, pissing yourself. My bride.

For all that, though, I pity

those unscathed by great love.

What I know of things divine, I learned

from you. You and this rascal dog:

rescued from the pound, spared

the killing needle and nursed back

from kennel cough and garbage gut

and, once, less ominously, a bee sting to his nose—

taffy colored, the moist rough flesh ballooned—

then, in later years, pancreatitis, viral warts.

The whole doggy diagnostic, now this.

Through it all, he’s been gentle, honey-hearted.

He’s grateful—freed prisoners don’t forget—

but uncanny as well. After you died,

he began each day by crawling onto my chest,

curling his paws onto my shoulders, licking my nose.

Slowly. Mindfully. Old dog, new trick.

It’s what the holy rollers crow about,

ripping open their hearts to the Lord.

That aching, mad want: He listens.

He watches. He knows. Loves.

If true, pity it didn’t count for more

when you were dying, or now,

as this minor, magical creature

noses toward his own death.

I promise I’ll hold him at the end,

stroke his head and flank and

tell him he was the best damn dog,

remind him that you thought so, too.

Then, if you can—though the smart money

says you can’t—guide him to wherever you are,

call his name (he’s hard of hearing these days—

will death cure that?) and open your arms

as he steadies his legs and shakes and

cocks his head, then figures it out,

starts to run.

* * * * *

So, Murderateros: What was the joy of your youth? Have you revisited it — or it you — in adulthood? Does it carry for you an element of the divine? Has it, in even some small way, saved you?

No need to stick to the Q&A. Feel free to make any comments you please. I’ll be happy to respond however, to whatever.

BTW: For a fictional version of a gifted young woman saved by cartoons, check out Nadya Lazarenko in my second novel Done for a Dime, most of which was written after Terri’s passing. My attempt at homage.

*****

Jukebox Hero of the Week: Terri didn’t live to see the Scissors Sisters, but I think she would have approved of dancing eggs, singing watermelons, and a giant pink goonybird:

Think Globally, Act … Not At All

Louise Ure

I got a research survey call that other night that stopped me in my tracks.

You know the ones. They only want “a minute of your time.” They promise it’s not a telemarketing call. Sometimes, if the topic interests me and I have the time, I’ll do the survey. Better my voice be heard than some Octamom with a fifth grade education, she says snarkily.

This time the topic was politics and it was a real live person on the other end of the line, not a recording. Those are both good things. Politics is a topic right up my alley these days and you can hurry along a real person, unlike the automated survey calls.

But then he started asking about San Francisco’s interim mayor, appointed six months ago when our previous mayor, Gavin Newsom, became Lieutenant Governor.

I blushed so furiously that I imagine the interviewer’s headset heated up across the wires.

I didn’t know the interim mayor’s name. I didn’t know we had one. Or an interim Chief of Police, since the last one was promoted to San Francisco Attorney General when the previous person in that position was elected Attorney General for California.

Sure, I voted in that election, but then it dropped clear out of my mind. It never occurred to me that my mayor was no longer in that position. That the Attorney General would have been replaced by someone else. That the police chief was also part of that magical game of chairs.

What was I thinking?

Having already committed to it, I bluffed my way through the interview, pretending that I knew the issues and individuals involved. (I hope not all respondents are as duplicitous and dumb as I was in my answers, but I do not hold out much hope.)

I thought I was a person who was voracious about staying au courant. I could debate either side of any argument (Should we build a mosque near Ground Zero? What’s the difference between taxing earned income and non-earned income? How does burka wearing effect French culture? Do CFLs pose a risk to American health or way of life?) because I knew the facts and opinions from both sides. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a point of view. I just think that persuasion is most effective when it is the product of an informed view of both sides of an argument.

But where was I getting most of my news? From national and international online sites. I knew more about Pech Valley in Afghanistan than Hayes Valley across town. More about the Kobe beef and foie gras sandwich at BLT Steakhouse in New York than I knew about where to go to brunch in San Francisco. More about the Casey Anthony trial than I knew about the July shooting by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police here in July.

For God’s sake, I know more about the State Senators in Wisconsin than I know about my own state representative. Who is that, anyway? (I can tell you my congressional rep, but only because it’s Nancy Pelosi and she’s a pretty big national figure.)

I quit taking the local newspaper after Bruce died, because I could no longer work the crossword puzzles (an aphasia of some sort that has lasted to this day) and the piles of unread papers reproached me every week. I didn’t watch any local TV news in favor of some other, lighter programming that was on at the same time.

Today, I don’t know who represents me in our state legislature or who serves on our city board of supervisors. I don’t know what new restaurants opened in the Bay Area in the last six months or what the ballet program is this year. I know where to shop for clothes in Sydney or Seattle but couldn’t tell you the same thing about San Francisco. I spend more time on the phone with Australians than I do anyone in California. I have more friends online than I have in the neighborhood.

I am a Citizen of the World, but not of San Francisco. I’m getting nothing from – and contributing nothing to – living in this paradise of tolerance and good food.

What ever happened to Think Globally, Act Locally? I know, that slogan was originally intended to mean that global environmental problems could be attacked with sound, local policy, but it should also hold true for other passions, problems and interests.

If I care about women’s reproductive rights, why don’t I get involved locally? If I’m a devotee of the Food Channel, why don’t I seek out those new places here at home? If I send money to foreign countries for literacy or food programs, why don’t I start by doing the same thing here?

I don’t make many pledges these days, because I know that I’m likely not to fulfill them, but here’s a pledge from me. I’m going to be a better San Franciscan in the future. I’m going to know what’s going on in my city and my state and when it’s important to me, I’m going to take action to make sure my voice is heard. I may not get a newspaper subscription again, but I promise to read up on the local goings-on online. I may even leave the house every now and again to enjoy this fair city.

So tell me, ‘Rati, do you still feel like a local resident or more like a national or international one? And either way, what is the one thing about your community that you most like or would most like to enjoy more?

P.S. Oh Lord, while writing this, a second research survey call came in, once again about the San Francisco mayoral race. Ha! Gotcha’! I’ve read up on the candidates now.

In Defense of Fiction

by Alafair Burke

Professor Burke goes back into the classroom this week, marking the start of my tenth school year during which I have balanced two professional lives – one as a legal academic, one as a crime fiction author. I probably spend more time and handwringing than I should pondering how these two lives fit together. One attempt to explain the coupling follows, in a short piece I wrote recently as a guest blogger for the wonderful Powell’s Books. Professor Burke thought y’all might enjoy it:

I went to a Book Blogger Conference at this year’s Book Expo of America convention. One vocal blogger (is there any other kind?) let me know that she only reads memoirs and “other non-fiction” because she is interested in “issues” and “needed books to matter.”

I let her assumption about the accuracy of memoirs slide. As a law professor who writes not merely fiction, but genre novels to boot, I was far more concerned about making the case that fiction – even low-brow, beach-book crime fiction – can “matter.”

For my day job, I write law review articles – hundreds of pages with still more hundreds of footnotes. Law review articles are supposed to be meticulously researched and relentlessly thorough probes of important and novel legal issues. They are intended to “matter.”

It is hard to know whether an individual piece of legal scholarship has impact, but one measure is its frequency of citation by courts or other legal scholars. To give you an idea of the numbers, Cass Sunstein, the most cited legal scholar in the country and now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was cited in eight judicial opinions and 927 law review articles in the past year. Yours truly has been cited in three judicial opinions and 208 law review articles – in her entire career.

In contrast, a modest print run for a novel with a major publisher is 35,000 copies. In short, more people read Michael Connelly than Cass Sunstein.

Of course, it’s not just the size of the audience that “matters.” I happen to be interested in the criminal justice system, which is undeniably shaped by public perception. And those perceptions are shaped in America not by law review articles or other works of non-fiction, but by popular culture.

In a world where a major cable news network allows Nancy Grace to preach fear six nights a week to an audience of more than 1.3 million, entertainment may be a sane commentator’s best hope of shaping public views about our criminal justice system.

I have written law review articles about the unseen, unreviewable effects of prosecutorial discretion, but I have certainly had more impact on the popular conception of a prosecutor’s role by showing Portland Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid employ – both for good and bad ends – nearly limitless charging and plea bargaining authority.

I have written about the problem of wrongful convictions, but my writing has surely shaped public opinion more through fictional (but realistic) depictions of high-pressure interrogations, flawed eyewitness identification procedures, overreliance on questionable informant testimony, and police investigations shaped by tunnel vision.

As a writer, I believe in showing, not telling. My job is to spin a good yarn, not lecture. But I nevertheless believe that, as a lawyer who cares about equity and accuracy in the criminal justice system, I can defend the genre in which I write. Books can entertain and yet nevertheless educate.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Have you have learned something surprising from a so-called “beach book”? When has an entertaining book also “mattered”?

Speechless

Well, I have very little to say this morning.

I thought of writing about a newly discovered television series HAVEN, very loosely based on the Stephen King book THE COLORADO KID. I don’t remember how I found it on iTunes, but I downloaded the first season, watched it in a week, and anticipate every episode of Season Two. It’s a crime show/supernatural show, which I love. I love real-world supernatural.

I’ve seen few good movies this summer (My two faves so far: X-MEN FIRST CLASS and SUPER 8. And the end of HARRY POTTER, but that’s another story …)

I’ve been reading YA mysteries, as well as trying to catch up on the JD Robb series. I’m only four books behind now …

Of course I’ve been writing. My next book, SILENCED, is due early October. I’ve been a little (a lot) nervous about this book because it’s the first book with a new editor and a new publisher. Kind of terrifying.

And the kids! Five kids, all in fall sports. You’d think they’d spread the out to keep me sane, but noooooo, I have to juggle five kids. Fortunately, my husband has taken over the boys and their football practices, and I take care of my younger daughter’s soccer practices. Now we just have to figure out who goes to what Saturday games. Thank God I have another driver in the house, my 17 year old daughter, who plays volleyball–and her games are Tuesdays and Thursdays, NOT Saturdays!

I can’t wait until school starts — for us, August 22. I need my routine back. I did get the school supplies early (yea!) and the kids wear uniforms (ordered!) but there’s a lot of things that need to be done this coming week–including three nights of orientations. And the fact that I’m going to have a senior in high school. I don’t feel old enough to have a daughter who is almost 18.

We didn’t go on a family vacation — we went last year, and hopefully I’m taking them all to Disneyland next summer the week before the RWA conference in Anaheim. But with sports, my New York trip, getting a new dog, and deadlines … the Brennan family didn’t get away.

So with all these things going on, I really didn’t have anything poignant to talk about for my blog. But my 15 year old daughter told me a great joke today:

Past, present and future walk into a bar. It was tense.

🙂

She found the joke on this great little clip I hope you enjoy. Have a great week.

The Help

by Alexandra Sokoloff

The film of The Help came out this weekend, and I know everybody else is going to be talking about it, and it’s my day today, and it’s been on my mind, so why not?

I will try not to spoil too much, but if you’re trying to stay pure before you read/see – you’ve been warned.

First, the book.

I understand why it’s popular and I also understand why there’s a backlash against it. I have to say it – it made me uncomfortable.

Now, uncomfortable is an emotion, not an objective criticism. And I don’t read books for comfort most of the time, I read for passion and thrills and to live a certain experience. Which can all be comforting, in their way.

I know a lot of people feel passionately about this book and I don’t mean to undercut that. But I’ll just try to describe the discomfort I felt about it.

There’s been a lot of criticism about the dialect, especially Aibileen’s. I didn’t mind the dialect at first – I love figuring out phonetically how people are speaking, myself, I’m actually a little obsessed with phonetics, and I know I’ve been guilty of going overboard with it in my own writing on occasion. But as I kept reading and got to the white characters…. who were portrayed with no such dialect at all…

Well, to write in such a broad way for an African-American character and not at all for white Mississippians… who have some of the deepest accents in the South….

Uncomfortable.

But what made me most uncomfortable about the book was that all of these maids ended up in the service of a white woman again, to get “her” book written. It made me feel guilty of being patronizing by association.

And I think a whole lot was left out.

Now, I know perfectly well that as a California native I cannot possibly understand the relationship between white children and the African-American women who raised them (Southern friends of mine say, “My other mom”). In fact, there are a whole lot of things about the South I will never understand, but that’s another post.

And as a white woman I have no business speculating about what was or was not true to the actual experience of the African-American women portrayed in the book.

But even so, I can’t believe that the depths of anger that must, must have been there, and are still there, were adequately portrayed.

I think it’s a good story. I think Stockett is talented, and she’s obviously created some powerful characters. I would rather have read this subject from an African-American point of view. That’s not Stockett’s fault. Absolutely, obviously, she wrote the book from her heart. But I felt that as the author she was offering a forgiveness to the white characters in the book that is not hers to offer.

And I sure would like to read a book with an alternative POV now.

The movie was less uncomfortable for me, possibly because I knew what I was going into, and a lot because of three key performances.

– Viola Davis as Aibileen. I would camp out overnight to see this woman read the phone book. I think she’s one of the major actors of our time. It is her movie, period. The depths of emotion – and emotional truth – that I didn’t find in the book I did find in her performance, and she has the authority to portray it.

– Emma Stone as Skeeter. Ever since Zombieland I’ve been seeing everything she’s in. The most exciting young actress working in Hollywood, I think, she’s stunning. And while I’m sure this was how she was directed, too, she knows this is not her story. I had huge problems with the Skeeter character in the book; I don’t think she ever got how irrelevant she was in the bigger picture. The movie cuts her role down to a more proportionate size, and portrays the character more as a journalist simply recording stories instead of acting as if this book is all her doing, and Emma Stone has moments – I felt – of reflecting the shame of her situation. It’s not really there in the book or the movie, but I felt it in her.

Btw, I have to say it for those who were here for my post 2 weeks ago: Tom Cruise doesn’t hold a candle to Emma Stone in the “too pretty to play the character” category, but it didn’t matter a bit, here (because Emma Stone is one of those actresses who leaves room for an audience to inhabit her AND her emotion and ferocious mental life sort of overwhelm her beauty). As a matter of fact, Viola Davis is way too pretty to play Aibileen. Pretty much the definition of Hollywood is “too pretty”.

– Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly. What a great villain this is! In my opinion Hilly is half of why this book has become a classic, and Howard doesn’t shy away from the viciousness. It’s a comic character, but the has her moments of wonderfully ordinary evil. I sure hope she made some people uncomfortable.

I think I liked the movie better than the book for the first half (and the dialect issues are much less apparent, partly because you can hear the broad accents in ALL of the characters) and I was totally with it, and also appreciating the adaptation – there were some very deft, concise additions and staging to underline the real stakes. Until that midpoint where

SPOILER (although the trailer does it anyway)

The maids agree to tell their stories.

And then the action just kind of stopped. It was an interesting thing to see, because theoretically the cuts that writer/director Tate Taylor made should have made the story play better, but actually nothing much happens in the second half of the book, and that just gets more and more obvious in the movie. The film gets a little embarrassing as it works the pie joke way too many times over a solid fifteen minutes, and the big reveal of how and why Skeeter’s beloved housemaid “left the family” is a pale shadow of what happens in the book, an awkward and unconvincing scene (it’s also staged in a room that is way too small for the action, a very strange choice. I could barely watch the action for trying to figure out why the scene was taking place where it was.) Also in the film the Millie and Celia subplot is cut down so much that I didn’t feel much investment in it. And unfortunately Millie’s character loses the internal life that she had in the book.

But the truth is nothing much happens in the second half of the book. So even when you cut out all the obvious fat, when you put it up on screen almost everything feels like filler. To ME. Until the end, where

SPOILER

Aibileen has a great final confrontation with Hilly – you can see her talking to her just as any one of the seventeen children she raised, and to me, that really worked, emotionally – it takes a lot to make me cry but I was wrecked.

I don’t know, this is hard. I have to think it’s always a good thing when a popular work of art puts a spotlight on racism; my discomfort is the feeling that the book and maybe the film are more of a feel-good bromide than any meaningful step toward – even a discussion that might change attitudes. But I could be totally wrong; maybe both the book and the film are doing good where good needs to be done.

And it does force me to think about the way I portray race in my own books, and how I’m falling short. And that – is good.

Anyway, Rati, if you’re up for it – what do you think?

– Alex

MAGICAL OPTIMISM

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

First of all, I want to thank Murderati for delivering Indonesia. I never know what’s going to come from writing this blog. Those three hours I spent on a bus with James Ellroy came after someone read my blog. I was invited to teach at the Omega Institute in New York as a result of my posts on this site. Through Murderati, I’ve been invited to contribute poetry and essays for publication and speak at conferences and workshops. But, until now, I had never been handed a country.

It seems my last blog, Synergy, was re-posted on various Facebook walls across Indonesia and now I have twenty-five new Indonesian Facebook friends. I don’t know if any of them have read my books, but they’ve all read my blog. So – thank you Murderati, thank you Internet, thank you Facebook. Whatever comes of the rest of my career I will always know this–there was a day when I was big in Bali.

That said, I’ll return you to our regularly scheduled post.

Magical Optimism…

My eleven year old boy opens his eyes and sees the world he wants to see and magically it is there. I remember I was once like that, when I was a boy younger than his years. The magical optimism slowly faded as I encountered adults who knew better, men and women who’d correct me when I was wrong. As the years advanced I grew up to become an optimistic realist, but a realist none-the-less. Although it is easy to slip into the slough of the cynic, I’ve generally fought to keep a “glass half-full” attitude.

My son re-booted my operating system recently when two things occurred.

Thing One: Noah’s favorite flower is the bright yellow sunflower. My other son, Ben, saved a couple seeds from destruction and planted them and they sprouted. Their little green stems grew and dangled and needed help and I convinced Noah, who had taken over the project, that we should tie their little vines to a tongue depressor with a fuzzy little pipe-cleaner from his arts and crafts supply kit. He trusted me (I’d taken a class called Greenhouse Management when I was in high school, which was really the slacker’s way out of taking Biology II) and I tied one of the nascent plants to the wooden stick and just about broke it in two.

The plant was a goner. I’d broken it in such a way that just a sliver of green connected the top to the bottom. It was only a matter of time before it would turn brown and shrivel up like a sun-stroked earthworm. I put a little Scotch tape around the break and prepared my son for the worst.

“It’s not going to make it, I just want you to know.”

“Maybe it will,” he said.

“I’ve lived a lot longer than you, kid, and I’ve seen things. Experience tells me that plant is going to die.”

“I’ll just keep watering it,” he said.

And sure enough, somehow, that plant sprang a sliver of green glucose cells and built an elbow to tie the two halves together. Now this little plant has grown thick and strong and healthy. It continues reaching for the sky today. In all my year of Greenhouse Management I never saw such a miracle.

At approximately the same time, Thing Two occurred.

Thing Two: While cleaning our fish bowl I accidentally let the fish (a beta) fall into the sink among the dirty dishes and general scum. I tossed the dishes to the floor, yelling, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” until I’d found the flopping creature and, after several tries, grabbed and tossed it back into the fish bowl.

Experience told me this story wasn’t going to end well for the kids.

Sure enough, a couple weeks later the fish developed a brown scab on the left side of his body. A couple days after that the scab appeared on the right side as well. It took another day for one side to eat into the other, creating a gaping hole.

There was a hole in our fish.

Experience told me this was not a good sign. The hole grew larger in the coming days and soon the fish stopped eating.

“I’m sorry, Noah, but this doesn’t look good. I think you should say your goodbyes.”

“Don’t give up,” he told me. “We can save his life.”

“I don’t know, I’ve lived a long time and I’ve seen things. My gut tells me it’s time to pull the plug.”

Taking a stab in the dark I suggested that maybe the local pet store had something to “fix the hole.” Sure enough, my son came back with a bottle of what I considered to be voodoo googlygock with instructions to add ten drops to the bowl, twice daily. We began treatment immediately.

The substance seemed only to blacken the water, creating a charcoal haze in which our fish would spend his final days. And the hole remained. I mean, I could see the toaster oven through the fish. I was surprised the thing had lasted this long.

And then the fish began to eat.

Days later Noah said that the hole was growing smaller. Ah, life through the eyes of a child, I thought as I peered down to study the beta. But he was right, the hole was smaller.

It’s been a month since this thing began and the hole is nearly gone. The fish, which was old to begin with, is older still, yet appears as healthy and playful as a young fishling. Maybe the playful part is my imagination talking, but he sure looks fit.

The point, if I may return to the purpose of writing this blog, is that my “realism” was really cynicism in disguise. If I had gone with my instincts, i.e. my experience, I would have seen that sunflower sapling strangle our fish in a whirlpool of toilet water as they made their way to the city sewer. I would have euthanized them to save myself the trouble of watching them die slowly, over time.

I didn’t know there were any other options. An eleven year old boy told me there was.

I think these two occurrences illustrate the fact that we occasionally need a paradigm shift. In my case, I needed to adjust my concept of what is and isn’t real. The way I lived my life had been tainted by negative experiences I accepted as truth. Noah did not have those experiences and he was strong enough to resist them when I suggested they were universal truths.

Maybe optimism is just a way of seeing life as it should be, and then participating in its positive outcome. Maybe a person’s good fortune is anchored by his positive attitude.

My boys will encounter great struggles in their lives. It’s unavoidable. They’ve already experienced the loss of their home. The negative effect this has had on their personalities has thus far been minimal — they veered toward the positive. Life in an apartment isn’t tough, it hasn’t stopped them from doing the things they love, like hanging out at the beach and enjoying their music and art classes. If anything, it’s removed some stress from my life, which removes stress from theirs.

I hope their optimism continues to flourish. I hope the people they encounter, the ones who thrive on gossip and negativity, won’t have an impact on their development. And I’m glad as hell my boy was there, like a young bodhisattva, to teach me the ways of the world.

To Finish First . . .

Zoë Sharp

August 2011 will go down in my diary as being the month of a lot of firsts. And I’m not talking about the first UK riots for years, either, although what’s happening over here is shameful and I feel I should be apologising on behalf of all the people who have not nipped out armed with a balaclava and a brick to get themselves a new free iPad. I tweeted last night that ‘Nothing quells a riot like rain. No rioting in Cumbria tonight then . . .’

Which brings me back to those firsts. Personal firsts. I’ve finally got myself on Twitter. Somebody – in fact, let’s face it everybody – told me it would be a huge time-suck. They weren’t kidding. I opened my email to find a chunk of notifications, and the faster I tried to go through and deal with them, the faster more of them kept popping into the Inbox. Eventually I had to give up and go and lie down in a darkened room.

And because the words ‘biting off’ and ‘more than I can chew’ are generally quite relevant to me, and because I never like doing things the easy way, I’ve also just opened up a couple of pages on Facebook, too. A personal page and an author page. Don’t ask me why I’ve got two. I think one might have been an error, and when I’ve got the hang of things, I might try and sort that out.

And in the middle of all this, I’ve launched my first eBook. Of course, I already have several of my Charlie Fox series out in e-format, but those were all taken care of by publisher, Allison & Busby. This is the first time I’ve had to think about everything that goes into a book from the title page to the meta-data. And the cover.

My brain is dribbling out of my ears and has been doing so for most of the week.

Looking into eBooks has been a huge subject, and I’m hugely grateful to all the people who allowed me to pick their brains while we’ve been wading our way through the sludge of disinformation out there. And oh boy, let me tell you, there’s a lake of confusion and opinion, much of it just plain wrong.

Eventually, though, we’ve managed to fight our way through, up to our necks in it and holding our noses, and develop a workable system for putting in a Word doc at one end and coming out with an eBook at the other. And when I say ‘we’ basically I mean my Other Half, Andy. Before I know it he’ll be drinking Jolt cola and snowboarding . . .

At the outset, we were told to farm out the conversion process, but never one to take the path of least resistance, Andy decided it was something he wanted to get into, and he has done so with such gusto that he’s now going to offer a conversion service for other authors who have out-of-print backlist that they want to get back out there in digital form. He’s putting together a website for this new venture and as soon as it goes live I’ll let you know – probably via twitter and facebook!

Of course, with hindsight, I realise now I should have started our eBook experimentation with the first book in the Charlie Fox series and gone from there.

Needless to say, I didn’t.

You see, I had this crazy idea that the easiest – for that read ‘smallest’ – thing to convert would be a digital anthology of short stories. I’m trying to introduce the word e-thology into common usage for this, which I hope everyone will pick up and run with. (Come on, it’s better than describing successful Olympic athletes as ‘medalling’ – which sounds vaguely pervy, doesn’t it?)

I already had four existing Charlie Fox short stories, with varying degrees of exposure. One, ‘Postcards From Another Country’ for example, had only ever been seen as an added extra in the back of the US mmpb edition of FIRST DROP.

So, I thought I’d just dash off another Charlie Fox short, put them all together with an excerpt from KILLER INSTINCT and some other Bonus Material, and join the digital revolution.

Yeah . . . righto.

For a start, ‘dashing off’ a short story proved more frustrating than I’d imagined. Maybe it’s because in the past I’ve always tended to wait for a prod from an outside stick before I get going, but I had what seemed like a good idea for a short with a highly chopped-up timeline. In theory, it was great. In practice, I banged my head against that particularly brick wall until the room spun, and couldn’t get into it. (Erm, couldn’t get into the short story, not the room – that would just be silly.)

Now, when I’m working on a book, I’ve found that if the thing won’t budge, it’s because I’m trying to write it in a direction the story really doesn’t want to go. But for some obscure reason I thought the short would get a move on if I just kept pushing hard enough.

It didn’t.

It was only when I eventually realised the futility of my efforts – and that wonderful old saying about there being no harm in turning back if you’re on the wrong road – that I made any progress at all.

When I say ‘progress’ what I mean is that I completely abandoned my first attempt and started again with a totally different idea. But before I knew it, this new ‘short’ story (ha!) had grown to close to 12,000 words. (Don’t ask me what that is in pages – us Brits use different size paper and everything. And what if there’s a lot of dialogue on a page, or you have a character who st-st-stutters?)

So, now I have a collection of five Charlie Fox short stories which spanned her career from civilian with ‘A Bridge Too Far’ right up to professional bodyguard with the new semi-epic ‘Truth And Lies’. The e-thology is called FOX FIVE: a Charlie Fox short story collection, and this is what it looks like:

The cover design was done by the very talented Jane Hudson at NuDesign, a graphic designer who has always astounded me with her creative chops and her ability to manipulate PhotoShop and Illustrator. I hope you’ll agree that she’s done a terrific job. Covers for the other early books in the series are on their way and I aim to have the whole backlist out before Bouchercon in St Louis September, together with the individual short stories from FOX FIVE. And then I shall collapse in a heap and sleep for several days.

So, ‘Rati, do you like the idea of an anthology – sorry, e-thology – of short stories featuring your favourite character? Or would you be tempted to give it a try to see if the character might become a favourite before plunging into any of the books?

And just in case you do, I’m offering free downloads of FOX FIVE to the first 50 people who email me on AuthorZoeSharp [at] gmail [dot] com. All I ask is that if you like what you read you post an online review, even just a few lines.

Right, I’m off to try and catch up with all this online stuff!

This week’s Word of the Week is e-thology, meaning a digital collection of short stories, as opposed to ethology, which is the science of character, or the scientific study of the function and evolution of animal behaviour patterns.

Neveldine & Taylor

By Jonathan Hayes

I was sauntering (yes, I saunter) down Fifth Avenue one beautiful day this spring when I spotted Michael Weston walking with a friend. Weston’s name might not be familiar, but if you watch movies or TV, you’ll recognize him – he’s one of the finest character actors around. You might remember him as the young psychopath in Six Feet Under who carjacks David Fisher, dousing him with gasoline and torturing him brutally:

When I saw Weston on the street, I wanted to approach him and tell him I’d just seen one of his movies, and that I thought he was great in it. I decided not to interrupt his morning, and I’ve regretted it ever since. In Pathology, Weston plays a psychopathic junior pathologist who persuades other young residents to kill people and then challenge their colleagues to figure out how they did it. It’s a typically arch slice of gonzo exploitation from the writer/director duo Neveldine & Taylor, whose films are so over-the-top that they make the bloodiest Tarantino flick look like a PBS documentary on the history of the finger sandwich at Wimbledon.

In Pathology, for example, it’s not enough to have doctors on a murder spree, their moral decay must be underscored by autopsy room slaughter orgies, with the pathologists smoking crack while shagging hookers and each other on the dissection tables. (Don’t click on the following, more representative, clip if you’re delicate, btw.)

I wanted to tell Weston that I was a forensic pathologist, and that I’d just seen Pathology, and just how wrong everything about it was, and just how much I’d loved it.

Writers and lay people often ask me just how realistic shows like CSI are. I think that Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have the right attitude: who CARES? If the story really moves and the dialogue is strong, the only people who’re really going to sweat the forensic science will be the occasional entomologist, pissed off by the misrepresentation of scene interpretation by arthropod succession. It’s all make-believe – you just have to decide on what your own tolerance for the improbable or impossible is. And in Crank 2, even the characters are aware of the absurdity of their narrative, commenting frequently on its implausibility.

What I love about Neveldine & Taylor is their unapologetic embrace of excess – not just the extreme violence that is a hallmark of their work, but the excess sex, the excess swearing, the formal excess of their visuals and soundtrack. We all know what “good films” should be like – take the slate of any Best Motion Picture Oscar contenders and you’ll see nearly identikit films about decent heroes or heroines struggling nobly against overwhelming odds. And the closer the films come to the ideal of “goodness” – which is to say, the more they resemble a period Merchant and Ivory production, ideally plus Nazis, or a physical disability, or both – the more likely they are to win. The 2010 nominees were far more interesting than usual (in part because there were ten of them, which let weirdness seep in at the margins) but seriously: do you think any movie other than the anodyne The King’s Speech ever stood a chance?

It’s not that The King’s Speech was a bad film – on the contrary, it was very good. But sometimes, you just need someone to come along and gut the plump burgher of Good Taste. We need someone to validate the flawed and the profane. Vulgarity and tastelessness provide an important balance for etiquette and decency, and they work best when delivered without apology. So we have South Park, one of the funniest, most incisive forms of social critique we’ve had in decades, half the dialogue bleeped for obscenity, rendered in primitive cut-out blobs.

Most of all, raw, deliberately graphic and extreme work that flies in the face of traditional notions of decency and “art” is exhilarating – it’s fun to see someone speak the Unspeakable. Even when it misfires horribly, as it usually does, I’m grateful when writers and directorss say Yes to risk. Case in point: in Crank 2, we are shown the genitals of a horse (erect!), a ferret and Jason Statham; it’s delightful.

Neveldine & Taylor have now finished five pictures: Crank, Pathology, Crank 2: High Voltage and Gamer. They also wrote the script for Jonah Hex; they were slated to direct, but walked away from the project over “creative differences”. Hex, a flaccid commercial failure, is interesting, since it shows how critical the team’s creative visual approach is to the written material. Pathology is satisfying, but I think much of the pleasure I took in it related to its scabrous trashing of my profession. Gamer, a sci-fi thriller set in a future where video gamers play first person shooters using living people as their combat arena avatars, had some good ideas, and looked great (a lot like the amazing Xbox video game Gears of War, actually), but ultimately failed to connect. The heavy material and the presence of “real” relationships (the major warrior and his wife and daughter) dragged the narrative down.

The masterpieces of the Neveldine & Taylor oeuvre are unquestionably Crank and Crank2: High Voltage. And I think they are legitimate masterpieces, particularly the sequel. The title is a polyvalent pun – “crank” can mean variously to move quickly, to intensify, an irritable eccentric, an aggressive rotational action, and methamphetamine, all of which apply to these movies.

This is high concept cinema at it’s finest. (I’ll now spoil a little here, although nothing you wouldn’t guess from the fact that there’s a sequel). In Crank, anti-hero Chev Chelios (a ridiculous name, and one of my all-time favourites) is a professional hit man who wakes up to discover that his enemies have poisoned him with a drug cocktail that’s shutting down his adrenaline system. Unless Chev Chelios manages to keep his heartbeat rocketing through constant stimulation (exposure to drugs, pain, danger and, of course, sex) his heart will stop. And there you have it: Speed in a thorax.

Chelios (Jason Statham) is a defiantly one-dimensional character. Told by his drug-abusing, defrocked physican/pimp friend Doc (Dwight Yoakham) that there’s no cure for the “Beijing cocktail”, Chelios chooses to spend his remaining time on the planet exacting revenge. What follows are 90 minutes of the most intense, obscene, violent action captured on film. (On video, actually – the films are shot in high-definition video, many by Neveldine himself on rollerblades with a hand-held consumer grade video camera, dragged behind a car unprotected at 50 mph.)

Crank is a cathartic, noisy blast of pure adrenaline, a sky dive with a malfunctioning shute distilled into two drops of pale yellow liquid, cut with bleach and blown up your nostrils by an Indonesian shaman while a Latvian dominatrix screams for her money. It’s disorienting, exhilarating and incredibly, exaltingly, blindingly fast.

But if the first film was a complete rush, Crank 2 is a hurricane blast – faster, denser, harder, stronger. The yellow liquid is now shot into your veins by syringe, and the dominatrix has found a gun. At the end of Crank, Chev Chelios plummets 10,000 feet from a helicopter over L.A., managing during freefall to snap the neck of his worst enemy and to leave a farewell message on his girlfriend’s voicemail. He smashes into the roof of a car and ricochets off onto the street, facing a camera, inert; we hear his last two heart beats, see his pupils dilate, and then he’s dead.

Crank 2: High Voltage kicks off with a squad of triad goons scooping Chelios’s body off the street with a shovel, and rushing it off to a lab for resuscitation. Learning that the plan is to keep him in suspended animation, harvesting his impressive organs whenever a crime lord needs replacement tissue, Chev Chelios escapes. He discovers that he’s been fitted with an artificial heart; Doc informs him that to stay alive, he’ll have to recharge himself constantly with electricity. Chelios races off to recover his heart, along the way repeatedly zapping himself with any current he can get his hands on. Or his tongue. Or his nipples – you get the picture.

The other characters are as one-dimensional as Chev Chelios – effectively, this is cartoon violence, so it makes sense to have a cast of caricatures. The film is a delirious picaresque set in a Los Angeles populated exclusively by ne’erdowells and demimondaines – all the men are homicidal thugs, all the women are whores or strippers, even Chev Chelios’s girlfriend (Amy Smart). The language is graphically sexist, racist and homophobic, and yet the film revels in its population of misfits, rewarding the audience with a final climactic Battle of the Marginalized on Catalina in which an army of Latino gang-bangers confronts armies of gay, black leathermen in body harnesses and studs, and multiracial prostitutes in almost nothing.

Crank 2 is a completely postmodern film, the purest exercise imaginable in speed and surface, sound and fury signifying nothing but sound and fury. As a formal composition, it’s an astonishing achievement – it’s hardly surprising that the film was screened at the Whitney Museum of Art.

Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone will love these films as much as I do – I’m sure many will absolutely loathe them. But for me, these things are an astonishing blast of fresh air.

So, what about you? Do you ever find extreme things can be completely refreshing, or is that just me? Remember: there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.

When books cross borders

by Tess Gerritsen

Lately I’ve been thinking of cutting off all email accessibility from the public because it gives me heartburn to receive messages like this one:

Recently I was in an airport bookshop where I spotted a new book of yours that I’d never seen before. I eagerly bought it, only to discover later that I’d already read the story, but it was published under a different title. I am thoroughly disgusted by your greedy ploy to encourage double purchases, and I will never buy another one of your books. Shame on you and your publisher!

or:

You and your publisher should be ashamed of yourselves for selling the same book twice, under different titles. I cannot believe that you would stoop to such a tactic. I have demanded a refund but the bookshop refuses to give me one. How money-grubbing can you get?

The reason for these complaints has to do with the fact I am published in different countries around the globe. In the UK, my thrillers are published by Transworld Publishers. In the U.S., my titles are published by Ballantine Books. Anyone who’s sold foreign rights understands that, with each new territory you sell to, you are dealing with a separate publishing entity, and each publisher will choose its own cover design, use its own translators, and yes — specify its own title for the story. Not surprisingly, my book ICE COLD will not have the same title in Germany, where it’s called TOTENGRUND. Nor will it have the same title in the Netherlands or Turkey or … the UK. Yes, even though they speak English across the pond, the UK is a foreign country. (Although some Americans refuse to believe this.) Englishmen drive on the left and they have foreign currency and no, they do not think of themselves as Americans with cool accents. Nor do they believe they are required to publish books under the same titles that we do.

Which is why I’m getting those angry letters.

Because the UK is a different readership, my publisher there prints my stories with locally appropriate spellings. E.g., neighbor becomes neighbour. Sometimes my UK publisher also has a differing opinion on what the title of a book should be. THE KEEPSAKE, for instance, fell flat as a title for the UK market, where the word “keepsake” had little significance. Instead, Transworld opted for a more visceral title: KEEPING THE DEAD. My US publisher, however, thought that KEEPING THE DEAD was way too visceral for delicate American tastes. Each publisher has control over its own territory, and so the book was published under two different titles. Transworld distributes to the UK and its territories; Ballantine distributes in North America. In theory, their markets should not intersect, and readers in the UK should not be buying the US version and vice versa.

But then we come to world travelers. And the internet.

Once a traveler leaves his home territory and enters another, he also enters a different market. Just as you will not find paracetamol in a US drugstore, you will most likely not find acetaminophen (Tylenol) in a UK pharmacy. Travelers have learned to expect that the names of drugs may change once you cross a border. But they have not yet accepted the fact that the titles of books may also change in foreign countries. Internet sales add another complication because suddenly an American can go onto Amazon.co.uk to buy a book published in the UK. Or UK readers may go onto Amazon.com and buy a book published in the U.S. This foreign-published book isn’t supposed to be available to them at all, but the internet doesn’t know that. The internet is just there, at your service, to give you what you demand. And when you accidentally buy the same book, under a different title, whom do you get mad at?

The author. Because of course it’s our money-grubbing fault that this happens.

For awhile, I was so guilt-stricken by the thought of all these readers paying double for the same book, that I’d offer a free title to everyone who complained. I’d mail out the books, free of charge. Then one day I realized that providing the free books, along with the foreign postage to mail them, had costed me hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I also wondered how many of these were authentic complaints. Maybe word had gotten out that Tess Gerritsen was an easy mark, willing to send out free books at the drop of an email. So I stopped doing it.

I also got fed up with being called a crook, a money-grubber, and a cheat.

I know I’m not the only author in this position. A US mystery bookseller told me that she gets complaints all the time from customers who come in asking for UK editions of books, and then demand their money back when they discover it’s the same book they’ve already read. I know authors who are forever explaining why their UK editions have different covers and titles. On my own website, I point out the international differences in titles. Still these double purchases happen, and the internet has made this worse.

Consumers need to be alert to the issue. On Amazon.com, the U.S. site, you can find my UK editions KEEPING THE DEAD and THE KILLING PLACE for sale. But neither of these titles is offered by Amazon.com itself; they are available through third-party sellers, and once a book gets into third-party hands, it is beyond anyone’s control. Likewise, Amazon.co.uk only sells the American editions through third-party sellers. Shouldn’t that be a clue?

Nevertheless, it’s the author who’ll get blamed for it. On Amazon.com, in response to an annoyed reader, I offered this explanation:

“This is the UK version of THE KEEPSAKE. It is published by Transworld in the UK and its territories and WAS NEVER MEANT to be sold in the US. Each publisher releases its own edition in its own market area. Unfortunately, with internet sales (which erases all geographical boundaries) this book may be inadvertently purchased twice. Please do not blame the publishers, as each company intends to sell only in its own market. But online sales and international travel makes it impossible to control where their editions end up.”

The responding comment was: “That is NOT an excuse!”

For some readers, no explanation will ever suffice.

Hello. Nice to meet you again.

by Pari

It’s been a bumpy trip lately. My gratitude goes to so many of you who have stood on the edges of my rocky road, handing me bottles of fresh water and homemade granola bars, when my energy wanes . . . . Truth be told, I wish I was further along on this journey, more settled, but for now my solace comes from the fact that most of the potholes I’ve hit haven’t turned into sinkholes.

In fact some have been quite interesting, including various shifts in self-perception. Several of the identities I clung to with such determination for close to two decades have become fluid, liquefying in my still gripping hands.

Wife to single woman
Writer-at-home to full time office employee
Mom always there to Mom always rushing somewhere

In the middle of all of this movement, one identity I abandoned has returned. For years, I was the woman who wrote Sasha Solomon. In 2008, I dropped that image cold to pursue other projects, to grow “beyond” a character and series that simply weren’t going to do much for my future career as a writer. After all, no one at the New York houses wanted Sasha. I wasn’t going to hit it big with her. Why waste the time writing her anymore?

Well . . .

A month or so ago, when my personal turmoils made me doubt other people’s perceptions of me as a strong, intelligent and independent woman, I decided to revisit the Sasha book I’d abandoned three years ago. Rather than read any of that previous work, I simply started adding to those 100+ pages. I’ve now begun picking certain sections at random – selecting a page number – and infilling with more vivid descriptions or twisting a certainty into something more interesting.

The book is at least 200 pages and I still have no idea where it has come from or where it might be going (though I’ve written at least one potential climax and ending). This is a very strange way to write a book, but I’m not anguishing about it at all. You see, I know that the story is going to come together eventually. I’ll print out all these pages at some point and start fashioning a cohesive whole. Since I’m a pantser by nature and writerly disposition, this is status quo – though I’m very curious to see the result of such a peripatetic approach to this particular tome.

More important than the final product this time though, is the process.

I’m honoring the pleasure of living with Sasha’s persona in my head and heart again. I really like the woman – warts and all – because she’s just so fun and tough and full of herself. It’s not that I want to be her; I just want a friend like her right now: Someone who isn’t afraid to call things the way she sees them – even when they’re nasty or upsetting. Someone who can find humor in just about anything and has such an irreverent way of looking at the world in the first place. Someone who is just as flawed – actually much more flawed – than I am and who is completely unapologetic about it.

Writing Sasha feels like coming home to a place I hadn’t realized I’d missed.

— I thought it might be fun today to discuss this:

Who, of the many characters you’ve read, would you most like as a friend right this minute?

Why?

Writers: Have you happily rediscovered a character you thought you’d abandoned?