10,000 Hours of Pure Joy

Hi there! I’m in New York today, attending the party conference known as Thrillerfest. As such, I’ve asked a friend of mine, award-winning author, cameraman, and all around cool guy Tom Kaufman to sit in. His post is incredibly intriguing, and you all know how much I love figuring out these kind of puzzles. Read his post, and at the bottom, I’ll share my results. Would love to hear everyone else’s too!

Without further ado – Tom Kaufman!

Thanks, JT, for letting me drive the bus today.

Have you ever finished reading a book, and thought, wow, what a great writer? I’ve often wondered what it takes to be great at writing. Is it having an ear for dialogue? Knowing how to plot? Writing characters that resonate in the mind of the readers, long after they’ve finished your book?

Well, yes, of course. But according to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, OUTLIERS, it’s also 10,000 hours.

First of all, what exactly is an outlier? Gladwell says,

‘Outlier’ is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience…In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.”

In OUTLIERS, we’re told that all of the greats, the people who have really excelled in their fields, have worked at what they love for at least 10,000 hours. And I have to say, Gladwell, a wonderful writer himself, makes a compelling case for this rule.

One of the examples he sites is the Beatles. Before they went to Hamburg, they were just an average rock and roll band. But in Hamburg they had to play 8 hours a day, six days a week. They lived on stage. And when they returned to Liverpool, their friends told them how different they sounded, like a professional band.

Did John, Paul, George, and Ringo get their entire 10,000 hours in Germany? No, but they had played together for years prior to that. What Hamburg offered them was the chance to work together intensely, day after day.

Another example Gladwell hands us is Bill Gates. As a teenager, Gates would sneak out of his parents’ house at midnight, and walk to a local university that had a computer lab. The lab was open 24/7. Gates spent every night there, writing code and programming, then hustle back to bed around four or five in the morning. His mother said she always had trouble waking up Bill for school.

Now, to be a huge success, there’s often more to it than simply being prepared. OUTLIERS goes into a lot of detail as to what exactly happened, the string of events that mad it possible for Bill Gates and the Beatles to get those 10,000 hours.

(By the way, Gladwell tells us that it’s a mistake to think we live in a meritocracy. We don’t, not as long as random chance plays a part. OUTLIERS shows us that being born in the right year is as important as the desire to work hard.)

The thing is, for these people, that work wasn’t a tedious chore. To you and me, 10,000 hours of computer programming might be hell. For Gates, it was heaven. Likewise, sleeping on cots, eating crappy food, and playing rock for German businessmen for eight-hour stretches seven days a week might seem like a punishment. For the Beatles, it was an incredible opportunity.

So let’s say we’re all on board with this, right? We want to be great writers. So how do we do that? Basically, we do what Ed McBain instructed, sit our fannies down and start typing.

Could we get our 10,000 hours in a year? Sure, if every day had over 27 hours in it, and we skipped little things like eating and sleeping.

Okay, well maybe three years? Yes, if you wrote for nine hours every day. Piece of cake, right?

Well, maybe for you. Nine hours a day is a bit steep for me. I might manage four hours a day though, in which case I’ll reach my goal in just under seven years.

Seven years?!

Yes, and that’s if I write every single day. If you want to factor in a few holidays, sick days, and those days when your mother comes to visit, you’re really looking at eight years.

It would seem daunting, if you didn’t love to write. But if you do, if it feels good to you, and not some chore you have to get out of the way, then it not only can be done, it has been done. Look at the great writers in our field, folks like Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and yes, Ed McBain, to pick three at random. They began their careers in the late fifties. They hit their 10,000 hours sometime in the mid- to late-sixties. And their work got progressively better.

Westlake once said, “The thing that I prefer, when I’m working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it’s easy to lose some of the details of what you’re doing along the way. Years ago, I heard an interview with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The interviewer said, ‘Do you still practice?’ And he said, ‘I practice every day.’ He said, ‘If I skip a day, I can hear it. If I skip two days, the conductor can hear it. And if I skip three days, the audience can hear it.’ Oh, yes, you have to keep that muscle firm.”

How about you? Do you think 10,000 hours is an attainable goal?

Thomas Kaufman is an Emmy-winning director/cameraman who also writes mysteries. His first book, DRINK THE TEA, won the PWA/St Martin’s Press Competition for Best First Novel. His second book, STEAL THE SHOW, comes out this July. You can see the rest of his blog tour here.

JT here. OK. I’ve done my calculations.

I’ve been writing full time for 8 years. In that time, my fiction output – this is fiction only – is at about 1,000,000 words: 9.5 novels @ 100,000 apiece and 15 short stories. 8 years = 2,920 days = 70,080 hours. I can’t average my daily time spent writing because it fluctuates too much, so I’m going by word count. It takes me 1 hour to write 1,000 words. 1,000,000 words/70,800 hours = 14,269 hours over the course of 8 years.

So 10,000 hours in a year, no way. But I probably did it in 6. And Lord knows, I love what I do. Am I an outlier? I don’t know. But I loved having a chance to examine the concept. Thanks, Tom!

So what about you?

Cult research – part 2

By PD Martin

So, in my last post I looked at cults and people who are drawn to join them. Even though this isn’t officially my research series week, I feel compelled to deliver part 2 today! And part 2 is all about the leaders of cults, the gurus. I’d like to make it clear at the outset that I’m talking about negative, destructive cult leaders such as Charles Manson, David Koresh, Jim Jones and Shoko Asahara (leader of the Aum group who released poison in the Tokyo subway).

Most NRMs/cults have a single leader, a guru who claims ‘enlightenment’ and promises salvation to his or her disciples or would-be followers.

There have been many fascinating books and articles written on gurus, such as psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners and Madmen, a Study of Gurus. In this book, Storr explores specific gurus (one chapter per guru); however, his introduction is particularly enlightening for general observations. As well as identifying gurus as elitist, narcissistic, arrogant, anti-democratic and intolerant of even minor criticism, he also concludes that they often experienced isolated childhoods. Storr’s negative observations don’t stop there either. He goes on to say that anyone can become a guru if he/she claims spiritual gifts and has the gumption to do so.

Gurus have also been ‘explained’ using two models – the psychopathology model and the entrepreneurial model. In a 2005 article for the Journal of Cognition and Culture, M. Upal talked about the first model, in which gurus have some sort of mental illness such as hysteria, paranoia or schizophrenia and experience hallucinations that they perceive as divine wisdom. Certainly Manson seems to be an example of this type of cult leader. The entrepreneurial model, as the name suggests, is more about the guru as entrepreneur – they’re in it for money and power. And there is a lot of power for gurus.

In most cults or NRMs, the members’ daily movements and routines are closely monitored and the guru usually has complete control over the disciples. This is an essential step in the guru’s wielding of power. Luna Tarlo, mother of American guru Andrew Cohen, has talked about how her son lashed out at his disciples. Although he justified it by saying that disintegrating the personality leads to finding a true sense of self, his mother (who was also a disciple for some time before leaving the NRM) ended up describing it as cruelty.

One of the ex-disciples I interviewed for a non-fiction book I’m working on, talked about many acts of cruelty and humiliation in the cult she was part of. Punishments dished out by her guru included banning married couples from living together, making ‘disobedient’ disciples comb the streets and pick up trash from dawn to dusk, forcing family members and disciples to eat out of dog bowls and general verbal abuse.

Storr also talks about gurus getting pleasure from exercising their power over disciples by ordering them to perform meaningless tasks and/or by punishing disciples who stepped out of line.

It’s hard for many of us to understand this power of the guru. And while the power is often abused and is something ex-disciples site as negative, at the same time even these people have strong positive feelings about what a guru is, or should be. Luna Tarlo likened surrendering to a spiritual teacher to falling in love, in terms of intensity. And even the ex-disciple I spoke to said: “The relationship between the disciple and the guru is very, very sacred. You are born on this earth to meet up with one person, and that one person is your guru.”

In terms of the dynamic between the guru and the disciple, it seems it’s difficult to explain. Descriptions range from spiritual saviour to abuser. In The Guru Papers, authors Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad describe the power of a guru over his disciples as the most absolute power in existence.

Whether that power is good or bad is something that’s debated by current NRM members and those who’ve turned their back on their old guru and cult life. For those willing followers, the guru is everything – their light, their reason for being and their saviour. But for ex-members, they often perceive their old gurus as someone who physically and emotionally abused them.

From a psychological perspective, cult leaders have been defined as having both narcissistic personality disorder and/or as being psychopaths. Some traits of narcissistic personality disorder include: grandiose sense of self, need for admiration from others, lack of empathy, preoccupation with fantasy worlds (in which the person has unlimited success, followers, etc.), exploitation of others, and arrogant behaviour. This certainly does gel with many gurus and their behaviour. It’s even been said that NRM leaders possess similar traits to serial killers (!) in the way they take power and sex to the extremes (quoted by Upal (2005), original source Wilson (2000)). It’s certainly an extreme statement, yet some of the personality traits do seem to be shared.

In Captive Hearts, Captive Minds Madeleine Tobais and Janja Lalich identify the following as characteristics of cult leaders:

glibness and superficial charm;
manipulative and conning behaviour;
grandiose sense of self;
pathological lying;
lack of remorse, shame or guilt;
shallow emotions;
incapacity for love;
need for stimulation;
lack of empathy;
impulsive behaviour (child-like);
early behavioural problems (conflicts with authority figures and/or poor academic results);
unreliable behaviour;
promiscuous sexual behaviour;
no real life plan (cult is the life plan); and
criminal or entrepreneurial versatility.

Many of these fifteen elements overlap with traits of narcissistic behaviour and some of the personality traits often displayed by serial killers. I’m sure the Murderati readers and authors who’ve researched or read about serial killers can see the overlap!

What do you think? Are the gurus who lead in this destructive manner like serial killers?

PS In my next post, I’ll be interviewing Aussie author Katherine Howell.

Mythiness is Next to Truthiness (Or: A Few Words on the Hero)

David Corbett

I’m writing this on July 4^th, a good day to reflect on heroes. And as has been noted on this blog on numerous occasions, crime fiction without heroes is like porn without fluffers (or words to that effect).

Note: Recent comments regarding the tediously cerebral quality of newcomer postings has not gone unnoticed. I really did try to make this not too “heady.”

But as even the merest glance at my photograph should make plain — I am, if not the ORIGINAL Egghead from Hell, certainly a worthy inheritor of the mantle.

And, as someone far wiser than me once remarked:

I am what I am

And that’s all that I am

—Popeye the Sailor Man

* * * * *

I was not one of those who jumped aboard the whole Joseph Campbell hero’s journey bandwagon, and I resisted the Christopher Vogler adaptation of those theories to writing.

For the uninitiated: Joseph Campbell employed Jungian psychology in a comparative study of the world’s myths, creating a book that became a seminal work in the study of heroic sagas: The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Christopher Vogler adapted Campbell’s work to the writer’s craft in his book: The Writer’s Journey.

Specifically, Vogler took Campbell’s analysis of the hero’s journey:

And adapted it into a twelve-step schema for storytelling.

This schema has been especially influential in Hollywood.

I’ve come around a bit, cottoning to Campbell much more than I used to, and I’ve made peace more or less with Vogler, seeing a great deal that’s commendable in his methodology — though it still makes me itch at times.

First and foremost, I have to admit that Jung has always struck me as a little bit on the ooga-booga side of psychology. If Freud was the Viennese Quack that Nabokov accused him of being, Jung was the misty-eyed myth-monger. (Joyce famously referred to the pair of them as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.) There was just something airy-fairy about the Jungian world, with a lingering whiff of patchouli, an aftertaste of bark tea. Every time I almost succumbed, a redneck sergeant major in the back of my brain caterwauled: Hey, numbnuts! Pull your head out of your–

My basic complaint with Campbell was I thought he cherry-picked his facts to suit his theory, over-simplifying myths to fit his interpretive scheme. Myths are far more complex, varied, contradictory and unique than such a universalist interpretation can allow. (But then, I almost always regale in the trees; screw the forest.)

A number of Classicists I studied (and respected) agreed. Some even claimed Campbell’s knowledge of Sanskrit was so fatally off he’d woefully misread the texts he was citing.

Now, Aristotle’s been thrown under the bus at times for rigging his argument as well. Much of his Poetics is premised on a reading of one play — Sophocles’ Oedipus the King — and consequently his analysis ill-suits a number of other Greek dramas, not to mention more modern ones. But that’s what happens, I suppose, when philosophers go slumming in the arts.

Vogler was even more problematic than Campbell for me, to the point I nearly threw the book against the wall every time he brought up Theseus. And his attempt to use his theory to analyze The Last of the Mohicans was maddeningly — dare I say laughably — overwrought and unconvincing.

In fact, I’ve seldom found Vogler’s approach as a whole useful in analyzing anything. In pieces, this insight or another, sure, I’ve found him helpful, insightful, even profound. But some of his ideas have to be refashioned or reimagined so totally— or tossed overboard wholesale (shapeshifter my ass) — that trying to adapt them to a modern story in the realist mode seems such a wasteful detour you’re better off not to bother with them at all.

In short, I didn’t think there was anything this method brought to the table that wasn’t addressed equally well if not better — and without the spooks and fairies — by Aristotle, Lajos Egri, Robert McKee, and others in the more standard dramaturgical tradition.

I also found the efforts to use myth to demonstrate the fundamental heroic nature of human experience to be at times simplistic, ham-handed, or just plain silly — cheapening the very concept of what it means to be brave.

It’s no accident that Disney has been the most enthusiastic enabler of the Vogler addiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cartoons — my brother, a DoD psychologist (excuse me: Human Factors Engineer), has often remarked that it’s “frightening” how much of my personality was formed by Rocky and Bullwinkle — but I don’t look to Loony Tunes for heroic inspiration.

Now, I’m a writer, I believe stories are the best thought experiments there are for understanding human experience. I just don’t think tagging an experience to myth automatically elevates it. [“Crap, he told himself suddenly, with what facility you reduce all things to their arty equivalent.” —Robert Stone, Hall of Mirrors] Nor do I believe the best way to understand a story is to compare it to another story.

My other main complaint with the Campbell/Vogler approach was that, where the method seemed most potentially innovative and rich — adapting the hero’s journey to the psychology of personal trial and transformation — it seemed on fuller reflection to be less capable of offering new insights than merely proliferating terms.

Do I really understand anything more about a person facing a crucible “change or die” experience — an inmate giving up the criminal life, an addict battling his addiction, a neurotic embracing intimacy, a corrupt cop going straight — by likening the ordeal to Jonah in the Whale, St. George and the Dragon, Odysseus in the Underworld? Does this really add psychological, emotional or moral resonance? Or does it instead, ironically, cheapen the experience by denying its unique, temporal and material reality?

Put another way: I’ve never been convinced that going the Campbell/Vogler route produced more compelling results than deep immersion in the realities of a character or a story — not to mention of a person and an episode in her life.

Call it my Aristotelian bias, but for me the dramatic rubber meets the road when you have to deeply consider how the seemingly complex and even contradictory facts before you become intelligible as you probe their core nature and meaning.

If you do that, you’ll arrive at fundamental truths every bit as rich and “timeless” as those of myth — precisely because you’ll be tapping into the same core human truths that myths do. But there’s no shortcut. No cutesy diagram to guide the way. You gotta sweat through the homework, Sparky.

Do some stories possess qualities that suggest a special world, or entering the inner cave, or seizing the sword, or returning with the elixir? No doubt. But a great many do not. And searching for these things in tales that do not obviously possess them creates interpretive convolutions that generate nothing but circular jabber.

Also: The problem with working from myths outward is that it’s an easy trap – you can knowingly or unknowingly begin to resort to the method as a formulaic crutch — and in drama all formulas are false.

Saying we’re all on a journey is somewhat reassuring, but it’s also so vague it could be applied without much of an interpretive stretch to a rock.

Speaking of which: It’s a certain rock from mythology (ironically) that got me thinking about all of this. And the rock in question, of course, belongs to Sisyphus.

This ancient tale returned to modern awareness courtesy of Albert Camus, who like youth itself is wasted on the young. Too many of us read him in college, when the stakes of life have yet to make their most visceral impression. (Death makes life clear. The rest is marginalia.)

Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” is deceptively brief. And I would bet that most of us, given our American optimist mindset, think of the core idea of this essay as: Life is “futile and hopeless labor.” The cheeriest insight to be had is: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Oh, the frolicsome, fun-loving French.

How refreshing to re-read the thing and find that such a downbeat interpretation is utterly wrong-headed.

In fact, the essay has a great deal to say about heroism.

Camus finds most interesting that moment when Sisyphus sees the rock roll down the hill again, and he begins to descend to retrieve it: “That is the hour of consciousness.” And if the myth is tragic, it is solely because Sisyphus is conscious.

And yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is far from a tragic figure. Instead, he “is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

This ethos animates a great deal of modernity — one hears echoes of it in this from Martha Gelhorn: “It is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect.” Or even this, in a backhanded kind of way, from Gelhorn’s short-term husband, that Hemingway mope: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

I hear it in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Maggie the Cat insists that life must go on even after the dream of life is over.

I hear it in the Zen adage: Death is like the falling of a petal from a rose — nothing more, nothing less. Or this from the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön: To give up fear, we must also surrender hope.

I also catch it in stories I hear from cops. Every crime solved results not in the ultimate triumph of justice, whatever the hell that is, but in going back down the hill to reclaim the rock.

I hear it in war stories, because there’s no concept in the lexicon more wildly misunderstood than that of victory, and no more insidious lie than a “war to end all wars.”

I hear it in stories of the middle-aged middle-class trying to hold on to their homes, their livelihoods, their dignity amid the impromptu experiment in narcissistic sociopathy sometimes referred to as the economy.

I see it in Louise’s accounts of her past year, and now caring for her much-loved father-in-law as he faces death. I hear it in Alexandra’s offhand mention of the incredibly difficult two-year slog she’s just endured, and Stephen’s and Cornelia’s accounts of dealing with their fathers’ suicides. I hear it in Zoé and Gar’s and many others’ tales of their struggle to keep their careers alive in the face of a crumbling and often disingenuous industry. The mountain is scaled by the inch. And gravity and the rock have their own thing going.

Heroism cannot always be measured by its triumphs, if only because they’re such a long way off — sometimes beyond the horizon line. On occasion the heroic lies in the simple refusal to close the book despite the overwhelming evidence that there’s no big reveal at the end of the story. No magic sword. No elixir. There’s just this. And it is everything.

So, Murderateros: Have you employed the Campbell/Vogler approach? Has it worked for you? Do you think I’m just a contrarian crank? Do you think my Sisyphean view of the hero is needlessly bleak? When you think “hero,” who ghosts up from your memory — especially on Independence Day? Chime in, spout off, tell it.

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: I turn this time to Eva Cassidy, who died much too young. (“What is it with Corbett and dead musicians,” I hear you cry.) This is her cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Tall Trees of Georgia,” a haunting song about another type of heroism — the lonely nobility of an honest heart.

The First of Many

By Louise Ure

Welcome back from your long holiday weekend, ‘Rati. (Well, the long holiday weekend for you American ‘Rati, anyway.) I hope your weather was as gorgeously lazy and blue as it was here in San Francisco. I did nothing particularly patriotic or unusual … dinner out with several friends, a remarkable barbeque on Monday, a day weeding on the roofdeck-garden which has left my muscles in a state of contrition … but it was good.

Oh, and I bought a car.

I’ve been on a car selling-binge for the last year, auctioning off Bruce’s racecars, the tow vehicle and trailer, but I still had two cars to go.

The first was a 1971 Mercedes 280SL that I bought back in the 80’s. I’ve loved that car for over a quarter of a century, using it as a daily driver, a Sunday treat, or a long haul Thelma and Louise touring car riding from Montana to Arizona and back again. That car has seen me at more cowboy bars and roadside motels than it has grocery stores and libraries.

But she’s aged better than I have, and my knees no longer make it easy or graceful to get in and out of that plush leather bucket seat. It was time to say goodbye.

I had a collector over to look at it a couple of months ago and he low-balled an offer I wasn’t interested in. “For that price, I’ll just use it as a Barcalounger in the garage.”

He kept calling back, notching the offer up a couple of thousand every few weeks. Finally, when he reached a price that was three times what I’d paid for it 28 years ago, I said yes.

The second car, a 2000 Mercedes SUV, reflected the wife, business owner, middle aged woman and dog transporter I’ve become in the last quarter of a century. It’s another car I’ve loved and I could happily keep driving it for another twenty years without a second thought.

With this car, it wasn’t my knees that betrayed me, but technology. As wonderful as that Mercedes was – navigation unit and all – it was still twelve years old and technology has outpaced car design by a long stretch.

I was tired of wearing a Bluetooth headset as my only means of answering a phone call while driving. I wanted easy access to my whole iPod music library and not just a lousy 6-CD changer in the trunk. I wanted a rear view camera to keep me from scraping my bumper on that stubby concrete post at the grocery store. Oh, and a little better gas mileage wouldn’t go astray, either.

So this weekend, I did a little research, found something I liked coming off a lease, and went north to a Marin county dealership and bought myself a car.

I make that sound easy, and it probably would be for most of you. But let me put this in perspective.

I am sixty years old and I have never shopped for and purchased a car by myself before. I inherited my first car through a death in the family. My mother went with me to buy the next car, and my brother fulfilled that function for the third.

By the fourth or fifth car in my auto-resume, Bruce was there, asking mechanical questions I didn’t even understand the answer to, and negotiating deals I thought we had no chance of winning. And I certainly didn’t have a clue about how to value or negotiate a trade in.

So I got internet smart, reading Kelley Bluebook quotes and checking out used car prices at lots all over town. I investigated recommended negotiating techniques and used car dealer tricks. (As my brother Jim reminded me on the phone yesterday, when he and his wife last went in to by a car, the saleman left them alone in his office and then listened in on their negotiation conversation through an open intercom.) I read Edmunds and Car and Driver reviews of various years’ performance. Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks?

The upshot, after a full five hours of negotiation (“Don’t worry about me, take your time, I’ve got my iPad to keep me busy, you take just as long as you need to figure out how to get to this number.”) they came down a few thousand on price, they came up a few thousand on the trade in, they threw in a bunch of extras like an extended warranty and handed me a few hundred bucks more I found lying in the weeds, and I got my car.

I think I’m going to like it. It’s a different brand than I’ve ever tried before and it will take some time to get to know all these flashy new hi tech toys, but it looks good in the garage and I smile when I drive it. (Forgive me for not picturing it here, but author/police officer Robin Burcell told me years ago about the dangers of showing our actual houses, cars or license plates online. I have enough stalkers in my life, thanks.)

And I think that what I’m really smiling about is that it’s yet another first. Another thing I’ve successfully done by myself. Many of my other “firsts” this year have been sad ones. The first Christmas without Bruce. The first road trip alone to Seattle to take care of his father.

Here’s to more happy “firsts” ahead.

And how about you guys? What is your most recent “first”? Or what “first” would you like to accomplish? It doesn’t have to be a Bucket List kind of thing. It can be tiny.

I think I’d like to make my first ever squirrel pot pie.

Welcome Chevy Stevens!

I’m not sure how we evolved this way, but somehow our crime writing community is comprised of a pretty likable lot. Getting to know the writers behind the words is such a nice perk of the business. I recently had the pleasure of getting to know Chevy Stevens. I had heard such wonderful things about her debut novel, STILL MISSING, that I bumped it up on my TBR list. After I recommended it to my Facebook friends, she was nice enough to get in touch.

I’m delighted to report that Chevy’s second book, NEVER KNOWING, is garnering just as much praise. And I’m even more delighted to host her for a guest Q&A here at Murderati, one short day before NEVER KNOWING hits stores. (Yes, on July 4, I have chosen to turn the page over to a Canadian. Please forgive me. I swear I’m a patriot!)

AB: I met a wedding planner once at a writer’s conference who said she didn’t think she could write mystery novels because she didn’t know anything about police and prosecutors. I said, “Now why would you want to write about cops and lawyers when you know all about the fascinating world of wedding planning?!” Your past work experience was in sales. Can you talk about how that brought you into your first novel, Still Missing?

CS: Sure! But first I want to say thanks for having me on Murderati. I’ve been following this blog for a long time, so this is a big thrill for me.

The idea for Still Missing came to me when I was a Realtor, working at an open house on Vancouver Island. To pass the time I would either read books or daydream. And if you have an imagination like mine and are alone in an empty house, those daydreams usually took the form of worst-case scenario nightmares. One day I started wondering what would happen if I didn’t make it home that night. How long would it take for anyone to notice? What would happen to my dog? My house? That awful thought lead to others, like what if I was gone for a long time? Could I ever recover after an ordeal like that? Then I became consumed with the idea and within six months I’d sold my house to finish the book.

AB: Tell us about your second novel, NEVER KNOWING?

CS: Never Knowing was inspired by a conversation I had with my editor about what it might feel like, if you were adopted, to find out that your birth father was a famous serial killer who had never been caught. The story took root and grew from there. I used a few other ideas that had been circulating in my mind for a while, for example there was a horrific murder in Wells Gray Park many years ago and when I read about it, it really upset me. Never Knowing isn’t based on that crime, but the image of a lonely campsite and the terrible things that could happen there, haunted me, so I explored those feelings in the book.

AB: Can you talk a little about the experience of writing the second book compared to the first? Did the writing experience change once you knew you were writing for a real audience and under a deadline?

CS: I felt a lot of pressure when I was writing Still Missing because I was living on savings and I really wanted to be published, especially as many people knew I’d quit my job to write a book. But yes, writing Never Knowing was different because my time was being pulled in all sorts of directions. And with all the marketing demands leading up to the release of Still Missing, I needed to be much more focused and disciplined. I couldn’t work just when the muse was upon me. When I wrote Still Missing, I took afternoon naps or went on long hikes with my dog—and then had another nap. Those days are gone! It’s marvelous that Still Missing took off, but it did add a new level of pressure to my second book because it was important to me that I write a worthy follow up. Some days that pressure was almost crippling and it was hard to write because of all the voices (not real ones!) in my head. But then I changed my mindset and just told the story that was coming to me, knowing that no matter what I was doing my best.

AB: I love the use of Annie’s therapy sessions in STILL MISSING as a way to show us the aftermath of Annie’s abduction and her attempt to heal. I did not, however, think of that therapist as a character. Did you know all along that the therapist would be the common thread into your second novel?

CS: Not initially. When I had an approved outline for Never Knowing, I began writing but something didn’t feel right about the structure. Then I started wondering if I could also do it in sessions. I thought it would be interesting to see the therapist through a different character’s eyes. It would also be challenging, but I was really excited by the concept, so I ran it by my editor and she loved it!

AB: Still Missing was a NY Times bestseller, has sold in about two dozen countries, and has been optioned for film. Congratulations on all the early success. What so far has been the most remarkable experience of your publishing career?

CS: You know, it’s all been wonderful. The first reviews, the first time I went to New York, getting e-mails from fans, making the New York Times list. But flying to Amsterdam last fall to meet my publishers was probably one of the most wonderful moments in my life. I’d been working hard all summer and it was the first time I’d had a couple of days off in months. I wandered around the city, gorged on goat cheese salads and stroopwafel (I also came home five pounds heavier but that’s another story), and fell head over heels in love with Holland.

AB: We actually haven’t met in person (yet!) but I feel like I know you because of the time we’ve spent talking on Facebook. We talk a lot here about how to balance our time spent writing and our time spent online. Your thoughts? Tips?

CS: It does feel like we know each other. Heck, I’ve even offered to puppy-sit for you (offer is still open), but I know Duffer has a waiting list. Balancing marketing and writing, with social time, has been one of my biggest struggles over the last couple of years. Recently I was getting very distracted by the Internet and having a hard time focusing on my writing. I’d start looking at homes online, and the next thing you know my morning had disappeared. So my critique partner, the fabulous Carla Buckley, and I created something to motivate ourselves. In the morning we email each other our “daily pledge” then we check in with each other to see how we made out. A big one for me was to stop surfing the net, so I have been disconnecting my Internet for long periods of time, then allowing myself brief breaks to check email and Facebook. It’s been helping a lot!

AB: Are you a plotter or a seat of the pants-er?

CS: Still Missing just unfolded organically, mainly because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and couldn’t plot myself out of a paper bag, which led to years of rewriting. Now that I’m on a contract, I work off an approved outline. But when I started working on Never Knowing, some interesting plot twists popped up as I went along, which also led to lots of rewriting. With my third book, I spent more time researching and working on my outline, hoping to cut down on some of the revising, while still leaving room for surprises. Things change once you start writing and getting to know your characters.

AB: I suspect we’ve hit it off not only out of mutual respect for the writing, but our shared love of dogs. Who’s your favorite literary dog?

CS: Love this question! Yes, as you know Annie is the dog of my life, so much so that I named the main character in my first book after her. Growing up I adored Clifford the Big Red Dog and Copper from Fox and the Hound, then Einstein in Dean Koontz’s Watchers and recently Enzo in the Art of Racing in the Rain.

AB: What’s next for you?

CS: I’m currently working on Always Watching, which is about the therapist, Nadine, who is in the first two books. But she’s never spoken until now. I’ve set her story in Victoria and Shawnigan Lake, which is where I grew up, so I’m enjoying writing about all my favorite places. I’m also finding the research for this book, particularly in psychiatry and cults, fascinating. Hopefully, my readers will agree!

AB: Chevy’s new book, NEVER KNOWING, hits stores tomorrow. I love recommending books when I’m a true believer in both the work and the author. I think y’all will like both Chevy and her books, so please show her the love.

Thanks, Chevy, for being here! Chevy is traveling today in preparation for the launch, so may not be able to check in routinely, but do leave comments. And while you’re at it, let us know your favorite literary pet!

PS. Many of you have been kind enough to follow my own exploits with the launch of my first stand-alone, LONG GONE. I’m pleased to report that it was a PEOPLE MAG summer book pick and the featured mystery on the TODAY SHOW this weekend (the “one book that you can’t put down this summer”: watch it here. The mystery part starts at 2:15) In return, I’d like to invite you to the webchat I’ll be having tomorrow, July 5, 9 PM EST, for members of the LONG GONE private book club. Here is the link. The password is ireadlonggone)

New York!

By Allison Brennan

First, for the fun part of this blog: winners. When I swapped blog days with David Corbett, I said I’d send five people a copy of my digital novella – in print because of a promotional thing I did for RWA and ITW. The winners are:

Sandra K. Marshall
Malcolm R. Campbell
Karen S.
Paty Jager
Reine

If you live out of the USA or would prefer a digital copy, I’ll send you one. If you want it in print, I have one for you! Either way, I’ll take care of it when I get back from NYC on July 11. Email me at Allison@allisonbrennan.com with your preferred format and snail mail address, if applicable.

Now, for the rest of the blog.

Again, Alex and I are connected by an unseen psychic chord because I, too, wanted to talk about e-books. (Alex, just stop getting inside my head! It’s getting REALLY creepy.) I could write thousands of words on this topic but decided that because I’m in New York City and in a fabulous mood, I’ll postpone it for another day.

So instead, about the Romance Writers of America conference.

No conference is perfect, but RWA comes pretty close. With over 2,200 published and unpublished writers in attendance (total membership tops 10,000, with 20% published,) RWA has been putting on huge conferences for years. We usually have a fantastic speaker for opening session (this time THREE fabulous authors in a panel—Steve Berry, our own Tess Gerritsen, and Diana Galbadon.) I missed it because I was having breakfast with my friend and mentor Carla Neggers, who’s among the smartest people I know.

I rarely go to workshops anymore, though there were some I wanted to hit—like my friend Candace Haven’s “Fast Draft: Writing the First Draft in Two Weeks” which MANY people told me was the best workshop they’d attended this year. (I used to write fast drafts, then would go back and edit. Now, I try but can’t. If I know there’s a problem, I can’t move forward. It’s driving me crazy.) We had authors from #1 NYT bestsellers down to aspiring writers giving workshops on pretty much anything, mixing genres, the business, e-publishing, craft, contracts, you name it. I missed them all. Time to order the audio disks for the car!

But the one thing I have always loved about RWA is the literacy signing.

This picture is less than half the room. 500 published authors selling books donated by publishers where all the proceeds go to a national literacy organization. The event is open to the public, so the authors usually send notice to all their fans. It’s vibrant and exciting and really neat to meet readers in the different cities RWA has their conferences. Thousands of readers waited in line for hours before the doors even opened. Until this year, we’ve raised over $690,000 for literacy. I suspect we raised over $75,000 this year alone.

I have always wished that ITW had a public signing event at Thrillerfest. Currently, we have small singings twice a day with the speakers/panelists from the morning/afternoon panels and events. That’s great—but no one from the public is allowed. (Largely because they’re generally pretty crowded.) A public event would not only give exposure to ITW and the attending authors, but promote the genre as a whole. Whether they model it after RWA or come up with their own unique program doesn’t really matter, I’m sure they’d do something equally as fabulous.

I’ve mentioned this desire to different people, and there have been differing levels of interest, and I’ll once again bring it up to someone, sometime next week as I roam the halls of the Grand Hyatt. Thrillerfest does a lot of things right and I love the conference; someday, I hope we have a signing open to the public.

Speaking of signings, as a mass market author I don’t do a lot of signings. Publishers rarely (if ever) pay for a mass market author to tour, and it’s not really cost effective to do it ourselves. But on occasion I sign locally, or with groups of authors. Or, sometimes I just attend author events, like when my daughter Kelly begged me to take her to San Francisco (2 hour drive) to hear three of her favorite authors (Libba Bray, Meg Cabot, and Maggie Stiefvater) speak and sign. She brought her favorite books with her, and bought a couple there, and even though Kelly is very shy and hates having her picture taken, I got her to pose with Libba Bray with the promise I wouldn’t post it on Facebook. So I’m posting it here:

Yesterday, I spent nearly five hours at the Algonquin Hotel—three short blocks from the Marriott where Toni and I stayed for the RWA conference—where I worked on my copyedits, had a bite to eat, and drank a glass or two of wine. I can see why it was a popular spot for writers–I could write at the Algonquin every day. Matilda is the resident cat—this is Matilda the Second.

After I posted this picture to Facebook, my cat Nemo sent me an email, hurt that I didn’t post a picture of him (even though he’s home and 3,000 miles away) and instead cooed over Matilda, so this is Nemo on my research shelf before my mom came over to organize my bookshelves:

And finally, here are a couple pictures from my field trip as a role player for SWAT training. Yes, we were tackled by SWAT. Yes, it was fun. Yes, I can’t wait to go back. But in addition to the “covered-pile” hostage exercise I was part of, I was able to observe live ammo drills/hostage rescue and close quarter drills from a catwalk, which was nearly as much fun.

Toni and I are moving over to the Thrillerfest hotel today, but I’ll be back tonight to answer any questions you might have about RWA, Thrillerfest, book signings, or role playing with SWAT. Or anything else you feel like chatting about!

Brave New E Book World

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I know, it’s a holiday weekend, but here at Murderati, no one sleeps.

Last week I threatened to start a related series of blogs on indie publishing and how the whole e book revolution has been affecting me.

In my post I talked about how over the years I have had pretty good intuitions, cosmic nudges as it were, about moving in directions that have enabled me to make a full-time living as a writer for pretty much all of my adult life. And the latest cosmic nudge was about e books. Well, okay, maybe that was Joe Konrath, who tends to be even more insistent than the cosmos.

At any rate, I’ve done it – yesterday I put my first original e novel up for sale, $2.99, any format.

Buy for Kindle:

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

I’d already worked through this process with my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbook, with about a dozen very patient author friends who had already been through it talking me through the steps. So this time was easier and faster because I’d already been through all the steps, and I know ALL of it is going to get easier and easier. Except, of course, writing the books. That part hasn’t changed, unfortunately.

So that’s the first point to cover, today.

FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS, IT’S ABOUT THE BOOK.

Here’s my story line:

Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna’s father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna’s secret crush, is having the exact same dream.

Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna’s own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…

If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.

This is a project that was very close to me and very hard to write. You know, every book is different, but I know from my own experience and from talking to a lot of author friends (including several of the Rati) who started publishing at about the same time, that sometime around about your fourth book you start getting restless and you just want to stretch.

So I was experimenting with a lot of things with SPACE. It’s my first Young Adult, my first book in present tense, my first book set in California even though California is where I’ve lived for practically all my life (apparently I had to leave it to be able to write about it).

Also I was adapting my own short story, “The Edge of Seventeen”, which won the Thriller award for Best Short Fiction two years ago.

Which I also just put up online, because that’s what we can do, now! Just 99 cents, any format.

(Both cover designs by my very talented sister, Elaine: ElaineSokoloff at gmail dot com).

Buy for Kindle

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

I’m not new to adaptation, it was half the work I did when I was a screenwriter, but I really had to open up the story. That was the best part, it turned out – I always felt there was much more to the story I’d initially told, but I really surprised myself with how much more there was.

Add to all those challenges the fact that for the last two years I’ve been dealing with a devastating family illness and death. It’s easily been the hardest time of my life.

I guess it’s no surprise, then, that when I’d finally nailed the book, it was…. How to say this?

Dark.

Really, really dark. Which I tend to be anyway, but under the circumstances… well, it was dark.

And it’s about high school. Now, I personally had a better time in HS than most, because we had such a great theater department and that’s what I was always doing. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t acutely aware of the horror and misery going on around me, and that’s what I write about in Space. And when you’re dealing with a sixteen-year old protagonist, everything seems all that much darker.

So that brings us to the second point.

WHY GO INDIE?

The first thing is always writing a great book. But once you have that great book, there’s the decision of how to market it. In traditional publishing, this has a lot to do with your agent deciding which editors are the best potential buyers at each house, and then the fate of the book is largely determined there. But with the rise of indie publishing, one of the new decisions is “Indie or traditional?”

Well, here’s one of the things that’s so cool about e publishing – that you can use it for those slightly off projects that I KNOW all you great slightly off people have. In this case, I was writing a YA that was – even as edgy as YA has gotten – edgy enough to give me and my agent pause about submitting it to editors.

Not that it wouldn’t be totally great to have a banned book in my bibliography, but… I was writing from the perspective of a 16-year old who has seen WAY too much, just like the 16-year old that I was. And while I myself was reading things that were way too old for me when I was – well, seven, actually, but certainly when I was 16 – what that meant was that I was reading adult books that were way too old for me. Because when I was a teenager there weren’t really that many YAs that were too old for anyone except for that twisted Flowers in the Attic series. And those were twisted in a way I was familiar with from my friends’ lives, unfortunately, so I didn’t really understand why the books were considered so twisted. I mean, why get upset about the books? Try getting upset about incest and child abuse in real life, and DOING something about it, why don’t you…

Um, sorry, where was I?

Oh, right. Nowadays there is a ton of edgy YA out there – edgy being the encompassing word for books that cover incest, rape, cutting, eating disorders, mental illness, child abuse of any kind, teen criminal behavior, school shootings, suicide… no taboo is left, actually. But in The Space Between I cross a supernatural thriller and edgy YA, which takes things a little further out there.

Now, that didn’t discourage my agent. But because of the life interruptions of my last year, I’m in the interesting position of having several interrupted spec books that I’m just now getting back to. So because The Space Between is my first and only YA, and one of my others is much more along the lines of my other adult thrillers, only even more mainstream, and because my agent is really aware of and supportive of my desire to get into the indie publishing business, we decided that I would indie publish Space, and he will shop the adult thriller traditionally (if that still makes the most sense when I finish that book).

It’s an experiment – because at least at the moment YA is not generally a great seller in e books, so it could be that a traditional publishing deal would be a better way to go. But things have changed so much in publishing in a year that e publishing first does not preclude doing a traditional publishing deal later; in fact it’s more and more common for traditional publishers to pick up indie books for traditional publishing.

I’m in the lucky position of having multiple projects and a steady income from previous contracts, so I can take some risk.

So the KIND of book SPACE is figured into that decision.

Another factor was price. I have traditionally published books out on Kindle at the publisher’s price of $11.99 and $12.99 and it just feels like publishers are killing all chance of sales at that price. I absolutely gladly pay twice that for a hardcover of an author I love, but for an e book? No way. Who wouldn’t gravitate toward a $2.99 book in the same genre? In this economy? Sorry, but that’s such an obvious reality it just makes me sick to see publishers ignoring it – and killing authors’ sales in the process.

The other big factor, of course, is rights and money. One of the biggest pulls for me about getting into the e book business now is – of course – the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, slightly less for most other formats. That can change, but at least if it changes I’ll still own full rightst to the book and can take it anywhere I want from there. I have no idea what kind of sales I can expect for a fiction YA; the only numbers I have to go on are the sales from a non-fiction workbook. But non-fiction is statistically the WORST selling genre in e books, and I’ve already done well enough with it to totally justify doing it as an e book rather than a traditional deal. And those were the kinds of numbers and comparisons that my agent and I were talking about in our discussions on the subject.

So the lessons here?

YOUR AGENT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. At least if you’ve chosen well, and those Rati who share mine will testify to the awesomeness of ours. You and your agent make these decisions together. If you don’t have an agent and are considering doing directly to indie publishing, I would strongly suggest that along with writing the best damn book you can write, you be doing reading every day on what indie publishing actually entails so you are going into it with real knowledge.

Here are the most essential resources I know of for indie publishing information:

– A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

Not that anyone here doesn’t already know, but Joe’s is the one essential site on e publishing.

– The Kindleboards

Browsing this message board a couple of days a week will give you a very practical crash course on everything from cover design essentials (what works for traditional publishing is NOT what works at thumbnail size), to promotion, to what indie authors’ actual sales figures are. People on the boards are friendly and helpful; I also found my two great proofreaders there. It’s also interesting to see the politics of indie vs. traditional publishing; personally, I just don’t see it as an Either/Or proposition.

– The Business Rusch Publishing series

Everyone, and I mean everyone, should read Kristine Rusch’s incredible series on the essentials of publishing and the changes in our world.

And speaking of agents, this is an interesting article by Barry Eisler on a new trend:

– I’ve also been hearing plugs for Digital Book World: but I haven’t read enough to give a personal recommendation.

Okay, I think that’s enough reading to get your through the four-day weekend (sorry about that!) so I’ll save my step-by-step guide of what I’ve learned about prepping a book for e publication and getting it up and published: editing, formatting, cover design, pricing, distribution, promotion, and the kitchen sink – for my next post.

So, questions. Does anyone else have something twisty there in the back of that drawer that you’ve been thinking of putting up as an e book? Anyone out there reading edgy YA, and if so, there any taboos you haven’t seen broken?

And – is anyone else watching 1776 for the holiday weekend? (Hi Allison!) Have a great one.

– Alex

I’ve known everyone I’ve never met

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

I had dinner the other night with my friend Robert whom I met in fourth grade. We were very best friends for two years until we left for different schools and then it was only sporadic visits, really, just a few times through high school and then a twenty year gap and then one afternoon in Los Angeles for about an hour and then another fifteen year gap and finally dinner last week in Hollywood.

Robert lives in New York now and he’s in town to produce and edit a documentary for the Discovery Channel.

We sat down at my favorite Thai restaurant and were instantly transported back to elementary school. The best of friends, remember. We were making films again in our heads with his regular 8, spring-wound motion picture camera. Thirty-eight years had not passed. It was very Einsteinian – we folded time to reconnect our lives.

This is not a unique occurrence. I remember attending a wedding, sitting down with a friend from high school to talk for a short time. Later, his wife asked him how it was seeing me again and he replied, “It’s like the conversation never stopped.” He meant the “conversation” that was our friendship, which had been set aside for twenty years.

It works conversely, too. Sometimes you meet someone for the first time and the conversation is so open and honest that you know you’ve made a friend for life. Or, perhaps you’ve known this person through eons of previous lives and the opportunity to meet again has just occurred.

I can’t help but feel that I’ve known most everyone I haven’t met and then I meet them again. It’s comforting. Here we are again, rolling through the stages of human existence, seeing the world anew with all the fears of children entering the forest. Here we are again, hello, do you need a hug, can I hold your hand through this next step, will you hold mine? Don’t worry, we’re going to make it. And then we’ll forget everything all over again. It’s heartbreaking to lose a friend but there’s the chance that we never really die we just start fresh for another go-around. But the memories, it’s a shame to lose the memories.

I see people and I know they’re on a journey and everyone must face it alone even with friends and family at their side. And we’re all so brave until we crack and then sometimes we’re braver.

It can be really terrifying and maddening and unfair, sometimes cruelly unfair, the things we are made to endure through the adventures of our lives. It can also be terrifically unique and joyful, too, seeing the world through our own set of eyes.

I have a special walk I take to the cafe where I write most days. It gives me the chance to see the world through my joyful eyes. It’s a tree-lined slice of woods near the beach and I watch butterflies and hummingbirds and crows and sometimes wild parrots flit about. And the Jacaranda trees shed their lavender flowers. And I smell the Jasmine and Society Garlic and there’s even a touch of Rosemary which I touch and bring to my nose. There’s always the sound of kids at play and dogs barking. I pet every dog I can except the short-haired ones which my wife is allergic to and sometimes I even pet the short-haired ones, too. As I descend the hill to my cafe I see the ocean spread before me.

The walk grounds me.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I find it necessary to stop, open my eyes, and listen. The world has plenty to say. And every single person I know or have just met after having met before has a story to tell.

Writing has been wonderful in that it gives me an excuse to slip between the cracks of people’s lives. To ask the really pertinent questions. Why did you go into this line of work? What makes it special? How does it make you feel? Was it the right choice? What do you really want to do? Are you happy?

Not exactly the kinds of research questions one expects to hear from an author. There’s an art to it; you work your way up to the tough ones. You start with things like, “How many quarts of blood typically drain from a human body?”

That’s a detail question. Anyone can pull the answer from a quick Google search. “Are you happy with the decisions you made in life?” Try Googling that one.

I’m really struggling with my current work-in-progress right now and I’ve determined the reason I’m flailing is I’m trying to tell an entertaining story and not a story about LIFE.

I don’t want to be remembered as a plot-meister. Plot is important and I’m a devout plotaholic. But plot without purpose is pointless. And, while a character’s purpose is not always known, his search for purpose is everything. The most interesting stories I’ve read involve the hero’s search for purpose while he’s busy chasing the murdering sons-of-bitches who did him wrong. I’m not interested in the chase unless I’m interested in the character.

Oh, I have babbled on today. I’ve decided that my blogs will take me where they must. Their primary purpose is to keep me engaged because if I’m engaged then maybe you’ll be engaged, too.

So, here’s a few good questions to throw off your day. For those of you who chose a career separate from writing, why did you go into this line of work? What makes it special? How does it make you feel? Was it the right choice? What do you really want to do? Are you happy? And, if any of this makes you feel uncomfortable, how many quarts of blood typically drain from a human body?

Playing It Safe

Charlie Fox

I hope you’ll forgive me this week if I hand over control to a kind of guest blogger*. I wanted to begin an occasional series about safety – personal safety, safety at home, in the car, on the street, in a dangerous situation. So, who better to talk about these topics than my protagonist, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox? Charlie had a short-lived career in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, passing selection for Special Forces training, but being dishonourably discharged following a court martial. (And I wouldn’t ask her about that if I were you.) She then taught self-defence for women in a small northern UK city, and eventually moved into a career as a bodyguard – initially for a London-based outfit run by her former army training instructor, Sean Meyer. When Sean was offered a partnership in Parker Armstrong’s prestigious close-protection agency in New York City, Charlie moved with Sean to Manhattan. She has been based there ever since.

Charlie Fox: I had to laugh when I saw the title of this post, because let me tell you, ‘playing it safe’ is not a phrase that ever made it anywhere near my school reports – nor my military appraisals, come to think of it.

That doesn’t mean I’m reckless, don’t get me wrong. If the situation demands it, I’ll get stuck in, but not without weighing up the risks and the odds first. And I’ll go a long way to avoid trouble if I can manage it. It was one of the problems I always found when I used to teach self-defence classes. People learn a few tricks and think they’re invincible. Never has that old saying ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ been more true than in personal safety.

Probably not a bad place to start.

I have to say, though, that these days my chances of being randomly mugged or attacked on the street are far lower than they used to be. No, that doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly grown fangs or another head. It’s just that I keep my mobile phone in my pocket and I’m not obsessed with texting, tweeting, or checking my damn email every thirty seconds.

If you’ve read Tony Walker’s excellent book HOW TO WIN A GUNFIGHT – and I’d recommend it – he describes the system developed by retired USMC lieutenant colonel John Dean ‘Jeff’ Cooper, which lists the four states of consciousness – White, Yellow, Orange and Red.

White is totally away with the fairies. These are the people who fall into fountains while answering texts:

Or walk off the edge of railway platforms while playing on their handheld gamer:

They are completely unaware of what’s going on around them, of potential dangers or threats. They may as well have VICTIM tattooed across their forehead in big letters.

Basically, the only time you should be in condition White is when you’re unconscious. Or dead. And even then, you’ll need to provide a note from your mum.

Yellow is the state you should aim for. Think domestic cat. I’ve always found it’s really, really hard to creep up on those furry little devils, however relaxed they appear to be. When you’re in condition Yellow, you’re aware of what’s going on, of who’s around you, and what their intentions might be – like stuffing you in a wire basket and carting you to the vet. This is not to say you have to be paranoid about things, but it might save you a lot of pain in the long run if you practice remaining alert while you’re out and about. Use shop windows to check out who’s following rather than checking if those pilates classes are paying off.

If you wear heels to work and know you have any walking to do later, take a pair of flats to change into. Running shoes of some description would be best, but even those fold-up ballet-pump type things are better than five-inch stilettos.

Keep those killer heels close to hand, though – you never know when they might come in useful.

If you carry a bag, put the strap across your chest rather than over your shoulder. There are some great bags out there with steel wire in the strap and woven into the material of the bag itself, which makes the old ‘slash and grab’ technique much more difficult for a would-be thief. They don’t have to look industrial. For example, this is a Metrosafe steel mesh shoulder bag:

If you’re wearing a rucksack, make sure the zips are closed. Tie something through the ends of the zips and loop them round to the front of you, so at least if someone tries to slide a zip open, you’ve half a chance of spotting it. Or get a steel mesh net which you can lock to an immovable object.

And just in case the guys are looking all smug at this point – because they’re not the rucksack type and wouldn’t be seen dead carrying a manbag – wallets in back pockets are even more vulnerable. There’s an old pickpocket technique called ‘pinch and push’ and I’ve seen it done successfully even with the tightest trousers. The thief falls into step behind the unsuspecting victim (who’s in condition White, obviously), nips a small fold of material of the back pocket containing the wallet between finger and thumb, and, having loosened the wallet’s snug fit, gently pushes it upwards with another finger. Takes no more than a couple of seconds. Of course, for the victim it means spending hours on the phone later trying to convince all the credit card companies that they really weren’t the one who maxed everything out on disposable electronic items.

Above all, when you’re in condition Yellow, look confident. Muggers are, by their nature, opportunity criminals. They’re predators who wait for likely looking prey and strike almost on impulse. If you look alert and confident, they’re going to pass. After all, it won’t be long before someone else wanders along with their ear-buds in place and their eyes firmly fixed on that tiny screen …

Having a dog is also a good deterrent, by the way. A few years ago, I dog-sat for a friend on a sink estate back home. (RIOT ACT) Pauline owned a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Friday who had once, in her absence, chased a delivery man up onto the roof of her garden shed and kept him up there all morning. That kind of reputation is pure gold when it comes to security.

Even those dogs that look like a little fluffy rat on a stick can usually be relied upon to make lots of noise. Of course, some people have to go one step further.

Orange is the next level up. Because you’re alert, you’ve spotted a potential problem before it’s become an actual problem, and you have time to make a considered decision what to do about it. Our primal instinct is for fight or flight.

Flight is the best option, every time. Trust me on this – I have the scars to prove it.

You leave a restaurant or a cinema, or a late-night shopping mall. You’re alone, and you notice there’s someone loitering near your car. Or they could simply be between you and your car. You could brazen it out, walk straight through with your best stern look and hope to intimidate them. Sharp did this once at a gas station in a run-down area, and got away with it thanks to the fact she was wearing a T-shirt from the Houston Top Gun Handgun Training Center. If you’ve just come from teaching your karate class and are still in your gi with your faded black belt tied casually around your waist, you’ll probably get away with it, too.

But why risk it?

Go back inside the restaurant, cinema, or shopping mall, and either wait until the threat has gone, or ask members of staff to walk you to your car. OK, if you’re a hunky six-footer who regularly wins Chuck Norris look-alike contests, you may feel a bit silly doing this, but if you regularly struggle to convince roller coaster attendants that you really are old enough and tall enough to ride, then it’s good advice.

Then we come to Red. It’s all kicked off. Someone’s in front of you and they’re armed and they’re directly threatening you. Having been previously in condition Yellow, however, their arrival won’t have come as a surprise, will it? You will already have had time to make a decision – fight or flight.

What you MUST NOT do is freeze. It’s an instinctive reaction to a predator, because as anybody who’s been in a sniper area knows, immobility makes you much harder to spot where any kind of movement will make you stand out every time.

Running is a good option. In fact, running is the best option. Sadly, I was never in the sprint league. Yelling is also a good option. Equally sadly, research has shown that you’ll get far more attention as a woman in trouble if you shout, “Fire!” rather than “Help!” or even “Rape!”

Personally, even if my would-be assailant has a knife or a gun, I’d still try to make a break rather than face the consequences of letting him do what he wants. If you allow yourself to be abducted and taken to a secondary location of your assailant’s choosing, the risk to you DOUBLES.

Besides, either he’s going to shoot me, in which case I’m stuffed anyway, or he’s just using the weapon in an attempt to subdue and control. Running means he has to run after me, or hit a moving target.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on gun ranges over the years. I’ve seen people practising for their concealed carry licences, who didn’t worry the target at distances of less than ten feet. In fact, most of them couldn’t hit an elephant if they were sitting on its back.

To be a decent shot, you need to put in a lot of practice. Carrying an illegal trophy piece on the street does not constitute practice. Therefore, the chances are that if you can put some initial distance between you and an assailant armed with a handgun, they’re going to miss. Risky? Maybe, but it’s one you have to calculate for yourself in the time it takes for Orange to turn Red.

And what do you do if flight is not an option?

Well, if she lets me back, maybe I’ll go into that next time …

So, ‘Rati, have you ever found yourself in an unsafe situation? How did you get out of it? How would you do things differently if faced with the same situation again? How have you engineered your characters into situations that required some ingenious method of extraction? And would you like me to continue this series from Charlie?

This week’s Word of the Week is gargoyle, which as well as a grotesque figure, originally meant a carved spout projecting from a roof gutter. The word comes from the Latin gurgulio, or Old French gargouille – meaning the throat.

And here – as promised to Reine – are a couple of pictures of our resident gargoyle, Desmond.

*OK, so Charlie’s not exactly a guest blogger, but I always try to do what the voices in my head tell me to …

“Allow myself to introduce… myself.”

by Jonathan Hayes

Hi there – I’m the Second Murderati New Arrival, Jonathan Hayes. Technically, I’m John Hayes, but so is my father, so everyone except for telemarketers and pollsters has always called me Jonathan. And lots of people also call me “Jaze”, after an old email address. I’m not picky – I’ll answer to anything.

I’m going to softball my introductory post – in the months, years, millennia to come, expect some forensic stuff, some writing stuff, some musings on the sweet mysteries of life, etc., but my first Murderati entry is just going to be a gentle “Getting to Know You” thing.

Mostly because I’m feeling a bit burnt out – it’s been a rough few weeks here at Stately Jaze Manor. My cat Bates died last month, which was surprisingly painful, and when I got back from my tour for A Hard Death, Petey, my back-up cat, welcomed me by developing a urinary blockage. I don’t propose to dwell on my cat’s urinary tract health (“my cat’s urinary tract health” – is there a more American phrase?), but suffice it to say the last fortnight started with fervent prayers for cat piss, then rapidly devolved into a blur of taxis, vets, animal emergency rooms, horribly invasive manipulations of poor Petey’s naughty bits, and salty tears as I watched the zeros line up on various cash registers (so far, we’re in for about $6,000. My friend Sue, an old medical school chum in London, tells me that’s more than the National Health Service charges for a heart transplant – a human heart transplant.)

Anyway, Petey’s back home now, and peeing, sort of, so I’m coming up for air, and writing my softball introduction.

I found Gar’s journey through the Vale of Publication really riveting – it’s great to hear an experienced writer talk about the ups and downs of life in the biz. Alafair interviewed me here before A Hard Death came out, so I don’t think there’s any need to go over my Epic Origin Story again.

In brief, I am a forensic pathologist; for the last 15 years, I’ve had a second career as a freelance food and travel writer, before switching to thrillers, starting with Precious Blood in 2007.

Forensics still takes up the majority of my time. There are about 500 Board Certified forensic pathologists in the USA, which is too few for such a vast expanse. The upside of this situation is excellent job security (unless you’re an epic screw-up – and there are a few out there). The downside? The quality of medicolegal investigation in this country is spotty at best.

I’m likely, then, the only forensic pathologist that you know. (I’ll get into what forensic pathologists are in a later post, and, also, what separates them from coroners.) The combination of our often high-profile work and our real world rarity has made us a fairly exotic species: if you turn on a TV, you’re almost sure to land on a forensic show – CSI, NCIS, various reality shows, etc. Indeed, a couple years back, a glossy magazine pronounced forensic pathologists “the new Super Models”. So, yes, a sexy, glamorous profession that has caught the public’s eye in recent years.

The reality is that forensic pathology is tough. It’s hard work – physically exhausting, intellectually demanding, emotionally draining. And staying in general pathology is far more lucrative than specializing in forensics – after all, state and city governments are not known for their largess, even at the best of times. The thing is, at the end of the day, forensic work is really fascinating stuff; not a day goes by when I don’t learn or see something i’d never known or seen before.

I live and work in New York City. Ours is a large, busy office, and I think that we’re just about the best in the country. Of course, I don’t doubt that other offices think that they’re the best, but that just makes me nod and smile indulgently.

We have almost 30 pathologists staffing five offices (one each in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island), which means that cases are managed expeditiously and thoroughly. Usually, the work day is 8AM to 4:30PM, but if there’s a mass fatality incident, for example, the hours instantly elongate. I’ve done autopsies at all hours of the day and night, typically after things like plane crashes. We try to avoid this, because when you’re exhausted, your judgement becomes impaired. And when you do things in the middle of the night, under pressure, without adequate support staff, the chances of a screw-up increase; the JFK autopsy, for example, was done well after normal business hours. One understands the huge pressures the pathologists were under, but that autopsy has been torn apart, time and again, and one can’t help but wonder whether things might have gone more smoothly if they’d waited to do the autopsy under normal circumstances in the full light of day.

So, yes, fairly regular days. Our facility is open seven days a week – another luxury of having a big city office – so I work quite frequently on weekends and holidays. I’ll get more into the nuts and bolts of what we do in later posts, but for now, here’s where I spend most of my days:

This is the main autopsy room in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Manhattan. There are eight autopsy tables here; the perforations alongside the tables create negative pressure, hoovering up any potential pathogens that might be released during the procedure. Next to each table is a scale, for weighing organs. This photo is a still image from a kind of cool New York Times panoramic image – if you click on this photo, it’ll take you to the original, and you can gaze at your screen as the image pans vertiginously around the autopsy room.

I live in Downtown Manhattan, near Union Square, a 25 minute walk from my office, which I love – both the walk, and getting the distance from my office. My apartment is a small loft, converted from an old brick warehouse that was originally built to house carriages and stable the carriage horses. I have high ceilings and great light, and, most precious of all in Manhattan, real tranquility.

Which is important, because I write mostly at home. I write in bed, formerly surrounded by cats, now abutted by cat. (I got the owl from an old girlfriend, a piece of Victorian taxidermy she’d inherited from her grandmother.)

Actually, mostly, I write the first draft in bed: when the deadlines become crushing, I move to my living room table. I find the cold, industrial aluminium chairs (from an insane asylum upstate) help me concentrate on writing.

When I absolutely, positively have to buckle down and get a draft done, I go to the Writers’ Room. It’s a cooperative space on lower Broadway, with cubicles, wifi, Lexis-Nexis access and Silence Nazis – seriously, you get fined, like, $100 if your cell phone rings. The gulag feel is perfect for finishing a book, plus it’s fun to watch liberals behave like fascists.

My final writing place is in Paris. A Francophile all my life, I finally broke down and bought a tiny (250 sq ft) attic apartment in the Marais, the city’s medieval center. I know this is going to sound insane, but, between my tight schedule and my v. French contractors and the standard disasters that accompany working on a 200 year old building, I’ve been renovating this miniscule studio for over 3 years. It’s under the eaves, with big French windows that open onto a stunning view. Most important of all, it has a diminutive elevator! A real find, since elevators are very rare in this arrondissement, where the streets are so old that they’re designed for horse-drawn carts. My dream is to write in Paris instead of the Writers’ Room, but so far, the only thing I’ve written here has been huge checques to various contractors.

Really, it is very lovely, and I hope to visit it someday.

OK, so I’ve bounced about inside this blogging software, and posted a few photos, and stuck in a few links; I think I have a rough sense of how this all works, so I’m going to stop here.

I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone. I won’t be talking about my own cases (for obvious reasons), and I won’t really be commenting on other high profile cases (actually, I will have something to say about the Casey Anthony case, but not about the forensics).

Oh! You should friend me on Facebook – I post the best stuff, if I do say so myself. Or at the very least, follow my Tumblr, which is mind-blowingly phenomenal, if occasionally Not Safe for Work. Or don’t – but if you choose not to, just know that you’ll be constantly missing out…

OK now, let’s see if that worked…