Looking Back, Looking Forward

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Zoë did a brilliant thing in her post last week – a looking back and looking forward at her career as a writer, and JT said something about all of us maybe doing it.  Which is just like JT, who is so good about one-year plans and five-year plans and that kind of grownup thing.

Well, maybe Steve’s post yesterday scared me into acting a little more like an adult, because I decided to do the career review thing for myself today, and the rest of you can do what you want.

A career is always evolving, I guess, it’s not just a writer’s career that does. And it’s interesting to look back over my career and see how certain patterns emerge. Today I’ll be looking at the fairly positive ones, not the horrific soul-crushing mistakes that take years to recover from. That’s another post.

So a first really clear pattern is that every 5 to 10 years I have moved from one medium to another, always incorporating what I’ve learned from each previous incarnation.

I started off not as a writer but in theater, at eight or nine, first acting (a lot of it) and dancing, then directing and choreographing. I didn’t start writing until college.  But in theater,  without meaning to,  I was learning all the jobs required to write: acting, directing, set design, lighting design, choreography, musical direction, props….  I also did a stint in video production in there somewhere.

I graduated from college and worked for a couple of years in an improvisational theater ensemble, which was more great training, and a totally fabulous time. But I started getting these– feelings. Whispers, you might say. They weren’t all that coherent really, but I was picking up on a message that sounded suspiciously like: “No one’s ever going to pay you to do political theater in Berkeley.”  It’s a coals to Newcastle kind of thing.

So since I’d already been to New York, and I knew I didn’t want to write for Broadway (or Off-), I decided – not all at once, but in a sort of gradual tipping point from “maybe” to “okay, let’s just do it” – that I’d move down to LA and become a screenwriter. Yes, just like that. You really have to love California; from birth we are completely inundated with T-shirt and bumper sticker messages like “Follow your bliss!” “Do what you love and the money will follow!” “Feel the fear and do it anyway!” 

Even more amusing- we actually believe all that.

So I moved down to LA and became a screenwriter.  Pretty much just like that.  Well, I worked in development for about a year and a half while I was writing my first script, and of course I was working my ass off learning the craft and the town and everything it takes to actually accomplish it all, but it really did happen pretty much like that. 

This is another example of a pattern that established itself early in my life. I’d be subliminally pushed to do something and then I’d power down, one might say obsessively, and make it happen. I directed my first full-length play at 16 by pretty much the same process; I landed an unheard-of gig (for a 17-year old!) in college directing a full-scale musical every year with an actual budget and in fantastic theater venues.  The Universe is very supportive of inspiration, I find.

I won’t go into my Hollywood years, it’s too convoluted a story for one blog and I still have the PTSD issues. I’ll just say I made a good and sometimes great living as a screenwriter for a long time until I started getting those feelings again– this time more like something was going terribly wrong in the industry. A lot of this was coming from being on the Board of Directors of the WGA, the screenwriters’ union, and getting an insider look at changes happening in the film business. I started getting whispers again– something like: This is insane. Save yourself.  Get out.  Or at least, diversify, as they say in the financial business.  And so I wrote a book. At night. Screenwriting became my day job as I sweated over the novel, one page at a time.  Sometimes one paragraph or one sentence at a time.  But that’s how a book gets written.

And that book sold and was nominated for a couple of awards and suddenly I was in another career. Just at the right time, I have to say, given what’s happened in the film business since I wrote that first book.

So now for the last five years I’ve been making my living at books. I have five published novels out, with numerous foreign editions, and a non-fiction workbook of my Screenwriting Tricks workshops. I have contracts for four more books, and every day I am incredibly grateful to be making a living at what I love (or some days, love to hate) in the middle of this terrible recession.

But –  I’m getting that feeling, again.  That – “Time to change” feeling.  “Diversify,” the voice whispers. Sometimes it’s not much of a whisper; sometimes it’s a bolt straight upright in bed with a voice in my head screaming DO IT!!!!  kind of thing. I mean, I have contracts for now, but what’s the business going to look like in a year?

Yes, I am talking about indie publishing.

We’ve been having these backstage discussions at Murderati about where we want the blog to go from here, and my own very strong feeling is that we need to be talking even more about e books and indie publishing. So I am putting my blogging where my mouth is and am going to do a series of posts on how the changes in the publishing business are affecting me and how I personally am dealing with it all.

I already have a toe in the e book business. Screenwriting Tricks For Authors is up on Amazon for Kindle, and I’ve been loving getting that direct deposit to my bank account every month; it really helped back there around Christmas when my advance check was taking about forever to show up. And a few weeks ago I finally buckled down and figured out how to get the book up on Smashwords, in all those formats that Smashwords does, and on B&N for Nook. And once I did, I felt like a complete idiot for not having done it before.  It is instant money that I could have been getting all along.

Back to the portfolio analogy for a moment:  it’s an income stream. As a professional author, I have many income streams. I get advances for my new books, I have a backlist that generates royalties, I have royalties from foreign publishers, and now I have e book income, soon to have much more, if things go as I’m planning – all in concert with my agent, of course.

The thing writers don’t talk about enough, I think, is how we actually manage to make that combine into a real living.  Well, I can tell you for myself, and for most of my friends who have NOT broken into the huge advance category but are still making a full-time living at writing books: how it’s done is by constant, grueling work to get more product out there to create more income streams – on top of writing the best book you can write every single time. It’s not very pleasant, truthfully – it means firing on all four burners 24/7.  But that’s nothing new – it seems to be the job description. Everyone I know does it.

Now, e books are a freaking ton of work that I’ve just added to an already overflowing plate. I am now responsible for lining up all kinds of support people that my publisher has always provided: proofreaders, editors, cover designers, formatters, technical services – and there’s a lot of new technical stuff I’ve had to learn myself, which I must say is not my forte. It’s overwhelming, which is why I haven’t fully done it before now. But I think it’s going to be crucial to have some eggs in that basket, so I’m biting the bullet, for real.  To mix all kinds of metaphors, as you all know I love to do.

And honestly, the control and flexibility you get with indie publishing is exhilarating. One thing I’ve discovered is that you can create your own formats. For Screenwriting Tricks, I have been working on and off for most of the past year on an extensive revision of the first book, incorporating all the things I’ve been learning in my own workshops. And then I realized – Why revise the first one?  At a $2.99 selling price I can put out another book that has a different focus, and people can choose which book is best suited to their needs, or get both – two whole workbooks for the price of one paperback novel! That’s an incredible thing. And I can price it that way and still make money because the royalties are so high.

So, in the next couple of weeks I am going to be releasing two new e books, the second Screenwriting Tricks book and a spooky new original e book novel: The Space Between – plus the Thriller Award-winning short story that I based that novel on: The Edge of Seventeen. And I’m going to write some posts documenting the process I’ve been going through and the resources I’ve discovered that helped me do it all.

It’s a whole new world, but it’s an exciting one, and I hope I can convey it in a way that might open some doors for other people thinking of taking the plunge.

So, a couple of questions.  Do any of you do periodic reviews of your careers to see how far you’ve come and where you want to go from now?  Do you find patterns?

And what about this e book thing?  Have you done it?  Are you thinking of doing it?  It’s coming up on Solstice, time for some serious manifestation.   Follow your bliss!!!

–  Alex

FOURTEEN

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

 I just celebrated another birthday and I realize I’m fourteen years old.

I was fourteen last year, too. And the year before that. In fact, I’ve been fourteen years old since I was fourteen.

Not that fourteen is the perfect age. Fourteen is a pretty rotten age. It’s in-between everything. You want to be big, you want to be a man, but you’re still a punk. When I was fourteen (as I am now) I was a freshman in high school. Ninth grade. Bottom of the food chain. Thirteen was better—I was in eighth grade and the oldest kid in middle school.

When you’re fourteen you think you’re gonna live forever. You think you might be a doctor or movie director or the president of the United States. You think you’re going to make a huge amount of money so you don’t really need to save. You live for the moment.

I realize I’ve never left this mindset. I know I’m going to make a huge amount of money, one of these days. Probably when I’m twenty-five. I know I’m going to direct a feature film, too. I intend to do that before I’m forty, because I hear Hollywood’s a pretty young town.

There are drawbacks to living fourteen. Like, you might buy a house without any money, using something the grown-ups call a zero-downpayment loan. But they have this great feature called a negative amortization payment and that’ll help, for a while. And then they got this even greater thing called a short sale. I guess there’s always something to look forward to.

Other things come up that are tough, you know, when you’re fourteen. Like, those things they put on bananas in the sex education class? You might want to wear one. Otherwise, well, all these crazy things happen that are just a bit too much for a fourteen year old deal with. I didn’t wear one and now I’ve got kids and a wife and I had to get a job for, like, a really long time, and I had to do what people said without talking back and the times I did talk back they said I was fired and when I went back the next day they said what are you doing here we fired you and I said oh.

Now I’ve got two kids. One is eleven and one is thirteen. The eleven year old is thirty-two. The thirteen year old is fourteen. We say the eleven year old is the wise one. He tells the rest of us to save money. We don’t know what he’s talking about.

My wife is fourteen, too. So, that’s cool. I think my thirteen year old will be fourteen for a long time as well, but then I think he’s going to get older and end up around twenty-one. And I’m hoping that our eleven year old becomes fourteen someday, maybe after his fiftieth birthday.

It’s not for everyone. I’m not even sure if it’s really that healthy, you know, in a psychological sense. I read in a book in my freshman something class that it’s called “arrested development.” You get stuck in the year where you had some kind of trauma. When I think back on it I remember that fourteen is how old I was when my dad left my mom. I remember waking up one morning to find my mother in the kitchen crying over a bowl of cereal. She’d been up all night. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “Your father left us.” I told her not to joke around. “Your father left us and he’s not coming back,” she yelled. Later that day my dad picked me up at soccer practice and cried, telling me he was leaving my mother to marry the woman he’d been seeing for six years.

Fourteen was the year the world came crashing down. It was the year I was expected to grow up, to take it like a man. I did all the things they told me to do. Things got really hard after that. I tried and tried and tried and tried.

What’s great, though, is that you have this awesome imagination when you’re fourteen, so you can fall back on your dreams and ideas and stories and the little movies you keep in your head. I think that’s how I got through it all. It’s a good thing I wasn’t the age they said I was or I don’t think I would’ve made it.

So, now I’m fourteen again and I have no idea how the rest of my life is going to play out. I know I’m going to direct a feature film someday and I know I’m going to make a lot of money so I won’t have to worry about how to pay the bills they keep sending me for all the things I like to do, like watch TV and go to movies and eat at restaurants (that’s really cool, I LOVE eating at restaurants!) and taking road trips with my fourteen year old wife and our kids. I know I’m always going to live near the ocean because I’ve wanted to live near the ocean since before I was fourteen and it’s one of the things that everyone told me I couldn’t do until I had enough money and I always thought hell why not. Come to think of it, that’s what I’ve thought about pretty much everything everyone told me I’m not supposed to do. I guess that’s why some people call me Peter Pan. That’s okay, he always was my favorite.

But a couple years ago I found this really cool group of other fourteen year olds. They all write books and together we call ourselves “authors.” I always thought I was strange and out-of-place and doing things the wrong way and then I met these other people and they’re just like me. It’s like camp for fourteen year olds forever. Thank God most of us have children to take care of us when we get into trouble. Because we can get into some real messes.

Anyway, it’s really good to finally have this figured out. Now when my accountant yells at me for spending money on things that don’t make sense I say, “Why would anyone trust a fourteen year old with that kind of money?” Or when my lawyer says disagreements should be handled in the courtroom I say, “Why do you think God gave me fists?” I’m starting to talk this way to all the grown-ups in my life. It’s really fun but I find their responses disturbing. I like hanging out with the authors the best.

Anyway, I feel a lot better now that I know the reason I do the things I do is because of my age. It doesn’t make things easier, I still get in a lot of trouble, but it explains a lot.

It’s funny how you gotta wait until these later birthdays to figure out the really obvious things in your life. I guess that’s why they say that youth is wasted on the young.

Death By … Euphonium?

Zoë Sharp

As you may have realised, I shouldn’t be here this week, but with the sad retirement of Brett Battles from these pages, it was suddenly realised there was a breach, and I’ve stepped into it!)

I am a very unimaginative serial killer, I’ve decided. Over the course of my writing career, I’ve managed to dispatch quite a number of people, with means from a hit-and-run that forced the victim off the edge of a cliff on his motorcycle, to throat cutting, disembowelment, having their neck broken in a bathtub, and being buried alive.

I’ve had my heroine, Charlie Fox, kill with her bare hands (or feet) on several occasions – one nasal bone smashed up into the frontal lobe of the brain, and one crushed larynx are the ones that spring to mind immediately.

Mostly, though, I tend to shoot people. Death is nasty and final enough without lovingly lingering over it like some kind of sado porn. And it’s usually the quiet deaths, the ones where people slip quietly away when you least expect it, that are the ones I remember.

The reason for this melancholy reflection is that this week is National Crime Writing Week in the UK. Organised by the Crime Writers’ Association, the event celebrates Bloodthirsty Britain in all its gory glory, and I quote:

A survey carried out to mark the start of National Crime Writing Week, which runs between June 13 and 19, has cast light on some of the original ways that crime writers murder their victims.

The Bloodthirsty Britain research was carried out by the CWA,which is organising the week. Members across the UK took part.

The CWA asked how many people they had killed off over the past year (2010). The average body count was 8.38 and the most people ‘killed’ by one author was 150.

The most inventive means of killing included:

Taxidermied alive

Sliced to death in an olive machine

Poisoned with soluble aspirin and ribena

Rigged a euphonium to land on victim’s head

Super glue in mouth & nostrils to suffocate.

Bees in a wicket-keeper’s inner glove leading to anaphylactic shock

Decapitation by glider cable

Trapped inside Damien Hurst style art installation

Dragged behind horse

Tied up and drowned by rising tide

Stabbed through the heart with a spangly stiletto

Drinking blood

Gored on the horns of a goat

Answers to why people like crime so much included:

“People like to crack puzzles. They also love strong but deeply fallible or troubled main characters they can empathise with, and crime writers dish this up in spades.”

“Crime Writing is a fantastic genre to examine big moral questions about society, the State of Man as much as any so-called “literary” novel.”

“Crime stories can illuminate and celebrate the human condition, not just tell grim stories.”

“Creates suspense and allows you to explore the wicked/bad side of your own character that you don’t actually want to act upon in real life…allows you a window into that world without you having to participate.”

More than 30% of those surveyed read crime fiction or watched crime drama every day of the year, and more than 50% read it weekly or several times a week.

CWA Chair, the best-selling author Peter James, said: “This survey has thrown up some fascinating findings and underlines why readers so love crime writing.

“One of the big campaigns undertaken by the CWA at the moment is to support libraries and we know that crime forms the most popular genre when it comes to borrowings. This research emphasises the reason why it remains so popular.”

I took part in an event at Kendal Library in Cumbria last night (Wednesday, June 15th) together with fellow Cumbria crime writers Anna Dean, Diane Janes, and Matt Hilton. Strangely, nobody asked us what bizarre methods of murder we’d come up with in the past, but it got me thinking.

So, fellow ‘Rati, what’s the strangest method of murder you’ve ever either come across in a novel, or devised for your own victims – erm, all in print, of course …

This week’s hasty Word of the Week is outspan. Not just a brand of orange (in the UK at least) but a South African verb meaning to unyoke oxen or unharness a horse. Also a noun, meaning a stopping-place.

And on a final note, I had the honour to be interviewed by the delightful J Sydney Jones for his Scene of the Crime blog this week. Please stop by and say hello!

 

Thank you to Lil Gluckstern (below) for bringing up the topic of Brett’s contribution to SHAKEN, which I am delighted to mention here:

One hundred percent of the royalties from this new collection of original stories will go directly to the 2011 JAPAN RELIEF FUND administered by the Japan America Society of Southern California. The 2011 Japan Relief Fund was created on March 11, 2011 to aid victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and resulting tsunami waves. With the funds that have been raised so far, $750,000 has been committed to nonprofit organizations that are on the front lines of relief and recovery work in northeastern Japan.

This collection was born out of the writers’ concern for the people in the disaster zone. SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN is an attempt by writers to pool their talents to help people in need, as musicians and actors so often do.

The book contains original stories by Brett Battles, Cara Black, Vicki Doudera, Dianne Emley, Dale Furutani, Timothy Hallinan, Stefan Hammond, Rosemary Harris, Naomi Hirahara, Wendy Hornsby, Ken Kuhlken, Debbi Mack, Adrian McKinty, I.J. Parker, Gary Phillips, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jeffrey Siger, Kelli Stanley, C.J. West, and Jeri Westerson. As a group, these authors have won every mystery award there is and sold hundreds of thousand of copies. They’re all working at the top of their games in this volume. SHAKEN; STORIES FROM JAPAN is art for heart’s sake, and the purchase price will help those who are struggling to repair, or at least soothe, these terrible losses.

Not all the stories are mysteries; the consensus was simply that all writers should submit something that touches on Japan. Linking the stories are haiku by the 17th-century master Basho, translated by Jane Reichhold, and Issa, translated by David Lanoue. Both translators donated their work, as did the cover designer, writer Gar Anthony Haywood, and the e-book producer, Kimberly Hitchens.

To Our Health We Drank a Thousand Times, It’s Time to Ramble On

by J.D. Rhoades

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it. This is my last regular post here on Murderati.

It hasn’t been an casual  decision, and it took a while to make. There are a lot of factors that have gone into it, but far and away the most important one is: I need that Tuesday evening back.

 As I’ve mentioned here several times, I still have a day job practicing law. That takes up most of my days. I’ve never been much of a morning person. I’ve tried getting up at 5 AM  to write, and it never seems to work for me. That leaves the evenings as my only realistic time to write fiction.

Every other Wednesday, I have a Murderati post due, so there goes that Tuesday. I also, as I’ve mentioned before, write a weekly political humor column for the local paper. That’s due on Thursdays, so I spend my Wednesday writing time on that.

So on my “Murderati weeks,”  I lose two evenings of fiction writing in a row. That’s made it very hard to get back to the work in progress on Thursdays. In fact, trying to pick the thread back up after two days is so bloody difficult that I confess, I sometimes give in to the temptation to just chuck it all and go watch Community (promising myself I’ll just write more on the weekend). Fridays are hit and miss because of family stuff, so….you can see the dilemma. I’m fighting  to  get my career back, which means every opportunity to write becomes precious, and let’s face it, I ain’t getting any younger and certainly not any prettier.

So some commitments have to go. The newspaper column may be next, but they actually pay me for that. Not a huge amount, but  as precious as time is, every dollar is almost as precious these days, what with one kind in college and another headed there.

All that said, this wasn’t an easy decision. I’ve had a blast here, and I will always be grateful to Pari and JT for inviting me. I’ll always be grateful as well for all the encouragement, knowledge, laughs, and even the tears  each and every one of you, both posters and commenters, has shared with  me.

I look over at the right sidebar, and I see all the folks who have come and gone: Simon. Michael. Elaine. Naomi. And of course, Ken. When Toni, Brett and Rob bowed out (for many of the same reasons I am), I realized that change is part of what keeps a blog fresh,  so it’s time for me to move along as well. 

The good news is that my replacement is going to be Jonathan Hayes. I’ve hung out with Jonathan some, and I can tell you he is  is one fascinating guy. He’s a forensic pathologist, a food writer, a music fan with tastes almost as eclectic as my own, a raconteur, and he writes one hell of a thriller. I know I’m leaving you in good hands.

I’ve let the folks know I may be able to pinch hit as a guest blogger from time to time, and I have a feeling that my inability to keep any opinion to myself means I’ll still be around in the comments. But for now…play me off, Jimmy!


Bloody Words Conference

by Tess Gerritsen

 

Sometimes, you just want to share travel photos.  And that’s what I’m going to do here, but I also want to say a few words about what brought me to Victoria, BC in the first place, and that’s the Bloody Words Conference. I was invited there as the “International Guest of Honor”, which was an honor indeed as it involved one of the most delightful few days I’ve ever spent at a writers event.  First, because it was a very low stress conference where I only had to sit on panels.  In my last blog post, I talked about how anxiety-producing it can be to solo- teach a workshop.  But panels are more like a conversation, a chance to share your honest, off-the-cuff thoughts, without the labor of composing prepared remarks. (If you want to keep writers relaxed and happy, make it a panel program!)

The other reason I had such a fine time was the fact we were in Canada and there’s something about Canadians that’s so darn, well… nice.  They’re not just helpful, they seem happy to be helpful. It started at the Victoria airport, where we discovered that my husband’s suitcase didn’t make the three-transfer flight from Maine.  He was standing there at the carousel, looking bereft because he hadn’t packed a toothbrush or even a change of underwear in his carry-on.  Suddenly an airport employee came swooping in from nowhere to ask if we’d lost a bag, and said: “Let’s just see what we can do!” After the necessary paperwork was filed, he handed my husband a sack with a shaving kit, toothbrush, shampoo, and detergent.  In all the years I’ve flown in the U.S. and lost bags (and it’s happened half a dozen times) I’ve never met anyone so anxious to help a beleaguered traveler.  

Why are Canadians so nice?  I posed this question while I was there, and one fellow offered brightly: “It’s because we’re so happy not to be Americans!”  He was quickly shushed up by his countrymen because “that’s not a nice thing to say.”  From taxi drivers to bellmen, rental car clerks to waitresses, there was something so different about the way they treated us there.  Instead of the bored and disinterested “I’ll have to check with management about this” that you hear so often in the US, what we heard in Victoria was “of course we can do this for you!”

At one point, my husband turned to me and said, “Tell me again why we live in the US?”

The conference itself was, as you’d expect, a friendly and collegial affair.  I was curious about the state of genre publishing in Canada, and was not surprised to hear about the same woes I heard in South Africa.  With a population that’s only a tenth of the US, Canadian writers simply don’t have a large enough readership for them to make a living, unless they sell internationally.  The US is considered the “elephant to the south,” the market that’s too huge to be ignored, and the market that everyone wants to penetrate.  In crime fiction, Americans are certainly familiar with Louise Penny, Rick Mofina, Linwood Barclay and Peter Robinson, but too many other Canadian crime writers simply aren’t distributed in the US.  

But now that there are e-books, it should be an international market, right?  Why don’t Canadian authors simply sell to Americans via Kindle? I discovered it isn’t as easy as just emailing a file to Amazon.  To self publish an e-book for sale to American Kindles, you must have an American bank account and mailing address.  That, at least, was what one Canadian told me.  Which makes it a bureaucratic hassle to sell your own books south of the border. 

Another complaint I heard was the lack of publisher support in Canada for genre fiction.  Publishing is partially subsidized by the government, and literary novels get all the financial support and review attention while genre fiction is left to fend for itself in the marketplace.  It’s not surprising that genre writers, who actually make a profit for their publishers, are a bit resentful. 

One of the best things about international conferences is the chance to meet authors I wouldn’t otherwise meet at US conferences.

 Michael Slade, the Canadian Guest of Honor, comes to crime writing with a lifetime’s worth of expertise under his belt.  He’s a criminal defense attorney, and some of his real-life stories will make your jaw drop.  (Like the time a satisfied client offered to kill any person of Michael’s choosing as a token of his appreciation.)  Michael originated “Shock Theater”, a staged reading of radio plays at various mystery conferences, and I was allowed in on the fun when we read “Chicken Heart.”  It’s a truly stupid play, but loads of fun to scream over.  Michael’s legion of fans are called “Sladists”, and they’re so devoted to Michael that one of them peeled down her pants to show off the “Sladist” permanent tattoo just over her rear end.  Now that is true fan devotion.

Grant McKenzie is a Scottish-born Canadian journalist whose crime novels have been translated into German, Chinese, and Russian.  He interviewed me for an afternoon session, and it was a truly delightful conversation.  He’s a terrific novelist who’s published internationally —  just not yet in the U.S.  I hope American publishers are taking note!

William Deverell, the local Guest of Honor, is another Canadian crime writer who brings a rich lifetime of experience to his novels.  He’s the Dashiel Hammett-award winning author of fifteen novels, including the Arthur Beauchamp series.  He’s also an attorney who’s been involved in more than a thousand criminal cases, serving both in prosecution and defense.  Bill and I had a lovely private lunch together where we talked about writing, the future of publishing, and some of the fascinating criminal cases that he’s litigated.  

Booksellers were at the conference as well, and here’s Frances Thorsen of Victoria’s “Chronicles of Crime” mystery bookshop, along with the author-autographed coyote placard that will hang in her shop.  Frances sat on a panel called “What’s hot, what’s not”, about trends in crime fiction.  If you want to know that answer, just ask a bookseller!

Here’s a photo of me with another writer.  It’s a statue of local Victoria heroine Emily Carr, with her pet monkey perched on her shoulder.  Hats off to any town that chooses to honor its authors.

 

After the conference, it was off to see world-famous Butchart Gardens, where I ogled gorgeous vines of golden laburnum.  It’s a poisonous plant, by the way, which was used as a murder weapon (fictionally) in the TV mystery series “Mother Love.”

Finally, no set of travel photos is complete without at least one shot of food:

Crab legs, anyone?

Getting attention

by Pari

I was a kid who wanted attention and got a lot of it . . . mostly negative. A rabble-rouser and talk-backer, I spent a good portion of my elementary school years in chalky unlit cloak closets being punished for one transgression or another.

Miss Klein, my third grade teacher – the one I called a “big fat barf” in front of the whole class – told my classmates in her creaky voice, “Ignore her and she’ll stop.” Mrs. Roberts exhorted my 5th grade cohorts with “Don’t pay attention to her, you’re just feeding the fire.”

While my teachers promoted negative PR about me, my peers held me in a certain amount of awe. Fury made me brave and I willingly took on bullies and mean teachers without a second thought. Glorious attention came with each exploit. The good variety provided sympathy, hugs, pats on the back and the occasional extra dessert in the cafeteria at lunchtime. The bad variety – the spankings and groundings – yielded more fodder for the tears that would evoke the good variety.

Through those years of my turbulent childhood and adolescence, I came to one undeniable and hard-earned conclusion: being sad or bad evoked the attention I craved; being content and doing what I was supposed to do rarely brought more than a glance.

In a way, I lived the adage Any PR is good PR . . . or any attention is, ultimately, good attention.

Fast forward to today. I don’t buy into that adage anymore and I don’t need attention like I did when I was a kid. That’s what makes my current life experience a bit odd. I feel like I’m being rewarded for being sad. People I haven’t heard from in years have reached out to me. Their reactions are very moving and appreciated — necessary, in fact — but they’ve also made me think a lot about my childhood and my desire for attention then. And being the person I am today, the woman who studies human motivation through the eyes of a decades-long PR pro — I’ve been thinking a lot about how marketers/PR pros play on our emotions to get us to act.

If you watch television or listen to the radio, you’ll soon notice that most ads are upbeat; even if they’re not funny, they’re selling good news:

This book will change your life!
You’ll love going to this amusement park!
Buy this car and D-cup women will throw themselves at you!
Offering her the diamond will fulfill your dreams.
Look at this starving child; you can change her life with just $.25 a day.

But wait. Not all ads are happy. What about:

Drunk driving kills.
Meth will steal your entire life.
This is your brain on drugs.
Look at the chunk of my face they had to cut off because I got cancer from smoking.

The first set of ads spur us to buy with promises of sunshine and daffodils. Perhaps the motivators have to be positive in order for us to part with our money. So how do we explain the success and prevalence of the second set of bummer ads? And what about political ads? Their efficacity confuses me most of all. Some are the obvious happy variety:  Vote for me and the economy will soar, you’ll be safe and everyone in America will have a Jacuzzi. Many, however, are based on fear or guilt or massive negativity: So-and-so is in league with Satan, wants to drink your children’s blood, voted to let terrorists fly first class to the U.S. without passports and wants to make you poor and kill your grandparents. He’s bad bad bad bad and scary and horrible and everything you don’t want . . . and, oh, by the way, I’m the good guy.

I’m assuming all of these ads and approaches work. Otherwise the billions of dollars spent on each variety wouldn’t pass hands each year. But which ads work best for which messages? Which ones get our attention and make us take the second step of doing the desired outcome?

Hell if I know.

That’s what I want to explore today.

Do you have a favorite ad? Tell us why (add a link if you can find it)
Do negative ads – like the PSAs or political ads I mentioned – work for you? Why?
Are you noticing other trends in advertising that are attracting your attention now?

 

I love to be in America

By PD Martin

First off, don’t forget to sing the title of my blog today, aka Westside Story.

After a couple of blogs on the writing/professional side of things, today I’m in holiday mode and thought my blog and state of mind should be one! At the moment I’m sitting in my Hawaiian hotel (Waikiki) and although we’ve only been here a few days, we’ve already packed lots in.  The fact that most of it revolves around the pool, food and shopping…

This isn’t our first trip to Hawaii, so maybe that’s why we’re not hitting the tourist sights as much as we ‘should’ be.

My first trip to Hawaii was in 1997, on my way to Canada. That trip was only four days long and marked the start of my one-year working holiday visa. I was only here for a few nights and it was party time! Then again, I was in my twenties.

My next trip to Hawaii was last year, when my mum shouted me for my 40th birthday. And yes, you now know how old I am! We called it the girls’ trip and it was Mum, my daughter and me. We had a great time and a few weeks ago Mum started dropping hints about how nice it would be to go back to Hawaii, but this time with my sister as well. So, here we are. And once again, my daughter’s prized possession, Pooh Bear, is along for the trip as an honorary girl.

It ended up being quite last minute, a June special. So it was all very sudden and very exciting! But it is quite a long flight from Australia (plus we had a couple of hours in Sydney) and I think Grace’s state on arrival says it all. This pic was taken in the hotel foyer, while we were checking in! We hoped maybe her cute collapse would get us a free upgrade to an ocean view but it wasn’t meant to be.

One of the things Aussies do when they hit the US, is shop. I kid you not. America has seriously cheap clothes. So, by day two we’d already been to Ross twice.  As I unpacked my day 2 shopping I did wonder if I needed THAT many ¾ pants (Capri) but you can never have too many when they’re like $9…right?

Of course, there’s only so much shopping a four year old can take, but we’ve also been hitting the pool for a couple of hours in the morning. The pool time is mostly for Grace, although my sister is a sun-lover.

Buffalo wings are also part of my American tradition. Yes, I know they’re terribly unhealthy but they are yummy! And although some places will advertise American-style buffalo wings in Australia, they just ain’t the same. So, on the second night we hit The Cheesecake Factory. Unfortunately, the wing experience wasn’t quite how I remembered it. I’m sure they never used to have any kind of crumbing or coating, but this time they did. Oh well, I’ll just have to try again another night.

For the trip last year, I also threw in a bit of research, in the form of a visit to the firing range. One night, after Grace was tucked up in bed and my mum was settled into the golf, I set out for my big gun experience. Gun laws in Australia, and my state of Victoria, are extremely strict and I thought Hawaii might be my only chance of firing an AK-47 and similar big weapons. It was certainly a once in a lifetime experience…there are really only so many times you need to fire a gun for research purposes.

Tomorrow is the factory outlets (more shopping), then a luau (Monday), Diamond Head (Tuesday) and finally a daytime catamaran sail (Wednesday). Then it will back to the Aussie winter. Brrr….

And maybe there’s a chance for one more go at buffalo wings!

What are your favourite haunts when on holidays? 

All Wrote Out

By Cornelia Read

So, finally got the second draft of the fourth book turned in.

I still have a very weak grasp on both who set the original arsons, and how my protag Madeline is going to be more proactive in involving herself in fingering the prime suspect who DIDN’T do it, and finding the guy who did.

(^ I have recommended the image above as cover art. My editor was amused but not, I think persuaded)

Kicking the ass of the person who actually set the the copycat arson was kind of a piece of cake, but hey, I’ve wanted to kick the ass of the person THAT character’s based on for, oh, about 15 years now. 

In fact, I saved that chapter for last when I was writing draft one, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. A little writerly revenge dessert, if you will. Wish fulfillment.

Although, okay, my writing group’s response was, “um, we get that you totally want to kick this person’s ass, but we should actually feel that your protag’s life is in danger at least for part of it, and THEN you can kick ass.” So, I tried to do that this time. At least a little more. But I did let Madeline UTTERLY kick ass at the end of it.

Also, I am trying to figure out how not to be such a terrible procrastinator in real life, about this deadline stuff. Because oh, MAN do I suck at getting things in on time. Have all my life. And it’s just ridiculous, really. I mean, okay, there is a certain OHMYGODOHMYGOD juju wonder thing that happens,

where you’re kind of forced to get in the zone and all, and sometimes the sparks fly in a good way and that part is awesome, and I do think I think of some of my best lines in that sort of state (favorites this go-round: “My husband thinks cunnilingus is an Irish airline,”

 

and “I felt like I was being sodomized by my own life. And not the fun kind of sodomy either.”) 

I mean, I got to see Cara Black, Hallie Ephron, and Hank Phillippi Ryan speak at a bookstore in Cambridge a while ago, and someone asked about their writing process, and Cara said basically she gets up in the morning, walks her dog, and then writes until about noon before she lets herself look at email. Which is just goddamn genius, really, and if I did that every day I might be an eminently more sane woman.

But of course my first thought was, “So. Maybe I should get a dog.” (Like, maybe a German Shorthaired Pointer, because they are awesome.)

Not “So. Maybe I should write for several hours in the morning instead of checking email right away and then, like, doing my tarot online at ninety-five different free tarot websites and then checking out what the free online I Ching readings have to say, and then wonder if I should make lunch or not, and check Facebook a bazillion times first. And then read someone ELSE’S book and then watch some shit on Netflix or xfinity and then go to sleep for the night.” 

Because, you know, SERIOUSLY it is a wonder that I don’t just get this card in every fucking position whenever I do that. Because it’s really fucking stupid of me.

Oh, well.

But now that it’s in, this is the fun part. Where I can do all the things I normally do–like talk on the phone with pals

And post pictures of The Great Hamster of Alsace on Facebook, with accompanying text about how weird it is that the wild hamsters of France should be wearing black turtlenecks

(seriously. In the wild.)

And various other crap that I get up to generally, but WITHOUT GUILT for at least a few days. I mean, how awesome is THAT, right?

And also, I can post video here of my new favorite song, “Philosphia” by The Guggenheim Grotto:

 

Which I think I most love because of the line, “work of art, oh to be a work of art…”

But, you know, other than that, I am pretty much all wrote out at the moment. I have been duking it out with good and evil in my head for a long time now, and maybe have a handle on it. Kind of. At least a beginning. At least in THIS book.

I hope I nail it in draft three. Which I would start tomorrow, if I had any sense. After I walked my imaginary dog.



Oh, and this morning at 2 a.m. (which will be yesterday morning at 2 a.m. by the time you read this) I celebrated with a breakfast of Ruffles and sour cream and onion dip. WASP soul food.

Although I briefly considered absinthe.

What do you guys do to celebrate something you’re really proud of yourself for finishing?

The Value Of A Local Bookstore

JT Ellison

Nelson Fox: Perfect. Keep those West-Side liberal nuts, pseudo-intellectuals…
Joe Fox: Readers, Dad. They’re called readers.
Nelson Fox: Don’t do that, son. Don’t romanticize them.

I was thinking about the movie You’ve Got Mail this week.

I remember talking about this movie once, I think on Facebook, and got scolded by a few commenters who were upset that it was one of my favorite movies. That I was a traitor to the cause because it showed Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) The Shop Around The Corner going out of business because of the opening of the monolithic FoxBooks, run by Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). And despite the fact that he’s killed her dream, ruining the best thing in her life (or is it?) she falls in love with him.

I was rather hurt to be scolded, actually, because I was as horrified as the next person that her adorable shop was closed. But it was the reality of the time. The big superstores WERE coming in and putting the little guy out of business. The Internet was a relatively new thing. Email was something we all salivated over – because we suddenly had instant access to our friends. It was unique. And love, well, I am a sucker for a good love story.

All that aside… I hope Nora Ephron is reading Murderati, because it’s definitely time for a sequel to that flick.

Here’s the set up:

Kathleen and Joe have a son, Joe Junior, who is heir to Fox Books. He grows up in an idyllic time, his father’s chain growing and growing and growing, his mother becoming a wildly successful author. And then come the ebooks, the advent of which means Fox is going under. In bankruptcy, his inheritance, his whole future suddenly murky before him, he is strolling the wonderful suburban neighborhood he grew up in on the Upper West Side, wondering what’s next, when he sees a small shop that has a For Lease sign. As he ponders what might work in the shop, an idea comes to him. Open a small, independent bookstore that caters to customers, staffs voracious readers, and has a deal with the GoogleBooks and the Apple iBookstore and Nook and Kobo to sell ebooks directly from the store’s cool, hip, inexpensive new website.

Of course, he must keep this venture quiet from his parents. He goes online to see what he can find about indie bookstores, and through Twitter, meets a smart, beautiful, knowledgeable bookie who happens to want to open a bookstore herself.

Their exchanges go something like this: (FYI: In Twitter world, the @ sign designates who you are talking to…)

@shopgirl I was walking down the street today…

@shopgirl I saw an empty storefront…

@shopgirl I think I should buy it and open a bookstore that specializes in both ebooks and regular books….

@shopgirl We can call it the Shop Around the Corner. Cause it’s around the corner from my Dad’s old store.

@foxyman LOL

@shopgirl I’m serious

@foxyman That would be lovely. It’s something that I really miss.

@shopgirl Why? What do you miss?

@foxyman The simple charm of an actual bookstore, where you can go and talk about your favorite writers, sit in a comfy chair …

@foxyman and just hang out reading. It’s something people want. I miss it. Readers miss it too.

@shopgirl I was just playing around. You’re saying I really should open a bookstore?

@foxyman I’m saying, sometimes, people who are looking for coffee just want coffee.

Nora, if you’re reading, just give me a producer credit, okay?

In all seriousness, the high irony of this situation is that if bookstores can hold on to the marketshare Amazon is stealing, they’re probably going to make it through. Especially the indies. But across the board, that means, in addition to stocking print books, finding ways to connect your readers with ebooks.

I’ll say it again: Finding new and innovative ways to get your clientele to buy their ebooks through you will make all the difference. If you can cater to both the ebook and print book crowd, you’re golden.

So can independent bookstores manage with ebooks? I’m no expert, but look at this little deal I came across yesterday on Twitter, from Powells. That’s a good deal. It gets books in the hands of readers. It was a simple, easy click of a button, and boom: I have 25 novels on my GoogleBooks. Meanwhile, the actual store still caters to the people who come in off the street, but now, because of their clever promotion, readers from all over the country are getting product; booksellers, publishers and writers are all getting exposure.

Not bad. Yes, it’s a loss leader, but just like any sale, get them in the door and maybe they’ll buy something else. Spontaneity. That’s something that ebooks are capitalizing on, this feeling of oh, I want that, and 30 seconds later, you have it.

Also a very good use of social media, something indie booksellers need to focus on. I’m always surprised by how many stores don’t follow authors. Seems a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it? We read too… (I’m @thrillerchick, BTW)

Anyway, I had already written my little Twitter play up there when I heard some great news yesterday: Ann Patchett is in talks to open a bookstore in Nashville. She makes my point below:

I think we’ve got to get back to a 3000-square-foot store and not 30,000. Amazon is always going to have everything — you can’t compete with that. But there is, I believe, still a place for a store where people read books.

Amen to that, sister.

When we lost Davis Kidd, I was heartbroken. DK was a part of my Nashville mythology well before I was an author. It was the first place my then-boyfriend took me when he brought me home to meet his parents for the first time. (Smart boy, showing me the incredibly fine bookstore I would have daily access to.) A few years ago, Davis Kidd moved their store to the Green Hills Mall, just around the corner from their original, quirky, UNIQUE (again with the unique) home. That homogenization really took some of the glamour out of going there. But go there we did. They had a café, so lunch was a weekly thing. The staff was still the same, awesome and amazing. And there was more room for signings. And a big ass fireplace in the middle, which was very cool.

But as part of the Joseph-Beth bankruptcy, the doors of Davis Kidd Nashville were closed.

Borders closed soon after, leaving downtown Nashville without an original bookstore. There are two great stores that will stock original books on special order (original versus used) but it feels wrong, somehow, not to have a store in downtown Nashville that is the real deal.

When my last book came out, it was right after Borders announced they were closing the store, and I had no place to go sign the books. Going to visit my book in the wild is one of the “rights of passage” for release day, along with Thai food and champagne.

I had no place to sign books.

I was very, very sad. Heartbroken, really. Nashville has an amazing library system, a huge literary community, and no bookstore.

< p>So hearing that Ann is getting involved makes me very happy. I will keep you abreast of the situation.

Today, let’s talk about our favorite bookstores. Even if it’s the Nook ebookstore… that’s fine. Just tell me what is special to you about where you buy your books. I’ll pick one commenter at random to win an ARC of my new book, WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE (9.20.11). Just a heads up (a point I’ll be belaboring from now until September) this one isn’t a thriller, but a gothic style psychological suspense.

Ready, steady, go!

Wine of the Week: Daniel Gehrs Cabernet Sauvignon Deep, dark and luscious, with a really long smooth finish. Excellent.

Looking Forwards and Backwards

Zoë Sharp

This is a very special year for me. This is the year that marks the tipping point in my life. I have now been making a living as a writer for longer than I have not.

More than half my life.

It hasn’t always been a smooth ride, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy and there are no medals for effort in this game.

But sustained effort is what we put into it, with the aim of appearing effortless on the page, no matter if the words have been sweated and slaved over, or dashed off in a single stream of consciousness before lunch.

(Sadly, I have yet to experience the latter state.)

All I ever wanted to be was a writer, even before I reached double figures. And even after I completed my first novel at the age of fifteen and it received ‘rave rejections’ from all and sundry, I never lost sight of that ambition.

It was another three years before I wrote my first paying article. A paltry sum, but real payment in exchange for words. It was a revelation that here might – just might – be something I could do. All the while, there was a character forming in the back of my mind. Not someone else’s experiences and shaping them with logic into a piece worth reading – or, more to the point, a piece worth being paid for – but my own story.

Still, the lure of commercial non-fiction was difficult to resist. One piece became ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. A living made, brick by brick, a skill acquired, a craft honed. From those first shaky steps on uncertain ground until, by the time I was twenty-two, I’d given up my ‘proper’ job and taken the next oh-my-God-what-have-I-done? step of being able to say, at last, “I am a writer” with no other visible means of support.

So today I’m looking both forwards and back, remembering the dreams I had when I was first starting out. It was a big exciting world and I felt as if it was at my feet. I had confidence and imagination. I was bursting with stories and characters until fragments fell out of my head and lay scattered around me so that I had trouble collecting them all up again. I still keep finding little scribbled notes for a hundred different ideas, a hundred different directions.

All I wanted was to tell those stories, speak for those characters. Or – better yet – to let those characters tell their own stories and speak for themselves. Words were both my workplace and playground. They were my refuge and my delight.

But those early rejections, however encouraging, were still rejections. My first novel was turned down, where my first serious attempt at the non-fiction market found four takers out of six. I was wary of taking another spin down that road. But it just wouldn’t leave me alone.

It took a long time to write my first crime novel. Years of stop-start work with a great many faith-slips and slides along the way. One step forwards and a great long slither back again. But eventually it was done.

And now, in the blink of an eye, it’s ten years later and I now I can say “I am an author” (subtly different from being a writer, I think) with nine published novels and a bevy of short stories under my belt. Sure, there are those who write faster. There are those who write slower. I can only judge myself against me.

But, looking back, I realise how lucky I am to have become what I wanted to be all those years ago. It would have been very easy to have been sidetracked into other things. Things I probably would have been happy doing in a lot of ways, but not deep down what I really WANTED to do. It is up to me, now, to make the most of it.

I have never been able to decide which is sadder in life. Having an ambition and never quite achieving it, or never having an ambition at all.

So, my questions to you today, dear ‘Rati, are several-fold: where are you now, in your career, in your life? Is it where you hoped to be when you started out? If it isn’t, what was the chain of circumstance that led to this point?

Where do you want to be?

And how to you plan to get there from here?

This week’s Word of the Week is lexis, a noun meaning the way in which a piece of writing is expressed in words, diction; the total stock of words in a language.