Friends, again… meet Alafair Burke

 

by Toni McGee Causey

 

One of the very best things about being a member of a blog like this is that we occasionally get to interview really cool people… and sometimes we get lucky and get to interview other members of the blog. I was particularly thrilled when Alafair Burke joined us here at Murderati, as I’d been a fan of her work and had heard great things about her, but it was a special kick to get to interview her on the occasion of her newest book which is about to appear in the bookstores, titled 212.

First, if you haven’t really met Alafair, you should know that (and this is directly from her website) she is a former deputy district attorney, and now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School. She’s got a fascinating background in law as well as literature, and if you haven’t checked out her website, you’re missing a treat.

The other really really cool thing about being a member of this blog is that I occasionally get to read my fellow blogmates’ books ahead of their drop dates. And yes, I am going to be all gleeful and smug about it, because, dayem, they are fine writers and I’m immensely lucky just to be a part of this group. I couldn’t wait to get my paws on Alafair’s latest, and I have to tell you, it showed up in the midst of great personal upheaval (my father-in-law was in hospice at that time, and we knew the end was near), and I feared my concentration would be nil…  and instead, I was utterly captivated. (Check out the video… and the excerpt for 212.) 

This story is not just ripped from the headlines, but it digs deep into those headlines and exposes the kind of ramifications few in-depth exposé’s could even hope to reveal. In an age when newspapers are glib about how politicians hire expensive call girls and in a day when those very same call girls can later become on air personalities, we’ve become accustomed to reporters just barely skimming over the reality of how deadly and compromising that particular crime actually is. In 212, Alafair explores the ramifications of two intersecting crimes–politicians hiring escort services and online stalking–and shows not only the harrowing results, but the determination of good people who are trying to find the truth, trying to make a difference. Her detective, Ellie Hatcher, is a stand-out, memorable woman you’re going to want to know as she battles her way through lies and deceit to try to stop a killer from striking again, even in the midst of personal risk to her own career to do so.

I couldn’t put the book down. 

Alafair’s got a lot of information up on her site, but I got the chance last week to ask her a few more questions:

1) You write New York as someone comfortable and familiar with the city, like it’s a second skin. I know you’ve lived elsewhere growing up, so tell me about your impressions of New York when you first visited or moved there… and how those first impressions changed (or were validated) after you’d been there for a while.

I first visited New York during the Son of Sam year of 1977.  My father’s friends told of us tales of carrying mugger money around – small bills in a fake wallet to hand to the muggers instead of the real stuff.  Then as an adult, I came here as a tourist, staying most in midtown, seeing broadway shows and museums, and dining at restaurants I saw on Sex and the City.  Now that I live here, I rarely go to those kinds of places and am annoyed when I do.  The places I cherish are little neighborhood spots that would have surely underwhelmed me as a tourist looking to take in the “Big Apple.” 

2) Was there a defining moment when you felt more native New Yorker than not? What was that moment and how did it affect your perception of yourself? Your vocation?

The defining moment was more like a two-stage process.  I remember standing in the TKTS line (discount theater tickets) at Times Square when I first moved to the city.  I looked up at the lights and signs and thought, “Wow, I really live here.  I’m even insider enough to buy discounted tickets.”  Within a year, I dreaded the thought of walking through Times Square with all of those skyline-gazing tourists blocking the sidewalk.  There’s a superficial roughness to New Yorkers that I understand now, but once you scratch beneath it, the people in this city are about as goodhearted as people can be. 

3) You’ve chosen two professions which aren’t exactly known to be easy on a person’s schedule, often costing hundreds of hours of late night work to stay caught up. What enticed you about becoming an attorney? Similarly, what enticed you about becoming a writer? How are the two similar? Different? If there was one way you could prep better for each vocation, what would that be?

When I went to law school, I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a high-priced entertainment lawyer putting together deals at the Ivy or a civil rights lawyer working for the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Given my lifetime fascination with crime, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had a real passion for criminal law.  I worked as a prosecutor for five years and was motivated to write by the stories I saw unfold there.  I thought I’d seen a side to the criminal justice system that wasn’t frequently portrayed in crime fiction.  They both require an ability to tell a story and incredible discipline, but writing requires a different kind of creativity that find liberating and sometimes incredibly frustrating.

4) In several of your posts and elsewhere, you’ve shown a sly, wry sense of humor that we all enjoy. What’s the zaniest thing (legal) that you’ve done that you can admit to us?

Oh lord.  I’m ashamed to admit that my craziest act was completely accidental. I went to a different branch from my usual gym.  This was back before I could afford a gym that gave you human-sized towels.  All they had were these little hand-sized things.  I was wondering around the locker room searching for the shower stalls, walked through a door, and wound up in the free-weight room. Warning: some locker rooms have multiple exits.

5) What is something that people who meet you for the first time are most surprised to learn about you?

I have really low-brow taste.  I like bad movies, pop music, and hot dog carts. I’m also very handy.

 

6) In your new novel, 212, coming out March 23rd, NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher is drawn into a case that you’ve described in your acknowledgements as inspired by recent headlines: politicians, escort services, innocent by-standers, cover-ups and downfalls. You’ve created a vivid, layered world where nothing is obvious and you keep us riveted all the way through as Ellie has to peel away layer after layer to try to find the truth before it’s too late. Tell us a little bit about Ellie, 212, and your process–how you chose this particular type of headline and why you wanted to investigate the ramifications.

Ellie Hatcher is an NYPD homicide detective who, like me, finds herself working in the same field as her father and tries to avoid the inevitable comparisons.  Also like me, she grew up in Wichita, Kansas when a serial killer was active, stalking, torturing, and murdering children and women.  Unlike me, Ellie’s father was a cop who spent his life hunting that killer until he was found shot in his own car. Labeled a suicide, her father’s death has never been resolved for Ellie.

The cases in 212 were inspired by a few real-life stories.  For years I’ve been pulling at threads of stories inspired by Neil Goldschmidt, a former governor of Oregon who admitted in 2004 that he had what he termed an “affair” in the 1970s with his then-14-year-old babysitter.  Many people in Portland were accused of knowing about the abuse and assisting the cover-up, including a man who subsequently became the Multnomah County Sheriff.  I’d been reluctant to write about the case immediately.  Portland’s a small place.  I worked with Goldschmidt’s stepdaughter at the DA’s Office.  I worked closely with a law enforcement officer who was implicated in the cover-up.  But the story of a man who’d done so much good in public life rationalizing a so-called “affair” with a child — and my imagined story of the woman that child came to be as she grew up in the shadow of his political ascension — kept pulling at me.  More than five years after the scandal, my hope was to pursue a fictional story inspired by the real one.  Using the role of the internet in the modern sex industry, I found a fresh angle.

7) On the lighter side for a moment, what’s your most unusual hobby?

Maybe this goes along with my lowbrow taste, but I really like karaoke.  And not in a hip, ironic way, but in an earnest American-Idol loving, Glee-watching, sing-your-heart-out way.  I think every book conference needs a karaoke session. Wouldn’t that be great?  At Bouchercon, the playlist could be made up entirely of crime-related songs.

8) And… finally, if you only could choose five words to describe yourself for posterity, what would they be?

Loved.  Was loved.  Appreciated both.

Alafair is hosting a really cool offer for a mystery gift for everyone who pre-orders 212 before it hits all of the bookstores on Tuesday, March 23rd — which means, you only have a couple of days left to take advantage of this terrific opportunity!

Meanwhile, tell me what ripped-from-the-headlines story you’d love to explore a bit more about? Is there a story you felt the press should have investigated more thoroughly? In this age of giving starlets 24/7 coverage if they hiccup, do you feel like we’re glamorizing everything that should be news? Or do you feel we’re getting into the gritty depths like we should?

 

In Which I Recycle…

By Cornelia Read

I’m getting down to the deadline wire for book four, spent yesterday giving a talk to fifty awesome eighth graders at the Gray New Gloucester Middle School in Maine (thanks to the ever-fabulous Michelle Guerard, AKA Ms. G)

Go Pats!

took my daughter Grace on college tours last week, got my website updates finished, figured out my Southwest itinerary for the book tour that kicks off March 29th (Seattle, LA, Corte Madera, San Mateo, Houston, and Chester, Vermont) and generally turned into a giant ball of confusion–and therefore hope it’s okay that I reproduce here my answers for a questionnaire for the Powell’s Bookstore website that went up this week.

Part I. 

Describe your latest book/project/work.

Invisible Boy is my third crime novel chronicling the adventures of Madeline Dare, a foul-mouthed cynic with a dark and twisty worldview who still secretly yearns to be Batman when she grows up.

 

She’s now escaped both rust-belt Syracuse and the clutches of a gothically culty boarding school in the Berkshires, finally having clawed her way back to Manhattan. This is 1990 New York, pre-Giuliani and well before the Disneyfication of Times Square: it’s brutal and it’s sketchy and everything reeks of piss, but it’s still her spiritual homeland.

Her sense of relief is, of course, short-lived. She volunteers to clear brush in an abandoned Queens cemetery and discovers the skeleton of a brutally murdered three-year-old.

When she starts fighting for justice on this little boy’s behalf, Maddie gets slammed with the revelation of a gut-wrenching secret at the heart of her own fractured childhood, upending everything she thought she knew about her family.

I was tremendously honored that Tana French described Invisible as a book in which, “the victim isn’t just one person, it’s all the world’s broken and betrayed children, and the danger can never be safely locked away.”

 

Part II.

1. If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?

They can call it whatever they want, but if it’s going to be an authorized biography, I insist that the epigraph be what my Sarah Lawrence classmate Ptolemy Tompkins posted as his Facebook status last weekend:

“The first rule of Wacky Childhood Club is that you must always talk about Wacky Childhood Club.” –Emily Zinnemann

This is mostly because I feel that quotation affords me some blanket forgiveness for the number of times I’ve been slightly lit at cocktail parties and launched into the story of my ponytailed dad showing up at my boarding school

 

unannounced one year for Father’s Weekend

 

 

wearing a t-shirt that said “FRY BRAIN” in red iron-on velour letters (gift from his fellow short-order cooks at The Neptune’s Net in Malibu),

 

his Marine Corps blouse (tie-dyed by these opium-freak bicycle mechanics in Marin),

 

boot-cut Levis belted with a ten-speed tire innertube (see above, opium-freak bicycle mechanics), and a pair of Gokey double-bullhide snake-proof boots held together with duct tape

—whereupon he proceeded to do continual massive bonghits while sequestered in the guest bathroom of the headmaster’s cottage over the next forty-eight hours, in between catching up with all the other dads he hadn’t seen since his days working on the floor of the NYSE or discussing Atlas Shrugged at The Brook.

2. What fictional character would you like to date, and why?


 Since the series I’m writing is hugely autobiographical and there’s about a twenty-year time lag between when what I’m describing happened and the point at which I’m actually writing about it, I’m now stuck having to portray the guy I just divorced as the kind of person I would voluntarily hang out with (an attempted mental contortion at which I always fail miserably for at least three drafts, to my editor’s increasing despair.)

This means I can’t say anything about my former spouse’s o’erweening latter-day Rush-Limbaugh fixation, his increasingly delusional claims that we should mistrust The New York Times while keeping the faith with bloggers who still seem to keep discovering briefcases full of “proof” that Saddam Hussein was meeting with Osama Bin Laden at every third falafel joint in Baghdad throughout the Nineties,

or his wearing of camo army hats around Berkeley despite the fact that when he had to register for the draft back in college he gave his name as “Siddhartha Gautama” and his address as “under the Bo tree.”

 

But I’m not bitter.

I do, however, henceforth plan to give the whole fictional dating thing a VERY wide berth.

 

3. Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.

 Right now I am most totally loving the following from the sublime and lapidary Joshilyn Jackson’s forthcoming Backseat Saints:

Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrikes’s copy of Forever and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation, wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair, never once cut. They were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near-constant headaches…. They probably had no more than an inkling about what went where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had dogeared the sex parts.

 

At first glance it seems so effortless, but she’s made this entire rich world—complete and poignant, oddly but achingly familiar—unfold within what’s basically an aside. You never see any of these girls again (except for Rose), but so much of what the book is about resonates through that passage in this Joseph-Cornell-oblique kind of way. Right down to Rose’s hometown being almost “fruition,” but not.

The woman is a goddamn genius.

4. What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?

My preferred shoes are an appallingly expensive pair of old-school men’s black Gucci loafers, purchased with a meaty swath of my first-ever royalty check. They’re social Kevlar/Kryptonite: I can wear them with my most blatantly ratty Goodwill-crap clothing and still strike a resounding chord of fear in even the most pompous Midtown maître d’,

which gladdens my tiny black heart.

As my alter-ego Madeline once said, “I wondered anew why some women were so desperate to wear ‘fuck-me’ shoes. I have long preferred ‘fuck-you’ shoes.”

If I’m going to pay the big bucks for footwear-subtext, I don’t want that subtext to be “OMG! I sooooo think I’m Sarah Jessica Parker!”

I want a shoe with gravitas, a shoe that says “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” in no uncertain terms.

 

(For more about shoes, my brilliant and witty pal Daisy James wrote a blog post about her recommendations for what I should wear on tour. She also did a killer list for Sophie Littlefield.) 

 

 

5. Describe the best breakfast of your life.

I still yearn for the plate of red papaya chunks and large cup of killer-intense “kopi susu” (market-Indonesian for coffee with milk—literally “coffee with tits”) delivered free to our doorstep every morning at this funky Balinese guest house my sister Freya and I crashed in for two months in 1988. Seven bucks a night with a perpetual racket of geckos in the palm-frond eaves and a plethora of totally hot Swedish surfer dudes in batik sarongs: awesome.

Barring that, an H&H salt bagel bedizened with Barney Greengrass Nova certainly wouldn’t suck. Something wicked about the succulence of that salmon, in a “Modest Proposal” way.

6. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

I spent my junior year at Trinity College Dublin because I had a bit of a Joyce fetish during the better part of my misspent youth. It took me less than a week to comprehend why he split for the Continent. On the bright side, the Guinness was excellent and cheap, I read The Basketball Diaries a bazillion times,

and I can still speak Hebrew with a County Kerry accent (useful amusement to proffer when you’re the seder’s token Episcopalian chick.)

 

7. Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?

 

Let’s just say that Mary McCarthy’s famously scathing summation of Lillian Hellman

(“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the…”) in fact accurately describes all writers who’ve ever lived—not least Mary McCarthy.

 

Then again, I’m a writer and I’m writing this, which makes my assertion pretty much like that thing in the book of brainteasers from Stuckey’s you read in the station wagon’s way-back oubliette while driving across Iowa forever on summer vacation in third grade—the one where the generic cannibal chief in the hula skirt and Sioux headdress tells the pith-helmeted missionary dude that he’s allowed to make a single statement and if it’s a lie they’ll boil him to death in a big pot but if it’s the truth they’ll just shoot him with a poison dart.*

And can I just point out here that pursuing scenarios of this hypothetical ilk to their fullest ramifications can only ever end with a blinding ice-blue flash and a noxious bang before—hey presto!—there we all are swanning around on the bridge of the Enterprise in that dopy alternate universe where Spock has a beard. Again.

I mean, maybe if you want to know whether or not writers are liars—accomplished or otherwise—you should ask a former Lehman Brothers executive or a closeted Republican senator with “a wide stance”

 

or, God help you, a good tax lawyer. Anyone else, instead of a writer. Especially a writer on deadline.

Because we poets and prose-hounds lie like rugs. We lie like Astroturf and wall-to-wall carpeting. We lie like faux-hardwood laminate flooring from IKEA, for chrissakes. In our sleep.

Or do we?

 

Oh, the mendacity!

* The missionary said, “I will die by being boiled to death in a big pot” so they couldn’t actually kill him, since if that’s a true statement they had to take him out with a poisoned dart, which obviously makes what he said a total lie once they did…. And, yes, I only know that because I totally peeked at the answers printed upside down in the back of the book. I also suck at algebra.

 

 

 

 

Part III:

 

Five Books That Best Explain What it Was Like Being a Little Kid at the Heart of the Counter-Culture in Late-Sixties California:

 

1. Living On Earth, by Alicia Bay Laurel

The commune handbook of choice, with tips on everything from why it’s important to use LOTS of incense when you’re cremating friends at home to optimal methods of organic delousing and surefire ways to craft weather-proof fashions out of second-hand army blankets and old tires. Bonus: a really good recipe for “Digger Bread.”

 

2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson

Nothing captures the mid-Nixonian zeitgeist like Thompson’s “wave speech” at the end of chapter eight, which reads in part:

 

[…]You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

 

3. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous

 

Purportedly the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the late Sixties, Go Ask Alice was my very favorite childhood read. I first raced through it when I was eight years old, and I’ve reread it an average of once a year since.

When I was a kid, the cool grownups all got stoned, only narcs wore ties, and Republicans were the people who drove down the freeway in their Cadillacs throwing just-emptied bourbon bottles out the window while they told jokes about poor people.

Alice totally got all of that, especially after she ran away to Haight-Ashbury.

Still today, I think of her as the big sister I never had—even though she was probably the pastiche of some snarky Williams guy working at Prentice-Hall, patched together from a few issues of Seventeen and some chick he sat next to at a Jefferson Airplane concert.

I don’t care. Alice is family.

 

4. A Child’s Garden of Grass, by Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene

From the original jacket copy:

“When you finish this book you will know all there is to know about the use of the weed from first joint to final effect.”

 

Includes two recipes for “Grass Tea”: the kind that makes you throw up, and the kind that doesn’t.

 

5. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

“That’s it, then you’ll know, that’s the whole trip man, and you gotta get in there, in that state of knowing man, to be really free, but you cant think about it, because then you wont know.”

Right on.

 

And here’s a bonus thingie… I remember being in the audience for this (my first and last time at Esalen–the whole hippie thing cured me young of any interest in public nudity):

 

 

 

Okay, guys… your assignment for today is to pick one of those seven questions above and throw me an answer, okay?

Back to hanging out with the arson investigator in Boulder in 1995 (fictionally). Please wish me luck!

You Wanna What???

by JT

Brett and Louise have both done posts about going home recently. You can’t every really go home… maybe you actually can. All hail the conquering hero, right? The prodigal son. The prodigal daughter.

The prodigal… writer??? Who could have ever imagined that?

Recapturing our youth is an impossibility; finding a path back through the jumble of memories, to the sweet, steady heartbeat of love and friendship we received, the good times, the bad times, all get tempered with age. We forget the details and the edges blur. Five years go by and your core group of friends fall off, ten years and you’re only talking to a few, fifteen, twenty…

Thank God for Facebook, right? The opportunity to reconnect with all your old friends (and enemies, and exes, and teachers) and dredge up all those old horrid memories and resurrect the sweet ones, both of which get amplified into nearly mythical proportions.

I’ve taken care this tour to match up with old friends. I had lunch with a friend from elementary school who’s now a major voiceover actor in Los Angeles. In Denver, I had dinner with one of my best friends from high school and my best friend from elementary school, and my first boyfriend (yes, we were in kindergarten. What about it?) In D.C., I’m staying with the other best friend from high school. The memories are flowing fast and furious, and I’m opening myself up to a whole world I’d put out out of my mind.

Moving away from home changes a woman. My parents moved me around just a bit. We had several homes in Colorado, but the Great Schism happened when they moved me from Colorado to D.C. when I was fourteen. I moved from the land of forests and 4H clubs to the denizens of society, began rubbing shoulders with the sons and daughters of the elite class in D.C., the politicians kids. It wasn’t an easy transition (and probably why you can drop me into most any cocktail party across the board and I’ll happily makes friends with the closest smile.)

I went to high school in D.C. After a disastrous first year in a small Florida college, I transferred to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. I wanted to go on in the political arena, and decided against Harvard so I could live at home for free and attend GW. Met the hubby that first night of classes, and he turned my world upside down when we eventually moved to Nashville.

I haven’t been back to D.C. for twelve years. And here I am, doing signings, riding around in cars with boys, signing stock in bookstores, drinking in pool halls, allowing the memories to creep back in. I’d forgotten how much I love this place. When we moved to Tennessee, I wasn’t happy, but I tried to hide that because I knew my husband was. And then I fell for it: the beauty, the dichotomies, the very differentness of it. Eventually, I was totally in love with Nashville, and I began to view D.C. with the same sort of horrified reverence as I do most things in my past – a world that happened to another person.

Kind of hard to separate past from present when you’re looking through your yearbook and laughing yourself into tears at the pictures, the memories, the genuine happiness. You know?

As you can imagine, I am much relieved.

My senior year annual was called YOU WANNA WHAT? I helped design the cover, a compilation of question marks and exclamation points. (This is not a surprise to those who know me, I am a fool for a well-placed exclamation point…) This is what the title means:

YOU WANNA WHAT?!

You can do ANYTHING you set your mind to. If it means going to the moon or getting an A on your English exam. The choice is yours; your interests and dreams grow during your time here and you leave with an idea of where you are going. Look around you and enjoy yourself. Do it all; varsity letter, straight A’s, anything you want. Now is the time, before you grow up. Don’t let anyone discourage you, if when you tell them your goals, they ask in an astonished and impressed tone; YOU WANNA WHAT?

I wonder, if that hadn’t been the theme of my life during those formative years, if I would have done some of the things I have? No one ever said no, you can’t. They only said yes, you can. Yes, you will. Yes, I believe.

Full circle. It’s a strange, strange feeling.

Okay, Murderati – what were you in high school? Happy? Sad? Most likely to succeed? Most likely to think cheerleaders were brainless twits and dye your hair, or date and marry them? Insider? Outsider? Sidewinder? Druggie, freak, band geek, theater geek, radio club, debate, athlete, Honor Society??? Share. (I wasn’t anything. I was a track geek, I guess, an athlete first and foremost, but I floated like a firefly between all the groups, with a friend or two in each clique.)

Because apparently, you can go home again.

Wine of the Week: Lemon Drops and Red Headed Sluts. Don’t ask….

Deep Breaths

by Zoë Sharp

Rob’s ‘Rati post from yesterday left me with this impression:

So, I thought today we could all use a little calm:

(And no worries about copyright issues here, by the way – both pix are mine!)

Stress, as I’ve said before on these pages, is a very peculiar animal. We need a certain amount of it to keep the juices flowing, but too much can make us ill or even kill us. Stress is not caused by work. Stress is caused by not coping with work. And I should know.

At one point, many years ago, I had an awful job selling newspaper advertising where they gave us impossible targets because they thought it would motivate us to keep trying that little bit harder. Failing to meet them, week after week, was a miserable experience. It actually gave me a heart murmur and I had to wander round with one of those portable ECG machines to monitor it. When my probationary six months was up, the sales manager brought me into his office to ask if I thought I saw my future in the job. I said, “Honestly? I don’t think so.” He said, “I thought you were going to say that. You’re fired.”

And although I hated working there, being given the sack was almost worse.

(And completely as an aside, both those phrases come from English craftsmen. Before the days of toolboxes, workers carried the tools of their trade in a sack. To be given the sack meant being discharged from employment and the worker had to carry his tools home in a sack. But, miners who were caught stealing coal, tin or copper, had their tools burned at the pit head in front of the other workers, as a lesson to the others. This was known as firing the tools, hence being fired. But I digress.)

I used to stress a lot more about my photographic work, and I still do to a certain extent. It’s a game where you are only as good as your last shoot. I cannot afford to go into an assignment with a ‘sod it, it’ll do’ attitude. I’ve seen it happen to other photographers who were once considered at the top of their field, and who are now … no longer photographers. A certain amount of stress in this situation is good. It keeps me sharp, if you’ll forgive the pun.

But basically, getting things wrong bugs the hell out of me.

Getting it wrong in my writing bugs the hell out of me, too. And I’m not just talking about making factual errors, although that REALLY bugs me. I’m talking about plot-holes. I hate writing myself into a corner and having to unpick to get out of it. OK, there’s no harm in turning around if you realise you’re on the wrong road, but I’d much rather be on the right road to begin with.

All this wandering train of thought has come about because, on Monday, I handed in the latest Charlie Fox book to my agent. I had a huge celebration, as you can imagine – I had half a day off and then did the ironing. Damn, I know how to live.

Since Monday, however, it’s been bothering me that this book seemed to cause me less stress than usual. I’m trying to work out why. Possibly it was down to the fact that my agent’s editor got me to look at doing the outline in a different way. I’m not particularly good at outlines, I admit, even though I use them for every book. They initially tend to contain every thought and image I’ve had for the story, which is often far too much detail, even if it’s stuff I feel I need to know in order to write it.

This time, I concentrated on producing the outline solely from Charlie’s POV. After all, with any first-person narrative, the information can only come out through what the main protagonist sees and learns personally. That seemed to work much better. And, amazingly enough, it’s probably enabled me to stick to the outline a lot more closely than usual, even though my original printout now looks like a soggy pencil-scrawled bit of some kid’s dog-chewed homework.

I broke this book down into more chapters than usual. A LOT more. Sixty-three and an epilogue, compared to fifty-six and an epilogue for the last book, even though that turned out about 5000 words longer. Writing in shorter chapters, I found, kept my attention fully focused on the scene. I could make progress more easily, without feeling I was going back over the same piece of work again and again.

I kept my summary up to date as I went, instead of filling it in right at the end. By doing this, I was able to go back and make minor plot modifications as I went, because I could see more easily where they ought to fit. Breaking it down, chapter by chapter, making a brief note of the conversations and key points, also seemed to make it easier to see if things didn’t fit, or needed more emphasis.

I didn’t put myself under pressure too early. Getting the start of a story right is vital for me. I can’t write an opening chapter without an opening line, and  I can’t write the rest of the book without an opening chapter. Or, in this case – chapters. I played with my first 10,000 words until I was happy they dropped me into the right place in the story, then started up a spreadsheet on December 1st.

I worked on 110,000 words as being the finished book, which seems to be about average for me. I gave myself 100 days in which to do the rest. Not backbreaking, but that’s 1000 finished words a day. Now I look back, I see that the final thing came in at 106,500 words, two days early. During that time, I had twenty days when I wrote nothing at all. The worst of these was four in a row in mid-December – can’t remember for the life of me why that was, but I think we may have been in London. My best day was 2580 words. My worst was 26.

And the weird thing is that I don’t recall any of the usual fits of despair that normally accompany writing a novel. It simply … progressed. I think that’s what’s worrying me now, when I can no longer do much about it. I’m wondering if it should have caused me more stress, because otherwise doesn’t that signify I haven’t tried hard enough?

I’ve gone out on a limb with this book. I always try to put Charlie under pressure in some way, but have I gone too far this time? I don’t know, and it’s worrying the hell out of me.

Because now, nothing I do makes a difference. While the book was in progress, there was always a chance to change course and avert disaster. Now I’m well and truly caught on the reef, and it’s in the lap of the gods whether I float off at the next high tide, or plummet to a watery grave.

So, I’ve plunged straight into the next outline, into planning the next opening chapter, just to try and avoid chewing my fingernails down to stumps. Because that, I’ve found, makes it very difficult to type.

I suppose, ‘Rati, I need help at this stage. Tell me how you feel at the end of a book. Tell me a story. Tell me anything to take my mind off worrying about something I can no longer do anything about until I get the rewrites in.

I’ll be out and about today, but will answer any comments in an erratic manner, as and when I can.

This week’s Word of the Week is enthusiasm, which is commonly taken to mean passionate eagerness in any pursuit. But the original Greek word enthousiasmos signified inspiration or possession by a god (from Greek theos, god). Along the way, it came to mean religious zealotry or fanaticism, sometimes simply ecstasy inspired by poetry. An enthusiast was originally one who laid claim to divine revelations, hence a visionary, self-deluded person.

And, after Cornelia’s comment, below, I couldn’t resist adding this – an origami velociraptor, of course!

 

 

 

 

AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!

by Rob

Okay.

I feel a little better now.

As I write this it’s yesterday.  The title is an expression of my complete and utter frustration.  My uncontrolled fury.

At what?

Technology.

Normally, I’m a pretty easy going guy.  And I’ve been a power user on computers for a couple decades now. There is very little in the world of technology that gets me frustrated.

But today (yesterday for the rest of you) I had a very simple technological task to take care of and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong.  Of course.

Let me explain.

About a week ago, I received my first pass proofs of my fourth book, DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN (ready for pre-order on Amazon and B & N!!!).  In general, I hate going over galleys.  By the time I get them I’ve been through a US rewrite and copy edit, as well as a UK rewrite and copy edit.  Which means I’ve already read the book in question about eleventy billion times.

After you’ve read a book that many times, the words tend to look like mud before your eyes and that’s probably not a great thing to be seeing when the galleys arrive.

Anyway, I was given a “return by” date and once I had some other chores taken care of, I sat down and started in on the galley corrections.  As usual, however, I pushed it up to the deadline because, like I said — eleventy billion times.

My plan was to mark up the pages that had typos, then scan them all, export them into a pdf file and email them to my editor.

Nice plan.

Haha.

Three hours before my deadline, I finished the corrections.  Time to scan.  But for some reason the scanner wouldn’t work with the computer I normally use with it.  I didn’t have time to deal with fixing it, so I took the scanner to another computer.

It wouldn’t work with that one either.

Okay.  I checked the scanner and it looks fine.  Just having driver issues, apparently.

So I hook it up to my Mac, thinking, Apple makes everything easy, right?

Wrong.

My Mac saw the scanner as a printer only.  I couldn’t scan anything if my life depended on it.  And since a couple hours have passed by now, my life probably does.

Okay.  One last try.  I hook it up to a Windows 7 machine.  Success!  I scan all the pages into a single file and save it as a pdf.

One problem.  The pdf is 18 megabytes in size.  Too big to email.

Shit.

So now I have to download a special program to reduce the file size.  This takes forever, but when I finally do the reduction, the pdf looks like crap.

Sigh.

Ten minutes before deadline.

I spend the next THREE HOURS trying to get that pdf down to a size I can actually email.  I won’t go over all the hoops I had to jump through, but let’s just say it was a colossal bitch of a project.

In the past, it has taken me about twenty minutes to do this.  And I honestly don’t know why it was so diffcult this time.

Needless to say, by the end of this whole process, I was literally SCREAMING AT MY COMPUTERS.  All of them.

If I had had a sledge hammer at that moment, I would have smashed every single one of them AND half of my house.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten that angry and frustrated and, honestly, the only way to vent was to scream bloody murder.  I’m sure all the neighbors heard me.

I know my family did.

But I really needed those screams.  They were the only thing that kept me from imploding.

So now I sit here, my file has been sent, all is well — except that I’m completely drained and rather than do a decent blog post today I’m merely venting my frustration.

And I ask all of you — how often do you find yourself angry or frustrated enough to scream.  Or, if not a scream, what do you do to vent?

Mad man out.

 

Down Time

 

By Louise Ure

 

We’ve all experienced it … in airport lounges, in waiting rooms, alone at a tiny bistro table waiting for your guest. It’s down time. That short forced period, often without internet access, when we are left alone with our thoughts.

These days my down time is often to be had at a hospital bedside or in one of those straight back metal chairs at the foot of a chemotherapy infusion chair. Conversation is not required. Just presence. Just being there so that when the eyes open they land on something loving and supportive.

And some of those times I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts. I need to be distracted.

Many of you know about my love of crossword puzzles. I can do them in ink. In three foreign languages. Quickly. They are my go-to down time staple. Not much to carry; I’ve even got all the New York Times crossword puzzles on my iPhone, although I miss the look of blue ink on newsprint when they’re completed. My favorite new clue? “What’s three less than once? (Four letters)” Check the bottom of the blog for the answer if you don’t know it.

Reading, of course, is a natural for down time, but I almost don’t want it to be a good book. I want something putdownable. Forgettable. Something I won’t remember as being associated with that day in the oncologist’s office.

During another trying time in my life I once read straight through every single one of the Diane Mott Davidson books, cutesy names, recipes and all. I loved them for the distracting froth that they were but have no desire to revisit those books or days.

I watch others for ideas on how to use this time, their haggard faces make them look like experts. The Russian lady skims rosary beads through her fingers like she’s shelling peas. The Asian man with a shock of white hair like a coxcomb is sleeping.

My friend Brian does Sudoku, which I’ve never warmed to. Why on earth would a number puzzle be so much more difficult for me than crosswords when each square is just a symbol after all? Why is it impenetrable for me to figure out the order of the numbers 1 through 10 while I can easily do it for a 10-letter word like “gesundheit?”

Some folks watch TV if it’s available. The offices and airport gates I frequent rarely have a program or channel that I’m interested in. Others find distraction in music, the ear buds leaking a tinny rhythm when you sit next to them. I don’t see many knitters anymore, but maybe that’s just California.

I dare say many of you writer-types like to work on a draft or jot notes about character and dialogue. I call that work, not down time.

I also don’t count idle cell phone conversations as acceptable uses of down time. Those are the natterings of people afraid to be alone, to be quiet, to be serene. They are a pestilence to the rest of us.

As you can tell, my friends, this is a week of waiting. Waiting for the curtain to rise. Waiting for the other shoe to fall. Waiting for news. For decisions. For an answer.

While we wait, tell me how you spend that forced down time. And if it’s reading, what kind of book? A comfort read? A “can’t put it down”?

 

* “What is three less than once?” Ocho. Read the word “once” as Spanish.

 

Rituals

Ever watch Monk?  I did.  A lot.  And I miss seeing my friend, Det. Adrian Monk, in part because he made me feel kind of normal.  You see, I can be pretty obsessive.  That wall I painted a couple of weeks ago?  I had no plans on doing that, certainly not on that particular day, and perhaps not on any day.  But once I woke up knowing that the wall needed to stop being white, that’s all I could think about.  I called the paint store, ordered the paint, walked to the store to pick it up, came home, popped open the can, and didn’t stop working until the job was done.  I tried to stop.  I did.  I sat down next to my husband for a snack break, but the thought of all those open paint cans, damp rollers, and that line between dry white wall and wet grey paint had me back up on my feet again.

But where Adrian Monk’s obsessive tendencies were sadly debilitating, I’ve always thought that I have a healthy amount of obsession.  My wall did get painted, right?  I’ve also lost a few pounds lately, doing it the only way I know how: obsession and ritual.  Count every calorie popped into the pie-hole and make sure that number is less than the calories burned.  (Shout-out to my calorie counter, Bodybugg.)  Back at the District Attorney’s Office, I used to crank through misdemeanor-issuing duty by forcing myself to issue cases in blocks of ten before even considering a coffee, bathroom, or hallway-gossip break.  Yesterday, I ran three miles in precisely 24 minutes — not 23:59, not 24:02, but 24:00.  Why?  Because I realized after a mile that I could beat my usual 25:00 pace, but didn’t want an uneven number, so I sped up as necessary to get the digital readout to wind up at 24:00.  No, I’m not kidding.  I actually did that.  Afterward, I looked like this, but without the tats.  Or boy parts.

One woman’s discipline is another person’s anal-retentive OCD freakshow.  I know.

But as much as I thrive on ritual, I can’t seem to import my usual habits to writing.  My fellow gym rat, Laura Lippman, recently compared her workout routines to her writing routine, where she puts in a requisite and round-numbered 1,000 words before considering a break.  I know many of you have similar word-count, page, or hours-at-desk minimums. 

Inspired by Laura, I’ve been trying to put in my 1,000 words a day.  But where hard, concrete, numerical goals do the trick for me in every other aspect of my life, this time it’s just not working.  Yesterday I walked away from my desk with a mere 489 new words added to the manuscript.  Unacceptable!  I would never hop off the treadmill after 4.89 miles.  4-8-9.  Nothing pretty or round or even or appealing about that at all.

The difference, of course, is that writing requires a different part of my brain.  On a treadmill, I don’t have to think about how to run.  I just put one foot in front of the other and try not to disturb my fellow gym patrons with all my panting and stomping.  Painting a wall is just a matter of moving brushes and rollers around until the color changes.  But words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and entire stories?  Those require inspiration and voice and sense of character and… choices! 

We writers often boast about discipline.  Even I of the undisciplined do strive to write something everyday and never to miss two consecutive days.  But I’m starting to think that walking away from the keyboard can also require discipline.  Last month, I suddenly worked through a plot problem in my work-in-progress while I was staring at the beach in Jamaica.  One of the biggest “a-ha” moments in my new book, 212, came to me during shavasana, or dead man’s pose, in yoga.   

“I’m not dead…but I know who’s about to be.” Is it that hard to believe that the art of writing requires you to let go of the part of your brain that likes round numbers?  So now instead of forcing myself to stay put for that 1,000 word limit, I ask myself why I want a break.  Do I know what needs to be written, but would rather play with Duffer or watch American Idol?  If so, I need to keep my behind in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.  But if I want to leave my desk because I need to think – about character, about voice, about motive, about story – I’m going to start trusting my instincts and turning off my inner Monk.

What are your rituals, successful or failed?  And when have you strayed from them, for better or worse?

Out of the Loop

By Allison Brennan

 

I’ve been out of the loop these last couple weeks, and I want to apologize to my Murderati partners in crime that I haven’t been visiting daily. Usually, reading the blog posts here and at my other group blog, Murder She Writes, are my first two Internet stops while drinking my morning coffee.

But sometimes, life gets out of hand and we all need to step back, tackle each project in turn, and reflect.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately. I don’t have any answers yet, so I can’t really share my thoughts. They’d read like a typical Libra on speed–on the one hand, A; on the other hand, B; but on the other hand, C; though maybe D. All the way through Z and back again. (And yes, I’m a Libra. I don’t hold much faith in astrology, but considering that Libra’s are said to weigh the pros and cons ad nauseum . . . then make a firm and definite decision they stick with . . . maybe there is a sliver of truth there.) I’m still in the weighing the pros and cons, and no where near that firm, defend-to-the-death decision.

But life getting out of hand . . . that I can relate to.

First, there were copyedits. Some writers breeze through copyedits. I’m not one of them. I hate copyedits. See, I LOVE writing. I LOVE revising. Getting that story done just right, having editorial input to ask the hard questions, making that story better, tweaking and fixing–I love it all. And the last stage, the galleys (or page proofs, whatever they’re called) is fun. That’s my book set for the press. It’s minor tweaking time, making sure the timeline is solid, changing words or phrases here and there, making sure the changes were incorporated from the copyedits, and that the rhythm is right. I try to read my page proofs out loud, every word–but at the minimum, I read all dialogue out loud to make sure it sounds right. I like this part–I feel like I have completely a huge accomplishment, it gives me the warm fuzzies 🙂 . . . juxtaposed to when I get my author copies, about two weeks before the book hits the shelves, and I alternate between “this is the best book I’ve written” to “this is so awful my career is over.” (And no, I never read my books after they are in print. I sometimes go back to read specific scenes because I forgot something, but I hired an indexer so I don’t have to do that anymore. Most recently, I had to re-read two chapters in FEAR NO EVIL because I couldn’t remember how many guards were left on the island and which ones were killed when Dillon and Kate rescued Lucy. It was important to know as I’m now writing Lucy’s book!)

Copyedits, on the other hand, is work. Hard work. Copyedits make me feel stupid. I see all those red and brown marks (my copyedits and line edits are on the same document) and think, “I can’t write worth shit.” Then I’ll see a page with no marks and think, “I’m brilliant!” Then I catch a typo or missing word and think, damn, maybe they just skipped this page because it was so boring. In copyedits, you have to go over each line with a fine-toothed comb, reading not only the changes but what you had originally. And though I love my line editor dearly, and most of my copyeditors have been very good, sometimes they get something wrong and make changes that are . . . well, wrong. And then there are the “Queries” which are copyeditor questions for the author. Some of them are easy (usually a slip up in timeline or using the wrong name or staging the scene–like once, I had a character entering the room twice . . . without leaving. Those mistakes are usually from revisions, when I make minor changes to a scene but don’t read it carefully enough beginning to end.) And some of them are HARD–and necessitate going through to fix something, or research a point, or rewrite a paragraph–or scene–because I missed something or my editor missed something or because I changed something in revisions, I forgot to fix a parallel point later on. For example in CARNAL SIN, I had a scene in my original draft that I cut from the final draft–but meant to rewrite and put back in. But forgot. It was a minor scene, but a pivotal turning point, and my line editor noted that there seemed to be this scene missing . . . it was. Integrating that, after rewriting it, was not fun.)

So for ten days I worked on my copyedits for CARNAL SIN. At the same time, they needed the excerpt for my next book to be printing at the end of this book. It’s a completely different story (CARNAL SIN is a paranormal romantic suspense; NO WAY OUT is a traditional romantic suspense that is also launching a series–same characters.) So switching gears was hard. I had a rough beginning, but I needed to clean it up and make sure that it WAS the beginning of the story. (Only once has the first chapter excerpt not been the actual first chapter. In TEMPTING EVIL, the excerpt in KILLING FEAR became chapter two in the actual book.)

And, as soon as I sent off my copyedits a week ago Thursday, I had to dive back into writing NO WAY OUT which is due mid-April.

But there’s also family. My oldest daughter, a 16 year old sophomore, is an athlete (volleyball and basketball) and her Div-V team was in the playoffs. On March 5th, they won the regional championship, played at Arco Arena. (yeah!) (Oh, another digression–on March 5th Katie also had her ACSI Choir performance. So for two days–the 4th and 5th–her choir joins with choirs all over Northern California. They learn several songs that they sing together for a night-time performance, but also they have what’s called “adjudication”–I think–where the individual schools are critiqued by this Big Music Expert Guy–who I don’t know, but he’s supposed to be a college music professor and very knowledgeable–after they sing three songs. So I went with Katie on Friday because right after adjudication, she had to quickly change from a black velvet gown into her basketball uniform and sweats and I then drove her halfway across Sacramento County so she could have lunch with her basketball team before the championship game–which she missed eating because they were done by the time we got there. BUT it was worth it because the Big Music Expert Guy singled out the sopranos in Katie’s choir as being pitch perfect and among the very best he’d heard in a high school choir. Katie is a soprano. I was very proud . . . especially since I can NOT carry a tune.)

So . . . we won at Arco, which means Nor-Cal playoffs. This is the third year we’ve won regionals, but we’ve never made it to the Nor-Cal playoffs. This year . . . we’re there. Next Saturday, we play for the Northern California Div-5 championship.

I love basketball, but more than that, I love this team. So I enjoy going to the games, supporting Katie (she’s a sophomore and non-starter, but when she goes I love watching her!), and supporting all the girls who I absolutely adore and admire. They are truly a TEAM and I’m so proud of them! 

Anyway, I’m not complaining at all . . . but the basketball schedule has impacted on my writing time, which means that I write later at night. Okay, full disclosure . . . I LIKE writing at night, but my BEST writing comes from 1-5 pm. I don’t know why. I try to start writing at 10 am. And three days a week I have to quit at 3 to get the kids. But if I could pick the four hours a day that I wrote quality scenes, it would be 1-5. Which means I have to work harder when I lose this time. And because I get stressed, I stay off-line more (or hop on and off all day, two minutes here, two minutes there.) But I don’t THINK of going to blogs because I have this mental slave driver that says, “You must write NOW! You have to leave in two hours!” . . . “You must write NOW! You have to leave in one hour, fifty-nine minutes . . . “

Needless to say, when that bitch, er, internal clock clicks in, I get NOTHING done even though I try. Those are the pages I end up deleting the next day.

And this week I also got report cards for all the kids. There is good and there is bad. One of the bad points was that my three youngest children have apparently not turned in much of their homework, and that was noted. They are in kindergarden, first and third grade. Okay, I was not much of a homework person. Like my third grade son, I could still ace every subject. (Though, he got a C in reading because he FORGOT to turn in his two book reports, even though the teacher gave him grace. Sheesh. Those reports were HALF his grade, if he’d just turned them in he would have gotten an A.) So . . . my bad. I never nag about homework. But this week? I set aside a 30 minute window before dinner to work on homework until done. One day, great . . . if it takes two or more? Fine. But I can’t help thinking that the teachers think that I am the failure because really, when you’re dealing with a 5 year old, who REALLY is responsible for the homework???? (They are homework packets that go home on Monday and are due Friday–spelling words, math sheets, reading ten minutes a night, vocab, etc.)

So I had that on my head–just like last year I had a period of Severe Tardiness where we were late three days a week (or more) for a couple weeks and I was called into the principal’s office. I was determined not to be summoned again! (This school year, they’ve been late 10 times. Last school year, they were late 10 times–in one month.)

Oh, and I had to read my RITA books. These are the books for the Romance Writers of America contest. I only had five books to read–a piece of cake compared to the 30+ books in the Thriller Awards!!! But I had less time and . . . well, one was FABULOUS, but the others were . . . not as fabulous. FAB book I read in one night (then went out and bought the second in the series and read that, too!) . . . the others took a bit longer to finish. I also judge the romantic suspense category of the Golden Heart. The last two years, I had the winning entry in my packet and KNEW it would final. This year . . . nothing stood out as exceptional. Two had potential, the type of potential where I wish I could contact the entrant and give them just a little advice because they are *almost* there but  . . . and there’s always that but. In the GH everything is anonymous and you don’t critique or fill out a score sheet, just a number score. Which is great . . . except when an entry could have been stellar if only . . . 

So that’s why I’ve been out of the loop. I’m sure I’m missing a few things . . . oh! The dog!

On Wednesday, March 3, a beautiful, friendly female black lab showed up at our house. It was pouring rain–a major storm. The dog walked by the French doors in my office and I ran out into the rain and escorted her to the back porch, which was covered. My daughter (Brennan #2, the 8th grader) dried her off and gave her a blanket to sleep on. That afternoon, we went to all the neighbors–and at night, those we missed–and no one was missing a dog. Because it was cold, Dan put a space heater on the back porch (I really don’t want to get the next electricity bill!) so the dog wouldn’t get cold, and we gave her a blanket and towel and she slept on our cushioned chair. We fed her hamburgers and toast.

The next morning, my boys discovered her. They dressed and ran out to play with her. Our dog was put to sleep last year at the age of 16. We had planned on getting another dog, but time and busy schedules . . . well, seeing the kids with her we realized we need a dog. All the kids loved her (except my 6 year old daughter who doesn’t like animals AT ALL and closes her bedroom door so the cat doesn’t go in there.) Dan and I loved her. We secretly prayed we never found the owner. On Thursday night we considered letting her inside, but decided against it for fear we’d be too attached. She slept outside (with the heater) again. We did buy food and a bowl for her, though. The kids started calling her “Liquor.” I put my foot down, even when they explained WHY–they meant “Lick-her” because the dog licked them when they came out to play :/ . . . I said no, and they changed the name ti “Licorice.” The teenagers put the foot down. I said, “Don’t name her, she’s not ours. Someone is missing her.” But on Friday morning, they called her “Brownie.” Again, the teenagers said, “Ugh.” I said, “Don’t name her, she’s not ours.” But . . . she was such a good dog! Healthy, friendly, happy, and great with the kids. And she didn’t bark except once when excited. 

Friday was the Arco basketball game . . . we left, and when we returned, she was gone.

We all assumed that her owners walked through the neighborhood calling for her and she went to them. 

On Monday morning, she returned. You know that adage–if you love something, set it free? If it returns, it’s meant to be yours? We were thinking . . . you know, maybe . . . 

She slept inside Monday night.

Then Dan took her to the vet Tuesday morning to see if she had a chip in her. She did. He called the owner. This kid–Jay, a 20 year old–was stunned. His dog, Kaylie, had been stolen six months ago. He lives way out in dairy country, at least fifteen miles from us. He’d gotten Kaylie from the pound when she was six months old. Had her spayed and chipped. One morning he let her out to do her business (she slept in his bedroom.) He chained her to the front porch while he showered. Fifteen minutes later he goes out to get her, and she’s gone. Her chain was cut. Her dog bed, bowl, and toys–stolen. Jay searched for her, talked to all the construction companies working in the area, did everything–and she was nowhere.

Jay had given up hope and was talking about getting another dog. He lived at one end of a new major county sewage pipeline project. Guess who lives near the other end? Yep, the Brennan’s.

When Dan called Jay, the kid was stunned and so excited that he left a friend he was visiting two hours away to drive back to get her. He came Tuesday night to our house and one look and I knew it was true love–him and his dog. We all miss Kaylie–she would have fit in so well here. But she wasn’t ours, and we knew Jay would treat her like a princess.

So all that, and my own reflections that I’m still reflecting on, has had me a bit off-center. I’m certain no more so than anyone else. But maybe my bit-of-off-center was partly due to forgetting my morning Internet excursions. I’ll try to do better in upcoming weeks.

I was trying to think up a question to ask ya’ll that relates to all this . . . and honestly? I can’t think of anything. So I’ll just ask: What do you do to re-group and get back on track with your life? 

Ask.

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I am not at Left Coast Crime this weekend, even though it would have been a no-brainer, L.A. and all.   

There was a time – like, yesterday – I would never have missed a conference.   Conferences are the social reward of being an author, cleverly disguised as essential career business.   I love them.   They are always exactly what I need in the moment.

But tempting as it is, and much as I am missing everyone, I don’t regret it.   I don’t want to take even a few days away from my writing right now.   More than that, I don’t want to pull myself out of writing mode, and conference mode is really different from writing mode. 

It’s been an exceptionally hard year for me, as it has for so many of the ‘Rati, and I think for many, many, many of our extended community.   And the whole rest of the world.

So I don’t have a lot of energy to split my focus, right now.   And I am so excited and grateful to HAVE a book I want to write again.

I tried this whole thing a little differently this time.    I always wait for inspiration to help me choose a project.    Well, “waiting” isn’t exactly the word, because it’s a more active process than that, deliberately throwing myself open to receive ideas, journaling, making lists as I’ve talked about before, foraging widely in subject matter that draws me.  

But this year I’ve been working a 12-step recovery program, Al Anon, for people who have been affected by other people’s drinking (which would be, let’s face it, everyone, right?).  One of the pillars of that program is releasing your own need to control everything under the sun and learning to first trust, and then gradually fully rely on a Higher Power of your own understanding.  (And for the record, the first thing I do when I buy one of the daily meditation books or any other of the literature, is go through and cross out any mentions of “He” in regard to a Higher Power.  Or add my own genders randomly.)

So this time, as I was finishing  Shifters, my Harlequin Nocturne book that comes out in October, and getting that gnawing restless feeling…   What next?   What am I going to write next?   I realized that if I am really committed to this spiritual path, this decision is like every other in my life – I needed to turn it over to my Higher Power.   And ask:   “What do YOU want me to write?”

(How you phrase the question in these communications is important, I’ve found.   It’s not “What should I write next?”    but “What would you have me write?”)

So every day, I’ve been asking, in prayer, meditation, in the car, lying awake at night – “What do YOU want me to write?

This question had actually become more and more desperate, especially once I’d finished the first draft of the current book.   Because I didn’t seem to be getting any answers.  

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been a professional writer for most of my adult life and I actually have a backlog of perfectly great, pretty developed story ideas that would take me much more than the rest of my lifetime to write.    But that isn’t the point.   I don’t want to be out there on my own writing, any more.   I want to be aligned with what the Universe wants from me.

But with no obvious answers forthcoming, I went into doubt.  I started to feel not just confused, but completely blocked about what book to write next.    I started obsessing about the need to give my agent some proposals (like, yesterday).   And I worked on ideas, carded them, did all the right things – all the while being less and less trusting of myself to make the right decision.    So over and over and OVER every day, for weeks, maybe months, I kept asking (in prayer, meditation, in the car, lying awake at night) – “What do YOU want me to write?”  “PLEASE tell me what to write.”    “I really NEED to know what to write, here…”

Then, week before last, I had the opportunity to go on retreat with some of my best writer friends.  

I’ve written about this before, my posse of mystery writer friends (I should say goddesses, really) I hang out with in Raleigh: Margaret Maron, Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Mary Kay Andrews and Brynn Bonner.   I was stunned when they asked me to join this group – my first book had just come out and I felt like such an amateur, comparatively.    I’d been reading Margaret for years and it was really like getting an invitation from the queen. 

We’re more a regular lunch group than a critique group, but several times a year we go on retreat to the beach or the mountains or some generally fantastic place – that’s how I came to stay in the haunted mansion in Southern Pines that I used for the model of my haunted house in THE UNSEEN. We get together in the morning to set goals for the day and help each other with story problems, work all day long by ourselves and then convene at night to have dinner and brainstorm on any new problem that anyone’s having.   And of course there are walks on the beach, field trips to cemeteries and nearby historical districts….

This trip we went to Mary Kay’s beach cottage on Tybee Island, off the Georgia coast near Savannah, which is the same charming, funky cottage she wrote about in her book SAVANNAH BREEZE.  Photos here.   And I almost didn’t go because there is so much else in turmoil in my life, but then I thought, no, “I will go, and I will come back with my story.   I have to.”

So we’re down at the beach, and a few days go by and I am still floundering, although it feels a lot better to flounder at the beach, somehow.   But on the third day, at our breakfast session, I was telling everyone all about my several story ideas, and I swear, Mary Kay just channeled God.   She got really intense, scary intense, and asked me bluntly, over and over again,   “What do you WANT this book to be?    What do you want it to do for you?   You have to ask for what you WANT.”  

Which is, always, the hardest thing for me to do.

And I opened my mouth and started telling them about a third book that I hadn’t even told them about because I hadn’t even figured out how to do it yet, and as I was telling them about it I was realizing that I have been, for weeks, getting the most clear signs about this book.  EVERYTHING, everywhere.    For every time I have asked this question the answer has been right in my face, in my inbox, on my shelves, appliquéd on the clothes I wear every day, in songs I hear, all right in my face.  

But I still hadn’t gotten it, so the Universe finally took pity on me and gave me the most direct answer to my question I could possibly have asked for, unambiguous, unequivocal.

So I am here today to say,  “Ask”.    Whatever it is.   Ask and wait for the answer.   The Universe is so patient, and so wants you to get whatever it is you need, that it will stay right there with you through pain and confusion and doubt and turmoil until you are ready to hear the answers you need.

I would love to know, today, if and how any of you consult with the universe or your own higher powers, in whatever areas of your life you do.

And of course, reports from LCC from all those attending!

– Alex



TWO AUTHORS WALK INTO A BAR…

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

Chris Ransom and I were brought together by our agent, Scott Miller, when Scott sent him a copy of my novel, BOULEVARD, to blurb.  And then I read THE BIRTHING HOUSE, Chris’s novel, and it blew me away.  I loved the dark, tense prose and his brilliant depiction of a common man passing through what could either be a deep psychological crisis or the scariest haunting you’ve ever encountered.  The psychological ambiguity and torment in his book brought comparisons to “Crime and Punishment” and “The Turn of the Screw.” 

THE BIRTHING HOUSE was first published in the U.K., where it became an instant bestseller.  It has subsequently been released by St. Martin’s in the U.S.

We come from a similar background, Chris and I.  We both struggled as screenwriters in Hollywood, became disillusioned with the process, and turned to writing novels.  I ran from the Biz to take a “day job” and he ran all the way to Wisconsin.  We are at the same place in our careers, having just finished our second novels.

We decided to meet in a virtual pub today to share a drink and a conversation about our experiences.  I’m not much of a drinker, so on the rare occasion that I do drink, I do it right.  I’m having a Macallan, aged 18, on the rocks.

Stephen:  Good to see you again, bro.  What can I get you?  I think you had a beer when we met in Hermosa Beach a while back.  You gonna wuss out again or can I get you a real drink? 

Chris:  Hey, buddy.  Good to see you again.  Where did you get that leather jacket?  You look like Serpico in that thing.  Every writer needs a leather jacket like that, but most of us can’t pull it off.  It really works for you because you’re the guy who wrote BOULEVARD.  I guess I’ll have another Guinness.  It’s either Guinness or a Moscow Mule, sometimes a Manhattan.  I’m not tough enough to drink straight scotch. 

Anyway, I wanted to correct you on something first.  Scott (our agent) didn’t send me your novel soliciting a blurb.  I swear.  What happened was, I asked him if he had read anything good lately.  He told me about BOULEVARD and I said that sounds like something I would love.  Then, being the busy agent he is, he forgot to send it to me, so I reminded him again, because I really wanted to read a novel about a homicide detective who is also a sex addict.  Who doesn’t want to read that, right?  So he mailed it to me, and I devoured it in two nights.  So I wrote back telling Scott how much I loved it, and thus the blurb.  You pulled off a minor miracle with that book, I think, walking that thread-thin line by taking Hayden to very dark places without ever succumbing to the gratuitous.  It was very controlled and just a searing novel.  So there, just wanted to clear up any notions of, whattaya call it, same-agent nepotism or whatever.

Stephen:  Well, it’s very cool how that all worked out.  When I read THE BIRTHING HOUSE, I found myself getting lost in the rhythm and poetry of your style.  I really couldn’t put your book down.  I remember when I had just finished the second draft of my second book, BEAT, I suddenly had the fear that, if I were to die right then, the book would never be realized.  Right now my two-book deal is my only “life insurance policy,” and I need my second book to be published in order to at least leave my family with something.  And your style just seemed to speak to me—it came to me in a flash – that’s when I wrote to you and asked if you would finish my novel if something terrible happened to me.  I thought it was very cool when you asked me to do the same for you.  Fortunately, we both survived writing our second novels and we can each enjoy sole writing credit on our works.  But, hey, if I fall out of an airplane before I finish Book Three, you know your assignment…

Chris:  Awesome.  We are each other’s life insurance policy.  Our wives will be so relieved.

Stephen:  So, what the fuck are you doing in Wisconsin?  You ever coming back to L.A.?

Chris:  I doubt it, though I do miss it.  I have a strong love/hate relationship with the City of Angels.  The tacos, burgers, weather, bookstores, and whole mess of the place are great.  It’s so vibrant and glossy here, so gritty and freaky there, which is fun.  But the traffic and housing prices and wannabe-a-movie-star scene of it wore me down.  Ultimately I need more peace and quiet to write.  Spending an hour in the car just to go to the post office drove me fucking nuts.  I grew up in Colorado, you know, so I need the open space that LA lacks.

But strangely I can’t seem to let it go, either.  My second novel, THE HAUNTING OF JAMES HASTINGS, is set in LA.  I have some very vivid memories of living in the historical neighborhood of West Adams, where we bought our first house, and that proved to be fertile ground for my second book.  It was a lot of fun to “go back there” for the nine months I spent writing the Hastings book.  Some of my favorite novels are these great, gritty LA stories, like ASK THE DUST, most of the Bukowski canon, and so much of the best crime fiction.  So maybe I wanted to steal some of that down-and-out atmosphere, dink around in with the dark side of the “scene”.

Stephen:  I’m a big John Fante and Bukowski fan, too.  My favorite Fante is BROTHERHOOD OF THE GRAPE.  I’ve never read such charming, seemingly effortless description of intergenerational feuding.  And, of Bukowski, I prefer his novels.  My favorite is HAM ON RYE.  I also love POST OFFICE and HOLLYWOOD.  It’s more than just gritty stuff, it’s perceptive, lyrical, humorous.

Chris:  Absolutely.  I think you recently told me that your second novel is not set in LA, is that right?  What was your decision with that?  Did you find it harder to jump cities?  More liberating?  How would you describe the effect of setting in your work?  For me it’s hugely important.  The setting helps set the tone for the entire novel, and I am very wary of getting the tone just right before I begin.  Do you feel the same?

Stephen:  I did switch locations for my second book, even though it is a sequel to BOULEVARD.  I’ve always loved San Francisco and I felt it would be a great place for Hayden Glass to find himself.  It’s a city filled with sexual triggers.  And I like making him a fish-out-of-water, his tough-guy LAPD tactics slamming up against the often subtle, more complicated tactics of the SFPD.  I did a lot of research with the SFPD – lots of ride-alongs and late nights doing beat patrol in North Beach.  Most of the locals think I’m an undercover cop, and I did get a lot of “Serpico” comments.  It was a fucking blast and I wish I could do it every day of the week.

To me, the city becomes another character in the book.  It absolutely sets the tone, and my characters are either in sync with the city or at odds with it.  In some ways, the cities are the most complicated characters in my books.

Chris:  I get so much pleasure from Colin Harrison’s novels for the same reason.  Reading him always takes me back to the pulse and throb of New York.  Harrison said something once about sitting in coffee shops to steal conversations and get ideas for his books, because in your average New York diner you might eavesdrop on cops, captains of industry, or some 80-year-old Chinese woman who’s husband has disappeared.  And I just love that man-on-the-street quality in fiction. 

Reading BOULEVARD is like traveling the underbelly of LA, taking a tour through the massage parlors, the deadbeat motels, the twisted clubs.  I didn’t see much of that while we lived in LA (I promise, honey, ha ha…), but you always sensed it there.  The drugs and sex and danger lurking around every corner… the cops who have more important things to do than bust you for jaywalking.

Stephen:  I’ll take another Macallan, by the way, and an Evian.  Christ, you’ve barely touched that Guinness.

Chris:  (Glug, glug, gluh . . . aahhhhh.)  Excuse me, bartender?  Can I get another pint?  My friend here is trying to put me into an early grave.  Thank you.

(Eyeing his new beer)  Bukowski makes a compelling case for living through something in order to have something to write about.  I just reread POST OFFICE for the 3rd or 4th time, hadn’t looked at it for years, and I too was struck by the elements you mention.  But what I really took away was a reminder of the value of writers going out into the world and doing something, finding something real to write about.  We can’t just sit behind our desk, writing in our own echo chamber.

Bukowski worked for the post office for some 12 or 13 years and that novel, his first, was the result.  Amazing.  It’s a hundred and ten pages or something, but it’s a whole life, you know?  If he had never written anything else, you could hold that book up and say, “Well, if you want to know what it was like to be a half-crazed mailman in mid-century LA, here it is.  Humanity at its most bureaucratic, absurd, and raw.”  He lived it, he earned that book as much as anyone can.

You mentioned riding along with cops and doing all kinds of real-life research for your follow-up.  I think that’s very valuable and probably a survival tool for a crime writer.  My work is a little more domestic and I probably need to get out of the house more.  A lot of my stuff is set in the average suburban home, the bedroom, stuff between neighbors, and so forth. 

Stephen:  I know you’ve got another U.K. deal for THE HAUNTING OF JAMES HASTINGS.  What’s happening in the U.S.?  And how are you proceeding with Book Three?

Chris:  My second novel dips a toe in the cesspool of celebrity a bit.  It features a celebrity look-alike, a guy who doubled for a fictional Eminem.  My character has no talent or artistic qualities himself, but basically made a living for several years pretending to be someone else.  I am a huge Eminem fan, and had read much of his biography, dissected a lot of his lyrics and so forth.  I actually met one of Eminem’s doubles when I lived in LA, and this guy really stuck with me.  Here was this young kid who helped Eminem with videos, awards show skits, and god knows what else–all because he had “won” some kind of weird genetic lottery and looked exactly like Marshall Mathers. 

What would this do to the average person, over time?  Pretending to be someone else?  Of the three main characters in my book, none are who they claim to be.  And it is ultimately a story about one man coming to terms with who he was–and who his wife was–before she died in this terrible accident.

Do you wanna do a shot?  Oh, I guess you’re already doing a shot.  Of scotch.  OK, fuck it, I’ll order one.  Grab her when she comes around again.

Stephen:  Yo, bartender!  So, will readers in the States get to read this Hastings novel?

Chris:  I hope so.  I was fortunate that Scott was able to secure us a two-book deal with my British publisher, Little, Brown, after they brought out The Birthing House.  Our man is currently shopping the Hastings novel to St. Martin’s and other US publishers as we drink, so I don’t know if and when it will be released here.  But Hastings and his group of false identities will be released in the UK on July 1, 2010.  In this economic climate, my friend, I’m just happy someone wants to publish it somewhere. 

What’s going on with Hayden after the sequel to BOULEVARD?  By the way–can we bill this all to Scott?  If he were here, we could easily make him pay the tab.

Stephen:  Scott’s too busy drinking with the other writers at Murderati.  He represents half of them already. 

I’m absolutely fascinated with your idea about the “Eminem” impersonator.  What a cool character.  It’s a fresh idea.

Book Three for me will be a standalone, and I’m currently bouncing ideas around in my head.  Have no idea where the “wheel of fortune” will stop.  But I think Hayden’s journeys will continue.  There’s at least one book left to complete his psychological through-line.  Despite the raucous ride he’s on, there’s a path to healing, and he’s on it.  The first book is just the first act. 

Chris:  I think a trilogy for Hayden sounds about right.  That’s a nice journey and stopping at two books might have felt incomplete, or short.  Healing is a long process, and the guy we met in Boulevard was pretty messed up!

I’m really looking forward to writing my third.  The writer’s emotional state is very different than with the first two.  With your first book, you’re just out to prove you can do it, right?  It’s you writing in the dark, the writer against the world.  That’s very freeing and gives you great reserves.  You have no deadlines. 

I don’t know if you felt the same way, but the second novel was, for me, much more difficult, more frightening.  You’ve got a deadline.   You did it once, but what if it was a fluke?  You’re afraid of repeating yourself, or doing something that’s too far off the radar for your readers, whoever they are.  Dan Simmons told me that Harlan Ellison told him that “any fuckhead can write one novel.  Real writers make their names on the second novel, third novel, fourth, fifth . . .”

Stephen:  Nothing like getting advice straight from the source.  I’m in total agreement with you about the different stages of approaching our first few novels.  I’m on the same trajectory.

Chris:  But now that we’ve done it twice, there’s a certain sense of (relative) calm.  Like, OK, this is a habit now, not a fluke, I can do this.  And yet, I find that the saying is true–every novel teaches you how to write a novel all over again.  Because every novel needs to be written in its own way, right?  It never comes easily.

Stephen:  I think my third novel is going to be a bitch.  I expect it to be more difficult than the second, since the second was a sequel.  And I still haven’t managed to shake that day job, so I still have to fit the whole process into evenings and weekends.  Well, brother Ransom, we’ve got twenty minutes to get downtown to hit that burlesque show you’ve been begging to go to.  Research never stops, I guess.  Go ahead and finish that shot, I’ve got Scott sending a town car to pick us up. 

Real quick, what’s your third book about?

Chris: My third novel is called THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.  It’s about a struggling American family confronted with a set of very, uhm, abnormal neighbors, another family who seem to have it all.  The Beautiful People are both more and less than human, hiding a horrible secret, and their fates are intertwined with my normal family.  It features two patriarchs going head to head, the children getting mixed up with each other, out of control wives.  It’s about health, appetite, and security.  How far will you go to provide for your family?  To keep them safe?  At what cost this American life?

I’m challenging myself with a bigger cast of characters on this one, more points of view.  I can’t wait to see how it turns out, and since I have another deadline looming . . .

Stephen:  Check it – Scott sent a stretch limo instead of the town car…go ahead and grab that bottle. 

Chris:  Why’s the bartender smiling at you?

Stephen:  She said she loved my work on Godspell and Wicked.  Left me with her resume and an 8 X 10 glossy.  I won’t tell her I’m the other Stephen Schwartz.  Let’s blow this joint.

Chris:  Catch you on the other side of book three, amigo.  Don’t forget your jacket!

Murderati folks – I’ll be at Left Coast Crime all day and it won’t be easy for me to make comments.  I’ll try to sneak in during breaks in the panels, if the Omni Hotel doesn’t charge me $15 every time I log on.  But Chris will be hanging out to chat with you throughout the day.  And, check out his website, it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen.