Dual Personalities

By Allison Brennan

Toni and I are at a writer's conference in New York (PASIC–the published author chapter of RWA) and one of the great things about this conference is that because we're all published authors, so we tend to talk about issues that we're all grappling with as published authors of all levels, from #1 New York Times Bestsellers to debut authors.

One discussion point that came up several times was writing in two or more genres: when can you do it, how should you do it, does it help or hurt and should you take a pen name.

There are as many opinions as their are authors.

When romance writers are talking about writing in a second genre, it's usually taking a second genre within the broader romance genre. For example, a historical author also writing contemporary romantic suspense. Sometimes, however, it's a contemporary romance writer who decides to write a mystery series.

One of the hurdles we face is the possibility of ticking off our core readers. If we venture too far off the reservation, we risk losing our base. If we lose our base without gaining new readers, we're toast. This is why many authors take a pen name–it's a way of distinguishing between the two "types" of books. Nora Roberts/JD Robb are one in the same, but Nora Roberts is associated with big, meaty, sweeping romances and JD Robb is associated with futuristic romantic mysteries. Jayne Anne Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jayne Castle are all the same person, but Krentz writes romance/romantic suspense; Amanda Quick historical romance; and Jayne Castle paranormal romance. But we all know it's the same person.

Yet some authors write under one name. Julie Garwood, for example, writes both historical romance and contemporary romantic suspense.

But taking two or more names is not limited to romance sub-genres. Thriller writer James Rollins wrote fantasy as James Clemens, publishing simultaneously (one Rollins book, one Clemens book) two books a year. Now, Jim is adding YA adventures (Indiana Jones) under his Rollins name.

Perennial bestseller Dean Koontz wrote under many pen names in multiple genres–romance, supernatural, horror, suspense, science fiction–before writing exclusively under his name and ultimately reissuing most of his previously published books under his own name.

Stephen King wrote books similar to Stephen King under the pen name Richard Bachman primarily because he was so prolific (another reason why Nora Roberts took a pen name–though she also did it because she was writing a series completely different from her trademark romances.)

Janet Evanovich, however, writes both the Stephanie Plum mystery series and her romance/romantic comedy novels under her own name; and James Patterson writes both thrillers and YA supernatural thrillers under his own name. And our own Tess Gerritsen started in romantic suspense, moved into mainstream thrillers, and also wrote a historical mystery/suspense all under her own name.

When I'm done with my current WIP, I'll start my supernatural thriller series. We've already decided that I'll write the series under my name. I've considered the pros and cons of this:

CONS

1) I write romantic thrillers. My current readers may be upset because there is not as much romance in the books (those there will be a romance–but it'll be a multi-book romantic arc instead of resolved by the end of book one.)

2) It's a series with the same characters through all seven books (as opposed to creating new characters for each book.) Some readers might now want to get invested in a new series.

3) Some people don't like supernatural elements in their suspense novels–even when the books are grounding in the "real world."

4) Readers might pick up a book with my name thinking they're getting one thing, but disappointed because they get something different.

PROS

1) Writers, like readers, often get bored writing the same type of stories. They want to try something a little different (or a lot different) in order to keep themselves fresh and engaged and creative. I'm ready to write something different.

2) When you have a good-sized audience who trusts you to deliver a good-story, they'll mostly follow you anyplace you want to take them. I hope my readers will trust me enough to show them a slightly different world.

3) You already have a name you've built–it would be almost starting at square one to write under a second name (including more time to market, another website, etc.) I don't have the time to manage two names!

One comment from agents and editors at the conference is that they cautioned us to writing a book "like" our last one. One editor said, "You need to deliver another book like the last and give your readers what they expect."

One argument is that you need to give them the same, but different, book. Another romantic suspense. Another cozy mystery. Another western-set historical. Another argument is that it's not the genre, but the feeling the reader has when they read your book that's important. Meaning, if you are known for delivering emotionally-driven stories, then you need to have emotionally-driven stories in all your subgenres. If you are known for your great puzzles in your mysteries, it doesn't matter if you set them in the future, the past, or any time in between.

I'll admit, I'm getting excited about embarking on this new adventure. It's an idea I've had for nearly six years, and I finally get to start writing it. But that doesn't mean I'm not scared of the potential pitfalls!

What about you? Are you willing to go with your favorite authors wherever they want to take you, even if it's a genre you haven't read before?

And because Toni said I had to, I just want to mention that my book SUDDEN DEATH comes out on Tuesday, March 24th. If you like romantic thrillers, I hope you run out to buy it this week. If you don't, I hope you run out and buy it this week . . . for your best friend, mom, dad, spouse, sister, brother, son and (I mean or!) daughter.

Creating Character – Jake Gittes

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Over on my own blog I have been doing breakdowns of different movies to illustrate the story structure techniques that I've been talking about here, and one of the films I'm analyzing is CHINATOWN, not just because it's a fantastic, classic movie, but because it's virtually one-stop shopping for all the story structure techniques I'm trying to illustrate.
And in the middle of this CHINATOWN story breakdown and analysis it struck me that the character of Jake Gittes is a virtual textbook all on his own on techniques of creating a great character. So while I'm trying to figure out how to handle doing a story breakdown that would fit on Murderati (they're very, very long, these things…) I did want to post on the character techniques that went into Jake Gittes that helped create a tragic and iconic detective for the ages.

And maybe coax some of you 'Rati to break down your own favorite character for us.

So, what IS it about Jake Gittes?
Well, first, they got Jack Nicholson to play Jake.
(Do that and your work is done, right?)
But that casting was no accident. Robert Towne wrote the part specifically for Jack Nicholson, who was NOT a star at the time, although he was rising. Towne used Nicholson’s voice, his mannerisms, his attitude, to develop a colorful, complicated fully-realized lead.
I’ve talked before about writing a character for a specific actor. And as authors, we can use this technique even more easily than screenwriters can – because we don’t have to go out and get the actor to play the part (and then compromise later with the ninth choice on our wish list). We can write any actor we please into any part we choose. So why not take advantage of that happy position of unlimited power?
Reread THE FIRM and tell me Grisham didn’t write that character for Tom Cruise (at the age he was when the book came out). Then look at Grisham’s THE PELICAN BRIEF – Darcy IS Julia Roberts, right? This writing-for-actors technique works, not just to create bestselling novels, but also to help you nail your intended actors when the book is made into a movie. (In fact Nicholson not only signed on to play the role, according to Polanski himself, Nicholson was instrumental in getting Polanski to agree to direct. That’s what happens when a smart actor has a vested interest in getting a movie made).
So there’s one major technique right there – Write for a specific actor.
But what else went into the creation of Jake Gittes?
Now, when you’re writing a detective as your main character, whether that detective is a cop, a PI like Jake, or an amateur, a lot of your choices are already made for you. You know there’s going to be a mystery, or a murder, or another crime – or a combination of all three of those things, and that the detective’s outer desire is going to be to solve that crime or mystery (and usually also to avoid being killed by the person s/he is pursuing). The incredible advantage of having all those choices already built in to a character probably has a lot to do with why so many authors and screenwriters choose to write in this genre.
The downside is that detectives have been done so often that it can be hard to do anything unique with the character.
Robert Towne hits a lot of classic points with Jake. I’d like to take them one by one.
1. Jake is a hero with a GHOST, or WOUND:
He used to be a cop working in L.A.’s Chinatown, where nothing was as it seemed and where Jake’s best efforts to help a woman ended up with her getting hurt instead. Though we never learn the details of the incident, apparently it was bad enough that Jake quit the police force and now is wasting his talents on divorce work. And the case he is about to take on will take him metaphorically and physically right back into Chinatown. He will be forced to relive his haunted past.
(And that recreation and reliving of a past trauma is a staple of drama for a reason: a lot of psychologists would say that that's the human condition, the "repetition compulsion": we all unconsciously seek out people, events and situations that duplicate our core trauma (s), in the hope of eventually triumphing over the situation that so wounded us.)
2. CHINATOWN is a “Hero Falls” story.
When we meet him, Jake seems on the surface to be doing pretty well. Whatever happened in Chinatown, it doesn’t seem to consume him. His business is good, he’s making good money, he’s not a broken down alcoholic or basket case, he keeps a sense of humor about things. But there’s a good reason the filmmakers start Jake on a fairly even keel.
For any story you write, there are certain big arcs that most characters fall into. One is a hero/ine who starts the story in emotional trouble if not actual physical trouble (generally brought on the emotional problem!), who takes the journey of the story, is forced to confront her or his deficiencies, overcomes them, and triumphs – to win a goal that was probably not the goal s/he started out with, but is clearly what s/he really needed all along. (This is the most common character arc).
A second pattern is an innocent hero/ine who triumphs over evil and opposition and wins her/his goal through sheer goodness. (THE WIZARD OF OZ and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE are good examples). The heroine and hero in those stories don’t have huge character arcs (although both characters gain in personal strength); the lesson for us (the reader or audience) is a more general one of how virtue and passion and doing the right thing are rewarded (and hopefully we the reader or audience are inspired by the story to be virtuous ourselves.).
A third pattern, though, is a hero who fails or falls. THE GODFATHER shows the moral fall of Michael Corleone (even as he rises in societal stature). CHINATOWN shows the fall of Jake Gittes, despite his sincere and determined attempts to do the right thing. While Michael Corleone makes the choices he makes deliberately (although the pressure of family history weighs heavily); Jake is a pawn, up against the greater forces of a malevolent universe. The only thing Jake learns in CHINATOWN is that his best efforts are useless; he should have learned his lesson long ago that the only way to survive is to do “as little as possible.”
So CHINATOWN begins with a protagonist who we come to understand is wounded, but doing better, and the mystery that presents itself to him as the case seems to offer a chance for Jake’s complete redemption (and the chance of love). The uniqueness of CHINATOWN, of course, and the reason it would not be made as a film today, is that the case that Jake (unconsciously) and we (consciously) hoped would redeem him destroys him instead.
This was a bold choice of the filmmakers (and it was not Towne’s original intention; it was Polanski who pushed for the tragic ending), and sets the story far apart from most Hollywood offerings; one might say it out-noirs most noir as well.
But there are other, more subtle techniques going on here to define Jake.

There is a character who is the protagonist’s mirror
A lot of Jake’s BACKSTORY, GHOST, INNER and OUTER DESIRE are dramatized through the character of Lt. Escobar. Escobar is Jake’s mirror – the man he could have been, in the position Jake could have been in now, had he stayed on the police force instead of quitting to go into private investigations. Escobar got out of Chinatown without quitting the force, and rose from there. When Jake is with Escobar we see Jake’s regret about quitting, his longing to be doing real police work (inner desire). Escobar is a character serves as both an antagonist, sometimes (actually dramatizing Jake’s internal opposition) and an ally. It’s terrific storytelling that Jake’s backstory is dramatized, brought to life with this character from his past.

The character’s inner and outer desires are in conflict
On the surface, Jake wants to do his not very taxing work, make money, and live the good life – doing, as he later says, “as little as possible.” This seems to mean he wants it easy, but we will find that he adopted this philosophy when doing his best to help someone resulted in tragedy.
Jake’s inner desire becomes more and more clear as the story progresses. From the beginning of his investigation of Mulwray, we see that Jake is both a very good investigator and a very passionate detective – he loves doing the work of uncovering a mystery, and his interactions with Escobar make us realize that he loved and misses police work. But even more – and he says this aloud – he wants to help people. He says to Evelyn that he wants to help her husband; after her husband dies he wants to help Evelyn, and when he finds out about Katherine he wants to help both women. So his inner desire is to use his substantial detective skills to help people.
So two great techniques going on there:
– Give us a character with inner and outer desires in conflict and let us see the inner desire start to triumph, and
– Dramatize the hero/ine’s inner desire – and have him or her state it aloud.
There are two characters who represent the hero’s good and bad angels, or two contrasting sides of his personality.
We see two conflicting sides of Jake in the dialogue and in Nicholson’s performance – he can be smart, sophisticated and charming; but he’s also crass, earthy and inappropriate. He’ll make an astute observation (like telling Evelyn that in his “métier” he doesn’t come across people who say they’re relieved to find out their spouse is cheating unless they themselves are cheating…) and then he turns around and undercuts it with a crude remark (he tells her that she changed her mind “quicker than wind out of a duck’s ass”)
These two different and often conflicting sides of Jake’s personality are physically represented by Walsh and Duffy, Jake’s operatives. Walsh is the serious, perceptive operative, focused to the point of being nerdy, and emotionally insightful and compassionate (he knows when to shut up and listen, he is the one who tries to comfort Jake in the final moments of the movie). Duffy is big, loud, crassly charming, and focused on sex and money – another side of Jake’s personality.
This is an easy technique to use and massively effective in developing both character and overall theme: you can see it in operation in Star Wars (Luke is a combination of the intellect of Ben Kenobi and the derring-do of Han Solo), and Star Trek (James Kirk is constantly having to balance the emotional id advice of Bones McCoy and the cold, rational superego advice of Spock).

There is a character who is the protagonist’s doppelganger.
Part of the eerie power of CHINATOWN is the relationship between Jake Gittes and Hollis Mulwray: the man he is initially hired to follow and whom he never actually meets. But Jake doesn’t just follow in Mulwray’s footsteps while on the case; he actually takes the same journey that Mulwray does: both investigating the water scam that’s going on and trying to help Evelyn and her daughter/sister. And both men are equally doomed. It’s a mesmerizing and haunting technique that gives this film a mythic resonance, and makes Jake more than just an ordinary hero, but a tragic figure.
The storytellers give the protagonist clever “business”.
There are scenes throughout the film that are deliberately designed to show how clever Jake is as a detective – some of the most memorable bits in the movie. Jake places a watch under the tire of Mulwray’s car to record what time Mulwray leaves the water pipe. He takes business cards from Yelburton, the Deputy Chief of the Water Department, and uses the card later to gain access to a crime scene at the reservoir. He understands instantly that something is fishy about a drunk drowning in the bone-dry L.A. River bed. He delights in torturing Yelburton’s secretary with his whistling and humming and wandering around the office and relentless questions until she caves and lets him in to see Yelburton. He steals the page he needs from a map in the Hall of Records by borrowing a ruler from the snippy clerk and then laying the ruler across the page and coughing to cover the sound of the page tearing. These often comic scenes are endearing and also make us admire and empathize with Jake. It’s a good idea to start becoming aware of how actors and filmmakers and novelists build character through this kind of business, and then ask yourself what kinds of scenes you could give your own protagonist to let his or her personality shine through.
The character goes to extremes
Another character trait that makes Jake unique is that he will not give up, even to the point of absurdity. For half the movie he has an enormous bandage plastered on his nose because it was cut by one of the goons working for the Water Department. You rarely see a protagonist in a thriller or drama looking like such a buffoon, but valiantly continuing the case in spite of it all, and it certainly sets Jake apart from most heroes.
The character has archetypal or mythic resonance.
And of course it helps that Jake Gittes is deliberately based on one of the all-time classic protagonists of world literature. Not that he has a lot in common with Oedipus, really, but even the slight resonance with Oedipus’s tragic blindness to his own culpability, and the deliberate references to the very first detective story, goes a long way toward making Jake a haunting character.
In the climax, the protagonist must confront his greatest nightmare
This is a very important point: in the climax of CHINATOWN, Jake finds himself (actually deliberately drives himself) right back into the same situation that almost crushed in him in his past. The climax externalizes Jake's GHOST, or WOUND: he is in Chinatown again, a wonderful, seedy, ominous visual, and he's trying to save another woman, two of them this time, when the last time all his best efforts to save a woman in Chinatown resulted in her getting hurt (in some way that was awful enough that he quit the police force). The lesson here is – spend some quality time figuring out how to bring your hero/ine's greatest nightmare to life: in setting, set decoration, characters involved, actions taken. If you know your hero/ine's ghost and greatest fear, then you should be able to come up with a great setting that will be unique, resonant, and entirely specific to that protagonist (and often to the villain as well.)
So what I hope you get from this post is a glimpse of how breaking down what techniques go into creating a specific character can teach you some tricks to use for your own characters.

So I'm curious – do the rest of you have certain protagonists, or just one, who are your models for what a great main character should be? Who, and why?

And happy, happy Equinox! Remember, what you do around this time has extra power, so make it good. 😉

– Alex

Chinatown Act One breakdown

Chinatown Act Two, part one breakdown

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Previous articles on story structure:

What's Your Premise?

Story Structure 101 – The Index Card Method

Screenwriting – The Craft

Elements of Act One

Elements of Act Two

Elements of Act Two, Part 2

Creating Suspense

Visual Storytelling Part 1

Visual Storytelling Part 2

Elements of Act Three, Part 1

What Makes a Great Climax?

Fairy Tale Structure and the List

I’ve Been A Bad, Bad Girl…

by JT Ellison

I went to the beach last week. It was supposed to be a celebration, a reward for hard work. My trip was preceded by another one of those insane deadline weeks – coming off four days of travel for the South Carolina Book Festival, the fifth book, THE IMMORTALS, was nearly finished. I'm talking inches away from being submission ready. I was just going through one last tweaking revision based on my critique partner's comments when the page proofs of EDGE OF BLACK came in. Cue panic, and scrambling. What was supposed to be a leisurely revision became an all out push to make sure both books got their proper due.

In a feat worthy of David defeating Goliath, I managed. Hubby went another four days without leafy greens and I turned in both books with an unbelievable sigh of relief. Washed my hands of them. Sent them to the powers that be and let them worry about it. Because I NEEDED A VACATION.

Florida was sunny and warm. My flight was eventful, only because of my elderly seatmate who was tippling in the Bloody Marys. She skedaddled off the plane when we landed in Orlando, but she was continuing the flight on to Ft. Meyers so the flight attendants had to capture and reseat her before anyone else got off. Tipsy little old ladies = herding cats. Priceless.

The beach was welcoming, salty air and ocean breezes. Lovely, really. Deep breaths. Unwind.

Not.

I spent the first day there on the horn to
New York worrying about a section of EDGE that might have a copyright
issue, and another day dealing with a long-overdue project that needed
some TLC so I could get it off the ground, which of course involved 17
emails of back and forth discussion – all of which I attempted on the
iPhone whilst laying in the sun. Bikinis and iPhones don't mix unless
you're on Girls Gone Wild, which I certainly wasn't.

With the advent of laptops and iPhones, I know I have to go to
Herculean efforts to actually get away. So I tried. I really did try. I put the phone away (but I had to keep
checking to make sure the copyright issue was settled.) I turned the
laptop off (but I had to turn it back on because I had to read a book
for a blurb that was on it. Note to self – always, always insist on hard copies from here on out.)

Did I get a vacation? Well, sort of. I walked on the beach, read three books, played two rounds of golf, ate fish three times and had salads daily to fight off impending scurvy, went to the movies (WATCHMEN was very cool) and saw three more at home, and attended a dinner party with friends and fans. We watched the shuttle launch, and I have to tell you, there in nothing, NOTHING, cooler than a sonic boom that shakes the very earth. Humbling as hell. And of course, I engaged in that time-honored vacation tradition – Twitter.

That's a pretty full week, to be honest. Aren't you tired just thinking about it? Because I'm exhausted.

Here's the problem. The whole time – laying on the beach, teeing off, reading, relaxing – a little voice inside my head kept banging away. "You need to get back to work, JT. You have a book due in September. You know you'll have to do revisions on THE IMMORTALS in the middle of that, and plan a tour for EDGE. There's that cool standalone book you started that's suddenly gelling that needs your attention. You have to finish the project your promised for ITW. You need to do your newsletter, and… and… and…."

Damn voice. I'd like to strangle it, but that might hamper my efforts to be creative, and we can't have that.

I've learned that when the Muse is speaking, you kind of have to tell everyone and everything to shove off and get whatever she's saying out of your head and down on paper so you don't lose it. I'm a firm believer in all good ideas stick like glue in your mind, but I also know my brain well enough that I know if I don't write these brilliant gems down somewhere, they will eat at me.

In the middle of it all, while I was supposed to be relaxing, I formatted a new document and wrote the first line of book six, THE PRETENDER.

So much for vacation.

Remember a few months ago I started working a new system of organization into my daily writing life? It's working. My Moleskine is filling up with ideas. My inbox stays empty. My To Do list stays manageable. My deadlines are met, my daily word counts pile up. All good things. I feel very much in control of all these balls that I'm juggling. Sometimes, to be honest, I think too much in control. Therein lies the problem. I need to find a way to let it all go, stop worrying, thinking, plotting and planning, and just be. There's not enough of just being anymore. And I have a feeling I may not be the only one with this problem.

My question for you today – what advice can you give to help? Any great tips or ideas for turning it all off, for living in the moment? Because I'd love to hear some…

Wine of the Week: Of course found at the beach – Gnarly Head Old Vine Zinfandel – EXCELLENT!

The Long and The Short of It

by Zoë Sharp

Some people are natural short story writers – I’m not one of them. That’s not to say I don’t write them, but I’m not in the habit of dashing off a quick tale every time I’ve a spare moment. My brain just doesn’t work that way. If I want to concentrate on something, I have to make a conscious effort to open a particular mental door and see what’s inside.

In some ways, I recognise that I went about this writing game slightly backwards. I didn’t have my first short story published until two years after my first novel. And it wasn’t something I’d had lying around in the bottom of a box in the attic, waiting for the occasion. I happened to be at a Northern Chapter meeting of the Crime Writers' Association – which is not nearly as Hell’s Angel-ified as it sounds – when I bumped into Martin Edwards. Martin was editing the CWA anthologies, and he casually suggested, as we funnelled into the dining room for lunch, that I might like to submit a story for the latest collection.

That year’s anthology was called GREEN FOR DANGER. It followed a previous anthology called CRIME IN THE CITY, so the countryside theme was a natural progression. In his introduction, Martin quoted Sherlock Holmes: "It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside…" How could I resist a brief like that? The result was ‘A Bridge Too Far’ about the bridge-swinging activities of a local Dangerous Sports’ Club, some of the details of which were drawn from life – including the fact that the local strict Methodist farmer had banned the club from using an ancient viaduct on his land every Sunday morning because he couldn’t stand the inevitable blasphemy as they launched themselves into the abyss.

I didn’t tell Martin until after he’d accepted the story that it was my first attempt, but he didn’t seem to mind. And no-one was more surprised than me when it was subsequently reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Since then, when asked and given a brief, I’ve written maybe another half-a-dozen shorts, including one for another CWA anthology, ID: CRIMES OF IDENTITY, called ‘Tell Me’, which has been used in a Danish school textbook, and turned into a short film. Is this a good time to admit that I wrote the whole thing during a long car journey?

When Megan Abbott was putting together her A HELL OF A WOMAN anthology, she particularly wanted stories about the forgotten female characters of classic detective fiction – the secretaries and waitresses and girlfriends. Those who lurked in the shadows rather than took centre stage. And when we missed a ferry to Ireland and ended up killing time in a little café in Stranraer on the west coast of Scotland, I watched the diners singularly ignoring the hardworking wait staff, and the story of Layla, a wronged waitress with a forgettable face, was born. ‘Served Cold’ was the result.

Writing a short crime story for the in-house magazine of a private bank was a tricky brief – no sex, no violence, no bad language. Lenny Bright arrived out of the blue, as an inept getaway driver who does and doesn’t quite get away with his crime. I was careful in ‘The Getaway’ to make the robbers target a building society, though, rather than a bank.

But give me no brief, no deadline and a very loose word count, and I tend to flounder. I think this goes back to my original route into writing, which was non-fiction. I started off as a freelance feature writer for the motoring magazines – the photography came along a little later – and I quickly became interested in car stereo, for which there were, at the time, several specialist publications. I was asked if I would take over a regular back page column for one of them, which was called ‘Random Play’. The brief was fairly loose – a round a thousand words of anything vaguely connected with car stereo or security. And I mean anything.

My first effort was a conversation between three men in a pub of the more and more extreme lengths they’d gone to in trying to prevent their cars being nicked. Nobody complained, so after that I filled the back page with weirdness – reports of strange military experiments with sound-based weapons; spoof letters from Members of the European Parliament outlining the latest pieces of bureaucracy gone mad, designed to stop anyone having a good time; tales of bass addicts and the lengths they’d go to satisfy their cravings.

For several years, I churned out this as a regular thing. Looking back, some of them were actually reasonably amusing, and the publisher kept sending the cheques, which is the only real indication of approval of your work that you seem to get in this business.

But then I decided that the time had come to move on, although I promised to do a guest spot if a really entertaining idea occurred to me. Needless to say, without the pressure of a regular deadline, it didn’t, and I never wrote another ‘Random Play’ page.

So it is with short stories. If someone says "write anything", it’s too much choice. The more guidelines or restrictions, the more my mind gets to work on integrating or circumventing them. Last year, I was asked to judge a local short story competition, with the theme of ‘Wild’, which was open to any interpretation the entrants cared to place upon it. And in the end, the final decider – in addition to the usual qualities – was how well the winning story incorporated some aspect of that theme.

So, when I was asked to do the second chapter of a round robin story this year, I was thoroughly intrigued, but not a little apprehensive. It’s another first for me. Stuart MacBride was kicking the whole thing off and I received his opening chapter a couple of weeks ago. Not an easy act to follow, isn’t Stuart. Mainly because his stuff is effortlessly very funny, dammit.

So, I tapped into the humour vein I haven’t opened up since those ‘Random Play’ days and went for a similar tone and style. Only time will tell if I’ve managed to carry it off or not. But if the person writing the chapter in front of you makes it dark and tragic, or light and comedic, do you follow suit, or go your own way? I think I’ve picked up the threads he left, continued the characters he introduced, plus one of my own, and doubled the body count. What else could I do?

So, my questions are, how do you feel about short stories? Do you enjoy reading them? Do you enjoy writing them?

If you have a series character, do you write short stories that include your series character, or do you enjoy the break from them?

If you’re writing for an anthology with a specific theme, how closely do you try and follow that theme?

Have you ever tried out a new character in a short story, and then gone on to write a book involving them?

Have you come across characters in short stories that you wish the author would carry forwards into a full-length book of their own?

This week’s Word of the Week is paramnesia, which is a memory disorder in which words are remembered but not their proper meaning; the condition of believing that one remembers events and circumstances which have not previously occurred. Its roots are from the Greek para beside, beyond, and mimneskein to remind.

I’m Asking the Questions Here…

by J.D. Rhoades

If you've been following the publishing news site Galleycat recently, you may have read about the brouhaha that erupted at the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) conference panel entitled "New Think for Old Publishers". There's a pretty good synopsis at Medialoper, which can be boiled down further to this: Traditional publishers, joined by social-networking guru Clay Shirky, were supposed to do a panel on the changing nature of the publishing industry. It quickly became clear that the publishers didn't have any idea how to negotiate the changes brought on by technology and accelerated by the troubled economy. Eventually , the panelists asked the crowd "well, what do y'all want?" The crowd got unhappy and occasionally downright hostile, and let the panel know it via comments. Interestingly, they also shared their disgruntlement via a special SXSW Twitter feed. Some "tweets included: "publishers have no clue how to save themselves and little interest in models readers want," and "This chance for learning has become a lean back and listen for the panel. It's audience funded brainstorming!"

The Medialoper piece summed up with "As presented, the panel was an insult to the audience and a waste of time for everyone involved."

I confess I was a little startled, not only by the reaction, but by the vehemence of it. Now, I wasn't there, so I may be totally off base (and if any of you were there, let me know, I'd love to hear your thoughts.). But from what I read, it sounds to me like these were people who apparently felt they'd been cheated because someone was asking them their opinion of which way things should go.

This was startling to me because when it comes to panels, blogs, what have you, interactivity is an article of faith with me. If moderating a panel, I like to go to Q & A as early as I can get away with it. When blogging here, I like to end up with a question or two. Sometimes, as in my last two posts here, I've spent the whole time asking you questions about what worked for you, and it seemed to go pretty well for everybody. I don't think I'd even read a blog that didn't allow comments. At least I wouldn't read it for long.

I don't just do it because I'm lazy. I mean, I AM lazy, but that's not my only motivation. But a few months ago, I saw a video essay by the aforementioned Professor Shirky, who's a professor at NYU (and who, as you can probably tell, has become a major influence on my recent thinking about media). The essay is transcribed here, and you can view it here. I definitely recommend you check out the whole essay, but one of the the main things that stuck with me was the story Shirky relates about friend of his, the friend's four year old daughter, and their DVD player:

in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What are you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

So what I like to do, every chance I get, is hand you the mouse and let you control things for a while. It never occurred to me that asking for audience participation would actually make people angry.

Or maybe the SXSW audience was irritated because they didn't know the answers either. In the current unsettled publishing environment, if the people who are supposedly in charge don't know which way things are going to fall, then the uncertainly just gets ramped up that much higher. And fear leads to anger. And anger leads to suffering.I think Yoda said that.

But here's the thing: we are seeing a revolution. And revolutions, by their very nature, are unpredictable. No one can really say with any degree of certainty (at least if they're honest) exactly what effects things like e-publishing, Kindles, eReaders on iPhones, or even POD are going to have on traditional publishing, or even if what we've known as traditional publishing is going to survive.

In a more recent essay, Shirky describes the revolution that took place after Gutenberg's invention of the printing press:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.

So in this brave new publishing world, the only way to stay on top is going to be to keep our minds–and our ears–open. To keep experimenting. And to keep asking questions. Because the next great idea could come from anywhere.

BTW, I was fascinated by Pari's experiment on Monday where everyone was invited to help write a piece of the story. It really took some unexpected turns. Maybe THAT's one potential new genre: the WikiStory.

So, today's questions:

Is interactivity important to you? For example, would you keep reading this blog if it didn't allow comments? Would you rather hear from us, talk back to us, or a little of both?

What's your idea to save publishing or if you don't want to save it, what's your idea to replace it? IOW, what models do you, as readers, want?

Here's the mouse.

The Truth About Left Coast Crime

By Louise Ure

The blogs are all full of sun-kissed memories of Left Coast Crime in Hawaii. Hibiscus as big as a plate. Whales that cavort around your outrigger canoe. Panelists that left you breathless with their insight and good humor. Those things are all true, but they weren't the truth for me on Hawaii's Big Island last week.

You see, I was co-chair of Programming for the con with Judy Greber. And that means that we'd been working for almost two years to attract and assign interesting writers and readers to interesting panels.

We weren't responsible for any of the "event" kind of functions – the luau, the Desserts to Die For, the Awards Brunch – just everything else that happened between nine and five for a five and a half day period.

You ever try planning a bunch of activities for kids at a birthday party? Stretch that party over six days and invite another 320 kids with ADD and you've got some idea of what I'm talking about.

First you've got to come up with the panel ideas. Bill and Toby Gottfried, our uber-committee chairpersons, had billed this as "the Unconventional Convention" but, hey! No pressure! Really! Just make every panel discussion something no one has ever done before.

You've got to include the basics, of course, like Bad Guys in Crime Fiction and Debut Novels. But maybe there's a way to discuss those differently than has been done at other cons. Take "Setting" as an example: maybe we ask, "Does Geography Determine the Genre?" and get the fur flying that way.

Naturally, everyone wants to be on the Research Panel. Why is that? I think that would be the most boring part of any presentation I gave. Maybe these folks do more interesting research than I do.

And you also want to try some new stuff, like Kate Stine's look back at "The History of the Mystery." And the six Aussie readers recommending Australian crime fiction writers. And the panel "Things That Make Me Stop Reading" with fans and reviewers chiming in about their pet peeves and dislikes.

The panels I like best are the ones where authors are not talking about their own books, so we created a panel just like that: authors recommending other authors' books.

So you've finally got a list of potential panels and you begin to see the confirmations come in. Then the real work starts – reading reviews and author websites, combing through "panel preferences" and travel schedules, emails flying back and forth like an army of dull-tipped arrows – to find the right mix of names for each topic.

And you email the attendees to let them know when and where they'll speak.

And they reply.

* One author said he didn't want to do any panels because he'd be there with his girlfriend and didn't want to participate. But could we put his name and picture in the brochure all the same?

* One reader wanted to be on panels, but was planning to go birding and see the volcano and go whale watching so would Wednesday afternoon between two and four be okay for all panel assignments?

* One writer said she couldn't do anything public until after noon each day. We didn't ask why.

* One woman complained that the author who had been assigned to the panel she wanted was nowhere near as competent as she to speak on the subject. Please move her into that slot.

* One was only available on Sunday. Another only on Tuesday. One was leaving before the Awards Brunch (could we reschedule it please?).

Get the picture?

I tried to calculate the number of hours Judy and I spent on Programming over the last two years but as the hundreds morphed into multiple thousands, I gave up.

Programming doesn't end there. Then you've got the last minute cancellations – a couple because of family emergencies, several more when the reality of their financial picture met them in the mirror. (It was not an auspicious year to be asking folks to fly to Hawaii. All told, the economy did impact us, but not to as great a degree as I would have predicted. Hats off to the organizing committee and the reputation of LCC in general for attracting as many folks as we did.)

And there were a couple of folks who paid their money, got panel assignments and planned on coming but just never showed up. Phooey on you guys. You made other folks pick up the pieces at the last minute and that's not nice.

I didn't get to the pool, the volcano, the beach or the whale watching boat.

So, my memories of LCC Hawaii?

Panels that were interesting enough and well enough distributed that there was a good crowd at each one. Spending time with Simon Wood who is the funniest man on the planet. Drinks with a female soldier named Brandy who showed me a whole new side of the American Armed Forces. Meeting Dr. Thomas Holland, the smartest (and sexiest) Indiana Jones clone I'll ever get close to. Lunches and dinners and last minute-piece-picking-up with Judy Greber, who is the funniest woman on the planet but doesn't know it.

And, oh yeah, that massage I treated myself to when the conference was over. I think it was worth all those thousands of hours.

P.S. Left Coast Crime in Sacramento in 2011? I'm not volunteering to do Programming.

A question for you, my 'Rati troops: what's the best panel you've ever seen or been on at a convention? And Happy St. Patrick's Day!

A story for everyone

by Pari (and everyone else!)

(Hi all. I've had a rough few days; the rescue dog we adopted bit one of our children and we had to take him back. It was heartbreaking, like losing a friend all over again. So, I decided to do something different for the post today. I trolled through the beginnings of my short stories and found this one. It's a good start. How about we write the rest of it?

Here's how I see this working:
Everyone who comments adds a sentence, a paragraph or two to the already existing prose from other writers. Toward the end of the day, anyone who wants to take a stab at the ending can do it — just let us readers know that's what you're up to. Anyone can contribute more text at any time; heck, I might do that, too.

I'm not sure this is going to fly, but thought it'd be an interesting experiment.

Let's see what happens.

One . . . two . . . three . . . HERE GOES:)

The janitor found the kid back by the dumpters before morning announcements. The child's face had already grayed, his body arched in a weird rigor mortis. No need to feel for a pulse. Eyes that glassy no longer held a soul.

"We can't just leave him there," said the principal, her breakfast returning from its first voyage down her throat.

"Can't move him either," said the janitor. "It'd mess up the police investigation."

"How do you know that?" she said too quickly, suspicious.

The janitor just shook his head and pulled a dingy handkerchief out of one of his many pockets. He dabbed at his eyes.

"You're telling me I don't want to know?" she said.

He closed his eyes and shook his head again.

The principal stepped back a little, her high heels making a clicking sound on the asphalt at the desolate edge of the parking lot. Cell phone at the ready but not yet open, she addressed the man who'd discovered the child. "Juan, would you go get Mr. Valdez? I'll need him to keep things calm while I deal with the police."

"Yes, Mrs. Henry." He started to leave, but she reached for his arm.

"And please don't tell anyone else about this. Not yet."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Her hand remained in place a minute after he left, the heat of their connection turning cold in the winter wind. It was times like these she hated her job, hated that there were parents who neglected their children or, worse yet, who paid the wrong kind of attention to them.

She took a deep breath, letting the tears fall from her cheeks onto her wool coat, and dialed 911. When that was done, she called the superintendent at his home and explained the situation.

"I wish you'd waited to call the police," he said. "You know the media will be all over this. Four kids in four weeks." His cough was phlegmy. "I'll get someone from communications out there to handle them right away. You just hold tight."

That was just like him to worry more about image than anything else. He hadn't even asked if she knew the boy. Horror of horrors, she did . . .

(So, what happens next?)

plotting anticipation

by Toni McGee Causey

Oh, I am a sucker for anticipation. I've been thinking about this for the last week-and-a-half because I decided to go ahead and have the LASIK surgery (as I write this, on Friday) and normally, I'm one of those people who researches all sorts of things–from how much pressure it takes to pull the trigger on a Remington sniper rifle, to work tools of the 1700s, to the ignitability of dust in a grain silo. I enjoy research, and I have an incredibly random collection of books and bookmarks to make any analyst confused. And I said "normally" above, because when it comes to the LASIK, I don't want to know. They kept trying to explain the procedure to me and I was all mature and plunged my fingers into my ears, all la la la la la, I can't hear you. Because there is no better way to build my anticipation and fear than just enough details to create just enough awareness of the dangers, and no ability to control them.

[Seriously. I am going to be hopped up on valium. I'm not going to be able to explain back the procedure to my doctor or do anything more than giggle. I just hope I don't say something insulting, like commenting on his botoxed brow.]

All of which led me to think about how much anticipation means to story-telling. There have to be stakes raised from the very beginning–I'd say within the first few pages. We might not know the ultimate stakes of the story, but something has to be at risk, and we, the readers, have to anticipate what the main character is going to do… and then the writer has to surprise us. If the character does everything exactly as we predict, leading to the outcome exactly as we predicted, then the anticipation of the next event goes to zero–or worse, the reader will put the book down.

But building anticipation isn't just a matter of naming the stakes–the ultimate consequences. I mean, after all, thousands of people have LASIK surgery every day, somewhere in the world, and it's not like I had this pressing sense of urgency about the procedure before last week. And I'm pretty certain that my doctor (who, thankfully, has done thousands of these surgeries), didn't think about one day doing surgery on me and then his life would be complete. For him, it's routine.

For me, it's my eyes.

It's personal.

Now, as I was sitting there in the consultant's office last week, studiously trying to ignore her description of the procedure, I did catch one part. She explained that at one point, as the doctor's working on each eye, there will be a few seconds where I won't be able to see. She said that he tells the patient, "Okay, you see that light above you? I'm going to turn it off for about ten seconds, and I'll let you know when I turn it back on." But really, she explained, you can't see because right then is when they're doing something to the cornea (I DON'T REMEMBER DO NOT TELL ME I DON'T WANT TO KNOW I AM NOT KIDDING) and then something something happens and "you can't see for a few seconds," and then she saw the look on my face and hastened to add, "but he's never not had a patient able to see the light as soon as that part of the procedure is over. Don't worry."

And I, being a fiction writer, immediately thought, Oh, shit. What are the odds of him doing THOUSANDS of surgeries and NEVER EVER having ANYTHING BAD ever happen, EVER? That would be akin to him being PERFECT and we know people aren't perfect so OH, GREAT, I'm going to be the one in ten thousand he has to admit to later who did not turn out so well. And I immediately wanted to ask about back-up generators (in case of a freak storm) and how many additional staff they had (in case a serial killer bursts in and takes out a couple of nurses) and did she know how long the wait was for new eyes from the organ donor people? [I did not bring all of this up, because I figured that freaking out the staff and making them nervous before I got there was probably a bad thing.] [I did ask for extra valium.] [They said no.]

So… anticipation. Tension. Raising the stakes.

There are fundamental elements to how to do this in story-telling, and many variables on these basics, but the main things we need to remember in order to build anticipation are:

1) create risks for the character — there has to be a downside to any choice they make along the way during the story. They have to feel like if they choose a path, there is the potential that they will lose their ability to achieve whatever their goal is.

2) they have to have a goal (which I am putting second, because I think people sometimes forget that there can be a SERIES of goals, leading to the ultimate goal of the story). That ultimate goal, in my case, is to come away from that LASIK surgery with improved eyesight so that I don't have to wear contacts or glasses all of the time. But I have a smaller set of goals which can be summed up by DO NOT FREAK AND CHICKEN OUT OF GOING.

3) both the risks and the goal(s) have to be personal to that character. Not just happening to them personally, which isn't the same thing, but personal to them–they have to care, greatly, about the outcome. They have to have something unique about them, and their story, so that the risks makes us concerned for them. We have to care.

4) things have to go wrong, and not in the obvious way. The things that go wrong for the character cannot go wrong in the way the character anticipates and fears… it has to be worse. It has to be worse in a way that they shouldn't have been able to anticipate, most of the time. If they can anticipate something going wrong and it goes wrong exactly as they anticipated, they don't seem very clever. If WE can anticipate it going wrong in a certain way and the character cannot, and that's the exact way it goes wrong, then the character is going to seem pretty stupid. If you want that character to seem stupid–if that's the point–then that's fine. But if you want us to root for them and to wonder oh, hell, what are they going to do NOW? then you have to twist the consequences and surprise us. Whatever you do, each time they anticipate something and try to do something logical, the outcome needs to get worse.

5) things need to go progressively wrong and that progression needs to escalate from bad to worse to horrible to no hope in sight to no way to win. One of the worst mistakes in a story is to have something go horribly wrong early on and the next two or three things that go wrong are about level to that first one (or worse, easier on the character)–because our interest will plateau. It will feel like they're marking time, like the writer is marking time until he or she gets a certain number of words done and can procl
aim the story "done." Keep the order of progression in mind when you're plotting (even if you're pantsing).

6) educate the reader along the way with only as much information as they need to understand the next section of the story. Build the information they need to know in bite-sized moments through the story, not in one big honking swallow up front. Readers are going to trust you that you're going to give them more information as you go. They're also going to trust you that you're only going to give them the highlights of what they need to know right now, not every single detail. They do need specific details, however. Do you think I'm ever going to forget her comment about that light going out? Nope. Not for years. She used a lot of technical language up 'til that point, but that point? Stuck in my brain. Do you think I'm not going to be counting those seconds when that damned light goes out? You bet I am. Do you think that I'm not also going to be listening intently for the sound of the storm, the sound of the outer door opening, anyone crying out in pain that may distract the doctor? Ha. Those are going to be some long damned seconds. For a crisp story, one that moves fast for the reader and makes them want to turn the page, give them the least amount of information that you absolutely have to give them for them to see and understand that moment.

7) we need to understand the emotional state of the character as these things go wrong and they try to figure out a solution. If we tell the story completely from the outside and don't get into the emotions, the reader has no reason to care.

One of the best stories that I saw recently that played with anticipation is INSIDE MAN with Clive Owen and Denzel Washington. It's a brilliant film, and one of my favorites. The story starts with Clive Owen's character telling you exactly what's going to happen next. He warns you that you're not going to understand (if I remember correctly) and he's not going to repeat himself. And even with that warning, you're still going to be surprised, because it's an excellent game of three-card Monty. (Figuratively.) And even as you see what they're doing, your mind is anticipating something specific and you're filling in those details and they end up meaning something entirely different. The thing that I liked so much about how this film accomplished its goal is that Spike Lee (director) and Russell Gewirtz (writer) didn't cheat the viewer. When you realize what it was you actually saw vs. what it was you thought you saw, you realize how the filmmakers used your own anticipation against you–and you respect them for it, because the clues were all there, all along.

That leads to:

8) use the reader's anticipation against them. Sometimes this means giving something a double meaning, or having a character lie. (It is critical to note that the CHARACTERS can lie to the reader, and to each other, but the AUTHOR cannot cheat by offering a suddenly different explanation to something that was already explained, just for the convenience of being a "surprise.") You do want the reader to be surprised, and that has to come from the duality of what's going on in the moment–not from acts of God or random coincidences at convenient moments.

Building anticipation is one of the simplest ways to look at plotting because as a person, you know how to anticipate. Think about those elements as you're writing; if it feels like something is stagnant, then you've probably hit a tension plateau–nothing worse is about to happen to the character. If it feels like it's taking too long to get moving, then look to see if you've over-educated the reader for that moment. Etc. Think about how to paint your character into a corner and then surprise us by how they get out.

I'm sure there are other elements of anticipation, but for now, tell me what movie/TV show or book have you seen/read lately that does anticipation really well?

[Update: the LASIK went well — painless, easy, and I can now see better than when I had contacts. I'm kinda floored. No serial killers bursts into the offices, no hurricanes or earthquakes. I have never been so happy to be so boring.]

My Deadline Survival Kit

By Cornelia Read

My third novel, Invisible Boy, is due in to my intrepid editor and his astonishingly wonderful henchwoman on Monday. That would be this coming Monday. As in, somewhat less than two days from this very moment, as you read these words. (And, hey, isn't this cover awesomely bitchen? Let's hope I don't deface its magnificence with a crappy novel on the inside. {Oy, the pressure…!})

Deadlines may well be the elixir of the scholarly life, and necessary, and goodness knows they light a fire under my sorry butt, but they are still big and scary and have large ugly teeth.

And then, right when you're chugging full-steam toward the finish line, you can get that weird thing where it suddenly seems as if you're typing in Lithuanian, and everything just looks wrong, if you stare at it long enough. Take, for instance the word "moreover." Does that look right to you? Is it a word you should EVER use? Is it even a WORD, or just a random sprinkling of letters?

And what does "threnody" mean? Could I use it to describe someone's sob of grief? Not to mention, come to think of it, that the very phrase "come to think of it" is pretty weird. And maybe a little dirty?

Seriously: Lithuanian. I'm sure it's a lovely country, but I'm supposed to be crafting a narrative set in Queens and Manhattan, circa 1990.

Personaluse_9137761~The-Number-7-Train-Runs-Through-the-Queens-Borough-of-New-York-Posters

Not one in which this might be the preferred local headgear:

This is not just the third deadline I've faced for a novel, it's the third deadline for THIS novel, which adds an extra element of scary, to me. I think it might actually make sense this time, but who knows?

What I do know is I have picked up a few things that make the last couple of crazed days go down a bit easier, both for myself and for those forced to be in close contact with me in my hours of final deep contemplation and typing.

Moreover, I would like to share these important safety tips with you, to try at home:

1. Treat Yourself to Ridiculously Expensive Junk Food

Are you broke? Fat? Heart condition? Vegan? Forget all that. This is an emergency, and you can go back on that lemon-juice-cayenne-maple-syrup fast the minute you attach your manuscript to a groveling email and hit the "send" button, in about 48 hours.

This is no time for half measures (or, for that matter, herbal laxatives). This is time for junk food of the highest order. But you don't need Snickers bars, you need dark-chocolate-coated caramels dusted with high-end French sea salt crystals that were scraped by hand from the luminous tail feathers of free-trade organic albino baby amphibious peacocks.

And screw Maxwell House, go for the eight-dollar latte. Or better yet, invest in a built-in German espresso maker that you can program to greet you in eight languages, including Portuguese and Dutch:

Don't just give up on cooking and eat Top Ramen straight out of the package (crunchy!)–find the most outrageously over-the-top pizza in your neck of the woods and ask them to lard it with foie gras, then deliver. (If you live in the Hamptons, that is actually possible–though I prefer the lesser escargot-laden pie in that particular vicinity).

In Berkeley, my Deadline Food of Choice is Gioia Pizza, the current menu of which offers the "Broccoli Obama" (broccoli, nicoise olives, capers, red onions, calabrian chilis, garlic and mozzarella cheese) and the "Radicchio" (roasted radicchio, pancetta, gorgonzola, garlic oil, and fresh thyme) during winter months. If your best local pizza place offers anything with goat cheese and a side of pomegranate coulis, embrace the hell out of that sucker.

Make sure that your ridiculously haute cuisine 'za has a New York style crust–thin, chewy, and with a nice "pull" to it. This is not a time for Round Table or Domino's, and it's important that you eschew crappy Bisquick-esque bases, or those crunchy ersatz crusts my ex once refered to as "ketchup on a matzoh," while on a business trip at a paper mill in darkest Newfoundland (also, if memory serves, the home of PFK–Poulez Frites a la Kentucky).

The proprietors of Gioia totally have the crust thing down. This is because they are members of what I call "the Brooklyn pizzafarian diaspora," people one wants to keep serious tabs on, when living west of the Garden State Parkway.

I'm not saying you should eat a ton of food, or anything bigger than your head–you have to stay sharp, not nap away precious writing hours in a pizza-induced coma.

It's not about quantity, but truly, my dear ones, you must remember that you are eating to support your brain in full-on Blue Angels throttle mode. Do not skimp on the quality.

2. Suck Down Those Stimulant Drinks, Baby

Don't skimp on the kick-your-ass beverages, either. It is important to have that college-allnighter mini formula-one cars racing through your bloodstream thing. Espresso… Red Bull… Diet Pepsi with Lime… Jolt Cola… Caffeinated Water… Espresso brewed with caffeinated water. (I mean, hey, Lee Child claims to drink 30 cups of coffee a day, and occasionally brews it with caffeinated water. So that MUST be a good idea, right?).

And if caffeine isn't quite enough, or makes you a ravening freakshow, there's also mateine, which is some groovy stuff, let me tell you–like green tea with afterburners (great mental clarity, a lot less jitters).

You can buy Yerba Mate (the South American beverage-substance which one imbibes for a mateine boost) in most decent grocery stores, these days. For a dual power shot, you can get coffee beans with Yerba Mate blended in.

Wheatgrass juice is just fucking lame, though.

Also, it might make you barf. Barfing is not what we're after, here. It takes too much time away from writing (or ruins your keyboard). And besides which, who wants to barf green, even on St. Patrick's Day?

3. Read Only Really Bad Books, if You Have Any Downtime

This is SO not the time to take up reading Nabokov, or Shirley Jackson, or Denise Mina, or William Gibson, or Ken Bruen, or any other consummate stylist. And don't read anybody who's really amazing at plotting, either. When you're finished writing for the day and want to unwind with someone else's book, make sure it's an indelibly awful one.

Don't read anything that will throw a spotlight on your own talent angst. Do not allow the brilliance of others to make you question your own creative validity at this time, or you will crash and burn during the crucial last forty-eight hours.

You need downtime reading that sucks so utterly hugely and voraciously on every level that you will feel like a goddamn genius by comparison.

I'm talking Bulwer-Lytton, or The Book of Mormon, here, folks. Tin-eared early Asimov is good, back issues of the Weekly World News even better.

It's also a good idea to read outside your genre, at this time, (while still sticking to the "sucks utterly" designation.)

I am currently re-reading an astonishingly ill-conceived and worse-rendered '90s historical romance faux-sequel (to an actually good book by a dead author). I've put it down on my bedside table each night this week and gone to sleep convinced I am the most talented writer who ever lived, at least in comparison to this woman's stinking pile of unreadable crap–an essential delusion when I'm closing in on typing that elusive "THE END."

Which sure as hell beats throwing up, or sobbing/shrieking with fear.

And when you're done, reward yourself with a GOOD book:

4. Housekeeping, Schmousekeeping

Are you the person in your household expected to keep the entire domicile lemon-fresh and squeaky clean? Two words: fuck that.

Strike a blow for anarchy in these desperate hours. Throw dirty dishes down the garbage disposal. Throw laundry down the garbage disposal. Then rename your vacuum cleaner "Anna Karenina" and find a handy oncoming express train.

When you've done all that, tell your family they will henceforth be learning the old-school table etiquette of Tamil Nadu:

eating with their hands off banana leaves.

Embrace entropy. Tell your children to hitchhike home from soccer practice, and/or ballet. You are busy crafting the uncreated conscience of your race in the smithy of your soul, after all.

Should they complain, advise them to Google "the second law of thermodynamics," then remind them that childhood is not just a job, it's an adventure.

This will not only build character, it will give them something to bitch about at cocktail parties when they grow up. (And they will probably become novelists, too. Or at least pen interesting memoirs.)

5. Dress for Success

Forget Queer Eye, ignore that snippy no-taste What Not To Wear chick, you need serious combat gear: huge ugly ripped sweatshirts, coffee-stained pajama pants, threadbare mismatched socks, paint-spattered frat-humor-slogan t-shirts with big holes under the arms.

Bustedtees.07fabc3fcd05a59b044d3a2599922e8c

The last hours of the final draft are an inward journey. Dress yourself as though you never expect to be seen outside your own house again, even by the visually impaired. This will also help keep you inside your house, working your ass off (bonus!).

Forget Tom Wolfe. The look we're going for here is pure Slapshot Hansons: "bloodied but unbowed."

And with that I wish all deadlining writers the world over a hearty "Sėkmės! Geros kloties!" (which is apparently "good luck" in Lithuanian)

How about you 'Ratis? Any tips for living through deadline world? Any favorite expensive junk food? Please share…

[And now for a bit of blatant self-and-others promotion: My writing partner Sharon Johnson and I are putting on the Berkeley Mystery Writing Intensive, a full-day conference for aspiring crime fiction writers, on Saturday, April 18th.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, or planning to visit, we'd love to see you there. Faculty will include David Corbett, Tim Maleeny, Sophie Littlefield, Tony Broadbent, and Juliet Blackwell/Hailey Lind, with literary agent Amy Rennert–as well as a veritable plethora of hardboiled law enforcement professionals.

Registration is $140, which includes catered breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snacks, parking validation, and a no-host cocktail reception/book signing at the end of the day. The event will be held at the historic Berkeley City Club:

designed by Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan

Please see my website http://www.corneliaread.com for more details, and a downloadable PDF registration form)

Welcome Glogger JA Konrath!!

Why Are We Blogging?

a guest blog by JA Konrath

Stop blogging. It's a giant waste of time.

It's 2009. If you're a writer, you already have a website, and you
probably have a Facebook page and a MySpace page. Maybe you Twitter.
Maybe you're LinkedIn. There are other social networks as well;
Shelfari, Goodreads, LibraryThing, RedRoom, Crimespace, and more
appearing every month.

It's obvious why we have websites: they're 24 hour ads for our books.

Granted, the best websites are more than just ads. A good author site
provides information and entertainment, with things to offer fans and
readers other than a giant beacon the blinks BUY ME!!! over and over.

The social networking sites also serve a purpose. Linking like-minded
surfers together allows writers to be discovered. Anyone who looks for
JA Konrath will find me easily; that's not a victory. But if someone is
on a friend's Facebook page, sees I'm also a friend, clicks over to my
Facebook page, clicks over to my website… you get the picture.

Your website is for people who are already looking for you. Social
networks allow people to meet you while they're looking for something
else.

But why the hell are we blogging?

As an experiment, visit your top ten favorite blogs. Read a month's worth of posts, and then read the comments.

Chances are high the same 200 people are the ones commenting on every single mystery writer blog on the Internet.

This isn't gaining new fans.

This is incest.

So why do we bother? Why do we keep wracking our brains to come up with
ideas for blog posts that are read by the same 200 people who buy our
books anyway?

Is it because we think we have to blog? Because our publishers tell us
to? Because we have no control over our book sales, so we might as well
try do do something?

Why are we doing this? Do the majority of our readers even know what a
blog is? Is this just a writer substitute for water cooler
conversation, because our professions are so solitary?

Be brutally honest: If you stopped blogging, would anyone actually care?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Yes, your blog is helpful. Yes, your blog is needed. Yes, you should continue blogging.

It's natural to think that you're just spinning your wheels. It's
normal to doubt that your words are having any effect at all. And if
you use a tracker, like FeedJit or Statcounter, you might even think
you have the low numbers to prove how useless this blogging thing is.

But it isn't useless. And here are some reasons why.

1. Self-promotion is intangible. Unless we physically put a book in a
reader's hand and watch them buy it, we don't see the effect we have on
our own sales. But we do have an effect. I know this for a fact,
because I'm on this blog tour, and every time I post someplace new I
watch my Amazon numbers spike.

2. The Internet is permanent. Your words on your blog can be Googled
three years later. Every time you blog, it's one more road that leads
to you. That means more chances to be discovered. It's cumulative.

3. Blogging isn't really incest. Sure, the same people comment over and
over, but the ones that really count are the lurkers. The people who
visit, but don't post comments. You have them. You probably have a lot
more than you think.

4. It's helpful. We were all newbie writers once. Sharing what we've
learned, giving back to the community that helped to spawn us, is just
good karma.

So next time you think blogging is useless, that no one cares, that
you're wasting your time, I point you to a lowly midlist writer who
never got front-of-store coop, never got a large promotional tour,
never got an advertising budget. But his seven novels are all still in
print, and if you Google his name you get over 60,000 hits.

That writer is Stephen King.

Ha! Kidding! That writer is me, JA Konrath.

Now run out and buy all my books. The new one is called AFRAID, written by my pen name, Jack Kilborn, and it comes out March 31.

Kilborn only has 3000 hits when you Google him.

But give him time. 🙂

Joe

http://www.JAKonrath.com
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/jakonrath

____________________________________

Many thanks to Joe for sitting in today. I'm at the beach – (and you can stop cursing my name now, thank you very much…) I'm taking a long overdue break, and I'll be back next Friday. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!