25 Writers

by JT Ellison

Before I start, I'd like to share some sad news. Louise Ure's mother, Jeanne Ure, passed away Wednesday night. I know I've treasured Louise's posts about Jeanne – told with such eloquence, detailing the hardship and agony of losing one you love piece by piece, and the beauty and joy that has been her life. Please join all of us as we send our prayers and condolences to Louise and her family.

It's fitting, really, that this post is about influences.

There have been a million and one memes floating around lately. I usually don't participate, for a variety of reasons. This one, though, is too cool not to participate in. I got it through Facebook, but it comes up on DorothyL sometimes, and other listserves.

Who are you influenced by? What writers have had such an impact on you that when asked to list them, you'll think of them immediately?

To satisfy the meme's mission, I decided to list mine out – along with the one book or story or play or poem that was the most influential to me with a random tidbit as to why. It was hard to keep the list to 25, as you'll see…

25 Writers:

1. Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita

I've never been as affected by a novel as I was Lolita. It taught me voice, and passion, and how an unreliable narrator can squeeze out your soul. Something I've never forgotten.

2. Virginia Woolf – A Room of One's Own

Because I've always ascribed to the belief that, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Amen to that, Sister.

3. Harper Lee – To Kill A Mockingbird

My first moments of social awareness.

4. Mary Stewart – The Wicked Day

I've always been fascinated with the Arthurian Legend, and this book, from Mordred's point of view and partially set in Wales, is my favorite of the lot.

5. Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

I read it at the suggestion of a boyfriend in high school I wanted to impress, and was blown away by the concepts. Her short novel Anthem is my favorite book.

6. Sun Tzu – The Art of War

I fancied myself a Taoist for a while, but the logic of the simple dictum make sure your enemy has a way to escape stuck with me. Fitting for war, and life. And how can you not love a book that's influenced the art of war throughout history?

7. John Connolly – Every Dead Thing

His first, and possibly one of the finest debut novels I'll ever read. Connolly has long been an influence on my writing – his literary style is unmistakable and effective.

8. John Sandford – Mind Prey

The book I was reading when I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing again.

9. Carolyn Keene – Nancy Drew and The Secret of the Old Clock

After reading the Nancy Drew' books, I spent several years insisting on being called George, even going so far as to sign my school photographs George M. To say I was a tomboy is putting it mildly.

10. Ernest Hemingway – Short Story: Hills Like White Elephants

I've never been so affected by a story in my life. Possibly the best example of metaphor ever written, and certainly one of the best shorts of all time.

11. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

I always hated the movie, because the book gave Frankenstein's monster a conscience. I've always felt that evil is a choice, and this book encapsulates that concept for me.

12. Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

I'm in love with Heathcliff, mental illness and all. There, I said it. And I thought the most recent BBC offering of the story was grand, if a little off the mark.

13. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

I'm also a bit in love with Mr. Darcy. And I married my own, so this book was a helpful guide to the path of true love.

14. Diana Gabaldon – Outlander

The book that precipitated my shift away from politics and back to writing. Grand, sweeping, and another main character I've got the hots for.

15. Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince

The art of the State, an essential book for me when I was planning my political career.

16. A.A. Milne – The House at Pooh Corner

I felt a great affinity for Christopher Robbins, because my stuffed animals had lives too.

17. Lee Child – Running Blind

My first Child book, with one of the most incredibly effective and affecting scenes I've ever read. A true impetus to get it right.

18. C.S. Lewis – The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

I was an imaginative child, so fantasy novels really worked for me. I cried so hard when Aslan died, and found joy again when he resurrected. I saw what power writers have and started writing.

19. Elizabeth George – Write Away

One of the first writing books I ever read, and a great influence on how to build a story.

20. Stephen King – On Writing

The most important book in my toolbox, simple, straightforward, and definitely a help in improving my writing.

21. Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandias

This poem is one of my favorites – succinct yet powerful.

22. Alfred, Lord Tennyson – The Eagle, A Fragment

My all time favorite poem – I recited it for an assignment in third grade, my first speaking part. It spoke to me, touched something in my soul. It still does.

23. Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

A journey into the heart of man, one not easily forgotten.

24. Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

The idea of one of the greatest novels of all time (Jane Eyre) having a backstory floored me. Lush and evocative.

25. Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night's Dream

This was impossible to narrow down, because I'm a Shakespeare fiend. But this is one of my favorites, along with Taming of the Shrew.

So what about you? Who are your influences?

Wine of the Week: A gift from a friend, the best way to enjoy wine.

2005 Nickel & Nickel Branding Iron Cabernet Sauvignon Yummy!!!!! The tasting notes from the Nickel & Nickel website say it best:

The 2005 Branding Iron is very fruity with flavors of blackberry and cranberry prevalent on the palate. This sweet fruit is accompanied by some peppermint and earth, while the oak offers up a warm toast and spice. The longer growing season this year allowed for good resolution of the tannins. The wine is fat and velvety with a long, coating texture that progresses into a warm, lingering finish.

“Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea!”

by Zoë Sharp

It has to be one of the best known classic cliff-hanger endings. The final scene from 'The Italian Job' with Michael Caine. The bus teetering balanced on the edge of the Alpine ravine, with Charlie Croker and his gang of gold thieves stuck watching their bullion booty sliding ever further towards the abyss as the bus rocks gently back and forth. Then Croker turns back to the gang and says, "Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea!"

But what was it? And did it work?

This year is the fortieth anniversary of the original version of 'The Italian Job', and to mark the occasion The Telegraph in the UK held a competition to see if anyone could come up with that grand plan to rescue the gold. The rules were simple – no helicopters, and it must be a scientifically provable theory. Over 2000 people tried their hand, with solutions ranging from the surreal (Superman flies in and saves the day) to the comedic. One gentleman claimed to have "a foolproof way of recovering the gold. However, since the occupants of the truck are a bunch of criminals and the gold does not belong to them, I refuse to divulge the method."

So, how would you do it?

The eventual winner did indeed have a very cunning plan, as Baldrick might have said, which I promise to share with you later, but first I wanted to see if anyone here could come up with something equally ingenious?

The reason for mentioning 'The Italian Job', and its ending, is that when we write a mystery or thriller novel, for me the ending is crucial. So often, it seems, a book can be front-loaded to the extreme. So much thought and energy – not to mention that low-down cunning – has gone into hooking the reader at the outset, that the eventual explanation can never hope to live up to it. I have even, on rare occasions, thrown a book down after the final page, feeling cheated.

There seem to be two main types of endings for the journey of your story. One is very circular, bringing with it some kind of closure or completion, and the other a lot more open-ended. According to Christopher Vogler in THE WRITER'S JOURNEY, which details mythic structure for storytellers and screenwriters, American culture tends to lean towards the circular, whereas Europe, Asia and Australia are happy not to have everything brought to such a neat conclusion. (And I do realise I’m speaking in generalisations here.)

Personally, I like some kind of conclusion, providing it doesn’t stray into the saccharine. I believe that is one of the reasons we are happy to read quite graphic and gory crime fiction. Because we know it’s all going to be all right in the end. Terrible things may happen in real life, inexplicable tragedies where nobody is ever brought to justice for what they’ve done, so we turn to fiction to provide that reassurance. We know that, although the ending might not be entirely happy, it will have some kind of a resolution that satisfies us.

Writing my Charlie Fox series, I have always tried to make the books free-standing, rather than standalones. Yes, there are continuing characters and there are returning characters, but I have always tried hard to make it so that if you pick a book up from later in the series, you won’t be baffled by in-jokes, nor will you encounter (too many) plot spoilers about what has gone before. Each plot is completely self-contained.

But that all changed with the last book, THIRD STRIKE. I ended with something that I knew would have to be addressed in the next book, and for the first time I realised I’d broken away from quite such a neat and tidy circular ending, and had left things a lot more open-ended.

I did a blog back in November last year, 'Tune in Next Week…' in which I talked about series books and whether it was possible to have cataclysmic change in a series, and the comments were very interesting indeed.

But this takes that question a step further. Do you need to have a neat and tidy conclusion to a crime novel? Does the hero have to catch the bad guy, or do you turn the bad guy into an ongoing nemesis of the Professor Moriarty ilk? To a certain extent, I feel this can lessen the threat posed by the villain. After all, if you know they’re not going to die, or get caught, then something of the thrill goes out of the chase. How long would greyhounds continue to chase the fake rabbit, if they were never allowed to catch it?

So, if you’d just written a thriller that just happened to be about a gold bullion heist in Turin, in which the intrepid heroes made their escape in three Mini Coopers, and ended with them pushing said cars out of the back of their bus as they drove over the Alps, celebrating their victory, would you, on the final page, be content to have the bus driver misjudge a corner and end up see-sawing precariously over the edge of a very long drop?

And, as a reader, would you throw the book against the wall if the final line was, "Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea!" Would 'The Usual Suspects' have been quite as satisfying if you’d never found out the identity of Keyser Soze? Did it matter in 'Ronin' that you never find out what’s in the case?

As always seems to be the case at the moment, I’m away on photoshoots all day today, but will reply to all comments when I get back this evening, so please bear with me.

This week’s Word of the Week is dénouement, which means the unravelling of a plot or story, from the Old French desnoer, to untie, and nodus, a knot.

The Heretic

by J.D. Rhoades

While reading Tess' post last week on how it's not enough to be a writer anymore, I had a bit of an epiphany. It was expressed this comment in which I said:

I wonder if [publishers would] be saying that, say, book trailers were so vital if the publishers were required by law to write, produce, and pay for them, or if they'd say "aw, why bother, book trailers don't really sell more books."

And websites…you think anyone bought THE DA VINCI CODE because of Dan Brown's website? Does he even HAVE one? How many if the people who made Michael Connelly's last book a bestseller discovered him through his website?

I'll admit, that comment came off perhaps a little crankier than I had intended. Actually, truth be told, I was a little crankier than usual that day for reasons we don't need to go into right now. But I think the point's still valid: you may sell some books through the kind of marketing "everybody says" you have to do. But I really don't think that the people who make blockbusters blockbusters are buying books because they saw a trailer, or even because they saw a website.

I know this sounds like heresy. But I think we here at Murderati, and all of us folks who frequent the book blogs, are a bit of a skewed sample. Most of us are not only hard-core book geeks, we also probably spend a lot of time on the Internet.

But here's something I've noticed. A lot of the biggest readers I know, including mystery readers, don't spend a lot of time Web-surfing, and those that do aren't hitting the book sites. My in-laws are voracious readers, and they don't even have a computer (which gives them more time to read). Several of my colleagues in the law biz read a lot, and I can't remember a single one of them telling me they bought a book because they saw a trailer for it on YouTube or stumbled across the author's website. I know I've sold some books via people I've met on Facebook, and a few due to the blogging I do, but none of those sales were enough to kick me up to the bestseller lists. And while there have been a couple of times I'd have had to take off my shoes and socks to count the number of books I've sold at bookstore events, more often than not I can just use the fingers of one hand. There have only been a couple times when the sales themselves justified the cost of the gas.

Now, do I think that publishers are just being evil and sadistic by telling us we need to do more and more, and pay for more and more out of our own pockets? Not at all. I think they're just as baffled as we are, and when something looks like a good idea, and they don't have to pay for it, they're willing to say "hey, go for it," especially if everyone else seems to be doing it.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Lord knows, that's happened before. So writers and readers, I want to ask you to do me a solid. I'm going to pose a few questions that I not only want YOU to answer, I want you to ask at least one friend or relative who reads and who you know IN PERSON, not just on the ''net.

1. Have you ever bought a book by an author who you'd never heard of because you saw the trailer for it on the Internet?

2. Have you ever bought a book by an author who you'd never heard of based on their website, blog, or MyFace page?Or did you more often find the author's 'net presence AFTER you read them?

3. Have you ever bought a book by an author who you'd never heard of because they were appearing in a bookstore and they caught your interest?

4. Have you ever bought a book by an author who you'd never heard of because you saw it in the store and it looked interesting? Where was it in the store?

5. If you've ever bought a book from an author who you'd never heard of for any other reason, why was that?

It's a totally unscientific survey, of course, but I'm interested in the replies.

Tribute Pains

By Louise Ure

I woke this morning with cramps up the length of my left leg, culminating in a white hot vortex of pain at the hip, just where my mother broke her leg a couple of weeks ago. And there was a scaly patch of skin about the size of a cigarette pack on my spine, just above where the bra line would have been if a 93-year old woman wore a bra in a hospital bed and asked to have her back scratched.

"Sympathy pains," I said to Deeply Supportive Spouse.

I've just returned from two and a half weeks at my mother's bedside, trying to remind a woman with dementia about why her hip hurt and calm her when she woke confused and frightened in a strange room.

"Tribute pains," Strong Silent Spouse replied.

I like that better. Tribute Pains, like Tribute Bands playing covers of their idols' hit singles.

So here are some of the hit singles from my Tucson sojourn. Not all are songs that you can sing without crying.

* A sure sign of changing times, it snowed in Tucson. White stuff covered the Catalina Mountains and the saguaros were frost-rimed in the morning air.

* The woman in the next bed had a more aggressive Tourette's-like version of dementia than my mother's. She started with a single sound … sh … sh … then worked it into shirt … skirt … short … shit … ending with the shouted refrain of "My shit. Eat Shit. Shit me!" I learned to duck when the repetition of "eff" worked its way into "fish." "Here's one fish," she'd call as she threw her top denture at me. "Here's a second fish!" was the lower denture. She had a good arm.

* William in Physical Therapy had been an army sergeant in Desert Storm. When asked to re-up, he declined. "They wanted me to treat my troops as numbers – as tasks – not as men. I couldn't do it. I'm doing what I want now." He promised to wear his Stetson, tight jeans and cowboy boots the next day if my mother would try to stand. I'd seen him in those jeans. I encouraged her to make the effort.

* Dementia is a selective thing. Why does her mind refuse to recognize her daughter-in-law but also carve a deeply etched memory of the pain of breaking her leg? She wakes from restive sleep crying, "Don't hurt me!"

* Having a Strong Silent Deeply Supportive Spouse who takes his mother-in-law's soiled bedclothes back to the hotel each night and washes them is a pearl beyond price.

* She clings to her faith in her pain, but at the end, she's a realist. The muttered prayer I overheard as she drifted off to sleep was, "Dear Heavenly Father, if this is my time, take me now." A pause. "But if it's not, then cut this shit out."

* They've rigged up a hookah-like pipe for Rose, a young Asian woman with cerebral palsy, so she can have a puff of cigarette out on the patio without flinging embers all over herself. We high five when we see each other in the hall, but that may be just her regular flailing. I'm not sure that she means to connect with my flat palm at all.

* CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) should be paid more. They changed diapers, spoon-fed and put lotion on my mother, all the time crooning "mamacita" or "mi hijita" to calm a frazzled mind. Steff, a raging gay Mexican man in hot pink scrubs, strewed rose petals over a patient's bed when he heard that she was returning from a doctor's visit with bad news.

* A moment in the winter sun on the patio can make it seem as if the world hasn't shifted on its axis and everything might be right once again.

* My brothers deal with the crisis of her injury the same way they face every other obstacle in their lives. Jim adds it to the already formidable list of things to be done. Robert, unable to watch the pain, runs from it, sure that somehow it is a failing on his part not to have made things right.

* My mother will return home today. Not because she's improved to that point, but because the insurance money will run out. A sweet Mexican woman named Socorro will be there to help clean her and feed her and my sister is flying in. We found thirteen gold coins in mom's safety deposit box to pay for the help for a few months.

* There were moments of semi-lucidity that I will treasure forever. As I left her that final night I leaned down to kiss my mother and tell her I loved her.

"I know it's been a tough few weeks for you but I loved our time together."

"Take it with you," she replied. "You can keep it."

I take it with me. It is my Tribute Pain.

Deliberate mistakes

by Pari

We novelists have been known to take liberties with the truth when it furthers a story. Sometimes we do it unconsciously. Other times, we know that the reality would bore readers to death.

I mean, who really wants to know how private investigators work? I did. I interviewed a well respected former policewoman who now runs a great agency in NM. She spoke about people’s expectations about the job, the ideas formed and nurtured by fiction and television, that were so far from her day-to-day efforts. In fact, the biggest parts of her work centered on research — at her computer or going through printed records — and then writing reports. Only once or twice in her career had she ever confronted a “suspect” and she regretted it. In fact, the impression I got from her was that most PIs deliberately strive not to be larger than life; they want to melt into the background, to be as invisible as possible in order to get the info they need.

However, reading about report-writing doesn’t rock most people’s world. It just doesn’t have enough oomph.

What about the CSI phenomenon?
Let’s face it, an octogenarian claiming she’s a 21-year-old Playboy model on her MySpace page is closer to the truth than most fictional depictions of crime scene analysis these days.

Yet, we writers have the resources to tell it like it is. In addition to the experts we cultivate as acquaintances and friends, there are marvelous online sources such as crimescenewriter.com, Jan Burke’s emails about crime labs, Lee Lofland’s wonderful blog — and reference books galore.

Sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to the truth, to try to counter all the misperceptions out there. However, I don’t write procedurals and to include too much info about how police — or professional PIs — investigate crimes wouldn’t mesh with what my books are about. All I can do is try to be accurate in how my protags perceive what’s going on . . . and my protags aren’t always right.

Yet I think that readers’ expectations have changed dramatically in the last decade or so. They want more procedure, more DNA analysis and national computer databases that in reality don’t exist or are too costly to conduct.

They have all of these ideas about what the truth is and those ideas simply are wrong.

Where’s the balance? Do we keep giving them the exciting confrontation between PI and perp because it makes a good climax to our book? Do we throw in a nifty piece of evidence scraped off a ladybug’s footpad because the insect crawled on the victim’s lips after he died and that makes our take unique?

Do we write these jacked-up versions, thereby creating even more erroneous expectations?

I don’t have the answers. That’s why I’m asking you.

Writers: How do you handle the balance? Do you put in the reality — the length of time things really take, the lack of resources, the mistakes — or do you take liberties?
Readers: Am I totally off? Do you want more and more procedure and CSI techniques or are you sick of those being stuck into everything?
Everyone: What’s YOUR favorite lie/mistake in print or television vis a vis crime solving or law enforcement?

the tao of publishing

by Toni McGee Causey

A few weeks back, I wrote an article about publishing — and in light of things like Anderson Distributors parking trucks (which affects mostly magazines, but has also affected thousands of copies of mass market distributions) and HarperCollins' bad news, and other generally frustrating publishing news, I thought this might be relevant here.

Everything you really need to know about the publishing business can be learned from a garage sale.

I know. Crazy. But trust me, it's true. (I am beginning to suspect that there is a whole tao of garage sales just begging to be written.)

A couple of weeks ago, my house was the site of a garage sale, hosted by my son and daughter-in-law. It ended up going exceptionally well, surprisingly. And as they were collecting junk and pricing it and displaying it and handling the crowd, I suddenly realized I finally had a parallel to explain the whole publishing business to non-writing family members and/or friends who were in the first stages of writing, pre-publication. And so I offer you: the tao of publishing.

1) It's not personal.

When you're selecting items for a garage sale, you have look past the personal value of an item, the sentimental value, and use an objective eye to decide if that item will sell. Something with a deeply personal meaning–a diary page, one ballerina shoe, that swizzle stick (bent) left over from that time you and your best friend had that thing happen in that bar in that other state that you've never told anyone about… those things aren't going to make sense out of context and to a marketplace. They may be vastly important to you; doesn't mean they're going to sell.

Sure, you've written the novel, and you want people to have a personal response to it, because then you'll know you've hooked them. But a personal response does not replace market reality. An agent, an editor, a publisher… these people are not rejecting a manuscript out of some nefarious plot to drive writers crazy. Publishing professionals want to make a sale. The agent wants to sell to the editor, who has to sell it to the marketing department and the publisher, who has to believe that there are enough people out there in book-land who will plunk down money for this property. They've got to weigh how many people will resonate with this project and they've got to be objective about its value as they're making that decision because their goal is not "to make you feel good about being a writer" and not to "support art" but is almost always to "make a profit." Which leads to:

2) Big ticket items draw people in.

When we advertised for this garage sale, we named the big items we knew would draw people in: electronics, furniture, exercise equipment, collectibles, a canoe. We didn't bother to mention the used books (which all sold), the glassware (all sold), the dolls (ditto), the purses (ditto), the shoes (surprised the hell out of me, but ditto).

We charged a little more for the name brand items than we did similar stuff–even though the quality of the latter was the same as the former. People will pay more for the brand name stuff… but, while they were there, they inevitably picked up some other item and bought it, too. Almost all of the browsers ended up taking something home, and I suspect that the majority of time, it wasn't the item they'd originally shown up to see.

Bestselling authors are that draw in the bookstores: they get the people in the door. They get paid more because the publisher knows people will likely pick up their book, but they also get paid more because the publisher knows that if they're on a shelf, the customer will stop and probably browse that shelf and, very possibly, pick up something else. When you start out, your book is possibly that "something else."

3) Group similar things on the same table.

This seems pretty simple: put like things together. Someone looking for the Minnie Mouse collectibles may buy more than one, so put them all in on
e place so they can find them. One guy came early and bought every Cabbage Patch doll we had (ten) and then started buying boy-type-toys. Someone else snapped up all of the hot-wheels. Things which were similar to these items were put on the same table, or near enough by, so that they caught the customer's attention.

Publishers want to know what your book is so they'll know where they can put it in the bookstore. This is why you don't list six genres in your query letter: it's sort of a space fantasy with a love story and comedic elements as the characters solve a mystery is going to get you an instant rejection. They won't know where to put it, and if they don't know, they won't know how to market it, and if they don't know how to market it, they don't know how to let customers know where to find it, or that it exists at all. You've just made their job ten times harder, and frankly, there are a lot more books out there that will make their lives easier. What would you do when presented with two books of equal writing skill, but one was easily marketable and the other one wasn't? You'd buy the one you knew how to sell. If you didn't, and you didn't frequently enough, you would be one of the publishers who are now going under.

But…but... I can hear you arguing, odd, cross-genre stuff sells.

Yes, it does. Generally, though, there's some way of marketing that book–or at least, the publisher believes there is when they take on the project. I am the first to admit: weird shit sells. We sold a porthole table for $200. I know, you're scratching your head, aren't you? I have been scratching my head for 15 years. A long time ago, my husband dragged home a porthole–the kind you see on actual ships–that he had "rescued" from the scrap yard. No, I don't know why. Yes, I asked. The only real answer I got was, "because it was cool," and I suspect that it was because it was a challenge. He then (because he is crazy) made a round table and embedded the porthole so that it functioned (again, he's crazy) and fixed it so that it could be opened (which meant you couldn't really put anything on the table–I mean, seriously, why would you want to do that?–unless you put the item on the tiny perimeter. You had to be careful if you did that, though, because as soon as you opened the porthole, the swinging motion generally knocked off whatever you'd put there). You could put a display inside the porthole (because, and I don't know why, it had a glass backside and yes, I thought that made no sense). He then epoxied the table top in black, but the legs were a very light oak. Ugliest table ever. I was so relieved when he agreed to sell it. Until he put a $200 price on it.

Now I ask you, what is the likelihood that someone is going to saunter over to a $200 table made out of a porthole and think, "gee, that's what I need to spend this week's paycheck on?" I knew I was going to be stuck with that damned table 'til I died. And then my neighbor (who is, not surprisingly, crazy) came over to see what all we had for sale, and he fell in love with the porthole. I would've carried it to his house for free, but when he tried to haggle my husband down, my husband refused. (Again, cornering the market on crazy here, this is the man who dragged home one of those styling salon hair dryers because it was "Only $10!" and "Wasn't it cool?" and couldn't understand why I didn't want it in the kitchen. But he got the last laugh when he turned it into a "time machine" and showed it at a big local art show and it was the hit of the show.)

As for the porthole table? Apparently, there's plenty of crazy to spare, because the neighbor bought it anyway.

So the rule is, weird shit sells, but you cannot count on it. You cannot hope that there is always going to be a porthole-buying-nut who lives close enough to your porthole table, who for some reason, doesn't have enough portholes in his life and feels like he cannot go home until he owns yours. So, even if you do have a porthole table to sell, you need to be able to do what my husband did–find its unique selling feature: it was antique. And an antique porthole table becomes, apparently, an entirely different thing. (Hell if I know.) Point is, if your book is not easily categorizable, figure out what is it that makes its uniqueness marketable.

4) Pricing is determined by what the market will bear

Now, that may seem self-evident, but it's tricky and can make you want to plant your head in your desk when you see things sell too fast (could've gotten more!) or too slow (oops, priced it too high, better lower it). Years and years (and years) ago, I had one garage sale–an estate sale of my great-great aunt's property. I had about a dozen hand-made quilts we were going sell. I'd kept the prettiest ones for family heirlooms, but the rest… shrug. Didn't expect to get $20 apiece for them. I was hanging them on the makeshift clothesline ab
out an hour before the announced time of the sale, and a man pulled up in my drive, made a beeline for the quilts and asked me how much I wanted for them. I eyed him and thought, "He's here at six a.m., asking me for these things, didn't even look at anything else. He's a collector." Then I said, "$125 each." He said, "I'll give you $100 each." Sold. I was pretty proud of myself. He took ten of the twelve, and later that afternoon, a lady asked me how much for the quilts. I'd forgotten them in the flurry of the day, and I think I must've looked at her blankly. She offered $200 each. She lamented that I didn't have more–she would've bought the entire batch at that price per quilt.

That was (I am not even going to tell you how many) years ago. Today, even factoring in inflation, I could not have gotten $50 each.

While we were pricing things for this garage sale, we had to take into account several factors: it was after Christmas (therefore, we'd missed the "must find a gift item that looks expensive but didn't cost much" rush), it's a bad economy (everyone's saving their money to spend on necessities, none of which we really had at the garage sale), and it was likely to rain the second day, which meant even die-hard garage salers wouldn't come back the second day to scoop up the "must get rid of it" last minute pricing you can normally do at the end of a sale. By keeping these things in mind, we priced everything to move.

The publishing corollary is that everything has its time. Advances are going to be lower while the market adjusts to the steep drop off in sales and everyone panics. Something that a year ago might've fetched a $100K advance might not get a $25K advance now or the writer breaks through huge with a big sale and lots of marketing dollars thrown behind it because there is something so marketable about the concept, a publisher thinks, "This, at least, I can explain in a phrase and sell it." It's a crapshoot.

Publishers are looking for ways to make a book work for this market–which might mean that you don't get the hardcover format because it's so expensive and they're not selling very well. It's not about prestige, it's about survival, and it's smart to look at what works for the consumer. I suspect there's going to be a bigger push over this next year for downloads–publicity and marketing–because there's next to no delivery costs–there's no warehousing, no shipping, no returns. In addition, trends will determine price–something that shows up when a trend is just heating up is probably going to get a bit higher advance than something that shows up after the trend seems to have peaked or the market is glutted. It's not personal, it's not about what you, as a person, are worth. It's what the market will bear. It's probably the most difficult thing to remember.

5) Reputation helps.

We managed to pull a lot of people into our sale very early in the day because our neighborhood is considered a hot spot. (We didn't really know that, but there have been a lot of successful garage sales out here… part of it is there are lots of families here, so the sales usually have a big variety of items). We got 'em in through a reputation we hadn't quite earned yet. We kept 'em (and made a bunch of sales) because we delivered: we had a lot of merchandise cheaply priced and people kept complimenting us on what a great, organized sale we had. Lots of people said we should have another. (Over my dead body.) But at least it worked for them.

Blurbs are the same thing–the publishing business is hoping that blurbs (or reviews) up your reputation from that of "who?" to "oh, we should give them a try." It won't work, though, if you don't deliver.

6) Some things are beyond your control.

The first day, we had a ton of people and huge sales. The second day, it rained. Stormed. I think we had two people show up, and one sale for the whole day. We had, luckily, made enough money the day before to have made it worthwhile, but it almost hadn't gone that way–we had almost opted to only have the sale for Sunday, not both days. Luckily, my daughter-in-law is a lot smarter than I am and she insisted we have it both days "in case of bad weather."

You can't help a bad economy. You can't help if a sales rep doesn't "get" your book. You can't help if a hurricane shows up the day your book is supposed to be delivered or the Anderson people park their trucks. You can't help a snowstorm, or a national tragedy. You really cannot help the decisions made in-house–these are beyond your control. You made the thing and handed them the thing–they have to sell it. Now, you might be able to nudge a few people, but the parallel would've been me putting out a few fliers in the neighborhood. Sure, I can self-promote and that may help to a certain degree, but if the publisher doesn't promote my book on a national level and my book's not available on a national level, no amount of me flogging it locally is going to increase my numbers high enough, fast enough, to make a big dent in "sell-through." If the sale were going on over a long period of time (years), word-of-mouth might spread and bigger and bigger crowds would show up–like some of those big "annual" garage sales held by entire towns, or held near (Camden?) Texas every second Saturday… but for the short-term, I can't do it all by myself. I can't control everything.

Sometimes, the wisest thing is to sell what you can, look at the rest, realize it is what it is (maybe it's a practice novel, maybe it's your third practice novel), and move on.

7) There's always stuff left over.

It will surprise you what doesn't sell. You'll be convinced certain items are going to fly off the tables–maybe because it was a popular item when you bought it new, or it's in great condition now (and at such a cheap price), or it's just so cool, of course people are going to want it. You're going to have stuff that fills a niche and you know for a fact people are looking for that type of niche item, and yet, when the day is done, there will be stuff left on your table, picked over, and you'll wonder why. Did you price it too high? Did you not put it in a prominent enough place? Did you put it next to something that overshadowed it?

Who the hell knows?

In publishing, it's a "best guess" business. People are trying to gauge what everyone's going to want in the future based off what they wanted in the past. Except as humans, we don't want to have the same exact experience day in and day out for the rest of our lives–we want something new. Different. Maybe not too different. Predicting that is not an exact science. And if you happen to send in a space-alien-time-travel-love-story right after the editor just had to remainder a rather large order of her previous space-alien-time-travel-love-stories, she's probably not going to be able to convince a publisher to take a chance on yours. If she just had a significant other who was rather space-alien-like dump her for a younger, hotter similarly-looking-space-alien-tart, then she may be turned off space alien love stories for months, and no matter how good yours was, it didn't stand a chance. Someone else, somewhere else, may snap it up. The things that did not sell at my garage sale? We donated to the Battered Women's Shelter, and you know what they're going to do? Sell those items in their stores. They figure someone, eventually, will buy the stuff. Who knows, they could be right.

Which circles back around to rule number one: it's not personal.

Okay, those are the big parallels… are there others I've missed?

Valentine’s Day, 14 Things.

By Cornelia Read

So I was going to write part two of my writing and craziness post, on depression, and then realized, “oh, shit, it’s Valentine’s Day.”

And figured, hey, for those of you all psyched for today, who needs a downer post, and for the rest of us, why rub it in?

Herewith, instead, I offer you fourteen things for Valentine’s Day, whether your love is requited, or not.

Piaf nouveau:

Once more, with ukelele:

Bling, baby:

Lithuanians and Letts do it:

A youngun with some real pipes on her:

The Billie, the Best:

See if I care:

La Divina:

Fred:

Nothin’ says lovin’ like Lily Von Shtupp:

Girl-on-girl action:

A brand-new recipe:

That baby talk:

How lovely it was:

So long, and

The Absconding Pen, And Other Tour Stories

by JT Ellison

Well, hi! Happy Friday the 13! Long time no blog, I know. I've missed y'all, so forgive me if this is more chatty than educational today.

I've been facing an interesting challenge, a book due March 1, and promotion to do for my January book. JUDAS KISS got moved up in the publication schedule, which is why I've been put in this position of having to cut back on some of my non-writing work in order to make my deadline. And I received copyedits last week for my September book, so it really was the perfect storm. I've got a handle on it all now (she says, with a quick look heavenward) and feel like things are calming down a bit. No travel for three weeks, so I'm breathing a sigh of relief.

I've also decided to do no promotion AT ALL from June-August, to give myself real time to get a chunk of my March 2010 book done so I won't find myself in this predicament again.

Right before Christmas, I instituted a new writing pattern, and I promised to report on how it's working. In a word, it's not. I read all the time management books, built a beautiful color-coded time map, put it in my notebook as a reminder, and proceeded to never follow it. Not even for one day.

My natural circadian rhythms don't work in the way I wanted for my new writing schedule, which was to get up and start my fiction immediately. I am simply not a morning person. I hit my stride around 3 in the afternoon. Once I abandoned the new method and returned to my 12-4 schedule, my word count shot up. So, chalk that up to a lesson learned. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, no matter how pretty and shiny the new methods seem.

What my adventure in time management DID do was help me prioritize my non-writing time in the mornings. I'm no longer losing writing days because I'm dealing with the Internet. My email is under control, Facebook is limited to marketing, a once or twice a day gander at status updates and a firm hand on the "Ignore All" button when it comes to invitations, drink requests, fairies and the like. It's liberating, I'll tell you that. I feel much more settled with my writing. My To Do list is consistently getting dealt with and I don't feel that clawing sense of guilt when I'm not writing. I've even gotten my reading back on track (which is probably a major reason my writing is going better.)

One of the things I heartily believe in is rewarding yourself when you accomplish your goals – major and minor. My latest little reward (for a three day turnaround on a full edit of Edge of Black, natch) was a beautiful, shiny rollerball pen to take on tour with me. I love fancy pens, and I have a gorgeous Mont Blanc that I adore. But I'm scared to death to take it on the road with me for fear of losing it. Which is kind of silly, because I never lose anything. I'm so good about that. I'm still wearing a ring I bought in Hawaii when I was 15. I've only lost one earring, (that was a function of the idiot I loaned it to in a parking lot to pierce his ear dropping it in the gravel. It ws my favorite diamond stud, too. Who's the idiot?) I have a twenty-year-old watch, a twenty-year-old Mont Blanc, and a seventeen-year-old truck. Oh, and a fourteen-year-old marraige, so I haven't lost him either ; )

So I tapped my Levenger coupons and ended up with a hot pink True Writer for $29.99.

I never in a million years expected to like a pink pen. It's just so not me. But the price was right, and I felt like if I ended up not liking it, I wouldn't have lost too much. When it arrived, I was shocked. It's beautiful. Darker than it looks in the picture, just the right weight for my hand. I also bought the rollerball refills with gave me some felt tips to put in it which work better than Sharpies on the signing pages because they don't bleed through. HEAVEN! I loved it so much, I decided to get another. One for home, to attach to my Circa and Moleskine, the other to travel with me. And if I lost it, I'd have a back up. But losing it wasn't going to happen – my goodness, I have a track record with objects. I have rollerballs from Staples that have traveled all over the world, literally, and made it home safe. An expensive pen that I'm really paying attention to is safe as kittens.

So the first pink pen went with me to Florida and Illinois, happily tucked into my bags. My pen loved me. I could tell. She was always ready to be opened, begging to come out of my bags to be shown off, the ink rolling smoothly out onto the page, the screw cap never getting dislodged. People commented on my pretty pink pen, teased me for being finicky and using it instead of pens provided for my signings, then oohing when they received the signed copy with the flourished signature. My pen and I were one.

Until the bitch absconded in Chicago, running away from home with a glee I can say still smarts.

I've searched high and low, retraced my steps, talked to every restaurant and hotel and bar manager where I sat on Saturday night, but she is well and truly gone. I ordered her replacement, which arrived today. From now on, she'll travel in her box instead of in my bag.

Don't think I'm crazy, but all of my inanimate objects are male. My car, my iPhone, my laptop. They're usually termed "Baby," and I identify them with a male entity. Wiccans and Pagans worship the God and the Goddess, so I guess my stuff is all associated with the God. But my pen was a girl, a Goddess, all the way. Figures it was a woman who'd have her own mind and refuse to be controlled.

Aside from the trauma of losing my pen, I had more random craziness over the weekend. I somehow managed to drop a carton of honey into my bag, which spread through the center pocket, got all over the case for Randy's Eee and coated my boarding pass with sticky goodness. I'm covered in bruises from a graceful trip Saturday morning trying to get up from the lunch table. I forgot to bring my postcards to the group signing, never a good thing. Southwest was overbooked on all five flights from Midway to Nashville, which stranded Randy and I at the airport for five hours. It was chaos, all weekend, all the time. I'm just lucky I didn't tip over the exceptionally cool glass decanter at Cooper's Hawk Saturday night – breaking expensive glass would have made my weekend complete. I don't think I've ever been so relieved to get home.

And now you know why my mother calls me Grace.

Regardless, the best part of touring is connecting with people. I've done nine or so events for JUDAS KISS, from Tennessee to Texas to Florida to Illinois, and they've all been wonderful. Love is Murder in Chicago was a fun conference, and I saw a lot of old friends. I also FINALLY met Bryon Quertermous, who is one of the nicest people in publishing, and the man who published my first short story, effectively kicking off my writing career. Thanks Q, for giving me a chance and being so cool.

So, that's the wrap up. To list everyone I've seen over the past two months would take all day, but you know who you are. I enjoyed it all – giggling in hotel rooms over cheesecake with my dear fellow blonde Laura Benedict, GPS tracking with Erica Spindler and CJ Lyons, dinner with Shane Gericke, the bestseller lists, the private dinner in Dallas, the surprise visit from my cousins in Houston, Sherlock's and Davis Kidd and Murder by the Book, the media, the signings, the panels. We'll do it again in September, me and Pretty Pink Pen 2.

But if this one runs away, I'm going back to the $2 pens from Staples.

Do you have a treasured artifact in your life?

Wine of the Week: 1991 La Cave Caluso Passito

This was a very different wine. It's technically a white, though it tastes like port flavored with the tiniest hint of wild apples. It's a lovely amber color too, definitely an unexpected taste. It comes from the Erbaluce grape, grown primarily in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is where my family still resides, so it was a very special bottle of wine for me. Drink after dinner as a treat, with fresh fruit or chocolate.

With my apologies for being a week late, the winners of CJ LYON'S contest for a copy of LIFELINES: Rashda, Debbie K. and Kelly Stone. Please contact CJ directly with your snail mail address. CJ at CJLyons dot net.

All the World’s a Stage

By Brett Battles

I search for inspiration in almost everything I come across in life. It could be in the emotional tension of a well made, and some times not well made, movie, the turn of phrase in a favorite book, the colors or lack thereof in a thought provoking painting. But I also find it in the more common things. The kindness between two strangers at the counter of a coffee shop, the way the leaves blow across the sidewalk in the fall, the sound of music being played by someone just learning a new instrument.

As writers were are artists, and by definition creative. But that doesn’t mean the creativity is flowing off us from the moment we wake up until the moment we go back to sleep. For most of us it ebbs and flows depending on our mood, how much sleep we’ve had, or maybe what we’ve had to drink. But for me, more than anything else, creativity is often stimulated by outside influences.

As a creative type you can’t always know when or where inspiration will hit you, but you can sometimes put yourself in a position it can find you if it wants.

That’s what I did on Tuesday night.

A very good friend of mine who I’ve known for over twenty-five years has become a successful theater director here in Los Angeles. So much so that he has been able to do something many of his colleagues only dream of doing, and that is directing full time. Doesn’t mean he’s make tons at it yet, but he is doing what he loves. He’s also starting to make a very good name for himself. And I couldn’t be happier for him. He is a great guy, and a loyal friend. If you ever get a chance to look at the acknowledgments of any of my books you see the name Jon Rivera or Jon Lawrence Rivera…same guy, and they are both him. Jon will always be in my acknowledgments because he has proven to be a better friend to me than anyone ever has the right to have. For that, I’ll never be able to thank him enough.

Jon directs several plays a year at theaters all over town. He’ll occasionally be asked to also direct a play at one of the local colleges. In addition, for the past year, the faculty at USC asked him to teach theater directing at their school, something he’s been doing for over a year now.

Anyway, the play he is currently working on is a world premiere called LAWS OF SYMPATHY. He’s doing it though the theater group he formed called Playwrights’ Arena, whose mission is to produce plays written by people who live in the Los Angeles area. A pretty cool idea.

Tuesday night I went downtown to the space they were rehearsing and watch for awhile as Jon and his actors worked on two of the scenes from the play. Since this piece has never been produced before, they were working out a lot of the issues that established shows would have had worked out years ago. Things like “Why is this scene set in this location?” or “Why are you having this conversation now when you could have had it on the phone earlier?” or “What is the emotion behind what you are saying?”

It was absolutely fascinating to watch. Plays, as you may are may not know, are a writer’s medium. Whatever is on the page is what the actors have to say. It’s not like the movies where often the script is more like a guideline. Here, if a director or an actor want to make a change bad enough, they must consult with the playwright, who may very well just say no.

What I really enjoyed as I watched was the first scene they worked on. In the script, the scene starts in the middle of a conversation…a pretty intense conversation, by the way. But even as they began rehearsing it there was some question as to how the characters would have gotten to this point, and why the conversation was occuring in the location indicated in the script. I watched fascinated as Jon and his actors, Ahmad and Celeste, talked it through, Jon often asking the actors why their characters where doing what they were doing or saying what they were saying. Then Jon had them act out the whole seen, not just from the middle as it was written in the script, but from the beginning, improvising so that they could explore the backstory, if you will, and reach the point where the playwright had begun. This was not stuff the audience will ever see on stage, not directly anyway. They WILL see it in the way the actors will be totally comfortable with characters they are playing, making the audience forget they are watching actors at all.

It was great to see how the Ahmad and Celeste handled this. Both were excellent and really seemed to know who they were even while they were still figuring out things about their characters. What was also great was seeing them working together to explore the relationship between the characters, because that is just as important as knowing the characters themselves.

In many ways I found it to be just like what I go through as an author, and what I assume most authors go through. We are the playwrights, directors and actors of our own stories. I often act out parts, looking for motivations, and emotions. But sometimes it’s actually harder when it’s just one brain playing all these parts. I envied the fact that Jon and Ahmad and Celeste could play off each other, and not just themselves, and even daydreamed about having actors come to my house and play out scenes from my whatever I was working.

When I left the theater, I felt like I’d been mainlining creativity. I couldn’t wait to get back to my keyboard. I’m sure this jolt will be with me for several days. But the great thing is once it’s gone Jon has said I can come back any time I want to observe again. I will definitely be taking him up on that.

So what are some interesting things that have inspired you recently? Did you stumble upon them, or did you put yourself in their path?

No song this week, but something even better given our topic. A little piece of incredibly inspired creativity I came across on another blog. Enjoy!

Toast

by Rob Gregory Browne

I'm completely brain dead.

I've been sitting here for a full ten minutes now and I've got nothing. Nothing.

For the last several weeks, I have been struggling to finish my latest book. I'm happy to say I wrote THE END last night —

— but at a cost.

I'm completely brain dead.

I'm an erratic writer. The first half of my first book was written in about three months. The second half took seemingly forever.

This book was the opposite. The first 150 pages took me months, while the last 375 were written in just a few weeks. Frantically.

It's amazing what a deadline can do to you.

I hear about writers writing several thousand words a day, guys like Stuart Woods who only writes, reportedly, a couple hours in the morning but manages to do an entire chapter in that time — and, frankly, I'm amazed.

Nora Roberts is noted for her speed and output (to put it mildly). And from what I can tell, Carla Neggers and others who came up from the romance ranks ain’t slouches either…

But there was one writer who had us all beat. His name: Walter Gibson, aka Maxwell Grant.

Gibson wrote the novels I loved as a kid — I was in heaven when I discovered the paperback reprints on my used bookstore shelf. He was the man behind THE SHADOW, and in 1932 alone, he produced twenty-four 60,000 word novels for The Shadow Magazine, a pulp that was published twice monthly.

120,000 words a month. Not to mention the some 680 magazine articles he wrote a year.

And this wasn’t just some isolated year. He did this for at least a decade.

Argue all you want that his stories were substandard. I freakin’ loved the reprints I read. Still have them on my shelf in fact. The first one I bought — probably in the 70’s — was called THE LIVING SHADOW — and it thrilled the hell out of me.

Just for a moment think about your deadlines and imagine having to write 120,000 words a month.

The mind boggles.

Do you ever have those moments when you're just so mentally exhausted you've got nothing left to say?

In the last weeks of trying to reach this latest deadline, I also received the UK galleys on my next book, saw the release of my second book, WHISPER IN THE DARK (Feb. 2), gave a presentation — along with Brett Battles — at Huntington Beach library, attended Bouchercon, got food poisoning, went to Men of Mystery, did the copy edits for book three, and went to two signings, one an eleven hour roundtrip drive that had me writing in the car as my wife took the wheel.

I'm. Freaking. Brain dead.

As this post makes abundantly clear.

Tomorrow night I'm having a launch party for WHISPER IN THE DARK. 7 pm at the Ventura, California Barnes & Noble. A portion of all sales in the store go to the education community. I hope those of you in the area can come.

If you can't make it then, please join me at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood at 4 pm on Saturday, February 14th.

I promise to have recovered by then.

Really.