Stream of Consciousness from an Airport

by J.T. Ellison

Have you ever noticed that we writers are a little strange? Here’s a great example for you…

I’m sitting in the airport at the moment, one of my favorite places in the whole world. There are so many PEOPLE around, so many strangers, big and thing, short and tall, black and white and hispanic and asian  (and I swear to God, an albino) blonde and brunette, male and female and kids, and babies, lots of babies. I know it’s rude to stare, but how can you not, when there are all of these different people around — all shapes and sizes and colors and smells and length of facial hair?

There’s the granola couple with the waist long dreadlocks and their newborn, the cheerleaders with their sweatpants rolled just over, just barely covering their butts, the Amazon woman — she has to be 6’6" is she’s an inch, and thin as a reed. Everyone wears different clothes and shoes and carries multiple bags and briefcases bags and look happy or sad or tired or annoyed . . . Oh, my, she really needs to put a sweater on. Ouch, that eyebrow piercing must have hurt like hell, why would you do that — really, eyebrows are so sensitive, just try getting them waxed.

It’s so strange because I’m in a city that I haven’t visited in at least ten years yet I keep imagining I recognize people walking by, because if you stop and think about it, as diverse and unique as people are, everyone still looks just like the people you know back home, I bet there’s some studies on why we ascribe certain facial affects and features onto strangers to make them feel like home.

That redhead really needs some aspirin, she’s been holding her head for five minutes now. Can you tell me why, exactly, women wear four inch heels and run late to their flights? The sweet-faced Finnish blonde is chatting with the heavyset older woman and you can see that she’s thinking about her mother as they chat. I wonder if she’s still alive?

Everyone is so busy, busy, busy, working on their computers or phones or blackberry or iPods — there really is nothing better than an elderly hippie with an iPod. Do you think they’re listening to ABBA or maybe some Stevie Nicks? That’s what it sounds like to me.

Oh, I like those sneakers, I wonder where I can find them? Can you tell me why there are wheels on a bag that’s only a foot square, because really, how heavy can you make a bag that could only carry a brick, tops?

Why aren’t more people reading? There’s a woman with a Dan Brown and a guy across from her reading something with a swastika on the front cover, and I’ve got Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION in my bag and I’m hoping I run out of battery soon so I have an excuse to turn this off and quit working and get back to the book, because it’s really quite good.

Do you ever notice how people don’t touch anymore — outside of the chicks who wear the four inch heels and rush to meet their planes, because they have no choice but to cling like a burr to the man (invariably bleached blonde tips on his spiky gel laced hair) walking next to her as they miss their gate and have to run the other direction. I shouldn’t get so amused at other people’s expense, karma’s going to bite me on the butt and sit me next to a crying baby for being so damn uncharitable to that poor girl but come on, honey, if you need to run take off the stupid shoes already.

Law and Order is playing on the television instead of twenty-four hour news stations, and everyone who isn’t reading (and that would be more than 3/4) are watching it blankly. I wonder how many times we’ve all seen this particular episode?

Mmmm, I smell fried chicken, real down-home fried chicken that smells so incredibly good, and there, they called my flight, I better go.

Faithfully transcribed from Midway, Chicago. Punctuation layered in later.

And so it goes. I love airports, and I love traveling, because somewhere in this little exposition there’s a gem waiting to be seized upon. After rereading it, I know what it is, and I’ll use it in my new book.

I’ve had to travel more and more in support of my books — to conferences and to signings all over the country. A simple four day conference is enough to exhaust me for a week anymore, which is pretty damn sad. Happily, I’ve wrapped up the last tour stop for my debut, and now get to focus on the next book. I’m curtailing my travel for this one, picking my dates very carefully. I’ll do some travel, but nothing as extensive as my 12 states from November to May. It’s just too much.

Now, enough of my babble, let’s talk about Mayhem in the Midlands. This is an exceptional conference, filled to the gills with READERS! The Omaha Public Library puts this one on, and from the minute I checked in I had a good feeling (maybe it was the book bag with an Agatha Christie novel in it?) One thing I’ve learned in the past six months, I prefer the reader conferences to the writer’s conventions. Not that I don’t love hanging with my friends, but that doesn’t get me in front of readers, which is where my bread and butter is.  Mayhem did an amazing job this year: the guest of honor, Alex Kava, worked with the conference organizers to develop a full-day forensics track with experts from the Douglas County crime lab, C.L. Retelsdorf and David Kofoed, the ADA from Douglas County, Leigh Ann Retelsdorf (siblings, not spouses…), and Dr. Melissa Connor, an incredible woman who handles excavation of mass graves, and in her spare time runs the Forensic Program at Nebraska Wesleyan. An embarrassment of riches, no doubt.

I was lucky enough to participate in two panels on Forensic Friday, both discussing forensics in our books and the realities of researching crime scene minutiae. It was enlightening, and a lot of fun. There was a presentation over lunch that covered a case handled by the Douglas County Crime Lab and prosecuted by Leigh Ann Retelsdorf — Jessica O’Grady — whose body was never found, but her killer is in prison for life. It was an incredible and intimate view of a forensics-laden case, replete with blood spatter analysis, detailed drawings, photographs and  diagrams, including a 3-D video reenactment of the crime scene. Suffice it to say I left lunch with a book already underway.

I think what I liked so much about this weekend was the vibe. The authors attended the panels with the readers, everyone participated, there was no posturing or pitching or ass-kissing, just genuine interest in each other. The line-up was stellar, and I was honored to be able to do a day of drive-by signings with my dear friends Shane Gericke, Rick Mofina, J.A. Konrath (aka James Patterson), Alex Kava and Erica Spindler (yes, it was an INCREDIBLE day!) then walked into the hotel and met toastmaster Jeff Abbott, who is as cool as his books, and makes a pretty good toast. I finally met Barbara Fister and Doris Ann Norris, and Carl Brookings, and Charlaine Harris!!! Jan Burke was there, her always gracious self, toting her incredible, vast knowledge of all things forensic. I got to hang with Libby Fischer Hellman and Marilyn Meredith, Sean Doolittle and the irrepressible Trey Barker, waved at least five times to Toni Kelner, ate with the adorable Chris Everhart and his writing partner, Gary Bush, and the elegant David Walker, got to spend some actual quality time with the always gorgeous and surprising Twist Phelan. I missigned Anthony Neil Smith’s copy of my book (duh, it’s NEIL), traded quips with my bud Chris Grabenstein, watched Donna Andrews work the room like the pro she is, put a face to the great name Honora Finkelstein and met her writing partner Sue Smiley.

Deb Carlin, Alex Kava’s business manager, had the four days scheduled like a well-oiled machine, and it was such a pleasure to be directed by her! There were four different booksellers in the bookroom, all of whom were adorable and kind, especially Becci West from I Love A Mystery in Mission, Kansas — the skull with the sunglasses was too much!

There was more: more people I met for the first time, more hands shaken, contacts made, laughter joined, but you get the picture. All in all, this was a great con, one that I’d be honored to attend again.

The best part though? I came home with a plethora of new ideas. Stuff to work into my current WIP, an entire book I want to do… and a true sense that I’m finding my place in all this. It’s scary to fly across the country to meet 200 people you don’t know, to have three panels to present, to be on for four days straight. But I’d go back tomorrow, it was just that good. Pictures here!

So what makes a good conference for you? And if you answer in stream of consciousness, I’ll give extra points — actually, anyone who comments today will be entered in the drawing for an ARC of my newest novel, 14.

Wine of the Week: I was introduced to this one by the lovely and talented Erica Spindler (another amazingly cool author you must read) Seghesio Old Vine Zinfandel — rich, big and spicy, a fantastic partner with the soft-as-butter fillet I had Saturday night. (and yes, I’m on a zin kick!)

The Constant Journey

by Zoë Sharp

I was beating seven bells out of a large rock with a pickaxe when the courier arrived. He was Polish – the courier, not the rock – although that fact has no bearing and I mention it purely for colour. The rock was pure Cumbrian. Solid, taciturn, and not for shifting without the judicious application of a little brute force in tandem with a lot of dead ignorance. Gardening would be so much easier round here if we were allowed to use just a small amount of explosives.

The Polish courier had tracked down our almost impossible address to deliver a box bearing the label of the distributor for my UK publisher. Even with the seals intact, I knew what it contained. And, for the first time, I found myself strangely reluctant to open it.

The new book.

It’s often the case that, by the time a novel finally comes out, you’re a bit fed up with it, but this latest one just won’t stay down. As I think I might have mentioned, the copyedits were a nightmare, and just when I thought it was done and dusted, I’m currently wading my way through yet another set of page proofs that contain strange additional bits of text, the origins of some of which are a mystery to me.

Then I opened the box.

And, what can I tell you? I think it looks gorgeous. They look gorgeous. The box contained not only the hardcover of the new Charlie Fox book, Third Strike, but also the mass market paperback edition of Second Shot, with its completely redesigned cover. And here they are. See what you think:

2s3s_uk_05 All this is somewhat apt at the moment because I’m supposed to be leaping headlong into the next book in the series. In fact, I’m supposed already to have leapt. Instead, I’m suffering from what I seem to remember a fellow ’Rati member describing as the yips.

How the hell do you write a book? I’ve written quite a few of the damn things now, and yet, every time I’m faced with that file called ‘Chapter One’ I get this terrible attack of nerves.

The stupid thing is, I know this one is a pretty strong idea. I went through the same processes I’ve been through before. I always start out by writing the flap copy – the bit that would go on the inside flap of the hardcover jacket. The bit you read just to see if the basic premise works, after the cover design or the title or the author’s name has grabbed you enough to actually pick the book off the shelf and open it. This half or two-thirds of a page is what I initially write and send to my agent, my editor. If the idea at its most simple doesn’t fly for them, there’s no point in spending any more time on it. Alex talked about loglines for movies, or the elevator pitch for the book. This, for me, is the next stage.

And once I’ve had some tentative feedback, I work up the outline into something more detailed. At this stage I throw in everything I’ve got. Not just the dramatic high points and the scenes and situations that hit me hardest, but even the odd line of dialogue. And I keep going over it, layering stuff in, building up the connections, trying to cut down my cast but bind them more firmly to each other with each interwoven strand.

With a first-person narrative, so much happens off camera. I put that in, too. I work out what happened to all the other players before my main character so much as sets foot on the first page. But, while I need to know who my cast is, I don’t spend huge amounts of time giving them complete biographies. This is the first time Charlie is being introduced to most of these people. She comes to them largely without preconceptions, so I do, too. And when she meets them for the first time, their quirks and foibles and strengths and weaknesses will make themselves apparent by what they say and do in any given situation, not by what I’ve decided in advance will be their given path. Mostly, I know what’s going to happen, but after that I’m as interested as anyone else – I hope – in how these people react to the events in which they find themselves.

In the case of Third Strike, I knew it was going to be about Charlie’s search for respect. Partly from her peers as she’s coming back into a new working environment after serious injury. (What did you say about not the perils of making your main protag sick, JT? Damn! Charlie spent half of Second Shot on crutches.) And partly from her parents. Her father, an eminent consultant orthopaedic surgeon, has never approved of what she does and worries that sooner or later Charlie’s ability to kill will be the end of her. Her mother, a highly strung former magistrate, just worries.

All through the books they’ve been lurking in background – peripheral characters, a hint to Charlie’s origins. Not just what shaped her early views, but what she was trying to escape from, to rebel against, when she first joined the army. Her father, in particular, has always been coldly disapproving of her choice of career and lover, but he’s played little more than a cameo role before – even if he did steal every scene he was ever in.

So this time I wanted to bring them both to the forefront and what better way than to have them suddenly require the services of a bodyguard. I thrust the pair of them into a pretty ugly situation and sat back to watch how they coped with experiencing the kind of danger, the kind of life-and-death choices that their daughter has to make on a daily basis in her professional life. The one they’ve never seen. The one they’ve never wanted to see. And as for Charlie, when she’s already on the back foot, feeling unsure of her capabilities in a strange job, in a strange town, what could be worse than having her own parents watching her every move?

Nobody remains unchanged by the events of Third Strike. In fact, for Charlie things may never be quite the same again. And her parents both go on their own emotional journey from which they emerge different people. Perhaps even people they would rather not have become.

So, with the new book, I want to move on. To move Charlie on. Yes, she gained the respect she was after in Third Strike, but in the next instalment she realises she’s looking for more than that. She’s looking for redemption. And I have the idea that how she goes about finding it will run the risk of alienating her from the people who mean most to her. The people she means most to.

So I have several questions from all this. Would your worst nightmare be a Bring Your Parents To Work day at the office, or would you love it? Do you feel series characters have to remain constant, or do you want them to change and grow as the series goes on? And how do you get stuck in to a new piece of work? What tricks do you employ to get past that terrifying first blank page.

This week’s Word of the Week – an accidental find caused by a surfeit of vowels during a game of Scrabble – is anomie, meaning a condition of hopelessness caused or characterised by breakdown of rules of conduct and loss of belief and sense of purpose. Also, anomic – lawlessness.

A Man With a Gun

by Robert Gregory Browne

Good morning, class.

I was talking to a friend recently who loves language, writes poetry and
short stories and wants very much to be a novelist. She has, in fact,
started a novel, but somewhere around the middle point she ground to a
halt.

“I’m stuck,” she told me.

Welcome to the wonderful world of writing, I almost said. Instead, I
gave her the advice offered by the master, Raymond
Chandler:

"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

Now, since Chandler wrote mysteries featuring private eye Philip Marlowe (the most brilliant of which is The Long Goodbye),
I assume he was literally suggesting that you bring in a man with a
gun.

But Chandler was a smart guy and an incredible talent, so I have a
feeling he meant much more than that.

Your Man with a Gun doesn’t necessarily have to be armed
and dangerous. If we think figuratively, he can be anything, from a
plot point to a sudden change in weather. The point is to bring in some
new element — possibly from left field — something unexpected that gets
the story rolling again and, more importantly, gets your creative
juices flowing.

I talk about this because I was recently entering Act II of a new book
and for a few days there, was desperately searching for my own Man
with a Gun. It took me awhile to remember a particular plot point that
I had thought up before I even started writing the book, but once I
did, the story once again blossomed and I was on the move.

The notes for my own Man with a Gun read like this:

  • Bag of clothes
  • Meeting of Brass
  • Blackburn reassigned
  • Carrots

Now, I know, none of those sound even remotely like a man with a gun
but, trust me, for the purposes of my story they were. Those four things
collectively created a plot point that propelled me forward,
probably for a good thirty pages or so.


THE WHAMMY CHART

In Hollywood, there’s a producer named Larry Gordon who supposedly
created (and I have no real verification of this) what’s known as a
Whammy Chart. The idea of a Whammy Chart is that about every ten
minutes or so in an action movie, you need a Whammy event. Something
big happening that shifts the story a bit and keeps the audience
interested. It could be an action beat, a sex beat, a relationship beat
— whatever. Just something that kicks up the stakes and keeps things
moving.

Some laugh at the Whammy Chart, calling it ridiculously formulaic, but I think it’s a pretty good idea.

In novels, you might want to have your beat, your plot point, your man with a gun happen every, oh, forty or fifty pages. 

This is just a ballpark, of course. Every novel, every story is
different, but I think it’s important to continually keep things
hopping, moving forward, progressing toward the hero’s goal. Give your
readers unexpected twists. Or you may want to finally fulfill a
promise you’ve made in your earlier pages and give them an event
they’ve been anticipating or dreading, like the death of a character or
that first kiss in a budding relationship.

The real beauty of the Man with a Gun/Whammy Chart is that it helps
you keep from getting stuck. Even if you don’t specifically plot out
what those Whammy events are, when you do get stuck, you know it’s time for one.

Raymond Chandler and Larry Gordon.  Very smart guys.

Now the question for the writers in the crowd (and I believe there are more than a few).  What do YOU do when you’re stuck?  What’s your favorite man with a gun moment?

A Soldier Not Yet Fallen

11699873

 

By Louise Ure

He’s been on my mind a great deal this week, this man I didn’t know well.


He was one of the soldiers we’ve been remembering this weekend. One of those turned inside out by war.


He died in the same year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, although when I think back now to 1968, it is Kennedy I think of more often.


I don’t have any pictures of him, but that’s not surprising. He wasn’t around much, and when a camera came out he was around less.


William Grant Ure was my father, and one of those soldiers who did not fall in war, but who nonetheless returned so damaged that he was unrecognizable to any who knew him before.


He was thirty-two years old and already a practicing physician when he married my mother in 1941. Sadly, the army wanted him that year, too. My parents boarded a train immediately after the wedding ceremony. He got off in Fresno to report for duty. My mother continued on to the honeymoon suite at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco and spent the weekend by herself.


Of course the army needed doctors. But what did they do with this Ear, Nose and Throat specialist from the desert? This man who had single-handedly reversed the course of tuberculosis epidemics among American Indians in Arizona and New Mexico? They sent him to the Aleutian Islands to act as the only psychiatrist to 4000 desperate men on a barren, frigid rock for four long years.


He came home a changed man.


To his credit, he honored the marriage he’d entered into only hours before his departure. But that commitment came with conditions. He wanted nothing to do with life, with living, with family. He wanted to be left in peace. And he was.


They had five children in eight years and my mother raised us alone. He had his own set of rooms in the house, and only ate dinners with us three times a year – Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving. I don’t remember him giving my mother a birthday present. We never took family vacations.


He was not unkind, just distant. Like a powerful, cold rain, you just had to learn to plan around him. When he walked into the backyard for a swim, you got out of the pool. If he came home from the office for lunch, you took your sandwich somewhere else. You didn’t go into his quarters without an invitation.


My mother tells me that he was a remarkable man in his youth. Tall, black-haired and confident, he played the ukulele and sang with a band on the radio. She said he had good friends and laughed easily.


By the time I knew him, he had settled for less.


Every night at ten o’clock he had a small steak he’d cooked to the consistency of shoe leather, a boiled potato, and a pitcher of gin flavored with only ice cubes.  He’d ricochet off the hallway walls as he returned to bed.


I thought all families operated this way, and was stunned the first time I had a sleep over at my friend Mary Ellen’s house. Her father sat at the table with us! And he even passed me the bread! I didn’t know how to react.


Like Robert Kennedy, my father died in 1968, and like Robert Kennedy he was assassinated. Not by a lone gunman, but by all the malevolent powers of war and loneliness and grief that had piled up in his heart in 1941 and 1942 and 1943 and 1944 on those cold, dark islands. He was not much older than I am now.


My mother was at a PTA meeting that night with the youngest of us. My three elder siblings were off on dates, or a science project, or just hanging with friends. I was home alone with him.


I heard him choking, and got up and knocked on his door to see if he was okay. No answer.


God help me, without permission I didn’t go in.


He got his wish. He was left in peace.

I won’t ask for equally sad memories, dear Rati friends. Just tell me how you spent your Memorial Day Weekend, or who you were remembering this year.


Memorialday


LU

Kilroy Was There: A GI’s War in Photographs

by Pari

HillermanmrToday, like many of you, I’m thinking about war. So let me tell you about one of the finest nonfiction books about this subject that’s ever been published. Above all else, Kilroy Was There: A GI’s War in Photographs is an honest record of the mud, grime, fear and drudge of war. Combine these powerful images with Tony Hillerman’s moving, personal narrative and the result is an understated and immensely candid work.

What differentiates Kilroy Was There from other books about World War II is its intimacy. Open it to any page and you’ll see scenes that will remain with you for a long time. Here — an American medic lights the cigarette of a wounded German soldier whose face is lined with blood. There — a cocky SS officer holds his head high when he’s tied to a post in preparation for his execution by firing squad. Tranquil meadows and abandoned byways are gruesomely pocked with the charred remains of tanks and, worse, young men whose bodies are dehumanized by their deaths.

There’s no pretense, no posing here. The soldiers are kids from farms and factories, classrooms and mines, living the day-to-day reality of an extraordinary situation. Their lives are recorded by other kids — combat photographers in the Army Signal Corps — as they cook, walk, smoke and ride on the side of tanks. Those long-ago photographers were on the front lines too, in foxholes shivering with their buddies.

The truth in these black-and-white photographs moved Hillerman to become involved with the project because, "They didn’t make war look fun. They weren’t sanitized by a PR department."

The story of how the photos came to the university press is as remarkable as the book itself. It begins with Frank Kessler, an accountant, known as "Pops" (he was 26 years old) in his Army Signal Corps unit. One of his jobs was to assign photographers to particular shoots, log the photos and file them.

When the war ended, "Pops" didn’t know what would happen to the photographs; he just knew they were too valuable to be left behind or lost. So he took them, some 600 in all, and stored them in his attic at home. Later, he told his family he wasn’t sure if what he’d done was legal . . .

Fifty years passed. "Pops" died and his brother Lee found the photos. The younger Kessler had been a POW during much of WWII. For him, the pictures reflected a war he didn’t know — one he didn’t see as a prisoner. He understood their importance and spent time organizing the collection and carefully transcribing the captions as best he could.

Kessler approached editor Joanna H. Craig at Kent University Press with the idea of creating a book in time for the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

"We were working backwards. We had the art, but didn’t have the text," she says. But Craig knew Hillerman had served in WWII. He’d been awarded the Purple heart, and the Silver and Bronze Stars. She also thought a celebrity forward would be a nice touch. She planned to have a prominent military historian write the majority of the text. It would’ve been a wonderful idea, but the man she’d asked became gravely ill.

Of course, Hillerman was too busy. He was on deadline for a new book. Still, a desperate Craig hoped he’d be willing to expand his foreward into the entire narrative. "I basically pleaded with him," she says.

What a coup.
Through Hillerman’s masterful words, we learn about oft-ignored aspects of war. With the empathy of someone who has been there, he describes the palpable fear of troops scouting around street corners — possibly walking straight into gunfire or death. We itch when Hillerman explains what it was like to go without showers for months at a time. We can taste the food, C-rations and the much worse K-rations, neither one very good . . . never enough. Think about it, most of those kids were still teens; they were still growing boys. And the author tells us how these adolescents fought, marched, hid, killed and watched their friends die.

"War is mean,  damaging and dirty," says Hillerman. "These pictures show the mud and blood." Through his spare narrative and the equally unadorned photos that Frank Kessler so wisely saved, Kilroy Was There emerges as an incredible reflection of a critical — and still meaningful — time in the history of the world.

. . . To everyone reading this post who has lost a loved one in war, known someone who fought or is fighting now — may this Memorial Day be one of peace and remembering.

My respects,
Pari

the tipping point…

by Toni McGee Causey

Eleventy quibillion years ago, when I was in fourth grade, I wanted to
be a writer. I wrote terrible poems, which I think only got worse as I
got older and the teenage years descended like locusts, leaving only
WOE and ANGST. By college, I had brief bouts of sanity, whereupon I
attempted architecture (ohmyGod, they do not tell you about the math),
business (my first accounting teacher gave me the final exam in
advance, with the answers, if I would swear to her I would never, ever,
take another accounting class again), and then journalism (where I
learned they had the picky little annoying habit of wanting reporters
to not make crap up)(this was before Fox News).

And in spite of a fine history of liking to eat and wanting a roof
over my head, I still wanted to be a writer. If you asked a question,
you would get a story instead of an answer. If I could sidetrack into a
couple of tangents? You might as well park a while, because the
stories? They would not stop.

All the while, I wrote. Much of it was bad.

I ran into a
former high-school teacher, who’d also been a librarian, who asked me
the tough question: why wasn’t I submitting for publication? Have you
ever run into one of your former teachers? THEY ARE SCARY. It’s like
they can retroactively fail you or their eyes shoot truth serum rays or
something, and I did not want to stand there in front of my
two-year-old and explain I hadn’t submitted anything because I was a
big honking chicken. So I took her advice and started writing and
submitting to the local paper. (They were insane enough to buy the very
first one. That’s like feeding a stray puppy. They did not realize
this, I think, until I was around so much, they added me to the regular
staff AND the food staff, and this was a fairly prominent paper. One of
my relatives realized that I was being assigned to write about how
people COOK things. He asked, "Isn’t that… fraud? You use the fire
alarm as an oven timer." I look back on this as the beginning of my
fiction career.)

Over the years, and we are not discussing how many, maybe more than
two but less than a hundred, I wrote more articles than I can remember
or count for newspapers and magazines. I started querying and
submitting (and getting sales) at national magazines, but my real love
was fiction. I tried my hand at a novel, but it was a spiraling mess,
and my husband could see how frustrated I was. (And EVERY husband out
there just substituted the words "complete raving loon" for
"frustrated.") So, being a very wise man who liked to wake up breathing
in the mornings, he encouraged me to go back to school for some writing
classes.

For a while, I was lured to the dark side (screenwriting), and
landed an agent, and did a lot of stuff that was almost-but-not-quite
what I wanted to do, which was to sell something I made up. Hollywood,
by the way, will kill you with encouragement, because when you meet the
executives, you will be told you are the most brilliant writer they
have read in forever and where the hell have you been all this time and
they want to be in the "Toni Causey" business. Swear to God, they will
say it and you will believe it because they are that good at
sincere. Until you’re sitting in the Warner Brothers commissary waiting
for the next meeting, furtively looking around to see the FRIENDS stars
on their lunch break (yes, I am dating myself, hush), and the same
executive walks by with his arm around someone else who is not you,
telling them how utterly brilliant they were, the most brilliant person
they’d ever read. That’s when you look down at the script in your hand
that is an action thriller that everyone absolutely loves but could you
make the man a woman and the woman a duck and wouldn’t it be great if
the horse saved the day? and you think, "I’m crazy, but I’m not this crazy." Some writers (our very own Alex and Rob) have the tenacity for that. Me? I kinda wanted to just kick people. (I never claimed to be mature.)

See, I had this idea. An idea for this funny, take-no-prisoners
kind of southern woman, who loves deeply and means well, in spite of
the chaos she causes, and I wanted to write that story and be true to
that story. So I quit screenwriting. (I had had some offers if I’d move
out there. I was not going to move the family.) I had a hard time
convincing my former agent that yes, I was serious. I was quitting to write a
novel. (I think she still thinks I am going to change my mind.) But I
quit, and I started writing Bobbie Faye. I wrote a quick draft
in script form, because I was used to that format, then a friend showed a
friend, the lovely Rosemary Edghill, who said, "Send me some chapters."
And I did. She gave me some notes (smart, smart woman), and taught me
how to write the kind of synopsis an agent needs ("I did not think you
could make this worse," she said of one draft of that synopsis, "but
you did." That’s because I am an overachiever. It took a lot of tries
before I figured out that writing a marketing synopsis is a lot like
writing a non-fiction article, and that I could do.) Next thing
I know, I’d signed with an agent and Rosemary had pitched it to an
editor, who made an offer, and St. Martin’s Press bought that book and
the next two based on three sample chapters and a synopsis. Almost
twenty years from the point where I saw my old high-school English
teacher and she’d said, "Why aren’t you submitting for publication?"

(Thank you, Mrs. Ross.)**

There is a great big huge world of "no" out there. Sometimes, following the dream does not mean hoppity-skipping down the easy path. In fact, a lot of times, it means zig zagging past mortars and incoming and a lot of almosts-not-quites and despair and frustration what-the-hell-were-you-thinking? and ugh-this-sucks and occasionally wow-show-me-more. And in spite of how long it took, and how much hard work, I have been exceptionally lucky–there have been friends and mentors who’ve said, "keep going," and who’ve said, "send that in." They changed my life. They were the tipping point for me.

So how about you? Who encouraged you? Or what’s something you tried that someone encouraged you to do and now you’re glad you did?

~*~

CONTEST: just stop in and say HI or name someone who encouraged you OR something you’ve tried as a result of encouragement. ANYTHING’s fair game here.

Remember, it’s CONTEST MONTH — every commenter on today’s post will be eligible for a signed copy of BOBBIE FAYE’S VERY (very, very, very) BAD DAY as well as a hot-off-the-press, not available in the stores ’til the end of the month BOBBIE FAYE’S (kinda, sorta, not exactly) FAMILY JEWELS. Excerpts from book 2 are now up HERE. Winner from this week to be announced on next Sunday’s blog.

WINNER FROM LAST WEEK — Billie! billie! Sister of the soul. 😉

Like last week, I put the names in a hat and
my neighbor chose. So Billie, please email me at toni [dot] causey [at]
gmail [dot] com with your
address and I’ll get your signed copies mailed out to you this week!

**This is part of the interview I did with Bethany Hensel over at Lux Magazine… I’ll post a link here to the rest as soon as I have it. Thanks, Bethany!

What’s your premise?

by Alex

I’m off to New Orleans this week to teach a five-day writing workshop run by Deborah LeBlanc called The Pen to Press Writers Retreat.

Yeah, pretty excited! Also feeling a huge sense of responsibility. Anyone who commits the time and money to a retreat kind of workshop is really saying to the entire world – “I’m serious about this, I’m ready.” And I want to give these people the best of what I know.

So my first lesson is going to be about premise.

I was at some author event the other night and doing the chat thing with people at the pre-dinner cocktail party and found myself in conversation with an aspiring author who had just finished a book, and naturally I asked, “What’s your book about?”

And she said – “Oh, I can’t really describe it in a few sentences– there’s just so much going on in it.”

WRONG ANSWER.

The time to know what your book is about is before you start it, and you damn well better know what it’s about by the time it’s finished and people, like, oh, you know – agents and editors, are asking you what it’s about.

And here’s another tip – when people ask you what your book is about, the answer is not “War” or “Love” or “Betrayal”, even though your book might be about one or all of those things. Those words don’t distinguish YOUR book from any of the millions of books about those things.

When people ask you what your book is about, what they are really asking is – “What’s the premise?” In other words, “What’s the story line in one easily understandable sentence?”

That one sentence is also referred to as a “logline” (in Hollywood) or “the elevator pitch” (in publishing) or “the TV Guide pitch” – it all means the same thing.

That sentence really should give you a sense of the entire story: the character of the protagonist, the character of the antagonist, the conflict, the setting, the tone, the genre. And – it should make whoever hears it want to read the book. Preferably immediately. It should make the person you tell it to light up and say – “Ooh, that sounds great!” And “Where do I buy it?”

Writing a premise sentence is a bit of an art, but it’s a critical art for authors, and screenwriters, and playwrights. You need to do this well to sell a book, to pitch a movie, to apply for a grant. You will need to do it well when your agent, and your publicist, and the sales department of your publishing house, and the reference librarian, and the Sisters in Crime books in print catalogue editor ask you for a one-sentence book description, or jacket copy, or ad copy. You will use that sentence over and over and over again in radio and TV interviews, on panels, and in bookstores (over and over and OVER again) when potential readers ask you, “So what’s your book about?” and you have about one minute to get them hooked enough to buy the book.

And even before all that, the premise is the map of your book when you’re writing it.

So what are some examples of premise lines?

Name these books:

– When a great white shark starts attacking beachgoers in a coastal town during high tourist season, a water-phobic Sheriff must assemble a team to hunt it down before it kills again.

– A young female FBI trainee must barter personal information with an imprisoned psychopathic genius in order to catch a serial killer who is capturing and killing young women for their skins.

– A treasure-hunting archeologist races over the globe to find the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant before Hitler’s minions can acquire and use it to supernaturally power the Nazi army.

Notice how all of these premises contain a defined protagonist, a powerful antagonist, a sense of the setting, conflict and stakes, and a sense of how the action will play out. Another interesting thing about these premises is that in all three, the protagonists are up against forces that seem much bigger than the protagonist.

Here’s my premise for THE HARROWING:

Five troubled college students left alone on their isolated campus over the long Thanksgiving break confront their own demons and a mysterious presence – that may or may not be real.

I wrote that sentence to quickly convey all the elements I want to get across about this book.

Who’s the story about? Five college kids, and “alone” and “troubled” characterize them in a couple of words. Not only are they alone and troubled, they have personal demons. What’s the setting? An isolated college campus, and it’s Thanksgiving – fall, going on winter. Bleak, spooky. Plus – if it’s Thanksgiving, why are they on campus instead of home with their families?

Who’s the antagonist? A mysterious presence. What’s the conflict? It’s inner and outer – it will be the kids against themselves, and also against this mysterious presence. What are the stakes? Well, not so clear, but there’s a sense of danger involved with any mysterious presence.

And there are a lot of clues to the genre – sounds like something supernatural’s going on, but there’s also a sense that it’s psychological – because the kids are troubled and this presence may or may not be real. There’s a sense of danger, possibly on several levels.

The best way to learn how to write a good premise is to practice. Make a list of ten books and films that are in the same genre as your book or script – preferably successful – or that you wish you had written! Now for each story, write a one-sentence premise that contains all these story elements: protagonist, antagonist, conflict, stakes, setting, atmosphere and genre.

If you need a lot of examples all at once, pick up a copy of the TV Guide, or click through the descriptions of movies on your TiVo. Those aren’t necessarily the best written premises, but they do get the point across, and it will get you thinking about stories in brief.

And now that you’re an expert -go for it. Write yours and share!

Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend!

——————————————————————————————————————-

I am thrilled to announce that while I’m in New Orleans next weekend the brilliant Megan Abbott will be blogging here on Saturday. I can’t wait!

Lost Book Friday

by J.T. Ellison

The lovely and mondo-talented Patti Abbott has started a cool retrospective called LOST BOOK FRIDAYS on her blog, Pattinase. (Click here for a listing of other LOST BOOKS) She asked me to contribute, and since I’m actually in Omaha today, at the wonderful Mayhem in the Midlands conference, I agreed to play.

My LOST BOOK is a controversial one. SONGS OF INNOCENCE, by Richard Aleas (AKA Charles Ardai.)Songs_of_innocence_cover_3

I’m sure there isn’t a soul in the crime fiction world who didn’t hear about the situation with Charles Ardai and the Edgar Awards, and I’m not going to delve into that quagmire. But since this book couldn’t get the recognition it deserved for the awards, I’d like to name it my LOST BOOK. (Richard Aleas is the pen name for Charles Ardai, to clear any lingering confusion.)

The title, SONGS OF INNOCENCE, is taken from the title of a book of poems by William Blake, one of my favorite dead guys, and obviously fitting for a detective named John Blake. The opening epigraph to Aleas’s book uses a selection from "On Another’s Sorrow":

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

I love the idea of this level of compassion, that it takes the truly tortured to understand grief and loss. This book takes this concept and pushes it to the extreme, to the very limits of human endurance, and beyond.

It’s a lovely opening to this story, the sequel to Aleas’s excellent debut LITTLE GIRL LOST. I read that and loved it, but SONGS OF INNOCENCE takes the next step, moving John Blake into a world with no boundaries, where the sex trade runs rampant in the streets of New York, where his own sanity is at risk. Aleas takes his character, puts him out on the ledge without a net, and watches to see what he’ll do. I love seeing authors take that kind of risk.

Which begs the question: When writing a series, or at least inter-connected works, how far can you push a character onto that ledge? Aleas does it so seamlessly, so effectively, that I wasn’t mad at him when I read the end (I’m not going to talk any more about the book, so don’t worry, no spoilers.) Surprised, yes. But I understood. I bought into the epigraph — Can I see another’s woe — I certainly can see and understand John Blake’s woe. It’s masterfully done.

John Connolly manages this as well — the tortured soul seeking redemption. Charlie Parker is my all time favorite character, simply because he is so imperfect, so haunted (literally and figuratively.) He’s driven by his past, trying to escape the horrors he’s lived through. He’s desperately trying to find a way to survive in a mean world — one that is essentially of his own making, mind you. Dave White does a nice job of this in his debut, WHEN ONE MAN DIES, as well. Jackson Donne is as flawed a PI as they come without being a cliche. Our J.D. Rhoades has a tortured soul in Jack Keller — a bounty hunter  — again, a peripheral law enforcement occupation. Maybe that’s the trick — make sure these guys aren’t cops and you can get away with it. These meaty characters are so hard to pull off, but when executed well, it’s nirvana.

We talked two weeks ago about the dangers of exposing character weaknesses, but these are four authors who do it right. I’m trying to think of some female characters that can fall into this category — Karin Slaughter’s Lena Adams comes to mind. She’s tortured, no doubt. I’m reading the latest installment in the Grant County series, BEYOND REACH, right now and I’ve got to say, I’m more annoyed at Lena’s stupidity that empathetic to her plight. I wonder if it’s just me, that flawed men are fascinating but flawed women are just flawed?

Hmm… now there’s some food for thought on a Friday.

I invite you to share your favorite lost book in the comments, your favorite epigraphs and/or your favorite tortured characters. I’ll be checking in sporadically. A big thanks to Patti Abbott for inviting me to play along, and I wish you the happiest of Fridays.

Wine of the Week: 7 Deadly Zins, a surprisingly original wine. I’m not a big zinfandel drinker, but this one blew my socks off. Light, but friendly.

PS: I’m giving away an ARC of my new book, 14, to my newsletter list at the end of the month. Just head over to JTEllison.com, sign up, and you’ll automatically be entered. When I send out my newsletter, I’ll announce the winner there. (And a note, I only mail these quarterly, so don’t expect to be inundated!)

Here’s the whole Blake poem, for those of you who are interested.

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief &
care,
Hear the woes that infants bear,

And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast;
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant’s tear;

And not sit both night & day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give his joy to all;
He becomes an infant small;
He becomes a man of woe;
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh
And thy maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear
And thy maker is not near.

O! he gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

I Don’t Sleep, I Dream

Deadline: June 2nd.
Today: May 22nd
Days left: 11
Useable days left: 7
Chances I’ll make it: 50-50

I’m typing as fast as I can. Not done….

…but close.

So you’ll excuse me if I post something some of you may have read before.

Before THE CLEANER came out, I sat down one night and wrote a short piece. It’s sort of about how my main character – Jonathan Quinn – was conceived.

So, here it is…a conversation with Jonathan Quinn.

__________

“I make things disappear,” Jonathan Quinn said.

I think we’d known each other about six months at that point. We’d met in Germany when I was working there on a project for a visitor center presentation that would live at a new Volkswagen plant in Dresden. The job itself wasn’t in Dresden, though. It was in Berlin, a town Quinn knows well.

I thought at the time he was just another American businessman working overseas. I think I first met him on the U-bahn train heading across town from the Mitte toward Ku’damm. I’m not 100% on that, though. The genesis of a character is often a drawn out process, and my memory of Quinn’s birth is murky.

By the time this particular conversation happened, we were both back in Los Angeles, where, it turns out, we both live. Quinn much more comfortably than I do.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

As he took a sip of his beer, I thought maybe he was just going to leave it at that. After all, this was the most I’d ever got out of him about what he did for a living. But then he said, “Sometimes things don’t go as planned. When that happens I’m the one who makes it all look pretty again.”

“Tell me about Berlin,” I said. I had sensed from the beginning that something had happened there, something I wanted to know about.

“Nothing to tell.” He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was lying.

That’s about as far as I got that night. What exactly the ‘things’ were that didn’t go as planned, I wasn’t completely sure, but I did have my ideas.

I could have just let him die right then. He was forcing me to work pretty hard to get to know him. I’d dismissed more talkative characters sooner than this. But there was something about him, something that made me want to know more. He was interesting and mysterious. And I’d be damned if there wasn’t something that had happened in Berlin I wanted to hear about.

A week later as we rode in my car, I said, “You’re not killing people, but you do deal with the dead, right?”

“You’re talking in black and whites. You, as much as anyone, know the world is made up of grays.”

This answer stung me a little bit. He was right. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who only think in black and white, yet here I was trying to put him in a neat little black and white box.

“Let’s just say I don’t kill if I don’t have to,” he went on. “But you’re right about dealing with the dead. It’s a big part of what I do.”

“You dispose of them?”

“Exactly.” He smiled as if I was a student and he was a proud teacher. “Disposal is one of the services I provide.”

“How does that work?”

“That I’m not going to tell you.”

“But you will eventually.”

“Eventually.”

“These other things you do, what are they?”

He looked out the window into the L.A. night. “I think that was your exit,” he said.

He was right.

I moved over to the right lane, so I could get off at the next ramp and double back.

“Just getting rid of a body isn’t enough. You’ve got to make it look like whatever went wrong never happened. Blood, fingerprints, spent shells, things out of place. These are all problems I have to deal with.”

“I can’t imagine you went to school for this. How did you get in and learn about the business?”

“I was recruited.”

“Out of college?”

He shook his head. “I was a cop.”

For some reason, that surprised me. “Who recruited you?”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s dead now.”

“Did he teach you a lot?”

“Everything.”

As I eased my car off the freeway, I decided to press my luck. “And Berlin?”

I was greeted with only silence. When I looked over at the passenger seat, Quinn was gone.

As time passed, bits of his story started coming to me. Not from anything Quinn said, but somehow I was sensing it, I guess. Even when he wasn’t around, I’d pick up on things. I would be at work or getting into bed or even watching TV and a name or a place or a situation would pop into my mind. Immediately I’d know it was part of Quinn’s story. Still, the problem was I had a lot of parts, but I didn’t have the whole.

The only way I was going to get that was to have Quinn tell it to me himself.

“Tell me about Orlando,” I said one morning.

“Leave her out of it.”

“Then let’s talk about Berlin.”

“Let’s not.”

The next day: “Is she a friend?”

“You don’t listen very well, do you?”

“No.”

“She’s a friend.” I could tell he was holding something back.

“Was she with you in Berlin?”

If she was, he didn’t hang around to tell me.

Each day I kept pressing, harder and harder, using the bit of information that had seeped into my mind.

“What did you learn about the fire in Colorado?” I would ask. “How long did you work for Peter?” “Why do you hate the cold?”

And finally, “Tell me what happened in Berlin.”

Finally one afternoon, he looked at me for a good long time before answering. “Okay,” he said. “If you think you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“You’d better write this down.”

So I did.

Interested in winning an ARC of THE DECEIVED? I’m running a sweepstakes on my blog.

Click Here for more details

Word of the Day

Nerf

I was out with the family for our evening walk  when the conversation
turned to a popular young-adult book series about vampires.

It seems that, in said series, the vampires can walk in daylight without
ill effect, don’t have fangs, and try to avoid killing humans. In fact, they drink mostly animal blood. "Yeah," my
son said, "they really nerfed the curse."

"They what?" I asked.

"They nerfed the curse."

"Nerfing" as it turns out, is apparently an expression from video and
computer gaming where an antagonist,  weapon or artifact is dumbed down
or reduced in destructive power by the developers in later versions of
the game.  Sometimes, the idea behind nerfing is to better balance the
game, to avoid the phenomenon of "when you get the Sword of Kumquat,
it’s all over, everyone else might as well quit." But sometimes nerfing
takes all the challenge out to the point where the game is  a boring
cakewalk.

So what does this have to do with crime fiction? Well, how many times
have we seen a message board post or amateur review in which someone
has said, "Well, I don’t like it if there’s too much violence." "I
won’t read anything where a child is put in danger." "I won’t read
anything where an animal is hurt." And god forbid you should kill off a
series character. Some of the things I’ve read from blogs after that’s happened make Stephen King’s character Annie Wilkes look like a poster child for mental health.

Ah, hello? This is CRIME FICTION. Crime is violent, at least if it’s
being done right. And villains, surprise surprise,  do villianous
things, including threatening women, children and small cute animals. And sometimes the good guys die.

But there’s also the question of balance. You want to make the antagonist powerful and deadly, but not so deadly he or she can’t be believably overcome. You want to make him or her nasty and evil, but not so much so that they’re cackling, hand-rubbing cartoons.

Likewise, you sometimes want your protagonist to be a bad-ass, but not so much that he lacks any vulnerability at all. For instance, I love Lee Child’s work beyond all reason, but there’s a bit in, I think, ECHO BURNING, where it says "Jack Reacher had never lost a fight." First thing that popped into my head when I read that  was "well, guess he’s not gonna lose this one, either, so much for suspense."  In later books Reacher did, from time to time, make mistakes, and even allow himself to think that,  maybe this time. he might not make it (or, more often, that the damsel du jour might not).  And that’s why Lee’s books get better every time.

But hey, I could be wrong. How about it? Writers, have you ever felt pressure, internal,  editorial, or
otherwise, to nerf? Have you ever read a book in which you felt that the
author nerfed the bad guy? And can you tell I just really like writing
the word "nerfed"?