My Weblog

Moving Day Approaches...

by Toni L.P. Kelner

In a few months--the contractor estimates four, and I estimate six--I'm going to do something I haven't done since moving into this house in 1982. I'm going to relocate my office.

You see, I've got two little girls who love toys and books, and a husband who writes and likes CDs and books, and I'm fond of books myself. Is anybody surprised that we've outgrown our house? So we're expanding it. We're blowing out a wall ten feet in order to convert a half bath to a full bath; create a mud room for the endless supply of boots, scarves, and hats that living in Massachusetts requires; and most important, turn a cramped three-season room that is our current library into an enormous open expanse to be used as an office for two writers and a library for thousands of books.

As the project gets underway, I've been looking around my current office and the stuff I've accumulated, piled, and gone into denial about the existence of. What will come with me? What will go into the trash? What will be stored in a toxic waste facility?

The desk, an old metal and wood-grain monstrosity that could survive a nuclear explosion, comes with me, of course. Ditto my Macintosh, the electronic accessories I need even if I don't know what they are, the banker's style lamp, the stacked paper trays warped from too much stacked paper, and the CD racks. Naturally I can't have the CD racks without the accessories: a killer bunny from Monty Python hanging from a shelf, a stuffed Pokemon, a parrot from a pirate costume, a happy face pirate hanging from his hook hand, several Neopets plushies, a plastic skeleton for reference and inspiration, and my painted bookworm Arty. Oh, and the CDs. On the desk itself, there's the usual mass of books and papers, plus my muse Poindexter the troll, a ceramic Snoopy at his typewriter, a Wild Thing, a furry platypus, a Sherlock Holmes action figure, and of course, a Jump-the-Shark Fonzie action figure.

I know what you're thinking. How could I possibly write without all that stuff surrounding me? It's all coming.

Okay, what about inside the desk. Surely I can get rid of some of that. Pens, paper clips, yellow stickies stapler, hole punch, calculator. Obviously I need to retain some of the eggs of Silly Putty are required, but do I need pink, hot pink, gold, silver, and glow-in-the-dark varieties?

I'm reading your mind again. Of course I need it all.

All right, what about the stuff on the walls? Cross-stitch Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, signed Fredric Brown print, picture of my favorite D&D character from years past, numbered Edward Gorey print, picture of a baby dragon, metallic print of Shakespeare's house, framed piece of burlap for all my buttons and badges, and most proudly, my framed Agatha nomination certificate. The feng shui really demands those things.

All right, maybe I should concentrate on losing some of the other furniture: my husband's Steve's desk, three filing cabinets, and four bookcases. Only Steve needs his desk, we need the files, and nobody ever has enough bookcases. Wait! There in the corner! A stereo rack. Who needs that when there are iPods? That's two feet by two feet of floor space I've rescued.

I look around the room again, calculating how much wonderful free space we're going to have without that stereo rack. Then I look for the contractor's phone number, wondering if we could blow that wall out just a few more feet.

The Muse, The Music, The Caffeine

by Mary Saums

Hi, there! Thanks for stopping in at our new blog site. The other Femmes lead extremely interesting lives, so I like the idea of a blog with them. Now I can see what all they've been up to and live vicariously through their adventures. My own bits here will more than likely be about books and music I'm enjoying. When a thought-provoking song or paragraph comes my way, I want to go grab people on the street and tell them about it. I imagine doing it by blog is much better and less likely to result in my arrest. This first time, though, I think I'll join in on the group discussion of where we write and where we are in our current projects.

I'll just say it up front. I'm weird about my writing. It's because my brain is naturally wired to be ornery. It's that way with everything, unfortunately, but it's particularly true in my writing quirks.

First, I require two places to write. For rough drafts, I cannot be in my house. Gotta get out of there. Too many distractions. So, right now, I'm sitting in my first choice for first drafts, Starbucks. They have great coffee, nobody bugs me, other folks are working on their laptops so I don't look like a freak among the normal. As it happens, the friendliest Starbucks in the world is in Belle Meade, right down the road from me, where Tad The Fabulous Barista (at left) conjures up my grande nonfat mocha latte with whip. Mmmm … chocolate and coffee. Good brain food.

         
What sets Starbucks apart from other coffee houses is the best thing of all. They aren't afraid to play some real soul music. Otis Redding just finished crying about a Long Time Coming and, joy of joys, The Staple Singers come through next on a funky groove with my Muscle Shoals boys. This, my friends, is heaven. It's like a big hug. Believe me, when I'm working on a draft, I can use hugs to get me through. Starbucks plays other good music, too, but there's nothing like soul to get your writing juices flowing. I admit, I'm partial. My formative years in the Shoals are to blame. A few photos from my old studio days (before gray hair!)are on my website if you'd like to check them out.

The other place I write is in my office at home. I do edits there. Sometimes I write in longhand, but I usually do rough pages into my Alphasmart, a portable word processor. I zip the draft from it into my desktop when I'm ready to edit. Somehow, correcting pages at home is no problem. Maybe it's easier to focus on words that are already there. Somehow, I can't seem to pull new ones out of the air as well in my house.It might be cat hair interference.

The office isn't fancy. A table underneath the window serves as perch for my two cats while they're on bird patrol. On my desk, I've got photos I like, cut from magazines, under a big sheet of clear plastic. These change periodically, but at the moment there’s Koko, the gorilla who knows sign language, with her kitten she named All Ball on her head. A similar set of photos shows Shana, a Golden Retriever mix with her pet rabbit cuddled between her paws. Above those are colorful vistas of Tibet and one of young Buddhist monks in class. These particularly inspire me after a recent read, The Skull Mantra by Elliot Pattison. Wowie – what a book. Deep and lyrical. Read about this unique series here.

Also in the office, I have large stackable wicker baskets for each project I’m working on. At the moment, there are four of those stacked by the desk. I've found that filing cabinets don't work for me. Instead I throw odd bits of research info - magazine articles, pictures, notes written on scraps of paper, etc. - in the baskets. That way, I know everything is in one place. Anytime I feel low on creative fuel, I dig through them for ideas. This is similar to Meg Chittenden's wine box method of fermenting novels. :) And speaking of Meg, if you haven't checked out the new Ladykillers blog, do so as soon as. Great stuff there with five killer mystery writers.

Where am I with my writing projects? I've been working on a couple of books in a new series. I call them Action Cozies. I’m thrilled to say the first comes out from St. Martin’s Press sometime in 2007. We're in the edit stage with it. I'm also working on the rough draft of book two. The beginnings of two other standalone novels are waiting their turns. Meanwhile, I’m slinging articles and notes into their baskets. A couple of short stories need work before I send them out. I'm always open to ideas on juggling projects! One of my goals this year is to learn to keep things moving on the production line. This may require me to up my caffeine intake.

         

Barista! Another latte, por favor!

My Paper Trails

by  Kris Neri

I always believe I'm going to have a neat study when I grow up. Some would argue that at my age, I'm well grown, but I know I'm still a work in progress. Getting back to neat…I mean it in the sense of tidy, not cool.

My study is already cool, at least to my eyes. Creatively painted in two tones, a soft pale teal rises nearly to the windowsills, while a cream color covers the walls and ceiling above it. And an octagonal window, beside my desk, looks out on some pretty spectacular Northern Arizona scenery, although my cat often blocks that view.

But what an amazing amount of clutter I've stuffed into the room! It's furnished nicely with both a traditional and a computer desk-hutch, bookcases and a cushy chair. Well, I'm assuming all those pieces of furniture still exist. I can't see the surfaces anymore for all the stacks of paper and enough desktop toys and memorabilia to fill a warehouse. However, there is a benefit to all that clutter, I've discovered. Keep those stacks high enough and you never have to dust the surface below.

For those of you familiar with my Tracy Eaton mystery series, who perhaps believe I've modeled Tracy's messy home on my own — think again. Other people's abodes inspired that clutter, though naturally, those inspirations shall remain nameless. The rest of my house is actually pretty well kept, but somehow, I can never bring that level of order to my own workspace.

Well, the work I do in this room pulls me in a variety of directions. From my study, I write, I edit other folks' writings, I teach online classes, and I do quite a volume of work there for my Sedona bookstore, The Well Red Coyote. And all of those avenues seem to require bushels of record keeping and printouts of projects-in-progress. Remember when the talking heads once predicted that computers would cause us to become a paperless society? Not happening here.

But my study doesn't merely capture the paper trails of a varied career, it celebrates a life. These walls hold within them everything from award and contest-victory certificates, and framed cover art — to a Harry Potter wand, a Voodoo doll and, this being Sedona, a collection of crystals.

Amazingly, I do pretty good work amidst all this debris. I recently finished a new project that I sent off to my new agent. It's a humorous supernatural mystery called High Crimes on the Celestial Plane. If that sounds like something you'd like, keep your fingers crossed for us. (Or send good thoughts while clutching your crystal!)

Now my writing is going in another new direction. I've just begun work on a Sedona-based mystery with loads of Native American lore and intrigue.

I've never been an outliner, but I regard myself as a loose planner. I need some idea of the novel's events when I begin to write, leaving others to the inspiration of the moment once I'm immersed in the book. But I always need a strong sense of character, and typically, when I'm ready to begin writing, isolated scene fragments float into my head, often without any obvious connection, and characters start talking to me in ways I certainly don't direct. At this point, the characters are beginning to wake me up at night to sound off, so I don't think the start of this novel is far off.

Whew! Do I actually pull all that together within this sloppy little space? Maybe I simply thrive in chaos, yet cling to some tiny anal fragment within me that refuses to admit it. Besides, I'm not alone in celebrating messiness. A.A. Milne said, "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."

Who wouldn't want that? Okay, I'm not going to be neat when I grow up, I'm simply going to be truer to my own colors.

Someone to watch over me

By Dana Cameron

My office is generally a mess.  I prefer it tidier, but time doesn't always allow, and one of the virtues of being an archaeologist is the ability to find things by stratum and association.  It doesn't matter, because when I'm writing, I'm not in my office anyway.  I'm in 18th-century London worrying about a dead footman, or on a dig finding a modern murder victim, or in Washington, DC, singlehandedly thrashing a whole roomful of international bad guys.

In the same way that I'm happier with a little background music--it helps block out intrusive stray thoughts--I don't mind visual noise, either.  But there are two things hanging over my desk that aren't just "noise:"  These are a print of the Reynolds portrait of Mrs. Siddons as "The Tragic Muse," and a calendar with photographs of far-away beaches.

Funny thing is, the other things in my office that overlook my desk can be real hindrances to work.  Books.  I learned a number of years ago that I couldn't edit my archaeology work in a room full of archaeology books, and I had to go into the library/spare room, where all the fiction is, to edit my lectures.  Similarly, I can't edit fiction in the spare room, where all sorts of literary greats are starting down at me.  Who could concentrate on their fiction with Richard Bausch, Dorothy Sayers, Edith Wharton, and Kazuo Ishiguro looming, watching, daring her...?

It sounds silly, but it was tremendously helpful to me when I realized this.  It was a way of getting rid of some of the internal (infernal?) editors that constrained how I approached my work.  You can't find your voice when you're worried about measuring up to others, and you can't let your imagination run riot when all you're thinking about is how other folks have used up all the good characters and plots. 

Maybe that's why I find the two pictures over my computer so reassuring.  For a muse (and isn't Melpomene the perfect muse for a mystery writer?), Mrs. Siddons doesn't look like she's doling out much inspiration.  She looks pensive, her gaze turned to the heavens; it's more a portrait of the actress searching for her own motivation.  She's still finding her own artistic way, even as she's represented as the muse of tragedy.  Reassuring, that.

And whenever I look at the picture, the questions come:  Isn't she hot in all those robes?  Are those her pearls?  Is she freaked out or comforted by the spirits that seem to hover behind her?  Did it take Reynolds long to do the painting?  And those boats on the Thai beach on the calendar--are they real or just props?  Motorized, or powered by oars?  What are the plants on the cliffs behind them?  Is that crevice in the cliffs wide enough for someone to row into--pirates, maybe?  How warm is that water, anyway?

And that's the key:  You can't explore when you think all the answers are already known.  My pictures are windows that take me out of my real space, let me ask questions, and free up my imagination to make up the answers.  Every writer needs to find her way past the boundaries of what is known, and maybe someone to give her a hand out. 

Ideal Writing Schedule

Writers are frequently asked to share insight into the perfect work schedule. I see the kids off to school by seven, hunker down at the kitchen table long enough to inhale a large mug of hot tea and the news in the morning newspaper, run up the stairs to my office to check e-mail and get started on my work by eight. By noon I’ve knocked out my five pages for the day, hit print and go out to lunch with friends. The afternoon sees me tidying the house, weeding the garden, and getting supper ready.

Right.

True confession: Like Donna’s perfect office, my vision of a writer’s life and the actuality are far removed. I only wish I was approached the productivity and organization in the piece of fiction above.

Real days usually go something like this…

5:45 am            Clock radio goes on. NPR gets progressively louder until…

6:00 am            Opie the 100 pound Lab shakes the bed to let me know he needs to go out.

7:00 am            Kids off to school.

7:15 am            Suck down my second cup of tea, this one strong enough to run a marathon under its own steam. Pick up Houston Chronicle.

8:00 am            Toss paper in recycle bin and head to desk.

8:15 am            Find desk buried under miles of extraneous paper. Do not remember leaving this much stuff on my desk so begin to go through it to see if there’s anything important.

Noon               Notice the time. Shriek. Open work in progress, print pages from previous day as I cannot find the ones I printed out the night before and read through to orient myself within the muddle that is my work in progress, pull up to desk and set about fixing things.

2:30 pm            Check word count and see that I’ve managed about half my projected quota for the day. Notice the time. Shriek because I was supposed to pick up a child an hour before. Print out pages written that morning and place on top of keyboard for easy reference in morning. See them slip to floor among other papers as I leave the room. Make mental note to remember where they are. Snatch purse and car keys and run.

8:30 pm            Dinner

10:00 pm          Wish I had enough energy to pick up the book I’m reading.

10:05 pm          Dead to the world.

Let me hasten to add that this is not every day. Some days are an average of the first ideal and the timetable of my worst days. And that’s okay. While I sternly tell myself I need to write five pages each day, I only really need two. I write best under pressure, so I provide my own. This doesn’t mean that the words flow freely each time I sit down, but it does help me keep that appointment with my desk chair on a frequent and regular basis. Every now and again, fortunately, I read the pages from the day before and it’s not horrible. And if I’m really having a good day, I remember where I am in the book and where I want the plot to go. I hit the keyboard and all those uninvited events that cropped up in the manuscript on their own -- and which would not let me edit them out -- crystallize into a plot point that is to die for. I show up at my desk every day hoping for one of those days. If I’m not there, I don’t catch them.

Better go keep my appointment with my desk chair.

Happy reading,

Julie

(With apologies for poor formatting -- can't quite figure out the blog thing, but working on it.)

A writer's space

By Donna Andrews

Back when I was juggling my day job and my writing, I had this vision of what a real, full-time writer's office looked like.  God only knows where it came from, but it still lingers there at the edge of consciousness.

Uncluttered.  Minimalist, but not the cold, industrial look some people think of when they hear that word.  More along the lines of William Morris's dictum for the Arts and Crafts movement: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

In fact, American Craft or Mission style wood features largely in this vision.  Warm oak in clean, elegant lines.  Cabinets so the useful stuff that isn't beautiful can be out of sight when not in use.  For decoration, only a few well-chosen objects.  Maybe a bit of turquoise pottery or an elegant splash of apple-green glass, catching the sun that slants through the windows in the afternoons.

Peaceful.  Serene.  A calm setting for the active mind. I could see myself, fingers poised over the keyboard, glancing up for a moment to search for le mot juste and finding no distraction in my surroundings--only inspiration.

Been reading too many of those damned decorating magazines, that's my problem.  Yuppie porn, I call them.

When I moved from my apartment to a house outside the Beltway, I thought I'd actually achieve that dream office.  For maybe five minutes.  But now that I'm closing in on four years at Casa Donna, reality rules.

(At this point, looking around at reality, the need to tidy overcame me. Imagine a gap of an hour or so between the last paragraph and this one.)

I remember the one and only time a photographer wanted to shoot my office.  Virginia Living Magazine sent him to do a photo to accompany an article about me.  He must have been reading the same decorating magazines I do--he told me he wanted to capture me in my normal environment, at work.  "Sure," I said.  "No problem."

Spent the next two days completely overhauling my normal environment.  Felt very proud when the photographer arrived and I led him into the office.  Like night and day, the change I'd wrought.

He turned pale and asked if there wasn't someplace else where we could take the picture. And looking through his eyes, I could understand why.   Compared to what it had looked like before, it was wonderful.  But compared to that ideal vision of a writer's space . . . eek!

Not that it's dysfunctional, but any resemblance between my vision and the reality is either accidental or very temporary.  I have too much stuff.  All of it either beautiful or useful or fun--I'd update William Morris's dictum to include fun.  But there's just not enough space to put it all.

There's a very nice futon couch at one end of the office.  Warm wood, bright turquoise cover.  Perfect for, say, kicking back and reviewing a copyedited manuscript.  But I go on these periodic missions to remove everything from the office that doesn't belong there.  Most of the time, the intruder stuff ends up on the couch while I decide where it does belong, and by the time I figure out, it's time for another cleanup mission.  I'm looking forward to lounging on that couch one of these days.

And the action figures.  I'm fond of saying that my workspace is guarded at all times by armed action figures.  People think I'm kidding, but there are well over fifty pairs of tiny plastic eyes peeping out at me from various corners of the room.  Spike, Buffy, Indiana Jones, Darth Vader, Aragorn, the Maltese Falcon, the crouching buzzard, the three tiny little penguins on top of the TV.

Yes, the TV--I have a tiny TV here at my workstation.  Because I don't just write here.  It's command central.  If I want to watch a movie while playing a computer game, or keep an eye on House while chatting with a friend, there's the tiny TV to do it with.

And paper.  That's the real hazard.  Not just the papers I create as a writer--drafts, research materials, and everything associated with marketing and PR--but also the papers we all create, just by existing in the twenty-first century.  Most of the time, the paper all lives in the office, even if there isn't room for it. Stacks of papers.  Boxes of papers.  Sometimes I take the time to organize it, purge what I don't need and sort the rest into the files down in the basement.  More often, like now, I just get fed up and move it all out of the office, into the living room, so I can write in peace without feeling weighed down by all those mountains of paper.  Not a perfect solution--the paper's still there; eventually I want to allow other human beings to enter the living room and haul it all back into the office; and in the meantime the office only looks better, not really tidy, .  But you do what you can to get your writing done.

Probably as good a transition as I'm going to give myself to the heart of the matter.  A writer's space isn't just a physical location.  There's also that unique mental place where the writing happens.  I expected, after a few books, that I'd have figured it out--mapped and organized it.  That I'd know where the ideas came from and how I turned them from notions into completed books.  Discover what works and what doesn't work, and learn to arrange my time and my mind to support my writing.

Hasn't happened yet.  I begin each book not really knowing if I'm doing it right and forge ahead in spite of the nagging suspicion that maybe this time I won't pull it off.  I've figured out that knowing how to do it right is less important than just sitting down and doing it.  Just as having the perfect writer's office is less important than having a space in which I can write.

So while I'm not giving up my vision of the perfect office--or the perfect writer's life--I'm not putting the books on hold till I achieve them.  And I'll send in a dispatch from the field from time to the time, when the gap between vision and reality grows wide enough to be amusing.

Welcome to the Femmes' Blog!

By Dana Cameron

It all has to do with Malice.

A couple of us had been discussing starting a Femmes Fatales blog for more than a year now, but it was this year's Malice Domestic that really got the ball rolling. Six of us (l-r, Donna Andrews, Dana, Elaine Viets, Charlaine Harris, Julie Wray Herman, Toni Kelner) were on a panel together (along with Femme for a day, Nancy Pickard, r of Donna), and we had a blast. The audience had a blast. And it occurred to us: What better way to keep that energy and inspiration going than with our very own blog? While I'm the newest Femme, I've always loved the idea that the Femmes Fatales wanted to share the fun they had together with their fans via the Newsletter. That's not going away: The party is just going to happen a little oftener and a little more personally. And why not? Nothing succeeds like excess.

If you don't know who we are, you're in for a treat. Nine fabulous mystery writers,whose books cover the range from cozy to supernatural, from chick-lit to medium-boiled. We love talking about writing and books and mysteries of all sorts; we're smart, funny, opinionated, diverse, witty, and more fun than a bucket of puppies.

So welcome, dear readers, to our virtual world. Pull up a pew, name your poison, let us know what's on your mind. And don't let anyone ever tell you that nothing good ever came of Malice, Mayhem, or a little murder.