My Weblog

I'm Not Cool

Sure, I'm lucky. I have a great television show based on my books. My books are selling well. My children are healthy. My husband's put up with me for (almost) 32 years. I have great friends. I know some amazing people.

But I'm not cool. I like bagpipe music. I like movie scores. I'm not even remotely interested in the Black-Eyed Peas or any of the other groups whose names I constantly scramble, to my kids' amusement.

I don't go to art-house movies, not that such an evening would be hard to come by where I live. The closest I've come was renting "Let the Right One In." (I did think it was great.) I get puzzled if the ending is ambiguous. I love a good "movie-movie," which is what my husband and I call a totally improbable film which nonetheless is a lot of fun. And I adore a good B or C flick. How many times have I watched when the giant shark snatches Samuel L. Jackson in "Deep Blue Sea"? And I love it every time.

I don't watch cool TV shows. Though I've seen "Breaking Bad," and I agree the scripting and acting is excellent, I have a hard time sitting still for it because it's so painful.

I don't know how to Twitter, and I'm not sure that I want to learn. My phone is so basic that it simply makes phone calls, and occasionally I hear it and answer it. I have a sneaking suspicion it would do more if I would read the manual and learn to punch the right buttons -- but I don't care enough.

I'm not even cool enough to have an informed understanding of foreign affairs and policies of my own government, and that's something I'm rightfully ashamed of (and I ought to be). But there just seem to be so many sides to every question. As soon as I figure out what the correct stance is, someone else gives me a great argument going in the other direction, and I'm left floundering.

There's a fine line between accepting your own limitations so you can quit struggling with your disappointment, and simply being complacent with your own ignorance. I see 60 approaching me like a freight train, and I wonder . . . when is it okay to give up?

Never? I was afraid you'd say that.

At last!* The secret revealed!** Three simple steps to improve your writing!***

by Dana Cameron

That's right:  I said three simple steps.  Ready?  Here they are: 

1.Figure out where you need work in your writing.
2.Figure out why your otherwise positive personal qualities might be getting in the way.
3.Figure out how to work around that quality.

    I said simple.  I didn't say easy.  But if you can do these things, I bet you'll make a breakthrough in your writing.

    For example, because I have been expanding my repertoire of story styles and situations, I've been running into plotting issues.  Like, all the frakking time.  When you're writing mysteries, thrillers, crime stories, adventures with big ideas, it usually helps to have big things happening.  And it hasn't been happening lately.  Sure, I'd be on the right track, I'd have a germ of the idea, but it always seemed to take someone else to say, if you just expand it, it will work better.  Frustrating, to have everyone else figure out your work faster than you.  Outside perspective is one thing, but this was becoming a recurring problem.

    So my problem was plotting.  Why wasn't I able to bring the drama?  Simple:  I don't like drama, I don't like chaos.  In my daily life, I prefer things to be organized, logical, rational.  I plan ahead, anticipate, study in advance, propose, reconsider, rework, then implement.  The way I figure it, if everything else is relatively organized, that frees me up to go crazy in my internal worlds.

    I bet you can already see how I was getting in the way of myself (and most writers' problems have to do with being in their own ways).  I finally, OMG, figured out that I was anticipating the problems my characters would have.  Then, being me, I would find a way to mitigate the problems before they actually happened.  You can't nip plot points in the bud, not if you're going to write adventures.   And, equally bad, I would find a way to make the problems things that could be logically dealt with, in whatever universe I was working. Not only was I diminishing the problems my characters would face, I was making it too easy for them to solve them.

    Oy.

    Figuring out the work around will be harder, but now I know, when I'm backing off because something seems messy and chaotic—things I would ordinarily avoid—that's the point where I should dive in.  Already, just having identified the issue seems to help.  It's not solving everything, but a problem that can be clearly stated, with data points, can be solved.  And that's where that otherwise useful personal quality can save your bacon, again.

    That's the lesson I learned this week.  Give it a shot.  Let me know what you come up with.  Good luck.

*I know for a fact this won't be the last thing I have to figure out to improve my writing.
**  Okay, and it's probably not all that secret, either.  Just something I had to learn this time around.
***  Note, I didn't say “make you the perfect writer” or “make you the best writer.”  It's all incremental, right?  YMMV.

On the email treadmill

by Donna Andrews

    I'm feeling a bit jaundiced about email tonight.
    When I got home from the day's errands and opened up my email program, I found that my email host for donnaandrews.com had sent me a second copy of every single email I’d received since June 16. 
    Every single email.
    And I get a lot of email.
    If I was completely caught up on email, the way I once was and hope to be again, this wouldn't have been a problem.  I could just delete all the old emails because I'd know they were dupes.
    And if I'd been really behind on my email and hadn't dealt with any of it, it would have been almost as easy.  I'd sort by date and all the dupes would be side by side with the originals, and I could just delete every other one and be back to normal.
    But as has been the case so often lately, I was behind but working hard to catch up, so dealing with all the duplicates is going to be a serious pain.  I'm going crazy, trying to sort out the emails I've already responded to from the ones I haven't yet dealt with.
    So much for my plan of getting my email inbox under control by the end of June.
    It wouldn't be so bad if they were all good and useful emails that I wanted to get in the first place, but a lot of them were emails that irked me the first time they landed in my inbox, and I'm not expecting to like them any better the second time I have to delete them.
    I was going to give you a rundown on some of the most egregious things I'm not looking forward to deleting again.  The nut cases who email every officer of every organization I belong to.  The Nigerian scam artists and their probable cousin, the dude in Zimbabwe who has already tried to contact me via Skype and QuePasa and is now bombarding me from "Are You Interested?"
    The sales emails from every place I've ever bought something and every place they've ever sold my name to.
    The nags from every charity I ever gave to and every political organization I've ever supported.
    The emails from people I've never heard of who turn out not to be new readers or long-lost relatives, but friends of friends of friends who hit "reply all" on messages to which I was one of the hundred and eighty ccs.
    The BSP from people who haven't figured out that more is not necessarily better where promotion is concerned.   I don't mean the monthly or quarterly newsletters from writer friends.  I'll scan those when I have time.  (Maybe make that if I have time.)  But the folks who send out something every week?  I don't want to hear from myself every week.
    And then the spam for Viagra and devices to enlarge a body part I don't happen to own. 
    It's making me tired just thinking about it.
    I find myself wondering: when did email change from something useful and fun into a chore?  I remember when I would open my email program and thrill if I had an email or two.  Not any more.
    Well, actually, I do thrill if I only have one or two, instead of sixty or seventy.  Especially if a good number of the sixty or seventy will be adding things to my to do list.
    Don't get me wrong.  I still like a lot of the emails I get.  When a friend emails with news, I'm happy.  When a reader contacts me to say they liked one of my books, I'm happy.  I like hearing from my editor, my agent, my writing group members.  The family can email as often as they like.  And I still find a lot of my email useful.  I don't know how the work of SinC, MWA, Malice Domestic, or any other organization would get done without it.
    But finding the happy and the useful seems to get harder every day.
    What I really need is for a cyber organizer to come into my inbox and help me deal with all of the email.  Like an online version of Niecy Nash or Peter Walsh.  Someone who would motivate me into reading what needs to be read, answering what needs to be answered, doing any necessary work that comes in by email.  Unsubscribing from things I'd rather not get any more. Bozo filtering a few more names.  Taking a long hard look at all those lists and asking myself if I really, really need to be on them.
    Or I could solve my own problem in a few keystrokes.  Block all those undealt with emails and delete them.
    Neither of those things is going to happen.  So I work along, trying to answer the important stuff promptly.  Getting behind when I travel or have a family crisis.  Catching up when there's something else, like a deadline, to procrastinate from.  I'll get back into the groove pretty soon.  And one of these days, I'll catch up.
    But right now?  Apologies.  I'm taking the night off. I may just curl up in bed with pen and a notebook and write something by hand.
   

My Season of Classes

By Kris Neri

I’m entering my season of classes. Not that it’s a real time on the calendar. It’s just that I’ve been too busy with my own recent releases, High Crimes on the Magical Plane and Revenge for Old Times’ Sake, to accept teaching assignments. But I’ve missed teaching, missed the interaction with students, even if all my classes now are online. So, I’ve scheduled three classes between now and the end of the year. My season of classes.

I’m already engaged in one class. I’m currently teaching a 5-week characterization workshop for the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime, called “Creating Characters That Live Off the Page.” The Guppies are an exciting, determined group, and I absolutely love creating classes and working with them. 

In August, I’ll be offering a 1-week online marketing class, “Approaching the Mystery Marketplace,” through the Writers’ Program of the UCLA Extension School, which will be a fun, fast-paced, fact-packed week on getting published.

Then, in September, I'll be repeating my popular online mystery writing course, “Committing the Perfect Crime: Writing Your First Mystery,” for the UCLA Extension School's Writers' Program.

Online courses are tough to create. All good instructors plan their courses, naturally, but in classroom  situations, they don't need to write every word of every lecture. Nor proofread them until they're perfect. But that's how online courses work. Proofing online material is like proofing a novel — I swear, mistakes creep in while you sleep.

On the upside, once an online course is finalized, the theory goes, the teacher doesn't have to revisit that work again. She can simply offer up those lectures to new students without having to put in any extra work. For the lecture part of the course, anyway; assignment feedback and questions from students work pretty much like classroom situations, except that they're typed.

But I like to review my courses before I offer them again, as I recently did for my September class. I look at the lectures to see if I can better clarify areas that have plagued some students. I add new assignments, take others out, and come up with new ways this round of students can attack certain challenges.

 As I reviewed my course, it struck me anew how much this class requires students to cover, and how much new mystery writers need to learn. And these are just the basics — they'll have to deepen their knowledge of all of this material as they go on. It also struck me what an act of faith and hope it is whenever anyone sets out to learn a new discipline.

While everyone who is published today made it over that hump — most take the abilities they developed for granted now, and have largely forgotten the growing pains they must have suffered along the way. I've never had kids, but I've heard women forget the pain of childbirth the same way.

While I've always been told I'm a compassionate instructor, nothing has brought back the difficulty of the journey, and the emotional ups-and-downs, like the art classes I've taken off and on for years. They're closer in time, and in memory, for me than learning to write. Granted, they're not precisely the same. The process of learning art contains a physical component. It's hard to get pencils and fingers and brushes move in a way that will allow what appears on the paper or canvas to approximate that image in the artist's mind. But while a writing student's fingers merely have to hit the right keys on the keyboard, the student's inability to paint as effective a word picture as she longs to, can feel just as frustrating.

Those times when I took art classes, while simultaneously teaching writing classes, allowed me to see  the struggle from both sides. I remember nights of dragging myself to art class, and confessing to my teacher that I felt hopelessly inept, forcing him to be as much a therapist as an instructor — even as I gave the same pep talks to writing students who were pained by their slow progress. I also remember the smug smile my art teacher would flash at times, I suspect because he could see the progress I was making when I could not — while I enjoyed that same satisfaction with my writing students. Every teacher observes when students are making leaps before the students make those discoveries themselves.

So…I try to remember my own leaps of faith, when I’m helping others take theirs. Although my September course is billed as "Writing Your First Mystery," it actually attracts a range of students, some newbies, some intermediates, and even a few who've been published, though those usually come to the mystery from other genres. I welcome them all, of course, and help them to the best of my ability. But I bring my strongest wishes for the newer ones. So that they can make the progress I know they're capable of, even if they don't know it. So that their leaps of faith and hope will pay off.

Anthony Awards Quiz!

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

The mystery world is buzzing over the Anthony Nominees! (And the Macavitys! And the Barrys!) And many authors, including a couple of Femmes! are very, very happy.  The awards will be presented at Bouchercon in October in San Francisco.

But how well do you know your nominees? 

 

For instance, these two opening lines:

I’m back.

I dropped my suitcase, slipped off my shoes, and listened to familiar Chinatown sounds spill in the windows.

Which of the Anthony Nominees for Best Novel is that from? Choose one. Easy, right?

     * THE LAST CHILD - John Hart [Minotaur Books]

*THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH - Charlie Huston [Ballantine Books]

*THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland [Quercus/Knopf]

*THE BRUTAL TELLING - Louise Penny [Minotaur Books]

*THE SHANGHAI MOON - S.J. Rozan [Minotaur Books]

It’s The Shanghai Moon, of course.  How about this one:

 

She lay on her bed fastened by narrow straps to a steel frame.

 

Hmm. Okay, that’s Stieg Larsson. You knew that, too

 

Let’s try a more difficult one.  Here are the nominees for Paperback Original:

 

BURY ME DEEP - Megan Abbott [Simon & Schuster]

TOWER - Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman [Busted Flush Press]

QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE - Max Allan Collins [Hard Case Crime] 

STARVATION LAKE - Bryan Gruley [Touchstone]

DEATH AND THE LIT CHICK - G.M. Malliet [Midnight Ink]

AIR TIME - Hank Phillippi Ryan [Mira]

 

Which one begins like this?

I had a body in the trunk of my car.

 

Okay, too hard? It’s QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE.

 

Try this one:

Griffin coughed blood into my face when I made to slip the chains under his shoulders.

That’s TOWER!

 

Okay, here’s an easy one. I hope. Which paperback original begins with this line?

 

It’s never a good thing when the flight attendant is crying. 

 

Yup, AIR TIME. (And this Femme is pretty thrilled!)

 

 

Now a much higher degree of difficulty. The short stories!  And the nominees are:

 

"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" - Ace Atkins, CROSSROAD BLUES [Busted Flush Press]

"Femme Sole" - Dana Cameron, BOSTON NOIR [Akashic Books]

"Animal Rescue" - Dennis Lehane, BOSTON  NOIR [Akashic Books]

"On the House" - Hank Phillippi Ryan, QUARRY: Crime Stories by New EnglandWriters [Level Best Books]

"Amapola" - Luis Alberto Urrea, PHOENIX NOIR [Akashic Books]

Lots of these are on line...and we’ve posted the links below. But—without looking--can you match the first five lines with the nominees?

  

***Here’s the thing—I never took drugs in my life. Yes, all right, I was the champion of my share of keggers. Me and the Pope. We were like, Bring on the Corona and the Jäger! Who wasn’t?

   

*** “Do you think he's dangerous?" 

    "Ron, you mean? Or Cooper? Down, Cooper."

      I pushed the Lab's massive yellow paw from my bare leg. With a big-eyed look that meant "just this once," he curled up under my bar stool, nose on my sandal. I love Cooper.

 

 

***Bob found the dog in the trash.

     It was just after Thanksgiving, the neighborhood gone quiet, hungover. After bartending at Cousin Marv’s, Bob sometimes walked the streets. He was big and lumpy and hair had been growing in unlikely places all over his body since his teens. In his twenties, he’d fought against the hair, carrying small clippers in his coat pocket and shaving twice a day.

 

 

***A moment of your time, Anna Hoyt.”

     Anna slowed and cursed to herself. She’d seen Adam Seaver as she crossed Prince Street, and for a terrible moment thought he was following her. She’d hoped to lose him amid the peddlers and shoppers at the busy market near Dock Square, but she couldn’t ignore him after he called out. His brogue was no more than a low growl, but conversations around him tended to fade and die.

 

**(one we don't have permission to use...)

 

Good luck with the quiz! And good luck to all the nominees! We hope to see you in San Francisco!

****************************************

(Check these links for the short stories!)

“Amapola”

by  Luis Alberto Urrea  in Phoenix Noir

http://www.akashicbooks.com/phoenixnoir.htm

http://www.luisurrea.com/home.php

 

“Animal Rescue”

 by Dennis Lehane in Boston Noir

http://www.akashicbooks.com/bostonnoir.htm

http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

 

“Femme Sole”

by Dana Cameron in Boston Noir

http://www.akashicbooks.com/bostonnoir.htm

http://danacameron.com/

 

“Last Fair Deal Gone Down”

by Ace Atkins in Crossroad Blues

http://bustedflushpress.com/

http://www.aceatkins.com/About/index.html

 

“On the House”

 by Hank Phillippi Ryan  in Quarry

 http://www.levelbestbooks.com/Quarry.html

http://www.HankPhillippiRyan.com

A Little Zap of Lightning

by Mary Saums

Hmm, after typing that blog title, I wonder if there's such a thing as a 'little' lightning zap. In the mind of one unfortunate enough to be a zappee, probably not. 

What I mean by a little zap is the kind in Disney movies and Terry Pratchett books. Like when the crinkly-eyed fairy godmother waves her wand and a flash of magic comes out, and zing! poof! there's this strange new creation. In fantasy stories, this often involves a frog.

In the real world, it involves a book. No longer must book printers toil and sweat days or months on end to produce their wares. 

Nowadays, books can be printed in a flash by companies like Lightning Source, a division of Ingram, whose plant is just down the road from us in Nashville.

Last night, Jim Patterson, manager of operations at Lightning Source, spoke to our local Sisters In Crime chapter. He talked about how the company works with all types of publishers, from those who print a few books a year to large publishers who may have 1,000 or more titles a year.  

Advances in print-on-demand technologies make it possible for a book to be printed, bound, packed and shipped within 24 hours after the order is placed. Talk about poof, flash. That is fast. It makes you wonder if they've really got some wyrd sisters and a couple of unseen academics with magic wands behind all that machinery which is set up just as a front.

Have you heard of the Espresso Machine? Not the drink one, the book one.

It's a print-on-demand machine in some bookstores that can spit out a book from scratch. Let's say you're looking for a particular book, but the store doesn't carry it. If the book is in the Espresso's catalog, the machine can print it for you right there, right then. Yes. Witchcraft, I tell you.

When writers talk about such technology (nudge, big wink, finger to side of nose) advances in the book world, we usually focus on how they affect our sales or how they help us get our work to readers. We worry so much about promotion that we become obsessed. Possessed. Bewitched and bewildered. Every now and then, we need to smack that whispering demon off our shoulder. Obsess less, step back and look at the big picture more, give thanks more often for all the great books we can enjoy.     

We live in a time when we can have books all around us, can access them easily, regardless of our income or social standing. Let's never forget how lucky we are to live now or how rich our lives are because of the availability of books.

Even if you do believe in the Evolution of Technology theory about how some books came into being, there's still the fact that we are booklovers for one reason, to see and hear and breathe in the little zings of magic coming up off the pages, regardless of their creator.  

 

 

Red Carpet Revisited

by Charlaine Harris

As I pack for Los Angeles today, I'll be thinking of the Season One premiere of "True Blood." I was terrified of being among the alien nation of creativity that "Hollywood" represents. None of these were my people. They were all part of the unknown tribe of glamous artists who work in the industry everyone -- everyone -- wants to break into.

I've learned a little since then, and I'm much more at ease. I no longer feel that I need a passport to attend an industry event.

(1) The suits aren't the suits. That is, great talents like Alan Ball don't wear Armani to work every day. Cargo shorts and a T shirt, maybe. One of the wardrobe staff told me, "The only people who wear suits in Hollywood are the agents." As far as I know, this is true, though I'm basing that on a small sampling.

(2) When they're not busy working in front of the cameras, the actors don't hang around being glamorous. They go sit in their canvas chairs and text friends and family, or listen to their Ipods. Yes, they all have multiple connections here on Planet Earth and regular problems to solve which don't involve beautiful clothes and papparazzi -- but their outer surface is part of their trade, and they take care of it appropriately. And they have a high tolerance for people fiddling with them all the time, tweaking their hair or makeup or clothing.

(3) There are lots of similarities between writing and acting as professions. You're only as good as your last book (movie). There's no job security. The paychecks are uncertain and spread far apart. You have an agent, and to some extent your professional life depends on his expertise and skill. And the general public doesn't understand the process.

Here's where I think writers are luckier than actors -- The writing events that require me to wear spike heels are few and far between -- in fact, non-existent. I don't have to worry about someone snapping my picture when I go down to my mailbox or bend over to pull a weed in my flowerbed. No one hovers around me fluffing my hair or dusting my face with powder. I determine when I have to be on location. And that's the way I like it.

Happiness, when worlds collide

by Dana

A while back, I mentioned that I was struggling with a character of mine.  She kept doing really fun things, but...I just didn't like her.  I tried all kinds of stuff, but she, and the work in progress, didn't work.  It felt hollow and false--it had no soul to sink my teeth into.  And it was her fault.  Okay, my fault.  It was driving me crazy:  there were some great scenes in the WIP in question, but I had no burning desire to do more with it.  I couldn't throw it out entirely, because those good scenes kept speaking to me--there was really something there--but neither could I continue with it.  I didn't even want to write the fun scenes without her, because, like her or not, she was a part of that story.  A very bad situation.

Another WIP was languishing, tons of potential, but nothing to drive it.  One of the classic problems as a writer is what to do when you can use the whole world.  Where do you start?  And in writing, you need more than a cool idea to make a book.  You need characters to enliven it.  Concepts are fine, but in fiction...you need characters.

Usually, I have two projects going, so when one isn't quite ready to be worked on, the other is.  But now, both Plan A and Plan B were stalled.   So I did what many a good writer has done.  I ran away from the problem.  Okay, not quite:  I was getting ready for Edgars Week and Malice Domestic, so it's not like I high-tailed it to Tahiti (sigh), but I decided I would use that time for a break, and come back to the computer in a couple of weeks with a fresh set of eyes.

On the train to Malice, it hit me.  Perhaps I was drawing from the genius of Femme Toni, who was in the seat next to me, perhaps it was submersion in the week-long communion with the mystery writing world, but I realized I needed to take the POV character from WIP #1 and put her into WIP #2.  This wasn't as obvious as it might seem from the above:  these were intended to be completely different styles, worlds, genres.  There shouldn't have been anything in common between them.

I sat, my head down, trying the idea out.  When the idea seemed to stand up to most of my mental arguments, I pulled out my notebook and started to write down more thoughts.  Suddenly, I understood why my  unlikeable character was the way she was, why she behaved in certain ways:  in this new "world," she made more sense.  All through the rest of the trip, I added to my notes: a good sign.

When I got home, I faced the acid test:  the blank computer screen.  Miraculously, finally, the words started to appear.  It's been slow going, but steady, which is all you can ask of the early days of a new book, a new world, new characters.  Huge chunks of the first book suddenly fit--snap!--into the new book, with incredibly minor changes.  The POV character is still not quite trust-worthy, but I know why, and I can make her human now.  She has a soul, she has guts.  The plotting issues are smoothing out, and things are moving ahead.

Whew.

My story has purpose, now.  My character is no longer two-dimensional.  I listened to that instinct that said, while the first WIP wasn't working, there was something in it that could be salvaged, that should be salvaged.  It pays, when writing, not to discard everything in a stalled story; it may not work here, but it may work amazingly elsewhere.  I have a reason to explore all the potential in that second WIP, now that I have the right girl to do it.  Sometimes you just need to hang in there long enough to fit those parts together, even if they seem worlds apart.