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'Tis The Season--To Check in the Closet and Under the Bed

by Alexia Gordon of the Femmes Fatales.

It’s October! This is my favorite month and not just because I was born in October. I know autumn officially starts in late September, but October feels like autumn really means it. Temperatures drop, at least in this part of the country, to sweater-weather range, leaves turn beautiful shades of red and gold, and spookiness takes center stage. Spooky stuff runs the gamut from kid-friendly trick-or-treat fun to Halloween fun of the adult variety to downright terrifying. There’s something for every bravery level. Lists of seasonal reading and viewing material are published, featuring books and movies and TV shows to thrill, chill, and scare the bejeezus out of their audiences. Sisters in Crime picks supernatural mysteries for its October ALA Bookclub Central list (http://www.bookclubcentral.org/2019/09/30/october-picks-from-sisters-in-crime-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/). This year’s list, Things that Go Bump in the Night, includes Killing in C Sharp, one of my Gethsemane Brown Mysteries. Book Riot published a list of “13 Books to Keep You in a Spooky Mood All Year Round” (https://bookriot.com/2018/10/30/spooky-books-for-halloween/) last year and “10 Horror Book Series to Get You in the Halloween Spirit” (https://bookriot.com/2019/09/13/horror-book-series/) this year. They also offered a list of suggestions for bookish Halloween décor (https://bookriot.com/2019/09/27/halloween-decor-for-book-lovers/) to help readers decorate their reading nooks in the spirit of the season. And, for readers who like to play dress-up, lists of literary Halloween costumes abound (https://www.weareteachers.com/best-literary-halloween-costumes-for-teachers/, https://bookriot.com/2017/10/10/literary-halloween-costumes/, https://www.buzzfeed.com/mallorymcinnis/lets-make-trick-or-booking-a-thing).

I don’t much go in for costumes or home dec but I love a scary story. Some of my favorites are—everything by Edgar Allan Poe, the ghost stories of M.R. James, and “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King. I don’t rely solely on literature to scare myself silly. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds gives me the creeps and makes me suspicious of our fine-feathered (so-called?) friends. Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Stephen King-derived 1408 and The Shining give me second thoughts about hotels. Laura is another favorite. It’s not a horror movie but it’s such an eerily atmospheric noir film it feels at home during the spooky season. The 1963 film, The Haunting, creeps me out even more than the Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House, that it’s based on. I can’t leave out the 80’s slasher films, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist makes my list, as does the 1976 version of The Omen (damn, that kid is creepy), Scream, and John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980). I must add Nicole Kidman’s The Others—about which I can say nothing without giving away the twist. The Babadook creeped me out so much it took me three tries to get through it. A more recent scary favorite is Netflix’s Malevolent. A couple of con artist siblings find out the joke’s on them when their fake ghost hunt turns out to be not-so-fake. Malevolent achieves what I love—a genuine creep-out without excessive gore.

Let me not leave out TV. “American Horror Story” disturbed me so much I couldn’t watch it. Same for the short-lived “The Exorcist” TV series and the long-running “Supernatural.” (This is a compliment.) Less disturbing (meaning I can make it all the way through episodes without turning on all the lights, checking to make sure the doors are locked and sitting with my back against the wall so no one can sneak up on me) but equally delightful (in a dark and twisted sort of way) are “unscripted” ghost hunting shows, like “The Dead Files” and “Ghost Adventures”, “The X-Files,” “Sleepy Hollow” (the Washington Irving story is fantastic, too.), “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991), and “The Twilight Zone.”

I can’t count the number of scary stories that are out there. If you need more suggestions, a Google search return lists such as, https://www.oregonlive.com/tv/2016/10/31_scary_tv_shows_ranked_from.html, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a24213055/scary-tv-shows/, and https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/top_100_horror_movies/. If you’re a fan of spooky, you probably have favorites of your own. Please share—what are some of your favorite seasonal reads and watches, from the not-so-scary to the jump-out-of-your-skin terrifying?

 

A Graphic Break from Writing

I just hit send on edits for my fifth Gethsemane Brown novel, Execution in E. Just, as in forty-five minutes before I sat down to write this post. (Which is why it’s late and why it may ramble.) Right now, I’m at that stage in an author’s life when I’m relieved that I finally—finally—don’t have a manuscript deadline hanging over my head (oh, sweet freedom) and where I kind of hate writing stories and never want to write again.

Of course, that’s hyperbole. I don’t hate writing, I love it. I’m amazed when a random idea stirs thoughts that my brain translates into words and puts them together in some order that makes sense not only to me but to others. But writing is hard work, mentally and (according to my eyes, wrists, back, and neck) physically exhausting. After I finish a manuscript, I need a break before jumping into the next writing project. But what kind of break?

I don’t want to do nothing. There’s too much risk of never going back to doing something. Doing nothing is my default setting because it’s so easy. I could whittle my TBR pile. Get lost in the rabbit hole (or black hole) of social media. Catch up on long-neglected emails. (Apologies to everyone I’ve ignored. Blame the edits.) But, at least for a few days, I need to take a break that doesn’t involve words. I need to exercise the visual part of my brain, the part that’s been pushed to the back of the shelf during these months while I’ve been editing my book. And, no, exercise is not a synonym for bingewatch.

I’ve decided to participate in The Sketchbook Project, sponsored by The Brooklyn Art Library. The Sketchbook Project and its companion, The Tiny Sketchbook Project, are physical collections of more than 40,000 artist sketchbooks housed at the Brooklyn Art Library in Brooklyn, New York. To participate, you buy a blank, kraft paper-covered, 5x7” and/or 2.33x1.66” notebook, register the book’s unique barcode with the library, fill the pages and decorate the covers of your book, mail the book back to the library by the deadline (each volume of the Project has a deadline—there’s no escaping them!), eh, voila!—You’re in the permanent collection. The library sends a list of suggested themes for each volume but you don’t have to stick to them. You can Instagram your progress (natch), using hashtag #sbpprogress, and you can opt (for an additional fee) to have your finished sketchbook digitized for the library’s online archive.

I’m going to challenge myself to explore visual arts while I take a break from the literary arts. Then, it’s time to jump into book six.

Remembering the American Women of World War I

Our guest today is Elizabeth Foxwell, Managing Editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection and editor of the critically acclaimed series, McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction. She has recently published an anthology of the writings of American women who served in various capacities in World War I, In Their Own Words, published by Oconee Spirit Press as both an e-book and in trade paperback. I asked her for a short description of this project, the first of its kind to focus on American women in World War I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Their work carried them up to the front, and they were subjected to shellfire, bombs and poison gas. Many of them were wounded, many of them were gassed.

 Now, unprovided for in many cases, aging and faltering under aggravation of old wounds and mental shock, and lacking the organizational punch to carry through a program which would aid them, this little band of women is calling for help.

 A recent call for the VA to assist women vets? No, these words were written by then-newspaperman Bruce Catton in 1937, long before he published his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Stillness at Appomattox. Yet his concerns about meeting the needs of the female U.S. veterans of World War I have a contemporary ring in highlighting these women’s service under combat conditions, the toll on them (some 200 American women died in the line of duty), and the nation with a short memory.

The absence of a collection reflecting the varied war work of thousands of U.S. women motivated me to compile In Their Own Words: American Women in World War I. Seeking to reach beyond the typical image of U.S. woman as war nurse, the book encompasses roles such as canteen staffer, dietician, entertainer, fingerprint expert, librarian, physician, Red Cross searcher, refugee advocate, reporter, stenographer, and telephone operator. It includes annotated, first-person accounts from the different theaters of the war, biographical information on each woman, and photographs. The accounts range from librarian Katherine Tappert’s description of reading tastes of Camp Upton (NY) patrons, official “song leader” Estelle Pearl Cushman’s activities with Southern troops, and Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore’s account of Japanese-German conflict to author-war correspondent Mary Roberts Rinehart’s apprehension about spies, pilot Ruth Bancroft Law’s campaign for admittance of women into the Army Air Corps, and black YMCA canteen worker Addie Hunton’s narrative of black soldiers burying the dead in France. I hope In Their Own Words will lead to renewed appreciation for the contributions and sacrifices of these women and so many others, and perhaps lead readers to learn further about the experiences that have real relevance to today’s women addressing the effects of war around the globe. The achievements of other American women in the war are featured on my blog American Women in World War I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “fingerprint girls” of U.S. naval intelligence, 1918. From left: Blanche Donahue, Marie S. Dahm, Blanche Stansbury, and Julia G. Boswell, with fellow fingerprint clerk James A. Noonan.

 

 

Write what you know, or...

by Kris Neri

Read below to have a chance at two different contest prizes that will go to two lucky commenters, a copy of my newly-reprinted thriller Never Say Die, and a copy of my 8-lesson writing DVD, Writing Killer Mysteries with Kris Neri: Eight Lessons to Get You Into Print.

Mark Twain once advised writers to write what they know. To be fair to Twain, that quote has probably been taken out of context and misunderstood. But whether he meant it in a broader sense or not, the question remains: should writers write what they know, or should they write what they want to know, what they deeply understand, the book and characters they connect to passionately?

I'd like to say I’m firmly in the latter camp. All of my characters, once they came to me, refused to let go until I wrote them into books. But they haven’t come from my life and circumstances. What I find especially interesting is that readers often assume that some of them come from my life, while others do not. My Tracy Eaton mystery series is one that loads of people believe must be based on truth. If you’re not familiar with it, that series features the daughter of reality-challenged Hollywood stars. I truly can’t count the number of people who’ve asked me who my parents are, as if they’re sure I’m going to name celebrities they know.

Sorry, folks, but Tracy’s over-the-top Hollywood parents, Martha Collins and Alec Grainger, are purely products of my imagination. I haven’t based them on anyone I’ve ever known, not to mention anyone I’ve ever been related to.

I also write the Samantha Brennan and Annabelle Haggerty magical series, featuring a questionable psychic who teams up with a modern goddess who is also an FBI agent. Nobody ever assumes I’m writing that from personal experience. I guess I don’t seem all that goddess-like.

The other book that people often seem to think I must have based on my real life is Never Say Die, a standalone thriller featuring edgy, enigmatic Zoey Morgan, a professional triathlete being hunted by some unknown killer. Now that Never Say Die is newly back in print, this is probably a question I’ll have to field again.

In Never Say Die, as Zoey preps for the most critical, career-making race of her life, someone hits her with a car during a training run and leaves her for dead. Though she pulls back from death’s door, she leaves behind in that nether world her memory of what might have led to the accident. As the attacks against her escalate, and the police strangely seem to regard her more as a suspect than a victim, Zoey must struggle alone to save her own life. But the choices she’s made in her shadowy life make that hard. While she prides herself on her strength and stamina in the face of physical challenges, she often retreats into cowardice in the emotional arena. Now that she needs them most, she doesn’t have the skills she needs to stand firm and fight. The things this enigmatic heroine doesn’t know about her own life just might get her killed.

On the most superficial level, it should be clear that Zoey doesn’t come from my life. She’s younger, blonder, and more fit than I’ve ever been. I have never remotely considered a career in professional athletics. So, how do I know so much about this niche career in what is a small sport in this country? At one time, my husband was a middle-aged, middle-of-the-pack amateur triathlete, and through him I met some female pros, who generously shared the insider secrets of their lives and work.

I put Zoey first in a couple of short stories, “Sentence Imposed” and “Deadly Obsessions.” I thought Zoey and I would be through with each other after writing those. Instead, I found I wanted to know more about her life. I wanted to know how she came to be the woman I met in “Sentence Imposed,” the first of the stories. In effect, my novel Never Say Die is a prequel to those stories, a history of Zoey’s many challenges and her growth.

So, no, I’ve never shared her career. But there are aspects of Zoey’s makeup I deeply understand. I understand her drive, her obsession — because I find those qualities in my own makeup. I also know why she holds back sometimes because I have those corners in my own character as well. My life is certainly not Zoey’s, but maybe a few aspects of it have become building blocks in hers.

Okay, so maybe I do both. Maybe I do sometimes write what I know. But after those things are processed through the character and her circumstances, I’m not sure that anybody but me could tell.

How about you, writers? Do you write what you know? And, readers, do you look for characters whose circumstances mirror your own?

 I will randomly choose one person leaving a comment to win a copy of Never Say Die. And I will choose one person to receive a copy of my writing DVD course, Writing Killer Mysteries with Kris Neri. Please indicate in your comment whether you want to be considered for either or both.

Where were you?

Today the Femmes welcome Lesa Holstine as a guest-blogger. An Indiana library administrator, Lesa is the author of the "Mystery" chapter in Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests. Lesa's Book Critiques is her blog, where she discusses books and authors, emphasizing mysteries. A contributing book reviewer for Library Journal, Mystery Readers Journal, and ReadertoReader.com, she was the winner of the 2009 and 2010 Spinetingler Awards for Best Reviewer.

For those of us of a certain age, November 22 marks the anniversary of the greatest mystery of our lifetime. Who was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Most people are sure Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Others, like my late husband, are convinced we never knew the whole story about the assassination. Fifty years later, the story still plays out on television and in the numerous books on the subject.

It seems everyone from Stephen King to Bill O'Reilly has a Kennedy book. If you're a Kennedy buff, a conspiracy theorist, or a librarian, you've seen all kinds of books in the last couple years leading up to the anniversary. As a public librarian, I'm guessing the most popular nonfiction topics in the U.S. are the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, World War II, and John F. Kennedy. We're fascinated by tragedy on a grand scale. And, assassinations that affect the entire country certainly are on a grand scale.

I know we don't have every book, but there are ninety-five nonfiction entries under "Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963-Assassination" in the online catalog at the library where I work. There are books that theorize that LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, the mob, or the CIA were involved in the shooting, including some ideas so strange that maybe the books should be fiction. There are also some fascinating compilations such as LIFE The Day Kennedy Died: Fifty Years Later: LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment by The Editors of LIFE or The Kennedy Years From the Pages of The New York Times, Richard Reeves, General Editor.

Looking for fiction? The biggest one (in more ways than one) is Stephen King's 11/22/63. Jim Lehrer's latest book is Top Down, a novel about a journalist and a Secret Service agent. Don DeLillo's 1991 novel, Libra, is still well-known. Even Columbo was brought into the assassination arena in a 1993 novel, Columbo: The Grassy Knoll by William Harrington. And, I have to say, my husband would have loved all the theories and books. He would have read every one of them.

I'm one of the youngest people who still remember November 22, 1963 fifty years later. I was six. We know where we were when we heard President John F. Kennedy was shot. For me, the memory that lingers came later. I was home with chicken pox the day of the funeral. I remember the sound of those drums. The echo of those drums over the years still symbolize the tragedy of a nation.

"Black Friday" is the day after Thanksgiving, a shopping day. For many of us who remember, the first black Friday in American history was November 22, 1963. Do you remember where you were?

The Stinkin' Rose

by Kris Neri

Is it possible to use too much garlic in cooking? Maybe, but I haven’t hit my personal garlic tipping point yet.

Case in point: Recently, Joe and I planned to make a pesto to use with cheese raviolis, along with some garlic bread. While I picked basil leaves in the garden, he crushed most of a head of garlic. Apparently, he planned for that bowl of crushed garlic to go in both the pesto and on the garlic bread. I misunderstood and threw it all into the food processor for mixing into the pesto.

Okay, that was probably a lot of garlic even for me. And I’m one of those people who buys into its
natural antibiotic properties, baking up a head of garlic whenever I feel a cold coming on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t — but it’s always so good, I never seem to mind a getting a cold so much.

Getting back to the pesto…I had to admit that when I tasted it raw, the garlic came through a tad too sharply. However, after only a little time on the stove, allowing it to warm, and when it blended with the creamy ravioli filling, it became deliciously mild and nutty, and remarkably balanced. Well, for my taste.

I probably can’t be objective when it comes to garlic. I’ve always been nuts about it. When I was much younger, I lived for a time in San Francisco. While we lived there, someone opened the most unique restaurant, The Stinking Rose, in which every dish on the menu contained staggering amounts of garlic. In a city filled with great restaurants, The Stinking Rose remains my favorite. Enough other people must agree because not only is the original in San Francisco still thriving, they now have one in Beverly Hills, too.

Garlic in California isn’t limited to two great restaurants, either. Gilroy, California calls itself the “Garlic Capital of the World.” In actuality, Gilroy doesn’t grow more garlic than anywhere else in the world, though they do grow loads there. Its claim to fame comes from the fact that one business, Gilroy Foods, processes more garlic than any other factory worldwide. If you buy your garlic fresh, it may come from Gilroy, but it may not. If you buy it in a jar, however, there’s a good chance that garlic began its life in Gilroy.

Gilroy is also famous for its annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, which truly is the mother of all garlic-celebrating festivals, and I’ve attended more than a few such events in various places. If you plan to go, plan well in advance. It’s tough to get a reservation in a local hotel if you haven’t made your reservations months, if not more than a year, in advance. After all, more than a hundred thousand stinkin’ souls invade this small farming community at festival time. There, you’ll find every kind of food made with garlic. My favorite is garlic French fries. Hot potatoes, hot fat, hot garlic — yum. What’s not to like?

There’s also a Great Garlic Cook-off, celebrity chef cooking demonstrations, a garlic braiding workshop, arts and crafts, live music, and much, much more. They even host a beauty pageant, crowning a Miss Gilroy Garlic Queen and her court, which they choose partly on the girls’ speeches about…well, you can probably guess — garlic. In the arts and crafts section, I still remember a beautifully painted platter depicting bulbs of garlic growing in a colorful garden. Deciding it was too expensive, I didn’t buy it. Sigh…I still wish I had, though.

The only garlic dish I’ve ever tried that I didn’t like is garlic ice cream. If you’ve never had it, you don’t have to attend a garlic festival to find it, you can make it yourself. Chop up lots and lots of garlic. Then mix that with a serving of your favorite flavor of ice cream. I had it mixed in vanilla. It tastes just as you’d imagine, with the raw garlic taste proving to be an oddly sharp compliment to the creamy, sweet ice cream. I somehow thought they would blend into something unique and wonderful. The “unique” certainly happened. But the “wonderful”? Not so much.

But other than ice cream, I think virtually everything can be made better with the addition of garlic.

How about you? What’s your garlic tolerance like? 

 

I drove in Southern California, and lived to tell about it

by Kris Neri

As a result of my recent Southern California tour for Revenge on Route 66, I have a confession to make: I am not in shape.

I’m not referring to my physical conditioning, although that’s also true. I have maintained the weight loss I managed to achieve last year, but my muscles are as gooey as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. Of course, since I live at altitude, when I return to sea level, I enjoy great stamina. If I had any muscular strength, I could go on forever.

But as I said, I’m not talking about my body not being in shape. I mean I’m not in shape to drive the Southern California freeways, the gold medal event in demolition derbies.

Driving challenges and unique road characteristics exist everywhere, though the degree of difficulty required to stay alive varies enormously. Here in Northern Arizona, that’s certainly true. In Sedona, the greatest challenge involves anticipating the awe of tourists who are likely to forget to accelerate in the face of an interesting rock formation. I’ve almost hit a few cars drifting to a stop.

And in nearby Cottonwood, the locals exhibit a curious practice at stop streets. They stop. Usually. But it doesn’t seem to occur to too many people that they’re supposed to remain stopped at a stop street that feeds into a right-of-way street. After a second or two, they simply drift slowly into ongoing traffic, causing cars in both directions to have to come to an immediate halt to avoid hitting them. They always seem surprised by the horns and nasty hand signals that result, too, as if everyone should know a stop sign means that after the briefest-ever stop, you’re allowed to go, no matter what the traffic conditions are like.

It’s only disconcerting the first few thousand times you experience it. Since speed limits here in Arizona are often set at snail pace, there’s rarely any danger, except to the frustration levels of driver who crazily believe stop signs mean drivers should stay stopped until they have the right to go. Heck, even the local cops drive that say.

Okay, small town driving can be quirky. But I don’t just drive in small towns. I make appearances in Phoenix and Tucson all the time, so I should be keeping my city driving chops in good shape.

But just as there's a difference between high school track meets and the Olympics, the stakes involved in  city driving will vary as well. In Arizona there is plenty of road space for local dwellers and visitors to share comfortably. That makes for more relaxed, considerate driving. (We could discuss a state that pours millions into road construction -- often widening little traveled roads in the middle of nowhere -- while continually defunding education, but that's a topic for a different day.)

Whereas in Southern California, no matter how much the freeways there are widened, there is never enough space by a factor of ten. That turns driving into a blood sport. While I did survive driving in that jungle for which I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t excel.

For instance, I forgot that when you want to change lanes there, you never signal. That just alerts other drivers to your plans, which gives them the edge in subverting you. When the stakes for space are so high, other drivers feel they have to snatch that bit of lane opening up before anyone can. Even if, by filling the spot you want, they find themselves in the absolute wrong space for their own exit. Not a problem. They can always frantically cut across six lanes to make their own exits. Southern California drivers have to be prepared to react to that, too.

While people there take pride in their ability to navigate this automotive jungle--including my husband, who is still a master--I must confess that even when I lived there, I was never among the best of the best. When I used to teach night classes on campus at UCLA, I always dreaded the ride home. By 10:30-11:00 pm, the freeways there finally move, but they're still crowded. Lane after lane of cars cruise at 80 mph with only three feet between bumpers. I always hoped that if fatigue did cause me to spin out at that speed, my car would tumble somewhere in a field where it's relatively safe to come to a stop on your car’s roof, rather than crashing through someone's house or flying off a freeway overpass.

Yet strangely, while Southern Californians take pride in their abilities to handle their crowded commutes, they also are a bit touchy about criticism. A long time ago, back when I mostly wrote nonfiction pieces, I once penned a funny article about local driving patterns. Sure, it poked fun, but with good-natured humor--nothing mean-spirited at all. I submitted that piece to all the local periodicals for which it might have been appropriate. But every one of them rejected it. And not just rejected — rejected with nasty, outraged letters, expressing how deeply my remarks had offended them. I felt as if, with my submissions, I should have sent along bandages for all those nerves I seemed to have exposed. It was one of the only spec pieces I wrote that I never sold.

I’m not any fonder now of Southern California driving than I was then. But I drove there once more throughout my recent tour, and I lived to tell about it. Just barely, though. Before my next tour, I think I’ll try to take some laps on really crowded Nascar tracks. That won’t test me enough, but it’ll be a start.

What’s the craziest, most maddening aspect of driving where you live?

Secrets and lies

by Kris Neri

My next Tracy Eaton mystery, Revenge on Route 66, will be out in mid-March. Its central theme is secrets, and the lies characters tell to keep those secrets.

That got me thinking about the lies real people tell. Are they all the same? How about the ones we call “white lies”? Some people maintain those are merely the grease that make sticky social cogs run more smoothly. But are they really harmless? 

I mean, if a woman asks her mate whether her jeans make her look fat, does she  really want a true answer, especially if they actually do make her look fat? Isn’t she really asking her significant other to help her engage in denial to boost her self-confidence? Wouldn’t telling her the truth just be cruel and unnecessary? Shouldn’t her SO want her to feel better about herself even if it means telling a little fib?

Still, it is a lie.

How about lies of omission? What if a friend wore something in a color that made her look sickly or blotchy? Would you tell her she should avoid that color at all costs? Me, I probably wouldn’t. It seems unnecessarily mean, even though some people might prefer to know it. I also probably couldn’t stretch the white lie limit by going so far as to tell her she looked good in that wretched color. However, I would make a note of it, and the next time I saw her wear a color that was especially flattering to her, I’d go out of my way to make sure she knew that was her color. What would you do?

Maybe the key is that lies told to avoid hurting someone, or truths held back for the same reason, are easier to justify.

But what if the lies were more serious? What if the person they could potentially hurt — is the actual liar? If there was something in your past that you felt sure would make people look at your differently, what would you do to keep that hidden? How far would you go? Those are the kinds of lies that are central to Revenge on Route 66. I won’t tell you everything my characters did, but like most real people my characters go to great lengths to keep their pasts from rising up to haunt them now.

I so enjoyed dealing with the secrets and lies in my characters lives, characters I’ve known for a long time, who kept those secrets even from me! Mysteries are often rooted in secrets and lies, of course, but rarely to this degree.

Personally, though, I’m more convinced than ever that I enjoy a cleaner past than my characters. I’m not sure I could handle the pressure of keeping such whoppers under wraps. Besides, doesn’t the truth have a nasty way of coming out eventually? And it’s worse for having been kept hidden for so long.

How about you? What’s your take on the harmless white lies? And how about the others, the ones told to hide the secrets that could make or break a life if they came out? What do you think about them?

Do people have a right to keep their secrets hidden?

Mercury, you X#&% devil!

by Kris Neri

For those of you who are into astrology...mercury will be coming out of retrograde in a few days. Can’t come too soon for me. I’m used to little electronic oddities popping up during Mercury retrogrades — broadband slows down, small, inexplicable changes appear in files, computer applications behave in atypical ways, and other electronic roadblocks show up that require some little time to get around them. But this time, Mercury, that blankety-blank devil, has really beaten up the Neri household in a memorable way.

Back when I was younger and more of a skeptic, I considered all this doomsday talk about Mercury retrogrades to be pure hooey. The trouble was that even if I didn’t believe in it, my electronics and appliances did. If my appliances were going to break, they did it then. If my electronics were going to burp, those burps also came during retrograde periods. Hey, I might have been a skeptic, but I wasn’t stupid – even I could see the pattern that kept emerging.

If I weren’t a believer now, I'm sure I would be now. Our biggest mishap was that our bookstore (we own The Well Red Coyote bookstore in Sedona, AZ) crashed, taking with it our Point of Sale software, the only way we have to conduct our business, and our only inventory record. It took three dawn-to-dark, exhausting days, two computer consultants, and numerous calls to tech support , but at the end of it, we were up and running again. Since then my own personal computer has been doing odd things, such as renaming folders, changing them from words that describe that folder’s contents to a random assortment of letters, and has been falling into such a deep sleep, it’s almost impossible to wake it. And finally, the bright red LED lettering on my car’s radio/CD player has faded into oblivion. Those last two might seem minor by comparison, but I like knowing what my computer’s folders contain without having to guess, and it’s useful to know what my CD player is playing just by looking. Mostly, though, I’m fed up with electronic mishaps.

A side casualty in the Mercury-electronic-failings is that they take with us our confidence in those pieces of hardware and software. The absolute certainty we typically maintain that when we turn them on, they’ll always operate as we expect them to. When serious problems occur, that confidence can be replaced by a knot in the gut, and is often responsible for a financial outlay. Either a little, or in our case this time, a lot of money.

I’ve been told that retrogrades are merely planetary slowdowns, but with my schedule, I can’t afford  to go any slower. I’ve also been told that retrogrades  are times meant to teach us lessons. I can’t deny that. The backup software operating  in our store’s computer was part of a package we bought from a company providing bookstore POS software. We were assured it would save the day if the worst-case scenario occurred. It didn’t. So we did learn something important, albeit at a high price, financially and emotionally. Now we’ve rectified that with what we think is stronger backup system. I’m grateful for that, although I wish that lesson could have come in a less dramatic fashion.

Sure, I know other planets retrograde as well, but that never seems to affect things the way Mercury retrogrades do. What’s crazy is that Mercury is the ruling planet of Gemini – and my husband Joe is a Gemini, and I have Gemini rising. Maybe Mercury expects more from us. I have news for that $%&# devil – I expect more from it, too.

How about you? Have you had any retrograde mishaps?

When did reading become uncool?

by Kris Neri

Long before I was a writer, I was a reader. I think I was practically born reading. Even before I understood what those marks were on the pages of my picture books, I made up stories that I pretended to read. You could also argue that was writing, so I suppose I was born writing as well. But it was also my way of expressing that, even as a toddler, I understood that reading was something I considered important, and something I wanted to be able to do.

I suppose it helped that my mother was a voracious reader, that I could see that the happiest part of her day was the quiet time she spent with a book. It wasn’t long before that was our shared reading time.

I can’t imagine a life without the pleasure of reading. Sure, I know we all have too little time. I certainly do. I’m a writer with too many day jobs — I own and operate a bookstore, I teach writing, and I edit. Still, while I’m pulled in too many different directions, just as I make time to write, I also make time to read. I breathe, I read.

For a developing writer, reading provides an amazing advantage. In addition to whatever personal pleasure a story provides, every book a newish writer reads also provides so many lessons in writing, which the aspiring writer absorbs unconsciously and effortless.

When I teach writing classes, I always ask my students to include, as a part of their introductions, the authors they read regularly, or the books they’ve enjoyed lately. Mostly, I want to know whether they’re reading contemporary mysteries or they’re more interested in the classics. While there’s plenty to learn from the authors of the crime genre’s Golden Age, it’s absolutely essential that new writers develop a sense of today’s mysteries, so they understand the expectations of modern agents, editors, and readers. Art always reflects its culture, and the crime genre has evolved enormously since the sedate days of the classics. While my job as a writing instructor is certainly to provide them with explicit instruction in the craft of writing, I also see it as my role to direct them to the authors I know they’ll benefit from for implicit instruction.

So, coming from a reading background, you can probably appreciate my shock when I report that increasingly a significant portion of my students insist to me that they have never read and don't intend to. It’s just not something that interests them.

Oh, they’re in the minority of my students — the majority are devoted readers — but the non-readers are a larger and more vocal minority than I would have ever expected.

I don’t get it. This is frankly a hard career. It’s hard to get published, and for too many, it’s hard to stay published today. Writers also have to achieve a publishable standard on their own — while we are edited, writers are no longer leisurely mentored by editors through draft after draft as they were in decades past.

 Why would anyone devote themselves to a difficult-to-learn craft and a difficult-   to-achieve career if they didn’t love the written word? And if they do love the written word, why wouldn’t they read.

If they merely yearn to see their names on a cover, a far easier route would be to simply print their names on some cover design and forget about filling all those pages in between.

I know I’m right about how much reading influences writers. I can always see the differences in the quality of assignments between the readers and non-readers. The quality of the readers’ prose is always more mature, their voices are more lively, as is their dialogue, along with their ability to weave in different types of dramatic beats.

The non-readers, by contrast, will often insist to me that their non-reader friends tell them they don’t need descriptions of places or characters, and they seem to find it annoying when I insist they do. If they read, this wouldn’t come as a surprise to them.

I don’t mind beating a very dead horse, so I expect to keep repeating what I’ve written here for my non-reading students. I even bring in bigger guns to sway them. My favorite quote is one Stephen King wrote in On Writing: “You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

Hey, maybe I should just stop reading their assignments.