Cabbages and Kings

Day 15: Intermission!

2008-06-09T17:00:00.004-04:00

This was a good day. Got a chapter finished and so did Kelly. In honor of that, we deserve a break. Let's have some fun. I saw this little quiz on one of my fave blogs and I have to admit, I had trouble figuring out my answers.

So I thought I'd ask you guys. Go get some Sno-caps and fill in the blanks:

1) Worst well-regarded film
2) Most overhyped film (note that this is slightly different from above; the first measures the absolute badness level, while the second measures the delta between reputation and actual quality)
3) Worst film to win a best picture Oscar
4) Most disappointing film (ie should have been good but wasn't)
5) Worst movie, full stop. (Must have been a major motion picture release--no direct-to-video, or film festival torture tactics, please)
6) Worst movie with good direction (ie terrible script, awful acting, producer interference, etc)
7) Biggest unknown treasure

Here's my picks:
1. "Unforgiven" (sorry, Clint)
2. "Cleopatra" (Even Richard Burton couldn't save this toga dog)
3. Vintage: "The Greatest Show on Earth" (Jimmy Stewart as a murdering clown!) Modern: "Crash" (a total wreck)
4. "Godfather III"
5. "Staying Alive" (John Travolta as a loincloth-clad Broadway gypsy; a crass sequel attempt to cash in on "Saturday Night Fever")
6. "2001"
7. "Cinema Paradiso" (okay, it won best foreign film but it's still my fave "little" movie. I also have a soft spot for "Downhill Racer" (Robert Redford going against type as a bastard Olympic skiier)

What say you?

Day 14: Is there such a thing as GOOD procrastination?

2008-06-05T15:08:00.005-04:00

It has been a rough two weeks. Kelly and I are having real problems getting traction on this new book. And when things aren't going well, it's pretty easy to find excuses. When the going gets tough, the tough...

Fold laundry.
Do the Times crossword puzzle.
Read blogs.
Write blogs.
Watch soap operas.

I've never been a soaps fan and even after I quit the day job to work at home, I never gravitated to daytime TV. Until this year. This year, I found the greatest time-killer, the best reason not to work, the most riveting soap opera in our times. Yup, you got it...

Kelly and I have been completely mesmerized by this historic battle. I have to say, rather shamefully, that I am 57 years old and although I have voted in every election since I was 25, I never really followed politics very closely. It tells you how issue-savvy I was in my youth that I voted for Gerald Ford only because he was from my home state. But this year...this year, I think this campaign has been a good distraction for me. I have learned more in the last six months about how this government works than I had in all my decades before. It has been enthralling. Some, however, say it has been ugly. To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck's famous quote: "Politics are like sausages, it is better not to see it being made."

I disagree. If I have learned only one thing from watching this campaign it is that we need to pay close attention to the sausage making.

Allow me a different metaphor. I'm left thinking that politics is a little like baseball. Both are best appreciated if you know the strategy, the rules, the history, the personalities behind the game. What does it say about me that now, in the fall of my life, I can explain the in-field fly rule and the Texas caucas system? I'm hoping it says I am maybe a better voter than I was in my Gerald Ford days.

The epic Democratic primary campaign is over now. Kelly and I are, like the candidates, decompressing and trying to get back to our work. Yesterday, I finally finished a chapter I had been agonizing on for two full weeks. Is it a coincidence that I finished it on the day the Democrats finally declared they had a "presumptive nominee?"

I can't go back to mere laundry-folding after this. So I signed up.

The book will get done. But so will other things. I guess this is just procrastination I can believe in.

Day 3: What's that smell?

2008-05-11T13:40:00.012-04:00

Okay, here we are, Day 3 of the New Book Diary, and I am still struggling with my opening paragraph. What do you think of this one?

The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. It's infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air...."

Yeah, that's what I thought. Whee, doggies! What's that smell?

But I didn't write it, thank god. It is the opening of a project created by Penguin and wiki called "A Million Penquins." Maybe you heard about it when it was announced a couple months back. The idea was to write a novel with a million collaborators.

And Kelly and I thought we had it tough with just two.

This is what the Penguin folks said on their website: "We've created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else's writing....we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel."

Turns out there were only 1,500 contributors. But that was 1,499 too many from the looks of things. But I guess this at least proves that the Infinite Monkey Theorum just might be true after all.

If you want to read the whole Penguin novel, here's the link. As for me, I think I better get back to work. I hear the footsteps of a million monkeys on my ass...

Day 2: Hook, lines and stinkers

2008-05-06T15:55:00.004-04:00

The opening line of a book is the single hardest line you write.

Many writers would disagree with that. But for my money, they are: A. those lucky devils for whom all things come easy; B. those diligent do-bees who can scribble down anything just to get started and then go back and rewrite or C. those types who aren't really very good at what they do or maybe are just phoning it in.

I know, that sounds a little harsh. But I truly believe this. I have great respect and envy for writers who create great openings and little regard for those who never even try. And can't you tell the difference?

I am not talking about "hooks." I'm talking about those rare and glorious opening moments in great stories that are telling us, "OOheee, something special is about to happen here!" Hooks? That's easy. I am firmly of the mind that anyone can write a decent hook. You've seen them, those clever one-liners tossed out by wise-ass PIs, those archly ironic first-person soliloquies, those purple-prose weather reports that substitute for mood.

We crime writers talk alot about great hooks -- getting the reader engaged in the first couple pages. We worry about whether we should throw out a corpse in the first chapter, whether one-liners are best, if readers attention spans are too short for a slow burn beginning. This is especially true if you are writing what we categorize as "thrillers."

But I'm tired of hooks. I'm thinking that the importance of a great opening goes beyond its ability to keep the reader just turning the pages. A great opening is a book's soul in miniature. Within those first few paragraphs -- sometimes buried, sometimes artfully disguised, sometimes signposted -- are all the seeds of theme, style and most powerfully, the very voice of the writer herself.

It's like you whispering in the reader's ear as he cracks the spine and turns to that pristine Page 1: "This is the world I am taking you into. This is what I want to tell you. You won't understand it all until you are done but this is a hint, a flavor, of what I have in store for you."

Which is why, today on Day 2, I am still staring at the blank page. Nothing has come to me yet and I know that I can't move forward until I find just the right key to unlock what is to come. I sit here, staring at my blank Wordperfect page, thinking that if I can only make good on my beginning's promise, everything else will follow. Because that is what a great opening is to me: a promise to my reader that what I am about to give them is worth their time, is something they haven't seen before, something that is...uniquely me.

Oh hell, I'll let Joan Didion explain it. I have a feeling she's given this a lot more thought than I have:

Q: You have said that once you have your first sentence you’ve got your piece. That’s what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.

Didion: What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Q: The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

Didion: Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.

Didion gave this interview around the time she published her great memoir after her husband's death "The Year of Magical Thinking," the first line of which is: "Life changes fast."

Maybe I am more hung up than usual on openings because I have read some really good books lately.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Wonderful opening, that one, from Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex." Because there in that one deceivingly simple declarative sentence lies the all tenderness, irony and roiling epic scope of his story.

And then there was this one:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

That one is from Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." This is the first line of a long paragraph of description that opens the book, yet look at what it accomplishes -- sets us down immediately in his setting, conveys the book's bleak mood and hints with those two words "out there" that he is taking us to an alien place where nothing makes sense (the criminal mind).

And here is the one I just started last night. I think you will recognize it:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta..

I don't know whether to laugh or cry (out of envy) when I read that one.

What is so terrifying about openings, I suppose, is that you only have so much space to work with: the first line, the first paragraph, that's it. Because once you've moved deeper into that first chapter, that golden moment of anticipation is gone and then you the writer are busily engaging all the gears to move the reader onward. The opening is the moment before the kiss; the rest is relationship. And you only have precious seconds to make a good impression.

I read a lot of crime novels. I do this to keep up with what's going on in our business but I also do it out of pleasure. But it seems to me that lately I am reading too many genre books that just aren't trying hard enough, and you really can see it in the openings. Maybe this has something to do with the pressure to put out a book a year. Maybe I am reading the wrong people. But I do find myself wishing for less "hook" and more artfulness.

But that said, I pulled a couple books from my crime shelf and found some "oldies" that I liked.

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped a girl off the bridge. -- John D. MacDonald, "Darker Than Amber"

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. -- James M. McCain, "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

The girl was saying goodbye to her life. And it was no easy farewell. -- Val McDermid, "A Place of Execution."

Not bad for one-liners. Then there are the more measured openings:

Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker - somber and sympathetic about it when I'm with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I'm alone. I've always thought the secret of dealing with death was to keep it at arm's length. That's the rule. Don't let it breathe in your face.
But my rule didn't protect me.

That's one of my favorites from Mike Connelly. It's from "The Poet" and it works because it succinctly captures his protagonist's voice and the theme of the story.

There is a bullet in my chest, less an a centimeter from my heart. I don't think about it much anymore. It's just a part of me now. But every once in a while, one a certain kind of night, I remember that bullet. I can feel the weight of it inside me. I can feel its metallic hardness. And even though that bullet has been warming inside my body for fourteen years, on a night like this when it is dark enough and the wind is blowing, that bullet feels as cold as the night.

Lovely writing from Steve Hamilton and see how the bullet, the setting and the key point of Alex McKnight's backstory coalese around theme?

These are some of the few who know the difference between a hook and an opening. These are the writers among us. These are the folks who understand that sometimes you have to write the opening last, like Picasso signing his painting. Because the great opening is the writer's true signature.

Diary Day 1: On with the show!

2008-04-17T15:13:00.007-04:00

Overture, curtains, lights,
This is it, the night of nights!
No more rehearsing and nursing a part
We know every part by heart
Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it!

Well, the curtain is about to go up on Book No. 10. And though that makes me a veteran on this crime writing stage, I still have first night jitters.

Writing that first paragraph never gets easier, folks. You'd think it would be rote by now. But starting a new book, confronting that awful field of white on the NEW Wordperfect document -- it is painful for me. Not just psychicly painful. Physically painful. Like stomach-knotting, heart-palpatating painful. (I've been telling myself it's just the diverticulosis but it's not). I have been putting this off for weeks now, procrastinating with every conceivable excuse. First there was SleuthFest. Then there was a friend's visit. Then I had to prepare for the Edgar symposium. And there was that critique I had been putting off. And all that laundry to be folded...

Of course, the longer you wait, the worse it gets. Because writing is exactly like exercising. If you stop doing it, your energy flags, your muscles atrophy, your mind grows cobwebs. You get fat and lazy. Then get you depressed because you've gotten fat and lazy.

Why is this so difficult? It's a confidence thing. Every time Kelly and I start a new book, I am scared shitless that this is the one that will reek. I'm terrified that we have run out of gas; that our ambivilence is showing and we will become one of those pathetic writers who phone it in. I'm worried that we don't have the energy to do it again. I'm thinking that this is the plot that is pallid, that this story is shapeless. I am certain that this is when it will all fall apart and everyone will see me for the fraud I am.

But...

Then I remind myself that once things get going -- oh, around chapter 20 or so -- it will come together. It will become fun again. I remind myself that I have been here before and come out the other end okay. I remind myself that every book feels like you are pushing a mamoth boulder up a hill until that beautiful moment when you crest and then you race downhill in an exhilarating rush. I remind myself that I am so damn lucky to have a contract in these tough times, to have the support of a fine editor and publisher, to get paid to think stuff up, to have readers who buy our books and write us emails of thanks. I remind myself about all of this and try to stop whining and do my job.

The good thing is, there is redemption even for scofflaws. There is always another day, a new chance. Another Monday....

Today is Monday. Today, I typed out CHAPTER ONE. (hey, it's a start, man!) But then I made a short detour here. Because I am going to try something new with this book. I am going to begin each day's writing with a short diary entry here about my progress. Yes, yes....I KNOW that is procrastination of sorts. Blogging, as we all know, is a huge time suck. As one of my favorite editor types Neil Nyren put it recently over at Murderati: "Blogs – I probably shouldn’t be saying this -- but sometimes I wonder if all the time and energy spent on writing a blog might not be better spent on…well, you know what I’m going to say."

But for me, in the past, this blog has also been like a quick set of jumping jacks. See, I figure just the fact that I have to come here and move my fingers over the keyboard might get my lard ass in gear again for the heavy lifting of fiction.

So, this is my first entry in a diary that will chronicle my trip on this curious winding road called writing. Destination: Untitled Book No. 10. Length of journey: as long as it takes. ETA: It's in the contract. What we'll see along the way: God only knows.

Every journey starts with one keystroke.

Ask not what you can do for your cell phone...

2008-03-23T14:50:00.003-04:00

I was going to wax philosophic about book stuff today but when I started reading over what I had written -- three different entries! -- it was all self-important gas. I mean, do we really need my opinion on Border's decision to stock all their books face out? Methinks not.

So while I wrestle with getting the concept for the next book in and free up my brain cells for fresh material, I offer you some really useful advice. Now, bear in mind I am a techno-phobe, a true Luddite as my friend Jerry Healy keeps telling me. (he should talk; the man is still using cans with string.) But even I have to admit some of this is cool. So print this out and keep it in your wallet.

FIVE THINGS YOUR CELL PHONE CAN DO FOR YOU

1. EMERGENCY HELP: The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile network and there is an emergency, dial 112. The mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly, this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

2. LOCKED OUT? Okay numbnuts, you locked your keys in the car. Does your car have remote keyless entry? Is there someone at home with spare remote? Call their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

3. HIDDEN BATTERY POWER. Imagine your cell battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#. Your cell phone will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell phone next time.

4. CELL PHONE STOLEN OR MISSING? You can disable it. To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: *#06#. A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep itsomewhere safe. When your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

5. FREE 411: Directory Service for cell phone companies are charging us $1.00 to $1.75 or more for411 information calls when they don't have to. Most of us do not carry a telephone directory in our vehicle, which makes this situation even more of a problem. When you need to use the 411 information option, simply dial: (800)FREE411, or (800) 373-3411 without incurring any charge at all. Program this into your cell phone now.

You're welcome! Back tomorrow with something sage and salient about writing, I hope.

Now let's talk about the bird

2008-02-11T11:37:00.008-05:00

I'm back. Sorry for the absence. Did your heart grow fonder?

Probably not. I know how annoyed I get when I click over to my favorite bloggers and find they haven't posted anything fresh. (Where have you gone, Barry Eisler?... a nation turns its lonely eyes to you...woo woo woo. And let's start a petition to get Miss Snark back while we're at it. )

Blogging is like flossing. If you don't do it every day, your gums bleed, your teeth go bad and start falling out, bacteria enters your bloodstream, you get a horrible debilitating disease and you die alone and in great agony. Probably without a will.

Okay, that's just what my dental hygenist tells me to scare me. But it works for blogging, too. If you don't do it with regularity and conviction, you die.

So I am back, if you'll have me. And today, I want to talk about the black bird.

You know which one I mean. Literature's most famous MacGuffin. The "fairly interesting statuette." The stuff dreams are made of. *

This year is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon." This deceptively simple detective story first saw the light of day as a serial in the old pulp magazine "Black Mask." But here we are decades later, still talking about the bird. Today, I was on a panel as part of our library system's "Big Read" program, talking about Hammett's book with three talented crime writers: Jonathon King, Anthony Gagliano and Christine Kling. And while we had great fun yakking about such tangential topics as femme fatales, the Depression and Humphrey Bogart, we kept coming back to the same thing: What is it about this book that still pulls at us?

Jonathon started things off by saying he appreciates the book mainly through his writer's prism. "To me, it's all about the writing," he said. Jon is a splendid writer (James Lee Burke no less said of his stuff: "He captures the intrigue, lyrical beauty, and darkness of the Florida Everglades better than any other writer I know of.") But it was kind of cool to hear Jon say he wishes he could get away with using words like "heater" in his books.

Anthony made an interesting point that Sam Spade was a new type of hero on the American landscape, a guy who can trace his lineage back to the Shanesque saviors of the American western. To which I had to respond that Spade reminded me most of Palladin -- a black knight who drank good whiskey, frequented the best San Francisco hotels and meted out justice according to his own moral code.

Chris had many points to offer -- there was a lively discussion of Spade's treatment of women -- but she was at her best in interpreting for us the famous Flitcraft parable , the theme that throbs at the dark heart of Hammett's story. It takes an English teacher to make stuff like that clear.

And what a great audience. One gentleman was so knowledgable about Hammett's life that he could have written a credible biography. A woman argued passionately that Lillian Hellman had written much of Hammett's best stuff -- and vice versa. But my favorite was the little elderly lady in the front who had read "The Maltese Falcon" as a girl during the Depression and reminded us it was "good entertainment, something to make us forget about things."

And that it is. Still. Critics and scholars will continue to dissect this book. Here's one essay in January Magazine I particularly liked written by Richard Layman, author of "Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett." And experts will continue to praise it: E.D. Hirsch, author of "New Dictionary of Cultural Literary" lists it as one of the 102 significant writers. (Hammett is only one of four crime writers listed, the others being Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Raymond Chandler).

But the bottom line? I have to side with the elderly lady in the front row. "The Maltese Falcon" is just a helluva good yarn.

* This line never appears in the book. Just the movie.

The real story on the fume-addled thriller writer

2008-02-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

It was hard not to be pissed if you read this past week about Whitbread award-winner Joan Brady. The American-born author sued a shoe factory in her English village claiming that toxic fumes wafting into her neighboring home had caused so much damage to her health that she had been "reduced to writing thrillers."

There was much gnashing of teeth in the crime writers world, of course, because here was yet another literary type taking cheap shots at genre fiction. This after Brady's thriller Bleedout" became an international bestseller. Harumph! How dare she slum, snark then take the money and run!

Well, come to find out, Brady never said any of this. The fumes thing came from a London Times headline, which also juxtaposed two extracts - one from her award-winning "Theory of War," the other ostensibly the opening paragraph of Bleedout (it is actually from later in the book) under the headline "Dumbing Down."

Here's an excerpt from a more recent article, quoting Brady on the brouhaha:

"I haven't dumbed down. I never said it. That's the pure invention of the Times. They have decided that this effete literary woman has become so stupid that she can no longer write boring literary fiction and writes poorly selling thrillers instead. My mental faculties haven't deteriorated. And anyway, what an insult it would be to thriller writers to suggest that you need to be stupid to write them. It seems to me so irritating that you would denigrate a remarkable genre where much of the best writing is done. I'm a great admirer of writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow."

The idea for the thriller "Bleedout" came only because she was mad as hell after battling for years for justice: "I wanted to line these people up against the wall and machine gun them. Magistrates, environmental health officers, lawyers, shoemakers, everybody. It's amazing how violent your imagination gets. I'd never been that angry before. At least you can kill people in a [thriller]."

Kind of makes me want to go out and buy her book now.

You can read the whole article HERE.

I'll take Brady and Barack and the points

2008-02-01T16:19:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm stoked. Two days to Super Bowl Sunday! As with political affiliation, it's not wise to disclose which side I'm rooting for. Let's just say I'm in a New York state of mind. (And I ain't talking about senators here).

But speaking of politics, I was watching Hill and Barack go at it last night and I got to thinking that maybe these debates could use a couple guys in the booth to tell us what is going on down there on the dias. You know, like football guys. Bring in Al Michaels to do the play-by-play and John Madden to do color commentary. The same cliches they use in football would work really well for debates:

Al: This game is going to be won in the trenches.
John: Obama needs to play smash-mouth football.
Al: Clinton should stick with her original game plan.
John: Oh man, Obama was just blindsided! That's gonna hurt come Monday morning.
Al: Yeah he bends but he doesn't break.

I love football cliches. I have been collecting them in a little book for years now. You can't watch football -- or politics -- without a good supply of them. So in honor of Super Tuesday and Super Bowl Sunday, I am going to share my best ones with you.

Feel free to steal these as need be. I promise, even if you don't know what the hell is going on, if you toss a few of these out there, you'll impress your friends. I know I will be using them when I go to my friend Doug Delp's house to watch The Game:

GENERAL PRE-GAME CHATTER
They have to play ball-control offense. (well, it IS hard to score without the ball...)
They have to establish their running game. (tell that to Tom Brady)
They have to stop the big play. (as opposed to the little ones)
They have to pound it out on the ground. (or in the case of Arizona Stadium on a giant grass-filled retractable tray)
They have to take care of the football. ("nice ball..." )
They should just go out and execute. (preferably not the refs)
They have to make plays on both sides of the ball. (it's a spheroid; it doesn't have sides)

QUARTERBACK MUMBO-JUMBO
Brady has happy feet (he's worried about getting slammed on his ass so he's jumping around alot)
That pass looked like a wounded duck. (no spiral)
He'd like to have that one back. (incomplete but easy pass)
He threw up a prayer. (Ah, the stink desperation!)
Manning is trying to force the ball. (usually to the opposite team)
Brady has all day back there. (Or an eternity.)
Great touch on that pass. (this one HAD a spiral)
Brady hit him right on the numbers. (the guy should've caught it)
Manning threw a strike. (He DID catch this one)
That pass was right on the money. (Even I could have caught that!)
They flushed Manning from the pocket. (But he ran out on very happy feet)

RUNNING BACK BANALITIES
They can't cough it up here. (fumble the pigskin)
He bulls his way for extra yardage (defense sucks)
They're running it right up the gut. (defense really sucks)
He's a bruising running back. (steroid user)
He's overdue to break one. (he's been sucky til now)
He couldn't turn the corner. (defense ran him down before he could reach the gut)
He needs to run more north and south. (and thus turn the corner)
You could have driven a truck through that hole. (fat guys up front are doing their job well)
He'll be buying dinner for the whole offensive line after this game.
(Which is partly why the guys up front are fat)

WIDE RECEIVER NONSENSE

He's got alligator arms (weanie didn't extend out for the catch)
That was a circus catch. (probably of a wounded duck)
That was a timing pattern. (no one really knows what this is but it sounds sweet)
He heard footsteps. (was afraid of getting his head torn off so he missed the catch)
He ran out of real estate (couldn't keep both feet in bounds)
They pay him to make those catches. (Randy Moss)
That looked like a blown coverage. (Randy Moss)
He had him covered like a blanket. (What Sam Madison probably won't do to Randy Moss)

KICKER CLICHES
They're going to call a timeout to ice the kicker. (Nah nah nah nah nah!)
This should be a chip shot for him. (tell that to the Buffalo Bills)
That kick splits the uprights. (goes right down the middle)
That missed extra point will come back to haunt them. (my favorite!)

DEFENSE DRIVEL
That was a game saving tackle. (which it never turns out to be)
That was a shoestring tackle. (the bugger almost got away)
The defense had that play sniffed out. (offensive coordinator caught napping)
The defensive line is quick off the ball. (they aren't as fat as most linemen)
The defense is starting to assert itself. (thus winning the battle of the trenches)
They're going to tee-off on Brady. (and try to dirty up his purty uniform)
That hit really cleaned his clock. (don't you love American idioms?)
He really got his bell rung there. (concussion)
He put the lumber on him. (Hard hit but beats me what it really means!)
That front line is 1000 pounds of beef. (and if you are playing a 3-4 that means really big lard-butts!)

THINGS TO OPINE ABOUT THE GAME'S MOOD
You can see the frustration starting to set in. (one side is losing badly)
Looks like we've got some extra-curricular activity on the field. (a fight!)
We hope that cooler heads prevail. (who are they kidding!)
They have a few choice words for each other. (some helmet-butting going on)
They're just exchanging pleasantries. (if you listen hard, the mikes pick up the obscenities)

INANITIES ABOUT INJURIES
Welcome to the NFL. (Said after a rookie is tackled or hit during his first game)
He was really clothes-lined there. (a forearm to the neck. Ouch...)
He ran into a brick wall. (a guy bigger than him)
He's slow getting up. (because he got his clock cleaned or bell rung)
Looks like we've got a player shaken up. (you try getting hit by a 280-lb mad man)
We hate to speculate on the injury...(but we will anyway).
They can ill-afford to lose him. (especially if he's named Brady)
Their locker room must look like a MASH unit. (and that's just the refs)
He left the field under his own power. (unless it's a cart)

AND SAVE THESE FOR THE FOURTH QUARTER
They're trying to milk the clock (they're ahead and trying to stall)
They're looking at third down and forever. (they're behind and desperate)
They're in four down territory. (they're behind, desperate and down to their last bullet)
It all depends on where they spot the ball. (and wherever it is, someone will be pissed)
They're marching down the field. (defense is sucking air)
This is their deepest penetration. (finally, they are inside the 20!)
They're knocking on the door. (near the goal line)
They've got to punch it in here. (you can only knock so long...)
You really want to come away with some points when you're this close (Hello, Chargers!)
They've got to take it to the big house. (get a touchdown BECAUSE....)

THE BEST CLICHE OF THEM ALL
There is no tomorrow.

Have a good Sunday!

On Books, Ballerinas and Offensive Tackles

2008-01-31T12:28:00.000-05:00

My head is preoccupied with revisions today so if you are looking for a coherent essay, let me direct you to Barry Eisler's blog about Clinton fatigue. It's not about books, but I like the way Barry's mind works so it's worth a read.

As for me, I need to clean out the lint trap:

The Art of Storytelling

My sister and I are going to be teaching a workshop at SleuthFest this year called "You Are Not a Writer, You're a Storyteller." We decided to focus on this because after years of judging contests, doing manuscript critics, sitting on panels and most recently, being involved in the MWA-St. Martins first novel competition, we think many writers are missing one major point:

If you can't tell an engaging, coherent compelling story, no amount of pretty writing is going to get you published. I can't tell you how many manuscripts fall apart on this simpliest of points. Yes, the writing is lovely at times. The similes sing, the description dazzles, the turn-of-phrase delights. But the story? It's too often anemic, stale, dull or wayward. Now I am not the biggest John Grisham fan in the world. God knows (and I think even Grisham does) that he's not the greatest wordsmith. But he's enormously successful because he knows how to tell a terrific yarn. But don't take my word for it:

Building a remarkable degree of suspense into the all too familiar ploys described here, Mr. Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard-hitting fiction is over. However passionately he cared about the nonfiction events he described in “An Innocent Man,” his strong suit remains bluntly manipulative, no-frills storytelling, the kind that brings out his great skill as a puppeteer. It barely matters that the characters in “The Appeal” are essentially stick figures. What works for Mr. Grisham is his patient, lawyerly, inexorable way of dramatizing urgent moral issues.
-- Janet Maslin, New York Times.

Word of Mouth

Considering what happened up in New Hampshire with polling, you might take this next item with a grain of salt. But it just confirms something my instincts and anecdotal experience in the book business has long told me: According to a 2005 Gallop poll, 75 percent of readers rely on word of mouth recommendations from friends, family, librarians, and booksellers when deciding what to read. Only 13 percent relied on reviews. The trick, of course, is how do you get word of mouth going?

On Tutus And Tackles

Was perusing the New York Times this morning, lingering at my two favorite stops: sports and arts. In Sports, I read about the New York Giants offensive line (for you non-sports types, that's the big fellows up front who form a pocket around the QB). In Arts, I was reading about those dancers who labor in the corps de ballet (that's the tutu group in the back that forms a circle around the ballerina).

Strange how similar these two pictures look, huh? But then it struck me how similar their jobs really are when it comes down to it:

1. They both depend on teamwork and complete unity.

“Sometimes I’m blocking with a blind side and one of the other linemen literally has my back. We must rely on each other. We have to know each other’s personalities to coexist out there, and we have to know each other’s tendencies. -- right tackle Kareem McKenzie.

“Sometimes you feel like you are just part of the scenery...the military aspect — the discipline, the straight lines, doing everything at the same time, the lack of individuality.”-- Cécile Sciaux, Paris Opera Ballet.

2. They will never be the stars but without them, the show doesn't go on.

“When you first get into the company, you don’t think you’re going to spend your life in the corps. Your dream is to be the lead, and at one level that never goes away." -- Dena Abergel, New York City Ballet.

“As kids, we all started out as quarterbacks or receivers, but then we got fat and slow so we became offensive linemen. We might try harder now, but who is going to notice a bunch of big guys blocking? -- Center Shaun O’Hara.

Well, you don't really notice them -- until they screw up. If a Giants lineman misses a block, Eli Manning gets sacked. If a corps girl's leg goes too high in arabesque during the Shades entrance of "La Bayadere," she shatters the whole lovely illusion.

So, if you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, pay attention to the fat guys up front. And next time you go to the ballet, watch the skinny girls in the back. There's artistry in their obscurity.

Which I guess can be said of many authors. The ones who may in fact have told a great story but didn't have good word of mouth, that is.

Pulp diction

2007-12-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

Now pay attention, kittens and bo's, there's a quiz at the end of this one.

I was an art major in college. This was before I figured out I couldn't make a living at this. Unless I planned to teach, but I was scared of kids. (Not a good character trait in teachers).

I was always pretty good at art. I can draw and paint and was cruising through my art classes with a B average. Then I hit a class called Three Dimensional Design. I was terrible. Evidence of my ineptitude was my "final exam" sculpture, which I called Nude With A Paper Cup Head. So titled because I couldn't get my figure's face right so I finally just filled a Dixie cup with wet plaster and stuck it on top. I got a D.

I just didn't get it. Ask me to paint on canvas, I was Rembrandt. Ask me to sculpt, I might as well have been Rambo. I couldn't think outside the two-dimensional box. Finally, my instructor told me I had to stop seeing the world in POSITIVES and start seeing it in NEGATIVES. In other words, I was so hung up on adding things, I was missing the beauty of subtracting. "Learn how to leave things out," he told me.

Lightning bolt! Paradigm shift! Well, doh!

I ended up abandoning art for writing. But I think that little piece of advice must have lodged deep in my brain cells because it is something subconsciously I have always tried to apply to my fiction writing.

Subconsciously I say because until recently, I hadn't even thought about that quote. Maybe I am thinking about it now because of the book I am reading. No, not Elmore Leonard, though he's the one who coined the famous writers axoim "Leave out the parts that no one wants to read."

My bedside reading is The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which I got for Christmas.

Handsome book...a compiliation of the best crime stories from the "golden age" of pulp crime fiction -- the 20s through the 40s. It's about the size of the Fort Lauderdale phone book. And to be really honest, parts of it read about as well.

Many of these guys were dismissed as the hacks of their day, churning out their stories for cheaply printed magazines like "Black Mask" and "Dime Detective." Yeah, they were lurid, the syntax cringe-worthy, the plots thin or nonsensical. But they tapped into a popular need for a new kind of human hero. The most memorable of the heroes became the prototypes for much of what we are seeing in our crime fiction today -- lone wolves fighting for justice against all odds but always on their own different-beat terms. Would we have Harry Bosch without the Continental Op? Jack Reacher without Simon Templar? Doubtful...

To be sure, not all the stories have aged well. The slang sounds vaguely silly now, the sexism and racism we can explain away as anachronistic attitudes. But the armature these writers created is still sturdy.

Especially in pure writing style. That is the biggest thing I am getting out of these stories, an appreciation for that streamlined locomotive style that propells these stories along their tracks. I read these stories now -- discovering most of these writers for the first time -- with a smile on my face and a highligher in my fist. There are lessons to be learned for us all, and you can almost hear James M. Cain whispering: "I'm not going to dazzle you with my writing. I'm going to tell you a helluva story."

These guys sure knew what to leave out.

Let me give you one little passage from Paul Cain's "One Two Three":

I said: "Sure -- we'll both go.
Gard didn't go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healy's made it all right.
We went.

Not: And then we left the apartment and got in my roadster and set out. We took Mulholland Drive out of the canyon and arrived just before dusk.

Just: We went.

How can you read that and not smile?

I heartily recommend the Big Book of Pulps. And speaking of art, check out some of the best pulp cover artists of the day at Rex Parker's terrific vintage paperback blog Pop Sensation. (I lifted that great Henry Kane cover at the top of this blog entry from his site.)

And now, in honor of our pulp forefathers, I am offering up this little quiz of pulp diction slang for your amusement. Answers at the end. And don't chance the chisel for a cheap bulge, bo. We Jake?

DEFINITIONS.
1. Ameche
2. Kicking the gong around
3. Wooden kimono
4. cheaters
5. Gasper
6. Hammer and saws
7. Orphan papers
8. Wikiup
9. Bangtails
10. Can-opener

TRANSLATIONS
11. I had been ranking the Loogan for an hour and could see he was a right gee. It was all silk so far.

12. I stared down at the stiff. The bim hadn't been chilled off. Definitely a pro skirt who had pulled the Dutch act.

13. I got a croaker ribbed up to get the wire.

14. By the time we got to the drum the droppers had lammed off. Another trip for biscuits...

Answers:
1. telephone
2. taking opium
3. coffin
4. sunglasses
5. cigarette
6. Police
7. Bad checks
8. Home
9. Horses
10. Safecracker
11. I had been watching the man with the gun for an hour and could tell he was an okay guy. Everything was cool so far.
12. I stared at the body. The woman hadn't been murdered. She was definitely a prostitute who had committed suicide.
13. I have arranged for a doctor to get the information.
14. By the time we got to the speakeasy, the hired killers had left. Just another trip for nothing...

A gift for you, dear weary writer

2007-12-18T18:31:00.000-05:00

See that silly picture at left? That is my dog Bailey. The antlers are photoshopped on but believe me when I say my dog is very phlegmatic about letting me dress her up, letting me make a fool of her, letting me...have fun.

Bailey has a lesson for all us writers in this holiday season. We need to lighten up. We need to be good to ourselves.

We beat ourselves up so much. We toss and turn in our sheets (See Tess Gerritsen's blog). We fret over the Writers Strike and our own personal writers strikes (See Lee Goldberg's blog). We pledge to work ever harder at our craft even though we've aleady driven ourselves to hell and back (see Joe Konrath's blog). We agonize over deadlines (see Alexandra Sokoloff over at Murderati)

Whew. I'm seeing that creepy Albino monk in the movie version of "The Da Vinci Code" (yeah, I watched it the other night on cable to cure my insomnia.) This guy was screwing barbed-wire anklets to his legs and beating himself bloody with cat o nine tails. It's a religious zealot thing, I know, but as I watched it I kept thinking of the pain we writers inflict on ourselves. Self-doubt, exhausting promotion tours, crippling envy, three-books-a-year contracts, flop-sweat fear. Hell, we don't need Kirkus. We're killing ourselves.

So here is my Christmas gift to you all. I hope you'll all take a deep breath (me included) and give yourself a break. My gifts to you are the exact things you probably won't give to yourself. But you need them.

This year, dear writer, give yourself:

1. Permission to write badly. This is the one I try to give myself every year because I am one of those "perfectionist" nuts who gets paralyzed trying to make every word sing. It has taken me a decade to understand that to get to the good stuff, you have to well, poop out a lot of crap.

2. The ability to know when you are brilliant. And you are. Even if it is just for one page, one paragraph, one sentence. You know when you've hit that sweet spot. You can feel it. Cherish it. You're not going to do it every time, but you don't need to. Brilliance, like diamonds, shines best when you think quality not quantity.

2. A good night's sleep. No obsessing about the wayward plot. No agonizing over recalcitrant characters. No worrying that they are going to find out you're really a no-talent fake. Because you aren't. Sleep. Take an Ambien if you have to.

3. A friend to celebrate the good news. Even if it's as small as you finished chapter two. Even if it's as big as a five-figure book deal and Clint Eastwood on your speed dial. Success is nothing without someone to share it.

4. An honest critic. Ah yes, that sacred cold eye, that invaluable reader, that one true editor who can tell you when you have lost your way. Your mother loves you too much to tell you the truth about your book. Treasure the one who can look you in the eye and say, "this sucks, you can do better."

5. The courage to question your agent or editor. Blind loyalty is dangerous. In politics, love...and publishing. A great agent or editor can be your biggest ally. But it is YOUR responsibility to steer your career.

6. A week off. Leave the laptop. Abandon the Blackberry. The cell can go to hell. Find someplace to which you can truly retreat, where the world cannot intrude. St. Barts is great if you can afford it. But your backyard deck will do. Drink good wine. Read trash. Eat too much. Make love. Dance in the snow. Breathe in pink...breathe out blue.

7. The courage to talk to a writer "bigger" than you and know you have something to offer them. The first time I found myself standing next to Lee Child I turned into the third verse of Janis Ian's song "At Seventeen." Years later, I still cringe. But now whenever I see Lee, I just picture him naked....

8. A few extra bucks to attend a conference so you know you're not alone. You need to get periodic infusions and if you approach cons right, you come away replenished and eager to work.
9. A long drive to nowhere or a walk in the woods to clear your head. You've got to quiet those shouting voices of doubt in your brain. This happens only in quietude. Or maybe driving down I-75 with "Bohemian Rapsody" blaring.

10. The clarity to recognize the seed of inspiration in the smallest things. You're stuck. You've painted yourself into a corner with the plot. Take a step back and look for small things. Open your brain and all your senses. You never know where the answer will come from.

11. Time to appreciate your family for appreciating how hard you work. Your people are important. Tell them. Often.

12. Kindness to reach down to someone who admires you. No matter where you believe you are on the writer food chain, no matter how low you think you are, someone is looking up to you.
Karma, baby, karma...

13. Permission to spend some of that advance money or royalty check on yourself. Buy a great bottle of Meursault. Rent a red convertible. Get botox. Splurge on Celtic tickets. My friend Rhonda Pollero just got a new agent, signed a fabulous six-book contract with a new publisher -- this after years of bad luck. She bought herself a diamond ring.

14. Courage to venture out of your comfort zone. This is a tough one because sometimes you can get slapped on the wrist or wacked alongside the head for your trouble. But there is no growth without chances taken. You just have to believe you are right. Even when everyone else -- and maybe even the sales -- are telling you otherwise.

15. And lastly, we give you the gift of Faith. Faith that....someone will love your book enough to buy it. That you have another good story still inside you. That no matter how tangled your book might feel, you will find the way home. That you are....brilliant.

Peace, dear friends.

My spine is all atingle

2007-12-05T16:49:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the writer is the last person to know. But in this case, I don't mind. I just found out our latest book A THOUSAND BONES is a nominee for the first annual Spinetingler Award. The awards will be given out by the online magazine Spinetingler.

If you don't know about ST, you should. It is devoted to spotlighting writers you won't find in the usual mainstream venues. Or as editor Sandra Ruttan puts it: "We want to entertain our audience while we promote and enhance the profile of talented emerging writers using the forum of electronic publishing. We know there are a lot of great stories out there that should have a place where they can be told, so we are providing that venue for them."

The nominees were selected by the magazine's editors but readers are the ones who will now determine the winners. Anyone can email their vote in by the deadline Dec. 30. (The rules are at the end of this post or you can go to Spinetingler.)

Just take a look at the list of nominees and you'll see why we feel honored to be included. At first, I was a little gobsmacked that we are considered "an emerging talent" -- but only because we just turned in book No. 9 and I always thought that puts us square in the midlist purgatory.

Which brings up the issue of perspective. It's hard to keep a good one in this business. You keep churning out books, doing your best to make each one better than the last. You have some success, you get some breaks, but you still feel sometimes that you're just frantically treading water hoping you won't get sweep away in the next downsizing wave.

It's all about perspective...

I heard Mike Connelly speaking at Killer Nashville a couple months back. He said that it took him a good ten years to make it to the bestseller lists. My jaw dropped because I had always assumed Mike's trajectory had been comet-like. But then he went on to say he completed three manuscripts before his agent shopped one around. He said he realized all three of those manuscripts weren't good enough to go out into the world. His agent sent out manuscript No. 4 -- The Black Echo. Which of course won the Edgar for Best First Novel.

Perspective.

I've heard similar stories from people like Robert Crais, Harlan Coben, Laura Lippman and many others. Folks we all assume have had an easy accension but in reality, worked a good decade before they got their big break and starting appearing on lists.

So yeah, I am pretty stoked to be called a "rising star" by Spinetingler magazine. And the next time I feel like I'm just sitting here on a plateau, I am going to try very hard to shift around and get a different perspective.

Here are the Spinetingler nominees. And if you're so inclined, we would be eternally grateful for your vote.

Best Novel – Legend
Ken Bruen, Cross
Ken Bruen, Priest
James Lee Burke, Tin Roof Blowdown
Laura Lippman, What The Dead Know
Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead
James Reasoner, Dust Devils

Best Novel – Rising Star
Sean Doolittle, The Cleanup
Charlie Huston, The Shotgun Rule
Larry Karp, The Ragtime Kid
Rick Mofina, A Perfect Grave
PJ Parrish, A Thousand Bones
Steven Torres, Concrete Maze

Best Novel – New Voice
Megan Abbott, Queenpin
Declan Burke, The Big O
Allan Guthrie, Hard Man
Steve Mosby, The 50/50 Killer
JD Rhoades, Safe and Sound
Duane Swierczynski, The Blonde

Best Publisher
Bitter Lemon Press
Europa Editions
Hard Case Crime
Poisoned Pen Press

Best Cover
Robert Terrall - Kill Now, Pay Later Cover painted by Robert McGinnis
Gil Brewer - The Vengeful Virgin Cover painted by Greg Manchess
George Axelrod - Blackmailer Cover painted by Glen Orbik
Allan Guthrie - Hard Man Design: Vaughn Andrews. Photo: (c) Corbis.
Nick Stone - Mr. Clarinet Designed by Emily Cavett Taff

Best Editor
Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime
Stacia Decker, Harcourt
Alison Janssen, Bleak House
Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Press
Dave Thompson, Busted Flush

Special Services to the Industry
Daniel Hatadi - Crimespace
Ali Karim – Shots, The Rap Sheet
Graham Powell - Crimespot
J. Kingston Pierce – The Rap Sheet
Maddy Van Hertburger – 4MA
Sarah Weinman – Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Best Short Story On The Web
The Leap by Charles Ardai - Hardluck Stories
Breaking in the New Guy by Stephen Blackmoore - Demolition
Amphetamine Logic by Nathan Cain - Thuglit
The Switch by Lyman Feero -Thuglit
Seven Days of Rain by Chris F. Holm - Demolition
Shared Losses by Gerri Leen - Shred of Evidence
The Living Dead by Amra Pajalic - Spinetingler
Convivum by Kelli Stanley - Hardluck Stories

Here's how to vote:
ONE E-MAIL PER PERSON ONLY. You cannot send another vote in, even for a different category – multiple votes from the same sender will not be counted. Take the time to consider your votes carefully. E-mails must be received by December 30, 2007.

You may vote for one winner in each category as long as all votes are submitted in one e-mail. Simply state the category and your chosen winner for each of the eight categories. Any votes that contain more than one selection per category may be removed from consideration completely. No ties.

Send your e-mail to sandra.ruttan@spinetinglermag.com with AWARD NOMINATIONS in the subject line.

YES! YES! YES! It's the Bad Sex Awards

2007-11-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

Ho, boy. I timed my return to the blog just right. Yes, folks...that can mean only one thing. It's BAD SEX AWARDS TIME!

Forget about the Edgar. Who cares about the Booker? Every year, I tremble with anticipation for the Ignoble Prize -- the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

The award was founded in 1993 "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." And to assure a level playing field, the award is open ONLY to modern literary fiction. No earnest romance, cheesy international thrillers or Henry Miller allowed.

This year's winner? Well, he's won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once, but now Norman Mailer, who died last month at the age of 84, fought off a formible list of finalists to take home top prize for his book The Castle in the Forest.

But as they say, it's always an honor just to be nominated. So, for the record, here were your finalists:

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods
Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach
Richard Milward's Apples
Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy
Maria Peura's At the Edge of Light
James Delingpole's Coward on the Beach
David Thewlis's The Late Hector Kipling
Quim Monzo's The Enormity of the Tragedy
Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan
Christopher Rush's Will
Claire Clark's The Nature of Monsters

Because I know how hard it is to write about sex without sounding like a fifteen-year-old boy, I've been following these awards pretty closely for years now and there is always a trend or two. Last year it was odd little nicknames for the female privates. This year there seems to be an obsession with pubic hair. (Hey, I am just the reporter here...)

So, without further delay -- because I know this is the only reason you are reading this -- let's get right to the excerpts:

Pubic Display of Affection
From Will by Christopher Rush

O glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise. Let me sing the black banner, the blackbird’s wing, the chink, the cleft, the keyhole in the door. The fig, the fanny, the cranny, the quim – I’d come close to it now, this sudden blush, this ancient avenue, the end of all odysseys and epic aim of life, pulling at my prick now, pulling like a lodestone.

Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language, solace lovelier than words. She pulled my hand away, positioned the prick, slid her buttocks deep into the grass, raised her thighs back high, crossed her legs behind my back, dug her heels into my spine and hauled at me savagely and hard. I fell into her.

You are the wind beneath my hand-job
From Boy Meets Girl by Ali Smith

Her hand opened me. Then her hand became a wing. Then everything about me became a wing, a single wing, and she was the other wing, we were a bird. We were a bird that could sing Mozart. … I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel can we really keep this up?

Or maybe it's just acid reflux
From Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters

When at last he reached in to touch me, there was nothing else left, nothing in the world but his fingers and the delirious incoherent frenzy of pure sensation they sent spiralling through me, as though I were an instrument vibrating with the exquisite hymns of the angels. Did that make him an angel? My toes clenched in my boots and my belly held itself aloft in a moment of stillness as the flame quivered, perfectly bright. I held my breath. In the explosion I lost sight of myself. I was a million brilliant fragments, the darkness of my belly alive with stars. When at last I opened my eyes to look at him, my lashes shone with tears. He raised a finger to his lips and smiled.

Kinky...with a dash of chervil
From Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media – a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges – the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo, while providing the inspiration for two discernible trails of hair, one running up to the navel, the other to the base of the spine.

Do you fancy a shag? How about a cheap berber?
From Richard Milward’s Fantastic Apples

She had on no knickers, and my heart went crash-bang-wallop and my eyes popped out. She hadn’t shaved, and her fanny looked like a tropical fish or a bit of old carpet.

"So, you just gonna sit there?" Abi asked, and I laughed nervously. I was hardening up, but it was all a bit of a shock really. All I’d planned that night was listening to a selection of records and maybe some homework. I tried to go down on her, thinking back to the Razzle and how the boys did it in that. But my heart wasn’t into it – her cunt smelt a bit like an armpit, and when I pulled the lips open I knew I’d have to shut them numerous times or else I’ll die of Aids or I’d fall into it.

Klaatu barada niktu, baby...
From Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods:

Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.

To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the problem. "Spike, you’re a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?"

She answers simply: "They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission."

"So you had sex with spacemen for three years?"

"Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas."

Bad sex on the beach
From Quim Monzo’s The Enormity of the Tragedy

She felt the cylinder rod of his plunger. Tried to work up a precise rhythm. Felt the sand sticking to her knees through her trousers. She and Luis-Albert were all there was in the world; she swallowed him centimetre by centimetre (whenever a wave hit the beach) and then immediately let it go centimetre by centimetre (as each wave retreated).

With apologies to 'Bartholomew and the Oobleck'
From Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a pile of towering soup plates.

In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid.

And last but not least, our winner:

Norman...ooooooooooooh. Norman, my love
From Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest

"Are you all right?" she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.

"All right. Yes. No," he said. Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

Fresh pulp

2007-11-17T14:51:00.001-05:00

I am still trying to push the baby out, so I all my words are being funneled into things for which they are paying me (ie a book that was due two weeks ago).

In the meantime, I have to alert you to my newest favorite website, Pop Sensation, where you find the best covers of vintage paperback crime novels this side of Ray Walsh's store in E. Lansing. And the commentary is priceless.

The fellow who does this site also has a great site called Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle, where every day he gives cheaters like me the answers.

Check it out and see you here Monday with a fresh post!

Halloweenie

2007-10-29T15:07:00.001-04:00

Scariest book I ever read: "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson

Scariest short story I ever read: "Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

Scariest movie I saw as an adult: "The Exorcist"

Scariest movie I saw as a kid: "The Blob"

Scariest moment I've ever had: sharing a panel with Charlotte Curtis, op-ed editor of the New York Times when I was only 21 years old.

Scariest thing I've ever done: Chairing the Edgars last year.

Scariest thing I ever saw: a shark while I was snorkling.

Scariest thing I want to do before I die: go skydiving.

And finally, the scariest thing you will see today:

That's me with my husband Daniel and dog Bailey going out to trick or treat. What's your scariest list? Happy halloween!

How to write a thriller

2007-10-29T12:42:00.001-04:00

Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

Isn't that the best two lines of dialogue you've ever read?

I have been thinking about James Bond -- and his creator Ian Fleming -- quite a bit lately. Part of this springs from the fact that I am supposed to be a "thriller" writer yet I don't really know what that is supposed to mean. Especially today when the genres are criss-crossing each other faster than panicked chickens.

Two years ago, I was a judge for the International Thriller Writers first contest and I confess that our First Novel committee had some trouble figuring out which books qualified as thrillers and which did not. The old rules don't really apply anymore what with the rich ingredients many writers are throwing into the pot these days.

You just can't limit the definition (as some still insist on doing) to the hoary formula: A common man thrust into extraordinary circumstances in (insert exotic locale here) faces down a (insert monster or menace here) with the help of the beautiful and mysterious (insert female stereotype here) to save (insert organization, country or world here) before the clock ticks down to the final second.

So what IS a thriller?

Beats me. And we won the ITW Thriller Award this past summer. But since I am still trying to wrap my brain around this question, I thought I'd go back to one of the originals -- Ian Fleming.

I had heard about an article Fleming wrote about thrillers and had been trying to find it for some time. Damned if I didn't finally stumble on it today as I was searching the web for something else. Kind of like finding your glasses when you're looking for your wallet.

So, I am going to go back to writing my chapter now, since the book is due in three days. But I hope you'll enjoy this article as much as I did. Fleming wrote it in 1962. There's some really good advice in here that still makes sense to me today.

HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER
By Ian Fleming

People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have." I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that.

We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them
from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one con-tained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.

The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.

But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the
typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.

I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500
words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody's fault except the author's, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around
you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.

The case of the missing bestseller

2007-10-22T11:59:00.000-04:00

This bestseller list thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. Recently, I blogged about how weird this business of compiling bestseller lists has become.

Folks, it just got stranger than fiction.

Seems the "public editor" (aka ombudsman or in-house maiden aunt scolder) of the New York Times Clark Hoyt has some issues with the way his newspaper compiles its vaunted bestseller lists. (I will recount the salient points here in case you can't access the Times online. And heads up to Galley Cat, where I found this link.)

First, Hoyt tells us that the NYT list is "powerful and mysterious" and quotes Larry Kirshbaum of Time-Warner as saying it is "the gold standard." Then, rather disingenuously, he goes on to say the list is "not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying, and it has generated controversy from time to time." This is common info in the publishing world -- even among authors. A Times' columnist is just now finding this out?

The latest brush-up is over Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night." The book has always sold well, and due to a new recent translation, it was enjoying a revival. At one point last year, it was simultaneously No. 1 on the nonfiction paperback list, No. 3 on the same list in its original edition and No. 7 on the hardcover list.

But last month, when the the Times introduced its expanded bestseller lists (breaking paperback into Trade and Mass Market) “Night” disappeared. This, after after a run of 80 weeks, after hitting No. 9 on the paperback list the week before.

“People called me to ask what happened, and I really couldn’t explain it,” Wiesel is quoted as saying. He said he still can’t, even after an explanation from The Times.

What happened? PE Clark Hoyt (as opposed to PI?) got on the case.

He unearthed lots of interesting side stuff:

The Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus, has nothing to do with compiling the list that appears in his section. It is done by the Times news surveys department.

The list isn’t tabulated from paper questionnaires sent to booksellers; it’s entirely computerized. The roster of outlets surveyed is not adjusted only once every five years; it changes constantly.

And it's a misconception that the Times surveys booksellers only about titles determined by publishers’ shipments thereby giving "sleeper" books no chance. Instead, some companies dump all of their book sales to The Times, while others fill out an online form based on the previous week’s best sellers and including space for unlisted books that have sold well.

And: The Wall Street Journal and USA Today name the booksellers they survey. The Times keeps its reporting booksellers secret.

Re: that last one, Hoyt tries to get an explanation from Deborah Hofmann, who is named as the "editor of the bestseller list." Sez Hofmann: "We are aware of certain publishers and certain authors, and we watch those publishers and authors for certain trends. People do try to game the list.”

Hoyt seems mildly perturbed by this, but again, the idea that someone might try to get on the list by bulk-buying at certain stores is pretty common knowledge in our business. I have heard my fellow authors admit their strategy is to do signings only at bookstores they know report to the Times. Such is the deseperation behind needing to get on that "gold standard" list.

But readers don't know any of this. Many of them depend (rightly or wrongly) on the NYT list to cull their book purchases. I've seen enough readers in B&Ns holding the NYT list to know this. The lists are posted at B&N, for heaven's sake. And readers are supposed to KNOW the lists aren't really reflective of what's actually selling?

Oh, but they would. If only they paid attention.

See, if you look hard on the NYT list, you'll see these little dagger symbols next to some titles. This dagger means, the small type below the list tell us, that "some bookstores report receiving bulk orders." Which means, someone might be "gaming" the book but it's on the list anyway so you readers figure it out on your own whether it's really a bestseller or not.

But back to Wiesel's book "Night." What DID happen to his disappearing bestseller?

Well, again, let's go to the fine print below the list, where next to the dagger clause, we find this phrase: "Perennial bestsellers are not actively tracked."

That means, acording to PE Hoyt, that someone arbitrarily decides a book is a "classic" -- or in the words of a Times editor "evergreen." And that book is taken off the list. No matter how many copies it is selling in relation to "The Kite Runner." You can add "evergreens" like "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- which also doesn't appear on the NYT list, even though it regularly outsells most the books that appear each week.

Why banish a book just because it has, ahem, such great legs? Hoyt quotes NYT editor Hofman again: "The Times wants a list that’s lively and churns and affords new authors the opportunity to be recorded.”

Or, to look at things more crassly: The Times wants its slots open to books that can generate advertising revenue. It's a lot easier to tap Viking for an ad in support of Garrison Keillor's "Pontoon" than it is to hit on Back Bay Books to tout "Catcher In the Rye." Even though the latter was recently No. 19 on the USA Today bestseller list, which reflects actual sales and doesn't ban "evergreens."

In a message to Wiesel’s publisher, Hofmann called “Night” a modern classic and said most of its sales are now driven by student reading lists. Said Hofman: “The editorial spirit of the list is to track the sales of new books. We simply cannot track such books [as Wiesel's] indefinitely.”

So, is Elie Wiesel a "bestselling author" or not?

According to USA Today he is. "Night" is at No. 129 this week, nine spots below “The Official SAT Study Guide.” (the USA Today list lumps all books, regardless of format or content, into one giant list).

Wiesel is nowhere to be seen on the New York Times list.

But hey, he's still got a chance. Hofman says the Times is considering adding YET ANOTHER bestseller list. It will be called the "Classics List."

Yo! Muse!

2007-10-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!
-- Dante, The Divine Comedy

If you are like me, you take your inspiration wherever -- and whenever -- you can get it.

Let's face it. Writing is not easy. (Warning: tortured metaphor ahead).

Writing is like sailing a Hobie Cat in the ocean in the middle of a squall. I know because I used to sail Hobies during my first marriage, which is probably why it didn't last. The marriage, not the Hobie. The day is always sunny when you launch your Hobie from the beach and you're all aglow with hardy-har-har-endorphins. So it is when you sit down and type CHAPTER ONE.

Then the storm hits and there you are, hanging onto a 16-foot piece of fiberglas and vinyl, hoping lightening doesn't hit the mast and fry your ass. You are out there alone in the storm, out of sight of land, riding the waves and the troughs, hoping you can make it home. You might even throw up. This is usually around CHAPTER TWENTY for me.

End of metaphor.

I often wonder what keeps writers writing. Tyranny of the contract deadline? Blind faith? The idea that if you don't you might have to do real physical labor for a living, like paint houses? All of those work for me. But sometimes, the only thing that keeps me going is a visit from my muse.

Now, let's get one thing clear here. I don't believe in WAITING for a muse to show up. I get really impatient with writers who claim they can't write until they feel inspired because frankly, 90 percent of this gig is writing DESPITE the fact your brain is as dry as Waffle House toast. (or as soggy, depending on which Waffle House you frequent. The last one I was in was off the Valdosta Ga. I-95 exit in 1976 and the toast was so dry it stands today as my singular metaphor for stagnant creativity).

But I do believe that sometimes -- usually when your brain is preoccupied with other stuff -- something creeps into the cortex and quietly hands you a gift. And these little gifts are what get you through.

There are nine muses in mythology, who were supposed to be the origin of all artistic inspiration. They were Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Urania and Thalia. (I always thought it was cool that Dobie Gillis's unobtainable ideal woman was named Thalia -- the muse of comedy). The muses ruled over such things as dance, music, history, even astronomy. No muses for crime writers, unless you count Calliope for epic poetry but I think James Lee Burke has her on permanent retainer.

I don't have just one muse. I've figured out I have a couple who specialize in particular parts of my writing. And they never come around when I am at the computer. Never get a whiff of them when I am actually in writing mode itself. They are like cats. They only come around on their own terms.

First, there's my dialogue muse. I call him J.J. because he sounds like Burt Lancaster's gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in "The Sweet Smell of Success." Always chewing at my ear saying oily things like, "I'd hate to take a bite out of you, you're a cookie full of arsenic." J.J. comes to visit me only when I am jogging. Never on the threadmill, mind you, only outdoors. J.J. makes my skin crawl but man, can this guy write dialogue.

Then there's my narrative muse. I call him Cat Man because he slips in on silent paws, sings in a fey whisper and only visits me just as morning has broken. Cat Man comes around about dawn, just as I am waking up as if from death itself. See, my husband's insomnia means we sleep with blackout drapes, a white-noise machine and the A/C turned so cold the bedroom is like a crypt. So when I wake up, it is with a gauzy gray aureole rimming the drapes, icy air swirling around my nose and a soft swoooshing in my ears. And there is Cat Man, spinning a long segment of sensual exposition that salvages my stagnant plot. I have learned to lay there, very still, until he is done with his song, because if I get up and try to write it down, he vanishes. Praise for the singing, praise for the morning, praise of the springing, fresh from the word.

I have a third muse. Her name is Flo because her voice sounds like that waitress who worked in Mel's Diner on the old "Alice" sitcom. You know, like the door of a rusted Gremlin. Flo is my muse of getting real. Her Greek name is Nike (the goddess of victory) and her slogan is "Just Do It." Because whenever those other two guys fail me, whenever they don't show up, Flo is there. She is the muse who knows that the only way I am going to get the book finished is through plain old hard work. Like Nike, Flo has wings. They symbolize the fleeting nature of victory. Or, as Flo often tell me, "Honey, if you don't get off your ass and just write the damn, you're going to lose your contract and you'll have to paint houses for a living."

I'd be lost without her. Who keeps you going?

Go ahead, make my day

2007-09-25T19:58:00.000-04:00

This is a tough week, book-wise. The deadline dogs are biting at my heels. The computer is getting ready to die. And those demons of doubt -- is this the biggest piece of crap I've ever written? -- have me staring at the clock at 3 a.m., twisting in my sweaty sheets.

But then, an email like this comes into my in-box:

Dear P.J. Parrish,
Hello, I just wanted you both to know that I started reading your books about three years ago. I am originally from the Detroit area and now live in Broward County with my wife and three kids. Your books have rekindled many memories when I was a child. Family vacations to Irish Hills, Houghton Lake, Frankenmuth, fishing trips on Lake Erie and the Huron River, and weekend trips to the U.P. I am a deputy with the Broward County Sheriff's Office and your books gave me a new inspiration about law enforcement and reinforce what I love about police work. Keep up the good work, I always look forward to the next book.

Thank you, Deputy Danny Krystyan. You gave me new inspiration and reinforced what I love about writing.

Making The List

2007-09-19T16:26:00.000-04:00

The news has finally come out that the New York Times is breaking its paperback bestseller list into two: mass market and trade. I had heard back in July that this was coming. Our latest book, A THOUSAND BONES, had come out and done well in sales, breaking onto USA Today's extended list but not making the Times, as everyone had hoped.

We were disappointed because expectations had been high for this one. But then our agent put things in perspective: the publisher was extremely happy with sales because the book had sold well for a long time.

In official publishing terms, it didn't have "velocity,"

but it did have "legs."

You'll have a better shot with the next book, our agent said. The idea being, of course, that once the paperback bestseller list got rid of perennial pests like Jodi Picoult, kite runners and crabby old Cormac McCarthy, good old fashioned genre books could retake their rightful turf.

The Times, in defending the split lists, said they did it to give more visibility to the literary fiction that is increasingly being published in trade format. (Nicholas Sparks is "literary"?) But the change is also bottom line-driven, considering that the Times's ad revenue has been declining and adding another page of lists might boost ad sales.

I suspect there's some plain old whining behind this as well. A couple years back, the Times added a children's bestseller list. This happened because some publishers were bitching that the Harry Potter books were hogging too many spots on the Fiction list and leaving no room for "serious" books. (In 2000, there were three Potter books in the Top 15). So children's books -- and Harry -- was banished to the kids table. And now that the trade paperbacks have been separated from the mass markets, all those "serious" novels won't have to go up against James Patterson and Nora Roberts et al.

So what does all this mean for us commoners, especially those of us who toil in the mass market ghetto? Well, just as the "literary" writers get more slots, so do we PBO folks have more chances to crack into the rarified atmosphere of bestsellerdom.

But does being a "bestseller" really have a big impact on your career? Some would argue no, that you can have a successful life as a genre writer without making it onto the Times list. Laura Lippman, for one, didn't do too shabby for herself before her latest, "What The Dead Know" finally made it to The List.

Making The List DOES matter, I think. First, on the simplest level, we are obsessed with all "best" lists. It's the ultimate game, one that we can all play, as we put our own tastes up against the official arbitors. Best movie? The critics have their favorites, with this guy leading the pack:

My vote would go for "Lawrence of Arabia" but I am a sucker for this scene every time I see it:

Best dressed? Vanity Fair says it is someone named Charlotte Gainsbourg.

But I think best-dressed guy Tiki Barber is a lot purtier.

Best hotel in the world? According to Travel and Leisure its Oberoi Udaivilas in Udaipur, India.

My vote goes to a little auberge in Bagnol-en-Foret, France, where I had fabulous frog legs in garlic, a memorable Meursault and a room with a view. I think I had great sex but it was a long time ago so I could be wrong.

It's all subjective, you see. But then again, so are "best books" lists. They are subject to all sorts of vagaries in our wacky business. Like which stores are reporting and which are not. Which lists are to be taken seriously and which are not. And, if you believe authors who have sued the New York Times, which editors like your stuff and which don't.

Although it is generally acknowledged that the New York Times bestseller list is the one and true list, there are others. And getting on any one of them can give you a toehold. There's the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly. Some think these other lists are becoming more a factor, especially the USA Today list because it publishes the raw data of actual sales from independent stores, chains and the dot-com dealerships. Liz Perl, executive director of publicity for the Berkley Publishing Group was quoted in Time Magazine recently: "A lot of people are looking at [the USA Today] list. It gets stronger and stronger."

And what about everyone's favorite whipping boy Amazon.com? Its Hot 100 list, a reflection of sales over the web site, is updated hourly. (The Times Book Review, because of its long lead time, can publish only the very latest estimate of the books people were buying two weeks ago.) "The beauty of Amazon is the instant gratification," Perl says. "If you have an author who appears on, say, 'Rosie O'Donnell,' you can find out right away whether or not there's a bump in the Amazon numbers."

The Amazon sample can be misleading. Self-improvement books do better on Amazon, romance novels far worse. In one example, Nora Roberts' "Tears of the Moon" was the Times' paperback No.1 and USA Today's sixth top seller, but only hit No. 19 on Amazon. One of USA Today's best-selling romances, "Wild Child," didn't even crack Amazon's top 1,000.

So is the Amazon list important? Again, in Time magazine: "In terms of actual sales, somewhat," says Bill Thomas, the editor in chief of Doubleday. "In terms of author psychology, very important. Authors check it like daytraders keeping track of the NASDAQ."

Nooo....authors checking their Amazon rankings? None of MY friends do that.

Then there are the major regional lists: the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune. The regional lists are valued as "predictors." The bestsellers "Snow Falling on Cedars" and A.S. Byatt's "Possession" among others were bestsellers in northern California well before they made it onto the Times list.

Getting on the Independent Booksellers list carries weight, as does the Mystery Bookstore list. There are lists that compare sales at chain stores with sales at independent stores. There are romance lists, business lists, African-American lists, religious lists, health lists, and children's lists.

As I said, making a list these days is not really a matter of sales so much as velocity. A book that sells 20,000 copies in one week may shoot to the top of the bestseller lists, whether or not those are the only copies it ever sells. A novel that sells 200 copies a week for 10 years will never appear on the lists, because each week it will be beaten by faster-selling books.

Why do bestseller lists matter so much? Well, because they create buzz. If a book is a best seller, bookstore folks are more likely to give it prime placement; some stores even discount NYTimes bestsellers. And readers are more likely to buy bestsellers. Alan T. Sorensen of Stanford Business School, who studied sales of hardcover fiction, found that the majority of book buyers use the Times’ list to see what is worth reading. Therefore, according to Sorensen, relatively unknown writers get the biggest benefit from being on the list, while for already best-selling authors such as Danielle Steel or John Grisham, being on the list makes virtually no difference in increasing sales. Most authors -- us included -- have a contract clause that provides a bonus for making the Times list. Typically, it is $7,000 for postions 1-5; $5,000 for postions 6-10; $3,000 for positions 11-15.

But no one seems to understand exactly how bestseller lists are compiled, especially the Times's list. Its exact methodology seems to be a trade secret. According to Edwin Diamond in his book "Behind the Times," the list is based on a survey of over 3,000 bookstores as well as "representative wholesalers with more than 28,000 other retail outlets, including variety stores and supermarkets." The list is based on weekly sales reports obtained from a selected sample of independent and chain bookstores, as well as wholesalers, throughout the United States. The sales figures represent books that have actually been sold at retail, rather than wholesale figures, in an attempt to better reflect what is actually purchased by individual buyers.

But guess what’s missing? All the mass market outlets like Wal-Mart, KMart, Target, Costco, and Sam’s Club -- and Christian bookstores (some 2,300 stores or so). This is a big piece of the market. As a result, the Times completely misses the number of units that are moving through some very significant sales channels. At best, they can claim that their bestsellers list represents sales through only one specific sales channel.

At the other end of the spectrum is a bestseller list like the one compiled by The Voice Literary Supplement, which polls a mere 25 indie stores, places like San Francisco's City Lights, Washington, D.C.'s Politics and Prose, and the Harvard Bookstore. Some list makers rely on statistical sampling and extrapolation to provide an estimation of what is selling at the stores that do not report; some don't. Some lists, such as the Wall Street Journal's, only track sales in big chain stores. Others, such as USA Today's, include online booksellers. Some follow only independent stores.

Quel mess, huh? You can compare this with how it's done in the music biz. Billboard magazine tracks every single album sold at every single music store in the United States. There has been talk about using BookScan in a similar way for publishing lists, but BookScan is very expensive for booksellers. And frankly, if there were only one legitimately tabulated national bestseller list, well, where would that leave the kingmakers of The New York Times et al?

For all its weight, the Times was slow to the bestseller business. Bestseller lists have been around since 1895 when novel sales were tracked by a trade publication called The Bookman. Nonfiction bestsellers didn't arrive until 1912, when Publishers Weekly began its own list. The New York Times didn't get into the act until 1930. If you want to read a juicy overview of this whole thing, get a copy of Michael Korda's book "Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999."

One of my favorite observations from Korda's book is his assertion that there is no way to tell what books by unknowns will make it big, given that readers are so unpredictable. He gives the example of the biggest selling book of the 1920s -- "The Specialist." It sold more than 1.5 million copies and was on display next to cash registers for years. It was about building outhouses.

And I can think of no other wisdom to add to that. So just for fun, I leave you with a sampling of lists from our past. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose!

1959

1. Exodus by Leon Uris
2. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
3. Hawaii by James Michener
4. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
6. The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene L. Burdick
7. Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
10. Poor No More by Robert Ruark

1977

1. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
3. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach
4. The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
5. Oliver's Story by Erich Segal
6. Dreams Die First by Harold Robbins
7. Beggarman, Thief by Irwin Shaw
8. How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong
9. Delta of Venus: Erotica by Anaïs Nin
10. Daniel Martin by John Fowles

1997

1. The Partner by John Grisham
2. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
3. The Ghost by Danielle Steel
4. The Ranch by Danielle Steel
5. Special Delivery by Danielle Steel
6. Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell
7. The Best Laid Plans by Sidney Sheldon
8. Pretend You Don't See Her by Mary Higgins Clark
9. Cat & Mouse by James Patterson
10. Hornet's Nest by Patricial Cornwell

This week

TRADE
1. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
3. At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks
4. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
5. The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
6. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
7. Dear John by Nicholas Sparks
8. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
9. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
10. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

PAPERBACK MASS MARKET

1. The Collectors by David Baldacci
2. 74 Seaside Avenue by Debbie Macomber
3. Killer Dreams by Iris Johansen
4. Innocent in Death by J. D. Robb
5. Act of Treason by Vince Flynn
6. Beyond Seduction by Stephanie Laurens
7. The Mephisto Club by Tess Gerritsen
8. Inferno by Troy Denning
9. Exile by Richard North Patterson
10. Silver Master by Jayne Castle

REJECTED!

2007-09-11T11:46:00.000-04:00

This isn't news to you if you have been trying to get published. Or even stay published: You have to be tough. How tough? You have to have the hide of a

The tenacity of a

And the drive of a

But even with all those qualities, you are going to get rejected. It happens to all of us. And it never stops. Even after you sign your first contract, you will deal with it. Your editor will make you rewrite. The marketing department will veto your title. Barnes & Noble will stock you but Costco won't. You won't get reviewed or worse, you get panned. And someday, you will be stalking some poor reader in the bookstore, see him pick up your book [YES! THEY LIKE ME, THEY REALLY LIKE ME!] and put it back on the shelf [NO! WHY DO YOU HATE MY BOOK?] Rejection is a staple of the writer's life, so no matter where you are on your path, you might as well begin to come to grips with it.

Even after you are published with a decent track record, you can still get dumped on. Four books into our current series, Kelly and I decided we wanted to try our hand at a light mystery. We finished it, convinced we were the next Janet Evanovich, had our new pen name picked out and everything. But our agent couldn't sell it. Not even to our OWN PUBLISHER! Which taught me a valuable lesson: It is not easy to write funny.

Rejection begins, of course, with query letters. This is a painful thing, the query process, because the agents who are rejecting you are usually maddeningly oblique about why they are giving you the thumbs down. Here's some examples of coded rejections I have seen:

1. "This doesn't fit my needs at this time."
2. "Your writing is strong but I don't feel I can be enthusiastic enough to fully get behind this project."
3. "I'm afraid I will have to take a pass. But I am interested in seeing other projects..."

What they really mean:

1. You can't write.
2. I already have four authors who write vampire detective series.
3. DaVinci Code rip-offs are yesterday's news. Have you considered paranormal chick lit?

I don't mean to make light of your woes if you are going through this phase of rejection now. But believe me, I have been there. My entry into this business took place during the Ice Age when it was possible to still submit to editors without having an agent. But the rejections were still as awful. I used to have all of them -- kept them in an old manila envelope in a desk drawer. Then when we moved a while back, I finally threw all the rejection letters away. Except for the first one I ever got, which I keep framed above my desk:
It is a classic! It doesn't reproduce well here, so let me point out some really nifty things about this particular rejection letter. First, it's a form letter. Second, there is no date. Third, there is no signature. But someone WAS kind enough to pencil in my last name and even take a moment to cross out "Sir."

I think this rejection letter is circa 1980. But you'll notice the language has not changed since. The inserts are how I felt at the time:

Dear Sir or Ms. Montee,
We thank you for the opportunity [yeah, right!] to consider your proposal or manuscript. [what, they can't figure out WHICH?]. We are sorry [I'll bet!] to inform you that the book does not seem a likely prospect [how elegant!] for the Dell Book list. Because we receive many individual submissions every day [you think I care how overworked you are?] it is impossible for us to offer individual comment [I'd say so since there is no human being attached to this letter to begin with!] We thank you for thinking of Dell [insert sound of raspberry here] and we wish you the best of success [ie don't darken our doorstep again with your crap] in placing your book with another publisher. [you'll be sorry some day!]

Sincerely, [you're kidding, right?]
The Editors [aka the evil Manhattan cabal trying to keep me unpublished]

So why did I keep this one? Well, with the passage of more than two decades I have gained a certain perspective about it. The manuscript I sent to Dell was really really bad. It had no business going out in the world in the state it was in. I know, because I kept it. Like this rejection letter, I kept it to remind me that this is a learning process. It still is. It always will be.

So if you are feeling blue today about rejection, just know this one thing: You are not alone. Pearl Buck’s novel “The Good Earth” was rejected on the grounds that Americans were “not interested in anything on China.” A editor passed on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” explaining it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” And let's not forget the agent who dumped Tony Hillerman and told him to "get rid of all that Indian stuff." (You can read more about Knopf's archives of other famous rejections by clicking here.)

Keep plugging away at your craft. Grow a tough hide, be brave, don't give up. And have a little faith:

Because it only takes one "yes" to make all the no's bearable.

The worst mistake you can make

2007-09-04T12:51:00.000-04:00

I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.

But today -- for the first time in months -- I feel good enough about the new book to leave it alone for a few minutes.

That is why I haven't been here much lately, even though I promised I would. See, the work in progress aka The Wip is due November 1. And this one is a killer. And I don't mean that in any of the normally good ways we crime writers refer to our work.

Kelly and I were on the road so much this year that we got a late start, and the ticking clock has been as loud as Poe's tell-tale heart in our ears all summer.

And the worst thing you can do to screw up your career is turn in your book late.

Being on time is very important. And it gets increasingly important the further into your career you go. Why? Because you can't get a foothold in today's crowded marketplace -- or keep one -- if you can't turn out a book a year on time.

That's the hardest thing a new writer has to grasp, I think. Before you get published, you have the luxury of time. Time for the virgin writer is a lovely, expandable, ever-accommodating thing. Kind of like a big purse. The bigger your purse, the most junk you carry around, right? Same with deadline. The bigger and looser it is, the more you will abuse it. Trust me. I know.

First-time authors spend YEARS making their books as good as they can. You have to in order to get an agent to take you on. Ah, but then what? Then you enter the big machine and you have to produce another. And another. And yet another. And here's the worst part of it: Each book has to be better than the last because publishers' attention spans (dictated by the computers at B&N and Walmart) are increasingly short.

Again, it's the luxury of time. Few writers entering the game today will be given the time to find their legs, their voices, their audiences. The reason is awful but pretty simple: It's all bottom line these days and there are too many young turks waiting to take your place on the publishers list. You have to produce well...and often.

So, what happens if you are late?

You lose your place in line. I learned this in great detail recently at the Killer Nashville conference. On Sunday morning, there was a very instructive panel with an agent, a Barnes & Noble manager, and the main buyer for all of Ingram (whom the other panelists called one of the most powerful women in publishing). It was all great advice, but the best insight came when someone asked what happens if you are late delivering your manuscript. All the experts agreed: You don't want to do this. Ever.

Here's the simple explanation: Your publisher creates its schedule at least a year in advance. And when an editor buys your book, the process begins whereby a bunch of folks decide where that book will be positioned to get maximum attention. Publishers jockey around each others schedules, trying not to have their books competing with similar books -- or with big star authors. Or Harry Potter for that matter.

So you sign your contract. You get your slot. Say you have a July 2008 release with manuscript delivery Nov 1, 2007. Now things get more complicated. To oversimplify things:

The cover design is based on your delivery date. Ditto advance reading copies (which are extremely important in getting bookseller buzz). Sales people start gearing up material for in-house and outside catalog placement. Marketing and publicity set a schedule of their own. And in the end, bookstores buy your book based on YOUR firm delivery date. And remember, this is happening for many other books at the same time -- from your own publisher and everyone else's. Every domino is in place.

Then you miss your delivery deadline. You're two, three, four months late. Life intruded, the kid got sick, you wrote yourself into a corner and had to backtrack, you had writers block, there was that three-week hiking trip in the Cinque Terre you really wanted to go on...blah, blah, blah.

What's the big deal, right?

That silence you hear is dominos NOT falling. You've lost your place in line, Bunky. And guess what? The world -- and the process -- will keep right on turning without you and your masterpiece. You've also been...unprofessional and made yourself a pain in the ass. Not something you want to have a reputation as being. Because publishing? -- it's a small world, after all. Once you've been labeled difficult, a prima donna, or unable to produce, that rep will follow you no matter how many times you switch houses.

I am not telling you this to scare you. Well, maybe I am. Because I got scared myself listening to the experts at Killer Nashville. See, I am not a fast writer. Writing is hard, even at times painful, for me. I try to worry each word into place, torture each paragraph into perfection. And that, my friends, leads me to paralysis.

Sometimes, you just have to sit down and let flow out. As the King says in Alice In Wonderland,

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

Because, as the Queen tells us,

"In this country, it takes all the running you can do to keep you in the same place."

The trouble with Harry

2007-07-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

The Harry Potter Effect is old news in our business by now. Every time a new Rowlings rock goes Ker-PLUNK in the water, we all eventually feel the ripples.

Publishers dance around trying to position their books to survive. Booksellers won't talk to publicists when Harry's coming to call. And us mere authors? We don't even think about scheduling a signing when Dirty Harry's packing heat in town. Except for my friend Elaine Viets who likes staring down the kid. (Click on her name to read how she begs him to make her day.)

Personally, I haven't given Harry much thought. Until this year. I got switched to a summer publishing schedule and woodenchaknowit, along comes another Harry. The final chapter in the saga, no less. On tour, everywhere I went I had to sit near a mamoth poster of the little bastard with a big countdown sign.

TEN DAYS TO HARRY! SEVEN DAYS TO HARRY! TWO DAYS TO HARRY!

Then, a couple days ago, the early numbers came in for my new book. Strong enough to break USA Today bestseller list and make my publisher happy. But not enough for the Times list. They said: Well, all numbers were down this month because of --

Ca sera. No big deal. And hey, kids are reading books. Folks are making money. Sales beget sales. A rising ocean lifts us all. It's a good thing, right?

Then I read Joe Nocera's Talking Business column in today's New York Times. In it, he makes a convincing case for the other side -- the Dark Side, if you will -- saying that "Deathly Hallows" is a microcosm for all that is wrong with the book business today. You probably can't get into the Times' archive dungeon, so I will try to summarize it here:

Before the coming of the big stores like Barnes & Noble, there was no such thing as discounting. If the cover said a book was $25, that's usually what stores sold it for. But once B&N started it, everyone joined in -- Borders, Costco, Wal-Mart and of course Amazon. The bigger the bestseller, the larger the discount.

Harry Potter’s American publisher Scholastic had a suggested retail price on "Hallows" of $34.99. But the Barnes & Noble price was $20.99, a 40 percent discount. Barnes & Noble “members” got an additional 10 percent off.

At Borders, the price was also $20.99. At Costco, it went down to $18.19. And at good old Wal-Mart, Harry could be had for $17.87. (If you were willling to jump over to the UK, you could get a copy through a Wal-Mart subsidiary for the equivalent of $10.)

And Amazon? If you pre-ordered, the book was $17.99, a saving of 49 percent (including a $5 gift certificate and free shipping). Nacero figures Amazon is losing $10 per book and quotes an Amazon spokesman as admitting it is being sold at “slightly below break even.”

So why is everyone willing to lose money on the biggest book of the year?

Part of the problem, as Nocero points out, is that books aren't sold by just bookstores anymore. More than 50 percent of all books are now sold by non-bookstores. And stores like Wal-Mart, Costco and Target all try to undercut each other because they see books not as an end unto themselves but just another item to be dropped in the shopping cart. They're willing to let the new Harry go cheap because those jumbo bags of Cheetos and bales of Pampers help offset it.

“It’s not that different from a hamburger joint giving away the second hamburger free,” says Tony Schulte, a former executive vice president with Random House and Knopf.

But Nocero isn't buying it:

It is different. You just don’t see other industries losing money on their hottest brand to get people to buy less desirable merchandise. But that’s what the book industry does.

Why the hell is Barnes & Noble playing this losing game? It has no choice, Nocero says, because every book Costco sells is a book sale Barnes & Noble has missed. And although Amazons sales are still a fraction of the total, every buyer who clicks on Amazon is one less body in a brick-and-mortar store. Nocero quotes Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly: “It’s almost biblical. What Barnes & Noble did [to the independent bookstores]is now being done to them.”

As if we didn't need to be told, this is all just more evidence that the book business is just plain wacked-out. In 1980, there were about 42,400 new titles, according to R.R. Bowker Company, which monitors new books. By 2005, the number of new titles had jumped to 168,000.

This is also a good thing, right?

Listen to Nocero:

It’s a funny business, the book business, and making little or no money on a brand as powerful as Harry Potter is only part of it. Name another industry, for instance, where the manufacturer agrees to take back — and reimburse the retailer! — for unsold merchandise. Yet that is how the book industry has operated since the Depression. What other business can you think of where sales are essentially flat, yet the manufacturers keep ramping up volume?" Nocera asks. [Yet] each of these practices has a certain screwball logic. Because most books are written by unknowns, book publishers suspect that the returns policy makes stores more willing to take a chance on a new author.

Sounds familiar? How often in our little crime writing community have we heard that it is easier to break out a debut author than to keep a solid midlister going? Independent stores are shuttering their doors. Shelf space is getting harder to get. The lists are increasingly dominated by a handful of mega-authors like Patterson, Roberts, Evanovich. And every time one of them puts out a new book, a little bit more of the bookstore real estate is set aside for their lucrative backlists, leaving less turf for everyone else.

So why do publishers keep churning out so many books? Again, Nocero:

The reason for the rise in the number of published books is that the big publishers are owned by conglomerates that demand increased revenue and profits from their book divisions. Because publishers have no idea which books will succeed commercially (Harry Potter is an exception) they react by publishing ever more books, hoping to increase their odds of hitting the jackpot with a “Tipping Point” or “Da Vinci Code.” The vast majority of books, by the way, are commercial flops.

Depending on how you look at it, even Harry.

And The Whimper Is...

2007-07-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

So I am doing my usual warm-up before hitting the computer this morning: folding laundry and watching "Frazier" reruns. I love Frazier because beneath his smooth surface is a roiling bog of neediness and insecurity.

Today was the episode where Frazier and his producer Roz are nominated for the Seebee Award, given out to Seattle's best broadcasters. Frazier tries to be above it all, but he just can't. He wants to win, dammit! But at the banquet, he finds out he is up against the aging icon Fletcher Grey. Fletcher has been nominated 11 times in a row and lost 10. Fletcher's date is his 84-year-old mother who has flown in from Scottsdale -- for the 11th straight year. Fletcher is also retiring. Frazier tells Roz, "if we win, they'll string us up." Roz says, "I don't care. I'd crawl over his mother to win this award!"

Frazier loses, of course. His agent Beebee deserts him. Roz gets drunk on Pink Ladies.

Sounds like a couple award banquets I've been to. Kelly and I have been lucky to have been nominated for some awards over the past ten years. But we've never won. Yes, it is an honor to be nominated. But it bites to lose. I can't lie and tell you otherwise. So last weekend, when we won the Thriller Award in New York City, all the little toads and newts in my bog of insecurity bubbled to the surface.

The International Thriller Writers conference had been great. But I went to banquet with no expectations. I sat between my agent and Ali Karem but I was filled with dread. Elaine Flinn kept saying it was our night. Doug Lyle wished me luck. Kelly couldn't make it, so I felt pretty alone despite all the good vibes. We might write hardboiled, but I am not. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I bolted for the lobby.

Jim Fusilli was standing there and barred my way. He put an arm around my shoulders. My friend Britin Haller grabbed my hand. Each nominee was announced by reading the first line of the book. Ours is "The Christmas lights were already up." I remember thinking, "God, that sucks."

I heard the title of our book announced as the winner. I started crying. I don't remember what I said on stage. Many authors, when they are up for awards, jot down a few bon mots so they don't make asses of themselves. They at least think things through. These are the authors whose gracious and often clever speeches are quoted in the blogs the next morning.

This is what SHOULD have been in my head as I went up there:

"Thank you so much for this great honor. First, I want to thank the ITW judges who put their careers on hold for months. Their job is doubly hard in that they first must read hundreds of books but then, they must decide on just one when any of the five finalists would be worthy. Second, I want to thank my fellow nominees. I am honored to have my book mentioned among their fine works. Third, I want to thank my agent and editor who...."

This is what was REALLY in my head:

"God, I can't believe I am crying! How pathetic and needy! Where's the friggin' stairs? I can't see! Who is that man at the podium? Shit, I forget his name! THE LIGHTS! I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING! Do I have lettuce on my teeth? Agent...mention her name. My bra is showing, I just know it. DON'T PULL AT YOUR BRA!! He's handing it to me. Jesus, it's heavy...don't drop it...don't drop it...don't drop it. Say something nice about the other nominees! Can't...can't...can't remember their names. YOU TWIT! You just sat on a panel with TWO of them this morning! Wait, wait...is it Paul LeVEEN or Paul LeVINE??? Forget it...buy them a drink later. I should have gone to the hairdresser before I left home. My roots are showing. Shit, did I thank my agent? JESUS! THE LIGHTS! Stop talking now...you're rambling, you ass...stop now and just go sit down. Okay, leaving now. TAKE THE AWARD! Don't drop it...don't drop it...don't drop it. Good grief...I'm here in New York City wearing Nine West because I was too cheap to spring for those black Blahniks at Off Fifth. Dear God, just let me just off this stage so I can get to the john and pull up my Spanx and get a glass of wine....

I made it off the stage okay. Here is the photo to prove it:

Walkin' the dog

2007-04-14T22:54:00.000-04:00

I took my dog for a long walk tonight. It was one of those lovely spring nights here in Fort Lauderdale. Cool, balmy, smelling of the sea and night blooming jasmine. The perfect kind of night for an epiphany.

Oh no...she's going deep on us.

Nah. Wouldn't do that. But will you allow me to be serious?

This is my blog sign-off tonight. I don't have the huge following to make any blogasphere headlines, but that it is not the point. I am writing to you folks who have have shown up here to read my stuff for the last year or so. Many have contributed, many have just lurked. We've had some fun, some passionate exchanges. We've learned from each other. You've given me great joy.

But here's the thing. Over the past couple weeks, I have come to a realization. I only have so much energy to give. To give to my loved ones. To give to my friends. To give to my work. To give to myself.

We writers, God, we are driving ourselves crazy these days trying to do it all. To blog. To tour. To promote. To network. To market. Too....?

What is being lost as we push the rock up the hill every day? Creative energy lost to our books? Time lost to our families? No nights to do something as simple as taking the dog for a nice long walk? No time to take a well-deserved breath and say, "enough?"

I have two friends named Elaine. My friend Elaine Flinn gave up her spot on her blog Murderati this week so she could find a better balance in her life. My friend Elaine Viets had a stroke this week. She will recover. But I am trying to figure out not just how I can help her but what I can learn from her.

I am writing this in an emotional state tonight. But with a greater clarity than I have felt in a long time. I will miss you all. I bid you to visit the sites listed at the left of this entry. Lots of good advice, entertainment and great stuff out there in the writer's blog world.

The time has come the walrus said
To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings
- Alice in Wonderland

And the time has come to sign off. Thank you all for visiting Cabbages and Kings. You've been great. As for me? Don't fret. I am walking the dog.

Busy work

2007-04-11T17:50:00.000-04:00

I have been gone a long time, I know. I suspect many of you poked your nose in the door, saw the room was empty and gave up. But if you are still reading this, you're giving me another chance. Thanks.

But life, as they say, has gotten in the way of late. I have been distracted with my chores as Edgar Week chair (Kelly has been, too). We've been gearing up for a tour that we are arranging and a workshop we will be teaching at SleuthFest this month. Busy, busy, busy...go, go, go. Right...

And then, today, I got a big slap to the head. One of my best friends, Elaine Viets, had a stroke last night. She had emergency surgery and will recover. But the road back won't be easy. Many of you know Elaine. If you don't, well, you should. She writes two terrific series that are laugh-out-loud but leavened with wry social commentary: The Dead-End Job books starring her on-the-run heroine Helen Hawthorne. And a newer series starring Josie Marcus, mystery shopper. Even though my tastes run to hardboiled, Elaine's series are one of the few I go back to because I know I'm going to get a great read. I really like her stuff.

I know she'll hate me to say this, but she's a role model for writers. She's been a stalwart at countless writers cons, a great teacher at SleuthFest, a former board member of Mystery Writers of America at the National and local levels who helped steer the organization out of its good-old-boy dark ages to its present health.

When I was just starting out in the business, I worked up the courage to go to my local MWA meeting, Elaine was the only person who went out of her way to make me feel welcome. I never forgot that. I try to remember to do the same now for other newbies. Later, when I got over my utter awe of her and Barbara Parker, we three become good girl buds, meeting for venting sesssions over drinks. We call ourselves The Hussies. I knew whenever there was a NEED HUSSIES! email alert, we were in for a good night of gossip, advice and providing whatever balm our careers and lives needed.

Elaine had a damn busy spring, with new books, tours, appearances at book fests. She still found time to edit the Edgar Annual, which is a stunner, meeting her deadline this week like the ex-journalist she is. She was scheduled to be a moderator at the upcoming Edgar Symposium, leading a great group of panelists who were going to talk about cozies, traditionals and chick lit mysteries. (She's a crusader for getting them the respect they deserve). She was set to be toastmaster at Malice Domestic next month (where she has won two Agatha's). She was set to lead a workshop in the short story at SleuthFest next week, and appear on a panel with Nancy Pickard, Barbara Parker and me. In this business, you need friends who have your back. Elaine is that kind of friend. She is a great broad, as we used to say in the old un-PC times.

This blog entry is the closest I came to work today. Mostly, I cleaned out computer files. I reorganized my address book. I threw out old files. I made new ones. When I couldn't find anything else to do in my office, I cleaned out my underwear drawer, refolded my husband's t-shirts, did the kitty litters.

That's what you do when something happens to someone you care about. You do stupid shit to give yourself the feeling that you have some control over something.

Well, fellow Hussie, we couldn't have a meeting, so I hope you don't mind that I vented here. Get well soon, friend.

Wearing of the Green

2007-03-17T12:46:00.000-04:00

Somewhere deep in my DNA, there's a slender strand of Irish stuff. So in honor of that and today's date, let's talk about the wearing of the green.

Not flattering shades of emerald, jade, sea-foam or even teal. I'm talking about the color of jealousy. We writers all get jealous. It's in our nature. We hear about another author who gets a big advance, gets a book tour or a full-page color ad on the back of the New York Times Arts section. And we start looking like this:
Not a pretty sight, is it. I am thinking about this today because of an acquaintance of mine. Not a friend so much as a colleague who I bump into at conferences and meetings. He has written twelve really good mysteries. He's had critical success. His publisher still loves him. But he is all bent out of shape this week about the Edgar Award nominations. When the awards were announced a while back, he ordered all the books in his category from Amazon and read them. Then the emails started: Why can't I get nominated? These books aren't better than mine. Is it because I write such-and-such?

I listened for a while. But you know, at some point you just tune this kind of thing -- and person -- out. Not that I am immune from jealousy. Believe me, I can rant about this with the best of them. But I vent to Kelly (or she to me) and we try to forget about it. Because -- and I don't mean to get all-Oprah on you here -- wearing this kind of green takes a lot of energy. Energy that you could be putting toward more positive things. Like, for me, finishing chapter 2.

And that is where I am going right now. Back to that chapter that's giving me fits. But first, my wishes to you for a happy St. Patrick's Day. Wear your green proudly today:
Or like this:

Or even this:

Just don't get caught looking like this:
As the Irish prayer goes: May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

To which I can only add: May you write well and long.

Downward facing writer

2007-02-20T11:34:00.000-05:00

I really hate starting a new book. It is really really hard for me. So much so that I go into a funk every time Kelly and I gear up for the next one.

Part of this comes from the postpartem blues of finishing the previous book. When we are gliding toward the finish line, I am giddy with energy and good vibes. And oh, that moment when we get to type THE END! Rapture.

But as soon as that manuscript flies away on its FedEx wings, I crash. I sit around in a stew of depression, doubt and despair. Is this going to be book where they discover we are frauds? Will I ever come up with another decent idea?

My funk goes on until Kelly finally kicks me in the ass and we start rolling the boulder back up the hill again. But this week, I realized I had to do something drastic, something preferably not involving pharmaceudicals. So I went back to my yoga class.

I used to be a very attentive yogi. It seems to sooth my demons, make me braver at facing the computer. Maybe this has something to do with endorphins? All I know is I always seem to write better after an hour of saluting the sun and standing on my noggin.

The thing I like about yoga is that it is very good for A-type personalities. In a yoga class, there is no way to compete, no way to measure your worth by outside standards. If you get hung up on the fact that the woman next to you can do a better lotus than you? Well, you've missed one of the points of yoga. Which is:

You. Only you. And your own progress. At your own pace.

Which, when you think about it, is great advice for any writer. See, we tend to get all bent out of shape by worrying about things outside our control. Like, how come Author X got a huge advance when he writes crap? Like, why did Author Y get a starred review in PW and I can't get any notice? Like, why does Author Z get a a 10-city tour and I can't get my local Barnes & Noble to let me sit at a cardtable and try to hawk a few books?

God, we all worry so much now about promotion and marketing. We're all afraid we aren't doing enough to push our books. Aren't talking up enough librarians, doing enough drive-by signings, attending enough conventions. We fret about pod-casting, viral marketing, networking, blogging, slogging and dogging. We spend so much creative energy trying to think of ways to separate ourselves from the pack, it's a wonder we have any juice left for writing.

When I was just starting out, I found myself at an MWA luncheon sitting next to Jan Burke. This was not long after she won the Edgar for "Bones." I was an awed newbie, and I said something stupid about how the bad writers seemed to get all the attention. She was kind and said all writers get jealous. And she added something I will never forget:

"You have to keep your head down and just write your books."

Five books later, Jan Burke is still there, making the New York Times list with her newest "Kidnapped." And me? I am trying to live by her words and the lesson of my yoga class -- that the only person I am in competition with is me.

So, if you -- like me -- need an attitude adjustment, I highly recommend some yoga. I'll even give you a few basic exercises to get you started:

YOGA FOR WRITERS

The King Dancer position. This is very good at helping you build balance. To do this pose, fix your gaze on something that doesn’t move so that you don’t lose your balance. Like maybe writing the best book you can?

The Fish Pose: It is good for developing flexibility. Because sometimes, you have to go in directions you didn't consider. Like abandoning a moribund story or trying a new POV. Or maybe adapting a pen name. If you need help with this pose, put a blanket under your head. Or read a book by an author you admire.

The Goddess: This pose helps you open yourself up. If this feels uncomfortable, you can use some folded blankets to prop up the spine. Or, find a good critique group to lend you some support.

The Crow: This is a hard one, but worth learning. Do not let your head drop! This will cause you to tip forward and fall. But don't worry; everyone falls when learning this pose. Just like every writer fears falling flat on their face, even the great ones.

The Headstand: Very good for getting the blood to your head and increasing overall circulation. Practice the pose at the wall. Try to move further from the wall each time, or remove one foot and then the other from the wall to practice balancing. You can't master this one in one try. And you can't become a successful writer overnight. It takes years of hard work and practice.

The Tree: Another good balance pose. If you cannot bring your foot high inside the high, bring it lower. In other words, lowering your expectations isn't always a bad thing. If you don't make the New York Times bestseller list on your first three books -- What? You're gonna quit? No, you keep trying and eventually your leg (or book) will go higher than you ever thought it could.

The Wheel: This is an advanced pose, mastered only after you've achieved strength and balance. Same goes for a writing career. You hang around long enough, you might become a big wheel. Need help with this pose? Have someone stand behind you and hold their ankles instead of putting the hands on the floor. Likewise, if you've got a spouse or family behind you, you can conquer the world.

And lastly...
The Pose of the Child: Rest in Child’s Pose at any time if you get tired or out of breath. Rejoin the class when you are ready. In other words, don't forget to take some time off, kiss your wife or husband, and play with your kids. Writers often forget the value of recharging the old batteries. You can't write about roses if you never take time to smell them.

Namaste, my friends...

On copy editors, jockstraps and other cosmic questions

2007-02-12T13:19:00.000-05:00

Copy editors, bless ‘em. Good ones are hard to find and hard ones are even better to find.

It’s even more of a thrill to find out they’re not pucker lipped crones with flaming red pencils, but a fellow Michigander with a sharp and knowledgeable eye. Such is our latest one, Wendy.

But let's back up a moment. When you write a book, you have only five chances to not end up looking like the world's biggest fool:

Write the best book you can.
Rewrite that book how ever many times it takes to cleanse it of all the cretinous prose, dumb mistakes and smelly cheese.
Have a great line editor who makes you go back and de-cheese it some more.
Luck into getting a great copy editor, who has your back.
And finally, read your galleys carefully

For all practical purposes, your only real last best chance is No. 4. The copy editor. She is the last gas station on Highway 95 between Las Vegas and Searchlight. He is the last butt in the car ashtray after you've just gotten off a four-hour flight. She is the one who tells you your skirt is caught in your pantyhose when you walk out of the bathroom. He is the one who tells you when to zip your fly or button your mouth.

When you get to the galleys, it is too late. The copy editor is all that stands between you and the abyss of hackdom, my friends.

So, we are here today (Kelly is writing this one, too), to praise Wendy the Copy Editor and her unheralded ilk (I think that's the right word...where's Wendy when I need her?)

For our upcoming book A THOUSAND BONES, Wendy corrected our lays and lies without being smug. She knew the difference between Mackinaw and Mackinac. She respected our idiomatic dialogue. She double-checked our French without being snide. (When I was writing romance, I had a British editor who scribbled in the margin of my manuscript: "Considering this author's lack of command in English, I don't think we should trust her French.")

Not only did Wendy help us keep our dates, ages and eye colors straight, she raised a couple plot questions we hadn't thought much about. Once we did think about her polite but pointed questions, we went back in for a final critical rewrite that made the plot stronger.

But copy editors being the eccentric souls they are, Wendy did bring up some questions that we -- or any other writers in their wildest dreams -- would never expect to encounter. Like...

Is underwear plural or singular?

Here is the paragraph as we wrote it:

Last night, she had washed out her underwear in her room and put them on the heating unit to dry, but they had fallen off during the night and were still wet.

This was her suggested version:

Last night, she had washed out her underwear in her room and put it on the heating unit to dry, but it had fallen off during the night and was still wet.

This set us thinking...

In almost every Thesaurus reference to underwear, there is an ‘S’ added to the word -- shorts, long johns, panties, drawers, bikinis, undies, woolies, bloomers, flannels, thermals, skivvies, boxers. Despite the fact the clothing in question is, indeed, a single piece of fabric.

Is it because panties have two holes for two extremities that we perceive it to be plural?

"She picked up her panties and put them on."
"He took off his boxers and tossed them to the bed."

This sounds right to us because this is how people think. But that leads us to an even more perplexing question: How come a bra, another single-piece item, which also holds two separate body parts, becomes an IT when we think of it in every day usage? Or what about a jock strap, which is similar but, technically speaking, holds three body parts?

"She took her bra off and laid them on the bed."
"He took off his jockstrap and flung them into the corner."

Whoa, what kind of image does that put in a reader’s head?

Now our particular problem maybe have come from Wendy’s perception that our character had washed both pieces of her underwear, not just her panties. And referring to a set as IT may have been more appropriate, even though we still prefer THEM.

In the end, that’s what we opted for and we’ll see if we won this strange battle when we get our galleys. But here at Cabbages and Kings, (where we do tend to talk about many things) we are here to serve your writing needs. And we writers do love our rules. So we leave you with this:

The Crime Writer's Rules About Underwear

Clothing with two sleeves or arm holes are an It.
Clothing meant to hold two pieces of the anatomy are an It.
Clothing designed for three (or more appendages) are an It.
Clothing with two legs or leg holes are a Them.

Except, of course, for a girdle, which is an It. We think.

Do you have the title gene?

2007-02-01T19:38:00.000-05:00

Let me run something by you, just for your opinion. Which of these titles grabs you for a thriller/mystery?

Somebody's Daughter
Hunger Moon
A Thousand Bones

We'll get back to those in a second. But now, let's talk about one of the most important things you need to succeed in this business. Forget talent, forget perseverence, forget craftsmanship. Even forget luck. I'm thinking today that what you really need is The Title Gene.

Okay, I am being a smartass here. Of course you need all those other things. But I am beginning to think that you just can't discount having the knack for great titles. It can make or break your career. It's a different talent than book writing. It's akin to headline writing in journalism. You have to sum up in one to five words the heart and soul of your story. And make it sound sexy, exciting and oh-so different from every other book screaming for attention on the shelves.

I think we give good title. Randy Wayne White once told me he really liked our titles and considering he's no slouch, I'll take the compliment. Our titles may not be super original, but they do convey the moods of our books. But I tell you, it is getting harder and harder to come up with something fresh in the crime writing business. How many variations are there on all the usual buzzwords -- death, black, darkness, grave, murder, cold, midnight, evil? You get the point.

Titles are a little bit like bras. Finding the right one is a deeply frustrating, uncomfortable exercise and you have to try on a bunch of them to find one that really fits. (Men, you're on your own here -- jockstraps?)

Our first book "Dark of of the Moon" went nameless almost to press time. It began life as "The Last Rose of Summer" and mutated into "Circle of Evil" before I found the Langston Hughes poem "Silhouette" that inspired it.

"Paint It Black"? Well, just listen to the lyrics of the Rolling Stones' song and you get the shivers.

Then came our dud, "Thicker Than Water." It's a terrific book but man, what a crappy title. And guess what? It was our worst-seller. Its original title was "Flesh and Blood" but Jonathon Kellerman had a book coming out the same time with the same title. Our editor told us, "Your book will suffer." Last year, Lisa Gardner had a book called "Gone," same title as Kellerman. I wonder if she suffered?

We followed up with "Island of Bones." Can't go wrong with "bones" on a title and frankly, we hit on the title before we had a plot for this one. It sold really well.

Then came "A Killing Rain." We didn't have a title until we were almost done. Then while writing a synopsis for the marketing people, I wrote: "The story takes place during a Florida cold snap, what the farmers here call a killing rain." Well, duh. But here's a postscript. When my sister Kelly was on a panel at Left Coast Crime, things were going nuts (Well, Joe Konrath was the moderator). At one point, David Morrell said something about Barry Eisler's latest, "A Killing Rain." Panelist Lee Goldberg kidded to Kelly, "you should sue his ass." Everyone howled. But it's really not funny when your book has the same title has someone else's. I mean, Jonathon King's "A Killing Night" came out the same time! And the same time my first short story "One Shot" came out, guess what Lee Child book was on the shelf? Lee, ever the gentleman, joked to me recently that I stole his title.

And that brings us to "An Unquiet Grave." Another of our books that didn't have a title until the end. But I was surfing thru Bartlett's online quotations (the writer's friend!) It was luck -- or karma? -- that the old poem was not only an evocative title but dovetailed with our theme. The gods protect fools, travelers and occasionally even writers.

Years ago, I read a book by John Katzenbach called "In the Heat of the Summer." Terrific book with a flaccid title. When they made a movie of it, it was retitled " The Mean Season." Much better, no?

Sometimes titles can turn on you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's called "The Great Gatsby" "Under the Red White and Blue" (the American Dream, get it?) Then he considered "Trimalchio's Banquet" and "The High Bouncing Lover." His editor Max Perkins changed it.

Margaret Mitchell originally named the heroine Pansy rather than Scarlett and wanted to call the book after her. She argued with her publisher and they suggested the alternative title using the novel's immortal last line, "Tomorrow Is Another Day." She finally offered up a line from her favorite poem by Ernest Dowson, "Gone with the Wind."

The apocryphal story about Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" is that it was originally called Catch-18. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? And then there's J. K. Rowling, who was talked into changing the name of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Changing one word can make or break you.

It gets worse:

"All the President's Men" working title: "At This Point in Time."
"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask" working title: "The Birds and the Bees"
"Valley of the Dolls" working title: "They Don't Build Statues to Businessmen" (huh?)
"Pride and Prejudice" working title: "First Impressions"
"Roots" working title: "Before This Anger"

Titles are so important, there is even a website now where you can test the "bestseller" quality of yours. And there are some guys who rent out as book titlers. Right...

I think I would rather just ask my friends who have the title gene. Like our buddy Rick Mofina. A couple years back, Rick would not tell us the title of his WIP no matter how many times we promised not to steal it. It would have been worth stealing -- "The Dying Hour."

Here's the thing: If you make it big -- I mean really big -- titles seem to cease to be important. Hell, you could slap "Evil Refried Beans of Midnight" on a Mike Connelly book and it would sell.

But the rest of us? We are stuck in title hell, still looking for that one great phrase that will separate us from the ever-growing pack.

I like Dave Barry's philosophy. His latest is called "Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down." He jokes that he wanted to call it "Tuesdays with Harry Potter" but that "the Legal Department had some problems with that."

P.S. Those three titles at the beginning? The first two were the working titles of our upcoming book until our editor Mitch said, try again. We were on chapter forty-something before "A Thousand Bones" surfaced. Kismet...

New! Booky Noise VI

2007-01-26T11:14:00.000-05:00

I am off to Bookmania in Stuart today, where I share a panel with Tess Gerritsen, J.A. Jance, Sujata Massey, Katherine Hall Page and Lisa Unger called "Once Upon a Crime." What a line-up, huh?

While I am gone, would you all take a look at Jeannie's opening to her book "No Apologies" and give her some feedback. Does it float your boat? Tickle your twines? Get your toes acurling?

Okay, talk amongst yourselves until I get home Sunday!

“Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Take them off.”

“Nooo…”

Ephraim pointed his really big gun at me as I stood on Gunnison Beach. A crisp October breeze cut across the sand and maked me shiver. The soft shimmer of moonlight cast an eerie silver glow across the water, making it seem like a mocking entity ready to pounce, but the real threat stood before me.

“You have what you came for, just leave.”

“Strip, damn it.” Ephraim took a step forward and aimed that gun at my heart. “Now.”

“Please, you don’t have to do this.” Thinking rape and murder and everything in between I kept inching back, away from the gun. “Take the money, it’s yours. Please just leave.”

“I want your clothes.”

“But why? I’ve done what you said. You have the money.”

“I want you naked so you don’t get any ideas about following me.”

“Oh, no.” A sense of relief, “I won’t follow you. I’ll just sit here and count to a hundred or something.”

“Sorry dear, but I have no reason to trust you. Now give me your clothes before I put a bullet in between those pretty green eyes.” The gun came up to give me a good look down its long barrel.

Gathering all the courage in my soul I raised my chin defiantly and said, “No. I refuse.”

“Then I’ll have to shoot you.” Ephraim said. I backed up a step, legs shaking and thought of Judy. It was all I could do not to look up to the dune where she was hidden video taping this exchange. She told me this would be an easy drop. Just hand off the money and leave, she just needed proof, that’s all.

Ephraim pulled the little thingy back on the top of the gun with an ominous click.

I flung off my denim jacket, ripped my t-shirt over my head and kicked off my shoes and jeans. It was a no choice situation and as much as I didn’t want to do this, even more I didn’t want to get shot. As I stood there in my bra and panties Ephraim said, “Everything.”

Booky Noise...HELP!

2007-01-22T12:00:00.000-05:00

Well, shoot. Or shoot me, if you must.

Due to an AOL problem (this is the new "the dog ate my homework" excuse), I have lost a couple of your Booky Noise entries that I had waiting in storage to post here. I thought I had saved them in a special folder, but they have vanished.

If you sent me one and still want feedback, please resend it asap and we can resume our critiques. Or, if anyone new to this blog wants to participate, here's the deal:

Booky Noise is devoted to our group here giving feedback on the opening of your work-in-progress. Please limit your opening to just a page or less, the idea being that if you can't caught our attention in a page, it ain't working anyway.

And to the four of you who were waiting, you're up first, if you can resend.

Going back to ferreting out the typos, crappy syntax and brain farts in my manuscript now...

Can you pass the 69 Test?

2007-01-18T13:36:00.000-05:00

Now that I have your attention...

No, I am not going to talk about sex again. Not even bad sex, which as we writers know is a helluva lot more fun than good sex. I want to talk about finding the heart of your story. And to do that, you have to try this little exercise:

Get out your book. (For our purposes here, "book" means published or un, completed or not. "Book" is that thing that has been keeping you up lately.)

Open it to page 69. Read what is there. I don't care if it's a full page or the last two lines of a chapter. (If you hit a blank page, you have permission to use either 68 or 70 but that's as much cheating as I allow.)

This page -- this single page -- capsulizes your entire book.

You don't believe me, do you. I didn't believe it either until I tried this experiment. I did it at the request of Marshal Zeringue, executive director for the Campaign for the American Reader. Marshal has this terrific blog wherein he promotes reading. Sez Marshal: "The goal of this blog is to inspire more people to spend more time reading books. I'll try to do that by shining a little light on books that I like and think others might find worthy of their time and attention."

He also came up with the Page 69 Test. He was inspired by Marshall McLuhan's suggestion that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read it. Marshal tried it with Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, and was so taken with the results he devised the Page 69 writers challenge.

On his blog, he has asked dozens of writers to answer the question: Is your page 69 a good place to get a sense of your book?

At Marshal's request, I took up the gauntlet and cracked open our most recent, An Unquiet Quiet. Here is our page 69:

As Charlie Oberon staggered closer into the light, everything came into focus. His bloody sweatshirt. A woman’s lifeless, naked body. Charlie’s long fingers pressed into her thighs. Arms hanging limp, shreds of dark wet leaves stuck to them. Her hair...long, blond and thick with blood.

“She won’t wake up,” Charlie cried. “She won’t wake up.”

Louis broke into a run toward him.

It's the end of chapter 8. Does it give a good sense of the book? I'll say only that I went into this experiment a sceptic and emerged...

Well, hop over to Marshal's blog and find out. And check out some of the other entries. They're fascinating. Especially N.M. Kelby's analysis of her book "Whale Season." Her page 69 is blank. She says it speaks volumes.

Okay...back to your own page 69. How does it work for you? What is there on this one single page that somehow serves to represent the very heart of your book? Think hard. It's there. If it's not? Well, maybe, just maybe, you haven't really found the heart of your book yet.

Let me know what you found out. We'll print them here.

When sex goes bad

2006-12-20T15:25:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year when thoughts start turning to book awards -- The Edgar, the Booker, the Thriller, Newberry, Nobel, Hugo et al. But I can't believe I missed my favorite -- the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award.

As a recovering romance writer, I know how tough it is to write good sex scenes. In fact, we have on-camera sex for the first time in our crime writing careers in our upcoming book A THOUSAND BONES. And folks, let me tell ya, writing this stuff isn't for the squeamish. We've all seen our share of bad sex in crime fiction.

But apparently, literary writers make a worse mess of it than your average genre midlister. This year's winner was debut novelist Iain Hollingshead, a mere whippersnapper at age 25, for his book "Twenty Something."

Said the judges: "Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts. Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

So, here for your amusement, are excerpts from the Literary Review finalists. WARNING: Don't read these with a full mouth of beer without first covering your keyboards.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
If Dawn Madden's breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie's got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I know watching was wrong but I couldn't not. Tom Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy hair there.

"If you want me to stop, Madam Crombie, you have to say now."

"Oooh, Master Yew," she croodled, "don't you dare."

Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck.

Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.

Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat.

Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.

Now Tom Yew's body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him. Once more, like he'd been booted in the balls.

Her fingernails'd sunk salmony welts into his arse.

Debby Crombie's mouth made a perfect O.

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
She put her hand around his penis and moved it back and forth and it no longer seemed strange, not even a part of his body, more a part of hers, the sensations flowing in one unbroken circle. And she could hear herself panting now, like a dog, but she didn't care ...

And she realised that it was going to happen and she heard herself saying, 'Yes, yes, yes,' and even hearing the sound of her own voice didn't break the spell. And it swept over her like surf sweeping over sand then falling back and sweeping up over the sand again and falling back.

Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs. The starched bolster in her parents' bed. A hot cone of grass-clippings. She was breaking up into a thousand tiny pieces, like snow, or bonfire sparks, tumbling high in the air, then starting to fall, so slowly it hardly seemed like falling at all ...

He waited for a couple of minutes. "And now," he said, "I think it's my turn."

The Whole World Over by Julia Glass
You're a sexy lady, know that?" Stan whispered as he unzipped her pants.

She had no answer; she kept her eyes closed and sank into the music. His naked penis, when she felt it against her bare skin, was a shock, mostly for the desire it beckoned from Saga's marrow.

"So touch me, Story Girl," he said.

Still she said nothing and kept her eyes closed. She felt Stan's pubic hair, like a prickly sea creature, move in circles on her thigh. Then, another shock, she felt his fingers ...

When he raised himself slightly away from her again, she opened her eyes only long enough to see that he was taking a condom out of a drawer in the table that held the books and the phone. She closed her eyes again and let herself sink further down, or come more fully to the surface, she wasn't sure which ...

And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity ... all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she'd lost for good. It nearly deafened her (but not quite) to the other, more alarming wave - the groaning and happy cursing that came from Stan.

Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh
As Skinner undressed, the old woman removed her coat and began to struggle out of a series of cardigans, pinafores and vests. Lying on the bed, she looked smaller but still monstrous, wrinkled rolls of flab spilling over the mattress. Foul aromas rose from the putrefying pools of sweat and dead skin trapped within the folds of her flesh. - Thoat ye'd be bigger, Mary pouted as Skinner removed his Calvin Klein briefs.

Fuckin cheeky auld clart ...

"Next time ah'll bring a strap on," he said bitterly.

Ignoring him, Mary lay back on the bed and pulled away at the sagging corrugations of her body until she was able to locate her sex. "Ah've nae cream tae lubricate this. Ye'll huv tae use spit. Howk it up," she commanded...

"Work it in," Mary urged, as Skinner took his thick green slime and spread it like a chef might glaze some pastry, at the same time slowly breaching and exploring. A ludicrously distended clitoris popped out from nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, the size of a small boy's penis, and disconcertingly strangulated groans coming from the bed told Skinner that he was hitting the spot. After a while she gasped, "Pit it in now ... pit it in ..."

The Religion by Tim Willocks
He slid his hands on to her breasts, moisture lingering in the creases beneath them, and his memory of their magnificence was shamed by the beauty they embodied now. Love and desire became one, each as overmastering as the other, and he pulled the red surcoat over her head and sucked her nipples and stroked her swollen vulva until she trembled and clung on to him and mewled with pleasure in his ear. He turned her about, her eyes bedazed and rolling with transport, and he bent her across the cold steel face of the anvil. He unfastened his flies and unlimbered himself and she rose up on tiptoe to receive him. He bent his knees to get beneath her and entered her from behind and her feet left the floor and she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge until she squeezed him from inside and he exploded to a prayer of his own within her body. They fell to the surcoat on the ground and Tannhauser held her in his arms and he stroked her hair while her body was racked by sobs.

The Book of Dave by Will Self
Dave licked between Phyllis's shoulder blades and drove his tongue down her grooved back. She shuddered and, grabbing his thigh, pulled it up and over her own so that he half straddled her. In the confusion of their bodies - his hairy shanks, her sweaty thighs, his bow-taut cock, her engorged basketry of cowl and lip - there was clear intent; so that when he penetrated her, they moved into and out of one another with fluid ease, revving and squealing, before arriving quite suddenly.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
"Mouffette? She's a papillon...a sort of French ladies' lapdog."

"A - You say," gears in his mind beginning to crank, " 'lap' - French...lap-dog?"

Somehow gathering that Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate "French" caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress.

"Well! you two are...pretty close then, I guess?"

"I wuv my ickle woofwoof, ess I doo!"

His thoughts taking wing. The day alone with a French "lap" dog! who might be more than happy to do for Reef what she was obviously already doing for old 'Pert here! who in fact, m-maybe all this time's been just droolin' for one-them penises for a change, and will turn out to know plenty of tricks! A-and- ...

It took a while for Ruperta to get her toilette perfect and her bustle out the door. Reef found himself pacing and smoking, and whenever he took a look over at Mouffette could've sworn she was fidgeting too. The dog, it seemed to Reef, was giving him sidewise looks which if they'd come from a woman you would have had to call flirtatious. Finally after an extended farewell notable for its amount of saliva exchange, Mouffette slowly padded over to the divan where Reef was sitting and jumped up to sit next to him. Jumping on the furniture was something Ruperta seldom allowed her to do, and her gaze as Reef clearly assumed that he would not get upset. Far from it, what he actually got was an erection. Mouffette looked it over, looked away, looked back, and suddenly jumped up on his lap.

"Oboy, oboy." He stroked the diminutive spaniel for a while until, with no warning, she jumped off the couch and slowly went into the bedroom, looking back now and then over her shoulder. Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. "Here, Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here, lookit this, yeah, seen many of these lately? come on, smells good don't it, mmm, yum!" and so forth, Mouffette meantime angling her head, edging closer, sniffing with curiosity. "That's right, now, o-o-open up... good girl, good Mouffette now let's just put this - yaahhgghh!"

Reader, she bit him.

And the winner is...

Twentysomething by Iain Hollingshead
She's wearing a short, floaty skirt that's more suited to July than February. She leans forward to peck me on the cheek, which feels weird, as she's never kissed me on the cheek before. We'd kissed properly the first time we met. And that was over three years ago.

But the peck on the cheek turns into a quick peck on the lips. She hugs me tight. I can feel her breasts against her chest. I cup my hands round her face and start to kiss her properly, She slides one of her slender legs in between mine. Oh Jack, she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair. She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I'm inside her, and everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to go have a cigarette. I'll just crush the lit butt into my forehead. It would be, I am sure, less painful than this.

More on toxic ideas

2006-12-19T18:47:00.000-05:00

Okay, confession time.

The opening featured on the previous Booky Noise workshop? It is the opening from a book Kelly and I tried to write. Actually, we wrote it, finished the damn thing. We loved it! And then our agent sent it to our publisher. AND THEY REJECTED IT!

Mind you, this was after we had already done four books for them so we had a track record. But they hated it.Our agent then sent the manuscript around to a bunch of other New York publishers, because of course we believed our publisher just didn't get it. EVERYONE passed on it!

Why am I even bringing this up? Believe me, it's not because I am not over it. I am. Truly. I bring this up as an object lesson of sorts:

1. No matter where you are on the food chain, you are never immune to rejection. So you might as well grow a thick skin. Now.

2. We had myopia. It was hard for us to accept the fact that this story and this character that we were so in love with was...flawed. We couldn't see it at the time because we were so close to this book. This story had some serious plot holes, some not-so-great characters and other weaknesses. Unpublished writers often talk about rejection letters, which tend to be maddeningly unspecific about the "why" of rejections. But you have to learn to read between the lines. All the editors who rejected our book said essentially the same thing: We had a big problem with an inconsistency in the book's TONE. It wasn't dark, it wasn't light; it wasn't hardboiled, it wasn't chick lit. The phrase that turned up in letters more than once was -- I am not kidding -- "it's neither fish nor fowl." I think that is an actual publishing term, but I could be wrong.

3. This was a toxic idea. But dammit, we loved it, and we did it anyway. We shouldn't have. To paraphrase that great philospher Sting: If you love some toxic idea, set it free.

I offered our opening up for you all in Booky Noise to illustrate one of my favorite axioms about writing fiction: Anyone can craft a killer opening.

I truly believe this. Given enough time and hard work, almost anyone can write a good hook. But can you maintain a consistent, compelling story over 250 pages? Now, there's the nub of it all.

So, sorry for misleading anyone. Hope you aren't pissed. Happy holidays and new Booky Noise stuff coming soon!

Toxic ideas

2006-12-08T14:33:00.000-05:00

I have trouble sleeping. Usually, it is because I can't slow down the hamster wheel in my head. It is whirring around, filled with junk, to-do lists, misconjugated French verbs, woes real and imagined and regrets (I've had a few, too few to mention).

And then there are those story ideas floating around in my brain just as I'm trying to drift off. Those tantalizing fragments of fiction, those half-seen shadows of characters-to-be, those little loose pieces of plots just waiting to be sculpted into...

Books?

Here is the question I was pondering last night just before I surrendered myself into the arms of Morpheus: Is every idea worthy of a book? Does every story really need to be told? And then, in the cold light of morning, the answer came to me: NO, YOU FOOL!

You all know what I am talking about. Whether you are published yet or not, you undoubtedly have some of the following around your writing area:

1. A manila folder swollen with newspaper clippings, scribblings on cocktail napkins, pages torn from airline magazines, notebooks of dialogue overheard on the subway, stuff you've printed off obscure websites. At some point, you were convinced all these snippets had the makings of great books. (I call my own such folder BRAIN LINT.)

2. A folder icon in your computer called FUTURE PLOTS or some variation thereof. These are the will-o-wisps that came to you in the wee small hours of the morning, whispering "tell my story and I will make you a star!" So you, poor sot, jumped out of bed, fired up the Dell and tried to capture these tiny teases. Or maybe you're one of those bedeviled souls who keeps a notepad by the bed -- just in case. (Mine is right under my New York Times Crossword Puzzle Book and paperback of "The Lincoln Lawyer.")

3. Manuscripts moldering in your hard-drive. Ah yes...the stunted stories, the pinched-out plots, the atrophied attempts, the truncated tries. (sorry, when alliterative urge strikes, you have to go with it). These are the books you had so much hope for and they let you down. These are the books you went 30 chapters with but couldn't wrestle to the mat for the final pin. These are the books you grimly finished even as they finished you. Maybe you even sent these out to either agent or editor and they were rejected. At last count, I have six of these still breathing in my hard-drive. And at least four others finally died when my former Sony did, lost to mankind forever.

So what do you do with all these ideas? You expose them to sunlight and watch them burn to little cinders and then you move on. Because -- hold onto your fedora, Freddy -- not every idea is a good one. Not every idea makes for a publishable book. And sometimes, you just gotta let go.

I read a good blog entry recently about Shelf Books. (I am kicking myself for not writing down who coined this great term; I'm thinking John Connolly? Someone please help me if you know). But the idea that you sometimes have to finish a book just so you can get it out of your system and move on makes total sense to me.

Some of these Shelf Books are meant to be only training exercises. They teach you valuable lessons that you must learn in order to be a professional writer. (definition: someone who writes for an audience rather than just themselves) Tess Gerritsen recently blogged about how she wrote three books before she got her first break with Harlequin, and how dumbfounded she is that some writers expect to get published on their first attempt.

But I think I understand that peculiar mindset. I have seen some unpublished writers lock their jaws onto one idea like a rabid Jack Russell and chew it to death. These writers become paralyzed, unable to give up on their unworkable stories, unable to open their imaginations to anything else. I think it is because they fear this one bone of an idea is the only one they will ever have.

Two things happen when writers reach this point:
They self-publish.
Or they get smart, take to heart whatever lessons that first manuscript taught them, put that book on the shelf, and move on to a new idea.

Here is my favorite quote about writing. I have it over my computer:

The way to have a good idea is to have many ideas. -- Jonas Salk

You have to know when to let go. And you have to trust that yes, you will have another idea. Maybe a good one. Maybe even a great one.

Booky Noise Workshop VI

Here is the latest candidate in the barrel. Let's push her over Niagra and see if the opening to her book floats:

It’s not easy starting your life over when people think you murdered your husband and got away with it.

Especially in a place like Morning Sun, Iowa. The folks in Morning Sun -- there’s only about four hundred of them -- don’t have much tolerance for weird people, especially a rattlebrained housewife who tries to bail out of her marriage after a couple of little marital “tiffs.” But I was born and bred in Morning Sun, and on that Fourth of July when my husband Brad came at me with the Ginsu knife we had just bought off a late-night infomercial, I didn’t figure I had a lot of options.

The police believed I killed him on purpose. My neighbors believed the police. My relatives believed the neighbors. But fortunately for me, the jury didn’t believe any of them. So I walked.

Actually, I ran. Three thousand miles to be exact, all the way to Las Vegas. I had to get out of Morning Sun and I figured Las Vegas was a good place to reinvent myself. It’s the kind of town where everyone takes big chances. It’s the kind of town where dwelling on the past is about the only thing that’s really a sin.

Booky Noise V: The Little Black Dress

2006-12-01T14:03:00.000-05:00

Help me out here for a moment. What the heck happens to some women when they have to get dressed up to go somewhere fancy? Why do some women -- who by day look stylish and normal -- after six suddenly morph into this:

Is it the prom syndrome? You remember yours don't you? How you ended up with a hideous dress and a Star Trek alien-woman hairdo? (To refresh your prom nightmare memories, check out one of my favorite websites: Ugly Dresses.)

Hang in there, I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.

There's something about dressing up that just confounds some women. They start out okay with a little black dress.But then they want to pile on every button and bow, every geegaw and doodad, every bijou and piece of bling they own. I've seen this phenomenon at ballets, at weddings, even the Edgar banquet. I know I'm picking on the women here, but men have it easy when it comes to formal wear; you have to try really hard to mess up a tux. But women? Some of them just don't know when to leave well enough alone.

So it is with some writers when it comes to description. (See? I told you I'd get to the point eventually.) Description is one of the most potent tools in the writer's narrative toolbox. It can set a mood, signpost a sense of place, and render characters into flesh and blood. Description has the indispensible function of letting the reader sense -- see, hear, smell, feel and taste -- what it going on in your story. If your description is truly compelling, it can made a reader believe in things that are otherwise incredible. (Think of what Stephen King does with "Salem's Lot." By making his mythical Maine town come alive through description, we are willing to suspend disbelief when the vampires start showing up.)

Unless you're Elmore Leonard, you are going to have to learn to write effective description. Speaking of Stephen King, I'll let him tell you why (in his book "On Writing"):

"Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It is far from easy. We've all heard someone say, 'Man, it was so great (or horrible/ strange /funny)...I just can't describe it!' If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. If you can do this well, you will be paid for your labors. If you can't, you're going to collect a lot of rejection slips."

Why do so many beginning writers have problems with description? I think it's because they don't know how much description to use. Some don't use enough. But usually, they have way too much. Description is narrative and narrative disrupts action. So a little goes a long way.

Which brings us back to the little black dress. When description is working well, it is concise and evocative. It also concentrates on a few well-chosen specific details that imply a host of other unspecific details. When Holly Golightly got dressed to go visit Uncle Sally in prison, she didn't junk up her Givenchy with jewelry. Just a great hat, gloves and sunglasses, my dears:

When you describe something, you have to resist the urge to gild the lily. Find one great image and set it off by itself. Description must be spare, clean and edited for its greatest impact. If you overdo it, you end up with something like this:

And here's a couple for the guys out there: This is the look you're going for -- basic black with two well-chosen accessories (Ray-Bans and big guns):

This, on the other hand, is a bit overwrought:

So how do you find your happy medium? How do you know when you've gone too far or haven't gone far enough? There are no easy answers. Description is hard to write! But here are a couple tips I've gathered over the years:

Don't generalize: Try to avoid abstractions. Be concrete in your descriptions. Instead of saying someone played a board game, say it's Monopoly. Instead of a "bad smell" use the specific "like sour milk." But again, don't reach too hard or you look silly.

Don't forget to compare and contrast: The secret to originality is the ability to see relationships. If you're describing something green, it's your job to come up with something fresher than "grass." Here's one of my faves from Steinbeck: "The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns." But again, don't strain it or you just sound pretentious.

Don't lean on adjectives: Just lining up a string of modifiers is lazy writing. (ie tall, dark and handsome). Try to find one vibrant adjective rather than several weak ones. But again, don't strain or reach for the Thesaurus. Sometimes a lawn is just a lawn...not a "verdant sward."

Don't use cliches: It's easy to slip into tired, flabby words. If you want to say something is white, you can't use "white as snow." It's not yours! Neither is "thin as a rail, sick at heart, hard as a rock" or even "overcome with grief." Time has eroded all those. It's your job to find new ways of making your reader experience your fictional world.

Yeah, it's tough to dress your writing for success. But don't despair. Description is one of the things that you can get better at. Believe me, I know. I used to lard my paragraphs with lovingly crafted images that dammit, were going to stay in there because I worked so hard on them! But then my sister told me one day that I was -- ahem -- dressing to impress. I had made every writer's biggest mistake: I had fallen in love with the sound of my own voice and was trying to be "writerly."

Finding your style -- be it writing or fashion -- is a lifelong process. When I went to my prom, I looked like a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and a Kabuki dancer. Through practice, I look a little better these days. Likewise, in my writing, I have learned what to leave off, what to cut out, so that now, when someone reads my stuff they aren't dazzled by my bling; they are experiencing my story.

Here is Stephen King again: "Description is a learned skill, one of the reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It is not a question of how-to, you see; it is also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can only learn by doing. "

Hey, if she can go from this:

To this:

So can you.

And now, let's move on to our new Book Noise Workshop submission. This one comes in from "J" who would like your input on the opening to her book:

The day is warm with the smells of cut grass from Bertram Beal’s riding mower. On the shell road leading to the house, a baby water moccasin sprawls like a torn fanbelt. A horse bangs his water pail in the stable. And in Mrs. St. Clair’s abandoned hothouse, its windows ironed opaque by the Gulf sun, the horticultural inmates left behind press their searching hands against the windows, trying to get out. The thought could keep you up all night.

Billy Junior’s widow sits in her aunt’s Taurus on the road outside. The air conditioner is broken and blows only hot air. Jenny St. Clair peers through the passenger-side window at the tangle of trees and the octagonal house beyond; from here, the house looks like a yellow and white wedding cake. Jenny touches the rosary beads hanging from the rearview as the drone of the lawn mower comes in through the open window. She wonders if the rosary beads ever work.

The hot air in the car finally propels her out of the Taurus and onto the verge, where she stands still and pale, her arms crossing and uncrossing as she strains for glimpses of the life she once had.

It has taken her weeks to get to this point.

Booky Noise IV: The Yeah But Defense

2006-11-30T12:49:00.000-05:00

Welcome back to the Booky Noise workshop, where we analyze the openings of some of our regulars here. I don't let the writer preface their openings here, don't let them "tell" you anything about the book because it is important that we read it cold, just like anyone picking it up at a bookstore might. Why? Because too often, when Kelly and I do writing workshops, we hear what I call the "Yeah But Defense." This tactic usually goes something like this:

Me: I really like your description but I find am I confused about where this is taking place and who is talking.

Writer: Yeah but if you read on to page 10, it becomes very clear that...

Here's the problem, and this is common to ALL writers (including moi): When we write, we have this wonderful thing going on in our brains. To me, it is like a movie I am seeing in my head. To you, it might be a soundtrack of people talking or maybe a storyboard of scenes. Whatever you are experiencing, it is probably very vivid and exciting. But then something happens as you begin to translate those images from your brain screen to the computer screen. Sometimes there is a disconnect between brain and fingers. Something becomes lost in translation.

We writers, often can't see this. But readers can. They aren't privvy to the creative process; all they care about is can they follow the story you are trying to tell? Is it emotionally involving for them? Is it dramatically compelling? Does it make sense?

And then there is the ego thing. We writers are big writhing gooey masses of ego. We are easily bruised and we are never so vulnerable as when we throw our new stuff out there for the first rounds of feedback. We want to be told our stuff is Great! Fabulous! Better than anything Paterson does! We don't want to hear our babies are homely. Even when we suspect they are.

So, next time you are offered feedback -- here, from your critique group or an editor, resist the urge to explain. Someday, when your book is on the shelf at Borders and a customer picks it up, reads the first page and puts the book down, you're not going to be there to say "Yeah but..."

Enough lecturing.

Let's take a look at Jude's opening. I am not suggesting Jude has a Yeah But issue here at all. (Jude was in one of our workshops at SleuthFest once and takes feeback like a trouper). But does this opening make you want to read on? Does it reel you in? (Apologies, Jude, given your fishing theme here!) Can it be improved? Let him know what you think:

My stepfather, drunken bastard that he was, taught me two important survival skills: How to use a baitcaster reel, and how to filet a bass. On August 16, I had gotten up at six A.M. and exercised the first. By nine, I stood under the shade of a very large pine tree, busy with the second. I wore khaki shorts, no shirt, a pair of topsiders and a ball cap that said Guinness. Typical north Florida fishing attire. I’d run out of Barbasol three days ago, so my razor was on vacation until further notice.

I scraped the scales off my third and final fish, looked up and saw a little red car turning from Lake Barkley Road onto my gravel driveway. It was one of those cars I call a Bic. Like the lighters, they’re cheap and disposable. You buy one fresh off the lot, and by the time it needs new tires it’s ready for the junk yard. An internal timing device insures that all working parts take a dive at the precise moment the warranty expires.

It struggled up the hill and parked beside my GMC Jimmy. The driver’s side door opened and a young woman got out, wearing what at first appeared to be a hearing aid. It was one of those cell phone gizmos you hang on your ear so everyone thinks you’re loony tunes walking around talking to yourself. In the future, they’ll implant a computer chip directly into your brain and you’ll be perpetually connected, via satellite, to people you don’t want to talk to anyway. I was hoping I’d die before anything like that ever happened when the woman said, “Is this where you live?” She surveyed my home sweet home--a 1964 Airstream Safari travel trailer, parked on lot 27 at Joe’s Fish Camp--my ten year-old SUV, my blood-stained picnic table littered with catch-of-the-day carcasses. She had an expensive-looking hairstyle, clipped shoulder-length, brown with streaks of caramel, and a dubious look on her face. She wore a navy blue skirt and jacket, a thin white silky shirt, some sort of shoes that didn’t tread well on my sandy yard and a white leather purse. I doubted she was old enough to drink.

“If you’re selling something, I’m broke so don’t bother. If you’re from the loan company, I’m really broke so really don’t bother.” I was six weeks behind on my car payment. I expected to wake up any day now and find Jimmy not there. A tow truck hadn’t followed her in, so I figured I was safe for the moment.
“I’m looking for Nicholas Colt,” she said. “The private eye. Is that you?”

Gobble gobble

2006-11-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

It's time to pause and give thanks.
I am thankful to have a great sister and co-author.
I am thankful to be doing what I love to do.
I am thankful someone actually pays me for it.
I am thankful there are still people out there who love books.
I am thankful that I still have ideas.
I am thankful for you all for coming here and sharing.

Now, I am off to Michigan for my annual turkey day bacchanalia. Back next week with more Booky Noise workshops. Have a great thanksgiving, all.

Are you ready for your mystery date?

2006-11-20T10:20:00.000-05:00

I was at the Miami Book Fair yesterday and after our panel, a woman came up to talk. We had met the previous year, and she wanted to thank me because evidently I had said something that inspired her to quit her soul-killing job and finish her book.

Now, I remembered her but I didn't remember what I had said to her. If you read this blog you know I am a realist about this business so I'm pretty sure I didn't pull a Pollyanna with her. I'll do what I can to encourage other writers just starting out, but I won't give false hope because that is just cruel.

So, I didn't really know what to say to this woman. I mean, just because I might like skydiving and have managed to get seven or eight jumps under my belt, I'm not going to push someone else out of the plane. Only they know if they have the guts and can afford the parachute. But she was very excited, and said she was very happy with her decision, so we talked some more.

It went something like this:

"So, are you submitting it yet?" I asked.

"Oh yeah," she said, "And I got a letter from Big-Name Agent at the Gigantoid Talent Management. He asked to see some sample chapters."

"Great! That's farther than most folks get," I said. "What about the others?"

"Others?"

"Other agents. What did they have to say about your query?"

"Well, I only sent out two. And Big-Name said he had to have an exclusive. So I'm not doing anything until I hear back from him."

"Oh," I said. "How long has Mr. Big had your chapters now?"

"About four months."

Okay...can you figure out where I'm going with this?

This woman had worked hard for three years to write her book. She had gone to writing conferences and workshops. She had done her homework. She had quit her job so she had enough time to follow her dream. (Don't worry; she had other means of support, so that's not the issue here).

But then she fell for the first guy who said "maybe." As in, "Yeah, maybe we'll hook up. Maybe I'll give you a call someday, baby. I don't know when exactly -- maybe even never. But in the meantime, I don't want you to talk to any other guys."

Okay, I realize Mr. Big was her Dream Date. And it's easy to get blinded by good biceps and blue eyes. Or in this case, a 212 area code and a client list heavy with bestselling authors. But would you wait around for this guy?

Of course not. If your book is finished and you're ready to send it out into the cold, cruel world, why would you do anything that lessens your chances of success? Finding a good agent -- no, let's correct that; not just a good agent but the right agent -- is maybe the single most important business decision you make as a writer. This person will be your advocate, your guide, your champion, your career-coach. And the best agent for you might not be Mr. Big at Gigantoid Talent Management. The best agent for you might be Mr. Sincere at Small But Personal Inc. Maybe even Mr. Cassius at Lean And Hungry House. But most definitely, the best agent for you is the one who sees something so special in your work that they plucked you out of the 200 to 300 queries they get every week. The best agent for you is someone who will believe in you even in those dark moment when you don't even believe in yourself anymore.

Exclusives are bad things -- for writers. Why? Because you are giving that one agent the power to tie up your manuscript for months. Odds are, the sample chapters you sent will be rejected. (Maybe for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality remember). But by agreeing to an exclusive, you have lost six to eight precious months in what is a long and tortuous process even in the best of circumstances. Until an agent agrees to take you on as a client, they just don't have the right to control your work like that.

If you won't take my word on this, I bow to a higher source. Here is Miss Snark Literary Agent on the subject.:

"Exclusives stink...To ask an author to tie up his/her work on open ended terms is disrespectful and counter productive. It's also a lazy ass way to do business. You can't provide her an exclusive read and you shouldn't. If she doesn't see the merit of that, why would you want to work with her?"

But, you say, Mr. Big said he liked her stuff. What if she turns around now and sends out a hundred queries and he finds out?

Well, worse case scenario: No other agent is interested. She is back sitting by the phone waiting for Mr. Big to call.

Best case scenario: She gets responses from forty agents who want to see her sample chapters. Then ten want to sign her up. She now has the luxury of choice. She can talk to them all, make a measured thoughtful decision and find the agent who is the best fit -- for her.

I wouldn't sit home waiting for Mr. Big to call. Don't know about you, but I had enough of that crap in high school.

So don't give away your power to the first pretty face that says "maybe." Beneath that pretty face there could be a true Poindexter.

Booky Noise III: I'm having a flashback!

2006-11-16T19:42:00.000-05:00

I love the idea of time travel.

One of my favorite old TV shows was Time Tunnel, that cheesy series from the Sixties where James Darren would fling himself into a swirling vortex and be transported back to solve crimes.

One of my very favorite movies was "The Time Machine" with Victorian hero Rod Taylor traveling to the future to save sweet thing Weena from the Worlocks.

And my favorite cartoon? You guessed it. Mr. Peabody and his dim bulb boy assistant Sherman who used the Way Back machine to travel back in time.

Time travel is way cool. I'd give anything to go back to Fin de siecle Paris or maybe ahead to the someday when we can hop JetBlue to Mars.

But time travel in novels? I don't like it, man. I don't like it when a writer plays loose with my linear sensibilities. In short, as much as I loved the Sixties, I am not a big fan of the flashback. Acid or otherwise.

Now, flashbacks in novels aren't always bad. Sometimes, they serve a very true and useful purpose. But they are not easy to work into your story and even the most seasoned writers can stumble when they leave the linear line and move backwards.

Believe me, I know. Kelly and I are just tonight finishing the final rewrite of our new book. And here I was, reading along in chapter 48 and I hit a patch of writing that made me come to a screaming halt. Note: I said chapter 48. At this very late point in the book -- nay, in ANY book -- the story should be roaring along to its inevitable climax, pulling the eager reader in its wake. But what did we do? In a key scene, we had inserted a flashback for our heroine. It was short, only a half page or so, but when I read it cold today, it stopped me like a brick wall. I didn't WANT to go back and hear this stuff. I wanted only to keep going on the trajectory that had been established.

Flashbacks, as I said, are useful. Even necessary. But every writer must bear in mind that no matter how well they are written, no matter how experienced the author, they are a brake. They bring your forward motion to a stop. So think twice before you use your Way Back machines.

Here are some general rules for using flashbacks:

1. No matter how well written, they stop the story, so use sparingly. They have to be related to the PRESENT action of your story.
2. Don't rely on flashbacks to fill in your backstory. There are many other more effective ways of giving your readers needed background info.
3. Never EVER put a flashback in the middle of a scene of great emotion or action.
4. Like, never use flashbacks in your climax. Do you even need to ask why?
5. When you do use a flashback, keep it very short. Then get back to the story as fast as you can.

Now, let's move on to today's Booky Noise Workshop. And I will pose the question: Can flashbacks work in an opening?

Today' s entry for our consideration comes from Gregory. He acknowledges that his flashback opening might be tricky, but he would like your feedback:

The first time I died, I was too young to fully appreciate it.

There was no tunnel of bright light. No chorus of angels. No movie of my life playing as I rose up, freed from corporeal form.

It began with a warning: “You better get down from there. You’re not Superman, you know.”

At seven years old, Chrissy had already perfected the hands-on-hips posture of authority. My other friends didn’t give her a second glance. A dozen sets of eyes followed my rapid ascent up the oak tree.

“Do it,” Donnie said, flashing a wicked grin. “I double-dog dare you.”

“I d-d-don’t think he-he-he’ll make it.” Sanjay’s treacherous tongue glowed fruit-punch red.

Eighteen years later, I still can’t smell Hi-C without getting nauseous. Funny how the mind works.

It took one more boost to reach a clearing between the canopy of leaves.

“My mom said to wait 20 minutes before going in the pool.” Timmy, the birthday boy, pointed to an egg timer.

My altitude provided a direct view into the second-story windows of the McDade house. There was Timmy’s bedroom, with a pile of unwrapped gifts left on his bed. Adult voices mingled with cheers for a televised football game.

I shimmied onto an overhanging branch, which bowed under my weight.

The task at hand was tricky: clear the patio railing, carry the concrete deck, miss the diving board, and dry my sneakers before mom picked me up at three.

A breeze excited the decorative helium balloons, swaying my thin perch.

“I’m gonna tell,” Chrissy said.

“You’d better not, Prissy,” I shot back.

“If you come down, I’ll give you one of my new Transformers,” Timmy said.

Donnie chimed in, “If he jumps, I’ll give him two.”

Before Timmy could raise the stakes, the egg timer buzzed. Like any good performer, I took the cue and pushed off the branch — launching into space.

No problem clearing the patio and pool deck, but my trajectory was off the mark. Instead of splashing into the deep end, I fell towards the steel ladder.

Arms flailing, I tried to air-brake. Missed the ladder, but unexpectedly landed on a floating boogie board.

On impact, the foam board shot out from under my feet and I tumbled backwards. A glimpse of sky, then black.

Weeks later, Timmy visited me in the hospital. He said it sounded like a cherry bomb when my head hit the diving board. Evidently, I sank before you could say: “Marco Polo.”

To me, it was all dark. No thoughts, no feelings. Don’t even remember swallowing water.

It took numerous reports to piece together what happened next. Timmy turned out to be the least reliable source, as he was primarily concerned with how this would affect his Nintendo privileges. He took one look at me, curled in the fetal position at the bottom of his pool, and promptly hid behind his parents’ BBQ.

Chrissy took her hands away from her mouth long enough to scream, “Call Nine-One-One! Call Nine-One-One!”

Nobody else moved. Donnie wet his pants.

The little bastard never did cough up those Transformers.

Booky Noise II

2006-11-12T17:52:00.000-05:00

Aimless Writer has submitted an opening for our consideration. Let's give him/her some feedback!

My eyes stung from the smoke as I stood across the street watching the flames roar out of control. Although twilight was settling in, the sky was lit like high noon. The intense heat from the fire warmed my face and bare shoulders even from this distance. Ash drifted about and the air tasted of acid and smoke, burning my nose and settling a nasty taste in the back of my throat.

“I didn’t start this fire.”

Officer Larry Schneider, one of Angel Fall’s finest, gave me a disgusted snort and walked away. I whispered it again, more to myself then anyone else, “I didn’t start this fire.”

And no one believed me.

My name is Riley Margate, a twenty-eight year old hairdresser and mostly average in all respects. My shoulder-length, blond hair is on the dark side (I have it highlighted regularly—one of the perks of the job), I have average hazel eyes that leaned more toward blue, then green. I go to work, sometimes a movie and then home to live out my quiet life. It’s a boring life, but I like it that way. I was never a drama-mama and prefer to be the fly on the wall instead of the one in the middle of a cat fight. I stay home most nights as a choice. Although my mother thinks I’m hiding, that’s just not true. I’ve just decided that I like things better at home.

No dating, no wackos and no problems. Average, like I said, but twenty-four hours ago I made a really bad decision and now the fire in front of me seemed to be the least of my problems. Fires burn, firemen put them out, but what that man on the beach made me do won’t go away as easily. I pulled the blanket up and hugged it to me. I thought about my bed at home and how good it would be to put on my flannel pajamas and get under the covers. Hide from the world and never come out. Then maybe this nightmare would go away.

NOTE TO Gregory Huffstutter: Please resend your Booky Noise excerpt and cut it down at least in half. We only want to deal with opening hooks, not whole pages. Thanks!

Booky noise I

2006-11-09T14:41:00.000-05:00

Let's do this right. As I get samples from you all of your book openings, I will post them separately as "exercises" so we can chew on them and comment. We'll call this the Booky Noise Writers Workshop. If you want to submit your opening for us to critique, just add it to the comment section on this post. It will come directly to me and I will re-post it under a new heading.

And now, the first session of the Booky Noise Workshop opens. Here for your consideration and comments is Mark Terry's opening from his fourth Derek Stillwater novel THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS.

Islamabad, Pakistan
October 20

The new guy said, “Do you trust any of these people?”

Agent Dale McHutchins, standing in front of his locker in the FBI headquarters in Pakistan’s capital city, adjusted his flak jacket and took a moment to consider the question. He had been working in Pakistan for five years, at first directly with the National Police Bureau, but finally they had set up their own headquarters.

“Some of them,” he finally said. McHutchins double-checked his SIG-Sauer P220 for the fifth time, and slipped it into his tactical holster. McHutchins leaned down and double-tied his boots. He was wiry, rather than big-boned, his graying dark hair cut close to his scalp, his jaw angular with a deep cleft in the middle.

The new guy, Jason Barnes, said, “You want to give me a hint? Who can I trust at my back, man?”

Booky noise

2006-11-08T16:50:00.000-05:00

What makes for a great beginning in a thriller or mystery? Ah, what a question. I know you -- like me -- probably think about it alot. All writers do, no matter if they are on their first book or their fifteenth. It is drilled into us by editors, writing books, conventional wisdom, and book reviewers who write stuff like, "After a slow beginning, Parrish's latest picks up speed..."

To be slow is to sin. It's like some Eleventh Commandment:

(Cue James Earl Jonesesque voice)

Thou shalt not commit a slow opening.

Generally, Kelly and I buy into this. Our books tend more toward suspense than the traditional mystery, so we are very aware of this need to get out of the gate fast. Our editors in the past have packaged us as "thriller" writers. We even teach this gospel in our workshops and our manuscript critiques. But lately, I've been thinking maybe we writers sometimes give this one commandment a little too much credence. Maybe our concerns about pacing are being skewed too much by the current trend toward thrillers dominating the bestseller lists. Maybe we are too worried that today's reader is too torqued up by TV, Tom Cruise movies and video games to tolerate a more measured entry into a story.

This thing is weighing heavily on me this week because our editor has asked that we ratchet up the action in our new book a tad. Kelly and I immediately understood his reasoning; we had already chewed on this issue between ourselves before he brought it up. Although there is plenty of low-burn suspense in the beginning of our story, there are no corpses, no murders, no high octane action until well into the story. Then things explode. But it is too late?

So we wrote a new opening and sent it on its way last night for our editor to consider.

Then today, I got a fan letter from Mike Bienkowski, a college professor up in Albany. Mike had just finished our book "An Unquiet Grave" and wrote to say: "The first paragraph was one of the best I've read a long while and it kept me reading. Congrats on breaking through all the booky noise out there. A very impressive performance."

"Booky noise." What a great phrase. But what did it mean?

So I wrote Mike back and asked. He replied: "By 'booky noise' I was referring to the standard, paperback writer opening page that I read (like the typical opening scene of a movie). I get so tired of explosions, muggings, love-fests, et al, that it was refreshing to read and see Christmas lights bouncing on branches in the breeze. The rest is all booky noise to me."

To which I could only think: Well, shoot...

Here is the opening of "An Unquiet Grave" that Mike is talking about:

The Christmas lights were already up. He had the top down on the Mustang and he could see them as he drove up, a cluster of small white lights that someone had strung on the coconut palm in his yard. A stiff breeze was blowing in from the gulf, moving the fronds and sending the lights bobbing and dancing like fire-flies on a hot summer night."

When I wrote that opening, I knew I wanted something quiet and evocative, something that spoke to the itchy out-of-kilter feeling a northerner transplanted to the tropics feels every time December comes around. It was slow but I knew it. And it was intended to portend something bad to come.

The next couple paragraphs are just as slow:

Louis Kincaid turned off the engine and just sat there, looking at the lights.

Fireflies. July Fourth. Michigan.

But there were no fireflies here. It was November, not July. And he was in South Florida.

His mind was playing tricks on him.

That last line is important. Because this book, on its surface, was about a murder in an abandoned insane asylum. But the underground railroad theme was about how even the mind of a healthy person can play tricks and cause a sane person to wonder where the line marking insanity starts.

So yes, the story started slow. And Kelly and I let it, trusting that we could create tension without carnage, trusting we had the ability to pull the reader through the story without tricks. And most important, trusting the reader to have the patience to let a story find its legs and rhythm.

But this newest book? Did we do the right thing by rewriting our opening and opting for a grabber? I wish I knew. The stakes are so high these days in our genre, the pressures so heavy to keep pace. The temptation to sin is great.

Maybe I just need to listen to my heart and tune out its own version of "booky noise." Until I work up that courage, I leave this blog entry without a clue, closure or any neat little summary. But thanks for listening.

True lies

2006-10-29T20:24:00.000-05:00

Time to come clean on the Tag Game. Here is the truth...

1. When I was 47, I was in the Miami City Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker" directed by the acclaimed Edward Villella.
True. This was one of the greatest thrills of my life. I was only in Act I but when it was over, I wanted to do it all over again. The experience gave me a taste of the narcotic all performers feel.

2. I once stood on my head at Les Invalides, the place in Paris where Napoleon is entombed.
C'est vrai. I have no shame. Here's the picture to prove it.

3. I interviewed Michael Jordan in the Bulls lockerroom for a story about "hang time."
Also true. This was on the occasion of Jordan's comeback (first or second one, I can't recall). Most the Bulls were nekkid or almost so. Mike was resplendent in a white suit. He was holding court surrounded by sycophantic sportswriters who all tried to elbow me aside. Jordan could not have been sweeter to me but maybe he was just tired of talking to jock-sniffers.

4. I was invited to a party on the royal yacht Britannia where Queen Elizabeth asked me what I did for a living.

True. I was sent by my newspaper to cover the opening of the Bahamian parliament in 1977 and got to meet Her Majesty on the yacht. (Here's the official invite). Liz did, indeed, ask me what I did for a living. I don't remember what I said because I was absolutely impaled by her icy blue eyes. For the record, Queen Liz is even shorter than I am. But her husband Phil was very tall, very gregarious and had a little too much to drink.

5. Telly Savalas let me lick his lollipop.
Well, I did get to interview him once and he was a sweetie. Gave me a big hug but did not let me lick his lolly.

So, Jude Hardin, you're our winner. Next summer, I will send you one of the first copies of our new book A THOUSAND BONES.

Tag...I'm it

2006-10-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

Don't know what rock I've been under, but there's a game afoot in the blog world called Tagging. I have been tagged by Jude Hardin to come up with five interesting or unique things about myself. One of them is not true.

Whoever is the first to guess which one is the lie gets a free autographed book.

1. When I was 47, I was in the Miami City Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker" directed by the acclaimed Edward Villella.

2. I once stood on my head at Les Invalides, the place in Paris where Napoleon is entombed.

3. Telly Savalas let me lick his lollipop.

4. I interviewed Michael Jordan in the Bulls lockerroom for a story about "hang time."

5. I was invited to a party on the royal yacht Britannia where Queen Elizabeth asked me what I did for a living.

And now, I am tagging Bob Morris, J. Carson Black, and the girls over at Lipstick Chronicles.

Why we need editors

2006-10-16T14:38:00.000-04:00

Editors have been weighing heavily on my brain of late. Mostly because Kelly and I recently turned in the rewrites on our new book and our new editor had requested more changes than we have been used to making over our eight-book career.

But other bits of brain lint have balled together in my lobes to have me thinking about this special species of human being:

1. I read an entry over on Lee Goldberg's blog from a self-published author who wrote: "When I finished the novel, I put it into the hands of a few big-time publishing houses. They all told me the same thing. 'We like the writing, but in order for us to sell it, you have to rewrite this and rewrite that, then send it back to us.' I wasn't about to start rewriting my book so that maybe some traditional publisher would take it."

2. I just got an email from an unpublished writer whose manuscript Kelly and I critiqued for charity a while back. This writer had a good idea, an engaging character, even a nice voice. But all that was obscured by the usual problems (wavering POV, throat-clearing opening, unclear physical action, too many characters introduced too quickly, adverbitis...) But this writer stuck to it, rewrote and rewrote, got an agent who made her rewrite some more. She just sold that mystery as part of a three-book deal to NAL. She's on her way and emailed me: "So right now I'm waiting for the revision letter from my editor for the first book, and meanwhile, I'm writing the second one."

Which of these two has the right attitude? This is not a trick question. It if were, why don't more writers get it?

You need an editor.

I need an editor.

Every writer needs an editor.

This goes straight to the heart of why I am so down on self-publishing. There is no real editing in the self-publishing process. Yet it is precisely the ONE THING every beginning writer needs most desperately. This is the reason why almost every self-published book out there today is so bad: there is no one in the process to put on the brake, no one to tell the poor writer where the wheels came off.

Now before I go any further, let's get our terms straight. I don't mean a copy editor (the comma and lay/lie arbiter). I am talking about the first reader of your book after you turn it in, the person who can tell you if you've tangled your plot in digressions, misunderstood your hero's motivation, or picked the wrong bad guy. The Big Picture Guy or Girl who understands what you are going for in your book and helps you get there.

Let me get back to my own experience for a moment. Because we collaborate, Kelly and I edit each other's writing. But we know that isn't enough. We know we need the entity we have come to call The Cold Third Eye.

Why? For the same reason any writer does. Because we, like all writers, live our story with every breath we take, intimately for months on end. Every day, it is playing on those screens in our heads, and we can see everything so clearly. But as with any writer, there is often a disconnect between that screen and our fingers as they hit the computer keys. Something misfires, something is lost in translation.

That is where the Cold Eye comes in. This is the person who tells you where you have gone astray. The Cold Eye (aka the editor) usually communicates in the form of the dreaded Revisions Letter, a document that can run as long as a legal brief and be just as scary. Now, getting this feedback is tough and sometimes writers get a tad defensive about it. Here are the kind of comments you might see in a revisions letter -- and how some writers might react:

Editor: Think about making this a Prologue.
Author: What? Prologues are strictly bush-league! It's the crutch of every bad writer! I won't do it! You can't make me!

Editor: I think X is a wonderful complex character but her relationship with Y is underwritten.
Author: But X doesn't really LOVE Y, so it's supposed to be without passion! We aren't writing romance suspense here!"

Editor: Is all this stuff between Y and Z necessary? Cut as much as possible.
Author: But we need this scene because it illuminates Y's motivation while introducing two quirky secondary characters who help convey the small-town setting!

Editor: Unclear whether X or Y is asking this. And they just don't seem to be as concerned about the evidence tampering as the reader will be. This whole plot element doesn't land properly.
Author: Doesn't this guy watch Cops? Police do this kind of shit all the time!It's completely believable!

Editor: Timeline problem: Is this the same day or a week later?"
Author: This is a simple linear plot! A ten-year-old could follow this, for god's sake.

Editor: "X pursed her lips." You use pursed lips too many times.
Writer: (sigh...)

Editor: Think about making this an epilogue
Writer (Gigantic sigh...)

Okay, for the record, these are actual comments from our editor's recent revision letter to us. His seven-page revision letter. And you know what? Once we got over ourselves and went back into the manuscript to see what he was talking about, we realized he was spot-on about every thing he said:

Chapter 1 works better as a prologue, making us rethink the advice we have given to other writers over the years that prologues don't work. Sometimes they do. In other words, there are no fast rules.

The romantic relationship we had set up in our book WAS underwritten. Our experience writing hardboiled stuff had made us squeamish about mucking about in such emotions, so we had tried to ingore it. Result? Anemic character development that didn't set up the impact we were going for at book's end.

The scene he asked us to cut with our beloved quirky secondary characters was nicely written but useless. We had fallen in love with the sound of our own words and disobeyed one of our own prime tenets of crime writing: If it does not advance the story in some way, take it out.

The part about the evidence tampering? Technically, we were right in that the scene we had written WAS true to life. We knew this; we had done our homework. But sometimes the truth isn't true in fiction. If your reader can't buy into the reality you are creating on the page, you have to bend reality enough to make it feel right and help your plot. Or as Stanley Kubrick once said: “It may be realistic, but it's not interesting.”

The timeline problem our editor noted? Here is the perfect example of author blindness. Kelly and I saw our story perfectly in our heads. We had even storyboarded it and charted the timeline on a graph. But the way we had written it was confusing, and we couldn't see it. You have to slow down and stick in enough time and place signposts so your reader doesn't get lost. Lost equals confused. Confused equals angry. Angry equals book thrown across the room.

Pursing lips? Well, that's our Author Tic. Every writer has one or two. You just don't see 'em. The Cold Eye does.

And yes, we changed the last chapter to an Epilogue.

So, what's the lesson here? Find your Cold Eye. Unfortunately, it may not be easy. Many editors are mediocre or indifferent. Some are truly bad and meddling. Raymond Chandler once wrote to his publisher: "Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive."

But that rare good editor? That person won't kill your style. But neither will he tell you you're brilliant (that's mom's job) or that your stuff is a million times better than James Patterson's (that's your hopeful spouse). A good editor -- your Cold Eye -- will tell you how to be better than you already are.

I leave you with one more quote, this one from James Thurber:

"Editing should be a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The [editor] should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'"

p.s. I have no editor for this blog. It is self-published. Any mistakes are mine alone, God help me...

Sniffing butts part II

2006-10-10T12:25:00.000-04:00

I thought I had the last word on strange mating rituals until I saw this today over on Miss Snark's blog. I think I saw these two in the elevator at Bouchercon...

Sniffing Butts.

Sniffing butts at Bouchercon

2006-10-06T15:01:00.000-04:00

So I'm on the plane coming home from Bouchercon, drinking my little bottle of five-dollar wine and digging into John D. MacDonald's "Nightmare In Pink." I'm chilling out, enjoying Travis McGee's trip to Manhattan when I come across this in Chapter 4:

I whisked the soot off the wall by the entrance steps and sat and waited for her, and watched the office people bring their anxious dogs out. You could almost hear the dogs sigh as they reached the handiest pole. There was a preponderance of poodles.

This is the most desperate breed there is. They are just a little too bright for the servile role of dogdom. So their loneliness is a little more excrutiating, their welcomes more frantic, their desire to please a little more intense. They seem to think if they could just do everything right, they wouldn't have to be locked up in silence -- pacing, sleeping, brooding, enduring the swollen bladder. That's what they try to talk about. One day there will appear a super-poodle, one almost as bright as the most stupid alley cat, and he will figure it out. He will suddenly realize his loneliness is merely a by-product of his being used to ease the loneliness of his Owner. He'll tell the others. He'll leave messages. And some dark night they'll all start chewing throats.

God, I love that passage. I am relatively new to the MacDonald books, so I am still discovering his delicious little digressions. This one made me howl in laughter. Not because it's so spot-on about poodles but because it made me think of the poodles I had met in Madison.

Now, I'm new to the dog world. I've had cats all my life and just a couple years ago got my first dog, so I am still deciphering the odd psychology of the canine brain. And maybe it was the cheap wine or post-conference fatigue, but I found myself thinking of all the dogs I had met over the weekend. Poodles, pugs, pekes, great danes. We were all there at Bouchercon, lapping drinks at the Concourse bar, nipping at each other's flanks on panels, sniffing butts in the hospitality suites. We're not cats. Cats will band together if they have to, but they don't really enjoy it. But dogs? They revel in other dogs and their dogness.

Lots of dogs at Bouchercon...

I saw big roving packs of golden retrievers, romping indiscriminately with all breeds. They were slopperly happy to just be at the dog park, man.

I saw regal afghans, confident in their beauty and talent, but who never looked down their snouts at anyone. They picked up the tab for everyone at the pub.

I saw hyperactive jack russells, jumping from table to table, eager to please on a panel or at a party. They charmed with their freshness and vitality, making you wish them a long life.

I saw plenty of pugs, the great and gregarious fans, sweet and smart, ready to give their love for a signature in their treasured first edition. God, you want to take them all home with you.

But then there were those poodles. Edgy, brilliant writers who, like MacDonald's Manhattan poodles, believe that if they could just do everything right, if they just keep trying to transcend the pack, they would get the commercial success that's their due.

And one night, I saw a clique of chihuahuas, trembling together in their self-congratulatory pack, waiting to nip at the ankles of those who pass by because they felt tiny and overlooked.

But the poodles and chihuahuas were the misfits. The rest of us? Wizened award-winning sharpeis dispensing advice, German shepherds on patrol for new agents, curly-earred cockers seducing with their big brown eyes over the rim of their Cosmos. Old dogs, young pups, and all the rest of us mutts, we were just trying to connect in that great, primal, canine way. I don't know about you, but I had a doggone good time.

Deadly sins...and virtues (for Bcon goers)

2006-09-18T19:50:00.000-04:00

Well, it's off to the annual writers' group grope Bouchercon tomorrow. And that got me to thinking --naturally -- about Dante's Inferno. (What? You don't pull your classics off the shelf just before you head off to a writers convention where you know that ego, lust, envy will be on full display and unnatural amounts of alcohol will be consumed?)

I had to read The Inferno in college and the only thing I recall about it was all the various tortures the evil-doers were condemned to perform for their sins. And the more I thought about the sins, the more I realized we writers who go to Bouchercon every year are oh-so vulnerable to our own sins, and that it might be instructive to exam them with some classical detachment.

So here we go. The Seven Deadly Sins (and Virtues) for Writers Going to Bouchercon. Lemme 'splain it to youse:

Lust (Latin: luxuria.)
(Classically described as depraved thought, desire for excitement, or need to be accepted or recognized by others.)

Huh. None of us can relate to this, right? No matter where you are on the food chain, when you go to Bouchercon, you hope and pray you get a panel. Then you hope and pray it is a good panel. Preferably not on Sunday morning when everyone is too hung over to get up and listen to you. And preferably with at least one big name author on it so you aren't stuck listening through the thin walls to the audience next door roaring in laughter at Barry Eisler's bon mots. Oh please. Don't tell me you haven't lusted after another author's panel assignment!

The punishment: In Purgatory, the penitant walks in fire. At Bcon, you sit alone at the bar watching the women elbow for the chair next to Lee Child.

Gluttony (Latin: gula)
(Classically described as an overindulgence of food and drink.)

If we have to paint this picture for you, then you haven't been to a writers' conference. Suffice it to say, the DorothyL posting board this past week was filled with Tips on Surviving Bouchercon. Most the advice involved consuming gallons of bottled water and snarfing power bars. You'd think this was the New York Marathon.

The punishment: In Purgatory, the penitant were forced to eat rats and toads. At Bouchercon, you sleep through your wakeup call, you miss lunch and are reduced to eating vending machine Doritos and licking the peanuts off the carpet in the bar.

Greed (Latin: avaritia)
Another sin of excess. It particularly applies to the acquisition of wealth ("What? That HACK got six figures?") but it's a blanket term that also covers deliberate betrayal, trickery, or manipulation. (I think this is the one James Frey got tripped up on).

Punishment: in Purgatory, the greedy were forced to kneel on hard stone. At Bouchercon, the greedy are condemned to sit between Laura Lippman and Ken Bruen at the signing table and learn a little humility.

Sloth (Latin, acedia)
Used to mean spiritual apathy but now is plain old laziness. This is my personal bete noir. No writer can relate to this one, right?

Punishment in Purgatory: thrown in a snake pit. At Bouchercon, you are doomed to listen to Joe Konrath tell you how during the last two weeks, while you were dogging it, he visited 10,000 bookstores, gave out 15,000 gallons of free martinis, placed twelve short stories with EQ, did five Podcasts, knitted two sweaters and helped deliver a baby while stuck at the Forest Park CTA station.

Wrath/Anger (Latin, ira)
Wishing to do evil or harm to others, or what Dante described as "love of justice perverted to revenge and spite". For writers, wrath manifests itself in posting anonymous reviews on Amazon, flaming an author you envy.

Punishment in Purgatory: Dismembered alive. Punishement at Bouchercon: Someone posts your scathing Kirkus review on the bulletin board next to the notice for SJ Rozan's basketball game.

Envy (Latin, invidia)
A little like greed, but usually involving the desire for something at the expense of someone else. Envy can inspire feelings of 'schadenfreude', where you delight in the misfortune of others. (AKA: The grass is always greener).

Punishment: In Purgatory the sinners walk around with their eyes sewn shut. At Bouchercon, you go to the bookseller's room and find out there is not a single copy of your books available. Worse, Helen from Big Sleep Books tells you Harlan Coben's next book has the same title as yours, same color cover, and is coming out in the same month.

Pride (Latin, superbia)
This is the one that got Lucifer kicked out of Heaven and turned him into the Satan. It implies narcissism. You see this behavior from authors who hog the spotlight on panels.

Punishment: In Purgatory, the pentinent were broken on the wheel. At Bouchercon, you get into a Friday night shooters contest with David Morrell and Reed Farrel Coleman and your sleep through your Saturday panel -- and you are the moderator.

But enough with the negative! Let's look at the examples of virtues and see how you can put them to good use at the conference:

Chastity (Latin, virtus)
Classically speaking, this means embracing moral wholesomeness and achieving purity of thought through education and betterment. Or practicing sexual abstinence. At Bouchercon, we strongly encourage you to go to other panels (you might learn something). And the sex thing? Not a good idea. This is a small community.

Abstinence (Latin, frenum)
Practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation. Careers can be made or broken over that third Jack Daniels. Be careful about your consumption of alcohol. Plato may have said, "in wine is truth," but too much truth at Bcon can bite you in the butt.

Generosity
So you see a lonely soul sitting alone in the corner of the bar. He or she might be a newbie author or an awed fan. In your insecure little heart, you don't think you are important, but they might. Go introduce yourself. Welcome them into your circle. Be kind with your advice. You were there once too.

Diligence (Latin, industria)
Decisive work ethic and a guarding against laziness. If you are lucky enough to get a panel, give it your all. If you have a small audience, give it even more.

Patience (Latin, patientia)
The ability to forgive; to show mercy. If things go wrong -- and at a conference as big and complex as Bouchercon, something will -- don't get your panties in a wad. Remember that the folks who put this thing together donated their time and energies so you could have a good time.

Humility (Latin, humilitas)
Modest behavior, not unfairly glorifying one's own self. Basically, don't take yourself too seriously. And fer god's sake, don't get all puffed up if someone says your stuff transcends the genre. It's not a compliment, bunky.

And lastly,

Kindness (Latin, humanitas)
Friendship and sympathy for its own sake. For all its problems, warts and little dramas, Bouchercon is the one place where writers, booksellers and fans come together in a magnificent celebration of our genre. Hardboiled or cozy, PI or procedural, cat mystery or thriller. It's one big, sloppy revival meeting and there's room for everyone under the tent. Even the sinners.

Like a virgin...a short virgin

2006-09-14T14:49:00.000-04:00

So I arrive home from my Vancouver vacation today to find two packages waiting for me. Not just any packages. Small cardboard boxes, and I know from their shape and size that they are from publishers. Books. My books.

I grab the knife and slit open the tape. My heart quickens as I pull back the cardboard flaps and peer inside. Is there anything sweeter than seeing your book for the first time? It's better than Christmas, man.

You published authors out there know this feeling. You who will be published someday have it to look forward to. And for me? After eleven books now, these books are even more special. I feel like a virgin, all shiny and new.

The books I got today are short story anthologies. And they contain the first short stories I have ever had published. The first short stories I have even written since the eighth grade.

The first anthology is already on the shelves: "Death Do Us Part," edited by Harlan Coben and presented by Mystery Writers of America. My story is called "One Shot," and in it, a middle-aged man returns to his old home in Detroit to try to find the key to unlock the truth about a childhood tragedy. It's written in the dark style of our Louis Kincaid series.

My fellow contributors include Coben, Lee Child, Laura Lippman, Ridley Pearson, R.L. Stine, Jeff Abbott and other terrific writers. I've already read most the stories and they are stellar -- as haunting and unpredictable as you're likely to find anywhere. I'm proud to be included because I wasn't an invitee; I had to crash this party. See, when MWA announces its anthology every year, it opens 5-10 slots to its membership at large (you don't have to be previously published at all to enter and a few of this year's writers are first-timers). You have to submit your story to a committee, which that narrows it down and sends the finals onto the editor for his or her choosing. I sweated mightily over this story, because no matter how experienced you are as a novelist, writing a short stories is like starting over. There are different rules and challenges. For my money, writing a good short story is a million times harder than turning out a full novel. There is no room for error; nothing is wasted. If one word is wrong, the thing falls apart.

The MWA experience gave me the courage to try again. But this time, I was invited, and I was so damn thrilled I almost peed my pants. When Joe Konrath decided to edit a collection devoted to hitmen called "These Guns for Hire, he corralled a wacked-out band of wombats and renegades. Listen to this line up: Ken Bruen, David Morrell, William Kent Kreuger, Lawrence Block, MJ Rose, Reed Farrel Coleman and many others. "Guns" hits the stores in October.

Kelly and I teamed up to write this story and it's a bit of a departure from our usual style. Dare I say, maybe even darkly humorous? It's about two almost loveable Memphis losers who team up to do in their nemesis on the eve of their bowling league playoffs. Kelly is a longtime league bowler with a lethal average so she knows her way around the back alleys. Me, I just tried to keep up. The title? Gutter Snipes. You can read the first page of our stories and the others at the the nifty Hitmen website by clicking here.

And if you're going to Bouchercon in Madison at the end of the month, I want to invite you to a couple of parties in celebration of these short stories and their authors.

"These Guns for Hire" authors will be gathering and signing Thursday Sept. 28 at Cafe Montmartre, 127 E. Mifflin Street, just a block from the conference hotel. We'll be there til the bar kicks us out.

And the MWA folks will be signing their "Death Do Us Part" anthologies at Boucheron as well. Day and Time to come. You'll get a free copy in your Boucheron goodie bag.

So, if you're in Madison, drop by and help us celebrate. You'll know me. I'm the blushing virign...the short one.

You MIGHT need to rewrite if...

2006-08-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

Hey folks,
Excuse my absence but I am heavy into rewrites this week. Kelly also does rewrites on our books but she already finished her parts. Sigh. So what else is new? So this is Kelly blogging away here today.

Take it, Kel:

You might need to rewrite...

If you have a line in your manuscript even close to: The evil killer bent over the lifeless body of the woman and cut out her heart...”

You might need to rewrite...

If you have ever written: “She looked at herself in the mirror. She had long, golden locks and sapphire blue eyes and a mouth that was just a bit too small. She reminded herself of a young but more lush Alice Faye...”

You might need to rewrite...

If you have more than two subplots going in your first novel.

You might need to rewrite...

If you have introduced more than three characters in your first chapter.

You might need to rewrite...

If you need a chart and an eraser-pen to keep track of your dead bodies.

You might need to rewrite...

If you’re trying to tie in a Russian spy story, a serial killer in Seattle, a vengeful woman who was raped twenty years ago and a small-town sheriff looking for love in all the wrong places.

You might need to rewrite...

If your dialogue between two main characters takes place in the kitchen, over coffee with frequent mentions of 1)Someone else’s baby 2) An ex-husband who never appears in the book or 3) Lack of a character’s sex-life.

You might need to rewrite...

If you get past page two without ever mentioning or somehow indicating WHERE the book takes place.

You might need to rewrite...

If you get past chapter two without introducing your main character.

You might need to rewrite...

If you get past chapter three or three without telling the reader what TIME of YEAR it is.

You undoubtedly need to rewrite...

If you believe that rewriting destroys spontenaity.

And you REALLY need to rewrite...

If you are the kind of writer who thinks they always get it right the first time.

Cardboard men and the women who love them

2006-08-04T12:07:00.000-04:00

Men characters...can't control 'em and can't shoot 'em.

Actually, I guess I could do the latter. And that is just about where I am right now with one of the dudes in our latest book. His name is Brad. He's the boyfriend of our heroine Joe Frye and he's making life miserable for me. I just want the guy to go away. But I can't do that, because he's important to the plot. Joe doesn't really need him but I, the author, do.

It's my fault. I gave birth to this creep. I can't even blame my co-author sister Kelly because when we plotted this book out, I was the one who drew duty on Brad. I put him on paper, I got him up and walking around. So now I have to find a way to deal with him.

I thought I was finished with Brad. When we turned in the book, I quickly forgot about him. But then our editor -- a very insightful gentleman named Mitch Ivers -- sent us his revision letter. And let's just say Brad didn't exactly float Mitch's boat.

Brad, it seems, is a cipher. In creating him, I committed one of the biggest sins of writing, something I preach about to every new writer I encounter. Namely:

Your villain MUST NOT be stupid, dull, or incompetent. He MUST be a worthy opponent for your hero.

Wait, you say, I thought Brad was Joe's boyfriend, not the villain. Well, the same commandment applies to love interests as well. If you expect readers to buy into a romantic relationship, the man you pick for your woman must be worthy of her affection.

Brad, alas, is made of cardboard. He's not the sexy UPS man. He's the UPS box.

I didn't take the time or energy to flesh him out. I neglected to give their relationship enough backstory to make it believable. I was so busy lavishing love and words on my heroine, the villain and the cast of fabulous secondary characters -- shoot, even the frickin' scenery -- that I just plain forgot about flaccid Brad.

I know why this happened, though I hate to admit it.

This book is the first one we have written that actually has a romantic relationship at its core. It is the first in what we hope will be a new series featuring our female cop Joe Frye. It is still dark in tone and hardboiled in its bones, but it does deal with the gooier things like sex and love. (Which don't come up much in Louis Kincaid's cosmos). So Brad had a place.

But I think when it came time to write about the gooier things, I froze. I had flashbacks to my romance writing days when if you didn't have sex every four chapters or so there was something wrong with you. But that was a long time ago. I haven't had to have sex since...I had to go look this up...1993!

Friends, I am here to tell you. It is NOT just like riding a bicycle.

The lesson here is: pay attention to every character and don't take shortcuts. I didn't do my job as a writer with Brad the first time around; I thought I could get away with giving him less than my best. So now, here I am, struggling with rewrites. Transfusing Brad with some blood, jolting him with the heart paddles, trying to make him come alive on the page.

I should have killed him off in chapter 20.

Ugly Babies

2006-07-31T18:31:00.000-04:00

So we just turned in the new book and our new editor loves it. But he does not love the title.

This is the first time this has happened to us. Through seven books now, we have gone to press with the title we turned in. I know this is not always the case. I have many friends whose titles are vetoed and a new one is slapped on (sometimes by -- HORRORS! -- the marketing department).

Which is why I am getting very nervous. I go to bed at night thinking of possible titles. I wake up in the same agony.

Because I know the power of a good title cannot be overestimated in our business. It is your first chance to make a good impression. It is a billboard by which you the author telegraph your whole book's theme and tone. And when your book is shouting to be heard above the din and roar at Barnes & Noble, a blah title is a meek squeak.

I suppose there are authors who don't sweat this. Some don't have to. They race through the alphabet (Grafton), numbers (Evanovich) or The Complete Bartender's Guide (Joe Konrath). And then there's James Patterson, who could slap LEAKY MEAT on a cover and it would sell millions.

But the rest of us resort to desperate measures. Like typing keywords into Bartleby's Great Books Online poetry engine. Try this: type in "death" or "bones" or some other crime-fiction hot-button word and centuries of poems come up, just waiting for you to steal. C'mon...those of you who've done this can fess up. I've used it. Do you think An Unquiet Grave came from my brain? Hell no. I stole it from an Arthur Quiller-Couch poem.

But Bartleby's has failed me on this latest book.

A while back, I was at festival in Sarasota with a passel of other Florida mystery authors. I was seated next to Randy Wayne White at dinner and I found myself uncharacteristically tongue-tied. (Partly because Randy and I till the same fields in our fiction -- southwest Florida -- and he was there first. But mostly because Randy is this Hemingwayesque dude who scares people). But then Randy leaned in and told me, "You have good titles." I took it as a supreme compliment.

Some authors just seem to have a knack for titles. Laura Lippman calls it the "title gene." Who has it? Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos...I'm sure you can name others.

What gives a good title resonance? Just for fun, I went to my shelf and found these:

Off The Chart
Absent Friends
Murder Unleashed
A Place of Execution
Devices and Desires
Blue Edge of Midnight
A Seaon in Purgatory
Hidden Prey
Parallel Lies
A Cold Day in Paradise
The Whispering Statue

Without knowing the authors, which ones work for you and which do not?

Titles I like:
Absent Friends. This title of SJ Rozan's book has resonanace for the characters and the unifying event -- 911 NYC.
Murder Unleashed. A cozy by Elaine Viets about a dog groomer. Of course!
A Season in Purgatory. Dominick Dunne's fictionalization of the Martha Moxley case neatly describes the moral dilemma at the book's core.
Blue Edge of Midnight. Captures Jon King's moody Everglades in a single vivid image.
A Place of Execution. Works on multi-levels for Val McDermid's claustrophic plot.
A Cold Day in Paradise. "Paradise" is a butt-end town in Michigan's UP. It works as metaphor for Steve Hamilton's chilly story.
The Whispering Statue. One of my favorite Nancy Drews.

Titles that leave me cold:
Hidden Prey. Yeah, I recognize the John Sanford franchise is title-proof but can you tell one from the other anymore?
Parallel Lies. Didn't give me a hint of Ridley Pierson's story. Sounds too Hollywood for comfort.
Devices and Desires. P.D. James has boooooring titles. Sorry.
Off the Chart. I like Jim Hall's books, but this title is too flippant for this book's dark tone.

Some of my all-time favorite titles (not just books):
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Jaws.
Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
The Iceman Cometh
A Hard Day's Night
Most stuff by Philip Dick but especially The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.
And the memorable: Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? (a really bad 1966 Brit-flick but a great title for Charades.)

So back to my title search. I know there's a good one out there somewhere. I just pray I find it before the marketing department gets ahold of things.

Oh. And Ugly Babies? Has nothing to do with my blog today. But damn, I like that title!

A latte and a Ludlum to go, please!

2006-07-25T17:49:00.000-04:00

Today, finally, I think I have something nice to say about the POD thing. (Yeah, hold onto your beanie, Lee).

There is a new gizmo out there on the horizon that could be the big saviour of publishing that so many folks have been waiting for. The thing that could wipe out the disgraceful 40 percent return rate on books. The thing that could do away with the need for huge warehouses and antiquated shipping and distribution systems. The thing that could eliminate the god-awful waste in publishing and finally silence the Terminator pulp machines that turn our unsold copies to dust.

Let me introduce you to the Espresso Book Machine.

It slices! It dices! It makes perfect potato hash browns --

Sorry. Been watching too much late-night TV. Back to the point...

The Espresso Book Machine is a real thing. This is a machine that allows the printing and binding a single copy of a book at the point of demand without human interactions. Here is how it would work:

Say someone wants a copy of my new book, "Darker and Stormier Nights." It hasn't exactly been burning up the lists, so it's hard to find. But my intrepid fan could just go to her local bookstore, punch in the title, insert a credit card to pay and less than three minutes later, walk away with a nice copy of "Nights." Kinda of like an ATM at your local B&N.

But wait! There's more!

This machine can produce a 300-page bound paperback with full color cover at a cost of about 3 cents per page. Three cents!

I know. Sounds like sci-fi, right? But I am not making this up. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky someday thing, the print on demand chimera publishing has been chasing for the last decade. The Espresso is churning out books even as you read this and by next year, you could see one in your town.

The Espresso is being spearheaded by Jason Epstein of Random House. Last year he teamed up with some corporate heavyweights to create On Demand Books. The first Espresso Book Machine was installed in April at the InfoShop at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., which has loaded 200 of its titles online for the three-month test period. Two more Espressos will be installed at the New York Public Library and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Egypt, in September. Epstein, who hopes to have the Espresso available more widely next year, is also now talking with a bookstore chain outside the U.S. about installing the machine.

Why is this a good thing for authors?

For starters, it could save endangered midlist titles, give new life to backlists and just maybe, start weaning the publishing industry off its mega-bestseller dependency. When and if every book is finally digitized, the market will be radically decentralized. The old ways of competing for ever-shrinking shelf space in stores will be obsolete.

Sez Epstein: The chief benefit of the machine is that a requested book would never be out of stock or out of print. Books would be less expensive, he believes, because it would eliminate the need to warehouse and ship books. And instead of the current system of guessing how many books to print -- a game that leaves bookstores stuck with piles of unsold flops and readers unable to find out-of-stock surprise hits --the supply will always be just right.

And get this. The Espresso will retail for less than $100,000. Not only can bookstores increase what Epstein calls "their footprint" but average Joe authors might finally have a presence in everything from airports to libraries to your corner Kinkos.

I won't bore you will all the details here. For a good scoop, go to this article in US News and World Report.

This kind of POD people I can take.

Save the Indy 500

Robin Agnew has been welcoming authors and readers in her delightfully cluttered cubbyhole store in Ann Arbor since 1992. Set down on Fourth Street, hardby the ivy-walled campus of University of Michigan, this is a must-stop place for readers looking for a great mystery -- or road-weary authors looking for some TLC.

AUNT AGATHA'S
213 South 4th Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
www.auntagathas.com

How'd you get in the business?
My husband Jamie was working for Borders and I was doing art fairs, and he was frustrated, I had a baby and was tired of travel and the physical labor of art fairs (plus producing all that art work was difficult with a baby). I had always loved mysteries and so I suggested a mystery bookstore. Classic case of leaping into the unknown before looking too closely at what it might entail!

Favorite thing about being a bookseller?
A toss up! Either favorite customers to talk books with or meeting all the authors we've gotten to meet over the years. Both are great.

What's unique about your store?
I think our huge backlist of used books. We are able to often supply out of print, hard to find stuff and also find all the books in a series when people want them all, and not just the most recent title.

What's your best advice to writers?
Write a good book, show up on time for events and don't be too pushy or disappointed if there aren't a million people at your signing. We are doing our level best to get the word out, and want writers to succeed almost as much as they do themselves.

What do you wish publishers knew?
That ALL the titles in a series should be in print! Mystery readers like to read series in order. Also that they should give good writers a bit of a chance to get some "legs" and word of mouth. A recent example which drives me crazy is M.G. Kincaid; she wrote two fantastic books and her series was picking up some momentum when she was dropped. That's a real waste of talent!

Three books in your store you wish more folks knew about?
THE LAST WITNESS, K.J. Erickson
SATAN'S LAMBS, Lynn Hightower
THE WOODEN OVERCOAT, Pamela Branch (these are subject to frequent change!)

What's on your night stand right now?
DEAD GIRLS DON'T WEAR DIAMONDS, Nancy Martin

If you were an adult film star, what would your name be?
I have no idea!

Damsels in distress

2006-07-15T20:10:00.000-04:00

One of the good things about touring is that you get a chance to read. And after days of hearing the sound of your own lips flapping (talking about your own stuff) it's blessed relief to sink into someone else's book at the end of the day.

When Kelly and I were on our recent Michigan Mitt Tour, we read alot. Whether we were sprawled on the nylon bedspread in a suburban Livonia Best Western or sitting on a balcony of a cottage overlooking the woods in Leland on Lake Michigan, books were our sanctuaries.

We read Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Stephen White, T. Jefferson Parker, PJ Tracy, Jan Brogan, MJ Rose, Allison Brennan. Lots of good, entertaining stuff. I had a great time with Charlie Huston's "Caught Stealing" and absolutely loved a quirky Michigan novel called "The Lake, The River & the Other Lake" by Steve Amick.

But then I hit a wall.

A friend gave me a book by an author whom I hadn't heard of before. I love discovering new authors, especially first-timers. I read the back copy. Good premise. I skimmed the first page. She had me. I forked over the cash.

That night I cracked the spine and settled in. I was in bed. I was ready. I wanted to be seduced. The first chapter was really good. A female cop, a grisly setup, a clear narrative voice, taut writing that teased me to turn the page.

So I did. And damn, I wish I hadn't because things went downhill fast. This female cop suddenly turned into a blithering mess. Worse, her ex-boyfriend came sniffing around and after she took him back, he took over the case. HER case! Suddenly, this cop -- traumatized though she might have been -- allowed weasel boy to take charge of everything. Worse, the writer LET HIM DO IT! Every time there was a new twist in the case, it was weasel boy who led the charge. Where was our heroine? Weeping and whining on the sidelines, a pathetic Hamlette, torn by indecision.

The thing degenerated into a writhing mass of bad romantic cliches. Complete with a see-it-coming-a-mile-away pregnancy that by book's end gives our girl a good reason reason to quit her police job and make waffles for weasel boy.

I was furious. Do you ever have the urge to throw a book across the room? I was sitting out on my friend's deck and heaved this one into the bushes.

Why?

It wasn't just because I hate women in distress books. The female in jeopardy is a standard of our genre and in the right hands, this can sometimes rise above cliche. But this author was dishonest. She started out with a premise that promised a woman of strength and depth. And I had expectations that this character would rise above her awful trauma through her own grit and courage. THAT was the story, wasn't it? As I finished this book, I found myself thinking about another book I had read, Theresa Schwegel's "Officer Down." This was also a debut and as such, it has its flaws. (Though it won Best First Edgar this year). But at least the author let her female cop heroine solve her own problems. She wasn't waiting for Dudley Do Right to right her ship.

In the end, I decided I was angry about this first book because I had been misled. I don't begrudge readers romantic escapism. Hell, I used to WRITE it. But this book was so schizophrenic it was like the first three chapters were written by Germaine Greer and the rest by Phyllis Schlafly. If your setup is a dark tale of a woman cop's redemptive journey, you can't switch tones mid-book and start going for the Rita Award.

What's the lesson here? Be honest with your readers. I don't mean be predictable. Be honest. That means finding a tone for your work and sticking with it so that the reality you create on your pages is believable. If you want to write romance or romance suspense, go for it and do it well.

But don't promise me Diana the huntress and then give me a damsel in distress. The book will end up in the bushes.

WiFi in the woods

2006-07-02T16:21:00.000-04:00

Greetings from northern Michigan! We are up in Grand Haven, a lovely little burg on Lake Michigan with a great indy bookstore called The Bookman. Lots of big sand dunes up here, high enough to block cell phone signals. Which is not a bad thing, actually. But I managed to find a hotspot for the lap top and wanted to check in just long enough to tell you all that I am guest blogging this week for my friend Elaine Flinn over at Murderati. I am writing about what it takes the survive as a published author these days...and some of the strange strategies publishers and authors alike are resorting to.

Check out Murderati.

And have a great safe Fourth!

You like me! You really like me!

2006-06-26T19:41:00.000-04:00

Do awards really matter? I'm not talking Pulitzer, Booker or Nobel here. Something more modest, like the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Macavity, Dagger. Ha! Not so modest if you're a writing member of our genre -- crime fiction.

I bring this topic up (which others have done often before this humble blogger) for two reasons. I was reading Tess Gerritsen's blog today and she talked about how thrilled she was to get a Macavity nod for "Vanished." Wrote Tess: "I’m astonished, especially after all the whispers from critics that my Edgar nomination was a complete fluke. I’ll refrain from uttering that famous old Sally Field line."

Shoot, I find Tess's enthusiasm refreshing. I remember once I was at the Edgar banquet (just an observer) and was seated next to one of the Best First nominees. During the salad, I noticed his ribbon designating his status and congratulated him on the honor. He muttered: "Oh, I thought I had written a literary novel."

Geez, I'd hate to see this guy REALLY excited about something. Felt a bit sorry for his wife, if you know what I mean. But Phlegmatic Phil didn't win and we were all spared what I am sure would have been a gripping acceptance speech.

Oh...wait. The SECOND reason for writing this. Well, I just found out we are nominated for a Shamus this year for our book "A Killing Rain." This is our fourth straight Shamus nomination. Am I blase about this? Gimme a break. I am thrilled to hell and flattered beyond belief. Why? Because the Shamus, like the Edgar is a confirmaton by your peers that what you are doing is...well, cool.

So a thank you to the judges because I know what a tough job it is. Not just to READ 40-50 books but to pick only one from what is a top-notch list this year.

WE'RE ON THE ROAD

Kelly and I are off to the home state tomorrow for a whirlwind two-week book signing and research tour in Michigan. So if any of you out there are ANYWHERE near where we will be, please come out and say hey. If you say the magic words "Cabbages and Kings" we will take you to the nearest wateringhole and buy you a cold one. Have a safe and happy holiday weekend. Here is where we will be:

June 29: Chicago. Centuries & Sleuths 7419 W. Madison, Forest Park IL. 7 p.m.
June 30: Saugatuck-Douglas Library. MI 7 p.m.
July 2: The Bookman, Grand Haven MI 715 Washington Street.
July 5: Leland, MI Leelanau Books. 109 N. Main St. 1-3 p.m.
July 5: Traverse City, MI Horizon Books. 243 E. Front St. 7-9 p.m.
July 6: Petoskey, MI McLean & Eakin Books. 307 E. Lake St. 1-3 p.m.
July 6: Gaylord, MI Saturn Books, 133 West Main (517) 732-8899 6-8 p.m.
July 8: Cadillac MI Horizon Books, 115 South Mitchell Street, Cadillac, MI
July 9: Midland MI Barnes & Noble, Midland Mall 6800 Eastman Ave. 1-3 p.m.
July 11: Lansing MI Schuler's Books. 1982 Grand River, Okemos. 7:30 p.m.
July 12: Livonia, MI Books Connection. 19043 Middlebelt Rd. 7 p.m.
July 13: Ann Arbor, MI Aunt Agatha's Books. 213 S. Fourth Ave. 7 p.m.

Crossing the finish line

2006-06-13T20:06:00.000-04:00

First, an apology. Those of you who are kind enough to stop by and read my ramblings deserve better than this -- my sloth and sin of not checking in these past two weeks. But I got in the weeds really bad this week while finishing The Book.

But the friggin thing is gone, off to New York on a FedEx wing and a prayer. And I haven't been this relieved since my divorce became final. (First husband. Second one took.)

This book was a bitch. The WORST. You'd think about seven books, it would get easier, but we all know it never does. We are launching a new series, with a new lead character and are trying to impress a new editor and publisher. My sister Kelly says I was a raving lunatic with this one, like howling at the moon hard-to-live-with. My husband? Don't ask. The man deserves a medal.

How neurotic am I? I ended up in the hospital with chest pains. But my ticker is fine, my doc put me on Xanax for a week and I went back to yoga. I mean, get over yourself, right?

Do you guys get this bent? And I have another question for you. I am asking this to find out that I am not crazy, not the only one who does this sort of thing.

What do you do RIGHT AFTER you finish your book? What do you do to pat yourself on the back? A massage? A new pair of Choo shoes? A good night's sleep? Sex with the perfect stranger? Do you have a celebratory ritual?

My sister and I have a ritual, which grew organically over seven books, much as our collaboration did. See, she always comes down to my place in Florida in March, the month that has coincided with the final push of the first draft. She stays a month and we grind it out in 10-hour, seven-day-weekly writing marathons with two computers, like Ferrante and Teicher. Or maybe those guys in Deliverance.

And then...

We get to the last page of the last chapter. And we do the same thing every year.

I type: THE
She types: END

We have a big hug. Then we get drunk.

This year, we missed our deadline because the book was going badly. She had to leave before we finished. So the ritual was disrupted. She was in Memphis, I in Fort Lauderdale. We were tempting the fates.

But when I sent her the final chapter over AOL, she emailed back and said she liked it. So I emailed it back with THE at the end. She emailed it back adding END.

Then I went down to Publix and bought a really expensive bottle of Pinot Noir and toasted to the rituals of sisterhood and authorhood.

My little secret: I love rituals. My dirty little secret: I love writing but I REALLY love having written.

Save the Indy 500
Every week, I will be spotlighting an independent bookstore. Today, I'd like you to meet Augie Aleksy, the owner of Centuries & Sleuths in Forest Park, Illinois. It's one of my fave places to visit because Augie makes every author feel like royalty and his customers are the best. Take it Augie...

Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore
7419 W. Madison Street
Forest Park, IL
Opened November 1990, moved to present location 2000

How'd you get in the business?
An opportunity came along to open the bookstore of my choice, doing what everybody says they "want to do someday." I also had the support of my wife. But first, I developed a business plan and conducted surveys of my chosen store specialties: history, mystery and biography. I wanted to find out what types of books people had purchased in the last quarter of 1989. The survey results justified my choices.
Favorite thing about being a bookseller?
Meeting interesting people, both customers and authors. Also, my son who was only 6 when we opened, had the change to meet with authors like Steve Allen, Peter Ustinov and Sara Paretsky. My former jobs in the financial industry never gave me or my family such a benefit.
What's unique about Centuries & Sleuths?
It's the only store specializing in mystery, history and biography, and the variety and longevity of our discussion groups. Plus we've put on some unique special events: a mock Trial of Richard III with real lawyers arguing before a federal court judge; a mock impeachment hearing of FDR for his prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor. We've also done Beans 'n' the Pot, a presentation of food from history and mysteries and a dozen Meeting of the Minds events similar to the Steve Allen PBS program of the 1970s.
What's your best advice to writers?
Write good books and be considerate of booksellers and customers.
What's your advice for the publishing industry?
Reduce the minimums to get better than a 40% discount.
Free freight
Continue good return policies
Consider the small independent bookstore when you tour big authors.
Keep up the good sales staff who sincerely try to help the little guy/girl make their store a success.
Three books in your store you wish more folks knew about?
Books by P.J. Parrish (honest, we didn't tell him to say this)
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (demonstrates link between history and mystery)
The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain. (his personal favorite)
The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox by Jennifer Lee Carrell
What's on your night stand right now?
Will Thomas's third Cyrus Barker mystery The Limehouse Text
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
If you were an adult film star, what would your name be?
Adrian Youngblood

Save the Indy 500

2006-05-28T15:01:00.000-04:00

This posting is NOT in honor of those guys (and gal) making that three-hour left turn up in Indianapolis today. This post is about some folks who need far more than flame-retardant suits and crash helmuts to survive their race.

I'm talking about independent bookstore owners. Two more closings were announced this month: Cody's Books in Berkeley and Ruminator Books, the nationally-recognized indy in St. Paul. You have to ask the reason? Declining sales and competition from chain stores and the Internet.

This is not an isolated bad month for the indies. Battered by online discounts and chain superstores, the American Booksellers Association has crumbled from 5,200 bookstores in 1991 to 1,702 stores in 2005.

Why should you care?

If you are an author, you probably already know why. As much as we need the chains to make it, most authors' chances of getting big-bucks promotion and placement in the chains and big-box discount stores is pretty small. So the handselling culture of the indies is probably your best chance of making a dent these days. We need these people. Badly.

If you are a reader, you need the intelligence, experience and personal touch the indies can provide. Say you suddenly discovered Val McDermid and ran through her entire catalog in a month. Do you think anyone at your local chain is going to suggest you try Minette Walters? (please, no emails about the fabulous clerk at your local Borders; they are the rare exception, not the rule.)

You're neither reader nor writer, just a human being? Well, damn it, you still should care. Because we need things of charm, idiosyncracy, intelligence and human scale more than ever in our supersized, homogenized, a Gap-on-every-Corner lives.

Yesterday, I attended the second annual Booksellers Appreciation lunch put on by my local Mystery Writers of America chapter. Mitch Kaplan, owner of the splendid Books & Books in Miami, and prez of the American Booksellers Association, was one of our guests. Mitch got into the book biz from a sheer love of what a Carnegie report once pronounced dead: books as things-in-themselves. I'll%

Blubbering

2006-05-24T20:04:00.000-04:00

Have you ever cried reading a novel?

No, I don't mean your first draft. I mean, has someone's work moved you to such a point that you shed real tears?

It doesn't happen often to me. Although I am a sucker for an emotional one-two punch. I remember reading Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club" on a plane and getting to a scene where the mother explains why she abandoned her babies by the side of the road. Well, I had to get up and go into the bathroom to compose myself. What a wuss. What a good book.

I know this is hard to believe, given my reputation (see previous post) as a hard-hearted bitch. But I cry at books, movies, and commercials (that one where the Army guy comes home for Xmas and wakes the house up making coffee gets me every time.)

Maybe it is because movies are more inherently commercial, but they seem to evoke tears more readily than books. Why is that? Are novelists more leery of the "cheap" reaction of tears? I think that is certainly true in crime fiction today. It is rare to find a novel, in these days of neo-noir aping and dick-lit posturing, that we get crime books that appeal to the emotions. The last crime novel I can remember actually bringing a lump to my throat was T. Jefferson Parker's Silent Joe. Why is that? We are dealing with the themes of death and loss all the time. We describe blood and guts with clinical accuracy. Why do we pull our punches when it comes to showing the emotional outfall of death?

I was thinking about the place emotion had in fiction tonight because I happened to catch the last half-hour of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Now I know that movie reeks quaint in today's world, but that scene where Spencer Tracy delivers his speech saying, "If what you feel for each other is half of what I felt for my wife, you'll be all right." With Katherine Hepburn all misty eyed in the background...great stuff.

Other movies I get the Kleenex out for:

Breakfast At Tiffany's: Holly searching for the metaphoric Cat in the rain.
Roman Holiday: Princess Audrey, pauper Gregory Peck. Hopeless love.
The Vikings: Dead Kirk Douglas getting his Viking funeral sendoff.
Field of Dreams: Kevin Costner playing catch with his father's ghost. Waaaa...
Sophie's Choice: Stingo reciting Emily Dickinson over the death bed.
Old Yeller: Well, you know what happened to the dog.

Why doesn't fiction evoke the same response? I don't believe it is because movies are more visual. What is more powerful than the blank screens of our own imaginations? I think it might be because today's crime writers are leery of being labeled as soft when we go into matters of the heart.

I had a conversation with a high-placed editor recently. She told me she has noticed two trends in crime fiction recently: the decline of hardboiled "guy books." And the rise of romantic suspense. Now, let's not kid ourselves. There is some terrific hardboiled stuff being written right now, books that don't turn up their noses at emotions. Likewise, there is some utterly putrid romance suspense on the shelves these days, stuff that gets everything about police procedure and forensics wrong and gets really messy treacly about the romance part. Eeeewwww.

Maybe I am wrong. Or just reading the wrong stuff. What has gotten to you? What has made you cry? Movies are easy. But give me some books as well.

Or am I wrong in my belief that there is still room for well-wrought (as opposed to over-wrought) emotion in today's crime fiction?

No guts, no glory

2006-05-13T11:33:00.000-04:00

My sister and I were talking about what it takes it get published these days. We talk about this alot, given the manuscripts we critique and the friends we try to advise.

Craft? Of course you need that. Although it's amazing how much folks think that isn't a given. (see previous post)

Perserverance? You betcha. (See Joe Konrath's blog for more on that)

Talent? Yes, I believe you need at least a dollup. Which is why some people, know matter how long or hard they try, will never get published. Sorry, but some of this is just in the genes, folks.

But Kelly and I also came to the conclusion that there is another ingredient -- courage. Which is not the same as perserverance. Some folks have great ideas but lack the courage to face the blank computer screen. Some start books but lack the guts to finish. And many -- oh, so many! -- lack the courage to then send their manuscript out into the world.

I try not to talk about rejection here too much. It can get depressing because no matter where you are on the publishing food chain, you face rejection. Looking for an agent brings you rejection. Then you get an agent and your book is rejected by editors. Then someone buys your book and the marketing department rejects it by deciding not to give it co-op support or a decent first printing. Then, Kirkus kicks you in the teeth. Then you sit at a card table at Borders surrounded by stacks of your book and no one stops. And finally, your book is in the stores but thousands of potential readers reject you and pick up the latest Patterson instead.

See what I mean? It never stops. Which is why you have to have courage. The courage to submit your book and get rejection letters. The courage to hand your book over to an editor and take criticism. The courage to soldier on in the face of astronomical odds, the courage to get back up when you've been knocked down by a bad review. The courage to be true to your style when you see the same old names on the bestseller lists. The courage to keep writing because it is what you do.

My sister loves to write song parodies. Here is her latest on Courage. Sing it to the tune of "If I Only Had a Heart." (From the Wizard of Oz). Maybe it can inspire you to keep going.

I could be a mystery writer,
If I only was a fighter
To get what I deserve.
I could write in any fashion
If I only had the passion
If I only had the nerve.

I could write a mystery story
It’ll be so good and gory
And better than Lehane.
It would be dark and scary
And very literary
If I only had a brain.

I'd write romance kind and gentle
And awful sentimental
With lots of sexy parts.
I could capture the devotion
And all the right emotion
If I only had a heart.

To write my book...to send it out and get a look
That is my dream...to see my work...on the big screen.

See, I have this great idea
About a mob-run pizzeria
It has lots of blood and gore.
But I’d sit at home all winter
And send it through my printer
And stick it in the drawer.

Yeah, it's good, but believe me, missy,
I was born to be a sissy,
Without the vim and verve.
But I could show my talent easy
If I wasn’t quite so queasy
And I only had the nerve.

GET OUT!

2006-05-10T13:13:00.000-04:00

Warning: crabby post follows.

I got hooked into reading a manuscript the other day. I did it as a favor to a friend who had a friend -- a lawyer, of course -- who had just finished writing his FIRST legal thriller. It was "a more literary John Grisham," he said. Would I read it, to, you know, give my opinion....?

So I started it last night. (I know, I never learn). I got maybe 20 pages in and I began hearing this voice in my head. Not my usual muse voices. This one was whispering: "Get out!"

Took me a while, but I realized it was the demon voice who had screamed at James Brolin in "The Amityville Horror." Only this voice was really me yelling at the writer of the misbegotten mess of a novel I was reading.

Get out, now, buddy. Get out of any notion that you could possibly ever succeed as a writer. Because you are tone-deaf to dialog, blind to characterization, and utterly and completely unable to tell a basic linear-plot story. Worse, you didn't bother to learn a damn thing about the craft that goes into fiction writing before you tried. You had the brass balls to think you could shortcut all that.

God, this just rots my socks, this whole idea that anyone can just write a novel these days. I have had it with professionals who write and think that just because their printer spat out 200 double-spaced pages of typing, they have made the leap to professional writer.

I am not alone in this frustration.

I have a new hero, a guy who is blogging on a site called Evil Editor.. He takes actual query letters and dissects them (I highly recommend his site for those of you struggling with the fine art of query writing). But this paragraph from Evil Editor to a writer who had queried him caught my eye the other day:

"Look, here's the thing. The competition to get published is fierce. If Evil Editor tried to write a symphony, he would expect someone with an MFA in music to mock his first attempt mercilessly. If Evil Editor tried to create a giraffe or a Dachshund out of a balloon, you would laugh at his comic ineptitude. So it shouldn't be shocking when Evil Editor suggests that while what you've learned about people, natural perceptions, and history may be impressive, what you've learned about English, particularly the craft of writing (so far), isn't going to get you to your goal. Take classes, join a critique group, read a lot, and maybe ten years from now you'll read this letter and laugh. When you're not groaning. Sorry, my friend."

Preach on, brother Evil.

Postscript: I awoke this morning to find out George Lutz, the owner of the real Amityville horror house, died May 8. Rest in peace. He finally got out.

March of the penguins

2006-05-05T20:33:00.000-04:00

Okay, this has nothing to do with writing, or crime novels, but it is about men and that is close enough. I have been thinking about this since I got back from the Edgars, thinking about how lovely all the women looked -- Twist Phelan in her pale satin, Janet Evanovich in her emerald brocade, Tess Gerritsen in her silver sheath, SJ Rozan in serious black bangles...and so many other beauties.

But the men? Ah, the heart skips a beat. Because I am a sucker for a man in a tuxedo. And there were plenty of fellows in formal wear this year, which makes me think that the decline of western civilization as we know it not as imminent as I thought.

There is something so sweetly charming, nay, sexy, about a man in a tux. Maybe it is the pure effort it epitomizes. I mean, come on, we women know about effort. We truss ourselves up in stilettos and body stockings and who is it all for? You, dear fellows. So when I see a man in a tux, I think about the intent behind it all. It takes effort to button those studs, tie that tie (okay, to strap on that fake), and find the perfect spot between ribs and gut where the cumberbund can settle.

Too many men at the Edgars just gave up, appearing in drab suits or -- in one awful display -- chinos and sports shirt. But the men in tuxes were a chiaroschuro buffet. So Astaire, so Gregory Peck, so James Bond, so...negative to our positive femininity. Just a few I noticed: Don Bruns (shown above with my friend Sharon Potts and my agent Maria Carvainis), Reed Farrel Coleman, Mike Connelly and Jerry Healy (with a wine stain on his white shirt that looked like a bloody stab from a vindicative wife).

So a belated salute to our men in black and white. You give new meaning to neo-noir.

Going to the Edgar prom

2006-05-01T15:06:00.000-04:00

Edgar week in New York. Lots of panel banter at the symposium, preening at the cocktail parties, barroom prognostications, and of course, boozy-weepy scenes in the bars after the awards are announced. I've been to four Edgar weeks now -- once as an utterly dazzled newbie nominee, twice as a panelist and once as a mere lurker. But this year, as I worked the room at the agent and editor cocktail party, it struck me like a lightning bolt: I was back in high school again.

All the old cliques were there. All the old insecurities were on display. All the old crushes, fantasies and pimply passions were hovering there below the surfaces. Big Name Authors surrounded by sycophants. Midlist Cassiuses with their lean and hungry looks. Wannabees wandering the periphery waiting to be asked to dance. (By the way, that's us in the picture above with Prom Queen Janet Evanovich.) It was ferocious in its poignancy, and at one point, I found myself sitting alone in the corner, with that old Janis Ian song, “At Seventeen,” rumbling through my head:

To those of us who knew the pain
Of six-figure deals that never came
And those whose names were never called
When announcing winners at the Edgar Ball
It was long ago and far away
And the world was younger than today
When dreams were all they gave for free
To small-press midlist geeks like me...

Okay, I changed the words a little. But the awful agony of high school is very much alive in our mystery community. We're a very welcoming group as a rule, and although there are a couple pricks and bitches in our school, we pretty much have each other's backs. But geez, when we put on our gowns and tuxes and get together at the Edgar prom, the tortured ghosts of our teenaged pasts come out...

The Jocks: Ah yes, the golden boys of the mystery world, they play hardboiled ball, throw the perfect PI spiral or get nothing but neo-noir net.

The Cheerleaders: The goodlooking girls who make the good grades and whose books get voted Most Likely To Succeed.

The National Honor Society: Brainy, brilliant, beloved by kingmaker critics, they labor only to transcend the genre and don't care if their books aren't carried in Costco.

The Greasers: Leathered and liquored, they lurk in the alleys of the thriller world, feared and despised. But they have the hottest sex and everyone secretly wants to hang with them.

The Home Ec Club: Baking muffin mysteries, chick-lit suspense and country-inn cozies, sniffing that no one takes them seriously. Except booksellers know they are quietly conquering the world one cat book at a time.

The AV Club nerds: No one sees them. No one cares. Until they suddenly publish a graphic novel and make a million bucks with an interactive website game, podcast tie-in and movie deal.

So what about you? Where do you fit in? Maybe, like me, you don't. In high school, I was one of those weird kids who clustered with a couple friends in the cafeteria, stuffing my face with Twinkies, watching the popular parade as it passed by.

I'm still weird. I'm still watching the parade. Neither me nor the books that I write fit in any one clique. But I see that as a good thing now. The thing about getting old is that you find your niche; the Cheerleaders start talking to you; you finally get asked to dance, maybe even by one of the Jocks. You figure out that sometimes the view from the outside is a lot more interesting than the view from the inside. You realize that beneath the pretty dresses and nice tuxes, everyone is just as insecure about all this as you are.

I will press this year's Edgar corsage between tissue and store it away.

Addendum: Skip on over to Tess Gerritson's blog for her sweet story about her Edgar dress. We women do get emotional about clothes sometimes.

New York state of mind

2006-04-24T23:31:00.000-04:00

Dear blog buds,

I'm taking a little shore leave this week to go up to New York for the Edgar festivities. If any of you are in the city this week, please stop by and say hey!

Tuesday: We'll be at Black Orchid Bookstore, 303 East 81st Street (between 1st and 2nd) 6 p.m. at a signing party with other Mystery Writers of America authors

Wednesday: At 10:30 a.m., we share the dais at the Edgar Week Symposium for a panel on Writing Teams with Jason Starr, Ken Bruen, Charles and Caroline Todd.

Wednesday noon: Big group grope signing at Borders 461 Park Avenue at East 57th St with fellow MWA authors Janet Evanovich, Linda Fairstein, Tess Gerritsen, Thomas H. Cook, S.J. Rozan and many others.

Thursday evening: The Edgar banquet, where I will wear red satin, drink red wine and be green with envy for the nominees and winners.

See you on Monday with a full report. Have a good writing week!

First round picks...and busts

2006-04-20T11:19:00.000-04:00

Was thinking today how much two of my favorite icons -- Dan Marino and John Grisham -- have in common. Stay with me on this.

I love the NFL. And because pre-season doesn't start for a couple months yet, I -- like many football geeks -- resort to a sad substitute, The Draft. I read the magazines, check out the websites and listen to the talking jock-heads on ESPN. Will Heisman god QB Matt Leinart go No. 1 or will the raw Vince Young leapfrog over him? Will my Dolphins go for a beefy safety or a WR so Culpepper has someone to throw to?

Yeah, I know. I need a life.

But sports section devoured and in need of something loftier, I turned to the Arts section of today's New York Times. There I read about Charles Frazier's upcoming book. You remember Frazier. He's the fellow who scored big with his debut novel "Cold Mountain." It was a critical darling, won the National Book Award and was a surprise bestseller.

Right after his big splash, Frazier chucked his agent and editor at Grove/Atlantic and on the basis of a one-page outline, sold his SECOND book at auction for $8 million to Random House. "Thirteen Moons" is set to come out this October. It is another epic love story set in the 19th-century South. Random House "is betting that readers who made 'Cold Mountain' such a hit will do it again for 'Thirteen Moons.'"

I gotta wonder. Is Random House making a shaky bet on a future prospect?

Sure, Frazier has a track record. But it was just one book. And this is literary fiction. Plus it's been 10 years between books. And $8 million is a lot of shekels for one book. Does Frazier have the arm to score another touchdown? Have his fans left the stadium? Is this going to be another one of those expensive busts we read about at the end of the year in Publishers Weekly that will make it tougher for Random Houses lesser lights? Wouldn't it be wiser to maybe trade down, and use all that money to build a couple of steady talents with potential?

Which takes me back to Grisham and Marino. Both were overlooked in their drafts. But both took rejection and turned it into a positive. Both turned out to be huge assets for their bosses.

Marino was taken by the Dolphins with the 27th pick. That means 26 teams took a pass on the guy who became the first rookie QB to go to a Super Bowl and was a first ballot Hall of Famer. Five teams chose QBs ahead of him. The Colts drafted John Elway knowing they couldn't sign him. Kansas City took Todd Blackledge. Buffalo took Jim Kelly. New England took Tony Eason. The Jets took Ken O'Brien.

Now let's look at John Grisham. He struggled to write his first book "A Time To Kill" while working fulltime as a lawyer. You can read about that part in this interview. Grisham was turned down by thirty-some publishers. "Everybody said no," he recalls. After a year of rejection, his agent sold "A Time to Kill" to the tiny Wynwood Press. The book sold 5,000 copies, most of them from Grisham hawking them from the trunk of his car. Wynwood went bankrupt leaving Grisham with no one to publish the second book he had been laboring on, "The Firm." But then a bootlegged manuscript of "The Firm" surfaced in Hollywood, and as Grisham has explained: "Some guy ran 25 copies, said he was my agent, and sent them to all of the major production companies. He got nervous when they started making offers. At some point he called my agent in New York, and the rest is history. It was an unbelievably lucky break, and I had nothing to do with it."

But like Marino, Grisham did go on to have a rather long and productive career.

Publishing is a lot like the NFL draft. Every year, there is buzz, hype and great hopes surrounding a handful of hot prospects. Is what goes on in the booths of BEA so much different than the machinations in the war rooms of the NFL, where team owners place multi-million-dollar bets on unknown kids in cleats? Is a publisher dazzled by a photogenic face and a "media platform" any different than a scout besotted by a 4.4 and a good Wonderlick score? And is an editor any better at predicting which writer will have a sophomore slump than a coach is at foretelling which rookie will blow out a knee?

No one talking about the NFL draft really has any idea what they're talking about. No coach can predict which guy is going to be the next sixth-round steal Tom Brady and which one is the next first-round dud Todd Marinovich. Likewise, no editor can predict who's going to be the next J.K. Rowlings and who -- despite all the money they throw around -- is going to be the next John Twelve Oaks.

The people whose careers depend on drafting players and authors have no real idea how they'll turn out, if they will be one-season wonders or if they'll have a long and prolific career. Like my guys Marino and Grisham.

So will Charles Frazier bring home the Lombardi again for RH? Or will he just be this year's David Guterson? I dunno, but if there were a fantasy league for writers, I'd be tempted to take a pass on this one and find a couple second-round gems with -- as the sports cliche goes -- a good upside. But what do I know?

When it comes to finding a winner, in the end sometimes it's just plain, blind, dumb luck.

Becoming

2006-04-17T19:35:00.000-04:00

I was watching the movie "Dave" the other night. It is one of my favorites and there is this great scene where the ersatz prez Kevin Kline asks his veep, "How did you get started?"

Ben Kingsley answers that he started as a shoe saleman and things kind of snowballed from there.

It made me wonder: How did you "become" a novelist? It is a strange track to choose, fraught with disappointments and so subject to the whims of the vox populi. (In our case, how well we register on on the B&N computer). What we do is not that different from politics in a way. Our best politicians begin life as something else (shoe salesmen) and through passion, ambition or whatever, morph into something else. So it is with novelists, I believe. We start out as something else in our quests to make money, support our families, live up to whatever dream we subscribe to, or what our parents hoped we would be.

Then...

Something clicks. And you are willing to give up all that for something you believe in. Something that makes your heart beat faster. Something that makes you sleep better at night. Something that lets your soul grow. Even as you know that nothing may come of it in the end.

So...

What were you before you became?

What were you doing when the notion hit you? What were you collecting a paycheck for when you realized it wasn't enough? Now, I know that most of us are still working the "real" jobs, and that's okay. Necessary. But I really want to know: When did it happen for you?

When did you become a writer?

In celebration of four good paragraphs

2006-04-16T19:46:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry. Please, indulge me.

It has been a bad writing week. I read over the last chapter I wrote, which took me five days to complete. It is pedestrian, banal, mundane. The best thing I can say about it is that it got the job done. It advanced the plot.

But tonight. Tonight, I started a new chapter and I wrote four paragraphs that I know are really, really good. Spare, simple, evocative.

This does not happen very often. As you well know. We fret every word, every paragraph, hoping the parts come together. We live in terror that the whole will not hold.

Very soon, I start rewrites and I don't know if the 100,000 words I have put on disk so far are good, bad or indifferent. I have lost a sense of things and am now running on total faith. It's enough to make you Catholic.

But those four paragraphs. That is enough to sustain me.

This is why we do this. No?

Confessions of a book mover

2006-04-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

So I go into my local supermarket a while back to hunt and gather and lo! there on the paperback rack is my book. As Martha says, it's a good thing. But alas, I am down on the bottom, wedged between the horoscope books and a romance with a really creepy cover. I curbed my cart, looked around to see that no one was watching, and promptly moved my modest stack of five books up to the No. 5 slot, bumping James Patterson down to No. 9.

Uh-oh... I hear sirens. I hear gasps. You MOVED your own books? You took over another author's legitimately won bestseller space? How crude, desperate and socially unacceptable!

Yes, I did it. I confess. I moved my books. And before you get all self-righteous, I know that are hundreds, nay, thousands of authors out there who do the exact same thing. But they won't fess up. And even the ones who claim they would never stoop to such a low, well, they commit sin by comission because they have whole armies of friends and relatives strategically placed all over the country who move their books FOR them. ("Hey, what can I do? Aunt Nancy up in Maplewood is just trying to help.")

I used to move my books all the time when I was just starting out back in my romance writing days. But I stopped. So why did I do it this time? What made me lapse? I think it was because I was feeling a little bit of disgust at the whole wacked-out book promotion and display system.

Most experienced writers know that prime shelf space in the chain bookstores is bought. This is called co-op advertising. It is a system adapted from the supermarket model where manufacturers pay more money for better shelf visibility. This is why the Special K is on the top shelf and Generic Oat Flakies are on the bottom. This is also why some authors get the Just Published shelf in the front of Barnes & Noble and your new book is shoved in the back of the store somewhere.

What? You didn't know that prime bookstore space is BOUGHT? Many published writers don't know. Most unpublished writers don't know. And I'm betting almost no readers know. Most folks who walk into B&N, Borders and see the big stacks of books by the front door believe they are there because they are bestsellers, or really good or important books.

Co-op is a complex, multi-tiered "cooperative" enterprise between publishers and bookstores, an advertising agreement really. In plain terms, it means that many of the books on display at the front of a store or placed face out at the end of an aisle are there because the publisher paid for them to be there, not necessarily because anyone at the bookstore thought the book was noteworthy or interesting.

The way it works is booksellers -- mostly chains, but also larger independent stores -- keep a certain percentage of a publisher's net sales, usually 3 percent to 5 percent annually. This money is used by the bookseller to defray advertising costs (like when a chain takes out ads or prints fliers to promote certain books.) But the publisher's money may also buy prime real estate in the stores -- those nice tables near the front door, the Just Published shelf, the Recently Released shelf, the good spots by the register, and even having a book shelved cover out inside of spine out.

You can see where this is going. But what does it mean to you, the powerless author? I'm lucky. I've gotten pretty good co-op support from my publisher so far. And I am sure it has been a big factor in getting me on some bestseller lists. But I wasn't so lucky on my first go-around as a writer. When I first started out as a romance writer, I was naive. Hell, I was dumber than a box of returned books.

I used to go to my local Big Bookstore and wonder why my books weren't there. Or if they were, why they weren't out on the New In Paperback table. I went to the manager and told him my books were on the South Florida bestseller list and I was a LOCAL AUTHOR, so why weren't my books out on the front table? The manager tried to be nice but there was pity in his eyes as he said I should talk to my publisher.

I got even angrier when I went to my local drugstore. My book was there, too, but it wasn't on one of the racks labeled 1-10 Bestselling Books in South Florida. The 18-year-old manager shrugged and told me to call his distributor. I did more than that. I went to the distributor's Miami office and asked him. Nice man in a blue suit. Told me, with pity in his eyes, to talk to my publisher. Later, I found out that the bestseller slots in drugstores and supermarkets and airports have nothing to do with sales. Each slot is bought and paid for on a sliding scale.

Now, back in the 1980s, publishers held their promotion cards even closer to their vests than they do now. No one would talk to me about co-op. And like I said, I was too dumb and disconnected from other writers to find out the truth.

To make a sad story short, I got dropped by my first publisher and had to climb my way back into the business. Flash to the present and my second career as a crime writer. I networked. I educated myself about the business. I asked my publisher if there would be co-op support for my books. I got answers. I now know that if my publisher has say, XX-dollars to spent on promoting my book, I don't want a tour. I don't want an ad in the Times or USA Today. I want end-cap displays in B&Ns, stepladders in Borders, and as many slots in as many airports as my publisher's budget will buy.

I don't begrudge the co-op system. It is what it is, a complicated merchandising machine that has evolved over the past two decades to accommodate the huge number of books competing for shelf space and consumer attention in superstores like B&N, Borders, big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco, and other outlets. Everything has been supersized and many publishers say that the tables and flashy cardboard displays that crowd the front of chain bookstores have become a marketing force more powerful than the traditional ones -- reviews, newspaper and magazine ads, tours and interviews.

I read an article recently that quoted a veteran New York editor saying "The Barnes & Noble stepladder is the best piece of real estate there is. When I go into a store I practically genuflect in front of the stepladder." (He added that one of his books with sales of about 800 copies a week immediately jumped to 3,000 to 4,000 copies a week once he paid for its placement on stepladders in stores across the country.)

I know I have to live with this. Even try to embrace it, if I am to succeed. So why did I move my book the other day?

I dunno. Maybe I was remembering the humiliation of my long-ago meeting with that empty suit in Miami. Maybe I was just pissed that so many good books languish in the backstacks spine out and never get found by readers. Maybe I am just distressed that so many readers today don't realize their choices are being made for them the moment they walk into the bookstore door.

Old habits die hard. I did move one more book...a really good book by a friend of mine who isn't getting any support from her pub. But I haven't moved any more of my own books since that day. I am P.J. Parrish and I am a book mover. I have been clean now for four weeks.

Night Terrors

2006-04-10T11:19:00.000-04:00

The new book is almost done. First draft, that is. I haven't read it through since we started the thing months ago. I am afraid to. I have this really bad feeling that it is a heaping, stinking, fetid, rancid pile of crap. I dream about it now, this pile of crap, almost every night, like Richard Dreyfus in "Close Encounters." I wake up in a sweat over it. My only consolation is knowing that I feel this way with every book. And that I am not alone.

Found this entry on Lee Goldberg's blog the other day, in which John Connelly talks about his own demons: "There is always that fear that this book, this story, is the one that should not have been started. The idea isn’t strong enough. The plot is going nowhere. I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and now have to try to find the right path again."

To which Lee responds: "This happens to me, too...but less often if I have a strong outline to start with (though an outline is no insurance policy against realizing 35,00o words into your book that it's crap and you're a complete fraud). In talking with other writers, I've noticed that the ones who hit the wall the most are the ones who make up their plot as they go along, preferring to be "surprised" by their characters and the turns in the story. Of course, this means the turns may lead to a creative dead end."

My night terrors are especially bad this time out for two reasons. We have a new publisher and I want things to go well. We have a new female protagonist who we are still getting to know. She is a spinoff character from our Louis Kincaid books. Can she carry a new series? Or will she be the Matt LeBlanc of crime fiction? Will our Louis readers follow us to the new one? Have we run out of good plots? Have we finally jumped the shark?

I don't know, maybe there are writers out there who never have any doubts. Maybe Nora Roberts or Joan Didion never break out in a cold sweat at night. But I suspect there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of you out there who are in the same sweaty boat as I am. Because getting published is the easy part, my friends. (I know, those of you who aren't don't want to hear that, but it's true.) Staying published is what's tough. That means consistently writing good books that people want to read. And did I mention trying to always become a better writer?

For those of you just starting out in this business, this is what awaits you. Days spent staring at your computer screen, deep in thought and faith. And nights spent twisting in damp percal. What can I tell you? I offer the same two words of advice I give to my youthful female friends about menopause: cotton pajamas.

Women doing men. And vice versa

2006-03-26T17:51:00.000-05:00

Got a great fan letter the other day from a lady named Rose O'Hara:

Dear P.J.: My husband is a Stephen King fan. Has read all his books and needed a new author. We went to the bookstore and found your first Louis Kincaid book. Well, he is hooked and is always looking forward to the next one. Here's the funny part. He doesn't think women can write as good as men. He thinks P.J. Parrish is a black man. I just found out when I went to your website [that you are women]. This is a good one. I can't wait to tell him."

Wish I could say this is rare. But we get a lot of fan letters that come addressed to Mr. Parrish. Most of them, in fact. Whatever the reason -- that our protag is a man or our style hardboiled -- many of our readers assume we are male.

Now I'm a card-carrying feminist. (Well, I would carry one if there WAS a card). And I used to be miffed about this Mr. Parrish thing, believing that I had a duty to carry the standard for female crime writers. (Maybe I did strike a blow for the crime writing sisterhood in the O'Hara household at least.) But you know, after living nearly ten years now as the neuter P.J. Parrish, I no longer take offense. I'll let reader Wade Beeson, in his recent email to us, tell you why:

"As a compliment, I could not decide if you were male or female, as you seem sensitive and understanding of both sexes. Thank you for a provocative read."

The women writing men and men writing women thing is a pretty hackneyed subject. It's dragged out for at least one conference panel a year. And I suspect Joe Konrath, Jerry Healy, T. Jefferson Parker et al, are as tired of explaining how they "do" women as I am tired of talking about how I "do" men.

It boils down to one thing for me: If you can't slip into the skin of another sex (or race or anyone outside your paltry sphere of experience) you have no business even trying to write. Failure to write believable characters of ANY kind is the supreme failure of the imagination.

"Madame Bovary" is one of my favorite books. From the first time I read it, I was awed by Emma. And by her creator's ability to bring her to such vivid life. I mean, I had just run my Visa up buying three pair of Charles Jourdan shoes when my rent was overdue. How did Flaubert know how I got to that nadar?

Flaubert "did" women well. But when he said "Bovary, c'est moi," he wasn't claiming he was his character. Actually, he once admitted he was terrified by "the need to invent." (Which I find vastly comforting!) He was a literary magpie who read medical textbooks to write about clubfeet, observed the town folks around him, and when he had to write a chapter about a agricultural fair, actually went to one.

It's said he probably even stole the whole idea for Bovary from a scandal that was going on near his town at the time, buying into the advice of his friends who told him "write what you know."

For years after his book came out, he peevishly maintained he just made the whole damn thing up.

But Flaubert WAS Bovary in a very basic way. His powers of observation, his imagination, his sensory antennae, his understanding of human nature --- all those things that make up what we call writer's talent -- it all allowed him to inhabit other skins. It allowed him to create one of literature's greatest female archetypes.

This man-woman thing is swirling in my head today as my sister and I write chapter 38 of our new book. The finish line is in sight, but it has been a hard race. See, this book is the first in a new series featuring a female protagonist name Joe Frye. But we are so used to living in a man's skin, that we are having a bitch of a time getting into her head. For the first time in years, I can sympathize with those of you just starting out -- those of you still trying to fit into that new skin.

Joe is taking shape. As are the men around her. A whole new world is coming to life every day under my fingertips. It is frustrating, frightening all over again. And deeply thrilling. I tapped into something inside myself to become Louis. I will plumb the female side of myself for Joe. And in the process, I will willingly lose something of myself.

Here's Flaubert talking about that process:

"What a delicious thing writing is --- not to be you anymore but to move through the whole universe you are talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was a man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were heavy with passion."

Isn't that, in a nutshell, why we write?

No. 13: Why I like this business

2006-03-22T11:31:00.000-05:00

For M. Carson Black, who likes his Arizona "office" view:

My normal desk faces a wall. I take my PC and my dog Bailey outside when I can't stand it anymore. Like I said, I am a lucky dog. So is my dog, who I found on the "remainder" pile at the Humane Society.

To quote Jerry Rubin, Buy My Books Or I Shoot This Dog.

Just kidding. My husband would shoot ME.

Twelve things we LIKE about this crappy business.

2006-03-21T11:04:00.000-05:00

My friend Joe Konrath sounds a little down over at his blog today, talking about the twelve things writers won't admit. (For the record, he's absolutely right about most of them). But Jude Hardin sez he got depressed reading it and wants to hear some things writers LIKE about the business.

My coauthor sister Kelly is sitting across the room this morning, banging out chapter 35, so I asked her. Here is what we came up with:

1. You can drink on the job and no one makes you pee in a bottle.
2. You can write off trips to New York.
3. You don't have to wear a bra at work.
4. You get to kill people you hate and not go to prison.
5. You can have mindblowing sex with whoever you want and not worry about rubbers, disease or your spouse leaving you.
6. You get to read fan letters (we love and answer every one we get and save them forever like old love letters. Honest.)
7. You get to be in the Library of Congress. (In 1983, I went there and asked for the librarian to bring me a copy of my paperback romance. She did. Quite humbling.)
8. You get to walk into a tiny bookstore in Moose-Butt Maine and see your book on the shelf. And then find out the old lady behind the counter has read your entire oeuvre and remembers each character better than you do.
9. You get to live inside your head for day, weeks, months, at a time and not get carted away.
10. You get to find a note taped to your bathroom mirror from your spouse or kid saying, "I'm proud of you."
11. You get to do something that gives others pleasure.
12. You get to do something that gives you joy.

Now I have to go write because we are up against a nasty deadline and Kelly is giving me dirty looks. Deadlines are one of the things I DON'T like about this crappy business. But no complaining. I am a lucky dog. And I know it.

"Heed this advice!" she said desperately

2006-03-11T09:51:00.000-05:00

I was sitting in a restaurant the other day when my friend and fellow author, Tom Swift, happened to stop by and ask if he could join me.

"Yes," I said cordially.

He sat down, his eyes slipping secretly to the paperback book lying wantonly near my wine glass. "I see," he said insightfully, "that you are reading a popular author."

"Yes," I said affirmatively, nodding energetically.

"Do you like the book?" he asked inquiringly.

I wasn't sure how to answer. Both of us had just returned from SleuthFest, which was geared for aspiring writers. There was a lot of good advice about plot structure, the differences between thrillers and mysteries, and character building.

My friend wisely picked up on my silence. "So," he said flatly. "I take it you don't like the book?"

"It was hard to read," I said effortlessly.

"In what way?" he asked inquisitively.

"Well, I'm not sure what it was," I said perplexedly.

"How was the plotting?" he asked ploddingly.

"The plot was okay. But it kind of fell apart toward the end," I added brokenly.

"That's too bad," he said sympathetically. "Anything else?"

"The characters were okay but kind of cardboard," I added woodenly.

"Really?" he said shockingly.

"Yes," I acknowledged.

"But the book was a New York Times bestseller," he interjected suddenly, jabbing at the book pointedly. "You are suppose to love the bestsellers. This one got great blurbs. And all the reviewers loved it."

"Well," I said deeply. "I just don't know what it was about the book that I found tiresome but there was something."

Tom Swift gave me a nod of his head, shaking it up and down, and then added a small, understanding smile, displaying his Hollywood teeth. "Well," he said philosophically. "Some books are just like that."

And with that, Tom sauntered away, slowly and casually disappearing into the misty dark inky black night.

I was left with my thoughts -- and that bad book. I was thinking about all the good advice I had heard at SleuthFest. Really good stuff, even a great debate about talent versus technique. But one thing kept coming back to me -- the thing all the good authors stressed. Robert Crais had said it best in his keynote speech: "Adverbs are not your friend.”

He didn't say it lightly. He didn't it dramatically. He didn't even say it succinctly. He just said it.

Up to my ass in alligators

2006-03-01T20:00:00.000-05:00

Hi folks,
Just checking in to tell you I am busy with SleuthFest this week. My sister and I are teaching a rather intensive workshop on suspense, so my brain is elsewhere. Be patient and I will be back with utterly enchanting, fascinating, trenchant and full-of-myself things to say about our writer's conference.

In the meantime, I leave you with the immortal words of one of my fave old bands, the Blues Magoos:

We're gonna take a little break
But we'll be back so don't be late.
Gonna grab a little smoke
And powder our nose
And then we'll be back
To tickle your toes...

Intermission!

(cue cacophonous 60s psychedelic rift)

Forget your book. Rewrite your attitude

2006-02-21T20:13:00.000-05:00

Had two encounters with unpubbed writers this week. This is kind of like a Yeti sighting but in some ways more terrifying. Because you never know if they're going to turn on you. You never know when they're going to open their mouths and show those fangs of bad attitude.

I like helping unpubs. I was one once, rejected by every publisher in New York before someone took a chance on me. I know the heartbreak. I know how hard and utterly confusing this all is. But I also know -- learned this through ten years experience publishing books now -- how important having the right attitude is. In fact, attitude might be more important than talent in this game. So when I meet an unpubbed with a bad one, I have learned not to waste my time or breath trying to help.

Back to the two unpubs I met this week. I had agreed to give some advice over coffee. We talked about their writing, and I answered questions. I had read the first 30 pages or so of their manuscripts ahead of time. But I didn't really need to. I could tell from just talking to them which one is going to get published and which one never will. See if you can figure it out:

Unpub A:

Wrote eight books.
Tried writing both romance and mysteries.
Has had all eight books rejected by editors.
Just finished a ninth book.
Queried 12 agents and got one to take her on.
Agent-submitted ninth book was rejected by five New York editors who all said book had promise but was too slow and lacked suspense.
Is still working on Book 9 trying to fix pacing problems.
Is reading books on how to write suspense
Has enrolled in the upcoming SleuthFest Thriller workshop
Is thinking she should submit the book to small presses instead of the biggies just to get her foot in the door.
Is working on a new idea and outline about a series PI just in case an editor wants a series instead of a standalone.

Unpub B:

Finished one book.
Bought an established author's critique at a writers conference charity auction. Established writer sent back critique of the first 50 pages with suggestions to improve book.
Didn't change a thing.
Sent queries to agents. Was very offended by the "lack of personal tone" of the rejections.
Got an eager Florida-based agent to take on him on.
Didn't change title after agent suggested it wasn't very marketable.
Book was rejected after multiple submissions.
Didn't change a thing.
Is looking for a "more connected" agent.
Had book published POD. Sent a copy to the established author asking for a blurb.
Didn't like my suggestion that he hone his story down to a single POV and make his plot linear, cutting the confusing flashbacks. Said the book "needed multiple POVs because of the story's complexity demanded it" and that his book was "not really genre fiction but more literary, like Mystic River."
Thinks there is a cabal in New York publishing designed to keep POD authors from participating in the distribution system.
Hasn't started a new book...but has lots of ideas.

I think you get the idea. Too bad unpub B never will. Yes, you can still write the book you want to and get it published. No, you don't have to sell out. But you have to be smart.

Being smart means learning your craft and walking before you run. (I'm guessing Unpub B never read the five Pat Kenzie Angie Gennaro books Dennis Lehane churned out BEFORE Mystic River).

It means listening to good advice when you are lucky enough to get it.

It means not taking every rejection personally. An agent or editor sends out a hundred SASEs a week and when they say no they aren't rejecting you. They are rejecting your work. There is a difference.

It means writing maybe ten books before you get it right.

It means not automatically expecting the "big" writers to reach down and pull you up. If it happens, consider yourself blessed and give back when it's your turn. But don't whine if it doesn't happen.

It means increasing your chances by making your work as marketable as you can without being false to the writer you are.

It means not not looking for short cuts.

It means not giving up.

It means having the right attitude.

10 things you should NEVER worry about

2006-02-13T12:34:00.000-05:00

I am shaking my head as I write this. Was procrastinating this morning by blog surfing and was over at Miss Snark's place where "a somewhat aspirant author" (is that like a slightly sanguine scribe?) was asking how much a manuscript should weigh.

Now maybe this guy was going for funny, but I didn't laugh. Because I have heard far more inane questions from folks trying to get published. There's so much advice floating around in the blogasphere, in how-to books and in magazines -- everything from plot structure to how to craft a killer query letter.

But I never hear one big thing that needs to be said:

Stop worrying about the dumb stuff. It drains your energy. It diverts your attention. It gives you a really good reason to NOT do what you really need to do -- write the best damn book you can write. See, if you're busy obsessing over what font to use you don't have to wrestle the hairy POV beast to the mat, do you.

So if you are trying to write a novel or you have finished one and are trying to get published, here is my list of things you should not waste one brain cell on. These are real questions I have been asked. I am not making any of this up, I swear:

1. Should I use Word or Wordperfect?
Whatever you are comfortable using. No one else gives a flying rat fart.

2. Will a publisher or agent steal my idea if I submit it?
No. If it is good and you show a basic command of the craft, they will buy it and work with you on it.

3. Do I need to get an agent?
Not unless you have finished at least one book. Preferably two. This is called counting your royalty check eggs before you have bought the chicken. Don't worry about renting out Carnegie Hall if all you can play is three chords of Heart and Soul.

4. What if they want me to change it?
They will. So don't sweat it.

5. Should I include a CD with my submission?
Paper is still the currency of choice in this business. Unless otherwise asked, don't bother with anything but. New York is a curiously 19th century place.

6. I don't want my mother to read the sex scenes, bad language or the character I modeled after my alcoholic Uncle Harvey. Should I wait until she is dead?
Being a writer means spilling a certain amount of blood on the page, taking emotional risks. If you aren't at this point in your life, you aren't a writer.

7. I'm querying an agent. Should I send my first chapter or my best chapter?
If your first chapter isn't your best chapter, you're in deep doo-doo.

8. Who should I dedicate my book to?
Geez...

9. Should I include my picture with my submission?
Only if you're Brad Pitt or his wife old whatshername.

10. My life is kind of busy right now. Should I wait until (fill in the blank): my kids go to college, my wife gets her promotion, my basement is finished so I can set up a home office, I finish night school, I have more time, I have more money, I have more energy...?
No. You will never have the ideal conditions to write. Something will always come up to distract you -- if you let it. You must choose to write. You must do it knowing that nothing may ever come out of it but the satisfaction of finishing your manuscript. You must do it on faith. Poe was penniless and died in a sewer. He didn't wait until he had the right desk lamp.