Monthly Archives: October 2008

Book Inhalation

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

Just a quick post today as I have just returned from book tour for The Serpent and The Scorpion and look a little like this picture – not that my boys care. They seem happy just to have me back home (bless ’em!) I had a terrific time visiting amazing mystery bookstores (and meeting actual readers!) in LA, Houston, Seattle, Portland and of course here in the SF Bay Area. I also got to have a great time at Bouchercon in Baltimore – am I lucky or what! But above and beyond this I also got to read some terrific books – with flights and travel I get to indulge in my favorite past time – ‘book inhalation’.

I’ve been away nearly two weeks and have managed to ‘inhale’ the following books (all of which I loved):
* Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (embarrassingly I hadn’t read this until now!)
* Charlaine Harris’ first Stookie Stackhouse – Dead until Dark
* Harlan Coben’s The Woods
* Linwood Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye
* Tana French’s In The Woods followed immediately by ‘The Likeness’ – you can see how much I loved those books int hat I read both in three days!

Not bad going I must say and my brain was thankful to finally have the time to sit back and enjoy. So I loved the book tour – spent lots of time with readers, fans, other writers and bookstore owners as well as books!
Now for some sleep…Before I do some more local events this week and then off to Arizona next week!

Add Water, Stir, and Kill

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By Camille Minichino/Margaret Grace

I’m very excited as I open a package from my favorite online miniatures store. I pull out a tiny bathtub, a bathroom sink, a two-inch male doll, and some mini-tiles to lay down a floor. Just what I ordered. Any other customer would probably be constructing a dollhouse bathroom.

Not me. I’m setting up a crime scene. All I have to do is throw the doll in the tub, add “water” in the form of resin, and toss in a miniature iron. There’s no sizzle, but the doll is dead just the same.

I have a lot of friends in the miniatures community. They all have Victorian dollhouses or New England cottages or a country farmhouse. My most elaborate dollhouse is a mortuary. It’s fashioned after the building where my Periodic Table Series protagonist lives. Gloria tiptoes past mourners on her way to her kitchen, trips over a trocar when she goes down to do her laundry. My dollhouse reproduction has an embalming room in the basement, viewing parlors on the “street level,” and Gloria’s apartment on the top floor. It wasn’t easy to fashion an embalming table out of foil, but I had to, since no miniatures stores seemed to have any in stock.


I’m not always turning matchboxes into caskets and strewing dolly arms and legs around a crime scene. Here’s a benign tip, for example, from my new protagonist, Gerry Porter, of the Miniature Mysteries series from Berkley: Lay some bell pepper seeds on a paper towel and let them dry. Then put a few of the seeds in an old contact lens/bowl and you have chips ready for munching (by a very small person). It’s a project fit for family viewing.

But for the most part, when I buy a set of dollhouse dining room silver, you can bet that I’ll pick out the tiny knives and sprinkle them with blood—uh, paint—in case there’s a mini-murder by a mini-serial killer eluded by mini-cops.

“Why don’t you write about romance instead of murder?” my husband asks me once in a while (when I have no crafts blades or scissors handy). “Don’t you love me?” I can answer the second question (of course), but not the first.

I’m always looking for the creepiest take on a scene, whether I’m doing grocery shopping, performing a wedding, teaching a class, or wandering around a museum. At an exhibit of Chihuly glass art in San Francisco recently, where others saw magnificent irises, beautiful ferns, and interesting seaforms, I saw a CSI-type close-up of a gunshot wound.

Mystery writers and miniaturists apparently have the same occupational hazard—twisting things, morphing scenes easily from an idyllic pastoral into a bloody crime scene.

Or is it just me?

The political season is ending, thank God.

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By John Ramsey Miller

I dislike politics, but I truly hate elections. The local, regional, and national candidates clutter my television set with constant half-truths and nastiness, send me slick mailers I don’t read, and their people call constantly to insist I vote for their candidates or ask me questions for polls, which I generally decline to answer as it is none of their business. Two of my three sons support a presidential candidate I think is an empty suit, and they get mad at my glib responses to their entreaties designed to get me to vote for their candidate. My third son is an ex-Marine who was in Iraq and he’ll probably vote with his father, but I’m sure of that. I explain to the other two that I am voting from the perspective of my life experience, and for someone I am more comfortable with. I also explain that if their candidate wins I don’t think it’s the end of the world, but more proof that elections have become simply another popularity contest where the issues and philosophies are secondary considerations at best.

My father passed away last October, and he never voted for a Republican in his life, and was very proud of that. He was a Yellow Dog Democrat who believed that members of his party were always the best choice for any office. I always vote for the candidate, Democrat or Republican, whom I believe will do what’s in the best interest of my country, state, county or city. I will cross party lines for the individual whom I feel is best suited and who will move us intelligently into the future. I have been wrong before and I’m sure I’ll be wrong again, but the idea of voting for someone just because they belong to my party is short-sighted and closed minded. I will never follow anyone holding any banner just because they can out-yell their opposition.

Because we are all flawed, politicians are also flawed, and we all know what it takes to be in a position to be nominated and elected, which is sobering and frightening at the same time. I think that whether Obama or McCain is elected what they can accomplish will be what the legislative branch allows to be done and that is also scary based on their past performance during our lifetime. Nobody believes that our congressmen and senators vote strictly (or even mostly) for what’s in the best interests of their constituents, but for what their biggest contributors think is best for “them.” Voters are only important because they keep them in office, and non-voters are merely shadow humans.

I’m proud of my liberal sons and I taught them to think for themselves and to vote their consciences. They are familiar with the issues, and know the records of the candidates, and will vote as informed individuals who pay attention. They are idealistic and believe their candidate will make the best president and make decisions on what he promised, which is an illusion I hate to ruin for them. I don’t mind that because of them my vote will be wasted, because they will learn a lesson for themselves. I hope I’m proven wrong and the country will somehow heal and get better under the next administration.

I believe that it is not just my right, but my duty to vote, because our own young men and women have given their lives for my freedom––to preserve our right to vote and live free. All citizens, yes, even those completely ignorant of the issues who will vote for a smile, should go to the trouble to cast their votes so their voices can be heard. Politicians only respond to voters, and if you don’t vote they could care less about you. Men who seem less qualified can and have become great leaders, and I always try to keep that in mind when someone I don’t vote for are elected by the majority. I firmly believe that, though we may not agree on directions, we can all learn to live with the results, as long as we live in a free country and can face the future together. I respect the office of the presidency, as should we all, and I believe that men (and women) can become more than they are when lobbed headfirst into the crucible of that high office.

Kindle Schmindle

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Well I finally saw one of the new wonder machines by amazon.com. I was on a cross-country flight from Washington to San Francisco when the guy in the seat next to me pulled out this nifty electronic pad, flipped a switch and made writing appear on the screen. He said it was a business book that he’d downloaded from the amazon site.

I’m not much for chatting up the people next to me on airplanes—in fact, I get my noise-canceling headphones in place as fast as I can as the most polite means of telling the world to leave me the hell alone—so I nodded and feigned fascination for long enough to get my trusty Boses on my ears and then went about my business. Had I been in the mood to engage, though, I would have told him that he hadn’t in fact downloaded a book—he’d downloaded merely the text.

I’ve been called a Luddite before, and not without good reason, so maybe it’s no surprise to my friends that I hold strong to my belief that a book by definition is printed on paper. A “book” on CD is a recorded story. A “book” on an LCD screen is . . . well, hard to look at. I’m a traditionalist on these things.

For me, the act of reading a book involves nearly all the senses. I love the feel of the pages, the aroma of the ink, the gentle whisper of sound that some with every page turn. When I read a really good book, the most impressive scenes and turns of phrase aren’t just locked into my memory as scenes or sounds, they’re locked in by their position on the page where I read them. As I plow through a book, I love to watch the progression of the bookmark. When I’m starting out on a trip, it’s that bookmark landmark that tells me whether or not I need to put a backup book in my briefcase.

When a book is awaiting its turn to be read, it lies supine on a pile; when it’s finished, it gets a place on my library shelves. On cold nights in particular, there’s no greater pleasure than sitting in that book-lined room with the reading light on, swallowed in my green leather chair with the volume on my lap and a scotch in my hand. I’m not much for napping, but if one must fall asleep accidentally, there is no better circumstance for it.

I look at computer screens all day and many nights. Everywhere I go, it seems, I’m surrounded by plastic and buttons.

But not in the library. Never in my library.

Charmed Nearly to Death

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Below: Harlan Coben hits me up for a blurb.
Kidding.

He knows I’d never blurb an Amherst grad…

I’ll say one thing, Bouchercon ’08 held the appropriate moniker. People sent to the hospital with food poisoning, people tumbling down flights of stairs, people consuming alcohol in levels roughly equivalent to those experienced at college frat parties (far be it for me to condemn that behavior, however, as anyone who saw me in the bar on Thursday night can attest).

Bouchercon ’08 was truly one for the record books. As has already been noted on various blogs and lists, the Jordans and Judy Bobalik did a phenomenal job of organizing something that makes herding cats look easy. Let’s call it the equivalent of herding parrots. And despite the few inevitable mishaps, it went off largely without a hitch. Here, then, are my belated comments on the experience…

The Panels: Wow, I ended up on some great panels. Those bribes really paid off. Booze and books (or something like that) with Ken Bruen, Jason Starr, Liz Zelvin, Con Lehane, and the inimitable Ali Karim moderating, Gordon’s Gin in hand. Lively and lots of fun. I also loved the one on “Psycho Killers,” here I thought I was an expert but I learned some things (like the true identity of Jack the Ripper. Seriously. Ask Mark Billingham if you’re curious). My only complaint was that my fellow panelists were all far too witty and well-informed. I much prefer to be partnered with dullards, it makes me look so much better in comparison.

The Food: I might be alone in this (although I suspect Robert Gregory Brown would agree with me), but I could not seem to get a decent meal in Baltimore. Part of that might be due to the fact that I ate a fair portion of my meals at the hotel restaurant, Shulas. Never expect a good meal from anyplace bearing any relation to football (I should have learned from all those years I ate at Boomers in NYC.) Lots of salt, copious amounts of butter. I escaped relatively unscathed (although the girl who vomited on Alison Gaylin in Burkes came dangerously close to hitting me as well). But I was definitely a little disappointed in the cuisine: I don’t mind a mediocre entree, but I do mind paying $30 for it.

Baltimore: I didn’t see all that much of it, not having a rental car, but wow– the Harbor? Awesome. I quickly learned, however, that there was only one proper route back from the harbor to the hotel. Take the street running parallel to that one, and you were quickly in the midst of seedy bars and places named things like “The Jewel Box.” I might be wrong, but they didn’t appear to be selling jewelry. Though I’m a hard core fan of The Wire, stumbling on set is unnerving. I kept expecting Snoop to turn the corner with her nail gun.

Lee Child: The man throws the best parties. Do whatever you must to get invited, they’re amazing. And Lee is always a class act.

Harlan Coben: Next time you see him, tell him Amherst is a safety school. He loves it, I swear.

My Voice: Started out normal, went through a series of phases from Lauren Bacall to Kathleen Turner on two packs a day to Froggy from the Little Rascals. I’m still recovering.

It was incredible linking faces to all those familiar names from various groups and blogs (such as this one), and I love it when people come up and introduce themselves by saying, “I’m your Facebook friend.” How 21st century is that?

Anyway, I returned home as always with no voice, twenty extra pounds worth of books (no checking the bag on this leg of the journey), a few photos, and a miserable hangover from lack of sleep and general overconsumption of liquor and salt. Whew. Thank god I have a full year until Indianapolis, this time I start training early…

PS- Stay tuned: next week I’ll tell you all about my tour of the FBI Academy in Quantico, including an interesting tidbit I picked up about what tomato sauce resembles under a black light.

Louise Ure, under attack by a rabid fan. Note her calm demeanor, this woman is pure steel…

Dreaming about tomatoes

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By Joe Moore
When your first book was published, was the experience everything you dreamed it would be? For me, it was quite different than what I expected. The first time I walked into a national chain bookstore and saw my shinny new novel on the new release table, it was a rush. I was proud. I felt like I was on top of the world. I couldn’t wait to see customers gather it up in their arms and rush home to read it. Then I stood back and watched as people picked up my book, glanced at the back cover copy, and put it down with no more interest than in choosing one tomato over another at the supermarket.

tomato1 That book cost me 3 years of my life and they passed judgment on it within 5 seconds.

Reality quickly set in. Not everyone will want to read my book. Not everyone will like it if they do read it. And I found out rather fast that once a book is published, the real work begins.

Today, I’m writing (with co-author, Lynn Sholes) my fifth novel. My books have won awards and I’ve been published in many languages. And yet, every day I face the reality that the true test of my success or failure is what the customer does when they stand over that literary produce bin and pick what they think is the ripest tomato. It’s about as scary as it can get.

As a full-time writer, I have the best job in the world. I would not trade it for anything. But a word to anyone dreaming of publishing their first book: be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

So when your first book came out, was it everything you dreamed of? And if you’re still working at getting that first tomato out there, what are you dreaming it will be like?

Could we cope with really hard times?

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From North Carolina recently, my daughter reported seeing men with baseball bats at fuel-starved gas stations. They were patrolling the lines of automobiles, preventing interlopers from cutting in.

Evidently a hurricane or a pipeline breakdown had disrupted energy supplies to certain areas of the southeast, and suddenly there seemed to be no gas for sale anywhere. To cope with the fuel shortage, my daughter stayed over with friends on campus to avoid driving; her manager at work had to send a vanpool to pick up the company’s workers. The city seemed to come to a standstill, she said.

And that was before we heard the news that the banks had run out of money.

So I’ve been speculating: if we were to have a real economic depression, how would today’s America cope? Most cities reportedly have a two-to-three day supply of food on hand. In the event of a severe disruption to the food supply, those baseball bats would come out again in a hurry.

According to some old timers I’ve spoken with, today’s America is less self-sufficient—and therefore less ready to cope with a depression—than it was eighty years ago. Back then, back yard vegetable gardens were plentiful, and many rural homes had a barn and a few chickens. To a generation raised on Starbucks, McDonalds, and WalMart, real deprivation would come as an ugly surprise.

But perhaps we have hidden resources. I can visualize ways that technology would push dramatic new responses to a crisis. Maybe instead of bread lines, we’d have “flash mobs” at grocery stores. They’d converge on a store, clean it out within seconds, and disappear. Then the government would bail out the grocery chains because they’re “too big to fail,” and life would move on.

In any case, the 24-hour news cycle would never stand for a prolonged depression. After a couple of weeks, hardship stories would get “old,” and we’d be back to discussing Paris Hilton’s next presidential campaign.

Or maybe we’d just get bored with suffering and ignore it for a few years, the way we generally do with war and poverty. And life would go on, only things would be much harder than before.

Any thoughts on how the technology generation would cope with a depression? Creative ideas, please!

FEMINISM IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

Inspired by my panel at Bouchercon on social issues in crime fiction, I thought that I should be clear and unapologetic – yep, I have a feminist heroine and I’m proud of it.

One of my fellow panelists also pointed out that I have a lesbian main character too and that it was great that this was not an issue in the book at all. In Edwardian England the concept of female ‘close friends’ was tolerated in a way that male ‘friendship’ most certainly was not – so in both Consequences of Sin and The Serpent and The Scorpion, the sexual orientation of Winifred Stanford-Jones is really only background to the plot and not a social issue per se.

One of the questions I and my fellow panelists (the terrific Neil Plakcy, Karen Olsen, Charles O’Brien, Frankie Y Bailey and moderator extraordinaire, Clair Lamb) were asked was whether we had a particular readership in mind when we considered addressing social issues in our fiction – to which I replied that I guess for those who didn’t believe that women should have got the right to vote, my books were probably not for them.

Other than that though we all agreed that the issues were integral to the story but not a pulpit from which we were determined to preach. In The Serpent and The Scorpion I raise all sorts of issues – the rise of socialism, the potential culpability of the so called ‘merchants of death’, feminism, Jewish settlements in Palestine, Egyptian nationalism – but none of these issues was something I necessarily felt compelled to write about – they all arose organically out of the creative process – through research on my settings, history, character and plot.

AND NEITHER IS ANY OTHER SOCIAL ISSUE…

Nonetheless it was interesting to hear about the ‘ghetto-ization’, particularly of gay and lesbian as well as African-American crime fiction. Seems that all too often these books will be marginalized in bookstores – often placed in a hard to find corner somewhere at the back of the bookstore (probably near self-help). Typically I have found my books are placed squarely in the mystery or general fiction sections – sometimes the historical mysteries are separated out but not usually hidden away where no one can find them!

On our panel we got to explore the ways in which mystery and crime fiction in general can provide a framework in which to view the world – to focus in and illuminate social issues that transcend genre as well as time period. I’m not even sure we can divorce crime fiction from social issues (crime is after all a social issue!)

People after all do not change. Their vices do not change. There is still injustice. There is still a passion for change. One day let’s hope there will be no need for boundaries and labels – genre fiction will no longer be considered literary fiction’s ugly stepchild and crime fiction, no matter who the protagonists are or what the social issues may be, the books won’t be marginalized in a bookstore but will be out there for all to see, find and read.

FEMINISM IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

Inspired by my panel at Bouchercon on social issues in crime fiction, I thought that I should be clear and unapologetic – yep, I have a feminist heroine and I’m proud of it.

One of my fellow panelists also pointed out that I have a lesbian main character too and that it was great that this was not an issue in the book at all. In Edwardian England the concept of female ‘close friends’ was tolerated in a way that male ‘friendship’ most certainly was not – so in both Consequences of Sin and The Serpent and The Scorpion, the sexual orientation of Winifred Stanford-Jones is really only background to the plot and not a social issue per se.

One of the questions I and my fellow panelists (the terrific Neil Plakcy, Karen Olsen, Charles O’Brien, Frankie Y Bailey and moderator extraordinaire, Clair Lamb) were asked was whether we had a particular readership in mind when we considered addressing social issues in our fiction – to which I replied that I guess for those who didn’t believe that women should have got the right to vote, my books were probably not for them.

Other than that though we all agreed that the issues were integral to the story but not a pulpit from which we were determined to preach. In The Serpent and The Scorpion I raise all sorts of issues – the rise of socialism, the potential culpability of the so called ‘merchants of death’, feminism, Jewish settlements in Palestine, Egyptian nationalism – but none of these issues was something I necessarily felt compelled to write about – they all arose organically out of the creative process – through research on my settings, history, character and plot.

AND NEITHER IS ANY OTHER SOCIAL ISSUE…

Nonetheless it was interesting to hear about the ‘ghetto-ization’, particularly of gay and lesbian as well as African-American crime fiction. Seems that all too often these books will be marginalized in bookstores – often placed in a hard to find corner somewhere at the back of the bookstore (probably near self-help). Typically I have found my books are placed squarely in the mystery or general fiction sections – sometimes the historical mysteries are separated out but not usually hidden away where no one can find them!

On our panel we got to explore the ways in which mystery and crime fiction in general can provide a framework in which to view the world – to focus in and illuminate social issues that transcend genre as well as time period. I’m not even sure we can divorce crime fiction from social issues (crime is after all a social issue!)

People after all do not change. Their vices do not change. There is still injustice. There is still a passion for change. One day let’s hope there will be no need for boundaries and labels – genre fiction will no longer be considered literary fiction’s ugly stepchild and crime fiction, no matter who the protagonists are or what the social issues may be, the books won’t be marginalized in a bookstore but will be out there for all to see, find and read.

Tough Times.

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By John Ramsey Miller

Well, I missed Bouchercon again this year. The one and only Bouchercon I attended was in Chicago a few years ago. I was tempted to go when it was held in Alaska, but if I ever go up there, it will probably be to collect red meat for my game freezer. In Chicago I met a lot of authors I wouldn’t have otherwise have met, and I enjoyed the social aspects like exchanging writer-war stories over a scotch on the rocks, and I learned a lot about the lives of other people who do what I do. I was on a couple of panels with other authors, and attended panels manned by other authors, which is always beneficial in that it gets me to think about our craft and see things from a new perspective. But, despite everything that was positive, I left Chicago unconvinced that the weekend sold any more of my books than I could sell by speaking at a book club in a small southern town. But you never know what creates sales and what doesn’t. Networking with people involved in the industry is almost never a waste of an author’s time or money, just like talking to readers is never a waste.

What I saw in Chicago was a large number of authors who were marketing their books (mostly) to other authors. But I suppose there were more readers, librarians, and fans, in Chicago than I’ve seen at most other conferences since. Don’t get me wrong, we authors buy books, and probably read more than most non-writers, but most authors are a lot more interested in promoting their own books than the books of their fellow authors. I’m not saying we authors don’t promote each other, because most of us do just that, and we are in turn promoted by authors who enjoy our work. There’s certainly no more rewarding audience than our peers. Money is tight for most of us, but think about conferences as an exchange of experiences, and that can make it worthwhile––plus you can write conference expenses off on your income taxes. By finding out what expenditures have worked for others, and what financial outlay didn’t, makes us money, by saving us money we’d otherwise waste as our brethren did. While our children may not choose to learn from our experiences, we are smart enough to learn from other author’s mistakes.

This year I’m only attending Thrillerfest and Magna Cum Murder in Muncie, Indiana later this month. I chose Magna because it’s not just more fun than most and far more intimate than Bouchercon, it’s like meeting with family and I learn something worth the outlay every year. Did I mention that it’s far more fun for the buck than most other writers conferences? Plus the folks at Ball State know how to put people together and make it a learning party. I plan to attend Thrillerfest every year, not just because it’s all about authors who write what I write. I’ll go to Thrillerfest until I have to walk to get there. The thing I like about conferences is that best-selling authors socialize easily with the authors who are not best-selling brothers and sisters, and they are happy to share the secrets of their success. If nothing else, it’s amazing to see so many talented people assembled in one place.

We are living in interesting and (of course) frightening times, and as belts tighten fewer new authors will be published as publishing houses become more careful about which books they can take financial chances on. The industry is going to be changing, and we are all going to have to be smarter to survive. With the economy in the shape its in, people will either be reading more to escape reality, or they will be reading less because they can’t afford to purchase books like they could before. I think we will all have to be a lot more intelligent with our future promotion dollars. We may have to forget bookmarks and start thinking about placing ads on knitted cozies that fit over the stocks of assault rifles, or on matchbooks that go into K-ration packs. Maybe it won’t be Mad Max time for a few years yet, but I’ll be working on new ideas as things change. Mad Max sprang to mind because we’ve had gas shortages in the Southeast since Hurricane Ike when people were actually following gas tankers on their routes in order to buy the gas at the stations where the loads were dropped off. I wish I were kidding, but when men and women can’t get to work or take their children to school, there is nothing humorous about it. I didn’t see many people reading novels while they waited in long lines at the pumps.

Attending conferences is expensive, and most of us can’t afford to attend the number of conferences we have attended in the past, or would like to attend. I’m having to decide which organizations I can afford to belong to, despite the write-off factor. Do you know how many laying hens you can buy and feed with $100.00? I do. Up until last year I belonged to several writer’s groups, but I decided to take a hard look at the yearly dues I paid. The ITW became smarter and found a way to forgo the yearly dues by using its members’ talent to generate those necessary membership funds. I feel confident that the ITW is doing what’s best for its authors, and operating smarter. If the ITW can do it, and offer the benefits they do, other organizations should be able to follow suit. It just took effort, vision and thinking outside the box. When I look at the dollars I spend on professional memberships, I start to wonder what those organizations are doing for my career in return for my money, and how flexible and innovative they are. We also have to look at what we can do for those organizations that are actively promoting its authors, and we should put our efforts and dollars where they do the most good. Now when I write a check for membership dues, I’m more critical and I look harder at what the organizations are accomplishing.

We will all have to learn to survive in a changing world, and to be smarter about how we do things and spend our hard-earned dollars. We’re all going to have to make choices we didn’t have to make before. We are going to be living in leaner and hopefully more interesting times than we’re accustomed to, and I’m not sure it will be a bad thing for any of us …in the long run.