Monthly Archives: December 2010

Is There Such Thing as Bad Sex?

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Most authors are happy to be recognized for their work, but how honored would you be if your book got picked as numero uno for the annual literary award – Bad Sex in Fiction?

A London magazine founded in 1979, Literary Review, has recognized “Bad Sex in Fiction” every year since the prize was initiated in 1993. While there are countless examples of great sex in fiction, especially in some of the best adult films found on sites like full tube xxx, literature seems to have more of a hit and miss relationship with sex. And the “winner” in 2010 was Author Rowan Somerville for the use of disturbing insect imagery in his novel “The Shape of Her.” Judges for the annual prize noted many animal references throughout the book, but they were especially impressed by his passage “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he ****** himself into her.”
Somerville, who was born in Britain but now lives in Ireland, took his victory in good humor, saying, “there is nothing more English than bad sex.” And he was honored to be shortlisted alongside American writer, Jonathan Franzen, who was nominated for passages within the best-selling book – “Freedom.” Prior winners include many literary heavyweights, such as Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a lifetime achievement for Bad Sex prize in 2008. Maybe these authors should have researched more by using the services of a london escort, where there really is no such thing as bad sex.
(What’s worse than winning the annual prize for Bad Sex? Try the lifetime achievement award.)

And in case you’re curious, last year’s winner, American author Jonathan Littell in his book “The Kindly Ones,” described a sex act as “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.” If you and your partner incorporated products from sites like Babestation Play sex toys I don’t think you or your partner would be feeling like your heads are being scraped out like a soft-boiled egg.

So reading about this award, I had to ask myself. Are the judges selected for their literary expertise or are they an authority on bad sex? (And if they have earned both distinctions, maybe they should quit reading during sex.)

And if, as an author, you’re no good at writing bad sex, should you be upset? Being rejected for a prize like this, isn’t that a good thing? This award could shed a whole new light on the time-honored author phrase – a good rejection.

Keeping in mind that this is a public forum, please use your own good judgment in replying, but I’d love to hear from you. Do recognitions like this make you want to buy the book to see what all the fuss is about? Or have you ever written a sexy passage that didn’t make your own edit process because even YOU were disgusted?

Guilty Pleasures

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Can you sit and read a magazine without feeling guilty? Do you berate yourself for loafing when you should be accomplishing something? For example, if you’re not writing, do you feel you should be working on your To Do List? How dare you sit idly by and read, play video games, watch TV, or talk to a friend on the phone! You’re wasting precious time. Every minute that ticks away is a minute gone from your life.

Is this purely a writer’s angst, or does it apply to all Type A personalities? Maybe the solution is to program a half hour or more per day into our schedule for pure relaxation. We schedule hair appointments and exercise routines, right? So why not a Time Out? The brain needs a diversion from all that intense activity. You’ll work better after a break. Consider it necessary to productivity.

When you’re on vacation, do you get bored and begin to lust after work? Are you happy lounging by the pool or does your mind drift to projects waiting for you? If this is the case, perhaps a more active vacation is what you need. You’ll be so busy, you won’t have time to think about things back home. Or if your mind needs a challenge, solve a Sudoku puzzle instead.

Assign yourself a book to read so you view reading as a task to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment while enjoying yourself.

It’s difficult for a multi-tasker to kick the habit. What do you do to relax without feeling guilty about it?

Thoughts about the color purple, then and now

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When I was a pre-teen, I had a stepmother who enforced a strict rule when it came to clothing: She wouldn’t allow me to wear anything purple. This sartorial restriction never made sense to me. After all, I pointed out, purple is the traditional color of royalty. My arguments fell on deaf ears: Purple was out.  (I also wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears–body piercing was only appropriate for Gypsies and “the French,” according to the wisdom handed down to me.)  

I never understood the ban on purple. Was the color considered to be vulgar, or simply tacky? My adolescent speculations ran wild. I had visions of plum-skirted Gypsies and French women jitterbugging through the streets of Paris–in my imagination they’d be whirling in all their purple glory, pierced body parts jangling.

Finally came the day–I think it was the eighth grade–when I finally got to wear something purple. I’ve never felt more daring than the day I ventured down the hallway of junior high in my pale lavender miniskirt and matching vest.

I guess it wasn’t only my stepmother who disdained the color purple. For example, here’s a line from a poem written in the early 60’s by  Jenny Joseph:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/And a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
 

I was reminded of the ancient purple prohibition when I ran across an article in the New York Times, Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers. The article describes how statistical analysis is being used to gain insight into the minds of Victorians. Researchers are doing electronic searches for key words and phrases to study how the Victorians thought.

As I read the article, my first reaction was to question whether people of different eras think all that differently from each other. Then I thought of my old purple ban. Nowadays, people don’t give a fig about wearing the color, although it’s apt to be called something trendier like “eggplant” or “pomegranate.”

Granted, thoughts about wearing a certain color is a minor thing. Can you think of any more significant ways that we have changed our ways of thinking over time? Are we really all that different in our thoughts than people of different eras? If so, how have you seen that reflected in literature or your own writing?
And by the way: What is the real deal about purple? Anyone know?

Moving Day

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

You will have to forgive my truncated blog post today as we are moving into our new house here in Melbourne. We haven’t had all our own stuff or been in our own home since May so you can imagine the state of excitement round here. My boys are dying to have all the Lego back and I think my husband is as heartily sick as I am of wearing the same repertoire of clothes.

We have made a huge lifestyle change in the house we’ve bought. Not only have we moved country but we have also moved from an essentially urban existence to a semi-rural one on the outskirts of Melbourne. We’ve all heard people say that moving can be stressful, but you don’t know how it feels until you are in this situation. With this being said, it doesn’t have to be as difficult as you thought, especially when you’ve got long distance movers who can give you a helping hand to make sure you get all your belongings there safely. Another piece of advice I have for anyone thinking about moving is to find a conveyancing solicitor in the area you are buying a house, as the communication between you both will be a lot easier, you’ll be able to meet up regularly and they’ll make sure you complete your transactions in the most effective way possible. Plus, it’s always nice knowing that you have someone on your side.

Although we have quite a bit of renovating and landscaping to do, ‘home’ now comprises two acres, a pool, a chicken run and a fire-bunker…yes, we are in a high bushfire danger zone now, so I have to come to grips with a plethora of fire fighting stuff – from water tanks and generator pumps to roof sprinklers, ladders and fire department sized hoses. Let’s hope we never need to use them (although my husband is thinking of volunteering at the local fire house so him in a fireman’s uniform could be a definite upside!)

Part of our rationale for moving back to Australia was to give our boys the kind of childhood we had – free to roam and explore – and apart from, snakes, bushfire, poisonous spiders, heat exhaustion, sunburn and broken limbs what could there possibly be to worry about?!

I’m also looking forward to writing when my outlook will be this:

So, what would be your ideal ‘outlook’ for writing be? A beach? The mountains? Skyscrapers? Or can you write just about anywhere?

I Wrote a Novel Last Month

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In November, for the first time, I took the NaNoWriMo challenge. In case you still don’t know, that’s National Novel Writing Month, and it has been the subject of some controversy. See here for another rant.
Moderation, IOW, seems in short supply when NaNo comes up in conversation.
So why’d I do it?
For one thing, the timing was right. In October I turned in the first book in a new series. I was due to start outlining the second book anyway. So I thought, what the hey? Let’s try it the NaNoWriMo way. My goal was simple: see what it is like to write this way, and expect that at worst I’d know my story better by the end.
Or, maybe I’d come up with something pretty close to the actual novel I wanted.
Also, some novelist friends of mine got in on the action. The small group included both “pantsers” and “outliners,” all multi-published. I  thought it would be interesting to see how we all came out.
In the days before it began, I actually started to get jazzed, excited about just pure writing for awhile. I think the happiest days of my writing life were when I was unpublished. I was writing for the joy of it. Oh yeah, of course I wanted to be published. But there was something so free and easy about those early efforts. Maybe it was all just a delusion, but if so it was a happy one.
Over the years, writing with contracts and under deadlines, I lost a little of that joy. I never stopped loving writing. Still do. But I’m talking about the feeling I get when body surfing here in So Cal, caught up in a wave and letting it swoosh me all the way to shore.
I thought it would be cool to write with reckless abandon again, to just throw myself out there and take a risk. Usually I do a month or more of planning and outlining, and ease my way into that first draft. I finish a draft in four or five months.
NaNoWriMo was going to get one out of me in thirty days. I wanted to see what it would look like.
I made a few preparations. I looked at my daily schedule and decided to cut down on a bunch of time wasters: Net surfing, blog reading, movie watching, e-mail lingering, news shows. It’s amazing how much time creep there is in these things.
Next, I gave myself a tentative schedule. I’d write my “nifty 350” words first thing in the morning. Just get up and let my subconscious provide the material. I would leave off the previous day’s writing mid-sentence, a la Hemingway, so I could dive right in.
NaNoWriMo shoots for a 50,000 word novel.  My goal was to get to 60,000 words.
I would keep track of my novel by drafting in the stupendous program Scrivener. This would show me –– through color coding and synopses and an “outline view” –– where I was at every stage of the process. It would update me on my word count, and let me jot scene ideas wherever I wanted. And a lot of other things I won’t go into. (Except one very cool feature is you can put your page on any background photo you have. I rigged it so I was writing with the interior of my favorite diner in L.A., Langer’s, in the background. I could almost smell the hot pastrami.)
And so, on Monday, November 1, I began.
On Tuesday, November 30, I finished, with 61,587 words.
So how are those words? I don’t know yet. I’m letting the thing cool, as I advocate in my revision book, and I will actually follow the process I lay down there (yes, he practices what he preaches). But I will tell you that the central plot element, the McGuffin as Hitchcock used to say, popped up spontaneously during one scene and said, “Here I am, pal!” It was awesome. It made the book.
I think there will be many scenes that will stay pretty much as is. I’ll have some fleshing out to do, of course, but the skeleton feels solid.
Next week, I’ll tell you some of the things I learned that may be helpful to writers. But let me say to those who took issue with NaNoWriMo, what’s the beef? So long as people know they’re not first drafting a publishable novel, why would anybody be against writers doing what they’re supposed to do, write? It ain’t that easy to do a fairly coherent 50,000 word story in a month. And my proverbial hat is off especially to those who hit 50k while also holding down a day job or family responsibilities or anything like that. I do this full time. It’s quite another thing to complete the challenge with a packed schedule of other duties. To those of you who made it I say, well done!
I loved doing a novel in a month. I feel a sense of accomplishment, like I finished a 5k or endured the unedited version of Heaven’s Gate.
So I’d love to hear from anyone who gave NaNoWriMo a shot this year. How was it for you?
And those of you who had a problem with it . . . You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?

And a Ho Ho Ho!

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I would like to follow John Gilstrap’s heartwarming blog (you wear that tux quite well, my friend) with a comment or two about gift giving, or to be more specific, giving books, in all of the permutations in which they are available in this Christmas season 2010. The planets aligned and it struck me, once again, that we live in a wondrous age. So many choices that it might drive a person mad. But what a way to go.

I have just finished reading Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. It is the first of three planned volumes, the complete work presented as Samuel Clemens intended, right down to his request — nay, demand! — that it not see the light of day until one hundred years after his death. Dribs and drabs of it have been published before now but this is the mac daddy, right here. It is sharp, nasty, clever, astute, prescient — Clemens predicted the e-book, believe it or not — and really, really funny. There is a good laugh every paragraph or two. The folks at the U. of C. at Berkeley did a remarkable job of putting this together, especially when you consider that it was compiled from several feet of handwritten notes, transcriptions, and the like. Some reproductions of Clemens’ handwritten passages are included, and I assure you that if I had been assigned the task of herding this particular gang of cats I would be in a quiet room sipping tranquilizers and listening to Michael Hedges CDs until the end of my days. It is available for free online at www.marktwainproject.org, and in an ebook version, but hunt down a hardcover version and gift it to a bibliophile. This is a work that is meant, was born, to be held in hand (well, hands, actually,) and read the old-fashioned way.

You can gift ebooks now, in some formats, and a couple of interesting works which are ebook-only appeared this week. Marcus Wynne, long a favorite of the intelligence community which he has been a part of, has returned after too long an absence with a new stand-alone thriller entitled WITH A VENGEANCE. Wynne is painfully aware of the way in which the world works, away from the theories and hypothetical and think tanks. Marcus deals with front lines, hand to hand with the terrorists in the trenches; WITH A VENGEANCE will put you on the edge of your seat and keep you there for several hours. Some of those who read this book, pre-publication, said it was too powerful, too frightening, for the reading public. I read it two years ago and have never forgotten it, particularly the first third of it. Anyone you gift this work to will either love you forever or never forgive you. Or both.

Dave Zeltserman is one of those thriller and noir crime writers who has slowly but steadily moved from the “critically acclaimed” list the “must-read” list of mystery and thriller fans. His literary thriller The Caretaker of Lorne Field transcended genres, and will undoubtedly receive several “best of” nominations when the various and sundry literary awards start to rev up next year. Zeltserman has a new, ebook only work just out entitled Vampire Crimes, in which he cuts across genres yet again, a crime tale of the undead in which Natural Born Killers meets Near Dawn. Don’t give this one to your niece with all of the Twilight posters in her room. You could give it to her dad, however.

One of the most interesting projects of all that came across my desk last week, however, wasn’t an ebook or a hardcover, but an audio book by Jim Fusilli. It has been far too long since I’ve seen a book-length work from Fusilli, and Narrows Gate is book length, but not available as a book. It is an original work commissioned for audio by audible.com, the first to my knowledge by a single author (The Chopin Manuscript, of course, was an collaboration of many). It is part novel, part performance piece; I remember when radio dramas were still available, and if they were still in existence, they might sound something like this dark and gritty mob tale set on the mean streets of Hoboken, New Jersey in the 1940s. I don’t normally listen to audio books as I can read faster than I can listen, but this is worth making the exception for; and if you have someone who loves crime novels and audio books, they will be in your debt if you present them with this.

Your turn now. What are you giving, book-wise? And what do you wish to receive?

Christmas Traditions

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By John Gilstrap

The season has begun. Forget about my “badass” photo and the thrillers I write–okay, don’t forget about the thrillers entirely–I am a softie for all things Christmas.  This is the season for giving and forgiving.  It’s the season of beautiful music, lovely sights, and for me, above all, family tradition.

Both of my parents are gone now, and I’m sorry to report that much of my extended family has become estranged over time.  Thus, it falls upon me to instill a sense of tradition upon my own son, even as the three of us build new traditions of our own.

It starts with the decorations.  They go up on the day after Thanksgiving, and they come down on New Year’s Day.  Actually, in recent years, the going up part has spilled over to the following day.  The cache of ornaments has grown over the decades, but each one of them has meaning within the family.  My wife, Joy, and I both have a sampling of ornaments from our childhoods, a few of those having been passed on to us from our parents’ childhoods.  The treetop ornament from my earliest Christmas trees is now too fragile to risk at the top of the tree, and is now displayed from a candle stick.  The box we store it in is older than I am, having once carried a favorite pair of my mother’s shoes, and it’s lined on the bottom with the front pages of newspapers dated January 1 from momentous years in our family’s history.

It’s like that with more than a few decorations.  Christmastime is a journey into family lore.

It’s also a time for entertaining.  Every other year or so, we throw a black tie dinner for a few friends at our home.  This is an “on” year, in fact, and tomorrow is the big day.  I can’t wait.  We are blessed with many friends, and between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, we will host or attend as many as ten different holiday celebrations, from pot luck at a neighbor’s house to cocktail parties to sit-down dinners.  If I can escape the season with fewer than five pounds added to my waistline, I consider myself a model of restraint. 

Then there are the movies that must be viewed with my son.  Tonight we watched The Santa Clause starring Tim Allen.  Before the end of the season, we’ll carve out time to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, and, newest to the list, The Polar Express.  The common trait shared by these films is a huge heart.  They’re all about people who love each.  Even after seeing it well over a dozen times, I still cry at the scene in Home Alone where Kevin finally talks to the old man in the church on Christmas Eve.

So, what about you, dear Killzoners?  What are your favorite Christmas traditons?  Beyond It’s A Wonderful Life (from which I need to take a continued break), am I missing any important Christmas films?  Can we all agree that George C. Scott made the best Ebeneezer Scrooge?

“Stupid Writer Tricks”

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or, “How far would you go to market your book?”

by Michelle Gagnon

A few weeks ago, author Tawni O’Dell wrote a very funny essay about some of the, oh, let’s call them “interesting,” experiences she had when marketing her first book. The article incited a rabid response on the Sisters in Crime listserv, where the debate centered on whether or not Tawni was taken advantage of because she was female, if she was a fool to go along with the absurd things that were asked of her, or if any author (gender be damned) would do the same.

Here’s what kicked off the uproar:
Tawni O’Dell’s debut, “Back Roads” is a dark, gritty portrayal of a family in crisis told entirely in the male first-person voice of 19-year-old Harley Altmyer. Entertainment Weekly offered to write a brief piece on O’Dell to coincide with the release.
Now, you can just imagine how excited her PR team was. A feature article, including photos, in a major periodical? Barring an Oprah appearance (more on that later), it doesn’t get much better.
So here’s how it went down, in O’Dell’s own words:

I was busily signing books at a table set up in the middle of the mall when I happened to look up and saw an anxious, overcaffeinated little troupe of petite Ray-Banned androgyny and ethnic ambiguity all dressed entirely in black and all clutching cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee coming toward me. (We didn’t have a Starbucks.) As they did so the wide-eyed, whispering herd of extra-large Steelers sweatshirts and camouflage hunting jackets milling around me split decisively in two to let them pass. The parting of the Red Sea couldn’t have been any more dramatic.

They turned out to be my photographer, Nathan (pronounced the French way, Nat-on,) his assistant, his other assistant, a makeup artist and a stylist.

One of the assistants informed me that Nathan would like to shoot me outside in some authentic Pennsylvania woods because his favorite scenes in my book had taken place in the woods and he envisioned me there. I told the assistant to tell Nathan, who was standing right beside us but apparently didn’t like to participate in his own conversations, that it was January and it was snowing. The assistant then told me not to worry, they would keep Nathan warm.

They then loaded me into their van like I was a kidnapping victim and off we drove in search of some authentic Pennsylvania woods. We didn’t have to go far. We found some behind the mall. A bunch of my family and friends that had been in attendance at the signing also came along. Nothing in the world was going to keep them from seeing this.

Nathan was thrilled with the woods. He found his voice and began barking orders in an accent I was never able to place. It was sort of a cross between Desi Arnaz and Kazu, the meddlesome martian on the Flintstone’s.

I stood by blowing on my hands and stomping my feet to keep warm when suddenly he turned to me, eyed me up and down, and proclaimed, “We need to tease her hair. I want glitter. Lots of glitter, and the clothes will have to go.”

“You want me to be naked?” I spluttered.

“Do we have some fabric?” he went on, ignoring my question and my obvious distress. “I see swaths of tulle billowing out behind her and hanging in the tree branches like a morning mist.”

“You want me to be naked?” I repeated.

Before I could do or say anything else, I was ushered back into the van where I was stripped down to my underwear and sprayed in glitter.

When I re-emerged, my chattering entourage became deathly silent. Jaws dropped open and I heard a few gasps as I crunched barefoot through the snow, wrapped in yards of sparkling gauze, with my butt hanging out, and wondering to myself, Did John Irving ever have to do this?

Nathan positioned me and began snapping away with his camera.

“You’re a wood nymph!” he cried. “Yes, you’re a wood nymph! You’re an ethereal spirit. You’re an incarnation of the sky. You’re real yet you’re not real at all.”

So. Should O’Dell have objected? Absolutely. Can I empathize with the fact that as an overwhelmed and inexperienced young author, she participated in the shoot without thinking it through first? Certainly. Have I done things in the course of hawking my books that I regret? Without question (although nudity has never been involved. Yet.)

The sad truth is that in a time of severely limited marketing budgets, when authors are must rely largely on their own resources with very little guidance, the results can occasionally be quite ugly.

Here are some of the more bizarre and extraordinary things writers have done in an attempt to sell their books:

* In 2008, an Indonesian writer threw $10,700 in cash from an airplane to promote his book. His editor probably should have clarified that when she told him to throw his entire advance into marketing, she didn’t mean it literally.
* This past spring, the aptly named Paul Story pitched a tent outside the cottage where his book was set and camped there for two months, selling copies to passing hikers (although I believe the book was mainly about isolation, so I question how many potential buyers he actually encountered).
* Remember when someone threw a book at Obama a few weeks ago? Turns out that was no political protest, but a misguided attempt by author Michael Lohan (who I can only hope is not related to Lindsay) to promote his work. No, I’m not kidding. The best part? The Secret Service released him without pressing charges.

So…I almost shudder to ask, but where would you draw the line on promotion? (Basil, I can practically hear you sharpening your quill in the wilds of Alaska.)

Oh, and don’t feel too sorry for poor Tawni. Turns out the EW article never went to print- because Oprah called and invited O’Dell to appear on her show fully clothed.

The Page 69-Bomb

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By Joe Moore

Over the last week we’ve had a noticeable increase in traffic and comments. This was due to the discussion of a few controversial topics including the use of the F-bomb and the C-bomb in novels. Some of the reactions were interesting, some downright shocking. John G. and I have a phone chat about it and our end conclusion: it’s a big world out there. You can never predict an individual’s reaction, especially when it comes to the use of profanity in the pages of novels.

I must admit I’ve never stopped reading a book because of the use of a single word. Most of the time, when I do stop it’s because the writing sucks. Either the plot was cliché or the characters were two-dimensional or the writing was weak and lazy, or all the other countless reasons people jump ship before the end. But for all the visitors that have visited our cozy little blog lately to comment on these subjects, thank you. Your patronage is appreciated.

So what is the page 69-bomb? Actually, it should say, the page 69 test. I used the word “bomb”as a cheap way to keep your attention. Sorry. The page 69 test is the real topic of my blog today. What is it? A trick to help everyone in choosing a book to read.

Picture yourself standing at the new release table in your local bookstore. You see a bunch of new arrivals. Some authors you’ve heard of, some names are new. How do you choose? According to John Sutherland, author of How to read a novel, you don’t judge a book by its cover.

Dust jackets, blurbs, shoutlines, critics’ commendations ("quote whores", as they are called in the video/DVD business) all jostle for the browser’s attention. But I recommend ignoring the hucksters’ shouts and applying instead the McLuhan test.

Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works. Rule One, then: browse powerfully and read page 69.

I tried it with a few books on my shelf to see if I was attracted to a book by what I found on page 69. Of course, these were books I’d already read. I was highly skeptical. It sounded more like a gimmick or parlor trick that a true test of a book’s worth. What I wanted to see is if page 69 reflected the story or style or voice of the book. Was it a good sample of things to come? In theory, page 69 should be far enough into a story that it exemplifies the heart of the tale. What I found was that, in just about all cases, the page 69 test worked.

After a few of these test cases, I worked up enough courage to do the test on my own books. I started with my current WIP (written with Lynn Sholes). Here’s what’s on page 69 of The Blade Of Abraham:

“Maybe I’ll do it,” I said, immediately thinking I would regret the commitment.

“I’m not going to hold you to it yet.” He nodded toward the half-empty Johnnie Walker bottle sitting on the railing. “I can’t let you make a decision while under the influence.”

“It never stopped you before.” I realized that was uncalled for. “Sorry.” I took a bite of the eggs. “You always were a good omelet maker.”

We sat in silence eating. After the last bite, I was full and totally mellowed out. Of all the people in the world, Kenny was the only one who knew me so well—all my secrets, all my vulnerabilities and fears.

He extended his hand. “Give me your plate. I’ve got a pan of hot soapy water waiting. I’ll drop them in and we can worry about it in the morning.”

I didn’t have much resistance left so I handed over the bare plate. Kenny disappeared for a couple of seconds before rejoining me on the swing. His arm slid around me and it seemed so natural.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Pleasantly.” I leaned my head on his shoulder.

“I’ve missed you, Max.” He lifted my chin and kissed me. Not hard. Just soft and affectionate. Cautiously, as if he might hurt or offend me. And that felt natural, too. “It should have worked out,” I said. “We screwed up.”

“What’s done is done.”

I looked at him. “There were times you made a damn good husband.”

Not exactly a knock-down, drag-out scene from a thriller is it? After all, The Blade Of Abraham is about an attempted detonation of a nuclear device in a major American city and the race to prevent it. Page 69 is the end of a chapter. It involves two people: my main character Maxine and her former husband. Max is a retired federal agent who got shot up pretty bad while on a mission and chose to leave after 20 years as a civilian federal agent with the OSI. Her ex has shown up to ask her to come back to work for the government, something she has no desire to do. It’s only when he tells her why they need her back that she must face the choice of risking all that she has left in life or remain safe and secure in her cozy Colorado mountain hideaway.

The basis of this quiet, serine scene is in fact the basic structure of the entire book. A woman is intrigued by a challenge, decides to take it on only to have her life wrecked down to her emotional bedrock. She has to pull herself back up from the depths, meet the challenge, and overcome everything thrown in her way to save not only her own emotional life but the very real lives of millions of innocent people.

Now that I’ve taken the page 69 challenge, how about the rest of you writers out there. Got the guts to show us your page 69 and determine if it exemplifies the heart of your story? Naturally, if page 69 falls on a page with just a couple of lines, you have permission to post page 68 or 70. But the point I’m trying to determine is, does the page 69 test work on your manuscript or published book? If someone picked up your book and only read page 69, would they want to buy it?

And for the readers out there, how about your favorite (or not so favorite) book. Does the page 69 test work for you? Remember, this is only a test. No actual books will be harmed in the writing of this blog.

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THE PHOENIX APOSTLES, coming June 2011
"A compelling page-turner." – Carla Neggers