By PJ Parrish

I am home. But my heart is still elsewhere. Call it jetlag or maybe just Post-Paris Depression. All I know is that is always takes me a while to come back down to Earth after vacation.

We’ve been to Paris many times, but this time was a little special. Maybe it was because we didn’t do much. We’ve been to all the museums and seen all the sights, so this time we did things differently. The Italians have a great expression for it: Il dolce far niente. The sweetness of doing nothing.  The closest French phrase is l’art de ne rien faire. The art of doing nothing. Which really is an art in a city where the Louvre is two blocks away and everyone else is running around trying to keep to their Chatgpt schedules. (Oh geez, gotta hurry, Mildred. The Eiffel Tower sparkles at 10 p.m.!)

We ate. We drank. We walked our dog Archie in the Palais Royal gardens. We did a Seine dinner cruise for my husband Daniel’s 80th birthday. We went inside the refurbished Notre Dame. While I dog-sat, Daniel and my bestie Linda went to the French Open (outside court access only for 30 euros…we’re not rolling in dough. But we did watch Coco’s great win on TV). That was about it.

Except we read. A lot. This is where I always catch up on my to-read list. But I always take books that are set in the country or city where I am visiting. This time, I started out with The Paris Widow by Kimberly Belle. It won the Edgar this year in Best Paperback Original. It’s a solid thriller, redolent of the city. I took it to lunch with me at Bistrot Valois.

Finishing that, I headed over to The Abbey Bookshop to pick up some used books. I don’t use an E-reader so this bookstore, run by Canadian Brian Spence, is always on my itinerary. I picked up and devoured The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George, a beat-up copy of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (because I love the movie) and Georges Simenon’s The Yellow Dog (because I have one).

Reading a book while you’re actually in the book’s world doubles the pleasure, I think. It deepens your appreciation for the culture and history. It connects you emotionally. And it enhances your memories once you leave.

That said, I did not read Under the Tuscan Sun when visiting there. Seemed a bit too spot-on, you know? In Rome, I brought a copy of Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling because we intended to visit the Sistine Chapel. Didn’t make it due to a mild illness, but I am STILL plugging away at this one. Dense but very interesting book. Maybe, like the pope implores Michelangelo, I will finally make an end of it one day.

So, crime dogs. Good to be home and among you again. Ready to get back to planting my tomatoes, walking around my lake, and trying not to miss duck confit and fresh-squoshed orange juice. Tell us, if you will, what books made your vacations more memorable. In the meantime, indulge me while I share a snap I took of Archie. It was 6:30 a.m. and raining. We were on our way to the boulangerie to pick up our daily croissants. We had the Louvre to ourselves.

(Spoiler alert. I am going to kill off some characters today and tell you about it.)

By PJ Parrish

Some of you might know I have a thing for apocalyptic stories. For some odd reason, dystopic fiction really floats my Charon’s Ferry. Give me degraded societies, post-nuclear nilism, and weird games of survival over sunny utopianism any day.

Aside: I am really a nice person. I tend to side with the optimists. You’d even want to sit next to me at a boring wedding.

But this is just my thing. One of my favorite movies is On the Beach, which led me to hunt down a copy of Neil Shute’s excellent source novel. No one dies in On the Beach, but everyone is doomed. The novel quotes these infamous lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

I also liked Suzanne Collins’ books and count The Road among my all-time favorite novels. So when we started watching the TV series, The Last Of Us, I was all in for the long haul. The Last Of Us unfolds 20 years after the world is ravaged by a fungal pandemic that transforms humans into aggressive zombies. The hero Joel is a hardened smuggler, haunted by past loss, who is tasked with escorting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl immune to the infection, across the remnants of the US because she might be the key to a cure. They make their grim way from the ruins of Boston to the Montana wastelands, dodging zombies, renegades and what’s left of a foul government force.  Think The Road meets Night of the Living Dead.

It’s really grim, yet strangely life-affirming, focusing on the prickly relationship between Joel and Ellie, and the drama’s main theme of human duality — our equal capacity for love and violence.

But then Joel dies. Not just dies by zombie attack. He is brutally murdered by rogue survivalists. I was crushed. I was so emotionally invested in this character that I almost didn’t want to watch the series anymore. A week later, it still haunts me.

Why kill off a good character? What’s to be gained? In The Road, Cormac McCarthy choses to kill off the father, who is leading his young son through the bleak post-nuclear world. But I sensed it had to end that way. The boy is taken in by a man and woman and the book’s elegiac ending is oddly optimistic:

She [the woman survivor] would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

I felt none of that sense of faith or higher purpose in Joel’s death. I felt only anger at the banal barbarity of it. I’m trying to process this as a writer. Sometimes, good characters have to be sacrificed. I get that. I’ve done it myself.

But killing off a character should always be done with the greatest of care. When done well, it makes us empathize with the extreme emotions characters are feeling. More to the point, it can — should? — provide momentum for the surviving characters. In the case of The Last Of Us, I can see where things are going to go. Joel’s death will spur Ellie to seek vengeance. But somehow it also seems a little cheap, done only by the writers to make me wonder, “What comes next?”

Killing off the good should never be only done as a plot tease. It must have purpose. I’m going to let someone else speak to this. Quoting novelist Karen Outen here, my emphasis in bold:

Killing off a fully realized character tests a story in a way unlike any other. It draws attention to itself, but the writer has to ask: does it draw energy away from or toward the story? Some deaths can render the story superfluous by contrast, or simply suck all the  remaining energy out of a story. At its best, a character’s death should arrest some lines of story movement but create clearer narrative paths—ones of heightened tension—for other parts of the story.

I see death acting as a pinball lever, shooting a story from one path onto another and opening a new world of consequences for the characters and for the story arc. That new thrust can be as exciting for the reader as for the writer, carrying along with it a dizzying array of emotional realities: regret, relief, hubris, grief, joy, fear. The basic question about whether to kill off a character, then, is no different than the question about any narrative choice: does it work? 

Does the death draw energy toward or away from the story? Is the death well earned? Does it propel the story via another character’s arc? Does it work? That’s the bottom line. I am willing to give The Last Of One a little more time to prove to me that it does.

________________

Postscript: I am on vacation for the next two weeks. In Paris, by the time you read this, taking in the sights, sounds and the insouciant house red. The world spins on. So please talk amongst yourselves and I will catch up soon. Bonne journée!

By PJ Parrish

Am a little under the weather today, so this post is a bit of a cheat. I love reading a feature in the New York Times Book Review called By The Book. Famous writers are asked a series of standard questions about their tastes. Always fun to read their revealing answers. I’m not famous but I’ll give it go. And then you guys can weigh in.

What books are on your nightstand?

Just went and checked. Well, this was surprising. Two out of three are non-fiction and I am pretty much a novel-addict. Am plowing through (still!) Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King. It’s the story behind the painting of the Sistine Chapel. I am not Catholic but I am fascinated by all things papal and this recounting of the power politics behind maybe the world’s greatest masterpiece is riveting. Pope Julius was so incensed over Michelangelo’s slow, secretive progress that he took to disguising himself and sneaking up into the scaffolding. Michelangelo caught him one night and hurled planks at the poor guy. The pope, bellowing curses, fled. The artist, fearing for his life, bolted off to Florence to hide until the pope cooled down. That scene didn’t make the Charleton Heston movie.

Second is Once In a Great City: A Detroit Story by David Maraniss. An elegantly told elegy for my home town that was abandoned by the world. Third (spine yet uncracked) is The Paris Widow by Kimberly Belle. I’m off to Paris in 10 days and I always take along a book set in my destination. This thriller just won the Edgar for best Paperback Original. Met Kimberly in the bathroom at the Edgars. She was so gobsmacked she could barely talk.

What’s the last great book you read?

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’ve read it twice now. An American epic. It’s tenderness gets to me and the characters still walk around in my head.

If you were to write something besides thrillers, what would you write?

Erotica. Tried it once. A sad middle-aged woman goes to Italy and gets laid. (This was pre-Under the Tuscan Sun so don’t jump on me.) My title was brilliant: Tarantella, which is a crazed Italian dance thought to cure deadly spider bites and bring the victim back to life. I still have the manuscript. It’s awful. I unwittingly wrote a comic novel.

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

When I was writing thrillers, I never read anything. Just couldn’t. My brain was too out there on Planet X to concentrate. I used to survive by binging on sports TV. This is how I became a hockey fan.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

That Keith Richards is really bitchy. In his biography Life, he says of Bruce Springsteen: “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.” And he says Mick Jagger is, ahem, not well-endowed: “He has a tiny todger.” (Which is an interesting new word I learned).

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times. It’s the autobiography of the infamous Detroit kids TV star Soupy Sales. It’s hilarious and ultimately quite sad. I loved this guy.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

Emotional honesty from the writer. Opening a vein. You can’t fake it. Though many try.

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I grew up reading the backs of cereal boxes so I will read anything. But I don’t like political thrillers. The reality is bad enough.

How do you organize your books?

By category. All my dance books, from my near two decades as a dance critic, are grouped together. All my royal family books share a high shelf. Thrillers and mysteries, mostly from friends, dominate the lower rungs. 🙂 And there’s one shelf where all my France/Paris books live together in happy utopian disdain.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Several very old and rare books on slavery. It was research for one of our series novels involving the underground railroad but I got carried away. One historic title is so offensive I shelve it spine in.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

Charlotte’s Web. Got it as a little kid. It got lost, along with much of my childhood paraphernalia, in our many moves. I found a beat-up copy at a barn sale last summer here in Michigan. It smells musty and is inscribed “To my daughter Anne.”

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Well, my hero, I’d have to say, is Charlotte the spider. She’s confident, thoughtful and a true-blue friend. Villain? Two: Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Moping around in moors, mired in self-pity. And he locks his wife in the attic! And Lady MacBeth, with one of the best lines in all of fiction: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Wish I had written that.

So, crime dogs? How would you answer any of these questions? Pick one or two or all. Would love to hear your secrets.

By PJ Parrish

Good morning, crime dogs. I am probably somewhere over Lake Erie as you read this. Or maybe catching the bus from lovely Newark airport into Manhattan. It’s Edgar Awards time, and as banquet chair, I am going to be out of touch today through Thursday night.

So, as I usually do, I thought I give you a look at some of the nominees this year. I focus on cover design because — obviously! — I have not read all the books under consideration. I like following trends in book design and it’s important to talk about it here because many of you, being self-published, design your own covers or have a lot of input into whomever you chose to design your book.

Your cover design is one of the most important decisions you have to make. It’s your mini-billboard to get readers’ attention, whether in a thumbnail-size on Amazon, on an iPhone, or, if you’re lucky, on an actual book shelf somewhere.

A cover creates the first impression, and encourages readers to buy your story. That’s why it’s essential to invest in it. Please, please, I beg of you, don’t hand this important task over to your nephew Jerome who just aced his sophomore art class. Hire a pro.

Two quick things to always keep in mind: Pay close attention to genre standards to signal to potential readers that your book is what they seek. If you’re writing dark, hardboiled stuff, you need all your cover elements — color, fonts, graphics — to convey the MOOD of your book. And if you’re writing in the grand tradition of Mary Higgins Clark, you’re going to want to go for something less gruesome or gritty. Something like this year’s nominees for the MHC Award:

Second, pay attention to what’s hot in the market these days. Yeah, there’s room for you to be yourself, but it doesn’t hurt to know what’s catching the eye these days.

That said, predicting what will be effective is not easy. Last year, the trend was toward bold typography (mainly sans-serif), nostalgic revival, and very abstract graphics. I see this in many of the Edgar covers this year and experts predict this will continue.

In cozies and juvenile mysteries, large serif or cursive sans serif fonts depicted in bright hues are popular. In fantasy and thrillers, animated GIF covers are hot — images like drifting clouds or flickering flames.

Eye-popping color is a big thing across every genre. As one designer put it:

The era of muted tones and grayscale snooze-fests is officially over. Bright, bold colors are everywhere, and it all started with contemporary romance covers that looked like they were designed in a candy shop. But now, these vibrant palettes are invading every genre—fantasy, thrillers, even horror (the horror!).

That gritty crime novel? It might have a shocking pink accent. Your post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic? Say hello to vivid oranges and electric blues. Why? Because readers want their bookshelves (and eReaders) to feel like an art gallery—not a funeral procession. And let’s be honest, a pop of color is way more inviting than 50 shades of beige.

Other mini-trends: BIG TYPE that takes up the whole cover space, like this:

Collages are big right now. Oddly enough in young adult — botanicals! Also, stock photography is yesterday’s news; the fresh look is illustrations.

Now let’s look at some of the Edgar covers to see if what I just said holds water.

BIG BOLD SPACE-HOGGING TYPE

ILLUSTRATIONS INSTEAD OF PHOTOS

COLLAGES!

BOLD TYPOGRAPHY

AND A FEW COVERS I JUST LIKE

I find this nominee for Best First Novel just haunting. No screaming colors, almost black and white. (only trendy thing is sans serif font). Yet the cloud image around the woman’s profile amplifies the title and makes me want to read the story.

Another winner, I think. This Best Young Adult nominee could have done the usual stock photo of an amorous Asian couple in a clinch. But the illustration conveys a modern mood (look at their expressions — is that love or hate?) with a nod to traditional Asian art.  Did you notice the half-hidden crane?

An interesting example of illustration rather than photograph. Not sure this one works, however, because the creamy background and water-color illustration might read too vague on anything other than a large format.

I’m conflicted on this Best Novel nominee. The setting is right there in the title but the combo of the green type and the murky street scene reads a bit muddy. BUT…then you see that one lighted window at the top of the building. Not bad.

Well, that’s all I have room for this year. If you’d like to see all the nominees and their covers, click here. Congratulations to all the Edgar nominees. This year marks Mystery Writers of America’s 80th anniversary. By the way, the 80th anniversary is designated as OAK. Which isn’t very interesting. Unless you’re thinking in terms of coffins or maybe Poe’s Cask of Amontillado.

By PJ Parrish

I love stories that take place in frozen tundras. Alien James Arness unthawed and on a rampage in The Thing From Another World. Neanderthal Timothy Hutton unthawed and seeking his god in Iceman. The Green Bay Packers vanquishing The Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 championship Ice Bowl game.

Icy climes have been the setting for some top-notch fiction. Maybe it’s the innate drama of the setting, or more likely the potential therewithin to exploit ice as a metaphor. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 short story “The Ice Palace” is about a southern belle who becomes engaged to a man from the North. She almost freezes to death in an ice palace at a winter carnival, which leads her to rethink the engagement. But ice stands as a metaphor for the differing attitudes of Northerners and Southerners.

Some of my favorites: Smilla’s Sense of Snow with its chilling opening at a Greenland funeral. Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman. And The Hunting Party, where Lucy Foley uses an important trope of the mystery genre: People aren’t always what they appear to be below their frozen surfaces.

And I have to add in here one of the most startling opening lines in fiction, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Full disclosure: Several of my own books take place in the frozen wilds of my native Michigan, including a scene where a body is found frozen in a lake and a terrifying trip across the “ice bridge” between Mackinac Island and the mainland that plunges my hero Louis Kincaid in the icy depths. So when this submission came across my desk, I was predisposed to like it. Thanks for offering it up, dear writer. I’ll be back in few minutes with my comments.

OUT ON THE ICE
a horror story

Hospital Corpsman Quinn Marie Chambers sat in the snow tractor her medical emergency kit in her lap, watching the other naval personnel and Marines investigating the beached whale. A small group of native Inuits looked on and seemed nervous.

There was little for Quinn to do as long as the other members of the Emergency Response Team didn’t get hurt somehow. She shivered at the cold.

The Inuit guide they called Mac sat in the back seat. He stirred, trying to get a better view of the goings on.

Quinn sipped warm coffee from her thermos cup and watched Chief Petty Officer Selsman trudge toward the big snow tractor. She finished her cup and poured another for him.

A nasty wind ladened with heavy snow and particles of ice blew into the cab when Selsman opened the driver-side door.

Quinn handed him the cup. “Beached whale?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean?

“Someone put nine bullets into its head.”

“Murder?’

“Maybe. Not sure if you can actually murder a whale.”

Mac said, “This will anger Qalupalik. This is an unnatural death. This will dirty her hair.” He shook his head in resignation.

“Who the hell is Qalupalik?’ Quinn asked.

“She is—”

“—a legend. A Greenland fairy tale. She is the monster in the deep protecting sea life. It teaches children not to screw up the ocean,” Selsman said.

Mac held his chin up and crossed his arms..

“Don’t worry about it. NCIS will be here soon to investigate to see if any of our personnel are involved. If not, it’s not our problem.”

In the back seat, Mac quietly chanted an Inuit prayer for the dead whale.

The two Marines on the team high stepped through the snow and wind toward the tractor. One held his hand wrapped in a handkerchief that had blood stains on it.

Quinn scooted over to let the marine have space to sit down. She tended to the wound. “How did this happen?’

“I was digging a bullet out of the whale’s head and my knife slipped.”

“Did you get the bullet?” Chief Selsman asked.

The marine smiled. “Damn right I did. And I bagged and tagged it as well.”

“Gotta love a good marine,” Selsman said.

“You should throw that bullet back into the ocean so Qalupalik can confront the killer with it,” Mac said.

“Can’t. It’s evidence,” Selsman said, starting up the tractor’s engine.

___________________________________

First off, I like the concept here. I mean, a dead whale isn’t as sexy, crime-wise, as a dead human being. But the fact the whale has nine bullet in its head is pretty cool, but more intriguing: Why do these Marines care? So I was definitely willing to read on. Good original set-up. Haven’t read this one before.

Some other good things: The writer handles dialogue well. It’s easy to follow, clean and I like the clipped no-nonsense tone of the Marines. It feels authentic.

But. Here’s the one thing I didn’t like: The protag’s detachment. The clue is right there in the second paragraph: “There was little for Quinn to do as long as the other members of the Emergency Response Team didn’t get hurt somehow.”

She is watching. She is waiting. She is doing nothing. All the interesting action is happening apart from her. Now, here’s the problem: She is not an active part of this investigation. Her job is medical only. As the writer puts it, she can do nothing but sit there unless someone gets hurt. So right from the get-go, she is positioned as a passive character by the circumstances.

How could this have been fixed? Not sure. And it’s not up to me to rethink or rewrite someone’s story. And it’s not terrible the way it is. I just wish there was a better portal for Quinn to enter the story, grab the spotlight — and our attention. So I am going to ask the writer to step back and look for a different angle, a different perspective on this scene unfolding.

It could be something as simple as changing the order of events. Does Quinn HAVE to be sitting in the snow tractor waiting? Wouldn’t she be more interesting if basic curiosity moved her to go out and see the whale for herself? Maybe, dear writer, you entered your story a beat too late. Maybe you need to back up and have her out there on the ice with the others during the initial discovery?

What would that do to improve things? You eliminate distance and detachment. If she’s OUT THERE you can give us a description of the whale and the scene (right now we have none). If she’s OUT THERE, she can see for herself the whale’s head. Instead of you saying she is watching (passive) the marines investigate “a beached whale” you can have her OUT THERE thinking (active) “This was no beached whale. Someone had shot the whale in head.”

A couple years ago, a pygmy whale washed up on a California beach with a bullet hole in its head. True story. I will spare you the gory photos here. (here’s the link) but it would have made for a very bloody dramatic scene for Quinn to witness and describe for readers.

Quinn needs to see it. Quinn needs to feel it. Quinn needs to tell us what she is experiencing. The last place you want her to be is inside a vehicle, drinking coffee and waiting.

Make her a hero. Even if there is not yet anything heroic for her to do. You need to set her up as a potential hero. Active, not reactive.

Then, as she views this massacred whale, a marine gets cut and she finally has something to do. Maybe this then can provide contrast to her feeling of impotency, of NOT being a part of the action.

Two other problems: First, where are we? There is one reference to “Greenland fairy tale.” Does this take place in Greenland? Where exactly? Because you’re dealing with Marines, I assume we’re near Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base). This is way up north and operated by the U.S. Space Force. It is one of the most strategically important military sites in the world.  (Hence its presence in our political news). You must find a way to establish this. It can be handled easily through Quinn’s thoughts:

They were at least twenty miles from the air base at Pituffik. There wasn’t a village or a single hut anywhere near this isolated beach. They were 750 miles from the North Pole and the nearest settlement, Qaanaaq, was more than 70 miles away.

Second problem: You really need to spice up your description. Such a fabulous setting. Such a gruesome “murder.”  Yet you don’t give us any sense of what it looks like, feels like, SMELLS like. (dead mammal on beach!). Again, we’re taking about the difference between telling and showing. Don’t tell me it’s cold; show me. Don’t tell me the Inuits “are nervous.” Show me via their actions, through her consciousness.

This is a good first draft, dear writer. With a re-positioning of Quinn and some vivid description (use all the senses!), you’ll have a stronger opening. Some quick line edits follow. My comments in blue

Hospital Corpsman Don’t open with a title. Find a way to slip in later, more artfully what she does. Her ACTIONS should do it. Quinn Marie Chambers sat in the snow tractor her medical emergency kit in her lap, watching the other naval personnel and Marines investigating the beached whale. A small group of native Inuits looked on and seemed nervous. This opening graph is passive. Why not opening with a vivid description of the corpse? Then surprise us by telling us, through Quinn’s thoughts, that it’s not a MERE beached whale.

There was little for Quinn to do as long as the other members of the Emergency Response Team didn’t get hurt somehow. She shivered at the cold. A little lazy; what does this cold FEEL like? Where is she from? Maybe this godforsaken Greenland cold feels completely different than the cold in her native WHERE? Never miss a chance to compare and contrast and to slip in a nuggest of her backstory.

The Inuit guide they called Mac sat in the back seat. He stirred, trying to get a better view of the goings on. More distancing. 

Quinn sipped warm coffee from her thermos cup and watched Chief Petty Officer Selsman trudge toward the big snow tractor. She finished her cup and poured another for him.

A nasty wind ladened with heavy snow and particles of ice I know you can do better than this. “nasty wind” is cliche. Has she been in this climate/place long or is she new here? Frame it through her experience and consciousness blew into the cab when Selsman opened the driver-side door.

Quinn handed him the cup. “Beached whale?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean? Again, she is passive. And you’ve deprieved the reader of SEEING THE ACTUAL SCENE! 

“Someone put nine bullets into its head.”  Bingo! This is where things get interesting. This should be like the third paragraph of your opening.

“Murder?’

“Maybe. Not sure if you can actually murder a whale.”

Mac said, “This will anger Qalupalik,” Mac said. This will dirty her hair.” He shook his head in resignation.  Great line! Let it stand there alone for a second.

“Who the hell is Qalupalik?’ Quinn asked.

“She is—”

“—a legend, Selsman said.. A Greenland fairy tale. She is the monster in the deep protecting sea life. It? teaches children not to screw up the ocean,” Selsman said.  Love how you brought in the Inuit lore.

Mac held his chin up and crossed his arms.. Not sure what you’re going for here? Anger? 

“Don’t worry about it. NCIS will be here soon to investigate to see if any of our personnel are involved. If not, it’s not our problem.” Who’s talking? And you need to start dealing with Greenland officials or at least bringing it up. Whales are both hunted AND strictly protected in Greenland. They would be obligated to immediately notify proper authorities.  

In the back seat, Mac quietly chanted an Inuit prayer for the dead whale. Unless Quinn understands Inuit, she wouldn’t have a clue what he’s chanting about. STAY IN HER POV. She can think that he seems to be chanting or singing but she can’t really know, can she? That is YOU the writer talking, not the character. Again, stay in her POV: What does it SOUND like? Don’t tell me he’s chanting; describe the sound.

The two Marines on the team high stepped through the snow First mention, btw, that there’s snow on the ground and wind toward the tractor. One held his hand wrapped in a handkerchief that had blood stains on it.

Quinn scooted over to let the marine have space to sit down. She tended to the wound. “How did this happen?’

“I was digging a bullet out of the whale’s head and my knife slipped.”

“Did you get the bullet?” Chief Selsman asked.

The marine smiled. “Damn right I did. And I bagged and tagged it as well.”

“Gotta love a good marine,” Selsman said.

“You should throw that bullet back into the ocean so Qalupalik can confront the killer with it,” Mac said.

“Can’t. It’s evidence,” Selsman said, starting up the tractor’s engine.

So, dear writer….again, thanks for submitting. I enjoyed reading this and want Quinn to claim her spotlight. And make this setting a “character” in itself. Remember what Smilla said: The Inuits have a hundred words for snow. You need more words! Would love the see your next attempt. Keep writing!

By PJ Parrish

Rejection bites.  Even 45 years after the fact.

I was cleaning out some old files the other day, searching for my portfolio of clips from my days working on my college newspaper The Eastern Echo. 

Didn’t find the clips but I found my first ever rejection letter from a publisher. It doesn’t have a date on it, but it had to be somewhere around 1980. That was back when I was trying to break into the romance novel business. I had a half-written manuscript and no clue what I was up against.

I decided to send it out to an agent. Guess who I picked? Mort Janklow. He was probably one of the top five literary agents in those days. His client list included Judith Krantz, Thomas Harris, Nancy Reagan and some guy living in The Vatican named John Paul.

I got a very nice letter back from him [his secretary], saying thank you but no thanks. So I decided, well, hell, who needs an agent? Why not go right to the publishers? I told you, I knew nothing back then.

So I sent my partial off to Dell Publishing. I don’t remember who I sent it to. And until the other day when I was cleaning, I didn’t remember exactly what their letter to me said. But here it is:

In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says. The bold-faced bracketed comments are mine.

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]

I can laugh about the letter now. But it stung at the time, and in a way it still does. Because I remember how insignificant it made me feel at the time. (I didn’t realize how insignificant I actually was in the grand scheme of publishing). The impersonal-ness. The cop-out cliches. The fact that no one had the guts to even sign their name. But I kept this letter for some reason. Who knows why? My mom might know, because she always said that I never liked being told what to do. And these anonymous editors were telling me I couldn’t be a published writer.

(A year later, a different manuscript I had finished, was plucked out of the slush pile by an editor at Ballantine Books. They paid me $2,500. I was up and walking!)

Here’s the thing about rejection. It never stops. Even after you are published with a decent track record, you can still get dumped on. Four books into our Louis Kincaid series, my co-author sister 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. I never tried that again.

Since I am retired now, I am sort of out of touch with the technical side of our business. Are query letters now done all by email? Does anyone even get paper rejection letters anymore? I kind of hope so, because tangible evidence of rejection can be a powerful motivator. Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, was rejected by nearly 30 publishers. He kept the rejection letters pinned to his wall, eventually replacing the nail with a spike.

Do rejection emails still come in the same code of yesteryear?

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 interplanetary romantasy.
3. Solar Punk rip-offs are yesterday’s news. Have you considered writing a horror-hardboiled mash-up?

I don’t mean to make light of your woes if you are going through this phase of rejection now. It’s not fun. But you will get through this. You will keep going. And with time, you’ll probably get a better perspective about it. Like I did.

The manuscript I sent to Dell was really, really bad. It was called The Last Rose of Summer, by the way. Go ahead, you can steal that title. The manuscript had no business going out in the world in the state it was in. I know, because I kept it. And yeah, It found it, too. It was actually physically painful to read it. But it reminds me that I learned a lot, and I came a long ways. This is a learning process. It still is. It always will be.

I read a good column by David Brooks the other day. He normally writes about politics, but he is often drawn into the side current of family or tribal dynamics. He asked a simple question in his column: Why do people do things that are hard?

Why do marathoners run almost to bodily ruin? Why endure the tedium of practicing the violin? Why does your curiosity compel you to explore the darkest cave despite your fears of going down there?

Why do we keep writing when we don’t even know if someone will ever read it?

Brooks believes it has something to do living in an “offensive spirit.” Meaning, you’re drawn by a positive attraction, not fear of failure. You see obstacles as challenges, not threats. “By the time you reach craftsman status,” he writes, “you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work.”

I know that strikes a chord with some of you.

So, if you are feeling blue today, 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.”

And know that if you remain in an “offensive spirit,” you can prevail. I feel this way about gardening. And trying to become a really good cook. And playing the piano and pickleball. David Brooks ends his column by quoting the sculptor Henry Moore. So I will as well — because it rings true whether you are writing a book or learning how to make pasta from scratch:

“The secret to life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

By PJ Parrish

It was early in my days as a mystery writer, and I thought I pretty much knew everything.

My first book got a really nice send-off from the great team at Kensington Books. The second book got an Edgar nomination. The third book in our Louis Kincaid series landed my co-author sister and me on the extended New York Times bestseller list.

I’m telling you this not to brag. But as a cautionary tale. Let’s keep going.

Then came book four, Thicker Than Water. From the start, my sister had reservations about it. I still remember what she said to one day when we were about 45,000 words into the first draft.  “It’s too….quiet,” she said.

She couldn’t quite articulate much more than that, it was just a feeling she had about the story. No one is murdered in present time; Louis is trying to solve a very cold case of a young woman’s death. The plot revolves around the dispicable man convicted of her murder, now out of prison, and two lawyers — one who put him behind bars and the other who died, knowing that he didn’t do much to prevent that. It is twisty, talky, and haunted by regret. Action took a rumbleseat to character. So yeah, it was a “quiet” book.

But that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was we let Louis get overshadowed by everyone else. He was the hero, yet we allowed the large cast of very colorful secondary characters to push him out of the spotlight while they strutted and fretted their grand hours on the stage.

Secondary characters are important. They can — and should — be a vital part of your story. No story can survive without them because they exist to support your protag and help propel the plot.

They are sounding boards, helpmates, or sidekicks. Iconic examples abound in crime fiction: Watson to Holmes, Cletus Purcel to Dave Robicheaux. Archie Goodwin to Rex Stout. Rocky to Jim Rockford.

They provide conflict and obstacles for your protago to overcome. Yes, this is what the antagoist does, but secondary characters can enrich a plot in small but significant ways — ie a police chief who constantly questions a detective’s methods.Captain McKay who dogs Dirty Harry Callahan to distraction.

They can be a love interest or companion. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Dennis Lehane’s series. Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum in Lilian Jackson Braun’s cozies.

They can be a foil, someone who provides a contrast to your protag. Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby. Draco to Harry Potter.

They can be a mentor who helps keep your protag on the right track or see the bigger picture. M and James Bond. Dumbledore and Harry Potter.

As you can see, I’ve been thinking about secondary (and even tertiary) characters a lot. This is because I got hooked on Ted Lasso. Okay, I know it’s annoying to many of you when one of us goes nutso talking about a TV show you haven’t seen. But bear with me. Because I don’t think I have ever seen — or read — anything that does a better job with secondary characters than Ted Lasso. I strongly recommend you watch the series, not just for enjoyment, but for a great lesson in how to create and control a large cast of memorable characters.

Quick recap: Ted Lasso is a Kansas football coach who is hired to strategically tank a failing English soccer club. As head coach, he inherits a miserable quarrelsome team and an owner whose only goal is to punish her ex-husband by sabotaging his ex-team.

Digression: I thought Ted was a titular protag. But he’s actually a eponymous one. Jane Eyre = eponymous. The Man Who Would Be King = titular. Just saying…

The plot of Ted Lasso superficially revolves around the question of whether a guy who doesn’t know a red card from Red Bull can turn the franchise around. But the real drama comes from all the intricate and intertwined relationships and the paths of their individual character arcs. The show is about empathy, kindness, and human connection even as it tackles dark topics like mental health, addiction, and divorce with sensitivity and nuance. To say nothing about the chasms between fathers and sons.

Ted is the main guy. No doubt about that. As great secondary character Kathy Bates Libby Holden says in Primary Colors of the presidential candidate and his wife: “The Stantons are my sun. I lived my life drawing light and warmth from them.”

So it is with those in Ted’s orbit.

The show excels at crafting compelling secondary characters by giving them distinct personalities, personal growth arcs, and allowing them to drive storylines, even when not the main focus, creating a rich and relatable ensemble cast.

Ted is a classic fish out of the water, at soccer and his own life. But as the series goes on, Ted learns about his sport and the people around him, and starts to deal with his failing marriage, his anxiety and his father issues.

But as I said, every character in Ted Lasso has a unique personality, background and an important role in the story. Which brings us back to what we all, as writers, can learn from our second fiddles. Things to look for as you write:

Personal Growth Arcs
The secondary characters in Ted Lasso undergo significant personal growth throughout the series, developing new skills and changing their perspectives. Has-been soccer star Roy Kent is angry and unlikeable, but learns to let go of crippling grudges, forgive his enemies and himself.

Storyline Contributions
Secondary characters are not just background players. They often drive storylines and influence the main characters’ journeys. Team towel boy Nathan Shelley is ignored by the team and derided by his father, until he gets a chance to help coach. And become an unlikely plot catalyst.

Relatable Characters
The show focuses on creating characters that viewers can relate to, even if they are flawed or struggling. Team owner Rebecca Welton comes across as cunning and cold, hellbent only on destroying her ex. Her arc is redemption and atonement as she overcomes her loneliness to become a confident leader of men.

That’s just a few of the folks I came to love and root for. When I finally finished bingeing on the series, I felt exhilarated and sad, like I was saying goodbye to my family and best friends. Shoot, I admit it: I cried like a baby. Can there be any greater compliment to a writer?

One last note about my book Thicker Than Water. To this day, it remains one of my favorite books in my modest oeuvre. Because I love the people in the story. And because my sister finally, in the eleventh hour, figured out how to make it less “quiet.”

I spoke earlier about how, if you, the writer, are not careful, your second fiddles can out-perform your first chair. You have to find that fine line beween creating a vivid cast and not letting them take over. That is what happened to us. And worse, we took the gun out of Louis’s hand. We didn’t let him solve the case. We left it up to happenstance.

But…

In the second draft, Kelly found a way to put the gun back in Louis’s hand. So it was with Ted Lasso. He’s been running away from fatherhood for years, acting as dad to an entire team of grown men rather than the boy who needs him most. In the end, damn everyone else, he does what he has to do.

Keep writing, diamond dogs. And guess what? Ted Lasso is coming back for a new season.

By PJ Parrish

In the wee wee hours of the morning this week, I had an idea for a new story. Now, most things that happen around 3 a.m. usually don’t end well, and I should have remembered that, considering that the last time I was startled awake at that hour was when a coyote and neighborhood cat were squaring off in my driveway.

But no, I got up, grabbed a pen and wrote down an opening paragraph. Let me share it here now:

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. Its 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.

Whee, doggies! What’s that smell?

Okay, I didn’t really write that. But I had you going for a sec, didn’t I. But someone DID write it. Actually, it was 1,476 people who wrote that, give or take a few. This gawd awful paragraph was created years ago by Penguin Books for a project called “A Million Penguins.”

Maybe you heard about it. The idea was to write a novel with a million collaborators to be called a “wiki-novel”. It was launched by Penguin Books in collaboration with Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University.

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.”

Anyone could call up the site and contribute to the story. Because the site got more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed “reading windows” that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going. Chaos reigned. A month in, Penguin mercifully pulled the plug.

I was thinking about the Penguin project this week after reading an article at Literary Hub about how AI is transforming our business, and why writers should embrace it. To quote the author Debbie Urbanski in part:

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: Can AI and a human write a novel together?

Sigh. I dunno. She posits that there is a “collaboration” possible between writer and AI. And that’s where I get queasy.

I collaborated with my sister Kelly on 15 books and a lot of short stories. It was at times a fitful process but always fruitful because we were equals and more important, we recognized that there was a third party in the collaboration that was always going to win any argument — the story.

I’ve had a couple other experiences with collaboration. Jeffery Deaver and Jim Fusilli asked me to join 14 other writers for a novel called The Chopin Manuscript, published by the International Thriller Writers. Deaver got the plot in motion and we each had a chapter after that. It was fun, frenetic and in hindsight, not a bad novel considering the inevitable clash of styles and egos. I remember I gleefully killed off one of the main characters in a great chase through the Paris catacombs but Jeff overruled me. We went on to write two more “serial thrillers” for ITW.

Letting another brain into your writing process isn’t easy. It should be approached with only the greatest care and clear-mindedness. When it goes bad — and I know some writers who’ve had it go very bad — it conjures up the Infinite Monkey Theorem:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.

Which is how I view AI. I’m a retired Luddite who has no real stake in this brave new world. But I know that I should be paying closer attention. I have a friend who has been asked to write a script about the history of the mystery genre. He is struggling mightily because the subject is both broad and deep. He resorted to ChatGPT. And damned if the thing didn’t spit out a workable script. But it has an oddly lifeless quality, like someone afraid to color outside the lines.

So what happened to The Million Penguins project? The university behind it published A Million Penguins Research Report. It concluded:  “We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was ground-breaking and exciting.”

Groundbreaking. Exciting. Sounds just like what they’re saying about AI. Or is that sound just the thundering footsteps of a million monkeys?

Keep coloring outside those lines, friends.

By PJ Parrish

I am gearing up for my annual gig as chair of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. This year is pretty special because it’s the 80th birthday of the venerable organization itself.

Digression: You’d think if you make it to your 80th anniversary, the appropriate gift would be something cool like diamond or platinum. Nope, the 80th is oak. What, for a coffin?

Well, maybe a coffin is apt, considering what we here all do — putting bodies in the ground. Anywho, we are going to honor MWA’s eightith by taking a look back to celebrate what was unique about each decade. So I’ve been boning up on crime fiction history this week. I am rather ashamed at my ignorance on this subject. Believe me, I have been trying for years now to get up to speed on my reading of our classics. But the MWA celebration is also forcing me to dig deeper into the less obvious writers and books.

And I’d like to pick y’all’s brains for some help on who and what books we should be including. More on that in a sec.

But first: Let’s review.

I suspect most of you know already that Edgar Allen Poe’s 1941 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered the first detective story. But do you know what is considered to be the first full-length mystery novel? That would be Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1861. Here’s the opening:

Chapter One

In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:

“Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.”

Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning (May twenty-first, Eighteen hundred and fifty), came my lady’s nephew, Mr. Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me, as follows:—

“Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, “I have been to the lawyer’s about some family matters; and, among other things, we have been talking of the loss of the Indian Diamond, in my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years since. Mr. Bruff thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better.”

Not perceiving his drift yet, and thinking it always desirable for the sake of peace and quietness to be on the lawyer’s side, I said I thought so too. Mr. Franklin went on.

“In this matter of the Diamond,” he said, “the characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already—as you know. The memories of innocent people may suffer, hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal. There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told. And I think, Betteredge, Mr. Bruff and I together have hit on the right way of telling it.”

If you didn’t get through it, don’t feel bad. I tried to read this book to give it an honest chance but the sledding was too tough. If I were doing a Kill Zone First Page Critique on this, well, let’s just say I would try to be kind.  I did come across one phrase I liked:

Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

Such was the style of the age, right? Things got easier, thank goodness. About 25 years later, two guys named Holmes and Watson showed up in A Study in Scarlet. You might have heard of them. Probably the best-known detective and sidekick in the modern period. Without them, would Nero and Archie exist? Would Spenser have his Hawk? And how could Michael Knight manage without his Kitt?

Then we jump forward to the 20s and 30s, the so-called Golden Age of crime ficiton, dominated by the grande dames Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In researching, I found one of the writers of this time, Ronald Knox, whose day job was Catholic priest, came up with his Ten Commands of detection fiction:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I especially agree with number ten. One should always be prepared for twin brothers.

In something of a backlash to Christie et al, some writers, mainly Americans, began to reshape the detective formula. Puzzle-solving novels were too…clean. The thirst for realism begat the hardboiled school. It was every man for himself and nobody trusted nobody.

First out of the gate, I discovered, was Carroll John Daly. His pulpy stories – The False Burton Combs (1922), It’s All in the Game (1923) and Three Gun Terry (1923) – all became instant hits with readers, especially his PI Race Williams. Après lui le déluge of the usual suspects —  Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ross Macdonald, Jim Thompson. The list is long, and you still hear echoes of them in much of today’s crime fiction. Without them and the characters they created, the world would not have been blessed with Dirty Harry.

Here’s a paragraph I wish I had written, from Dorothy Hughes’s classic In A Lonely Place. Which was also a helluva movie starring Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

Where did things go from there? Wow, that’s a topic for another post, maybe part II, since this one is running long. And I am still heavy into research mode, only up through the 60s so far. I have learned that our genre has grown many, many twisted and bountiful branches. I’ve been doing this Edgars banquet gig for about 25 years now, and every year, when I see the new list of nominees come out, I am amazed at the variety and vitality I see. It seems to me that crime fiction, since the 2000s, has become ever more inclusive, exotic, richly textured and, yeah, I’ll go there — less dependent on cliches, stereotypes, and worn tropes.

So, now I turn to you guys. I am putting together the program and will be asking some authors to write about a particular decade in crime fiction — 1940 to the present — why they love it. I’m also having a video made that celebrates each decade of MWA’s remarkable history, which includes not just the influential books but also the standout crime TV shows and movies of each decade.

Tell me what you gravitate to — authors, characters, eras — and why it moves you. You’ll be doing me a solid, bims and fellas.

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

By PJ Parrish

I am dipping a toe back in the fiction waters this week because I got an assignment to write a short story for an anthology. Man, my gears are rusty because I have officially retired from novel writing and without the daily routine, everything sort of freezes up.

Apologies to those of you who struggle with these demons every day. But shoot, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do this. Which means I am going to resort here to yet another metaphor.

Writing is like sailing in the ocean in the middle of a squall. I know because when I was young and living in Fort Lauderdale, I used to sail Hobie Cats competitively. 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? All of those have worked for me in the past. But today, I am sitting here staring at my empty screen waiting for my muse to show up.

Now, let’s get one thing clear here. I don’t really 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 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 1995 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 — Calliope, Clio, Erato, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Urania, Euterpe, and Thalia. (who was Dobie Gillis’s unobtainable ideal woman, btw). 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 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.

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. makes my skin crawl but man, can this guy write dialogue.

Then there’s my narrative muse. I call her Cat Woman because she slips in on silent paws, sings in a fey whisper and visits just as morning has broken. I sleep with blackout drapes, a white-noise machine and the A/C turned so cold the bedroom is like a crypt. So as I wake, there is icy air swirling and a soft swoooshing sound. And Cat Woman, whispering a long segment of exposition. I have learned to lay there, very still, until she is done, because if I get up to write it down, she vanishes.

My third muse is Flo, named after the waitress who worked in Mel’s Diner on the old Alice sitcom. Her voice sounds like the door of a rusted Gremlin. Flo’s Greek name is Nike (the goddess of victory) and her slogan is “Just Do It.” Because whenever those other muses fail me, Flo is there. She is the muse who knows that the only way I am going to get anything written is through plain old hard work.

I’d be lost without her. Who, or what, keeps you going?