If I transported you into the current book you’re writing or reading…

Where are you?

What obstacles are you facing?

How are you surviving — by using special skills or by hiding behind the main character? 

Please include title and author. 🙂 

By John Gilstrap

I came of age during the 1970s. I was six years old when JFK was assassinated in 1963, and I lived in the Washington, DC, suburbs during the violence and political turmoil of 1968-74. Every radio in the house was tuned to WMAL AM630, and they were on pretty much all the time. I woke up to Harden and Weaver giving the time and weather forecast 20 times an hour, and went to bed with Felix Grant playing soft jazz in the background. (When snow was in the forecast, I of course slept with my pajamas turned inside-out as a talisman for schools to be closed. Messrs. Harden and Weaver would be the deliverer of that news, requiring an earlier alarm so I could go back to sleep if my wishes were granted.)

I dreamed back then of one day becoming a radio broadcaster. As I approached the end of my high school years, the lure of the Columbia School of Broadcasting was almost overwhelming. In the end, I went to college instead, at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where I hoped to join the staff of WCWM, the college radio station. Alas, that turned out to be a clique for people whose lifestyles were different from mine, and I found myself not welcome.

After I graduated and returned to the DC area, I became addicted to morning and evening drivetime radio. The Morning Zoo fad was huge there. Even in the early ’80s, commutes were long and brutal, so radio entertainment was essential. My shock jocks of choice were Don Geronimo & Mike O’Meara (“We’re fat, we’re white, we’re Catholic, and we’re sick about it.”) In the afternoons, I preferred a more staid commute, so it was back to WMAL and Trumbull and Core (originally called Two For The Road, but they changed it after MADD started making waves). That afternoon broadcast was all about local and national news, but with a fun spin.

Fast forward to the 1990s and the beginning of my writing career. I’ve lost track of the number of radio interviews I’ve done by way of promoting my books. Add podcasts to the list and it has to be in the hundreds. Technically, those qualified as “being on the radio” but it wasn’t the same. First of all, the vast majority are phone-in interviews, and for the most part, I’m telling the same stories and answering the same questions, back-to-back. It’s the nature of touring.

Then came May 3, 2022. My publicist in New York arranged an in-studio interview with WRNR Eastern Panhandle Talk Radio and TV10 in Martinsburg, WV, essentially in my new backyard. I had the whole last segment of the show, about 25 minutes, and it went very well. Lots of laughs. When the show was over and we were saying our goodbyes, I mentioned to Rob Mario, the host of the show, that I had always dreamed about being on the radio.

Bam! Right then and there, he offered me a slot in his rotating schedule of guest hosts. The format of the show is local and statewide politics and community activities. So far, I’ve interviewed the mayor of Martinsburg, the president of the Berkeley County council, the director of the Health Department, and a number of the local business stars. If you’re reading this on August 24 between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m. Eastern time, I am on the air now.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts here in TKZ that I’m a Type-A extrovert. One of my biggest concerns as we walked away from a lifetime of living in Northern Virginia was wondering how I was going to streamline the process of getting to know people in my new community. Living in Berkeley County, WV, is the very model of rural small town life. County fairs are still big news, and the local paper reports the substance of valedictory speeches from the local high schools. I worried about being the outsider.

And then this opportunity fell into my lap. I am humbled and thrilled. I’ve always been a news junkie, and now I get to talk one-on-one (in front of thousands of people) with the newsmakers themselves. In fact, my very first interview on my very first day as a co-host was all about West Virginia’s proposed abortion legislation. Yikes! I think it went well. (They did ask me back again (and again . . .))

To bring this back around to the true focus of TKZ, Being a writer and having books to sell provides many opportunities to get out in front of other people. The odds are stacked against introverted authors who cave in to their shy tendencies. By being out there, wherever there is, that moment of celebrity can blossom into tremendous opportunity. I figure it can’t hurt to be introduced at the top and bottom of each hour as “New York Times bestselling author John Gilstrap.” Let’s call that soft marketing. I swear I can hear listeners all over the Eastern Panhandle turning to the person next to them and saying, “I’ve never heard of him.” If a few turn to their internet machines and do a search, well, that can’t hurt either.

And if no one does that, that’s okay. I’m fulfilling my dream of being on the radio.

By PJ Parrish

I’m going to tell tales out of school today. About some of the dumbest mistakes I’ve made in trying to write. Some mistakes died sad deaths in my C-drives. Others got fixed before I made a fool of myself in print. Maybe my confession here will help keep you on the righteous path.

Digression alert: I love idioms. I love their silliness, their creativity, their origins, and the slivers of insight within them. As you’ve read here, I’m trying to bone up on my French via online Babbel courses and yesterday’s lesson was idioms. La fin des haricots (the end of the beans) means “Well, that’s over!” And if you want to say someone is knee-high to a grasshopper, it’s haut comme trois pommes. As high as three apples. To have a hangover is avoir la gueule de bois — to have a wooden face.

So, telling tales out of school? It dates back to 1530, appearing in William Tindale’s The Practyse of Prelates: “What cometh once in may never out, for fear of telling tales out of school.”  It used to refer to kids gossiping about what they heard at school, but now we use it mean divulging secret information.

The tales I am going to tell out of school today all involve mistakes my sister Kelly and I made in our writing journey. Digression two: One of my favorite I Love Lucy episodes is “Lucy Writes A Novel.” She sends it off to a publisher, and he shows up with a check wanting to buy her book. But he wants to change the title to “Don’t Let This Happen To You!”

So pay attention, crime dogs. Don’t let any of these mistakes happen to you.

Introducing Too Many Characters Too Soon.

My sister’s first stab at a novel was a long historical family saga set in the Nevada casino world. She was working in the business back then and had tons of stories, great characters, and had boned up on her history of the birth of gambling. Her first chapter set-up was terrific — the offspring and four ex-wives of a rich patriarch (think Steve Wynn) are gathered at his gravesite at dawn as the lights of the Strip blink off in the distance.  Everyone there has a reason to hate the guy and an even better reason to kill him. Kelly’s mistake? She introduced every single one of the family members, giving each a name, thoughts, dialogue. I think I counted 32 characters in the first ten pages.

The lesson: Don’t flood your stage in the opening moments of act 1. It confuses the reader, makes them feel stupid, like they need a family tree. Give your reader a couple characters to digest at most. Please don’t make their names sound alike. And never wait too long to introduce your hero. From the get-go, readers search for characters to invest their emotions in, and you run the risk of them attaching to what I call a “false hero” if you’re not careful.

Nothing Happens

Flash back to 1989. Miami Vice is on TV and I’m trying to make the switch to mysteries after getting dropped as a romance writer. I had a terrific idea for a character — the lone woman detective working in the homicide division of the Miami PD. Lots of sexism, tokenism, testosterone poisoning. And to make her baggage even heavier, her husband and daughter died in a horrible boat crash in Biscayne Bay (that may have been a revenge murder for her busting a bad guy).  My first chapter opens with my heroine fishing at dusk in the Everglades. And she’s thinking. And remembering. And mourning. And thinking. And sighing. End of chapter. My agent, after reading it, told me to go home and read some Michael Connelly and PJ James.

The lesson? We belabor it here, especially James: Get your characters UP AND DOING in the opening moments. The thinking, remembering, musing, pondering, reflecting….save it for later. Please. I’m begging you. Something must happen. Action, then reaction. Oh, and don’t try to follow the zeitgeist — Miami Vice went off the air before I finished my first draft.

Larding In Backstory

Back to the casino…Kelly and I wanted to take a break from our Louis Kincaid series and we had an idea for this crusty-but-lovable character named Bailey. (The crusty-but-lovable bit should have been our first warning.) She’s a housewife who falls into an amateur detective gig at a run-down Nevada casino owned by her crusty-but-lovable father. We had a pretty good opening graph:

It’s not easy starting your life over when people think you murdered your husband and got away with it. Especially in a place like Morning Sun, Iowa.

But then we got mired in backstory. This is what followed:

The folks in Morning Sun — there’s only about four hundred of them — don’t have much tolerance for weird people, especially a rattlebrained housewife who tries to bail out of her marriage after a couple of little marital “tiffs.”

But I was born and bred in Morning Sun, and on that Fourth of July when my husband Brad came at me with the Ginsu knife we had just bought off a late-night infomercial, I didn’t figure I had a lot of options.

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

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

Okay, it’s not horrible, but it wasn’t good enough to get published. Our publisher passed. Our agent shopped it around and everyone passed. This, after we had made the New York Times list with our regular series. Why? Because it’s all backstory, it’s all telling. And it goes on this way for almost the entire first chapter. Nothing is happening in the present. Bailey is telling us her past rather than letting it emerge organically as the plot — plot? Now there’s a concept! — begins to unfurl. We tried to rewrite and have something happen earlier — a showgirl eventually falls off the casino tower. But it was bogged down with backstory and thus fatally flawed.

Don’t Take The Weapon Out Of Your Hero’s Hand

Thank God this mistake didn’t make it into print. And I owe it all to my sister’s blood lust. We’re racing to the finish line on our fourth Louis Kincaid mystery Thicker Than Water. We’re riding something of a wave because our second book got an Edgar nomination, and our third, Paint It Black was the one that got us on the Times list and got us nominated for the Shamus and Anthony. Thicker is what I call our “quiet” mystery, since it’s about a cold case and no one dies in the present. It’s heavy on character development, awash in nefarious lawyers and twisted family secrets. I treasure the review of it Ed Gorman gave us in Mystery Scene: “The quiet sadness that underpins it all really got to me, the way Ross Macdonald always does.”

So what was our mistake? In the climax, our hero Louis confronts the villain in a cemetery at the grave of the cold-case dead girl. Louis knows the guy killed her but can’t prove it. The guy, being a slimy but slick lawyer, knows Louis can’t prove it. In the first draft, Louis has to let him just…walk away.

Kelly wouldn’t sit for it. I still remember her words: “He’s has to DO something! Louis would never let him get away with this!” She was right, of course. I had taken the weapon out of Louis’s hands. There was no justice done, no circle closed. Yes, it was true to life, but it felt lifeless. We went back into the plot, rewrote the entire book, and finally figured out a twist that allowed Louis to nail the bad guy through some nifty legal machinations. But that still wasn’t enough for Kelly. Here’s how the conversation went when we got to that grave scene the second time:

“Louis can’t just walk away,” she said.

“But he’s got the evidence on the guy now. The guy’s going to prison,” I said.

“I don’t like it.”

“It’s reality.”

“I don’t care. I’m going to have Louis beat the sh– out of him first.”

And she did. We spent 300 pages building intense sympathy for a dead girl. The guy couldn’t walk away untouched. So Louis lost his temper and wailed on him. The scene gave an emotional catharsis that was missing.

The lesson: Never let your hero fall into passivity. You don’t have to do what we did, but always look for opportunities in your plot to make your protag sound clever, find a special clue, make a vital connection or, literally use the weapon. I’ve seen this flaw in many manuscripts I’ve critiqued wherein a writer allows a secondary character, usually a colorful sidekick, to outshine the hero. Yes, your hero needs to be human and make mistakes. But don’t ever let him or her be a bystander in your plot parade.

Postscript. I was originally going to call this Ten Mistakes That Will Doom Your Novel. I have enough material, believe me. I didn’t even get to my awful attempts at erotica. But I’ve flapped my gums enough for today. Good writing!

So here I am typing with seven fingers, and one thumb for spacing.

I’m sure we all type differently. Some with only index fingers, while others might utilize more digits as they watch the keys. There’s the “hunt and peck” crowd, and then those of us who were taught to touch type without looking at the keyboard.

That’s where I fall in. I never look at my fingers or the letters, only the words that appear on the screen, at least until three weeks ago when my orthopedic physician diagnosed a partially torn ligament in my left middle finger. That injured digit is now strapped securely to its index neighbor, requiring me to watch my left hand hunt and peck.

Being longer than the rest, the middle finger hamstrings my index digit, which should be striking the letters b, f, g, r, and t. Mr. Middle often misses c, d, e and because I can’t find the home keys, there are many, many typos.

Thanks to my lucky stars I can delete and backspace with my right, which I do on nearly every other word. If I was using real paper and White-Out, I’d be buying both by the train load.

for example, rhis is whar it looks lik4 qhen I’m nor warchinfg my gands.

This current malady throws off my writing balance on the other hand, causing it to make mistakes. And to make things worse, I just today sliced the end of my right middle finger and that bandage is also causing problems.

Irritating ain’t no word for it, and I have a self-imposed book deadline by the end of this month.

To make things worse, I had to visit my regular doctor to get a reference to the ortho.

“So, what brings you in today” The masked physician’s assistant settled down in front of her laptop resting on the exam room’s counter. In days gone by, those counters held a variety of torture instruments utilized by doctors who actually came into the examination room.

“Like I told the lady on the phone when I made the appointment, and by the way, she asked a lot of questions, anyway, I tripped while the Bride and I were hiking in Sedona and she says I fell like a redwood. I think I fractured my left middle finger.”

I resisted the urge to hold it up to her, fearing she’d take the familiar gesture the wrong way.

She hammered her keyboard with all fingers. “Which one?”

And that question brings me to my biggest pet peeve, besides this injured digit. No one listens anymore, because everyone is on some kind of device when they should be paying attention. Whether it’s the local fast food drive-through, which invariably gets my order wrong, to the kids bagging groceries, to the doctor’s office and an exam I didn’t need.

Through six decades of work and play, I’ve jammed, fractured, dislocated, cut, and broken almost all my fingers, except for the one in question. I waited for over six weeks after this particular injury for the swelling to go down, but it remained puffy. By the time I called the doctor’s office, it was stiff and painful in the mornings and I couldn’t curl it any longer.

The truth was, I wanted a specialist, but my GP said he had to see me (read here, his nurse practitioner) before he would recommend anyone and the others I called directly required a reference.

So Nurse Calpurnia sat at her computer and typed while I related the events leading up to that moment. “So anyway, that’s what happened.” I waited while Nurse Calpurnia squinted at her screen, apparently typing her own novel with two fingers. “And now I’m typing with nine fingers.”

She paused and considered my statement. “You only have eight fingers and two thumbs.”

“Oh, we’re going there, huh? Okay, I type with everything except for my left thumb, which just hangs there for balance I guess, kinda like an outrigger, and strangely, it doesn’t get tired after an entire day of working on my novel.”

She addressed the screen, distracted. “So it’s just your middle finger.”

I wanted to hold it up at her, but she wouldn’t have seen it anyway. “Yes. I wish I’d jammed my left thumb instead.”

“Why?”

I was succinct in my presentation, so what did she miss? I had to blink at that question for a moment, something she didn’t notice, either, because she was still hammering away on her keyboard.

Maybe she wants to be a novelist, and takes some kind of mysterious keyboard shorthand to get all the details, and then while patients are talking, she can write two or three paragraphs on her manuscript. At the end of any given day, Nurse Calpurnia could be five or six pages further along toward finishing. I think that’s kinda brilliant.

She pulled me from my reverie. “So you’re healthy otherwise.”

“Well, my knee’s still a little sore, but I’m not here for that. I’ll come back later if it keeps hurting so we can go through this again when I need a knee specialist.”

She missed my sarcasm. “Let me see your finger.”

And once again, I resisted the urge to demonstrate a proper gesture. She studied the extremity for a moment. “Let me see your other hand for comparison.”

“It looks a lot like my left, but without the swollen finger.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“One.” Instead of striking three letters, she typed for about five minutes, likely finishing a conversation between her characters.

“I can type really fast.” I decided to interrupt her train of thought. “Some days I’ve knocked out over 5,000 words, and once, I wrote 14,000. Now I’m down to 2,000 on a good day, because I taped this one to my index finger for support.” I paused to let that sink in, since she was still working on her book.

She finally straightened, cracked her knuckles, and frowned at me. “Why’d you wait six weeks before coming in?”

“I expected the swelling to go down.”

“But it hasn’t.”

“No.”

We nodded at each other and smiled, glad to have come to some sort of understanding.

“I need to take your blood pressure, pulse ox, and listen to your lungs.”

“They’re fine. I was in a month ago for a physical and all the pokes and listening and prods and blood work said I’m healthy.”

“Things can change.” She performed those duties as assigned and sat back down and attacked her keyboard long enough to finish a chapter. “Looks good.”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her book, or my exam results. “All except for my crooked finger.”

“It doesn’t look all that straight, does it?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Have you taken anything for it?”

“Gin.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, aspirin, but I’m an author and we drink…some…because I think it’s a law or we’re contractually obligated, so a few gin and tonics to chase a handful of aspirin and I’m good until the next day.”

“Fine, well, it looks like I need to send you for an X-ray.”

“That’s why I’m here, so I can get in to see an orthopedic.”

“We don’t do that here.”

“I know. I’m going through the process that would have been quicker if the doctor’d just given me a referral.”

“He can’t do that until he sees you.”

“Will he be in?”

“Not for something like this. I just made you an appointment for an X-ray at the imaging center.”

“When did you do that? You haven’t touched the keyboard since you finished that last chapter.”

“It was rather long, wasn’t it?”

“Everyone wants to be an author.”

“We all have our goals.” She closed her laptop and left.

So here I am, fingers still strapped together and typing 4,000 words a day, but backspacing over half of them because they’re typos. I really wanted to finish this novel by the end of the month, but that’s not happening. I’m shooting for October 1, with 30,000 words to go, which equates to 60,000 strokes plus revisions…

…I’m gonna quit now. It’s too depressing.

Reader Friday: A Fan Moment  –  Dale Ivan Smith

Like many authors, I have been fortunate to have moments in my author career where I’ve received emails from fans, or a message on social media from readers who liked my work. There was the woman who plowed through my Empowered series in a few days and wrote to tell me she couldn’t stop reading, and how she’d missed sleep thanks to me because she had to see how the series turned out. Then there was the award-winning fantasy author who emailed to say they had enjoyed my urban fantasy novel Gremlin Night.

Writers are also readers, and I’ve been equally fortunate to have some fan moments with authors whose own writing made a difference to me. One author was David Morrell, who I met in person at a writer’s workshop he gave here in Portland years ago. I’d found his novel First Blood a riveting read, and his non-fiction book on writing, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing AKA The Successful Novelist. David was as thoughtful and encouraging in person as he was in his writing book. He  took the time to talk to each of us during breaks. Being able to talk to him casually for a couple of minutes meant a lot and helped reinforce the kindness he showed throughout his workshop.

Another was getting to meet Neil Gaiman in person. I had loved his Sandman graphic novel series and his novel American Gods, and his television work for Doctor Who and Babylon 5. At a 2013 book signing hosted by Powell’s Books here in Portland, I mentioned to him I had applied to the six-week Clarion West Writers Workshop he would teach at shortly. When I had applied to Clarion West a few months earlier, his upcoming workshop inspired to go further and apply as well to a two-week novel writing workshop being given by Kij Johnson, another Hugo and Nebula award-winning author.

I ended up not being accepted into Clarion West. However, Kij did accept me for her novel writing workshop and itt had just ended shortly before his book signing. We agreed Kij was a brilliant writer and teacher. I told him that, while I was sorry not to have made it into his workshop, Kij’s had proven transformational for me, and it was thanks to him inspiring me to apply to both CW and the Novel writing workshop. He smiled and reached out and shook my hand.

Now it’s your turn. Please tell us about a fan moment you’ve had with a reader, or as a fan yourself with an author you admire.