By John Gilstrap

Self-doubt is a crippling condition for any artist. (Spoiler: It never goes away. You just learn to manage it.) For young or inexperienced artists–hereinafter called writers because this is a blog about writing–self-doubt can be paralyzing. You write something you think is pretty good, but when you show it to your “beta readers” they have suggestions, so forward progress stops on your story.

The writer’s internal monologue goes something like this: I thought that description of the lightning strike was pretty strong. But if Beta George didn’t like it, there must be something wrong. He said he didn’t like the word “struck” because he thought it was a cliche. And he said Main Character Harriett wasn’t scared enough. I don’t get why she’d be more scared than she is, but if Beta George thinks. . .

I call this navel gazing. No further work gets done on the story because the writer is wrapped around his own axle trying to make Beta George happy–even if it’s against the writer’s own better judgment.

Does this scenario sound familiar to anyone: Mary has been working on her story for eighteen months but hasn’t gotten past Chapter Three. Every time she tries to move forward, she looks back and realizes that what she’s written is terrible. She wonders why she ever thought she could write a book, maybe has a little cry or maybe a big cocktail, and then she goes back to the beginning.

NOTE: Up to and excluding the part where she starts over, this is a process I go through with every book. Twenty-one of them. It’s part of the process. Literally, writing crappy prose is a necessary element of the journey to get to the end of a project. And not just at the beginning of a career. Every. Friggin’. Book.

Having done this a few times grants the advantage of having confidence in the crappy parts. I know that once the creative boiler comes up to pressure and I’m steaming through the story, I’ll be able to take care of damage control. But I have to get up to pressure. I have to move the story forward.

I’m going to share my strategy for managing doubt and crappy prose, and then I’m going to share how I think you should handle it until you feel confident that your boiler is sound.

I start every writing session by rewriting what I wrote in the previous two sessions. Then, when I finish today’s session of moving forward, I intentionally do not go back and edit. That’s tomorrow’s job, after things are less fresh in my head. Rewriting takes about an hour most days, and then I forge ahead. By the time I get to the end of the first draft, I’m really on my third or fourth draft, and all I need is a quick pass for a polish.

My system works for me because a) I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and b) I force myself to add at least a thousand words to yesterday’s count. Two thousand is better, and I think my record is 8,900. I don’t want to do that again.

Here’s my suggestion for others: Eyes Front. Don’t look back. Period. Hard stop.

Pick a targeted word count or a date on the calendar (think 10,000 words or three weeks–a real stretch). Until that milestone is reached, you are forbidden to look back at what you’ve written. Keep the story moving forward. Only forward. Get that boiler churning. Fall in love with your story again. And no cheating! If you forget what you named that guy in Chapter Two, mark the spot with asterisks and keep going.

When you reach your milestone, you MUST congratulate yourself for having met it. If you’re sailing your book at full speed through calm waters, set another goal and keep pressing on. If you need to go back to fix stuff (all those asterisks, for example), go for it. Make all the changes you feel are necessary, but remember that you still owe yourself a thousand words of forward progress.

Don’t let your book run aground while you’re cleaning the bilges.

What do you think, TKZers? Worth a try?

(Disclaimer: The quiz part of this post I lifted from one my own old posts. Don’t sue me.)

By PJ Parrish

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

I had my usual hot date this past Sunday. He’s a dream-boat of a guy and he never disappoints me. We met in a bar in Toronto back in my salad days, and had a Same Time Next Year sort of thing going on. But then we drifted off into other things and lost touch.  But a couple years ago, I ran into him again and it was like…magic.

Okay, before I get in trouble here, I will tell you that my hot date is Eddie Muller. I first met Eddie oh, maybe seventeen years ago at a Bouchercon conference. Back then, he was still writing crime fiction and had won the Shamus Award for his debut novel The Distance. My sister Kelly and I were nominated for our third book Paint It Black. We lost, but I remember Eddie was very sweet to us. Bought me a drink, as I recall.

Fast forward to 2017 and I ran into Eddie again while I was channel surfing. He had a great new gig as the host of Turner Classic Movie’s Noir Alley series. He would introduce each film, drawing on his lifelong love of the genre. We now hook up every Sunday morning on TCM. (This Sunday it’s Underworld U.S.A., starring Cliff Robertson who’s out to avenge the murder of his father even as he falls in love with a femme fatale named Cuddles, whom he just might have to kill.)

It was Eddie who introduced me to what would become my favorite noir film A Kiss Before Dying. It was Eddie who showed me that my teenage crush Dr. Ben Casey was really a creep in Murder By Contract. It was Eddie who led me to the novels of James M. Cain via Double Indemnity.  Here’s Eddie talking about that seminal classic:

I am still trying to catch up on my noir reading. (I didn’t get to The Maltese Falcon until about ten years ago, I confess). Digesting noir, with its emphasis on oppressive mood and shadowed morality, with its lean mean style, has helped me find my own voice as a writer. I am not a true neo-noir practitioner, but I feel a deep connection to its dark heart. One of the best compliments I ever got was when Ed Gorman wrote of our book Thicker Than Water: “The quiet sadness that underpins it all really got to me, the way Ross Macdonald always does.”

A couple Christmases ago, my husband gave me The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. It’s a compilation of the best crime stories from the “golden age” of pulp crime fiction — the ’20s through the ’40s. It’s about the size of an old Manhattan phone book. And to be really honest, parts of it read about as well.

Many of these guys were dismissed as the hacks of their day, churning out their stories for cheaply printed magazines like “Black Mask” and “Dime Detective.” Yeah, they were lurid, the syntax cringe-worthy, the plots thin or nonsensical. But they tapped into a popular need for a new kind of human hero. The most memorable of the heroes became the prototypes for much of what we are seeing in our crime fiction today — lone wolves fighting for justice against all odds but always on their own different-beat terms. Would we have Harry Bosch without the Continental Op? Jack Reacher without Simon Templar? No way…

And while we’re at it, let’s not get sucked into the notion that noir was only a guy thing. Valerie Taylor had a career churning out books like The Girls In 3B, a classic ’50s pulp tale showcasing predatory beatnik men, drug hallucinations, and secret lesbian trysts. (Her books, among others, have been reissued by Feminist Press.) And would we have Megan Abbott or Sarah Gran without Dorothy B. Hughes, who wrote the twisty indictment of misogyny In A Lonely Place (the source of the Bogart movie)? Doubtful…

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

Especially in pure writing style. I think we can read these stories now mainly to appreciate the streamlined locomotive style that propels these stories along their tracks. When you read them, you can almost hear James M. Cain whispering: “I’m not going to dazzle you with my writing. I’m going to tell you a helluva story.”

These guys sure knew what to leave out. Here’s a passage from Paul Cain’s “One Two Three:”

I said: “Sure — we’ll both go.

Gard didn’t go for that very big, but I told him that my having been such a pal of Healy’s made it all right.

We went.

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

How can you read that and not smile? I heartily recommend the Big Book of Pulps. And if you haven’t connected with Eddie on Noir Alley, you’re missing out on some of the best stuff television has to offer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area where I reside averages forty inches of precipitation per year. Seattle, which has the reputation of being rainy all of the time, averages thirty-eight inches annually. I am given to understand that Seattle receives a steady, gentle rain (and a bit of snow in the winter) throughout the year, with precipitation occurring a bit more frequently than every other day. It rains every few days in Columbus over a period of about six months — April through October —  and then we of course get some snow during the rest of the year. 

We sometimes get some spells of heavy, flood-warning rain. We had several days of those a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t have any damage, outside or inside. It was still a bit emotionally wearing, in a seasonal affective disorder way. It is easy to wonder by the second or third straight day of rain whether the sun will ever be seen again.

It is on such days that I think of Ray Bradbury, or, to be more precise, two of his stories. The first of these was originally titled “Death by Rain” and appeared in the pulp magazine Planet Stories in an issue published on September 23, 1950, almost one year to the day before I was born.

Forgive me for exhibiting a moment of looseness of association. I actually had the opportunity to buy that magazine for a dollar in 1962 at a used bookstore. I instead used the dollar to buy several brand new comic books, including one titled The Amazing Spider-Man #1, which I still own. My logic at the time was that I already had “Death by Rain,” retitled as “The Long Rain,” in the Bradbury short story collection The Illustrated Man. The original cover price of Planet Stories was twenty cents, and the merchant was selling it for a whole dollar. It seemed like a bad deal to me. I was right. I can buy that issue of Planet Stories for under thirty dollars on e-bay while that Spider-Man comic is worth considerably more than that. 

To digress from the digression,  I have read “The Long Rain” dozens of times. It presents a future in which a rocket ship crashlands on Venus in the early days of Venusian colonization by Earth. The astronauts on board who survive are beset by constant rainstorms which, in the 1940s, were thought to occur to occur on Venus. The astronauts attempt to reach one of the sun domes — shelters constructed during earlier visits to Venus — in a last-ditch survival effort. Hilarity does not ensue. Tragedy does. The ending is enigmatic, even more so upon each rereading. Folks still argue about it. I think of that story whenever the rain never seems to stop and the sun becomes a memory stay thankful for having my own sun dome, as well as the (almost) certain knowledge that the rain will eventually pass. 

The second Bradbury story that comes to mind during the central Ohio version of monsoon season is titled “All Summer in a Day.” It isn’t as well known as “The Long Rain” but is a bit more poignant and ultimately maybe the better tale of the two. “All Summer in a Day” published in the March 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which, unlike Planet Stories, is still around. Bradbury is mentioned on the cover but does not get top billing, interestingly enough. His contribution to that issue is a classic nonetheless. “All Summer in a Day” is also set on  Venus. The Venus of this story is somewhat similarly inhospitable to the Venus of “The Long Rain” but has been sufficiently colonized to have children residing there who were born planetside and elementary schools built for them to attend. One of the school children is a girl named Margot who moved from Earth to Venus five years prior to the story’s present. Margot is the only one in her class who has seen the sun. The reason for this is that (in the story) the sun is only visible on Venus for one hour every seven years, The event is coming up, and it’s a big deal, particularly for Margot, who misses seeing that which she had previously taken for granted. The problem is that some of Margot’s classmates are unhappy with her, and as a result they…well, you will have to read the story to find out, but I will tell you that it is for me one of the saddest stories I have ever read (I’m getting a little misty-eyed just writing about it, but don’t tell anybo… Oops).  “All Summer in a Day” has been collected in a number of Bradbury’s anthologies, including the U.S. Edition of A Medicine for Melancholy. Bradbury, as the result of stories such as “All Summer in a Day”  and the chilling “The Small Assassin,” acquired the reputation of hating children. Maybe he did. I don’t share that opinion, but after reading “All Summer in a Day” you will understand why he was painted with that brush, and why I think of it after several days of central Ohio gloom.

I doubt Bradbury thought at the time he wrote the stories I’ve been discussing that either of them would be remembered decades later. He lived long enough to see that happen, and to see them taught, studied, and even adapted to other media. That’s pretty good for a couple of stories that were purchased by editors at the rate of a couple of pennies per word and published in what were referred to as “pulp” magazines. The lesson here is that you might have a story or five that accumulated some rejection slips. Check your hard drive or your file drawer and read a few of them, pick up a couple, shine them up, and send them out again. It is possible that the churl who rejected them initially now sleeps with the fishes and that a pair of fresh editorial eyes will look more favorably upon them. Sixty years from now someone may be discussing your story as a result. I assure you that stranger and more unlikely things have happened. You might even be still alive to see it.

Back to the rain… I am not alone in feeling this way, at least about “The Long Rain.” Our own blogger emeritus Joe Moore reported having a similar reaction to that story in this space way back in 2012. What about you? Do you have a favorite story that deals with weather that has been written either by you or someone else? And sure. It can take place on any world, including this one. 

Enjoy your weekend. May it be sunny. 

By Elaine Viets

I’m starting my sixth Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery by returning to my comfort read, Agatha Christie. After all, she’s sold a billion books in English and another billion in foreign languages.
Why read an author who’s been dead for nearly 45 years?

Because her writing is timeless. I still learn from her. Here are three ways:
(1) Agatha Christie’s character descriptions are superb.
Even the most unimportant characters are carefully described.
In Death on the Nile “smooth-footed, deft-handed waiters ministered” to Hercule Poirot’s table, serving him an excellent meal.

And while the butler didn’t commit this murder, his brief appearance is memorable:
“A few minutes later she was being ushered into the long stately drawing room, and an ecclesiastical butler was saying with the proper mournful intonation, ‘Miss de Bellefort.’”
I love those phrases –”an ecclesiastical butler” “with the proper mournful intonation.” I can almost hear him intone her name.

(2) Agatha Christie finds fresh ways to describe series characters.

It’s tempting for series writers like myself to repeat the same descriptions of our main characters, book after book. But we have to be careful. Readers are smart enough to recognize boilerplate.
Here’s Agatha’s description of Hercule in After the Funeral. This is the 29th mystery in the Poirot series, but she still comes up with a new description:
“There were no curves in the room. Everything was square. Almost the only exception was Hercule Poirot himself, who was full of curves. His stomach was pleasantly rounded, his head resembled an egg in shape, and his moustaches curved upwards in a flamboyant flourish.”
Hercule is talking to Mr. Goby, an expensive operative who acquires outre information. Here’s Agatha’s clever description of a nondescript operative:
“Mr. Goby was small and spare and shrunken. He had always been refreshingly nondescript in appearance and he was now so nondescript as practically not to be there at all.”
Mr. Goby has to deliver a long list information that could have been quite dry. But Agatha livens it up with a funny bit. Here’s how Mr. Goby gives his report to Poirot:
“He was not looking at Poirot because Mr. Gobi never looked at anybody. Such remarks as he was now making seemed to be addressed to the left-hand corner of the chromium-plated fireplace curb.” He delivers his first round of information that way.
For the second batch, Mr. Goby “shifted his gaze to an electric plug socket.”
The third burst of info is given while he “winks at a lampshade.”
And finally, Mr. Goby finishes his information “by nodding his head at a cushion on the sofa.”
Mr. Goby never appears in this book again, but Agatha has found a good way to make what could have been a boring recitation of facts entertaining.
(3) Agatha Christie knows how to skip esoteric discussions that can bog down a scene.
Hercule is back at that fine dinner, and the host says, “‘You will enjoy your dinner, Monsieur Poirot. I promise you that. Now as to wine–’
“A technical conversation ensued, with Jules, the maitre d’hotel, assisting.”
Agatha also uses this technique to avoid repetitious dialogue from scene to scene.
That’s how I prep for my newest novel. I don’t call it procrastination, though Agatha has some 80 books and short stories.
What do you do before you start your novels?

***********************************************************************
A Star Is Dead – “witty dialogue and well-defined characters” says Publishers Weekly – sold out of its first printing. Buy it  here:

https://tinyurl.com/y7cv83v4

Photo courtesy of Kathleen Reardon

Today, I’m visiting with mystery author Kathleen Reardon, Ph.D. She is professor emerita in management at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and now lives in Ireland. Her website is aptly named comebacksatwork.com because she is an expert in comebacks!

We “met” through the Authors Guild discussion group while discussing new strategies for book launches during the pandemic. The more we “talked,” the more I thought her story of persistence in the face of daunting setbacks would interest TKZ readers.

While Kathleen’s accomplishments are extraordinary, the challenges she had to overcome are even more extraordinary.

Welcome to The Kill Zone, Kathleen!

Debbie: Your background is academia and you have written numerous award-winning, bestselling business books. What prompted you to write fiction?

Kathleen: As a teenager, I loved writing fiction and poetry. My junior year English teacher, Judith Kase, was particularly encouraging. Back then, I expected to be a writer and English teacher for life, but my career took me on to an MA and Ph.D. in communication sciences, college teaching and research. There was little time for creative writing, especially prior to tenure. At thirty-two, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Recovery took a while as did salvaging my career.

The fiction writing bug finally bit and wouldn’t let go in my early forties. My father had encouraged me to write fiction. He thought I’d pushed it aside long enough, but there was still the challenge of becoming a full professor. I also had three young children. So, I wrote most of Shadow Campus, my debut novel, during summer breaks until 2012 when I focused and got it done.

DB: What was the spark for this book and/or your series?  Please share how you came to write it.

KR: The spark for Shadow Campus was being the first woman to go up for tenure at a top business school. Breaking the glass ceiling is never easy. Change is hard. Sometimes resistance leads to incivility. One day I woke up early and began writing. Over the next week, I got the bones of the story on paper. I just couldn’t stop. Shadow Campus was born that week and I was en route to becoming a mystery author.

 Damned If She Does (2020) is a stand-alone sequel. Here again, the spark was experience as a female professor. I wrote most of the novel before MeToo began. It’s first and foremost a New York City crime mystery. But fiction often conveys messages about reality. A major subplot deals with abuse and the potential consequences of secrecy. Is there a best way forward? Is it better personally and for society to identify a perpetrator? Or are women damned if we do and damned if we don’t?

DB: A reviewer of your debut novel draws an interesting comparison between academia and organized crime! Is there an element of truth? Does it apply to Damned If She Does too?

KR: In my nonfiction, especially The Secret Handshake and It’s All Politics, I write about levels of politics in organizations from church choirs to multinationals – the worst of these is pathological politics. In my first trade book, They Don’t Get It, Do They?,as well as my Harvard Business Review classic, “The Memo Every Woman Keeps in Her Desk,” my focus was on the challenging road many women travel when they endeavor to be recognized and promoted for exceptional work. Weaved throughout both of my novels are insights from that work.

In Shadow Campus, Meg has all the credentials for promotion. Yet, in the opening scene – the night before her tenure decision – she is found hanging in her office, nearly dead. We learn that this crime was facilitated by several characters. I think that’s what the reviewer saw as “organized crime.”

DB: Readers are interested in your particular process for writing. Do you have special or unique techniques you use?

KR: People ask me how I keep readers from knowing who did it. The answer: I hide it from myself. Any of the primary characters could be the killer and I keep several as candidates until near the end. It’s a lot like spinning a number of plates, but that’s what I enjoy about mysteries. If I know precisely “who done it” while writing, there’s a good chance that I’ll accidentally telegraph that to my readers. So, keeping me in the dark keeps them in the dark too. I truly enjoy that aspect.

DB: You “interviewed” one of your main characters for a post on your website. What a great idea (which I’m going to steal)! Tell us about that.

KR: Shamus Doherty, Meg’s older brother, is a diamond in the rough. Many women who’ve read my two novels consider him very appealing. He’s complex and caring but a bit rough around the edges – gruff when he means to be tender. These characteristics wreak havoc with his love life. He can be overbearing as an older brother. To his credit, however, he does learn.

My interview with him was a chance to get inside his head a bit. He didn’t want to be interviewed, but he felt obliged because I’d created him. His wit and charm came through. I merely wanted to give him a chance to speak for himself. I can hear him now denying that altruistic claim. Be that as it may, I think he kind of likes me.

DB: Is there anything else you’d like to share with TKZ?

KR: I was fortunate to attend an Authors Guild webinar with Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume. It was great. Margaret said you need to grab the reader by page 5. By then he or she knows whether this is a door worth walking through. I think that’s great advice. Judy said she misses the freshness of being a new author. That’s food for thought. How do we get that back each time we sit down to write? I tend to take walks, enjoy nature, step away from the story and then allow myself to become enthused with where the characters are likely to take me next.

Book three of the trilogy is calling me. It will be based in West Cork, Ireland.

Thank you, Kathleen, for visiting TKZ! Congratulations on your new release, Damned If She Does, which Kirkus Reviews named among “Great Indie Books Worth Discovering.” 

~~~

TKZers: Do you have special tricks that propel you over the hurdles of writing? Have you come back from misfortune? 

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Debbie Burke’s thriller, Dead Man’s Bluff, is available for pre-order at this link for only $.99. Publication date: June 23.