One Writer's World

Where Have the Birds Gone?

2011-10-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

October is a decision month for me. This is when I decide, quietly, whether or not I'm going to feed the birds this winter. When I was growing up, we fed the birds throughout the worst winter months but never in the summer, since we felt they had plenty of food in the natural world. So, October and November were a time of getting the bird feeders ready and choosing the appropriate bird seed. But with the change in the species frequenting our backyard, I no longer feel the same way about feeding the winter birds.

I don't know if this is part of global warming, but the species we now see around our house have changed dramatically in the last couple of years. We've had an influx of flocks and flocks of sparrows. They're everywhere. When I walk in the early morning, they flutter up from the ground and hide in hedges until I pass, chirping in annoyance until I'm well beyond their feeding ground. Unlike most other birds in this area, they don't quiet down when humans approach; instead, they get louder and louder, as though warning us off.

When I look out the window in the late afternoon I no longer see the pairs of cardinals that have lived on this stretch of our street for years, nor the occasional junco or chickadee or gold finch. I haven't even heard the mocking bird recently, and I haven't seen a cowbird in years (I don't actually miss that one, considering its behavior). I don't look for barn swallows, since there aren't any real barns around here anymore either, and I miss their distinctive flight pattern and forked tails.

My backyard now consists of hundreds of sparrows swooping and diving, forking and rejoining, rising as a single mass, scattering and reforming; a blue jay that insists on pecking at the door frame on the back porch; and a lot of crows that make as much noise as they want, thank you very much. Last weekend a flock of turkeys wandered down a nearby side street, and have since crossed several streets and found their way to the front yard of an old estate on the water, where a small dog chases them.

Last winter we had a flock of mallards march stately across the frozen snow to our back terrace to eat all the seed we had put out for the regular winter visitors. They drove off all the other birds and filled the terrace. Even when I went out to drive them off, they didn't go far. Watching them approach inexorably, over snow drifts and snow piles, slow step by slow step, in a straggling line, was the most disappointing part of the winter. I don't want them back again this year.

I miss the birds of color and, I think, independence and grace and variety. The cardinals were a bit skittish of people and hid among the bushes, but their color and thoughtful movements were a delight. The chickadees, juncos, and others came and went and all shared their space on the terrace. With the influx of mallards and sparrows, the quieter, more colorful pairs are gone, driven away by both other species and climate.

With the onset of winter I am becoming reconciled to the permanent loss of the more colorful birds and the new residency of the sparrows. I probably won't feed them, since that will only encourage them to stay, and will certainly attract the ducks. But I am thinking of planting a garden next summer just to attract the kinds of birds I have come to miss. I have all winter to plan.

A Little Nostalgia (Very Little)

2011-10-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling nostalgic today. Perhaps it was the rain yesterday and today, which kept me inside staring at my computer and feeling morose, or perhaps it's because I just finished the first draft of another novel and now I have time to let my mind wander in a different way.

My nostalgia around writing takes one of two forms--thinking about my earlier work and recalling those who helped me along the way, beginning with teachers from way back when. Today I'm thinking mostly about the stories from years ago that were never published.

I have dozens of stories and articles locked in limbo on floppy disks. A couple of years ago I got a disk reader for my iBook, but it would only read disks of a certain color (black was in, everything else was out). Granted, these disks are old and the work stored on them older still but I was curious to find what was there. The titles on the labels didn't ring any bells, and the one or two articles I really wanted to find weren't listed on the labels. I had recently had a request for an article I'd written and discussed on a panel, so I set about finding it. I couldn't find a paper copy, but I knew I had a backup. After all this looking, all I can say is, I believe I did at one time have a backup.

My confidence in digital records was never very great, and it diminishes with each passing year. I have stacks of floppies with once treasured work that I will probably never see again in any form, having thrown away paper copies for the blissful delusion of preserving rare storage space by relying on disks. I have two old backup systems that I never use now--and I would need a different attachment to read them. My MacBook Air needs an attachment for just about everything.

Work composed before I got a computer is still accessible because the paper hasn't yet turned to dust, so I occasionally come across something I wrote in my teens and twenties and even into my thirties. Two things catch my eye. First, there's an occasional phrase or insight that feels new to me and I ponder this and think about reusing it. Second, the earlier nonfiction pieces have an underlying confidence that amuses me--this is youth at its most obvious and annoying.

I once decided to rework an earlier (much, much earlier) story and began by ruthlessly cutting out everything that was mediocre, unimaginative, a cliche, etc. After a few hours of this--rereading, cutting, rethinking--I was left with two paragraphs I considered acceptable. I still don't know what to do with them, but the experience taught me how much my writing has changed over the years.

Except for the days when I have a little extra time on my hands, or it's raining like a monsoon, I rarely think about my old work. It's done, published or put away, and no longer relevant to what I'm doing now. I'm one who believes that life is a series of rooms that we should inhabit fully as we pass through, then turn off the light as we leave and move on. I may never find out what's on those old floppies, but I know I'll never care beyond a mild curiosity, and if they're stacked on the desk when I have a wastebasket in my hand, they may disappear and I will never think about them again.

Writing in the Moment

2011-09-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a new series with a plot that seems to grow more complicated every time I start typing. At first I thought I had the basic idea worked out--who the murderer was, the motive, the mode of investigation, and the back story that would fill out the novel. I worry every few days over whether or not the story will be long enough, or complicated enough, to satisfy the discerning mystery reader. I worry I'll be left with a ho-hum novella. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it's not working out that way.

I am not someone who can outline a plot and write from the outline. I've read plenty of how-to books that recommend this, especially for a first novel, and for several years I even felt like I'd never get anywhere if I didn't learn to outline. Of course, I was writing and publishing the entire time I was lamenting my inability to outline. But still, this seemed like such a good idea--so practical and goal-oriented, and recommended by very successful writers that I really felt I should master this skill. Writers who work from outlines can use one to produce a summary or a synopsis on demand, find exactly the right place to add a clue or complication, and can always tell the editor waiting for the final draft where they are in the story and what to expect as the writer moves forward. In the end, however, I gave up trying to learn this technique, and I remain in awe of those writers who have mastered it. But I'd rather have a root canal than compose an outline and follow it.

For me, writing a novel or short story is a process of discovery. I have to be in the story, living each scene and discovering connections between characters and events from their past as I go along. By the time I reach the end of the first draft, the identify of the murderer has changed three or four times--it's amazing to me the number of characters I create in any one book who are capable of murder and make quite reasonable villains. The victim doesn't change, but his or her character deepens, and I learn more about who he or she is and how this person could do something that would inspire murder.

By the time I'm two-thirds of the way through the first draft, I have so many clues and loose ends to tie up that I worry I have made the story too complicated, perhaps needlessly so, and won't be able to finish it. This is when I start thinking about whittling down the number of characters, perhaps combining two minor characters into one and making this composite more interesting or effective. If the novel feels it has gotten away from me, that's all right. I'm willing to let the book have a life of its own--as long as I can steer it to a satisfying conclusion. And of course, I have to have faith that I can steer it anywhere.

I liken my technique to the experience of a vacation. I don't expect the same experience twice even if I visit the same place twice. Life doesn't work that way. Each day is new, with its own set of challenges and discoveries, no matter how much sameness we think we are encountering.

Whenever I try to explain my approach to writing--one of the more popular questions at writers' panels--I think of John Updike and his contrast between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. Writing nonfiction, Updike said, is like hugging the shore, the term for sailing always in sight of land. Writing fiction is sailing away from the shore, away from the safe markers of the world, to discover what is out there. It's risky and it can be scary, because the waves are higher and the wind stronger, but the chance is much greater that you'll find a new land.

Discovering Francetta

2011-08-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

Recently I finished a manuscript about Anita Ray, the Indian American woman photographer who lives in India at her aunt's hotel, but through the last few days of working on the manuscript I kept hearing the voice of another character. This is the kind of thing that often happens to me when I'm finishing a book--I hear the voice for a character in the next book, see the story idea starting to cohere in my imagination, see scenes that will show up in the story. The problem is, the character's voice is entirely different from everything else I've written. Her name is Francetta and she is totally unlike any of my other protagonists in many ways. Nevertheless, I kept listening.

I finished the Anita Ray and sent it off, and then sat down to hear what Francetta had to say to me--who was she and what was her story? In the first few pages, she was mostly a very hard-nosed woman pretty angry about life. She had lots to say and her language wasn't always pretty. But she had a wry sense of humor, a laser sharp eye for the phony, and a fearlessness in facing life that I admired. I listened.

Francetta has quite a story--about her murdered husband, her months in prison, and her friends who aren't really friends. She looks on her past as a foster child with acceptance, and stays focused on the present--her friendship with her mother-in-law, her growing son, and her husband's memory.

Francetta tells her story with verve and a sly sense of humor. I don't know the whole story yet, but she's letting me in on it in bits and pieces.

I usually write as a process of discovery, uncovering the plot and clues, getting to know the other characters and their lives, but usually I know the protagonist pretty well. But this time I'm discovering just about everything--a new character, a new setting, a new kind of crime, a new language. I'll let you know how it goes.

eBooks and the Slush Pile

2011-04-11T17:34:00.001-07:00

Over the last few weeks I’ve come across lots of discussion about eBooks, the future of publishing, and how the career of a writer is changing. Most of the time I come away from these discussions confused at the amount of information that is out there and needs to be absorbed just to begin to understand the problem. But then it dawned on me:

Ebooks are the new slush pile.

Now, this may not mean anything to most writers today because over the last thirty or forty years most publishers have given up the slush pile. The slush pile was a long and honored tradition of publishing houses accepting for review manuscripts that arrived unsolicited. No agent had sent them and no editor had requested them. They arrived because the writers had enough confidence (or demented ego) to believe that a stranger would buy their work if just given a chance to read it. And sometimes they were right. Thousands if not millions of mss went through the slush pile, but rarely did any one stand out enough to be read from beginning to end, and then to capture the reader’s attention so thoroughly that he or she decided to pass it up the line. If you know how the slush pile works, you know why surviving it is a rarity.

An editor assigned to manage the slush pile was usually new to the business and had many other duties. Her job (and it usually was a she) was to glance quickly through the mss (read page one, check page 200 to see if the author is still on the same topic and can still write, and read the last paragraph to see if the writer is still sane) and select an appropriate rejection letter. The editor signed this, usually with a pseudonym. (Unless you’ve actually worked in a publishing house, you have no idea how many people will show up uninvited and unexpected, insisting on seeing “their” editor.)

If the editor happened to come across something that seemed truly remarkable, she might read more, and if she read the entire mss and liked it, she then had to persuade a number of other editors, all senior to her, that here was something worth looking at. Considering the known writers the other editors were working with, the slush editor had her work cut out for her. And this is where eBooks come in.

There is no longer a need for a slush pile. Any book published in eBook format is in essence sent out into the world’s largest slush pile. Many of these books will die or disappear after selling half a dozen downloads to the author’s friends and relatives. These results are in essence kind rejection letters (“Thank you for letting us review your mss; I’m sorry to report that this isn’t for us”).

Few novice writers will reach the heights of Amanda Hocking, who sold upwards of a million ecopies through her own efforts. But she is proof that there still is a slush pile and that it still works—by word of mouth, she sold her books one reader at a time, working her way up the scale of readership, until she had an audience that would return again and again.

Tags: editing, slush pile, writing, Amanda Hocking

Six Rules for Success

2010-12-04T11:19:00.000-08:00

Mystery writing conferences are a great opportunity for those of use who work at our craft in isolation most of the time to get together and renew our enthusiasm. This year’s Crime Bake was one of the best, and I came away with lots of things to think about and new books to read. The panels brought a lot of new names and topics, but through it all, writers came back to a few main points about writing and the life of a writer. These are worth keeping in mind no matter who the writer is—the author of a bestseller, of a first book, or of half a dozen mysteries that sell modestly. So here they are, the qualities of a successful writer as reiterated by a number of writers who have achieved a range of success.

First, be persistent. Writing the novel takes time, selling it to a publisher takes time, producing it takes time, and selling it to the book-buying public takes time. It can take twenty years to become an overnight sensation, so keep working year after year after year, and you will continue to learn and grow and eventually get there.

Second, continue to study your craft no matter how many stories or books you have published. There is always more to learn, always something you can do better. Do you struggle with dialogue? Listen to how people talk, transcribe conversations, practice set pieces with two people encountering each other in a café or on the street. Write things outside your comfort zone—write a thriller short story if you’re used to writing traditional stories, practice a fight scene, describe a place you don’t expect to use in a story and how your character moves through it. Read, write, learn.

Third, write with your whole self. This usually comes out as write from the heart, or write what you love to read, or write what you want to read. But however you phrase it, you as the writer must be fully involved in the task of writing the story; if you’re not involved, your reader won’t be either. This also means, write without thinking about who will publish it. Forget what happens when you’re finished—just write the story.

Fourth, forget about following trends. By the time you finish your book, the trend will be petering out and the editors will have moved on to something else. Even worse, if you’re writing to a trend you’re liable to be writing poorly, writing something that you don’t truly care about, and it will show.

Fifth, don’t complain about how hard this business is. If it were easy, every single person you know would be a writer and everyone would be successful (how that would work out mathematically for book sales I don’t really know). Don’t complain about the agents or editors or reviewers; they’re not going to change for you or anyone else, and they are, for the most part, doing a great job in a difficult business. Their life isn’t any easier than yours. Your job is to write, and leave the rest of it to others.

Sixth, accept the fact that luck will play a role somewhere along the line, so be ready. Write that book, send it out, and show up at events and conferences. You want to be ready when Lady Luck decides to smile on you.

There may be more core rules than these six, but I think these are pretty sound. As I listened to the other writers talk and share stories, I could hear these rules underlying their commitment to their writing.

End-of-Book Rituals

2010-11-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

I would be the first to admit that I have a few quirks, but I like to think that most of them are harmless. One that I have learned to live with is my end-of-book ritual simply because this is a compulsion I can’t control.

Whenever I finish a book, as I just have, I know that it is really done because I throw myself into this ritual. I no longer want to read the manuscript over again and again, find something to fix, improve, change for the sake of changing. Instead, I have an uncontrollable need to clean up my office, and this means going through drawers, files, shelves in the closet, to pull out old notes and articles and whatever other paper I can find to recycle. I’m not happy until I have at least one paper bag stuffed full of paper, and I usually need at least two bags to feel I’ve done my duty and satisfied this demonic drive.

If you were to ask me (and please don’t), I’d have to say that I have no idea where all this paper comes from. (And we’re going to be a paperless society? But that’s another topic.) But I sure have a lot of it, and some of it is years old. How did I miss it the last time I did this? I finish a book at least every two years, but the paper keeps piling up—reviews of books I mean to read, recipes I want to try, articles I’m sure I can’t live without or promised to send to a friend, old research notes and cryptic notes to myself.

I wish I could say I was at least methodical about this, but I’m not. I just start rifling through the first pile of paper I come to, perhaps the one crushing the basket where I keep the mail (yes, that’s another story), or the one underneath my notebook on the current mystery novel, or the one on the windowsill that’s been great insulation against the drafty sash during the winter months. Sometimes I start going through my desk drawers, and that of course leads to old manuscripts I set aside when I became convinced the story wasn’t working (and then that leads to . . . and that’s yet another story).

My ritual is harmless, good for the environment, and probably good for my soul. Other writers have other rituals—going out for a celebratory drink that might last for days, emerging from the writing room to meet children who have grown six inches, eating that rotten apple hidden in the desk drawer. I have a friend who didn’t pay bills for three months, and whose desk was such a mess that she had to take bills and checkbook to a restaurant to find a table to work on in order to pay everything.

My writing rituals are as important to me as any of those created to mark the major turning points in a person’s life—birth, marriage, death, and all the other significant steps along the way. The rituals of beginning, stages of the work, and the ending tell me that I’m moving along, and sometimes are expressed in an instinctive way before I realize consciously, fully, where I am, or that I’ve reached the next stage. At the halfway point in a book I suddenly feel like I’m leaning over a precipice and go through an automatic review of where my characters are, as though they too are hanging off a precipice (as indeed some of them are).

I know these moments are coming, wait for them, expect them, and move through them because they tell me that the book is moving along as it should—they are the current of the ocean I sail on. And because such stages can’t be forced, nor can my feelings about them be concealed or denied, I know the book is progressing the way it should. The ritual is the manifestation of my deeper feeling of the life of the story.

Right now, a large paper bag stuffed with all sorts of paper is sitting out on the sidewalk waiting for the recycling pickup, and I am free to contemplate my next writing project, knowing that the initiating ritual will overtake me before I have made a conscious decision to begin. But that’s another story.

Final Payment, the next book in the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva, is now sitting on an editor’s desk, waiting for a yea or nay.

Ruminations on Choices

2010-10-25T16:40:00.000-07:00

Over the last several months I’ve come across three writers who set out to write one book and were nudged into another direction by an agent or editor. All three ended up with a successful book, but one that bore little resemblance to the one they began, and each one has had a different reaction to the entire experience. I’ve listened and sympathized and tried to imagine how I’d feel if I faced the same dilemma—accept the editor’s guidance and produce a successful book, or hew tenaciously, even stubbornly, to my original intent and produce something more satisfying to me but probably less successful.

I’ve had plenty of experience writing for hire, and have gladly used my skills to produce textbook chapters and whole books on topics that hold little personal interest for me. Writing is a skill I have, and I’m glad to apply it to whatever comes along—and pays reasonably well. But I haven’t been put in the position of having to change my original intent in a book or essay that I developed.

This is where many of us, myself included, are ready to think, and say, that we’d hold out and produce the book that was true to our vision. We’re idealists, or we like to think we are, willing to stick to our principles. We believe we know what the best book on this topic is, or the best one we can produce, and we want to see that one make it into print. Or, perhaps we’d go in the other direction and say, yes, of course, we’d do whatever the editor wanted without a second thought. We’re professional writers and we write to deadline, producing what the client wants—a speech for a conference, a grant for several thousand dollars, a book review, an article on laws protecting animals. Writing is writing, and the advance tells us we’re expected to produce something that will sell. Or, maybe we’re born negotiators and we size up the “opposition” to our idea and try to find the middle ground, something we can still commit ourselves to passionately while incorporating the editor’s or agent’s suggestions. The real experiences of my colleagues haven’t been quite like this.

One writer, an accomplished academic, told me that it took her over a year to figure out what was going on. During the entire writing process, she’d thought the editor was obtuse, difficult, and perverse in her suggestions. After months of this tug of war the editor signed off on the final manuscript and said to the writer, “You were so hard to work with—you were deaf to our instructions. Your book proposal was just a way to find out if you could write—we didn’t really want that book. We wanted someone who could write. We knew what the market wanted. You sure made it hard.” At the end of the whole thing my friend felt like giving up writing.

Another writer came to believe that she can’t finish her book without the help of an editor, or book doctor, as they are now less flatteringly called. She submitted her manuscript to one person after another, getting advice, some hands-on writing, and approval after approval. The final manuscript feels a bit homogenous, bland, but definitely polished. This is the result of the school of thought that holds if it is well written, the story or narrative will emerge—somehow. I suppose that gives away my view—there’s more to a good story than a polished sentence, and the writer should have buckled down and written her own book.

A third writer started out with one narrative and followed the agent’s suggestions to produce another, something different from anything she’s written in the past. I watched the book develop and even I’m not sure when it changed course and became a completely different book. Even a proposal for a crime fiction series is likely to elicit suggestions from the editor on the direction the series should take—types of protagonists, settings, plots.

The experiences of these writers seem to announce the demotion of writers, but they are balanced by the new opportunities, reflecting the kinds of changes that are taking place—writers have less and less control over their work, and writers have more and more opportunity to control their work. There’s more work-for-hire writing, less support from traditional publishers, and more opportunities to self-publish and actually sell our own work via Internet and even traditional avenues.

When I started writing fiction in college, the goal was to write well, yes, but also to write truly, authentically. Now, to even say that seems self-conscious and pretentious, and yet the vision of this kind of work lingers.

My three friends have books they’re somewhat satisfied with, and certainly are pleased with the success they’re having. But when I listen to them talk, I hear in at least two of them that bittersweet sense that somehow their book got away from them and became something else, something they like but something that is not quite theirs.

For anyone who writes the underlying goal has to be to write something that only that person could write, taking advice as it comes, keeping the sensible and abandoning the rest, using it to help make the work stronger. I don’t know if we really are beset with more challenges to producing a book according to the writer’s own vision than writers in earlier decades or centuries, or if the challenges are the norm for working in a commercial world, but at least they make me think deeply about what I want any particular work to be, and that always makes for a better book.

The world of the writer today makes me think of the advice that people in social services often hear—change is the constant, attitude is the variable. This is what I keep in mind whenever I start any new project--I let it go, follow it, and learn as much as possible from the whole experience.

Writers and PR Photos

2010-09-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Writers are called upon to do a lot of different things beyond writing—teaching workshops or large classes, organizing and running conferences, serving on awards committees, soliciting donations from other writers for worthy causes, marketing books, and more. Many of these require the dreaded PR materials—a bio and a photograph. (It seems a mean irony that the joy of the solitary profession of writing now comes with the dreaded publicity tour.)

I have figured out a number of bios, but the PR photograph is something I avoid as much as possible, which is why most people think I’m ten years younger than I am. But this month I had to come up with something new, so I have studied publicity photographs to get a sense of what my options are and what I should try for. If I had known this exercise was going to leave me so depressed, I wouldn’t have bothered—I’d have substituted a gray blank with a little circle drawn in.

Publicity photos of writers come in a variety of types. First, there is the serious look—face front, eyes studying the photographer, not a flicker of humor anywhere, an expression almost of accusation for anyone wanting the author to engage in such frivolity. Some of these even come with an uplifted eyebrow, a furrowed brow, a down-turned mouth to emphasize the somber nature of the personality of the creator. These are the authors of serious books—about revenge, dark mystery, rogues of the business world, and worse. I suppose writers (and others) go for the serious look because it makes one look weighty and implies that anything this person is associated with must be significant. Just look how somber they are! We are meant to take these writers seriously—and I do—but alas, when I try to look like that, the photographer tells me I look unwell and would I like to sit down? When I say I’m fine, I’m usually told to relax, don’t look so grim.

The same frontal look with a smile reveals the sexy, the polished, the makeup artist, the good friend, the man or woman with a great sense of humor. For me, I just look like I have a double chin.

Then there’s the pose with props, including glasses or hands—the hand on the face, below the chin, resting on a shoulder, clasped behind the head, on the throat. My all-time favorite is the hand and fingers splayed across the face so you can barely identify the person behind.

Lots of photographs come with other props, usually a pet—a cat but also dogs, horses, and other moving breathing creatures—but also items indicative of the topic of the book. For books about cooking, the author standing over a big brass pot or a tray of food always works. And the most obvious one—books—is sometimes the least workable for me because my bookshelves are stuffed with books and pottery and stacks of paper and old artwork and CDs.

And of course, there’s the setting—with a city in the background for anyone who travels or writes about exotic places. This one would work for me if I could remember to get a photograph of myself when I’m traveling, which I can’t seem to do. The background is a great idea, as long as it supports the theme of the book and, in my mind, reduces the image of the writer. Part of setting is the clothing—a suit for a business book or a person in a yoga outfit for a fitness book.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable having my photograph taken, but while I was working out what might work, I looked over a lot of photographs of other writers and came away with the unexpected feeling that there really are an awful lot of nice people in this business, if their photographs are any guide. A few faces smiling back at me were sometimes artificial and posed, and obviously so, but many more of them had expressions of delight and curiosity and wonder and friendliness. I could imagine more than one saying, Omigod, that really is my book you’re looking at! I really did it! I wrote a book! The warmth and enthusiasm in the other women who must have fretted about double chins and lank hair and dull wardrobes and all the other unimportant things in a life put an end to my fussing. For heaven’s sakes, it’s only a photograph.

So I stopped procrastinating and finally got a photograph of me in front of my bookshelves—books and me, half hidden behind a hand, looking pinkish with no makeup, but at least recognizably me. And now, thank you to all the other writers who have gone through this cheerfully, leaving your portraits to encourage me.

(If you want to see the final selection, check out my website. www.susanoleksiw.com)

The Future of the Book

2010-08-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I enjoyed one of the treats of being a published writer. My local bookstore, which I have patronized since it opened in 1967, held a reading and signing for me. Even though it was a small group, I still felt some anxiety about what to read and how to discuss my newest book, Under the Eye of Kali, but deeply pleased that I had a new book and could talk about it to others.

Near the end of the evening, two other writers and I got into a discussion of publishing on Kindle and self-publishing (not the same thing, but easy to conflate). I haven’t tried Kindle yet, and sometimes I think about it for my earlier books that are out of print, but I am very reluctant to resort to self-publishing in any format, especially in Kindle or the like, for any of my several mss sitting rejected on my closet shelf. But I am increasingly in the minority.

This is not a lament about the end of publishing as we know it, or the problem with a marketplace packed with self-published books that no one has vetted and are probably for the most part unreadable. No, all that may be true, but right now I prefer to see the opportunity in this dismal situation—dismal for traditional writers, anyway.

It occurred to me recently that those of us who have over our working years redirected our retirement savings into keeping afloat the local bookstore have a unique future ahead of us. A friend who is moving got me thinking about this when he explained that he and his wife had hired a “stager,” a woman who works with a real estate agent to prepare a home for showing to prospective buyers. The stager walked through and told them how to rearrange the furniture, which pieces of artwork to remove or re-hang, and, unequivocally, to get rid of the books. “No one reads anymore,” she said. And they removed the books.

A private high school library recently threw out all its printed books, in order to become an online resource center—no more books, not even packed into bookshelves against outer walls as “good insulation,” as my father-in-law often said.

With the Kindle and a generation of people like the “stager” and the headmaster of a certain prep school, books will become rare and unusual and hard to find. Children will grow up not knowing what a book is, what it looks like, how it weighs down the hand or a backpack, how it is used page by page. This is the opportunity.

People like me, who have shelves and shelves of books, old ones and new ones, falling apart ones and carefully protected ones, good ones and nastily critiqued ones, will in essence have a treasure for a museum. We will open our doors to the curious, to show them the BOOK, not to read, of course, but to observe and study, like a vase or a statue. Little children will cry, “But what does it do?” “Does it move?” “Can you change the color?” Parents will shrug and pull out their Blackberries and tweet their children’s cute comments to their grandparents, who will be sunning themselves in tropical New Jersey.

The museum will also be the site of psychological testing. For those who want to graduate to a higher level of functionality in the world, they will have to visit a museum and prove that they can read an entire book, from beginning to end, in a reasonable period of time and remain focused on the topic. And one part of the test will be recognizing that there is a single topic being developed. This person will be awarded a Certificate of Consciousness.

There won’t be nearly as many museums as you think in this future. Alas, to my surprise, I often visit friends, people I’ve always thought of as intelligent and interesting and well read, and discovered not a single book in their home. But there will be enough museums scattered across the country to ensure that everyone has at least a reasonable chance to see one book in his or her lifetime, not to read, but to see, like visiting a Da Vinci (a real one, in oils) or Van Gogh.

None of this means that there will be fewer books written. Alas, no. But they will be written entirely on little phones and other such devices, and instantly erased if they don’t live up to the standards of the software evaluating spelling, punctuation, grammar, and thought (defined by vocabulary and sentence structure). If nothing else, the number of mss floating through cyberspace from agent to agent will decline, but the number on Kindle and other such formats will explode. But by then the length of an average novel will be reduced from 100,000 words to 10,000 or fewer, to make it easier to read at traffic lights or while waiting in line for coffee.

Drinking coffee will not be allowed in Museums, except by the owners.

Level Best Books at the Crossroads

2010-07-27T17:27:00.001-07:00

Early in June the three editors of Level Best Books got together to talk about the future of our project. We had read most of the 70 plus stories and were looking at our schedules. This would be our eighth anthology.

Level Best Books grew out of a desire to publish a collection of short crime fiction by The Larcom Press, for which I was a co-founder. When we closed down the press, along with all of our projects in the pipeline, I felt especially sad about the anthology. In 2003 I approached Kate Flora and Skye Alexander, and over lunch in Gloucester, Level Best Books was born. I had started out only with the idea of finishing the anthology started by Larcom, but the idea took hold, and so began our series of anthologies. Together we published three, but then Skye moved to Texas, and thus outside the New England writing community. Ruth McCarty joined me and Kate in a seamless transition.

The Level Best Books anthologies have been a pleasure from beginning to end, but also a lot of work. We set as our launch date the weekend of Crime Bake, so that we could introduce our book, Undertow, and new writers, and sell books to the ideal audience. The pattern was set, and with the second anthology, Riptide, the cover and interior design was too.

Each year we tried out different names, drawing up lists of weather and New England related terms, poring over possible cover photographs, and reading dozens of stories. We enthusiastically commented on the growth of individual writers over the years, the expanding list of contributors (and sometimes of the definition of New England, but, alas, we are traditionalists—just the six states for us), the consistently good reviews. This project had no downside except time.

And that was the issue. We put in our own money and made it back every year plus a little more (very little more); we loved the stories; we loved the covers; we loved the writers. But we still had only 24 hours in any one day, and 7 days in a week. There was no flexibility in producing the book because our deadline, Crime Bake, was the only way to get the books the publicity they needed to make back our costs. I had the job of editing, laying out, proofing, working with the printer, to get the book done on time. We printed 1,200 books every year, and Kate had the job of delivering books to bookstores, libraries, and individuals who purchased the book. She handled most returns and invoicing. She and Ruth set up events and nudged writers to set up more.

In case I failed to make the point—this is work. And all three of us have other responsibilities, and they were starting to close in on the little free time we had. As we sat down in early June, each one of us knew this year could be tough. We thought about taking a year off, or trying to push through just one more year, but in the end, the problem was now—not enough time to do the kind of job we have done for the last seven years.

Seven years is a long time, and seven anthologies are something to be proud of. So, this is where we stop, on a high note, proud of what we’ve done, glad we did it, and mindful that other opportunities will come along, for us and for all the other writers we worked with.

But there’s more. I wrote the above valediction in early June, before we knew there might be a second act for Level Best Books. The cooperative will not come to an end, though our involvement in it will. Four writers, all known to us and much admired, have stepped forward, and will continue the work of publishing the annual anthology of crime fiction by New England writers. So, to Mark Ammons, Kat Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler, welcome and good luck and congratulations. I eagerly look forward to the next anthology, only a few months away.

Reviewing Ruminations

2010-06-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I came across a book about studying Hindi in India, and I immediately snatched it from the shelf in my local bookstore. This was my cup of tea—living and studying in India and loving every challenging minute of it. I kept the book on a table near my desk until I could settle down and devote an uninterrupted stretch of time to it. This title looked so good I was willing to wait. I liked seeing it there and anticipating the pleasure I would have when I could begin reading it properly—on a quiet Sunday afternoon without interruption. Soon thereafter I came across a review of it in one of the larger newspapers. And it wasn’t good.

The review cast a pall over my enthusiasm, and I remember in particular the reviewer’s intense dislike of a particular scene in the book that seemed, for him, to summarize all the negative points of the story and its author. The shimmering green of the cover seemed to fade, and now its placement at the top of my TBR pile (to be read) seemed a reproach rather than a promise. I put off reading it and went on to other things.

But I am a Yankee born and raised and I had spent good money on that book. It was time to read it and, if nothing else, get my money’s worth. Dutifully, I picked it up and began. And I am so glad I did. Katherine Russell Rich has written an entrancing and enchanting book about moving to India to learn Hindi. Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language is everything I look for in books about India, one of the great loves of my life, and I’m glad to recommend it to anyone interested in India, learning a second language, how the mind works with languages, writing a memoir, and any number of other topics. But here I want to focus on another lesson—that of the responsible reviewer.

As I became more and more engrossed in the memoir, I occasionally wondered when I’d come across the scene that had so upset the reviewer, and was curious to know if my take would be so very different. I read on, forgot about it, remembered it, read on. When I began to think I had mixed up the review from another book with this one, I finally came to the scene that had earned the reviewer’s scorn—somewhere near the very end of the story. And it wasn’t a scene at all; it was a brief comment about an incident that happened after the main narrative of the book. That made me pause.

The negative review that almost kept me from reading this book, and might well have kept me from purchasing it if I had read it before I discovered the title in the bookstore, bore no resemblance to the narrative I enjoyed so thoroughly. This is exactly the kind of review that brings reviewers as a group and reviewing as a professional a bad rep. It also prevents readers from finding books they will love and learn from.

This isn’t an essay on the ten characteristics of the responsible reviewer. It is a reminder to all of us who review books to stick to the book as a whole, keep the big picture in the forefront of our imaginations as we write, and make sure our review bears a close resemblance to the book we’ve just read. Take note of your jealousies (yes, I wish I’d written this book), ignorances (the information on language learning was an eye-opener for me), and all the other ways we hobble ourselves. And if you really don’t like a book, don’t review it.

Finding the Voice—Anita’s Debut

2010-06-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

Author copies of my new book, Under the Eye of Kali, arrived the day before I left for a week’s vacation a couple of weeks ago. When I looked at the box I felt momentarily frozen. She had actually arrived. I suppose this sounds odd because it sounds like I’ve anthropomorphized a book, but I was really thinking about Anita, the protagonist of my new series set in India.

Some years back I tried writing a novel about Anita Ray but it just didn’t come together—there was something wrong in the voice of the character and the way she operated, moved through the landscape of people and the country. I had tried several times to capture Anita’s essence—and I was sure it was there, just beyond me, drifting toward me like a fragrant breeze but not quite reaching me. I was dissatisfied and I couldn’t resolve the feeling. I knew something was wrong, and in some of the reactions of outside readers I knew at the time, I thought I sensed the same lukewarm response to Anita.

Frustrated with these less than successful attempts at a novel featuring Anita, I tried writing a scene that could be the beginning of a short story. My idea was to give her exactly what she has to deal with, no distractions, no elaborations, no subplots. I did and it worked. Anita emerged at once with her irreverence, insouciance, and independence. I had her.

Without realizing it, I was using a technique that I often recommend to students when beginning a story. If you’re not sure about the protagonist, or about whose story this is, try writing the opening paragraph from different points of view—first, third, close and omniscient, the main character, a peripheral character who tells the story of another, more important figure. Each opening paragraph will be different, but one will resonate with you the moment you hear it being written or read. You have found the voice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald would have written a very different novel in The Great Gatsby if he had used a different narrator instead of the young man slightly in awe of the character of the title. And the pleasure of Sue Grafton’s series is experiencing the world with Kinsey Milhone. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe could hardly have any other voice and be the same.

Anita’s voice sounded true the minute I heard it, but there was more. I loved the way the short story form revealed her. She reacted to the people around her but also edged past them to find her way through the crime. She pushed the other characters, defining them and their behavior. And through her I got to talk about a traditional culture in India that I admire and also deeply care about. I wrote one story and then another and another and another. The stories were fun to write and fun to read. I loved them. And, fortunately for me, Linda Landrigan at Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine loved them too.

After a while I realized this wasn’t going to be enough. Anita needed a novel, but I had tried so many times I wasn’t sure I wanted to fail again. I spent about half a nanosecond on that thought and jumped into thinking up a larger story line. I am something of a compulsive writer—I just keep at it, even if it isn’t going well, until I collapse exhausted or finished. So, I set out again.

I had tried a character, female and living in India and more or less part of the landscape and culture, in different voices—first person, close third, omniscient—none of which had worked. I had long ago forgotten about them, and concluded back then that I had tried too hard to shape her personality, but the person who emerged in the short story lived vividly every time I started writing. Would she translate into the longer form?

She did.

Anita is her own person, and when I pick up the hardcover with its perfectly thought-out cover design (I wish I could take credit for that too, but no) I feel the weight of her as a separate person, someone who can’t be forced to follow any plotline or story arc or anything else I might require of a character. I’m just as curious now to find out what she’s going to do next as would any other reader be.

So, yes, she has arrived, in more ways than one.

Under the Eye of Kali, by Susan Oleksiw (Five Star/Gale/Cengage, 2010).

What is a story?

2010-04-27T17:10:00.001-07:00

A friend recently passed along a collection of stories to me, unpublished but edited, and asked me what I thought about them. I settled down to read through the mss, but at the end of the first story, I knew what I was going to find all the way through. Still, the request came from a friend, so I kept reading, and at the end of 250 pages, I felt the same way as I had at the beginning—this was not a collection of stories. Only one entry could actually be called a story.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. I am often asked to read mss by unpublished writers—it’s a fact of life for almost every published writer, especially one who has published both short stories and novels. I say no in almost every case, partly because of the time involved in reading and partly because I don’t want to be drawn into editing and teaching a new writer I don’t know when I have my own work to do. But reading this collection got me thinking. Why is it so hard for some writers to grasp the essence of a short story? What is a short story?

It’s easier to say what a story is not. A short story is not an anecdote, a curious incident, a sequence of events. It’s not a description, a slice of life (though such a work was popular in previous decades), a character sketch, a funny or sad moment.

Most of us who write fiction struggle to come up with a workable definition because we’ve been called on, at conferences and on library panels, to offer something definitive to the audience. We do our best, but at the next event, we’ll come up with some other way to define the short story. Having said that, let me take a stab at it.

A short story has shape, and it focuses on a significant moment or event in a character’s life. The reader begins at the moment that a life or situation is about to change—we begin with the norm and immediately feel the redirection of life, and this is what we watch as the story moves forward. As we come to the end, the change bears fruit, or climaxes, or however you want to put it, and we see the character moving forward in a new direction, a new way. Life is different, and we can feel it. A fellow writer once put it this way. Something happens. People change. Mysteries remain.

The ending of a short story is like the final couplet in a sonnet. All the preceding lines lead up to the last two lines, and are lifted higher by them. Without that closing couplet, the sonnet would fall flat, sound hollow and pointless; the reader would come to a halt wondering about the point of the journey. The short story must bring us to that point when a character is different in a deeply significant way, and we have seen and felt it happen, felt it growing along with the character. We close the book and know, as Hemingway urged, that we have read something true and honest.

Writers' Groups, Part II

2010-03-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

Writers’ Groups, Part II

During the last twenty years I’ve participated in seven writers’ groups, but most of them have been organized into one of four categories. All of them were interesting and have played a role in my life as a writer, but some were a better fit than others. I look back on all of them fondly and sometimes with amusement at our disjointed efforts to move forward.

First is the support group whose members are writers. The group usually meets in the evening on a weekday or a Saturday morning on a weekly basis and focuses on anything about writing, encouraging its members to complete work and send it out. Members share resources for research and names of journals to send work to, commiserate on rejection letters, and generally encourage each other to keep writing. Discussions tend to wander, and not everyone is a practicing writer.

Second is the group that comprises writers who have published something and are focused on continuing to get work into print. They arrive at the meeting with coffee and perhaps a snack to stave off hunger, or a late lunch (or early dinner). They read their work, listen to general comments, and report on efforts to publish.

Third is the group that expects a certain amount of work from its members. Each writer brings copies for others to read along with as he or she reads the story or chapter or scene from the current work. Comments are expected to be substantial and helpful, but not of the order of how to recast the entire story (a temptation we all fall into when enthusiasm exceeds judgment). The reader asks questions and discusses the comments. Everyone feels a certain investment in the work and expects regular updates on progress of other publishing efforts. This is not the place for writers who can’t seem to finish anything, never take a risk, or are waiting for inspiration.

Fourth and last is the group for those with a tough hide. These groups are usually small because they require more work than the other groups and devote one session to each member. The writer sends copies of the chapter to be discussed to the group members in advance, giving the members time to read and analyze, and prepare for an in-depth discussion. At the meeting, the writer whose work is being discussed sits on the sidelines and listens to the discussion, not allowed to comment, interject explanations, challenge or correct misinterpretations, or add anything to the discussion. After about two hours of this (if the writer is still in the room), he or she is allowed about half an hour to comment on the discussion. This kind of group has no room for anyone who is not writing regularly and not advanced enough to produce substantial work.

I’ve participated in groups in every category, two that served wine and food, one that adjourned for a meal after every session, one that never served anything edible and didn’t expect anyone to bring anything edible, and one that felt like a picnic. But all of them included writers who were dead serious about their work, who listened attentively and thoughtfully, and contributed what they could, and many who went on to publish books and stories and articles.

Even if some of the earlier groups I participated in seem a little frivolous or disorganized when I look back on them, it is clear to me that I learned from the others in the group, drew inspiration from them, and kept going because they were there every week or every month encouraging me. You can’t ask for more than that.

Writers' Groups, Part I

2010-03-17T14:34:00.001-07:00

Writers’ Groups, Part 1

Earlier this week I visited a writers’ group I used to participate in regularly. The group meets weekly in the home of a fellow writer, and we observe certain rituals and practices developed tacitly in the first few weeks. This is the seventh group I’ve participated in since about 1990, which suggests a certain fickleness on my part.

Writers’ groups differ according to the personalities and needs of the members. Because most of the groups I’ve been in have been dominated by women, there is always the danger that we’ll become a support group rather than a critique group, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The first group I joined met in someone’s backyard in early August and comprised a mix of writers—fiction and nonfiction, new and well established. We had no plan, no format, no sense of where we were going, and as I listened to the others talk about what they wanted to accomplish I felt somewhat lost. I had no idea where I was going. I left and joined another group that focused on writing fiction, where I remained until it was disbanded one evening. During the several years I attended, we arrived at five o’clock, sometimes with coffee and something to nibble on but always with something to read. We were serious business. Only on special occasions did anyone bring food to share with the group, as a form of celebration.

After the group ended, two members got together and restarted it but I never rejoined, though I remained friends with many of the members. Instead I joined a group an hour’s drive away, and on the way to my first meeting was hit by a car, whose front end was demolished. It was raining and windy, and the driver was a young man on his way to a job interview. I wince when I think about it—he was unfailingly polite and heart-sick. His front end would cost him at least a couple thousand dollars to repair. I still think of him and his car. That too was a mixed group and all business—no food, no chitchat.

For many years I gave up on groups until someone persuaded me to try one in the next town but one. I did, and they were interesting but very unfocused, and one member asked me if I’d be interested in running for public office. I have no idea why except that she was political and I could write. I quit and drifted into another group with two men and two other women, who seemed to want a counterweight. Each meeting ended with a jointly prepared meal—a unique perk. My participation in that group lasted for a few months and I drifted off again. The last group I was in has been reconstituted at least once and its original members have dispersed throughout the country. This group had its own rituals—wine and munchies and catching up for the first half hour.

Most of the members of these groups have gone on to have some success in publishing. I come across their names on title pages of books, magazine articles, short stories. The title often brings back a discussion about a particularly knotty passage or challenging research, and I’m glad to see the writer made it through to the end.

Each group has been different, but they all had the same purpose—to give each of us the kind of moral support we need to get over the hump of our own self-doubts and excessive modesty. There is, after all, something arrogant about thinking that I have something to say and the rest of the world should hear it. That kind of thinking goes against all my socialization and upbringing. But the drive to write, to get it down on paper, to push it out into the world is stronger than any brainwashing or training. So my books are out there, in part thanks to the many writers who have listened thoughtfully to my work and offered comments and suggestions, but most of all thanks to the tacit support and approval for the mere act of doing the work.

Opportunities Old and New

2010-02-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

I was expecting to use the month of February to get things ready for the launch of my new book, Under the Eye of Kali, in May; the official date is May 19, but I haven’t scheduled any events for the book until June, to give the publisher time to get books out and into libraries and stores. That sounds very rational, but my month has come to a close and I have a stack of things yet to do. This is where I should start whining about how much work writers now do to get a book notice and succeeding in the market, and then maybe a little whining about how it gets harder the older I get. But as I rifled through the notes I’ve been making for myself over the last several weeks, I realized that I’m overwhelmed with work for a good reason.

When I began writing I was a teenager, and the choices for a book were hardcover or paperback. As the editor of the college humor magazine, I typed up my copy, took it to the printer, and a few days later walked over to the printer’s office and picked up a scroll of uncut pages to proof, made changes in pencil in my dorm room that night, and took the pages back the next day. That’s called writing and editing. I hand delivered stacks of finished magazines to various locations on campus. That’s called sales and distribution. Life was simple.

Any writer starting out today faces an array of choices that simply were not available when I began writing, and keeping up with the new opportunities is both a challenge and a thrill. My new book will appear in hardcover, but I hope to sell other rights as the year moves forward. This is what a writer can consider.

Paperback rights can be sold to publishers who sell on the mass market or to a smaller subscription group such as book clubs.

Trade paperback rights lead to a better-quality paperback that can compete with hardcovers in quality and distribution.

In addition a writer can look at large-print books, audio books, and eBooks. The last one is in its great growth period and in a few years will be a venue for publishing that is equal to standard publishing now. Serious nonfiction began coming out in new formats thirty years ago, when academics with important scholarly work that would sell no more than a few hundred copies saw their books published on microfiche.

All of these formats are available to me through established publishers, but writers can go it alone now and have exactly the same options. For most of my writing life the assumption was that anyone who self-published did so because a legitimate publisher wouldn’t take the mss. There was a reason it was called vanity publishing, and the product usually wasn’t very good. Virginia Woolf notwithstanding, most self-published books until recently were dull, poorly written and edited, and not worth the paper they were printed on. That is no longer true. The Lace Reader is the most recent proof of that.

Writers who have had solid careers in producing novels and stories year after year are being brushed aside by publishers who are hoping a new face with a new series gimmick will hit the mega-seller list. But instead of drifting off into another career, selling insurance maybe, these writers have other options. The growth of eBooks means that a new audience will see their work, and for those who still want to hold a book of paper in their hands, new technologies make it possible and affordable. POD (print on demand) books are popping up everywhere, and they keep old books in print and open doors for other writers shut out.

Keeping up with all of this and getting my books on the market in the best formats has changed over the years, requiring far more time than ever. But the opportunities mean new readers and new ways to reach them.

Google and . . .

2010-01-31T11:49:00.001-08:00

Most of the time when I think about my writing life, I’m thinking about the writing part—how the story will develop, the way characters are starting to act out, the problems with certain clues. Once I start, I am lost in the story until it finishes. But this month has been about other facets of the jewel of my life—sales and marketing.

I’m not talking now about how to set up programs with libraries, signings at bookstores, or talks to university groups. January 28, 2010, was the deadline for writers to opt out of the newest (and probably final) settlement with Google. The Authors Guild has been staunchly behind the settlement, declaring it a good thing for writers. The National Writers Union has been just as staunchly opposed to it. The last several months have brought me a steady stream of emails about the settlement and opportunities to review the terms on phone seminars. I read the settlement papers sent by one group and sat in on a phone seminar from another. I won’t go over the details here, but I will say that the statement by two lawyers (not both in favor) during the seminar decided me. I opted out of the settlement.

Hard on the heels of that deadline, on January 29, 2010, Macmillan was shut out of Amazon’s Kindle sales and then had all of its books pulled from Amazon, over the issue of pricing. Macmillan is huge and most of us buy books published by one of its imprints some time during the year without even realizing it. The day I signed my contract with G.K. Hall for my first book in 1985, A Reader’s Guide to the Classic British Mystery, the editor sighed and told me, “That’s the last contract we were allowed to sign. Macmillan shut everything down when they bought us out and put everything on hold. The writers are going crazy waiting to find out what’s going to happen.” I know what happened to some of them.

Amazon is now doing to Macmillan a bit of what Google is trying to do to writers—take over “the product” and make all decisions, regardless of official ownership and other rights.

This is not a good time for writers, but when I think about other writers, from Chaucer, who had enough day jobs to populate a small village, up to the number of writers in recent years who were also physicians or businessmen or teachers, I realize there is no time that is good for writers. I don’t know if it matters who wins in the Google settlement or in the Macmillan/Amazon dispute. I only know that the business is changing and the only way to maintain any integrity in my work is to hold on to it as much as possible. When I go on line and find copies of my books for sale in India (India!) and in Europe in formats never part of any contract, I wonder if it’s possible to hold the line, but I’m not ready to give in just yet.

In the 1960s the average starting salary for a social worker was $5,000. A writer who sold a short story to a major magazine, Redbook or Saturday Review, was paid $5,000. The advance for a novel was generally $5,000 into the 1990s and 2000s. And now? Can you imagine any unknown writer selling a story for $30,000? Or getting an advance of $30,000 for each book in a series of midlist crime novels?

Google and Amazon are not the problem—they’re just symptoms of a larger problem, and not one that I can solve, but at least I can resist it as the opportunity arises. And for now I will sit on the sidelines and watch the big guys duke it out while I work on selling my crime fiction through the usual outlets—bookstores and libraries—and work to find perhaps a few new ones.

The Vacation That Wasn't

2010-01-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year when I head off to India for three weeks of sunshine, spicy food, and sleeping late. I have been doing this off and on for over ten years, and before that I lived in India for a year at a time, returning to the States to complete graduate school and for work. India is in my blood and my psyche. So when events transpired to keep me here this January, I thought I could cope by planning my trip for next year. But I was wrong. I’m not exactly in mourning, but I have been doing the kinds of things that lovesick souls do—mooning over substitutes and thinking of “what might have been.” And this has led to what has turned out to be “the vacation that wasn’t.”

During the first week of January I watched Malayali movies every night—often the same one over and over again. I love Indian movie music—it has a lilt and a lightness that just makes me want to swing and dance and percolate joy. One of the movies is set in Trivandrum, the city where I used to live, and the shots are of places I know well—the Secretariat, parts of Statue Road (since renamed), one of the colleges, and several side streets.

I love the autorickshaws, and even though I supposedly graduated to taxis because of my adult and employment status, I still prefer the little three-wheeled autorickshaws. They’re easy to get in and out of when taking photographs, let the passenger enjoy the breeze, are reasonably priced, pass down narrow lanes and alleyways, and can be found everywhere. Any movie with autos is fun for me to watch. After the movies I page through an Indian cookbook, thinking about what I might make, and then settle down with a Malayalam lesson book. When I went to India to study Sanskrit, I took along a grammar book for Malayalam and picked up a little of the language. I have continued to try to pick up more and more of it, but that’s a challenge in the US. Still, I have a first grade reader and a few other books and I make a pretense of studying them every once in a while.

This is where I start to get restless. The first book-length story featuring Indian-American Anita Ray, set in my beloved Kerala, will appear in May 2010, and I have a second one ready to go if the first one does well (as I hope it will). But I already have several ideas for the third in the series, and I know the main idea is a good one because it keeps popping up after the first time it came to me about three years ago. One of the tests of a good idea for me is if it comes to me, seems exciting, and then after I put it aside to think about something else, it keeps coming back. When this happens, I know it has staying power and can be developed into a novel. This idea for the next Anita Ray novel has been showing up and showing up and showing up regularly, but I’m not yet ready to begin writing. I know that once I begin, I will have to stay with it for months. Writing a novel is a commitment—a long-term one that I cannot set aside because something else comes along or I’m crushed for time or I’m tired and want to get to bed early or any other reason that seems a good excuse for avoiding the work of writing. When I begin writing a novel, I have to stay with it.

The result of this vacation is that I can now feel myself settling into another book—or perhaps being taken over by it. It’s like looking into a well, listening for the sound of a pebble hitting the water or the muddy bottom, waiting for an echo to come back to me. Instead of leaning over and waiting, I’m falling—down and down and down. I am down in the well, and the only way out is to wrestle my way up the sides, stone by stone, scene by scene, working my fingers into crevices and holding on while my nails crack and my skin tears, pushing up and up and up until the book is written, and I again have time on my bloodied hands.

And the bigger problem is that I have several ideas for books, but when an idea for a novel comes along, it takes me over and the other ideas subside and wait quietly for their own day in the sun. But this time I’m going to write about them too, in another blog—and maybe the demons that fight for my writing energy, drawing me into the well, will sit still and listen to the entire menu of ideas before dragging me off again. Staying at home with time on my hands is becoming far too dangerous. I don’t dare spend a vacation at home anymore.

Perfection

2009-12-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

This is about perfection.

Five days before Christmas my husband and I decided it was time to get serious about this holiday. After years of planning months in advance to get our gift shopping done on time and mapping out long drives to both sets of in-laws, we only had to move from one room to another and shop for ourselves and a few friends. Life had become easy—to such an extent that the annual holiday fever floated by us like a cloud of stale cigarette smoke. We sneezed and ignored it. And then we looked at the calendar.

We drove up to a local farm store where we purchased more than we could eat in a week (I choose food on the basis of color and smell), bought a tree, and ordered a turkey, to be picked up the next day. So, on Monday, after work, up I went, collected the big bird, and drove home on criminally unlighted roads still icy from an earlier storm. My preparations were about done.

The tree made it inside on Sunday and we put up the lights. I decorated, plugged everything in, and went off to find something to read. It wasn’t until a day later that I looked at the tree more closely. It was a balsam fir standing about 7 feet tall. I poked at the branches, crawled underneath, stepped back. To my delight and amazement, the tree is perfect. Now, this is perfection as defined by holiday trees. It stands straight, its boughs stretch out in an even conical shape, it is pleasingly proportioned from base to crown. The color is a deep, dense green. It isn’t missing branches, doesn’t have broken branches, doesn’t sag on one side. The tree is perfect in its shape and size and color. I’ve never had such a tree before.

Usually when I chose a tree, it’s the least ugly one on the lot that will fit in the back of the car or on the roof. I don’t expect beauty. The one we got this year is perplexing, and I have spent more than an hour just looking it over or sitting and admiring it.

This is not about trees, however. It’s about perfection.

I don’t believe in perfection. I don’t believe in tempting a capricious fate or falling into arrogance or obsession, which is where the pursuit of perfection seems to lead. So I looked upon this tree as a freak of nature and of the holiday season (and whoever trimmed the branches—perfectly—before it reached the sales lot). It wasn’t anything to take seriously. And then we had the turkey.

We ordered a fourteen pounder so we would have enough leftovers to make sandwiches, turkey pies, etc. I stuffed and cooked the bird and pulled it out when it hit the requisite temperature. Then came the annual ritual of getting the turkey, or at least most of it, from pot to platter. We have been doing this for years and have yet to manage it without a lot of wails of distress as half the bird, glued to the pan, refuses to budge, drumsticks fall apart, and the rack pulls off the back. With previous holiday birds in mind, I was ready to try to hold together as much of the turkey as possible. My husband armed himself with serving forks and lifted—and the entire turkey in one piece floated over to the platter—where it remained intact. No wing flopped and tore, revealing clean white meat, no skin from the back slipped and hung as the bird flew from old perch to new. Nothing came apart, ripped, fell off. Perfection—again. And there the turkey sat—in its entirety. This was weird.

I belong to the school that believes perfection is impossible, an unattainable goal pointed to by some designed to make others miserable and unhappy with their lot, especially with their families and friends and credit card balances. Perfection is a trick of salesmen, designed to keep us forever dissatisfied with what we have or who we are. No matter how well I do something, if it’s not perfect, I have failed. That is the message of every huckster selling how-to improve yourself books, makeup kits, exercise machines, cruise vacations, a second or third car, and on down the list of items depicted in consumer catalogues cramming our mailboxes. I ignore all this as best I can.

For me, done is better than perfect. If I have a deadline, I make sure it’s reasonable and then work as hard as I can to meet it. When I’m done I’m done. I know the temptation to hold back and try to improve it—whatever it is—to make the story or novel or grant application or whatever I’m working on just a little bit better. But I don’t give in to this. This way lies madness—or poverty. Consider the American painter Albert Ryder, whose long career as an artist ended with his death in 1917. Despite almost fifty years of painting, he left only about 150 works. At the end of his most productive period he became fixated on improving each painting, redoing the canvas again and again until the original picture was lost beneath layers of paint and new pictures. A patron who had ordered a painting had to go to Ryder’s studio and physically take the canvas off the easel to get the work he had wanted. Ryder’s striving after perfection satisfied no one.

I don’t strive for perfection. I strive to finish something with as few flaws as possible, sending off a manuscript that I know is not perfect because it cannot be—unless it’s a fluke that has nothing to do with me. That’s the way I look at the Christmas tree and the turkey. They are flukes and will not be repeated—nor could they last. Shakespeare knew this when he opened Sonnet 15 with the lines “When I consider everything that grows/Holds in perfection but a little moment.” The tree will drop its needles, the lights and decorations will come down, and the tree will be dragged to the mulch pile out back where it will turn brown over the coming months. I will remember it fondly for its uiqueness and in a few years it will enrich the vegetable garden.

As for the turkey. . . If left in its perfect state, it would rot. We admired it for a few seconds, marveling at its intactness, and that’s about all you can do with something that’s perfect. So, we admired it, then set about carving it. Somerset Maugham said, “Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.” In this instance he was only partly right. It was delicious. You might almost say it was perfection.

Gatekeepers

2009-12-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

During a recent discussion with friends on the possibility of a library panel on self-publishing, I was explaining the requirements for joining various writers’ groups—the rules for the Authors Guild, the Writers Union, and Mystery Writers of America are all different. This came up because MWA had just published their list of acceptable publishers and the criteria by which they are evaluated. We had just been through the debacle of Harlequin’s new foray into self-publishing/vanity publishing, and I was explaining in detail why Harlequin had been dropped and why Level Best Books, of which I am an editor, qualified.

This is the kind of arcana that writers love, mystery writers especially—the minimum advance, minimum print run, number of titles published, number of years between books, number of reviews and from which publications—we’re not the least bit coy about talking about the financial side of our work, perhaps because for most of us it’s pretty dismal. Samuel Johnson would find no blockheads in our crowd, though he’d find plenty of poor souls.

When the subject turns to self-publishing, writers with traditional publishers (the ones who pay and produce) cringe or wince or fall silent. We have an uneasy relationship with the self-publishing concept and no reason seems adequate. We trust the editors to vet a manuscript and as writers we want that sign of approval. Someone thinks well enough of what we have written to pay real money for it. Someone else is going to do some of the hard work—edit, design, print, and distribute the thing. Reviewers—not relatives or friends but people we don’t even know—are going to take us seriously (the one dream all writers have in common) and read the book. Self-publishing suggests the writer couldn’t find a publisher, or doesn’t have faith in his or her work to try to find one. The tacit judgment is that real writers find publishers.

I’ve had all these feelings and I recognize them as the contemporary brainwashing. Some of my fellow writers have self-published beautiful books of fiction and poetry, as well done as any from Houghton Mifflin or Random House.

But lately I’ve been wondering about how bizarre this standard can seem.

Several times a year I come across a new local musician who has put out a CD. He or she has chosen the songs and backup musicians, and used a local recording studio. She pays for all of this and hopes to get it back by selling the CD and, with luck, getting attention from radio stations and perhaps a bigger music producer. Now, I know absolutely nothing about the music business, but I pick up these CDs and marvel that any musician can pull together the cash, make a CD and sell it, and no one in the music industry thinks any less of the product because the musician took the initiative to produce it on his or her own. Other musicians pick up the CDs, listen to them, and react to the music, not the manner of production. Why do writers face a host of gatekeepers (publishers, reviewers, bookstores, readers) and musicians face none (except money and access to a recording studio)? Why are writers judged by how their work is produced, and musicians are not?

I don’t know the answer, but I suppose the real question is whether or not writing will go the way of music. Will writers in a few years publish their own books with no stigma attached to the work for its being self-published, and flog their books just as musicians push their CDs at performances? Will publishers become nothing more than providers of printing services? The world of writing is changing so rapidly that anything seems possible. But a world without gatekeepers in publishing will be really strange. Writers will have to learn to do the work of editors and designers. And readers will be left to vet books on their own—after they’ve paid for them.

Judging a Book . . . Update

2009-11-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

After writing the last blog, on book covers, I expected to put the topic behind me and move on to something else of interest to, well, me, if I’m being honest (and perhaps one or two others). But, to my utter delight and amazement, I had an email from my editor, Tiffany, at Five Star, asking me what I thought about the sample cover she had attached. This is where I admit that I read that short sentence two or three times, just to let the pleasure of being asked to comment on the cover sink in. (I also reread jokes to savor the full impact—I was raised to be a dour Protestant.)

Tiffany’s note was short, since she’s nursing a broken collar bone and can type with only one hand. But it was clear and to the point. Does this cover work for my story? I opened the attachment, scanned it on my laptop, then printed it out. I was immediately pleased that the designer seemed to have read the story, or at least understood it. The novel, Under the Eye of Kali, is the first in a new series featuring Anita Ray, an Indian American woman living in South India at a hotel run by her aunt. It is a land of palm trees and high rises shooting up next to low-slung traditional houses with thatched roofs, with long white beaches running unhindered up the coast. And the cover pretty much got it—high rises behind a row of palm trees, water lapping gently against the coastline. But all was not perfect.

Now, I do not in any way regard myself as visually artistic—I enjoy taking photographs, mostly for fun and my own pleasure, and I have strong views on what works and doesn’t work—but I would never dare tell a designer how to do his or her job. But Tiffany asked for my opinion.

The one discordant note for me in the proposed cover was the image of a rug beneath the waves and a beringed hand emerging over the rug but still in the waves. It just seemed to be too much. After thinking about it for a day or so I emailed back that I thought the rug and the hand were a bit too much—they made the cover fussy. My thought had been an image of a deity emerging into view beneath the waves. I sent that back with thanks for having been invited to review the cover. I didn’t expect anything else to come of it, and wondered when I’d see the final book.

Just a day later Tiffany sent me a revised cover—with exactly the image I had imagined. There just below the water’s surface, slowly emerging into view, is the figure of a deity with a necklace of skulls/heads. It’s fabulous! I sent back my enthusiastic approval and thanks once again to Tiffany.

The cover for Under the Eye of Kali, due in May 2010 from Five Star, works perfectly in my view—with the story and the depiction of contemporary South India. The story takes place in a modern resort surrounded by palm trees, the murder victim is found along the shore, and the villain . . . You’ll have to read the book.

And now, if there are any complaints about the cover, those complaints come straight to me. I can’t hide behind the excuse of being only the writer and having nothing to do with the design of the cover. If I get to say what I like and don’t like, I get to take the heat if others don’t like it. But even so, this is one two-edged sword I’m glad to grasp with both hands.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

2009-11-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

A member of the Five Star chat list recently posted a thoughtful and passionate piece about the role of luck in launching a new book. He touched on a lot of points, but one in particular caught my eye—the cover design.

Whenever anyone talks about the effectiveness or irrelevance of a cover, I recall an encounter in the old Spenser’s Mystery Bookstore in Boston. The sales person had just read what she considered a terrific mystery but found the cover so off-putting that readers just weren’t picking it up. She talked about how well written it was, how interesting the story was, how she had been thoroughly caught up in the whole thing. She thought I’d like it too. And as I listened to her describe it, I had to agree. But that cover . . .

The cover was brown with a figure emerging from the darkness dressed also in brown, and not a particularly attractive brown either. I could not bring myself to pick up that book. I was like everyone else she had tried to sell it to (or most others)—I couldn’t get past the cover.

When my first mystery novel was published in 1993, my editor, Susanne Kirk, called to tell me about the cover. “There’s an old chair . . .” When I saw it, I thought I understood why she made the call. A Victorian-style chair in purple was placed against a black background, and had two eyes, a nose, and a slash for a mouth scratched into the picture, as though someone were defacing a photograph. I gulped, reminded myself to be grateful for being published by Scribner and set about selling the book as best I could. I accepted the cover as one of those things. Then, a friend showed it to her son, a successful graphic designer, and reported back that he really liked the cover—he thought it was very effective. Really? Well, who knew? After that I just hoped I’d run into a lot of designers who read mystery novels.

Most of the time I pay little attention to the covers. I look at mine, at those of my friends, and forget the rest. But after reading Gordon’s comments I thought about some of the covers I really liked. In 1992 Ellen Nehr, who has since died, published the Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928-1991, a massive undertaking in which she included a selection of book covers. Most are unremarkable in design (the usually threatening male with a gun, skulls, dead bodies), but one in particular has stayed with me. The Needle’s Kiss by Austin J. Small appeared in 1929 with a cover of near perfect 1920s Art Deco design in blues and purples; the scene is of a man standing on a bridge smoking and another man fishing out a body floating in the river. Unfortunately, the cover also comes with the prejudices of its times. The headline “A hideous menace confronts the Thames River Police!” floats over the standing figure, who is wearing a green Mao-style jacket and smoking a cigarette, with the suggestion of Far Eastern features.

Most of the covers Nehr included make much with little—two or three colors, usually black and white and another, red or green or blue—and do their best to create the fear and suspense the reader hopes to find in the story. I was also surprised to discover that I owned one of these—a battered copy of Marion Bramhall’s Murder Solves a Problem (1944).

All of this leaves me still with the question of the importance of a cover. A good cover is a gift from the publishing gods, a bad cover is a curse, but the mediocre cover is just that—sort of neutral. I doubt anyone remembers Small’s book (well, okay, maybe Jon Breen or Jim Huang) or the cover, or the cover of my first book, and that’s a relief. This business is hard enough without starting to feel that everything is out of our control—the success or failure of something we’ve worked on for months, even years, at the mercy of a young designer trying to decide which bar to head to after work if he can just get this last cover done. No, I’d rather think that somewhere, someone will love each and every cover and we just have to find that person—and then hope he or she likes the story as well.

Characters: Where do they come from?

2009-10-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

A recent post by Carol Kilgore at underthetikihut.blogspot.com got me thinking about how I create characters, and some of the resources that have stimulated and broadened my thinking over time. So, thank you, Carol, for starting me thinking about this.

I’m like many other writers—I like to think my characters emerge as their own souls, fully formed, entirely independent of mortal creation, eternal and grander than my mere imagination can create. A dream, yes.

More likely is that I’ve been absorbing the traits and behaviors of those I see around me as well as what I read, and there are some very good resources for helping the faltering imagination with character development.

First, the twelve astrological signs tend to give a well-rounded description of a number of personality types, and their less attractive qualities can easily be laced with evil intent. The home-loving Cancer can become the obsessive wife who will kill to protect her home, and the hard-driving Taurus can be the insensitive executive who tramples everyone and anyone in the drive to get ahead—a gratifying choice for the victim. Any book explaining astrology gives full descriptions for these personality types and a year’s worth of predictions suggests the kinds of traps each one might fall into.

Second, a few years ago several books were published about the ancient Sufi tradition of the Enneagram, which describes nine personality types and their interrelationships. The descriptions of each one go on for several pages and even include examples of each type. The nine types are the perfectionist, giver, performer, tragic romantic, observer, devil’s advocate, epicure, boss, and mediator. No one person is entirely one type, and the teachings include variations on the standard one. The givers can be seen in the negative side to be quite selfish and histrionic—a wonderful dynamic for a supposedly good character.

Third, the characteristic features of specific features of handwriting can lead to a remarkably deep sense of who someone is. Handwriting analysis books are readily available, and examples can be drawn from one’s own writing. I sometimes use reactions to someone’s handwriting in a story to reveal something about both the narrator and the other character. It can be unsettling to see a well-dressed woman scribble a note in the appalling handwriting of a barely literate child, or a graceful signature written by a construction worker.

Fourth, I recently came across a book about ethnic character types. I found this at first hard to swallow, but after reading through some of the articles and coming across some other ethnic history, I began to see the value in some of it. The Irish, which is my heritage, were slow to assimilate because they wanted to keep their ethnic heritage, which included a love of the passing day—a love of living in the present rather than making money in order to someday have a good time. I pondered that for a long time, as a member of the tribe, and had to admit that it has some merit. But that’s another story.

If you have tips to develop characters and find their flaws or their virtues, let me know. I’m always looking for ways to expand my library of resources.

Destiny and Its Branches

2009-09-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

Destiny and Its Branches

I recently came across an old photograph of one of my brothers, now dead, among his classmates and couldn’t stop wondering about these children who are now nameless. It is typical of photographs of schoolchildren, in which they are invariably lined up, admonished to stop wiggling, and told to smile. Most of them manage, looking more mystified than vain or eager to have their photo taken. But none of that is what fascinates me. What grabs me is the story I see unfolding. If you line up any dozen children from a grade-school class, each and every one looks like he or she has the same potential, the same opportunity, the same future as any other. They are bright-eyed, tidy for the most part (it’s usually before recess for this kind of portrait), and about the same size. And yet, in each one are the seeds of a unique and striking life—with at least one tragedy and, one hopes, at least one great joy.

The thought about children hiding their futures behind bright smiles and curious eyes came to the fore again recently when someone I grew up with was arrested for a violent crime. I was stunned—and still am. It got me thinking about other people I have known since childhood or college and what has happened to them in the intervening years—which number more than I care to think about. A dear college friend committed suicide, leaving behind a loving husband and two brilliant children; a relative died the same way, unable to come to grips with the sorrows of his life; one of the nicest, most popular guys in grade school chose drugs and motorcycles; and a happy-go-lucky prep school student has been struggling with mental illness for thirty years. These are the lives that throw into relief the quiet ones that are lived in the suburbs with summer vacations spent white-water rafting or hiking, or rewriting for the tenth time the novel they started in college or during a brief period of unemployment.

This recurring wonder is probably what’s behind some of my drive to write. Nevertheless, I didn’t expect my characters to emerge so violently from my own life. It’s one thing to interview a criminal, to learn how he or she thinks, or to go into social services and count in a client list a few ex-felons, men or women guilty of robbery or kidnapping. We keep them at a respectful distance according to the dictates and professional requirements of our job. And no matter how much we might come to respect, like, even admire them for the changes they bring about in their lives, it’s not the same as looking back at your childhood and discovering that an old friend is now charged with a serious crime.

The only way for me to deal with this turn of events is to put the character into a novel, so this story about a childhood friend will probably show up in a future Mellingham. I want to understand how this life happened, how it evolved and took the turns that led to that startling newspaper report. Only by experiencing such a life through my imagination will I understand it on a deeper level, and set aside the facile explanations or even condemnations.

That’s how I cope—I write about it, whatever it is. When I visit a new place, I see it as a setting for a novel or short story; if I meet an interesting character, I want that person in a book. I improve people’s speeches in my head while they are talking to me, rewrite their personal histories, and re-imagine their fate. Eudora Welty had it about right when she said in One Writer’s Beginnings, “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime, and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” Writing is for me the best way to make sense of life.

Guest Clea Simon on Anthony Trollope

2009-09-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

This week I welcome Clea Simon to my writing world. After I wrote my last piece, on Graham Greene, it occurred to me this might be a good opportunity to find out about my fellow writers’ favorite books. Since I’m always look for more titles to read, I asked Clea Simon about her favorite writer, and she sent me this.

Clea Simon on Anthony Trollope

A few years ago, when PBS adapted The Way We Live Now for television, I had a mixed reaction. On one hand, I was thrilled that my husband got to learn about the sleazy financier Melmotte and his Madoff-like shenanigans. On the other, so did millions of other viewers—and suddenly my secret was out. Anthony Trollope was in the public eye. I no longer had Mr. T to myself.

Okay, so it’s pretty silly to feel like I ever had any ownership over Trollope. The 19th Century Brit was one of his century’s most successful novelists and while his fame may have faded a bit in this era of fast-paced thrillers, there have always been readers who have loved his cynical, funny social satires and convoluted family sagas, books like Can You Forgive Her? and The Prime Minister.

Trollope wrote novels the old-fashioned way, letting us get to know his characters—and their numerous flaws—before rushing them off into action, usually in the marital or social markets, occasionally in the personality-driven politics of the day. In two of my favorites, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, he follows one particular young man through most of his adult life, from early ambition and thwarted love to a mellower, and somewhat wiser maturity. He takes his time—these are books to curl up with—and he always delivers. Sometimes arch, always funny, and often wise, Trollope is a writer I often re-read. When I think of his wit and sharp eyes, I think I’d have loved to meet him. He’s a writerly writer, not in a pained, self-conscious way (yes, he’s lighter than Henry James), but in the sense of being an assured wordsmith.

Perhaps it makes sense that I have a sister copy editor to thank for introducing me to him. Several years ago, when we both worked at the Boston Globe, a Living/Arts desk colleague loaned me the use of her lakeside Maine cabin for a weeklong vacation. She had a canoe, an outdoor shower, a lovely dock. Everything one would need for a restful week. Except the weather didn’t comply. After only one day of swimming and sunning, the rain closed in, and the book I’d brought to read myself to sleep was soon exhausted. Poking about in her shelves, I found a well-worn paperback copy of The Eustace Diamonds, and I was hooked. The middle of The Palliser novels, this 1871 picaresque features a slick anti-heroine, very much in the mode of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair). Just insecure enough to be sympathetic, she leads the bon ton a merry chase as she hangs on to her late husband’s family jewels beyond all reason—and all profit to herself. It’s a great fun soap for the pre-TV age, and one I re-read fairly regularly.

I admit, these books may not be for everyone. I’ve always been a fan of long, gossipy novels. The Gothic adventures of the 1790s have inspired my new mystery, Shades of Grey, and I’d just as soon tuck myself up with a Henry Fielding or a Thackeray as watch most dramas on TV. But Trollope is easier reading than even these, fast and funny and full of well-drawn characters. These aren’t necessarily qualifications that critics look for these days. There may be a reason that Trollope is best known at present as the source of TV drama; fiction critics tend to favor action-packed thrillers or navel-gazing meditations to a well-written story line. But these are still my models for what a good novel should be, and what I aspire to write like. They are certainly the kind of book I love to read, over and over again.

Clea Simon is the author of five mysteries and three nonfiction books. She can be reached at http://www.cleasimon.com

Back on the Shelf

2009-08-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Back on the Shelf

Exhaustingly hot days can be just as good as cold snowy ones to justify lolling quietly on the sofa on a weekday afternoon, thinking about what books to read, what new ones to buy, and, yes, which ones to weed out to make way for the new. I have to force myself to do this every now and then or life would be unlivable in my small house, and my husband and I don’t want to go the way of the Collins brothers.

The bookshelf that got my attention this afternoon is the one to my immediate left, behind my desk, where I keep books on writing. I’m something of a junkie for these, and keep all of them no matter how slight or trivial. This makes it hard to find something to cull, but it does make for an enjoyable half hour while I poke among old friends and rediscover the pleasures of a particularly good but forgotten writer.

Stephen King’s book always leaps out at me, and I enjoy leafing through it. But next to it sits an old standby that I like for many reasons. Technique in Fiction by Robie Macauley and George Lanning is a quiet, thoughtful work that guides the writer through all the stages of writing including the most mysterious one, the conception of a story. Lots of writers do this in their how-to books, some well and many less well. But what I like especially about Robie’s book (I use his first name because I had the good fortune to meet him a few times, including when he visited a class I taught in Boston) is the tone. He brings to this book his many years of experience as an editor with Houghton Mifflin but also he brings his own character and personality. He is thoughtful, precise, firm in his opinions but also equally clear why he has them.

Too many books in this category are written with a sense of breathlessness, a chase headlong to the finish, to produce the perfect book, the absolutely best, rip-roarin’ mystery anyone ever wrote. They are all passion and opinion and way too much of the author and not nearly enough of other writers who have left us exceptional work.

This leads to another reason I still admire this book and return to it often. Robie was extremely well read, and this is evident on every page in every example. He puts John Updike and Alberto Moravia on the same page (literally) in discussing setting, place and milieu. He moves gracefully from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ann Beattie. We pass through Russian literature and the Norse sagas, and consider the views of other critics—E. M. Forster, Chekhov, and Madison Smartt Bell, among others.

The last reason I’ll give will definitely seem quirky to some. This is that each chapter ends with footnotes. I love footnotes. I love the tidiness of them, references all arranged in a row, numbered and neat, the listing of publishers I may not know, the promise that each idea is tied to reality and can be found once again in another form in another book. I love the orderliness of footnotes, particularly coming after a discussion of the disorderliness of characters and their behavior. For me a footnote demonstrates the writer’s implicit regard for the reader, as well as the care the writer has taken in his own work. And I love the promise in each note that there is more and here is where you’ll find it.

All of this derails my afternoon of good intentions. I will read a few more pages, enjoy the voice of quiet authority and erudition, and put the book back on the shelf one more time. Then I’ll go find something else to do while the sun is too hot and the humidity too high to hear the call from the garden.

Graham Greene's Doctor Fischer of Geneva

2009-08-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party (1980)

Graham Greene is one of those writers who tend to be pigeonholed as this or that type of writer because it makes things easier for the reader or critic. In Greene’s case, two of the categories I have come across are Catholic writer or popular writer with political themes. Both of these descriptions are true in a literal sense. Greene converted to Catholicism when he fell in love with the woman who would later become his wife, and his novels certainly have political themes. But these categories don’t interest me. What grabs me is the way Greene tells a story.

The trend right now is to stories that are more and more extreme—more violence, more murders, more outrageous behaviors. Writers who work to develop interesting characters with some depth are urged to abruptly toss in a serial killer, an assault or rape, or something worse. The story lurches forward. This is not true of all writers working today, but of enough so that I found myself struck by the differences when I picked up one of Greene’s lesser works, Doctor Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party, which appeared in 1980.

Doctor Fischer is a retired millionaire living in Geneva with his daughter, who despises him. His wife is dead and she holds him responsible. She falls in love with the narrator, Alfred Jones, a man in his fifties who lost his hand during the Blitz and now works as a translator for a chocolate company in Switzerland. The story revolves around the dinner parties Dr. Fischer gives, to which he invites only his select group of so-called friends. His daughter calls the friends toads, an apt error for toadies. The rules of the dinner party are that the guests must tolerate his insults and humiliations in order to receive a gift at the end. These guests are not poor, but they will endure anything to add to their wealth. This is one of Greene’s themes—about the level of corruption among those who already have everything and the true nature of violence, the psychological damage it does to the human spirit that is greater than physical harm to the body. Evil is intentional but also pathetic. There are no murders, although Alfred’s young wife dies in a skiing accident, but the cruelty is so intense that nothing more is needed. The story holds the reader, as we watch the simple, subtle ways Greene removes layer upon layer of self-deception and the power of the bully who is himself miserable.

As I finished the novel and laid the book on the stack to be returned to the library I could still see each dinner scene vividly. This is what I look for in crime fiction or thrillers or whatever we call them—a character whose intent in this world drives the story, is the story, and remains alive and riveting long after the book is finished.

Graham Greene is admired for many things in his fiction, but I most admire him for never pulling any punches—he sees his characters as they truly are through to the bitter end, and he never comes up with a happy ending, nor a gratuitously violent or dark one. The ending is true to the character.

July 21, 2009 The Ones We Let Go

2009-07-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Ones We Let Go

Late July is when I clear my desk and get started on editing stories for the Level Best Books annual anthology of crime stories by New England writers. I love the idea of plunging in and rereading stories I like and discovering new things to like—a minor character I barely noticed before, an especially apt description, an incredibly clever trick of misdirection. But this time I will read with a sense of loss too.

When the other editors and I began this cooperative, we put out a slim volume of eleven stories that came in at 182 pages, plus front and back matter. Last year we published 26 stories coming in at 273 pages. That’s about our maximum for printer’s costs. So what’s the problem? For the most part every year we find that we agree on the good stories, the ones we wished were better, and the ones that are just not ready. We may have to say no to a few stories we like, but we grip our pens and check them off. Over an afternoon of lunch and tea, we whittle the list down to one that we can all agree on and can afford to print. That didn’t happen this year.

I make a sort of grid of the stories, with author’s name, title, word count, city/town/state, and record my thoughts in the space that follows each one. As anyone who has ever read for a contest or collection, these can range from detailed plot outlines to single words telling all—Huh? Yuck! Perfect! This year was no exception. In the left-hand margin I note my vote—yes, good, maybe, no. (I also tend to quibble sometimes and put in yes+ or ok+ or ok- You get the idea.) When I counted up my Yeses, I had thirty-six. Thirty-six! And that was just me! What about Kate and Ruth? (You can see how much this has upset me. I’ve broken one of my cardinal rules—no more than one exclamation point in at least 300 pages.) I knew Kate and Ruth would push the list of Yeses up to at least 50 because my Yeses were just my taste on what works for this anthology—not a judgment on the quality of every story.

The first time I judged a story contest I was given about twenty stories to read over a month’s time. The stories were by high school students and were for the most part pretty good though not yet publishable. One in particular was what I regarded as typical for the age—a teen meditating on life with a single superb poetic sentence right in the middle of the story. The rest of it went nowhere but I still remember that story. The story I chose, however, was one that made me laugh out loud with its droll sense of humor, the writer’s distance on her character, and the unexpected development of the story. This was a writer with a future—she never forgot her audience, and never took herself too seriously. I arrived at the meeting convinced all three of us judges would pick the same story. Man, was I wrong! (Oops! And again . . .) Not only did no one else pick the same story I had chosen, but the other two thought it was too “plot-driven.” And one judge picked the no-story story with the perfect sentence! Truly there is no accounting for taste.

I am reminded of this experience every time I sit down to read for the anthology, but for the most part the three of us at Level Best come in pretty close on our lists of choices. We have the same regrets for stories we can’t include and each of us has one or two that we alone love and champion. This year mine was a short piece by Bill Joyner, whose voice in fiction is unmistakable to me and is one of my favorites. We’ve been in a writers’ group together for a number of years and I’ve enjoyed hearing his novel develop. Two other writers whose stories were especially hard to let go were Mo Walsh and Barbara Ross.

When we started this venture we hoped we’d have enough good stories to make a volume. Now we have more than enough, so many in fact that we occasionally toy with the idea of doing a second volume in the year, but that’s a lot of work and we have other lives.

So, for those of you thinking about next year, here’s a word of advice. Short. We always make room for good SHORT stories—a hundred words, a thousand words, fifteen hundred words. Think of Hemingway’s story in six words: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” Short is good. Another word: Persistence. One rejection does not a career make (or break). We love publishing new writers, good writers, little-known writers. Keep writing. And keep sending.

From Terry Odell’s blog...

2009-07-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

This piece first appeared on Terry Odell’s blog on July 7, 2009. She has a great site and I urge others to visit there, and I also thank her for the opportunity to share this with her many readers.

My First Love

One of my favorite pastimes is wandering the aisles of independent bookstores checking out the mystery novels, looking for books by new writers and new books from old friends. Writers take me into little known corners of the world—Dana Stabenow teaches me about Alaska, Alexander McCall Smith about Africa, and Cara Black about Paris. I love learning about a new place, and I understand the satisfaction derived from writing about a city or landscape well loved. For me that place is India.

My character Anita Ray grew out of a deep love of India and a longing to experience that country when I couldn’t get there. If I couldn’t take my vacation traveling out to the beach at Kovalam, I could send Anita, watch her stop at the local temple, enjoy a bowl of fruit sitting on the beach, or ride along with her on a bus into the hills. She took me to all the places I loved but were too far away to get to.

When I was about ten years old, perhaps younger, someone gave me a book of stories set in Asia, and I was hooked. I have never forgotten that book, and I have never forgotten the moment those stories opened up an entirely new world to me. And that was about it for several years—until I was sixteen. I went to a very progressive girls’ school (which is why I still count on my fingers) and had the good fortune to be offered a class in Asian history. Once again the fascinating world of India (and, yes, also China and Japan) worked its magic on me, and my love of Asia deepened into a love of India specifically. After the end of the class, I spent free time looking for information on India—cutting photos out of magazines, studying images of buffalos and monsoon damage and sari-clad women and visiting museum collections of Indian art. I was not very sophisticated about it, obviously. Unfortunately, back in the 1960s, there wasn’t much information available. India was regarded as just that country with millions of people living in poverty. Who would want to know about that?

And then I went to college, where the cosmos presented India in the form of art history, and that was it. I couldn’t get enough of it—and fortunately my professor was kind and tolerant and kept devising more classes for me to take. At the end of the year, when I had to graduate—and thus leave behind all these wonderful opportunities to explore India—he announced an Asian festival for the coming year—art lectures, exhibits, dancers, visiting scholars. I was tormented to be a worker and not a full-time student, but overjoyed to be participating anyway. (And so began my life as a writer with a day job.) And that year did it for me. An idle comment about graduate school and the following year I was on my way to the University of Pennsylvania, where I was the only graduate student studying India who did not arrive via the Peace Corps.

After living in India during two year-long trips, getting a PhD (yes, in Sanskrit), I had to get a job, again, so I reentered the so-called real world. I thought India was lost to me, and did my best to put it behind me. Then, after many years, my husband casually remarked that he had enough “miles” for a round-trip to India—for one.

I went back to Kerala, in South India, and not until I landed in Madras (the name recently changed to Chennai) did I believe I’d actually get there. When I landed in Trivandrum in Kerala I was stunned with amazement—and so were the friends who opened the door to someone they hadn’t seen in fifteen years. That was in 1999, and I’ve been returning almost every year since, trying to remember as much Malayalam as possible, taking in the changes in the landscape (high-rises everywhere), the streetscape (girls in jeans and tight jerseys), and shops (air-conditioning!). I’ve rejoined a community of friends that, kindly, never forgot me, and now I even toy with the idea of living there for six months a year after I retire. All right, so I’m dreaming, but it feels so wonderful to imagine.

I have never questioned the appeal of this country for me—it’s something I’ve taken for granted—it’s just a part of me. A good friend feels the same way about Umbria in Italy, and another has devoted his life to visiting Guatemala and helping a certain village there. Our callings, if I may characterize this love of other lands in this way, is a mystery to me, but thanks to Anita Ray and her extended family I can play with the smaller mysteries of her life while content to live within the greater one in mine.

Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn from this wandering through my education is the importance of exposure to other worlds. That is certainly important and significant, and I believe wholeheartedly in putting books and maps and artifacts in front of children and letting them learn how great and wondrous and large the world really is. But in the end that seems a pedestrian conclusion to my early journey. One friend insists my love of India stems from the obvious—reincarnation. I lived there in an earlier life and the echoes of that identity resound through my present existence. Perhaps there is something in me, a refusal to accept the strict format of Christianity, another kind of echo from my teen years when the headmistress forced a Thai Buddhist student to attend Sunday services, that resonates in the Hindu world.

I’m uncomfortable with easy, one-sentence summaries of a lifelong predilection that could have gone in any number of directions. Why, for instance, was I not influenced by my mother’s love of Greek and Roman culture, the wonderful books she found for me, and the extensive library she kept for herself and let me poke around in?

Sometimes I think we are all displaced and we find a path back to our home territory, and if we’re lucky it’s not too far away to visit, is relatively congenial and accessible in the present world, and brings us joy and insight into the rest of the world.

The Book I Want to Write But . . .

2009-06-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I was reading a small book by Graham Greene in which he included summaries of book ideas he never got around to writing. These were two or three page narratives, not outlines, of a story—succinct, packing the GG punch, and very satisfying to read. They had remarkable depth for something so short.

As I was turning the page on one summary, however, a different version of this story came to me—one that corrected what I brazenly considered a flaw, and took me into an entirely different direction. I couldn’t get the new story out of my head. I made dinner, I did the dishes, I worked on a short story, but that “new story” line kept popping up. I finally decided I had to give in to it, which I thought meant just scribbling down a few notes and putting them aside.

I opened a blank page in Word and started to describe the story of a hostage who is released without anyone else knowing about it (in ways that are intended to complicate the plot, of course), and the story went on from there—I couldn’t type fast enough. Characters I hadn’t imagined ran across the page, complications that I have never used and never thought of came right along. I kept typing and typing and typing, and ended up with about twenty pages—and was nearly exhausted. I couldn’t have stopped the story if I had wanted to. It had its own shape and design and purpose, and I was merely transcribing. At every point where I thought I could stop writing, the story went on, with one more twist, one more surprise. A few days later I said to a friend, “This is a LONG book. I’m going to be tired at the end of it.”

This wonderful, unexpected experience may have been inspired by Graham Greene, one of my all-time favorite writers, or perhaps my unconscious was just ready to throw this idea out to me. For whatever reason, I have a pulsating scenario of a novel I long to write, but haven’t—yet. Right now I’m working on the sixth Joe Silva book, finishing up an Anita Ray short story, and editing a manuscript for my day job. But that novel about the hostage is always there in the back of my mind, waiting to be written. And oddly enough, the basic idea doesn’t seem to grow cold or stale, which is what would have happened if the idea was a weak one, just a flash of personal entertainment.

So, watch for this one in the distant future. It won’t go away. It demands to be written, and so it will. But I can’t say when.

2009-06-02T18:04:00.000-07:00

“Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.”

Malcolm Cowley, Introduction to Writers at Work, First Series (1958)

Every spring the libraries in my area each hold a book sale, and I’m right there buying books I don’t need, will probably not get to for several months, and can’t live without. The exception is always the book of quotations. I recently picked up A Treasury of Familiar Quotations, published by Avenel (a division of Crown) in 1955, with no editor or compiler given. This is very disappointing because I want to know whose quirky tastes have brought together Hannah More and Colton, Mrs. Osgood and Dryden. And with no index of names or quotations, I have to leaf through every page running my finger down the page looking for feminine names, most of which I don’t recognize. Things have changed a lot since the 1950s.

Better is the International Thesaurus of Quotations compiled by Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl (rev. ed. 1996; 1^st ed. by Rhoda Thomas Tripp). This one has three indexes, including one of authors and sources, so I can see almost at once the number of women quoted among the men. On the first page of the index are listed five women (if I don’t count Anonymous) among 36 men, a small improvement over the 1955 book.

But my all time favorite is The Mystery Lovers’ Book of Quotations, compiled by Jane Horning (1988). I keep this book near at hand and page through it occasionally, noting all my favorite writers from earlier years. I imagine Ms Horning reading happily along in Dick Francis’s In the Frame and suddenly faced with the almost paralyzing choice of reading on or stopping to savor and record the perfect line, such as this one: “The most damaging lies are told by those who believe they’re true.” I don’t know what I would do here. Mark up the book so I can come back to the quote? Stop reading and thus break the flow? Chew my pencil to bits?

Sometimes I read through a few quotes to get oriented to the crime story I’m working on. But sometimes Ms Horning records a gem that I clutch to my heart, like this one from a novel by Lucille Kallen: “There are two actions that are almost equally reprehensible to me. One is the act of beginning a sentence and then refusing to finish it. The other is murder.”

When I come across quotes like this written by writers I either haven’t read or don’t know, it reminds me of how vast is the crime fiction genre—and probably why I’ve spent much of my adult life squandering my time, as some of my acquaintances have tactfully put it (my friends know better). The danger is that I’ll spend an entire evening reading quotes from Robert Barnard or Ross MacDonald and not get any of my own writing done.

And the quote at the top of this piece? I couldn’t resist it, but I’m not going to elaborate on it. Maybe I’ll come back to that another day.

Level Best Books--Where's the Profit?

2009-05-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

Level Best Books—Where’s the Profit?

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading the last story on my list of those submitted for consideration for the seventh crime fiction anthology by Level Best Books. Quarry, the title my co-editors and I have chosen, looks like it’s going to be our best collection ever. Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty and I are finishing up our notes, and will meet some time in June to discuss our choices. This is the fun part, but there is more.

All of us have met someone who wants to publish a journal or book, but few know exactly what that means. For the many writers who look high and low for a paying venue and wonder why they’re disappearing, here are some figures to ponder. I supplied these, or figures like them (costs change every year, unfortunately) a while back, but here is a fresh look at what it costs us, the three editors who constitute Level Best Books, to produce an anthology each year.

We pay nothing for layout and design (we already have that), and our costs are those we can’t avoid. Printing for 1,200 copies of a book 8.5 by 5.5 with perfect binding, 273 pp. and xii pp., and four-color cover is $4,704 (in 2008 dollars). In addition, we pay each author $25 per story; with 20 stories, that’s $500. We pay $100 for the cover photograph. The website costs about $210 a year, postage for mailing mss is $489 (photocopying 2 copies of approximately 70 stories is donated), and mailing proofs is about $30. We usually place ads in the Edgar program book and Crime Bake book, for $475. These out of pocket costs add up to $6,508.

That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? If we just sell all the books at $15 per book, we’ll bring in $18,000, for a net of $11,492. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Each author is entitled to one free book, and we send out review copies. Okay, so now we have only 1,150 books to sell. The authors are also entitled to buy copies at half price, $7.50. We usually sell at least 300 copies to the writers, for $2,250. We now have 850 books left to sell.

Libraries get one third off, and sometimes buy up to 400 at this price, for $4,000. That sounds pretty good. We send out our flyers, set up panels, and take orders. We now have 400 books to sell. We turn to the bookstores.

Bookstores like to carry local titles, especially if one of the authors lives in the area. We scour our New England towns for independent bookstores and do our best to persuade them to take a few copies. Some are receptive, some are slow to warm up to the anthology, and some are downright hostile. But we get the books out there, thanks mostly to Kate and Ruth. Bookstores can buy books at 40% off, or $9, or at 50%, or $7.50, and no returns. If they want to be able to return the books, sometimes one of us has to go pick them up. The No returns policy is a good idea. So, let’s say we sell 300 books at $7.50 with no returns, for $2,250.

We now have 150 books left to sell to individuals, at $15 each, on which we will pay sales tax to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

If we set aside the books we plan to sell to individuals at full price, we will take in $8,500. We haven’t even purchased stamps for promotional mailings, paper for the many times the mss is printed and reviewed before being mailed out, and gas for driving around to bookstores to deliver books. We have not paid for design and layout, and we do not have an office or dedicated phone line. And we certainly have not paid any salaries to the editors. We have not calculated damaged books, stolen books, and lost books either mailed or left somewhere for pickup.

In addition, every story is read at least once by each editor; some are read twice during discussions over whether or not it really works well enough. Each story is then edited, and the page proofs are reviewed by all three editors as well as the authors. We deliver books to panels at libraries, to bookstores, to special events like conferences. We pay for our own gas, tolls, and aspirin. None of this is charged to Level Best Books, which is the only reason we have any money left.

Our profit so far would appear to be about $2,000, but there are three of us to share this. Despite all this, when I look up from this off-white keyboard and across at the bookshelves on the other side of the room, I feel a little burst of warmth and pride at the sight of the anthologies all lined up. It’s a wonderful feeling to hold the finished book in your hand, to have another reader ask you to sign a copy, to see the books neatly stacked on a table, ready for sale.

Back in the eighties, when I first began working in the Boston area, an editor said to me, “It takes a lot of people to make a good book.” He was right. We have a good printer, good writers, good artists for the cover, and three editors who bring different tastes and skills. It all seems to work, and the tiny profit we make seems to be all we need to keep going for one more year.

Blog Bits

2009-05-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

This short piece begins what I have labeled Blog Bits—short letters to other writers and readers on what I find most interesting or confusing of entertaining about the creative life. I’ve called them bits because I’m pretty sure these random musings won’t turn out to be full-fledged essays. But they will be honest about my work, how I go about it, and how I view this publishing business.

As I launch my new website featuring the Mellingham books with Chief of Police Joe Silva and the short stories featuring Hindu-American sleuth Anita Ray I’m stuck with the unexpected topic of photography, not writing, for my opening letter. A couple of weeks ago I hung an exhibit of photographs in the art gallery at the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. The images are of Okanogan County in Washington State, a glorious land of high desert country, pine forests, and cold rippling streams that can turn into raging floods.

The photographs are meant to complement a series of poems by Jana Harris that tell the story of pioneer women in the late 19th century in the area before statehood. The poems sometimes brought me to tears in their descriptions of hardship and sudden death quietly accepted. Tomorrow night four women will read a selection of the poems and sing songs of the period, and enter into the experiences of women undaunted by any burden or challenge or disaster.

I took up photography in the late 1990s, just to enjoy for myself while traveling. But the images that I took seemed to have a strong narrative quality and, as a writer, I felt compelled to add to their understanding with a short text. Apparently one medium at a time isn’t enough for me. The first exhibit was entitled “Women at Work in South Asia,” and most of it appears on a separate page on this website. Take a look. Let me know what you think. And welcome to this new site.

Oh How Can I Keep On Singing by Jana Harris was first published in 1993 by the Ontario Review Press.