Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

I Would So Totally Smell as Sweet

By Barbara Poelle

 

It’s official.  I have Ben Bernanke Tourette’s.

No, I do, and I am not alone.  Husband has it, too.

It’s like on February 1, 2006, Husband and I were struck with a very rare form of OCD known as “Bernanke Blurt”, which is a compulsive and undeniable urge to shout the esteemed chairman’s name back at the TV whenever it is said. It’s as if we are forever embroiled in some sort of horrific fraternity drinking game. 

It is especially prevalent with all of the bru-ha-ha of late as some sort of economic something or other is apparently happening in this country. So now it’s like we have SEASONAL Bernanke Blurt. Oh, and people? It is airborne. For example, Husband can be watching TV in the living room while I am in the office and even if I don’t hear the newscaster say Ben Bernanke, I hear Husband say it, and so then I say it.  

Ugh, boil the water and unspool the bandages, ‘cause we got it bad.

I have to tell you, though, it is just so satisfying to say. It’s like licking frosting from the beaters. If this is what it feels like to wash your hand 17 times then, wash on, dear friends, wash on.

Ben Bernanke.

It’s like sitting in noodles!

Ben Bernanke.  

It’s like dunking your whole head in pudding!

BEEEEEEN BERNAAAANKE.  

So much power in just a name.

Like this great exit on the way from LA to Vegas:  Zyzzyx Rd . Each time I drove from LA to Vegas (um, enough to truly appreciate the phrase “What happens in Vegas…”) I would compare Zyzzyx to my maiden name which had a few extra consonants-  like all good Polish girls do- and think  “Phew, at least my name isn’t Barbara Zyzzyx”. But now I am not so sure.  I mean, come on, Barbara Zyzzyx definitely knows conversational Cantonese and looks good in leather pants. Barbara Zyzzyx can sense rain in her left shoulder, as an old bullet wound always seems to tighten before that first whiff of ozone. Barbara Zyzzyx never falls down in airports while her husband hollers, “I mean Babe, really, what is WRONG with you?”

Barbara Zyzzyx is the kind of lady we all could really get behind, not only because she remains upright in crowds, but because she has a hero’s name. There is something so mystic, so personal, about authors choosing their character’s names, and I have always wondered how they know when they’ve got it, that perfect name.  Because unfortunately, while there are some truly forgettable plots out there, they are coupled with some doubly forgettable character names. But then there are those jewels, those mysterious marriages of story and character that just explode off of the page (or off the screen!) with some character names that really just ring my bell.

Like, John McClain from the Die Hard quadrilogy (Yes, it is. It’s a quadrilogy). And of course the yummy Jack Reacher penned by Lee Child. Whoops, now I am on a role, names like Hermione Granger, Stu Redmond, Blanche DuBois, Randall McMurphy, Jane Eyre, Howard Roark, Scut Farkus, Astrid Magnussen…just to name a few.

And I know that there are other names from past novels that I love, and those in future novels I look forward to discovering. And some of those names are being thought of and penned right now, this minute- oh, how can I possibly stand it? What’s in a name? Everything!

Sigh.

 In the meantime, I suppose I must be content with good ol’ Ben Bernanke.

Ben Bernanke.

Ahhh, like resting your cheek in cheesecake, isn’t it?

 

The Making Of "It's Just A Mystery"

Jeff Cohen

If you haven't checked in yet on the music video It's Just A Mystery which I believe might be the first in crime fiction publishing history (until someone proves me wrong, at which point I'll say, "oh"), please take a moment--okay, three minutes and fifty seconds--to watch. Then come back here. I'll tell you a little bit about it.

Okay? Good.

I got the idea for the song, which I have to admit is the first time I've gotten an idea for a song since I was required to write some for a college course thirty years ago (!), because of one of the periodic threads on DorothyL about what certain sub-genres in mystery mean, and where the lines are drawn. This would be about last October or so. It takes me a while to write songs because, um, I hadn't done it in thirty years, and I wasn't that good at it to begin with.

So after many sheets of crumpled legal pad (can you tell I was in avoidance mode from my actual paying work?), I had a workable set of lyrics, and picked up the guitar to try and work out a tune. The problem was, it seemed to be exactly the same tune I wrote for that class at Rutgers in 1979, and even though you wouldn't have known the difference, I would, and that was troubling.

It took a long time, and I went through a number of direct steals... um, homages. James Taylor, Jim Croce, a little Billy Joel (I can't play Paul Simon to save my life). Finally, something resembling a tune took shape, and I practiced for a while, not knowing why. I had to read the lyrics off a sheet, since I had no talent for remembering them (something I've read that I have in common with John Lennon, perhaps the only thing).

Eventually, I had to decide what to do with the result of this effort. Not having (nor wanting, nor deserving) a recording contract, my next best alternative--going door-to-door with a guitar and singing it to people--seemed somehow inefficient. What if people weren't home? Would I have to come back? What would happen after I got out of my neighborhood? What about when I hit the ocean?

That's when the notion of a music video was born. I'd seen enough book trailers--and liked most of what I saw--to know it is an effective tool, but I didn't have much of a budget (okay, NO budget; are you happy now?), and besides, the song wasn't about one book (although I certainly knew A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION was coming in April--a week from tomorrow, for those keeping score at home). It was about genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres.

So a music video, something I wasn't aware of anyone else doing just yet, seemed novel (you should pardon the expression). But I didn't know how to make one. And I wasn't going to turn myself over to some anonymous filmmaker whose work I not only didn't know, but couldn't afford.

Luckily, my son was available.

Josh is a film major at the Antionette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, part of Drexel University in Philadelphia (and there's a sneaky reference to that in A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION, of all places). And as luck had it, I had just finished the song when he came home for his winter break in December. He brought his digital camcorder with him.

We discussed ideas and shot a "master" of me singing the song. A few times. I wasn't crazy about my performance on any of them, but as it turned out, it didn't matter. We ended up not using any of that footage, mostly because Josh's break ended and when he went back to school, he started a class on editing. The improved technology he acquired and the skills he gained made a difference. But it rendered the earlier footage unusable.

So we talked every night (we Skype, so everybody gets to see each other) about ideas for the video. And we scaled back our ideas for budgetary or practical reasons (we couldn't have a body fall behind me on the line "as further bodies drop"). There wouldn't be additional cast members or choreography. There would be me. In costume, sort of.

The weeks while Josh was in Philadelphia were devoted to me learning the lyrics to my own song (that perplexed expression on my face is an indicator that I was only partially successful) and him learning about editing tricks with Final Cut, which came in quite handy.

Once he showed up for spring break a couple of weeks ago, we were ready. We shot a new "master" of a slimmed-down version of the song (I used to do a highly unimpressive musical break in the middle, and there might have been another chorus somewhere) that was the best I was ever going to do, and we took some exterior shots (that sepia-toned "ivy covered halls" shot is of the quad on the Rutgers College campus, shot a little over a week ago that Josh sepia-ed up in post-production).

Then came the "costume" shots. We'd considered every idea we could to dramatize the "lady who works in the flower shop," including asking someone from a local florist to stand in front of her store, but when it came down to it, the best alternative was to have me put on the hat my wife wore at our wedding 22 years ago and put a scarf around my shoulders, and lip-sync badly.

When we tried to do what we called "film noir guy," we had some setbacks. Josh wanted to do a "window blind" shot, like in Double Indemnity, a movie he'd studied in American Classic Cinema (you wouldn't believe what we're paying for him to watch the Turner Classic Movies catalog and have someone explain it better than Robert Osborne). But the blinds in our front windows wouldn't cooperate, and we couldn't get dark enough shadows with the lighting we had. So that shot had to go.

Not to mention, as has been noted, we didn't have a trench coat. 

Once we did all my parts, it was up to Josh to turn it all into something coherent, and here, he truly did shine. I'm not sure how any of that software works, but he cobbled all the footage (together, I think we had about a half hour that got cut down to three minutes and fifty seconds) into a tight little movie. I'm not crazy about the way I look, but he didn't have enough technology to change reality.

More than anything else, this was a great experience, working with my son on a project and trusting him to make it work, which he did beautifully. One night after we had shot a bunch of footage, I was going up to bed (college students stay up to ridiculous hours and then sleep until ridiculous hours), and Josh called up, "nice working with you today." At that moment, it didn't even matter if the video was ever finished--I'd gotten more than I could have hoped out of it.

In any event, it's there for a laugh, and maybe--just maybe--to be a reminder that A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION will be in bookstores April 7. I hope you like it, and so does Josh.

The Dreaded Moment of Suck

   

During the lifespan of a Bleak House book, I may read the same text seven or eight times. Sometimes a time or two more, sometimes a time or two less. (It depends upon my working relationship with the author and the way we work through revisions.)

Suffice it to say: I read each title *intensely* before it's bound between hard covers and made available for mass consumption.

And over the course of those months, at some point after my initial acquisitions read but before my final check-all-tiny-last-minute-changes review, I experience a moment while reading when I think,

"Oh god. This book is terrible. Is this book terrible?!"

*Gasp*

I know! I'm almost ashamed to admit this. I certainly don't want to give the impression that I think any Bleak House book is less than stellar. Obviously, right? What would that say about the company? Our authors? Heck, my own professional skill set?

But I want to talk about this because I sometimes head authors address a similar feeling, and I find it fascinating. I hear them talk about the moment of self-doubt which seizes them -- wholly unfairly -- and convinces them that the ms they're slaving over is utter crap. Some authors I've heard speak to this say the feeling creeps up just after they reach the halfway point of their first draft, when they've set everything up, invested a ton,and know pretty well where it's all going, but still have to get it there.

That makes sense to me -- having focused so much on a ms, worked mostly in solitude, and being essentially past the point of no return, I can believe that it's easy to doubt yourself. No matter how many previous titles you've published, no matter how many bestseller lists you may be on. Bestseller status doesn't fill blank pages for you.

My experience with a ms is much different from the author's, of course. My work is not creation, but refinement. I still, however, spend a lot of time with the mss. And I certainly feel a sense of ownership when I usher a book from query through publication.

I want to be proud of the work that I do, and I want to be praised. (That's natural, yeah?) I want Bleak House to be renowned for publishing great crime fiction. And I believe in what we do, and the titles and author in which we invent.

But, just like the authors I discussed above, I encounter that moment -- when I've been shut up so long with a ms, trying to brainstorm a solution to some little character flaw, or soothe some plot hiccup, or elegantly replace some overused (but totally awesome) word. The dreaded moment of suck.

And when that moment comes, it's horrible. My will to continue to work flows entirely out of me, and if it's a cloudy day, all I want to do is curl up and take a nap.

I get all antsy about the critical reception for the book, and I get all gloom and doomy about sales projections.

I imagine myself stripped of my deputy sheriff editor badge and run out of town by disappointed librarians.

Once properly indulged, I can let go of my self-doubt and propel myself into productivity. I remind myself that I'm a smart reader, and that I have the best interest of Bleak House at heart. I talk myself back into loving the book in question -- because it was never really that I stopped loving it in the first place. It was just that for a moment, my trust and my faith in myself, my tastes, my abilities, wavered.

It only ever lasts a moment, but boy. It's a doozy.

Changing of the Guard

Robin Agnew

This week our local paper, The Ann Arbor News, announced that it wil cease publication this July, going to a two day a week print edition, but focusing most of their energies online.  They join the venerable Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, who are also reducing the number of print editions they publish (down to three days a week) and increasing their online presence.

Today I read an article about the fact that Braille is dying out - with new voice technology, fewer blind people know how to read Braille, saying it's too "difficult".  It's been proven, however, that a familiarity with Braille increases the odds of both higher education and employment for the blind, as well as just plain literacy.

This week I listened to a piece on NPR about the Kindle.  That piece was so depressing I had to turn off the radio.  One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle is that many books can now be accessed for free - and so, like music, people are going to be expecting something for nothing.

These are all (it seems to me) giant changes and it speaks to the fact that our society, instead of becoming more literate and better educated is becoming less so, and the tools that enable this decline are so omnipresent that, like the frog in the water that slowly begins to boil, we haven't noticed until it's too late.

I've heard many of my fellow booksellers complain (lament?) that we are now dinosaurs - what will happen to the book business?  News distribution? Reading? Education?  If I knew the answer, of course, I'd be rich.  What I do know is that reading is a quiet, thoughtful activity that takes some concentration and intellectual engagement.  The necessary level of concentration is something our busy, noisy world offers very little of.

What's selling books these days are events and the fact that bookstores are a place for social interaction (our book club nights are usually the busiest of the month).  Whatever gets people in the door and on their way with a book is a good thing.  I do worry that my customer base is on the older side - with some exceptions.

And The Ann Arbor News?  It may not have been the greatest paper on the planet, but it was the only paper (aside from the University of Michigan's Michigan Daily) that wrote about my hometown.  Downtown, this week, seems like it's been in mourning for the News.  Every customer has mentioned it - as one older lady with no computer lamented, "How will I read the obituaries?"  It's not only the loss of a landmark business that's been around for more than 170 years and a loss of over 200 jobs, but it's also the loss of something more intangible.  Something we should all be thinking about.

Calendars and such

PJ Nunn

I’m often asked what tool is most important for an author to utilize in promoting a book. Usually, the expected answer would be a post card or bookmark, or maybe a well constructed press release. But that’s not what I say. Maybe it’s a trick question, but the tool I see that’s most needed and most often lacking in an author’s toolbox is a calendar. I’m sure there are those who use one diligently and faithfully, but so many don’t.

 

One of my favorite books for years has been The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and it still is. I haven’t made time to read The Eighth Habit yet, but I assure you I will. I’ve learned over the years to rely heavily on my Daytimer, and am slowly making the transition, at least in part, to my Blackberry. The reason is simple. In this day and time, if I don’t write it down, it’ll get lost in the shuffle. And often, if I don’t schedule it, it won’t happen. It’s not rocket science. It’s just the way it is.

 

So often, I hear something like, “Once I get through with this, then…” and it sends up a little warning flag. It’s really easy to be task oriented with a single focus, but when it comes to juggling the writing with promoting, it’s worth learning to juggle rather than alternating one with the other. “I’ll finish these rewrites before my deadline, then I’ll figure out what I need to do about promotion…” sounds logical, but it may mean that author will miss promotion deadlines in the meantime. Probably that’s the number one argument for needing a publicist to help with those things.

 

Every writer has to find his or her own rhythm, and it usually means writing at certain times each day. It’s what to do with the time after that writing time that comes into play. Good planning may, in some seasons, even mean shortening that writing time to accommodate some promotional planning and activity since the normal daily schedule usually fills itself up with other daily activities.

 

Every temperament has its strengths and weaknesses, and some lend themselves to self-discipline and multi-tasking better than others. But every writer who is building a career as an author must implement a plan to achieve success. That plan should be multi-faceted and is not a task that can be completed then put aside. It will be a part of the business as long as there is a business. The same is true for promotion. It’s an integral and ongoing part of any business that involves selling a product. Target markets may change, campaigns may come and go, but getting the word out about your product will always be necessary.

 

As a publicist, I see all kinds of plans and efforts every day. Some authors have it down to an art and work seamlessly with their in-house publicists or with help they’ve hired on their own. Some smaller press authors have made a huge impact with little or no outside help, although I do wonder sometimes when they find time to sleep!

 

Those of us who are regularly active in the book publishing industry still recognize that there are hundreds or even thousands of new titles released every year that we’ve never heard of despite the authors’ and publishers’ promotional efforts. Some days I feel I’m totally immersed in the mystery and suspense genre, yet invariably when award nomination time comes around there will be titles on the list that I’ve never seen before.

 

The bad news about that is that even large promotion efforts don’t reach everyone who loves to hear about new releases in the genre. The good news is, that means there’s always something else that can be done to reach new readers.

 

So what does a calendar have to do with all that? There’s something comforting to me about a blank calendar. It gives me a measure of control over my days, even when later they may seem totally out of control. Even if I have to change plans sometimes (and I often do), it still lets me have something to say about where my time goes.

 

Typically, whether planning things for myself or for a client, I like to use a 12 month calendar. That way, I can take what is often a lengthy list of things to be done, and spread them out so that the task seems less intimidating. I review things each month, rescheduling things from the past that didn’t get completed, and making changes in the future to accommodate new information I’ve gained along the way. A planning calendar is just that – a plan. It should never be carved in stone. Expect changes and they’ll seem less troublesome.

 

Putting a deadline on things to accomplish, then parceling them out over days or weeks can make even the largest job seem more doable. It can also help put caps on the amount of time you allow yourself on other pursuits, even those within your overall plan. For instance, an author might determine that she should spend time making contacts with booksellers or book clubs, but find that making those phone calls isn’t her favorite thing to do. She may also determine that creating a presence on Facebook will be helpful to her career and find that she really enjoys that. If there’s not a clear plan in place, she’ll find that weeks can go by with a large amount of time spent on FB and twittering, and very few calls to booksellers have been made. Carefully planning can prevent that.

 

Essentially, a carefully planned promotional calendar can help on a number of points:

·         It can schedule time for all tasks that the author deems important

·         It can help the author stay on a schedule that will bring the best results

·         It can assist the author in keeping balance in the amount of time spent on various promotional activities

·         It can bring stress relief from knowing that there’s a plan for success in place

·         It’s a plan that is flexible enough to be open to change when new information comes along

·         It should include “me” time for the author that has nothing to do with work at all

 

Till next time,

Gushing, picking nits and cryptic lists

Sharon Wheeler

As most journalists will tell you, muttering under your breath and staring at a blank Word document waiting for inspiration to strike comes with the territory. But if you write for a living, you can’t have any truck with so-called writer’s block.

A writer friend of mine always says briskly that she can’t afford to have writer’s block. After all, if you don’t write, you don’t get paid. That thought concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I was catching up writing some reviews this week and for some reason was finding them awkward to complete. I had half a dozen album and a couple of book reviews to finish like yesterday. My usual approach to writing is to get ideas down on the page, be it words or phrases that have leapt into my mind, and then edit later. So there was a list of seemingly unrelated statements on the screen and not a lot in the way of fluent prose.

Half the problem was that I liked both of the books, and most reviewers will tell you that those are the worse reviews to write, as you don’t want it to sound like you’re gushing constantly, but you also don’t want to appear to be picking insignificant nits …

The albums were a different matter, and served to confirm my friend Lee’s theory that no decent music comes out of Canada! So I was having to send my sarcastic gene off with its case packed for a holiday … Even then, it was a matter of trying to balance the considerable negatives (why the hell does what the Canadians call indie music sound like 1960s UK prog rock bollocks?) with the faintest sliver of a positive.

In the end, I knocked off six album reviews in an afternoon and evening (that included listening to them as well as writing, in case you’re wondering what took me so long!), and polished the book reviews the next morning. And at times it did feel like I was keeping a shopping list, as I typed cryptic words or phrases onto the page – Virgin Mary, lift music, garden shed, spaghetti western and tinnitus all made perfect sense to me, honest!

I did make one discovery, though. Beware of multi-tasking while you are reviewing albums. There I was, listening to a deeply bizarre but really rather good album called The House on the Causeway and wondered why it had a spoken word bit which sounded like an advert for air fresheners in the middle. But then it was a strange album, so I shrugged and started adjusting my review accordingly. And then I realised it was something on the ITV site which I had open in the background. Quite what it all had to do with an online interview with the actor Ben Miller was beyond me …

The best bit

Is there anything to match it? That moment you hold the first copy of the book you’ve toiled, sweated and sometimes even wept over? When you flick through the pages and see words you thought you knew by heart looking new and fresh and somehow better than when they only existed as a pile of manuscript or a Word file on the computer?

 

Authors, please believe me when I say I get almost as big a buzz from it as you do.

 

Just one copy of each title is delivered to us here at the office; the rest of the print run goes into our distributors’ warehouse, and we order the quantity we need for review copies and promotion. They arrive a few days later and don’t stay long. But that first copy…

 

The one that arrived a few days ago isn’t just the first copy of a new title – it’s also our first title of 2009, and it’s a bit special in a lot of ways. I may have mentioned in passing – oh, OK, shamelessly plugged a time or seven – Criminal Tendencies, the collection of short stories we’re publishing to help raise some funds for a cancer charity. This is it, folks; it’s here. Available in the UK from early next month, on special promotion in branches of Waterstone’s, and, we hope, in a lot of other bookshops too. We’re working on that. Very hard indeed. One pound sterling for each copy we sell in the UK will go to the National Hereditary Breast Cancer Helpline. In the USA it’s released in September (but see below) and one US dollar per copy sold will go to the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

 

It’s crammed with short stories, all of them criminally brilliant, by some of the best and most popular crime writers around: Val McDermid, Reginald Hill, Andrew Taylor and a whole lot more – including Zoë Sharp, who is International Guest of Honour at Mayhem in the Midlands in Omaha, Nebraska, in a few weeks. Thanks to Dufour Editions, who distribute our titles over the water, early copies will be available in the bookroom there, and I’m sure Zoë would be delighted to sign them.

 

All twenty-six of the contributing authors have given their stories free of fee or royalties, and pretty well everyone, at each stage of the process, has made a similar gesture. Which only served to confirm what I knew anyway – crime writers are warm, generous people. The only small fly in the proverbial ointment (there’s always one, had you noticed?) was a rather mean-spirited letter which appeared in a magazine aimed at aspiring writers; its author demanded to know what we planned to do with the rest of the money people paid us, and came very close to accusing us of profiteering off the back of a couple of deserving charities. The letter didn’t actually name us, but there were circumstances which made it obvious who it was referring to.

 

I was more angry with the magazine than with the misguided letter-writer; they gave the letter a star rating and a prize, which, to me anyway, implied that its editorial staff supported the view it presented, and therefore knew just as little about the way publishing works. On a similar tack, I’m aware there are people out there who think a 10% royalty for the author means the publisher coolly pockets the other 90% of the cover price and takes long holidays in the Bahamas – but surely those people shouldn’t include suppliers of information to aspiring writers.

 

Just for the record, and in case anyone of similar mindset happens to dip into Dead Guy this week (not that I’m really worrying about that – our readers are perceptive, well-informed people), we need to sell twice as many copies of Criminal Tendencies as we normally expect from our titles. If we don’t we will actually lose money. 

 

But that’s not going to happen. Crime writers are warm, generous people; the crime readers I’ve met, and that amounts to quite a few over the past six years, are just as caring and agreeable. And of course they enjoy a well-written, neatly-plotted, properly developed crime story.

 

And Criminal Tendencies contains twenty-six of them.

Pretty is the New Charf.

by Barbara Poelle

Ugh. There is a Pretty girl in my office building. And I don’t mean like your neighbor shows you a picture of her niece and you’re like, “Hey, there, well..she’s…pretty,” while they nod and beam. I mean like the kind of Pretty that needs a capital P. The kind of Pretty where I immediately gain 5 pounds in my face and grow some sort of chest pimple while I am standing next to her in the lobby waiting for the elevator.

Pretty kind of looks like if Mandy Moore and Angelina Jolie had a love child. Pretty accessorizes. And Pretty has this uncanny superhero-like ability to always appear next to me when I think I am having a good day; it’s as if I yelled, “Hey Kool-aid” or more like, “Hey Shame Spiral!” and poof there’s Pretty.

Like last Thursday. I felt like I had kind of a sassy thing going on with my zip up black boots and a somewhat dangerous top with a silver clasp that really seemed to say, “I can get a little crazy. I can drink espresso after 6pm,” (Um, no. No I can’t. It’s like what happens when you feed a Gremlin after midnight). So I am standing at the elevator bank humming Tainted Love, tapping my leather clad toe a bit, forgetting Pretty even exists. The doors open and I step in and they are about to shut when who manages to slink in right before the doors close without disrupting the slide? Pretty. In size 0 jeans and a jaunty yet clearly expensive scarf.

Okay, now COME ON, the Fates would NEVER allow me to sashay into the elevator while the door is closing. The Fates would make sure that I tripped and fell into the elevator and then the doors would slide shut on a trialing end of my scarf and I would be madly untangling myself while making gagging noises and then enjoy the painfully silent journey as I remained, collapsed and rubbing my neck burn, amongst the legs of others on the elevator floor.

But not our best girl, Pretty. Nope. She slides through balancing a coffee while texting. It’s all I can do to not push her right down, but then she’s like, “Eleven please,” without looking up and Little Barbie the Troglodyte shuffles over and presses 11.

Sigh.

I have no idea if Pretty adores her job. I have no idea if Pretty has love in her life. I have no idea if Pretty has ever seen the sunset in Pebble Beach, holding a Bloody Mary the size of a toddler, while the Scottish dude plays the bagpipes on the Links at Spanish Bay.

All I know is that Pretty gets within my orbit and I immediately curve into myself as if "fight or flight" has simply become "fat". 

It’s almost Pavlovian.

However, I am not alone in my quest for total insanity, as I recently heard a similar story from a colleague that reminded me of Pretty.  Okay, let’s say we have an author whom we’ll call Anna. Now Anna has a three book deal with St. Martin’s Press and her numbers are just fine and she has tidy little royalty checks zipping her way across the ether. Everyone is looking forward to re-upping her contract. Now Anna has a “friend” in her critique group whom we’ll call Bobbie. Now Bobbie has a two book deal with Berkley, she got hers after Anna, and for a little bit less, but for whatever reason, she is a touch ahead, selling maybe 1500 more copies per book than Anna and she is also due for a re-up.  Anna finds out what Bobbie is getting as far as an advance/co-op/publicity/option clause, whatever and will be unable to shake the feeling that Bobbie got the better deal. Now Anna has 3 more books with SMP, and suddenly what looks like a legitimate shot at the extended Times list, but she cannot help but fixate on Bobbie’s new cover art. Then Anna gets a fantastic article in Marie Claire but cannot stop musing about Bobbie’s appearance on the local KUSA morning show with Blart and Fergie.

(OMG, would you not tune in EVERY DAY to watch a morning show starring Blart and Fergie?)

So here we see that no matter what her agent, her editor, her husband, her neighbor (the one with the pretty niece) says, Anna cannot help but feel like Bobbie is having a better career than she is. And for that reason, and that reason alone, Bobbie IS having a better career than Anna. Because Bobbie ain’t the one on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. sobbing into a towel so her husband can’t hear, is she? And Bobbie ain’t the one madly scouring chat rooms looking for people bashing her “friend’s” book. And Bobbie for sure ain’t making passive aggressive comments to other writers in the critique group about who is “settling” for what when. So Anna is living her truth- Bobbie IS better off. But only through Anna’s eyes.

Now I have another colleague whom we’ll call Polly Soot, because for the love of Elvis that chick doesn’t need any more publicity about how good she is.  Anyway, Polly Soot has this DIVINE list she calls the seven deadly publishing sins.   http://waxmanagency.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/the-seven-deadly-publishing-sins/  and I think she does an outstanding job of really exploring some of the self-defeating behavior that authors can get into early on in their career. Check it out. And then tell me how AWESOME it is that she uses a Don Quixote reference as kind of a throw away. So high brow. It makes me want to cheer and barf at the same time.  Medically speaking: to charf. (Mom! Charf isn’t unladylike! It even sounds classier! Don’t unfriend me.)

I guess what I am saying is that I don’t want the Annas of the world not to enjoy their successes because they are worried about the Bobbies of the world having more.

Live it and love it.

What’s that? Oh. No. I am still not okay with Pretty’s ability to wear size 0 jeans while munching a chocolate covered croissant in the elevator.  But today’s lesson was for you, not for me.  

 

 

Enough, Already

Jeff Cohen

All right, I'll be the first one to say it: I've had enough of Sully.

In 1981, when the hostages were released from their Iranian imprisonment, the comedian David Steinberg said that while it was wonderful these people were now free, the media explosion following their release would eventually reach a saturation point. "When a hostage shows up in the Secret Square on Hollywood Squares, we will have had too much of them," he said.

Such is now the case with Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot--sorry, heroic pilot--of a US Airways flight that landed safely in the Hudson River after running into at least one flock of birds. 

Now, believe me, I take nothing away from Mr. Sullenberger's feat--it saved a lot of lives, took great grace under fire, and was a shining example of a consummate professional doing what he should do under very, very difficult circumstances. I applaud Mr. Sullenberger, the pilot.

But Mr. Sullenberger the celebrity is starting to grate on my nerves.

Not surprisingly after the passengers and crew were rescued, there was quite the media frenzy, and everybody wanted to interview "Sully." That's certainly understandable. Why (after the first couple of hours) they didn't want to interview his co-pilot, the flight crew or the rescue teams that went out in the boats to get the people out of the freezing cold Hudson was questionable, but certainly the captain of the aircraft should take the lion's share of the credit for seeing to the safety of his charges in so extraordinary a fashion.

But then Sully started showing up on 60 Minutes, in an interview only slightly less lengthy that the one of the incoming President of the United States. The interview, it should be noted, took roughly four times as long as the heroic act itself, but then, it wasn't necessary for Sully to tell the passengers what was on his mind in six different ways while the plane was going down. He had to attend to other things, and did so magnificently well.

The next thing you know, it was Sully-mania. Sully got free tickets to Broadway shows, and was photographed entering and leaving said shows. The photographs were published in newspapers. Sully showed up on some late-night talk shows, on Larry King (the show, not Larry himself), on local news, national news, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and for all I know, in Mad Magazine, pushing Alfred E. Newman to the side for one month to utter, "what, me worry?"

Sully was at the State of the Union... sorry, the first address of President Obama to a Joint Session of Congress.

Now comes the news that William Morrow has paid between $2.5- and $3-million for Sully to write--no, not A book; TWO books! The first, not terribly surprising, will be an autobiography of sorts, putting forth the theory that "everything in his life led up to that moment." Much as everything in my life to this date has led up to me posting this blog entry. Only a little more dramatic. I doubt Morrow would pay $3-million for my explanation of how I posted this blog entry. And good for them.

The second book's contents were not disclosed, but there was some speculation that it would contain some of Sully's poetry. Yes. His poetry.

My point is not that Sullenberger doesn't deserve the attention, the admiration, hell, the adulation that's being thrown his way. He did a wonderful thing. But on a basic level, he did what he was supposed to do. And I'm willing to bet he'd agree with that statement.

What the hell; in a year or so, I'll get to find out if he does in fact agree. I can read it in his book. Or maybe in a poem.

When he's the Secret Square on Hollywood Squares, I suppose that will be too much.

Untitled

This Friday, I drove with my family to Chicago to attend the opening of my sister's BFA show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My sister (who is much, much cooler than I am) and her friend Kyle created for their final project the John Flaxicorn Memorial Library, "[A] collection of comics and books created by the staff, faculty, alumni, graduating seniors, and underclassmen of SAIC."

Their library is currently open in the Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., on the 7th floor. If you're in the Chicago area I *highly* recommend swinging by to check it out. There are comfy chairs, reading lamps, fancy rugs, and most importantly scads of comics. And they're free! Part of the idea of the project was to create multiple copies of each title, and to offer them up for readers to take with them when they leave. I, myself, grabbed a couple Beth Hetland originals, as well as a Small Science Collective title and a really special Anders Nilsen.

If you go, you'll also be able to wander the gallery to take in other SAIC graduating seniors' final projects. There are some really incredible pieces there, and I enjoyed walking around the space, letting color and form and design overload my senses. (And skinny jeans. Since I was there for the opening, I spied droves of skinny jeans. I think it's an art school requirement.)

But one thing I and my compatriots noticed when exploring the artists' works was the (to my mind) inordinate number of "Untitled"s in the mix. Seriously, at least one per wall, sometimes more.

Now, I don't pretend to be an art expert, not by any means. But it struck me as odd that something that the artist puts so much into -- that something the artist is ready to share with the world -- wouldn't have a name.

Not even a working title, just an "un."

I thought to myself, "Well, what did she [the artist] call it when she thought about it? When she said to herself, 'Oh, I'd love to go out tonight but instead I have to go home and work on Untitled.'"

Maybe she thought, "my painting?"

In my world, the world of books, everything has a name. Sometimes the title isn't the same from manuscript to finished book, but it's always called *something*. And I always have shorthand versions of those titles for myself, usually just the first letter of each word of the title, to help me keep my calendar organized and not too filled with pencil marks.

I work on our Bleak House books for quite a long time -- at the very least, for nine months -- and I know my authors have put a great deal of work into them before I even see them. I can't really concieve of putting that much time and effort into an endeavor and not creating a name for it.

But then again, maybe I'm just title-happy. My cats each have three or four names, and I answer to at least twenty-five nicknames. At least! So perhaps my life of labels has trained me beyond a place where I can appreciate the simplicity of "Untitled."

I think, maybe, I'm just too in love with words not to use them at every opportunity.

The Reading Habits of Men

Robin Agnew

I realize that the essay that follows is a giant generalization, but after 17 years of dealing with the public, I can tell you that it's pretty true.  I have a customer - we'll call him "X" - who has been shopping here practically since we opened.  I've introduced him to many, many writers, mostly because he kept buying the same Robert B. Parker book again and again and obviously needed some help.

So thanks to me he's read Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Harlan Coben, David Housewright, Kent Krueger, Steve Hamiliton and many more.  Do you sense a pattern here?  I'm even aware of it.  A few weeks ago he was in, soon after we'd had S.J. Rozan here to sign books, and I was feeling enthusiastic as I'd devoured 5 or 6 Rozan books before her visit.  Anyway, I sold him a copy of Winter and Night and thought no more about it. 

I saw him again two weeks later when he was in to buy the latest Marcus Sakey paperback.  We chit chatted a bit - his kids are a smidge older than mine, and one of his elementary school buddies taught both my kids 5th grade.  Anyway, he then looked a little sheepish, and he said, "You sold me a book by a woman."  I seriously couldn't remember which book I'd last sold him, though I did have a memory of it being a good choice.

He then said "I read it right through and then I saw her picture!"  By this time I had twigged that it was the Rozan book.  I said, "Yeah, and you loved it, didn't you?"  He refused to admit it, and mentioned that his wife was still laughing at him.  He then said there was something "not quite right" about the whole book.  There was no way I could get him to admit that Rozan was every bit as good as his favorite guys.

The thing is, X isn't alone.  He has many companions, many of whom are actually horrified by our front table full of cozies.  For them a guy who writes dark or funny is all they want, and it's foolish to try and sell them anything else.  I'm still getting over the guy who told me Val McDermid was "girly".  (Excuse me, but what???)  I've fooled a few of them with PJ Parrish, I'll admit.  Including X.  I'm still not sure I can ever bring myself to tell him the truth about the Parrish sisters.  Between you and me, shhh!

Eagles or turkeys - What sets an author apart?

PJ Nunn

I have a friend who’s a motivational speaker who often teaches in corporate settings. He titles one of his most popular topics Eagles or Turkeys, and he talks about the basic things that either help or prevent employees from making their way up the corporate ladder. Every now and again someone will ask me if I can tell those who are destined to ”make it” in the book biz from those who won’t. I can’t swear I’d always get it right, but there are some of the same qualities that seem to have predictive powers.

Obviously, individuality is desirable and there are no hard and fast rules, really. But the following generally raise a flag to me, good or bad:

Positive impressions:

1. A photograph taken by a talented photographer in a professional appearing press kit. You’ve heard me say it before, and you know a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? HOWEVER if the photo was taken 20 years ago and you no longer look like that, get a new one.
2. A pleasant, confident attitude that lets people know you’re comfortable with who you are, and even like yourself. But beware the fine line that crosses over to arrogance. It’s a balancing act.
3. Someone who laughs easily without making self-deprecating remarks. Speaks highly of others and never has anything negative to say about anyone in a public setting. Asks questions more often than offering opinions. Listens well. Shows interest in the work of others and speaks knowledgably about the industry.
4. A person who presents a professional, attractive appearance, true to brand.
5. Someone who enjoys his/her work but obviously sees it as the business it is and doesn’t take things personally. Pays more attention to advice of industry professionals than to other writers/authors who are not yet well-established in the field. Popular opinion, especially in internet circles, isn’t always accurate.
6. Someone who is as charming at a signing event with one person in attendance as at a signing event with one hundred adoring fans.

Warning signs:

1. Unprofessional materials including fuzzy snapshots and incorrect spelling in letters or promo information. Press kits and business cards that look “home made.” There’s a fine line between quirky and irky. Creativity is a plus, but you want to present yourself as playing in the league in which you really want to play someday. If you can get professional appearing business cards from Vista Print for $20, why run them on your inkjet printer?
2. Likes to gossip; talks too freely about bad experiences with others.
3. Failure to communicate, particularly about scheduling issues. Changes mind frequently and vacillates back and forth about how to proceed.
4. Crosses the line from persistent to pushy. The old adage says the squeaky wheel gets the grease but in this business it’s very easy to burn bridges by pushing just a little too hard. Choose your battles carefully whether following up with an agent or a TV producer if they’re slow to give you the “yes” you’re seeking. Calling once too often can result in a “no” when waiting until they were ready might have brought a more favorable response.

So the moral of this story is, the eagles will soar above others, while the turkeys stand on the ground, drowning, looking up into the rain.

Till next time!

Vote with your feet

Sharon Wheeler

I read this article in the week where the writer was bemoaning the fact she had to get to an obscure corner of France, and that the only way to get there was by Ryanair – and she then proceeded to list the airline’s considerable shortcomings. She then finished the piece by saying that of course they had no choice, but to use Ryanair as no other airline flew that route.

I was heard to mutter “actually, you have three choices apart from that. One, don’t go. Two, go by car (there’s a very convenient tunnel connecting the UK and France, in case you haven’t twigged). Three, go by train (ditto point two, with the addition of Eurostar and France’s very efficient railway service).”

OK, so that was maybe a bit flippant, but I get heartedly racked off with people whining about poor service and not voting with their feet. I decided ages ago that I’d never use Ryanair, which treats its passengers like shit and, to coin another bodily function phrase, constantly takes the piss. The airline’s latest delightful dodge is to close all check-in desks and charge people for checking in online before they leave home. Very helpful if you’re not online, or have a knackered printer …

Some good friends of mine have a house in a fairly remote part of the Dordogne, and have invited me to stay. And yes, the only airline that flies anywhere near is Ryanair. So I’ve plotted out the route using Eurostar and then trains from Paris to the nearest town. Good grief, they even have buses in France for the last leg . . .

It’ll no doubt work out a bit more expensive (not much, though, once you take into account Ryanair’s list of hidden charges) and take a bit more time. But it’ll make me feel better. And I’ll have all that train time to catch up on reading.

If something or someone pisses me off, I vote with my feet. I’ve changed banks twice as a protest against bad service. And I get fed-up with people saying ‘oh, it won’t make any difference if I stop flying Ryanair/shopping at Tesco/giving British Telecom my custom.’ Yes it will, just so long as other people decide they’re no longer rewarding bad service.

Those of us of a certain age will remember the boycott of Barclay’s Bank in the UK as a protest against its investments in apartheid era South Africa. It worked – mainly, I suspect, because the company realised that students boycotting the bank and voting against having branches of it on campuses across the country was going to be a major problem when the next generation of professionals had taken their custom elsewhere.

And in case you’re wondering what the hell this has got to do with books, the same applies to authors. We’ve blacklisted four writers on RTE because of unacceptable behaviour. And when they or their publicists have asked, we’ve told them why. Not being reviewed on one website probably won’t hit their sales hugely, but three of the four were mid-ranking writers who don’t get reviewed much elsewhere.

Anything that makes people think before they behave like arseholes is fine by me …

Am I missing something here?

Last Wednesday evening’s gathering of women who work in publishing was something of a departure for me. Mostly when I’m surrounded by people interested in crime fiction they’re keen readers, or sometimes writers.

 

And in that situation I can be pretty sure that someone will approach me with a slightly coy expression and the words, “If you’re looking for something to publish…”

 

Strange though it may seem, I very rarely am.

 

I’m learning new things about publishing all the time, and one thing I learned early was that publishers don’t actually need to look for something to publish. Mostly they’re spoiled for choice. We little guys don’t receive as many submissions as large publishing houses, but even we get more than we can comfortably deal with.

 

So, since all I have to do to find these manuscripts is open the morning mail, why would I, or any publisher, feel the need to trawl the internet in search of more of the same?

 

Yesterday afternoon the phone rang. (Several times actually, but the other calls were a whole other rant.) The caller introduced himself, but I’ve forgotten his name. He asked me if I’d received his e-mails – three of them, over a month or so. If I had, I’d forgotten them too.

 

He began to tell me about his exciting project which was about to change publishers’ lives. Think how much easier it would be, he enthused, if all I had to do to find new work to publish was log on to one website – at absolutely no cost to me, this was a completely free service to publishers – where I would find huge quantities of novel extracts posted by talented new authors.

 

I spotted three flaws in his argument in that one sentence.

 

First, it costs me nothing to open an envelope, and since my technological skills don’t include persuading my computer to work at warp speed, opening a few envelopes is probably a lot quicker.

 

Second, forget the one website part. This guy may have just the one website, but there are other guys with other websites.

 

And third, in general new authors come looking for publishers, not the other way round. If I ever do need to go looking for new authors, I’ll simply run another Search. It’s worked pretty well twice already. Though to be fair, the guy on the phone probably didn’t know that.

 

He bent my ear for five minutes or more about the wonderful and unique service he was providing to publishers, and since I was too well brought up and polite to hang up on him I made noncommittal noises and used the time to delete some spam, which I can do with three-quarters of my attention on something else. Come to think of it, his three e-mails probably got deleted during a similar phone call with someone else.

 

I asked one question, about the selection procedure for work posted on the site. Answer: none. Any unpublished writer can put their novel extract up there.

 

When I finally got off the phone – he was pretty persistent – I realised that the really worrying thing was that no cost to publishers almost certainly means a cost to someone else. My best guess is those unpublished authors trying their best to get noticed.

 

So if any of them are reading this – don’t do it, guys. Don’t spend your hard-earned shekels putting your work on a website no one useful will look at. The few publishers who still accept unsolicited work would far rather you checked out their own guidelines, and sent chapters they might actually want to read directly to them.

 

I’m sure the guy means well. But it helps if you find out how things really work.

 

Or am I missing something?

Huh. The Rhythm IS Gonna Get You.

By

Barbara Poelle

Something horrible just happened. It’s so horrible, I am not even sure I can talk about it. Okay, here it is. This is so bad. Okay. I am in my office. I am a grown-up. I have a Roth IRA and a marriage certificate. And just now, when I got some good news on one of my projects, I clapped my hands and leapt from my chair and yelled, (this is so horrible):

“Let Me See That Tootsie Roll!”

And then, oh, the terror. Oh the humanity! I proceeded to shout, (oh help me), “To the left to the left to the right to the right…” while doing something extremely untoward with my hips.

The true horror of this moment, however, was not the when I launched to the part of the song where I chanted, “Now, dip baby, DIP.” But the fact that as I rotated the groove in its full circle, while coffee grinding the arms of course, I ended facing out the window and there, in the building across the street, mouth agape, was a stranger in a cubicle, staring at me from across the distance.  

Don’t worry.  I didn’t just come to a screeching halt like a needle across the surface of a record.  Oh no. I just sort of lost my stank in slow, awkward increments, so that it looked like not only was I in need of some sort of medical attention, but those rushing to my aid should definitely bring a wallet for me to bite on.

(Honestly, though, in the scheme of shame, that is so like a -4 in the History of Barbara. Once, back when Husband and I were dating, there was one afternoon, we were having a lovely conversation about the movie Before Sunrise, and my pants fell down. My pants fell down. That is not normal. People’s pants should not just fall down when they are talking about Richard Linklater movies. In their defense, though, this was from an era when my pants were being held up by my hip bones, not my lunch.)

Anyway, my groove of horror got me giggling a little, and then a lot. There is nothing better than a hearty gut laugh, and I had me a doozie today.

Which is why every year, on my birthday, I have my friend Amy tell me about the time she had to be cut out of a dress in the fitting room at H&M.

Wait for it.

Twice.

(I am gone in gales of laughter right now.)

Yes, it is true, the same H&M, six months apart, Amy had to be cut out of a dress. I will never do the story justice the way she can in person, but let me try cliff noting in three easy phases, from the very first telling and every June since:

She begins: “Hey, thanks! Yeah, I lost about 20 pounds since last summer, uhh, ‘cause there was an incident…”

In the middle we get to: “I know, so so so horrible, right? Well, just wait. Six months later, I walk into the same H&M…”

The ending: “…just know there is a picture of me like a wanted poster saying, “This chick is NOT a size six.”

(Now I am leaving out the best parts, like, “…and then a line of sales associates actually formed as they all individually took a crack at me…” but you get the gist.)

This tale does not have an ounce of profanity in it. It does not exploit any race, religion, or belief. It is a story of an Everywoman, gasping and red faced, in the small confines of an H&M fitting room, having life throw her a curveball. (uhh, twice.)

This is the kind of comedic protagonist who rings my bells. And although it is really, really hard to beat a story that includes the line, “…and she only succeeded in ripping out the front  of the dress, so the flesh of my stomach exploded out  and began undulating with every gasp…” I think it is a clear barometer of sorts to gauge the comedic works that I go ga-ga over.  

This spring, I would love to sign a comedic fiction that slays me. (I have got a real corker of a non-fiction coming out this fall. Don’t worry, I’ll be barking about it come September…) but in order to sign something awesome, I need to read more comedic fiction (like A Night at the Operation of course!) As of today, my list of top ten favorite laugh-out-louds in both fiction and non-fiction would be (in NO particular order):

1.       Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott

2.       Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss

3.       Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

4.       Lamb by Christopher Moore (although A Dirty Job is a goodie too)

5.       The World According to Mimi Smartypants by Mimi Smartypants

6.       (I cry a lot in this book too, but that nativity scene kills me)A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

7.   The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman

8.       Any of the Blanco, Texas novels from Ben Rehder

9.       Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

10.   In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd

I feel like I should definitely be reading more in the comedic fiction world before I go launching into the unsolicited queries with a flashlight and machete…any suggestions? I’ll be here.

Uh, yeah, I’ll be here…Droppin’ it like it’s HOT, yo.

To the left to the left….

 

 

That was funny?

Jeff Cohen

What makes you laugh?

Those of us who traffic in comedy of one sort or another like to pretend that we know what works and what doesn't. We can tell you about certain sounds in words that make a joke better, or the rhythm of a sentence and why moving one word will diminish the laugh. 

There is, in fact, a story that I believe is true, of the writers on Caesar's Hour, the 1927 Yankees of Comedy Writing (including, among others, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Lucille Callen and Carl Reiner) arguing an entire afternoon about a sketch involving a roulette wheel at a casino: What number should Imogene Coca bet on? Twelve? No. Twelve isn't funny. Forty-six? No, that's not working. It took them all day to come up with thirty-two. And these are comic geniuses.

All art is subjective, but comedy has two factors working on it at the same time: No two people have identical senses of humor (they're like snowflakes--cold and transitory), and comedy is the only art form for which everyone knows the response being solicited, one that's easily recognizable. If nobody's laughing, comedy is dead. It's win or lose, and there are no degrees of success. 

The idea of analyzing a joke is anathema: E.B. White once said it's like dissecting a frog. "Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it." 

But the cold, scary truth is that nobody really knows why a joke works, or when it will meet the response it seeks, laughter. Lots of bad comedies are made because the makers think all the jokes are a riot, and then they discover they've made Ishtar.

So I'm always nervous when a book is about to be released. Will the readers agree with me about what's funny? Were my editor and I deluding ourselves when we went with this joke, or should we have cut it out? And now, with A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION only three weeks (and a day) away, I'm poring over the manuscript pages, trying to figure out where I went inevitably wrong.

Of course, there's also the odd delightful moment when I get an email from a reader citing one of the jokes in the book. It's almost never one of the ones I considered a sure-fire, can't-miss, slam-dunk (insert your own cliche here) laff riot, but it's always wonderful to have someone tell you that what they read made them laugh, and I never get tired of hearing it. I don't care if you laughed at the word "and," please let me know.

So, in order to soothe my troubled mind (and manipulate you into checking out the book), please help me with this experiment: Read the first chapter of A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION. Just click here. I'll wait. 

Okay. Now, assuming you found anything therein amusing, please comment on it below. Let's see if we're all agreed on what's funny, or if everyone has a different favorite. I'd really like to see the response, just to match it against my own expectation. I'll tell you this much: One of my favorite lines in the book is in that chapter. I'm willing to bet nobody thinks it's the best line there except me. Let's find out.

Gentlepeople, start your engines!

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a business like this?

You know what I find upsetting?

Murder.
Violent death.
Rape.
Assault.
Kidnapping.
Coersion.

I mean, right? You do, too? … Do you?

Then what in the hell am I doing in my line of work? I read books centered around these crimes EVERY DAY. All day. It’s the genre in which I’ve chosen to work: Crime. Mystery. Suspense.

Books about Very Bad Things.

And as much as I may think I’d like to be, I’m not naive. I understand that what I read about — the things happening to make-’em-ups — those things happen every day to actual, real people. Crime and criminals are part of real life.

So why fill my reading life with more of the same? What am I getting from reading about the parents who accidentally-on-purpose left their child in a hot car? What do I learn from the death of a woman who, as she’s being raped, is asked to choose between her child’s life and her own eyes? What purpose is there in reading about the man who defends himself with the only weapon handy — an axe?

The other day I read a couple items online talking about this new movie, The Last House on the Left. Well, it’s not really new — it’s a remake of a retelling of a reimagining, or something like that. It’s a story that’s been told on film before, and this latest version just hit theaters on Friday. It’s not really the kind of movie I would go see, but reading criticism of it has got me thinking.

People are upset about the graphic, brutal rape scene in the film. They’re upset that such a representation of reprehensible violence against a woman has passed the ratings board with an “R” and not an “NC-17.” I can’t speak to the specifics of the scene, or the context within the movie at large, or anything like that, because I haven’t seen it. But I have read books where a woman has been raped in what I would consider to be notably brutal and graphic scenes. A particular book springs to mind (I read it in college, but not as an assignment), and at several points during my reading I felt compelled to put the book upside-down in a shoe box, put the shoe box in a suitcase, and put the suitcase in the closet.

But eventually, I took that book back out again. I finished it.

I also vividly remember the time (seven years ago, almost!) I tried to watch “Straw Dogs.” I got really upset, turned it off, and as yet have not had the fortitude to go back and see it through to the end.

So what’s the difference? What makes some fictional violence palatable — or, at least, finishable? What compels readers to keep turning pages, even as their stomachs are turning? And why put themselves through it?

Violence is a form of conflict, and conflict is necessary to any narrative. But it’s when the depraved nature of the violence becomes the story itself — no longer a point of conflict within a larger plot, but the beginning, middle, and unchanging end — that’s when gratuitousness supersedes storytelling, and that’s not a book I’d choose to finish.

Packing for a plane ride

Robin Agnew

It's a well worn family joke that I over pack when we travel - not clothes, but books.  And I'm happy to say that I may have passed it on to the next generation.  I was discussing with a customer recently the number of books necessary for travel and we agreed that the minimum number was four.  Two for the trip there (what if you finish one on the plane?) and two for the trip back, same deal.

They also need to all be a little different from each other (to suit your reading "mood") but still be appropriate "airplane" material, which for me has a few standard rules: 

1)  The book can't be too complicated - you never know who will be in the next seat.  Last time there was a baby on one side (very active) and next to me a tiny, sleeping Asian woman.  I preferred of course the sleeper but was trying to remember the time when I had an infant and a toddler as the woman next to me did and was wondering how I managed it.

2)  The book has to have some really interesting feature - a gripping narrative or a fantastic character or both.

3)  Sometimes best of all is a re-read of a book you read a really long time ago that you can now barely remember.  The faint memories will get you through any kind of air turbulance.  Sujata Massey's delightful book The Flower Master recently got me home very nicely.

4)  The ultimate airplane author is a three way tie:  Robert B. Parker (though those are too quick of a read), Harlan Coben or Michael Connelly.  But of the three Parker's are the only ones I've re-read, since I truly did read them originally 20 or so years ago.

And if you are like my customers you may buy a lot of books in preparation for a trip and then read them before you leave, necessitating, as once happened, a frantic airport call where a customer asked me to choose books for her via phone in an airport newstand.  I have rarely heard someone in such a panic!  My own son told me he didn't need his book on the plane on the way there this last time - he had his Nintendo DS - but in fact he became so desperate that he read the inflight magazine.  He didn't make that mistake on the way home.

So where ever your travels - always pack a book or five.

Random thoughts

PJ Nunn

Let's blame it on the weather. Tuesday afternoon it was 80 degrees. Wednesday morning I woke up and found it 38 and pouring rain. Wind chill of 29. Now I know many of you have seen worse, but have pity. I live in Texas. It's not supposed to do this. Even the bugs don't know how to act when it does this.

So I've stayed inside most of the week. It's better that way. Especially when I'm thinking of how many of my clients and other friends have spent the week in Hawai'i where I'd rather be. Maybe next time. I'm planning for Bouchercon but somehow it doesn't seem quite the same.

i think I've hit a record this week for the number of missed phone calls I've made. Radio hosts are always a challenge to catch, but it's been everybody lately. Reporters, writers, CRMs, store managers, you name it. I'm really wondering how people keep their jobs when they're never there. You don't suppose they're all just avoiding me? No. They weren't there before I even said who I was. Strange, that.

In spite of that, the number of events I've confirmed at this point in the month has already exceeded what we confirmed in both January and February so something is working right. I've also had a rather long list of frantic authors I've spoken with who have books coming out in the next month or so and neglected to call until now. Those are fun. If you're one who's been doing that kind of neglecting, please call now and don't wait. Last minute is doable but it's never best for anyone.

I've been having a great time working on Jeff's newest - I may be a tiny bit prejudiced but I think it's his best yet. I love it! Be prepared to buy one on April 7. Or buy 10 and give some away.  

A couple of our February releases are already hitting the charts - if you've missed them you might want to check them out:

Homicide in Hardcover by Kate Carlisle, ISBN-10: 0451226151, ISBN-13: 978-0451226150, Signet Paperback, 304 pages February 3, 2009 $6.99

 

Posed for Murder By Meredith Cole IBSN: 0-312-37856-4 ISBN-13:   978-0312378561 St. Martin’s Press Hardcover, 256 pages  February 17, 2009

 

We've also got another couple of great titles still to come this month:

 

Death’s Door by Gail Lukasik, ISBN: 1-59414-714-2 Five Star, Hardcover March 2009

Under the Fifth Sun by Jeffrey Osburn, ISBN:1-60076-128-3 StoneGarden Publishing March 25, 2009 Paperback

And April brings even more fun:

April 2009

Devil’s Island By Carl Brookins

A Night at the Operation:A Double Feature Mystery By Jeffrey Cohen ISBN-10: 0425228150 ISBN-13: 978-0425228159 Berkley Prime Crime Paperback, 304 pages  April 7, 2009 $7.99

Killer Keepsakes by Jane Cleland, St. Martin's Minotaur April 2009

In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff, ISBN-13: 978-0312544904, St. Martin's Minotaur Hardcover, 368 pages, April 28, 2009 $24.95

The Bogey Man by Marja McGraw releases on 4/1/09

The Dead Man by Joel Goldman ISBN: 0-7860-2040-7 Kensington/Pinnacle Paperback 384 pgs April 2009, $6.99

 

As you can see, there's no shortage of things to read around here. I've still got a stack of review copies for Mystery Morgue that have yet to be opened by my desk.

 

But tomorrow brings another list of broadcast personnel to call in the morning, journalists, store and conference personnel to call in the afternoon. And in the midst of all of those, I've got a variety of other niche folk to call, and a search for a private investigator. Did I mention I love my job? And that I'm never bored?

 

Till next time,

 

Listing heavily

Sharon Wheeler

Regular visitors here will know I have a weird fetish about lists (my excuse is that my brain goes down and not across, as those who have seen me trying to timetable classes will testify). So I couldn't resist the challenge that came round recently where you were presented with a list of 100 books and where you had to indicate how many you'd read, how many you intended to read, and how many you loved.

I'd read 63 – an English Lit degree and Masters, plus a fixation with European lit, have a lot to answer for (the bumpf with the challenge claimed that the average adult had only read six of the top 100 books on the list). There were a couple I honestly couldn't remember if I'd read or not – Anne of Green Gables and The Bell Jar. And I may be one of the few people on the planet who hasn't read Lord of the Rings and has no intention of doing so! It's failed my 50-page rule on two separate occasions and I now have far too many other books to read to bother with trying again. And no, I haven't read the bible either . . .

If you're feeling anally-retentive, here's the list – see how you do:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was pretty stingy with books I loved – only His Dark Materials, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Cold Comfort Farm and Midnight's Children made my list. But there was only one on there that I'd never even heard of – Mitch Alborn's The Five People You Meet In Heaven.

It did occur to me, though, that there should be a category on the list for books started and not finished – that would include Lord of the Rings, Catch 22, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, The Shadow of the Wind and Brave New World.

I've no idea why I've never finished The Shadow of the Wind – I got about halfway through, was enjoying it well enough, but it didn't quite grab me enough to keep going. I intend to remedy War and Peace, though, and it's next up on my TBR mountain. Any offers out there for so-called classics you've always been meaning to read?

A few days later a similar one with films did the rounds. I'll spare you that one – not least because I'd only seen about six of the 100!

The whole shooting match

By the time you read this, always assuming someone is reading this, of course, I’ll be on a train en route for London for a meeting of an organisation called Women in Publishing. Why do these things always seem to happen on a Wednesday evening? I won’t be back at base till the wee small hours of Thursday, far too late to be firing up the computer and posting my Dead Guy contribution, and by next Wednesday it’ll be history.

 

Ah well, I’ll just have to imagine how it will be.

 

Despite the obvious connection, I’m not a member of Women in Publishing. Since I live three hours from the place they hold their meetings, it wouldn’t be practical; and since most of British publishing happens in London I don’t think they have what’s euphemistically called country members.

 

I’m going because I’ve been invited to speak at the meeting, which is flattering and scary in equal parts. The scary part isn’t the actual speaking; I’ve run enough writers’ workshops and done enough conference sessions not to be fazed by standing up in front of a bunch of people. It’s just that when I set out to put together a half-hour talk on being a crime fiction publisher, I realised, as I occasionally do, that everyone else in the room, however lowly their position, will probably know an awful lot more about the publishing business than I do.

 

Preparing a talk really concentrates the mind. Not to mention making you aware of things you don’t think about on a day to day basis. Like, how much you don’t know.

 

The meeting is focusing on crime publishing, which presumably is why they decided to ask me. But I don’t see how there can be much difference between crime publishing and any other kind, except the books themselves. The process is surely much the same: reading manuscripts, commissioning the brilliant ones, editing, getting a cover designed, typesetting, proofreading, printing, promoting.

 

But I could be completely wrong. Having come into the business from a point of no knowledge and learned everything I know on the hoof, I could be wrong about every little thing.

 

That’s what’s scary about giving this talk.

 

Then again…

 

A young graduate with aspirations to work in publishing has been coming into the office one day a week for the past few months. In exchange for a few hours’ envelope stuffing or hunting down information on the web (both equally useful), I’ve been introducing her to the finer points of running a small publishing company, and now she’s applying to big companies for more substantial and, ahem, paid work. Mainly she’s applying for temporary internships, and she’s finding that the bigger the company, the narrower the scope of the available opportunities. The application forms all ask her to specify which area of the operation she wants to work in: editorial, distribution, marketing, finance and design have all been offered.

 

I’ve never worked in a big publishing company, but long, long ago I did work for several large organisations; and I found that once you begun to carve a particular groove, it’s not often easy to get out of it and into something which might be more the kind of thing you imagined when you signed up. So maybe something I’m going to find tonight is that the people in the audience will know a great deal about a small part of publishing.

 

Now, is that more useful or less than knowing a little about the whole shooting match?

Traiting Up

by Barbara Poelle

Maybe you can help me with something. And by something I mean preventing my husband from throwing either himself or me from the George Washington Bridge.  Here’s the deal:  I am not what you’d call “fashionable” or maybe even “pulled together” or perhaps “bathed”.

I don’t have time for such frivolities.

But what I do have is this habit of winding a lock of hair around my index finger as I read.  And perhaps as you might imagine, in my job, I read from time to time. But sometimes, much to my chagrin, my hair is pulled back with a hair elastic and I cannot get at that favored strand.  In order to release the mane for the appropriate twistosity,   I must remove the hair band and place it delicately next to me, on whatever surface is handy.

Now apparently these small, black elastic ovals peppering our lovely home create some sort of white hot anger in my life partner.  I am not sure why. But I can say that, on average, once a week he will storm into whatever room I am in and go very quickly and very passionately through the seven stages of grief while clutching one of these elastics.  It is a truly fascinating thing to behold. I have never seen anything quite like it. Last Monday he came into the bedroom holding one at about shoulder height and kind of shook it menacingly and said, “This has GOT to stop. This has GOT to stop.”  And then proceeded to both inflate with defiance and wilt in defeat all at once.

 It was almost beautiful.

So in my infinite wisdom (oh, it is infinite) I said to him: “If I died, you would be so touched every time you found one of those”.

He was, uh, nonplussed, to say the least.

 (OMG, I have NO IDEA what nonplussed means, I have just always wanted to say the phrase, “He was nonplussed, to say the least”. That was so awesome, it felt like I was getting away with something, like buying $.25 worth of Laffy Taffy with a quarter I found on the ground outside of Super America.)

Anyway, despite the nonplussing, it got us talking about quirks, and I realized that quirks are the traits that make characters. And the more individual the quirks are, the more solid the character. They can be as clearly stated as Adrian Monk, or as subtle as Miss Marple. I mean, who doesn’t love the fact that Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes or that Arnold Drummond needs clarification on Willis’s thought processes? That is what makes them characters.

There is plenty of opportunity for us to steal from everyday life to enhance fictional characters and give them layers. Take for instance my sister (please). This is a woman who got ALL of the looks and ALL of the brains, but when she is reading something and really contemplating it, she drums her fingernails on her front teeth. Holy Christmas and the Easter Bunny, have you ever heard a woman drum her fingers on her front teeth for the length of Stephen King’s IT? No, no you haven’t. Because we would have met in the support group. But what an awesome trait to give a character. (That is the second “awesome” this blog. Third time’s a spanking.) Then I started thinking about how when we all used to sit down to watch a family movie together my dad would pull his socks off to the point where they just covered his toes and how my mom loves shoe string potatoes to the point where I think she may have killed a man in Reno just to take his fries.  (That is the single funniest thing I have ever said. I can’t stop laughing.)

And Husband, don’t even GET me started on Husband, he has this obsession with post-its.  This is a man who owns two palm pilots, a calendar and an iphone, and still, he covers every surface, both horizontal and vertical, with notes to himself. (Sometimes I add, uuhh, shall we say, some “blue” to-dos. Really funny when he sees them on the ‘fridge. Really horrifying when Holly Root does.)

About a year ago, I asked one of my authors who was struggling with book 2  to write down 20 character traits about their protagonist that may or may not be clearly stated in the work. The most amazing things appeared on this list that then allowed the author to understand the whys and hows of their character’s motivations. I am not going to share the exact discoveries, because then I would be no better than that dude in the weird mask who exposes magic’s secrets,  but I will tweak them a bit to demonstrate:

[character] is afraid of frogs

[character] always has some shade of the color red on , toenail polish, underwear, etc

[character] has never had a relationship last for longer than 6 months

 Do you see what you can pull from that? Now imagine 20 of those. You can shake open the fiercest fist of writer’s block with 20 traits, because you can write a short story on just the underwear and the frogs and the 6 month relationships (that just described every year of college for me) so you can open any chapter with that.

Nobody wants to read plots. Everybody wants to read characters. So make them readable.  Make them interesting. Make them secretly cut out pictures of dogs in clothes, make them afraid of ice cubes, make them murmur the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” when nervous. Or best of all, make them leave their hair binders peppered around the house and make their Husbands love them more, not less, because of it.

(uhh, do you think that worked? I hope so, because I need to read this proposal and my hair is tied back…..)

Now That You Bring It Up, What IS In A Name?

Jeff Cohen

In my family, names are... transitory.

That is, titles and animal names are transitory. Everyone in my family has had roughly the same name since birth. But titles--TV shows, movies, books--are not always the same one their creators have bestowed upon them. 

For example, in my house, Inside the Actors Studio is known as "The Incredibly Pretentious Guy Show." At one point, there was a theme song for said show, but it never really took off, as it was simply the words "The Incredibly Pretentious Guy Show" with a rudimentary tune.

We used to call Lost "Crazy Island People," but lately have taken to "Rost," which is an extremely obscure joke from the unappreciated Gene Wilder movie The Frisco Kid. We do still have the theme song for Lost, which is sung to the tune of "Brazil":

They're LOST

They've no idea where they are;

They can't just hop into the car;

They're LOST

Granted, it's a little crude, but it does a lot more than one drum beat can to get you up to speed on that show. Although, as my daughter recently pointed out, since everybody on the show now knows exactly where they are, the name of the show should be changed to Confused, which would not only be more accurate, but would also describe the audience at the same time.

Our dog is probably the being who suffers most from our less-than-permanent view of names. While his actual official name is, and has been, Copper since before we adopted him nearly eight years ago, he has, on occasion, been called at least the names listed below:

Horatio

Rudolfo

Mr. Copper T. Dog

His Honor The Dog

The Woofmeister

Copster

Copper (that's the French pronunciation: CoPPERE)

Woofer

That Stupid Mutt (with the greatest affection, of course)

The Hairy Beast

The Mighty Hunter

Craw, Not Craw!

Everybody's Favorite Dog

Mr. Bowser Hannigan

Fred

There have been others.

It's not that we don't respect names; we just love them enough not to stop at one. It's amazing we stopped at one for each child (although I do call my son "Boss," "Chief," "Kiddo," and "Sir"). We did have additional names ready for each child, but we knew both times exactly what we were going to use when the baby was born--although it was a tossup there at the end what Eve would have been named had she been a boy, so we're glad she cooperated by being herself.

None of this applies when I'm naming fictional characters. I'm starting a new series at the moment, and believe me, I detest every single character name I've come up with so far. Just like I hate every character name  I've ever devised for any piece of fiction (screenplay, novel, just lying) in my life. Hate 'em. They all sound ridiculous to me, like people who have fictional names. 

And yes, I've tried the baby naming books and the other techniques. It's not that I can't come up with names for characters--it's that I don't like any of them.

Luckily, the names we chose for our children have worked out just fine.

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree ...

So, turns out I might be growing up.

This week, a friend from college called and asked me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding in October. I’ve been to friends’ weddings before, sure. I even attended the wedding of a childhood best friend about four (gosh, four?) years ago, despite not having seen her for many, many years prior to her special day (through no fault of anything but going to separate high schools, colleges, etc). It was awesome and surreal and from the pews, felt totally, totally safe.

Safe from growing up: pinching pennies, growing mustaches or fractions of inches, etc.

I mean, I’m very happy for Tatiana. She’s delighted, and we’ve already exchanged a bunch of emails about her dress, my potential dress, the other bridesmaids, the possible wedding dates, and all that kinda stuff. She’s wanted to be a bride for a long time, and I’m so glad to be able to share this experience with her.

But it also kinda freaks me out, because as with most things, I start to think, “Wait, should I be doing that?”

Should I be getting married? Buying a house? Talking about what color couch will match the paint in the sitting room? Becoming … boring?

Because in my head, I can’t help it, I equate marrying with growing up with Boringness. Responsibility. Budgeting. Retirement planning. Snooooooze.

I’m the oldest grandchild on both sides (yeah, I was kinda spoiled), and my dad is the oldest of six. We used to have a huge Fourth of July party every year at our house, complete with my aunts and uncles and their significant others carousing around and being really, really fun. They used to play this dice game which involved betting and lots of beer. It was kinda like the one they played in Pirates of the Caribbean 2, only with less eternal damnation to a watery grave. And they let me play, once, with Coke. I’m not good at betting, I got wired.

But anyway: I distinctly remember the transition from fun, carefree, gluttonous Fourth of July parties to fun, chasing toddlers, talking about growunupstuff Fourth of July parties. All of a sudden I had some cousins. All of a sudden my wild and crazy aunts and uncles were less wild and crazy. (Now, granted, I could also have been suffering from ‘Hey why isn’t everyone paying attention to ME anymore?!’ syndrome. I get that there’s more to this crazy inner psychosis of mine than just fear of growing up, just as there was more going on than my perception of my relatives becoming boring because they were no longer goading me into drinking eight Cokes in one day. It’s all a complicated patchwork.)

And I don’t want to grow up.

I mean, ok, sure, I might eventually want some of the things that Real Life GrownUps have. But I don’t want to be BORING!

And I don't of course mean to suggest that I think my friend Tatiana is becoming boring. It's just that when faced with these milestones in my life, and the lives of my friends, my first reaction is the impulse, 'Wait! Don't take yourself too seriously!' which I guess, in the long run, isn't such a terrible reaction.

My dad did remind me, when I told him I feared I was growing up, not to make a leap in logic: just because Tatiana is growing up doesn’t mean I am. Good point, Dad. I may just have to climb a tree in my my bridesmaid dress. That’s appropriate wedding party behavior, right?

Both Ends of the Spectrum: Peter Robinson & Bryan Gruley

Robin Agnew

Last week, we hosted one of mystery's stars, Peter Robinson.  This week, we hosted a launch for a brand new author, Bryan Gruley.  Both events were delightful, at both events we sold plenty of books, and each had a slightly different feel.  Usually it's not such a stark contrast between the established writer and the newbie, but this week and last it was.  It's made me think a bit.

Peter Robinson hasn't been in this area for years (despite the fact that he lives in relatively nearby Toronto), and he's never been to Aunt Agatha's, where his books are perennial bestsellers.  He's in a slot with Elizabeth George & Deborah Crombie - the kind of read that, if you're a fan, you just can't pass up, and even if you aren't, you can be taken in by the literary qualities of all three writers, who use setting, character and theme every bit as skillfully as any so called "literary" writer.

In any case, Peter showed up on the dot of noon, and the store was jammed.  People kept filing in, and we'd gotten calls all week of this variety:  "Is Peter Robinson really going to be at your store?"  I couldn't quite believe it myself, having been an ardent fan of Inspector Banks for years.  Apparently Peter had had a really long and irritating morning, and his driver had had some kind of mishap at the airport that necessitated going back to her house for a different car before coming to Aunt Agatha's.  In short he was tired, he's gotten up early, and he'd had nothing to eat.

With almost any human the "nothing to eat" thing is a problem.  I immediately offered him tea - he perked up when I said I could get green tea - and he perked up even more when I mentioned a cheese roll.  He hadn't even wanted to speak, he'd ecpected a stock signing, but after the tea he'd decided it might work, and the crowd was too big to be placated by a mere signing.

Once he got warmed up and got the type of adoring questions that must please any writer, he became quite cheerful, and happily signed stacks of books as the line passed through, stopping for people to ask questions or snap a picture.    Our customers have been coming in this week and raving about meeting him, and I hope he doesn't remember it as a terrible experience.  In my copy of his book he thanked me - for the cheese roll!

This week we hosted a new author, Bryan Gruley.  Bryan is not a young newbie but a 51 year old who is bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal in Chicago.  But his wife confessed to me that he had been nervous about signing at our cozy little store.  He had sent me in advance a nice long list of family in the area and most of them showed up, necessitating the borrowing of the handy pilates studio in the back of our building.  As it happened the signing was odd - we couldn't get into the studio right away - and so he signed books first, and then talked.  Because the crowd were family or had gone to high school ot played hockey with Bryan, they all stuck around.

This was a book launch party, something we don't do all that often, and it felt like a real "launch".  There was a lot of giddy joy in the audience that seemed to be going both ways as Bryan enthusiastically talked about both his book and the publishing process.  It was truly a joy to be there and share this moment with him.

I like when a week has both ends of the experience spectrum, both interesting in their own way.  It's not something I would trade away easily for any other kind of job, and it also doesn't come along every day, so when it does, it needs to be savored.

What am I?

PJ Nunn

It's been kind of a melancholy week for me. One of those weeks when life is just bigger than I am and I have to remind myself that I don't have a say in how everything comes out, I just have a say in how I respond to the outcome. Two excellent cons and I'm not going to either of them. Worse, LCC is in Hawaii where my adopted son and his wife are stationed in the army and I haven't seen them in too long.

I was reminded this morning of a question that comes up from time to time. What should an author expect from a publicist? That's a problematic question because it varies from one to the next. Quite a bit. But still there are some constants. Being a publicist is generally a thankless job, something to which I'm sure my blogmates can relate in their various industry positions as well. And I don't say that to whine, it's just the way it is. I knew that going in and I'm ok with that. I feel like Lynne's post the other day - most days I love my job.

What it means is that if the author doesn't get the results they want, it's easy to blame the publicist. But if they DO get results they want, it's easy to believe it's because the book is so good. Kind of like if the book doesn't sell, it was a bad agent, but if it does, it means some editor recognized great talent.

Don't think I'm author bashing - I love authors. It's just part of the job. I don't need or expect lots of thank yous and I'm fairly secure in my abilities and not inclined to be moved by things that are said about me, good, bad or otherwise in most cases. It's just that once in a while they pile up.

It all goes back to the word that crops up a lot in my job: expectations. And if I queried a hundred authors, asking them to define a publicist's job, I'd probably get nearly a hundred different answers, most of them too general to be of much use. Something like...

a publicist is someone who...

    sends arcs to get reviews

    gets your name in the paper

    makes you famous

    gets you on Oprah

    gets you on tv and radio shows

    sets up events like cutting ribbons and county fairs

    arranges your travel

    sends out press releases

    comes up with ideas to help you get publicity

    tells people what to think about you

    gets you on the NY Times Bestseller list

I think some of those things are covered in my job description, but many of the authors who hire me really don't know what they can or should expect from me. I try hard to spell that out, but maybe there'll always be someone who expects something I can't or don't do. I wish that wasn't true. While I'm fine with taking the inevitable rejection that goes with my job, I really hate to disappoint my clients and I'll work very hard to try and be sure that doesn't happen.

The best thing an author can do to avoid those kinds of disappointments is make sure things are communicated clearly from the outset, both with the publicist at the publisher (if there is one) and with anyone the author hires. NEVER ASSUME. You know what they say about that.

I work regularly with house publicists from many publishers, large and small. Most of them are very hardworking, overworked actually, and underpaid. They are usually responsible for way more clients than one person can adequately handle, even with an assistant. Most genuinely want to do a good job for their authors and most are happy when authors hire me to help out because they recognize their own limitations. I work with several authors who also hire someone local, often from a local college, to do research, mailing etc. and I'm fine with that, too. A well-oiled team can do far more than a single person.

I have good working relationships with other individual publicists, some in NYC, some elsewhere. Some only take on a handful of clients at a time and give them their virtually undivided attention for a short while. Others have a full staff and handle a larger number. I fall somewhere between the two. I wish sometimes that I could cut my list and give undivided attention, but to do that I'd have to hike my rates way up and that would eliminate a lot of the mystery authors I work with. They just aren't ready to afford those $25,000 fees. Besides, I enjoy variety.

So it's important to know who you're working with. There's sometimes a little problem with some publicists promising things they can't deliver. In most cases I don't think it's because they mean to misrepresent. It's usually in-house publicists who really want to do more than they can realistically do. All too often, with outside publicists it's the opposite problem. They charge really high fees and promise very little. No one knows better than I how erratic and undependable the market is, and how often I've called a producer or guest booker who's scheduled sometimes hundreds of interviews with my clients over the years, only to hear that the program format has been changed, or they're only scheduling politics right now, or the producer changed jobs, or for whatever reason they're just not going to work with us right now. The good news is, we can call back in six months and probably get a different response. The bad news is, whatever we were sure would happen isn't going to happen today. Still, I think an author should be able to get what they pay for, within reason of course. If a client hires me to get them on 10 radio shows, I'll guarantee that. I just won't guarantee which 10 shows because I don't have the final say in that.

Most authors understand that they need to communicate clearly about what they're buying, but the problem arises when they don't know what questions to ask. They don't know the ropes of the industry and aren't sure what to expect. I try to be available to answer questions and give them as much information as they want, but I still miss the mark sometimes. I can't read their minds and while some things are pretty standard, others would require me to anticipate something I have no way of knowing. So my best advice is when you don't understand something ask. If you don't get a good answer, keep asking. It's important that you have clear understanding of what's being done for you and what you should be doing.

So, while I can't give you an accurate description of what an author should be able to expect from a publicist because there's not a "one size fits all" description, there are some things that you should always be able to count on:

A good publicist should...

    demonstrate good knowledge of the industry and what it takes to sell books

    speak candidly and not hesitate to tell you if he/she thinks an idea won't work and why

    be able to answer your questions clearly and not be offended that you asked

    be able to speak clearly about your desired goals for the promotion campaign and be willing to utilize your ideas and suggestions

    not promise you unqualified results

    provide you with a list of references

    be flexible enough to make adjustments mid-campaign if needed

    doesn't hesitate to offer advice you don't agree with, and isn't offended if you don't take that advice

    be someone who thinks first of what's best for you and your career

There is no such thing as a perfect publicist, and I'm no exception. But in today's marketplace, a good publicist can really be a boost to your career. Publishers just can't afford to invest as much in marketing as they used to and few authors can afford to invest the time and energy in promotion that is needed to get attention for a new book these days. So do your research, ask your questions and feel free to email me if you're wondering about any part of this process. But don't be mad if I don't answer for a day or two. My email box stays full.

Till next time,

A tribute to Barbara Franchi

Sharon Wheeler

It's been a week where I've felt numb. Barbara Franchi, the founder and publisher of RTE, died on Saturday after a long illness. She'd fought so hard and so long against the cancer that I'd convinced myself she was invincible.

I first met Barbara and her husband Rudy about six years ago. She'd set up the site in 2001 when she realised there was a gap in the market for a crime fiction review site. And it just growed and growed, thanks to Barbara's boundless energy and the enthusiasm of reviewers and publicists from the big publishers in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Barbara had a well-developed bullshit detector, a wickedly dry sense of humour and she missed absolutely nothing. We soon found we were on the same wavelength and I looked forward to hers and Rudy's visits to London when we'd go clothes shopping and sample the city's unusual restaurants. They even found me a Chinese restaurant that served good vegetarian food and where the waitress didn't bat an eyelid when I said I didn't eat egg!

When they were back home in the States (first Boston, and later Los Angeles when they moved to be nearer family), Barbara and I emailed constantly, swapping rants, gossip, jokes, cartoons and recipes. Oh, and we kept the website ticking over very happily. We were both thrilled to bits when the site was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2007. Barbara's response to the news that we hadn't won was typically brisk: "Jim Huang deserved it. Have you seen all the things he does for the mystery community?" She was right.

The respect and affection Barbara was held in by the crime fiction community was obvious in the avalanche of lovely emails I received from publicists, writers, reviewers and readers, all saying how much she would be missed.

And Barbara will be missed, too, in the antiques world where she and Rudy were regulars on the Antiques Roadshow in the States. A non-crime fic friend of mine squealed with delight when I said I knew the Franchis, and said they were her favourite experts, with Barbara's quiet, non-nonsense manner perfectly complementing Rudy's flamboyance! Many people also knew them via their online movie memorabilia business.

Barbara passed away on Saturday evening. Rudy, her daughters Jill, Susan, Regina, her son-in-law Tony and her grandson Bennett were at her bedside. For those in the Los Angeles area, the family will be sitting Shiva on Sunday March 8 at Jill's home, 3725 Mountain View Avenue, 90066 (310 398 3105). Contributions in Barbara's name can be made to Beit T'Shuvah, 8831 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034.

Perks of the job

Sometimes I love my job.

Actually, make that mostly. There are frustrating moments and tedious ones, annoying people and difficult ones – but that’s life, and the compensations outweigh the negatives to create a mainly positive ethos.

But sometimes I really love my job.

Last weekend, for instance. Normally I take Saturday off altogether, and catch up on sleep and domestic chores; then I go into the office for a few hours on a Sunday, to clear up bits of paperwork and odd jobs that have fallen through the cracks over the week. It’s no hardship; the office is a very short walk from our back door, and it’s easier to take care of those jobs when it’s quiet.

But last Saturday we left the chores, jumped in the car and took off for a pretty seaside town up on the east coast.

It wasn't a joyride. There was definitely work involved. We’d been invited by the owners of a lovely indie bookshop to run a crime fiction quiz on Saturday evening: one of our low-cost promotion gambits, and great way to meet crime fiction fans and initiate them into the considerable delights of the Crème de la Crime list.

The quiz went well. Lots of participants told us what a good time they’d had; the members of the winning team were delighted with their prizes; and though the booksellers didn’t make many sales, they saw the venture as a way of letting people know the bookshop was there.

The people who came off best, and I don’t begrudge them for a moment, were the owners of the café where the quiz was held. The bookshop wasn’t an ideal venue, and when there’s a café called Sherlock’s a few hundred yards away, well, it’s no contest. So the quiz took place in a wonderful atmospheric environment, complete with memorabilia and ancient books. And lots of cake, all of it laden with cream and frosting and calories and most of it home-made.

People were eating interesting sandwiches and spooning up luscious frothy hot chocolate as well, but it was the cake that proved most popular.

One tiny sadness was that I didn’t get to sample it. By the time we got to the café, I was already stuffed with the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten. I had the small portion, which the menu tagged Leave room for dessert. There wasn’t. Which was a pity, because the desserts looked pretty scrumptious.

I told you I love my job.

The thing was, this little town was just too far away to travel there and back in a day. So we’d decided to give ourselves a mini-break and stay overnight. The internet offered up a lovely bed & breakfast on the top floor of a tall, characterful house; there was home-made cake there too, but we didn’t get to sample that either, for reasons too complicated to go into. And the fish restaurant, also an internet find, is apparently the chef Rick Stein’s favourite watering hole when he’s in that part of the country, and Rick is a hard man to impress, especially when it comes to fish.

Next day we drove home via another pretty seaside town which some old friends moved to a few years ago, and took the opportunity to catch up with them – but that wasn’t really work. The quiz night was, though, and even setting aside the culinary delights and the lovely accommodation, it was the most pleasurable kind. There was a suggestion that we might go back another time and run a murder mystery evening for them. I’m certainly up for it.

When we do that, I’ll let you know first-hand about the cake.

I Can’t Handle the Truth

by Barbara Poelle

So I have jury duty this week. And I am not gonna lie, this morning I was pretty pumped, because 100 years ago chicks couldn’t vote so the least I can do is perform the civic duty that simply amounts to listening. I’m proud to be an American citizen. God bless America and the Los Angeles County Fair. I am humbled and awed to be a part of the system, no matter how miniscule my role.

Okay, who are we kidding? Do you KNOW how much I love to give my opinion? I mean, come on! And now someone I don’t even know is going to ask what I think about someone else’s business? Oh, YUM.

People, I was born to jure. (If you’re not used to me doing that by now, you never will be.) We are speaking of a woman who hollers at the 7:30 am newscasters to the point that Husband yells from the bedroom, muffled from the depths of his pillow, “Yeah, honey, you hold them accountable!” We are talking about the woman who, in traffic, once released a diatribe of such bile and rancor in regards to a stranger’s bumper sticker, that Husband slowly shook his head and murmured, “You are full of just so much poison”.  We are talking about the woman who writes letter of both commendation and condemnation at the drop of a hat, or quite frankly, the drop a platter of salsa on Husband’s pant leg.  

This is the woman you want as your juror, a very passionate believer in her very own opinion.

Okay, not only would you want that quality in your juror, but, seriously, I wore what would quite possibly win The Most Adorable Juror contest. I picked it out the night before and I really feel like it said, “I am intelligent and honest but maybe a bit of a wild card. Maybe my middle name is Jo. Or maybe it’s Danger.” (Say that last part kind of growly.)  

Tomorrow I am going to go for something a little more style, but with some essence of humility about it. Like my middle name is for sure Danger (growly) but my aloofness comes from being misunderstood. (Look into the middle distance like you’re in an 80’s hair band music video)

Oh, another thing I am able to find enjoyment in, besides my wardrobe choices, is the fact that I have an author who writes these wickedly delicious crime novels…let’s just call her Sophie. Um, because that’s her name. And let’s call her book something fun and different, like, uhh, oh!  A Bad Day For Sorry. Um, because that’s the title. And oo! Oo! Let’s pretend it is coming out August, 2009. Because it is. Anyway, so Soph writes this series which I can basically sum up as saying it’s like The Closer meets Dexter. There is this salty heroine who runs a sewing shop in a small town in Missouri, but her real business is helping women, uhh, “take care” of their abusive husbands throughout the tri state area. Right? Don’t you just want to push someone down to get your copy? Anyway, so Stella, the protagonist, has certain instances when she encounters the law (wait until you meet “the law”- think if Ed Harris and Viggo Mortenson had a love child.)( Wait, don’t.) and every time Soph writes something technical about the surroundings or the language it is so spot on because she will research/call/visit/break into/burn down whatever facility can give her the essence of what she is describing. It can be as simple as the mechanism of a cell door, it doesn’t matter, I know when I read it that Soph has most definitely crouched down in front of a cell door somewhere and listened to how it sounded when it slid shut. This is what can make the difference between accessible writing and stand out writing. It is effortless to the reader because so much effort has gone into the writing. I am 87% sure that Sophie does not kill husbands on the side. Fine, 83%.  But the feel of a wrench in Stella’s hand, lifted and swung, I know Sophie toggled a wrench in her hand to get the heft and the weight of it before sitting down to write that day.  

So that being said, I am going to try and be uber vigilant during my jury duty and maybe I will be able to help one of my authors down the line with something. I didn’t really think of this until the end of day today, but I was able to jot a few things down and maybe someone will find this helpful as they craft their novel. These were mainly off the cuff, some a bit more refined than others, but I still think they are all extremely helpful:

 The drinking fountain outside of the jury holding room is extremely warm to the touch, yet the water still arcs cool and refreshing.

It smells like fear and fruit roll-ups in the hallways of the court house.

The metal detectors did not like the amount of pocket change the woman in front of me was carrying, but I sailed through with a large canister of mace attached to my keychain and a mysterious bottle of liquid that is actually eucalyptus oil, but totally could have been nitroglycerin.

The bathrooms on the 11^th floor do not provide adequate escape opportunities for criminals, as the air vents are only as wide as a human head.

Courthouse Security uses the word “jackhole” a lot. Like when they have to be called to the women’s  bathroom on the 11^th floor because some jackhole has their head stuck in the air vent.

I think the best jurors are the ones that look a little dangerous.

So there you have it. Go ahead and poach what you need to from those humble observations, I think that they could really make all the difference. And Soph, the first line of book three is the best thing ever; I actually started crowing when I read it. Keep going! I can’t wait to read the rest.

Now excuse me, I have a big day pontificating tomorrow, and I need to go ice my head some more.

List-O-Mania

Jeff Cohen

First of all: To all those packing their bags to attend Left Coast Crime on the Big Island of Hawai'i, my sincere envy--I wish I could be there, but it wasn't possible this year. Perhaps after money makes a comeback. But this is my last chance to get in a plug: Please consider voting for IT HAPPENED ONE KNIFE for the Lefty Award. I can't promise you anything in return other than gratitude, but if you thought it was a funny book, I'd appreciate the endorsement. End of commercial.

On to this week's puzzler: I know authors who read the New York Times Bestseller list like an instruction manual. They analyze the titles (and the authors) listed, and in some way, shape or form (whether they admit it to themselves or not), they try to emulate those books in hope of seeing their own names on that list some day.

Others use it to best examine the market. What are people buying? How is it different from what they were buying last year? Six months ago? What does it all mean? They hope to use this information in negotiations with publishers, in planning strategic marketing moves and, yes, sometimes to decide what they should write next.

Personally, I find the list horribly depressing.

First, let's define what we're discussing. There is no "New York Times Best Seller List." There are, by my count, SIX such lists published on a weekly basis by the Times in its Book Review section on Sundays. The February 22 edition is representative of those lists, so let's look at that group, so I can explain why it makes me want to sprinkle Strychnine on my Cap'n Crunch.

The lists are: Best Sellers (Hardcover) in Fiction and Nonfiction; Paperback Best Sellers in Trade Fiction, Mass-Market Fiction and Nonfiction; and both Hardcover and Paperback versions of "Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous." With the use of "Miscellaneous," we can assume the Times is trying to be cute.

 

There are 15 Fiction Best Sellers, 16 Nonfiction Best Sellers, 20 each of Paperback Trade Fiction, Mass-Market Fiction and Nonfiction, and 10 each of Hardcover and Paperback, "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous." That covers, in total, 111 books the NYT considers to be "best sellers."

Now, let's forget that the word "best" is a superlative, so therefore the Times should list only one "best selling book," the one that sells more that all others in a given week. We'll forgive them that little bit of obscurity, since filling up most of three full magazine-sized pages with one book title would probably be a little trying. But out of those 111 books, what can we discover about the state of publishing and (worse) the state of literacy in America (I'm guessing the lists don't cover books sold in Canada, France of Outer Mongolia--is there still an Outer Mongolia, and if so, what happened to INNER Mongolia?)?

The Fiction list (in hardcover) leads with the latest John Grisham novel, a development so predictable I might as well have written that the world continued to spin on its axis this past week. It then goes on to include (remember, this is in 15 books) works by James Patterson (and one of his minions), Stephenie Meyer, Janet Evanovich, Bernard Cornwell, W.E.B. Griffin, Jack Higgins and Patricia Cornwell. Out of 15 books, eight that were probably on the list before the author started typing.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of those authors. I've read and enjoyed the works of some, haven't read others, and have read and not-so-much enjoyed one or two of the rest. The point is, it doesn't matter if their books are lousy. The only way they're not making the list is if Stephen King decides to write 15 books and release them all on the same day, which I wouldn't put past him.

The Nonfiction list (hardcover) includes the memoir by Joe Torre (really by Tom Verducci) about managing the Yankees (with no sentence or even chapter that includes the words "A-Rod" and "steroids" in the same context); the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell (who will show up on paperback lists galore), a book about a cat who became famous for, you know, being a cat (NONFICTION, remember); a book by a couple with sextuplets (perhaps the public saw the word "sex" and blocked the rest out); and books by Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, about which the least said the better. There are two books by comedians (Denis Leary, Chelsea Handler) and one by a guy from the Howard Stern show, which is sort of like being a comedian, without the obligation to do anything funny.

And there's the Inaugural Address by Barack Obama, who quite frankly has done well enough in his relatively young life that he could vacate a slot on the List to someone who could actually use the sales. Sure, it was a good speech, but I'm hoping the President isn't tearing through the Times to find out if he outsold "The Mighty Queens of Freeville" (he did).

On the trade paperback fiction list, we'll find (among others) books by Grisham (I know; you're shocked!), Sophie Kinsella, Patterson, TWO by Khaled Hosseini and the leading trade paperback, a book about a man who is invited to a shack, according to the Times, "apparently by God." How much do you think THAT invitation would go for on e-bay?

Mass-Market fiction? Danielle Steel, Grisham, Kinsella, Nora Roberts, Dan Brown, Robert B. Parker and... oh, enough already. Gladwell has two more books on the paperback non-fiction list, as does Obama (nos. 1 and 3), and there's a book about a dog to compare with the cat book on the hardcover list. Of the 20 books in various formats of "Advice, etc.," only four are diet books, but one is written by a comedian, one is ABOUT a Stephenie Meyer book, and others tell women how to attract men, as if that were hard.

One is about "tattoo culture," which I would have bet the homestead was an oxymoron.

They made the dog book into a movie with Jennifer Aniston. One can only dream of the cat movie.

What can we learn from studying these lists? Mostly, that if you're a famous author, you're likely to stay that way. That the public enjoys things it finds recognizable and comfortable. That being a comedian means you can write advice books. That Ann Coulter should be illegal without a prescription. Maybe even with.

You can't write a best seller. You can write your book, and if you have a great deal of luck, great timing and smart marketing, it can BECOME a best seller. If you try to write one like, let's say, John Grisham because he's so successful, you'll end up writing something that probably won't even be published.

We already have a John Grisham. Be you.

What I'm Not Reading

Ugh, you guys? I have a confession to make: I'm not reading enough.

I mean, outside of work. I'm reading plenty during the course of my Bleak House duties, and I love every minute of it (I especially love the read after the revision stage, discovering all of the amazing, elegant ways my authors have come up with to address the concerns I raised in editorial talks). I read every book we publish (obvs, right?), and I read several possible-for-Bleak-House books, and sometimes some partials, too.

But non-Bleak House, non-paycheck reading has, for me, lately fallen by the wayside. And, I mean, I guess that's ok. Life is cyclical, and in the past few months some of my other interests have moved more to the foreground, while reading has fallen a bit behind. I'm knitting quite a bit more these days. I'm out of the house at derby practice or meetings or forums or workouts several times per week. I'm devoutly dedicating one hour of every Friday night to Battlestar Galactica (let's not even TALK about what will happen to me three episodes from now, when it's [sob] over [keening]). And before bed each night, I've been working my way through all my seasons of Star Trek: TNG dvs (except the elusive Season Six, which I have yet to own).

In the meantime, though, while these interests cycle forward, the hours I like to spend in a beam of sunlight on a Sunday afternoon with a good book are less available to me. And my TBR pile (or my HTR pile -- my Halfway Through Reading pile) is growing. A lot. I worry that the books I have on my bookshelves now stand at a 60/40 ratio -- 60% waiting to be read or finished, and only 40% complete and beloved.

Like Derek Nikitas's Pyres. Like Peter Gadol's The Long Rain. Like Laura Lippman's Life Sentences, which isn't on my shelf yet but soon will be.

And then there's the nonfiction. Personally, I have a hard time reading nonfiction. I find value in it and love to learn from it, but I have to gear myself up for the experience. So it takes me for-EV-ah to finish. Like Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart. Like Derek Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe. Like Peter Singer's Practical Ethics. Like Leslie Cannold's The Abortion Myth.

And there are the Big Books Everyone Talks About which I have yet to finish. Like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

Then there are the books that were gifts, and which I am so excited to read but haven't made time for. Like Maxwell Bodenheim's Naked on Roller Skates (thanks, Tasha!). Like Jason Lutes's Berlin, books 1 and 2 (thanks, Sisterbot Beth!). Like Peter Pan (I know, it's embarassing to me that I haven't actually *read* this book, as the story of Peter Pan is pretty much my favorite thing ever).

In any case, there's a lot of material on my bookshelf that I'd like to devour. And beyond that, there is a wealth of material not yet on my bookshelf, kept on a mental list, that I'd like to someday explore. And past those borders is the material I don't know about, but that I'm sure I'll want to read once introduced.

But in the meantime, I just cast on for a new sweater. And there's a very, very important bout on Saturday. And have I mentioned about the Battlestar Galactica?! There are so many pursuits to which I'd like to devote my time, and the books I have won't spoil. So I'm saving them for another day -- maybe when it warms up enough to take a blanket outside. I know I'll enjoy them on that day, and until then I have to let go of the guilt of the TBR/HTR piles. There's no earthly way I can do everything I'd like to do in a day, so I'm gonna just enjoy what I've chosen and not feel guilty about making the choice.

p.s. I'm planning a possible super-secret-best-friend surprise, which may involve a long car trip, coming up soon. If you were to be in a long car trip situation, might you bring a book on tape? Which one?!