Would you rather?

Debut Authors Brad Parks (FACES OF THE GONE) and Carla Buckley (THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE) recently got together to play a game called Would You Rather. Brad served as victim.

Carla: Brad, my hope is that we’ll catch a glimpse of the real Brad Parks instead of the witty, debonair author you play at conferences.

Brad: Okay, I promise to be my true self: Dull and boorish, with a dash of insufferable.

Carla: Sounds like fun! Okay, first up: would you rather go sky-diving or spelunking?

Brad: Carla, you probably don’t know this, but according to family lore, my great-great-grandfather was the Maryland state skydiving champion in 1881. You can imagine how proud the family was, and it came with a first prize of $50, which was a lot of money in those days, and some crabs (the kind you eat, not… oh, never mind). Anyhow, he went onto nationals and was narrowly beaten out by a guy from Montana. Supposedly the judging was a bit circumspect, though that might just be my Aunt Patsy’s version. Either way, it haunted my great-great-grandfather for many years – sent him into a depression, really, but we don’t use the “D” word in my family – until his son, my great-grandfather, won both states and nationals in 1902. It was big. He was in the papers, did Letterman, the whole thing. Well, you can imagine the pressure on my grandfather when it came his turn to defend the Parks family name in the world of competitive skydiving and… what? The Wright Brothers didn’t fly until 1903? Oh, then spelunking. Definitely spelunking.

Carla: You had me right up until 1881.

Brad: You’re pretty quick. Aunt Patsy had me going for years with that bit.

Carla: It’s hard to think straight when you have an Aunt Patsy. Now your protagonist owns a pet, right? Okay, a pet question: would you rather own a ferret or a snake?

Brad: I know what you’re thinking: This is a shoo-in for the ferret. They’re furry. They’re cute. And there’s no better friend than a ferret when you’re hunting rabbits. But I’m going with the snake, for reasons of basic physiology. See, I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old, which means I already have enough life forms dependent on me for food on a very regular basis. So I have to think about the convenience factor here. Ferrets are mammals. Mammals are warm-blooded. That means they need to eat every few hours. Snakes are cold-blooded reptiles, which means you only have to feed them, what, once every two weeks? That fits into my current lifestyle a little better. Plus, have you ever seen a snake eat a mouse? It’s just cool. So snake. Snake all the way.

Carla: Nope, never seen a snake eat a mouse. I have seen my 12 pound dachshund leap up onto the kitchen table and devour a plate of Bagel Bites, though.

Brad: How is that possible? Is your kitchen table two feet tall or something? It’s a dachshund, Carla. Its legs are, what, six inches long? You’re just trying to get me back for the whole 1881 thing aren’t you?

Carla: Faced with a plate of Bagel Bites, a dachshund knows no limitations. Speaking of super powers, Brad, would you rather have the ability to see into the future or read minds?

Brad: Actually, Carla, I already can read minds. For example, when you were reading that skydiving bit from question one, you were thinking, “Oh my God, this answer is totally lame, I never should have agreed to be seen in public with this guy.” So I’m going to have to go with seeing into the future. There are a lot of practical applications to clairvoyance – in the stock market, in averting disasters, in knowing whether I can skip the latest version of Windows and wait for the next one – but the chief advantage is that I would never lose at fantasy football again!

Carla: Then you’re a gambler, hmm? So would you rather go to Las Vegas on your own and win, or go camping with your family?

Brad: This is question would seem to be a total trap. Because if I say “Vegas, baby, Vegas,” then I’m a typical pig of a guy, from the tip of my snout to my curly tail, and you and every other female reader out there will be like, “Oh, he’s one of those.” But if I say “camping” then I’m a liar. I mean, that’s the box you just put me in… right? Wrong! The truth is, I’m going to Vegas, but not for the drinking, the gambling, the chorus girls, the fake Sphinx, the all-you-can-eat buffets, or the luxury of sleeping past 6 a.m. (see the part above about having young kids). No, it’s because my wife doesn’t really like camping. At best, she tolerates it. So I’m going to Vegas for her. See? I’m really a good guy after all.

Carla: The secret to a successful marriage.

Brad: Yes. I’m sure trips to Vegas have saved many marriages.

Carla: Or resulted in them. So, it’s clear that you’re a good husband, but would you rather be a good friend, or a good son?

Brad: Excuse me, Carla, I need to go call my mother now. This question has sent me into spasms of guilt. Because my initial instinct was, “Of course! I’ve got my priorities straight! I want to be a good son!” I mean, my mother gave me life and breath. She stayed with me through ear infections and sore throats and those months in 1989 when I decided I wanted a mullet. Do you know she made pancakes for me every morning when I was in high school? Every morning! (Oh, yeah, my dad is a heck of a good guy, too). So shouldn’t I pick good son?

But then I thought about my actions since, oh, birth. Have I really been a good son? Haven’t there been, like, a billion times I put my friends first? I mean, I basically spent all of junior year of high school at the Kovarovics’ house (if you saw Kris Kovarovic, you’d understand). And I realized: I have totally taken my parents for granted. I’m a jerk. Ohhhhhh the guilt. Hello, Mom?

Carla: Please don’t tell my children your mom made you pancakes. Ever.

Brad: Aww, come on. I bet you do something self-sacrificing that will trigger spasms of guilt in your ungrateful children 20 years from now. Share.

Carla: Sorry, but that’s something that needs to come out in years of therapy. Now, I would be remiss to leave off without asking you a question pertaining to your craft, so tell me: would you rather know how your book is going to end before you start writing, or be surprised along the way?

Brad: This is easy. I want the surprise, every time. I want to take my characters, put them in a sticky wicket, and not know how they’re going to work it out. I know this brings a bit of agony, too – because there are going to be times when I get utterly stumped and have no clue where I’m going next. But that’s more than worth it for the pleasure of starting each morning not knowing what’s going to happen in my writing that day. I love those scenes that sort of arise spontaneously as one situation leads to the next. For example, in FACES OF THE GONE, my protagonist, Carter Ross, ends up smoking pot with gang members to prove he’s not a cop. About mid-way through writing that scene, Carter started whispering to me, “Hey, Brad, you know, I don’t really smoke weed that often (giggle). I’m kinda high right now (more giggling). I, uh, can’t walk.” The next thing I knew, Carter was stumbling all over the place, bumping into things, making messes. Then he goes back to the office, nearly runs over his boss, who smells the marijuana on his clothes, and more hilarity ensues. Very little of it germane to the plot. But, damn, it was fun to write – and, I hope, read.

Plus, can I tell you? I’m afraid of what I call super-readers. The super-readers are those people who plow through 200-plus books a year and can saw through my prose – and see through my artifice – in less time than it takes to assemble Ikea furniture. I’m always worried that they’re going to figure out the end by, like, page 50. So I figure if *I* don’t know how it ends on page 50, the super-readers won’t know either.

Carla: Brad, I have a feeling the super-readers will stick with you even if they do figure it out.

Brad Parks is the debut author of FACES OF THE GONE (December 2009, Minotaur Books.) He can be stalked at www.bradparkbooks.com.

Carla Buckley is the debut author of THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE (February 2010, Delacorte Press.) She can be reached at www.carlabuckley.com.

Samoa Op Ed Published in Wake of Tsunami

I became familiar with American Samoa when asked to administer wage hearings there in 2001. At the time I was a Chief Economist with the U.S. Department of Labor and interested in promoting increased wages for the impoverished population of this South Pacific U.S. Territory.

Although that was eight years ago the memory and plight of American Samoans have stayed with me. In fact, the beauty of this tropical island and its unique culture made it ideal as the colorful backdrop for my new novel, ISLAND OF BETRAYAL (Gauthier/April 2010). Hopefully, the novel’s depiction of American Samoa’s problems will call attention to the need for remedial action.

In the meantime, when the tsunami hit the Samoas, I thought it an appropriate time to remind policy makers that Samoans face many fundamental problems, such as inadequate education and health care that should be addressed in addition to tsunami relief. The piece was quickly accepted by The Honolulu Advertiser, Hawaii’s largest circulated daily. Since Hawaii is geographically the closest U.S. State to the Samoas and the home of many Samoan natives, the Advertiser was an ideal newspaper for the column.

As a bonus, at the article's conclusion, the Advertiser credited me with my latest non-fiction book, SELLING OUT AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY: HOW LOBBYISTS, SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND CAMPAIGN FINANCING DENY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE as well as my upcoming novel, ISLAND OF BETRAYAL.

For a copy of my Op Ed, see the EVENTS section of my website, www.alanlmoss.com.

Norb Vonnegut onTop Producer

My name is Norb Vonnegut, and I wrote Top Producer. It's a novel about Grove O'Rourke, a stockbroker thriving in the frenzied world of high finance. His life unravels overnight, however, as he uncovers the dark and twisted secrets of his best friends. Inside an industry that revels in the glory of betting big and being right, he learns the hard way what some people will do for vast sums of money—and what they will hide.

These days, it's difficult to identify with anyone from Wall Street. But I hope you'll care about Grove, a decent if somewhat irreverent guy who could be any one of us. He works hard and keeps his head down. He's trying to hold it together as he chases the dream. Only Grove has no clue, he has no idea what's lurking round the bend.

Top Producer begins inside a raucous party of 500 people, where Grove watches the spectacular death of Charlie Kelemen—best friend and money manager with the Midas touch and spending habits to match. After the funeral, Charlie's widow confides to Grove she can't find her husband's money and has only $600 left in a checking account. Grove offers to help, but the more he looks for her fortune the more trouble he finds. With the police. With his colleagues. With some really bad guys.

I've seen plenty during my years on Wall Street—big money, snap decisions that worked and some that went way bad. I've worked side by side with people who belong deep inside the pages of fiction for their quirks, scary-smart intelligence, or relentless drive to grow rich. I know the rush of trading first hand and understand how it feels to buy and sell one hundred million dollars of stock in one day.

As an author, I wove much that is real into the story. Financial risk, trading errors, and cutthroat competition—the day-to-day stress of stockbrokers is all there. The dialogue and jargon are real. I know because Grove O'Rourke borrowed one of his best lines from me.

"My job is to bring you the best of Wall Street. And protect you from it at the same time."

Inside Top Producer you'll find financial advisers who are obsessive, almost maniacal in their insistence on secrecy. It's real. People swap firms all the time on Wall Street, which means stockbrokers never discuss clients by name. Never. Today's colleagues are tomorrow's competitors.

I remember well, from my days as a stockbroker, the tension of open-plan seating in an occupation that prizes confidentiality. No secret was safe among the rows and rows of low-rise cubicles. To protect the identity of our clients, in a room full of ears, my team used aliases. We actually named our clients after super heroes.

So when John called from Malibu, my sales assistant would stand up and holler across the desk, "Norb, Batman is on the phone."

Or when Nikki called from St. Barth, the message was, "Wonder Woman on line two, Norb."

We had Green Lantern and Flash. At times when the phones lit up, it sounded like the Justice League of America was asking for our financial advice. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. Our system broke down when we told clients their superhero identities. The problem was simple.

Everyone wants to be Superman.

My observations from a career in finance—some shocking and some humorous—find their way into the fiction of Top Producer. You'll encounter procreative fruit flies, an eighteen-foot inflatable rat, and other anecdotes from the intriguing edges of Wall Street. You'll also find the dark side, the cons and the frauds, which unfortunately are all too real.

Although Top Producer is a novel, it may change the way you think about financial services—as it did for me. My fact and fiction collided the evening of December 11, 2008.

I was walking down Fifth Avenue to a client's Christmas party. It was pouring that night, and my shoes felt like colanders. In my left hand, I held a king-sized umbrella. It was losing a one-sided battle to gusting wind and driving rain.

With my right hand, I was hitting a BlackBerry's refresh button for articles from The Wall Street Journal. Every time I "refreshed," new stories popped up. After a day away from the desk, I was catching up on financial news before wandering into a party filled with clients and financiers.

One story jumped out. One story made me forget the inclement weather and soggy pedestrians. One story took my breath away. I stepped out of the rain into the doorway of an office building. I first called my agent, Scott Hoffman of Folio Literary Management. And then I called my editor, Pete Wolverton of Thomas Dunne Books. I left the same message for each.

"We need to talk. My novel just came true."

The Bernard Madoff story broke on the afternoon of December 11, 2008. His confession roiled the capital markets as details of a $65 billion fraud came to light. It opened the floodgates to news of other Ponzi schemes, outright frauds, and tax evasion.

No one was more surprised than me. Top Producer is a novel about financial corruption. But I sold the story to St. Martin's Press in 2007 and had finished 99 percent of the edits before December 11, 2008. I do not know Bernard Madoff and never contemplated him as I wrote.

At its core, my novel is about friendship, betrayal, and ultimately redemption. I personally enjoy stories about underdogs, about everyday people who solve problems under the duress of overwhelming odds and bleak consequences—no matter the backdrop, Wall Street or otherwise.

Happy reading.

Norb Vonnegut

Top Producer is a Today Show Top Fall Pick!

Dream Killers

by Jamie Freveletti

I’m a bit tired of people stepping on dreams. I have a lot of dreams. Some are pretty attainable, and others are off the charts so rare that even I have to admit the odds are long.

But I still don’t want you to step on them.

My view on dreams is that if I’m not bothering anyone, haven’t compromised my real life existence to attain them, and in other ways am a responsible person, then the best thing to do is leave me go on my merry way.

Which brings me to the moral dilemma I face when giving panels on writing. People ask me, will this be published? What are the odds? What do you thnk?

Here’s what I think: the odds are long, we know that. The time spent on writing may never pay off, either financially or in published format, we know this also. So what? Should you give up? Stop writing? Choose not to start? Only you know if that’s right for you.

Of course, this answer never satisfies. When I say, “if you continue, diligently, for many years, taking courses, staying in the writing world, going to conferences and panels to pick up tips, you will be published.”

The next question I get is: “How many years?”

Answer: Depends.

This answer is not acceptable to many, either, but it’s true. Last week I watched “Biography” present George Clooney. By most standards, he’s a success in his field. The backstory was interesting. He landed in Hollywood in his early twenties. Did bit parts and recurring roles until he hit with “ER.” Time from landing in LA to ER: ten years give or take. Ten years to get a role that really pushed his career to the next level. That’s a long time. If I said ten years to a new writer, they’d likely get angry. “Ten years! But I want this manuscript to sell now, not ten years down the road.”

I imagine Clooney wanted to hit ten years earlier, too, but that wasn’t in the cards for him. From ER he took roles in movies that generated roller coaster reviews and average box office. Then came “The Perfect Storm.” Big hit, great reviews. Time from landing in LA to big hit—eighteen years, give or take.

So should the unpublished writer give it ten years to get published, another eight to hit huge, and be prepared to wait eighteen altogether? I’m not a fan of delusion, but in this case absolute truth is harsh. Even I, the tortoise of the hare and tortoise race, wince at eighteen years.

But I write because I have to. I love it. A few days without writing and I’m definitely headed into a downer mode. Best I just hit the computer for a couple of hours. I always feel better after. The only other option is to quit. Now, that’s a great option if it doesn’t really matter to you, but if you like writing, like creating characters, and like the creativity that goes along with it, then don’t quit.

Just trudge onward. Your turn will come.

Jamie Freveletti
Author
Running from the Devil
Morrow: May 2009
www.jamiefreveletti.com

Can a novel change the world?

by Karen Dionne

I don't mean DaVinci Code or Harry Potter change, though there's no denying those novels' influence. They've redefined the term "blockbuster," spawned countless knock-offs, created a new sub-genre, even added words to the popular lexicon.

I'm also not referring to Booker or Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction destined to be discussed and dissected by literature students for decades.

I'm talking real-world change. The kind of change that affects people's lives in demonstrable, tangible ways. Meaningful, food-on-the table change that addresses a critical and very real global problem, such as the lack of clean drinking water.

Every day, more than a billion people have no choice but to consume contaminated water. A child dies every 15 seconds because of it. 2.7 billion people live in areas with inadequate sanitation, with 40-60 million deaths per year the result.

Contaminated drinking water is the issue at the heart of my environmental thriller Freezing Point. The story features a concerned environmentalist who thinks he can alleviate the world's fresh water crisis by melting Antarctic icebergs into drinking water. Instead, his lack of understanding of the polar environment coupled with corporate greed creates an even bigger problem that ultimately threatens the entire planet.

Disillusioned, he abandons the corporate world and goes to work for the WaterLife Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on providing clean water and sanitation for underserved communities around the world.

The novel, of course, is fiction. But the WaterLife Foundation is real. In my author's notes, I direct readers toward this worthy non-profit. I discovered the organization while researching the novel, and was particularly taken with the way WaterLife targets villages and peri-urban communities with chronic water and sanitation issues - areas that are overlooked by emergency aid organizations because they're not experiencing a catastrophic situation, yet which actually represent the greatest need.

A typical WaterLife project is the one in Bapa, Camaroon, which includes a rehabilitated well, pump, and water reservoir for a health center serving 3,500 people.

3,500 might seem a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering billions. But these aren't just statistics, these are people: 3,500 very real people with hopes and dreams of long life and health and happiness - and the right to basic human services most of us take for granted.

Likewise, compared to hardworking environmental groups and documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, my novel's potential for social change is small. And the story wasn't written to educate; it was written to entertain.

Yet all writers hope their words will make a difference. If my readers come away with a greater understanding of the world's water crisis and are moved to action, the story's reach might - just might - extend beyond the page. A reviewer observed that Freezing Point's "ingenious plot, genuine characters, superlative writing and nail-biting suspense will change the way you look at a bottle of water." Another said, "The storyline is chilling, and the reader can't help but become educated about the earth's fresh water resources."

Earth's fresh water situation is critical. Uneven distribution, pollution, abuse of the aquifer - serious scientists around the globe are sounding the warning. By incorporating their concerns into the storyline, I hope my novel shines a small spotlight on a very big problem.

For more about the WaterLife Foundation, visit www.waterlife.org.

Also see Michael Specter's analysis of the global water crisis "The Last Drop," as published in The New Yorker, October 23, 2006

Photo by Antony Funnell / AusAID

This essay originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Karen Dionne is the author of Freezing Point (October 2008, Berkley), a thriller Douglas Preston called "a ripper of a story," with other rave endorsements from David Morrell, John Lescroart, and many others. Her next novel, Boiling Point, will be published by Berkley in October 2010. For more information about her, go to www.karendionne.net.

Rewind: Baseball and Breakout Novels

Greetings: I had several requests to post this blog on our site. So for those of you who were kind enough to visit me last week at Terry's Place, please forgive the double billing. I found the responses to that blog to be very interesting, and many fell into the following 3 general categories:

• Some people didn't accept the findings of the video, which I happen to believe is well researched. You're welcome to watch it and draw your own conclusions.
• Several people noted that while our audience is undoubtedly changing, our principal message as writers remains the same. Again, that's open for debate, but I'm interested in your take.
• A few people brought up the intersection of technology with the task of modern-day writers: whether that be putting words on the page or the beast we call publicity/promotion.

I'm fascinated by all of the above, and I don't pretend to know the answers. The original post follows.


What do baseball teams and breakout novels have in common?

I’ve become something of a baseball fan recently—and not ONLY because the Texas Rangers are in the pennant race. It’s exciting to hear the crack of the bat, sit in the stands and cheer, watch the fireworks each time Michael Young smashes a homerun.

Writing is a little like baseball. You want to hit one out of the ballpark, but doing so requires focus and determination. In truth it probably requires more than merely writing an excellent book. We also need to know what TOMORROW’s readers will want to read.

How much time do you think passes by the time I write an 80,000 word manuscript, send it to my agent, she sends it to a few publishers, they get in a bidding war over it, a contract is signed, and I’m given a slot? I’m a quick writer—some people say I’m obsessive-compulsive, but I find that terminology harsh. Best case scenario for me is six months to write, then another six months from agent through contract negotiations. At that point we can tack on another twelve to eighteen months for production before the book actually appears on a shelf—if things go well.

So when I open up a brand new document, as I did last week, and begin a sparkling new story—I need to envision what readers will want to read two to three years from now. What will seem fresh and exciting to them?

Have I mentioned that writing rocks? It certainly does. I love it, and I’m awed by the entire process.

This idea of envisioning what my reader will want to read in two to three years is a bit daunting though. Some days I feel as if I’m attempting to write science fiction. The enormity of this task was brought home to me this week when I was directed to the following video.




It’s entitled “Did You Know?” I’ve watched it five times now, and I’m still fascinated. Researched and designed by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Jeff Brenman, I believe there’s something there for most everyone—but certainly for anyone trying to communicate. To date, it’s received over 2 million views on youtube. So even though it wasn’t designed for writers, I think it bears a little attention in this discussion.

Part of our job includes envisioning our audience. I write romantic thrillers, a wonderful blended genre—and one that is constantly changing, both in content and in readership. As I watched the video, quite a few items jumped out at me (and the song is catchy too). For instance, I learned—

• China will soon be the #1 English speaking country in the world
• 1 of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met on-line
• There are over 200 million registered users on MySpace
• There are approximately 540,000 words in the English language today, five times as many as there were during Shakespeare’s time

WOW! Each one of those facts astound me, and they each change the picture in my head when I envision my reader and my novel which will appear on the shelf in two years. (Okay, maybe not the last fact, but it is very cool and gives me pause each time I choose a word.)

I also think Fisch/McLeod/Brenman do well when they end their video with “So What Does It Mean?” They don’t even attempt to interpret their findings, but rather leave it to their viewers.

So how did I interpret what I saw? I immediately started thinking about my readers . . . the ones in 2012. The ones who will be reading the book I just started writing. The video reminded me that instead of becoming caught up in minutia such as whether my book will appear in hardback, paperback, ebook, Kindle, or on someone’s IPhone . . . perhaps a wiser use of my time would be to spend it considering my reader’s background. What do they consider a romantic gesture? Will they recognize my male lead as heroic? Can they buy into the basic premise I’ve so carefully laid down on page one and will it thrill them in the way I intended?

I believe romance in its truest form doesn’t change. When you strip away the trappings of our time—technological and societal—romance remains the same. I teach collegiate age young adults, and they still love a good story. The question for me is whether as a writer I have the ability to catch and hold their attention long enough to place my tale of love in their hearts and minds.

As authors, when we do that, we’ll have earned ourselves loyal readers. Kind of like true baseball fans—ones who stick with their teams through good seasons and bad.

I’m interested though. What do you think of when you picture TOMORROW’s readers? Are they different from today’s readers, or pretty much the same? Does technology change our conception of romance or the things we fear? And does it, or should it, change the way we write?

~Drue

The Cost of Love, will be published by Five Star Press in March, 2010. For more details visit http://drueallen.com/.

The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker releases today!

Hello my debut friends and seekers of thrill!

I'm particularly thrilled that my cross-genre debut Gothic Victorian Fantasy Romance Novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, first in the Strangely Beautiful series, releases today!

From the back cover:

What fortune awaited sweet, timid Percy Parker at Athens Academy? Considering how few of Queen Victoria’s Londoners knew of it, the great Romanesque fortress was dreadfully imposing, and little could Percy guess what lay inside. She had never met the powerful and mysterious Professor Alexi Rychman, knew nothing of the growing shadow, the Ripper and other supernatural terrors against which his coterie stood guard. She knew simply that she was different, haunted, with her snow-white hair, pearlescent skin and uncanny gifts. But this arched stone doorway offered a portal to a new life, an education far from the convent—and an invitation to an intimate yet dangerous dance at the threshold of life and death…

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What people are saying:

"A compelling, engaging novel that drew me in from page one. Bravo!" --M. J. Rose, bestselling author of THE REINCARNATIONIST and THE MEMORIST"

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Its pages are like the petals of a rose: a many-layered tale gorgeously told... It's Bulfinch's Mythology and Harry Potter and Wuthering Heights in a blender."— Alethea Kontis, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show

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"Suspense, mystery, and the paranormal are all rolled into a historical novel with a gothic flair that will entice the reader and leave her wanting more... Ms. Hieber is an artist that puts her art into words."— Book Wenches

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"...it was thrilling to be engaged in a book that kept me reading well past 1 a.m., that got me out of bed not long after to begin again. And that, of course, means that I will absolutely be reading the next book, and the one after that and so on."—Tempting Persephone

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"Leanna Renee Hieber creates a sense of enchantment from the very beginning, and the novel caught me up in its spell... elegantly written and chock full of interesting characters and mythic themes."—Fantasy Literature

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"THE STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL TALE OF MISS PERCY PARKER unfolds at a steady pace, introduces unique characters, and provides a magical start to what will surely be an engaging series."—Darque Reviews

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As I deal with Jack The Ripper within the book, you can hear a few of my thoughts on Jack at a post at Murder She Writes or my new author introduction interview by Toni McGee Causey at Murderati. You can visit my website and check out reviews and interviews.

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I hope you'll follow along on my Strangely Beautiful Haunted London Blog Tour where every day I tell a new ghost story I use in the book! There's a ton of chances for book giveaways and you can enter my Contest for two cool prizes!

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Blessings and I hope you'll give the beginning of the Strangely Beautiful series a try!

Leanna Renee Hieber
www.leannareneehieber.com
www.twitter.com/leannarenee

The Writer as Kitchen Slave

by Karen Dionne

I’m a writer – a published author, a novelist. I’m not yet a household name, but I’m not a wannabe either. My first thriller published last fall with Berkley, a division of Penguin/Putnam. My publisher paid me an advance, sold German and Czech rights, and this spring, bought a second thriller from me on spec.

I’m also co-founder and co-administrator of Backspace, an Internet-based writers community with over a thousand members in a dozen countries. I organize and run the Backspace Writers Conference in New York City every year. Backspace has the endorsement of some of the top people in the publishing industry. When I email literary agents, editors, and bestselling authors, they answer – usually within minutes.

But writing is only half of what I do. Like most novelists at the beginning of their careers, I have a day job that pays the bills. In my case, it’s working alongside my husband doing high-end furniture upholstery for interior decorators from a workshop behind our home.

Last week, I went to a customer’s house because the cushion I’d sewn for a piece of wicker porch furniture didn’t fit. It happens. We’ve been in the business for decades and we’re very good at what we do, but life isn’t perfect, and occasionally things go wrong.

This customer lives in a lovely house on a lake in one of my city's wealthier suburbs, complete with winding, wooded driveway, a beautifully landscaped yard with a bronze sculpture and gazebo, and secondary driveways labeled with discreet signs (“To Boathouse”) to indicate their purpose.

The woman was not so lovely. As soon as I arrived, she launched into what turned out to be a full half hour of abuse. She scolded, insulted, ridiculed, accused, demeaned, yelled, hit things, threw things, and even yanked the cushion from my hands as I was trying to determine what mistake I had made when I sewed it.

In hindsight, I should have called a halt after five minutes. Given her my cell number, told her I was going for a cup of coffee, and explained that she was welcome to call me after she’d calmed down and I'd come back and finish the job.

But upholstering furniture is a service business. The customer had a legitimate complaint, which I was there to fix. So I suffered through her tantrum until I had the measurements I needed, escaped to my car at last, and drove off, hands shaking, close to tears.

Understand, I'm not easily intimidated. My first novel isn’t a cozy Agatha Christie-type mystery, it’s a science thriller that plays out more like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. To research my next novel, I traveled 7,000 miles to Chaitén Volcano in Northen Patagonia, Chile -- an active volcano officially on Red Alert. I stayed in the town at the volcano’s base, even though it was ruined by a lahar and is without electricity and running water. I hiked to within one mile of the lava dome. I saw steam vents, heard explosions from within the caldera, and felt a small earthquake.

None of that frightened me. But this woman’s screaming as if she were the lady of the manor and I was her kitchen slave was one of the most disturbing experiences I've ever had – made all the more bizarre by the fact that I’d just come from New York City, where I was a featured author at a thriller writers convention and did a joint book signing with a bestselling German thriller author at a landmark bookstore in SoHo.

My customer didn’t know about the other half of my life, of course. I understand her ignorance. Writers aren’t rock stars. Even the most successful tend not to be recognized. #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child relates how once while he was touring, he noticed the woman in the seat beside him on the plane reading one of his novels. He didn't introduce himself and claim ownership; instead, he waited to see what would happen. Hours later when they disembarked, the woman still had no idea she’d been sitting next to the novel’s author, even though she could have easily matched up her seat mate with the photo on the back of her book.

For most published authors, the glamorous life of a writer includes a day job. It's entirely possible I wasn’t the first author with whom my customer crossed paths. The barista at her local Starbucks, or the mechanic who rotates her tires, or the IT guy who fixes her computer might well be an author whose novel she read, loved, and admired.

But ignorance doesn't excuse my customer’s bad behavior. Whether a person’s accomplishments are obvious or not, everyone deserves to be treated with respect. No one should be treated like a kitchen slave – even if they happen to be a short order cook.


Karen Dionne is the author of Freezing Point (October 2008, Berkley), a thriller Douglas Preston called "a ripper of a story," with other rave endorsements from David Morrell, John Lescroart, and many others. Her next novel, Boiling Point, will be published by Berkley in October 2010. For more information about her, go to www.karendionne.net.

Tweeting in character

By Jeremy Duns

I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, and have been enjoying it. The site has helped me interact with readers of my debut novel Free Agent, and I think find new readers for it, but it can be challenging for a writer. When you spend all day trying to fashion an exciting and coherent story in 80,000-plus consecutive words, Twitter’s 140-character limit can take a little getting used to.

So I was interested to see a couple of writers trying something new on Twitter: tweeting in character. A couple of months ago, Joseph Finder, author of Paranoia and High Crimes, set up an account representing the protagonist of his latest novel, Vanished. Heller is described in his Twitter profile as an ‘intelligence investigator, security consultant, fixer, ex-military’ who ‘knows where the bodies are buried’. And just to make the message clear, he tells us he is ‘working with author @JoeFinder to tell my story’. Finder tweets as Heller as though he were a real-life citizen. So the character often links to stories online about intelligence and security matters, and exchanges banter with his Twitter followers – he has over 1,450 of them at the moment. Finder sends the tweets to Facebook, too, where he continues the conversation. One of his associates explains some more of the reasoning behind the experiment here.

Another thriller-writer adopting this approach is Jeff Abbott, author of Panic and Fear, who set up an account for Luke Dantry, the protagonist of his latest novel, Trust Me, in July. Abbott announced the development on his blog, saying that Dantry would ‘write about his researches into the next wave of terror and criminal networks’. The character is a grad student in psychology penetrating online extremist sites to try to determine which participants might become violent. In Trust Me, he is kidnapped, whereupon he realizes that his research is much more dangerous than he believed.

Abbott said he decided to put the character on Twitter because ‘he was the reason I got on Twitter in the first place: Luke uses Twitter to broadcast a message to his friends that he is innocent of a crime. I thought it would be a fun way to share a lot of the research I did into the dark world of online extremism – which I believe to be an enormous threat to our everyday lives.’

Like Nick Heller, Luke Dantry tweets links relevant to his field of expertise, but he is not in character to nearly the same extent, often directly referencing both Abbott and Trust Me in his tweets. Still new to the game, he currently has 36 followers.

I have been following both of these experiments on Twitter with interest, and a few weeks ago started wondering if I could do something similar with my own protagonist, Paul Dark. But unlike Heller and Dantry, Dark is not a contemporary character: my novels take place in 1969, at the height of the Cold War, and Dark is a British secret agent on the run. A character who lives in a pre-internet age using Twitter – how would I do it? What would he have to say, and why would he be saying it? Unlike Abbott and Finder’s characters, he wouldn’t be able to interact with other people on Twitter without shattering the fourth wall, but interaction is key to Twitter. Sure, some writers have serialized novels on Twitter – RN Morris, for example – but I wasn’t sure what I could add by doing that.

Then last week I read an article in The Bookseller about Philippa Gregory tweeting her latest novel. Here was a character from the 15th-century on Twitter! I found it interesting that she preferred some of the prose she had used to that in the novel, and I liked her idea to tweet around the edges of the book. It reminded me of Lawrence Durrell’s interconnected novels The Alexandria Quartet: at the end of each, Durrell included a few pages of ‘workpoints’ that provided descriptions of characters or places, alternative interpretations of events and possible sub-plots, extending the world of the novels and letting readers imagine further spins on it.

Reading http://twitter.com/elizwoodville is a curious experience. There is no interaction, just a series of posts that both advance the plot and can be read individually. Over 500 people are following the character, myself included. Because of the way Twitter works, I find it rather hard to follow all the tweets as they appear in my feed, and reading so many from the bottom up on the character's page, especially with Twitter’s current rudimentary archiving function, is also difficult. But Twitter works as a sort of skim-reading device, and the effect of @ElizWoodville, I find, is that her tweets subtly invade my stream of updates about political debates, publishing news and the like, and that even though I don’t read all of them or try to keep track of the story too closely, I still come away with a strong sense of the character, and the time she is living in. It’s very impressive, and certainly makes me want to read the book.

So yesterday I set up a Twitter account for Paul Dark. My novels are in the first person, which is an advantage, but this version of Mr Dark expresses himself in the present tense as opposed to the past. I have decided to do something along roughly the same lines as Philippa Gregory, but with no time limit to it (she’s only tweeting as the character for a week), and to write as I go along. This has the benefit of spontaneity, and I feel that having written two novels from Dark’s point of view I can now effectively ‘channel’ his voice. In fact, the exercise is already helping me as I gear up to write the final book in the trilogy.

I have, naturally, had to adapt to the site. Free Agent is a breakneck-paced spy thriller with nearly every chapter ending on a cliff-hanger. But cliff-hangers don’t really work on Twitter, because of the way it streams and is read. So Dark's tweets follow lines of the first novel but do not stick too closely to them. Sometimes I rewrite or edit passages from the book; other tweets are either free-floating thoughts or circle around moments in the novel, like Durrell's workpoints, or songs on a soundtrack that were not in the film. The chronology is much looser, and I intend to insert some foreshadowing of the second novel and perhaps the third into tweets as I go on.

It’s an experiment, both in terms of marketing my work and in terms of my writing. So far, I am enjoying it. Strangely, although Twitter offers just 140 characters a time, I find that Dark is slightly more expansive in this medium than he is in Free Agent. But I hope I am succeeding in capturing his voice, and that I will be able to both entertain people who enjoyed the book and find new readers as well. Please do let me know what you think!

Free Agent by Jeremy Duns is published by Simon and Schuster in the United Kingdom and Canada and Viking Penguin in the United States. See http://www.jeremyduns.com for more information.

What is a 'thriller', anyway?

By Matt Hilton

Recently, during Thrillerfest in New York, the question was posed to me: What’s the difference between a mystery and a thriller novel? Although my answer may have been a little pithy, I explained that in my opinion a mystery had a problem to be solved while a thriller had a problem to be dealt with.

Of course, this is a very limited manner in which to describe the differences. You can of course have a thriller that contains a mystery, and also most mystery books are thrilling by the very virtue of their subject matter. I’ve pondered quite a lot on the subject since, and thought it time that I put some of my conclusions on record – all of which I hasten to add are probably subject to change.

Because ‘a mystery’ pretty much tells us what to expect, I thought of which ingredients I found were necessary to make a thriller and the first thing that I came up with was that the term is very subjective. Thriller books transcend genre: we can have crime thrillers, action thrillers, adventure thrillers, historical thrillers, supernatural thrillers, sci-fi thrillers, romantic thrillers...and the list goes on. In other words, it doesn’t matter what the genre, it’s the structure and driving force behind the book that defines it as a thriller.

A thriller can be set any where, any time, but they all have a commonality. The books are fast-paced with plenty of action and generally hold a sense of impending menace or doom.

Usually a thriller focuses on the emotion and inner workings of the protagonist who is often running away from or running towards something that is both very dangerous and life-threatening.

There is generally an under-current of good versus evil.

Many thrillers are about ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and are typified by the protagonist running for their lives, before turning to face and ultimately triumph over the danger. Others, like my books, tend to follow a protagonist with the skills to fight back, but who is facing overwhelming odds.

Often there is a mystery to be solved, but sometimes the danger is out there in the open for all to see and the protagonist’s story follows his/her attempts to put an end to it while also trying to stay alive or to save someone or something else.

The protagonist often has some kind of weakness – often a burden on his/her soul – and during the events of the thriller he/she must contend with and often overcome this weakness in order to avail him/herself against the danger.

Thrillers are often full of reversals and twists, that amp up the pace as the protagonist must find new ways to contend with these surprises. Often there is a ‘ticking bomb’ where time – or the lack of – becomes an enemy in itself.

There is generally an expectation of impending violence around each corner. Violence may not always be physical – but may be delivered by way of plot twists or surprises that crash and burn their way through what the protagonist or (more importantly) the reader expects.

Tension is maintained by conflict, and by posing questions of when, where, why, what and, probably most importantly, how? (i.e How on earth is the hero going to get out of this one?)

My list isn’t exhaustive. There are many other factors that make a thriller, and there is a huge likelihood that other thriller authors will disagree with some of my points and come up with some salient ingredient that requires adding to the pot. Going back to my first paragraph, well, the truth is, I’m still pondering.

Matt Hilton is an ITW Debut Author. His ‘Joe Hunter’ thriller series debuted with Dead Men’s Dust in May 2009. Book 2, Judgement and Wrath, will be published by Hodder and Stoughton (UK) in October 2009 and by William Morrow and Co (USA) in May 2010.
http://www.matthiltonbooks.com/