Susan Breen, Author at Miss Demeanors

Mystery women

February 12, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

On March 1, I’ll be speaking at a feminist mystery writing panel at the Book Culture bookstore in NYC, with several of my fellow Miss Demeanors. Whenever I think about feminism, I think about my mother, who was a very reluctant feminist. My mother got married in 1955 and she embraced the whole suburban dream. She used to joke that she was one of the few people in the world who actually wanted to be a housewife. We lived near Levittown, Long Island, which was the epicenter of suburbia at that time. My father worked as a display animator, which meant that he made mannequins move. You might have seen his work at the It’s a Small World ride at Disney World. Everything was going to plan, except that, when he turned 30, my father came down with a form of Multiple Sclerosis so virulent that within a few years he couldn’t move. My mother found herself in desperate need of a job. We were blessed to have a business in the family and she got work there, but the experience taught her, and me, that no matter what your plans, a woman has got to be able to rely on herself. When writing my Maggie Dove mysteries, I was drawn to yet another woman whose life did not go to plan. Maggie Dove was a woman content with her life as a mother and wife. She thought she had everything all figured out, but then her life was jolted by tragedy and she had to build everything up all over again. She solved a mystery, started up a detective agency, made new friends. Took risks. If I had my life to do over, I would take many more risks than I have done, and yet I’m glad that now, as I hit my sixth decade, I’m not yet too old to take challenges. This January I went on the Women’s March, which was not at all the sort of thing I would have done in years past, but as I looked around at all the strong women around me, I thought how proud I was of all of us for speaking up, for taking a stand. My mother would have been right at the front of the line. Info about the panel:https://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-kelly-oliver-susan-breen-tracee-de-hahn-carrie-smith-cate-holahan

Who are we?

January 6, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

The Miss Demeanors have a new look on our web site. I love it. It seems mysterious, glamorous and maybe a little dangerous. Sort of like Myrna Loy. None of those words actually describe me, but a person can dream! Anyway, thinking about that made me wonder how my fellow Miss Dismeanors would describe themselves and our group. We’re all mystery writers. We’re all represented by the fabulous Paula Munier. But we’re all quite different too. We write different types of mysteries, for example. We’re living different sorts of lives. So what one word describes us?Here are the answers I received: Alexia: Cool. Women writing crime. What’s cooler than that? Cate:Brave. There is an honesty in fiction, a need for the writer to lay bare her true impressions and observations about human nature from beneath the thin veil of character. Putting yourself out there demands a certain amount of chutzpah. Michele:Dynamic. I am amazed at how much living my fellow Miss Demeanors crowd into life. They are either scooting off to Switzerland, Ireland, or New Orleans, or they are launching new books, even while they raise kids, work as physicians, writing teachers, etc. There is an energy beaming within and radiating from my blog mates. I admit when I’m feeling a tad depleted, I’ll go back to some earlier posts to borrow a little of their energy. Paula:Persistent. Not a very glamorous trait, but one of the most important if you want to succeed as a writer, or as anything else. Publishing can be a tough business, and the bar is high, and the road to success can be long, but all of us have endured. We’ve learned that the “write, revise, repeat” mantra is the only one that really works. We keep on writing and revising and repeating. We persist. And so we publish. Robin:Paula beat me to the first word that came to mind. The hazard of being in the latest time zone of the team 🙂 So I’ll say diverse. While we’re all women who write crime fiction, each of us incorporate our unique views and life experiences across multiple subgenres in fun and different ways. Tracee:Engaged. With everything… their writing, families, blog colleagues, and other members of the writing community. And they still have time for friends, church, teaching, politics….oh, and yes, day jobs. What I admire is how each part of their lives gets the full focus when on deck. I’ll round if off by saying “friends,” because I think that’s what we’ve become along this journey.How about you? What word one describes yourself?

Medieval dogs

January 4, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

While doing research on my new mystery, I came across a completely irrelevant bit of information that I found charming. It was in a lecture by historian Toni Mount on medieval nuns. The lecture started off interesting, and then she began talking about wayward nuns. Immediately I was more interested. Then she started talking about wayward nuns and their dogs. I was hooked. Nuns were allowed to keep cats, evidently, because they took care of the mice. But they were not supposed to have dogs, because they served no purpose!!! Of course these medieval nuns led a very difficult life. They prayed and worked constantly, and with little human affection, and so it’s not surprising that they became passionately attached to little dogs, so much so that they would sneak them into church. At one point a bishop had to pass an injunction against bringing dogs and puppies into the choir, Mount points out. For those who were caught, in one particular parish, there was a punishment: the nun had to fast on bread and water on one Saturday. (A small price to pay, I suspect.) I spend a fair amount of time holed up with my dogs. Being a 21st century writer is not quite like being a medieval nun, but there is a fair amount of solitary work, and I am up early, and I felt like learning about their dogs gave me a richer understanding of who they were. On such small details are stories built! (If the course sounds interesting, you can find it at www.medeivalcourses.com.)

Second chances

January 4, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

As I go teetering into advanced middle age, I’m more and more conscious of the fact there’s a surprising amount of fun yet to be had. Instead of sitting around waiting for one of my children to produce a grandchild (not that that wouldn’t be a good thing!), I’m cavorting with the Miss Demeanors, going to conferences, discovering new drinks, writing an exciting new novel, getting into trouble, planning to march in Washington. In fact, I’m doing things I didn’t do when I was young because I worried too much about repercussions. Or because I was exhausted. One of the things I like about the protagonist of my mystery series, Maggie Dove, (I hope it’s okay that I like her!) is that she’s given me a chance to explore more deeply what getting a second chance means. It’s scary for Maggie. She’s set in her ways. She’s found a safe place and doesn’t want to emerge from it, and yet, when she’s forced to come out of her shell, to solve a murder, she loves it. She becomes a Sunday School hellraiser, if such a thing is possible. A person who has been a great second-chance role model to me is the great First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She started off her life being a certain sort of person. A debutante, a society wife, a political wife. But then her husband got polio and everything in her life turned upside down. Although she was shy and insecure about her looks, she had to step out onto the political stage. She was a great advocate for women’s and civil rights during FDR’s presidency, and after he died, she continued as a diplomat. She also wrote a fabulous memoir, This is My Story. It’s one of my favorite books. How about you? Are there any role models who inspire you?

Candy! Candy!

January 3, 2017 Susan Breen Uncategorized

The protagonist of my new mystery is a woman who likes to eat candy bars. (Don’t ask me how I know. I do.) She’s the sort of person who keeps a candy bar in her pocketbook for times when she has low blood sugar. She’s the sort of person who has a favorite candy bar, and I have spent a great deal of time, energy and calories trying to figure out which particular candy bar that would be. I was going to go with a classic. M&Ms. I like them myself, but I thought there were too many of them. For my purposes, I needed something you could take a big bite out of. Skittles were also out, for that reason and also because they took on political connotations I didn’t like. Butterfingers were too crunchy, Milky Bars too soft. Then I stumbled across the Take Five bar. It’s an intriguing candy. First of all, it has a jumble of flavors: pretzel, caramel, peanut, peanut butter and milk chocolate. My protagonist is definitely a person who likes jumbles. She mushes her food (I think). She likes jumbles of people too. In fact, one of the things that gets her in trouble is that she befriends everyone. It’s also a candy bar that has never done as well for Hershey as the big guns: Kisses and Peanut butter cups. The Take Five bar flies under the radar, sort of like my protagonist. And it’s quite tasty. As I discovered from eating a lot of them. This one small detail helped me discover so much about my protagonist. I love the way that happens when you’re writing. It’s like a puzzle. One small details builds on another and bit by bit a complete character emerges. In this case, she’s someone who I like quite a bit. How about you? Do you have a favorite candy bar?

Acceptance

December 30, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

Every New Year’s I make a resolution to improve myself in some way or another. I will be more productive, more focused, more ambitious and so on. But this year, I concluded that if I haven’t changed by now, I’m probably not going to. And all I’m going to succeed in doing is make myself feel guilty, which I already do enough. So this year I decided to accept what I am. And what I am is a slob. My desk is cluttered with papers, books, pictures of dogs, notes from people I love, notes from my agent with advice, tissues, water bottles, an icon my son brought me from Russia, dog treats, post-it notes, and books. I’d like to say there’s order to this madness, but having just spent half an hour looking for an important bit of information that I found under a chair, I doubt it. What there is, though, is energy. My office feels alive to me. When I walk in, I feel like I’m jumping into a stream of running water. Periodically I do clean it, and then I feel very virtuous, and then I sit down and write and darned if I know how it happens, but by the time I stand back up, it’s a mess again. But you know what? It works. How about you? Is there anything you’ve come to accept about yourself this New Year?

Pitching

December 2, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

December brings many exciting things for me (and others), and one of them is the New York Pitch Conference, where I’ve worked for almost ten years. This is a 4 day extravaganza/endurance contest in which authors pitch their novels and memoirs to editors, receive feedback, and occasionally contracts. One of our success stories landed on the NY Times Best Seller list. My own first novel, The Fiction Class, was sold at the pitch conference (which was how I came to get a job there), and my second and third novels were sold by my fabulous agent, Paula Munier, who I met at the pitch conference. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s a truly magical place. My job is to meet with a group of 14-18 writers, help them write their pitches, and then sit with them as they talk to the editors. This has taught me a number of things. One is, when speaking to an editor, you should never put your head on a table and cry. You should also not grab on to her hand and refuse to let go. But mainly it’s taught me that a good pitch can help you shape and sell your book. A lot’s been written about pitches, and I won’t go into it, except to say that the essential part of writing a good pitch is to make it sound interesting. That sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many people feel compelled to pack a pitch, and a novel, with all sorts of “essential” things that are really not that interesting. How do you know what’s interesting? You have to try to put yourself in a reader’s point of view. Say I come to you and say that you have a choice between reading a book about a woman’s experience at the podiatrist, or reading a book about a woman accused of faking the kidnapping of her child. Unless David Sedaris wrote the podiatrist one, you’re probably going to go with the kidnapping. It’s high stakes. There’s a story there. You know something’s going to happen. There are few things in life as wonderful as seeing a spark in an editor’s eye when you tell her what you’ve written. It’s so exciting for me to be a part of this journey, though sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m the one who’s learned the most from all of this. Have you ever written a pitch for your novel?

Inspirations

December 1, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

When I was a young mother, it was out of the question for me to go to an MFA. program. First of all, I didn’t have the money. Secondly, I had four young children. Those years were filled with hiking around and laundry and writing late at night. Though I did manage to persuade my kids, for quite a long time, that they should go to bed at 7:30. I remember my oldest son once saying to me that he was the only kid in 8th grade who had to go to bed so early, and I said he didn’t have to go to sleep at 7:30. He could read for as long as he wanted. He just needed to let me have time to write. Anyway, during that time, I had to invent my own personal MFA program, and the way I did that was by finding passages in short stories and novels that I liked. I would type up those passages, because it helps to have the words in your fingers. Then I would print them out and put them on my wall. I’d read them over and over again, trying to figure out what worked and why they moved me. One particular influence was V.S. Pritchett, who I became obsessed with. Another was Anne Tyler. At one point I think I covered my wall with paragraphs from Saint Maybe. I was thinking of that recently when I read a book by Neil Gaiman. I’d never read anything by him before, but a lot of people love him, and I’m always intrigued by writers who are loved. I came to this passage, which is describing a character with a hangover: His skin felt clammy, and his eyes felt like they had been pt in wrong, while his skull gave him the general impression that someone had removed it while he had slept, and swapped it for one two or three sizes too small. An Underground train went past a few feet from them; the wind of its passage whipped at the table. The noise of its passage went through Richard’s head like a hot knife through brains. Richard groaned. I love this for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s true. If you’ve had a hangover. Which I have, once or twice. It’s alive. It’s funny, but it’s real. It surprises me. It makes me see something familiar in a new way. I’m going to type it up and put it on my wall. How about you? What passages inspire you?

The shapes I see in trees

November 29, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

Every day that I can, I like to go off into the woods, with my two little dogs, and admire the trees. (You might have deduced as much if you read Maggie Dove.) Of course I love the leaves, but what really intrigues me are the shapes. There is so much drama in a forest! So much emotion, especially in the trees knocked over by a storm. Few things are as sad as a tree tossed to its side with green leaves still growing. What I love is how the shapes change depending on the light. IOne of the things that’s been very useful to my writing self is that trees help me see how humans express emotion.So, here are a few of my favorites. 1. Anguished treeLook out how the feathered hands reach up to protect, and you can almost hear the howl coming out of this poor trunk. 2. Ghost coming out of a tree. 3. Sassy tree: Can’t you hear it swish? I have many more tree pictures, but perhaps I’ll stop there. How about you? Do you have a favorite tree?

How long do you write?

November 28, 2016 Susan Breen Uncategorized

I was on a panel not long ago, with several other mystery writers. Various people in the audience asked questions, and one wanted to know how many hours each of us spent writing every day. I answered, “six.” Whereupon one of the other panelists, (who happens to be a friend), barked out, “You’re lying.” (You might wonder what people who are not my friends say to me.) I pointed out that I wasn’t lying and that she was a bully and then she said… Well, never mind. Yesterday, though, when I did in fact spend 6 hours writing, I found myself thinking about the question and realized that when I say I’m writing, I don’t mean that I’m sitting at the keyboard typing for that six hours. I’m doing a bunch of things on top of that. 1. I’m thinking, which, to the naked eye might look like I’m looking out the window at the oak tree on my front lawn. But so much of writing is imagining, and so much of that is letting my mind wander. 2. I’m reading. Because the book I’m working on now involves a different historical period, I’m reading lots of books about how people in that time dressed and ate and talked. I’m also reading psychology manuals and trying to get a better understanding of why people do what they do. And sometimes I’m reading Agatha Christie or Louise Penny, just because I want to absorb their wisdom. 3. I’m outlining. I don’t write up a formal outline before I start a book, unless an editor wants me to, but I do like to jot down notes about what’s to come. Just in case I forget. Or I might jot down a bit of dialogue. 4. I’m drinking coffee. 5. And yes, I’m pounding on the keyboard. All of which takes six hours, or sometimes more, when everything is going well and I’m in that groove and I don’t even notice the time has gone by. How long can you write?