What's your name?

I teach creative writing for Gotham Writers in Manhattan. The hardest part of my job is not the critiquing, or the lecturing, or the reading–though that’s certainly work. But the hardest thing to do is make sure that everyone likes each other. Or at least respects each other, and after years of working on this, I’ve discovered that the best predictor of whether a class is going to go well is whether people refer to each other by their names. Now you may think that sounds easy. All you have to do is introduce people and they’ll know each other’s names. But you’d be wrong. Most of us, especially when we’re nervous, which people usually are when they’re in a writing class, are not paying attention to extraneous information, such as the name of that guy sitting in the corner. So he might tell you his name is Joseph Conrad, but if you’re like me, it goes right out of your head. What you do not want is a group of people saying, “Yes, I agree with that lady in the blue shirt.” You want people connecting, and so my job is to harangue my students into remembering names (in a polite way). The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I teach in Times Square and my students come from all over the world. I grew up with people named Susan and Robert and very occasionally Priscilla. But in my classes I am presented with a true cornucopia of names, which is fabulous, but hard to get straight. So one of the things I do is write people’s name down using my own phonetic system and then I keep saying those names over and over again. Zagreb, would you hand Sushma a piece of paper? Alice, will you help Rothschild lower the window? And so on.  Sometimes, if even my best efforts don’t work, I do one of my favorite writing exercises, which is to have people write about how they got their name. Everyone has a story about her name. One of my favorites (I won’t use her name), was a woman whose parents had agreed on the name they were going to give her. But when her mother went into labor, her father left the hospital and went to a bar. Where he stayed for 36 hours. The mother was so angry that she decided to name her daughter after a television character in a TV series she knew he didn’t like. So every time that man said his daughter’s name, it was a rebuke. My own name comes as a result of a compromise between my parents. My father was Jewish, born in the Bronx, and my mother was Christian, born in Queens. My father was truly the best-natured person in the world, and he almost never said no to my mother, but when they were talking about baby names for me, my mother said she wanted to name me Christina. My father said, “Absolutely not! No Jew from the Bronx can have a daughter named Christina.” So they settled on Susan, which is an old Hebrew and Biblical name. All of this is a long way of saying that I have been thinking about community a lot, having just returned from my first trip to Bouchercon, which is a huge gathering of mystery writers and readers that takes place once a year, this year in New Orleans. One of the most fun parts was getting to meet people whose names I knew from Facebook or Twitter. In a reverse of the usual situation, I knew the name but not the person. But more about that on my blog tomorrow. How about you? Where does your name come from?    

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What's New in Social Media

One of the perks of being a Random House author is that you get invited to webinars where various publishing folk tell you about things they think you should know. I love going to these webinars. You don’t know who else is sitting in, of course, because you’re just looking at a screen with a picture on it, but I like to imagine Paula Hawkins sitting across from me in the void and thinking, “What if Maggie Dove met The Girl on the Train? Why don’t I call Susan and ask?” Anyway, yesterday the topic was “What’s New in Social Media.” The speaker was a young woman who handles all the social media at Penguin Random House and she had a lot of interesting tidbits. Here are some of them. 1. Share content you enjoy. (Yes, it’s okay to post all those pictures of dogs!) Readers want to know who you are and what your interests are. Social media is about getting across your personality! 2. You don’t need to be on every platform. Pick the one you like. But. If you are only going to pick only one, go with Facebook. That’s the big one, with more than a billion users. She advised authors to set up a fan page because while there are limits to the number of friends you can have, there are no limits to the number of fans you can have.  3. Twitter and Facebook tend to attract older users. The newer platforms, such as Snapchat, tend to draw younger ones. She said young people tend to colonize the new platforms and then the old people move in.   4. Because it’s the internet, there are always going to be some haters. Don’t respond. Don’t get upset. Don’t dwell. (But don’t forget. Never forget! 🙂 )   5. One of the most exciting new platforms is called Litsy. It’s an app for your phone, and it’s all about books. When you go on, it’s a little like instagram, except that there are only pictures of books. You can take pictures of books you’re reading and post them and write blurbs about them. I posted a picture of my fellow Miss Demeanor Cate Holahan’s book, The Widower’s Wife, against a red pillow, since it’s a domestic thriller.  Best of all, it’s a new platform and only has 28,000 or so users so far, so joining Litsky gives you chance to get involved with something on the ground floow. (Imagine if you’d joined twitter when it had only a few thousand users!)If you do decide to join, let me know and I’ll follow you. There’s another platform that’s similar called Reco. I haven’t checked that out yet. Probably her most important advice is to have fun with it. Social media really is about connecting. What about you? Which platforms do you like?  

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Copy Edits

    This is my week for going over the copy-edited version of my new novel, Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency (which will be coming out on November 8.)  It’s my last chance to make changes before it goes into publication, which means it’s my last chance to get everything right. On every page of the draft, there are notes from the copy-editor. Sometimes he just wants me to think about a word. Other times it’s more substantive.  Here are some sample questions: 1. Timing is very important in mysteries, as you can imagine. At one point I say that something happened two weeks ago, but actually it happened 20 days ago. Fix that! 2. Early in the novel I refer to a cat as having green eyes, but later on he has yellow eyes. Fix that! 3. I keep misusing “further” and “farther.” 4. Maggie has a conversation with her nemesis, Walter Campbell, and she feels badly for him. But soon thereafter she loses her temper. Take more time, the copy editor cautions. Wait a beat before she yells. 5. I tend to use the word “dumbfounded” a lot. Which I frequently am. But I shouldn’t use it too much. 6. I refer to a book of magic spells. (There are witches in this book!) But I got the title wrong. I fixed it. And so on. None of these things are onerous, but it’s important to get it all right. There’s nothing worse than finding a mistake in a book. Completely damages the author’s credibility. In my first Maggie Dove mystery, the copy-editor found a real doozy. I was referring to a psalm and got the number wrong. Maggie Dove is a Sunday School teacher and that would have been an embarrassing mistake. One of my favorite things about this process is that it does give you a chance to fix mistakes, which is not something you always get in life. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone walking alongside you saying, “Just a minute. Are you sure you want to do that?” (Maybe that’s my husband’s job.) Anyway, only 100 more pages to go through and then my new mystery will be as fresh and shiny as I can make it. Then I can get going on a first draft of a new book and make whatever mistakes I want! Have you ever found a mistake in a book? Or have you made one? (In a book, or in life?)    

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Writers' Police Academy

One of the trickiest things about being a mystery writer is getting the police procedural facts right. Given that my protagonist, Maggie Dove, is a 62-year-old Sunday School teacher, I don’t imagine anyone expects her to know how to set up a perimeter. But she does come into contact with people who should know such things, and it’s crucial to get those facts right. I’ve spent a lot of time researching and reading and watching Criminal Minds, but when I got a notice about the Writers’ Police Academy, I jumped. The Writers’ Police Academy is a four-day workshop, located in Green Bay, Wisconsin, designed to teach writers how police work. The conference is run by former detective Lee Lofland and all the instructors have direct experience with law enforcement. In other words, they know what they’re talking about. I spent last weekend at the conference, and my mind is still spinning, but I want to share some of the things I learned. At the beginning of each day, there was a surprise scenario to give us the feeling of what it would be like to be caught in the midst of some disaster. On the first morning we were presented with a gruesome car accident. A drunk driver had plowed head-on into a car, and the body of one of the drivers was flung through the window. (Subsequently the body got up to take selfies.) As we watched, the police interviewed the DWI suspect and arrested her. The EMTs attended to the inured. A helicopter arrived to cart away one of the victims. (Helicopters are much noisier and windier than I realized.) When the scenario was over, all the participants came over to answer our questions about what happened.   The next day we had an even scarier scenario. We were all sitting in a lecture hall, listening to a presentation about the history of terrorism, and all of a sudden we heard shouting from the hallway. A man burst in saying he’d been stabbed. Then, other people in the lecture hall began crying out that they’d been stabbed. Then the police burst in, guns drawn, and shouted at everyone to put our hands over our heads (which turns out to be a hard thing to do for a long period of time.) After all that was over, they explained what they did.    So, as you can see, every day began with my heart pounding. And then there were the classes. Each day you had 20 or classes to choose from. I tried to pick classes that would be useful for Maggie Dove to know. So one of my first classes was on “Mashed Potatoes of Death: Are You Going to Eat That?” The instructor, Dr. Denene Lofland, told us about weapons made from natural sources that could be easily placed in food and drink. Easily! A treasure trove of information for Maggie Dove. The most unnerving class I took was on Death Scene Investigation. There, former police officer John Flannery showed us pictures of actual crime scenes and explained how they were handled. One thing I feel fairly sure of is that Maggie Dove will (probably) not come across dismembered body parts in Darby-on-Hudson. But if she does, I can describe them. One of the most entertaining classes was by David Corbett and titled, “Private Investigation: Or How to be a Dick for Fun and Profit.” Given that Maggie Dove is embarking on a career as a private detective, I was heartened to hear  Corbett say that being a PI is a career designed for women. They tend to be better listeners and people are usually less intimidated by them.  Another great class titled “Why They Were Bad” was taught by forensic psychology professor Katherine Ramsland, who has a new book out about the BTK murderer. She had each of us draw a picture of a person, and then she looked at some of the pictures and it was just amazing what she could deduce from what the person had drawn. (Let’s just say it was a bad sign that I drew a stick figure without hands.) This would be a fascinating exercise to try out with your character. How does your character view the world? On the last night of the workshop, there was a banquet and best-selling author Tami Hoag spoke. She spoke so passionately about character and how it’s impossible to know what a person is really like by just a cursory look at them, though we are all guilty of judging people that way. I was so inspired I bought her new book, The 9th Girl, and read it on the way home, along with fellow Miss Demeanor Cate Holahan’s new book, The Widower’s Wife. So would I go back? Absolutely! But next time I’d like to get in the class where you do high speed chases.   

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What scares you?

  So much of writing is scary. Should you write down those thoughts? Will your family think you’re crazy?Should you send your work out to an agent? What if she thinks you’re crazy?Will anyone buy your book? What if all the reviews are one stars? So much of publishing makes me nervous, but I vowed to myself, when I turned 50, that I would try to say yes to everything people asked me to do, which is how I came to take part in a reading at the Parkside Lounge last Thursday night. This was an event fraught with anxiety. First of all, it was in the East Village in NYC.  Once I get south of 14th Street and the numbers go away, I just have to accept that fact that I’m going to spend an hour lost.  I carefully mapped out subway directions. Dragged my sister-in-law and a friend into a subway, which wound up being un-airconditioned. It was 100 degrees. My make-up dripped onto my lap.  Then there was the place itself, which was, exactly as I feared, much cooler than I am. (I’m not speaking of temperature here, but of a state of mind.) The walls were red (I think). There was a pool table in the bar. The emcee was a very cute young man who reminded me of Lin-Manuel Miranda. And there was I to read about the Sunday School teacher who is the protagonist of my cozy mystery. But not yet, because first there were three hours of other people reading. (I was the headliner, either because I’m that good, or because I harangued the most people into going.) First up was a man writing about his first time using a condom. Then came various other intense and very moving pieces. Then came a woman describing an intimate relationship with an ice cream cone, and then came me, talking about Maggie Dove. I went up to the stage and the light shone right into my eyes. I’m a teacher and used to relying on visual cues. When people start looking down at their cell phones, I know it’s time to move along. So it was weird to be in a cocoon of light.  Anyway, I started to read the first chapter of Maggie Dove. Suddenly everyone got quiet. You know that feeling when people are really listening to you? It’s a nice feeling. When I was done, everyone applauded. Sincerely, I felt. Afterwards I got an e-mail from someone who had been there who had been one of my students several years ago. She was so excited to hear about my book, had written one herself. Wanted to reconnect. The next day I got this group photograph, and as I looked at it, I thought how much fun the whole thing had been. Writing is about saying yes.   But now I think I’d like to stay curled up in my office for a bit. At least until Thursday, when I have a reading at Bryant Park. How about you? Have you ever done anything scary? 

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