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Dear Readers, You have had a rough couple of weeks. The election, the loss of DST, the dreariness of November. Please allow me to transport you for a day to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands where I set my books, No Virgin Island and Permanent Sunset. I wrote this originally for someone who was too ill to travel but was able to visualize a day in paradise. You awaken in a bed not your own but as comfortable. You stretch, feeling tropical breezes brushing your body. There are no aches, no pains, just anticipation of another day in paradise. The smell of coffee brewing lures you from your bedroom into the kitchen where you grab a mug and pick a croissant or scone and some strawberry jam and head out to the back deck.     The sun is rising over Ram Head spilling light onto the lush mountains and vast ocean. The colors grow so brilliant your eyes wonder can those verdant greens and cool azure blues be real.     You realize you have decisions to make. What will you have for dinner that evening? Lime tarragon swordfish on the grill? Chicken piccata with capers and lemon? Or maybe shrimp scampi? And you need to choose which beach you will go to today. Will you settle in at Francis Bay, where there is sun and shade to pick from and simple but sweet snorkeling? Perhaps a day at Trunk where the sand is so perfectly fine you don’t care how many tourists are sharing it with you. Or will you go to Gibney down that long driveway onto a beach under a glorious canopy of palm trees so quiet, you are sure it must be private?Next, you must decide what book you will bring? Should you crawl into a good Louise Perry or has Lee Child written a new one just for you?     You realize you cannot possibly make these decisions without first taking a dip in the pool. You slid out of your sarong and pause at the edge of the pool, feeling the warmth of the tropical sun slide down the back of your body, filling your spine with a growing glow that spreads throughout every cell. You look up at the cloudless cornflower blue sky and dunk into the warm water, moving slowly with ease.     Now you are ready to make those decisions and go. Soon you are at the beach of your choice, with your book open on your lap as you sit in the world’s most comfortable beach chair, occasionally running the sugar-fine white sand through your toes. You dip into the silky turquoise water at your will, floating in the warmth of water so clean you can see your toes and the little fish that want to swim with you.     By the end of the day, you’re ready to toast the setting sun on the back deck overlooking St. Thomas with its lights twinkling like a Christmas tree and Puerto Rico in the distance. Your raspberry Stoli lemonade slides down your throat while you munch on stuffed mushrooms and ciabetta dipped in aoli.     Dinner over candlelight is divine. Good company, the glow of a little sunburn with a touch of red wine makes the food even better.     You watch a little silly local television while you nibble at a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s Bourbon Browned Butter ice cream and yawn. You grab that book you are so into and return to your fluffy bed with pillows just like the ones at home. You crawl in, listening to the tree frogs lullaby you. You need to get some sleep.     You get to do this all over again tomorrow.   

 I have a confession to make. I love school/office supplies. While other women flock to Sephora enraptured by the latest eyeliner from Bobbi Brown, I am pacing up and down the aisles of Staples checking out the latest notebooks and highlighters. I ponder whether my post-its should be lined or not in the same fashion other people decide what kind of car to buy.            What’s with that, you might ask. Indeed, I have asked that same question many times. I connect it to my love of writing. These are the tools of the trade. And for me, the ultimate tool is the fountain pen.            When I attended a Catholic grammar school, the nuns would not let us write with anything but a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens were considered suspect and vulgar.  Blue ink was a must, although secretly I would purchase a bottle of peacock blue ink, which was the color of the Caribbean. I would use it covertly to write notes to my classmates, hoping traces of it would not be visible when I switched to traditional blue.         We practiced the Palmer method daily until the muscles in our forearms pleaded for mercy. Often my clothes became stained with ink because it was more common then to fill your fountain pen from a bottle of ink. Modern day cartridges were regarded with disdain.        Over the years, I moved on to other kinds of pens. In law school, I became partial to the Papermate “Jotter” ballpoint pen. It wrote smoothly and fit nicely into my hand. I protected it zealously, carrying a cheap Bic pen in case anyone wanted to borrow a pen. No one was going to get his or her hands on my Jotter.       Sometimes I missed my fountain pen, but I thought using one would only complicate my busy life as a lawyer. When I discovered the Uniball Gel Impact  Roller with its bold 1mm line, I was in heaven. This baby writes as smooth as jelly sliding over peanut butter. Clients would admire the Uniball while signing documents. I gave a fair number away.       But I still missed the fountain pens from youth. There is something elegant about writing with a fountain pen. It says “I want my words to be worthy of this noble instrument.” A few years ago while attending a writing seminar in Boston, I strolled into a Levenger store (sadly no longer there) during the lunch break. There it was. A fountain pen with my name on it. I bought it, returning to the workshop, poised to write notes with my long lost friend.        The feel of this pen in my hand, the sensation of the ink flowing across the page, is soothing to me. It makes writing as much as a physical act as a cerebral one. While not practical for drafting lengthy manuscripts,  at least not for me, note taking and journaling with my trusty fountain pen bring me great pleasure, I’m almost embarrassed to admit. But for me, it’s about revering an object that connects what’s in my head to the page.Do you connect your passion for something to an object or supplies that make it happen? Is anyone else out there finding more bliss in Staples than Sephora?

Fear. I could probably write a thousand blogs about it. I have written a few. This is the newest installment. Call this one, ”The Terror of Trying Something New.”            Perfect.  The need to do something perfectly feeds and fuels fear. Fear and Perfection: The Deadly Duo for a writer.            I have written six entire novels, two of which have been published, I’m grateful to share. I think I have found my voice, but I’m not sure if that hasn’t made me think I am limited in some way in what I write.            First, I am a mystery writer, born from a lifetime of reading and loving mysteries. I enjoy many kinds of mysteries, including traditional, police procedural, domestic suspense, and cozies. I love it when a mystery takes me to a new location or returns me to a beloved one.  Transplant me back into time and I’m  there with the protagonist into challenges of the era.  But I wondered, could I possibly write in one of the unchartered venues or subgenres?  Would the Deadly Duo prevent me from even trying?            Enter NANOWRIMO, the annual November challenge to writers to write a 50,000- word novel during the month of November. I’d tried once before,  but given up when I realized 50,000 words in 30 days does not allow you to be perfect.  For reasons shared only with my therapist and well beyond the limitations of this blog, I need to be perfect.            But the gentle side of living past the age of 60 has shown me I can try anything if I give up on the notion I  must be perfect, so even though November was scheduled to be the month from hell for me, I said, why not?            Since I was already giving myself the option of being humanly imperfect,  the relief I felt was liberating. Hell, if it doesn’t have to be perfect, I could try anything.  I chose a protagonist who was far younger than I am comfortable writing. Her past suggested her story would fit the suspense, if not thriller, subgenre.  The location was urban, not island or small town.  It was exhilarating to dabble in previously unchartered choices that risked imperfection. The more daring I became, the more excited I got, and the less frightened of failure.  After all, it’s only NANOWRIMO, right?            When I realized early on that having cataract surgery on both eyes in the same month might impact my word count, I was tempted to say, I’ll never get the 50,00 word count and wished I could count the number of characters or letters I had written. I was ready to quit.  But my protagonist,  Olivia, screamed at me and said, “What? You’re going to leave us on the page in this mess?”            I started writing plot points and ideas on brightly colored post-its and stuck them on a board so I wouldn’t lose the thoughts that were coming to me so rapidly I was afraid they would be gone if I couldn’t write them on the page. I’d never done this before, although many of my talented writing colleagues use this technique.  Soon the board was nearly filled with fluorescent stickies where I had spilled my brain. I was on fire. And if a particular idea didn’t work, wasn’t perfect enough for my unrealistic self-established standard, I could take it down, crush it in my hand and toss it into the wastebasket.  A revolutionary act for a perfectionist. I had declared war on the Deadly Duo.            Will I finish in time to meet the 50,000-word count by the deadline.? I honestly don’t know. I’m trying, but hey, I’m not perfect. Will I finish this book.  Hell, yes.  I’m on fire and the Deadly Duo won’t  stand in my way, thanks to NANOWRIMO. And guess what. I’m having fun not being perfect.            Does the Deadly Duo affect your writing or reaching other goals?  What is NANOWRIMO teaching you?  

I thought the search would never end, but in some ways I didn’t even know what I was seeking. I was the poster child in a world where you are told you can be anything you want to be. But how do you know what you want to be, and more importantly, who you want to be?            At the end of my attendance at a traditional Catholic high school, there stood three lines for women. You got into the line for nurses if you were scientifically inclined. If you weren’t, you got into the line next to it, which was for teachers. If you couldn’t make up your mind or weren’t motivated, you were relegated to the third line for secretaries.  It was 1967.            BOOM! The world exploded almost immediately after that. Vietnam. Civil Rights. Peace, Love, and Happiness. And so much more. I had been given a second chance to make choices.            And did I ever make choices. Having gotten in the nurse line first, I quickly realized I wasn’t well equipped for a profession for which I have the most profound respect. I just didn’t belong. I had always wanted to be an advocate, a lawyer. So off to law school I trotted, while I worked as a welfare director in a city during the Regan administration. Talk about not belonging.            The lawyer-gig fit better. I practiced family law, where the human skills I learned as a nurse could be combined with deductive reasoning and advocacy. But I didn’t really identify with my fellow lawyers. I certainly didn’t want to play golf with them and steered clear of bar association memberships.            I discovered I enjoyed mediating conflict better than duking it out in court where families are psychologically dismembered by words spoken by lawyers and then swiftly forgotten. In mediation, I found comfort and support in other professionals who agreed there was a better way to disagree. But many mediators come to the field driven by many diverse motivations. I had yet to feel I had found my community.            While a brief stint as a yoga teacher brought me joy, I still didn’t feel as if I had found “my peeps.”            All the while, my inner writer had been gestating. The lawyer gig had revealed how much I love to tell people’s stories. After all, that’s what I did for my clients. I told judges their stories as persuasively as I could, trying to distinguish them from the myriads of other tragedies poured like lagers of misery.            At first I was afraid to admit I was a writer. But then I joined a writing group where I found others afflicted with the same addiction to words and storytelling. Buoyed by connecting with other writers and sharing  the alternating elation and despondence only writers can appreciate punctuate the love of writing, I began joining writer’s organizations and attending writer’s conferences.             How can I describe the relief and jubilation I felt at finally finding my people? Although the initial encounters with other writers are often awkward and stilted because everyone knows writers are short on social graces, what follows usually are conversations,  laughter, and laments on a level resonating with the “who” I finally have found me to be.  I had discovered where I belonged, who my tribe was, and the pleasure of being with my peeps.             

 You know that old expression, “The ayes have it,” don’t you? Actually, it could be a pretty controversial expression this week, given the debate about the popular vote versus the vote of the Electoral College. But I’m talking about the eyes, as in you cannot be grateful enough for good vision, particularly if you are a writer.            Recently I’d noticed that I wasn’t seeing so well, even with my pricey Ralph Lauren faux tortoise-shell frames with navy blue sides. I’d pass exits on the highway and began confusing words. I’d see “promise” as “premise.”            A trip to the eye doctor confirmed that my vision had declined and yes, I was a perfect candidate for cataract surgery. Me and five million other baby boomers. Knowing how pricey new glasses are and that they would likely be good for only a year, I signed the consent form and last week I had the left eye done. The second eye will be done two weeks later.            The procedure is only momentarily painful, worse than the humility I felt at becoming Miss Daisy, driven by my husband everywhere for a day or two. I can’t say I enjoyed the feeling of being herded through a procession of appointments with my fellow AARP members, but I kept reminding myself not to be a curmudgeon and that the goal was to see better.            I warned the students in a law class I teach that I would be a movie star last week, wearing over-sized sunglasses after the surgery to class  under the glare of the fluorescent lights. They chuckled politely, but when one student sweetly suggested the class could send their emails in larger fonts, I experienced a combination of appreciation with suppressed indignation.            The after-effects of the surgery on the first eye have been minimal. I told my husband that I thought highway driving at night might actually be more enjoyable for everyone if they could see the same illuminated angel wings I witnessed in the place of headlights. Someone shared the experience of thinking she was perfectly back to normal in one day until she poured wine between the two glasses she had placed on the counter. A little embarrassing, inconvenient, but no big deal.            The real deal about having cataract surgery is this: You get your eyes back. It is amazing what I am seeing even less than one week later out of that lucky left eye that got to go first. The right eye is jealous, struggling to keep up with the print I can see on labels, the definition of objects, and especially in the words I read and write. I had no idea how much I was struggling.            I also didn’t have enough appreciation for the gift of sight. So here’s a toast to the two little orbs sitting above our nose. Eye, eye!            Have any of you learned to love your eyes the hard way? P.S. Please excuse any typos in the blog this week, but after that, cut me no slack.           

Yesterday my computer ‘glitched’. I’ve had a computer crash before. Twice actually. Both times the machine simply stopped working. It wouldn’t turn on. Game over. One time a technician replaced the mother board, the other time I bought a new one. Both times I accessed my documents from a backup drive and quick as a wink I was back in business. Yesterday was worse. Worse than a complete shutdown. It was heart palpitation bad. Every time I opened a document the content was that of the file opened immediately preceding it. Think about this. Pick a recent file and open it, and while the file name remains correct, the content is from the preceding one. I tried changing the file names, copying the document…. At this point I felt a cold dark panic. I pulled a document from my backup drive…. Same thing happened. I restarted the computer a few times, nothing changed. Imagine: You cannot keep content in a document. It felt like a ghost was in the machine. Watch The Shining, it was that frightening. End result, I turned my computer off and left it. Much, much later I restarted it a final time (okay, I waited until the next morning, today) and miraculously everything is fine. If I didn’t have a witness I wouldn’t believe it myself. (Their response to the problem was maybe you’ll have to retype the document from your hard copy….. ah, but that was the problem. Once the newly typed text is a new document, the next time you open it the content will be from an older document. ARGH!) All we can figure out is that something happened when the power went off yesterday. I think that the files were in the middle of backing up to Dropbox and something got ‘off’ (that’s a technical term). Anyway, back to normal today. What’s your worst computer failure?  

I took a well-deserved break the other evening and went to a movie. I picked Jack Reacher, Never Go Back as my two hours of entertainment. The problem, and one I should have anticipated, was that once I’d seen the movie I needed to read the book. How did it compare, what changes were made (other than the obvious ones…. how tall is Reacher?). Fortunately (deep irony here), when I went to my book shelf there it was – Lee Child’s Never Go Back in hardcover splendor. I have a lot of books that I’ve bought and not had a chance to read, so there is no shame in an unbroken spine. I thought I’d take a peek at the first chapter or so and get a sense of the difference between movie and manuscript, then get back to work on my own manuscript. It takes me around a minute to read one page of a novel. That’s over four hours to read Never Go Back. In one big chunk of time. I’ll skip the obvious, clearly I enjoyed it. What struck me is how much of Reacher is internal. Jack Reacher the quintessential action hero is actually the quintessential cerebral action hero. How does that translate on screen? How do you show Reacher weighing all of his options and trying to get the bad guy to back down unharmed? Reacher is a loner and loners aren’t the most loquacious people. How do you translate that into film without it becoming a silent picture? Anytime I read I feel like I’m taking a personal master class in writing. With Lee Child it is a master class in picking the exact level of detail to incorporate. In an interview he once said that he skips research. He wants to write what will feel familiar to the reader. If the reader expects the gun to be heavy why interrupt their immersion in the story to explain that ‘technically the xyz revolver is lighter than most in the same category.’ Who cares! At that point in the story, with the gun pointed, all the reader should care about it What Happens Next. Child knows this. Maybe a little of his talent and skill will rub off on me as I re-read my own draft, trying to gauge the details needed for my reader to feel the place. Really feel it. I undergo serial reading more often that I’d like to admit. (A real confession here…. a bit embarrassing… I was on a long flight last week and read three Jack Reacher novels in a row. Yep. In a row. It was like eating a whole bag of candy at Halloween. I blame this on e-books which allow instant gratification. I also blame this on the airline. There was not one single good movie to watch.) Back to the point. Reading a clump of books by one author is instructive. If they have a continuing character you see very clearly how they capture that introduction each time. How much description and backstory is enough? How much does it vary? You judge what the author keeps as part of their style and what is unique to the story being told in that particular book. How do these authors keep us coming back? We want familiarity, but not imitation. In Lee Child’s Never Go Back the story was comfortingly expected, yet fresh. Of course, in the end, I have to remember that I read that last Reacher novel when I should have been writing. Maybe Lee Child will offer a few hours of his time to make up for my writing jag? Writing for me, of course. Or maybe I should count the debt paid, since I certainly learned enough from my read to justify those few hours immersed in someone else’s world. Thank you, Mr. Child.