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Divine Reading

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 Today is the eighth day of Lent. For Christians, the forty days leading to Easter are a time to prepare for the holiest day of the Church year, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Many Christians observe Lent by giving up something such as chocolate, smoking, or social media. Others take on a spiritual discipline such as centering prayer. I wondered if there was a spiritual discipline centered around reading. There is.  Lectio divina, divine reading, is a form of prayer that dates to the sixth century. The technique is simple. Read, reflect, respond, rest. First, select a reading. Go someplace quiet and read the passage aloud. Notice if a particular word or phrase stands out or touches you. Reflect on the special feeling or insight. Reread the passage and converse with God in response to what you read. Rest. Lectio divina is specifically a form of Christian contemplative prayer. However, the technique could be applied to secular reading. How often have you come across a passage—a sentence or a paragraph—in a book or short story that struck you as powerful, that stayed with you long after you finished reading? The next time this happens, pause. Read the passage aloud and reflect on it. Notice how it makes you feel, reflect on your reaction. Read the passage aloud again and discuss your reaction with yourself. Write down your response. Or go ahead and talk it out. No one’s judging. What techniques have you used to deepen your understanding of, or connection to, what you read?

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Fair Game

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 The movers brought my furniture today. Except for a few minor snafus—driver arrived, crew didn’t; car battery died so couldn’t get it off truck—everything was going well. Until. The crew parked in the nameless alley behind my house and had almost finished unloading my household goods when a cranky neighbor showed up and demanded both the crew’s pickup truck and the moving truck be removed. She “needed” them moved, she said. The movers had parked in the alley to avoid blocking the road in front of my house. They weren’t impeding traffic. They weren’t parked in the woman’s yard. They weren’t blocking her driveway or preventing her from leaving her house. Cranky neighbor was so offended by a moving truck in a back alley, she called the police. The policeman who responded did not seem overly concerned. He remained polite and professional. He simply asked the movers about how long they thought they’d be then left. Cranky neighbor stayed home and spied on the movers, looking for reasons to scold them. Welcome to the neighborhood. Being an author always alert for story ideas, I immediately thought this woman would make the perfect fictional murder victim. I fantasized ways of killing her off and created a list of suspects with a motive for doing her in. The list was long. I mentally scouted locations for the crime scene and devised a reason for my sleuth to be in this otherwise charming town. Then I stopped. I reminded myself part of what made this town charming was its small size. If I wrote a story and people read it (as I hope they would) they’d recognize the person on whom I’d wreaked fictional vengeance. That probably wouldn’t get me invited to many parties or included on any Christmas card lists. Last Spring, Richard Cohen wrote an article titled, “How Writers Will Steal Your Life and Use it For Fiction.” He explained how writers crafted characters inspired by people they met and examined how this literary identity theft impacted both writer and written about. One of my favorite episodes of “Midsomer Murders” deals with a man whose life has been turned into a novel by someone else. He feels victimized, his experiences stolen, leaving him with nothing to write about himself. There are ways to borrow someone’s life without offending them or risking libel charges. Transform males into female characters and vice versa. Borrow traits from several different people and combine them into a single character. Change your locale. Get their permission. Some people might like the idea of being an author’s muse. However we handle it, we’re unlikely to stop using bits and pieces of real people to build fictional characters. Life has too many good stories to pass up. Maybe writers should all wear warning buttons like the one I recently gave a writer friend—”Be careful. Anything you say may end up in my novel.” How do real people inspire your writing? How do you disguise them? 

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Good Bad Guys

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 I binge-watched “American Greed” on Hulu tonight. The show, in its eleventh season, airs on CNBC. Stacey Keach narrates each episode which details a fraud investigation. The show doesn’t focus as much on the law enforcement officers and prosecutors who pursue the fraudsters as it does on the con artists who commit the crimes. That’s what fascinates me about the show—the look inside the mind of a criminal, what motivates a person to lie, cheat, and steal. I remember someone in one of my writing classes asked about creating an antagonist. I don’t recall the exact wording of the question but the gist was, how do you create a believable, relatable villain? The answer was, make sure the villain is the hero of his or her own story. Every villain has a reason for their actions. Their motivation for doing what they do makes sense to them even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. When I’m plotting a mystery the first things I figure out are whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit. Literature has given us spectacular villains, some as remarkable as the heroes they oppose. Professor Moriarty,  Mr. Ripley, County Dracula, The Joker, Cruella DeVil. In 2013, The Washington Post published a list of “best” literary villains.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-greatest-villains-in-literature/2013/09/12/fa7dd6c6-0e74-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html?utm_term=.f6f39f348116 Who are some of your favorite bad guys? 

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Movies or books? What's your fancy?

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Hollywood award’s season came to a close this week and I realized how many of this year’s nominated films I had missed in the theaters. Many of them looked so good I need to find a way to rent or stream over the next months (Lion and Moonlight in particular, although I noticed that the winning documentary – The White Helmets – is on Netflix so I may start with that). I love movies, but I’m not an aficionada. I simply enjoy them. Movies let us enter an unfamiliar world, inhabit the space of another person or culture. Arguable books do the same – as writers we create a world expressed through words on a page that readers can inhabit and interpret. The reader sees and tastes and feels and hears. I asked my fellow MissDemeanors if they turn to movies for things not found in a book or vice versa…..and what about move adaptations? Cate Holahan – The movies in my head that play when reading are often better than the adaptations I see, later, on screen. There are exceptions. Harry Potter was pretty great in both forms, IMHO, probably because the filmmakers took such pains to keep everything true to the book. I tend to enjoy action stories more when watching them on the screen and mysteries more on paper. That said, I think adding Amy Adams to anything makes it better. She’s like the seasoned salt of Hollywood. One of my favorite films is Fight Club which I actually think is a better movie than a book. (I know, sacrilege for a writer to say). It’s not just because Brad Pitt spends half of the flick with his shirt off either. I think Ed Norton played the protagonist in an amazingly believable manner, an incredible feat since the main character is an unreliable narrator. I also think that the script had a fluidity that the actual book, which is broken up into vignettes, didn’t. I appreciated that continuity of story that the movie brought. I LOVE Chuck Palahniuk though. He’s brilliant and his dialogue is carved with an X-Acto blade. I try to read everything he writes.  Alexia Gordon – Why choose either/or? Be greedy and choose books and movies. I don’t have a strong preference for one form over the other except action/adventure. I prefer action movies to action novels, with one caveat–the movie action sequences must have awe-inspiring choreography. I like movie adaptations of books. (TV adaptations, too. I adore David Suchet as Hercule Poirot.) Sometimes the movie really is better (Field of Dreams vs Shoeless Joe being a prime example). Seeing the movie before reading the book doesn’t ruin the book for me. I don’t much care for book adaptations of movies. Screen-to-page adaptations don’t seem to have the same depth as page-to-screen. My favorite movie is Casablanca. Laura and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir are in the top ten. So are Hidden Figures and Rogue One. Laura, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Hidden Figures are all based on books and Casablanca is based on a stage play. And Ring Lardner, Jr. co-wrote the screenplay for Laura. Paula Munier – This is a dangerous question because there’s nothing I’d rather do than read books and watch movies. I love books and movies and TV and theater. Which is just another way of saying I love good stories. (But if I had to choose only one, I’d always default to books.)Many of my favorite films are based on my favorite books: Enchanted April, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, The Jane Austen Book Club, The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Princess Bride, to name just a few. Just as many are based on screenplays or stage plays rather than books: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Annie Hall, Gosford Park, Amadeus, Moulin Rouge, Singing in the Rain, anything by Shakespeare, again, just to name a few. And of course as a mystery fan I have enjoyed virtually every mystery series on television–from British cozies and Scandinavian police procedurals to New York cops and Los Angeles private detectives.But when it comes to the screen, what I love best are movies about writers: Midnight in Paris, Cross Creek, Barton Fink, Stranger than Fiction, Adaptation, Henry and June, Shadowlands, Becoming Jane, Impromptu, My Brilliant Career, Il Postino, Field of Dreams, Finding Forrester, Out of Africa, and more. These are the stories that inspire me to become a better writer…and they are the best of all! Susan Breen – The other day my daughter harangued me into going to see La La Land because she said she knew I’d love it, which I did. From the moment the story began, I was hypnotized, but part of what I loved so much about it was sitting next to her and sharing the experience. There’s something communal about movies that you don’t always get in books, though perhaps that’s why book clubs are so much fun. On the other hand, I genuinely feel as though some of my best friends are characters from books, and I don’t think you get to know actors in the same way. But the bottom line is, I’ll read or watch just about anything. I love stories. Robin Stuart – I have a go-to movie for reminders not to play games with readers. I practically studied The Departed. I have no idea how many times I’ve seen it. The audience is clued into all but one twist within the first 15 minutes yet it’s still fraught with tension. I re-watch Silence of the Lambs periodically to see how Jonathan Demme (a genius) and Ted Tally (the screenwriter) encapsulated so much backstory into compelling scenes without data dumping and just a dash of misdirection. It’s remarkably true to the book, which is one of my favorites, but I like the movie more. I also gravitate to Jake Gyllenhaal’s films because he makes interesting choices that are almost exclusively character studies so I’ll usually see them several times to catch the layered nuances. The same with Ashley Judd’s films with Morgan Freeman, based on books by Joe Finder and James Patterson. High Crimes and Kiss The Girls are two favorites that are great stories where we see the evolution of believable characters. And I second Cate’s feelings about Fight Club. The book is great but the movie stands on its own. Unreliable narrators are tough to pull off in visual form and this movie accomplishes it beautifully. Michele Dorsey – I have lots of confessions here. I have to confess that movie going and television watching were casualties in my legal career, especially since I taught evening courses for thirty years. I’m looking forward to catching up on movies and television series. Of course, I haven’t missed everything and have found reading a book before seeing a movie works best for me. I’m often disappointed by the movie version, but like Paula, I am a book lover first. One of the exceptions was Mystic River, which I thought was very well adapted. And here’s another confession. I love romantic comedies, starting with the Jane Austen movies but anything directed by Nancy Meyers will do. I adored a rocom about a mystery writer called American Dreamer. Finally, my last confession. I love Cinderella movies, especially the ones where Cinderella is feisty. Ever After is my favorite. Whew, that was a lot of confessing.  What about the rest of you? Any favorite movie adaptations? Any love lost between movies and books?    

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Mystery writers talk feminism

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Last night I was privileged to join four other female writers on a panel at Book Culture in Manhattan. We all write in the mystery / thriller genre, but that wasn’t why we gathered. March 1st was the first day of Women’s History Month and our theme was feminism. In our conversation we didn’t attempt to define feminism for all women or even for ourselves; instead, we examined our books through the lens of our female protagonists – who they are and why we created them. I think that everyone in attendance would agree that it was a good conversation – and one that opened more avenues of discussion. As a writer and reader, I hope that Women’s History Month will remind us to think about the women who have influenced our lives, and the kind of influence we would like to have on the lives of others. At the same time, it is a chance to reflect on powerful women in fiction. How do these characters take the reader outside everyday life? How do they help shape our world, or create a better understanding of our place in it? There are many powerful women in literature – who are the most influential in your life? (Many thanks to my fellow panelists: Susan Breen, Cate Holahan, Kelly Oliver and Carrie Smith. Check out their books in stores and online. Great reads all.) 

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Any collectors out there?

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Even in a pared-down live-small lifestyle I think that people have at least one item that serves no practical purpose but, instead, is a talisman. It could be a reminder of a person or place, or a reminder to dream of the future (a simple postcard of a beach you have visited or want to visit). I am guilty of having many such objects, but one collection is both fanciful and concrete. Technically it’s my husband’s, begun with a simple set of metal bookends, etched with the shape of a building, inherited from his mother. From there the metal building collection started. In my mind, one object is solitary and is endowed with meaning. Two play off each other. Three is a collection. With nearly 300 metal buildings, my husband’s qualifies. It started a little tongue in cheek, then was added to in remote locations, some were given as gifts, some purchased in antique stores. We started to compare the variety of metals and craftsmanship. Next thing we were connoisseurs.  It’s a diverse collection. Some are simply buildings. Others are jewelry boxes topped by a building, a few are desk sets with calendars. My favorite happens to be a salt and pepper combo. Much rarer are the coin banks. We have been fortunate to travel extensively and when I glance at the collection I am reminded of places we’ve visited. More than that, I dream of places I have yet to go.   Do you have a talisman (or collection) that serves as an aide-memoire? For me these memory aides are also reminders of a bright future.  

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Is there such thing as too many books?

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 My husband claims that I don’t understand the purpose of a book tour (which is evidently to tout my own book). Recently, during the course of sixteen days, I traveled through seven states, visiting 13 bookstores. During that time I bought books. (Of course.) How could I not? Each store was a unique experience. Moreover, it was a chance to talk about we were each reading. The clerks had amazing recommendations and it was impossible not to follow up on their suggestions. One of my first purchases was The Lives of the Great Gardeners. It is a lovely surprise. Four to six pages on individual gardeners throughout the ages – from Le Notre and Thomas Jefferson to contemporary designers. Matthew Beaumont’s Night Walking promises to be a journey though London. The Art of American Still Life was purchased at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, one of two books accompanying a charming exhibit. The Sound of a Wild Snail is a marvelous tale of patience and harmony. Rising Tide was a favorite recommendation in Arkansas where much of the subject – a terrible flood – took place. My mother’s family is from the region and I recognized many of the names and small towns. I will dive in soon for a full read. Some are new authors and titles to me. Others feel like old friends – most particularly Louise Penny, Ian Rankin, Charles Todd and Charles Cumming. These books have climbed to the top of my to-be-read list (I’m 25% of the way through…. Todd’s Racing the Devil lived up to and beyond expectation). The Warlock and the Wolf was a gift from the author who attended one of my book signings. Many thanks for the thoughtful gesture. I confess to purchasing Michael Connelly’s The Crossing at the airport to get me through the first terminal wait. But it made the trip with me, so counts as part of the haul. Like many people, I fall into reading habits and this was an opportunity to branch out. I’m curious – have you branched out in your reading selection recently?  

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Book Tour! A time for writers and readers.

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 On February 6th I left home for my very first book tour, and for the next two and half weeks I visited 13 cities to talk about and sign Swiss Vendetta. I had an idea of what to expect. I have public speaking experience from my former job in the non-profit world and with university alumni relations. The latter required travel and sometimes Q&A in a different city every night. From this, I was prepared for the daily cycle of fatigue and even random thoughts along the lines of – why did I say yes to this? At the same time, I anticipated the jolt of energy that arrived every time I stepped in front of the crowd or sat at the signing table. In this, I wasn’t disappointed. There were a few surprises. The first one is a slightly embarrassing: that people had read Swiss Vendetta. To give me some credit, the night of my first stop coincided with the day of the book’s release. It was impossible for anyone other than a beta reader or recipient of an advance copy to have read it. I got used to that rhythm. The questions were about my background, why I started to write, did I always know I wanted to write mysteries. A few days into the tour, the story changed. A man raised his hand, not for a question, but with a statement: I loved this line from the book, “The young are foolish. But foolish doesn’t mean you deserve to die.” For a second I didn’t know what to say. Was the nice man a plant, someone sent by my mother to make me feel good? How could he know what was in the book? Fortunately, I relied on the old standby of Thank you, which bought me a moment to realize he’d read the Swiss Vendetta and had an opinion. However, in that first half second it was a little like what it must feel like to meet a stranger who holds up a photograph and says, Hi, I’m your here-to-fore unknown brother. Very personal and unsettling and then exciting and also a step into uncharted territory. From this point forward I had the great pleasure to meet readers – many people who had read the book and wanted to talk about characters and setting and plot points and favorite lines. Each and every one of them gave me a tiny moment of joy (even the man who had a complicated question about a character entering a place and leaving and then reentering). It was a pleasure to talk about the second in the series – A Well-Timed Murder – and to speculate about a third. I had another entirely pleasant surprise near the end of my time on the road. In reading emails from readers who had a thought to share, and some who said that they wished they could come to a signing but work prevented it, there was one from a very nice woman who had heard my book recommended by an author at his own book signing. I have always felt a comradery among writers (at least in the mystery and suspense genre) but the idea that we are out there in the world celebrating each other was such a pleasant experience. I arrived home exhausted. There is a rhythm on the road that keeps you going and when the rhythm breaks you feel the fatigue of travel and of ‘being on’ every afternoon or evening. At the same time, I can’t wait to go out there again. Apart from actually writing, talking about writing and reading is pure joy. Thank you readers who turned out and made these weeks unforgettable! As a reader, what do you look forward to at a book talk and signing? Authors, what’s been your experience meeting your readers? 

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Four-Legged Writing Partners

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Speaking of my dog and drafts, I have to give credit where it’s due. Method and motive are two key ingredients to crime fiction. So are red herrings. As I wend my way through early drafts it’s not unusual to hit a snag where logic breaks down. This is where Emma comes in. When I get stuck, I take her for a walk. I’ve learned that she has little patience for me to suddenly stop and jot down ideas in a notebook so I take my phone to dictate instead. I figured that I’m not the first author with a four-legged writing partner. This brought to mind a question for my fellow Miss Demeanors. Dogs or cats?   Alexia: I prefer dogs but like dogs and cats. Saying I prefer dogs is sort of like saying I prefer chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream to moose tracks. I’m not saying no to either but given the choice… I don’t have a concrete reason for the preference. Maybe because dogs seem more social. Having a cat would be like having two extreme introverts in the house. Dogs provide me with social interaction and force me to get out of the house. Cate:I have an eight year old puggle (half pug, half beagle) who acts like a cat for half the day. Westley loves attention and affection, but also loves sitting in his favorite spot and sleeping away most of the day. He is very good company as I write. Petting him helped me distress from the more intense scenes in The Widower’s Wife and my upcoming book Lies She Told.            Paula:  We have two dogs: 1) Freddie, the inspiration for FIXING FREDDIE: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle (Adams Media, 2010) and 2) Bear, our Newfoundland-retriever rescue, the inspiration for Susie Bear, the search-and-rescue dog in my mystery SPARE THESE STONES, coming in 2018 from Minotaur. We also have a tiger tabby named Ursula, the 8 1/2 pound Queen of All She Surveys, including dogs and humans. You’ll find both cats and dogs in my work, as well as in my life. They also keep me company as I noodle on my stories. Dogs are good for walking and hiking and snowshoeing and paddle boarding; cats are good for naps and reading and binge-watching British mysteries. All good for fueling my process creative process! Susan: I have two little cockapoos and they are my obsession. (They’re a mixture of cocker spaniel and poodle.) They keep me company when I’m writing and they take me for walks when I’m not. I also have two rescue cats with whom I have an amicable relationship. They don’t scratch me, and I feed them. When I was writing Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency, I knew I wanted her to have a pet. Maggie Dove seemed to me to be a rescuing sort of person, and so over the course of the novel she absorbs two cats. I’d love for her to take on a Golden Retriever, but I need to think more about that.               Michele: We have always had cats and dogs. At one point, my three children seemed to believe they were each entitled to their own individual dog and cat! The dogs were always golden retrievers, except for one little blonde cocker spaniel who crept into my heart, and the cats often tabbies. We lost our thirteen year old golden, Cheddar, in September. Three weeks later, our sixteen year old cat, Miss Dingle named after the town in Ireland, died of a broken heart. They were inseparable. Ours hearts have huge holes right now as we ponder how to continue to have pets when we have sprouted our own wings and travel.              Tracee: I have two Jack Russell terriers – Alvaro and Laika. Alvaro is the one who demands a walk, which is usually a good thing, although sometimes he wants the walk at the very worst time. Laika – named for the terrier sent up by the Russians in Sputnik – only wants lap time, sometimes I think she wants to be a cat. She certainly wants to be better friends with the neighborhood cats….our favorite is Malcolm who literally runs across the yard when my husband arrives. Ever faithful even though he’s technically the neighbors. We also have a Flemish Giant rabbit named Guinness who came with the house! She is perfectly lovely, a very very dark brown. When I need a completely understanding companion she’s the one to visit (she has her own house in the back yard). She is quiet and undemanding but always ready to cozy up in exchange for a carrot. The Jack Russells pretend they want to be friends, but based on their attitude to the squirrels I think it would end badly!  

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Write. Revise. Repeat.

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 Writing is rewriting. We hear that at every conference and workshop. What surprises me is the accompanying chorus of groans from attendees. Apparently, I’m in the minority of writers who enjoy revising. I think of the process as similar to painting. The first draft is my pencil drawing. I’m just blurting out the arc of the story, seeing what works and what doesn’t. There are lots of eraser marks on the canvas at this point. I add color in broad strokes in version 2. This is when my primary focus is character development. In version 3, I add shading and details to evoke empathy and reaction. I keep going until my agent tells me it’s done, or an editor tells us both. To give you an idea of how much revising I’m talking about, let’s look at my journey so far. I worked on a single manuscript through 8 revisions before I felt ready to pitch agents. Landing one of them was my singular goal. So where did I pitch? At a dedicated pitch conference, Algonkian’s New York Pitch (https://newyorkpitchconference.com/). This particular conference is part workshop, part opportunity-of-a-lifetime. I can’t say enough good things about the experience. While there, I revised my pitch 4 times, based on feedback from agents and editors. What happened next? I got signed by the very rock star agent I’d set my sights on before I stepped foot in New York, Paula Munier. What am I doing now? Revising, again, based on feedback from some of the top publishing houses and conversations with Paula. I’m also working on the first pencil dra – I mean, first drafts of two new manuscripts. In between, I’ve written and revised outlines for two more projects that are waiting for my attention. I can’t wait to see how all of them turn out. See, I love the process. It’s fun and satisfying to see my characters take shape and evolve. I love it so much I intend to keep doing it, over and over again. 

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