Gardening by the inch?

By Lonnie Cruse


I'm sure some of you have seen the show GARDENING BY THE YARD on HGTV with host Paul. He's totally insane, so I can relate. But personally, I garden by the inch. Strawberry pots here, old fashioned washtubs there. Works for me because I recently harvested my very first strawberries. Yes, I've planted them before. No, they haven't produced. Sigh. But THIS time I have berries. Okay, THREE berries, but it's a start and more are ripening even as I type this. The strawberries are growing on my front porch along with petunias to attract the hummers to the hummer feeder and some sort of vine one of the lovely librarians gave me last year when I attended an author day at the Crab Orchard Lake Library. It grew a little last year but is making every effort to take over that end of the porch this year and I'm letting it. The huge pot beside the petunias is filled with rosemary.

Last week, out back of the house I planted five tomato plants by the side of the porch steps. I put them there because the area gets full sun (assuming it ever stops raining) and it's close to the brick base of the porch. I've observed from watching friends grow tomatoes that those who plant them near a brick wall get the best and largest crops. I'm assuming it's because the brick gets hot from the sun during the day and holds the heat at night, like a hot house. Whatever. It works!

I'm trying something new I read about to control weeds, hoping it works. I put newspaper on the ground first, wet it down so it would stay, then put four wheelbarrows of dirt in the area (yes, I dug three of them and transported, hubby joined me and dug/transported the fourth. He also transported some bricks for me to line the area so he won't mow over it.) After I planted the the tomatoes and "hilled up" the dirt around them, I put more wet newspapers around the plants, watered them down, and covered the papers with just a bit more dirt. The newspapers are supposed to keep weeds out (and they biodegrade over time.) It looks a bit messy, but if it works . . . . I also planted marigolds in a row around the tomato plants which does a good job of keeping worms off the plants. Supposedly the worms that usually destroy tomato plants won't cross a line of marigolds. I hope they know that.

Now, I usually, um, cheat with my tomatoes. Meaning I slip over to McPlants in Metropolis and buy one of their hot house tomato plants that already has blooms AND baby tomatoes in early May. Unfortunately, this year, while they had plants a foot tall or better, NONE of them had blooms and/or tomatoes. What IS this world coming to? Really. So I bought one tall plant sans blooms and four small plants, and we'll see. In July, if I'm lucky.

To the right of the porch are two antique washtubs, (oval) one with rosemary (I adore rosemary, use it to cook and I often put it in the pages of my journal, just for the smell.) Next to the rosemary is the tub with two kinds of mint, regular and pinapple. The pinapple doesn't smell as good (I'm an olfactory person, if you hadn't guessed) but the varigated leaves are lovely.

A few feet further down is a huge square washtub with the rest of my herbs, chives, marjoram, thyme, basil, etc. All but two of the plants in that tub made it through the winter and I replaced those. The rosemary stayed green all winter, including surviving the severe ice storm we had, and while the mint hid in the bottom of the tub, it came out at the first sign of spring.

We have a HUGE yard, so I could easily garden on a grand scale. But it's really too difficult, between the deer and the bunnies (yes, I've tried every method known to gardeners to discourage them, but they seem not to have gotten the memo on that) and our 2.2 acres used to be a corn field and we assume all the spraying, etc has made it so difficult to grow things. I have a few roses and other plants out, but it's a challenge here. The porch and the areas nearby seem to be the best place.

The three strawberries I harvested and ate were delicious. Can't wait for more. Love using the rosemary with chicken or in spagetthi sauce. And this container gardening is small enough for me to maintain without killing myself. If you aren't a gardener, or think you have a black thumb, may I suggest some container gardening on your front or back steps? It's fun and very satisfying.

And if you would love to be a writer but are afraid to tackle an entire manuscript, how about container writing? A chapter here and there? Bit by bit? You'd be surprised what you can harvest that way. Good luck with it.

Boy Books and Girl Books

Elizabeth Zelvin

Not long ago I heard an eminent editor admit that in his publishing house, people refer without irony to “boy books” and “girl books.” Since I became active in the mystery community, I have heard many discussions of the fact or belief that, by and large, men will not read books, or at least novels, by women. That’s why many female writers conceal their gender behind initials, although like the initials in phone book listing, the use of initials in authorship has become a signal that the person thus identified is probably a woman.

Men may object to this generalization, which oversimplifies as generalizations always do. It might be illuminating to ask what books by women they read. Are they “boy books” written by women? Are they crossover books? Noir is very fashionable these days, and women as well as men are writing noir. Megan Abbott comes to mind—a woman who had already written a scholarly examination of the tough guy in American fiction before her first novel was published. Or how about women whose prose style is “tough” and would have been called “masculine” before the women’s movement? I think of SJ Rozan, a writer I admire greatly, of whom I like to say (when I can get away with it) that her prose is built like a brick s***house. Not a wasted word, not a dangling clause, not an adverb. It doesn’t hang together—it grips.

A hundred years ago, when I was a college English major, there were two kinds of writer, or rather, two prose styles: Hemingway and Henry James. Hemingway’s the guy who put the kibosh on polysyllabic words of Latin derivation and made action verbs king of the sentence. Back then, it was possible to say, “I don’t warm up to that Hemingway style. I don’t know that I want to write that way.” I know, because I said it, and no one lynched me. Today, that choice has become an absolute. I heard the highly respected Stephen King tell an audience how to be a writer the year he was made a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America: “Read, read, read. Write, write, write. And lose the adverbs.”

I confess I have mixed feelings about abolishing a whole part of speech, maybe a quarter of the English language, by fiat. Actually, adverbs aren’t lost. They have migrated to the other side of the aisle, where the girl books sit. I learned this from a prolific and talented short story writer named Tom Sweeney. He’s been published in Ellery Queen and SF magazines and also in Woman’s World, which I’ve heard is a tough market to crack and pays well. Tom told me Woman’s World wants adverbial writing. When he writes for that particular market, he makes sure he puts those adverbs in.

Am I saying women don’t write nice tight sentences with action verbs? No, of course not. And I can delete an adverb with the best of them. I think it’s subject matter, focus, and sensibility, to use an old-fashioned word, rather than prose style that separate the boy books from the girl books.

I’ve written before about relational psychology—the theoretical approach that explains how and why men mature through separation and women through connection. Separation and autonomy—the tough-guy loner PI—boy books. Connection and relationship—mysteries, and not just cozies—girl books. Another psychological model uses the gender-related concepts of instrumental and expressive traits. Instrumentality is about how stuff works. Expressiveness is about how people feel. Instrumental—technothrillers—boy books. Expressive—romances, sure, but also character-driven mysteries—girl books.

Am I exaggerating? Still oversimplifying? Of course. But like the eminent editor, I’m making the point that there are boy books and girl books. Let’s tackle the distinction from another angle. Let’s look at the Great American Novel. Suppose we lived in a less patriarchal society. Suppose we had always acknowledged that there are boy books and girl books that have to be judged separately on their merits within their own categories, the same way there’s a male winner and a female winner in the New York Marathon. Here are my picks. Great American Novel, boy book division: Huckleberry Finn. Great American Novel, girl book division: Little Women.

How many men have read this wonderful book? Its author created characters so real that it’s still in print almost 140 years after publication, still read for pleasure—and with pleasure—by millions of readers, and still capable of moving readers to tears on an umpteenth rereading, as well as inspiring some of us to become writers like its protagonist. My husband has. I’m proud to say he’s read almost all of Louisa May Alcott, motivated by an interest in the vivid and accessible picture of life in 19th century New England in the context of Transcendentalism, whose theorists included Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father. He (my husband, not Bronson Alcott) also wanted to know what was in those battered books that I was crying over every time I read them. I’d like to hear from any other man who has.

Torturing Women for Fun and Profit

Sandra Parshall

I’ve just put aside, unfinished, yet another “Instant NY Times bestseller!” that features long and thoroughly sickening passages told from the point of view of a deranged serial killer.

As I wrote in a previous blog, I’m not terribly squeamish about violence in fiction, and I’ll admit that I like Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels, but I usually steer clear of serial killer stories. They seem to be taking over crime fiction, though, so they’re hard to avoid. And they’re more graphic than ever before, especially in the degrading way they treat women. What’s especially disturbing is that many of these books are written by women.

The one I just gave up on went into great – and, dare I say it, loving – detail about the killer’s torture and rape of his female victims, and the sensual pleasure and sexual satisfaction he experienced. After three or four such scenes, I was feeling queasy and disgusted. I had to ask myself how many more descriptions of the killer’s engorged penis I really wanted to encounter. The answer was none.

The book was a bestseller, and it was written by a woman, which means that in all likelihood the majority of its readers have been women. I have to wonder what enjoyment female readers get from this kind of story, which seems to me to be a kind of pornography. Yes, justice will be done in the end, but is the triumph of good over evil in the last chapter enough to make the degradation that precedes it a pleasure to read?

There’s no question that crime fiction writers have to come up with ever more shocking scenarios to grab attention in a crowded marketplace, and taking readers into the sick mind of a serial killer seems to be a favored approach. It’s all imaginary, since the average writer isn’t a serial killer and has no firsthand knowledge of the psychopathy involved. The author can make up anything he or she wishes to produce suspense and shocks. Most of the time they choose to portray women as victims of torture. These unfortunate females are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, kicked, raped, sexually assaulted with objects, starved, suffocated, drowned, shot, stabbed, buried alive -- every awful bit of it described in detail, all in the name of entertainment.

Sure, the occasional story will have a male victim. But fictional serial killers have a lot more fun torturing and murdering women. And apparently readers find women much more appealing than men as victims. I’m trying to understand why.

Why does the reading public support the mass production of books about the torture and killing of women? Why are so many readers, many of them female, entertained by this kind of novel? What emotional need does this entertainment meet in the reader? Why do women make “better” victims than men?

An even scarier question: After these maim-and-kill-her books begin to seem tame, what’s next?

Falcon and Falconer

Sharon Wildwind

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold …
~William Butler Yeates, The Second Coming

There are a lot more favorable reports than I expected from people who bought a Kindle last Christmas. The talk turned very quickly from “Will I like this?” to “Where can I download books.” The answer, of course, is only from the company that sells the Kindle. But in the ensuing discussion about downloading, I learned that lots of libraries now offer a download service for e-books. The download is good for three weeks, then something—I’m not quite sure what—happens so that the book is no longer readable. I have visions of Peter Graves watching the smoke coming out of the tiny tape recorder at the beginning of Mission Impossible. In any case, this e-book service is apparently spotty, available in certain parts of the country, but not in other parts.

Along the same intersection of technology and geography theme, Blogger, the people who host this very blog, have installed a post-now, publish-later feature. This means I can write my next blog at any time, post-date it, and have it magically appear at the right time on Tuesday morning. The only problem is we are having some trouble with the timing on the automatic poster. One of the Deadly Daughters discovered that the default time setting for this service matches the current time in Belize. No one knows why or how to fix it.

All books are now classified as thrillers, which has come to mean, “We want you to buy this book.” The name cozy mysteries, which went through an identity change a few years ago to become traditional mysteries, now appear on the verge of being morphed again into classic mysteries. Again no one knows why, how to fix it, or if it even needs fixing.

The on-line mystery lists, the mystery conventions, booksellers, and almost anyone else you care to name are on exhausting round #937, or there-about, regarding inclusion versus exclusion. Is an author an author or not? Many of the lists have stopped being helpful in themselves and have become a nexus or clearing house for other information. Click here to read my sample chapters. Click there to read my blog, follow my virtual book tour, link to my pod cast, or read what I’ve posted on my web site. I’ve even gone over to the dark side and now subscribe to two sets of writing-related pod casts and one RSS feed. This morning, I have 22 pod cast episodes to listen to and 55 RSS headlines to read.

The way the mystery world is changing is enough to drive me crazy.

Did I mention that, in spite of taking my cholesterol meds and eating all the right things, my happy cholesterol (what I call the high-density variety, the good stuff) is the pits? My doctor had one word for me: exercise. So every morning now, I’m out pounding the pavement for thirty minutes. And no, I haven’t flipped out. There really is a connection between Kindles, e-book downloads not being available in Montana, blogs running on Belize time, identity questions, pod casts, RSS feeds, and cholesterol.

When I get past my warm-up phase and into my walk all of this noise floats away. Yes, the mystery world is now confusing, but those of us in the mystery community, both individually and collectively, are strong, smart people, and we’ll find our way through the background business noise. The important things remain the same. Who dies? What effect does that death have on people around them? How do I make my villain likable and dastardly at the same time? How can I make my heroic heroine bigger than life? What’s the difference between a clue and a really good red herring? What’s the difference between good and evil and what is justice, anyway? It’s important that we don’t lose sight of what’s at the centre of the genre we write.

_____
Writing quote for the week:

The only thing really worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
~William Faulkner, southern author

Jess Lourey On the Herstory of Mystery

(submitted by Julia Buckley)

Thank you to the Deadly Daughters for allowing me to guest blog today on a topic that is near and dear to my heart: female mystery authors.

It is widely accepted that the first published mystery was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” penned by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 (and if you were going to contend this assertion, the blog of Poe’s Deadly Daughters wouldn’t be the place to do it). Wilkie Collins published his riff on detective fiction, The Woman in White, in 1860. Then, Sherlock Holmes hit the scene in 1887, providing the ultimate detective prototype. The mystery genre was taking shape, and by the turn of the century, it obtained mass appeal with the publication of pulp magazines and dime novels.

Like much literary history, the ascendance of the mystery novel is dominated by male authors. Heck, even Nancy Drew was originally penned by a guy. As Virginia Woolf wryly observed in 1928, it’s difficult to write without a room of one’s own. However, despite the obstacles of the time, three women managed to write their way to the top of the pile, redefining the mystery genre and turning out some amazing fiction. So, allow me to present to you a short herstory of mystery, featuring Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Although Sayers considered her greatest work to be her nonfiction translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and her time better spent writing literary works than detective fiction, she is best known for her mysteries. Sayers was born in England in 1893. She earned a degree in Modern Languages in 1915 and went on become a copywriter, which is what she was doing when she published her first novel, Whose Body?, in 1923. Whose Body? introduced the aristocratic, monocled amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who helmed 14 of her novels and short stories. She once commented that she envisioned Wimsey as a combination of Fred Astaire and P. G. Wodehouse’s fictional Bertie Wooster. In 1931, Sayers introduced Harriet Vane, her other main protagonist, in the novel Strong Poison. Critics suggest Vane, an Oxford-educated mystery writer, was a stand-in for Sayers.

Sayers is most famously known for bringing a literary element to detective fiction. Her writing is praised for being intelligent and layered, and she’s really, really creative with the cause of death in her novels (poisoned cat’s claw, anyone?). She also had a killer personal life, including a lover who was an unemployed car salesman at the time of their trysting, an illegitimate son, a devout Catholic faith, and amazing contemporaries, including C.S. Lewis. Sayers stopped writing detective novels in the late 1930s and instead focused on her poetry, religious dramas, and nonfiction.

Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham, though today not as widely known as Sayers or Christie, was one of the great Golden Age mystery writers. She was born in London in 1904, and both her parents were successful writers at the time. Although she published her first book, Blakkerchief Dick, in 1923, it wasn’t until 1927 that she published her first piece of detective fiction, and not until 1929 that her seminal character, detective cum adventurer Albert Campion, appeared on the scene as a minor character in The Crime at Black Dudley. Rumors have it that Campion was intended as a parody of Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey.

While Margery Allingham is unknown to most mystery readers today, I include her in this herstory because she wrote some great books worth discovering, and she is easy to identify with. She began writing “serious literature,” but found it out of touch with her easygoing nature and so switched to mystery, which she found neat and clean, a box with four sides—"a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it." According to the Margery Allingham Society website, mystery writing was “‘at once a prison and a refuge’ to a writer unsure of her aims but confident of her powers.” She improved with each book, stuck with mystery writing even when she couldn’t make a living off of it, and took risks with her characters. How many mystery writers out there can relate to that?

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is not only the best-selling mystery author of all time—-she’s the best-selling author, period. Her collected works have only been outsold by the Bible, and I’d argue that her writing has much better pacing.

She was born in England in 1890, married in 1914, and had one daughter in 1928. She published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, in 1920. Christie’s beloved protagonist Miss Marple first appeared in 1930 in The Murder at the Vicarage. Under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, she wrote six romantic novels, and she also wrote four nonfiction books (note to you mystery writers who want to branch out—-even Christie did it!). All told, Christie wrote over 80 novels and short story collections and more than a dozen plays.

Anyone who has read Agatha Christie will have their own argument as to why she is still so widely read. For my money, it’s her character development, timeless examination of human corruption, and wicked (but fair) plot twists that keep me coming back for more. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Christie’s characters have a keen eye for detail, and I never finish one of her novels without feeling like if I just paid a little more attention in life, I’d see a whole new world.

And how can you not love a woman who says things like this?

· “An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.”
· “Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.”
· “I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.”
· "If I was born once again, I would like to be a woman - always!"

Although more women were becoming published authors in the early 1900s than in any other time in history, they were still underrepresented in all but one area: mystery. They dominated this genre. Danced on it. Slapped it and made it their own. Thank you, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie, for opening all those doors for us and for providing limitless entertainment and inspiration.

And so tell me: who did I miss on this herstory of mystery?

Jess Lourey, the guest blogger for today, has just released August Moon (http://www.jesslourey.com/august.html), the fourth novel in her Lefty-nominated Murder-by-Month series. Of August Moon, Denise Swanson, author of the Scumble River Mysteries, writes, "Lourey has a gift for creating terrific characters. Her sly and witty take on small town USA is a sweet summer treat. Pull up a lawn chair, pour yourself a glass of lemonade, and enjoy."

Jess will be touring the West Coast with mystery author Dana Fredsti in May and hitting the Midwest in June. Check her website for more details. Also, to win a free copy of August Moon, be the first person to email Jess through her website and correctly identify the female Scottish mystery author who was a contemporary of the above three and should probably have been included in this post. Be sure to tell her that Poe’s Deadly Daughters sent you!

Guest Blogger Tamara Siler Jones

Award-winning writer, Tamara Siler Jones, mixes magic, fantasy and forensics in the Dubric Byerly mysteries – Ghosts in the Snow, Threads of Malice, and Valley of the Soul. Tamara is currently working on the fourth book in the series. Visit her website at www.tamarasilerjones.com

Black Feathers

Many, many years ago, a man named Walt Disney made a movie about an elephant. Most everyone has seen it - I hope - and most folks know that Dumbo was an elephant that could fly because he had these REALLY BIG ears. And, well, he could just fly. How cool is that?

Anyway, some well meaning blackbirds and a mouse convinced Dumbo that, in order to fly, he needed a black feather. He didn't. He just needed to believe in himself.

Sometimes writers, both working and aspiring, cling to their black feathers, often when they're faced with failure. They brandish their feather and lay blame somewhere else. It's difficult to believe in yourself, it's a lot easier to believe in the feather, or fault things that render the feather impotent.

My critique group sucks!
I can't find a critique group!
I write perfectly! Don't need a critique group!
I write too big for genre!
I write too niche for genre!
I'm too original for these small minds!
I write too cozy for these highbrows!
They're all crooks anyway!
My book's worth a million dollars!
My cover art sucks!
My cover art doesn't fit my story!
How-to-write books are all wrong!
How-to-write books say this is the way!
How-to-write books disagree!
My agent dropped the ball!
My editor doesn't give me enough time!
Writing well is all about following the rules!
Writing has nothing to do with the rules!
I had shitty distribution!
I hate first person but that's all they buy!
I hate third person but that's all they buy!
Marketing didn't advertise it!
No one understands my brilliance!
I deserve to be published!
Reviewers get paid to write hatchet jobs!
XXX has it in for me!
My story's got plenty of plot!
It's literary! I don't need a plot!

And on and on and on. We've all heard them, we've probably all said them. I have too, on occasion.

The truth of the matter is, there are no black feathers, no tricks, no gimmicks, no sure things. It's up to us to fly. It's also up to us to make sure that we write things other people want to read. If you've submitted your story to every publisher and agent on the planet and they've all said "No", toss the feather away and admit it's probably not them.

It's the writer's job, their responsibility, to tell a compelling story that people want to read, in fact they'll want to read it so much that they'll pay money for it. It's the writer's job to fly, not the feather's fault when they don't.

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild -- timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline -- a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample -- that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that, Dumbo didn't need the feather: the magic was in him."
-- Stephen King,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Gotta love The Steve. :)

Killing your darlings . . . say what?

"Kill your darlings" is a familiar phrase to writers. And trust me, none of us like to hear it. We write something we think is absolutely fabulous, can't wait for others to read and adore it like we do. Then we send it to our friendly readers or critiquers or editors and they say: "Kill it!"

Shriek! Kill it? Say what? Surely you jest? It's some of the best stuff I've ever written! Women will read it and faint in delight . . . grown men will sob with joy! HOW CAN you possibly suggest that I kill it???

Because it doesn't move the story forward, they say. Because it stops the flow. Because it doesn't add anything. Because you've climbed on your private soap box to preach to the reader. Because it doesn't even fit into the story.

So we crawl into the nearest closet and lick our wounds, unappreciated, unloved, misunderstood. Sigh. Then we think it over. These criqituers know our stuff. Even like our stuff. If they are saying something needs killing, it probably needs killing. So we crawl back to the computer or typewriter, poise a finger over the delete key, silently apologize to our darling, and hit DELETE. Sob.

The point of all this, assuming I have one, is that as writers, we are way too close to the "forest." We are IN the story as we write it. We know exactly where the characters are sitting or standing, what the setting looks like right down to the smallest detail, what the characters are wearing, thinking, saying. It's like standing at a party with a paper plate full of appetizers in hand, listening in on the surrounding conversations. So we whiz merrily along, fingers flying over the keyboard, describing what we're seeing, what our characters are doing, and sometimes we might take off on a tangent. That's why we need others to read for us. To keep us on track. To tell us what works. And more important, what doesn't.

The hardest thing for a writer to do is to ask for criticism. And it's what we need the most. Independent eyes, fair eyes, to catch not just typos but plot holes and errors. Things that bring the story to a screeching halt. So we search for good critiquers or editors, those who know and understand our style and can help us stay true to it without wandering off somewhere into left field. And someone who respects our talent enough not to try to get us to write it "their way." And we listen to them and do our best to learn from them.

Because once the book is published, the very last person we want to stop reading our work is the reader who has paid for the opportunity.

Having been on both sides, a writer receiving critiques and a critiquer saying: "Kill it!" I know how tough both jobs are. But a good critique can make the difference between a so-so manuscript and a break-out manuscript. Are you in a good critique group? Have a terrific editor that polishes all the rough edges off your manuscript? If you are struggling to get published, maybe it's time for a fresh pair of eyes on your manuscript?

Book Tour: Don't forget to pack your resilience

Elizabeth Zelvin

In general, I’m a good packer. I take plenty of changes of easily washed underwear. I don’t forget my migraine pills or the charger for my electric toothbrush. For the first leg of my first book tour, I threw six copies of Death Will Get You Sober into my suitcase, the air traveler’s equivalent of the proverbial box of books in the trunk of the author’s car.

By Day 2, I was glad I’d taken the books. At the first bookstore where I was scheduled to appear, the copies they’d ordered had not arrived. The bookseller was reluctantly ready to cancel when I offered to bring my own books. She was glad to work it out so the books people bought at the event registered as genuine sales, essential to my publisher’s good opinion of me. Books, I thought, that’s the essential, just as experienced authors had told me.

By Day 5, I’d decided the essential was the GPS. I owed that tip to the master of book tours, Joe Konrath, whom I don’t know personally but whose 600-bookstore tour a year or two ago is legend. I got the GPS in January so I’d have time to practice, fell in love with it immediately, and quickly became completely dependent on it. Her. I call her Sadie. (I’ve since learned that almost everybody names their GPS, talks to it, and feels as if they have a relationship with it.)

Unfortunately, my own Sadie developed laryngitis the day before the start of my trip, so I had to rely on my rental car providers for a GPS. My first experience was good: Avis provided a unit that was less advanced than my own, but when I turned it on, there was Sadie. Same voice, same patience with my mistakes on the road (“Recalculating,” she says calmly), same perfect navigational timing.

Next state, next rental car: Disaster! Alamo is a lot cheaper than Avis, and their GPS is correspondingly less advanced. Not only did this strange woman—not my Sadie!—fail to announce the names of streets, but she failed to pick me up on satellite as a went around and around confusing airport boulevards, ending in a Walmart parking lot having a meltdown on the cell phone to my husband in New York. “I don’t know where I am!” I wailed. (He’s used to this. His daughter once phoned from Bruges to say she was lost, but that’s another story.)

Not-Sadie finally located me on satellite and guided me more or less to my hotel, which turned out to be a little inn so secluded that I drove around the block several times before I figured out how to arrive, as opposed to being almost there and lost again. I did ask: the next-door neighbor had never heard of it. It’s that hidden. You have to walk through a jungle to find the office. I was still getting lost between bed and breakfast the next morning.

Let’s see, what else on Day 6? No air conditioning in my tropical room. They offered to move me, but considering I still have bricks—I mean books—in my suitcase, I settled for a fan. My next-stop bookstore canceled because their books hadn’t arrived, and being a chain rather than an indie, they couldn’t make do with my copies. I called my 88-year-old cousin, who had invited her book club to that event. She didn’t think they’d mind—actually, she said she didn’t think they’d care—but there was a hitch to our plan for a nice familial visit: she was about to go to the hospital for an emergency procedure.

At that point, I decided that if you can only take one indispensable tool, forget the books. Forget the GPS. Just make sure you pack your resilience. The book tour will kill you without it.

Are conferences worth the money & time?

Sandra Parshall

A popular mystery writer once said that her agent told her she could either be a “conference slut” or she could pick one or two conferences to attend each year and spend the rest of her time at home, writing. She chose the second course, and it certainly hasn’t hurt her career.

I remember her words when I see a newly published writer struggling to attend as many conferences as possible and still get the next book written.

As I wrote last week, mystery conferences are fun, and they give us a chance to see friends and take a break from the isolation of writing. But the number being offered is staggering. Some are strictly for fans, with published authors trying to be entertaining enough in their panel performances to send the audience first to the book room, then to the signing line. Others are aimed at aspiring writers who want to learn from published writers – and again, the authors participate in the hope of selling some books and making themselves better known.

In virtually every case, writers have to pay their own way. A lot of mystery writers out there, especially first-time authors, are spending their entire advances and much more on travel and conference fees. It seems to make sense – after all, if you don’t get a rave review in the New York Times and your publisher won’t buy big splashy ads for your book, you have to get the word out somehow, don’t you?

But does it benefit the average writer’s career if she turns up at half a dozen or more conferences every year? Will she sell many books at those conferences, or will she always sit at her signing table, twirling a seldom-used pen and watching the bestselling author across the room autograph tall stacks of books? I don’t know the answers, not even for myself, since Malice Domestic and Bouchercon are pretty much it for me.

I’d like to hear from other writers – and fans – about this.

If you’re a writer, how have you chosen the conferences you attend? Do you think those appearances have given your career a boost? Do conferences take you away from your writing?

If you’re a fan, do you feel as if you see too many of the same writers year after year, or do you look forward to seeing familiar faces? Have you discovered any new-to-you writers at these events?

For both writers and fans: Which conferences are on your must-go lists, and why?

I Got By With A Little Help From My Friends

by Darlene Ryan

* Sharon Wildwind will be back next Tuesday.

Most of you probably don’t know that I've spent the last three months in a cast after having surgery on my right foot and leg at the beginning of February. Well, three casts if you want to get technical; one made of gauze and plaster, which weighed a ton, one made of gauze and fiberglass--red fiberglass which is what happens when you have a ten year-old with you--and one that was rigid plastic with more straps than a medieval chastity belt.

I learned a lot of things while I was cast-bound. For instance, a man will never miss an opportunity to cop a feel while holding a woman upright in the shower even though he has been married to her forever, and her leg is wrapped from toes to hip in black garbage bags and she hasn’t shaved her armpits in six weeks. It’s way more fun to watch Jesse come back from the dead on All My Children than it is to take a tour of the inside of Dr. Oz’s digestive tract on Oprah. (BTW, Darnell Williams who plays Jesse? Yummy with a spoon.)

After the surgery I was sick. I don’t mean kind-of-queasy-feel-sort-of-crappy sick. I mean SICK. Wretchedly, dry heaving sick. Had to be held upright by nurses sick. Flashed a room full of strangers sick. Yes, that is the third time I’ve flashed people in a hospital. No, I swear I don’t have a secret desire to be a stripper. Later, when I'd been shot full of some anti-nausea wonder drug it occurred to me that being a writer is kind of like wearing a mental hospital gown all the time. You have to be willing to expose yourself—your inner self, not your dimpled backside—when you write. You have to be willing to share some of what moves you, what terrifies you, what motivates you, with your characters and with your readers.

Once I was home, what little mobility I had came with the assistance of crutches. Crutches aren’t easy to use. They take time and practice to master, especially when you tend to be klutzy. Using crutches involves technique. And you can’t learn it from the Bruce Willis thriller Striking Distance. (Try using crutches the way Willis does in a courtroom scene early in the movie and you’ll end up in traction.)

Writing requires technique as well; where to put the commas, how to develop characters, when to end a chapter, how to write a synopsis. It takes time and practice to write well. And it helps to learn the techniques from people who know what they’re doing. In other words probably not from Bruce Willis movies or your mother, unless you happen to be, say, Jesse Kellerman which would make best-selling author Faye Kellerman your mom.

Maybe the most important lesson I learned was that while writing may be a solitary profession, being a writer doesn’t mean you have to be a solitary person. It was my writing friends that kept me from going totally bonkers. My blog sisters kept me up to date on everything happening in the writing world. Fellow Guppy, Janet, made me laugh with her emails. Susan sent me sugar-free chocolate which tasted like the real stuff. Sharon Wildwind helped me deal with peeling toes.

Hank Ryan’s Face Time landed in my mailbox in the middle of a snow storm when I had RUN OUT OF THINGS TO READ and the library was closed. HelenKay Dimon’s Right Here, Right Now got me through a two hour wait at the fracture clinic, and made the orthopedic technician blush. And Lynn Viehl’s advance copy of Twilight Fall kept me company when I got ordered back to bed. Thanks guys!

One Last thing:

Brenda Novak's 2008 On-line Auction to Benefit Diabetes Research is now underway and will continue all month. www.brendanovak.com There are hundreds of items to bid on, including books and gift baskets from well-known authors. For writers there are reads and critiques offered by some of the best agents and editors in publishing. Poe's Deadly Daughters has a Mystery Lover's tote bag in the gift basket section, Item # 1011096. Along with our books there are other treats including a Metropolis tee shirt and a Poe action figure. And of course, lots of chocolate! All the money raised goes to research to find better treatments and eventually a cure for diabetes. As someone who will benefit from that, a big thanks in advance for your bid.