Interview with author Sylvia Dickey Smith

By Lonnie Cruse

Today I'm interviewing author Sylvia Dickey Smith. I met Sylvia through my critique group (where it's gals against the guys and the gals generally win.) Thanks for joining us, Sylvia!

PDD: Tell us about Sylvia Dickey Smith. Where is she from, where is she headed, and what is she doing in between?

SDS: I was born and reared in Orange, Texas, a small town on the Texas/Louisiana border. As G. Howard, says, Orange has its own gravity. You get out early or you don’t get out at all. I was one of those who left early—right after high school. At times I’ve been glad I left, and at other times, wished I could move back. Where am I headed? New York Best seller list I hope! In between, I work at improving my writing, my marketing and my book promotion.

PDD: Tell us a bit about your Sidra Smart series.

SDS: Ah, Sidra. Sidra is one of those post menopausal women ready to take on the world. She’s left a world where she felt caught in a vise and has ventured out into a world so foreign to her some days her head reels. Her new world couldn’t be more different than the one she left. Her ex-husband is a preacher who controlled who she was, what she said and did, and what she thought. Soon after her divorce, her brother dies and leaves her his detective agency in small town Texas. Now she’s on a roll trying to figure out who she is, what she stands for, what she doesn’t stand for, and what she absolutely won’t stand for.

PDD: What prompted you to write this series?

SDS: Life—my own, and that of other women caught in similar circumstances. I write to entertain, but my writing also gives voice to important social issues. These issues may be subtly woven in the stories, but they are there. I encourage readers to look for them. DANCE ON HIS GRAVE, book one, was inspired by a true story. DEADLY SINS DEADLY SECRETS deals with people’s prejudices and the blind eye we can turn on injustice and abuse. The newest book, DEAD WRECKONING, is due out April 1, 2008. I’ll let you figure out the social issues in that one.

PDD: You are also working on a contemporary romance. How difficult or easy is it for you to switch from one genre to the other? What draws you to each?

SDS: I shelved the romance for now. I realized I wasn’t having nearly as much fun writing it as I was the mysteries. But I must take opportunity and tell you about the historical mystery I’m working on that’s lots of fun. The book takes place during WWII, and again is set in my hometown. The title is A WAR OF HER OWN.

Before December 1941, the sawmill and farming town of Orange, Texas was full of grand homes, its streets lined with virgin pine, ancient oaks draped with Spanish moss, and bayous full of cypress and water tupelo trees. If someone even said damn, folks fell out in horror. Codes of conduct were exacting, at least in public.

Then, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, propelling the whole country into what became the Second World War. Along with it, Orange shipbuilders gained contracts with the Secretary of War to build Dreadnaughts, destroyers, and destroyer escorts. All hell broke loose. By 1944, the population of Orange had exploded to well over 70,000 people, and with this explosion, a war effort to end all war efforts. Yet one woman fought another war, and the unnamed enemy resided within her.

This work is such fun for me, and as you might expect, is loosely based on family members who lived there during that time period. I hope to have it finished and be ready to query within the next few months.

PDD: Among the topics you present to groups is Mystery Writing and Self Discovery. What did you discover about yourself when writing your mysteries?

SDS: Oh boy. Well, I think the most important thing I learned was that I had a voice. All my life, I forced that voice to lie dormant, fearful to use it, to speak out, to take a risk. Writing helped me tap into it and let the written word embrace it. I learned of my keen insight into people, and a strong intuition available to me. To put it simply, I learned to be authentically me.

PDD: What is a typical writing day like for Sylvia Dickey Smith?

SDS: (Laughter) There’s nothing typical about my day. There was at the beginning, but you know how life happens in the midst of our writing. Previously I spent almost all day at my computer, in my private office, starting early and ending at dinner time. Then, my mom grew ill and came to live with us, needing my time and attention. She passed last year. But did things settle back into the old routine? No way. We decided to downsize, which stole much of my writing time. We packed, we sold, we gave away, we trashed. Then the move happened and along with it the sense of having lost my writing space. Next, an 18-year-old grandson moved in with us. I had forgotten how much a teenager eats! Add to that, a further lack of writing space. But I’ve recently carved out a cubbyhole behind the laundry room and steal a few minutes there several times a day.

PDD: You belong to a monthly book club. Besides the fellowship and the food, what does the club do for you? And what can you do for the club?

SDS: It helps educate me on what people like to read and why. What they like about a book and what turns them off. I see the delight in their faces when they discuss one they love, and it inspires me to keep at it. What I do for them, I think, is to remove the halo many people like to put on an author. (Maybe some authors enjoy the halo. I am not one of them.) I share with them my struggles to make a work happen, the pitfalls inherent in the process, etc. What I love the most is when they review my books and want to talk about my characters!

PDD: Any tips for new writers to help them stay focused?

SDS: Dig in your heels and keep at it. When those voices in your head tell you that your writing stinks, stuff a rag in their mouth and keep going. Force yourself to sit in that chair and put words on the page. Find a way to get inside the scene, inside the character’s head. Feel what they feel and allow the dialogue to evolve from deep inside that character.

PDD: What is your best marketing tool? What sells books?

SDS: I love starting conversations with strangers. I enjoy that one-on-one contact, of being real with people, the kind of contact that binds us at a spiritual level. Perhaps that is what makes people interested in me and my characters. I hope so.

PDD: You work with a critique group. How does the group help your writing? How do you help theirs?

SDS: Wow. I couldn’t do it without them. For one thing, when you write, you know what you mean to say, so when you read it back, your brain reads what you meant to write—not what you wrote. They find where I’ve used the wrong word, made a grammatical error, ‘head-hopped,’ where I may step outside my point of view—all those things that an author can miss when we read our own work. Members are also good at pointing out a ‘darling’ that we need to kill--that beautiful prose that we fall in love with, but has nothing to do with the plot.
My desire is to offer the same back to them. I hope I do.

PDD: Anything else you'd like our readers to know about you or your writing?

SDS: I am in the process of creating a whole new website and hope folks will stop by to visit when it is up and running, probably around April 1st, when my third book, DEAD WRECKONING launches. The address is http://www.sylviadickeysmith.com/. There is a link on the site to my blog at http://sylviadickeysmith.blogspot.com/.
Just recently, my protagonist, Sidra Smart, got her own website where folks can ask her questions, make comments, read short stories about her and her brother Warren who left her the Third Eye Detective Agency. They will also soon learn about her new venture making Alligator Pickles! These pickles feature, of all things, a dancing alligator on the label and are pickles with a byte! She will offer these pickles for sale at some of her book launch parties and will give away her secret recipe in book four, due out next year. Oh yes, her blog address is http://sidrasmart.blogspot.com/. She told me to tell folks she hopes they’ll stop by and chat!



PDD: Alligator Pickles? Facinating. I'll have to look into that. Thank you for sharing with us today and best of good luck with the new book!

Dorothy L. Sayers, Men, and Lord Peter Wimsey

Elizabeth Zelvin

Over on the DorothyL e-list, they’ve been discussing Sayers’s Gaudy Night, in which Lord Peter Wimsey courts Harriet Vane amid the dreaming spires of Oxford, while she struggles with her ambivalent feelings not only about Lord Peter but also about love and work. Someone inevitably mentioned the widely held belief that Sayers herself fell in love with her protagonist, a charge often used to criticize the high ratio of romance to mystery in this book and its sequel, Busman's Honeymoon. If so, I’d argue that it doesn’t hurt the book. Besides, it’s understandable, given what we know of Sayers’s life, that she chose to create an ideal mate for an intelligent and independent woman.

Sayers’s husband was an unemployable invalid and an alcoholic whom she cared for and supported during their 25-year marriage. Co-founder of the Detection Club with G.K. Chesterton, she evidently ruled the group of Golden Age mystery writers with an iron hand. The juxtaposition of rescue and control in Sayers’s life makes perfect sense to me as an alcoholism treatment professional with 20 years of clinical experience and publication credits on the subject of the spouses and partners of alcoholics. Or I could explain it in terms of family systems dynamics. When one partner (in this case, Sayers’s husband) is increasingly dependent and incapable of responsibility, the other becomes overresponsible: a caretaker and enabler. Sayers put a lot of energy into propping her husband up, which could only have increased his dependence. At the same time, she developed her taste for being in control and exercised it in other areas of her life, like being bossy about the rules of writing detective fiction.

Sayers’s marriage was not her first bad relationship. She had an affair with a man who refused to marry her, claiming not to believe in marriage but later admitting he was “testing her,” like the lover Harriet Vane is accused of murdering in Strong Poison. She also had a child with a man who left her when he learned she was pregnant. Wish fulfillment through fiction is one of the rewards of writing fiction. I hope Sayers got some satisfaction out of killing off Philip Boyes—and skewering him again in Busman’s Honeymoon, when Lord Peter has the opportunity to observe that Harriet has not experienced sexual generosity before.

How can any reader resist a passage like this:
“He knew now that she could render back passion for passion with an eagerness beyond all expectation—and also with a kind of astonished gratitude that told him more than she knew....Peter, interpreting phenomena in the light of expert knowledge, found himself mentally applying to [Boyes] quite a number of epithets, among which ‘clumsy lout’ and ‘egotistical puppy’ were the kindest.”

Why do critics give Sayers such a hard time about making Lord Peter a human being of depth and complexity yet a little larger than life? She’s not the only writer to project a yearning for love—transference, to use a psychoanalytic term—onto a fictional character. If it’s done well enough, the character will become so vivid, memorable, and appealing that readers will do the same. For example, if Diana Gabaldon’s not in love with Jamie Fraser, I can’t imagine why so many readers are. Although her Outlander books aren’t mysteries, a remarkable number of subscribers to DorothyL admitted on the e-list that they’d be glad to go to bed with Jamie. I bet the sentiment is shared by many other readers of this wonderful series of historical time-travel romances. (I won’t say they transcend their genre, which is always an insult to genre fiction, but they are fine and satisfying novels.)

Would Sayers be as popular as she is today, fifty years after her death and seventy since she stopped writing mystery novels, if Lord Peter and Harriet were not in love and their love story so richly and passionately presented? I don’t think so. So stop picking at them, and leave them alone.

And Happy Valentine's Day!

Women in history, women in mystery

THE WINNERS OF THE FREE BOOKS are Carol, Julie, Nancy, Caryn, and Jane. Send your full names and addresses to me at sandraparshall@yahoo.com and I'll put your books in the mail!



Sandra Parshall

History books are filled with heroes -- the men who led nations, waged war, made most of the scientific and technological advances -- but heroines are scarce. Only a few women broke through the cultural barriers to become major figures. In recent decades, women’s studies have given us more insight into the lives of women of the past, but history is still largely about men, both the exceptional and the ordinary. Historical mysteries, though, offer us a legion of strong heroines who take control of their own lives, fight the social constraints of their time, and risk everything in a quest for justice.

Two of my favorite historical mystery heroines are written by Anne Perry. Hester Latterly is a nurse who worked with Florence Nightingale on the Crimean battlefield and returned to England filled with progressive ideas about patient care, only to run into the brick wall of ignorance erected by male doctors. In partnership with policeman turned private detective William Monk, Hester uses her stubbornness and intelligence to solve crimes. In Victorian England 35 years later, Perry’s heroine Charlotte Pitt goes about crime-solving in a very different way. Charlotte is from an upper class family but has done the unthinkable in marrying a common policeman, Thomas Pitt, and accepting a far lower social status. Charlotte is invaluable to Pitt when he’s investigating crime among the aristocracy, because she can move in and out of that circle with ease. Charlotte is always a lady. She almost always does what is considered socially acceptable. And she’s a heck of a good spy for the cops.

Perry’s deep characterizations and attention to detail set a high standard, but many other writers are creating their own memorable female sleuths in historical settings. I’ll mention just a few you might want to look for.

Rose Melikan began her mystery writing career with The Blackstone Key (Touchstone, 2008), set in 1795 England and featuring Mary Finch, a young woman longing for adventure and dreading a future of teaching at Mrs. Bunbury’s school for young ladies. Europe is at war, England is threatened with invasion, and Mary finds herself embroiled in a deadly plot involving smugglers, secret codes, spies and traitors. Melikan is an American, but since 1993 she has been a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, focusing her academic research on British political history in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Her historical details are impeccable, and she has a style that beautifully presents the sensibilities of a lively young woman of the period. An interview with the author and a list of discussion questions at the back of the book will be useful to reader groups.


Victoria Thompson’s Gaslight Mysteries feature Sarah Brandt, who grew up in a wealthy home but now works as a midwife in the dreary tenements of 1890s New York. She witnesses poverty, crime, and violence, and together with Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy, she seeks justice for the less fortunate. In the latest book, Murder on Bank Street (Berkley Prime Crime, 2008), Malloy sets out to solve the murder of Sarah’s husband, Dr. Tom Brandt, four years in the past. What he discovers is devastating to Sarah and may destroy any
chance Malloy has for a future with her.



In the Ursula Marlow Mysteries, written by Clare Langley-Hawthorne, a headstrong (and beautiful, of course) young heiress in Edwardian England struggles to keep control of her father’s textile empire. This series has been compared favorably with Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. In the second installment, The Serpent and the Scorpion (Penguin, 2008), Ursula is off on a business trip to Egypt, where a new friend is murdered and the friend’s sister dies in a fire at one of Ursula’s factories. Back home in England, Ursula discovers possible links between a former suitor and the murdered women, at the same time she fends off Lord Wrotham’s marital overtures.


Emily Brightwell’s long series of Mrs. Jeffries mysteries should suit those who have read all the Miss Marple novels and long for more of the same. Mrs. Jeffries keeps house for Inspector Witherspoon – and serves as his secret weapon in crime detection. The latest, Mrs. Jeffries in the Nick of Time (Berkley Prime Crime, 2009), has the cunning housekeeper back in action, solving the baffling murder of a train enthusiast who died upstairs while a gaggle of friends and relatives sipped tea downstairs.

Suzanne Arruda, whom I interviewed here recently, places Jade del Cameron in a place and time where adventurous women probably had more freedom than anywhere else on earth: colonial Africa during the 1920s. Jade leads safaris, shoots, flies a plane, and solves murders. In the latest book, The Leopard’s Prey (Obsidian, 2009), Jade has to clear her lover’s name when he is suspected of murder.

Do you read historical mysteries? Which series is your favorite, and who is your favorite heroine?

Want to try one of the mysteries mentioned above? Leave a comment and tell me which book you’d most like to read – The Leopard’s Prey, The Blackstone Key, The Serpent and the Scorpion, Murder on Bank Street, or Mrs. Jeffries in the Nick of Time – and why. I’ll choose a winner for a free copy of each book. Check back tomorrow to find out if you won. Scroll down through Liz Zelvin’s Thursday blog (only after reading it, of course!) and you’ll find the names of the winners added at the top of my blog.

Five Minute Miracle

Sharon Wildwind
2008 August
I am not going to save this tiny cast-off leaf I found on the floor at work. It’s hardly bigger than the nail on my little finger. It would never survive.

2008 October
This year I am absolutely not going to bring anything in from the garden. Especially not that aloe vera plant. I mean that thing is so old that I’d need genealogy software to track how many generations of cuttings that thing is from the original plant. Besides, it already has a couple of frost-nipped spots. It would never recover.

2008 November
These seeds I saved from the marigolds heads would probably never sprout. Don’t they treat these things to be sterile, so you have to buy more seeds next year?

2009 January
Oh, look, this avocado seed has a split in it. Hmm, I can’t see even a hint of root down inside. Every time I plant an avocado seed, it never sprouts. Why bother?

2009 February
Shoot, I knew we should have eaten this sweet potato sooner. Look at all of those ugly white sprouts coming out of it. Looks like something from another planet. I wonder what would happen if I gave it a little sunlight?

One table-top garden made up of bits and pieces that I never thought would survive. But what the heck, dirt and water and sunshine are cheap, and you never know, do you? The rescued Snow White poinsettia in the middle may have been a mistake. It isn’t looking good, but you know, I swear there is one miniscule leaf bud down there close to the soil line. Why don’t we just give it a a few more days and see.

Last week, I came across a phrase that I’d learned once, but forgotten and I was glad to see it because it was something I needed to hear again: Don’t give up five minutes before the miracle. Whatever we’re hoping for next in our writing careers, whether it be an agent or a publisher or the breakout novel or maybe just that next paragraph, we must not give up. We are all growing our own table-top gardens.

Why wait for Saturday? Let’s spend this whole week celebrating love, hope, joy, and peace. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Bleachorexics and the Culture of Perfection

by Julia Buckley

There's a trend that began in Hollywood and which now extends far, far beyond it that has always really bothered me--the obsession with white, white teeth. (This is often accompanied by faux tans that look orange and unusual, but I'll save that for another post). The tooth phenomenon, I read on this ABC blog, has become such an obsession for some people that they are referred to as "bleachorexics" and they flirt with the danger of totally destroying their teeth.

What is it, then, that makes people so determined to look so unnatural? In some movies I am so distracted by an actor's weirdly glowing teeth that I can't even appreciate his or her performance. I just keep wondering, "Don't they know that their teeth look that way?" I wonder, too, if they think that white teeth somehow make them more authentic, because to me, even in these days of good dental hygiene and a healthy braces trade, "normal" teeth would be a bit crooked and not entirely white.

Skim through blogland and you'll find that folks in other countries find Americans strange--not just because we are, to them, weirdly friendly, but because we as a nation have some scary white teeth.

Now, some might think that my argument is nothing but sour grapes: not only did I never get braces as a kid (my parents couldn't afford them), but I have inherited a tooth enamel that could only, at its kindest, be called "ivory," and at its worst, "yellow." All of my siblings have this color teeth. What it creates, though, is a mouth full of dentiture that does NOT draw attention to itself. It goes with our skin. If I went to the dentist tomorrow and told him to make my teeth twenty shades whiter, I think it would disorient everyone I know. How could they not notice my suddenly powder-white chompers, my newly odd smile?

Beyond this, I wonder that no one objects to the fact that we are a culture trying to homogenize itself. How many starlets have given in to that horrible "get too thin" disease that has eaten away at the bodies and self-esteems of many good women before them? How many men feel they are not worthwhile, especially as a visual image, if they are not pumped up and muscular, then sprayed brown and bleached until their teeth can light a room? Doesn't this feel like a conveyor belt of falsity? Isn't it okay to just be yourself these days?

In any case, even if I fell victim to this public-scrutiny disease and found myself somehow lacking, I simply don't have the priorities to spend thousands on my teeth and skin. I have a ten-year-old car and kids who need college educations. I'm pretty sure I'll remain authentic until I die. :)

I had a friend who got her teeth whitened recently, for a wedding. She was convinced that she wouldn't look good in the wedding pictures unless her teeth were somehow better, whiter, cleaner looking. She went for the procedure in my town and then stopped to visit me for a while. Through our entire conversation she clasped her jaw and moaned in pain. "This will go away," she assured me. "It will be worth it. The pain only lasts a while."

Okay. I'll take her word for it, but I'm still not going to whiten my teeth.

What's your take on this phenomenon? Is it simply a social necessity? A way to make movie star dreams come true? Or a sign of our obsession with our own faces?

photo link here.

An Author's "Mews"

by Lorna Barrett (who also masquerades as L.L. Bartlett)

And the winner of a copy of Lorna's latest release, Bookmarked for Death, is Chris Redding. Chris, please contact me at darlene at darleneryan.com. Thanks to Lorna and cats for joining us this weekend.

Just about every author I know has at least one pet. Most have more than one. Some have more than one species, too. But the majority of us seem to have cats. Or rather, they have us.

I’m currently owned by four cats. Most of the day they lie around the house, snoozing their lives away. This time of year you can find them under incandescent light bulbs or lying with their snoots pointed into the heat run. I swear, sometimes I think they’re going to cook themselves, but cats love heat.

These days, Chester, our dominant cat, seems to be able to find the best source of heat and stick with it. If the sun happens to be out, he’ll follow it to every room in the house. More often than not, it’s just plain gloomy. (We live in Western New York. I think only Seattle has more gloomy days than us. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.) Chester’s not much of a lap cat during the summer, but come winter, he might deign to sit with me, but mostly he prefers hanging around with my husband. (It’s a guy kind of thing, I guess.)

Bonnie, terrified over just about everything (except at breakfast time, then she’ll challenge the boys to a fight--and then screams bloody murder if they take her up on it), lives on the heat run behind the couch. She comes out for meals, and likes to watch DVDs with me. (Last week we watched episodes of Star Trek Enterprise and the movie Iron Man. She prefers more quiet shows. And let’s face it, photon torpedoes are a lot more quiet than everything blowing up in a guy flick. After all, I don’t think sound travels through the vacuum of space. Am I right?)

Now Betsy, our little Princess, was very ill with cancer in 2007. She had an amazing recovery (sure shocked the heck out of our vet when we brought her in for her yearly shots this past September), although she’s a bit … crabbier … than she was before her illness. Still, she still likes to do her Betsy things -- hanging out under light bulbs (especially if you’re trying to read -- blocking light is No. 1 on her list of things to do) and moving around the house to check out all the heat runs. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

Throwing a monkey wrench into the works is my tiny son, Fred. (Also known as my Little Prince.) Fred isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he’s super handsome and he knows it. He also knows that if he’s in trouble, all he has to do is lie down, roll over and look cute. (And darned if it doesn’t work every time.) Fred will sleep under a light bulb, but has never learned that heat runs got super warm. (See dim-bulb comment above.)

I’d like to say that the cats keep me company as I work on my books, but that would be a big fat lie. No, they’re in the next room with my husband (and that 200 watt incandescent bulb). Hubby also works from home, and did years before I did, so the cats have their routine and they’re not changing it just for me. It’s just as well. Sometimes they come in for a visit and like to sit on my arms as I type. This, of course, makes it very difficult to type accurately--which I have a hard enough time doing without their “help.”

I also have a comfy chair in my office, with a nice light. I like to sit there to edit. Unfortunately, the minute my butt hits the chair, some cat will wander in and demand to sit on my lap. Since I keep my drafts in a big three-ring notebook, there’s nowhere to put it if there’s a cat on my lap. So I have to sit, twisted like a cheese straw, and put the notebook on the chair’s arm. Then a cat will get annoyed, stand up, turn around at least three times, nudge the notebook until I move it to the other arm, and then sit down again. I’ll turn the page, make a note, and the process starts all over again.

Of course, cats have other habits. They’re very clean. With all that washing, they ingest a lot of hair. How often have I been working when I heard hubby’s voice call out, “Someone’s puking, someone’s puking.” Since I write mysteries, it’s up to me to play detective to find the culprit and remove the evidence. (Not one of the perks of working at home.)

But would I ever live without cats? Never.

By the way, my new book, Bookmarked for Death, features a cat. Her name is Miss Marple and she steals every scene she’s in. She’s based on my cat Cori, who lived to the ripe old age of 20.

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Lorna Barrett writes the Booktown Mystery series, featuring Tricia Miles and her Haven’t Got A Clue bookstore. It’s available now. Hop in the car and rush right to your local bookstore. Go on! Do it now!

The Great Ice Storm of '09 part two whereupon we enter the dark side

By Lonnie Cruse

Awhile back I heard a news report about a blizzard in Michigan (I think it was Michigan, because shamefully that's how much attention I paid at the time, and probably how much attention others paid as well) and several thousand people were without power. We've been without power for a few days before here in Southern Illinois, so it's not like I'm totally out of the loop on this, but I really didn't think that much about it. Not until a huge power outage hit us last week. I'm posting this because I wondered how many others have no real clue what the term "thousands are without power and authorities don't know how soon it will be restored" really means. Please take a peek with me at the dark side.

Ice forming on trees looks soooo pretty and so delicate and so, um, not dangerous, maybe? But the truth is, ice weighs the limbs and branches down on the trees, bending them until they break. Thanks to gravity, the damaged limbs and branches have nowhere to go but down, right on top of whatever is below, be it houses, cars, or people. And sometimes the weight and the damage brings down an entire tree, often huge trees that looked strong and healthy only hours before. Worse yet, some trees survive the initial damage only to come down during the next ice/rain/wind storm, catching home owners by surprise.

Below: metal table and chairs on the front porch. Not a place you'd want to sit now.




Yesterday we were over in Paducah for church (Sunday morning, Feb 1) and afterword we transferred food from our friends' freezer to ours. They are still on a generator and we (for now, because in this area you take nothing for granted) have power. The amount of limbs, branches, and whole trees down in Paducah is amazing. Lots of houses with holes in the roof.

Once we got our power back I heard on the news that the linemen in one nearby county have to replace several HUNDRED light poles before power can even be restored in that area. And that number is FAR higher than they generally replace in an entire year. Ice not only brings down trees, it splits those huge poles and brings them down. Graves County in Western Kentucky may be without power for thirty days or more. The power company there experienced some major kind of problem that will not be easily fixed. Doesn't really bear thinking about. I was going nuts after only three days without power.

The trees in this area look more like they did when we had a killer tornado a few years ago. Nearly every single tree has no top, just raw branches looking like the tops were snapped off by a passing giant. And the branches torn completely off the trees litter the ground so thoroughly that you can't see what is underneath them in some places. Clean up is dangerous. A friend of ours was helping his son rescue his car when he was hit by a falling branch. He had to have several stitches. Wires are down everywhere, making it dangerous as well as difficult to check your property. Insurance companies are listing their phone numbers on television and radio so customers can register claims and get a processing number. Probably gonna be a long wait.

Below: damaged trees and limbs in our back yard near the creek.

Western Kentucky was quickly declared a disaster area by their governor and FEMA is helping them. Police and other authorities canvased door to door, checking on residents. Meanwhile, our governor's impeachment trial by the Illinois state senate began just before the storm hit, but poor Blago was too busy traveling the television talk show circuit to attend his own trial OR to notice what was going on in the southern-most tip of his state. He keeps saying he just wants to do the job the voters of Illinois hired him to do, but I'm not really certain he's ever figured out just what that job is. Anyhow, after a fifty to nothing vote to oust him, the locks at the Governor's office were changed and the lieutenant governor was sworn in around the time we lost power, but we're not sure if even the new governor knows how bad things are down here to date either. Nothing has been said on the news . . . when we get news.

Last week I enthusiastically and somewhat prematurely posted here that we still had power after the initial storm ended. Sigh. Before the power actually went off we kept hearing a loud buzzing sound outside our house. I was chatting with a friend on the phone when Hubby shouted that there was a huge fire across the road from us.

Back to last Tuesday afternoon: We live about three miles outside of Metropolis on a couple of acres that used to be a corn field. There is no house across the street from us, only an open field where flames from a downed power line were shooting several feet into the air along with a large cloud of smoke. And the scary buzzing sound. I called 9-1-1 and the operator told me it was indeed a downed power line and the fire department was on the way. Ditto the power company, but they were much later getting here, being kept busy with other downed lines. The ice storm was already doing its worst. I'm surprised the downed line didn't take out our power as it was hanging from the pole in front of our house, but it wasn't until the power company arrived that we lost power. And it stayed off.

Below: note the electric pole middle right of the picture. A line came down from there, landed across the road in the field, and the fire was just to the left of the pole and was big enough to be seen over that hill.

It was just growing dark when the power went out so I lit three oil lamps and about a dozen candles. Sounds like a lot, but trust me, it wasn't nearly enough light to read by. Or do much else by. Hubby and I listened to an audio book using my iPod and a battery operated speaker system. It was a Naigo Marsh mystery, A Man Lay Dead. And I read What Are You Wearing to Die by Patricia Sprinkle, with me still hovering over the candles. We have gas logs fueled by a propane tank, so the living room was comfy to live/sleep in. At least in the beginning.

Trust me, besides the sound of someone breaking into your house, I doubt there is anything so scary in the middle of the night as the sound of falling branches and tree tops. Since our lot was cleared decades ago for the corn crops, there are no trees close to the house, but they line the creek a few yards from the house. I knew the house was safe, but what about the garage (where Hubby is restoring a '57 Chevy) or the storage shed? What about the neighbors and their children? Was everyone safe? Their houses undamaged? What would the morning bring?

Below: note how low the electrical line going from our house to the neighbor behind us is. And all the ice on it.

Wednesday: The neighbors up the hill came down here early that morning to share our heat because their twin babies are too small to stay in an all electric house without heat. No damage to their house, but tons of limbs in their yard and ours. When we heard rumours that we might not have power for a week, they decided to pack up and brave the icy roads to head an hour away to Grandma's, who did have power. Thankfully, they arrived safely. By now, no stores were open in Metropolis, or in the larger city of Paducah, KY, across the river. And if you've watched the news lately, likely you saw pictures of the terrible damage over there. No stores and no gas stations open meant that we all had to survive with whatever we had on hand when it started. A few places opened on Thursday, but the few brave who ventured out could only buy $25 worth of groceries using cash and could only take $100 out of the bank. Gas stations were still closed. EVERYTHING in the area was at a standstill. Yes, most of us stocked up when the storm warnings came, but supplies dwindled quickly.

At lunch time Wednesday Hubby decided to roast hot dogs on the gas logs in our fireplace. I wasn't concerned since he used to be an expert at roasting them on a gas stove. Unfortunately we no longer have a gas stove, opting for electric when we bought this place. (And yeah, what WAS I thinking? With a gas stove, gas furnace or logs, and gas water heater, one can survive a VERY long time during a power outage. Sigh.) Anyhow, he was using one of my better oven mitts to keep from burning his fingers, even with a long fork, and he set the mitt on fire. He poured water on it, then ate his dogs and went onto the next task. I kept smelling smoke and checked the kitchen. The mitt was smouldering on the table I use for a kitchen island. I used more of our precious stash of water to put the fire out and tossed the damaged mitt out into the back yard. And threatened him with physical violence if he used any more of my good mitts.

You might remember I mentioned in preparing for the storm I'd filled both tubs with water because we are on a well with an electric pump and I wanted to have water to wash our hands with or flush the potty with IF the power went out. Well prepared, right? One tub leaked out around the stopper, so we were down to one. Urrrrr. Where was I?

Hubby kept me sane (and probably from killing him) by using an old pan on the gas logs to heat water for hot chocolate and my daily cup of tea. Meanwhile branches were still coming down and I couldn't see my favorite old glider out in the back yard. I worried that it had been badly damaged.

Along about now the neighbor on the other side of us headed to Grandma's as well, leaving us alone for quite a distance on this road. And the prison escapees I mentioned in an earlier post were still at large. I slept on the couch with one eye open. Hubby sleeps like the dead. He fed the birds each day, knowing they couldn't peck far enough through an inch of ice and two or more inches of snow to eat. At least until we ran out of bird seed, and then he used the bread I had in the freezer that soon thawed. We had enough bread to feed a small army. Of birds, anyhow.

Below: Hubby feeding the birds at the backyard feeder.

Thursday: Don wanted to brave the icy roads and bring home hot food. Cold cereal was wearing a bit thin and he was out of hot dogs and oven mitts to burn. Unfortunately for him, all the restaurants within driving distance were still closed. I, on the other hand, learned how to toast bread by holding it over the gas logs with my bare fingers, mind you. Best toast I ever ate. More food was thawing in the freezer so we put some on the sun porch by the window to keep it cold. Worked pretty well. Many of our friends had moved to higher ground, meaning Marion, IL, an hour away where the storm missed. Motels were full. Generators sold out, more were shipped in, and I vowed to buy one this spring or summer when prices come down out of the sky. Gas sold out at most stations, shortly after they were able to open. Trapped in a house with no electricity was becoming less and less fun.

Friday morning: Somewhere in the middle of the night our propane tank ran dry and the temp outside was in the teens. We could no longer stay here. We bundled up to finish out the night, and packed up that morning, heading to our friends' house around the corner. They have a large house and a large generator. We were invited before, but they have a large family as well and we didn't want to impose. At this point we were fully disposed to impose.

We had warm food at long last and other people to talk to besides each other. I stopped having visions of Donner Pass and the cannibalism of my nearest and dearest and concentrated on beating one of their granddaughters in a hot card game. Hubby cleaned out our freezers and brought along what he thought was all of our meat to cook at their house. (He missed a pound of burger and some frozen fruit which I later had to discard.) A master griller, he fired up their grill and proceeded to feed a dozen or more of us steaks, ribs, and chops. He's by now the most popular man in the neighborhood. I'm staying there with him, so I'm allowed to join in the feast.

One of the married daughters in this family was determined we were going to have Monkey Bread (cut up canned biscuits, covered in butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon and baked in a Bundt pan, for the unfortunate of you who never had this treat) but the dad of the house insisted the generator could NOT carry the electrical load of the oven. It would shut the generator off. The rest of us were determined to back her against him, so after dinner, we shut down everything in the house except the oven, sat with one small light on in the kitchen and sang hymns while the Monkey Bread baked. Best Monkey Bread I've ever had.

After the "party" broke up half the family hustled back to another of the hosts' daughter's house, next door, and the rest of us dived for our respective beds and called it a day. Just before we retired, we heard the good news, the lights were back on in the entire neighborhood! We elected to stay overnight anyhow as Hubby had turned off our power at the box so we (hopefully) wouldn't be hit with a power surge when the power company re-connected us. It's a rarity, BUT last year two neighbors suffered house fires when a downed power line was incorrectly re-connected after a storm. No one was home, but the damage was extensive and they are still recovering from it. Hubby wanted to turn our power on in daylight when he could see what he was doing. I agreed. Any bed in a storm, so long as it's warm.

Saturday morning: Our friends feed us a large breakfast and send us on our way home. At last, all good things are possible. Hot baths, flushing the toilet without having to dip several pitchers of water first, television news. Yea! My first task is to clean out one refrigerator and two freezers. I promise you I now have the cleanest fridge in two states. Maybe three.

So many things impressed me about this disaster and how people reacted. Many families and friends took others in, sheltering those who had no heat and no generators. Few without heat were able to stay home. Many churches and community centers opened what they called "warming shelters" giving folks with no heat and no way to feed themselves a warm place to stay and served them hot meals.

One of our sons took his family to his wife's mom's house. Our other son and his wife have a small generator and were able to stay home, but he did make use of our washer/dryer last night for laundry and our television for the Super Bowl. He received word that his power was back on during the game.

A police officer friend is staying with us now that we have power and he still doesn't, sleeping during the day, and patrolling on twelve hours shifts at night until things settle down in his area and he has electricity at home. Our youngest son called from California, not to commiserate with us mind you, but to proclaim thankfulness that he no longer lives here but resides in sunny California. Sigh. We really should've adopted him out when he was younger and cuter.

On the down side, many locals bought generators in order to be able to stay home, only to have them stolen in the middle of the night. And at least twenty people died due to improper use of generators. (Kept them inside instead of outside and they put out poisonous fumes.) And some who bought generators for this emergency are now selling them at a discount. Hello out there! Tornado season is about a month away! Power will be out again. Generators will be humming again.

Things I managed to enjoy during the power outage:

Hearing that family and friends were okay.
The white beauty, the sparkling trees (before they fell.)
The absolute quiet when absolutely NOTHING in a house is operating (furnace, TV, appliances, etc.)
The antics of the birds on the front porch.
Cross-stitching or reading without the guilt of "I should really be doing ___ (fill in the blank.)
Not having to be anywhere because absolutely nothing was open even if I could have gotten there. And, boy howdy, does a "To DO" list shrink at a time like this.
Staying warm in sweats despite no electricity.
Battery operated games and radios and speakers for iPods.
Non-cordless phones that kept us in touch with the world when cordless phones wouldn't work. And being with a cell phone company whose product continued to work when another well-known company's phones wouldn't.
And most of all, the neighborhood kids coming to slide down our hill during the outage.

Below: the intrepid sledders.

Things I missed or outright hated:

No local news or national news. What were the rest of you doing without us? Sniff.
Little or no warm food. The best of cold cereals grows wearisome somewhere around day three.
Lost or severely damaged trees.
Batteries that ran down. And the propane tank running dry. Sigh. NO way to re-charge or re-fuel.
Not knowing where the escapees were. We are a bit removed from our nearest neighbors. Screaming wouldn't help much. Shooting might.
The sound of a live wire buzzing and the sight of flames and smoke.

That's how we survived the first (and dare we hope the last?) great storm of '09. Many are still without power, cut off and struggling to get by, or forced to leave home. I ache for them. After church yesterday one family went to gather water in five gallon buckets from someone else lucky enough to have access to power and water.

Yes, our ancestors, some not all that far removed from our generation, often lived their lives without all the luxeries we take for granted like electricty and running water. Hubby grew up in a home without electricty until he was a teenager, (which meant no running water as well) and my family lived in the hot Nevada desert without air conditioning, only a swamp cooler which really didn't do the job, until I was a teen. It's amazing how much for granted we take these simple things . . . until we don't have them.

Meanwhile, my survival list is growing. Refuel the propane tank. Get more batteries in all sizes. Get a small camping stove to heat tea water and roast hot dogs in safety (yes, I know it has to be used outside or in a WELL ventalated area.) Get a new plug for the guest bathroom tub. Stock plenty of bird seed. Save for a generator. Pray for good weather. Try not to hate anyone smart enough to own a gas stove, a gas hot water heater, and/or has access to natural gas, which doesn't run out. You might want to update your survival list too. Just in case.

Against the Grain: Unlearning What We Know About Relationships

Elizabeth Zelvin

A few days from now, I’ll be giving a talk at the Mid-Manhattan Library in New York City on how to have a good relationship. Since not many readers of Poe’s Deadly Daughters are likely to get there, I’d like to offer a foretaste of the topic. I chose it as a way to mark the transition from my current mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, to its sequel, Death Will Help You Leave Him, which will come out in October. The new book deals with destructive and addictive relationships, so it seemed to fit. It’s also in honor of Valentine’s Day, which represents the desire of most folks to be part of a couple and their utter cluelessness about how to make it work.

It’s not our fault. We are bombarded with messages from the popular culture that mislead us about the nature of love, how to attain it, and how to make it last. Falling in love, from a psychological standpoint, is a perfectly good description of short-term bonding. Unfortunately, a fifty-year marriage—in the vernacular, happily ever after—is not a short-term bond. Songs tell us that some enchanted evening we will meet a stranger, dance a little, send a valentine, and get along perfectly for the rest of our lives without ever having to say we’re sorry.

Alas, that’s not the way it works. Let me offer several different perspectives on relationships and how they go wrong, from popularizers who have written best-selling books on the topic, all based on sound psychology.

Harville Hendrix, the author of Getting the Love You Want, developed something called Imago relationship theory to explain that mysterious process of attraction that is often called “chemistry.” He gave the name Imago to the unconscious image of our ideal mate that we carry around within us, a combination of both the positive and the negative traits of both parents plus all the potential traits within ourselves that we disown or deny exist. Imagine the permutations. He says this unconscious lottery explains why as romantic love fades, couples start to push each other’s buttons and stir up childhood wounds. Of the ensuing power struggle, he says, “In despair, people begin to use negative tactics to force their partners to be more loving....What makes people believe that hurting their partners will make them behave more pleasantly?” Good question.

John Gray, the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, took a view of male-female relations that makes sense in the light of both traditional psychodynamics and the relational model developed by feminist psychologists. Men really are different from women. Men cope by pulling away and working things out. Women cope by talking things out and connecting. Men show love by not worrying (assuming women’s competence). Women show love by worrying (maintaining the connection). Gray says that women’s most frequent complaint is that men never listen; men’s, that women are always wanting to change them. Ring a bell?

John Gottman, the author of The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work, looked at conflicts, which he divided into solvable conflicts, which can be negotiated if the couple can learn not to sabotage the process, and perpetual conflicts, which there’s no point trying to solve. My favorite concept from Gottman’s work is one he cites as one of the best predictors of divorce: failed repair attempts. Have you ever had a bitter argument with your partner that ended when one of you said something funny and you both dissolved in laughter? Do you and your partner take turns being the one to climb down first and admit you’re wrong, or at least extend an olive branch? Can you and your partner accept a reasonable apology, let go of your self-righteous anger, and stop sulking? If so, you have a valuable skill: you can repair a relationship that’s been damaged by a quarrel.

So how do you go about building a better relationship? Look for Part II after Valentine’s Day.

And the winner is...

Sandra Parshall

Meryl Streep said recently that “there’s no such thing as the ‘best’ actress” and that “everybody wins” in a year when many great movies provide showcases for talent. Of course, she said this while accepting a best actress award from the Screen Actors Guild, but there is some truth and good sense in the statement. It’s wishful thinking, though, to imagine that creative people can rise above the competitive streak that is an inborn aspect of human nature.

Writers aren’t exempt from the craving to outshine one another. Maybe we’re not as cutthroat about it as movie and TV people, but would most of us trample the bodies of our beloved grandmothers to get to an Edgar Award? You bet. If you win a single award of any kind, you will be labeled forevermore an “award-winning author” – regardless of whether you continue to turn out good books or never produce another that’s halfway readable.

I’m thinking about all this because it’s that time of year again, when Malice Domestic registrants are filling out their Agatha Award nomination ballots and everybody’s looking at the just-released list of Edgar nominees and saying, “Huh?”

The campaigning for an Agatha nomination usually takes the form of e-mails and mystery e-list posts “reminding” everyone that a writer’s book is eligible for a nomination. When the reminder is coming from a personal friend, it’s hard not to feel pressured. Sometimes I think writers expect a nomination simply because they’re friendly with a lot of the people who will do the nominating. But what if you don’t think your friend’s book is one of the five best of the entire year? You don’t have to say so, of course, and no one will see your ballot except the person who counts it. The whole situation is uncomfortable, though -- and unnecessary. If I think a book is terrific, I’m going to remember it. I don’t need to be reminded of its existence.

The Anthony Awards given out at Bouchercon, and many other crime fiction awards, are the result of the same sort of process. Attendance at a conference, or membership in an organization, or even a subscription to a mystery magazine, gives a person the right to make nominations. A lot of factors influence the nominators – friendship, subgenre preferences, biases that have nothing to do with the quality of books (“I don’t like violent books, or books with graphic sex, regardless of how well-written and well-plotted they are”), and, most important, the limits on how much a person can read in one year. If you haven’t read every crime novel published in the last year, how can you choose the best?

That brings us to the Edgars, which are awarded by committees. Every year both writers and fans complain about the nominations. “I’ve never HEARD of most of these books! How can they be the best?” (I hope you see the fatal flaw in that reasoning.) “Why don’t they ever nominate a cozy?” And so on. The refrain is the same, year after year.

I’ve done my share of grousing when a book I loved – for example, Laura Lippman’s wonderful What the Dead Know – is nominated for (and ultimately wins) just about every other award in existence but doesn’t receive an Edgar nomination. I don't always agree with their choices, but I have to respect the simple fact that the Edgar judges do read every eligible book that is published and submitted by publishers for consideration. Each unpaid judge in the novel categories suspends normal life for a year and reads hundreds upon hundreds of books before choosing the five she/he considers best. As I understand it, a period of discussion and perhaps re-reading follows to reconcile disagreements among the members of a particular panel, and ultimately they arrive at a list of finalists. Then they choose the winner in that category. It’s not surprising that this laborious process usually produces nominations for serious books that display outstanding, original writing and in some cases tackle social issues.

Lighter books will have a chance at other awards. A mystery or thriller doesn’t have to be life-changing to be great entertainment. It doesn’t have to pulsate with psychological or social significance that will outlast the ages. Each award has criteria, and the people making nominations have to keep those criteria in mind. You wouldn’t nominate a Karin Slaughter book for an Agatha. That doesn’t mean the Slaughter book is worthless. You can’t expect to see a cooking cozy get an Edgar nomination. That doesn’t mean the cozy isn’t entertaining (with great recipes included). And if your own book receives no nominations, that doesn’t make it a failure. Mystery writers might be happier if no awards were ever given, if we weren’t forced to applaud for authors whose books were deemed “better” than ours. Awards are here to stay, though, and all we can do is try to be realistic and sensible about them.

Would I give up my own Agatha Award? Are you nuts? Will I fill out my Agatha and Anthony ballots this year? Of course. Will I be annoyed if my favorites don’t win? Of course. I’m only human, after all.


In case you’re interested, the book I’d like to see win the Agatha for Best Novel is I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming.







My favorite for the Anthony is Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook.

Which books are you rooting for this time around?

In the Twinkling of an Eyebrow

Sharon Wildwind

My characters have very predictable bodies. When faced with emotional moments they get nauseated or their hearts race. Chills run up their spines if they are excited or sexually attracted, and down their spines if they are frightened. In fact, when I’m clicking along in an early draft, and don’t want to stop to think out physical reactions, I use [nausea], [spine chills] [heart races] as placeholders. That way I can later use a global find to locate all of those places where I need to come up with something else—anything else—please.

Admittedly, some body parts—kidneys and bladders for example—don’t lend themselves to expressing emotion. After a character suddenly realizes she should have made a pit stop before confronting the villain, or the detective aches every time he moves become someone sucker-punched him in the kidneys, where else can you go?

Livers are even worse, unless maybe you’re writing a historical mystery, set in a time when humors were believed to rule the body, and you can use a line like, “He awoke the next morning feeling liverish.” Maybe you could get away with, “She cast a jaundiced eye over the proceedings.”

The heart has been turned inside out and upside down in the name of good (and bad) literature. It’s raced, palpated, skipped a beat, contracted, stopped, restarted with a thunk in a character’s chest, melted, been broken, bent, torn apart, mended, healed, and in the immortal words of the late John Denver, “You dun stomped on my heart/And you mashed that sucker flat/You just sorta stomped on my aorta.”

Okay, let’s get serious about some body parts that authors can use to express emotions, starting with hair. Not the point-of-view character’s own hair because that’s almost always limited to “The hair on the back of her neck stood up.” or “So much for washing my hair. I flipped the greasy strands into a pony tail, double-checked the back-up .32 in my ankle holster, and was out the door in under two minutes.”

Hair on other characters can be a wonderfully sensual detail to which the point-of-view character reacts, even on the first meet. “He had three long sections of hair, which he’d carefully arranged in the classic comb-over, hoping I suppose, that I wouldn’t notice the pink scalp peeking through underneath. Kind of sad, actually. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘Let’s get a cup of coffee. I’m buying.’”

And you can’t beat hair in romantic scenes. “He slept on his stomach, with his face turned away from me. I reached over and traced the baby-fine curls on his neck. Six small crescents lay quietly against his skin and a seventh one flipped and refused to lay flat. ‘That’s always the way the world works for you, isn’t it,” I thought. “On the seventh day, you never get it right.”

The all-time body-parts champions for expressing emotions are faces, hands, and skin. The problem is that writers use them up too fast.

“Her face darkened with anger.” That’s it. Face reference. Got to use another part of the body next time for variety.

Think about how many parts there are to the face: hairlines, eyebrows, eyelashes, upper lids, pupils, irises, lower lids, tear ducts, nose bridge, nostrils, cheeks, cheekbones, upper lip, Cupid’s bow (that’s the little dip the middle of the upper lip makes), lower lip, upper teeth, lower teeth, chin, and multiple kinds of skin. That’s just in a normal face. There could also be hair, moles, scars, etc. in the less-than-blemish-free model.

“Mrs. Adelle was one scary woman, too well-bred to admit to anger; too infuriated not to show something. Her pupils contracted, just a little. A small white line formed briefly along the top of her Cupid’s bow. A woman that controlled was bound to come apart one day. I just hoped I would be in the next state over when the springs burst loose.” It's a face reference, but there are still loads of face parts that could be used later in the story without the writer repeating herself.

It’s the same thing with hands. Four fingers, each of which has three knuckles; a thumb with two knuckles; a palm with loads of lines; fingernails; blood vessels; more skin—assorted variety—as well as a potential for calluses, scars, and age spots. Remember that Sherlock Holmes contended he could tell almost everything worth knowing about a man by looking at his boots, his clothes, and his hands.

So if you're stuck in a heart racing—spine tingling—face darkening rut, here's a way out of it. Divide a piece of paper into three columns. In the first column write down all the anatomy you can think of. Break multi-part features down into component parts. In the second column, trot out all the over-used conventions, no matter how bad. Just for a giggle, I often color this column purple—for purple prose, of course. Once you have the overused cliches out of your system, in the third column, try to come up with new ways that body parts can be used to express emotions. I hope you find some cool things there you never thought to use before.

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Writing quote for the week:

Waves of hoo-haw washing through the protagonist, is a pet peeve…if your character is afflicted with rising tides of fear, chills of panic running through their spine, and roiling senses of panic …they are a victim of their body…pathetic, rather than interesting.
~Tim Esaias, author, poet, essayist, and writing teacher