One girl to envy

(Guest blogger Pamela Ridley)

Pamela Ridley is an author who has published three novels: Between Tears, Lies Too Long, and Another Memory. Readers fall in love with the depth of characterization, the fast-paced writing style and the surprising plot twists entrenched in every story. Her body of work also includes short stories and flash fiction published through various e-zines.

Villains need camouflage in order to keep their nasty little secrets. The key question is what allows a villain to walk among regular folks largely unnoticed? The answer: aspects of their personalities that people find appealing or useful.

In 2005, The American Film Industry compiled a list of noteworthy villains. The top five? Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader, The Wicked Witch of the West, and Nurse Ratchet.

This is not exactly a group to hide their light under a barrel. I took my own poll and asked people how those five characters managed to get away with so much before they were stopped. Here’s a sampling of what I got back:

Hannibal Lecter, like a cobra, is seductively and hypnotically brilliant.

Norman Bates may be a psychotic gynophobe, but he’s also a lost young man, who appears harmless. It probably helped that the Bates Motel wasn’t located on a major highway.

Darth Vader is power-hungry, and at the same time sympathetically dutiful.

The Wicked Witch of the West is grumpy, covetous and cruel. Not much camouflage there, but like Norman, the place she lives is hard to get to.

Nurse Ratched is a vengeful, repressed megalomaniac, but from the distant view of the hospital administrator’s office her ward looks well run. Even the most recalcitrant patient seems to “settle in” after a while.

Most villains have some redeemable traits or certainly they can have if a writer paints them with finesse; a stroke of this, a bit of stippling here, some blotting there. With the correct shading, texture, and perspective, our villains spring to life with a job in addition to murder in our fictional worlds.

A brilliant person with at least minimal social skills can develop multimillion dollar enterprises from scratch. Throw in seductive and hypnotic and all bets are off—whatever she/he undertakes is doable. This person can be an author, run a string of funeral homes, or create a one-of-a-kind legacy like Hannibal Lecter.

An overprotected and dominated character could also be a gentle, unassuming person, who smiles a lot while working at the tollbooth, as a CPA, or in the hospitality industry—until she/he snaps and turns into a Norman Bates. You just never know.

Someone who thinks a job title gives them power to execute directives, facts notwithstanding, could be a police officer, a CEO, or a Darth Vader.

A no-nonsense, tough-minded person who advocates the desired values of the day could be the go-to community organizer, the chairman of the chamber of commerce, or she could be The Wicked Witch.

Someone who recognizes her worth, refuses to be taken advantage of, and struggles to suffer people who continuously defy her wisdom could be a presidential candidate, the coach of the soccer team, or she could be a Nurse Ratchet.

I have a particular villain on my mind these days, and this is a spoiler alert. If you’ve got Lies Too Long on your To Be Read pile, or it’s likely to end up there shortly, and you hate knowing who the villain is, you might want to skip the rest of this blog, and go directly to checking out my books at my web site.

That villain on my mind is a manipulative, narcissistic control freak, but that just means she’s insightful, wants things done right and she needs to be seen in the best light while doing them. All the characteristics that make her a great car salesman also make her an awesome event planner. Her events always feature vengeance.

She is the type of person who clogs up a former boyfriend’s tail pipe and adds cream of tarter to a classmate’s dish during cooking class just to be the one who always comes out on top. And, oh yes, she has a personalized plate that says 1GRl2NV. (One girl to envy.)

How does she get away with all of this? She’s slender, light-skinned, and has long straight hair. Capitalizing on her looks and intelligence, she worked her way through college, got connected with the “right” boyfriends and the “right” social network and the “right’ job with the good income. She’s successful selling cars and she’s the president of her sorority – the post graduate chapter, and she's on the lookout for the "right' man. All she needs to complete the picture is a couple of “less than” underlings, women who are less than she is and will be certain to appreciate her.

She adapts (being the person others need her to be when it suits her purpose); she survives (refusing to take crap from anyone) and she takes matters into her own hands even when it means she has to do some remote control mischief, using other people to do evil deeds for her.

I think that, given the right set of circumstances, most people could commit evil. Can’t I perform “morally bad” things if I’m protecting my life, family, home or country? What if there is no other means for me to gain justice? My villains, in their minds, have a justification for what they do. Their rationales are outside of what the judicial system allows, but they are always heartfelt. Does their kind of thinking cross the line separating the sane from the insane? I don’t know.

It’s two sides of the same coin. The same negative aspects that make a villain memorable, also benefit her. Cloaked in a deceptively functional job, your villain can, literally, get away with murder.

A library, how do I love thee, let me count the ways

By Lonnie Cruse

I love buying books, both print versions and e-books for my Kindle. I love holding and reading both. However, it gets expensive, and print versions take up room on my shelves. There is always the library for books I want to read but probably won't want to keep. Except, sigh, I FORGET to check the library. Until recently.

I'd been hearing about a book by an author I know and like on the DorothyL discussion list. Someone gave it a favorable review. I immediately went into Amazon to check out the price. The paperback was fairly cheap, which meant the Kindle version would be cheaper. NOT! Argh, I was so irritated by that. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I want to read that book! What to do, what to do?

The light dawns and I click into my local library, do a search, and there are seven copies! Yea! I order one. They will call me when my copy is available. I'm in business!

You notice I'm not mentioning the author or the book title? That's because it is not the author's fault that the Kindle edition is higher than the paperback, nor is it Amazon's fault. Publishers determine the price of a book on Amazon. I don't want to embarrass the author by naming names. But the publisher lost a sale for the author. IF I bought the book cheaper as a paperback, I'd have to pay shipping. I could get it at a book store, but there aren't any close to me. I do a LOT of shopping for books and movies on Amazon. Sigh.

Point is, I do forget about my local library AND the library in Paducah. Shame on me. They have tons of great stuff to read, movies for check-out, etc. Because I'm not inside either city, I have to pay for my card each year. Therefore I need to give it a work-out. I need to get more book and movies from there. I need to support the libraries because libraries are struggling to stay alive.

Do you use your local library? If so, what is your favorite part? The print books? Audio books? DVDs? Computers? Etc? Please share with us.

Lighthearted Mysteries

Elizabeth Zelvin

The guest at a recent MWA NY dinner was acclaimed literary novelist Joyce Carol Oates (every possible award and 56 novels, of which 39 were NY Times Notable Books of the Year, along with a larger body of work that includes multiple collections of poetry and short stories as well as essays and other nonfiction). She loves mystery and suspense and asserts all her books are crime fiction on some level, but said (in response to a question--yep, I asked if there's any place for humor, fun, and even levity in her work) that she doesn't understand "lighthearted mysteries--aren't they called tea cozies?" (direct quote), because murder is serious business. Later, I wished I'd asked a different question: “What do you want from your audience?” I know what I want from mine. I want my books to make them laugh and cry. I want them never to forget my characters. I want them to come back for more of the series because my characters and those around them feel like family. I want opening a new book about my characters to feel like coming home.

I’m not debating the fact that Oates is a world-class writer whose work has the ability to move the reader. And I’ve had plenty of experience with readers, agents, and editors who are puzzled by the juxtaposition of humor and such dark topics as alcoholism and domestic violence in Death Will Help You Leave Him and Death Will Get You Sober. But humor, in life or in fiction, is a way of coping with even the darkest reality, maintaining hope, and sometimes moving beyond it. Letting go of the past is essential to getting on with life. The ability to reflect back on the past with greater insight helps too. And humor can be a powerful aid in doing that. Victims can’t laugh—but survivors can. And while Oates, from what I heard her say, is drawn to the mysteries of life in a broader sense—that part of human experience that can never emerge from the shadows—I’m most interested in hope and insight and the tools, including laughter, that help turn victims into survivors.

Having written two lighthearted mysteries that are not cozies—to the extent that some readers and reviewers have even found the optimistic subject matter mean (as in “mean streets”), depressing, and even sordid and my funny, flawed, endearing characters “low-lifes”—I’m well placed to assert that mysteries like mine can be serious in the sense of the French term sérieux—not trivial, not to be taken lightly—without being no fun. Who wants to be no fun? I didn’t invent the laughter in my fictional twelve-step meeting rooms. In real life, you’ll find it in every meeting. Are there some topics that are so serious in the English-language sense that any levity at all is inappropriate? I don’t think so. There might be some exceptions. But there are probably exceptions to the exceptions too.

What’s your favorite lighthearted mystery—with or without an underlying serious theme?

The Life of an Audiobooks Narrator

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

I couldn’t live without audiobooks, and one of my dreams has been to have my own work recorded. That dream has come true with the Blackstone Audio edition of my new mystery, Broken Places, narrated by Tavia Gilbert. Tavia is a stage and voice actress who also produces, directs, and narrates books, full-cast recordings, and documentaries. She has won the audiobooks profession’s Earphones Award and been nominated for an Audie. Recently she agreed to satisfy my curiosity about the way books are recorded and how audiobook narrators work.


Q. How long have you been an audiobook narrator? How many books have you recorded in that time?

A. I've been narrating books full-time since September of 2007, when I got my first contract with Blackstone Audio. I was, truthfully, a bit lost before that gig. I had left my day-job the year before, and I was really struggling to make my way, half-heartedly auditioning for commercial voiceover work and dreaming of really meaningful narration work. After my first job with Blackstone, I continued to get assignments monthly, and now it's a rare week when I don't have a book to record. I've worked on more than 70 books? 80, maybe? I'm losing count.


Q. How does someone get a job as a narrator? Did you audition?

A. I did audition for my first Blackstone title, after I met Grover Gardner, a veteran narrator and the studio director for Blackstone, at the Audiobook Publishers Association Conference in New York in May 2007. I gently but persistently followed up with Grover after that initial meeting, and he finally sent me an audition piece. He cast me, and the following day he called me back. I was sure he was going to fire me before I even started - realize his mistake - but he gave me a rush title to work on, so I had my first two gigs. Every book I do I have a moment of a crisis of faith, and I think that it will surely be the very last book I ever get to do, but so far I'm adding new publishers and new projects fairly steadily.


Q. Who decides which reader will record which book? Do narrators specialize in certain genres, or in fiction vs. nonfiction?

A. A publisher's studio director or casting director is in charge of choosing the narrators for projects. From time to time an author will have the right to approve the reader assigned to their book, so a few samples may be sent to the author to review before a final casting decision has been made. There have been a handful of projects I've hoped for, and it's thrilling when I've been chosen and heart-breaking when another narrator gets the job. One gig was already assigned to another narrator when I heard about it, and after campaigning for about a year, I was finally given the assignment. The book was Sing Them Home, by Stephanie Kallos, who is a dear friend of mine and one of my college instructors (voice and speech for the theater), and the book won my first Earphones Award and got great reviews, so my determination to land the project paid off.

I think yes, some narrators have their niche, and I imagine that every narrator has a genre they are most fond of, but no matter what the material, the job of the narrator is to serve the vision of the writer with the most authentic voice. What I mean to say is that it's imperative for the narrator to fully inhabit the narrative voice and serve as a medium between the printed word and the listener. So no matter the genre, the process is the same - get out of the way of the work - let the work flow freely through you - and humbly embody the author's voice and vision.

I've done everything from children's and young adult titles, mystery & suspense, contemporary fiction, sociology, biography/memoir, full-cast theater, philosophy, religion, historical fiction, and science fiction. I'm not sure there is a genre I've not had a chance to do yet, but my favorite projects are literary fiction, meaningful memoir, philosophy, and creative non-fiction. I am never so fulfilled as when I get a project that is about social justice and equality. I've been really fortunate to do projects that I think are important, most recently, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, which inspired and infuriated me.


Q. Have you ever been asked to narrate a book that you hated? How do you handle that kind of problem?

A. Yes! And it's painful. It's got everything to do with the quality of writing. If the writing is masterful, there is great pleasure in narrating. If the writing is poor, it's an uncomfortable process. There is a vulnerability in great writing - a revelation of the author's heart - that is rich and beautiful in its idiosyncratic truth no matter what the subject matter or genre. Knowing that there are gorgeous books to be read, it's disheartening to get a book that relies on trendy cliche, author egotism, or cheap formula. The worst for me is reading books with female characters that are stereotypes, or books that use sexual violence to titillate. I have turned projects down if I feel that I can't commit in good conscience to the work. I've used a voice name to distance myself from a piece of work that I am uncomfortable with. But if I do a project, I am committing to embodying it and believing in it during the whole of the performance. Whether I'm working on a book that is gorgeous and transcendent or just pretty okay, I want the performance to be enjoyed and appreciated by the listener and the author, and so I endeavor to stay present moment to moment and not judge the material in the process of recording it.


Q. Do you read a book more than once before you start recording? Do you mark it up, check pronunciations, make notes on characters, etc.?

A. I read the book in full once before I read. Ideally, I would read the section the night before that I will be narrating the following day, but most often I am reading and prepping next week's project at night. I don't mark my script much at all, though each book is different and so it may require its own marking. I do always try to mark paradox, because to bring those juxtapositions to life requires mindful intention and inflection.

I am responsible for the research for my projects, so I look up a lot of the language in a dictionary or encyclopedia, call hotels or city halls or embassies to double-check pronunciations of geographic locations and proper names, call librarians for assistance. When I'm reading fiction or narrative non-fiction, I note each character and what they say about themselves, how the author/narrator describe the character, and how they are described by other characters in the book. That's exactly how I would prep a theatrical character, and it helps me make specific acting choices. I will also note how I think the character's voice sounds - i.e., low, laconic, whiny, halting, bright, strained.


Q. Recording a book must be like appearing in a play or movie in which you play all the parts. Writing a novel is a lot like that too. Broken Places has characters from different levels of society and different places, and many are natives of the mountains, so when I was writing I heard various accents in my head. How do you prepare to do different voices and accents?

A. I would LOVE to have a lot of time to prepare dialects and character voices, but a full-time audiobook recording schedule is pretty tight. I have a stock of characters that I can pull from ("Ok, he'll be my low, slow Southern guy, and I'll use my bright, breezy snob for her"), and I continue to explore and challenge my vocal instrument and my acting specificity to create new people to play. I use my friend Paul Meier's International Dialects of English Archive, which is an invaluable resource, as well as his dialect training materials, and I use the International Phonetic Alphabet as a shorthand to transcribe the key sounds of a dialect.

I constantly soak in the way people speak, listening critically to how people express themselves with sound and language, tone, pacing, rhythm, volume, pitch, placement. I have started finding clips of interesting and idiosyncratic speakers that I can imitate for a particular character, from YouTube or NPR or movies. I also just work on the fly and I try something out until it works. It's very challenging, and I've gone back through an entire book and rerecorded the dialect of a character (a very manipulative Eastern European criminal) because I just wasn't satisfied with my first interpretation.


Q. How long does it take to record an average-length book? How many hours a day do you record?

A. It generally takes me about two hours to record one finished hour of narration, so a book that totals 10 hours will take 20 hours to record. Sometimes I get down to an hour and a half for one finished hour, but that's a rare, victorious, shining star recording day. I record for five hours a day, at most. I used to do seven, but it's really hard on my body, especially my neck and shoulders.


Q. Do you work with a director who is on hand while you’re recording?

A. Unfortunately, many audiobooks are no longer being directed. With digital technology transforming the publishing world, budgets have been cut, and audiobook narrators are often self-engineering and self-directing. But I love working with a director, and have frequently paid out of pocket in order to bring one in for the duration of the recording. I've worked many times with a wonderful director and long-time theater collaborator, Stephen, and we are close enough that we've had great disagreements and debates about character, language, word emphasis, and tone. It's great to have someone to pay attention to the long arc of the story, and it allows me to relax a little bit and trust that someone else is in charge. For the first year and a half I narrated I always paid for a director, and it was a great investment. I am successful self-directing because I've had such a great director to work with. When audiobook publishers are willing to invest in a director, it really pays off with the best possible performance.

I produce, cast, and direct as well, and I've found that when the budget doesn't call for a director for the entire process, it can be very valuable to work with the actor on the narrative voice at the beginning of the recording. The narrative voice is SO important, and I enjoy "sculpting" with an actor the voice they use. I'll sit in on a book for the first couple of hours and then check in later to answer questions, give support, and remind the audio engineer what they should keep in mind creatively as they're running the session. Later I'll give the actors feedback about phrasing, breath, relaxation, paradox, pace.


Q. How do you fit this in with your other work?

A. I do some theater, commercial voiceover, and on camera work, but audiobooks is my main gig. (How lucky am I? Reading for a job! It's pretty great.) But it's going to get exponentially more complicated and challenging when I start a two-year, low-residency masters program in creative non-fiction this summer at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'll be reading and narrating for work and reading and writing for my MFA. I have a business in development, Talkbox, which I believe will be the key to my sustainability as an artist, and where I can weave together the inter-related passions of my life - theater, photography, writing, sound design, story-telling, and activism - and produce and publish work. I want to keep paving my own way in the world, and I'm open to wherever pursuing risks and joy may lead me.


Q. What do you enjoy least about narrating audiobooks?

A. What do I enjoy the least? Days when I have persistent mouth noise. My own reluctance to get the work done on a book that's not a lot of fun to read. Tension and tightness when I want to be so relaxed. Jaw tension. Oh, this is my biggest frustration. Some days I feel like I have lock jaw, and that's a real sign of fatigue and the need to do some body work - get into the pool, do tai chi or qi gong, or talk a walk on the beach. Very aggravating to feel these things when I'm on a tight deadline.


Q. What do you enjoy most?

A. I love the moments of work when I am filled with joy and delight with language. Language is the most beautiful gift, and an enchanting phrase, a complex idea masterfully unfolded, the brave exposure of a terrifying truth - all these awaken me, make me more fully alive, engaged, and present. Sometimes when I'm reading a book I will gasp and tears may come to my eyes because something the author has written is so true, or because I've just learn that I've truly not been alone in thinking or feeling something all my life, or because the writer has been so delightfully playful with their words. I love narrating a book that I wish I myself had written. I love that I am a better writer because of this very intimate, intensive exploration of language through audiobooks. I appreciate that I have an opportunity to tell a story that someone will absolutely love, as I adore stories voiced by narrators like Davina Porter, Barbara Rosenblat, and Norman Dietz.
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Learn more about Tavia and hear a sample of her work at www.taviagilbert.com.

Punxsutawney Prognostication

Sharon Wildwind

Monday evening some of our collection of stuffed animals left for Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania. This is their year to be part of the International Monitoring Committee for the Fair Treatment of Marmota monax, also knows as the ground hog.

As they explained it to me, their functions are to ensure that Punxsutawney Phil is gently lifted from his burrow and is not subject to scorn and abuse should he predict six more weeks of winter. They will also do quality control at a lavish tea served in Phil's honor after his public appearance. I suspect the last duty is the reason that the agreed to serve on the committee.

Zoriana, our little socialist/feminist dragon, also intends to find out why all of P. Phil’s Inner Circle, that group of caretakers so nattily attired in the tuxedos and top hats, contains no women members. But that’s a whole different story.

After tea, Phil returns to his burrow for a nap, and the International Monitoring Committee comes home in a condition that best reflects their perpetual state: stuffed.

Unless you have been sleeping with Phil—or perhaps even if you have, for all I know he has 24/7 cable news and a wi-fi connection in his burrow—you know that in the past week
1) a major electronics company unveiled a new gadget and
2) an on-line book and one of the “big six” in North American publishing went head-to-head over electronic book rights.

I will not bother to further clog the Internet with arguments and counter-arguments. They are out there for the reading.

I’ve stayed away from the more knee-jerk, inflammatory, end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it pieces in preference to thoughtful and, in most cases, contradictory analyses. I found it interesting that well-informed, intelligent people can come to such diverse conclusions, given the same set of facts from which to work.

In the end, I was reminded of my husband’s “On any given day” theory. He participates in a competitive sport, and he goes into each competition knowing that while ability, good instruction, and practice—especially practice—play a large part in who wins, on any given day, combinations of factors determines the winner. Maybe someone had a good night’s sleep and his opponent didn’t. Maybe someone is upset by a family crisis and her opponent isn’t. Maybe it’s the luck of the draw: if A meets B in the first round that may produce a different outcome than would happen if A didn’t meet B until the semi-final round.

On any given day
~when an author signs a new contract, much of that book’s future will depend on the terms included in the contract regarding both printed and digital rights management.

~having at least a basic understanding of the multiple ways in which books are published is as critical to any writer as having a basic understanding of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and story structure.

~putting all of your publishing eggs in one basket is no longer the way to go.

~there will always be a new technology, a bigger-and-better gadget, or a new publishing arrangement on the horizon. Work with what you have today and let the future take care of itself.

~if real estate is location, location, location, writing remains story, story, story. Go write, write, write.

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Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
~Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor and philosopher

Oh, my gosh! According to our blog counter, today is the 1,000 blog posted to Poe's Deadly Daughters! Happy blog day to us, Happy blog day to us. Well done, my sisters!

Need Inspiration? Click Here

by Julia Buckley


Images taken by the Hubble Telescope might render one speechless. They remind the viewer of her smallness in the universe while providing visuals that seem to originate in a celestial kaleidscope.

According to a 2009 article in Science News, a revamped Hubble has discovered a whole new set of galaxies that reveal information about our universe in its youth. Thanks to our newest scientific technology, we are able to see farther and farther into the life of our universe and are, in essence, seeing pictures of the past, perhaps even hints at the creation of the world.

The universe holds many fascinating mysteries, but the Hubble has uncovered a new one. According to the article and to Richard Ellis of Caltech in Pasadena,

"Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe — the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen atoms into their subatomic constituents.

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for protons and electrons to recombine into atoms. But the universe has long been reionized, with hydrogen atoms once again split into protons and electrons. Many astronomers have assumed that ultraviolet light from the first galaxies did the splitting."

We are often focused here on earthly mysteries, especially fictional ones that reflect real life. But sometimes, to quote Robert Frost, we must "take something like a star, to stay our minds on and be staid."

Do images like the ones above spark your own universe of creativity?

Mark L. Van Name (guest blogger)

Mark L. Van Name has worked in the high-tech industry for over thirty years and today runs a technology assessment company in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. He has published over a thousand computer-related articles and multiple science fiction stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the Year's Best Science Fiction.

He spends far too much time thinking about obsessions, alienation, and the nature of evil, all topics dear to mystery writers’ hearts.

PDD:
What obsesses you?

Mark:
This question, for one. Seriously. I spent way too much time considering it and pondering the nature of obsession, how to draw the line between continual fascination and obsession, wondering when being interested or committed or curious morphs into being obsessed.

I never found the answer.

The world is endlessly, ceaselessly fascinating. The more I look into anything, the more interesting it becomes. Given enough time, almost anything could intrigue and, for at least a while, obsess me.

So it came down to this: Those things that repeatedly float to the top of my always simmering soup of interests and fascinations are what I’ll label as obsessions. They include, in no particular order:
• child abuse
• personal responsibility
• the moments when doing the right thing means doing a hard thing, sometimes even a wrong thing
• the nature of evil
• how context changes how we feel; torture is bad, but would you do it to save your kid?
• society’s need for people—soldiers, cops, firefighters, EMS workers, trauma nurses, and on and on—who do jobs that will leave them messed up forever and to varying degrees uncomfortable at fitting into any society other than the one of people like them
• the power of the ocean, particularly as a storm is rolling in
• how one look, one momentary glance at someone you love can take away your breath, raise your pulse, and for a split second steal your heart
• the awful tendency of humans throughout many lands and many times to create groups that are “other,” then to treat those others as less than human and thus be justified in doing whatever they want to them
• the nature of intimacy, how a single kiss with one person may be scarier and more intimate than a night of sex with another

Clearly, entirely too much obsesses me.

PDD:
Are there themes you keep coming back to in your writing?

Mark:
Yes, though not by conscious intent. Though I don’t believe in any hard and fast rules for fiction, in general I think theme is something we shouldn’t consider too closely when writing at least the first draft of a book. The reason is simple: The needs of the story should trump everything else. If our stories are good, our characters real, our plot compelling, then themes will emerge—whether we want them to be evident or not.

In my case, several of the obsessions I mentioned above appear as themes in multiple works. Almost all of them, in fact, occur in more than one of my books. If I had to pick one theme, though, that recurs more often than any other, it would have to be alienation.

PDD:
How does alienation affect you?

Mark:
Alienation is a natural consequence of living through experiences that most people cannot easily understand. When your background contains powerful elements far from the norm, it’s quite natural to feel a bit apart from those who don’t seem able to relate well to what you experienced. Protagonists who face difficult, often violent jobs inevitably pile up such experiences, so they are naturally alienated characters.

Growing up a bookish kid has also been a classic path to alienation for quite some time. I grew up such a kid, and my background includes many experiences powerfully different from the norm, so alienation is a natural topic for me.

PDD:
What do your books say about alienation?

It’s always dangerous for writers to explain what their books say, because that is a question better left, I believe, to readers. What the writers of my favorite novels meant to say is far less important to me than what I took away from those books—and that is how it should be for all readers.

What I hope my novels and stories say about alienation is that even when you feel alone, even when you are sure you are the only person like you, you can live a good life, do well by others, and ultimately find and connect with others who are, if not exactly like you, close enough that you can understand one another reasonably well. I suppose the short form of that is, you are not alone.

PDD:
What is the hardest thing for you to write?

Scenes in which very little physical action occurs. For example, some of the most emotion-packed moments in some of my stories, like some of the most emotion-packed moments in many of our lives, occur in meetings. When the doctor tells you that you’re going to have a child—or that your mother’s breast tumor is not benign. When you’re sitting around a table discussing lay-offs. When you’re planning a fight. When you’re negotiating for high stakes. In those meetings, frequently the only actions are small—nodding, slumping, sitting up straighter, leaning back, and so on—and yet emotions are running high. Such meetings can be vital to a story, and so I want to tell them, but I also, of course, want to make them compelling. Dialog has to carry the bulk of the load, but folding in just the right amount of physical business is vital and can be tricky.

PDD:
As a writer, how do you set up and carry through these scenes? Any writer's tips about how to fold in the physical business?

Mark
Maintaining imaginative concentration is the key in such scenes, as it is in so much of writing. If you’re there, really there in the story, then you can feel that the room is stuffy and sweat is soaking your armpits, that the person on the other side of the table leans back whenever you’re aggressive, and so on. Once you’re there, in the place and in the character, just write what your viewpoint character experiences.

PDD:
You said something World Fantasy convention in Calgary, which intrigued me, "Brilliance being encapsulated in evil equals primal fear." Do you have any further comments about that?

Mark:
We generally fear most the forces we can neither fully comprehend nor ever control—but only when those forces are in our faces. So, we don’t fear the weather most of the time—but let a tornado come roaring at our homes, and our lizard brains will spike with fear.

Similarly, people who do bad things but who seem understandable are far less scary than those who appear to be both brilliant beyond our comprehension and also evil. A true genius with evil intent is as unpredictable and potentially damaging a force as that tornado, and so we react with primal fear to both. Fortunately, as fun as those characters can be to try to write in fiction, they will not appear in most of our lives.

For more information about Mark and his books, visit his web site.

How much am I worth on eBay?

By Lonnie Cruse

Some time ago I discovered a neat little thing on Google. You can have yourself "Googled" every day by signing up to be notified when your name pops up anywhere on the Internet. This is great for authors as we can see who is checking on us, on our books, reviews we might not know about, etc. Recently my name popped up on eBay so I clicked in to see why. Someone is selling one or more of my books on eBay. I couldn't help but notice that the seller is asking more than my books sell for in a store, so I mentally wished the seller good luck with that and clicked out.

Now, mind you, this news would make *some* authors livid (that wouldn't be me) because the author whose book is sold by a third party on eBay (that would be me) will receive NO royalty for this sale. So why am I not livid? Because to begin with, said seller had to purchase my book in the first place in order to re-sell it. So I did make a royalty there. Okay, I won't make a royalty on the re-sale. BUT I might get a new reader out of the deal, and if the buyer likes my book and recommends it to others, I'll make more sales. It's all good.

I recently received an e-mail (through my website) from a reader who picked up a copy of my first book in the Metropolis Mystery Series, secondhand, from a store that sells secondhand goods. The buyer wanted to know why the person would sell that particular copy of the book since I had autographed it with a personal sentiment to someone who is closely related to me by marriage. I had to chuckle over that one. The person I autographed the book for lives half a continent away from me and likely never dreamed I'd find out it had been re-sold or traded away. Nor do I plan to enlighten that person. I told the new buyer that my "relative" likely was cleaning out book shelves and decided to purge it, which was fine with me because it brought me a new buyer/reader. I also offered the new buyer the rest of the series at a cut rate, IF he decides he wants to read the rest of the series. I encourage my readership whenever and wherever I can.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE royalties. When I received my last royalty check from Harlequin Worldwide for the paperback edition of Fifty-Seven Heaven, an amount quite a bit heftier than I'd expected, I literally clutched my chest. I never dreamed the paperback edition would sell that many copies!

Several of my other books are available on Kindle, so Amazon sends me small royalties periodically, usually around $10-$20. Not a fortune, but money just the same. And it spends as well from my pocket as it would from Amazon's. Yes, I do LOVE receiving royalties for my books. But even more, I love having new readers find me. More to the point, read me. Read the books that I slaved over a hot computer to produce. Because that's really why I write. To share my thoughts with others. To connect with others. And if they enjoy the read, so much the better!

I don't care how much I'm worth on eBay, and if that seller makes a couple of bucks off me, so be it. I care about how much I'm worth to my readers because they are worth so very much to me. Thanks for stopping by!

New Kid on the Block

by Sheila Connolly


Poe’s Deadly Daughters are delighted to welcome Sheila Connolly as our new blog sister. Sheila is the author of the Orchard Mysteries, the forthcoming Museum Mystery series, and, as Sarah Atwell, the Glassblowing Mystery series, all from Berkley Prime Crime. Her debut novel as Sarah Atwell was nominated for an Agatha award for Best First Novel. The new Orchard Mystery, Red Delicious Death, is due out in March. Sheila has been an art historian, an investment banker, a non-profit fundraiser, and a professional genealogist as well as a mystery writer. Welcome, Sheila! We hope you’ll find being a Deadly Daughter as rewarding as any of your other “hats.”

Starting in February, Sheila will be blogging on the fourth weekend of every month. Liz Zelvin will continue to blog on Thursdays (except for today).



I am delighted that the writers of Poe's Deadly Daughters have invited me to join them.



That makes me the New Kid–again. Being the new kid is something I have a lot of experience with, because my family moved around a lot when I was young. No, my father was not in the military, but he frequently became impatient with jobs and bosses (like the one at duPont who told him he wasn't a big enough fish at the company to drive a Buick), and since his area of specialization–fluid mixing systems–was in demand, he could always find a new job. I don't even remember the early moves (at age one and three), but I can definitely recall the ones in pre-school, kindergarten, fourth grade and eighth grade.


As an adult, I've added a lot more moves: going off to college, then graduate school; getting married and moving to North Carolina, then California, Pennsylvania, and finally to Massachusetts. In all these places I held a variety of jobs, short- and long-term, and for a time I went back to school. As a result, I was always walking into new situations, meeting new people.


It's never easy, especially if you're not a gregarious person, which I am not. I was the shy kid but I was also the brainy one in any class. But I made friends and did well in school, and survived it all. Maybe it made me a stronger person, but that doesn't mean I liked it.


Only recently did I realize that I've become part of yet another group, thanks in large part to the Internet: the writers community. This time the entry was almost painless. I feel like I have a lot of friends, some of whom I've never met face to face and possibly never will. But in cyberspace we all share our triumphs and our disappointments, and even a lot about our lives–we "know" each other. And if you go to writers conferences you will see clusters of people gleefully greeting each other, trying to cram a whole lot of friendship into a very short time.


And there's one more community I hadn't even thought of until now. When we moved to our current house, we built in a wall of bookshelves in one room, and for the first time in many, many years, my husband and I had the space to unpack all our books. We'd been collecting mysteries since we first married, back in the Dark Ages when there was no Internet and no Amazon and you had to seek out second-hand bookstores and hunt for paper copies of the books you wanted. And we collected series–too many to mention, but you can safely assume I have all the classic mystery writers, in complete sets. Yes, I read them all, but the collecting part was fun too. The result, however, was a lot of linear feet of books, which for a long time had no place to go.


Here we finally unpacked them all and lined them up on the shelves (which quickly overflowed, but that's another story). But what hit me when I started writing this post was: I have my own little piece of shelf now, something I never expected when I started collecting mysteries. Five books of my own (plus large-print copies) have joined all the great names on my shelves. I'm up there next to my idols–Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and more. I'm the New Kid on the bookshelf block–and I like it!

This Is Your Brain on Facebook

Sandra Parshall

Facebook. MySpace. Twitter. Blogs. Websites. Internet listservs.

Somehow it has become an absolute necessity for writers to use them all, and use them frequently, in the hope of enticing readers to buy books. Like love-starved hermits hoping to make a human connection out there in cyberspace, we sit at our computers, tapping away, posting here and posting there, trying to hawk our books without actually sounding like we’re doing a sales job. Be interesting! Be funny! Be shocking, if you can’t be anything else! The whole point is to attract attention, make people want to know more about you — make people want to read your books.

I had a website before my first book came out. After some resistance, I joined other writers to start this blog. Heaven knows I’m on enough internet listservs. But I refuse to join MySpace, which I’ve always associated with teenagers and pedophiles. I held out against Facebook for a long time before I finally gave in recently. Twitter? No way. Okay, I have a Twitter account, I even have a couple of followers, but I have never tweeted. Not yet.

It’s astonishing how obsessed writers have become, in such a short time, with creating a “cyber presence” that readers will encounter at every click of the mouse or touch of a mobile device keypad. Look at the numbers, though, and you’ll understand why that potential audience is irresistible.

Try to absorb this fact (gleaned from the January/February issue of Scientific American Mind magazine): If Facebook were a nation, it would be the fourth most populous country in the world. (The U.S. is the third.) With more than 250 million members on every continent, six-year-old Facebook is way ahead of the older MySpace, which has 125 million users. Twitter has millions of users, but every source I’ve consulted gives a different figure. Is it only seven million or is it 75 million? Whatever — a lot of people are tweeting and following, and writers see them all as potential book-buyers. Facebook seems an especially promising source of new readers, because its fastest-growing membership segment is the 40 to 60-plus age group, more likely than the kids to spend money on books.

But does it work? Considering how much time social networking eats up, is this an efficient way for writers to reach readers? In the short time I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve noticed that most of the messages being exchanged are between writers who know each other — friends chatting about their daily lives. Most writers who have both personal Facebook pages and fan pages have a lot more friends than fans. Even in a universe as vast as Facebook, writers have formed an insular little society of their own. Facebook seems to serve the same purpose in writers’ lives that internet listservs do: providing relief from the isolation of writing. Anytime we feel the need, we can reach out and make contact online, tell somebody what we’re doing or thinking, find out what they’re up to (not much, usually).

In the latest issue of Publishers Weekly, nonfiction author Melinda Blau writes about her own experience with using social media for book promotion and confesses that, like many writers, she let it spiral out of control and take over her life. All her time online hyping her book hasn’t led to fame and fortune. Time to quit, she says. But she’s not giving up social networking entirely. She’ll do it just for fun now, not for book promotion.

I’m torn between wanting to do everything I possibly can to make readers aware of my new book (the title is Broken Places, and it’s out in February, in case you haven’t heard) and feeling a little desperate about spending time online when I could be writing. Because I’ve always been shy, online socializing and promotion has an undeniable allure. Where to draw the line is the question.

Are sites like Facebook useful only for socializing, or do they help writers find readers? What do you think? Have you ever bought a book because you “met” the writer on Facebook or MySpace? If you’re a writer, do you think social networking has helped you increase sales?