Playing the Movie Game

by Julia Buckley

My family loves movies, so my husband made up this game. Everyone throws a few papers into a hat, on which are written the names of living actors or actresses, the possible title for a future movie, or a word that a must appear in a title.

Then someone picks a couple things out of the hat and has to think up a movie premise based on what is written on their two pieces of paper.

My son Ian picked these two: Hal Linden and Robert De Niro.

His movie idea was this. Hal Linden and Robert De Niro play older secret agents who must prove that they still have what it takes to bring down the bad guys and can keep the nation safe. Title: SOCIAL SECURITY. :) (My younger son said that they both have to wear turtlenecks and hats. Not sure why).

Graham picked "House of the--" and "Jack Black." He decided that he would create an action comedy called HOUSE OF THE DEMON SPAWN, and Jack Black is a neighborhood man who is initially frightened of the haunted house, but hears a heavy metal song that inspires him to arm himself with axes that will allow him to take down the demons (my children are violent).

My husband picked Willy Nelson and Burt Reynolds. His premise: Willy Nelson is an old-time country music star who has retired. Burt Reynolds is his biggest fan from years back; he goes on a quest to find him and determines that Willy's character has hit rock bottom, so he makes it his goal to rejuvenate Willy's career. His title: NEW TRICKS (as in, you can't teach an old dog . . .). This one sounds like a movie cliche, but that's part of the goal of this game.

Ian picked "Tobey McGuire" and "Snow Serpents." His premise: Tobey McGuire is a scientist who has heard about seismic events in The Alps. Sure enough, giant serpents are wreaking havoc on the Alps skiing communities. Tobey has no way to fight them; he attacks one with a pen he has in his pocket, and the serpent bites off his hand. His hand is eventually replaced with a flame-thrower, which he uses to battle the serpents in their icy realm. Mila Kunis plays his snow-suited love interest. The title, of course, is SNOW SERPENTS.

It's a fun creative exercise, and of course it could apply to all of our favorite mystery staples. Here are some starters:

Philip Marlowe
Peter Wimsey
A clue
The necklace
Miss Marple
The road to
The girl in the
Redemption
Tom Selleck
Kathleen Turner
Michelle Williams
yellow dress
dirt-covered locket
Daniel Craig
Penelope Cruz


Add some of your own and brainstorm your way to the next big mystery!!

What do you think?

Ed Lynskey's Small Press Adventure

This weekend's guest blog is from Ed Lynskey, the author of the P.I. Frank Johnson mystery series (including The Zinc Zoo out in 2011) as well as a small town cozy mystery, Quiet Anchorage, also out now.

My Writing Career Kicked Off in the Small Presses

by Ed Lynskey

First, I’d like to extend a warm thank you to the good folks at Poe’s Deadly Daughters for the opportunity to hang out with them today. Sandra asked me about Wildside Press, the publisher of Lake Charles, my new Appalachian noir. So, I thought I’d discuss how I got my start in writing through the small presses and then speak of Wildside Press.

While I attended a community college in my early 20s, I was introduced to the small press and little magazines community, and it opened up a new world to me. Scores if not hundreds, of little magazines edited by literary-minded folks published their own journals. They were often crudely produced although the so-called “mimeos” (from their copies reproduced on a mimeograph machine) came out before my time.

Long story short, I published poetry, reviews, and the occasional short story in the small press magazines over the years. I’ll also lump in the literary magazines produced by many of the graduate school writing programs (the MFA degrees). Some of the leading editors, such as David Wagoner and Stephen Berg, liked my work enough to publish it. After a time, I landed big credits at The Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, and Washington Post. That was heady stuff.

It was never about the money. The small presses and little magazines operated on shoestring budgets and done as labors of love. Many of them folded before my work even appeared in the slated issue. The only pay was often in one or two contributors’ copies. Their distribution was counted in the dozens or hundreds, if even that. But it was during this long period that I honed my craft, as they say. Or at least I had lots of practice at writing, and I like to think it enabled me to get my writing chops.

The big drawback with the small presses, and literary writing in general, is the limited audience, where few people have the access to read your work. Moreover, literary writing has a niche reader appeal. For instance, my mother and two sisters are voracious readers, but they never enjoyed my “literary writing.” That troubled me. After all, we write in order to be read by as many as possible and, hopefully, to thrill or intrigue them.

So, you have to write the stories the majority of readers like for their entertainment. The late Tony Hillerman told the anecdote about how early in his writing career, his goal was to reach a wide readership, so the popular mystery, not literary (he was a journalism college professor), was the fiction genre he chose to work in. Lucky for us fans he did. Anyway, that notion got me to thinking on how I might increase my audience.

I’d been a devotee of mysteries since an early age. Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, and Hugh Pentecost were the first trio of crime fiction authors I was turned on to as a kid. I checked out their books from our small town library and devoured them over the summer breaks. Some ten years ago that old affection launched me into creating my own mystery novels. The PI Frank Johnson series marked my first titles to see print.

Wildside Press brought out Frank in The Blue Cheer in 2007. It sold reasonably well, distributed through Diamond Comics, before the economy took a nosedive (oops, I almost wrote “swan dive” there). But things in 2011 are looking up again, and Lake Charles will hit the streets. It’s a coming-of-age yarn set in the 1970s and based in the Great Smoky Mountains. I’m relieved and appreciative the initial reviews have been favorable ones.

This year I also went soft-boiled by writing a small town cozy mystery titled Quiet Anchorage, featuring two elderly but spry sisters who’re amateur sleuths; this book is currently on sale, and its reviews have also been positive ones.

Finally, Frank will also be back this year in all his raging glory in The Zinc Zoo. Despite his move to the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., he still manages to get into more trouble than he can handle.

Perhaps best of all, my mom and sisters are now reading and liking my books. A few other readers have read them, as well, and attracting a real audience for once feels gratifying to me.

Read the first chapter of Lake Charles to learn more about the book and author here:

Lake Charles is up for pre-order sales at Amazon Books.

A Tale of Woe

Elizabeth Zelvin

A house in the Hamptons—how glamorous it sounds! Our flimsy little house (800 square feet—yes, that’s two zeroes—in its half acre of crabgrass, sand, and rocks (“For this, my grandfather left Ireland?” my husband said when we first tried to dig a garden twenty years ago) is about as far as you can get from a celebrity mansion on the dunes. That’s probably why it was targeted and broken into over the winter, as we found when the plumbers came to turn the water on in April. No massive doors, no live-in caretaker, no electronic security system. We think the thieves may not have been too bright, because it seems they didn’t realize that a house this cheap would contain nothing worth stealing. They broke a window, jimmied two locks, and they were in. They opened a few drawers, left a once-expensive camera and its lenses lying on the bed—not digital, so why bother?—and got away with my jewelry (one pair of earrings I didn’t like much and a bunch of costume jewelry that I bought at yard sales) and my husband’s work boots, for which he paid $40 at Kmart fifteen years ago.

So we had more visitors at the house that weekend than we’ve had in years: first the cops, then the locksmith and the glass guys (who might or might not charge enough for us to make our deductible on the homeowner’s insurance, which covers vandalism but not theft), and the specialists we needed to fix all the other problems that materialized while the house was closed: the refrigerator guy who confirmed that our fridge (old enough to vote but until now reliable) had died and the cable guy, who restored our service after a tense twenty-four hours of Internet deprivation. We also did more visiting than usual: to one neighbor to leave our milk in their refrigerator and pick it up each morning, to another to leave the key to our new deadbolt locks. Once we could get online, we had to shop for refrigerators, which cost a bundle and, according to the repair guy, break down after three years nowadays. We have to replace a broken hinge on the gate to our deer fence, but after studying the nibbled-down shoots of daylilies in the garden, I concluded that the deer, not the human intruders, are to blame for that bit of vandalism. Did I mention that we closed the house and drained the water to save money and avoid winter damage? Well, the pipes didn’t burst this year—but I’m not at all sure we came out ahead.

On the glass half full side, the vandalism didn’t get ugly, as could easily have happened. We didn’t lose anything of value (the TV also being old and cheap and the computer having spent the winter in the city). The garden is filled with daffodils, the forsythia are in bloom, and I’ll be only a ten-minute drive from the beach all summer.

Back on the Review Rollercoaster

Sandra Parshall

Everyone who leaves a comment today will be entered in a drawing for an ARC of Under the Dog Star.

Now begins the review roller coaster. The giddiness that comes with a glowing review, the despair that follows even the slightest criticism of my newborn literary baby.

Under the Dog Star won’t be published until September, the only version available now is the uncorrected proof (ARC, or advance reader copy), and it doesn’t even have a final cover yet (although a rough mockup that has since been discarded is popping up everywhere). But the first review has appeared. Of course I’m obsessing about it. It’s on an internet review site called BookIdeas.com, not in one of the powerful industry magazines (Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus), but it’s all I have at the moment, so I’m obsessing about it.

Not that it’s negative. Although the reviewer takes a slightly jokey tone in spots, it’s a favorable review without a single outright nasty comment. Some samples:

“The author manages rather deftly to address some basic ideological issues in her narrative... the conflict between the rule of law represented by our deputy sheriff and the mob rule of a renegade posse is vividly presented.”

“The... storytelling technique is similarly solid, particularly the author’s attention to detail in presenting dialogue.”

“Rachel is portrayed as a person of pluck, stubbornness, and passionate dedication to her cause.”

“Fans of murder mysteries will get their fill of mayhem and local color and characters in this well-written tale.”

So what bothers me? The reviewer doesn’t think Tom Bridger, the deputy sheriff who is co-protagonist with Rachel Goddard, is charismatic. Tom, the reviewer notes, lacks the “charming insouciance of Peter Falk in Columbo or the dry humor of Jerry Orbach in Law and Order.”

Waaaah!

I love Tom. Rachel loves Tom. I think Tom is strong, honest, courageous. He has no patience with idiots and heartless bastards. He’s a tough cop in a place where just about everybody owns a gun and resents law enforcement. Hit him and he’ll hit you back, with interest. He has been known to land a hard kick to the ribs of a drug dealer, and in Under the Dog Star he uses a particularly painful method of getting vital information from a bad guy. But he absolutely does have a sense of humor and a soft side. He loves and protects Rachel, his little nephew Simon, and Billy Bob, the old bulldog he inherited from his father. In this book, though, he’s dealing with some of the worst scum he’s ever encountered, so the lighthearted moments don’t come often. Does he really have to be insouciant like Columbo or a wisecracking cynic like Orbach’s L&O character Lenny?

Okay, this should be enough to make you understand what I go through – what most writers go through – when reading reviews. Forget all the good stuff, all the praise. What I always home in on, and remember forever, are the negatives, however small they might be.

I wasn’t expecting the first review so early. I thought I'd at least have a final cover before the reviews started. But now I’m over that initial hurdle and braced for more. 

Bring ’em on. 

I’m ready. 

I hope. 

****************************
Leave a comment to enter the drawing for an ARC of Under the Dog Star. Make sure I can reach you by e-mail if you win -- either include your e-mail address in your comment or send it separately to sandraparshall@yahoo.com. I ask only this of the winners: If you like it, please tell a lot of people, but if you don't like it, please tell no one.

Background List

Sharon Wildwind

As much as I love DCI Tom Barnaby, both as played in Midsomer Murders by John Nettles, and as written by Caroline Graham, I love Graham’s stand-alone Murder at Madingley Grange even more.

A brother and sister who are in need of spare cash decide to take advantage of their aunt’s departure for the continent to raise capital. Simon Hannaford thinks a murder weekend will be a breeze. They have Aunt Maude’s imposing pile, Madingley Grange, complete with peacocks, as a backdrop. They have his sister, Laurie’s, cordon-bleu cooking skills to feed the guests. They have a trunk full of 1930s regalia for the guests to wear. What they don’t have is a group of hired actors and a plot for a murder weekend.

No problem, Simon says. He’ll whip up a little murder outline and the guests can do improv theater for the weekend.

The punters arrive—not as many as Simon had hoped for—but enough to anticipate a profit. Each comes for his/her own reason, not all of them having to do with murder. Derek, an obsessed Sherlockian arrives wearing a cape and deerstalker. The weekend is a bitter disappointment to him. He’d envisioned cozy evenings by the fire with fellow aficionados discussing blood spatter patterns, obscure South American poisons, and the Reichenbach Falls. Instead he’s awash in people who not only don’t read mysteries, but some may not have read a book at all.

One evening Derek holds forth with a convoluted discussion about Jane Marple and Maude Silver, finishing with, “And it must be noted that they constantly knit baby clothes. Now what do you think of that?” Half of the punters think Derek is a nutter, and none of them have the slightest idea what the deuce he’s talking about.

To tell the truth, I don’t either, and Graham never explains it, which makes it all the more fun.

At least Derek recognized the importance of the background list. A background list is a way to use tiny details to enhance a story.

Background lists work like this. All books have a theme, a global umbrella under which the author works. It might be is revenge any less deadly when served cold, or the consequences of not being able to let go, or—one of the romance genre standards—a second chance at love, as in the British TV series As Time Goes By. Two young lovers are separated by circumstances during the Korean War. Forty years later they meet again. Is it too late for love?

Second chance is great for a background list because you have three words to work with: second, chance, and love. Draw three columns and head each column with one of those words. Then think of as many related words as you can. Usually 10 or less per column is enough. For example: Second—two, twins, pair, second-place, second-class, runner-up, second-best. Chance—luck, gambling, chance meeting, no chance in hell, odds, dice, chancer, risk, opportunity. You can do love for yourself.

What you use the background list for is fine tuning a manuscript, the place where you can take advantage of eensy-bitsy-tiny details to reinforce your theme. A character has to stand in line at a bank. Put him second in line. She has to do an activity that the man doesn’t approve of. She goes out gambling with the girls. He refers to immigrants as, “Being treated like second-class citizens.” The woman’s daughter is upset because she was a runner-up in the school’s election.

What you’re doing is bombarding the reader with subtle references to second-chance-love. It’s called subliminal messaging, and it’s so powerful that it’s illegal in Australian and British broadcasting. Nothing has been said about books.

The way I see it is, he’s going to have to stand in that line anyway. Why not make that count for something? She has to have a conflict with the daughter. Why not make that count for something, too?

John Nettles, incidentally, is leaving Midsomer Murders after 13 seasons. You can read about the change here. I’ll miss him, and there’s nothing hidden or chancy about that.

_______
Quote for the week:
I wanted to die in noble fashion in the service of my country and then be buried with full military honours in Westminster Abbey.
~John Nettles, actor

In fact, the producers assure us that Tom and Joyce will simply retire.

Memories of the Bookstore

After I had taught for five years at my first job, the school RIFFed ten teachers due to budget problems; since I was twenty-seven and at the bottom of the totem pole, I was among those who had to go.

Finding another teaching job proved to be difficult, so I started scanning the want ads. I was thrilled to see that a giant Barnes and Noble was opening near me, and they were hiring! I called and arranged an interview. When I met with the two managers who were hiring, I said that I preferred a managerial position, preferably in fiction. They asked what my credentials were. I told them that I had a B.A. in English and was an avid reader. I produced a typed sheet of every mystery novel I'd ever read, who wrote it, and a brief description of why I loved it. I got the job--manager of fiction.

It was a nice job. I soon learned how to use the register, how to stock shelves in the stockroom, and how to work the floor. Soon enough the managers of other sections knew to send people with questions to me, especially if they were questions about mysteries. "You'd have to ask Julia," they would say, "because mystery is not my area."

I loved helping people find books--either because they were hunting for something but couldn't remember the name of the series, or because they wanted to discover something new--maybe, for example, they just knew they wanted "something funny." So I'd introduce them to Joan Hess or Sparkle Hayter or Dorothy Cannell, and they'd come back and say they loved the book and would proceed to buy the whole series.

There were down sides to the job, of course: we were open until 11 at night, and the truly creepy people seemed to wander in at about 10:45. One man, in a chilling moment that is far creepier in retrospect, asked me if we had books about live burial. I was so naive that I didn't know what he meant. I said I didn't think so. Then he asked for books about women's make-up. Twenty years later I'm still haunted by the idea that he was somehow planning to bury a person alive. My husband tells me I've read too many suspense novels.

The other problem with the job was that I was exposed daily to beautiful, glossy books, with new titles coming in every week, and all I wanted to do was find a quiet corner and read one. That, of course, was against the rules. Also, with my 15% discount, I spent far too much on book every week. Over the seven months that I was there, my husband and I spent well over a thousand dollars "saving" money on books. :)

So finally I realized that I'd have to go; I found a good job at a boys' school in Chicago and felt that I was ready to get back into the classroom, a place where I got paid to talk at length about books. There really is no better environment than that for a bibliophile.

My beautiful Barnes and Noble is now empty, and the huge parking lot that was once jammed full of cars is an empty expanse of concrete. It's a lonely place that seems to invite some tumbling tumbleweed. When I pass it I see it as a metaphor for the book industry, and the way we're moving out of giant buildings and into our own laptops, either out of laziness or a sort of widespread agoraphobia that suggests we no longer prefer to meet people in person. I can't complain, though, because I'm sitting here on my laptop and "chatting" with people online, and later I'll probably make a purchase online because it will be so much more efficient than running a physical errand.

So the trend is insular--we stay in our houses--except that the pendulum may well swing back again. We'll get tired of virtual everything and demand a Renaissance of palpable things and human interaction.

Only time will tell.

It Only Took 13 Years

by Laura Alden
Agatha Award nominee, Best First Novel

After almost 13 years of writing, I’m now a published writer. An author. Hard to believe, but true. Which means that, to some people, after 13 years of spending much of my free time writing and reading about writing, and studying other writers and kinda-but-not-really telling friends and family that I was working on manuscripts, I’m suddenly an authority on All Things Writing.

Hah. As if. Some days I think I know less than I did ten years ago.

People ask me about e-books and sales figures and what the market is for memoirs and what’s the best way to sell a non-fiction manuscript? They ask me about selling poetry and children’s books and how do I think a novel about a young boy who learns he was adopted by a family of vampires would sell?

Um, no clue. Honest. I really have no idea.

“But you’ve written a book,” they say, looking at me sideways, letting their words rise at the end of the sentence, adding just a dash of doubt.

Sorry, I tell them. Wish I could help you, but I really don’t know. I just don’t know that much about writing.

And I don’t. How can I? See, for me the hardest thing about writing is knowing if what I’ve scribbled down is any good. If I don’t even know that, how can I pretend to know anything about writing?

When I’m writing, I have no idea if any of it is worth keeping. Even when I’m rereading, I really don’t know if it’s crap or if it’s decent. The really weird thing is that sometimes, on rereads, any given scene will scan like a champ. (Yes! I can write! I’m not a complete imposter!) A week later I’ll read the same scene and want to delete the whole thing for being such an insipid and pointless piece
of drivel.

My only comfort is that this feeling of I-have-no-clue-what-I’m-doing seems to run rampant in authors, even very successful ones. (Yes! I am not alone!) Of course, this comfort is completely overshadowed by the hollow realization that very successful authors can feel that they have no clue what they’re doing.

Uh-oh. If they feel that way, what chance do I have of getting a clue?

Well, none, actually.

But you know what? I don’t care. I love to write. I love to create stories and people and places. If I can keep on doing that, I can live with muddling my way through this business of writing, putzing along, doing my best. And with any luck, every once in awhile, I’ll be able to make someone smile, way deep down inside. If I can do that…well, then everything turned out just fine.


************************************ 
Laura Alden grew up in Michigan and graduated from Eastern Michigan University in the 80’s with a (mostly unused) Bachelor of Science degree in geology. Currently, Laura and her husband share their house with two very strange cats. When Laura isn’t writing her next book, she’s working at her day job, reading, singing in her church choir, or doing some variety of skiing. Laura’s debut novel, Murder at the PTA was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her second book, Foul Play at the PTA, will be released in July.

It Ain't Me, Babe

by guest blogger Julia Williams, bookseller extraordinaire and offspring of Sheila Connolly, for reasons which will shortly become clear.

Hello, internet world! I’m guesting today for my mother, Sheila Connolly, as a broken ankle and general post-conference brain-friedness prevent her from coherent typing. The doctors told her to stay away from keyboards for at least a week, but you know how she is. She continues to claw at the laptop as I write this, attempting to wrest back her sacred blogging duty, but I’ll have none of it. I think she’ll pull through. In the meantime, you’ve got me. You can call me Julie.

In case you hadn’t heard, though I’m guessing you had, this past week saw mystery writers and readers and lovers of all stripes convene for Malice Domestic 23 in sunny Bethesda, Maryland. Actually, I’ve just asked my mother if it was in fact sunny there, and she reports that she didn’t see any windows, just the inside of the conference hotel. So it might have been sunny. I’ll speak with the fact-checking department and get back to you. With the grownups gone off to points south, it was my job to hold down the fort here in Massachusetts, and while I am generally a nervous person where creaky Victorian houses are concerned, I hardly found time to be frightened, between working sixty hours a week and my very important commitments to Monday night pub trivia and constant attention to Bravo reality programming. Besides, any time I wondered what the folks might be up to, I had only to log onto Facebook, where Malice photos soon began popping up in my feed like crocuses on the neighbors’ lawns. There was my mother, chatting variously with Liz Zelvin and Krista Davis (both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the Virginia Festival of the book — small world!), and snaps here and there of another Facebook friend, the talented and eternally chic Hank Phillippi Ryan. It looks like everyone had a good time! There is something marvelous about writers’ conferences, isn’t there? You never can tell what’s going to happen.

This puts me in mind of the first conference I can recall attending. It wasn’t strictly a conference for writers, but it was an academic event at which thinkers presented their work and looked to foster dialogue within their field of study. I was in my first year of college, and drove down from school with a few other students to meet up with a professor whose history class we were all taking at the time. One morning, our group arrived late from the local bed and breakfast and sat in the back of a large conference room for the first talk of the day. After a long presentation on atrocities in Europe during the past century, we all slumped in our chairs and looked at our shoes as the audience began to file out. A tiny woman in her eighties shuffled up the aisle toward the exit, but stopped when she saw us. She patted my friend on the shoulder, said “Cheer up, dear,” and walked on. We all chuckled, felt the mood lighten a bit, and left for a late breakfast. We only discovered the next day, at the conference’s keynote reading, that the woman had been the great writer and poet Grace Paley.

Which describes perfectly what I love about conferences. You may hardly know what’s happening outside the hotel walls, but the excitement of the conversations and connections going on inside make you forget to care. Be it in Atlanta or Austin or Boston or Bruges, the simple aggregation of creative types in one place with one focus makes for an interesting time. Did you ever put some beetles in a jar when you were a kid, and then shake up the jar to make them fight? No, I didn’t either. That would be cruel. Don’t do that. But you get my point. Conferences are a great time once a year (or twice, or many times, depending on how you feel about travel) to recharge your creative batteries, to get excited about your craft, and, heck why not, schmooze with the writing community over tiny quiches and wine. What did you all get up to at Malice this year, if you went? Do tell.

Thanks for reading, cats and kittens. You’ll get Sheila back next week, I promise. Over and out!

Help! I'm shrinking!

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been hearing the expressions “little old man” and “little old lady” all my life, but it never occurred to me that people actually shrink as they age until I read Isabel Allende’s 1985 novel, The House of Spirits. There’s a climactic passage near the end of the book that I found utterly memorable. Alba, a young woman who has been imprisoned and tortured, is freed and has a tearful reunion with her grandfather.

“Grandfather!”
“Alba!”
“Grandfather!”
“Alba!”

Who knows why this simple exchange was so unforgettable for me? But it was, and I was equally struck by Alba’s realization that her grandfather—a towering figure her whole life, a man strong and powerful enough to sweep a peasant girl up on his horse and rape her (the former at a gallop, the latter presumably sans horse)—has turned into a little old man.

I was only in my early forties at the time, so I didn’t take it personally. I did start to notice the fact that my parents (in their forties when I was born) were definitely shorter than they’d been when I was younger. Some time in my adolescence, I stopped growing at the comfortably medium height of 5’5’’. My dad was a little taller than me, my mother a little shorter. By the time they reached their nineties, I topped them by a head. (See photo of my son with my mother, who was 95 at the time.)

My own shrinkage began some time in my fifties. I used to order custom-hemmed pants from a particular catalog, and I gradually became aware that my inseam (the actual length of the leg from groin to ankle) had changed from 29 inches to 28. If I didn’t order them shorter, the pants legs would flop over the tops of my shoes.

I kept putting 5’5” on forms and documents, but I knew that I was really 5’4” now. I accepted it. I got used to it. A first: I put 5’4” on my application to renew my passport a few weeks ago. So imagine my horror when the doctor measured me during my annual physical a couple of days later and broke the news that I am entering my late sixties at only 5’ 3 ½”. I don’t like it! I want a do-over! And worse, is this going to go on? I’m afraid it is.

There is a way to keep oneself from shrinking. My doctor confirmed it when I asked, but I first learned of it from my best friend from third grade. When we were both eight years old, I was taller than she was. I was still the taller when we were forty. If she resented it, I never knew. It was just the way things were. She was double-jointed (she can sit easily in full lotus position and could probably still wrap her legs around her ears, if she chose to try), and I was taller. But now I’m not. Her secret? Weight training. She does it with a trainer at the gym twice a week, and it works. I’m shrinking. She is not. And I love her, but I cannot deny she gloats.

Am I going to start lifting weights in a belated attempt to stop this discouraging natural process? Probably not. I won’t enumerate the many things I already do to keep myself fit and healthy as I age. I’ve got to leave some time for writing and the rest of my life. I’d better warn my grandchildren that by the time I’m ninety, I’ll be looking up to them. Way up.

Sue Grafton at Malice Domestic

Sandra Parshall

 Accosting a world-famous author in the restroom at a conference is considered the worst kind of behavior. But there was Sue Grafton at the sink, and there I was, and I doubted I’d get another chance. Besides, I didn’t actually accost her – never touched her, in fact. All I did was babble about what a thrill it was to have her at Malice Domestic and to hear her speak in person.

She was most gracious. Something similar probably happens whenever she sets foot in a public place. Each time I saw her or heard her speak over the weekend, I was impressed by her accessibility, her cheerful personality, and her patience with adoring fans. If any author has earned the right to be a prima donna, Sue Grafton has – she was at Malice to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award – but she remains... well, nice.

She’s also very funny. On a panel with other honorees Donna Anderson and Carole Nelson Douglas, she shared some of the gratifying, amusing, and occasionally bewildering letters she receives from readers. (She responds only to real letters sent through regular mail. If she tried to answer all her e-mail, she probably wouldn’t have time to eat and sleep, much less write.) In the bewildering category, one reader accused her of endorsing animal abuse because she wrote about a character who did nasty things to innocent creatures. A lot of readers apparently want to see Kinsey Millhone on TV or in movies. Sue said she would rather roll naked in ground glass than sell the rights to her character. She worked in Hollywood for 15 years before turning to mystery writing, and she doesn’t want Kinsey in the hands of scriptwriters and producers.

A reader once asked whether she is paid for “product placement” in her novels. The answer is no, but she’s received unsolicited gifts from the folks who make Vlasic pickles and Jif peanut butter (ingredients in Kinsey’s favorite sandwich), and the company that makes Saucony athletic shoes. After someone at Saucony saw a photo of Sue wearing that brand, she began receiving a new pair of shoes every few months. After a while she’d accumulated so many that she asked her benefactor to desist. Now she’s sort of regretting that she stopped the flow of free shoes. (She wears size 6, by the way.)

On another panel, Sue told her own aspiring writer story (every writer has one). She worked in Hollywood, hated writing by committee, and was desperate to get back to solo writing. She had seven unpublished novels. An agent had told her she showed no talent for plotting. That assessment made her so mad that she was determined to show the woman just how well she could plot. We probably have a blind-to-talent agent to thank for the Alphabet Mysteries.

What will happen when she reaches the end of the alphabet eight years from now? (And would she like a nickel for every time she’s been asked that question?)  She doesn’t know. Every new book scares her and makes her wonder if she can do it again. She doesn’t even know yet what the W will stand for in that book. “I don’t want to outstay my welcome,” she said, and she isn’t sure whether she’ll continue writing.

She promised her readers one thing: she won’t kill off Kinsey in the last book. But exactly where her character will be and what she’ll be doing when the series ends –  “That’s up to Kinsey.”