The Nightmares We Share

by Julia Buckley

Everyone has the occasional nightmare, although I find that I have fewer of them as an adult.  A recent nightmare, though, had me thinking again about what causes them and why they seem so real--which, for me, is what makes them so frightening.

According to this site, the ten most common nightmares are 1)Being lost 2)Missing a boat or plane 3)Being chased 4)Failing a test 5)Nudity 6)Being ill or dying 7)Car troubles 8)Teeth falling out 9)Falling 10)Faulty machinery.  Although I would not have come up with this list on my own, I've had a nightmare that fits almost all of these categories. Real nightmares have little to do with movie nightmare images like scary clowns or ghostly children.  Instead, they always seem to be glimpses of real life gone slightly (or extremely) wrong.

In my last nightmare, I was leaving my house by the side door, and doing what I always do, which is turning my back to the car in the driveway in order to lock the door.  In that instant someone grabbed me from behind, around the neck.  It was dark outside, and my abductor had the cloak of invisibility. My family was just inside, behind the wall, but when I tried to scream, no sound came out.  And I came to a realization: I had always feared this would happen, and now it had, and there was no escaping it.

Then I woke up.  The most terrifying part of the dream had not been the intruder in the dark, but my defeated acceptance of a terrible fate. My conviction that I would die was the detail which woke me up--and the whole terrible dream was triggered, I think, by the fact that I was too hot.

So the age old question emerges again: was this merely a biological response--my brain making up a story which was guaranteed to wake me?  Or was I tapping into the collective unconscious--one of Jung's archetypes which he suggested we all share--"a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals"?

I guess I'd prefer to think that there is some sense in the nightmares.  I like to think that, if I examined them, I could sort through something in my conscious life which my unconscious was trying to bring to the forefront.  But my dreams have become more elusive with time.  My husband claims, when I relate my dreams, that they are surprisingly linear, like a story, while his are just blobs of images here and there, and he can rarely remember them at all.

What sorts of nightmares do you have? Are they on the list above?  Do they ever seem to reveal something about your conscious life?  And are they linear?  I'm curious!

And happy Monday.  :)

A Canadian in the U.S.: My Love Letter to Michigan

By Victoria Hamilton
Author of A Deadly Grind

“Nobody in the States would buy a mystery set in Canada.”

That’s always been the prevailing wisdom, as far as the mystery publishing world has gone. Most Canadian mystery writers with ambitions beyond our border have caved, and set their books in the United States. 

Of course, Louise Penny (and some notable others) have blown that theory out of the water; Ms. Penny’s Quebec-set Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries are making rather nice headway on the New York Times bestseller list, and for good reason. Her writing is, of course, excellent, and Canada is a rich, beautiful, fascinating country, with a wealth of great locations for mystery novels.

But I’m one of those who decided to flow with the stream, so I set my Vintage Kitchen Mysteries (#1, A Deadly Grind, came out May 1 from Berkley Prime Crime) in the United States, Michigan to be exact. Close enough that it feels much like home to me, but in another country, so it feels just a shade exotic. I know Michiganders (58% of those who reside in Michigan prefer ‘Michigander’ over ‘Michiganian’ as a demonym… did you know that?) are going to laugh. Exotic? Michigan??

A little background on why this is so for me: I live in Southwestern Ontario, a part of Canada that looks, on a map, as if it is a spoon thrust down into the jam pot that is the United States of America. Growing up, I spent a lot of time on the Ontario shores of Lake Huron at a provincial park, camping. All around me were campers from Ohio, New York, but mostly, Michigan. The old-style Michigan license plates, white lettering on a blue field, was opposite the Ontario plates, blue lettering on a white field, and you’d see about an equal mix of both in the parking lots and on camp sites.

And the American kids were the coolest! They wore the neatest clothes, had the best stuff, and radios everywhere, in that lakeside campground, were tuned to CKLW, a Windsor/Detroit station that played nothing but Motown. To this day, when I hear the O’Jays or the Stylistics it takes me back to the smell of lake water and tanning lotion, and the sound of waves and gulls.

So when I was pondering where to set my Vintage Kitchen Mysteries, Michigan was an easy choice. A natural choice. A great choice! That state has taken a lot of hits in the Motor City belt in the last few years, but Michiganders will come out of it just fine.

I invented a town called Queensville, across the St. Clair River from a fictional Ontario town, Johnsonville, with a divided island in the middle called Heartbreak Island. I created a fictional history that highlighted the cooperation and love between such close neighbors. We may disagree from time to time, but Canada and the U.S. set a gold standard for international friendship that I feel can’t be matched.

And so I have been greatly flattered by the many letters and reviews that have named Queensville, Michigan, as a place folks would like to visit. I’ve received more than one letter asking me if it’s real. Well, yes, it is real, in my mind, and in the lives of the characters I’ve created who love their town, and their state.

I’m endlessly interested in the towns and cities that make up the fictional landscape, from Cleo Coyle’s wonderful real life Village setting in her Coffeehouse mysteries, to quaint Elderberry Bay, Pennsylvania, home of Janet Bolin’s ‘Threadville’ sewing mysteries; the United States is dotted with crime-ridden cozy towns. For other mystery writers I wonder… why do you set your series where you did? Did you make up a town? Did you use a real city? How have readers reaction?

And for readers of mysteries, how important is the setting of the mysteries you read? Do you mind the ‘Cabot Cove’ syndrome, small fictional villages with an ever decreasing population and an ever increasing crime wave? I’d be interested to hear!
                                        ~::~
Victoria Hamilton writes her Vintage Kitchen Mysteries out of a small Southwestern Ontario city, but hopes that her fictional town of Queensville, Michigan feels like Anywhere, USA. Book 1, A Deadly Grind came out May 1, and Book 2, Bowled Over will be released March 5, 2013.

Visit her website at http://www.victoriahamiltonmysteries.com/
Victoria Twitters at: @MysteryVictoria
Victoria’s characters blog at Killer Characters on the 21st of each month.

The Purse Inheritance

by Sheila Connolly

She pulled the battered box toward her and untied the faded ribbons.  Lifting the lid, she inhaled deeply of the scent that meant childhood to her—her grandmother's floral sachet, mixed with her mother's cigarette smoke.  Inside the box lay neatly wrapped bundles, each swathed in white tissue paper, tied with colored ribbon, a brief note tucked under the bow, in her grandmother's or her mother's handwriting…written on a "DON'T FORGET" pad.  How could she forget? 

No, I haven't gone over to writing women's fiction; this is a true story. 

Recently my sister moved into a new home, and in the process she was purging her place of unnecessary items.  Her concept of "necessary" and mine aren't quite in synch, but unarguably I have more storage space than she does.  As a result, I am now the designated custodian of the hereditary purse collection. 

We're not talking ancient or valuable here, except for the family associations.  What I have is about two dozen evening purses that belonged to my grandmother and my mother, and which date from roughly the late 1940s to the 1960s (including a tasteful black clutch I carried to my first formal dance in 1967).  And many are beautiful. 

My grandmother, in the
purse years

As I've no doubt mentioned before, my grandmother left her husband, after he'd decided he wanted to be a dairy farmer in Maine and failed, and she moved to New York City, where she found work during WWII.  When I say she found work, there's a story there too:  she was barely scraping by when she attended a funeral in New Jersey for an old family friend, where she met someone who was instrumental in getting her a job at Lipton Tea (and a ride back to the city, saving her the train fare), where she rose to the position of Assistant Director of Human Resources before retiring in 1958.  I'm guessing that the Golden Age of the Purses lies between 1945 and 1958, and I know the purses (along with my grandmother, of course) attended some fabulous events, including a dinner with the Queen of England. 

So the purse collection speaks of another time and place, the glamorous New York when there were still night clubs and big name bands, where you could sing along to golden-age Broadway musicals, and dine at the 21 Club or Le Pavillon or the Waldorf.  And you had to have the right purse for every occasion. 

Most of the beaded purses are French, a few Belgian, and the beadwork is elegant and intricate.  Most came from a small boutique called Henri Bétrix, on Madison Avenue.  I was probably there at some point—shopping was one of our traditional school-holiday pastimes when my sister and I visited my grandmother, and we were familiar with most of the high-end boutiques on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, not to mention Tiffany's (we used to go in and try on diamonds for fun, when I was a child). 

There are those (like my sister) who would argue that I shouldn't be keeping such useless stuff.  But as long as I have space I'm going to hang on to things like these purses, not only because they belonged to people I loved, but also because they capture a moment in time, from a lifestyle now gone.  And I still visit the purses now and then and remember the women who bought them and carried them, which now include me and my daughter (who in fact carried the paisley purse on a recent trip to New York City). 

Testing Fiction on the Brain

Elizabeth Zelvin

A March 2012 article in the New York Times reported that “new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing [that] when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters” our brains our stimulated, the experience promotes social learning in the same way as our real-life experiences do, and that we actually become more empathic as a result of reading novels.

“The novel,” according to the article, which sites several studies, “is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.”

We mystery lovers already know that. Readers of series return again and again to participate vicariously in not only the investigations but the social circles and life experiences of beloved characters. Many writers talk about how our characters talk to us and to each other in our heads and tell us how they want the current story to go, often against our design. (For me, it’s one reason I don’t outline. My characters aren’t interested in my outline.)

More good news: A 2010 study...found in preschool-age children [that] the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind,” which evidently means the capacity to “ ‘understand the complexities of social life’” and reflect on our mental and emotional states. This suggests that character-driven stories, which emphasize human relationships and are interested in emotions and succeed by evoking empathy, do a crucial job that cannot be done by a diet of action stories and plot-driven thrillers alone. This pleases me enormously as a writer of character-driven mysteries and a reader who is always hungry for novels with characters I can love.

The article also made a case for evocative language, citing studies that have found that parts of the cortex that perceive texture through touch become active when stimulated by metaphor. “Metaphors like ‘The singer had a velvet voice’ and ‘He had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like ‘The singer had a pleasing voice’ and ‘He had strong hands,’ did not.” The olfactory cortex is similarly aroused by words with strong odor associations, eg “perfume” or “coffee”.

I thought it might be fun to check random passages in the work of a few mystery writers who are known as excellent stylists to see how many cortex-zinging words and metaphors I could find. I chose P.D. James, the late Reginald Hill, and S.J. Rozan.

P.D. James (A Taste for Death, pp 92) was harder to do than I expected, because she makes so many cultural references in lieu of direct description. The cortex no doubt lights up at “the ceaseless grind and roar of [a particular London street} and “a fugitive sun glinted on leaves which were only now beginning to yellow and which hung in heavy swathes, almost motionless in the still air.” But I doubt that “one of the rare examples of Sir John Soan’s domestic architecture,” “the conventional Georgian houses on either side,” or “its neo-classical facade in Portland stone and brick” do the trick. And how about her comment that the house looks “almost arrogantly unique”? I would need the neuroscientist’s instruments to make that call.

Reginald Hill (The Woodcutter, p 259) also used more cultural metaphor than sensory metaphor, again, not what I expected. A family tomb is “the most prominent supultural monument, resembling in Hollins’s democratic eyes one of those blockhouses still visible on parts of the UK’s sea coast out of which the aged eyes of Dad’s Army peered in fearful expectation of seeing cohorts of Nazi storm-troopers goose-stepping out of the waves.” I can’t believe my Jewish cortex would be unmoved by those Nazi storm-troopers—but as writing, it’s a long way from “leathery hands.”

In S.J. Rozan’s work (The Shanghai Moon) as well, I had to pick my way past dialogue and cultural reference to find the cortical stimulants: “...traffic was at full stampede, giving out with honks and rumbles the way a herd of cattle might bellow and stamp” and “a tray of sweets, tiny teacups, and a gourd-shaped pot. A flowery fragrance filled the air.” (p. 79) “Anita opened the box, releasing a swirl of rosewood and age,” (p. 142) “the book’s once-rich leather cover, now mildew-spotted and flaking,” and “cradling the rosewood box” (p. 143).

My conclusion? I’m not sure, but perhaps it’s that fiction is so complex that it flitters away like butterflies from the grasping hands of even the most determined neuroscientist.

The Story Behind the Story: Hitting the Wall

by Sandra Parshall

Second in a series of occasional posts about writing Book 6.

I know it will happen every time, I know the point at which it will happen, yet I always feel blindsided when I hit that first wall in the first draft of a new book.

While I do as much preparation as I can before I begin a novel, I’m not a writer who can produce a detailed outline and stick to it meticulously all the way to the end. I decide what the story is. I collect the most important characters (knowing others will show up as I go along). I know the identity of the villain(s) and the motive for the murder(s). I know where I’m going without being sure of every step along the way.

When I have a first scene in mind, I start writing.

You may sneer at “the mystery formula” if you like, but I’m comfortable with beginning each book in a roughly similar way, counting on circumstances and characters to make it fresh every time. The dramatic inciting event – a murder or the discovery of a body – comes in the first chapter. This is what I look for when reading crime fiction too. I want to know quickly what the story is going to be about. By chapter two, we begin to understand who is affected by the crime. From  chapter three through the middle of the book, the story opens up, it expands to include subplots and unexpected threads.

And that’s where I always hit a wall.

I question the premise itself: Can I really make a good story out of this material? Do I have enough material here for the kind of complex story I enjoy telling? I doubt my ability to pull it off. (That doubt will linger until the book is finished.)

Once those doubts set in, it’s awfully easy to let them expand into overwhelming angst. Does it matter whether I write this book? Who will care if I don’t finish it? I consider destroying my computer. And so on. When I find myself at the edge of a sheer drop into a black chasm, it’s time to pull back, refocus, and move on.

That's where I am right now.

I will do more outlining. The middle of a crime novel should be bursting with suddenly exposed secrets, rivalries, and unsuspected relationships. But before I can write all that, I need to give the characters more thought. The hidden story – what really happened – matters most, because it drives the actions of the characters. If I don’t thoroughly understand the hidden story, I’ll get to the end of the book and have trouble justifying what the characters have been doing for the last 300 pages.

Eventually, I’ll regain my confidence and plow back into the writing. I don’t worry about writing well at this stage. I’m not concerned with pace or continuity. I don’t include much description. I don’t go into a lot of detail about anything – except what the characters are saying. I let them talk as much as they want to, and if they’re new to me and I’m not sure who and what they are, they will reveal themselves and their lives in their own words. I can shape the dialog in the next draft.

Many writers say they love the first draft and hate rewriting, but I’m the opposite. The first draft is torture for me. But I have to produce that big, messy lump of story before I feel safe, before I can breathe a sigh of relief and think, Yes, I’m going to make a book out of this.

Rewriting – shaping the story, finding the right pace, filling out the characters – is what I love. Rewriting is the prize at the end of the first draft, the goal line I’m running toward. It looks a long way off right now, but I know I’ll get there if I keep coming to the computer every day and letting my characters talk.

Heat

Sharon Wildwind

Let’s discuss heat, shall we?

Not the uncomfortable, lethal heat that has affected much of North America over the past ten days, but guy-and-gal heat. You know, hormones, pheromones, and that ilk. What got me thinking about hormones is being part of a romance writers critique group this summer. Chances are I will soon have to come up with few hot, spicy scenes.

Having been happily married for a long time, I’ve got a good idea of how hot and spicy works. But I’m certain that my husband prefers if what happens at home stays at home, so I should cast further afield for writing material.

How about all the way across the universe?

For all of my science fiction geekness I somehow missed Doctor Who. I have a vague recollection of a winter in the mid eighties when a group of us retired to someone’s house very early—about 2 AM—every Saturday morning to watch Doctor Who on PBS. I’ve no idea which doctor we were watching, though it was likely either Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy. As I said, it was 2 AM, and beer and skittles had been involved earlier in the evening. Emphasis on the beer.

Since my husband also had missed the Doctor Experience, we raided our local library for old episodes. We eventually reached the 10th Doctor, played by the Scottish actor, David Tennant. Now there is hot and spicy.

Let’s be clear. I’m sure Mr. Tennant is a smart, funny, attractive man. If I ever ended up having coffee with him, no doubt we could have a delightful conversation about writing, drama, and directing. It’s his portrayal of the Doctor that gives me the hots.

The look chosen for this Doctor is one step short of an unmade bed. Spiky hair, pinstripe suit, tie askew, long wool coat flapping as he walks and trainers, the perfect footwear for a character who’s most frequent line seems to be, “Run, run for your life.” All that running and flapping is part of the charm. He’s a healthy, young, male animal and it’s stimulating to watch him being physical.

As this is a family-oriented blog, I shall refrain from discussing implications of sonic screwdrivers.

Did I mention smart? He’s got an eidetic memory. Nine hundred years of experience hasn’t dampened his childlike joy and amazement when he discovers something new. Of course, nine hundred years, much of it running for his life, has also given him nightmares. Keeping the joy public and the nightmares private gives him an oh-so-sweet vulnerability. And an intense desire to treat him with remarkable kindness and charity.

“But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (Andrew Marvell). That regeneration thing is always on the horizon, sometimes a black speck, now that we’ve watched almost up to The End of Time/Parts 1 and 2 it looms like a huge dark cloud. Waiting for the end is like covering your eyes during the scary parts, but leaving your fingers open just wide enough to catch a glimpse of what’s happening. You want things to happen and you don’t want things to happen because after it’s over, it’s over. And all that will be left are memories.

------

Quote for the week

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

~Victor Hugo, (1802 – 1885), French poet, novelist, and dramatist

What's in a Name?

by Julia Buckley

What is the significance of your name? It's clear that the names bestowed upon us by our parents are inextricably linked with our identities, and they are key touchstones for relating to others and to ourselves. More specifically, though, what does your name mean, and why did your parents select it?

This website has some interesting history of names, including mine. Julia is a common name in Hungary, and my grandmother, Juliana Wigh, is my namesake (and I hers). At the time that my parents named me in 1964, they were under the impression that my grandmother's full name was Julia, so that became my name. It was not particularly popular in the United States--in fact, my mother said she picked it because it was unusual.

In almost twenty years of schooling, I never encountered another Julia; there were a couple of Julies, but that name has different origins. Thanks (I think) to the popularity of Julia Roberts, Julia is now ranked much higher in the United States, as this graph shows. It was at its highest popularity in 1880.

When I was about eleven, my father found out, by looking at some old papers of my grandmother's, that her full name was not Julia, but Juliana. He was exasperated with her (my grandma had a way of exasperating people). "Mom," he said. "Why didn't you ever tell me your full name? We named Julia after you!" She shrugged. "Yah. Julia, Juliana."

She didn't see it as an important distinction, but I had a tiny identity crisis, thinking of the name I didn't have, and the girl I could have been, had I been christened Juliana. I started writing "Juliana Rohaly" on my school papers, and I demanded that my siblings call me Juliana, as well. But the phase didn't last. Ultimately I was born Julia and I remain Julia to this day--and we think of my grandmother as Julia, too. (In Hungarian, the name is pronounced Yoolia, and the diminutive is Juliska--pronounced Yulishka--and that is the only thing my grandmother ever called me. It stands for something along the lines of "Little Julia," which I was to her, as the youngest in the family).

Another interesting note about my name is that when I was christened, my mother's sister Marianna, who lived in Germany with all of my mother's family, was quite smitten with the name. In Germany, too, it was unusual; a few years later when Marianna--or Tante Nanne, as we called her--had her first child, she named her Julia. So now I have a cousin Julia (pronounced Yoolia) who is my namesake. And the family name lives on!

What's an interesting story behind your name? Did the website tell you anything you didn't already know?


Image courtesy of www.railroadsignals.us/letters.htm

Fate

 by Leighton Gage
Author of the Inspector Mario Silva novels

We all have our family stories, don’t we?

Here’s one of mine, one that always reminds me how close I came never to writing any books. In fact, how close I came to never having lived at all.
 
My grandfather was the youngest of seven children.
 
When he was four, his mother succumbed to diphtheria.
 
Before he was ten, four of his siblings died of other diseases.
 
When he was fourteen, his father, a master mariner, who’d spent most of his working life on the sea, tripped on some corn stubble, fell face-down into a puddle and drowned in his own back yard.
 
My grandfather’s brother, twenty-two years older, became his legal guardian. But they didn’t get along. So granddad soon followed the family tradition and went to sea.

He taught himself geometry, taught himself navigation, took and passed his master’s papers for both sail and steam.
 
 

In June of 1903, aboard the Andrew Nebbinger, a five-masted schooner bound from Valparaiso to New York by way of Cape Horn, the captain’s appendix burst – and he died of septicemia. My grandfather, then serving as his first mate, took over the ship. It was his first command. He was twenty-one years old.
 

 
In the course of the next fifteen years, he had many adventures, survived two shipwrecks and also being blown-up by high explosive when a German submarine fired on his vessel.
 
But he never married.
 
One day, in early January of 1918, with the First World War still raging in Europe, he and his best friend, Billy Butler, arranged to meet for a drink at a bar in Boston.
 
Captain Butler was scheduled to set sail for Cape Town in the morning, and my grandfather, for Bermuda, three days later.
 
Both ran into heavy weather. My grandfather’s survival was touch and go. By the time the storm abated, he’d lost two of his masts and been blown halfway to Africa. And then his ship was becalmed.
 
Captain Butler, driven to another part of the North Atlantic by the same storm, put into Bermuda for repairs, went ashore and checked into the New Windsor Hotel, then a favorite of seafaring men. And each morning, when he’d come down for breakfast, he’d ask the girl behind the desk, an eighteen-year-old who’d just begun working there, if there was news of my grandfather’s ship.

Most sailing vessels, in those days, didn’t carry radios. Three weeks went by without a word. 

Captain Butler left Bermuda convinced that he’d lost a friend. But he hadn’t. The very next day, my grandfather sailed into Hamilton Harbor and checked into the same hotel.
 
The following morning, the girl saw his name on the register, screwed up her courage and knocked on granddad’s door to tell him how concerned his friend had been.
 
I have before me a yellowed clipping from Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, the only daily newspaper on the island, published continuously since 1828.
 
It’s dated Tuesday, February 26, 1918.
 
The headline reads: ROMANCE OF THE SEA.
 
The sub-head reads Wedding followed by Honeymoon on Husband's Vessel.

In the body of the article, readers are informed that a wedding took place at St. John’s Church, Pembroke, on February the 22nd, 1918, at 7:30 PM with “the Ven. the Archdeacon officiating” and that it was followed by a supper at the Royal Windsor Hotel, “provided by Mr. A. M. Moore”.
 
The hotel is long gone.
 
The church is not.

These days it looks like this. 



 
The eighteen-year old was my grandmother. I can’t get at any of my photos of her at the moment, but she was quite beautiful.
 
The vessel was my grandfather’s. They continued to live aboard ship until their first two children were born. Some of my mother’s earliest memories were of the sounds of a tall ship – the creaks of wood and rope, the wash of water against the deck and hull.
 
And Billy Butler?

After sailing out of Hamilton Harbor, his ship was lost at sea.

No trace of him, or his vessel, was ever found.

How’s that for fate?

***********************
 



Leighton Gage writes the highly-acclaimed Chief Inspector Mario Silva series, crime novels set in Brazil. His latest is A Vine in the Blood. 




You can visit him on the web at: http://www.leightongage.com and read his blog at http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/.

What Works

by Sheila Connolly

This past weekend I read a book by an author I know and admire.  It wasn’t a recent book, but rather one that crawled out of my endless To-Be-Read pile (I'm trying to sort through my books, and papers, and supplies, and…).  I don't recall when or where I got it.  

I like this writer.  I've read a number of her earlier books and enjoyed them.  Actually, I enjoyed this book too, but kind of in spite of myself.

On the plus side:  she has a great voice—sharp and funny.  She's honest about the fact that her male characters (mostly macho military types) tend to think from, uh, below the belt—and they acknowledge it, although that doesn't stop them.  She's great at portraying romantic confusion, and almost all her lovers are definitely starcrossed (and communication-challenged).

So why am I complaining?  Here's why:

Too many characters.  In the writer's defense, I will say that she writes a kind of multi-character series that focuses on only a few characters (and usually pairs) in each book.  So in theory we know almost all of them each time we dip into the latest book.  But in this case…I flat out lost count.  I believe there are at least ten major characters, equally split between the genders, and they all end up paired off by the end, if they weren't already.  Or weren't in an earlier book before some of that miscommunication happened and one or the other stormed off in a confused huff, usually to some dangerous foreign assignment where people shoot at them.

But even recognizing a few of the names here didn't help.  I simply couldn't keep them all straight, and worse, the chapters bounced around from one to another willy nilly.  Two names even started with the same first letter (not fair!).  Look, I liked all the characters, and found them convincing, or at least entertaining—but not all at once, in the same book. (I did have to wonder how the heck the author kept everybody straight when she was writing this—she must have had a massive whiteboard or a whole lot of sticky notes.)

Where's the plot? As I said, I really like this writer's voice, so I didn't mind letting things unwind at the author's pace.  It's not a short book (477 pages in hardcover), so there was no hurry to get the story rolling.  But…by the time I reached p. 122 and still had no idea what the plot was going to be, I began to worry.  Maybe if I were to go back with a microscope, I might find a few hints of what was to come, but my general response was, when's this thing going to start?  I'll concede that the author did pull it all together by the end, but she took her own sweet time about it (I guess if you're a New York Times bestseller, you can get away with that).

Why do I care?  Well, I'm a writer and I want to know what makes a book work.  I've read—or more accurately, started—quite a few books that I dropped after a few chapters, saying, this really isn't working for me.  Sometimes I can say why, like the characters are simply not believable, or the language is clunky and dull.  But sometimes I can't put a finger on what I don't like—I simply know that I don't.  And life is too short to read books you don't like.

I've also read books that I loved, where the plot looked like Swiss cheese but I really didn't care because I was so caught up in the flow of the author's words, or the excitement of the story, that I just kept plunging right along.  It's a guilty pleasure—but I don't have to critique everything I read, do I? Can't I just enjoy, now and then?

That's why this particular book was such an anomaly for me. I finished it. In fact, I spent a lot of this past weekend reading this book (because it was cooler than doing anything else, like moving).  I did finally get caught up in it, somewhere in the middle.  But what it proved is that the characters and the voice trumped the pacing and the plot for me, as a reader.  I'm not sure how to use it myself.  Note to self:  make sure your characters are appealing and well-drawn.  And throwing in some sex doesn't hurt either.

What draws you into a book and keeps you reading?  Character, plot, style, or some combination of all of those that just clicks for you?

A Paradigm Shift in the Collective Unconscious

Elizabeth Zelvin

I used to hate that term, “paradigm shift.” I considered it the height of intellectual-snob gibberish. Then everything started changing, and I got it that sometimes it’s the perfect term for a change in the general culture that’s so massive that nothing is ever the same. For the generation just ahead of mine, the watershed was World War II and plastics. My ex-sister-in-law, twelve years older than I, was a teacher, and for some reason I have a vivid memory of her telling about a conversation with her class about the world before plastics.

“What were picnic forks made of?”
“Wood.”
“What were raincoats made of?”
“Cloth.”
What were pens made of?”
“Metal.”
“What did people wrap things in?”
“Paper.”

For my parents, born shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, it was World War I. When they were born, there were no airplanes and few automobiles. People functioned without radios or telephones in the home. As those of us who love British mysteries and historical novels know, before the War, the hierarchical class structure separating Upstairs from Downstairs was intact. After the War, it started to crumble, and after World War II, it had essentially vanished. I don’t have to spell out the paradigm shift we’re going through today: the explosion of technology—and its miniaturization, which I consider its least anticipated aspect—that has made mysteries and even science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s utterly outdated. New inventions in both communication and transportation have changed everything about how we connect with one another on our shrinking planet.

It’s odd what memory latches onto: I remember my son, now in his early forties, telling me about a new development called the World Wide Web. “It’s going to revolutionize how people use computers,” he said, and so it did. A couple of years before the ubiquitous cell phone appeared on the streets of New York, I remember an online mental health professional colleague saying on an e-list, “The last two revolutions in the Philippines couldn’t have been conducted without cell phones.”

Until quite recently, as, once again, British novels bear witness, educated people had a cultural common ground based on literature that they could draw upon and refer to in a reasonable expectation of being understood. Everybody who read had read Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland. Lord Peter Wimsey could quote from either, and we knew what he was talking about. We had even read Homer, if not in the original like Lord Peter (when I went to college, the Iliad and the Odyssey were required reading in Humanities 1), and could field a reference to Achilles or the Trojan War with ease. In contrast, I remember a conversation with a fourteen-year-old cousin in 2004 or so about the movie Troy, which reduced that epic conflict from ten years to three days and took many liberties with the plot. “Have you read the book?” she asked.

Nowadays, not only have our culture’s reading habits changed dramatically, but there’s too much to read. Politics have decreased the attention in the school curriculum that was once paid to “dead white males” like Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll. This is not all bad. I would have loved to be made to study Little Women or The Help instead of Silas Marner and Giants In the Earth, the two most stultifyingly boring novels I can remember being assigned in school.

My point is that books no longer provide the material by which we communicate through common points of reference. Instead, movies occupy that space in the collective unconscious. We all know The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind and The Godfather. Instead of “To be or not to be, that is the question,” “My kingdom for a horse,” “I can believe six impossible things before breakfast,” or “It was the best butter,” we all resonate with “We’re not in Kansas any more,” “Tomorrow is another day,” and “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” All these movies were made from novels, and some of us have read the books. But the reason everybody knows these references with all their implications is that we’ve seen the movies.