Monday Caption Contest and an Ode to Veterans

I always enjoy photo caption contests as a test of good writing, and when I ran across this old shot of my son and my nephew, I remembered that it was often misinterpreted and might lend itself nicely to a writing challenge. Some people saw the two as friendly souls about to kiss each other, and others saw pugnacious expressions that seemed to be picking a fight.

What do you think?  And how would you caption this photo?

On another note, may all veterans of war and their families feel honored and appreciated today for the service and sacrifice they offered (and still offer) their country.  A shout out to my father, who served in the Korean War, and to my sister Claudia, who served in the U.S. Navy for twenty years.

My dad is still this handsome, by the way.

Inside the Academy

Kathleen Jabs, Guest Blogger

My first contact with the Naval Academy was the catalogue. I was seventeen, a high school junior, trying to figure out what to do when a classmate passed me the book. The picture on the cover hooked me – midshipmen dressed in crisp blue and gold, stretched over the gunnel of a sailboat, holding the lines taut as they battled wind and waves. I devoured each glossy page – I was entranced by the science, the sense of opportunity, the chance to be around the ocean and crisscross the world. I had no real idea what the military was. I was seeking adventure, a change of scene. I judged the book (and the school) by the cover.

My dad went to Officer Candidate School after college and served in the Navy for four years in the mid-sixties. Our family’s naval history began with stories about how he had spelled naval wrong (navel) and had to march demerits while my mother waited for him outside the gates at Newport. He also spoke about packing a box of books with him when his ship deployed to the Caribbean and reading in his stateroom when he wasn’t on watch. It sounded exotic, a bit romantic. It aligned with my ideas: I wanted to be different and somehow bold.

Back then I didn’t know what I wanted to do. One minute I imagined a career in politics. The next I wanted to be a leader, to be of service. Some days, I dreamed of being a spy. I knew, no matter what I did, I wanted to travel and live abroad. The Naval Academy seemed like a perfect launch pad. I would trade short term freedom for long-term independence. I found a quote in the catalogue that said, “the Naval Academy is a great place to be from, not at.” I decided I could live with that.

I reported to Annapolis in July 1984, a member of the eighth class with women. It was only my second time south of New York. It never occurred to me that I would not be welcomed. The hostility from my squad leader was a shock, but I was so busy trying to survive that I didn’t feel singled out by gender, only by performance.

My lack of familiarity with the military showed in every aspect. I didn’t know how to wear or assemble uniforms. I wasn’t in good enough shape. I was unprepared for all the seriousness. I laughed when my squad leader pulled out my desk drawer and ran his fingers around the inner hinges, producing a pile of dust. Who knew the drawers came all the way out? Or the mirror came off the wall? I bit back my laughter until the demerits started to add up. The first afternoon I hoisted a rifle on my shoulder and started marching in a square on the deck outside, I felt the first twinge of despair. What had I signed up for? Why couldn’t I measure up?

I vowed to improve. I studied my military lessons and memorized the insignia and ranks. I worked on the room. I fixed my uniforms. Slowly, over the course of the summer, I got in shape. I woke up each morning with strands of hair curling on my pillow. I was too exhausted not too sleep, but my nights were restless. I was committed to endurance, to proving myself worthy. We were surrounded by stories of heroism and tales of unbelievable bravery and courage. Admiral Stockdale in the prisons of Vietnam, Colonel Ripley on the bridge in Vietnam, Admiral Farragut in Mobile Bay, John Paul Jones shouting the storied cry, “I have not yet begun to fight.”  I didn’t imagine I would be in a sea battle or even a war, but I wanted to be ready for what tests might come.

It didn’t occur to me that we studied no women heroes. I didn’t expect it. The only women I knew back home who worked were teachers or nurses. Most of my friends’ mothers were full-time homemakers. When I left for the Academy, I was conscious that I was following a new path, one not quite tested. The first women entered the Naval Academy in 1976 and graduated in 1980. What a debt all of female USNA graduates since then owe those first women. Recently, I’ve the chance to meet some of the first class women and I’ve been inspired by their ongoing efforts to mentor the next generation.

In Black Wings, I wanted to capture that time of firsts – the early years of female integration into combat domains and the larger military structure. It was critical that the time period be late 1980’s, early 1990’s. At that point, women had been serving in the military but were still excluded from most combat platforms. When those restrictions were lifted, it ushered in a new era. Audrey Richards, one of the main characters in Black Wings, longs to fly fighter aircraft and land on a carrier. When she gets her wish, she faces incredible hostility, both at the Naval Academy and in the fleet on account of her gender. Times have since changed. For the better.

The Navy I serve in now is so different than the one I entered. The opportunities for women have exploded. Women now serve on submarines, regularly fly combat aircraft and are present on all ships in all rates. Rarely am I ever the only woman in a room. With all those changes have come new challenges – trying to balance family, children and a military career is daunting, especially with today’s deployment cycles.

I’m in constant awe and admiration of the sacrifices and determination our men and women in uniform make. The lengths of deployment have steadily increased and the operational tempo is at an all-time high. Ships departing for a six-month deployment understand they may not be home for eight, nine, even ten months. When the ships are in port, they’re ready to surge – this week there are three ships off the coast of New York assisting in Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. It’s all part of the Navy’s mission to be ready and operate forward. The sacrifices our sailors make on a daily basis are incredible.

I’m proud to serve in the Navy and to be a Naval Academy graduate. I’m aware of the wealth of opportunities I’ve been afforded and I can look back with compassion, perspective, and even laughter on the early trials. It’s one of the reasons I keep the old Navy Academy catalogue on my shelf. The book lived up to the cover.

Black Wings is available at Fuze Publishing and also at Amazon in trade paperback and e-book formats. Click here for a video trailer for Black Wings.

You can find me on Facebook.

Poe's Daughters salutes Kathleen and all current and former serving military personnel on this Remembrance Day/Veterans Day weekend.

Campaign Lies

by Sheila Connolly

It's over.  The election is finally over. Seems like it's been going on for years, doesn't it?

 

Mark Twain once said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

 

Now we can state clearly:  everybody lies.  Only in politics, it's called "spin."

 

A long time ago I took a college-level course on statistics.  I did this not because I was fascinated about how to manipulate information to serve an end, but because it was a requirement for admission to an MBA program I planned to apply to, back when I was working for an investment banking firm.  Let me be perfectly clear:  in all the years I worked in business, I used statistics exactly once, when I proudly charted not the increase in membership applications at a nonprofit museum where I worked, but rather the rate of increase. In other words, people were applying for membership faster.  It made a pretty graph.

 

We have endured months of political commercials, from both national and local candidates, on an hourly basis at all times of day.  After a while you can tune them out mentally, or hit your "Mute" button and ignore them.  You've seen them all before, anyway—dozens of times.  But what is curious about these back to back ads is that they are saying diametrically opposed things—and they can't both be right.

 

There are statements like, "Candidate X voted 100% of the time to support the Save the Aardvarks Bill."  Correct, because the bill came up only once (and was roundly trounced by the opposition party, as Candidate X knew it would be) when s/he voted for it. Who does this statement influence?  The aardvark lovers already know the voting record for every candidate on their favorite issue; people who wouldn't know an aardvark if it bit them really don't care. But the general impression the statement gives looks favorable for the candidate, right?

 

Statements like this aren't lies, exactly; they are manipulations of the truth. The creators (diligent campaign hacks, er, experts) choose their words with great care, making sure that nothing is exactly untrue (in the legal sense) but that whatever they say puts their candidate in the best possible light for the target audience.

 

But how stupid do the wordsmiths think we voters are?  When you see conflicting commercials one after the other, you know they can't both be right.  It has been said that the vast majority of voters know who they're going to vote for from the beginning, and they seldom change their minds in the course of a race.  Voters have even been known to vote for incarcerated candidates, because he belongs to the right party and he's been good to them, or so they think (if wasn't their money he embezzled, right?). Party loyalty runs deep—and voting a straight party ticket avoids all that decision-making stuff.

 

So the target for ad-crafters is the Undecideds, who can't seem to make up their mind until they hold the ballot in their hand on Election Day.  Do they flip a coin?  Do they vote because they hated Candidate Y's pink necktie, or Candidate Z's clunky earrings, in the last ad they saw? Conversely, do they reject a candidate because they hate his or her gravelly or squeaky voice? The candidate may be a brilliant person, with a mind like a steel trap and honest to the core, but can his or her election hinge on vocal chords or wardrobe choice?

 

But campaign staffers still go after voters with words, rather than brute force or cash offerings (most of the time, anyway).  They believe that by choosing the right, the perfect words, they can convince us.  The words matter, and I suppose that we writers should be happy about that.

What Makes A Writer A Pro: A Neglected View

Elizabeth Zelvin

With fewer and fewer writers making a living writing fiction, the publishing industry frantically trying to predict the next bestseller, literary agents running scared, and more and more writers bypassing the gatekeeping process of traditional publishing in the age of the e-reader on the one hand and legacy business practices on the other, the perennial discussion of what defines a writer as a professional has become rather heated lately. We’ve been having this conversation on Poe’s Deadly Daughters, and it’s been going on on various readers’ and writers’ e-lists that I participate in.

There are two front runners for most widely agreed-upon criteria for being a professional writer. One, not surprisingly, is making money. In the mystery world, Mystery Writers of America is well known to define the professionalism it advocates for by making the dividing line between its affiliate (ie aspiring) and active (ie professional) members the earning of a certain minimum advance from a publisher that puts the work it accepts through a selection and editing process without any conflict of interest (such as an author list consisting solely of the publisher’s relatives or the publisher charging the author a fee for editing the work in question). Distribution to brick and mortar bookstores used to be an equally important proviso. That, of course, is changing.

The second thing that makes a writer a pro, according to a lot of those with opinions on the subject, is writing every day. I have heard quite a number of bestselling and highly regarded novelists talk about how they treat their writing as work that they sit down to daily, in short, as a job. James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and James Patterson all write every day. Note that all these writers, being highly successful, are paid for writing every day. None of them has to fit their creative time in around the demands of a day job, small children, or other significant distractions. James Patterson did have a high-pressure day job, an important executive job with a major ad agency. For many years, he got up at 5:30 am to write before going to work. (I heard him say this myself.) He still gets up at 5:30 am to write. But James Patterson authors or co-authors one out of every seventeen books sold in America yearly. Is James Patterson the only professional writer in America? Everyone knows that Patterson has co-authors, that he “team writes,” as he calls it himself, like advertising copywriters and movie and TV screenwriters. Some people might argue that that fact makes him less professional than other writers.

Both of these perceptions of professionalism leave out something that I think the public discourse on the topic has gone astray in ignoring completely. No, two somethings: the writer’s craft, and enough knowledge of the way books reach readers to function appropriately and effectively within the maze that publishing in its broadest sense has become.

I don’t write fiction every day. And I have spent a lot more money than I’ve made in the process of learning my craft, researching and writing my work, getting it published, and promoting it, which professional authors know that they must do in the 21st century. However, I know the difference between good prose and bad, my own or someone else’s. I know that my task is far from done when I’ve completed the first draft of a novel or story. I must revise it over and over, till I’ve fixed everything I can spot. Then I must subject it to critique, picking “critters” I respect whose suggestions are likely to be well-informed and helpful. I accept that I may have to “kill my darlings,” ie delete passages I loved when I wrote them in the interests of a tighter story. I know how not to switch point of view in the middle of a paragraph, how to use dialogue and action to “show, not tell,” and how to construct my story in a series of scenes with appropriate transitions. I’m not just saying I know that as a writer I should do these things. Any aspiring writer who’s read a writing book or attended a workshop knows them too. I know how to achieve these elements of craft. How? Because I’m a pro.

I’m still amazed when agents, editors, and fellow writers exclaim over how “clean” my manuscripts are. It astonishes me that in this age of intense competition, anyone turns in a manuscript that has typos, spelling errors, flawed punctuation, grammar, and syntax, and incorrect word usage. How come I don’t make any of these mistakes (beyond the occasional typo—I’m only human)? Because I’m a pro.

Because I’m a pro, I know how to submit a manuscript. I know what to put into a query letter and what not to put into a synopsis. I can describe my story at varying length from elevator pitch to query paragraph to one-page synopsis to three-page synopsis to chapter by chapter outline to jacket copy to catalog copy if called upon to do so. I know to scour the website of every agent and press I approach for submission guidelines and follow them to the letter. If I’m asked for a marketing plan, I can provide it. If I’ve submitted what I thought was a standalone novel, and the publisher asks for a blurb on the next five books in the series, I can sit down at the computer and bat it out.

The other day, a small press publisher to whom I’d submitted my Young Adult manuscript asked if I’d be interested in helping him start a YA imprint (for pay, of course). I was startled. I suggested that first, he needs to see if he likes my manuscript. He might not, and my study of his website turned up one factor that might make a working relationship between us difficult. On the other hand, the question fired my imagination, and within three days I’d come up with a page of ideas about what I could do, what I’d need to learn, and what I’d need to ask for in such a role. I’ve never been or thought of being a publisher. I haven’t sold a YA manuscript yet. But I’m a writer, I’m experienced, I’m published, and hey, I’m a pro.

The Story Behind the Story: Finding the Shape of a Novel

by Sandra Parshall

This is one in a series of occasional posts about the mechanics of the novel-writing process.

I’ve always resisted crime fiction formulas – first plot point here, drop a second body on page XX, etc. – but my books all seem to take on the same shape naturally, without a lot of conscious thought. It’s not so much a formula as a design I find appealing as both a writer and reader.

It looks a lot like a snake that has recently downed a hefty meal. Apologies to all of you who just winced and exclaimed “Yuck!” But the comparison is apt.

The book I’m writing now, sixth in the Rachel Goddard series, is assuming that familiar shape. As always, I will find plenty of room within it for sharp turns in unexpected directions, but basically, it’s a stuffed snake.

As a reader, I want a crime story to get off to a fast start. For some writers, I may be willing to hang in there, but in most cases I’ll abandon a book rather than wait fifty pages for something to happen. With my own books, I try not to test readers’ patience with too much set-up material. I like to kill off the victim in the first chapter. My first book, The Heat of the Moon, isn’t a murder mystery, so this doesn’t apply, but I did throw readers into Rachel’s emotional turmoil as quickly as I could. In Disturbing the Dead, the first victim has been missing for ten years, but I open the first chapter in the middle of a search for her scattered bones on a mountaintop. In subsequent books, someone turns up dead in the first chapters.

That’s the big plot point, the inciting incident, the event that sets the plot in motion. After that swift, shocking bite at the beginning, I have to hold onto readers, make them care enough to stick around.

The second chapter opens out the story a bit, brings in additional characters, and begins to show the effect of the crime on people around the victim.

I’m always a bit baffled when writers moan about the “middle muddle” in their books, because I believe the middle is where all the best stuff should happen. That’s when the story balloons like a snake’s midsection after a large meal.

The middle of my books is where both Tom and Rachel dig around in the lives of other characters, uncovering nasty secrets that may or may not have a bearing on the plot, getting to know aspects of people they haven’t seen before, bringing motives into focus. A murder can have wide-reaching consequences. A murder changes the lives of those left behind, whether they’re connected to the victim or the killer. All of this comes to light in the middle of a book. It could turn into a muddle if revelations aren’t carefully controlled, but if information is carefully rationed, the result is suspense.

I someyimes find it necessary to kill off another character about three-quarters of the way through the book. If I choose to do this, the killing must be meaningful, it must increase suspense and tension, not merely add to the bulge of baffling information. It has to push the story toward its conclusion.

A snake devouring a meal might not be the most pleasant mental image, but that’s what I see when I visualize the shape of my story.

Can you see the underlying shapes of novels you’ve read (or written)? Name your favorite crime novel and tell me what you see when you consider its shape.

Turning Back Time

Sharon Wildwind

No, this isn’t a story about daylight savings time. It’s about a reunion that happened last weekend.

Thirty-five years ago, in a land far, far away, there was a wonderful restaurant called Stone Soup. The name comes from the European folk tale about a traveller who—with a little help—turned a stone and a pot of hot water into a meal. If you don’t know the folk tale, read it here.

Obviously, it’s a story about co-operation and that’s what Stone Soup, the restaurant, was about. A group of people who believed in community building and slow food (long before there was such a term) came together to make a difference.

The people who worked in this co-operative restaurant also owned it. They shopped, cooked, cleaned, invented recipes, dished out food on the serving line, and came in on the weekends to water the sprout jars. It was a business that did well while doing good.

Eventually they expanded into running a children’s shelter, created businesses devoted to baking and sprouting, provided a weekend-venue for live music, and had their own farm land, where they grew a good deal of the produce used in the restaurant.

Their original restaurant site had been a high school for African-American girls. The school closed two years before Stone Soup opened and the building had become a home for half a dozen social services, as well as a day care and a YWCA family life education program.

It was a worn brick building on the edge of the downtown area. The only drawback was a minuscule parking lot, so if you hoped to get a parking spot, you came at the beginning or end of the lunch hour, but not in the middle. The risk you ran by coming at the end was that your favorite dish might be gone. You might have to settle for rhubarb cobbler instead of apple pie, or chili in place of broccoli-chedder chowder. Some hardship!

The first of four Stone Soup locations

An uneven cracked sidewalk led down a few stairs and through a set of wooden doors. Serving line on the right, tables in front  and to the left. Wood paneled walls, big windows along one wall. Round tables, probably left over from when the building was a school. Drawings, quilts and a variety of bric-a-brac was attached to the walls. Huge ferns and spider plants were tucked into every corner. There was always music on the stereo, most days, light jazz or bluegrass.

Always something interesting on the walls

Food was served in brown earthenware bowls and plates, and the servings were more than generous. Two kinds of soup to choose from, built-to-your-specification sandwiches, lots of pies, brownies, cookies and huge cinnamon rolls. About the time I moved, literally, down the street from Stone Soup, and went from a day job to working the midnight shift—meaning I could go to lunch a lot more often—they started serving weekend brunches as well. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I did a lot of writing there, especially after I lived within walking distance. The wonderful thing was that, already having my journal with me, a lot of notes about Stone Soup ended up in those journals. I’d originally planned to let my first set of characters spend some time there, but I realized that it was too magnificent a place to be relegated to the background. One day, I’m going to use Stone Soup, up front and centre, as the main stay in a mystery.

The past weekend there was a Stone Soup reunion. I wasn’t able to attend, but with the help of a local florist and the ability to add a PDF document as an e-mail attachment, I sent them flowers and a letter of good wishes. And I spend part of the weekend going through my journals and digging out old photos. It was a wonderful way to turn back the clock.

Part of the Stone Soup co-op, circa 1985

Here’s my advice. Even if you aren’t and have no desire to be a journal keeper, if you have a special place in your life right now, document it. Give it its own notebook. Fill that notebook with every detail you can. Take photos. Collect a ton of memories. In thirty-five years—maybe a lot less—you’ll find a way to use that material in a book. Don’t let it slip away from you.

---------

Quote for the week:

My most poignant memories really revolve around just being a part of this amazing place. When I reflect back, it felt very much like working at a summer camp — hard work, incredible teamwork and feeling like I had a part in an amazing social experiment to make the world a better place. It was never really about the food — although the food was fantastic. To me, it was always about the idea of a very different kind of business, and I’m sure it influenced me greatly to spend the rest of my working life in nonprofits and in looking for work with meaning first, more than making money.

~Penny White, Stone Soup Cooperative member (quoted in the Asheville Citizen-Times)

A Lesson in the Love of Words

by Julia Buckley

I just started teaching a nine-week creative writing class. The group is ideal: there are only ten of them (as opposed to the group twice that size I'll have next semester). They are all teenage girls who are super creative, and at least two of them want to be novelists. They are enthusiastic about everything we do. And last Friday, we were all inspired by a certain poem for various reasons.

It's a free verse by Billy Collins called "Litany." First I had the girls listen while the poet read his own work, which you can see here.  He reads it like the college professor that he is, investing the poem with a wry humor and an ironic wink at the idea of metaphor in love poetry.

But then we watched the same poem recited by a three-year-old child.  You can see him in the box below. The girls unanimously agreed that they loved the child's recitation more.  Why? I asked.  Because, they said, he obviously took such pleasure in the words he was saying; he loved them.



                          

How important do you think it is to love the words you are writing or reading?  What did you think of this child's recitation?  According to the notes written by his mother, this is not the only poem he memorized at this tiny age--he memorizes text as a hobby.

What's the last thing you memorized?  What are the words you love best?  Did this boy inspire you?  Did he make you cry?

I'd love to hear your feedback about words and our hearts; please share on this bright November Monday.

Move Over, Rosie: Real Women of WWII

by Joanne Dobson and Beverle Graves Myers
Co-authors of Face of the Enemy

The winner of the free copy of FACE OF THE ENEMY is Nan. Congratulations! Thanks to everybody who left a comment.

Joanne Dobson

Beverle Graves Myers

Everybody knows Rosie. She’s the poster babe for the women of World War II—the can-do factory worker in the red bandana who’s rolling up the sleeve of her blue overall to display a determined bicep. But, as we discovered in our research for Face of the Enemy, life wasn’t all Rosie the Riveter for our wartime grandmothers.

In Face of the Enemy, besides writing a page-turning mystery, we set out to highlight women's wartime experience in New York, America’s largest city. After decades of listening to family stories and watching the History Channel, we knew that it was largely women who created the homefront culture. From mundane efforts like saving grease and fat to be used in ammunition production, to bold, "unfeminine" initiatives such as taking lessons in commando training at the YWCA, women “did their bit” while men went off to combat.

Our characters move well beyond Rosie and those other stereotypes, the Betty Grable type pin-ups and the plucky girls drawing stocking seams up their legs with eyebrow pencil. Louise and Cabby, our series protagonists, fight the War at Home in their professional roles as nurse and New York Times journalist. So do other women at their Brooklyn boarding house and the women they will encounter as the New York in Wartime series unfolds. With the exodus of young men from the city, women were thrown into professional, social and personal roles that transformed their previously gender-determined lives in unexpected ways.

Have you heard of the OSS? The Office of Strategic Services? This early espionage agency maintained an apartment on the Upper West Side where women as well as men were trained to be saboteurs and spies. Graduates of the Seven Sisters, such as Smith and Vassar, were particularly in demand as trainees for overseas postings because of their European travel experience and foreign-language skills. Also because many of them were young and pretty, a decided advantage for a spy! At the end of the war, OSS functions were split between the State Department and the War Department, and some of the women went right along.

How about the Manhattan Project? This top-secret program dedicated to splitting the atom was so named because it began at New York’s Columbia University. At least 300 military and civilian women eventually participated in the effort, most in clerical or support positions.  But a few highly trained female scientists were directly involved in the research effort. Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese scientist, became known as “The First Lady of Physics” for her work on nuclear fission. She and others truly opened the door for women to pursue scientific careers after the war.

Plenty of women did take up work on factory assembly lines, many employed outside the home for the first time ever, and some leaving small towns to relocate near the production sites. It wasn’t just airplanes and ships. The entire economy was on a war footing—lingerie producers turned to putting out parachutes and piano factories made long-distance radios. One issue that stood out for us: what happened to the workers’ children? Day care was almost unheard of and not every woman had a willing mother or aunt to watch the children. We were shocked to learn that it was common for older boys and girls to be parked at the movies, which ran all day and evening, and infants were sometimes left in the back seats of cars to sleep while their mothers held down the third shift. Thankfully, social service agencies eventually got up to speed.

Face of the Enemy takes an intelligent, well-informed, lively, sometimes even tragic, look at the dilemmas facing ordinary and, believe us, not-so-ordinary women on the homefront during the second World War. People whose paths would never have crossed otherwise were thrown together, and the resulting political conspiracies, class/ethnic dramas, and star-crossed romances are the very stuff of suspenseful, high-end murder mystery. We hope you enjoy it!
*************************
Joanne Dobson is the Agatha-nominated author of the Karen Pelletier series from Doubleday and Poisoned Pen Press. In 2001, the adult-readers division of the New York Library Association named her Noted Author of the Year, as the writer whose books they most enjoyed recommending. For many years, Joanne was an English professor at Fordham University. She now writes full-time and teaches writing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Website: www.joannedobson.com

Beverle Graves Myers is the author of the Tito Amato Mysteries set in dazzling, decadent 18th-century Venice. Bev also writes short stories that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and numerous other publications. Her work has been nominated for the Macavity, Derringer, and Kentucky Literary awards. A former psychiatrist, Bev now writes full-time. She and her husband live in Louisville, Kentucky. Website: www.beverlegravesmyers.com

Joanne and Bev are collaborating on the New York in Wartime series, which debuted in September 2012 with Face of the Enemy. 

Leave a comment for a chance to win a free copy of Face of the Enemy!

The Merger

by Sheila Connolly

This week two of the Big Six publishers, Random House and Penguin, announced plans to merge, sending ripples through the publishing community.  I am published by an imprint of Penguin.

 

For those who are not writers, the Big Six is the collective name for the major publishers, most based in New York.  They have been, until now:  Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.  Each includes multiple imprints, some of which you may have heard of or remember.  The list goes on for pages, and represents a lot of the former small publishers that  those big publishers have absorbed (or swallowed) because they were having trouble surviving in a difficult publishing environment.

 

Random House and Penguin are the two largest trade houses in the country, and include the two dominant publishers of mass market paperbacks. Random House publishes about 10,000 titles each year; Penguin 4,000 titles. Together they would control 17% of the market, making it hard for Amazon to jigger with the Buy buttons for those titles (as they have done occasionally).

 

Why this merger?  Economics, or so they claim.  In a press release, Penguin pointed to "synergies from shared resources such as warehousing, distribution, printing and central functions." Funny—most of these functions refer to print books. Of course, the companies also add that this merger "advances the digital transformation on an even greater scale."

 

The big publishers (in my opinion) have been slow to respond to the whole digital revolution.  They didn't see it coming; they dismissed it as a mere flash in the pan.  Obviously they were wrong, and now they're playing catch-up.  But it's like trying to turn the Titanic—the traditional business of print books is hard to move quickly.

 

Another reason for the merger?  Amazon, which now controls a huge market share in book sales. Are we witnessing a battle of the Titans?  The old guard forming an alliance to confront the fleet upstart Amazon?

 

Of course, on a more personal note, I have to worry about authors like me who publish with one or the other Big Six companies or their imprints.  I'm friends with a lot of others in my position, mostly cozy writers.  Will our contracts be valid, going forward?  Are we going to have to wait and see whether those contracts are renewed or extended?  Who will sign any new authors or offer any new contracts until the dust settles? (If all goes as planned, this will be later in 2013.)

 

I'd guess that most book buyers pay no attention to the logo on the spine of a book—they recognize the author, or the style of the cover, when they make a selection.  They won't know that some of their buying options may disappear in the coming months.  It's harder and harder for them to find a bookstore to browse in, so of course they flock to Amazon because it's so much easier to shop there.

 

Random House CEO Markus Dohle says, "the whole idea is to preserve the small company culture and small company feeling on the editorial and creative side."  Let's hope so (please don't take my editor away!).  As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts.  It's going to be a bumpy night."

 

One last question:  will it be Random Penguin or Penguin House? Outgoing Pearson (Penguin's parent company) chief executive Marjorie Scardino joked that "Random Penguin did come into conversation, but it hurt the penguin's feelings."

 

 

JK Rowling Goes Over to the Dark Side

Elizabeth Zelvin

Last time I looked, J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, had more than 1,310 holds on the 200 copies available to borrow from the New York Public Library. So I gave in and spent $14.99 on the Kindle edition. (Amazon is selling the $35.00 hardcover for $20.90.) Mystery writers needn’t panic: it’s not a detective story. It’s a masterfully and smoothly written literary-mainstream novel that I was glad I’d read but didn’t fall in love with.

Readers looking for the voice and sensibility of the Harry Potter books won’t find it in The Casual Vacancy. There’s no fantasy in the rather grim depiction of a smug English village in which the comfortable middle class are forced to interact with the socioeconomically disadvantaged council estate (the British version of “the projects”) next door. The events of the novel include child abuse, bullying, domestic violence, mental illness, a rape, and a suicide, as well as enough sex and greed and as little love to justify the most cynical opinion of the English village. Rowling’s Pagford is a hotbed of political maneuvering and dysfunctional family dynamics.

One of the features of the Harry Potter books that made it so appealing to adults as well as children was its endearing protagonist, Harry himself. Readers also empathized with Harry’s best friends, Hermione and Ron. The Casual Vacancy has no protagonist. I’d categorize it as closer to close-third-person point of view than omniscient narrator, but the point of view shifts frequently among a dozen main characters. The shifting POV is so deftly handled that I’d acquit Rowling of headhopping. But her POV characters are all so deeply flawed that it’s hard to root for any of them. They’re not endearing. They’re not lovable.

Rowling is willing to show a few of her characters behaving well. But inevitably, in another scene, in a different role or relationship, they’re shown behaving badly. The work that came to my mind as comparable was the movie Crash, in which the same character could be a sexually abusive, racist cop in one scene, a loving father in another (if I remember correctly), and a heroic firefighter in a third. But the whole point of that movie was that people show different sides of themselves as their lives intersect with those of others. That’s not Rowling’s purpose. I don’t think her characters’ complexity is meant to show the good and evil within each person, parallel to the macro good and evil in the world of Harry Potter. I might be oversimplifying, but it seemed to me that Rowling’s bleak view is that human nature is venal and self-serving, and that the real world being what it is in the 21st century, few can rise above their fears and hungers. In other words, Muggles suck.

Some readers won’t mind the absence of a protagonist. Equally, not all will mind the absence of a character endearing enough to empathize with. For me, however, at least one endearing character is the essential factor in books I fall in love with. I’m not saying that her characters are bad guys. They’re not like Voldemort or Harry’s Uncle Vernon. The latter is a fairy tale wicked uncle, portrayed without depth or realism. (If he appeared in The Casual Vacancy, he’d have to be an abusive guardian with a plausible psychological backstory.) The novel’s teens and adults have too much depth to be called grotesques. Most of them are complex enough to have a vulnerable side that makes them fleetingly sympathetic. But they’re unattractive in an inventive variety of ways. Hypocrisy, malice, and narcissism are well represented, kindness and especially self-knowledge in short supply.

As she reaches her denouement, Rowling finally shows compassion for her characters. A tragedy precipitates a general change of heart. A near-psychopathic teenage bully and mischief maker becomes remorseful. A hypercritical parent becomes kind and gentle. A self-mutilating teen stops cutting. A contemptuous wife becomes loving. We know from the Afterword that Rowling “supports a wide number of causes and is the founder of Lumos, which works to transform the lives of disadvantaged children.” To me, that suggests that we are supposed to take away a socially liberal message from the story. But all that has led up to that point is such a discouraging vision of society and people that I’m not sure every reader will get it.