A Few of My Favorite Things, Part I

Elizabeth Zelvin

Kittens’ whiskers? I don’t think so. Brown paper packages? No, though I must say I prefer brightly colored presents piled under a tree to knowledge of what’s inside them—more scope for the imagination, as Anne of Green Gables would have said. Schnitzel with noodles? Sounds good, but not on my top ten foods list. I wonder if anyone has tried updating the lyrics from The Sound of Music for the 21st century? Here are a couple of the postmodern high tech items that I’d put on such a list.

EZ-Pass. This electronic transponder allows motorists to zip through toll booths without laboriously rolling down windows (it was a laborious process once upon a time) and counting out change. It also permits me to drive through tolls in special lanes in which no slowpokes (ie cars without EZ-Pass) are allowed, sometimes significantly shortening my time on the road. EZ-Pass started out in 1991 in the New York metropolitan area (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) and is currently used throughout the Northeast, as far west as Illinois, and as far south as North Carolina. It automatically deducts appropriate sums from my credit card, so I don’t have to worry about running out of funds or having to refill it. The system works. I’ve been using it since it started, and it’s never let me down. It’s stuck to the windshield of my car, and when I say stuck, I mean it really sticks, using a rigid plastic Velcro-like system of hooks and loops. The only time mine kept falling off, my husband eventually pointed out that I had failed to remove the protective clear plastic backing. Oops.

GPS. The global positioning system, which I also use in my car, tells me where to go and how to get there from wherever I am by consulting a satellite that detects my location from way up in the sky and instructing me in an electronic voice (gender and accent of my choosing). Unlike other navigators with whom I’ve driven, Sadie (almost everyone names their GPS) never loses her temper and always defers to me if I select a different route from the one she’s suggesting. She got me safely to bookstores and libraries in unfamiliar cities all over the country on various book tours starting in 2008. If I make a wrong turn, she calmly says, “Recalculating” and tells me the distance to the next turn and exactly what the road sign I’m looking for will say. Her presence is a huge stress reliever. I hate getting lost and like to arrive wherever I’m going on time. When I turn the key in the ignition, boot her up, and hear her pleasant, familiar voice, I relax. Her only flaw is a persistent desire to put me on the Cross Bronx Expressway, which any New Yorker knows is hideous with traffic and to be avoided at all costs. But they say the GPS is no substitute for local knowledge. So I just ignore her, and she recalculates and gets me where I’m going.

Coming in Part II: iPhone and iPad

Success Can Be Dangerous

by Sandra Parshall

Non-writers seem endlessly fascinated by “the writing life” and by each author’s “process” – the minutiae of a writer’s schedule, where we write, the exact number of hours spent sitting at the computer, where our ideas come from, how we do our research, whether we outline or not.

We answer these questions, usually, with a certain puzzlement as to why anybody would care, but with immense gratitude that readers are interested in us at all. Neither the questions nor answers, though, even scratch the surface of the true “writing life.”

If you want the truth, read Lionel Shriver’s essay in the October 21 edition of The New Republic. Writing is a high-anxiety occupation, she points out accurately, and now more than ever authors are driven by fear. Fear that their next books will be rejected by their publishers – for every contract permits the publisher the absolute right to decline the book to which an author has devoted a year or more of her life. Fear of being forgotten by readers. Fear of publishing something that will turn readers against them. Fear of saying no to any promotional opportunity, however much time it takes away from writing.

Success removes these anxieties for only the rarest and most secure of authors. For others, a breakthrough to big sales may make matters worse.

Shriver’s seventh book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was a hit and became an acclaimed film. At last she had the kind of success authors dream of. And she discovered that “if you really want to write, the last thing you want to be is a success.” Shriver, now 56, has a “frenzied calendar” and feels afraid to turn down any invitation to a conference or festival, any request for an interview, a speech, a signing, a quote, a feature story, a blurb, a review. She could easily spend all her time running hither and yon – doing everything except sitting at her desk and writing – “at the modest price of scalding self-disgust.” She recognizes that “this indiscriminate, pushover availability is pathetic.”

She does it out of fear, a deep terror that “worked its way into my very bones” during all the years when she knew she could lose her publisher, her career, at any time. Success has made her afraid of losing her success.

Shriver’s frantic life is different merely by degree from that of many beginners as well as midlist authors who have hung onto publishing careers for years without “breaking out” into stardom. Writers receive their orders from their publishers and agents: Get out there and do every damned thing you can think of to sell books, and expect to do most of it at your own expense. Families and friends and favorite pastimes are pushed into the background as writers scramble to keep their names before readers. They blog, they tweet, they answer e-mail, they put out newsletters and run contests, they chat on Facebook, they do seemingly endless “blog tours” for each new book, they attend big, expensive conferences, they spend a fortune traveling around in person to do bookstore signings that can’t possibly yield enough royalties to cover the cost of getting there. They want to be everywhere, all the time, even at the risk that people will get sick of the sight of their faces and names. They want to be celebrities, because celebrities are the people our society values most.

When do they write? Whenever they can find time to fit it in. Some are scrambling to turn out two or three books a year, yet the promotion doesn’t stop. Writing, for too many authors, has become secondary to promotion.

Something is seriously out of balance in this picture.

Life wasn’t like this for writers in the past. They might have made a few appearances when a new book came out, done a tour if money was available to pay for it, accepted invitations to speak, but they didn't keep at it day and night all year long. Social networking didn't exist as a distraction. Mostly they sat in solitude and wrote.

Some writers still live and work that way. We don’t see them at every conference and every bookstore. They don't tweet or blog or do Facebook. We don’t see their names every time we go on the internet. Enough of these people become successful to make the rest of us wonder how they managed it without constant self-promotion. Is it possible that all they did was sit in solitude and write a great book – and then another and another?

Maybe it is possible.

But how many other writers would have the courage to try something so radical? 

A Writers’ Place

Sharon Wildwind

I’m spending a few days with another writer. Her house has always been one of my favorite places because I'm inordinately curious about places where writers live. I’ve been known to discreetly check out closets, but there’s no need to do this here. Her whole house is out there, on display, filled with treasures.

She has an number of display areas: old-fashioned windows with wide sills, little cubbyholes where walls come together, glass-fronted display cabinets, and the inevitable bookshelves in every room.

Another thing she has in almost every room is plants. We discovered a fascinating article in the local paper last weekend about how some houseplants remove toxins from indoor air. With all of the chemicals now used to produce furniture, drapes, carpets, and even bed linens, there is out gassing for months or even years. Those fumes contain benzene, formaldehyde, and other life- and health-threatening chemicals. Electronic equipment like computers and large family entertainment units emit acetone.

 Two dedicated house plants —- dedicated means a specific houseplant picked because it reduces specific chemicals —- are recommended for each 100 square feet of living space, and the plants should be placed as close as possible to the areas likely to emit the gasses. For example, peace lilies placed close to home entertainment units or computers gobble up that acetone. For more information from NASA on how greenery can improved air quality in closed spaces, go here.

Every window in her house has glass baubles and light-catchers. Here’s a kitchen window over the sink. All of those hanging things create a love place to wash dishes, and when the sun hits the window just right, rainbows dance across the room.

Her house is all about visuals. She has a talent for placing unrelated objects next to one another to create visual vignettes all over her house. Here’s a painting, a salvaged wooden freeze, and a cloth cat decorating  a corner.

The last time I was here —- far too many years ago —- I said to myself, she can’t possibly find place to put anything else. Of course I was wrong. There are always places to add a few more details, like replacing ordinary plastic light switch covers with colorful ceramic ones.

I’m most fascinated by what makes it inside a writer’s magic circle, that three or four feet of space surrounding the heart of the workspace, the desk, the computer, and so on. This blue-and-yellow arrangement is one of the thing my friend has there.

Unfortunately, I have a habit of rarely changing the stuff on my desk. After a while, it disappears.  I don’t mean it gets lost in the shuffle, though goodness knows there are days when that happens.

I mean that I stop seeing it. When I stop seeing it, it stops inspirational.

 Maybe we writers could campaign for something like Daylight Savings Time, only call it Desk Rearranging Day. Four times a year we could put away the old, bring in new things, and stir those creative juices.

I have a question this week instead of a quote:
What physical objects inspire you? What do you like to keep inside your magic writing circle?

Those of you in Canada, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving yesterday. We certainly did.

Going to the Woods and Coming Into Focus

This photo was taken on New Year's Day. We wanted to do something significant to mark the new year, and the new chances we had before us. So, like Thoreau, we went to the woods, a place where we would not let the daily chores of life bog us down, but could instead embrace the bigness of life and be inspired by it.

Since then life has, predictably, gone into overdrive, and we've rarely had time to look at the big picture, as we did on that frigid January 1st. My oldest son has entered the rhythm of college life, commuting to classes each day and then going to work in the evening.  My youngest son has started high school and learned that it is much more challenging than was grade school, and he must spend more time on homework and projects.

My husband's job is not only time-consuming but also physically taxing, and he often comes home with not enough physical or mental energy to do more than sit on the couch and watch television.  

Much to my joy, I'm about to sign a contract with a new book publisher.  I'm thrilled about it, but again reality has crept in: I will be working two jobs, teacher and writer, and if you count mothering as a third job, then you'll be sympathetic to the idea that I don't find much free time.  I'm not saying that I need it; I've reached a stage in life during which I pretty much need to be working on something at all times--perhaps it's a way of justifying my existence.  My chore list is eternal, but I make it myself, and that in itself is a luxury.

I think, though, that it's time to go back to the woods.  Just as I'm constantly re-charging my laptop and my phone, I need to re-charge myself and my busy family.  We need to remind ourselves that the narrow paths we trod are not the whole world. That we are connected to that bigger world becomes more obvious when we turn our eyes upward, outward or inward--anywhere that we can get a sense of the larger world and its endless possibilities.  

Do I have time to go to the woods?  Yes and no.  There's a little forest preserve near our home that could be a temporary respite. Beyond that, there are some deep and lovely places--where one could get lost for hours--just a couple hours in either direction.  That might be a possibility for Thanksgiving weekend.

How do you recharge?  Do you go away, or do you have some sort of ritual that you can do in your own home?

Must every heroine be beautiful?

By Sandra Parshall

In a recent New Yorker blog, Adelle Waldman raised provocative questions about “the problem of female beauty” and the prevalence of beautiful women characters in fiction. She suggests that men are so powerfully drawn to beautiful women in real life that the valuation of women by their looks carries over into fiction. 

Waldman quotes novelist Lionel Shriver’s complaint that “fiction writers’ biggest mistake is to create so many characters who are casually beautiful.” These fictional women have many extraordinary qualities that appeal to the books’ male characters – and, by the way, they’re gorgeous too.

Waldman also offers examples of books, such as Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, in which the male characters’ pursuit of beautiful women is more pointed. Walter, the ardent feminist in the Franzen book, is attracted only to beautiful women. Walter’s son can’t enjoy sex with his pretty girlfriend unless the light is on and he can see her lovely face.

Beautiful heroines are the norm in crime fiction, of course. Beautiful and young. Miss Marple was a special case. Only in recent years have we begun to see older, less attractive women running around chasing criminals and getting into nasty scrapes, and they are still a novelty and rarely have romantic relationships. Men can age, as Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch does, but their love interests will likely be young and hot forever. Many women readers love Barbara Havers in Elizabeth George’s books because she is plain and dumpy, but you’ll notice George has yet to give Barb a real love life complete with romance and hot sex.  Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli is supposedly plain, but she’s married to a devastatingly handsome man, and as the books have gone on her looks have been mentioned less and less. And look who plays her on TV.

How do you feel about this?

Be honest.

You will no doubt say that you can you cheer for a heroine who is middle-aged, overweight, gray-haired, and plain of face.

Do you want to read book after book about her, if her life is realistically limited by her age and looks?

Will you believe a handsome man, who can have his pick of gorgeous women, feeling sexually attracted to her and pursuing her passionately?

What about the mousey young woman with thick glasses, an overbite, and a high-pitched nasal voice? If she’s smart, is that enough to make you keep reading about her?

Are attractive women inherently more intriguing? Do we assume more interesting things will happen to them because of their looks?

And while we’re on the subject, how do you feel about unattractive male protagonists?

Room for Something New

by Sheila Connolly

Last week I wrote about the obsolescence of things learned in the past. Now I want to look at learning new things.

There seems to be some scientific consensus that exercising one’s brain will keep it healthy and nimble.  I’ll vote for that (note that writing is the most recent of a long line of careers for me).  In addition, I’m interested in learning about skills that people don’t do anymore, because I find myself writing about the past, even though my books are set in the present.

Last weekend I went to Old Sturbridge Village for their annual Apple Days celebration (which of course I consider research for my Orchard Mysteries).  They have a nice collection of heirloom trees there, all untouched by chemicals, and they offer (among many things) a tasting each year, which is fun since most people don’t know these older trees exist, much less have a chance to try them.  I was pleased that I actually have some of the ones they shared this year, and I was so enamored of one variety (“Mother”) that I ordered one, that will arrive in the spring. That makes it my ninth apple tree (I have a very small orchard).

I did pass up the cider molasses making demonstration, because it promised to be a long slow process: build fire, hang cauldron of fresh apple juice over it, boil until thick, skimming off whatever crud floats to the toop.  End of recipe.

However, I was excited to learn how one shoots a musket (ca. 1816), which is useful information.  It involves measuring black powder (which looks more like small gravel than powder) into the barrel, stuffing down a wad of cloth to keep it there and contain the charge for just a bit (if you’re really shooting, you’d put a lead ball in next), then adding a dash of powder to the “pan,” then sharpening your flint so it will produce a spark, and finally you get to shoulder the thing and fire.  It’s very loud.  The process gave me a whole new appreciation of warfare, when each combatant had to go through this laborious process just to shoot a single bullet. (And also deal with misfires and erratic shots that go astray, no matter how good a marksman you were.)

And then I went on to the communal cider making display.  Actually that’s a misnomer:  it was an apple grinding event, powered by an ox, that created the mush that would then be placed between layers of rye grass in a giant press and squished to force out the juice, which was then transferred into barrels to ferment.  At that point the description gets even lovelier:  the biological detritus (like a few mouse carcasses, dead insects, leaves, stems and twigs) gets blown out the top bung-hole by the fermentation process, while the “lees” sink to the bottom of the barrel.  If you want to decant the drinkable part, take it from the middle! 

I learned that cider making really was a communal effort.  One entrepreneur owned the grinder and the press, and the good citizens would bring their apples (and their ox or horse for power) for processing; they would then pay the owner in barrels of cider.

After that I was fascinated to listen to a reenactor describe how to bake in a brick oven (build large fire early in the day, to heat the bricks, then remove the fire, shut the flue, and start adding what you want baked—the stuff that takes longest goes in first, toward the back, and you keep adding more items through the day).  The way to test the heat is to stick your hand in and see how long you can stand it:  10-12 seconds means it’s about 450 degrees. Anybody want to go back to the good old days?

I’ve been visiting OSV since I was a teenager.  I’m not sure what impression it made on me then, but it was enough to keep me coming back over the years, and I introduced my daughter to the place when she was just about the same age I was when I first saw it.  I don’t expect anyone to hand me a musket and tell me to shoot someone (or something), nor am I going to haul bushels of apples to a shared press.  But knowing how these things were done gives me a better understanding of life in earlier centuries. It’s a wonder anybody won a war, when the weaponry was so erratic and slow.  It’s a wonder anyone managed to cook anything (particularly in the summer, when the kitchen must have been blazing hot, not to mention infested with flies, attracted by the livestock just outside the door).  But wars were fought and people ate, so I guess it all worked out.

I love research. And to think I call this work! 

 

AVAILABLE NOW!

Humorous vs funny

Elizabeth Zelvin

What’s the difference between a humorous mystery and one that’s funny? I know that many writers and, more important, agents disagree with me, but imho (in my humble opinion, as we say online), calling a manuscript humorous is the kiss of death. “I’m enclosing my humorous mystery manuscript, A Barrel of Deaths, in which my madcap protagonist, Corky Screwball, has a series of hilarious adventures as she tracks a murderer through the sewers of New York.” As an agent would say, not for me. The “humorous” label is like a laugh track on a TV sitcom. The obvious anxiety that the readership or audience won’t know it’s supposed to be funny unless they’re prompted is detrimental to genuine humor.

If I’m told a book is humorous, I expect to find a peppering of jokes—sometimes identified as jokes in the text—and a strained humor that may be expressed in excessive adjectives and adverbs, coyness about sexuality and strong language, an intrusive narrative voice that may overpower the characters’ voices, clichés produced as if the author has no idea they’re not fresh, and other devices by which some writers try too hard to be funny.

On the other hand, if a reader I trust tells me a book made her chuckle or laugh out loud, I’m willing to try it in the expectation of being pleased. Sense of humor being as individual as taste in books, I may not find it funny. But I won’t be unwilling to try it or braced against being distinctly unamused.

I’ve done so much purging of my bookshelves lately that it’s hard to find “humorous” passages I don’t find funny, but here’s an example. I’ve omitted the author’s identity (no one I know personally, but the book got good reviews) and character names.

I contained myself until we were in the car….Then I leaned forward and said, “You know who [that] is? He’s the kid who lives next door to…[t]he house where the murdered man was!”

Now here’s one of the differences between men and women. If they had been women, both of them would have turned around with their jaws dropped and their eyes stretched wide. They would have said, “No! You’ve got to be kidding!”

Being men, X said, “Huh,” and Y didn’t say anything at all….

X said, “God, it’s nearly one o’clock. We’re all gonna hate getting up in the morning.”

Sometimes men are just no fun.

In contrast, here’s a passage from the late Donald Westlake, a writer who wrote many very funny books in his distinguished career. I won’t try to find a passage I thought was a sidesplitter. As I said, what makes people laugh is idiosyncratic and varies from one reader to another. But here are the first two paragraphs of Get Real, Westlake’s posthumously published final novel. It features his series character Dortmunder, a likable crook to whom the unexpected inevitably happens as he proceeds from caper to caper. Note the simplicity of the language, the absence of cliché, the distinctive voice, and the effortless command of tone.

Dortmunder did not like to stand around on street corners. A slope-shouldered, glum-looking individual in clothing that hadn’t been designed by anybody, he knew what he looked like when he stood for a while in one place on a street corner, and what he looked like was a person loitering with intent. The particular intent, as any cop casting an eye over Dortmunder would immediately understand, was beside the point, and could be fine-tuned at the station; the first priority was to get this fellow in charge.

Which was why Dortmunder didn’t like standing around on street corners; he hated to give cops the feeling there was duty to be done. And yet, here he was, in the middle of a weekday morning in April, as obvious as a carbuncle in the pale glare of the weak spring sunshine, the near-beer equivalent of real sunshine as in, say, August, but still plenty bright enough to pick out a questionable detail as large as John Dortmunder, who happened to be waiting, in fact, for a cab.

Need I say more?

Is it a virtue or a vice?

by Sandra Parshall

“She’s generous to a fault.”

“He’s the bravest person I’ve ever known. He’s fearless!”

“He could sell ice to Eskimos.”

“I wish I had her self-confidence.”

“You couldn’t ask for a more loyal friend.”

We all know people like that. We’ve all said things like that. And we all know, consciously or not, that beyond a certain point those admirable traits can  become obnoxious, obsessive, or downright dangerous.

In her excellent Psychology Today article, Mary Loftus puts it succinctly: “The nature of a virtue is that a vice is almost always hidden inside.”

In fiction, writers tend to go with the extremes, because they make for more vivid characters who can move the plot. The “brave” and “fearless” person is less likely to be a firefighter or mountain climber than a criminal with a string of homicides to his credit. The “generous” person is a manipulator who doles out favors to ensnare others. The smooth talker is a corrupt politician. Loyalty, carried to extremes, can result in all kinds of bad acts. The blatantly self-confident person is a braggart who makes an ideal murder victim. (Come on, haven’t you ever wished you could bash somebody like that with the closest blunt object, or at least slap her silly to make her shut up about her marvelous accomplishments?)

Sometimes our “best” traits are also our worst flaws.

Loftus writes in her article about a recently published book, Fear Your Strength by Robert Kaiser and Robert Kaplan, that explores the danger of carrying an initially positive trait too far. As business consultants and executive coaches for a total of 50 years, they’ve seen everything. Name a strength, they say, and they’ll describe cases where it got out of control, doing damage and sometimes wrecking a career.

In his book Tipping Sacred Cows: Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues, Duke Corporate Education faculty member Jake Breeden warns that oldfashioned preconceived ideas of what is virtuous can lead to overwork, micro-managing and, ultimately, burnout. If you’re in management and force your values on those under your authority, you will stifle creativity and breed simmering resentment and unhappiness. Breeden compares extraverts to vampires in the workplace, sucking confidence and productivity out of others. Flexibility, in your own behavior and your expectations of others, can yield better results.

On the other hand, being constantly agreeable and bland, never making waves, won’t get you far in business. The more agreeable you are, the less money you’re likely to make. And an accommodating nature sets you up as prey to the fearless, thoroughly self-confident types who won’t hesitate to knock you down and stomp on you as they make their way to their destinations. However, nice guys appeal more to the average woman, and anyone of either gender who has an agreeable nature is more likely to be happy in life, with or without major professional success.

Many of these good folks gone wrong have become stereotypes in crime fiction. Readers recognize them almost immediately for what they are and can predict their behavior farther on in the story. If they unexpectedly show a better side, it feels jarring and unrealistic, because we don’t often see that kind of change in real life. The slow evolution of good trait to bad, the spiraling down of a single person’s nature, is usually reserved for literary fiction, where speed and pace aren’t as vital and the story isn’t driven by the plot. The most we’re likely to get in a crime story is a flashback, or glimpses through other people’s memories, of what a victim or villain was once like, along with an explanation of why he or she ended up going to extremes. Sometimes a single event brought about the change, and that life-altering experience is the key to solving the crime. We may get the same compressed picture of a protagonist’s evolution. 

As I write about this, my own characters keep popping into my mind as examples, although when I was creating them I certainly didn’t intend them to be stereotypes. I wanted all of them, including the villains, to be complex and, in the end, understandable. As both a reader and a writer, I think the best fictional people have aspects to their natures that are so familiar, so easily recognizable, that they make the characters’ more extreme behavior understandable.

Do you have people in your life who have carried virtues too far? Can you name memorable fictional characters who fit this description?

Imaging Yourself Successful? Don't

Sharon Wildwind

If you want to do something well, imagine yourself doing that thing well. If you want to be successful, visualize yourself as already being a success. Imagine every detail as perfect. Allow no room for the slightest imperfection in our dream.

Does this sound like every self-help book or guru you’ve ever read or heard? I offer another possibility. That kind of visualization isn’t a roadmap to success, it’s a dark and devious trap. Why?

Because most of us aren’t nearly creative enough with our imaginations. We turn our hopes for our big, bigger, biggest days into something no self-respecting Hollywood screen writer would write.

My vision is that I’m having lunch at a top New York restaurant — I like Italian, so how about Del Posto’s on 10th Avenue — with an editor from a big publishing house.

Between the Lobster Salad Oreganata and the Porcini Ravioli with Chestnuts she tells me how much she loves my work. She says I’m the author she’s been waiting years to find. By the Rare Wild Salmon over Perilla she waxes poetic about how she and I are going to build a fabulous career for me. As we linger over our Butterscotch Semifreddo, and designer expresso, she says she hopes I’m as excited as she is because she can’t wait to get started.

What’s wrong with imagining that?

It’s powered by the same infinite improbability drive as Zaphod Beeblebrox’s ship, Heart of Gold in the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Remember that device (temporarily) turned Ford Prefect into a penguin, and did bad things with a million-gallon vat of custard. It’s not something I want to mess around with.

Here’s what my imaginary afternoon would probably really be like.

It will be not just raining. but pouring. Maybe there is even a hurricane off the coast waiting to make landfall. Liz knows far better than me the likelihood of getting a cab during a NYC downpour, but I’m betting it’s not good. I arrive at the publisher’s office with damp, flat hair; mud splattered stockings, and squishy shoes.

My editor apologizes profusely, but an unexpected telephone conference has been scheduled in an hour and would it be okay if we go around the corner to a mom-and-pop Italian ristorante where we can be served quickly? Okay, so it’s still Italian, so I say fine.

Before the waitress hands us menus, my hostess tells her that we are in a hurry, so could we have green salad and the spaghetti special? I can get green salad and spaghetti in Calgary! I console myself with the thought there might be a gooey dessert later.

It turns out to be fascinating to watch how she can eat and talk at the same time. I’m eating, at least I think I’m eating because food is disappearing from my plates, but what I’m mostly doing is taking notes on napkins of all the things she’s telling me I have to do now.

No time for dessert, of course. It’s back through the rain to her office where she shakes my hand, says she’s looking forward to us building a working relationship, and do I mind telephone calls after 10:00 PM?

She hands me off to a second associate editor, who takes me to her tiny office and reviews my contract with me in excruciating detail. I’m not sure I understand half of what she’s telling me. Finally she hands me two copies of the contract, suggests that if I have any questions, I should get my entertainment lawyer to look at it before I sign. And please return the signed copies to her by next week.

Once more into the rain, dear friends. Back to the ristorante, I think, where the waitress recognizes me, finds a towel so I can dry my hair, and brings me something gooey and another cup of expresso. I sit by the window eating, drinking, and thinking that I don’t know an entertainment lawyer. I don’t even know if there is one in Calgary, and if there is, I bet he or she costs big bucks.

Somewhere between the wet wool, garlic, and coffee smells, as I watch through the window ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives in the rain, I realize I’m about to make one of the biggest decisions of my life and nothing, absolutely nothing I’ve every imagined came close to how wonderful, funny, and aggravating this afternoon has been.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t imagine good things happening to us in the future. I’m saying we need to build in enough high stakes, humor, and humanity to make what we imagine come as close to real life as possible. We’d do that for our characters, wouldn’t we? 

Quote for the week

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

~ Neil Armstrong, (1930 – 2012) naval aviator, test pilot, aerospace engineer, astronaut, and university professor

The Story Behind Clark Rockefeller

an interview with Julia Buckley

Since the now-notorious "Clark Rockefeller," aka Christian Gerhartsreiter, has begun to serve his life sentence in an American jail, I thought it might be timely to share and interview I did with his biographer Mark Seal, in 2011:

From the interview:

Mark Seal was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his new book, THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT.

Your publisher compares Clark Rockefeller to Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley, and a person in the book compares him to Swift’s Tom Jones, but he reminded me of another fictional character: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, who changed his name (from James Gatz) as a mere boy:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time . . . His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all . . . . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end,” in pursuit of “a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”

I thought of this every time I read accounts of people who felt Rockefeller was an egotist, or that he seemed desperate to appear not just like them, but better than them. Did the parallel ever occur to you in the years that you did this research?

Yes, you are absolutely on target. Gatsby, like Rockefeller, is about a man nobody truly knew, who hid behind façade of wealth and taste that really wasn’t really real. As you note, Gatsby was a boy named Jimmy Gatz from North Dakota without connections, money, or education. He invented himself as Gatsby, much the way Christian Gerhartsreiter did as Clark Rockefeller.

Throughout all of his identities, “Rockefeller” never seemed to do actual work, other than the task of manipulating other people, their homes and their money. So where did he get his impressive art collection—or, if it was fake, how did the art itself fool so many people?

It’s one of the big mysteries of the book, and everyone seems to have a different answer. Some say the art was loaned to him by a friend, others insist that he had the copies done by some unidentified copyist somewhere, someone else insisted that he possibly painted them himself (which I found difficult to believe, considering the quality of the paintings). His attorney told me the paintings were derivatives, worthless, really. But they were indeed done so well they fooled artists, art experts and galley owners.

How do you account for the fact that some very smart people were utterly bamboozled by Rockefeller, while others (including one notable woman who compared the story to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) said they never for a moment believed in him or his ridiculous persona. What might have accounted for the difference?

Of course, many who say that they knew now may not have been as vocal back then. So it’s difficult to say who really knew and who didn’t. He was extremely believable, at least in the beginning, and people are willing to believe things when they are said by some one who is seemingly educated, erudite and, most importantly, has a famous name.

To a certain extent, Rockefeller’s wife seemed to buy into his fiction because he filled a requirement in terms of her own aspirations. Do you think her ambition was the major reason that she never seemed to question all of the inconsistencies in her husband’s life?

She is a very smart, educated woman. I believe she was taken in for the same reasons as everyone else, and she insisted in the trial that she didn’t use his name for career advancement.

You met Clark Rockefeller. What was your own feeling after your meetings? Did you feel his charisma, or did he seem pathetic?

I was not able to interview him. The book is built on interviews I conducted with those who knew him, police reports, court transcripts, television and other media documents. And, of course, I was able to observe him day after day in the month-long trial.

Ah. If we viewed Rockefeller in terms of the Tragic Greek Hero, what do you think would have been the primary flaw that led to his downfall? After all, he managed to live his false lives for a very long time. Was it Clark Rockefeller who brought down Clark Rockefeller?

The flaw that led to his downfall is that he wanted it all: the $800,000 divorce settlement from his ex-wife and his daughter, even though his ex-wife was granted custody. He brought himself down by kidnapping his daughter.

Does Rockefeller embody a twisted version of The American Dream?

Yes, in the sense that he was like so many immigrants who came to this country: reinventing himself for the new world. However, in Clark’s case, somewhere along the line he forgot about facts and embraced a life of fiction.

Do any of Rockefeller’s friends visit him in prison?

Yes, several of them have said they visited him in prison.

Interesting! Were there people who testified on his behalf in court?

There were psychologists and psychiatrists who testified on his behalf.

Now that Christian Gerhartsreiter has been charged with murder, do you anticipate that he will be in jail for life, or do you think that he might charm a jury into acquitting him?

I wouldn’t want to second-guess a jury. But like everything about this case, I will be riveted to the trial and its outcome.

Mark Seal, thanks so much for letting me read this fascinating book and for answering some of my burning questions.

A journalist for thirty-five years, Mark Seal is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT: THE ASTONISHING RISE AND SPECTACULAR FALL OF A SERIAL IMPOSTOR, now on sale. Seal was a 2010 National Magazine Award finalist for his Vanity Fair profile of Clark Rockefeller.

He lives in Aspen, Colorado. View Seal's website at www.markseal.com