A New Voice: Ken Isaacson

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

In Ken Isaacson's first novel, Silent Counsel, a child is killed by a driver who invokes attorney-client privilege to prevent his lawyer from revealing his identity until a satisfactory plea agreement is reached. The prosecutor refuses to deal and the child’s mother turns her wrath on the defense lawyer as she tries to discover who killed her little boy. Kirkus Reviews called Silent Counsel, which was inspired by a real case, “a complex story [with a] heart-pounding climax.” Ken has practiced law for 25 years, first as a member of a major Wall Street firm and now as in-house general counsel to an international transportation company. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, dog, and four cats.

SP: Why did you decide to write about a mother who lost a child, rather than a father? Do you think the story would be very different with a male character?

KI: Wow…no one’s ever asked me that before. And now that I think about it, I can’t say that I ever made a decision to write about a mother rather than a father—it never occurred to me that the story would be anything other than from the mother’s point of view.

I think the story would have a different feel if it had been done otherwise. In Silent Counsel, Ben’s parents, Stacy and Marc, drift apart following their son’s death, mainly because they have different ways of coping with the terrible hit-and-run that tore their lives apart. Stacy becomes obsessed with finding the person responsible, while Marc is determined to grieve in his own way, but then try to move on. And Stacy wonders whether a father could ever understand the depth of the biological bond between mother and child that makes his solution impossible for her to accept. I think it’s that bond that drives the story, and if it were told from the father’s point of view, that element would be missing.

Of course, that’s not to diminish the loss suffered by a father in such a situation. I can tell you that when I first conceived the story, my oldest son was about six years old (the age of Ben Altman in Silent Counsel), and writing about losing a child was certainly an emotional experience.

SP: On the same subject, a perennial question on writers’ listservs is whether men and women can write convincingly from the POV of the opposite gender. Were you completely comfortable writing about a woman’s experiences, or did you ask your wife or other female readers for their opinions and insights?

KI: I’ve watched some of those threads online, most recently on DorothyL, and was amused by some of the perceived telltales that expose men writing women or vice versa.

For my part—and probably because I didn’t know any better—I did feel comfortable writing from Stacy’s POV. Again, I had small children of my own, and it was easy to find much of the emotion within myself. But my wife was my early reader, and I did rely on her to let me know if things rang true or not—not only with Stacy’s POV, but with the story in general. And there are a number of changes that I made as a result of her insight—the most significant of which was to re-write the whole dang story from the ground up. Initially, the focal character was the mother, Stacy, with the attorney, Scott Heller, playing a more or less supporting role. Without giving too much of the story away, Sylvia felt that Stacy didn’t make a terribly sympathetic character to be cast in the main spotlight. So I went back to page one, and re-wrote the entire story, shifting the focus to Scott, the lawyer. (Can you believe it? A lawyer as a sympathetic character! Go know.)

Of course, my wife enjoys pointing out that I seemed to accept her suggestions only after one or two other early readers made the same observations. “Oh, you were waiting for someone else to tell you that too?”

Ah, well. Isn’t that how men and women communicate?

SP: A lot of people don’t realize how specialized the practice of law is – they figure every lawyer knows everything about all aspects of law. Were you, as a civil attorney, well-versed in criminal law when you began writing this book, or did you have to brush up on some points?

KI: You’re right. The practice of law is extremely specialized. I’m not particularly well-versed in criminal law at all—I took the required introductory course in my first year of law school, which was quite some time ago, and really haven’t had any exposure to it during my career.

But so much of the law is always evolving and is ever-changing—even the narrow areas that individual lawyers carve out as their specialties. So even if I were to have written a story revolving around my own specialty (uh, if you give me a few minutes, I’ll be able to figure out what that specialty is…) I’d have had to do some legal research.

That’s the thing about the practice of law. You don’t really learn “everything there is to know” about a particular subject. You learn the questions to ask, and where to look for the answers. It’s a constant game of “what if,” which makes it a great background for novel writing.

Did I have to do some brushing up on the legal issues found in Silent Counsel? Yes, I did. For example, I didn’t have a clue about the distinction between manslaughter and aggravated manslaughter, or what the range of penalties for each was. I didn’t know how a county prosecutor’s office was structured, or how cases were assigned to individual assistant prosecutors. And I had to do quite a bit of research into the intricacies of the attorney-client privilege. The list of what I didn’t know is actually pretty long.

One of the things I’ve come to learn is that experts are quite willing to share their knowledge if you simply admit to them (1) you don’t know jack, and (2) you appreciate the opportunity to learn from them.

SP: More and more writers are being published for the first time in middle age (or older). Do you think you’re a better writer now than you would have been at 25 or 30? What do you bring to your writing now that you would have been lacking when you were younger?

KI: Middle age, huh? [sighs] I suppose you’re right.

I guess age has given me an advantage that I lacked in earlier years. For one thing, I’ve certainly read a lot more now than I had by the time I was in my 20s, so I feel I have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t, from a readers perspective. Things like pacing, rhythm, switching POV, and the like.

In addition, I’ve been a lawyer for almost thirty years. As a lawyer, I write for a living. Granted, it’s a different kind of writing—although a lot of cynics would say that lawyers write fiction for a living—but I have to believe that years of brief and memo writing have helped me to be able to formulate ideas and points of view and then convey them to a reader. That’s gotta count for something.

In fact, when I first sat down to begin writing Silent Counsel, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed, so I decided to approach the task as I did a legal case. I remembered an instructor in one of my continuing legal education classes advising of the importance of developing a theme for your case. “A case without a theme is just a bunch of testimony,” I’d been told. “A car crash doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s a tragedy that involves real people and real consequences.” Cloaking your case with a theme gives jurors a reason to stay interested and alert: “This case is not just about young Will being injured when the buckling mechanism on his infant seat came loose. It’s about the kind of corporate greed that places the cost of recalling a defective product and the benefit of saving a child’s life on opposite ends of a scale—and tips that scale against the child.” Now, with that theme in the jury’s mind, otherwise dry testimony about how this strap connects to that latch may be, if not interesting, at least a little more bearable. There’s a reason to care.

The difference I was faced with when setting out to write a novel was that in the context of a legal case, I start—necessarily—with the facts as they’re presented to me. I search for a theme that relates well to those facts and exerts the right amount of emotional pull to grab hold of the jury. Writing a novel, though, allows the reverse. When I started, the page was, of course, quite literally blank. There were no facts, only an idea: What if the attorney representing a hit-and-run driver couldn’t reveal his client’s name because the court held it was privileged information? With that premise in mind, I began constructing facts: I decided that the victim of the driver had to be a child, because readers (my jury) would care more about this arcane legal issue if the attorney-client privilege was being used to shield someone responsible for a youngster’s death.

I knew that the lawyer in my story would face a difficult ethical dilemma—needing to protect the confidences of a client while feeling that the “right” thing to do would be to help the grieving mother. Because I had never faced such a challenge, I decided my lawyer should (like me) be unaccustomed to criminal practice and protecting the rights of the guilty. I made him a corporate litigator handling a “quick referral” for a friend—just a matter of making a few phone calls to the prosecutor to see if a deal could be made. This way, in the process of writing, I could experience the doubts and misgivings of my protagonist as he did, for the first time. And, I decided that my lawyer should have a young child of his own, so the conflict he felt between duty and right would strike close to home.

From this germ of an idea, and these few basic facts, emerged competing themes: Silent Counsel would be about a lawyer’s struggle with his personal beliefs when confronted with the fundamental need for secrecy between client and attorney. It also would be about a mother’s frustration and rage at a system that places more value on a legal technicality than bringing the killer of her six-year-old boy to justice.

Once this theme was established in my mind, I began “filling in the facts.”

Like I said, when I decided to try my hand at a novel, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed, and I therefore drew on my experience as a lawyer constructing a case. I suppose that had I set out to write without having years of lawyering behind me, I would have really been lost!

SP: How has publication changed your life? Has anything about the process surprised or disappointed you?

KI: You mean like how, before Silent Counsel was published, I had no free time, and now, since publication, I really have no free time?

Seriously, the biggest—and perhaps most surprising—change for me seems to be the enormous amount of time that must go into promotion. It began in the months leading up to the release, establishing a presence on the web and planning a tour, and it continues virtually unabated three months after the launch. I’ve done about forty signings, about ten radio or TV interviews, and a number of conventions, books shows, and panel presentations, across the country.

Once the Christmas season passes, I expect that frenetic pace to slow some, but I’m learning that it sure is a lot of hard work. I always knew that things didn’t end when the book hit the shelves, but I really did not realize the amount of time and effort that would be required.

I’m certainly not complaining! I genuinely enjoy getting out there. The challenge is time management. What comes to mind is something that Stephen Covey wrote about in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People regarding the proper “P/PC” balance—that is, the balance between production and production capability. Too much writing, without promotion, doesn’t get you very far; by the same token, too much promotion, without writing anything to promote, isn’t very good either. Achieving the right balance is the key.

SP: Were you active in MWA before you were published? How do you believe mystery organizations benefit the unpublished and newly published members?

KI: I became active in MWA well before I was published—I joined a few months after I finished the first draft of Silent Counsel. And I believe it was one of the best moves I made.

I had completed the manuscript, and I looked at the pile of paper in front of me and said, “OK. Now what?” I had absolutely no idea what to do to get it into print. Always up for a challenge, I looked around in the bookstores for newly-published legal thrillers by first-time authors, and I reached out to a number of them for guidance. Everyone I contacted was willing to share their experiences with me, and one suggested I join MWA.

I did, and I’m glad. Those of the members who are published authors run the gamut from well-known, accomplished bestsellers to midlist authors to newly-published authors struggling for name recognition. One thing they all have in common is a passion for what they do, and a willingness to help those members not yet published. (OK, that’s two things.)

Now, the road to publication is a long and tortuous one, and can be discouraging at times. I found that becoming part of the MWA community—getting to know people who’ve made it, and people who were struggling to reach the same goals as I was—was invigorating. Every time I attended an MWA event, whether it was a monthly dinner meeting, a symposium, or the annual Edgars Banquet, I found that my determination to continue on was renewed—despite any recent rejection letters I might have gotten.

So, yes, I do feel that MWA (and no doubt for the same reasons, other mystery organizations) benefit the unpublished and newly-published members. And that’s without even getting into the substance of the various programs that the organization offers!

SP: Have you had a chance yet to learn which types of promotion work best and which are a waste of time and money? Do you find My Space useful – or is it impossible to tell whether something like that benefits a writer?

KI: Ahh, retailing pioneer John Wanamaker once said, “I know that half my advertising costs are wasted. But I can never figure out which half.” No doubt the same can be said about promotional efforts.

I don’t know that I’ve come across any types of promotion that I can specifically identify as a waste. As a newly-published author, starting with zero name recognition, as far as I’m concerned, anything that gets my name out there is worthwhile—whether or not the sale of a single book can be traced to it.

I’ve done my best to create a presence on the web. I have a website (www.KenIsaacson.com), a MySpace page (www.MySpace.com/KenIsaacson), and a Crimespace page (www.Crimespace.ning.profile/KJIsaacson). I participate in online discussion groups such as DorothyL. I’ve toured, and since the beginning of September I’ve had almost fifty events, including bookstore signings, panel appearances, library discussions, and radio and TV interviews. With the exception of the bookstore signings—where there are hard numbers about sales—it’s impossible to measure the event’s success in terms of books sold. And even with bookstore signings, there are intangible benefits that go beyond the simple number of books sold.

I can only assume that my use of MySpace has been successful for me. About six months before Silent Counsel was due to be released, I established a MySpace page, as well as my website. Now, the problem with the website is that people have to actually know about it to be able to find it. And apart from my wife, my three sons, and my mother, there weren’t a whole lot of people who knew to click their way over to my website in the months before publication.
MySpace is a different story. I’m assuming you know how MySpace is structured, so suffice it to say that it’s not too difficult to develop a list of friends that are a ready audience for what you have to offer. And unlike your traditional website, which must attract traffic, if you “work” MySpace right, you can deliver your message to your audience.

Has MySpace helped sell Silent Counsel? As your question implies, it’s hard to say. I do know that in the weeks leading up to publication, Silent Counsel climbed to the number 2 spot on Amazon’s list of Hot New Releases in legal thrillers, and it’s maintained a position in the top 5 since then. The only thing I can think of attributing that pre-publication success (before I went on the road) to is a web presence, and my MySpace page was the centerpiece.

SP: What are your career goals? Do you think you’ll ever write full-time?

KI: I have a great day job. I left the private practice of law almost six years ago to become in-house general counsel to a corporation. I don’t miss my law firm days at all. For more than twenty years, I had to account for all of my time, every day, in six-minute intervals, so the billing could be done. And I had to worry about client development, finding new ones, and maintaining the existing ones. As general counsel, I have a single client, and no need to worry about billing or client development. I can just do my job. And the bonus is that because I have an office all to myself, I get to bring my dog to work with me!

I’m also a technology nut, so my office is virtually paperless—everything’s scanned into my computer, and synchronized with my laptop. So I can work from almost anywhere, which I’m often forced to because of the nature of the business. In fact, I often joke with the president of the company, telling him, “I’m not going on vacation next week…but I’ll be working from Breckenridge.” Or Long Beach Island, or wherever.

I have no present plans to give up the law. I also intend to keep on writing. I suppose if I had to guess which one I’d end up doing longer, I’d say that I’ll probably end up retiring from the law before I’ll stop writing.

SP: What advice do you have for aspiring mystery writers?

KI: The best single piece of advice I can think of is one word: WRITE!
What I mean by this is that we too often get caught up in the planning. We think of good ideas, we research, we outline…we seem to do everything except put pen to paper. I’m not suggesting that anyone skip the necessary preliminary stages (though we could have a spirited discussion about outlining, and whether and to what extent it’s necessary), but don’t become paralyzed by the initial steps. Get yourself writing!

In addition, by all means join an organization like MWA. There are groups for nearly every genre and sub-genre you can think of: mysteries, thrillers, romances, you name it. Like I said in answer to one of your other questions, surrounding yourself with driven, like-minded people is invaluable—for inspiration, for support, and for knowledge.

Finally, persevere. Whether you aspire to have your work published, or you write because you just have to write, it’s a long and often discouraging road. But keep at it, and don’t give up.

Formula One Racing

Sharon Wildwind

The question came up again last night at a Christmas party.

“Why do you write mysteries?”

The usual answers flitted through my head:
a) I don’t know.
b) Because I read a lot of mysteries.
c) Why not?

I think I mumbled something that was an amalgamation of those three answers. I was distracted by cheese dip at the time. In the car on the way home, I asked myself the question. Why do I write mysteries?

Maybe for the same reason that highly adventurous people cram themselves into tiny, low-slung cars and race around the closed streets of Monaco, in one of the world’s most expensive sports, Formula One racing. Only I get to get the same kind of thrill without using petrochemical products and contributing to global warming.

Formula One competitors depend on on-board electronics, their car’s aerodynamics, precision suspension systems that allow sliding sideways through narrow curves, and tires built to take the strain of speed, friction, and city pavement. Formula One is the only sport—as far as I know—that awards two grand champion trophies each year, one to the best driver and one for the best car construction. If it were up to me, I’d award a third trophy each year, to the person who designed the best closed-circuit course.

Of course, I have this very strong prejudice. I’d award the course trophy every year to Monaco. I mean, how could anything compete with coming into that impossibly tight hairpin curve in front of the Grand Hotel, whose balconies are filled with suave men and gorgeous women? Of course, there is Singapore’s new night course: Formula One meets street racing. That has possibilities.

Face it, we mystery writers run on a closed track. When mystery equals murder, as it does most of the time, we all know the genre conventions. A body, the detective committing to finding the murderer, some clues, some suspects, life gets sticky, usually a second body, the detective vows to see justice done—which is quite different from wanting to solving the crime, more clues, life gets stickier, the joy ride down the funnel, life gets stickiest, the moment of revelation/danger, the end.

So the real answer to Why do I write mysteries? is vowing to see justice done. I really love writing and reading that Man of LaMancha moment of intense personal commitment. Imagine Richard Kiley belting out, “To be better far than you are.”

For me, that’s the Grand Hotel hairpin curve of the story, made all the more wonderful because it’s played out, not before balconies of beautiful people, but in the heart. Evil won’t win, not if the protagonist has anything to say about it. But there will be a cost to facing evil. By this point in the story, the protagonist knows that. And goes ahead anyway.

So the next time I’m at a party, and someone asks me why I write mysteries, I’ll probably mumble the same inane reasons that I did last night. Or maybe I’ll say something about Formula One racing and the hairpin curve at Monaco. Somehow, I don’t think I could pull off discussing courage, sacrifice and intense personal commitment over the cheese tray. That’s much better left for the cold clarity of the morning after.

----
Writing quote for the week:

All combat takes place at night, in the rain, and at the junction of four map segments.
~Conrad Breen, in the movie Wag the Dog

MW Mystery Writers' Christmas Feast

by Julia Buckley
I spent Sunday afternoon at Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore, where the wonderful Julie Hyzy had planned a lavish Christmas party for the MWMWA (that's the Midwest Mystery Writers Of America). We weren't all there, and we missed the members who couldn't make it, but we had quite a turn-out and a great deal of fun. First, allow me to identify some people, for those of you who keep track of your MWMWs. :)

(Standing, from left to right: Ted Hertel (President); Julia Buckley; Michael Allen Dymmoch (Secretary); Julie Hyzy (Vice President); Naomi Smith; Jonathan Quist (Treasurer); Amy Alessio; Annie Chernow; Elizabeth Nelson; Robert Goldsborough; Harriette Gillem Robinet; Michael A. Black. Kneeling, from L to R: Tom Keevers; Raymond Benson; Luisa Buehler; Kathryn Moran. And that's Libby Hellmann sort of crouching between the two rows. :)

I told my husband that I wanted to start my diet BEFORE New Year's, just so I wouldn't have the pressure of a New Year's Resolution. But then Julie presented us with this buffet:
and I munched my way into a non-diet level of ingestion. Tomorrow, for sure . . .

Julie also planned for us to play Pictionary/Charades using the titles of mystery novels. Libby Hellmann and Ted Hertel proved very adept as members of Team Two (our foes), but in the end we tied and there was peace in the valley.

It was a great way for people who like writing and reading mysteries to celebrate the holidays together.

And thus, the parties have begun. How have you been celebrating December? Is anyone reading Christmas mysteries?

Major Talents at Small Presses

Troy Cook (Guest blogger)

Our guest is a reformed filmmaker who decided, after working on 80 movies, that he’d rather write novels. His first crime novel, 47 Rules of Highly Effective Bank Robbers, was nominated for major mystery awards. His second, The One Minute Assassin, was released this fall.

Troy Cook here, with a topic near and dear to my heart, the indy presses. In light of recent changes to the MWA guidelines for their list of approved publishers (which I won’t go into here), I wanted to take a moment to champion some of the wonderful companies that have been bringing us great books and new discoveries.
But why should we care about the magnificent independent presses? We all love the big NY publishers and want to be published by them, so why do indy presses get me excited?

It probably starts with my background in independent filmmaking. In the film business 80% of all films are produced by the independents. Yes, a lot of them are crap, including plenty of the 80 films I made in my career. But it’s also where you discover the next great filmmakers of our time: Quentin Tarantino, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, among others. These guys, with their crazy ideas about filmmaking, explored and created works of art in the independent world before being snatched up by the big guys.

I think it’s the same with big publishers as it is for the studios. Big publishers are defined by their stockholder value, which makes it next to impossible for them to take too many risks. And every new author is a risk. That’s where the independent presses come in. They can take a chance on a new author because they don’t need huge sales numbers to be profitable. They can grow an author from scratch all the way to big sales.

Of course, then the NY pubs swoop in and lead the author to bigger and better distribution and sales. Which is pretty cool.

Will this happen to me? To you? It remains to be seen, but it is possible to make a splash even when you’re with a small press. My debut mystery picked up rave national reviews and won multiple awards, garnering interest from a big NY pub, selling out its print run, and landing me a film deal. So I think it’s plausible.

A couple of examples of the small press rags to riches story are Sean Doolittle and Victor Gischler. Well…rags to riches might be a stretch since very few authors get to the riches stage. But these guys were with a cool small press called Uglytown, with good sales, and eventually got snatched up by Bantam/Dell. One day, I hope to follow in their footsteps.

Visit the author’s web site at www.troycook.net

PDD re-interviews author Marcus Sakey, by Lonnie Cruse

My blog post today is an interview with author Marcus Sakey. You might remember that PDD interviewed Marcus before, but his book has since been contracted to be made into a movie, which makes other authors drool with envy. So we decided to invite him back and get the skinny on this exciting developement. Please grab your drool towels and check it out. And if you want more to drool over, check out Sakey's website, listed below. He's not too hard to look at.

PDD: We understand that LivePlanet, the production company owned by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon just purchased movie rights to your book, THE BLADE ITSELF. Congratulations! Did you or your agent go after that sale, or did they come to you?

MS: Thanks! I'm thrilled about it. Credit mostly goes to my film agent, Sarah Self, who worked hard to get the novel to production companies she felt were a good fit. We're both fans of LivePlanet, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's production company, so it's a real pleasure that the book landed there. They did an amazing job adapting Dennis Lehane's GONE BABY GONE, and the same team is slated to work on mine.

PDD: Do you know if either or both of these fine actors will star in the movie? Or are they only interested in producing it? And any chance YOU will appear in the movie?

MS: No idea at all. I'd certainly be thrilled if they did, or if Ben chose to direct--his work on GONE BABY GONE really impressed me. But it's all in their hands now, so other than saying I have great confidence in their judgment, I don't have much to offer.

As for me cameoing, I would love to. There's a scene where a bystander gets killed by having his his throat key-punched--I'm hoping to play the role of the corpse.

PDD: Hehehe, we're sure you'd do a convincing job. Let us know if you get the part. For those who might not know, tell us a bit about what happens when a production company buys the rights to your book. Envious minds want to know!

MS: It's very much a work in progress right now, so I can only tell you as far as I know. Basically, they buy the exclusive option to make a movie, which isn't the same thing as a decision to actually make it. But as they already have a studio, Miramax, on-board, the odds look better.

The first step, after the champagne-popping on my end, is for them to hire a screenwriter to adapt the novel. They've tapped Aaron Stockard, who co-wrote GBG with Affleck. Of course, with the strike, everything is sort of brought to a halt. Hopefully it will be resolved equitably for everybody soon.

Anyway, as I understand it, after that they start trying to attach actors, finalize questions of direction and producing, and if all the stars align, go forward with the film.

PDD: Will you have any voice in the screen play and/or the making of this movie? Or is it all out of your hands?

MS: The folks at LivePlanet have been very generous about including me in the early discussions, and Aaron and I chat by email, so as we move forward I hope to be involved in a very peripheral, support kind of way. But it's largely out of my hands.

Which is a good thing. I think it's a mistake to believe that writing a novel qualifies you to write a movie. I'd rather sign with a crew of people I trust and just let them have it, be able to focus on the next book.

PDD: Tell us a bit about the book, THE BLADE ITSELF. And where readers can get a copy before the movie comes out.

MS: THE BLADE ITSELF is the story of two blue-collar kids and small-time criminals on the South Side of Chicago who one night undertake a robbery that goes desperately wrong. One of them lands in maximum security; the other escapes, and reinvents a new life for himself. But seven years later, his old life comes to visit.

I've been really fortunate critically; it was selected a New York Times Editor's Pick, featured on CBS and NPR, and recently named "One of the Year's 5 Best Reads" by Esquire Magazine. The paperback just came out, which is kind of a thrill for me.

PDD: Wow, a thrill indeed! What inspired you to write the book?

MS: Crushing poverty?

Jokes aside, I always knew I wanted to write. But the seed for this story itself came as I was walking home one day, down the nice street that led to my nice apartment I share with my nice wife. And it hit me suddenly that all of these things could be taken from me--that, in other words, the things we love make us vulnerable. And wham!, I had a conflict and the beginnings of an idea.

PDD: Wow, great begining! How did you find your agent and/or publisher?

MS: Pretty much the old-fashioned way. I queried a whole bunch of agents, got a stack of rejections, and eventually found the right guy, Scott Miller of Trident Media Group. For any interested folks, I've got a pretty detailed article on how to write a query letter and find an agent on my website (link to http://www.marcussakey.com/writers.php). A lot of people helped me while I was getting started, so I like to share what I've learned about the process where I can.

PDD: Sounds like a great help to authors! What's next on your writing horizon?

MS: My second book, AT THE CITY'S EDGE, comes out January 22nd. It's the story of a discharged soldier who returns from Iraq to find a similar war raging in his Chicago neighborhood. It features corruption and politics and gang warfare and love and redemption and car chases and gun fights and Roman history, all the good stuff. I'm excited about it--I think I've really grown as a writer, and besides, it's just fun to have something new to talk about.

PDD: Sounds like it has something for everyone! Anything else you'd like to tell us about the process of moving your book from paper print to on the screen?

MS: As yet, the process has involved no Thai hookers, leggy models with bedroom eyes. But I'm maintaining hope.

PDD: Thanks, Marcus. Please keep us updated!

How Times Can Change While You Write Your Mystery

Elizabeth Zelvin

I found a terrible blooper on page 2 of the galley proofs of Death Will Get You Sober, which my publisher sent for my review with a stern warning that if changes were more than minor, I might have to pay for them myself. The offending passage occurred in the first scene, when Bruce, my protagonist, wakes up in a detox ward on the Bowery on Christmas Day without a clue as to how he got there, thanks to the alcoholic blackout that followed the last he can remember. The guy in the next bed is smoking. A nun appears, asks Bruce how he’s feeling, and offers him a cigarette. What’s wrong with this picture?

When I first went down to the Bowery as a counseling intern in 1983, back before the last flophouses were replaced by fern bars, it was okay to smoke in detox. The unshockable nun in my story, at least in the first scene, was loosely based on a real-life nun whose trick for bridging the empathic gap between her and the alienated and defeated men some people still called “Bowery bums” was always to carry a pack of cigarettes that she could whip out and offer as a way to connect.

I thought up the title and wrote the first 2000 words of Death Will Get You Sober so long ago that I can’t remember how long it’s been, certainly more than ten years. I didn’t write the rest until after my second sojourn on the Bowery, where I ran an alcohol outpatient program from 1993 to 1999. Times had already changed considerably. The notorious men’s shelter, with its smoky lobby teeming with edgy humanity and its history of mayhem on the stairs and drug deals on the street outside, had been renovated and transformed into a well regulated social service agency. By the time I left, the fern bars had already started taking over.

I took out the manuscript and finished the first draft in 2002. In the next five years, while looking for an agent and a publisher and writing the next three in the series, I revised it many times. I condensed the first scene as I learned more about the craft of cutting backstory and getting to the first body. I deleted a couple of adverbs along the way. But it never occurred to me to tinker with that first exchange between Bruce, the smoker in the next bed, and the nun. Nor did my editor or the copy editor who reviewed the manuscript question it. Yet when I saw it in print for the first time, the problem leaped out at me. Readers in April 2008, when the book finally comes out, will know perfectly well that patients aren’t allowed to smoke in bed. I had to find another way for the nun to make her entrance.

Smoking’s not the only thing I’ve had to change in the course of writing the book and getting it to publication. The Bowery material in the book had its genesis in notes I took as an intern in 1983. One young black patient (not yet called African American) with whom I worked wore his baseball cap backwards. My comment: “An individualist!” That found its way into the first draft—and had to be deleted after a whole generation started wearing their baseball caps with the bill sticking out behind. Then there was the joke about not knowing whether someone talking to himself on the street is a schizophrenic or merely using a cell phone. That’s no longer funny, since cellphonistas are now a fact of life and far more common than the mentally ill on the streets of New York.

One of Bruce’s sidekicks, Jimmy, is a computer wiz, a handy plot device to help my amateur sleuths get needed information. In the early versions, I had Jimmy laboriously explain to his girlfriend, Barbara, how to search for something on Google. Now “google” is a verb, and Barbara would be odd indeed if she didn’t know how to look up simple facts. Originally, my main characters didn’t have cell phones. That would have flown if I’d sold the manuscript in 2002 when I first finished it, or even in 2003, when I got my first agent. But it didn’t happen that way, and I had to give them cell phones to keep the book from seeming hopelessly dated.

Time keeps rushing on, and publication takes its own sweet time. Meanwhile, the Bowery keeps changing. When I first walked south past Fifth Street in 1983, I entered a different world. In my book, I wanted to convey the flavor of that world before it vanished completely. Well, it has. I recently attended an event at the Bowery Poetry Club, my first time in the area in several years. When I came up out of the subway and looked around, I was dismayed to find the whole neighborhood has been swallowed up by NoHo. It exudes a homogenized trendiness. No trace of the alcoholic’s Mecca remains. My editor dismissed my suggestion that I convey in some kind of note or foreword that I’ve telescoped the gentrification of the Bowery for purposes of the story. Now I just hope that readers aren’t turned off by a greater disconnect between history and reality that I could have dreamed that time would bring about.

I'm Lost

Sandra Parshall

When I tell people that I can get lost in my own neighborhood, they laugh because they think I’m joking.

I’m not.

I have what is quite possibly the world’s worst sense of direction. What dyslexics suffer through with words on a page is similar to what I endure when trying to find my way through the physical world. When I’m in my own house or yard, I know which way is which – early morning sun hits the front of the house, so that must be east; the back of the house receives late-day sun, so that must be west; our screened porch gets sun for most of the day, so that’s south; and the side where nothing but hostas will grow in the yard – I’m willing to bet that’s north.

When I leave my own property, though, all bets are off. I become disoriented and I’m likely to get lost if I deviate from certain often-traveled routes.

If you’re giving me directions, please don’t say, “Drive southwest for 1.2 miles, then turn east.” This is gibberish to me. Instead, paint a three-dimensional picture. Tell me what businesses, schools, churches I’ll pass on the way. Describe what’s on the corner where I’m supposed to turn. And please tell me whether to take a left or a right.

While my sense of direction is especially bad, I believe most women see the world as a collection of landmarks and topographical features. Have you ever called a doctor’s office or a business and asked directions from the woman who answered the phone? She undoubtedly gave you directions that made sense – “Turn right at the Olive Garden restaurant” or “Go past the building with the arch that looks like a toilet bowl and take the first left” or “Drive past Fresh Fields and turn right at the Wachovia Bank.” In the wilderness, a woman might memorize her route not by tracking it on a mental compass but by noting the big oak tree that’s been scarred by lightning and the jagged boulder with lichen in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s profile.

Men and women simply don’t see the world the same way. That statement might be heresy to Gloria Steinem, but its accuracy has been confirmed by several scientifically structured experiments. While some individuals of both genders will think like the opposite sex, the majority of women use landmarks to find their way around, while the majority of men use maps, compass points, and calculated distances.

These differences are believed to be evolutionary. For most of humankind’s history, men have been the hunters and women the gatherers. Prehistoric males ranged far afield in search of edible prey, and they had to develop a reliable way to find their way back to their caves. They learned to pay attention to the sun’s position in the sky, and to create a mental map of the landscape. Women stayed close to home, and they learned where the berry patches and fruit trees were. (Even now, according to one study, women learn their way around a food market much faster than men do.)

The differences in the way men and women navigate shows up even when they’re working – or playing -- in virtual environments. Female architects, designers, trainee pilots, and computer gamers all function more efficiently when they use 3D graphics that resemble the real world and view them on wider screens that improve spatial orientation. Tests conducted by a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and Microsoft researchers showed that when women used wide screens and realistic 3D images, their performance equaled the men’s.

All of this makes me feel marginally better about my pathetic navigational skills and less guilty about the money I spent on a GPS unit. I wonder, though, whether political correctness will ever allow us to honestly depict such gender differences in fiction and make use of them to propel a plot forward. Writing about a woman who can’t follow a map invites accusations of sexism from women, although the men in their lives may think it’s a realistic portrayal. A male character who meticulously states exact mileage and compass orientation when giving directions would make many women roll their eyes in exasperation.

As with so many other aspects of human existence, the facts may be firmly established for decades before people will willingly acknowledge them in everyday life. Fictional heroes and heroines, whom writers tend to present as idealized versions of their own genders, might never catch up with reality. My heroines possess all the navigational skills I lack. They know where they’re going and how to get there. And if some researcher says this isn’t realistic, I have a ready reply: Hey, it’s fiction!

Wagging Our Tales Behind Them

Sharon Wildwind

This morning I want to talk about bravery.

Not bravery that makes headlines, or earn medals, or is commemorated on a plaque, but a simply brave, everyday act.

A lot of us who write mysteries were born before the personal computer, iPod, picture cell phone, or Blackberries. Heck, some of us were born before the fax machine or cable television. A few of us might even have been born before television itself.

In a shrinking publishing market with changing and uncertain promotional venues, writers who are by no means technologically-savvy or even technologically-comfortable, step up to take chances. We develop and maintain web sites. We blog. We send book trailers out into the world, wagging our tales behind them.

This past week my husband and I did a brief survey of book trailers on YouTube. We wanted to see what two viewers—one who knew more about mysteries than computers and the other vice versa—would find coming to mystery book trailers cold. Let me stress that what follows is strictly personal opinion.

My husband and I each spend several hours, almost every day, on computers, and a fair bit of that time is spent connected to the Internet. My husband had spent a lot of time on YouTube in the past four months; I’d spent none. In fact, I wasn’t sure how to get to YouTube until he showed me. Yet, neither one of us had ever seen a computerized mystery book trailer. So the first thing that we learned was that unless we went looking for them, we weren’t going to trip over a trailer on our way to other things.

That, in itself, says something about who sees trailers. The viewer has to know they are out there and go looking for them.

We watched roughly 100 book trailers chosen at random. Approximately 45% had 100 hits or less in the past year. A few of them had hits in the thousands and the one that had the most hits by far, about 25,000, had the words “toilet humor” in the search words. It was also filmed in a public toilet.

So I did a comparison between search words and number of hits. Trailers got more hits when their search words were likely to be popular terms, which had absolutely nothing to do with mysteries. Will a wine-lover, looking for a information on a really good bordeaux, care about a mystery trailer in which the main character brings a bottle of really good bordeaux to a party? The number of times viewed suggested, yes, maybe. But cross-checking the book advertised with the sales on amazon.com didn’t show anything spectacular. Lots of hits on the trailer, no way of knowing if the viewer watched the trailer all the way through once they got to the site, and not a lot of book sales.

Some of the trailers were mini-dramas, scripted and professionally or semi-professionally videotaped. These tended to fare better in the bean counting than the ones that were slides backed by music. Production values for all of them, no matter what format, ranged from barely acceptable to really, really awful. Many of them were far too long, with the best ones for holding our interest all the way through being 50 to 60 seconds in length.

Many of them lacked information such as publisher, publication year, where to buy the book, or ISBN number, all of which would have been extremely helpful to know if I had wanted to go looking for the book.

There seems to be a perception out there that if I’m really entranced by the trailer, I will Google the author, go to his or her site or go to amazon or a similar site, and get that additional information. The answer to that is, no I won’t. If it’s not in the trailer, I’m not going looking for it.

After a week of watching trailers, I have sad news for all of us. None of the authors’ names stuck with me. None of the trailers convinced me to buy a single book or even check one out from the library.

This is where the bravery comes in. We’re the ones in the vanguard. Ain’t no one out there going to tell us how to be successful with book trailers, because no one knows—yet. But like that well-worn example of the bumblebee who doesn’t know he can’t fly so he goes ahead and does it, we’ll keep making book trailers. And I hope, no I expect, that we’ll get better and better at them. And the fortunate thing is that computer-technology is such a fast medium, we’re going to see better results soon, or sooner, or even soonest.

For what they are worth, here are some things I learned last week about mystery book trailers:
~Keep them short. 50 to 60 seconds is a good length with which to begin experimenting.
~Work with a stop watch. Time out the flow. You certainly don’t want every image on the screen the exact same length of time, but images that contain words, like your book cover, should be on the screen slightly longer than non-word images.
~Be still when words are involved. It’s hard enough to read words on a screen without having them moving across the screen or vibrating in and out at the same time.
~As Joe Friday once said, “The fact, ma’am. The facts.” Title, author, publisher, publication year, where to buy the book, ISBN number, and contact information for the author.
~Don’t attempt to raise the viewer to an unbridled pitch of unrequited excitement in 60 seconds. Don’t leave the viewer with more questions than answers. Use the journalistic who, what, when, where, and why. Think in terms of that one-line elevator pitch that we frequently discuss on the mystery lists.
~Experiment with ways to change images all you want, but in the finish product use one or two per trailer. Yes, I know your computer may be able to do twenty-seven different kinds of screen wipes, but I really don’t want to see all of them in the next minute.
~Use moving pictures whenever you can. Show the viewer something that will augment the book, like the small town in which you set the book.
~Think of trailers as disposable items. Make two, they’re small. Make them often. Aim for a dozen or two dozen that you can mix-and-match, depending on your venue.
~Forget YouTube. Forget catching a viewer on the fly with search words. If you build it that way, they will not come. Tie your videos into your web site or your blog or some place that people are already coming to look for you.
~Give the viewer a choice: a button on your web site that says “View my latest book trailer here,” rather than making them sit through a download every time they come to your site. Believe it or not, we have crossed over the 50/50 mark. More than 50% of computer owners in North America are now on broadband and less than 50% are still using dial-up modems. However, many, many users are using older equipment or have bare-minimum computer skills. Aim for the least-technological viewer or make different trailers to reach different populations.
~The question of copyright could take an entire book. Bottom line is if you use any visual or sound not in the public domain you’ve cheated another artist out of money.

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Writing quote for the week:

You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
~Annie Dillard, writer and journal keeper

Sartre's Notion of Otherness and Acceptable Polar Bear Attacks

By Julia Buckley

Dear PDD Readers, I have to keep this short today because I am still finishing a paper for my graduate class. It is entitled "Adoption and Sartre's Notion of Otherness." In it I explore my relationship with my adopted sister and toy with the idea that society always wanted our family to "explain" her, even though she is just as American as anyone else, being a naturalized citizen of Chinese descent. In researching the paper I have immersed myself in the writings of sociologists, psychologists, and literary critics so that I might develop a most educated opinion.

So my brain is just about fried. :)

However, in honor of our mystery blog, I'll tell you a funny story. My dad sent me an e-mail entitled "Polar Bear Attack in North Manitoba." Now, my father has been known to send me some rather shocking e-mails, some of which are traffic fatalities captured by security cameras (which he sends as a way of telling me to be careful at the wheel. Scared straight, and all that).

Needless to say, I was very fearful about the Polar Bear e-mail; yet, being a mystery SOLVER, I wanted to open it. I did, and saw this:


















Sorry, but I can't attribute these photos to anything but an unsigned e-mail that is getting passed around. Cute though, aren't they?

Okay, back to the books. :)

Writing in the Spaces

by Darlene Ryan

When I wrote my first book—A Mother’s Adoption Journey—the munchkin was a baby, just over a year old. Her father was away five days out of every nine working in another city. There wasn’t a lot of time to write. One of the things I learned back then was if I waited for inspiration to hit I’d never write. And the other was that I had to take advantage of whatever bits of time I could find. I call it writing in the spaces—taking advantage of all those chunks of lost time in a day—time waiting for someone or something else. Five minutes here, fifteen there can very quickly add up to a page a day. And in a year a page a day becomes a book.

Take time where you find it.

I carry a notebook with me most of the time. Several of my writing friends never go out the door without their Alphasmarts. I’ve spent time writing in the doctor’s waiting room, at the orthodontist’s office, at the Diabetic Clinic, and at the back of the school gym during a speech by the principal—she was a little long-winded that day.

Inspire yourself.

I’ve been hit by the boom on a sailboat, by a soccer ball, a two-by-four, a car door and a sewer pipe—which is partly why I’ve spent so much time writing in my doctor’s waiting room. I’ve rarely been hit by inspiration. But I’m often writing something in my head while I’m doing something else—which might explain all those “non-inspirational” whacks to the head I have suffered.

When I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor I’m also writing a scene in my mind. Waiting at the express checkout in Wal-mart I’m trying to fix a plot-hole in my outline. And if you notice me mumbling to myself when I’m out on my daily walk that’s because I’m working on dialogue—or practicing to sing back-up for Rascal Flatts.

Don’t finish that thought.

Whether you’ve been writing for ten minutes or two hours, when you stop, set up your next starting point. Scribble a few notes about what happens next. Read the next paragraph in your outline. Some writers swear by stopping in the middle of a scene or even the middle of a sentence.

Just do it.

Don’t waste time staring at an empty page or blank monitor. (Which you won’t have if you’ve already set up your starting point.) No checking emails just one more time or warming up your fingers with a quick game of Solitaire. When you have time to write, write. Don’t worry about exact grammar or finding the perfect adjective. Get the words down on paper. Churning out words without obsessing about every one may feel weird at first. The more you do it, the easier it gets. I swear.

Maybe you’ll end up with a scene you’re certain is badly constructed, poorly written drivel. Maybe next month when you’re looking at the same scene in rewrites you’ll be surprised at how good it was.

Don’t write.

Yep. That wasn’t a typo. Spending every spare minute writing or thinking about writing will turn you into a twitching, stressed out drudge. Make sure some of those free minutes in the day go to your family, your friends and you. Have coffee with a friend instead of your notebook sometime. Once in a while spend those few minutes standing in line imagining yourself chatting up Matt Lauer on the Today Show. (Love you, Matt!)

So how about giving it a try for the next month? Five minutes here, twenty there. At the end of the month see if you’ve written more than you usually do. That’s it. Let me know how it works. You can email me through my website: www.darleneryan.com I promise to take five minutes to answer.