New Year's Dreaming

by Julia Buckley




















I love this image of my cat, Rose, gazing out the window with a rather dreamy expression. Perhaps she's making New Year's resolutions. The great thing about early January is that there is a real psychological boost in being able to start over--what is it for you? A new book? A new diet? New confidence?--for me, even a new age, since I always turn a year older just as the world does.

Or perhaps Rose was looking at this beautiful etching on our window--crystalline art that appeared after a frigid night. I found them lovely--the cat and the ice--so I thought I'd share the pictures along with some January philosophy:

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."

~Hamilton Wright Mabie

"New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

~Mark Twain

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective."

~G.K. Chesterton

Happy New Year to all.

Start the new year with a free e-book!

 

Leave a comment this weekend and you could start the new year with a free e-book by one of the bestselling writers we hosted this week.

Five of our readers, chosen at random, will each receive their choice of a free Open Road Media e-book from one of this week's guests: Jonathon King, Jack Higgins, Lawrence Block, or Stephen Coonts.

Leave a comment if you’d like to enter the drawing. So we’ll be able to contact you if you win and tell you how to download your free book, either include your e-mail address in your comment (if you feel comfortable doing that) or send it privately to sandraparshall@yahoo.com. Winners will be notified on Monday.

A full list of available titles may be found using these links:
 
Jonathon King
http://openroadmedia.com/author_king.html
 
Jack Higgins
http://openroadmedia.com/author_higgins.html
 
Lawrence Block
http://openroadmedia.com/author_block.html
 
Stephen Coonts
http://openroadmedia.com/author_coonts.html
                           
Happy new year to all our friends – and thank you for reading Poe’s Deadly Daughters!



                                     


Just for fun, can you guess which countries these new year's wishes represent?

New Year's Mushrooms

by Sheila Connolly

Sorry, it's just me, although I'm honored to be following in the footsteps of some pretty heavy-duty writers this week.

Tonight is New Year's Eve, and in my household that means . . . not much. We'll drag out a favorite DVD (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to be precise), open a bottle of champagne and watch the ball in Times Square drop at midnight. If we're lucky we'll still be awake at 12:05.

Gone are the days of wild New Year's parties. Not much of a loss, because I can't recall more than two or three, and those were a long time ago. Heck, the annual fundraising dance for our local organic farm, music provided by Dale and the Duds, is livelier than most of the New Year's events I've attended. I guess I'm just not much of a party person.

But I will admit that I try to make a resolution or two each year. Or at least I think about it. Committing to a resolution and then blowing it just sets you up for frustration, and a writer faces plenty of that without asking for it.

What would I like to do better next year? Get organized! My family has gotten good at tiptoeing through the boxes of books and research files and promotional materials in order to navigate our second floor, and all that stuff is piled on top of the boxes of genealogy files. Then there are all those books I really do plan to read, stacked three deep on every available shelf, with teetering piles of more books in between. Who knew that writing would take up so much space?

So as soon as I meet the looming deadlines (yes, plural) and overhaul my website, I'm going to have to take a hard look at all those stacks and piles and boxes and figure out a better way to manage all that paper. Maybe there's a shredder in my future. I've read that I can raise mushrooms on shredded paper, so if the writing thing doesn't work out, I'm ready to start a mushroom farm. Sounds like a plan!



What's your Number One resolution for 2011?

UNDER SIEGE: 20 years later

by Stephen Coonts

Stephen Coonts is the bestselling author of 28 thriller, suspense, and nonfiction titles. A former Navy pilot and Vietnam War veteran, he worked as a taxi driver and a police officer before attending law school at the University of Colorado and embarking on a legal career. He published The Flight of the Intruder, his first novel–and first bestseller–in 1986. As he explains in the video interview below, he has drawn on his personal experiences in many of his books. Today he writes about a 1990 novel that remains as relevant now as it was when first published.

Columbian Narco-terror was the inspiration for Under Siege (1990).  Unfortunately, the narco-wars being waged in Mexico today give the novel an immediacy that I certainly didn’t intend.

The sad fact is that the United States’ inability to stop the use of illegal narcotics by its citizen means that foreign suppliers can make obscene fortunes supplying American addicts and recreational users. This problem will not go way by being ignored. The narcotics industry has destabilized the governments of Latin American and Mexico and resulted in the murders of thousands – nay, tens of thousands – of police, soldiers and innocent bystanders. This despite the fact that the U.S. has spent over $50 Billion in the war on drugs, which is an abysmal failure.
 
We have packed our prisons with users and dealers, addicts are among us in every walk of life, and our hospitals are packed with people who have poisoned themselves with heroin, cocaine, meth, and abused legal painkillers.
 
As the headlines prove, the criminals making these profits are willing to do whatever it takes to protect their income.  They will bribe, murder, extort, kidnap and destroy representative government without sorrow or remorse. 

Under Seige is still as timely as when it was written.  I wish it weren’t, but it is.

For more information, visit http://www.coonts.com and http://openroadmedia.com/author_coonts.html.


   

Introducing Chip Harrison

by Lawrence Block

No Score is the first of four novels featuring Chip Harrison, and they all bore the lead character’s byline when they first appeared as paperbacks from Gold Medal Books. The working title of No Score was The Lecher in the Rye, which sums it up well enough; it’s a picaresque account of a young man’s desperate attempt to become sexually experienced.

Gold Medal did very well with the book, and a couple of years later I wrote a sequel. And, because I liked the voice, I wanted to write a third book, but how many times could one lad lose his virginity? So in the third book I put him to work for a private detective, and books three and four are mysteries and could be called Nero Wolfe pastiches.

In 1984 The Countryman Press reprinted No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again in a double volume and asked the ideal person to write an afterword:

Some Afterthoughts
by Hilton Crofield

     I don’t know why they asked me to write this. Somebody’s original brilliant idea was for me to write an introduction to the new edition of No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, and I said OK. Don’t ask me why. Then somebody else got the bright idea of calling the double volume Introducing Chip Harrison, which meant that I would be saddled with the job of introducing Introducing Chip Harrison, and I said that, if you really want to know, I’d rather go into the bathroom and squeeze a pimple. So they said OK, we’ll make it an afterword, and I said OK again. Don’t ask me why. It’s not as if I was getting paid for this.

     Chip Harrison needs no introduction, and I don’t suppose he needs an afterword either, so you can stop reading right now . . . If you’re still with me, I just want to tell you that these are my kind of books. Chip Harrison is a sort of a lecher on the wry side. More than that, when you finish the book you want to call him up and talk about it.

     Listen, I’ve got a tip for you. Don’t do it. Years ago I wrote a book and said how sometimes I wanted to call the author in the middle of the night, and this guy named Ottinger had his name down as author and so many weird kids called him up in the middle of the night that the poor guy lost it. He went up to Maine or Vermont and quit writing and only leaves his house once a year. He always sees his shadow, and it's always six more weeks of winter.

     I wouldn't want that to happen to Chip Harrison. I've already read the rest of the books, and I know that Chip went to work for Leo Haig and takes care of tropical fish when he’s not helping Haig solve crimes. If you haven’t read those books, go out and get them right now instead of wasting your time reading this crap I have to write.

     Anyway, I like old Chip. I think Phoebe would like him, too. And I hope you liked him, but if you didn’t, well, tough. What do you expect me to do about it, anyway?

     Oh, yeah. The business about the name. Lawrence Block is now listed as the author of the Chip Harrison books. They had Chip’s name as author originally, but now they’re supposed to be by this Lawrence Block. Same as my book is supposed to be by old Ottinger.

     Well, I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to. And neither do you.

(Hilton Crofield, “Some Afterthoughts,” afterword to Introducing Chip Harrison, by Lawrence Block, The Countrymen Press, 1984)

That’s what Hilton Crofield has to say, and I wouldn’t attempt to improve on it. If you’ve enjoyed No Score, you’ll very likely have a good time with Chip Harrison Scores Again, and may then wend your way through Make Out with Murder and The Topless Tulip Caper. If you didn’t much care for No Score, well, you probably won’t like the others, either. But I don’t want to talk you out of anything. Best to buy them anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Lawrence Block has published more than 100 books, including four bestselling series, as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has received many awards in the U.S. and abroad and was named a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. For more information visit his website. He welcomes e-mails at lawbloc@gmail.com.

Five Questions for Jack Higgins

Jack Higgins is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 60 thrillers, including The Eagle Has Landed and The Wolf at the Door. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Born Harry Patterson, he grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The political and religious turmoil in Northern Ireland became a significant influence in his books, many of which prominently feature the Irish Republican Army. Before becoming a full-time writer, he had a career as an academic. He now lives in the Channel Islands.
   
What author has influenced you most?

I could read by age three and read most of the greats by ten. I always scribbled but The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald totally inspired me. It’s still my favorite novel.

What historical events do you draw on when writing?

As an academic with a doctorate, research is second nature to me, but my early life in Belfast was one of perpetual violence.  Shooting and bombs were common.  I’ve written about the IRA more than any other modern author.

What is your method of researching events/details in your books?

It’s simple these days, put the right names into the computer and the information is there for you.

What news sources do you turn to for current events? 

BBC News is tops in my opinion, but I keep up with American TV, too.  

Other than The Great Gatsby, which books inspire you?

The Count of Monte Cristo—Alexandre Dumas 
One of the greatest swashbuckling stories of all time. This story of a man wrongly imprisoned who escapes, finds the treasure and becomes the mysterious count hell bent on revenge has been filmed many times.
   
The Day of the Jackal—Frederick Forsyth
The turning point in the modern thriller, almost thirty years ago it was a world sensation with its description of the attempted assassination of General De Gaulle. The combination of genuine historical figures and fiction opened up a whole new world.
   
A Christmas Carol—Charles Dickens
The greatest novel about Christmas ever written. I read it myself every year as part of the festivities.
   
For more information, visit http://openroadmedia.com/author_higgins.html.

     

The Story Behind the Novel

by Jonathon King

Jonathan King is a former police and court reporter who draws on his journalism experience in writing the Max Freeman crime novels set in southern Florida. The Blue Edge of Midnight, first in the series, won the 2002 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His most recent novel, Midnight Guardians, continues the Freeman series and is set in the Everglades, where the author enjoys canoeing and airboating. Here he talks about the events that drove him to write his first book.  


If you lived in Florida in the mid 1980s like I did, you know the name Adam Walsh. Yes, the Adam Walsh who was abducted from a local mall and whose subsequent death has been told over and over and spurred his father, John Walsh, to create television’s  America’s Most Wanted and led to legislation to protect abducted children. Adam’s death raised the consciousness of the media, and I was a member of that media.

Part of The Blue Edge of Midnight comes from that seminal event. As a South Florida police reporter I covered several incidents of missing children. I was actually in the home of a missing child in 1990 with helicopters in the air, leaflets being handed out and police dogs on the sniff when the missing child began to whimper from behind a couch where she’d fallen asleep only steps away from where I was interviewing the distraught mother.

The other impetus behind that book comes from Florida’s century long conflict with the Everglades, a pristine ecosystem that has been encroached on for over a hundred years. The battle between Florida real estate expansion and the Everglades is epic. I dovetailed that struggle by creating a character in The Blue Edge of Midnight who believes - as a denizen of the Glades who knows animal instincts - that no animal will try to raise its young in a place where it is threatened. In his warped vision, be believes that if he threatens the young of the suburbanites moving into the Glades by kidnapping their children and killing them, he can dissuade the encroaching hoards from moving into his world. 

When my protagonist, Max Freeman, gets caught up in the villain’s plan by being the first to discover the body of the latest child killing and becomes a suspect, he has to clear himself by finding the real killer.

It may sound simple, but every story has its twists and turns. I am a firm believer that the truth is rarely black and white. The ways of human beings are almost always convoluted and real stories, based on reality, are the ones that teach and yes, entertain us.

Visit the author's website at http://www.jonathonking.com/.

 

Out With The Old, In With The New . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

Merry Christmas/Happy New Year to one and all!

WHERE does the time go??? Just last year many people were worried about Y2K, some people preparing by storing food and water, etc. I'm not still not sure exactly what they were afraid of, except computer meltdowns which would have shut down stores and kept us from buying food and other necessities. Well, we in southern Illinois deal with that from time to time, way out here in the boondocks, when an ice storm hits and we live without power and other modern amenities for days on end. Sigh. Where was I? Y2K. As you have already no doubt figured out, that really wasn't LAST year, it was TEN years ago and where DID that entire decade go?

Life has a way of sliding quickly by us, whether we are actively living it, or simply watching from the sidelines. A couple of decades ago I was involved in a job I wasn't totally crazy about. It was physically and mentally difficult for me. I'd often heard that we should stop and reflect every now and then about what we are doing with our lives. Are we happy where we are? Do we still want to be there in five years? Or not? My answer was NOT, so I quit and went back to college (in my mid-fifties, mind you) so I could go in a different direction with my life. With my career. That decision led to a new, better job, but it also led me to be able to become a published author, something I'd only dreamed about until then, not even daring to dream that it could actually happen.

So, dear reader, are you happy where you are? Do you still want to be there next year? In five years? At the end of another decade (2020, which sounds far away but will be here before we can blink twice!)

Where do I want to be next year, the next five years, the next decade, assuming I'm still here? Pretty much where I am now, except I need to exercise and work out more in order to maintain my current physical strength. ( I've discovered that we "seniors" lose a lot each decade, no matter how much we work out to maintain.) I want to stay published, particularly in non-fiction. I want to teach/encourage other women. I want to grow as a person. And I want to smell the roses along the way because IF time flies when you're having fun, I must be having a REAAAALLLLYYY good time!

So I repeat, Happy New Year to one and all. May it be our best year ever. And I wish us all 365 days of noooo power outages. Sigh.

PS: Just signed a contract with Harlequin to bring my latest book, FIFTY-SEVEN TRAVELING out in paperback sometime in 2011. It came out in hardback this past July.

And author Patrick Miller did a terrific article about my new book because it's set in a tourist area (Smoky Mountains) so IF you are an author with a book set in a tourist area, you might want to contact Miller to see if he is interested in doing an article about it. The link to the article is here: http://southeasternliterarytourisminitiative.blogspot.com/2010/12/murder-in-dollywood-country.tymlhttp://

It's a Holiday

by Sheila Connolly

(Hey, you're supposed to be having a lovely time celebrating with family and friends–what are you doing here? But thanks for stopping by.)


Once upon a time, Christmas was a religious holiday. That didn't mean a lot to me when I was growing up. I had a rather sketchy religious upbringing: my father was Catholic, my mother a nominal Episcopalian, and nobody attended any services (they were married in both churches, to keep his parents happy). Neither was very concerned about passing on their convictions, such as they were, to my sister and me. In my formative early years, I attended a Quaker school, which muddled things even more. So I never had the Sunday school, drag-to-early-service experience.

Which makes it all the more odd that in graduate school I found myself studying medieval art history, and that meant churches. Not just any churches, but the grand cathedrals of Europe, where the builders strove to reach the sky, dissolve the walls, and fill the soaring space with literal and figurative light. Or if you want to take an opposing view, the rich patrons sought to erect large and ostentatious monuments in order to impress their friends and foes and buy their way into heaven. Whatever the impetus, the results are undeniably magnificent.


In any case, I have probably been in more Catholic churches in my life than most Catholics, from St. Peter's in Rome on down to the tiny "chapel of ease" where my Irish great-grandparents worshipped.


Obviously for me Christmas was a largely secular holiday, distinguished by presents and food. My parents and my grandmother were indulgent, so there were many presents. There was also much food, as my grandmother would arrive from New York bearing baskets of absurdly large fruits, bags of nuts in the shell, packages of dried dates, and of course, cookies and candies. It seems quaint now, when foods from all over the globe are available in local supermarkets, but back then it was a big deal.


For my husband and me, most of our families are gone now, and our siblings live in states sufficiently distant that it's not easy to get together. Every year I honor my own family holiday history by retrieving the tarnished blown-glass ornaments from the attic and hanging them on the tree, reminding myself of where they came from and when I first remember them. My husband brought none with him to the marriage, and can't even remember any family tree traditions, although of course we've added plenty since we've been together. I even cherish the plastic Joe Montana that my sister sent me one year (we lived in the Bay Area during the 49ers' glory years).


Even though I may not call myself religious, I still feel a compulsion to celebrate something at this time of year. Whatever organized religion may tell us, December is still the time of the solstice, when the days begin, imperceptibly, to grow longer again. I've been lucky to visit Stonehenge and a number of other stone circles, large and small, and it's humbling that those ancient, pre-literate cultures knew that there was something magical about the solstice, and built their own monuments to celebrate it. Organized religion just borrowed from them.


We believe that the sun will return, crops will grow, and life will go on. That's worth celebrating no matter what you label it. Happy holidays, whatever you choose to call them!

Guppies Revisited

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently had the pleasure of compiling a list of 2010 publications—novels and short stories—by members of Sisters in Crime’s online Guppies chapter. I joined Guppies in 2002, shortly after becoming a member of Sisters in Crime’s national, or rather international, organization in support of women mystery and what we’d now call crime fiction writers. At the time, Guppies was a small interest group rather than a full fledged chapter devoted to the Great UnPublished, hence the name. Without naming names, let’s look at the stats. When I joined, only one Guppy had a book, a woman whose novel had been published by a small press in 2000. Another woman, whom I met in my local SinC meeting in New York, had left the Guppies when her first mystery came out in 2000 and gone on to write several more books in the series.

In 2003, three Guppies I knew got published, two with a small press that later folded, a victim of its own expansion, the other with a venerable house that decided a couple of years later to abolish its mystery line. Two of the three left Guppies on achieving publication, the third chose to stay. In 2004, a Guppy who had failed to find an agent published the first of a series with a prestigious small press. She left. In 2005 and 2006, two Guppies who had been active on the group’s e-list published their first novels. They decided that the group was so supportive and such a good resource that they didn’t want to let it go. They stayed, and I believe this was the turning point.

Today, Guppies serves five hundred hundred writers, both Sisters in Crime and what I’ve heard called Mister Sisters, who are seriously seeking publication, emerging writers trying to develop their careers past the first novel or short story, and established writers who have observed the camaraderie among us at conferences and heard that as a group, we have abundant information to share about the rapidly changing and often chaotic course of publishing in our genre. After wondering why it took me fifty years of dreaming of being a writer to publish my first novel, I realized the simple answer was that I’d tried for far too long to do it alone. Guppies help each other critique their manuscripts, write query letters and synopses, seek agents, deal with rejection, start the next manuscript while the last one is making the rounds, and rejoice at each other’s successes, whether it’s a rave rejection, an offer of representation from an agent, a book deal, or a good review.

In 2009, Guppies published a total of four first novels, fourteen additional novels, and sixteen short stories. In 2010, Guppies published ninety-five novels and short stories, including more than a dozen first novels, an impressive tally indeed, especially compared to none in 2001 and 2002, less than a decade ago.

No author, aspiring, emerging, or established but not immune to setbacks, can afford to take today’s crazy publishing climate personally. Guppies avoid this particular trap by schooling. We keep swimming along together through disappointments and rejections and the occasional triumph, and when we voice our hopes and fears, we hear all around us a chorus of, “Me too.”