Far from the primrose path...

By Kate Flora
 
Sometimes the course of our careers is mysterious and far from smooth. I never meant to write police procedurals. When I started writing mysteries back in the mid-1980’s, I was a practicing lawyer, spending my days in a world that still found women lawyers a novelty. I had a nice, big feminist chip on my shoulder and I wanted to write books about women as heroes, women in charge, women rescuing themselves. My long-time protagonist, Thea Kozak, did all of that. I happily rode the wave of post-Nancy Drew writers coming of age for several years. I loved Thea. I loved my reader’s reactions to her. I felt like I was rejoining a group of old friends whenever I started to write a new book in the series. And then the series got dropped.

Many of us know what that’s like. You’re writing a book a year, you feel like you understand the drill, you’ve got the rhythm, and suddenly, someone jerks the rug out from under you and you’re lying there on your back, trying to figure out what happened.

But writers write, regardless of the world’s acclaim. My agent was saying try something new. So I looked around and realized that to make it credible, crime writers have to know about crime. I’d been asking my local police a lot of questions. I’d taken a citizens’ police academy course, and a police-taught RAD class. I thought the police were really interesting. Since a writer grows when she challenges herself to do something new, I decided to write about a trio of male cops. Got a lieutenant in the Portland, Maine police department to be my advisor, and my Joe Burgess series began.

Playing God was born over breakfast with a Newark, Delaware cop when I was at the Mid-Atlantic Mystery Conference in Philadelphia. He described the devastating effect a murdered child case had had on a colleague. That story meshed with my vision of the kind of cop I wanted Joe Burgess to be—a man who had seen too much, who had black patches on his soul. My imaginings and his story were fueled by my deep anger at the way doctors had handled my sister’s final illness. I needed distraction. I needed obsession. So I set out to see how fast I could write the story of a philandering physician found dead in his Mercedes, and of the cop whose mother that doctor had carelessly misdiagnosed, who now had to investigate his death. Powerful stuff.

I wrote 10-11 hours a day, and in four months, I had written 485 pages. With brilliant editing from Joshua Bilmes, the book emerged a hundred pages lighter, but still strong and dark. And a funny thing happened. I had spent such intense time writing book that when I typed “The End” and tried to return to normal life, I felt like my friends had abandoned me. My imaginary friends. I had to start the second book so I could spend more time with them. The Angel of Knowlton Park, about investigating in the death of a small boy found in a city park, was written at a normal pace. And Burgess and his colleagues settled back into being characters again. Characters who struggle with the challenge of being normal when their world is so far from normal.

As someone who lived through the Vietnam era, and spent a year jumping every time the phone rang at an odd time, I wondered what the effect of Iraq and Afghanistan, and another wave of our young coming home damaged and unacknowledged, would have on our veterans. That wondering led to the third Joe Burgess, Redemption, when the body of Reggie the Can Man, Burgess’s high school football buddy who never recovered from the war, is pulled from Portland Harbor and an astute M.E. suspects that the drowning was no accident. As long as Reggie was alive, Burgess could always hope for his recovery. Now that hope is gone. The one last thing Burgess can do for his friend is see that his killer is found.

Writing police procedurals has led me down some strange roads, including a lot of nights in cop cars on back streets in dark cities. It led me into the arena of true crime when my police advisor decided he wanted to write about his most compelling case. It has led me deep into the Canadian woods on an ATV in pursuit of another true story. It’s going to take me to Arkansas, following the story of an international child abduction. And down the dirt roads of Maine as I help a warden write his memoir. My personal hero, Jim Huang, revived the Thea Kozak series by publishing Stalking Death. I’m now gearing up to write Death Warmed Over.

Along the way, this is what I’ve learned: If life knocks you over, get up and go on. Only you get to decide you’re a writer. Take chances. If the thought of writing something scares you, that may be the next thing you should write. If you think you write mysteries with strong women, and a strong male character comes knocking with a story, open the door. Follow your heart. Write the story that speaks to you. And believe that if it gets you excited, it will probably excite your reader as well. 
******************
Attorney Kate Flora’s twelve books include seven Thea Kozak mysteries, two gritty police procedurals, a suspense thriller written as Katharine Clark, and a true crime, Finding Amy, which was a 2007 Edgar nominee and has been optioned for a movie. Her current projects include Death Dealer, a true crime involving a Canadian serial killer, a screenplay, and a novel in linked stories. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. She is a former editor and publisher at Level Best books, former international president of Sisters in Crime, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake conference. Her third Joe Burgess police procedural, Redemption, is available now. For more information, visit Kate's website. 

Promotion--The Sequel

by Sheila Connolly

Four years ago, a month or so before my first book came out, I wrote a post for the now defunct blog Writers Plot, about what little I knew about promotion. In advance of the publication of my eleventh book next week (Fire Engine Dead), I thought I'd revisit the topic, to see what I may have learned in those four years.

In 2008 I created a formula for deciding what promotion any individual writer should do. Let's see how well that stands up! (Original bits in italics)

There are many, many sources for information on what to do to promote your book, your series, yourself. Books, blogs, loops, websites, consultants--you name it, they're happy to tell you what you need to do. The problem is, they don't all agree.

Well, that hasn't changed too much. I should have included agents and publicists, not to mention the ubiquitous Joe Konrath.

Let's assume you have a published book in hand and you want people to buy it. Let us also assume your goal is to sell as many books as possible, so that your publisher is happy and you can keep writing books.

Okay, that's still true, sort of. Except now the publisher is not the controlling factor. You now have the capability to publish through a small press (an ever-growing number) or even go straight to electronic publishing yourself. You have more choices than you did four years ago. Whether that's good or bad, for either the writer or the reader, is still up in the air.

But whatever medium or vehicle you choose, you still may need to promote yourself and your book(s). So here's the formula from 2008:

T + M + W + E = PromoScore


To explain:


Time (T). First, set aside time for writing. Then figure out what time you have to allow for (a) a job, (b) a family, and (c) eating and sleeping. What's left is T, your time for promotion.


Money (M). If you don't have a trust fund or a rich spouse, you need to decide what you want to spend on promotion. Assign an amount of money M that you are willing to put into each kind of marketing for your book.

The core list of promotional efforts is fairly consistent among the "experts": set up websites and blogs and pages in the "social networks" such as MySpace [substitute FaceBook and Twitter here]; participate in writers and readers loops; attend conferences; arrange book signings; buy ads in industry publications; seek out interesting alternative venues (knitting stores, hairdressers, horse shows) that tie into your work; contact local libraries and newspapers. You will notice these vary widely in T and M requirements.

All of these are still possibilities, although some have emerged as more effective than others.


Willingness (W). Lots of writers are shy and solitary, so this is an important consideration, and you can't just ignore it. How much do you like or hate each activity, on a scale from one to ten? Call this W for willingness. You hate large groups? Then conferences get a 2. You love blogging? Give that an 8.


This is something I think a lot of writers overlook. For example, All your friends tell you that you have to spend time on Facebook, connecting with your readers. You hate Facebook. Therefore you would give it a low W score (you don't have to tell your well-meaning friends). Remember, this is a comparative number.

Exposure (E). How many people can you reach with each type of effort?

Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? If you love talking to book clubs but only six people attend, is that a good use of your resources?


Put together the variables: T (time), M (money), W (willingness) and E (exposure) and you get the equation:
 

T + M + W + E = PromoScore

Apply this formula to each of your promotional opportunities. Give each a score, and then rank them and figure out what you think will give you the results you want: sales. Without losing your sanity.

So what do I think, four years later? Having tried (in no particular order) blogging (four different blogs), conferences, paid ads, library and bookstore talks, Facebook, a website, writers groups, and sweet-talking a widely-varied group of vendors to please, please carry at least one of my books?

I still think the formula works. You're one person and you can't do everything, so you have to find a way to decide which ones will be most effective—for you. Guess what: people still don't know what actually works. The most consistently-cited factor is word of mouth, but that still assumes that you can get your book into the hands of someone who will like it and will tell their friends about it. So never be shy about talking about your writing—you're still your best promoter for your own work.

And don't forget Fire Engine Dead! An arsonist targets a Philadelphia fireman's museum...but what was the real target?

I Don’t Outline...But

Elizabeth Zelvin


At a writing conference I attended recently, an “inspirational” keynote speaker talked about the importance of daydreaming to the creative process and encouraged the writers (and illustrators—it was a children’s literature event) to get centered by some sort of ritual,

such as lighting a candle before applying what a bestselling author who also appeared at the conference calls “butt glue.”


I’m no stranger to the temptation to pop out of the chair when I lose concentration or get stuck for the next word, scene, or sentence. And I do daydream in the sense that my characters are most likely to start talking in my head, or my unconscious to provide a needed twist or plot point, is when my mind has a chance to float free: in the shower, while I’m driving, and especially in bed in the morning when I’m awake but not ready to do my stretches and get up. At this point in my life (the third third, regardless of my longevity), an alarm clock and a day job would be a catastrophe from a creative standpoint.


The inspirational speaker went so far as to provide 1,200 scented tea lights for the conference attendees to take home and use, if they choose, in their own rituals. Mine is sitting on the end table beside my favorite seat on the sofa. I never refuse a freebie, and I like candles very much. But at no point did I have the slightest intention of lighting it, chanting, meditating, or performing any sort of ritual before I sit down at the keyboard. I can remember times (in the Seventies, when I wrote my first three novels, never published) when I went through a routine involving pencil sharpening and the watering of plants. But I knew at the time that these were procrastination rites and not a summoning of creativity. (I don’t think I’ve used a pencil since the Seventies. Have you?)


It occurred to me, as I sat on the sofa meditating on my unlit tealight, that I associate such rituals as lighting a candle with sitting down, gluing butt, and staring at a blank screen—you know, what used to be called a blank piece of paper. Further, I realized that I never do that. How can this be? In the perennial division (not a debate, since we all write however we write) between outliners and what I prefer to call into-the-mist writers (I hate the term “pantsers”), I’m firmly in the camp of those who don’t outline, but write the first draft of a novel or short story as a journey into the unknown or dimly seen. My brand-new realization about my own process, however, is that I never sit down before the screen with no idea of what I mean to write today.


Here’s how my process works: In that daydreaming time, my characters start talking in my head, or a story arc or line of narrative comes to me. Sometimes, annoyingly, it comes in short bursts in the middle of the night, so I keep having to get up and stumble around in the dark. I had a light pen, but I mislaid it. I have a digital recorder, which works in the car, but my husband, who needs his sleep, would be very unhappy if I used it in the bed at 3 AM...and 3:30...and 4:00.... So how I get it down while the fit is on me is to scribble it (in pen) on scraps of paper or post-its to decipher in the morning. When I sit down at the keyboard, I invariably know what I’m going to do: either write the next consecutive line or scene or chapter of an already started manuscript or develop the scribbled fragments I’ve accumulated.


So it’s a good thing I never light the candle. It might burn up all those post-its and scraps of paper before I’m through with them.

Book Lust, the (digital) sequel

Sandra Parshall

In May of 2007, the last time I wrote about book lust – we all know what that is, don’t we? – the publishing world existed in a universe quite different from today’s.

I waxed rhapsodic about the bookness of a book:

What in this world is more wondrous, magical, intriguing, alluring than a book? An entire world contained between two covers! But It’s not the content alone that I love. I enjoy the feel of a book in my hands, I admire a sturdy spine, I appreciate an attractive cover and an elegant design. I’m a type junky and always check to see whether the book includes a note about the type. I’m disappointed when I don’t find that information. (My favorite typeface, at least for the moment, is Sabon, which is used in Stephen Booth’s British editions.)

I admitted that once I owned a book, I never wanted to let it go. When we moved, about 20 years ago, from one Washington, DC suburb to another, we thinned our book collection and donated dozens to the Arlington County (VA) Central Library’s used book room. As soon as they were gone, I began to suffer an agonizing remorse. How could I have given them up? How could I live without them? For a long time after we moved next door to Fairfax County, I made regular trips to the Arlington Library, where -- yes -- I gradually bought back a fair number of the books we had donated. They were mine. They belonged at home with me, not with strangers.

Every reader and writer I knew felt the same way. Although they sometimes complained about the lack of space in their houses for other objects, not to mention humans, they could not part with their books.

That was May, 2007. On November 19 of that year, the Kindle went on sale. Some of us laughed at it. We already knew about e-books. We knew that practically nobody read them. After all, who would want to read off an electronic screen when they could be holding a real book in their hands?

But while earlier e-readers had languished in the marketplace, the Kindle had the might of Amazon and its breathtakingly huge inventory behind it, and the Kindle began to sell. We heard a rumble deep in the heart of the book world. We felt a faint tremor in the earth beneath our feet. The rumble grew to a roar, the tremor built to a violent convulsion that threatened to leave no bookstore standing.

And the definition of book lust morphed into something undreamt of in the spring of 2007 B.K.

People who coveted printed books in the Before Kindle era started looking askance at those piles of rectangular objects that took up so much space at home and were a nuisance to carry while traveling. To be sure, diehard fans of “real books” remain. But many have turned into hybrids, declaring that as much as they love printed books and always will, they don’t have room for any more and prefer to acquire e-books instead. E-reader tablets continue to sell, and as many as one-fourth of all Americans already own one. (At the end of 2011, Amazon sold a million Kindles a week.) E-book sales are gaining market share by leaps and bounds.

In the wake of all this change, I have noticed the parallel growth of e-book lust. Some people declare that they have more e-books on their machines than they will ever get around to reading. They troll for free e-books online and download them in staggering numbers. I suspect that a great many of those books will never be read, which is not something the authors want to hear. Electronic book hoarding has a lot in common with print book hoarding. Its one virtue is that it takes up less space.

I have an iPad with the Kindle app on it, and I’ve downloaded a handful of e-books. If a reference book I might use often for research is especially cheap as an e-book, I will download it. I stay away from the Kindle Store because I know I am a book addict and I don’t want to tempt myself. Once I give in to the urge to go browsing, I will be lost.

Now let’s talk about your book habits.

Do you own an e-reader?

How many books are on it right now?

How many downloads have you bought in the last month? The last year?

Are you buying more e-books than printed books?

How many of your downloads have you actually read?

Have you downloaded books on impulse, only to realize later that you’ll probably never read them?

Do you remove a book from your reader after you’ve read it or decided you don’t want to read it?

Have you ever given an e-book as a gift? Do you think you ever will?

Going to the Zone

Sharon Wildwind

One afternoon when I was four years old, my mother left me and my brother in the car while she ran into a friend’s house to pick up a sewing pattern. My brother was about three months old, asleep in a basket on the back seat. Car seats? Seat belts? Never heard of them.

The car, with the parking brake on, was parked at the top of a hill. A few minutes after my mother went in the house, the car started to roll down the hill.

I realized I couldn’t reach the brake pedal, opened the door, got out of the car, closed the door, ran for the house yelling for my mother, and got to the house in time for her to run out, get in the car and stop it before it plummeted down the hill. I did all of this in seconds, with absolute focus and clarity that I remember to this day. That was my first experience being in the zone.

I love that zone feeling. The way that time dilates. That sense of absolute focus. The way that connections that I couldn’t see before suddenly make complete sense.

Here’s what research has discovered about how we naturally increase our ability to zone:

1. Focus on the task. If you are writing, write. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t Google or Bing or any of those other new verbs. Don’t get up to check if your spices needs to be arrange alphabetically. Write, write, write over and over.

2. Slow breathing and pulse rate. That’s not as hard as it sounds. Find your pulse in your wrist. Take a deep, slow breath. Hold it for a couple of seconds at maximum inspiration. Let it out slowly. In those couple of seconds with your breath held, you should have felt your pulse slow. The more you practice this, the easier it gets. Um, stop somewhere short of hyperventilation and passing out, okay?

3. Enjoy the pursuit. Believe that the task is rewarding for its own sake. Find the sweet spot where your skills are perfectly matched to the task at hand. There’s no sense kidding ourselves, a lot of writing isn’t enjoyable. We get through it because we have to, because whether it’s editing for comma usage or mucking our way through a scene we don’t yet understand but have to finish, those tasks are part of the package deal of being an author. We hope for, live for those incredible, tasty bits where the writing becomes supremely fun.

4. Silence self-critical thoughts. Unlike that breathing and pulse thing, this often is neither easy nor fun. But it is doable and, over time, we either learn to cope or we give up writing and go somewhere else more fun.

5. Expand the focus to include an outside reference point. We’re talking reward points here, whether it’s a perfect cup of tea as soon as you finish this chapter, or anticipating climbing on a plane for Hawaii in three months. We need rewards and treats outside of ourselves, outside of projects for which to aim.

6. Keep doing the above 5 things for roughly 10,000 hours of practice. If we imagine 300 days a year as a base, and practice, say, 2 hours a day, that should take us about 16 to 17 years to achieve.

Or if you’re in a hurry, and putting in 10,000 hours of practice doesn’t appeal to you, you could sign up for lab experiments where your brain patterns are teased apart and projected on a screen. Then you have the fun of learning to change the shape of the pattern to create a zoning pattern. Create the right pattern and enter the zone immediately.

For the people in a real hurry, scientists have discovered that zapping certain brain areas with electricity produces transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This fast tracks your brain instantly into a zone state that lasts as long as the electricity flows. If you’re interested, check out the New Scientist article about research in this area. This is being touted as the next great revolution in education.

If you have some concerns about this, especially for your kids, you might also want to look at the Scientific America article on the ethics of tDSC.

For the really got-to-get-to-that-zone-and-hang-the-consequences group, people are actually trying the tDCS stimulation at home as a do-it-yourself project, with instructions they found on the Internet. Never mind that we don’t know what the long-term effect of this research are. Never mind that a short-time side effects can include blindness that lasts several months. I can’t think of a single situation where home-grown tDCS a good idea. But then, maybe I’m just old-fashioned. After all, I was born before infant car carriers and seat belts.

So what’s it going to be for you: practice, practice, practice, or a 9-volt jolt to the brain?

----------------

Quote for the week:

To the make of a piper goes seven years of his own learning, and seven generations before. At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and leaning a fond ear to the drone he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.

~Neil Munro (1863–1930) Scottish journalist, newspaper editor, author and literary critic.

The same can be said of writers as of pipers.

Reflecting on the Oscars

by Julia Buckley

Ah, the Oscar Ceremony. Some criticize it for its pomp and circumstance, its forced glamour and sometimes stilted or self-serving speeches. I love the Oscars for those reasons, and more. The telecast is a yearly tradition for my family, and we always manage to splurge on junk food by suggesting that our gluttonous snacks are required Oscar fare.

As I watched the event this year, I pondered the notion of the acceptance speech. How well did people really understand what they were supposed to do up there, and how gracious were their speeches?

All the speech books suggest that one should consider SPAM--situation, purpose, audience and method. At the Oscars, this would dictate that one would

A)be aware of their special circumstances and appropriately grateful for them, as well as remaining conscious that all of their fans are watching (situation).

B)understand that it really IS an honor to be nominated, and that their goal is to be THANKFUL. However, it is clear when people approach the mike that they have varying purposes: politics, networking, grudge-holding, Hollywood-bashing (or praising), or, as is the case of one starlet whom I particularly dislike and who tends to win OFTEN, celebrating themselves at long-winded length while ignoring the orchestra.(This particular person wasn't present this year). (purpose)

C)be conscious of both the audience in the auditorium and the audience at home. What would bore them? Is the speaker's job to entertain those people, or to try to please the people involved in his or her own film? (audience)

D)realize that a well-prepared and beautifully rendered speech is far more enjoyable than a list of names. Should they be reading the names of endless producers, directors and camera people off a little piece of paper, saying that they'll make mistakes because they haven't brought their glasses? Or should they try to entertain the audience by showing the very skills that won them the award--that is, skills in public speaking and presentation? Skills in ACTING? So often the award recipients are disappointing when they approach the microphone.

The best speeches by far are those that are truly heartfelt. Who can forget Roberto Benigni, who in his euphoria at winning walked across the seats of the auditorium and moved the audience to tears with his enthusiasm and joy?

For the reasons above, I have chosen my favorites from the 2012 Oscar speeches:

Runners up:

Octavia Spencer, for her sweet and genuine acceptance speech. I think she moved the entire audience to tears.

Asghar Farhadi, the director of the winning Foreign Language film; the paper he read from was forgivable because he had an important message that he wanted to make sure to translate correctly--and everyone was listening.

Michel Hazanavicius, who won a Best Director Oscar for THE ARTIST, for his heartfelt speech, in English, when he forgot the original.

And my winners for the best acceptance speeches: A TIE: the always-elegant Christopher Plummer, who acknowledged his fellow nominees AND his wife and daughter, and brought a gentleman-liness to his presentation that one does not always see in the actors of today.

And the wonderful Jean Dujardin, whose joy and sweet French accent as he accepted his best actor award for THE ARTIST, highlighted a true love of The Oscars and the silent films that inspired him.

All in all a truly fun and joyous Oscar ceremony, with some truly lovely speeches.

Severed Heads, Torsos, and Other Mayhem

If you’re at all squeamish, maybe you’d better skip this post. Then again, if you like mysteries and crime novels, you’re in the right place, because I’m going to talk today about the grislier aspects of crime. We’ve heard in the news several weeks ago about the discovery of a severed head in L.A.’s Bronson Canyon, where, ironically, many an L.A. film crew shoots crime dramas. It’s as noir as it gets, all right, since the head was found near the iconic Hollywood sign. And as if that didn’t satisfy our prurient curiosity, they soon found the severed hands and feet of the same victim. And because I’m just as grisly as the rest, I kept thinking, “Where’s the torso?”

On a clear day in Los Angeles, you can see the Hollywood sign from quite a long way away. It is a universal symbol of Hollywood, the studios, and all the dark deeds of a gritty Los Angeles in the thirties and forties. Minor actress Peg Entwhistle found lasting fame when she dove from the "H" in the sign, committing suicide.

L.A. is home to many a noir story and the recent murder falls right into the same category. In fact, it was the same week in 1947, that the severed body of Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, was discovered in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, an area in the heart of Los Angeles. She was found nude, mutilated, drained of blood, with her torso nearly severed in half. The corners of her mouth were slashed giving her an eerie semblance of a rictus smile. Her murder remains in the minds of crime enthusiasts because of its grisly nature as well as the fact that it is unsolved, although many have tried to claim that they solved it.

The Cleveland Torso Murders were the act of a serial killer, also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, committing his crimes between 1935 and 1938 in Cleveland, Ohio, though some investigators credit 40 victims to the serial killer, with a victim as early as the 1920s and as late as 1950. The killer killed his victims by decapitation, and often mutilated the body, castrating the men, and sometimes severing the extremities. Headless torsos were found abandoned. Sometimes the heads were found, sometimes not. Again, the killer was never found.

Why are we drawn to such things? Why is it that the news will always lead with, if they could, “the nude body of a woman was found today…”? We are all prurient, always have been no matter what we claim. There but for the grace of God go we, perhaps. But it might be more. In a series of studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researchers came away with the knowledge that women are particularly drawn to crime stories, more so than men, out of their own fears of being a victim of violent crimes. Forewarned is forearmed?

We now know the identity of that most recent victim of the January murder as 66 year old Hervey Medellin, who lived in an apartment off Sunset Boulevard. (Are you feeling the noir?)

But Medellin is more than merely a plot device. Authors are careful, or at least we mostly try to be, when we lift stories "ripped from the headlines." It's better to disguise it a bit, especially if these are recent crimes and victim's families might feel the harm of it. Crimes of years and years ago, on the other hand, as in the case of Jack the Ripper, are certainly fodder for authors. Here again is a slashing, disemboweling set of serial murders. It seems the public never gets tired of new iterations of Jack the Ripper, also unsolved.

Let us hope that this most recent killer is soon found and that there are no other victims. Meanwhile, the circus continues.

APPLES

by Sheila Connolly

As I may have mentioned here, my Orchard Mystery series came about because of a conversation with my agent. She had seen (and rejected) a submission about a woman who stumbled into running a bed and breakfast in western Massachusetts, in a colonial house that happened to have a ghost. If you've read any of the Orchard books, you know that the house is not a bed and breakfast, and there is no resident ghost.

But we both liked the setting and the central character, so we started batting around ideas that that might work while keeping the good parts. Rural area, with some high-brow colleges nearby…hmm. We rejected the idea of an organic farm, and then I said "apples," and we were off and running.

What is it about apples that is so appealing? Well, they've been part of American culture since the colonies were settled in the 17th century: the first European apple trees were planted in 1623 in Boston by William Blackstone, who was a minister to the Plymouth settlers. Every household had an apple orchard, mainly for making cider, since people didn't trust the well water and hard cider contained enough alcohol to kill most of the bacteria. George Washington built a distillery to make apple brandy, and John Adams greeting each day with a tankard of (hard) cider. Many of us grew up with the Disney-fied version of Johnny Appleseed (a distant cousin of mine), who was instrumental in spreading apple trees westward.

So unquestionably apples and hard cider were a central part of American life—until Prohibition crushed them. And where there were once as many as a thousand varieties in this country, now we grow only a handful. Still, we regard apples as a healthy food, and their juice as a healthy drink.

But is that all? Since I've been writing about apples for a few years now (educating my city-raised heroine—and myself—about them as I go), I've become more aware of apple representations in the media—and they're everywhere. Somehow a bowl full of apples has become an iconic image.

I'm not going to get into the whole Adam-Eve-Snake-Apple issue. I'm not talking about food-related ads or cooking shows. What I've found recently is that I keep seeing bowls of apples prominently displayed in kitchens and even living rooms on television and in the movies. Take the series The Closer. Those who follow that series will know that neither the protagonist nor her spouse have much interest in cooking. Sure, an apple is a handy snack to have around. But what troubles me is that in this case (a) the apples are left sitting out, unrefrigerated, and (b) there are far more apples in that bowl than the two residents of the household could consume before those poor apples went bad (unless they wanted to risk serious intestinal upsets).

Once I noticed this, I started seeing the same bowl of apples everywhere--network shows, and a lot of commercials. And even in the White House: during a recent newscast held in the Oval Office—yes, there was that bowl of apples, front and center on a low table.

How did we manage to load a simple fruit with such iconographic significance? I'm guessing that a bowl of apples immediately suggests home, history, honesty, hard work, and healthy bowels. But at the same time we have more or less homogenized them, ignoring or breeding out the subtleties of flavor and size and appearance. Say "apple" to almost anyone and their first thought is "Delicious," or just maybe "Macintosh." (My alternate theory is that they are alien seeds, and when they hatch they will take over the world.)

I will plead guilty to exploiting that same iconography for my mystery series. Is there anybody who doesn't love apples? The apple orchard in my fictional Granford is an ongoing and growing character in the books, and my readers seem to respond to that. I'm happy to take advantage of that symbolism, whatever the origin. And I've planted six apples trees around my house.

I like my Kindle

Elizabeth Zelvin


As a writer, I have ambivalent feelings about Kindle, its parent, Amazon, and e-readers in general. As a reader, I like paying a lower price for books and not having to carry bulky tomes around in order always to have something to read at hand. When I finally got a Kindle as a gift, I hoped that I would fall in love with it.


I’d heard a lot of users say they loved their Kindle, whether or not they expected to before they got it. In our era of constantly changing technology, there are some devices that manage not to become objects of widespread if not universal love-hate at best. I love Sadie, my GPS, who’s navigated me through strange cities all over the country to bookstores and libraries on obscure streets and back roads. I love my EZ-Pass, which has saved me endless road hours and upper arm stress that I once would have spent rolling windows up and down and scrambling for change at toll booths on highways and bridges. I love my iPhone, which gives me long distance calls for free, connects me with help when I’m lost or late or stranded, and allows me to show the latest videos of my granddaughters dancing to my friends and anyone else I can grab hold of when the kvelling fit takes me.


So far, to my disappointment, my Kindle has not joined this select company. I like it, but I don’t love it. For one thing, in spite of having heard over and over before I got it how hard it is to format books for e-readers, I’m shocked at the unprofessional quality of the text.


To do the big publishers justice, the traditionally published new novels I’ve seen so far are as free of errors as the general run of print books. But, like many new Kindle users, I’ve been stocking my e-library with classics that are in the public domain and therefore offered either free or at a nominal cost. I’ve been reading my way through the works of Louisa May Alcott (23 books for $1.00) and of L.M. Montgomery (14 novels and numerous stories for $0.99), and the errors in both are downright weird. I don’t know if humans or electronics are responsible for repeated instances of “blas” for “blasé” and “piq” (was was it “picq”?) for “pique,” but they jolted me out of my reader’s trance over and over.


In Agatha Christie’s early books, the drawings and diagrams that are an essential part of the puzzle are missing. Chapter III of The Mysterious Affair at Styles begins: “To make this part of my story clear, I append the following plan of the first floor of Styles. The servants’ rooms are reached through the door B. They have no communication with the right wing, where the Inglethorps[ rooms were situated.” No plan. No indication, eg “[PLAN]”. No footnote. Frustration for the reader.


I’ve managed to learn to use just about all of the features of my iPhone, thanks to tips from other users and the helpful folks at the Verizon and Apple stores as well as trial and error. Not so the Kindle. I have the Kindle Touch, and I can turn the page forward or back with a simple tap on the right or left. But periodically, an inadvertent hand movement sends it skipping whole chapters forward or back through the text. So far, the only way I’ve found to correct this is to go back to the beginning of the book and “leaf” through it (tap-tap-tap-tap-tap....) until I find my lost place.


Electronics manufacturers delight in making their products increasingly “interactive.” Is this really a benefit? Maybe so, to the younger generation who tell all their Friends on Facebook every time they brush their teeth. But not to me. Every time my pinkie accidentally brushes the screen as I read, the ever-helpful folks at Amazon give me a thorough definition of the word, I’ve hit, most frequently “the” or “was.” What makes them think I need it?


At the end of each book, a screen invites the reader “Before you go...” to “Rate this book (on a five-star scale) and “Share you’ve finished.” I live in dread of accidentally tapping the “Share” button. I’m afraid that doing so will broadcast my reading choices to the millions of readers on Amazon, and of course no explanation of the feature is offered, so if I’m wrong, I’ll never know. I wanted a read I could take on the subway—not a permanent relationship with Big Brother.

Forty Words for "Looked"

Sandra Parshall

(I'm at that hair-pulling stage again, feverishly working on last-minute changes to a new book for my editor and trying to root out all the overused words that dot the landscape of my novel like stubborn dandelions. This post, which first appeared here in slightly different form back in the earliest days of Poe's Deadly Daughters, remains as sadly appropriate as ever.) 

People who keep track of such things report that the English language has almost one million words. Why, then, do I have so much trouble finding an alternative to “looked”?

Every writer will know what I’m talking about. It’s that broken-record thing your mind does without your conscious awareness. I can write a complete first draft without realizing that I’ve used a vocabulary of 200 words, tops. When I shift into rewrite mode, my inner editor is aghast to discover the same verb two dozen times -- in every chapter. She looked. He looked. They both looked. Again and again and again.

[Pause to bang head on desk.]

Out comes my copy of the Rodale Synonym Finder. Peered? A specialty word to be used sparingly, but great in certain contexts. Peeked? How many adults ever peek? Glanced and stared are easy to abuse, and like looked, they can multiply faster in a manuscript than hangers in a closet.

When I begin a manuscript with the intention of avoiding looked, some other word invariably moves in and takes over. Glared is one of my worst rough draft habits. My characters, always a high-strung lot, glare at each other, at traffic, at stormy skies, at inanimate objects and life in general, all the way through the first draft. I never realize I’m doing this while I’m doing it.

[Pause for more head-banging.]

My only remedy is to read through the first draft and make a list of overused words so I can replace them next time around. I’m dismayed at how little this list varies from one manuscript to the next. [Do you ever learn? Apparently not.]

English sometimes feels like a blunt-force weapon to me, lacking the delicate calibration of other languages. We don’t have marvelous words like Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude and hikikomori to convey complex emotional states. To say the same thing, writers and speakers of English have to string several words into a phrase or an entire sentence. Even angst and macho are borrowed from other languages.

Alaskan Native Americans have forty words for snow, to denote its many states and textures. I have three: snow, the generic white stuff; slush, what the generic white stuff becomes when it lands on warm pavement; and snirt, the dirty mounds of once-white stuff that are created by plows and always seem to last into May.

English may not have forty words for snow, but it has plenty of alternatives to said, and enthusiastic writers try to use all of them. I am no exception. Ironically, though, said is one word that should be allowed to stand in most cases, because our characters become ridiculous when they’re constantly exclaiming, shouting, pleading, crying, whispering, expostulating, etc. Said is believed to be invisible to the reader, regardless of how many times the writer uses it -- unlike, for example, looked and glared. So I often find myself striking some of the alternatives and upping my said total in later drafts. Then my editor tells me to replace most of the dialogue attributions with action.

 

I confess to feeling a mean little spark of glee when I realize that a well-known writer has failed to tame a bad word habit. One bestselling author is addicted to the word coursed. Adrenaline coursed through him. Anger coursed through her. Panic coursed through her. Joy coursed through her. And, of course, desire coursed through him. The author’s books are popular all over the world, which indicates that little or no irritation has coursed through her fans.

Are writers the only people who notice these things? Do they matter at all to readers who are not writers themselves? Maybe not. Maybe a book with incessantly glaring characters would go over well with readers. But as long as my overused words make me want to bang my head on my desk, I’ll continue to keep my list and spend days finding alternatives before I declare a manuscript finished.