Remembrances of Halloweens Past

by Julia Buckley



















Today I put up my Halloween decorations. I love Halloween–not because I throw parties or wear costumes or go trick-or-treating (although I do like to accompany my children when they go).
I just like to mark the changing of the seasons. I like the colors, the crisp air, the crunching leaves. I like lighting candles and buying pumpkins and watching the neighborhood lit up with orange fairy lights.

I’ve finally reached an age, though, that I start to feel nostalgic for all Halloweens past. I was thinking of some memorable ones today.

My first Halloween memory is not even my own, but one my father and mother passed down as a family legend. It involved my sister, Claudia, who is eight years my elder. My parents adopted her from a Hong Kong orphanage when she was four years old. She looked two because she was so malnourished. When they went to pick her up at the airport, she fought like a little tiger as she was handed to them–two strange white people who were taking her away from the only life she had ever known. My father feared they would be arrested for trying to abduct a child. But this fierce little girl was theirs now.

In the car my mother gave Claudia a little purse that she’d brought as a present. My sister took it, then surreptitiously stowed everything she could find into the purse. They took her home and tucked her into bed, but for many weeks afterward they would come back to find her sleeping on the hard wood floor–something she had grown used to at the orphanage.

By the time Halloween came around Claudia had started to adapt to American life. She played with her brother Bill, who was her age. She had never fully mastered Chinese, but she also had trouble learning English, so she spoke a babyish mixture of them both. My father explained to her, through words and pantomime, that he would take her and her brother from house to house and people would give her candy, which she could collect in a little bag.

This was something she liked. She marched up to each house, almost assertive in her little cat costume, saying something resembling trick-or-treat when she approached the doors. Suddenly, though, my father saw his tiny daughter come running back to him, knocking down children like bowling pins. The sight was so comical that he was laughing–until he saw her terror. “Luncava!” she said (or that was how my father remembered it).

“What? What do you mean?”

“Luncava! Luncava!” she screamed.

My father didn’t understand. And so tiny Claudia, in desperation, put out her hands to look like paws and began to pant like a dog.

“Dog?” my father asked, and then he spied an ancient shepherd padding down a driveway. He picked up his terrified daughter and her bag of candy and brought her home. At the time I’m sure he was too protective to laugh at her, but as the years passed it became a funny story, even to Claudia herself.

Another of my favorite Halloweens was from just a few years ago; my sister’s trick-or-treating days are over; she is a tennis pro in Virginia (not far from our own Sandra Parshall. This is one of her publicity shots).

It’s my own children who dress up now, and after they discovered Marx Brothers movies a few years ago they decided to be Groucho and Harpo. My littlest son was so committed to his costume that he refused to speak; Harpo never did, of course.

Some people recognized his dilemma right away. They said, “Oh, okay Harpo, I know you can’t talk.” But many of those who answered the doors had no idea who Harpo Marx was, and wondered why this little boy in the trench coat wouldn’t speak. That’s when my older son, Groucho, would step forward and say, “He can’t talk–he’s Harpo,” and manage to secure candy for them both.It was a display of brotherly love–something brought out by holidays and dress up occasions and seasonal rituals.

Halloween allows stories like these to stay in my memory when the stories of every day might fade away. The marking of the seasons means the marking of the years of our lives.

What’s your favorite autumn memory?

So What is Bouchercon, Anyway?

Jeffrey Marks (Guest Blogger)

Bouchercon, the yearly world mystery conference where authors and fans of all types of mystery meet and talk about their favorite books, will be held in Baltimore this year. The conference was named after Anthony Boucher, a renaissance man in genre fiction. He mastered the novel, the short story, radio, and genre criticism in a short, but full life. Following Boucher’s death, the mystery community decided to honor him by starting a conference in his name.

Since its inception in 1970, the world mystery convention has drawn in over 35,000 mystery fans, authors, and publishers. The annual conference, better known to fans as Bouchercon, has grown from a few hundred fans to the largest gathering of crime writers in the world.

The first Bouchercon hosted 82 mystery fans and writers, including Robert Bloch as guest of honor for the conference. Bloch and Boucher had known each other for years through their mutual love of science fiction.

After the first year, the conference was moved to the fall to avoid conflicts with the annual Edgars dinner, held in late April in New York City. The conference was a success, in that they had enough funds to plan a second Bouchercon and then a third.

It wasn’t until 1976 that I first heard of Bouchercon through a series of newsletters from mystery booksellers. All of them had stories of the generosity of spirit that embodied Anthony Boucher. Everyone involved in mystery and science fiction had a kind word to say about Boucher and a volume of those tributes could easily be compiled. A number of tributes came out after Boucher’s death in 1968 and continued over the next decade.

It was no wonder. Boucher was a tireless force for genre fiction. He not only wrote mystery novels, but penned a number of mystery and science fiction short stories. He wrote radio plays for both Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen. He founded one of the preeminent science-fiction magazines and started a true crime magazine as well. He translated the mystery works of authors into English for magazines, and of course, he reviewed mysteries and science fiction for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times.

It took another 16 years for me to attend my first Bouchercon in Toronto in 1992. The 23rd annual convention was no longer an intimate gathering of mystery fans. Over 2000 people jammed into the Royal York hotel. It was a formidable sight to see people ebbing and flowing through the panels, discussions, and book dealers’ room. The convention had added a Guest of Honor, Margaret Millar, and a Toastmaster, and a Lifetime Achievement award. I had the opportunity to sit with a table of writers at a banquet which hosted its own “best of” awards, appropriately called the Anthony awards.

Still, even with the addition of more mystery-related events in the four-day event, it felt as though something more had been lost. Many people no longer knew who Anthony Boucher was and what he represented to the genre. I frequently heard attendees refer to the event as “Boo-cher-con” instead of the proper “Bow-cher-con”.
Some ties to the past remained. In the last several years, the Bouchercon committee has come up with a memorial to Boucher, so that new members might know who he was and his place in the genre. Phyllis White, Boucher’s widow, was still given membership number one. She faithfully attended the event, but as time progressed, fewer people could pick her out of a crowd. Sadly, she passed away in 2000 and no member of the family has taken her place.

Even as direct memories of Boucher fade as time goes by, his reputation lives on. Bouchercon continues to thrive in its fourth decade. Boucher is still widely regarded as the best mystery reviewer for the New York Times. Mike Nevins recently collected his reviews for Ramble House, a project that was long overdue. His magazine, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, still publishes some of the best genre fiction available.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to miss this year’s event, but I’m on the planning committee for next year’s event in Indianapolis. I am looking forward to seeing all my friends there.

Jeffrey Marks is the Edgar-nominated author of Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of the Screwball Mystery, Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and the recently published Anthony Boucher. Marks has written novels and short stories in addition to his history of mystery series, which looks at the lives and writings of some of the most popular authors of the middle years of the last century. His website is: www.jeffreymarks.com.

Don't judge a book by its cover? Surely you jest???

By Lonnie Cruse

My friend, Suzanne Adair, has a new book coming out this month. She sent me a link to the cover to get my opinion. I think it's great! First I just saw the green. Then I saw the action. Great concept. And I've already read the manuscript, so I know the story is just as great. Her whole series is a terrific read.

I don't know who coined the phrase about not judging a book by its cover (and yes, I know it's meant more for people than for books) but it doesn't work for me with books OR people. Covers draw me to books faster than the author's name (unless I'm mid-series with an author and loving it.) Take Deb Baker's DOLLED UP FOR MURDER. I'd not read her work when I saw her book at a mystery conference, but I simply could not pass up a cover like that. Could you? If you grew up loving dolls, you'll love the book. And the series.

Author Carola Dunn is blessed with some of the best covers I've ever seen. Take a look at this one, it's my personal fave. But ALL of her covers are terrific. So is her writing. This isn't the first in her series, so you probably want to read that first.

I was browsing a book table at the Virginia Festival of Books in 2002 and spotted this interesting cover of Frankie Y. Bailey's book. I dithered back and forth, not having read her work before, but I knew I had to buy a copy . Her covers are all terrific and her stories have me hooked. I've read almost the whole series.

The cover created by an artist for Five Star on the front of my own mystery, FIFTY-SEVEN HEAVEN, was beautifully done and has sold a lot of books for me. The cover is on the left of this blog. A reader recently told me that the cover told it all. I agree. I was lucky. Lots of authors get NO input on covers. I was asked to give a brief description of the book and to give any suggestions I had. The artist outdid herself, and that cover has sold a lot of books for me.

I remember a friend whose books were drop-shipped to her at a huge mystery convention. When she opened the box, she was horrified by the cover. It was bland and nothing like she'd been told (or shown) it would be. Covers not only affect the buyer. They can send the author ducking for cover. (You'll pardon the pun?)

Of course, what is glued between the covers of a book has to be so well written that the reader wants to pass the word (and often the book, if they can turn loose of it long enough) to friends and family. And the author's writing talent makes the difference in whether or not the reader buys the next in the series. I know all authors try to write the very best book they can. But covers are what first catch the attention of the reader in a book store. At least they do me.

Do you have a favorite book cover? A cover so great that you could not leave the store without the book? A cover that introduced you to a new author? Care to share?

My get-up and go is alive and well

Elizabeth Zelvin

Back in the Fifties, the Weavers used to sing a song:

How do I know my youth is all spent
My get-up and go has got up and went
But in spite of it all, I’m able to grin
When I think of the places my get-up has been.

I’ve been unable to find the songwriter. Most references I googled said “Anonymous,” and the book Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul claims it’s copyrighted material without saying who holds the copyright. I sang that song myself many times long before anybody took chicken soup out of the bowl and put it between book covers. And I had the impression it was written by Lee Hayes, the legendary bass vocalist with the Weavers.

As I get older…and older and older…the song, which I always thought was fun, gets more and more relevant. My father, who lived to 91, used to be the living embodiment of the final stanza:

I wake up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
And if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and roll back in bed.

I’ve reached an age at which my contemporaries are starting to die of what’s sometimes called natural causes at what we used to consider old age. I’ve had interesting friends all my life. Even if I hadn’t seen or been in contact with some of these people for decades, they remained vivid in my mind. I always assumed that one day they’d pick up the phone or I’d shoot them an email, and we’d pick up exactly where we left off. It’s been a shock to realize that with some of them, that isn’t going to happen.

As a lifelong writer whose first novel came out this year, I admit one of my many feelings on learning of the passing of these friends from junior high and high school is disappointment that they’ll never know I’ve finally achieved this cherished ambition or get to enjoy the book. But of course, that’s not all. I feel cheated of the catching up and schmoozing we could have done. I want to know how they were affected by the civil rights and antiwar movements of the Sixties and by the women’s movement later on. I want to know if they got to write their books and paint their pictures and play their music and travel all over the world. I want to know if they had fun. I want to know if they were happy.

Several of the friends I’ve lost were academics. To some extent, they lived the lives that most of our parents back in Queens expected us to. I’m in the other group, those that jumped the rails—and believe me, for this old English major, running off with genre fiction was an act of rebellion—and reinvented ourselves every few years. On the other hand, academics of our generation could be and often were political firebrands. Having survived all that, they should be retiring—a state that no longer means golf and bridge and Florida as it did in my parents’ day, but a turning of their energies to a new set of dreams and ambitions. Another, whose career was even more checkered than mine—poet, therapist, and stand-up comic (“I’m not a shrink, I’m an expand!”)—got cancer shortly after finally inheriting enough to relieve his endless scrabbling for a living.

For those who had kids, I hate the fact that they won’t get to see their grandchildren grow up, in some cases, will never know them. Grandkids are the payoff for all that showing up for adult life and what kids put parents through. Let’s see, my granddaughters are four and 18 months. If I live as long as my mother did (and let the planet please not fall apart by then), I have a good chance of dancing at their weddings, cradling their children, and maybe even holding their first published books in my hands.

What does your stuff say about you?

Sandra Parshall

The cover art for the October issue of Psychology Today is arresting – a huge sandwich filled with books and DVDs – but the lines above the magazine’s name were what caught my eye:

TASTE & PERSONALITY
WHAT YOUR STUFF REVEALS ABOUT YOU

I already know myself all too well and don’t need a magazine article to explain what my “stuff” says about me. But I thought the piece might spark some new ideas for fleshing out characters, creating fictional people who would be intriguing, unpredictable, so I forked over $4.99 plus tax (when did magazines become so expensive?) and brought home a copy of PT to peruse.

What I learned was that humans are disappointingly easy to sort into stereotypes. Eriq Gardner’s report on research into the mystery of human “taste” verified some obvious assumptions: extroverts enjoy art/music/films with sensational elements, forceful action, and themes of sexuality or violence; introverts are drawn to quieter, more contemplative works of art and books and films heavy on character development. When we want people to know what we’re like, we tell them about our preferences in entertainment, and feel reasonably sure they’ll get the right idea.

Some tastes may be programmed into us before we ever open our eyes to the world. For example, a study of 3,000 twins determined that a love of jazz is at least partly inherited. There’s no jazz gene, Gardner is quick to point out, but people do inherit personality traits and aspects of intelligence that influence their preferences.

Does this mean we’re enslaved by brain chemistry and inborn traits? We all make snap judgments of people based on the outward evidence of their taste in clothes, food, art, music – but are those judgments invariably accurate? Will the devotee of classical music always be quiet and thoughtful? Will the person who loves country always be down to earth, unpretentious? Don’t we all know people who contradict the stereotypes? Of course we do, because most of us have overlapping personality traits that tug us in different directions and make us love a rock concert one day and seek quiet solitude the next.

So where does this leave the writer whose editor and readers demand consistent behavior from characters?

Writers can tap into the reader’s unconscious assumptions about people in some useful ways. The car the character drives, or the clothes he chooses for casual Friday at the office, will create an instant impression, saving the writer paragraphs or pages of character delineation. A mystery writer can also use the tendency toward quick judgments to throw the reader off the villain’s scent. The character who looks and acts too innocent to be anything but guilty has become a cliche, but authors can still use variations of this technique, creating emotional or cultural disguises for their killers. Because it’s difficult for anyone to hide his true nature for long, the real person will show through in a habit, preference, or possession that doesn’t fit with the rest of the disguise and opens a window to the truth.

Agatha Christie wrote villains and heros alike in their simplest form. Scratch the surface and you won’t find much underneath. Today, if characters aren’t complex and intriguing, they’re dismissed as cardboard cutouts that can’t carry a story. Readers want to be surprised – but not too much. The story may focus on crime-solving, but the writer has to be an attentive student of human psychology to succeed.

As a reader, do you value consistency over surprise? How do you react when a fictional person does something “out of character”? Does it make the character seem more real or less real to you?

Now let’s get personal: What does your “stuff” – the music you listen to, the books you read, the colors you’ve chosen to decorate your home – say about you? If you were telling a new acquaintance about yourself and wanted to make a great impression, what would you reveal about your tastes and what would you leave out?

It’s a Plan

Sharon Wildwind

This past weekend I finished writing my business plan … for 2008. Since it’s only three months until I have to do the plan for 2009, I thought it was time to get busy for this year.

That’s not exactly true. I’ve been working on the plan all year. Bits and pieces. Here and there. Mostly in my head, though some of it had made it to paper. It’s not that I’m a novice at this. I spent fifteen years in a nursing position where I had to do the whole dog-and-pony show of yearly objectives, quarterly reports, and performance measures. I can sling the business lingo with the best of them.

In fact, several years ago, when I was weighing the pros and cons of transforming writing from a serious hobby to a business, one thing that tipped the scales in favor of going pro was that I was already doing the stuff my instructor in “Starting A Small Business” course lectured about every week.

What put me so far behind this year was that turning from a caterpillar to a butterfly thing. I’ve done six business plans, each of which has pretty much followed that small business template taken I learned in that long-ago course. Each year I felt more like the constraints fit less well, like trying to sew from the same pattern I bought ten years ago. My business shape had changed, but my business plan hadn’t.

For a while I went through a creative funk. I wondered if it might make more sense to embroider my business plan, or dance it, or drum it, because the neat Harvard outline I was staring at wasn’t working any more. And the thought of wading through the library’s collection of how-to build your business books didn’t appeal to me. The problem with those books is that often, when they talk about the “small business operator,” they mean a business with six to eight employees, a truck, an office, etc.

I reality there is just me, a computer, a filing cabinet, a chair, and some volunteer help. Oh yeah, and a couple of dozen characters, for whom—fortunately—I have to file neither withholding tax nor health benefit plan paperwork. There are some advantages to being an only.

I started by teasing out things that change only a little and things that change a lot from year to year. Then I tried to describe the things that changed only a little in the shortest, simplest way I could.

History and legal status of the company:
I formed a company. It’s still in existence. It will stay in existence until I either run out of ideas or something bad happens.

Products and services:
I write and sell mysteries. Sometimes I write and sell other things. I’m better than some authors and worse than others. If someone gives me a chance to do it, I also teach classes about mysteries and about writing.

Skills and capabilities of the owner:
I know how to write. I’ve got a list of other things I still need to learn how to do. I whittle the list down from one end and add new things to the other end every year. The list, like the business, isn’t likely to disappear.

Company management and organization:
I’m the owner, the manager, and the only employee. I keep track of stuff. I pay bills on time—mostly. I keep track of what's happening in the mystery community.

Land, buildings, memberships and equipment
I work at home. I keep in touch with a number of other writers and fans. They help me with stuff. I have all the standard office equipment. My major expenses every year are for paper, ink, computers, research, postage, and a mail box rental.

Assumptions and critical risks
The next book I write could be lousy.
The next book I write could be terrific, but the marketing could be lousy.
I could get bad reviews.
Someone could sue me.
I could sue someone else.
I could get sick or die.

Those simple sentences became my core business plan. Okay, I prettied them up a little and threw in a bit of business jargon, such as niche marketing, currently active focus, and competitive advantages and disadvantages.

The things that change frequently worked themselves into a day timer where I record how much time I spend on the business every day, plus a variety of simple spread sheets:
An inventory of what equipment and supplies I have in my office.
An inventory of books on hand.
A tracking sheet for books sold each quarter, how much I sold them for, and how much I owe in Goods and Services taxes.
A list of the articles I read from the Internet about the business of publishing and the creativity of writing.

That left only one thing: goals and objectives for this year. Since I was going for simple in a big way, I boiled it down to one diagram.

It’s like playing poker. Nothing beats writing. Creating a multi-media/Internet presence comes in second. Running the business comes in third, and so on up the pyramid, to that little bit at the top, grabbing the brass ring. I’ll gladly take advantage of any unexpected opportunities that come my way.

So there it is, my business plan in a nutshell.

If you’d like to read about another simple plan, I suggest looking at Jay and Jeanne Levinson. Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing: a simple battle plan for first-time marketers; Entrepreneur Press; 2008; 978-159918153-0. They have a seven sentence plan that will get almost anyone started.

-----
Writing, or perhaps I should say, business quotes for the week.

Real artists ship.
~Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, and co-founded of Apple, and of Pixar Animation Studios.

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.
~Sharon Schuster, photographer

When "Everything is Permissible": The Notion of Blaming The Victim

by Julia Buckley

On November 15, 1988, a woman named Karen Wood put her twin baby daughters behind their safety gate and ventured into the back yard of her new Maine house which was, for her husband and herself, a dream home. Wood walked to the edge of the yard and into an area which led into the forested region beyond it (her house was in a relatively new subdivision). Moments later Karen Wood lay dying on the leaf-strewn ground. A hunter had mistaken Wood for a deer and shot her full in the chest with a high-powered rifle.

Beyond the tragedy of this occurrence is the surprising and equally tragic aftermath--that many people in Wood's new home town blamed her for her own death. She was, many long-time residents said, in the wrong for not wearing orange during hunting season. (Yankee Magazine wrote an article about the case in 1989; you can read it here). Wood, the victim, could obviously not defend herself or her actions, and many people, most of them fellow hunters, rallied around Donald Rogerson, the hunter who shot Wood without bothering to verify whether or not she was, in fact, a deer. Wood was also blamed for wearing white mittens.

The man who shot her was not ever prosecuted for her death, but one might argue it is because Wood had the misfortune of being a woman. In the previous hunting season, the three fatalities had all been men, and the victims were not blamed for their misfortunes. Two of the shootings resulted in convictions and jail terms. According to an article by Mari Boor Tonn, Valerie A. Endress, and John N. Diamond, Wood can be seen in almost mythical terms.

“[There is] a universal propensity to blame women for acts of violence visited upon them, especially when women unwisely venture into dangerous areas or male “turf” without legitimating accompaniment. Ironically, Wood’s gender, which made the death of a young mother so intensely tragic and threatening, is also that which made it simpler for many people to explain. As woman, Wood embodied the complex incongruous relationship of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ universally assigned to females. In Wood, the virgin-whore dichotomy took the form of mother-temptress” (Tonn, Endress and Diamond in Burkchardt 241).

So, according to many, Karen Wood should never have ventured to Maine at all, much less out of her own yard. She should have known her place.

I thought of this story recently because my English students are reading Crime and Punishment, in which a young man commits murder to prove an exalted and rather ridiculous theory. (This isn't a spoiler--it says as much on the back cover). But later in the book the man, Raskolnikov, is having some difficulties justifying his crime--the killing of an old woman, a moneylender. He insists that "I killed not a human being, but a principle!" and later, "Oh, I will never, never forgive that old witch." In his guilt, he blames the murder victim, Alena, for the fact that he killed her. If Alena had not been a manipulating person, a grasping usurer, then he would not have done what he did.

But this leads to one of Dostoevsky's themes. He once wrote, "Without God, everything is permissible." He suggested that without a moral framework, humanity would choose anarchy and could justify any base action.

The notion of blaming the victim, prevalent in life as well as literature, seems to be one of the things that becomes permissible when people refuse to look into their consciences for the truth.

Sources:
Yankee Magazine
Burgchardt, Carl R. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Strata Publishing, State College, Pennsylvania (contains Tonn, Endress and Diamond article).

To Blog Or Not To Blog

by Krista Davis

* Winner! Winner of Krista's new book, The Diva Runs Out of Thyme is Pat G. Pat, send me your mailing address (darlene at darleneryan.com) and we'll get it in the mail to you. Thanks for visiting, Krista.)

Krista Davis is the author of The Diva Runs out of Thyme, the first in a new series, available this coming Tuesday.

I confess that I have been remarkably slow to come to blogging. Websites make sense to me. Websites are like store windows, except the wind isn’t blowing snow in my face and my legs aren’t exhausted from running all over town.

But blogs. Oof. Posting every day. I had visions of spending more time on the blog than on my next book. However, I recently listened to a lecture by attorney Richard Levick that gave me pause and forced me to reconsider my thoughts about blogging.

The lecture was actually about crisis management in big companies but he emphasized blogging in a way that I hadn’t considered. He pointed out that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was driven by a blogger. Indeed, we all know the name Matt Drudge now. News organizations hounded his
blog for updates on the Lewinsky matter. It wasn’t a bigwig reporter who kept that story going -- it was a blogger. And that changed our world in more ways than one. Today, television news networks haunt the blogosphere, looking for news. Bloggers are actually a source of news!

Big multinational corporations are beginning to blog and sell themselves through social networking. Blogging has become such a powerful marketing tool that even the big guys are jumping on board. Did you know that publishers send boxes of books to influential bloggers? Did you know that there are perfume blogs and that some perfume companies, unnerved by the influence of perfume blogs, are beginning to invite bloggers to press events?

The number of people reading blogs is staggering. There are several interesting surveys, with all sorts of stats, but the bottom line is that blog readers number in the millions. What that means to us is that for once, we don’t have to pay for marketing. We can do the same things that big companies are doing. There is no ridiculously unaffordable fee and anyone can play -- the internet is fast becoming the great equalizer. Of course the field is crowded with blogs, but
standing out from the pack is another topic.

Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder of BlogHer, likens the blogosphere to the kitchen table, where we can sit down and converse about the things that matter to us. I love that analogy. How many times did you type a couple of keywords into a search engine yesterday? So did millions of other people. Millions.

A blog is an opportunity to reach out to consumers in a manner that’s shaking up corporate marketing. Even if a person hits on your blog only once, that’s one more bit of exposure for your book.

Corporate America has realized that the future of marketing lies in the internet and more specifically in the blogosphere. If you’ve been balking about blogging, it might be time to make use of this tool -- it’s free and it’s right at your fingertips.

(Ask a question, share your blogging experiences, or just say "Hello" in comments and you could win a copy of The Diva Runs Out of Thyme. Check back Sunday night to see if you've won.)

Busy is as busy does . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

I recently spent an eternity in a student dental hygienist's chair at a local technical/vocational school. Don't get me wrong, she did a wonderful job on my teeth and gums. Very through, which I really needed. The students there don't just scrape the tartar off your teeth, whiz a little polish over them, and send you on your way. They carefully check your teeth, one by one, to see if they've retained the proper gum depth or have receded, and they carefully check the rest of your mouth to see if there are any other problems, like suspicious spots. Having lost a sister to cancer in the roof of her mouth, I'm obviously cautious. But all this care takes time. A loooong time.

Added to that, I have a VERY hair-trigger gag reflex. I can watch the gory forensic shows on TV or read books or do research on same and not turn a hair. I mothered three boys, and we all know how gross small boys can be when they put their minds to it. (Or grown up boys when the mood strikes, sigh.) Still I never turned a hair over that either. But approach me with anything resembling a dental tool and the gag reflex quickly kicks in. For this particular visit they actually had to feed me peanut butter crackers and water to calm my stomach and finish the visit.

I survived this visit, as I usually do, but it dawned on me that the hardest part for me in a dental chair is . . . THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO BUT JUST SIT THERE AND THINK. No books to read. No TV to watch. No needlework to work on. No laundry to fold. No meal to cook. Just sit there with my hands tightly gripping a tissue, thinking my own thoughts. Wow, I am soooo not used to that, and it struck a chord in me. How busy (should I say multi-tasky?) am I every day? How busy or multi-taky are most of us? Most of the time?

At home I rarely watch television without something to do in my hands. Needlework to work, greeting cards to make or send, a book to read during commercials, laundry to fold, dinner to stir. Whatever I can find that needs doing. It's what we women do. I admire men (including my hubby) who can actually watch TV without doing anything else at the same time. So for me, time in the dental chair REALLY stretches out with nothing else to do. I'm thinking of taking my iPod next time and listening to a book. Except the ear plugs might get in the tech's way. Sigh.

I suppose the reason this "nothing to do but think" business struck me this visit was because I've been reading a book about time management for women. I have to say, it's a great book with suggestions on how to save time and get more done, yet the author doesn't advocate filling every single hour of our waking day with busyness. She strongly encourages women to budget their time, not waste it, but she also strongly encourages taking time to enjoy a sunset, watch the birds, interact with our family, particularly children, rest, regenerate, etc. In other words, we don't have to be doing something "important" every minute of every day. We need time for ourselves, to recharge.

Having spent many long hours at my computer for the last nine years writing my mysteries and other long hours promoting them, I needed something like this. I needed to stop and think about what really needs to be done each day . . . and more importantly, what doesn't. What to spend my precious twenty-four hours per day on, and what to let go.

What about you? Are you stressed out by trying to get everything done on time? Are you too busy living your life to enjoy it? Too busy getting things done? One of the things you can do (assuming you aren't already) is make lists. That helps you to see what's really important in your life and what isn't. What can be put off and what demands your attention in the here and now.

If you'd like to know the title/author of the time management book, contact me offblog at nevada1943@yahoo.com. And if you think you need a couple of hours with nothing at all to do, call your local dental hygienist. By the way, the vo-tech schools that teach this class charge far less for a check-up/cleaning than you'd have to pay at the dentist's office. Just a thought.

Mean Streets and the Gritty City

Elizabeth Zelvin

I was pleased but somewhat surprised to be invited to take part in a panel on “The Dark Side: Gritty New York City” at the New York Public Library in September. My traditional amateur-sleuth mystery begins with Bruce, my protagonist, waking up in detox on the Bowery. If that doesn’t take it out of the cozy category, the use of the word “puke” in the first sentence alone surely disqualifies it. But my story is anything but dark. And grit is in the eye of the beholder.

Years ago, when I had just completed the first draft of my manuscript about a recovering alcoholic and his friends who find a murderer while romping through the church basements of AA, an elderly lady in my first critique group objected to the recovery theme, saying, “The topic is so sordid.” I had the sense to quit that critique group. Some agents and even editors found the subject “depressing.” Overall, I knew my story wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. But I believed there were readers out there who would find Bruce’s journey back from the brink of self-destruction hopeful and inspiring. And so it has proved. Even better, I’ve heard from folks who got the humor that really exists in AA meetings. To tell the truth, I think my book is hilarious. I was relieved to hear that some readers chuckled and even laughed out loud along with me.

So here’s my question: to what extent do laughter and whatever happens when an alcoholic turns his life around—redemption? healing?—cancel out grit and darkness? How mean can a street be when not everything that happens on it is tragic? Having worked in addiction treatment programs for many years, I have perhaps a paradoxical view of it. On the Bowery before its recent gentrification, and even more so at another job up in East Harlem, I can remember looking around at treeless streets, broken pavements, the grimy buildings of “the projects” or the dinky bars and flophouses and thinking, These really are mean streets. But these streets also housed programs in which people were getting better. They also housed children and grandparents and people who loved each other and people who’d dig up a square of earth and plant a garden, just like anybody else. And for some of my clients, with their histories of abuse and violence and incarceration, a crummy, small apartment on these streets represented a longed-for second chance. Privacy. Freedom. Hope.

Another challenge to the concept of the gritty city is that New York is always changing. The notorious men’s shelter on the Bowery that I first entered as a scared counseling intern in the early 1980s had been turned into the setting for some model programs for the homeless by the 1990s. The agency I worked for also developed programs, including supportive housing for the formerly homeless—street people with histories of mental illness, substance abuse, prostitution, crime, and despair—in the Times Square area and Hell’s Kitchen. All three of these neighborhoods are now vibrant, fashionable communities. The social service programs are still there, a tribute to the fact that people really can be helped. But the grit is gone.