Storytellersunplugged

When it rains, it pours. We’ve all heard that a million times, and though it’s a generalization with no real basis in fact – it’s also true that when things get overwhelming, they only seem to get crazier. This year has been that way for me, so I figured I’d take a day here, write a post and see if I could put it in perspective.

For several years I had very little published…those were recent years. It happened because, as most things do, publishing seems to come in cycles. You don’t necessarily see things that you have sold come out near the time they are sold. During the years in question I had some short stories published, and my last White Wolf novel was published – a High Fantasy book titled “Relic of the Dawn”. I was writing, and even selling, but things just weren’t appearing on shelves, and sales without books did little to help with the fact that the readers I’d worked years to cultivate were forgetting I existed.

So enter 2007. Things picked up a little. I had a collection come out from a small press publisher in the UK – it got some notice – a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award, and it sold out pretty quickly. That was followed by my novel “Ancient Eyes,” also quickly sold out. I spent the summer writing a long novella and I had another short period of nothing…a dry spell, I guess…and then it hit.

I sold another collection. This one will actually have an affordable trade paperback edition which should help my readership and circulation. Then I sold another novel – this one sold not only to a trade hardcover publisher, but to a signed limited publisher as well –simultaneous release planned. Then I sold a novella – the one I’d been working on all summer. It went on sale and sold out in two weeks. It’s a limited edition, yes, but with a trade paperback in the future with decent distribution. Then I sold another novel. Then I sold ANOTHER NOVEL. Well, to be honest, a novel that I’d sold was pulled from one publisher with no ill-will and transferred to one that will actually publish it reasonably soon. Both of these two novels are older books, but both will get decent circulation and very nice treatment from the publisher.

Then I won the Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. Years like this just don’t happen. Not to me, anyway. What I’m doing now is writing desperately to keep the wagon rolling forward. If ever a year was designed to assist an author in leap-frogging out of the small puddle to at least the next loop in the river, this is the one.

It feels very self-indulgent to be writing this post, but on the other hand, this is what we do here. We write about the world of the author. We write about what it’s like to struggle. We write about what thrills us, what depresses us, what angers us. We write about what motivates us to go on, and where the stories are born. This time I’m writing to say that I seem to have done something right. The stars have momentarily aligned in my favor…and it’s difficult to process it.

I’m very grateful for the things that have happened over the past few months. The award is the sort of validation that only those who understand what I do – and why I do it – can understand. My fellow writers found a grouping of my words worthy of note. Publishers found my stories fascinating. Readers are getting excited that new work is forthcoming. It’s hard not to grin, to be honest, and I’m not really the grinning type.

So – for the support of this group, the inspiration of the Gonquin table, the passion of Richard Steinberg, the magic woven words of Thomas “Sully” Sullivan, the worlds and words of Janet Berliner, the long, strong friendship and camaraderie I feel for the group within the group, Mark, Beth, Brian, Wayne – the Pseudocon crowd who have been with me almost every step of my literary career – to Bill Lindblad for reading, selling our work, and caring about our work, to Bear and Sarah, Cody and Alexandra, who I’m still getting to know – to Justine for her deep inspiration … to Rich Dansky, my fellow warrior in the White Wolf wars…to Skipp who makes me smile, and to my old, old friend John Rosenman, who can still beat me at tennis, and who was there when I made my first sales…for all of this, I’m thankful. This is what you all get this month from me. I’m overwhelmed, and I probably have a lot to share, but I needed to get this out. And to all of our readers here at Storytellers Unplugged who validate us every day by reading along and commenting and giving us a sense of purpose and value…we couldn’t do it without all of you.

As I’ve said a thousand times…

Onward!

The View from the XX Set

by Justine Musk

1

Writing is seduction, when you think about it. Seduction is to get inside someone else’s view of things and reshape it to your own, to lead them in your chosen direction, to compel them until they are exactly where you want them, whether it’s in your story or in your bed. What writers and seducers have in common is a mindset that is empathetic enough to get into the skin, the head, of another human being and know what they are feeling and how those feelings might be altered…and an eye that is cold and objective enough to know if they’re making progress toward their aim, or if it’s time to revise the course.

Writers and seducers, then, understand human nature. And since human nature comes to us in male and female packages of experience, any real understanding needs to enfold the other sex as well as your own, or else the only people you’ll know how to seduce will be the people just like you.

And maybe not even them.

2

My father likes to tell an anecdote about the time our car broke down along a dark highway during the kind of cold snowy night only a Canadian town – well, maybe a few others — can make. My father told my mother and me to stay within the safe warm confines of the car while he tried to flag down help. Minutes passed. I looked through the windshield and for just a split moment the man I saw wasn’t my father at all, but a hulking, shadowy, six-feet-plus stranger with the hood of a bulky parka pulled over his head.

I got out of the car and slammed the door and hurried to the side of the road, making sure to stand in the full glare of the oncoming traffic. My mother freaked out and yanked at my sleeve, worried that I was about to get hit. Before I could even fend her off, help had arrived.

My father likes to end this anecdote with what is more or less the point of it – how I had put myself out there like a billboard, because I knew that people would stop for me but not for him. This seemed so obvious to me that I was surprised that he was surprised by it. It was not unlike a comment a male friend would make to me at university a year or so later, about how irritated he felt when he walked through campus at night and the girl just ahead of him would cross the street to get away from him. My friend was maybe six-five, with spiked hair and a long dark overcoat. Like my father by the side of the road that night, he seemed completely oblivious to the impact he made on others — especially women — especially a young woman walking alone at night. The comment also made an impression on me because I suddenly realized that I had no idea what it was like to be perceived as the walking, physical threat, the person who, in that moment, gets tagged as a possible rapist or worse. I had never thought to look at it from that perspective.

3

My father was a principal who dealt with mostly women – teachers, secretaries, mothers. He liked to complain about what I now call “pretty girl syndrome”: certain women who monopolized attention and offered up the most banal opinions with authority and confidence. They were used to people listening to them and didn’t think it was just because of their looks.

Soon after I moved to LA, I witnessed a version of this firsthand. My husband lives in a very guy-dominated world – he moves between business, technology, physics, engineering – and his friends had gotten comfortable around me. If I wasn’t quite one of the guys, I definitely wasn’t one of the girls, either, especially since I wasn’t available or under 30 – or under 25 – like the young women our friends brought to restaurants and concerts and parties. These men were highly intelligent and successful. The girls were sweet enough and probably bright enough except academia – or reading material in general – had never been a priority for them. Still, I was struck by how they would break into a conversation with a comment or statement so many light-years off from the informed, sophisticated discourse going on at the table that I would actually think they were joking. They weren’t joking. They held forth with authority and confidence on things they knew almost nothing about. When I took a longer look, I saw what my father had been talking about: these guys, who were generally nice and well-mannered guys to begin with, gave these girls a lot of attention, seemed very interested in what they had to say. It was only when the girl left the room that the nature of her male attention would abruptly change: observations about how inane or boring or annoying or ‘dumb’ she was. When the girl returned, the same guys were back to hanging off her every word. It made me realize – with a touch of what might have been shock – just how insidious the halo effect of beauty actually is and how it determines the tone of how the world treats you, which in turn shapes your perception of yourself (“I must be really interesting”) and others (“People are friendly and nice.”) For all the actresses who find it difficult to be taken seriously because of their beauty, there are, it seems, a lot of girls who think they’re being taken seriously when they’re only being beautiful. And because they never get that look into life on the other side of the great gender divide, many of them don’t realize the trap they’ve fallen into until much later, when they not only realize they don’t have the talent or intellect or skills they maybe thought they did, they no longer have that youthful beauty either. And people are no longer so friendly and nice.

4

So it’s hard to see through the fog of perceptions and projections we all carry around us, especially when we’re looking at the other sex. We’re not only dealing with them, we’re dealing with the shadows we cast onto them as well as their shadows on us. And so in order to truly see them, you have to see how they truly see us.

Before you can get into anybody else’s head, you have to get out of your own.

An opposite-sex-character made from the shadow-stuff of fantasy and projection never rings true. I remember enjoying the movie Knocked Up. I also remember how that movie also never thought to question or explore why a character as gorgeous, brainy and successful as the female love interest would ever be attracted to someone as immature and schlumpy as the male protagonist over his much more impressive rivals. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen – anything can happen. But her choice to be with him, as well as her choice to keep their baby, actually did require more of a look into her inner life, her head, than the movie was willing to give us. The movie just wasn’t interested in the female perspective, and as a result a lot of women have a bit of a problem with it (including the female lead Katherine Heigl, who referred to the movie as ‘sexist’ and then got slammed in the press for biting the hand that feeds her). They might have enjoyed the movie, as I did…but we were never truly seduced by it.

And it seems downright juvenile next to a film like Michael Mann’s Heat – another genre film, meant to entertain, another film made by and about men, but this story makes an honest attempt to position real female characters within that male world. You can sense the histories and psychologies that are uniquely their own, how their lives bleed past the edges of the frame and weren’t just invented to fit inside it. Mann even gives men and women different languages – the women are articulate and tend towards therapy speak – the men are direct, fragmented, and given to macho clichés. Mann seems truly interested in women and how men relate to them, or fail to relate to them, and it shows. It also enlarges his audience. I would crawl through broken glass – okay, maybe I wouldn’t, but I’d seriously consider it – to see a Michael Mann movie, whereas the thought of a Michael Bay only inspires a yawn.

5

I can’t help wondering if it’s slightly – slightly – easier for women to step into the male POV than vice-versa. And not because women on the whole are more sympathetic and relationship-oriented – if anything, that could lead them into the trap of what I think of as soap-opera men: male characters who obsess and ruminate over things like feelings and relationships, while their real-world counterparts go to work and watch sports and wonder why the hell their girlfriend talk their ear off about some problem if she didn’t want him to actually solve the damn thing. Novel-writing has a rich and long history of women taking on male personas and finding through them not only commercial and social acceptability, but a new kind of power and freedom. For a male to step into anything female seems to have a kind of taint to it, a threat of stigma and downgrade, as if the continuing day-to-day invention and maintenance of one’s masculinity will be undone with one stroke of a silky pink pen.

Jonathon Franzen wrote what myself and others consider a genuinely great book with “The Corrections”, but even though he could vividly depict the female characters, he kicked up national controversy when he balked at seeing the Oprah Book Club sticker on his book. He was worried that it ‘feminized’ a hefty and serious novel, even if the novel does chronicle the disintegration of one family and the attempts of its children to correct its flaws and mistakes through the creations of their own families. In other words, even if the novel explored dysfunctional domestic life, god forbid it be tagged a domestic novel, which means a female novel, which means a lesser novel. If male writers like Franzen fret over their literary credibility when they cross over into traditionally female material, no such equivalent seems to exist for female literary writers who move into traditionally ‘male’ subjects of war, like Pat Barker did with her Regeneration Trilogy, or the kind of American violence that Joyce Carol Oates has explored through a lifetime’s body of work. If Franzen got slapped with the indignity of an Oprah sticker, writers like Barker and Oates win awards and acclaim. (Oates, by the way, had no issues with being an Oprah Book Club selection herself.) If Franzen worried that his identity was somehow in danger of being diminished — even as his sales shot through the roof — I doubt Barker and Oates entertained the same concern.

Because this, I’ve come to understand, is one of the central differences between the male and female perspective, and when I cross from female to male it’s something I really have to work to wrap my mind around. It would never occur to me, for example, to open this essay not unlike Richard Steinberg opened his on ‘Part One’ of this same topic:

Let me assure you, dear reader, that I have on me a pair of breasts. They are not huge, but they are not small. They are a large B/small C, which works well on my tall frame because I can wear whatever I want to wear, from a high-necked halter to a low-cut sweater, without looking too boyish or too floozy, and even go braless if need be without any risk of smacking myself, or anybody else, in the face. When I was pregnant, they got the job done with aplomb.

I like my breasts. I have, as you can see, an excellent relationship with them.

But I still like to write from the point of view of the opposite sex.

While female vulnerability is steeped in the physical, male vulnerability seems steeped in the idea of maleness itself. Because you can’t just look like a man — you have to act like one too, and your performance as a man is gets measured and judged day after day after day. And part of being a man is defining yourself against what is ‘female’ – including your own vulnerability. The culture helps you with this. After I had my sons, a man I had known for a long time told me about a disturbing event that happened to him in a city park when he was six. If he had been a girl, he told me, he would never have been allowed to roam free like that, and the incident would never have happened. Female vulnerability is acknowledged and validated and sometimes even celebrated. True male vulnerability is like something swept under the carpet, out of view, so that we actually need to remind ourselves — like my friend was making a point to remind me — that little boys are every bit as vulnerable as little girls. The fact that we instinctively coddle the latter over the former probably does a lot to explain why statistics show that boys are much more often the victims of sexual molestation. Predators – at least in the past — have more access and opportunity to get them.

6

Writing from a character’s viewpoint feels, for me, like slipping into a different kind of mindset, and the more developed that character is – the deeper I am in the writing – the more distinctive that sense of mindset, as if I’m opening the door to a character’s bedroom and stepping inside.

I’ve written two dark-fantasy novels – “Bloodangel” and its sequel, “Lord of Bones” which drops July 1 – and although the protagonist is female, most if not all of the other viewpoints are male. Those mind-rooms marked ‘male’ do seem to share a quality that maybe you could describe as ‘masculine’ — maybe the masculine shadow of the man I would have been if my chromosomes had emerged with one small but vital difference. I’m conscious of my viewpoint toughening up, turning maybe a bit more caustic, the psychic wounds more deeply buried and harder to get at. While my female protag’s angst is easily expressed, my male characters might offer up in place of it the devil-may-care sarcasm Lucas Maddox, or the wary, guarded, careful nature of teenage Ramsey, or the focus and determination of Kai. It’s not that Jess isn’t wary or focused, or that the men in her life aren’t every bit as haunted as she is (this is, after all, dark fantasy). But where Jess might turn inward, using the tools of introspection and emotion, the men turn to action and logic and banter and problem-solving. Likewise, the men are comfortable with power, supernatural and otherwise. They feel comfortable with it. But Jess’s struggle with her own emerging power and the aggressive ways she’s forced to use it – how this darkens her sense of herself and affects her relationships – forms a big part of the story.

Judging from reader email, it’s the male characters in my books that tend to be their favorites. In BLOODANGEL, the best-liked character is Ramsey, which makes me glad he didn’t meet the fate I had originally planned for him. In the sequel LORD OF BONES, the viewpoint I enjoyed writing the most, and found the most comfortable, was actually that of Lucas Maddox, a person whom I would seem to have very little in common with. Although, as a psychologist recently reminded me, all your characters are you, manifestations of you. You can’t write what you don’t understand – at least not convincingly.

So I can’t help thinking that maybe in this space of mental and creative androgyny – where the writer uses all of his or her observations of human nature in order to write from a place that enfolds both genders – some of the strongest characters are made. Instead of creating an opposite-sex character out of flimsy half-baked projections, prejudices, wishful thinking, you can meld the difference of your gender with your understanding of the other gender to make complex, fascinating, emotionally moving characters. You can write about tough men who are vulnerable and vulnerable women who are powerful (just as Joss Whedon did when he created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character you might have heard of).

7

When Richard Steinberg suggested we collaborate on a two-part essay about writing from the viewpoint of the opposite gender, I thought of something Zadie Smith said when I went to hear her read and give an interview at UCLA. The interviewer remarked on her ability to write from the viewpoints of characters of different ethnicities. Zadie more or less shrugged off the question, saying that the purpose of fiction is to enlarge human consciousness, not to slice it down into labels and categories, not to act as if people are utterly alien to each other, all trapped as we are in this human condition. In any case, she thought the greatest difference lay not between different races, but the different genders.

Crossing that bridge involves understanding the other gender in a way that also means understanding ourselves. It means developing an eye that is deeply empathic and coldly objective at the same time. It means knowing how to seduce – even as we ourselves are seduced, with all the thrills and pleasure that involves….and also, maybe, the lies. But behind every lie is the truth, and as writers — and observers of the human condition — it’s our job to get at it.

—JM

Hi all, it’s been busy times at the soap factory, so I haven’t had time to do up a column for this entry. So instead I thought I’d share this kid’s horror story with you.

Skeleton Eater

By Edwin McRae
Let me tell you a little fairy-tale, one that you probably haven’t heard before, one that definitely hasn’t been turned into a movie by Disney…yet. It’s a story about Danny, a young boy from a land not very far away and a big, bad giant that ate children. Interested? Good. I knew the child eating would get your attention. Now, where was I?

Danny’s Grandad called the giant, ‘mechanical stairs’, in the same way that he called movies, ‘moving pictures’, and the radio, ‘the wireless’. Danny’s Dad called it ‘an escalator’. Danny, his Latin at six being a bit rusty, called it the Skeleton Eater.

There was a story, told in secret hideouts on rainy days, about a boy called Tim. Tim got lost. Danny’s Dad talked about it over their big pieces of paper covered in squished ants.

Tim got lost in H&J’s, the big shop with the best toy place in the universe on the second floor. It had Lego castles and space stations as tall as the roof, beach parties of Barbies, enough plastic swords and shields to attack Troy, magic tricks, board games, cuddly bears and bunnies, Thomas the Tank Engine train sets and every X-man in mutantdom.

Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been down with a majestic case of con crud for the last few days, and my positive vibes are finding it hard to cope with my cotton-wool-and-swiss-cheese brain right now. But for a while now I’ve been in something of a state, and that’s got nothing to do with whether or not I can stop hacking any time soon or unblock my sinuses.

You see, for the first time in something like five years… I’m without a contract in the pocket.

Over the last, oh, eight years or so - pretty near the duration of my full-time writing career - I’ve had a good-to-damned-brilliant contract in my pocket for all the books that came out in that time period. Working backwards, the Worldweavers trilogy was sold on the basis of a synopsis ALONE, for a good and decent sum of money even given that it was three books’ worth of contract - but the last of that money was paid out to me in February, and the last book is in its copy edit instar on my desk right now, and pretty soon these books are going to be part of my personal publishing history. Before that, I sold “Embers of Heaven” on the strength of a synopsis, for a REALLY good sum of money (given that the contract was in pounds sterling and I live in a country where those are worth practically twice whats written on the contract in terms of cyphers alone). Before that, the various foreign editions of “The Secrets of Jin Shei” basically kept on popping into the hopper - we’re up to twelve languages and counting now, and all of those brought in good-to-middling amounts of money (more often than not in Euros) trickling into my account. You might say that I wrote “Jin shei” itself on spec initially, as it were, but that spec was only at the beginning - it helped me to get a fantastic agent who then did all the rest while I sat back without worrying and wrote the book. It was the agent who re-sold the “Changer of days” books (”The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days” in the USA) during this period, too - if you want to run down the actual chronology it was 2001 and 2002 for the initial NZ editions of “Changer”, 2004 for the US hardcover edition of “Jin Shei” followed by the other foreign editions straggling over the years including the UK/Aussie/NZ edition, and the Spanish incarnations which are still ongoing with a pocket edition due this year. Then 2005 for US paperback of “Jin Shei” and the fantasy duology in the US. Then 2006 for the UK release of “Embers”. Then 2007 for Worldweavers #1, 2008 for Worldweavers #2 (”Spellspam”, released just a few weeks ago) and 2009 for Worldweavers #3, “Cybermage”.

Good run, eh? Any soul out of there will tell me to go away and quit whining. How many people get this blessed?…

The thing is… I did not do a Rowling, or a King, or a Dan Brown. I sell thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, maybe hundreds of thousands of books when all is totted up - but I did not “break out”, I did not hit millions or get on Oprah or hit the New York Times lists. I did not prove myself to the bean counters. And I have a lot of stories left to tell… but it is the bean counters who get to decide whether I will get to tell them, because I may now be in a position worse than any dewy-eyed newbie who walks through the doors. I am a writer with a record. And if my record is judged wanting, it will no longer matter that I have stories left to tell or that I can tell them well. I am midlist, and I am left singing the midlist blues.

I am writing another novel right now. Of course I am - I cannot quit, any more than I can decide to survive without a heartbeat from now on. But I am writing it because I am writing it and not because someone has expressed a willingness to buy the thing from me. I’ve just come back from a con and I’ve heard people tell me that somebody has just recommended me to them - the words “Alma Alexander? Oh, I LOVE her stuff!” have been reported to have been uttered. And I am happy beyond words to have knowledge of their being uttered, because writing is - always has been - a joy to me, and knowing a story of mine has brought a degree of joy or happiness or enjoyment to somebody else is a big thing. But I need to sell a thousand books in a week now, just to get past the hurdle of an editor’s implication that she liked a synopsis of mine but she’s waiting to hear from the marketing people… because there’s a track record. I may be faced with changing the name I write under. I may be forced to start all over again. I may be forced to start winning that “I love her stuff” reaction from people all over again from scratch.

And that’s if I’m lucky.

Eh, maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because I still can’t quite breathe without stopping to hack, and I haven’t been outside in days, and it’s been snowing for two days out here at the tail end of March with my blooming daffodils bowed underneath the weight of the snow. Maybe my optimism is under that snow somewhere too, having bloomed early like the daffodils and now staggering under an unexpected load of reality. But I honestly thought that being published would make things EASIER for me, not harder. Maybe I was just being naive.

I’ll go back to my chores now. I have a copy edit to finish, that of the third book in the trilogy, and I might even get it in by the deadline that I promised it by despite being sick at the worst possible time. I’ll go back to the new novel, and keep writing it, and try and keep up the hope that somehow somewhere there will be a good home for it when I am done. In the meantime… if you feel generous and are in need of something to read for yourself or for a reader in your life… please consider making my publishers’ bean counters happier. My books are still in print.

The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.

When you start writing, everything is easy–it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.

This is–yes, Virginia–deeply unfair.

Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday–but never writing to-day.”

The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.

What makes it harder is that–even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects–outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like–for instance–having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program–as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that–you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.

You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.

Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.

I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.

It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.

Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.

Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.”  And we would complete that task.  In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.”  (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.)  “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.”  And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task.  (Overachiever, remember?  In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.)  This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done.  Nothing left.   Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words.  Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.

Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it.  The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory.  (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.)   But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy.  It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel.  It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.

I don’t know what my next novel is going to be.  But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.

By Wayne Allen Sallee

I keep wondering each time the 28th of the month rolls around exactly when I’ll be typing my piece without snow on the ground. Well, OK, its mostly hail today. The hard snow that eventually bounces into Indiana, once its banged off my huge, middle-aged nose a few times. It is spring here, there are maybe two days in a row that one can feel it, not the temperature, but the sound of early morning birds and evening gulls in the parking lots. It’s the gulls and mournful they sound that bring up moments in the past, a gull with a broken wing I saw on a grey Good Friday who seemed resigned at his eventual doom. And from that I can recall most of that entire evening and weekend. Charles Gramlich, a writer displaced from New Orleans by Katrina and FEMA, hipped me to the term “iceberg memories.” Just as my dreams are incredibly detailed, in fact, the gulls and grey skies are repeaters along with the expected el trains and buses.

Music is probably the biggest instigator for iceberg memories that I may or may not choose to use in a story. This past Monday, I was up north for the book launch of HELL IN THE HEARTLAND, an anthology of stories set in Illinois, and Mike Martinez gave me a CD mix. Mind you, I still have an 8-track that could tape blank 8-tracks, and a cassette player with mixes from the early 90s. When one cassette broke, Charles’ wife Lana fixed it. While I had tried to fix it myself–imagine Jerry Lewis as a brain surgeon–I played my DEATHPROOF CD and kept Jack Nietzche’s “The Last Race” on repeat. Louder each time. Of course, when I got the cassette back, I realized I had Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” on side two, right before “King Tut.” The only iceberg memory from that is the fact that I drank a lot in 1994 and assumedly had way too much time on my hands. Now, Mike had basically offered to burn some songs by The Ides of March and add a few other songs of his choosing. And what’s incredible about the mix is that most songs really do bring back memories for me. In a big way, images that I have put in my stories and used as springboards for other pieces.

Before I go on with a partial list, I ask if the same goes for those reading. I know music plays a large part of a writer’s life. I enjoy typing to Glenn Gray’s Cosa Loma Orchestra from the 1920s or Eartha Kitt’s song from the 50s. All I need to get back in my brain is the horns or Kitt’s voice and the crack of the ice in my glass of water. My Frankenstein’s laboratory is certainly different than most would expect. But, the memories this mix brings back, some spot on with stories I’ve written, songs I’ve mentioned.

Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was first, and it brought me back to Rogers Park, where I lived with three artists. I had a manual typewriter, a stack of SASE’s, and it seemed like I never stopped typing as my roommates listened to new wave. A song I wish was on the CD is Nena’s “99 Luftballoons,” if only so I could get the lyrics of “99 Words For Boobs” out of my head. Its on YouTube, and the damn phrase I keep mumbling at the bus stop is “comfy pillows and Don DiLillos.” “Lake Shore Drive” by Aliotta Haynes and Jeremiah is THE Chicago song. I first heard the song in the early 80s, and when I lived north in Rogers Park, well, everyone was on LSD “Friday night trouble bound” one way or another. I have several stories set in Denver, and two characters in a record shop vie for the 45 RPM, one giving it up so he could get Robert Mitchum’s “Calypso, Is Like So…” instead. George Pelecanos tends to put references to a ton of music in his crime novels, characters will drive through have of Washington DC arguing about which band had the best cover of some Marvin Gaye song. Pelecanos is much richer than I am in musical knowledge. Well, he’s much richer than I am, period.

“The Weight,” by The Band. I was starving in Bellair, Illinois, pop. 54 in the summer of 1983. There’s a long story to how I ended up in this town, living in a yellow house with no windows and writing for a farm supplement that went into the Casey Daily Reporter. I could never cash my checks because, well, you know, I was a hippie from up thar by Chicagah. The guy who got this writing thing in motion split with some chippee half his age about three weeks into it; there were eight writers who starved. Mark Rainey published my long poem “A Rural Truth As Ugly” in DEATHREALM, the first of many mentions of this experience. In other stories, I basically kill the same man only giving him different names, the bastard who left me calling for my father to pick me up because I had only eaten one pack of Saltines in three days. I still had cuts on my fingers from when me and Bob McCoppin stole a can of Mighty Dog from a back porch and almost cried when we realized we had no can opener. We used pens and then tried to scoop the stuff out, slicing ourselves as little as possible. The stuff tasted like cookie dough served in Hell. But Bob had a cassette of The Band’s Greatest Hits, and we sang the words to “The Weight” as loud as we could, shoving this crap down our throats, blood from our fingers making us look like Heath Ledger’s Joker.

The Ides of March. Their work is hard to come by, though you can hear “Vehicle” on most 70s stations. “I’m a friendly stranger in a black sedan…” That one, and “L. A. Goodbye” really send me back. The latter song has been playing on jukeboxes in several stories, and in THE HOLY TERROR. The band is long gone, but Jim Steronik lives in nearby Berwyn, looks twenty years younger than me, and has written about 80 songs for other singers that have made the Billboard 100. Virtually my whole life in the decade before my first writing was published in a saddle-stitched book out of Detroit called BEATNIKS FROM SPACE, all on one CD. There are other songs I could mention, but this essay seems one-sided. I hope some of you will imagine me and the Mighty Dog when hearing “The Weight” again. Do any of you put certain songs in your works on a conscious level? If I drift away enough, the closing guitar riff on “L.A. Goodbye” fades into the sounds of the gulls I hear every night as I walk home. As always, thanks for reading…

–Wayne

Memory hits in the damndest places.

Halfway across the Atlantic, for example. It’s the day after a business trip to Paris, and I’m bone-weary. The flight is full; no empty seats for stretching out this time, and the woman in front of me had reclined her seat into my lap even before takeoff. A coworker’s got the seat next to mine, intent on her portable DVD player and hoping vaguely that nobody’s seated a kid where they can see the gory vampire shenanigans unfolding onscreen. The in-flight movie’s a non-starter, not with the back-of-seat screen shoved down roughly to the level of the oddly shaped pizza that passes for an in-flight meal.

So I doze. A baseball podcast I’ve heard five or six times before loops on my headphones, lulling me to sleep with promises of slugging third basemen who’ve reported to camp in the best shape of their life. Outside, it’s a grey airplane wing keeping me from seeing grey clouds over grey water. I close my eyes and try to sleep, wearily aware that the 5AM wakeup call I’d set for myself was midnight back home, that the trip had been too short for anything but wallowing in jet lag, and that I normally don’t go to bed until two hours, body clock time, after the damnable French alarm clock had gotten me up.

(A note to the curious traveler: French hotel rooms almost never feature clocks, alarm or otherwise. They have television sets with clocks and alarms built into their bases, and said television is generally plugged into the one available wall socket near whatever passes for a desk and thus serves as an appropriate spot for a laptop. If you’re going to use your laptop, you must first unplug the television/clock/alarm. This leads to untold quiet panic when you finish, plug the TV back in, and attempt to reset the clock manually so as to avoid the possibility of setting it wrongly, oversleeping, missing your plane, and being stranded in France without  any clean socks as a result. This somehow never ends up being a problem, however, as the sheer worry over the possibility of a possibly incorrect clock translates nicely to a night full of panic-stricken awakenings every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. But I digress.)

And so I doze, and I remember a night, fifteen years gone. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just a memory of driving around a part of Boston called Allston on a rainy fall night, trying to find a parking space near a friend’s house.

Then I wake up, and I think about what had just crawled out of my subconscious. There was no particular reason for this memory to emerge, nothing on the trip that would invoke it. There was nothing coming up that would summon it, either – no trips to Boston, no visits to the friend’s house I was seeking in memory. Hell, it wasn’t even the right time of year.

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually dozed back off, right back into that same memory. Back into the bare black tree trunks along the narrow streets, slick with rain as water dripped off the branches. Back into the long straight drive along the cemetery wall that marked the edge of the neighborhood, with the distant sound of the Commonwealth Avenue traffic whispering on through. Back to shining, cold streets twisting and turning past too-tall, too-thin houses squeezed in against one another like an overcrowded bookshelf. Back to a moment and a time long gone, one that hadn’t seemed particularly significant when it happened.

At that point I shook myself awake again at that point, a bit confused, a bit restive. There was a bit of brow-furrowing as I tried to figure out why this particular memory had chosen this particular moment. Nothing about it stood out; I seemed to recall that at the time, I was mostly more irritated than anything else over the complete and utter lack of parking to be had. I was late, or at least I remembered being late, and being irritated with myself for precisely that reason. And being late, and being on the hunt for parking, I spent those moments staring at the serried rows of cars that wrapped up both sides of those Allston streets. I didn’t look at those trees. I didn’t look at that cemetery wall.

Or at least, I didn’t think I did. Yet here they were, vivid in memory, in imagination.

I stayed up for a while, played for a little while on my Nintendo DS, read a bit of one of the books I’d brought with me. Put on my iPod, too, with fancy noise-reduction headphones and a whole lot of writing music on the hard drive. All of that bought me an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then I was out again, back in Allston, a passenger in memory.

Truth be told, I was no closer to figuring out why that memory had emerged. As I write this, I must confess, I still don’t know. What I do know is that all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that memory was there for the taking. White streetlamps reflected off the road, purple clouds scudding overhead, sidewalks humping up at odd angles because of over-aggressive tree roots – all of them were available. I didn’t remember seeing any of this at the time, but clearly I did, clearly I had, because now it was all there for the taking. Yes, the memory of annoyance lingered, along with hints of panic and urgency and oh-Jesus-I’m-late-again-and-they’re-gonna-kill-me. But that’s not what matters now. What I see, what I remember are those black branches, twisted in the thin bits of moonlight. It’s the solitary man walking his dog, seeing me cruise by and turning away. It’s the hiss of tape in the cassette deck and water under the tires,  the creak of worn-out windshield wipers and the thunk of a suspension that was never made for Boston potholes.

And all of that is now available, waiting to be summoned up again. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had, of things I didn’t realize I’d seen. But they were there, surely enough, real enough to be picked up out of the corner of my eye and kept against the day when they were needed, or wanted, or perhaps just worth taking a look at once again. I’m sure I’ll find a use for those trees sooner or later. Maybe not in the book I’m working on now, maybe not for a while, but they’re in the inventory, there to be called upon when I need them. The same goes for the sounds of that night, and for the wet stone wall with its locked cemetery gates and array of empty beer bottles standing sentinel up top, and for every other bit of that evening that’s told me it was important enough to stay with me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’m sure there are other memories like that, waiting for their moment to emerge, using their own inscrutable logic to decide when they’re needed. I’ll welcome them, and look forward to revisiting what they have to show me. I’ll look forward to seeing what they can give me for the next story, or the one after, the found gems of memory that I didn’t know I needed at the time. The readers need never know where those pinched, angular houses came from, or how that cemetery gate was just a flash in a rearview. They don’t need to know, and they never will. It’s enough that I do, and that for whatever reason, at whatever time, I remembered where to look for them.

by Janet Berliner

This month, writing through a period of dreadful pain, I wrote my first children’s novel. Despite the obvious adversity, I thoroughly enjoyed the work. Apparently my editor did, too, given that She “couldn’t put it down,” called it a book for kids from eight to eighty, and sent a check at once.

I have four novels-in-progress. I pulled up the one I had thought I would finish next, but my thoughts went elsewhere. What I really needed was to take a trip. Knowing that could not be, I started to feel sorry for myself.

Fortunately that state of being bores me very quickly, so I turned my thoughts to traveling days and started to write. Since I can’t find words without a title, I called what I was writing GO TO COME BACK: Journal of a Caribbean Eaveswatcher.

See what you think–

A writer who is traveling should study guidebooks and take voluminous notes.
The operative word there is should. The postscript is: Do what works for you.
In 1945, I flew on a plane for the first time. I was six years old, alone, and had a mastoid in each ear. I did not take notes.

Ten years later, I cruised the Indian Ocean from Cape Town to Durban and back. I brought home a beautiful, hand embroidered evening bag–which is now haute couture–and a pristine, empty notebook.

In-between, there were trains and cars and buses. At twenty-one, I left South Africa on a ship bound for Southampton, the first of countless trips to countless towns, cities, and countries.

Almost every time I took with me a clean notebook, but good intentions notwithstanding, I was always too busy eaveswatching on the world to make notes. I added a tape recorder, but didn’t use it.

Finally, I decided to make a simple camera my notepad. The first photo I took was of my foot in black sand. South Africa’s beaches are pure white; I didn’t know there were black sand beaches, and pink ones, and ones like Nice, covered in pebbles and half-naked ladies.
My mother was angry at my extravagance when she saw the photo. “Can’t you be more careful? All you got was a foot.”

She didn’t understand that my only stupidity was not writing date and location on the back of the photo. That foolish omission led me to collect local newspapers, travel brochures, and postcards along the way.

I continued to take pictures and added the device of writing letters to a carefully chosen friend, one who would keep them for me as a journal to be used on my return.

The letters were greatly appreciated, but somehow didn’t come back to me.

For me, travel meant renewal. It meant filling the void left after finishing a book or a relationship; it was also fodder for my stories. Yet hard as I tried, writing it all down the first time I went to a new place diminished the experience. There it was, sealed in ink, rather than a memory that lingered and grew in my head and heart and soul.

But here’s the rub.

While, for the most part, I didn’t make notes in foreign parts, almost all of my work is primarily set outside of where I live. Not only does travel inspire me after the fact, but I find it difficult to write a story set in a place I haven’t visited, even for as little as a few hours. In a very short time, I can get to know the smells and the colors and the texture of the air. I can see how people walk, the way they talk to one another, and the way they view strangers. One of my favorite people, a writer who is talented, rich, and famous, got that way by writing multiple books set in a country he’d never seen. For that, he has my admiration. Heaven only knows I’ve tried, but I just can’t do it.

It wasn’t until 1992, forty-seven years after that first plane ride, that I realized my travel affliction was not unique to me. I was discussing his book, Travels, with Michael Crichton and learned that he reacted exactly the same way I did. Even when he knew he was going somewhere to do research, it was only after the second or third visit that he buckled down to note-taking.

Nothing, he said, could change the fact that we had seen everything through the eyes of a writer, because that’s who we were. In retrospect, that was exactly what I had done. My conscience felt clear.

I do my best thinking either pacing or in a bathtub. That night, sitting in a tub after a full day spent interviewing Michael, I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook next to the tub and fashioned a little boat, which I floated in the water. Watching it, my mind drifted to my travels and to the area of the world that always calls me to come back, the Caribbean.

In Israel I had found brotherhood neutralized by contention and a profusion of dried figs; in Greece I had found white sands and black olives; in America, I found Fig Newtons blooming on Supermarket shelves, along with warnings of calorie and fat content. In Spain…

…”You’re doing Europe at the wrong time,” someone said. If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium, echoed from times past, the Dark Ages, pre-computer, when I worked as a travel agent in South Africa. That was when travel agents had to be multilingual and plan the routes, book every hotel directly, individual tours, each flight and ship and bus for every traveler who came into the office wanting to “do” Europe, as if all of the countries of Europe blended into a pudding which they could swallow and regurgitate later with the help of Fodor’s.

More recently, I’d attended one of those “everybody mingle” events. I wandered into a group discussion about vacations and where, ideally, each person would prefer to live.

“What about you?” someone asked.

“The West Indies,” I said. “Grenada.” I used the correct pronunciation, Gre-NAY-da.

“Where’s that?” one man wanted to know.

“In the Caribbean, close to Trinidad.”

“Trinidad?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean Grenada.” He pronounced it Gren-ah-da. “The place we invaded.”

I started to correct him, but stopped. They wouldn’t want him in Grena(y)da anyway.

“We’ve done the Caribbean.” His perky wife looked at me as if she expected applause.

Showing enormous restraint, I walked away without uttering another word. I wanted to yell, “You can’t¬ do Europe or the Caribbean or Africa or the United States.

Is every state in America the same? Have you seen the country once you’ve been up the Empire State Building? Do you understand the people?

Of course not, I thought, blowing gently on my paper boat to move it around. The Caribbean was a perfect example. I had traveled there countless times. No two islands were exactly alike in their history and politics, or in the daily behaviors of their people. The flora and fauna were different, as were the foods and the smells, the music and the breezes, the sand that caressed your feet, the sea that enfolded you like embryonic fluid or tossed you around like a mother-to-be with indigestion.

I got out of the tub with a vision.

While completing my present writing commitments, I would write a short retrospective of some of my first island experiences. Then I would return to the islands, this time to research and write. I would “do” the Caribbean at least one more time, this time with a sense of purpose: to show the singularity of each island.

The thought of visiting the islands yet again was enticing. Exhilarating. Doing so as a writer setting out to share the experience was daunting, but not overwhelming.

Wrapping myself in my robe, I went to my computer. Which memory, I wondered, would demand to be written first?

Now, the question is, do I go back to one of my thrillers or continue with this? And if I do, will anyone buy it?

That’s the question we all face, isn’t it, as we contemplate the rising cost of everything.
Like Scarlett, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

–Janet Berliner

By Stan Ridgley 

             Quite often now – surely far more frequently than in early years when I dwelled in wiseass territory – I count my blessings.

            What blessings might those be?

            Immersion in a sparkling diversity every working day.  Tickled by the delights of a thousand different worldly combinations of cultures and milieus, served to me daily. 

           Others have it worse. 

           I sat passive in a car recently, precious minutes spent precisely as I chose to.  Slumped in the driver’s side, idly tapping the pearlized paint on the car door. Waiting in a parking lot.  A sunny day, shiny heat, but not unpleasant.  Nothing to recommend it either, save that the sun’s position along the horizon that day was marginally farther along than the day before . . . but not as far as ’twould be the next.

            A brief wait.  For a beautiful woman.  That self-same sun glinting off her blonde hair, the breeze catching her locks.

             Brief, indeed, but a wait long enough to peer at and ponder a law office up on the second floor of a ruddy brick building.  And I did ponder for a moment or two the fate of the person or persons in that office.  A lawyer “practicing” law.

             Locked into a life of repetition and ritual.

            Money, yes.

            Satisfaction?

            Perhaps.  Who knows? 

           But a day like every other.  Formulaic.  Familiar scenarios changing only in their mundane particulars.  Cramped.  The same people.  Cutouts.  Problems.  Role-playing.  Deadening.

           Maddeningly the same.

           A dulling, yet compelling psychological stimulus to act strangely.  Yearning to burst out, to shatter the golden shackles, to act . . . ignobly.

           But . . .

            A turn of the key, the engine rumbles low and smooth, and the formulas vanish, replaced with an insistent wind in the hair and a feeling of gratitude . . . even relief.  There but for the grace of God . . . 

            I toil in the second-largest metropolis on the east coast . . . a city of seven million, the home of Rocky and of Liberty.

            In the office next to mine is a fabulous marketing professor by the name of Masaaki.  Japanese, quite obviously.  In the offices on the other side are Arvind and Ram, colleagues of Indian descent, brilliant in their fields.

             I step out of my office to grab a bite at one of the many kiosks lining the main campus thoroughfare.  Walking out of the building, I hear strange-sounding, lyrical African tongues, Italian, Polish.  Students all.  Music pulsing on a spring day, echoing off the buildings, the contrapuntal rhythms of youth.  Do I fetch fruit from the Vietnamese kiosk . . . or a sandwich from the one run by Jon the Serb?  Or veggies from the Turks?

             There is always at least one Mohammed in each of my classes.

              This semester, I have two in one class.  One from Jordan, the other from Bangladesh.  Increasing numbers of students from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria.  Two from Albania.  The Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cohorts are always large.  Closely followed by the Vietnamese and Thais.

               Jin is an interesting young man . . . Chinese, but grew up in South Africa and is a citizen of that country.  Speaks perfect English and has fantastic potential for a sharply defined personal comparative advantage.

               Ali is from Sudan.

               Muhammed from Mali.

               Asmaa from Morocco.

               And a smattering of Americans.

               This is diversity.

            This is true diversity of the kind the purveyors of the new appropriateness did not have in mind when the word became politically charged.  In fact, my university has been rated the nation’s Most Diverse Campus by the Princeton Review.  Only in such a place can someone fluently bilingual yet feel inadequate among the multilingual and talented.

            I testify to that diversity.  And to that talent.

            What does it mean for purposes of this space?

            Just this.

            The percussive effect on the soul of such a rich mix of cultures and peoples, all bright and inquisitive, all ambitious and energized, all intense and poised to hurl themselves onto a world that has no clue of what’s in store . . . well, how to measure it?  How to describe the pressure, the charge, the unharnessed and unruly dynamism?  How to measure it as compared to what would have been had a different environment prevailed in the similar time period.

            And, of course, there is the issue that every person forms a distinct portion of every other person’s environment.  So when we talk about a diverse environment’s impact on students, we are essentially talking of the students’ endless interactive impacts on each other individually and on themselves in the aggregate.

           What does it mean to learn in such an environment as opposed to one where, say, a brown face makes only an occasional appearance and a foreign accent is an aberration?  Or in an environment where there is homogeneity of one type or another, where white faces, yellow faces, brown faces . . . where beautiful lilting accents are a rarity? 

           To meticulously mix metaphors, this yeasty, electrical atmosphere is apparent to me, but strangely not to many of the students themselves.  This congeries of cultures is just the way it is.  It is not viewed overtly as an advantage or disadvantage, I think, but just a reality.

            For me – and for anyone who seeks engagement with life – it is a nirvana of sights, smells, exotic delights, and meshing of intrigues.  It is a seething, almost alive feeling of anticipation.  You cannot underestimate the potential intellectual energies of 34,000 college students massed in one place, dedicated (presumably) to learning, and unbearably optimistic about what they will do with themselves in the coming days, months, years.

            Such an atmosphere is enlivening to the inquisitive mind.  It is the antithesis to ritual and routine, formula and fatuousness.  It is the wellspring of creativity, the beating heart of innovation.

            The problem, for young people, is to reckon up their luck.  Their incredible luck at all of this. 

            I’ve reckoned up my own, and my cup runneth over. 

           A hundred story ideas beam out at me every workday.  I see a hundred stories in the faces of students, gathered together by a self-selection process that yields a sublime combination of careful selection by major, age, and interest . . . but random according to who actually shows up in the group I face each day.  I gain inspiration from the lifeforce of a hundred, and yet additional hundreds.

            Another day begins in several hours.

            I’ll drive into Philadelphia, but I’ll not complain at the cost of the gas. 

           I’ll celebrate life’s bargain that conveys me, personally, across an urban expanse to enjoy the delights the world has to offer, concentrated within the confines and shelter of a great university. 

           And when I get a moment to catch my breath . . . I’ll chronicle one of those stories.

Being a cross-genre kind of girl myself, I seem always to be preaching to other authors to think more broadly about other genres their books might fit into, and about how to promote themselves in other genres. This kind of thinking and marketing is particularly important for authors in the horror genre because, let’s face it, horror is not exactly a popular book genre these days. In fact, I’m not sure it could be any LESS popular. I don’t know how many of the rest of you have considered the fact that with Borders potentially being sold and the most likely buyer being Barnes & Noble, there soon be be NO bookstore chain with a horror section. B&N maintains no horror section whatsoever, and even Borders’ horror section is rarely more than one shelf. Not one row, one shelf.

Yet you browse around in bookstores and you see rows and rows of, oh, science fiction and fantasy, paranormal romance, mystery and thrillers.

I’m sure eventually there will be a horror renaissance… we all know these things go in cycles. But I’m writing NOW, and I need to be making a living NOW, and I know I’m not the only one. It’s interesting to see how many cross-genre, cross-promotional panels that are scheduled at WHC – I’m glad to see it, because I think that’s a conversation all of us in the genre need to be having.

I’ll be doing a report on WHC with that slant next month (and also reporting on the Public Library Association, which is the reason I’ll be late for WHC, but for my money, in terms of promotion, PLA is unmissable.)

But this month I’m posting a report on Left Coast Crime.

I love conventions and maybe my cross-genre talk is really just an excuse for me to go to more of them. But since my books do easily fall into other genres (we don’t even use the H-word at St. Martin’s – I write “supernatural thrillers”) I spent a lot of time in my debut year exploring conventions in all the genres I fall into: horror, mystery, thriller – and (though admittedly this is stretching it) paranormal romance. And you can turn up your nose at the last all you want to, but guess where I sold more books last year than at any other convention – and I mean, ten times as many books, in hardcover?

Romantic Times.

Those readers buy books, emphasis on BUY.

But before I get all radical with the talk about the romance market, I’ll try what might be an easier sell to this crowd: the mystery conference.

This month I attended Left Coast Crime in Denver: http://www.leftcoastcrime.org/2008/

Left Coast Crime is primarily a fan conference, so if you’re writing dark and suspenseful and more psychological horror, or horror with a police procedural or investigative element, it’s a very viable conference for you to pick up new fans (and also get yourself into a Western market, if you’re based in the East). I’ve only been to two LCCs but I’ve been to a very wide variety of conferences in the last two years and I think LCC is probably the second best mystery con out there for me (Bouchercon is first - it’s HUGE and in Baltimore this year in October, really something dark suspense authors should think about attending…)

I love LCC because: it’s so casual and friendly, it’s very inclusive about sub-genres and again, it’s very, very, very fan-oriented. The organizers are great about putting all published authors on panels, so as long as you register in good time, you are guaranteed to have a nice spotlight.

I’ll set the stage: Denver is a fairly good-sized city in a great bowl of plains, surrounded by a ring of very high snowy mountains. Gorgeous. The airport is quite a ways away from downtown, where the con hotel was – a 45-minute car ride through a lot of open plain.

Downtown is very funky – there’s a Gold Rush feel to it and an instant sense of eccentricity – in the layout of the streets (narrow and veering wildly all over the place, coming to strange triangles everywhere), in the buildings (many of which are built in strange triangles to fit the strange triangular intersections), and the overall dress is Wild West: lots of cowboy hats and boots and fur vests. The people – well, the people were a trip. As in San Francisco (another Gold Rush town, come to think of it, Denverites cultivate their eccentricities. One of the first things I saw when we got off the freeway downtown was a homeless guy perched on a bridge with a sign that read: SPACESHIP BROKE DOWN – NEED MONEY FOR PARTS. And from the look of him, he wasn’t kidding.

So my top three things about LCC:

First - at the risk of beating this into the ground, LCC is a FAN conference. This was more true in Seattle last year, but the fans tend to outnumber the authors by a wide margin (more and more rare at conventions) and they are very much there to find new authors. They go to the new author showcases and all the panels and they take notes… then go home and report on the conferences and the authors to their book clubs. It’s fantastic word-of-mouth.

Here’s my specific tip: I’ve been to two LCCs now and for some reason the hospitality suite is the place to be. LCC is great about providing pretty full breakfasts and lunch, all complimentary, and coffee and snacks throughout the day. The suite wasn’t as packed as it was last year in Seattle, but I still had some of my best con experiences just sitting around drinking coffee, stealing coconuts from the catering decorations, and getting to know a lot of readers who I know will go out and get my books. It means that you will have to forgo some hanging and drinking with your author friends, but I really think you might have the most fun and useful conference experience just planting yourself in the hospitality suite and never leaving. It’s one-stop shopping, with free food and caffeine.

Second, if you’re an author, ALWAYS hit the local bookstores. On Friday, my friend Pari Taichert and I rented a car and drove around to eight Denver bookstores to meet managers and sign stock. It took about four and a half hours (because of Friday traffic and because Denver is much more spread out than you would think). We got to visit both Denver Tattered Covers, which are absolute cathedrals of books, each in their own way, one in a great old downtown building and another in a grand old theater – and the completely charming Murder By the Book, in a house in a funky little walking area – as well as make the rounds of the B&Ns and Borders. You get much more of a sense of the town driving around (renting a Garmin GPS helps!) and you are establishing a relationship with another book market.

Third – always try to hit the forensics panels, which are an entire track at LCC. You will always get your money’s worth in the forensics panels. Mystery Writers of America veteran and forensics expert Jan Burke did a stellar job assembling law enforcement and forensics professionals, and it’s always gold to hear her and Dr. Doug Lyle talk about their work – you can get a year’s worth of research in in an afternoon. And I love hearing forensics and law enforcement experts from the specific region – you get a much better sense of the whole region in general.

LCC is once a year in the late winter, and yes, always West of the Rockies… but I hope some of you will think about coming over to the Left side.

http://www.leftcoastcrime.org/2008/

- Alex