The LadyKillers

From Mary Anna--Diversions, the ones we take and the ones we don't

As I sat here looking at this week's topic, diversions, my free-associatin' brain took me down two paths, poetry and physics.  (But what's new?  I've both feet on those paths for years now, and it's been an interesting stroll.

One of the most famous lines in poetry uses the word "diverged," and its topic is the heartrending fact that we don't have the time to walk every path that life offers us:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood...."  

Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken," 1916.

When confronted with the topic "Diversions," I immediately skipped over to a web page that gave me the full text of this public-domain poem for free.  Having barely absorbed it, my brain flitted off to thoughts of my fluid mechanics class, when a discussion of how a stream of water would diverge and recoverge when encountering on obstacle in its path.  Much energy could be (and has been) expended in examining how the behavior of that water would differ if it were moving with the turbulence of a river in spring thaw or the smooth, laminar flow of a slow, shallow creek.  (Lest your eyes glaze over, this problem is very important to anybody out there who occasionally drives over a bridget.)

Mother, lover, engineer, novelist, musician--I could probably have played any of those roles better if I'd been willing to pick one path and stick to it, but I'm not good at that kind of diversion.  I'm not good at letting go of the desire to stroll down all the paths.  Perhaps it hasn't been the most peaceful life plan, but it has been interesting. And it ain't over yet.

May all your paths be fascinating and all your diversions be pleasant.

Mary Anna

 

A Writer's Image? Perhaps imagination is at the heart of it.

We're talking about the writer's image this week on The Lady Killers.  When I saw that topic, I have to admit that my first thought was, "I have no idea what to say. I'm going rogue.  I'm going to talk about...um...this piece of chocolate here in my hand.  It's really yummy."  But I went rogue with my last post, and then Ann followed me down the garden path of rebellion.  If we keep this up, chaos will ensue.  Do you really want to live in a world where a bunch of Lady Killers are on the loose and there are no rules????

I don't.  So I intend to play by the rules today.  The blog wants me to write "A Writer's Image," so that's what the blog shall get.  But I freely admit that this is a ticklish subject.  Think about my average workday.  I'm sitting at home alone, working in a t-shirt and jeans, and this is only because I have a modicum of self-respect.  I could do what I do in flannel pajamas and bunny slippers.  (Well, it's Florida, so flannel pajamas would be overkill.  However, I cannot describe the flimsy stuff I usually sleep in, because my son might be reading this and he would then feel compelled to rip his mind's eye out by the roots.)  At least 95% of the time, I have no "image" to uphold, but there is that other part of my job.  Sometimes I have to go out and meet the public.

Saturday, I gave a talk at a bookstore.  Tonight, I'm speaking at a library.  For such events, bunny slippers and a flimsy nightgown do not cut it.  Jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers would be less likely to get me arrested or institutionalized, but I don't think they convey the proper respect for my audience.  How I look  has no bearing on the quality of what I write, but there is an element of show-biz to what I do for a living.  People who enjoy my books can read them in the comfort of their home.  If they leave the house to come see me speak, it is because they are interested in me as a person.  I do not think they want to see a frumpy 50-year-old grandmother.  

I cannot do anything about the second and third descriptors, but I don't have to be frumpy.  I put some thought into how I dress for an event.  I wear makeup and a little jewelry and I fuss with my hair a little.  Probably more importantly, I try to reach out to the people who attend, making an effort to tailor my talk to their interests and to answer their questions with thought.

On a less personal level, I think it's important for me to present a professional image even when I'm not there.  I put a great deal of effort into my books, and I want to present them in a way that communicates that care.  So I paid a professional to design my website.  I also paid the best photographer I know to take my author photo, so that I would have a picture that did actually look like me, yet didn't scream "frumpy grandmother."  I have a few projects that I published myself, and I paid professionals to lay out the text and design the cover.  Again, if I don't project a professional image, how can I expect my work to be taken seriously?  You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can get a sense of the degree of importance its maker assigns to its public image.

But this is all icing on the cake.  First, you have to make the cake.  I spend 95% of my time putting together and polishing stories that are worth the reader's while.  My business is creating works of the imagination, and the worlds in those books are far more real than any surficial "image" that can be painted on them or on me.  My imagination is what I have to offer.  My image is merely a tool to get people to look more closely at my imaginary worlds as they decide whether to dive in.

News and Self-Discipline

NEWS FLASHES!!

• Michael A. Black's third Leal and Hart novel, Sacrificial Offerings, just came out in hardcover from Five Star.
• Michael also has a short story titled "The Black Rose" in a recently released e-book anthology called Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT. PROTECT is a national organization affiliated with author Andrew Vachss that works to protect children by lobbying for passing legislation designed to prevent child abuse. All the proceeds go to PROTECT. Other contributing authors include Patti Abbott, Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, and Joe Landsdale, and Vachss, among many more. For more about the cause and the book, and to buy it (in its many different e-book forms), go to http://the-lost-children.blogspot.com/p/protectors-stories-to-benefit-protect.html. The direct link to amazon is right here.

• Staci McLaughlin, Penny Warner, Ann Parker, and mystery author Carole Price continue their Murder in the Valley events this week:
  • Thursday, September 13, 7:00 p.m., at Towne Center Books in Pleasanton, California.
  • Saturday, September 15, 1:00 p.m., at  Orinda Books, Orinda, California.
• This Thursday is Diana Orgain's last scheduled post at the LadyKillers. Be sure to drop in and wish her well with all her writings! We hope she'll drop on in for a guest post and let us know what she's up to. Hannah Jane will move in and be trading Thursdays with Staci McLaughlin.
• Mary Anna Evans will be conducting a writing workshop at Murder on the Beach in Delray Beach, Florida on Saturday, September 15, from 10 am to noon.
• Mary Anna will also be speaking at the Ponte Vedra Library in Ponte Vedra, Florida on Monday, September 17, at 6:30 p.m.

Next Up: SELF-DISCIPLINE

The LadyKillers tackle the topic of self-discipline this coming week... some, no doubt, will attack it in a more disciplined style than others. Be sure to come visit and see what they have to say!

"The first and best victory is to conquer yourself." ~Plato

From Mary Anna--I'm going off-script in praise of curiosity, despite the lure of sex and violence

I ordinarily follow rules.  If I'm supposed to write a blog entry about sex and violence, I do that.  If I'm supposed to write about a rock, I do that.  Today, I am a rebel.  If you want to read about sex and violence, watch this space.  My fellow LadyKillers will be talking about those things all week long.  I want to talk about the power of human curiosity

It has been a few days since the passing of Neil Armstrong and the media furor that reminded us of his remarkable life is dying down.  Let's face it.  As a species, we have a short attention span.  The fact that most of the world still knew Neil Armstrong's name, when he had spent 43 years avoiding the limelight that he had duly earned, is a fair measure of what he did and what his accomplishment symbolized.  When a thinking person considers the life of Neil Armstrong, he or she can only have one response.  "My God.  We sent people to the moon and brought them safely home ."

We forget so easily.  If you want a good face-full of NASA's accomplishments in the 1960s, take a trip to the Kennedy Space Center.  Stick your head inside a claustrophic command module and look at the controls.  They look about as high-tech as the dashboard of a 1960s Ford.  Then ponder the fact that this vehicle and the rockets that threw it to the moon were designed with slide rules.  Those spacesuits?  Were they molded from futuristic materials like the outfits worn by faux-heroes in today's comic book movies?  No.  They were made by human hands using sewing machines.  Ladies and gentleman, if Neil Armstrong and the team supporting him could do what they did in 1969, then we as a species can do anything.  We simply have to want it badly enough.  And, like Neil Armstrong, we have to possess the courage to risk everything in the pursuit of something worthwhile.

There are those who question our investment in space exploration, pointing out that the money could be used to take care of people who are in need.  I do not question the value of helping people in need, and I vote accordingly.  There are other expenditures I'd like to see cut in favor of funding science, but my intent here is not to talk politics.  And, though I believe that NASA has paid back our investment in terms of technologies and materials that make all our lives better in ways so pervasive that we have ceased to notice them, I am not going to do a cost-benefit analysis in terms of dollars and cents.  I would much rather balance the ledger that measures inspiration against the status quo.

If our president were to announce, "We choose to be free of nonsustainable fuels in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone," I believe we could do it, and I believe our country is not the only one that would take up the challenge.  (Picture me tipping my hat to President Kennedy as I type this.) If he or she were to say, "We choose to free humanity of hunger, because it is within our reach," I believe we could do that, too.  

Cynics believe that we are fueled as individuals by the desire for money and things, but they underestimate the power of the human imagination.  Money buys us the toys we use to distract ourselves when our lives are empty of dreams.  Right now, I think our society needs a dream.

I cannot tell you how happy I am that a human-made thing name Curiosity is running around Mars right now.

Mary Anna

http://www.maryannaevans.com

From Mary Anna--Existentialism? On a Monday morning? Really?

Our topic this week here at the LadyKillers literary salon is "Real Life vs. Virtual Life."  I don't know about you, but I'm not sure there's enough caffeine in the world for me to do this subject justice on a Monday morning, but you know me.  I'm always game.  I'm thinking of having a family crest designed with the motto, "I'll give it a shot.  How hard can it be? "  Except I think this new family motto will look much more aristocratic once it has been translated into Latin and inscribed in Gothic calligraphy.

The question of real life versus virtual life seems new to the current inhabitants of the planet, because computer technology puts it in our faces every day.  When we watch a movie, we ask ourselves, "Did the actor playing Spiderman leap off the tops of skyscrapers while shooting artificial spiderweb fiber from his wrists so that he could swing through Manhattan like a monkey through a jungle?"  When the inevitable answer is, "No," we ask ourselves, "Did he swing across a movie set with fake skyscrapers behind him, while wearing a safety harness?  Or did a computer generate the whole thing?"  For most the us, the answer to that question is, "I'm not sure."  In other words, somebody just reached in my head, grabbed the concept of reality, shook it up like a cup of Yahtzee dice,  then poured those dice back in my head and said, "Have a nice day."

I think we overestimate the newness of this phenomenon.  When Og and Olga the Cavepeople sat around the campfire and told stories about wooly mammoths they had slain, their fellow cavepeople were free to take them at their word.  Or not.  "You should have seen him!  He was taller than the trees and the ground shook when he walked and he had one big eye in the middle of his forehead!  This here mammoth we just ate is a monster, but you should've seen the one that got away!"

Much, much later, the printing press made it possible for the storytellers in our midst to reach far beyond the small circle of compatriots around our personal campfires. (And we thank you for that, Herr Gutenberg.)  

I routinely get emails from people who want to know whether a particular character or place in my stories is real.  I do not leap into the world of existentialism and ask them in return to define what they mean by "real" before I answer their question.  Why do I not ask them to do this?  Because I am not a first-class jerk.  I hope.  Otherwise, I would just quote some impenetrable bit of Sartre, "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards," and leave them hating me, with their questions unanswered.

Do I have a point here?  Yeah, I do.  What was it?  I guess my Monday-morning brain is just trying to say that the imaginary creations that we call "virtual" in the video game and movie world are nothing more than the recreation of the imaginary things we've always held between our ears.  In some ways, a fearsome alien that has never existed outside a computer's brain or on a movie screen is no different than a fearsome beast that never existed outside the brains of Olga the Cavewoman and her rapt audience.  They both have a lot in common with the imaginary characters that I drop into Faye Longchamp's world.  Their population grows with every book I write.  

Olga's beast was independent of the magical science inside a computer and inside a printing machine, so it may have been the most virtual creation of all.  I raise my morning cup of caffeine to Olga and to you all.  Cheers!

Mary Anna

The reward of a job well done -- From Mary Anna

It's back-to-school time and, though it's been a long time since I was in grade school, I still get a feeling a renewal at this season. I love the smell of fresh-sharpened pencils and a newly opened box of crayons. I love the sense of starting anew. I love the annual ebb and flow that is denied to adults who work year-round jobs. I think that we're wired to need the sense that a job has been done well, giving us the twin rewards of resting and then starting something exciting and new.

I've been lucky in my choice of work. I am not on such a regular schedule that it is always the same time of year when I finish a book and take a fallow period to prepare for the next. My life has been such that there has always been some other stressor to soak up that fallow period that I had looked toward while writing each book, but still the feel of ebb and flow was there. If you don't get that from your work, maybe it would be interesting to look at your hobbies and see if you can find one there. Taking music lessons as an adult that require preparation for an end-of-the-year concert would be a possibility. Or training for a swim meet or a bike race that has a definite date to push toward. You know what you like to do. I like to write books.

Or, if all else fails, go buy yourself a big box of crayons, open the lid, and take a sniff.

News (of a summery sort) and REWARDS!

NEWS FLASHES!!!

It's summer! It's hot! It's... up-to-the-minute LadyKiller NEWS FLASHES to enjoy with your iced tea this Sunday...

• Camille Minichino proudly proclaims she has survived another heat wave in Northern California, even as she longs for a bit of a vacation on Revere Beach.


• Penny Warner is in Carmel, California, doing research for Code Buster #3 (she recently sold books 3 & 4 in the series.) Penny adds: "Did you know there was a pirate at the Carmel Mission?  And he used pirate code...."


• Ann Parker has indulged herself by buying a gallon of chocolate mint ice-cream from the local Loards. Nothing says summer like ice cream. Yum!


• Meanwhile, Rita Lakin has turned on the heat in her house to keep warm.


• Mary Anna is basking in reflected glory, as her younger daughter took first place in mythology at the advanced level in the National Junior Classical League national convention last week. Yay, Team Evans!


• Sharan Newman is working on life in the Crusader kingdoms in the  12^th century.  To that end, she made her own hummus last night.  She does NOT intend to turn off the air conditioning to find out what life was really like then in summer.


• Michael A. Black got the side door painted on his "repair the garage" summer project and was *this* close to nailing up the flashing when suddenly a horrendous storm hit. In Michael's words: "Wind whipping around, heavy rain, power outages galore, and tree limbs all over the place." ... That's the Midwest for you! ... He adds, "But the roof I put on earlier in the summer didn't leak." Well done, Michael!


• Priscilla Royal is busy fanning the cats who don't care what anyone else thinks. They're hot.

REWARDS

So, what do you give yourself as a reward for a job well done? (A shout from the peanut gallery: Ice cream!) And what exactly do you consider a reward... Money? Acclaim? A day all to yourself to do whatever you want?  A line of checkmarks on the daily chore list?

We'll be talking about rewards. Stop in with your cuppa (or your ice cream!). We look forward to your comments!

From Mary Anna - Quotes to live by...now that's a tough one...

Today, my blogger's job is to come up with one single solitary quote that's strong enough to live by.  For a word person, that's a tall order.  For a novelist, it's well-nigh impossible.  If novelists did not all suffer from chronic logorrhea, we would say what we had to say and be done with it.  It would not take us 350 manuscript pages to get to the point.

Everybody has a cultural tradition and I think that's cool.  In mine, when pressed to come up with timeless words of wisdom, we look to Jesus.  For a man who lived a short life a long time ago, he said a lot of things that are still timely.  Taken to heart, these five words would change the world:

"Love your neighbor as yourself."

I'd feel a tad presumptuous in trying to elaborate on something so simple and so profound, so I just won't.

Mary Anna

From Mary Anna...Do law enforcement and archaeology mix?

This week's topic is "Cops," which is a little problematic for me.  I write about an archaeologist, and I write mysteries.  I like for readers to feel like they're still in reality, even when they're really in my imaginary world.  Thus, I put a lot of thought into whether my plots are plausible, or even possible.  Any one writing a series about an amateur sleuth is going to face a particularly knotty problem:  Most people do not stumble over dead bodies every year or so.

By choosing an archaeologist for my series character, I avoided some of that problem.  Faye is out there digging for buried stuff all the dang time.  It's not completely impossible, or even implausible, that she might encounter a corpse or a treasure big enough to inspire murder.  Still, just because someone finds a buried skeleton does not mean that the police are going to involve her in the investigation or spill their guts about what they've learned.  Faye's dealings with law enforcement are necessarily going to be at arm's length.

Or are they?

After a few books in which there were good reasons for Faye to be involved in the investigation, I found that she had built up something of a resume'.  She had built a track record of working with police who were dealing with a specialized kind of crime.  On occasion, this resume has even gotten her hired to help as a consultant.  I can't say I planned it, but as I begin the eighth book in the series, I'm working with a character that a cop might want to have hanging around his or her investigation.  This is incredibly freeing as I think of plots for books I might want to write in the future.

For those of you who enjoy amateur sleuth mysteries, what do you think?  Do you enjoy the book more when there's a good reason for the protagonist to be involved in yet another murder?  Or do you suspend your disbelief to the point where you don't really care if there's a good reason, as long as there's a good story?

Mary Anna

From Mary Anna--Careful...people will talk...

We're talking about dialogue this week, and I'll confess that writing dialogue once terrified me.  I wrote a lot of (sadly unpublished) short stories when I was learning my craft, and the first few were all set in the first person.  In some ways, a first person story is all dialogue, but in other ways, there's hardly any dialogue.  In first person, it's easy to write things like, "I saw Sally and she told me that Josh had been acting suspicious lately.  I asked her why, and she said that he'd stopped coming to happy hour on Thursdays and and he always comes to happy hour on Thursdays."

Maybe this would be tolerable in a short story, but I really think it would have been better to hear Sally say, "Josh has been acting so weird.  He stopped coming to happy hour and karaoke isn't the same without his growling baritone."  The problem for an apprentice writer is that it's very intimidating to learn to handle all those rules governing the punctuation of dialogue.  And just thinking of all those quotation marks gave the younger me palpitations.

In problems of writing technique, and probably in problems of life, I think it's better to face the issue head-on.  Sometime in the 1980s, I set myself a project of writing a short story entirely in dialogue.  It is, yes, sadly unpublished, but by the time I finished, I was no longer intimidated by a few measly quotation marks.

I tell this story and about 364 others in my new writing book called Your Novel, Day by Day: A Fiction Writer's Companion.  In it, I reveal everything that I wish someone had told me ten years ago...okay, these days, it's more than twenty...  It's available in ebook and print editions, and here's a picture of its very pretty cover.  If you're into fiction writing, check it out...

Your Novel, Day by Day: A Fiction Writer's Companion