The LadyKillers

News and Readers Speak!

NEWS FLASHES!!

• May 10, 7 p.m., Penny Warner and Ann Parker will be speaking and signing at the Livermore Public Library (Civic Center). Free event. Surprise guest appearances by two local authors (one is another LadyKiller ... hint hint) with debut mysteries coming out this summer are promised as well!
• May 14, Susan Shea will give a talk about art, money, and crime - the themes of her Dani O'Rourke mystery series - at the Sausalito (CA) Library. Free, 7 p.m. 420 Litho Street, plenty of free parking.
• The second and third books in Susan Shea's Dani O'Rourke series will be published by Top Five Books in 2013.

NEXT WEEK: READERS SPEAK!

... And what do they say?

To find out, check in with the LadyKillers this coming week. Be sure to bring your favorite cuppa and be prepared to SPEAK (if so desired).

“We read to know that we are not alone.” ― C.S. Lewis

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde

News (and Left Coast Crime!) and Who's Got a Clue?

NEWS FLASHES!!

• Ann Parker and Camille Minichino will lead a new mystery book club at Towne Center Books, Pleasanton, California, on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, starting March 20, 7 PM.
• Mystery author Kaye George will be our honored guest poster on Wednesday, March 21. Please drop by and see what she has to say.
• Susan Shea, Cindy Sample, and Michelle Drier will speak at a fundraising dinner for Contra
  Costa Community College  on Friday, March 23.
• LadyKillers will appear in abundance at the upcoming Left Coast Crime convention in Sacramento, California (March 29–April 1). Here's the roundup of panels and appearances:
  
  • Thursday, 1:30 p.m. "Where the Palm Trees Meet the Pines" - Susan Shea
  • Thursday, 4:00 p.m. "Killer Crafts" - Penny Warner, Camille Minichino
  • Friday, 9:00 a.m. "A Real Place or Not?" - Susan Shea
  • Friday, 10:15 a.m. "Tea and a Cozy" - Camille Minichino
  • Friday, 1:30 p.m. "On the Noir Side" - Mysti Berry
  • Saturday, 9:00 a.m. "Magical Mystery Tour" - Margaret Lucke
  • Saturday, 10:15 a.m. "Pre-20th Century History" - Ann Parker, Priscilla Royal
  • Saturday, 11:30 a.m.  "Start 'Em Young" - Penny Warner
  • Saturday, 11:30 a.m. "Retirement Can Kill You" - Rita Lakin
  • Sunday, 10:00 a.m. "Liars Panel" - Rita Lakin

Give Me a Clue...

CLUE: something that guides through an intricate procedure or maze of difficulties; specifically : a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution of a problem.

Who better to tackle the subject of clues than writers and readers of mysteries?? This week, the LadyKillers are on the hunt, looking for clues...

JUST INKLINGS

- from Susan

 

I know writers who say an entire story popped into their heads at once, fully formed, clearly defined, and simply awaiting their work as scribes to get it all down. Admittedly, some of these brainstorms happened at three a.m. and didn’t stand up to the light of day, but others appear to have been the real deal, wonderful novels that got published and reviewed well and all of that.

Well, cheers to them. For me, there are inklings of stories first, and inklings of the denouement glimpsed through the underbrush long before I reach it. Sometimes the ideas for a scene or a setting or an entire book come from my professional experiences, other times from my personal life, and still others from things read or observed at a distance. Here are a few examples:

• Having worked for a scientific organization that does research in Africa, I learned a lot about the politics in developing countries that are still in awkward states of transition from tribal alliances to national bureaucracies, from sale-and-barter social arrangements to government-controlled collection and disbursement systems. Bending new and what seem like arbitrary laws, accepting bribes, arranging to have people you don’t like arrested…Hey, there might be an idea here for a crime story.

• Hearing good artists griping about being shut out of galleries while others with connections or the right kind of graduate degrees suck up the attention of the limited number of local collectors, I wondered about that nasty emotion, jealousy, and how someone barely making ends meet would feel if a former colleague hit the jackpot.

• Out for an early morning walk, I passed two young, shabbily dressed men slouching along. One had a mutt of a dog on a rope. As I went around them on the grass, I heard one of them say, “Yeah, but you did shoot him.” I immediately slowed down, but all I could hear of the response was, “But you would have too if….” Short of stopping in the middle of the path, which I wasn’t keen to do since the dog was mostly German shepherd and they were talking about guns, I was left with only the inkling of a scene and two juicy characters.

• I tore a story out of a magazine recently. A lovely old Chinese vase was sold at auction in London for $86 million. The catch? It was sold after a swirl of whispered interest stirred up in China by a smaller auction house. The seller? Don’t know, although it’s rumored the piece was looted by British or French soldiers during the Second Opium War in 1860. The buyer? Anonymous. And, of course, I have an inkling of an idea that would make a great story.

 

News? Unknown...

News!! (...late breaking, because the spam filter refused to 'fess up)

• Susan Shea is speaking at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library Thursday, February 16 th 7:30 (free and all are welcome). Title of the talk is "How Money Moves the Art World," and it's about the intersection of art, money...and crime, of course!
• Feb 18, Saturday, at 10 AM: Rita Lakin, Vinnie Hansen, Susan Shea, and Priscilla Royal at the AAUW book panel, Fellowship Hall of Christ Lutheran Church, 780 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito.

UNKNOWN

The topic has several of the LadyKillers scratching their heads, but that's okay. Join us this week to see how creative minds interpret THIS one...

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.  -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.  -Arthur Eddington

Award Winners' News, and Next Week -- Initiation

NEWS FLASH!

• Left Coast Crime is only two months away. Look for some of your favorite LadyKillers to anxiously await the awards banquet! Award nominations include Rita Lakin's Getting Old Can Kill You for the Lefty (best humorous mystery novel), and Ann Parker's Mercury's Rise and Priscilla Royal's A Killing Season, both nominated for the Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery.
• Other news: Ann Parker, Susan Shea, Penny Warner, and Camille Minichino will be at an AAUW meeting at the Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church, Sunnyvale, California, on Thursday, February 9, at 7 PM.

Initiation

Every transition has its initiations, be they informal "welcome to the writer's life, kiddo!" or formal rites. Next week, writers talk about initiation.

Inspiration, Not Imitation

-       from Susan

Reading while writing, tricky. When I’m engaged in a first draft, I try to stay away from anything with close similarities of style. So, if I’m attempting humor or a light touch, I hold off reading authors I admire for doing that well. I don’t want to find my own voice (or my character’s) morphing into that of someone I admire. Best to go back to them when my own draft is done. No harm during revisions – I’ve put my own mark on paper.

It’s a bit different with the new book I’m working on because I’m drawn to some older prose. Some author friends are gently trying to head me off, suggesting I at least modify my idea because modern readers won’t embrace the kind of opinionated, omniscient narrator I have in mind. But has Jane Austen ever really gone out of fashion? Listen:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.

I’m not planning an 18^th century mash-up of Pride and Prejudice with murder, vampires, or romance, told in the prose of the period. But the modern story I want to tell may insist on being told in an old-fashioned way, in the voice of an off-screen persona who comments knowingly, wittily, on the manners and morals of the time, the people, and the place as the tale unfolds. And for that, I am rereading Austen and Trollope, to see how they carry it off, what I might use in my construction of a modern narrative, one for today’s impatient, hurried readers.

Ultimately, it’s all about teasing one’s own voice out, listening to it, encouraging it, not letting confidence in your voice be undermined by how well other authors achieve theirs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chop wood, carry water

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” – attributed to author Annie Dillard on a website that collects quotes related to carpe diem

                                                                                        * *

The Buddhists have a saying, “chop wood, carry water.” Basically, it describes a way of living in the present, whatever that present is. If you are doing a boring chore – chopping wood – do it mindfully. Focus on the experience and do it well, aware of the sounds of the ax on the log, and the smell of the sap, the movements of your body, the pleasure in seeing the pile of firewood grow.

That’s a good message for anyone engaged in creative work, as is Dillard’s. The best moments for writers, painters, dancers and others engaged in making art are those in which we’re transported beyond ourselves, caught up in the act of creation, lifted momentarily beyond the tasks to a state in which the work itself is not something we’re conscious of, only the experience of making. Lost in creativity.

But most of the time, dancers are aware of aching hips, painters are struggling with getting oils to adhere just so on stretched canvas, and writers are beating their heads against walls searching for the right word to describe something. It’s hard, it’s repetitive, it frustrates us because we want so much to be in that other state – “in the zone.”

But there’s only one way to get to the “zone,” and that’s to chop the wood and carry the water, to stop trying to force the transcendence and to live and work in the current moment. When you’re pushing for it, hoping for some future happiness, grumbling about the present, you’re moving further and further away from the “zone.”

I know – easier to say than to do. But in 2012 I intend to work on spending each writing day in the present and relishing the experience of searching for the right word, making sentences count, and letting the creativity overtake me when it will. I’m sure I’ll need to remind myself of these goals again and again. I know there will be times when I give in to the seductive power of daydreaming about future success rather than face the tough road toward it. I like the concept, though, and think I’ll make a sign to put over my desk so that when my eyes and my mind wander, I’ll get a little shove back to the present and the undeniable fact of Annie Dillard’s quote.

Good luck to each of you in 2012 – may you succeed in your goals and have happy times getting there!

 

Starting a new story

 

-from Susan

At a party the other night, a woman I’d just been introduced to said brightly, “I could never write a book. I mean, where do you even get your ideas? How do you start?”

The noise level was high, her comment was merely party chatter, and we had moved on to other topics within a minute. Knowing she wasn’t an aspiring writer, I didn’t try to answer the question seriously, just murmured something about ideas being all around us. But for LadyKillers, I will offer a few parts of an answer that shifts, deepens, and changes over time for me. I’d like to hear others’ answers too.

1. Ideas really are all around us. I think writers are observers, standing back from the world a bit, listening (okay, eavesdropping), watching how other people interact, noticing oddities in the news, and people’s behaviors. It seems to come with the writing gene.
2. Our imaginations are healthy. If you’ve been to a writers’ conference, you’ve heard at least one panelist explain the “What if…?” habit. I see a skinny man at the ATM who’s shifting from one foot to the other, holding his cigarette in a curled hand as if to shield it from other people’s view, and glancing jerkily over his shoulder every few seconds, and I can’t help it. “What if he’s waiting til foot traffic dies down to rob an ATM user? Or install one of those ATM hack machines? Or plant a bomb?” He becomes a bad guy in my imagination and a physical model for a character whose crime could start a new story.
3. Writing is an itch that must be scratched. Starting’s not so hard for us, even if the start turns out to be a false one, as Michael’s story yesterday shows. We write because it’s essential. It’s our way of being in the world.
4. We crave attention for our stories. Why else would we keep at it when the first draft caves in the middle, or the complicated rationale for the crime threatens to morph into nonsense, or the editor wants a fifth rewrite?

We start because the wished-for outcomes – if not fame and riches – are readers who get a weekend’s pleasure from what we’ve worked on, and who tell us they never guessed who did it, and because we got to tell the story of the desperately ill man whose calloused hand curled around the cigarette to shield it from the rain, and whose wife never met him at the ATM because she had been kidnapped….Ooops, there I go.

Bye for now. I have a story to start.

 

Social Networking, or Oh My God, What Is That Huge Blob Swallowing Manhattan?!

 - from Susan

 

It was a cool idea. You get to check out people you sort-of know. Oh, even cooler, you get to comment on them. On anything, actually. Oh, sweet. You get to share your comments with your friends…or, hey, with the whole world. I mean, everyone wants to know what you think of Beyonce’s baby bump, right? And where you are right now, and what sandwich you just ordered. And a picture of the sandwich, and a satellite image of the deli where you ordered it? And then people can tell you instantly that they approve of your choice of tuna on rye…or not. In fact, someone will undoubtedly send you a link to a YouTube video they made last week about why you shouldn’t eat tuna because most of it is caught in unsustainable ways, and then someone else, one of your 4,523 Facebook or Twitter friends, will send a rude note: “F_ it, I love tuna, dude!” But that person, whom you’ve never actually met, could be a paid influencer for the unsustainable tuna industry organization, so you have to check him out, which is easy because everything about him, including a picture of his wife and baby, are in Facebook’s open pages, as is a list of the movies he loves (“Jaws,” of course) and his DOB, where you notice he’s 2 years younger than you and has more friends and his own fan page from the days he had a grunge band in Seattle.

If you happen to be a published author, or aim to be one, you start the ball rolling and then try to keep up with it by running (metaphorically) as fast as you can, scooping up eyeballs, Tweeters (a.k.a. Twoots), and “Friends,” all of whom are potential fans of your books, people out there in the Twitterverse who will say something nice in 140 words or less, or who will cheer you on in Facebook. These are wonderful people, people you would actually like to know, except for the guys who try to hit on you from small towns in Alaska or the Philippines or try to sell you something, or are actually only software programs that post oddly worded messages on your web site’s “Comments” section like this real one:

Thanks for your nice experience to share with us. Really awesome article with plenty of informative things to be known for us.

And so it goes.

(That last is a quote from a famous author who somehow sold a lot of books even though he didn’t have a Facebook page, wasn’t known as a great social networker, and had nothing to say about Kim Kardashian’s marriage. Come to think of it, he did write science fiction.)

 

News and Social Networking

NEWS

• Sunday, December 11, 3-5 PM, LadyKillers Ann Parker, Camille Minichino, and Susan Shea will be at Mission Coffee in Fremont. Watch as we struggle to wrap our books for holiday presents!
• Michael A. Black's latest book is officially out: The Incredible Adventures of Doc Atlas. Just in time for the holidays!
• We have two honored guests posting this week. Please stop by and say hello on "their days":
  • J.J. Murphy will be our honored guest on Thursday, December 8.
  • Kathleen Ernst will be our honored guest on Saturday, December 10.

 

NETWORKING

Topic up for discussion this coming week: Social Networking. Do a little networking of your own and drop on in to read and comment on what the LadyKillers opine.