Reminder to Self

Reminder to self: Your writing life is supposed to be enjoyable, and sometimes even fun.

A few recent things brought on this reminder.

1) Last week I went on what was supposed to be a mini-vacation, and ended up being more work than play.

2) I’ve noticed a decided lag in upkeep in my house. I used to move things around and enjoy reorganizing. It’s starting to look like a museum around here.

3) I haven’t entertained in ages. I used to entertain a lot, and I find myself neglecting to invite people over.

4) Last night I had a critique from my writer’s group and all night tossed and turned, worried that I’ll never be able to really the manuscript right. Although this morning I felt more sanguine, I didn’t like that feeling that I must get it right immediately.

5) I have intended for weeks to go see the new Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum. I realized that somehow I never find the time.

6) I find myself feeling beleaguered, thinking of all the things I have to do to write and promote books as some kind of treadmill.

Is that enough? What it points to is that I am burying myself in my study every day, working. I have always preached the virtue of spending some time away from writing each week to refresh myself. And I’m not practicing what I preach. When I’m away from my desk, I constantly worry that I should be doing something: working on the new book, editing the old book, arranging a book tour, figuring out a promotion schedule, updating my website, sending out a newsletter, reading a book I’ve neglected to read, taking care of Sisters in Crime business, taking care of MWA business, writing a short story or article, and on an on.

What this calls for is new resolve. I’m determined to look at the world with fresh eyes—not the sunken eyes I see in the morning with dark rings surrounding them. And to do that I have to go to the museum, entertain friends, get new curtains in my kitchen, move paintings around, listen to some music, try a new recipe, call a friend I haven’t talked to in a while, read a book that has nothing to do with writing mysteries, take a day off. In short, smell the flowers!

Here are some flowers for you, too:

Enjoy your day! And take some time off to smell the roses.

What's in a Name

One of the dumbest things I ever did was name my first book in the Samuel Craddock series, A Killing at Cotton Hill. Not that it isn’t a perfectly good name—but that it’s long. After that, my publisher wanted me to name every book with the same cadence and the same “intent.” That is article-noun or gerund-preposition-proper name. That actually makes the naming a little easier, but what I never figured was how tricky it would be when I write short biographies. Usually when a writer attends a conference or has a reading event, she is asked to provide a short biography of 50 words. By the time I list a few of my books in my bio, half the 50 words is used up.

So when I sat down to write the psychological suspense novel I have in mind, I thought for once I would make the title short. Then I realized how easy the “formula” makes it for the Craddock novels. For a stand-alone, I had no such guidelines, and it’s hard.

What an author wants to convey in a title is a sense of the type of book it is, and a sense of the “intent” of the book. First, people approaching the book should know it’s in the broad “mystery” genre. A reader who picks up Ulysses knows what they are in for. But so is the reader who picks up “The Ulysses Solution.” Someone who picks up a book entitled, “The Brokered Tangent” would be disappointed to find it’s about a muffin lady who solves crimes in her spare time. Likewise, “Miss Lisa’s Moment of Mystery” will baffle readers expecting a cozy mystery and finding instead that’s it’s a thriller about an international conspiracy in which there is a lot of kick-boxing. Although it might actually be fun to confound expectation, it won’t win the author loyal readers.

The issue of intent means giving the prospective reader a sense of what the book might be addressing without giving away too much. Girl on a Train is a brilliant name for the book because it isn’t just about what she saw from the train, but that she inserts herself into the story. One good trick is to use the name of the protagonist in series titles, with a clever turn of phrase that gives a hint of the story. James Ziskin’s Heart of Stone comes to mind, a sly play on the name of Ellie Stone.

Then there is the issue of adding a touch of ambiguity. That’s the hardest trick of all. Would Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs have been as intriguing if it had been entitled, “FBI Agent Saves Brave Girl From Monster?” Would Laurie King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice have been as enticing if it had been, “Aging Sherlock Holmes Takes on an Assistant?”

I’ve been playing with the title for the book I’m beginning, trying to come up with something intriguing, but not too revealing. I’m thinking of calling it Just Like You. I’m hoping “You” will become the new “Girl.”

Jump, Turtle, Jump

The deck is cleared: my “finished for now” manuscript is off to my writer’s group, emails are caught up, and my husband is out of the house for a few days.

Ideas for a fresh, exciting new book are written up and ready to go. Not exactly an outline, but a few pages of synopsis. Looks like it could be a winner. Really a great idea with good characters.

So, let’s go! What? “Let’s Go!” What do you mean? Start writing! Just jump right in there. Doesn’t have to be brilliant, remember? You’ve got a scene in your mind. You know where it is, who the scene will focus on, and what happens. So….GO!

Folks, it’s like getting a turtle to jump. Ready, get set, jump. Yeah, I didn’t see it either.

I danced around the page all day long. Played some word games, remembered some things I urgently needed to buy on-line, made a phone call. Found a few pieces of paper on my desk that needed to be moved from one spot to another. Made a list.

Eventually, at about 4:00 I made myself put some words down. Not many. Couple of hundred. Immediately I ran into a problem with the relationships between characters. Made a chart of who is who, which was very satisfying.

This morning more of the same: Jump, you sucker, jump! Turtle sat there. I did some reading. More phone calls. More games. More sighing. Ate some blueberries. The crazy thing is that Facebook is the perfect way to waste time, and although I did do a little social media, I found it super boring.

Which tells me that I needed to do all that weird dancing around the computer to start the book. For whatever reason, I had to look at that blank page: I had to peek under the shell of the turtle, let him wander around a bit, and eat some lettuce.

A few more lines went down and then I thought, “Wait! I have to have a working title.” Talk about an opportunity to procrastinate! I looked through Bartlett’s Quotations, stared at the books on my shelves, wrote down random words, wrote some phrases, tried some possible titles, and rejected them all. Finally put one word at the top: Reunion. And then I started expanding on the few paragraphs I had written yesterday. I changed some names to better reflect the characters. I moved them a little farther along, thought some more about what the relationships were among the characters in the scene. Got a couple of the characters to joke with each other. Discovered that one was anti-social, one was resentful, one calculating.

Before I stopped tonight, I had over 2,000 words. Some relationships got set up, a few haracters talked to each other. A couple of characters startled me.

Okay, the turtle didn’t exactly jump, but at least it ambled off the finish line. Maybe tomorrow that sucker will leap for the stars.

Plotting While You Play

I killed a lot of people last week. Here’s how it happened:

I spent five days on our sailboat in Long Beach. I am not particularly fond of being on a boat. Five hours is fine. Five days? Not so much. Especially when the day after I arrived we took the 5-hour trip to Catalina and I got soundly seasick.

But boating is my husband’s passion, so every now and then I give in. Those reading this who love to sail will say, “Oh, boo hoo, poor you.” Yeah, I get that all the time. Still. Seasick? Bored out of my mind? Yep. And don’t even mention those old salts who smugly say to my husband, “Put her behind the wheel! She just gets seasick because she doesn’t like not being in control (or because she’s afraid or whatever).” No, sweetie, that isn’t it. I just get seasick.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. Mooring off the town of Avalon was delightful.  Everyone is in a holiday mood and the town models a Mediterranean seaside village, a jewel off the California coast. So we had a great time while we were there. And the sail back was fabulous, with the wind in the perfect direction. Which is great for a while. But five hours of looking at the water and chatting? If I could read, I wouldn’t be so annoyed. But I get seasick if I even think about reading. One of our friends who came with us said, “I didn’t realize we couldn’t read while we were sailing.” Some people might be able to, but we were among those who can’t.

I have yet to figure out why sailors love to be on the boat for hours at a time staring at the water. In my experience sailing is hours and hours of boredom punctuated with the occasional moment of delight—and the rare moment of terror.

So what’s a writer to do? Plot. Plot. Plot. And for as mystery writer that means Kill. Kill. Kill. As it happened, my agent wrote me a few days before I left for the trip to say we needed to give my publisher a couple of synopses for new books. One of the plots I already had laid out, but I had to think about the other one. And I also have been laying out a psychological thriller, so I got a chance to roll that around in my mind. So, it isn’t all bad, as you can see from the photos!