An event strewn week (end)

I’m off to Phoenix for the weekend, two events and a chance to see my friends in Scottsdale of the Poisoned Pen, bookstore and press. Back Monday, assuming I survive the sudden climate change.

If any of you are within striking distance of San Francisco, you should know that I am doing an evening conversation with Michael Chabon next week, on November 2nd, at the Koret Auditorium of the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin Street) from 6:30 to 7:30. If you haven’t read his take on an aging Sherlock Holmes, THE FINAL SOLUTION, you need to go and order it right now. It’s a gorgeous little book that left me breathless with Michael’s sense of prose.

If the name Michael Chabon rings bells but you don’t recognize the melody, Michael wrote the Pulitzer winning ADVENTURES OF CAVALIER AND CLAY and WONDER BOYS among others. He also happens to be a terribly nice person, and handsome to boot. Sorry, I can come up with no drawbacks to the man, and I’m greatly looking forward to the event. Please, come join us.

Newsletters

I’m putting together the quarterly newsletter, which will go out some time in November, and in addition to the cover of THE ART OF DETECTION and maybe a photo of me in England, I’m trying to decide what I want to write.

Author newsletters occupy one of those tricky areas between promotion and the personal touch. Nobody wants junk mail; I dare say, nobody wants to write junk mail. When I put together a newsletter, I try to fill it with things that might interest, amuse, and maybe even inform my readers—an upcoming book or event, how I’m doing on the book in progress, a certain amount of what I’m doing outside the writing sphere, that sort of thing.

However, due to the nature of the beast, there’s not much feedback. I assume that those who don’t actually take their names off the mailing list find something of use on the newsletter, but basically I keep it short, sweet, and to the point, figuring that if anyone wants to hear me blither on, they can come to the blog or spend a few weeks reading their way through the web site.

But I’d like to know, if anyone out there has any specific thing they like to see in author newsletters, could you mention it here? Progress of the next book, sure, and mention of upcoming events, but beyond that, what? Thanksgiving recipes? Tales of the cat? Fashion tips?

Suggestions welcome, and in turn, may I suggest that if you want to see said photo and cover, and you’re not on the mailing list, you might like to sign up here.

THE ART OF DETECTION in the box

That’s TAD done and dusted. At long last, THE ART OF DETECTION is off my desk, all the blue Post Its (notes to self) removed and the brown Post Its (notes to editor) folded neatly along the side of the page; all the copy editor’s mistaken changes of my American English into English English (Mr. to Mr and Dr. to Dr etc, etc) dragged back west of the Atlantic; an entire subplot woven in (Have I said something earlier that contradicts this bit I want to add? Where did I mention this character before? What other key words should I use to find those mentions? Haven’t I used this descriptive phrase before? Ad infinitum, ad nauseum); all the additions marked for insertion, stapled onto their relevant pages, and double checked to make sure they got printed (only found one that got overlooked); explanatory notes written and attached; double oversized rubber bands strapped around it; inserted (with difficulty—the thing was big to begin with, and I put another hundred pages of replacement on top of it); the Fed Ex mailing label filled out; and into the Fed Ex box at two thirty yesterday afternoon with a most satisfying slither and thump.

The proof pages, work of some poor longsuffering maniac of a typesetter who has to work through 500 pages of typescript with changes on every line, will come to me in a month or so.

And after that, I NEVER HAVE TO READ IT AGAIN.

Head down, pen to paper

You want to know how to become a successful writer? Look at what Ian Rankin has to say on the matter.

TO PLAY THE FOOL was the first book I wrote under contract. Sixty pages or so into it, my mother fell down and broke both her wrists. She could do nothing for herself. My husband was in China and my siblings both had full-time jobs—fortunately my kids were in school during the week.

And I wrote. I used that book as a retreat from the long hours spent feeding, dressing, and entertaining a person whose arms were frozen. An hour here, forty minutes there, I would retreat to my writing quarters and look up weird quotes that could be used by Brother Erasmus in his convoluted manner of communication. For five weeks (and three days, but who’s counting?), until the giant casts were replaced by smaller plaster that started below the elbow, my life was words and service.

A broken-wristed mother is, of course, nothing compared to the diagnosis received by the Rankin family. I cannot imagine the grimness of the thing. But I can understand the impulse to crawl inside your head and put words in order, just to feel in some sort of control. Another time I had a building project going on literally all around me. We had just moved, we were building a small house in the back, the main house was in packer’s limbo until we could move my mother into the new place, and I wrote. Skil saws, men’s voices, trucks and hammers and continual interruptions when consultation was needed, and I wrote.

You ever seen a small baby fast asleep in a place so noisy your ears hurt? That’s your basic overstimulated writer, too, hunkered down in the corner of the room over her writing pad.

There are, of course, things that get in the way of writing. I don’t do well at ordering words into existence when I’m sick, for example, and when I’m on the road for a book tour, I figure that I’m working one full-time job, promoting the book; I have the right to coddle myself and put the other job on hold until I get home.

Of course, this from a writer who last took a holiday in 1999. (Five days in Maui, if you really want to know, and yes, it was gorgeous, sitting on the beach counting waves, nary a research topic in sight.)

Writing (in) a draft

Lee Goldberg has some interesting things to say (Oct 19) about rejection—or rather, passes on some interesting takes on his book from jaundiced editorial eyes. Nearly twenty letters turning him down, and the book goes on, when finally published, to great reviews.

As I read through the above paragraph, an intriguing thing pops out at me: His BOOK goes on to do well, but HE is the one who got turned down.

Yes, rejection is personal. Anyway, it feels that way, especially when it happens time and again, and when it’s your baby who is being rejected. A soccer mom whose kid fails to make the cut at least doesn’t have her salary slashed as a result. A writer whose much-loved project knocks on door after door, hoping for warmth and welcome but finding only a reintroduction to the street, feels that very real street outside, looming.

There ain’t no guarantees in the writing business. It’s scary even to mention the possibility, as if failure is a demon summoned by voicing his name, but it’s very true, it’s waiting just outside. I’ve got sixteen books out there, sold a couple million copies, had titles on the New York Times list, and still, every day I feel the cold draft at the bottom of the door. My accountant talks about SEP accounts, and I think, well, that may be necessary. My husband asks if we’re going to have the money for some project or another, and I have to tell him I don’t know.

You’d think I would be the last person able to function with that degree of uncertainty in her life. I’m a fairly structured person; I like things more or less tidy; it annoys me when people are late, and annoys me enormously when I am late. How can I blithely sail into the end of the year not knowing how many zeros will be on my income return the following?

In part, I think, it helps to sneak into the whole writing-as-income thing backwards. When I started, my husband was earning well, and my income was supplement—for example, my advance from Sweden bought central heating, so we only had to use the wood stove when we wanted to. (It was a Scandinavian wood stove, too: I liked the balance of events.) By the time he retired and I was earning with some regularity, it was too late to remember that my earning was at the whims of fortune.

So how do you keep on, feeling that cold breeze moving around your ankles?

You keep on the same way you keep on with whatever book you’re writing: one word at a time.

It helps a lot to be an efficient compartmentalizer, which I am. I focus on what’s at hand, put aside the less pressing and those things I can’t do anything about yet, and try to sweat about only those things I can change. I may not feel I can do anything about the quality of my first draft, but I can certainly move on with the quantity, so I keep writing. I can’t do anything about the state of the publishing market or the tastes of the reading public, but I can keep writing, so I do. I can’t do anything about the overall plot or character development on the manuscript that’s sitting on my desk at the moment, because my editor would kill me and the mortgage company would repossess if I said I needed another six months on it, but I can do something about the copy editor’s wrong corrections and the occasional clumsy phrase that catches my eye, so I do.

I suppose it’s something like the Wright Brothers must have felt. Long, painstaking, mistake-strewn months when you can’t even see the body of what you’re building; then the slow, exciting coming together of wings and wheels, props and flaps; and finally the moment when it’s all together, when you climb in, pull down your goggles, and mail it off to New York.

It’s an exhilarating fifteen-second ride.

And then you pull up your laptop and get started on the next one.

Scary things

Please turn your thoughts to Ed Gorman, on his way to a scary procedure. Ed is one of the founding members of the mystery world as it stands today, and having him go shaky is frightening for us all. Strength, Ed. And we’re going to miss your blog.

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And while we’re on grim things. Molly Ivins checks in on the anti-torture amendment Senator John McCain, who knows about the subject of torture, wishes to attach to the current military appropriations bill, and which has caused Bush to threaten to veto said bill:

“This is the United States of America. It is our country, not George W. Bush’s personal property. The United States of America still stands for the rights of man, for freedom, dignity, and justice. We do not torture helpless prisoners.

“Remember, we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was such a horrible brute that he tortured people. This is beyond disgusting. The House Republicans, who have no shame will try to weaken McCain’s amendment. They need to hear from decent Republicans all over this country. Don’t leave this hideous stain on your party’s name. This is NOT what America stands for. We’ve had more loathsome and more dangerous enemies than al Qaeda and managed to defeat them without resorting to torture.”

This is from my paper, if anyone wants to post a link to this online, please do.


And I hope changing the posting process to include word recognition hasn't been a hassle for you. Thank spammers for making our lives easier and more pleasant.

Damp Quills

So, what do we think of the Quill awards?

On the one hand, any group with the sense of humor to hand not one, but two awards to the Jon Stewart crew is my kind of people. On the other hand, the entire thrust is so commercial, it’s a little off-putting. On the one hand, any book that received a starred review from PW or was a Booksense pick (Booksense is the voice of the independent bookseller’s association) qualifies for nomination, but on the other, so does any title that appeared on bestseller lists in Barnes & Noble or Borders.

I don’t know if I live in one of the fourteen areas where NBC is carrying the awards ceremony (Oct 22, 7:00 pm) but if I do, I’ll be watching. Let me know what you think.

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In a completely unrelated topic, I received a change-of-address notice from my British publisher yesterday that bore a large stamp showing the lower half of a front door, superimposed with the words:
RISING DAMP

At first I thought this was one of those stamps the post office periodically issues to raise awareness of some topic, or even raise funds for it. But then I took off my glasses and squinted at the corner and saw, in teensy letters, what looks like:
ITV 1955-2005

I suppose “Rising Damp” is the name of a television program on Britain’s ITV channel, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary—the channel’s fiftieth, surely, not the program’s. Still, it makes for some interesting reflections about Britain before that realization settles in.

For those of you who have never lived in the British climate, rising damp is what you get when you build brick houses on damp soil, cover the brick with plaster, and live in it for a few decades. A damp-proof course will keep it under control, or elaborate treatment, but bar that, the walls develop a severe skin condition, uneven patches of crumbling surface to which wallpaper refuses to bond and paint buckles. You can treat the surface, but that only pushes the damp higher up the wall. It’s like living with a leper—you love them dearly, but there are parts you just try to keep under cover.

The face of a book

The face of THE ART OF DETECTION was revealed to me, as in a dream… Actually, UPS brought it on Saturday in one of those brown envelopes that explode grey fuzz all over everything when you pull the tab.

I’ll post it here and on the web site when they finish “tweaking” it and sent me the jpeg file in a few weeks (my poor editor is off to Europe in the meantime, please include her in your prayers—yes I know the Frankfurt book fair is hardly on a par with New Orleans for disasters, but for a woman who doesn’t get a thrill out of travel…)

So now I know what the world will see next June. And although books judged by covers and all that, in truth, books inevitably are judged by their covers. An appealing cover makes a person want to hold it, just as a cute child makes people put their hands out to pat. And the more people pick up a book, the more people will end up carrying that book to the register and plunking down hard-earned cash for it.

THE ART OF DETECTION is, interestingly enough, not being sold as “A Kate Martinelli novel.” The Martinelli name doesn’t appear on the cover, nor is there a SFPD badge or a pair of handcuffs. It’s billed, in the lower right corner, as “A novel of suspense”, period.

And actually, it makes sense, particularly now that I study the cover art. There’s been a stretch of years since the events of NIGHT WORK, the past Martinelli story, and the world has changed enormously. It’s a series novel only in the sense that its characters have the same names and histories they had in the earlier books. Presenting it as, in effect, a stand-alone Martinelli may be in part a marketing ploy, but more than that, it reflects what the book is.

Which brings me to muse about the fluctuations of the publishing world when it comes to the series novel.

When I sold my first book, in 1992, I saw it as a novel, period, even though it dealt with cops and murders. Quite rightly, Ruth Cavin at St Martin’s Press categorized it as a mystery, and then asked me for more in the series. In the early Nineties, the series was all, and stand-alones worked mostly when they could be lumped as a series, such as Dick Francis’s horse books.

Within a few years, the limitations of the series began to appear. The dangers of repetition loom large, when the writer is locked into one set of characters and settings, and boredom threatens. There is also the problem of catching new readers, because even if the book is a satisfying independent read, most people seeing a shiny new hardback billed as “number ten in the Joe Bloggs P.I. series” are going to be a bit put off by the thought of nine nagging novels in the wings.

So by the end of the century, publishers were beginning to put the series novel in second place, concentrating on the stand-alone Big Book, to be sold with all the bells and whistles they could summon. Series novels were given smaller advances, less promotion, less attention generally. They still sold, and publishers still bought them, but the real interest was in the stand-alone.

But whether the reading public didn’t like them as much, or if that wave of interest happened to coincide with the Internet’s theft of hours from the free time of the general population, publishers found that merely being a stand-alone novel wasn’t enough to guarantee a book’s success. So yesterday when I went into my local bookstore, Jan the owner was telling me that he’d noticed how many series novels he’d seen in the current catalogue (sorry, not sure which house’s catalogue it was.) One book after another had its title followed by, “A Glassblowing PI novel” or “A Jack Russell Mystery” or…

So if I were a new writer, what would I do to capture the eye of an editor? Series or stand-alone?

Looking at what I do, I suppose my answer would be, in addition to “Just write what you love to write,” that if I were a new writer, I’d do both. In the past twelve years, I've written in two series, although because I get bored easily, the books don’t really follow in each other’s footsteps. The Martinellis, for example, each have central characters who reappear only tangentially in subsequent stories. The Russells move from place to place, with five inside England and three without, and again, characters of their own.

And of the stand-alones I have done, DARKER PLACE, FOLLY, and KEEPING WATCH, two are closely tied—not as closely as books in a series, but with overlaps. And in the future, other novels will develop other characters first seen in FOLLY—and even, I think, manage to tie in DARKER PLACE to the cycle.

When is a series not a series? When are stand-alones not stand-alones? And, when am I going to write a "stand-alone Russell"??

House keeping

To everything there is a season, the Good Book tells us, and this week has been my season for housekeeping.

Consider: January to June, first draft and first rewrite. A month of touring and conferences, followed by two months of intensive rewrite. Finally in September handing THE ART OF DETECTION over to my editor (to whom, incidentally, the book is dedicated) and a week later flying to England.

Which means that since January, the house has not had any attention to speak of. Oh, it’s been kept tidy and clean, largely in part to the cleaning lady I hired eighteen months ago after finally deciding that yes, it might be a sin to depend on someone else to clean, but it was a minor sin, and at least I could walk across the floor without my feet sticking to something. And besides, she has a kid to support.

But tidy isn’t orderly, and out of the corners of my eyes I’ve been aware of all those things a hired cleaner doesn’t feel the authority to deal with: the dying house plant in the corner, an accumulation of filing-that-doesn’t-fit-anywhere, the brown and peeling bathtub grout that needs to be replaced, half an acre of increasingly opaque window glass.

When my daughter was small, we lived for a summer in the old house in Oxford, England that we still own. My husband went ahead of us to India, making sure the housing arrangements there were adequate for an American with a one year-old, and in those two weeks, I painted the Oxford house.

The walls were all covered with wallpaper, in marginal shape but too enormous a task for me, particularly since I’d never done wallpaper before. But the trim and the doors, those I could manage, and I did so, at night after my daughter had gone to bed. Night after night, as the bells from the city fell silent and my neighbours came home, I got out my pots of paint and transformed the woodwork, playing with alternating colors (colours) on the panels of the doors, picking out the shades of the wallpaper, enjoying the smooth paint going on, knowing that it would be dry by the time small hands were patting around in the morning.

By the end of those two weeks, I owned that house as I had not before. I had sat in the quiet rooms and paid attention to it in a way no one in years had done. There was nothing I could do at that time about the age of the furniture or the inadequacy of the kitchen, but I listened to the house creak and settle each night, bent over one patch or another of stairway trim or door paneling, and when we flew to India, the house and I were at ease with each other.

Housekeeping is more than scrubbing the bits that a paid employee doesn’t bother with. It is about a relationship with one’s environment, nest-making and marking and re-shaping the world to suit one’s needs. When I finish with clearing and scrubbing the wide greenhouse-window shelf over the kitchen sink, it probably looks precisely the same to anyone else, but I can see the clear lack of shed leaves in the corners, and feel restored.

The copy-edited manuscript has been kept waiting all week, while I keep house and put my thoughts into order, but I refuse to consider it procrastinating or even wasting time. When I pick it up on Monday, I know that it will go more smoothly for the delay, because the itch of an unkept house has been soothed. Or maybe it's just my way of marking time--I don't get jet lag, but I do find it takes me a week to settle to anything after I return from a long trip. I am dis-placed, and need to let my soul catch up with me.

However, in the meantime, this weekend is Open Studios in Santa Cruz County. My agent is coming down from San Francisco (thus cleverly avoiding the fly-bys of the Navy’s jet fighter display ten feet off her windows) and she, my sister, my daughter, and a friend will spend a couple of afternoons touring artist’s studios. The sun will smile down on the magnificent autumnal colors of a Central Coast October, the neighbors will finish their grape harvest, and we five will sail blithely off to snoop through the homes of artists, admire handmade wares, and occasionally fall for one.

And Monday, THE ART OF DETECTION.

Home again

26 September

I seem to have had some problems getting Sunday’s posting to link to Left Coast Crime. If your link didn’t work, you can paste in www.leftcoastcrime2006.com. This is your chance to meet all those English writers you’ve admired from a distance for so many years.

Cornwall seems a very long way from here. We’re in Nottingham at the moment, visiting family—a step granddaughter who is about to have her second baby, making me a step-great-grandmother three times over. I feel old….

On the drive up here from Bristol, I was thinking about a conference held by Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen, back in the mid-nineties. The topic was AZ Crime Goes Classic, and focused on classic crime writers such as Dorothy Sayers, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others. There I met three writers who have become friends: HRF Keating, Val McDermid, and Michael Connolly. Amazing to think, that I might have missed knowing them, but for Barbara’s conference.


3 October

The past week in England was taken up with family stuff, if one counts close friends as family. That, and a bout of illness—I either picked up a 24 hour bug, or I was poisoned by a hotel.

In Manchester, where Val McDermid’s house was in a state of chaos thanks to decorators, we more or less made our way through the listings in the phone book for a nearby hotel, and ended up in a Victorian place out of some Stephen King novel. The bedside reading lamp was broken, the point in the wall where it should have been plugged in had been smashed to pieces (wires sticking out, 220 volt wires…), the bathroom had not been cleaned, the air was thick with the stink of cigarettes and alcohol, the kettle for making a cup of tea had a cord that didn’t reach from table to outlet, so one had to kneel on the floor to boil water, and as its high point, there was a permanently mounted sign in the bathroom over the sink declaring THIS WATER UNPOTABLE. I have stayed in some dreary and unclean places over the years—the cockroaches in Madras, a pillowcase with a boot print on it in a Travelodge in Terra Haute—but I have never before come across a hotel in a developed country openly admitting to undrinkable water. The next day we fled, head aching and stomach roiling, to a basic and blessedly clean chain hotel down the road that was five pounds cheaper to boot. I don’t know if the 24 hour bug I had the next day was a flu or a reaction to the Acton Court, but may I make a suggestion? Given an anonymous list of hotels, don’t start at the top.

After coming back south from Manchester, we spent two days in London doing end-of-trip business, more my daughter’s than my own, as her year here had left her with banks, phone accounts, and the like to be settled. I put her on the plane Friday morning, spent the rest of the day packing my own bags and shopping for last-minute presents, and got onto my British Airways flight on Saturday with a clear mind and a lot of research material for TOUCHSTONE.

Oh, and the book for 2006? THE ART OF DETECTION was waiting for me when I got home, with its ten thousand Post Its and those dangerously brief little remarks in the margins from the editor’s pencil. My brain isn’t quite ready to dig into it yet, but I made my first foray this morning, removing the doubled rubber bands and glancing inside. Inevitably, the first thing I see is that the copy editor has carefully gone through and removed all the periods after Mr and Dr. Which would have been fine if it was a Russell novel, written in English English, but it isn’t. So I shall have to go through and place my STET on every one of her corrections.

I closed the manuscript and walked away from it.

I then spent an hour or so hacking weeds, yet another of those jobs that just don’t get done when a book is active. Basically, I don’t like gardening, so it’s one of the tasks that I allow myself not to do until my desk is clear. The place is now a jungle of overgrown salvia and sprays of Bermuda grass, and I eye the container of herbicide thoughtfully.


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So, what did I learn on my (non-) holiday?

I smelled the air and walked the ground of Cornwall, particularly Land’s End, where my character in TOUCHSTONE has gone to retreat from the world. I have made the first forays into research, with a score of titles to follow up through my home library. I have a stack of books and pamphlets a foot high on Cornish arcanities (and a lesser pile of British novels whose authors are much loved but hard to get here, but that doesn’t count as work.) I don’t yet know what the book is about, or how it gets to where it is going, but I have a vague sense of direction, and the entire fall to feel my way forward before I begin writing it the first of the year.

For the labor of two weeks, that’s not bad going.