Candy's Blog

One of Those Weeks

2008-11-17T11:23:00.003-06:00

Ever have one of those weeks when it begins to feel as if anything that can go wrong, will? This past week…

My daughter ripped the bottom out of her low-slung sports car on one of New Orleans’s Katrina-ravaged streets. While it’s in the shop being repaired, she’s driving MY car (down those same Katrina-ravaged streets). Then…

The washing machine in my mother’s house broke down. Since it’s old, I decided to go buy a new one--not easy when I don’t have a car. Then,

Our cat Nick, one of the stupidest but also one of the sweetest felines in the world, went into kidney failure. We’re hopeful he’s going to recover, but he’s not out of the woods yet. He’s only eight years old, poor guy. Then…

I broke my toe. Without a car (see above), I’d been walking. No more. Then…

My washing machine broke down. Fifth time in two years. Grrrr.

And then, although it was technically not in the same 7-day streak, Steve and I did a booksigning at a local independent bookstore this past Saturday and sold not a single book. Not one. In all my years as a published author, I’ve never been skunked at a booksigning. I guess there’s always a first. I’m not taking it personally—I’ve talked to huge NYT bestselling authors who fly into a town for a signing and don’t sell, so I know it happens (plus we were able to sign a lot of stock). But still…

The good thing is that with the exception of Nick's health, these are all pesky (although in some cases, expensive) irritants. I know life could be so much worse. Nevertheless, here’s hoping for a better coming week!

You Can’t (Usually) Go Home Again

2008-11-08T10:32:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite books of all time is M.M. Kaye’s Trade Wind. I fell in love with it when I was quite young, and have reread it with equal pleasure several times over the years. So when I came upon Kaye’s Death in Zanzibar at the recent Friends of the Library Booksale, I considered it a find.

If you’re not familiar with the two books, Death in Zanzibar is a whodunit from the fifties, very much in the style of Agatha Christie. In writing the “modern” murder mystery, Kaye conceived a backstory involving a rakish nineteenth-century English outlaw/privateer, a prudish American do-gooder, and a trove of hidden treasure. In one of those fascinating twists of the creative process, she found herself so obsessed with her “backstory” that she later went on to write that story, too, in a sprawling historical novel that became Trade Wind.

I remember checking Death in Zanzibar out of my local library in the seventies, and being swept away by lush descriptions of the island and its culture. So I thought I was in for a real treat when I started reading it last week—“thought” being the operative word in that sentence. To begin with, where’s the island? I’m now half way through the book, and we’re still on the plane! Why didn’t I remember that part of the book? Obviously, because it wasn’t memorable. Yet I intend to continue reading, not because I’m enjoying the story (I’m not) , but because the book itself is an eye-opening period piece.

First of all, it’s taking our heroine days to get to Zanzibar; that’s what international travel was like in the fifties. I myself have vague memories of flying back and forth to Europe as a child and having to stop and spend the night in the Azores (okay, I know I’m really dating myself here!). Yet if I were to read this book without looking at the copyright date, I suspect I’d guess it was written in the thirties, rather than in the fifties. Ladies wear lovely linen suits and hats, and young women traveling alone are ever-so-careful of their reputations. A flamingly gay secretary is caricatured in a most politically incorrect way, as is the Westernized Oriental Gentleman (aka Wog, for those of you familiar with overt mid-twentieth century British racism), who is portrayed as a sinister character largely by virtue of being labeled a “nationalist” who wants to kick the benevolent British out of their God-given colonies. Oh, and then there’s all the talk about the evil “Reds.”

Sadly, Death in Zanzibar is a novel that has not aged well in the way of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn, or even Kaye’s own Trade Wind. It occurs to me now that all three of those novels were actually “historicals” at the time they were written, even though the first two were set within the remembered lifetimes of their authors. Which is a thought I hope to ponder, at a later date.

Serenity

2008-11-04T09:32:00.003-06:00

It’s been a hectic month. The LA Bookfestival, Bouchercon, out-of-town guests, newspaper, TV, and radio interviews, booksignings, and a three-week bout of the flu I’m just beginning to recover from. But this past weekend, Steve and I grabbed the chance to go up to the lake and just sit on the porch and soak in the beauty of changing leaves reflected in still water.

It was our first visit to the lake since Hurricane Gustav two months ago. When we left, the power was still off and we abandoned huge piles of broken limbs, so we’ve been anxious to get back up there and make sure everything was all right. It was, but unfortunately we couldn’t stay as long as we’d have liked, since we had a TV appearance scheduled for first thing Monday morning.

And, as if life weren’t hectic enough, Where Serpents Sleep is released today. Somehow, given the election-day timing, I doubt too many people will be rushing out to buy it! I don’t know about you, but I am soooo glad this election is almost over. I’ve been finding it very hard to concentrate this past week. And I have Book Number Five in the series due so soon I can’t breathe when I think about it. I need to go back to the lake…

On Coop

2008-10-29T21:47:00.005-05:00

No, this isn’t a post about chicken coops. The coop I’m talking about is publishers’ coop, which is pronounced “co-op” even though it’s spelled like the barnyard habitat of our little feathered friends. So what is coop? Coop is the money publishers pay to get their books a better position in stores. The theory is, the more people who see a book, the more people who will buy a book. If a book is simply stuck sideways on a shelf at the back of the store, it could be the most brilliant novel ever written but no one will ever know it because it will languish unseen and unread in the dark.

Until I became involved in the book industry, I did not know publishers did this. I thought when you went into a drug store or grocery store and saw Stephen King’s latest in a stand by the checkout behind a sign that said, “Number One Bestseller,” it was because the book was, literally, the number one best seller. Now, it could very well be, but that’s not why it’s there; it’s in that slot because that’s the slot King’s publisher paid for. If the publisher had only paid for “Number 8”, that’s where it would be. If a publisher hasn't paid any coop, then you won't see that book at those racks. Simple as that.

Publishers’ coop money also pays for books to sit on the tables at the front of Barnes and Nobles and at Borders. The books on the end caps (the ends of the rows, where books are displayed face out) are all there because of coop. And the cardboard display stands (“dumps”) at the front of stores? Coop, again—although dumps seem to be going out of style these days. The biggest outlay in coop ever spent in publishing history was laid down for, you guessed it, The Da Vinci Code. Bottom line: coop works.

So for writers, having their publisher agree to pay for at least some coop is a Really Big Deal. It’s also frustratingly hard to get. I’ve written over a dozen books, yet The Archangel Project is the first book I’ve ever had come out with coop. Traveling up to Baltimore barely a week after Archangel’s release was a heady experience. I checked out every Hudson’s News I passed, on every concourse, and there it was: The Archangel Project, in Bestseller Slot Number Twenty-something. A little higher number would have been nicer, since it would have brought the book up to eye level, but hey, I’m not complaining!

As the writer of one of those twenty-five Anointed Ones, it was great. But as a reader, my reaction was a little bit different. You see, the more bookstores I ducked into, and the more I saw the exact same books (in the bookstalls on the concourses, the twenty-five “bestsellers” were typically all they carried), the more troubled I became. I mean, what if I was flying and none of those twenty-five titles appealed to me? Think about it: thousands of newsstands and bookstalls in airports across the country, all carrying the same twenty-five titles, all there courtesy of the coop paid by their publishers. Magnify that by the Walgreens, the Walmarts, the fill-in-the-blank chain. Oh, look; there’s the latest Grisham. And there’s the Lisa Kleypus. And there’s the latest Raymond Khoury. Again and again. What if I was looking for, say, C.S. Harris’s Why Mermaids Sing (also released this month in paperback, but given no coop)? Tough.

Is Archangel a better book than Mermaids? No. Is it going to sell a heckova lot better, thanks to all that coop? You betcha. On which thought I’ll leave you with this snapshot of Archangel on the shelves of a bookstall in Tampa—right between the latest Grisham and the latest Khoury.

Still Alive, Barely

2008-10-21T10:40:00.002-05:00

I brought a nasty case of flu home with me from Baltimore that I still haven't shaken. But I wanted to share this STARRED Publishers Weekly review of Where Serpents Sleep, which hits the stores the first Tuesday in November. I could have done without the "predictable" line (excuse me?!) but since they gave it a star, I can't really complain!

"Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery C.S. Harris. NAL/Obsidian. The savage murder of eight prostitutes at a London house of refuge provides Sebastian St. Cyr with yet another challenging puzzle in Harris's outstanding fourth mystery to feature the Regency-era gentleman sleuth. St. Cyr, who's been despondent ever since a stunning personal revelation toward the end of 2007's Why Mermaids Sing, is roused from his funk by Hero Jarvis, the fearless and independent daughter of his mortal enemy. Jarvis, who was doing research at the house of refuge at the time of the murders and barely survived the massacre herself, asks for St. Cyr's help in tracking down those responsible. The amateur detective finds no shortage of suspects, ranging from the pimp of some of the dead girls to Bow Street magistrate Sir William Hadley, who had patronized them. While the developing attraction between St. Cyr and Jarvis is a little too predictable, Harris does a nice job of weaving the many plot strands together while exploring the complex character of her protagonist. (Nov.)"

The Thought Police and the Thriller

2008-10-16T10:22:00.002-05:00

A disturbing story was making the rounds among authors and editors at this year’s Bouchercon: it seems that a segment of Lee Child’s readers are so enraged by antiwar statements made by characters who are Iraq War vets in his latest Jack Reacher novel that these readers are tearing out the offending pages, using them as toilet paper, and mailing them to Child.

Child found this reaction somewhat bemusing, given that he literally took quotes from real Iraq War vets and put them in the mouths of his characters. We all know that anti-war vets exist—they haven’t exactly been keeping quiet. Not only that, but it’s a time-honored tradition in fiction to have characters disturbed by their war experiences. So what’s going on here?

I first encountered this troubling mindset in some of the reactions to my Sebastian St. Cyr books. The fact that the series is about an Englishman in the early nineteenth century didn’t stop certain readers from objecting to statements my main character makes about things like the Napoleonic Wars and the American slave trade. That’s right; evidently having a character who is speaking in 1811 criticize the existence of slavery in the United States (while trying to wheedle information out of an ex-slave, no less) marks me as both liberal and unpatriotic. And as for the idea that Englishmen might have committed what we would today call war crimes or that a war veteran might be troubled by his experiences? How dare I suggest that anyone of Anglo-Saxon origins could ever be anything less than a hero in war, or that wars can be horrible rather than ennobling experiences.

So when Steve and I wrote The Archangel Project, we knew what we were letting ourselves in for. We could have written a safe, predictable thriller about Islamist terrorists, but the truth is, we don’t find the menace of terrorism nearly as scary as the threats to the American way of life that come from inside this country. So Archangel is about things like the Big Brother trends in modern government, the influence of giant energy and defense conglomerates on foreign policy, the dangers inherent in the privatization of the military and intelligence sectors, and the inevitable economic impact of militarism and empire building. And the bad guys? Basically, they’re people who are greedy, although they try to disguise their greed behind an exaggerated patriotism and neo-conservative philosophy. Given what they’re doing, it would be beyond implausible to have any of these guys profess to be a “liberal.”

But any reader who therefore leaps to the conclusion that Steve and I are “liberals” is making, well, an unsupported leap. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those people who considers the “L” word a dirty slur. But I’d like to point out that Libertarians also condemn the above-named tendencies as Bad Things, and they think of themselves as “conservatives.” In fact, Libertarians are virtually the only group that has been vocally against the war in Iraq since before it began. They run a great website called antiwar.com that provides links to all the news that is either never printed in this country, or is typically buried on the bottom of page F56. You’ll notice that antiwar.com is in the list of links on the right; it’s always been there. Does that mean I’m a Libertarian? No. The truth is, I’ve lived such a huge chunk of my life outside the United States that I don’t find I can identify too closely with any of the current parties.

Yet there’s no denying that Steve and I feel passionately about current trends and follow them closely; otherwise, the idea for The Archangel Project would never have occurred to us. The important thing to remember is this: our stories are STORIES. “President Randolph” is President Randolph, not President Bush; he will be in The Deadlight Connection next year, long after Bush is gone. We write dialogue, not polemics, and every word is there either to advance the plot, deepen characterization, or provide information the reader needs to make sense of the story. Some readers may find that the realities we choose to mention threaten some of their deeply held beliefs, but that doesn’t alter the fact that our purpose is not to challenge their beliefs, but simply to tell a story. Our female protagonist, Tobie, is actually a fairly apolitical figure; she’s never been particularly interested in history or current affairs, and it shows. Our male protagonist, CIA agent Jax Alexander, is keenly aware of both. But Jax is not a front for either Steve or I; instead, Jax, Matt, and Colonel McClintock are all inspired by the many intelligence personnel we have known over the years. Because the truth is, when you’ve heard your President get up and tell the American people something you know is directly contradicted by the report on your desk, or when you’ve been ordered by your superiors to go up on the hill and lie to Congress, you tend to get a little cynical. A lot cynical. This unblinkered realism is the reason so many veteran CIA agents have been forced out of the Company in recent years. And yes, we do touch upon that, too—again, not because we’re writing a polemic, but because in order for our story to make sense, this little-known reality needs to be stated—however uncomfortable some readers may find it.

Every writer inevitably brings his or her own particular ideology to their books. You can only write thrillers about the things that scare you. Certain modern American thriller writers whose names I won’t mention display such vitriolic bigotry and xenophobia that I can’t read their books; yet one rarely sees their racism criticized. Why? I suppose because if a writer’s basic beliefs and assumptions chime well with the popular passions of his age, the majority of his readers won’t even notice his bias. Back in the days of the Cold War, most American thriller writers took it as a given that the Russians/Commies were the bad guys and the Americans were by default the good guys. Only a few, generally British authors dared look at some of the things Western governments were doing and suggest that maybe overthrowing democratically-elected leftist governments and replacing them with right-wing dictators backed by death squads was both morally objectionable and stupidly short-sighted (can anyone say, “Iran”?). All you need to do is consider the reception given a few years ago in the United States to the film based on Graham Greene’s The Quiet American to realize how far we still have to go in this respect.

So Steve and I expect The Archangel Project to rattle some readers. That’s okay; controversy is good for sales. But there’s a difference between controversy, and the kind of unreasoned hatred that once prompted angry mobs in Pakistan to burn Salmond Rushdie in effigy, or that leads partisans at a political rally to yell “terrorist” and “kill him” when the opponent’s name is mentioned. What has happened to the civil discourse we once liked to think characterized our country?

No writer should ever have to worry about what is going to show up in his mailbox.

Back from Bouchercon

2008-10-13T16:20:00.000-05:00

Well, I’m back from Baltimore, and exhausted. This was my first Bouchercon, and it was a heady experience. I met Lyssa, my Harper Collins author, for the first time, and so many authors and wonderful, enthusiastic fans of mysteries that my brain is still spinning.

Writing full time is such a quiet, solitary endeavor that these eighteen-hour days spent around people and being bombarded by excessive noise has left me in sensory overload shock. I’m hoarse from shouting to be heard over the roar in the bar, and I can only wonder at my fellow authors who spent those hours in the bar drinking adult beverages rather than sipping iced tea. How do they do it?

I’ve come home with some great tales of bizarre behavior, none of which I have any intention up putting up on the Internet (sorry, guys!). What is it about conventions that leads some people to indulge in stupid antics? Or do these people behave this way all the time? One would think that, eventually, the Darwin Law would take them out of circulation.

All in all, Bouchercon provided me with much food for thought, which I’ll be pondering over the next few days. After I get some sleep and this headache goes away.

Charmed to Death

2008-10-07T02:35:00.003-05:00

I hope this is a case of better late than never: I will be Baltimore, Maryland, attending this year's Bouchercon ("Charmed to Death") from Wednesday, 8 October to Sunday, 12 October. For those of you not familiar with Bouchercon, it's the big American mystery convention, and is being held at the Baltimore Sheraton City Center Hotel, 101 West Fayette Street. Because I was so slow getting my act together, I'm only on one panel--Thursday, at 10:00am, in room International E. The panel is "Let's Work Together" (i.e., writing with a partner), and my fellow panel members will be Cara Black, Meredith Anthony, Donald and Renee Bain, Larry Light, and Michael Stanley. There will be a book signing in the Carroll Room immediately following the panel.

So, if you're in the area, I hope to see you there!

Archangel Is Here!

2008-10-02T10:53:00.004-05:00

The Archangel Project arrives in bookstores this week. Given this book's long gestation--Archangel was half written when Katrina hit three years ago--I'm finding it a bit hard to believe this is finally happening. But il est arrivé!

I understand some bookstores even have a stunning dump (one of those cardboard display boxes you see at the front of the store) with a great "tag" line: Think you know what's real? Think again. I myself haven't seen one yet, but if anyone spots one, I'd love a picture.

It's been a busy week. My sister arrived for an eight-day visit last Friday. I had a birthday--on what will now go down as the greatest stockmarket crash in history . Archangel was released. I got Deadlight in to my editor ON TIME. I'm getting ready to be on a panel at the Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, and then next Wednesday I fly to Baltimore for Bouchercon. Phew!

As soon as I get back, I need to buckle down and finish book five in the Sebastian St. Cyr series. My editor shot down my working title--What Hell Marks. So we have a new title: What Remains of Heaven.

A Learning Process

2008-09-22T10:04:00.004-05:00

Well, the last scene of The Deadlight Connection is written, which would be cause for celebration if I weren't so frantically combing through the manuscript, looking for errors and little turns of phrases that just don't quite sound right while keeping a nervous eye on the calendar. It doesn't help that I compressed the action into seven days, rather than eight, which means I'm also doing some date juggling. But the important point in all this is that the #@$% thing will be finished by its official deadline, even if it is six months late by my own deadline.

I've realized I write books in one of three ways: 1) I make reasonable revisions as I write, then finish the first draft and go back for a more substantive overhaul and cosmetic corrections;. 2) I write the first draft in a white heat, barely looking at what I've written until I reach the end; and 3) I make a series of massive, bloody overhauls long before I finish the manuscript, as well as less drastic but still substantive revisions, so that by the time I write the last chapter, all I need is to go back and do the final cleanup.

After having written upwards of fifteen books, you'd think I'd have an established work pattern, but I don't. Of the three approaches, I personally prefer #2, but that only seems to work when the book is working. I simply can't keep going when I realize there's a hideous problem (or two or three) in what I've already written.

Now that I'm (almost) finished with it, I find I'm surprisingly happy with this book. I think it's a fun read. The only thing that startles me is that it's LONG--which is one of the reasons (but only one of them) it took so long to write. You'd think after having written all these books I'd be better at judging a story's length.

All of which reminds me that while I know a great deal about this book-writing business, there is still much that I am learning.

Hog Hunting in Louisiana

2008-09-18T23:02:00.002-05:00

Yes, I'm hyperventilating about getting this book finished on time, and I'm scheduled to give a keynote address at a luncheon on Saturday up in Baton Rouge, and my sister's coming for a ten day visit in a week, and I still haven't put away any of the stuff I packed up when we evacuated for Hurricane Gustav, and I'm supposed to fly up to Maryland in three weeks, but... I wanted to share this photo of an alligator catching his dinner on Highway 51, which is a road that runs near my, ahem, lake house. Hopefully I'm not violating anyone's copyright here since it came to me by email, but here it is...

Lost Days

2008-09-13T10:34:00.002-05:00

I might have been able to handle waking up Friday morning to that maddeningly familiar sound of wind and rain if I hadn’t looked over to see what time it was and realized our power was out. Again. Our recent experiences with Gustav have made me realize how very, very fond I am of electricity (not to mention the fact that I just spent $$$$$$$ at Whole Foods to restock my fridge and freezer).

It’s hard to concentrate under those conditions, but I was determined to do it, writing in longhand. Then our power came back on. Why is this a bad thing? Because my daughter’s power was still out. She came over dragging the contents of HER Whole Food-stocked fridge and a heavy dose of high anxiety. The truth is, it is hard to write when communities around you are going under water. It’s as if their cries of anguish are carried in the wind. And when you’ve seen your own house go under water, the resonance is painful.

Yes, Texas got the brunt of the storm, and what happened to Galveston was tragic. But coastal Louisiana is suffering a heart-breaking tragedy of their own, largely away from the media’s eye. Who out there has even heard of the Isle de Jean Charles?

Last night, we wandered down to the lake, a couple of blocks from our house, expecting to see some white caps and waves. We saw more than we expected. And looking back at the levees, and realizing how high they AREN’T, was a sobering experience.

Yet somehow, today, I MUST write.

In Deadline Hell

2008-09-11T16:28:00.002-05:00

The Deadlight Connection is due on my editor’s desk the first of October, and I’m in a bit of a scramble to finish it, having just lost two weeks to the rigmarole of Hurricane Gustov. (As I write this, the outer bands of Ike are pounding New Orleans with howling winds and driving rain; they say we should only get tropical storm force winds, although the storm surge will be a bit of a worry.) When I remember that I originally planned to have Deadlight finished by the first of April, I have to laugh. The best laid plans of mice and writers…

On another front: while we were evacuated, we discovered that The Archangel Project is an October Indie Next Pick (and thanks so much for your congrats, S). If you’re going, “Eh?” let me explain: the Indie Next List is drawn up by the independent booksellers association and is sent to its members as well as being available on line. Each month they announce the new releases and make their recommendations. They hardly ever recommend mass-market originals (which is what this book ended up being) so being an Indie Next Pick is a Big Thing. Archangel will be officially released September 30, which is the day after my birthday and the day before Deadlight is due…

So, back to writing--although it's hard to write with one wary eye kept on the weather.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig!

2008-09-07T00:08:00.002-05:00

We’re home, we’re safe, our houses made it through the storm in great shape, and so did our city. Here are a few of the moments from this past week that I’ll always remember:

*Caught in evacuation traffic at 1:00am on Sunday morning and admiring the way the wet blacktop reflects the miles and miles of brake lights ahead of me as I listen to the Moody Blues singing Traveling Eternity’s Road…

*Waking up early Sunday morning to go get gas for our generator, only to discover that all the gas stations in the area are sold out and closed. Oh, dear.

*Watching the pine trees around the lake house thrash wildly back and forth as the hurricane rolls over us on Monday morning and thinking, We should have had some of these suckers cut down.

*Listening to a continuous bombardment of broken limbs from said pine trees crashing down on the roof and thinking…but I already said that.

*Losing power at midday and thinking, We don’t have any gas for our generator.

*Spending days playing Charades, Clue, Scrabble, and Crazy 8s in a futile attempt to keep my electronics-deprived daughter from unraveling, and thinking, Why didn’t anyone tell me a hurricane can take 48 hours to pass?

*Emerging into a shattered world to spend five hours driving around looking for gas and ice, and finding neither. (This includes three hours spent parked in 95 degree heat in a line at a open station, only to be told when we are the fourth car from the pumps that they just ran out of gas.)

*Finding an open hardware store, to be told that since they don’t have power, we can only come in and shop if we have 1) our own flashlight, and 2) cash. (We have both, and buy lamp oil and batteries).

*Driving up to a little town in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi and scoring both gas and ice. (Only, since there is a limit on the amount of gas each customer is allowed, we are only able to fill our cars, not our generator’s gas cans. Good thing we got the lamp oil and batteries.)

*Watching the rising sun spill across the mirror-like surface of the lake while cooking pancakes on a camp stove on the front porch.

*Hearing that our house in New Orleans survived the storm with nothing worse than a downed fence and a refrigerator full of spoiled food, and that the power is finally back on. We’re going home.

*Feeling a zing of joy as I turn from I55 onto I10 and see that sign that says “New Orleans.”

*Listening to my next-door neighbor (who is in law enforcement) tell us about his hurricane experiences, then watching him pull an M16 and an AK 47 out of his car and carry them into his house.

Ironically, given Hurricane Gustav’s final path, our lake house actually got hit harder by the storm than the house we evacuated.

Thanks to everyone who wished us well. It’s wonderful to be home (and to take a hot shower). But I'm not unpacking. Have you seen some of the projected paths for Hurricane Ike?

Headin' for High Ground

2008-08-29T16:36:00.002-05:00

We're in the last stages of boarding up the house and hauling what's movable from the first floor up to the second. Then it's off to the lake house with seven cats for a fun-filled weekend of wind and rain and high anxiety. 'Till next week.

Katrina Day Number Three and Counting

2008-08-26T12:23:00.004-05:00

Friday will mark the third anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf shore, essentially wiping out the New Orleans we all knew and loved, and altering forever those of us who lived through it. It’s a story the rest of the country has long since grown tired of hearing. But for those of us who still live here, the storm is a part of our lives. It’s become a tradition for a group of us to take a tour of the city, then meet for lunch at a local restaurant before heading over to the home of author Laura Joh Rowland for desert. Laura’s house in Gentilly took about four feet of water on the bottom floor, and she says organizing the annual event means she has something to look forward to on that day, rather than simply dreading the memories the anniversary inevitably brings.

I’m not sure that works for me. But the get-togethers make for a fun day, and since it’s been a while since I’ve driven out to Chalmette and the Ninth Ward, I’m also curious to see how things are progressing down there.

In my own neighborhood, probably one out of every fifteen or so houses is still empty—gutted and abandoned. I often look at those houses when I go for a walk and try to understand what happened to the people who used to live there. Are they dead? Are they someplace else, still paying mortgages on houses they don’t inhabit? Why don’t they sell the houses? Or if the bank has repossessed them, why doesn’t the bank sell the properties? Of course, in the truly devastated neighborhoods, selling probably isn’t an option.

With Hurricane Gustav now taking aim at the Gulf, we're also all reviewing our evacuation plans...which has added a nasty fillip to the looming anniversary.

Image courtesy of weatherunderground.com

Updates

2008-08-21T23:11:00.002-05:00

We’ve finally updated the C.S. Harris website, with the stunning new cover of Where Serpents Sleep, the fourth book in the Sebastian St. Cyr series due out this November 4. You’ll also find the cover copy and an excerpt of the first chapter, as well as some of the events/appearances I’ll be making this fall.

There’s a new section on the website, too: Special Features. The first “special feature” is an article on porphyria, the genetic disorder from which the British royal family has suffered since the days of Mary, Queen of Scotts, and that helped drive King George III mad. Check it all out at csharris.net.

You’ll notice we also updated the blog a bit and fixed some old links. And the RSS feed finally works—or so I’m told.

And one more update from my Florida daughter: seems the third time's the charm. Fay is finally hitting her college--now that the evacuation is over and they're all back on campus!

And You Thought That Signed First Edition Was Worth Something

2008-08-20T21:31:00.002-05:00

A reporter for the Guardian spotted this ad on Craig’s List: Wanted. Fourteen people to fake authors’ autographs on 53,760 hardcovers at a Los Angeles warehouse. “You will need to be able to copy the look and style of both authors’ signatures,” says the ad. You also must be able to stand the rigor of signing books for 8 hours a day, at an estimated rate of one book every 15 seconds. If you’re good at forgery, go for it: They’re paying $25 for every 200 books signed.

Exactly who are the lazy authors who can’t be bothered to sign their own books? That’s a deep dark secret.

Enquiring minds want to know.

And here's the news from Florida: "I told you not to worry. All we got was a little rain shower."

Fay and the Faint-hearted

2008-08-17T20:39:00.004-05:00

It doesn’t help that we’re just days away from the three-year anniversary of Katrina. But the truth is, no one with hurricane-induced posttraumatic stress syndrome should send their youngest child to college in Florida.

Fay isn’t a hurricane yet, but they expect it to turn into one before it comes ashore. The path has been vibrating back and forth across the western coast of Florida, with landfall expected close enough to my daughter’s college that they’re ordering an evacuation. That means they close the campus, and where the students go and how they get there is up to them.

“Keep yourself safe,” I tell my daughter in one of the thousand phone calls I’ve made to Florida in the last 48 hours.

Her response is predictable. “I can’t believe you said that. It’s just a little Category 1. I went through Katrina, remember?”

Like I could possibly have forgotten? I say, “It’s not the hurricane I’m worried about; it’s the evacuation traffic.”

“Oh. I’ll be careful.”

But I lied, of course. I am worried about the evacuation traffic, but I’m also worried about falling trees and rampaging storm surges and roving lawless gangs and all the other nasties that come with hurricanes.

I’m really great at worrying. Unfortunately, from here, it’s all I can do.

Rewriting, Again

2008-08-15T11:24:00.002-05:00

I’m rewriting The Deadlight Connection once again. How many serious reworkings does this make? I’ve lost count.

So what drove this particular rehashing? The realization that I didn’t have enough conflict between my two protagonists. In the first book of the series, The Archangel Project, Jax and Tobie spar back and forth constantly. In Deadlight, they were getting along way to well. The sizzle was gone. It was…boring.

So I’ve rethought Tobie’s motivations and goals, gone back to her roots, and started rewriting. In the process, I’ve recaptured the characters I loved in Archangel and given this new book a much needed spark. Maybe, just maybe I can finally say, "By George, I think I've got it." About six months late, but better late than never.

How did I go wrong? Distraction, I suspect. This has been a sucky year. But my mom’s in our house now, things are beginning to settle into a pattern, and while I find my writing hours reduced, I also find that in my non-writing hours I’ve started doing something I haven’t done in a long time: I’m thinking about my book.

Which is how I realized I’d lost the conflict between Jax and Tobie, and how important that was for making the book a fun, fast read.

Now, if I could just finish the #@%& thing!

Choices, and Gone Baby Gone

2008-08-11T10:54:00.002-05:00

One of the realities of life in our family that has long driven my girls crazy is the way my sister—the novelist Penelope Williamson—and I tend to talk about writing for hours and hours and hours whenever we get together or chat on the phone. I remember one time Penny said, “The more I write, the more I become aware of the choices I make every time I sit down to write a scene.” Ever since that conversation, I’ve been far more aware of the choices I make, and how the number of choices I have to make seems to expand the more experienced I become.

I think this is true for most writers. As beginners, we tend to rush into each scene with lots of enthusiasm and little sense of conscious choice. But as we gain experience, we become aware of those choices and begin to make more deliberate decisions. Where to start a scene. Where to set a scene. Whose point of view to use. When and how to end a scene. And on and on.

So what does this have to do with Gone Baby Gone? Steve and I watched this movie Saturday night. And then, last night, we watched the Bonus Features, including the “Audio Commentary by Writer/Director Ben Affleck and Writer Aaron Stockard.” When I first saw it listed as a selection, I said, You’ve got to be kidding. The entire movie with a soundtrack of the director and writers talking about the movie? Sounds boring, right? Maybe for most people, yes. But for those of you out there who are writers, fascinating. Because most of what they talk about is the choices they made—some good, some bad, and the compromises they had to make. I also found it fascinating to realize, by watching the movie through their “eyes”, just how many subtle little things I’d missed. Whatever you might think of Affleck as an actor, there’s no doubt he understands storytelling, and has studied and learned from the masters.

A few weeks ago, Steve Malley ran a post on the wisdom to be gained from watching the bonus features on DVDs. If you want to take his advice, Gone Baby Gone would be a great place to start.

Book Club Sales

2008-08-05T14:52:00.000-05:00

Last week brought some good news. The Book of the Month Club and Mystery Guild are buying both C.S. Harris’s Where Serpents Sleep and C.S. Graham’s The Archangel Project. Both titles will be “featured alternate selections”--one in October (I think), the other in November.

But this is the really neat thing: the Science Fiction Book Club is also buying Archangel! They say that although it’s a little out of their usual “realm,” they think the remote viewing element will appeal to their members.

How neat! Does this mean I can now say I write “science fiction”?

I guess not.

An Interview with C.S. Graham

2008-08-01T11:00:00.002-05:00

This weekend, WRBH will be airing an interview with “C.S. Graham” on The Archangel Project. If you don’t live in the New Orleans area, you can listen to the interview by going to their website at www.WRBH.org. If you’re in the broadcast area, WRBH is at 88.3 FM on your radio.

The website doesn’t do podcasts, so if you want to hear it, you need to click on the “Listen Now” button on the website at the exact time the interview is being broadcast: on Saturday, 2 August, at 8:30am Central Time, and on Sunday, 3 August, at 8:30am and 10:30 pm Central Time.

The voice of C.S. Graham in this instance will be my co-author (and spouse) Steven Harris. It’s a great interview, so if you can, do try to catch it. We hope to get it up as a podcast on the website noon.

As for me, my mother is now in our house. Everything is still chaos, but I’m trying to get back to work on The Deadlight Project. I'd love to go up to the lake for some intensive writing, but that will have to wait until my mother gets more settled, and my youngest heads back to college.

The Writing Gene

2008-07-28T09:34:00.005-05:00

Going through my mom’s lifetime collection of Stuff, I’ve finally reached The Bookcase.

Now, the last thing my house needs is more books—especially since moving my mom into our house has entailed sacrificing some precious feet of bookshelf (and just try getting furniture down a hall lined with bookcases!) But what makes THE Bookcase extremely problematical is that all the books on it were written by my mother’s husband or daughters.

What does one do with all of these lovingly inscribed books? There are simply too many to squeeze into her new bedroom. My dad (the historian Raymond L. Proctor) published three history books, with two translated into foreign editions. I have one history book and a dozen novels to my name. I didn’t give her copies of most of the foreign editions, but I did give her some of those that came out in hardcover with interesting covers. And then there’s my sister, the novelist Penelope Williamson. She’s written a good dozen herself, also published in hardcover in numerous foreign translations.

One might be tempted to think my sister and I inherited our writing gifts, such as they are, from my dad. But the truth is that while my father was a wonderful verbal storyteller and an excellent historian, he leaned heavily on my mom in the writing of his books. Tucked away in my mother’s desk, I recently found a collection of short stories that I didn’t even known my mother had written. They are truly wonderful stories, artfully crafted, never missing a beat in story arc or character development. Once, my mother dreamt of becoming a journalist. She even won a scholarship to a local Catholic women’s college, but the Great Depression intervened. My grandfather lost both of his businesses, and rather than go to college and become a journalist, my mother went to work as a secretary to help support her family, then married my father and became an Air Force wife and mother.

My mother is one of those people gifted with a serene temperament, never looking back with regret at what-might-have-beens. But when I found those short stories, I gazed over at that bookcase full of her family’s writings, and wept. For what might have been.

White Doves at Morning

2008-07-22T21:46:00.001-05:00

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers, yet I’ve had this historical novel sitting unread on my shelves for years now. I’m not sure why it took me so long to pick it up. Because it isn’t one of Burke’s standard, contemporary crime novels? Because the Civil War is a depressing period? Whatever my reason, I’m glad I saved it, because as hectic as my life has become these days, I needed a treat.

The prose is pure Burke, lush and lyrical, with that magical facility to hone in on the essence of a thought or emotion in a way that makes the reader think, Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like. The characters are pure Burke, as well. Burke follows four young friends from the tense moments that precede the War Between the States, through the first battles, to the arrival of Union soldiers in Louisiana and the beginnings of Reconstruction. Interestingly enough, the novel focuses on Burke’s own ancestor, Willie Burke, a poor but honorable Irish immigrant, and his friend, Robert Perry, wealthier, but also a good, admirable man simply trying to survive and do the right thing in a world gone mad. Despite their personal opposition to both the war and slavery, both men join the Confederate Army—to protect their homes and loved ones, and because that’s what honorable, brave men do when their leaders go to war.

Unusually for Burke, this book also features two strong female protagonists: Flower Jamison, the beautiful half-black slave fathered by the owner of Angola Plantation, Ira Jamison, and Abigail Dowling, a Massachusetts abolitionist with whom both Willie and Robert Perry are in love. I have read that White Doves at Morning is actually Burke’s favorite of his books, and he lists the strong female protagonists as one of the main reasons.

But apart from the protagonists, what would a Burke novel be without a wonderful assortment of villains? There’s Clay Hatcher and Todd McCain, of the “poor white trash”/Knights of the White Camellia stripe; the evil Rufus Atkins, overseer of Angola Plantation; and the wealthy Jamison, his evil flowing more from his self-obsession and weakness rather than from the inherent sociopathic tendencies that drive the others.

Writing about the Civil War is always tricky, but Burke approaches his topic unflinchingly; he never shrinks from portraying either the horrors of slavery, or the barbarity of war, or the horrors of what the Union soldiers did to the South. In so doing, he doubtless p’ed off a whole passel of both Southerners and Yankees, along with those still inclined to see war as a nation’s “finest hour.” Yet, oddly enough, this book is actually not as dark as I’ve found many of his crime novels.

I could go on and on, because I really, really enjoyed this book, but I’m writing this in a hurry. We’ve set Friday as the day we move my mom out of her own home and into our house. Hopefully by next week I’ll manage to get back into a more regular blogging schedule.