Candy's Blog

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2009-07-02T12:37:00.003-05:00

It’s one of those phenomena we’ve all encountered—and puzzled over—time and time again. There's the incompetent but amazingly smug coworker whose misplaced self-confidence perversely convinces his manager the idiot is a superstar, thus earning the fraud an undeserved promotion. Then there’s the appallingly ignorant but blazingly self-confident politician who speaks with such poise and self-assurance that a huge chunk of her audience doesn’t notice she’s spouting an incomprehensible tangle of meaningless words and phrases. So it’s nice to know that scientists have actually calibrated, explained, and named this marvel: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

So what is the Dunning-Kruger Effect? Basically, it’s the tendency of people who are incompetent to over-estimate their own competency. Or, in Dunning and Kruger’s words, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.”

According to their Nobel Prize winning study Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf), the most incompetent people are exactly the ones most convinced of their competence. “The skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain—one's own or anyone else's. Because of this, incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term metacognition….

“In a perfect world, everyone could see the judgments and decisions that other people reach, accurately assess how competent those decisions are, and then revise their view of their own competence by comparison. However, [our studies] showed that incompetent individuals are unable to take full advantage of such opportunities. Compared with their more expert peers, they were less able to spot competence when they saw it, and as a consequence, were less able to learn that their ability estimates were incorrect…Incompetence, like anosognosia, not only causes poor performance but also the inability to recognize that one's performance is poor.”

An interesting corollary is that the most competent people usually underestimate their competence. In other words, the more you know, the more you focus on what you don’t know. And, ironically, the more inclined you are to believe that your peers know as much if not more than what you do.

Of course, none of this is news. It was Thomas Jefferson who once said, "he who knows best best knows how little he knows," while Charles Darwin observed back in 1871 that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." And then there’s the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (who, ironically, never suffered much from self-doubt) who said, “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Gratuitous Laughter

2009-06-29T11:43:00.002-05:00

I don’t have a very high opinion of gratuitous sex and violence in either books or film--with “gratuitous” defined as scenes that do nothing to advance the plot but are there simply because sex and violence have broad appeal. But what about gratuitous laughter? Ah, now that's different.

There actually is such a thing as non-gratuitous humor, where the humor comes from the plot line itself. But much humor is gratuitous—a situation or gag stuck in the story just for laughs. Take it out and the plot would run along fine; it just wouldn’t be as funny.

I pondered all of this while watching the recent Star Trek movie over the weekend. SPOILER ALERT. Take, for instance, the scene where Bones gives Kirk a vaccine that makes him sick in order to get him onto the Enterprise. That scene is necessary to move the plot forward. What is not necessary is that Kirk has a reaction to the vaccine; that complication exists solely to inject humor into the scenes that follow. Likewise the scene where Scotty and Kirk materialize on the Enterprise and Scotty finds himself in some sort of cooling system. Again, that complication is played out solely for laughs, to make their arrival on the Enterprise more interesting. In fact, one could argue that it's the humor that makes this movie enjoyable to watch; like The Voyage Home, this Star Trek movie goes for the laughs.

Yet while gratuitous humor does not bother me, it occurs to me that the word complication could actually be used to describe the gratuitous scenes of violence that I find boring and annoying. So perhaps the truth is that I simply have more patience for humor than I do for violence? Hmmm…

On a side note, We got rain!

Hottest Day Ever

2009-06-25T12:24:00.004-05:00

It’s official: yesterday, Audubon Park recorded the highest temperature ever in the entire history of the city of New Orleans. And we have a long history.

Now, 104 degrees might not sound like much to those accustomed to the searing heat of places like Arizona or Australia (I can remember in Adelaide my kids would get out of school if the temperature hit 45 Celsius). But you add in our humidity and it can be a killer. Plus, it’s only June!

The normal high for the end of June is 90 degrees. The previous high temperature for this time of year—99—was set in 2006. The city’s previous record high was set on August 30, 2000 (August is when we expect this kind of weather). There is a pattern here, and I don’t like it.

Yes, oh ye doubters, the world is heating up.

Ironically, it actually did cloud up for a while late yesterday afternoon. The sky grew dark, the wind blew, the temperature plummeted into the 80s, and we got all excited thinking it was actually going to rain. I've heard rumors that some places did get a shower. All we got is a spitting. But I must say, those brief moments of relief were heaven.

(I should probably mention that the National Weather Service gets their figures for the city from the airport, which is 16 miles to the west of the city, in the swamps. There the temperature was “only” 102.)

The Dog Days of…June?

2009-06-23T17:35:00.004-05:00

Yes, I know it’s supposed to be hot in New Orleans in the summer. But it’s only June, for crying out loud. Normally we get a few 100+ days in August, but not this early in the year! My thermometer has been hitting over a hundred degrees all week and it’s in the shade.

It’s been so hot that that streets are buckling. Two half-mile sections of Interstate 55 between New Orleans and our lake house have been closed after the road buckled under what state highway officials called “continued excessive heat.” I’ve never heard of such a thing.

There was a time not too long ago when it clouded up and rained here every day at 3:00; you could practically set your watch by it. It didn’t rain for long, just enough to cool everything down and water everyone’s garden. It also drove the humidity up so high you sometimes felt like you were going to drown just breathing, but it was part of the natural cycle of things. Read diaries from New Orleans in the 18th and 19th centuries, and they’ll talk about the daily afternoon showers.

Our afternoon showers have been MIA the past several years. Going to pick one of my daughters up from the airport this afternoon, I noticed the grass along the highway is turning brown. I have never seen that down here.

I do not like what this means for the temperature in the Gulf or the hurricanes that will be forming.

Some Sorta Good News, and Some Painful News

2009-06-19T20:07:00.001-05:00

Okay, here’s the good news: there will be a sixth Sebastian St. Cyr book!

Here’s the bad news: it will be released as a trade paperback original. In other words, no hard cover, no massmarket paperback. The Powers That Be are hoping this maneuver will reposition the book and increase sales.

Personally, I hate trade paperbacks. I think they’re the worst of both worlds: insubstantial and impermanent like a massmarket yet big and bulky like a hardcover. But I know a lot of people who do like them. And here’s the weird thing: stores like Barnes and Nobles keep trade paperbacks on their shelves for a year whereas paperbacks and hard covers get sent back in just a few months. In fact, I’m told it was B & N who suggested NAL switch the series to trade.

So now I need to come up with a title for this opus….

The Good News, and the Bad

2009-06-15T11:47:00.004-05:00

The good news is that my thriller publishers loved the proposal for The Babylonian Codex, so all systems are go with that book. Phew.

The bad news is that I still haven’t heard from the publishers of my Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series. My editor, Ellen, loved the proposal. So the problem isn’t the book. The problem is the economy.

Although Where Serpents Sleep hit significantly higher on all the lists than any of the previous books in the series, the actual number of sales didn’t increase. Now, given that the book came out last November in the midst of the horrific stock market crash, when everyone was focused on the economy and the election, and given that its performance on the lists indicates that its relative sales were better, I think the book actually did pretty well. Without a promotional budget, it always takes four to five books for a mystery series to catch on. We’re at the tipping point. I’ve worked so hard on this series, for so long, that I’m feeling kinda sick at this point. I heard back from my thriller publishers in two days. My Sebastian book’s proposal has been with Penguin for at least a month.

Fingers crossed and squeezing tight.

Nail Biting Time

2009-06-10T13:09:00.002-05:00

I’m feeling somewhat like a wallflower, sitting around anxiously waiting to see if someone’s going to ask me to dance. Why? I currently have not one, but two book proposals out, one to each of my publishers. One proposal is for my third thriller, a book I’ve called The Babylonian Codex. The other is for the sixth Sebastian book. It’s an idea I love and starts with Sebastian’s friend, Gibson, buying the “resurrected” body of a young man and discovering that his illicit corpse was murdered. (I’d give you the title but, um, it doesn’t have one yet.)

What exactly is a book proposal? It’s the first three chapters/30-35 pages and a synopsis of the book, intended to give publishers a good feel for what the finished product will be like. Book proposals can be scary things to prepare, since so much rests on them (like whether the publisher will buy the book, and how much they’ll pay). Squishing the plot line and characters of a 400 page book down into a five page synopsis in a way that not only makes sense but sounds enticing is an art. And polishing those first three chapters into something sparkling and alluring when you haven’t written the rest of the book can be a challenge.

During the course of my writing career, I’ve only had one book proposal knocked back, but that experience was enough to scar me for life. I spent months researching and plotting out a second thriller I called The Bermuda Effect, and had written about a hundred pages when my editor said, “We don’t like this idea. Come up with something different.”

I learned a valuable lesson: don’t invest too much time and effort and heart into researching, plotting, and writing an idea that may not sell. And I learned another, slightly more cynical lesson: the less you give them, the less they can criticize. Dazzle them with smoke and mirrors, but don’t give them too much to think about.

But I still have a lot of time and heart invested in these two ideas. And the publishing environment right now is not good, so this is a bad time to be going out with one proposal, let alone two. So, yeah, I’m nervous. Stay tuned….

New Orleans Leads the Country…in Killings

2009-06-07T15:24:00.004-05:00

The FBI’s annual report on national crime was released last week. The good news is that New Orleans saw a 17% fall in the number of violent crimes over last year. The bad news is we’re still the most murderous city in America. By far.

New Orleans officials complain that the FBI is using outdated population figures. The FBI used a figure of 281,440 from July of 2008, whereas the city claims the population is now 311,858. And some say even that figure is low, since it doesn’t include thousands of undocumented laborers. (Which begs the question, Who does count undocumented laborers?) Anyway, it’s all quibbling because whichever population figure you use, we’re STILL Number One.

Using the FBI’s figures, New Orleans had 64 murders per 100,000 population. Using the city’s figures, New Orleans had 57 murders per 100,000 residents. Which means that even if you fiddle the numbers, poor ole Number Two, St. Louis, with a measly 47 murders per, has a ways to go to catch up. Scary Baltimore is third on the list, with 37 per, with Birmingham giving them a run for their money at 36.

But you know what’s really scary? Baton Rouge is Number Seven! Thirty murders per 100,000. Who’d have thought?

Why is our murder rate so high? Well, we can blame Katrina for some of it. People are depressed and short-tempered; they can’t find housing and jobs. Plus, population disruptions lead to gang territorial disputes, which lead to killings. But the truth is we were killing each other at a scary rate before the hurricane. Why? I don’t know. And I’m wondering why someone isn’t asking THAT question.

Cross Marketing

2009-06-01T15:18:00.005-05:00

I’ve been grumbling so much lately, I thought it was time for a post thanking my publishers for doing something brilliant. What are they doing? Since the paperback edition of Where Serpents Sleep is coming out in exactly the same month as the paperback original of The Solomon Effect, NAL and Harper Collins are putting ads in the back of each other’s books. So readers will find an ad for Where Serpents Sleep in the back of The Solomon Effect, and vice versa.

This little exercise in cross marketing was the brainchild of my NAL editor, Ellen Edwards—who is, by the way, both the world’s most brilliant, conscientious editor and someone who loves the Sebastian series every bit as much as I do.

The two series are extremely different from each other, given that one is a contemporary thriller with a breezy tone and the other is a fairly dark historical mystery. But there are sure to be some readers who will enjoy both books. And given that the print runs for my thrillers are about fifteen times that of the historical mysteries (from which you can gather that the Sebastian series is, for me, a labor of love), we’re hoping the Sebastian series in particular will get a big boost.

I tried to upload the image of the Harper Collins ad, but couldn't get it to work. But there'll be a picture of the cover, with this copy:

Think you know what’s real and what isn’t? Think again . . .
If you enjoy C.S. Harris’s unique blend of action, suspense, and rich characterization, you’ll love her new edge-of-your-seat contemporary thriller series! Collaborating with former intelligence officer Steven Harris, she now also writes as
C. S. Graham.
Don’t miss The Solomon Effect!

CIA agent Jax Alexander and remote viewer Tobie Guinness hunt for a lost Nazi U-boat that’s hiding a deadly secret in this new novel by the author of The Archangel Project.

www.CSGrahambooks.com

On Sale: 9/29/09

Of Heaven and Hell

2009-05-29T11:44:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, a historical mystery writer penned a rather ghoulish tale set in a dark, ancient crypt and strewn with dead priests and mummified corpses and all manner of nasty secrets. She called her tale What Hell Marks, after a favorite Shakespearian quote. She sent if off to her publishing house, along with what she thought was a great suggestion for a cover, including a menacing arch, a worn staircase, a glimpse of the skirt of a woman running away, and a skull.

Her publishing house said, “You know how we talked about doing something to make this series attract more female readers?”

To which our writer nervously replied, “Yes….”

“Well, we think women would be put off by a book with ‘hell’ in the title. So we’re changing it to What Remains of Heaven.”

Our writer attempted to demur, but The Powers That Be prevailed. (Unless your name is Grisham or King, The Powers That Be nearly always prevail.) Our writer was unhappy, but she’s been in this business long enough to know that she needs to roll with the punches. Then the cover arrived. (Cue screams of horror.)

Unfortunately, our writer is prevented by The Powers That Be from showing you this original version. But let me describe it for you: Drift back in time to the 1960s, when Gothics were all the rage. Got that mindset? Good. Now, picture a woman, barefoot, wearing only a white corset and a petticoat (complete with bare shoulders, heaving bosom, and bare back showing through the lacings of the corset) running up dark castle-like steps wrapped in an ethereal light. Think Sarah Jessica Parker in a corset and torn petticoat being chased by a ghost. You may suspect I am exaggerating. Believe me, I wish I were.

Our author takes one look at this cover and nearly swoons. She frantically calls her agent. She emails her publishing house. She is reminded, not so subtly, that her name is not Grisham or King. She is told, “The marketing department LIKES the cover. We said we wanted to do something to make this series appeal more to female readers, remember?” (Cue death knell in the distance.)

Our author weeps. She pleads. She says, “But it looks like a romance! And it is NOT. Don’t you think this cover sends a false message? This book is strewn with dead bodies.” She is told a new cover would be prohibitively EXPENSIVE. She says, “Can you maybe cut the woman off at the waist so all we see is her skirts?” No. “Then at least photoshop it to make the corset and petticoat a color, and get rid of the bareback seen through the lacing and add sleeves so that it looks like a dress? And put shoes on her feet? And get rid of the paranormal-like lighting effects? And maybe add a skull at the base of stairs? And, and…”

After much grumbling, she receives a new version, and a warning: This is it. Like it or lump it. Alas, our author is lumping it (whatever that means), and crossing her fingers that this cover won’t put off every male reader (and non-romance reading female reader) that her series has.

The cover just went up on Amazon, and already our author has received this comment from a reader named Chen: “Is that really the cover? Or is that a "stand-in" until a cover is finalized?  I'm hoping it's the latter. Otherwise it gives it too much of a "romance novel" feel. I am really enjoying this series and I guess I'd like to see the book have just the right look… I hope that's not the final cover.”

Alas, Chen; that’s the final cover. Believe me, I feel your pain. Times a million. I try to console myself with the thought that at least it's no longer Sarah Jessica Parker in a corset being chased by a ghost.

So, without further ado, here it is:

Make Up Your Minds Already!

2009-05-26T12:18:00.004-05:00

Going over copyedited manuscripts always puts me in a cranky mood. Going over two copyedited manuscripts, one right after the other, when I can hardly think straight thanks to the flu has put me in an ubercranky mood. (So you’ve been warned.)

Now, I’m not one of those writers who see copyeditors as the enemy. I know I do incredibly stupid stuff when I’m writing. When my brain is flying along in creative mode, I write ‘sat’ when I should use ‘set,’ and ‘discrete’ when I should use ‘discreet,’ and a dozen other strange permutations of the English language. A car that is black in one chapter suddenly becomes red. A character named Yates suddenly becomes Yardley. And no matter how many times I go over a manuscript, I still miss those pesky little mistakes. Lots of them. So thank god and publishers for copyeditors.

But there’s nothing like going over two copyedited manuscripts back to back to make you appreciate that this is not an exact science. I feel like screaming, Okay, guys! How about if y’all get together and make up your pedantic little comma-obsessed minds?

Do we say: Now, she knew she was wrong. Or do we say: Now she knew she was wrong.

Because you see, if it’s so important that you guys feel the need to take out a comma—or put it in—then shouldn’t you all agree, especially since you claim to be using the same style guides? Obviously not.

Or here’s another one/Or, here’s another one: What I want to know is, Do I capitalize the D? Or should I say, do I capitalize the d? One copywriter says, no. The other says, Yes. Ghrrr.

And don’t get me started on capitalization. Back in the dark ages when I went to school, if you wrote, “the Secretary of State [as in, Clinton] walked across the room,” the office-as-placeholder-for-the-name was capitalized. But it seems that in the decades since, newspapers discovered that such capitalizations slow down their readers, so they stopped using them. Now (,) everyone (including certain New York publishing houses) is following the newspapers’ lead. The problem with that approach is that if you have a character who is constantly referred to as “the Colonel” or “the General,” then I think it’s less confusing for readers if the old rule is followed. So I have stuck to my guns on this one. But believe me, it’s exhausting. As in parenting, one must pick their battles.

Now (,) you might think I could just jot down some notes about house rules and make the effort to have my next manuscript conform. But apart from the fact that I don’t need one more distraction, these aren’t house rules; these are individual copyeditors’ rules. I looked up previous manuscripts. And you know what? I started sticking those bloody commas in after the “now” and the “once” because a previous copyeditor with the same house insisted they were needed!

So, I give up. Or is that, so I give up? Or should I have said, Or is that, So I give up? Or…

Don’t Go Down in the Basement. Then Again, Maybe…

2009-05-22T12:03:00.004-05:00

We’ve all had those moments. We’re watching a thriller/horror movie. It’s dark. Evil people/spirits/creatures are aprowl. Our pretty young thing hears a noise down in the basement. Does she go for help? No. Does she run like hell? No. We’re screaming, “You idiot! Don’t go down in the basement!” But does she listen? No. She goes down in the basement.

Why do writers do this? Frequently it’s because they’re lazy. If our heroine calls the police and says, “I think there’s a prowler in my basement,” there goes our writer’s scary/gruesome scene. It’s a lot easier to get an unbelievably stupid character into trouble than a smart one.

That’s not to say that smart characters can’t make mistakes and get into trouble. Everyone makes mistakes, especially when they don’t have all the necessary information or if there’s something in their past that is driving them to make bad choices. Or maybe our character has a choice between a bad alternative and a worse alternative—say, she hears her baby crying down in the basement. Then she has my sympathy and respect when she goes rushing down into trouble. But those kinds of situations are a lot trickier to set up. They’re more work. (And even then some opinionated reader will probably criticize your character for making a poor decision.)

Yet I’m beginning to suspect that there are a lot of readers/viewers out there who don’t actually care if their hero—or at least their heroine—does the equivalent of going down in the basement over and over again. Consider, for instance, a certain megaselling series, which is sort of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer only without the kick-ass heroine (I always thought Buffy’s snap kicks and knife hand blocks were a big part of her appeal, but then, what do I know?). Rather than dispatching her enemies with Tae Kwon Do and a stake and a humorous quip, the heroine of this megaseller goes down in the basement over and over again, largely so that she can be rescued by her hero. I don’t think this is an example of lazy writing. This is deliberate. In a sense, it’s a retreat to an earlier age, where the damsel was in distress and the hero saved the day. And readers love it. One out of five books sold in the United States in the first quarter of this year were by this author.

One might actually deduce that its heroine’s propensity to go down in the basement is an important part of this series’ appeal. Is that true? I don’t know. If you’re a fan of this series, please don’t think I’m criticizing it, because I’m not. This author has obviously tapped into something huge here. I’m just trying to understand it.

When Urban Legend Turns Out to Be Fact

2009-05-18T10:32:00.006-05:00

Living here in Katrinaville, we hear all sorts of ugly rumors. About how everyone seems to be sick. About how deaths in our city have skyrocketed even though the population has fallen. About how everyone is on antidepressants. About how in the months after the storm hospitals were dealing with more suicide attempts in a typical 24-hour period than they normally saw in a month. We’ve all been to more funerals in the past four years than most of us have been to in our lives, but up until now our perceptions have all been antidotal; we could tell ourselves maybe it wasn't really as bad as we thought.

Well, now the studies and facts and figures are coming out, and they’re not pretty. Yes, in the nearly four years since Katrina, levels of sickness have indeed risen sharply. Nearly two-thirds of New Orleanians now report chronic health problems, up a staggering 45%. The number suffering from depression has tripled, with suicides still running at double what they were in 2005 (and they’re actually now way DOWN from what they were in the first 12 months after the storm). The city’s population is still at less than 75% of what is was before Katrina. But here’s the scary part: Only 57% of the city’s medical facilities have reopened, and even hospitals that are open are short-staffed.

If this were Burma, or Bangladesh, I could maybe understand it. But for a major American city to be hit with a natural disaster and then essentially abandoned by the federal government is a disgrace. Yes, lots of money flowed in here, but as is typical in such cases, it went to the Shaw Group, and Halliburton, and Blackwater, fattening the balance sheets of Corporate America while the city itself—and its residents—were left to slowly collapse.

And here’s another unpleasant statistic: One in five New Orleans residents now say they are considering leaving the city.

The Cover of The Solomon Effect Makes Its Debut

2009-05-12T12:30:00.006-05:00

The cover of the next C. S. Graham thriller, The Solomon Effect, has now been authorized for official release, so here (drum roll) it is…

This is the book that was once named The Deadlight Connection. The editors and marketing department both liked the original title, and it was used for the “teaser chapters” at the back of The Archangel Project. But when it came time to cover conference the book, the art department “couldn’t get their heads around” the original title. It’s the first instance I know of a book retitled in this way. But after months of going back and forth, I finally came up with a new title that everyone liked. All it took was a couple of little rewrites and it, ahem, even fit the book.

I’ve reached the point that I actually like the new title better than the original. What do you think of the cover? I think it's striking, but you can be honest--I’m not the one who designed it!

Winners of the 2008 Reviewers' Choice Awards Announced

2009-05-08T17:58:00.004-05:00

Where Serpents Sleep was nominated by Romantic Times for a 2008 Reviewers' Choice Award. The awards were given out at the RT convention a week or two ago and the results have now been posted on RT's website. There are lots of categories, but the winners in the area of Best Mystery and Suspense Novels are:  

  • Amateur Sleuth: Too Pretty to Die by Susan McBride (Avon, February 2008)  
• Contemporary Mystery: Sleep Softly by Gwen Hunter (Mira, February 2008)
  • First Mystery: Stalking Susan by Julie Kramer (Doubleday, July 2008)  
• Historical Mystery: Where Serpents Sleep by C. S. Harris (Obsidian, November 2008)  
• PI / Procedural Novel: The Dirty Secrets Club by Meg Gardiner (Dutton, June 2008)  
• Suspense / Thriller: Dark Summer by Iris Johansen (St. Martin's Minotaur, October 2008) 

I don't know what kind of effect these awards have on readers, but next to the RITAS these awards are considered the biggest in the romance business and definitely do count with publishing houses, so it's always nice to win, even now that I've moved into mystery/thrillers.

Thank you, Romantic Times.

The Last of the Dominoes

2009-05-04T13:19:00.006-05:00

On Sunday, my extended family gave a birthday party for my Aunt May. She’s ninety-seven. Amongst the family members attending were her three surviving siblings, who range in age from my own soon-to-be ninety-two-year-old mother (on the right, in the yellow top and skirt), to the baby of the family, Uncle Jiggs, now eighty-five. My Uncle Al is turning ninety.

My grandparents, Elizabeth and Peter Paul Wegmann, married relatively late in life but still managed to have nine children. My grandmother used to tell the story of how she brought all of her little ones through the flu epidemic of 1919 by lining them up every night and giving each a hot toddy of honey, lemon, and whiskey. All four of her sons went off to fight in World War II, and by some miracle not only survived but all came home, one after the other, on the same day. Of good German stock, my grandmother lived to be ninety. My grandfather died at ninety-two. As they aged, their nine children all seemed to share the same somewhat bizarre conviction that they, in turn, would live to be ninety or ninety-two. Then they would start keeling over, one by one, in order of their birth. Like dominoes. It became such a family joke that we started calling them the Dominoes.

When I moved to New Orleans a few years ago, all nine were still alive. But then, inevitably, the Dominoes started falling. The first to go was my Aunt Helen, the second oldest, who died at the age of ninety. It was quite a shock. She wasn’t supposed to be the first to go. Then came 2005, a horrible year for us, when we buried four in less than 12 months. The eldest, Aunt Henrietta, was 95. But one of the brothers was “only” in his late eighties. My Aunt Clair died, at the age of 93, in the aftermath of Katrina. Since the cemeteries in the city were still under water, we had to bury her in a small town up the river. It was, to say the least, traumatic.

Now there are only four Dominoes. Uncle Al still lives at home, alone since the death of his wife last year, although his sons are trying to talk him into moving into an assisted living complex. He says, “Heck, I don’t need that! I still mow my own lawn.” Uncle Jiggs had a stroke a few years ago, but is well cared for by his wife, who is 25 years his junior. My mother had a stroke after Katrina and now lives with me, although she’s still going strong. Aunt May still works every day in her garden, although she admits she now needs to get her great-grandsons to dig the holes for her. She told me a few years ago that she’s decided she’s going to live to be one hundred.

I suspect she’s going to make it.

The Death Instinct

2009-05-02T15:25:00.005-05:00

As part of the research for my next thriller (tentatively called The Babylonian Codex), I recently read a fascinating book called American Fascism: the Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges holds a Masters in Divinity from Harvard and is himself a Christian, which means he understands radical Christianity in a way someone with my background never could.

Of course, this slim, frank little book provoked predictable outrage. How dare anyone suggest that the Dominionist movement in the United States is anything but a peaceful, democratic attempt to, um, jettison the Constitution, turn the country into a theocracy, and unleash a holy war on the rest of the world in preparation for Christ’s triumphant return? I mean, it’s not as if Purpose Driven Rick Warren says over and over again that he draws inspiration from the demagogic success stories of the past, namely Hitler, Lenin, and Mao. Oh, no, wait; I guess he does.

Anyway, it’s a fascinating and eye-opening work written in lyrical prose with great insight, and I highly recommend it. But while looking over the author bio before slipping the volume onto my bookcase, I noticed that Hedges is also the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Now, I had vague memories of having ordered that book a couple of years ago, although I never read it. So I went hunting for it on my shelves, and sure enough, there it was.

As an example of marketing, the contrasting author bios found in these two volumes are amusing. Whereas American Fascists emphasizes Hedges’s Christian background, War tells us that Hedges was a Pulitzer-winning war correspondent for the New York Times. He covered the bloodiest atrocity-provoking conflicts of the last decades of the twentieth century, including El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Gaza, Lebanon, the Gulf War, Algeria—you name it, he was there. Again, this is a man who knows of what he writes. And he writes with a rare eloquence and erudition (his bachelors is in English literature, and he has studied Classics and reads both Greek and Latin—as well as speaking Arabic, French, Spanish, and German). His thesis is that mankind idealizes and perpetuates a false image of war that seduces societies and beckons them on to destruction. Not a new theses, obviously, but as explicated by Hedges’s personal, endlessly horrifying experiences, his insight resonates in a way that a coldly reasoned philosophical or psychological explanation never could.

In May of 2003, just weeks after George W. Bush gave his infamous Mission Accomplished speech, Hedges delivered a commencement address at a college in Illinois. When he said, "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security," he provoked such outrage in the audience that he had to end his speech and be escorted off campus by security forces. The New York Times—his employer—reprimanded him and demanded he shut up about the Iraq War. Rather than comply, he quit.

Now, that’s my definition of hero. Apart from which, as an old time Classics major myself, I can't help but love a writer who casually quotes both Catallus and the Iliad.

Gratuitous Sex and Violence

2009-04-27T14:09:00.004-05:00

I’m in the midst of slogging my way through the latest thriller by a NYT bestselling author. I’m putting myself through this torture because I like to keep current with the publishing industry, and because the subject of this particular book touches close to something I’ve written myself. Since I’m not enjoying the process, I’m reading fast. And I’ve found I can skip the action sequences without missing anything. I’ll come to one and think, Oh, good; the bad guys are going to try to kill the heroes again; I can skip ahead at least ten pages!

If that isn’t the definition of gratuitous violence, I don’t know what is. I’m reminded of the gratuitous sex scenes that populate so many of today’s romance novels. When I was judging RITA entries, I frequently found myself skipping sex scenes, too. Now, since authors put in sex and violence in order to make their books more entertaining, yet some of their readers are actually skipping those scenes, something is obviously wrong.

So how does a writer keep an action sequence—or a sex scene—from being boring?

In the best action sequences or a sex scenes, something happens that actually moves the plot forward. We learn something new about the characters. The characters learn something new about themselves or each other. The action ups the stakes. Or it changes the characters’ motivation. Or it changes the characters’ goal. Or the characters acquire new information that causes them to alter their course of action. But something has to happen besides just violence or sex. When nothing changes—if the characters and the conflict are all the same at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning—then the scene is gratuitous. The writer could yank the car chase/shootout/sex scene from the plot (or the reader could skip it) and no one would notice. The plot line would flow on without interruption or confusion.

Unfortunately, today’s audiences are so addicted to sex and violence that writers frequently feel the need to insert sex/violence every so many pages/minutes. Now, it’s pretty hard to make each and every one of those scenes pivotal. Yet I do think it is possible to have gratuitous sex and violence without boring the more discriminating members of your audience. How? By creating sympathetic characters.

If your readers care about your characters, they will be carried along by the action, both because they care what happens to the characters and because they like spending time with them. If I’m watching a movie and I don’t like the characters, I have nothing at stake; I couldn’t care less if they killed or caught. Oh, our heroes are being shot at again? Yawn. Let me go make another cup of tea…

Even if I don’t care about the characters, an action sequence can still hold my attention if it’s well done, if the sequence is original, or funny, or cleverly orchestrated. Ironically, the NYT bestselling author of the thriller I’m reading at the moment writes really, really bad action sequences. They’re unoriginal, unbelievable, and badly executed. There is absolutely nothing to entice me to read them. So, I skip. A lot.

Of course, a lot of people really don’t care if the sex and violence in a book or movie is gratuitous or unoriginal--they're actually reading/watching for the sex and violence. Sigh.

Unheroic Heroes

2009-04-20T10:24:00.002-05:00

I’ve been pondering the dynamics of heroes ever since I finished reading a recent mystery/thriller. The book had a lot going for it—after all, I finished it, and as most of you know by now, I have a tendency to put books down and never pick them up again. Not only did I finish this one, I even sat up into the wee hours of the night reading it, something I almost never do. But I’m not going to tell you the title because I have some unkind things to say about this book.

While not exactly lyrical, the writing was good. The book is set in winter in the Rockies, and the author does a wonderful job of hitting on all the subtle, telling details of the mountains in a way that took me right back to my youth in northern Idaho—I could feel the nip of the sub-zero temperatures, hear the squeaking crunch of the snow, smell the sweet scent of the pines. The plot had a few issues, but the author set up the story in a way that I could see the horrific, inescapable train wreck at the climax building from early in the book—which is undoubtedly why I ended up missing a few hours of sleep. I just couldn’t look away.

So what was wrong with this book? The characters. It’s not that they were clichéd or cardboard or unbelievable, because they weren’t especially so. They were just…unlikable. And (except, obviously, for the hero) they were meant to be. Apart from the protagonist’s wife and daughters, all the women were either crazy, power-mad bitches, or shallowly obsessed with their looks, or dumb sluts—or all three. The men—with one exception—were surly assholes. Now, I’m all for conflict on every page, and it’s hard to get conflict if all your characters are saints. But when everyone in your book is portrayed as unpleasant, and we’re looking at these people through the eyes of your protagonist, it starts to feel like maybe the protagonist is one of those guys who just doesn’t like anyone and who especially has issues with females. And that diminishes him.

I also had problems with the protagonist’s behavior. At one point, the law officers arrest a man they think is the killer. The suspect (the one male character who is not a decidedly unpleasant individual) has surrendered peacefully, yet one of the deputies hauls off and smashes the butt of his rifle into the man’s face hard enough to break teeth. A great place for our protagonist to step forward and act, well, heroic, right? But what does our protagonist do? Nothing. So the deputy smashes the poor suspect in the face again. What does our protagonist do? Nothing. He doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t protest. And, afterwards, he doesn’t report the incident. In other words, he behaves in a very unheroic manner.

Of course, in real life, most guys wouldn’t do anything. I know that. But I don’t want to read about the kind of guys who go along to get along, the kind of guys who would torture kids in some CIA black prison because they were “ordered” to. I want the protagonist of a mystery/thriller to be heroic. And this writer didn’t deliver. He didn’t even have the protagonist agonize over his failure to do something to avert/stop/compensate for this injustice; that would have worked, since he could then have grown during the course of the book and acted like a hero at the end. But it didn’t happen. After this disgusting display of police brutality, our protag simply goes on with his life and forgets about it. Eeeww.

In the end, our protagonist does risk his life to stop the train wreck we’ve seen coming. By that point, his stepdaughter’s life is also at risk, which does a great job of “upping the stakes” since we now have a pretty, blonde-headed (of course she’s blonde), emotionally vulnerable little kid in danger of being swallowed up by the train wreck. Yet I’m left with the impression that if she hadn’t been his stepdaughter, he wouldn’t have risked even his job, let alone his life, to avert what he knew was a horrific abuse of government power.

Now, the writer of this book may be a great guy. He may not have issues with women. But I doubt it. This is the second of his books I’ve read, and my reaction to the first—which I read a couple of years ago—was very similar. So I don’t think I’ll be reading him again—I don’t like being left with a bad taste in my mouth. Which is a shame, because there are some things he does very well.

Oh, and he killed a cute, pathetic little dog and the kid—both unnecessarily. When “they” tell writers that’s not a good idea, they’re right.

The Triumph of the Underdog

2009-04-15T16:52:00.004-05:00

The triumph of the underdog: it's something we all want to believe can happen. But how often to we get to see an underdog triumph in real life? Not often, which makes those few, rare moments all the more precious.

Picture a frumpy middle-aged woman from a small town in Scotland. She’s never been married; never even been kissed. But she dreams of becoming a singing star. She gets a chance to go on a national talent-scouting program, and she grabs it. When she walks out on stage, everyone laughs at her. They think she’s going to make a fool of herself. Then she starts to sing, and audience and hardened judges alike gasp in wonder at the beauty of her voice. By the end of her performance, they’re on their feet, cheering, with tears running down their faces.

Of course, this song can make me cry under even ordinary circumstances. But this performance—ah, this performance is sublime.

What Really Happens to Heroes

2009-04-11T12:43:00.004-05:00

I was planning to do a post today about heroes in fiction, but instead I’m going to write about a real-life hero, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.

As deputy director of LSU’s Hurricane Center, van Heerden created a hurricane modeling program that predicted—very accurately, as it turned out—what would happen to the southern Louisiana coast and New Orleans if the area were hit by a major hurricane. Horrified by what he knew was going to happen, van Heerden spent the years before Katrina battling to get everyone from FEMA to the Army Corps of Engineers to listen to him. They laughed at him.

His forecasts predicting massive levee failures and flooding in Eastern New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and the Lower Ninth Ward, were published in the Times-Picayune the day before Katrina hit and helped convinced many to flee. He was at his post at the Hurricane Center, sleepless, through the long dreadful hours of Katrina’s landfall. After the collapse of the federal levee system, he was in the city, watching the water sweep away homes and businesses. This a man who, through intelligence, dedication, and hard work, helped save the lives of countless thousands. After the storm, in a white heat of anger, he sat down and wrote a book called, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina. It’s a gripping read that will leave you sick and angry and wanting to shake a few people. More than a few people. (I blogged about it when I read it in August of 2006, right after we moved back into our house, here.)

Not only did van Heerden write a book, he also agreed to head the forensic investigation on what went wrong. Dubbed Team Louisiana, this investigation prepared the report The Failure of the New Orleans Levee System During Hurricane Katrina for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. Because of his expertise and the accuracy of his forecasts, he was frequently quoted by various media outlets. Needless to say, his comments were not flattering to the Powers That Be.

So how did LSU treat this hero? In November of 2005, they told him to stop talking to the media because he was hurting the university’s chances of getting federal dollars (not to mention reflecting badly on George Bush, good buddy of the University’s chancellor O’Keefe). And now, under the direction of Louisiana’s new Republican governor, LSU has fired van Heerden. Their reason? None given, not to the press, nor to van Heerden himself.

Risking his job, Van Heerden fought long and hard to get the truth out there, to save lives, to save our city, to save our coast. That’s heroic. Now, he’s paid the price. In popular fiction, he would ultimately triumph as a reward for making the morally “right” choice. But this isn’t fiction; this is life.

Sixth Annual Jubilee Jambalaya Writers Conference

2009-04-07T16:19:00.007-05:00

Most writers’ conferences are informative, and they’re usually good places to make contact with editors, agents, and other writers. But I don’t think there are many that can compete with the Jubilee Jambalaya Writers' Conference in Houma, Louisiana, when it comes to good old-fashioned fun. Picture great jambalaya for lunch, good music, and lots of friendly, pleasant people who love books and love talking about books.

This year, Steve and I were able to stay for the Saturday night shrimp, crab, and crawfish feed that Tina, one of the organizers, always puts on for the presenters. As the night wore on, F. Paul Wilson started strumming the guitar; a motley crew sang along. And then Tina--who's been battling cancer with a courage and grace that awes me--dragged out her wigs and charmed everyone into posing in them for pictures. Since I don’t have their permission, I’m not going to post the photos I took of some of the other authors. But this one of Steve looking like an aging hippy is just too good not to share.

I guess it's only fair that I suffer the same fate, so here’s you-know-who in a red wig.

What can I say? I love this conference!

Hello, April!

2009-04-01T11:06:00.006-05:00

I don’t know about you, but I am really glad to see the back of March. In the past month I have: finished my fifth Sebastian book, What Remains of Heaven; seriously injured my eye; slogged (one eyed) through my editor’s requested revisions on my second thriller, The Solomon Effect; lost one of my cats; caught a nasty case of bronchitis that provoked a porphyria attack; and slogged (bucket within reach) through massive editorial rewrites for What Remains of Heaven. I’ve also participated in the presentation of an all-day workshop for aspiring writers at our local Barnes and Noble; had my youngest daughter home for spring break, and presented a luncheon speech at the Metairie Literary Guild. I started plotting my sixth Sebastian book, tentatively entitled What the Dead Tell (I know I won’t be allowed to keep that one), and then, yesterday, I sat down in a white heat and wrote the first chapter.

Coming up this month, I need to finish nailing the plot of the Sebastian book and write the first 35 pages and synopsis; plot the third thriller and write that proposal; and participate in the Jubilee Jambalaya conference down in Houma, where I’m presenting a workshop on plotting. It’s still a lot to do, but this is the part of writing that I love. Unlike (cue morgue organ) the dreaded edits.

Why do I hate edits so much? Because at that point, almost every book I’ve ever written strikes me as a piece of cr*p. I am painfully aware of the story’s warts and weaknesses. But time (or my own talent) has run out: this is as good as it gets, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s never good enough.

But the proposal stage (cue bird song and time elapse photos of spring flowers unfurling) is a time for falling in love, when my story idea is still a bright shiny bauble toward which I reach with excitement and wonder. There is no book, only an idea, and as we all know, falling in love with an idea is so much easier than loving a reality!

National Porphyria Awareness Week

2009-03-30T11:49:00.003-05:00

If you watch House (for some reason the writers of that show love porphyria) or if you’ve ever seen The Madness of Kind George, you’ll be familiar with the rare medical condition known as porphyria. But you’d be amazed by how many doctors in this country don’t know about it, or have only the fuzziest idea what it involves or how to deal with it. And that’s a problem, because a leading cause of death among porphyria carriers is doctors and the drugs they prescribe.

March 28-April 4 is National Porphyria Awareness Week, which attempts to raise awareness of porphyria among both the medical community and the population at large. Basically, porphyria is a metabolic disorder, usually hereditary, that interferes in the production of heme. Heme is best known for its presence in hemoglobin, but it’s also a necessary component in other things beside blood and the delivery of oxygen. There are actually eight different forms of porphyria, which differ from each other in significant ways. They’re all called “porphyria” because when certain enzymes involved in the production of heme don’t do their job, the precursors of heme—known as porphyrins—build up in the body. Although porphyrins are normally present in small amounts, when they build up they can cause big problems—the biggest of all being death.

Porphyria is challenging not only because it is deadly and rare, but because its symptoms are so elusive. It is possible for a person to live their entire life with porphyria and never know it. Then, out of the blue, something can happen to provoke a porphyria attack. What does a porphyria attack look like? Depending on the type of porphyria, it can include severe abdominal distress (think the worst kind of stomach flu), a skin rash that results from exposure to the sun, weakness, faintness, peripheral neuropathy, mental confusion, hallucinations, coma, and death.

What can provoke an attack? A low protein diet or fasting. Hormonal fluctuations (menstruation or pregnancy). A viral or bacterial infection. Stress. Chemical exposure (“chemicals” including everything from pesticides to over the counter drugs to chemotherapy).

Thanks to the madness of good ole King George, having porphyria is sometimes seen as something of a stigma. But the truth is, porphyria didn’t make George III crazy; what drove him mad was the arsenic his doctors gave him to treat his porphyria (clever guys, they were treating his attacks with a substance that just gave him more attacks; the man must have had the constitution of an ox to survive with even half his marbles). Yes, having a bad porphyria attack can make porphyria sufferers a little fuzzy for a week or so, but we—usually—come back.

And yes, I said we. I discovered I suffer from porphyria when doing the research for my first Sebastian book. Curious to know more about the disorder that affected the Hanovers, I Googled porphyria and found myself reading a list of the seemingly disparate symptoms that had plagued me since adolescence. This is an example of serendipity at its most precious, since the discovery helped me save the life of one of my daughters when she suffered a horrendous attack after Katrina and the area’s emergency rooms were unimaginable, indescribable nightmares.

So here’s to raising national awareness of porphyria. You can read more about porphyria, and what can be done to help increase awareness of this problem here.

Check it out. You or someone you love might have this condition and not know it.

Quack!

2009-03-28T11:18:00.005-05:00

Steve and I started feeding the birds and squirrels back in those ugly, traumatic days after Katrina, when the hurricane’s winds had stripped the vegetation from the area’s shrubs and trees, and the receding floodwaters had left neighborhood gardens brown and dead. Now, Steve throws out big scoopfuls of seed and nuts and cracked corn every morning before he leaves for work. Our garden is an oasis of birdsong played out against the splash of the fountains (and the occasional “Meow! I want one of those!” from our gang of fascinated, ever-hopeful inside cats).

But this is the first time we’ve looked out the window to find ducks in our garden. I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given that we live only a couple hundred feet from a canal. But it was still enough of a treat to send me scrambling for my camera.

Bye, guys! Ya’all come back now, you hear?