Roux Morgue

These Foolish Things Remind Me of You

2012-01-28T18:25:00.000-08:00

So. We're having friends over for dinner, and usually when I cook I want music on, something rockin' with a beat. Motown usually works. Janis. Allman Bros. Stones. But today, after something of a hellish week where I don't have much brain left, I wanted order and something soothing. Not too orderly as in Bach, but something with passion tied up in a neat bow. Beethoven!

I can't help but think of my father when ever I hear Beethoven. Classical music was his life's blood, and the hours I listened to KKHI as a child...Well, it was a lot. There was always that terrible moment when a new song would come on and my father would grill me and my sister as to which composer has written this specific piece. We never knew, but then we were eight and six at the time, so I consider a little slack is in order. As I grew older, I grew more savvy, and when the quizzing would start, I began to say Beethoven automatically in the hopes that I'd be right. Luckily, it more often than not turned out to be Beethoven. Lucky me.

Anyway, I was listening to the Pathetique sonata, a piece that I tried in vain to learn, and I thought of my father. Nice, kind thoughts, actually. And then I wondered about the other givens in my life. Dad = Beethoven. The smell of bacon = my mother (who still to this day cooks a full breakfast every Sunday morning). Nail clippers = my husband (who once tried valiantly to protect me from a bunch of homeless people who were circling a phone booth we were in with the file attached to his nail clippers). St. Patrick's Day = my friends Micheal and Tanya (who give the best party ever). And that kind of laughter where you cry it's so funny = my sister. Because we when get together, we laugh like that.

Have You No Shame, Mrs. Deen?

2012-01-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

I don't watch television (well, with the exception of HGTV with my daughter when she comes home from college and the occasional bout of CNN if and when something news worthy happens), so I'm basically ignorant of the legions of celebrity television chefs that rule the airwaves. To me, there is only one person who deserved her own television cooking show, and that person was Julia Child. She knew how to cook, and she had a personality and charm that made you want to cook. End of story.

A couple of years I found myself in the X-ray department of my local hospital (irony of ironies), and as all waiting rooms in hospitals now have televisions to convince you that you're not waiting THAT long, I found myself watching Paula Deen's cooking show. I know it's not fair to base one's opinion on one show, however, an entire fifteen minutes devoted to dumping cartons of sherbet into a punch bowl filled with 7-up and then mixing them together does NOT constitute cooking in my book. There was some other recipe on this show that had something like forty pounds of butter--I think it was mashed potatoes and the ratio of butter to Idahos was essentially one to one--and, again, not particularly noteworthy. Let's put it this way, neither her ideas nor her personality had me frantically searching my TV guide for the next installment of her show.

Then lo and behold it was announced this week that three years ago she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. One hates to be cynical, but the fact that she has withheld this information (which is, of course, her right) until she successfully landed a sponsor to pay her for her years of promoting fat-laden, unhealthy food and her moribund lifestyle seems, uh, a little craven to me. She continued to offer her up her brand of fare for three solid years without a single mention that the very food that she was extolling you to cook was likely to make you obese, and, therefore, vulnerable to Type 2 diabetes. How lovely, folks. Just eat your way to medical intervention. Donuts? Have four. Deep-fried cheesecake? Have another piece.

Is it just me or is this insanely irresponsible? Granted, I'm surrounded by medical types on both sides of the family, so perhaps my layman's knowledge of medical stuff is a little more informed than your average Joe. Diabetes is a nasty disease. How nasty? It's like up there with cancer as far as I am concerned. It affects your entire body. As in losing toes and going blind to name a couple of potential side effects. I've currently embarked on a regime to eat better and exercise more, and the primary reason? My sugar numbers are heading in the pre-diabetic direction, and I would rather cut out chocolate forever than get diabetes. THAT'S how bad a disease it is.

So, I have to ask Mrs. Deen, why didn't she tell her loyal fans immediately that the lifestyle that she was promoting was in fact a direct line, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, to a lifetime of being insulin's bitch? The standard line seems to be that they wanted to have a clear message about all this before making the announcement. It took THREE FRIGGING YEARS to hone a public response to this news?

I don't think so. It took three years to find a sponsor. She disgusts me. Either keep it personal because it is personal, or use your new-found knowledge to immediately revamp your show so that your old message of "every thing's better deep-fried" is now "let's find new ways to make delicious food and not kill ourselves in the process." I'm not saying that she doesn't have the right to deep-fry cheesecake. But what I am saying is that there are consequences to that type of lifestyle choice--as she has found out--and, personally, I believe she has a responsibility to let her fans know exactly the cost of such a lifestyle.

In my opinion, there's no middle ground. You have a show. You have people who follow you. Well, now they've been following you into Type 2 diabetes. Will they get a discount on their insulin if they mention your name? Hope so, because insulin is expensive.

Posting Fool! The Biography

2012-01-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, three posts in a week. I'm outdoing myself. Still no pictures though. Sigh.

After I finished writing up yesterday's post on Reardon's biography of M.F.K. Fisher, I began thinking about what a different animal the biography is from, say, the novel. Unlike the novel, where even when it's not about the author, it's ALWAYS about the author, a really good biography is about the absence of self. In the biography, the writer tries to step back and take a really clinical and hopefully unbiased look at the life they are chronicling. There were certainly passages in Reardon's book (and Moorehead's on Gellhorn) that had me raising my eyebrows at both women under study (neither of them would be in contention for a mother-of-the-year award), but the biographer really doesn't have that luxury. She/he can't roll her eyes and say, oh for heaven's sake: you take off for France when your daughter is clearly not mentally able to care for her toddler and you wonder why your sister--who has assumed your responsibilities--is miffed at you? The biographer just puts it down on paper and lets the actions speak for themselves. I'm sure that Ms. Reardon has opinions regarding Mary Frances and her too-apt tendency to throw her hands up and then board the next plane as does Ms. Moorehead--who was personal friends with Martha Gellhorn--and Martha's tendency to cut off long-term friendships with a precision and arrogance that is cruel, but neither of them let the self intrude.

When the self does intrudes, the biography becomes either a love letter or a hatchet job, neither of which is the stuff of good biography. I felt that way about the Muriel Spark biography that I reviewed, what, last year? Stannard was terrified and in awe of this woman and it came through on the page. He always had an excuse and an apology for her rotten behavior, which undermined what he was trying to say about her. I am at a loss to define Muriel Spark because her biographer wasn't honest with us. His self interfered. "Yes, she was imperious and demanding and often cruel, but, but, but, love her anyway," he begged. "Because I am so in thrall with her and I want you to be too."

I don't think we need to be in thrall of anyone. We just want to know what makes/made them tick.

Book Review: The Poet of Appetites: the Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher

2012-01-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

M.F.K. Fisher is pretty much the perfect writer in my eyes. I mean, come on! She writes exquisite prose about food. I've owned Joan Reardon's biography of M.F.K. Fisher for a while, and in keeping with my current obsession with biographies, I pulled this from the bookshelf of doom (where I can never find the book that I want, however, I usually find something that I want to read). I devoured it in two days. The stories that rivet me the most are the ones that I have some connection with. Books set in the Bay Area where I grew up and continue to live immediately have an "in."

I had just finished cooking school when M.F.K. Fisher's star went supernova. As an industry insider, I had a few chuckles over several veiled references to people in the food business who, although not named, were rather obvious if you were part of that culture and I was. It was a heady time. The Bay Area was truly at the forefront of the food revolution that sent people back to farmer's markets for organic lettuce and the local butcher counters featured free range chickens and Nimian Ranch beef and Peet's owned coffee and restaurants were theater. When I wasn't working (when wasn't I working?), I was eating out. There was Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower and Mark Miller and a host of other people who were rewriting food in America, and M.F.K. Fisher was the intellectual doyenne of them all. I had friends who were a lot braver than me and made pilgrimages to Glen Ellen, California, to have lunch with her. I adored her as a writer before I became a chef, as my love of language is on par with my love for the table.

This book reminded me of another biography of a strong, independent woman whose relationships were the proverbial nightmare and who was often the lone woman in a field of men, and that is Martha Gellhorn's biography. Both women struggled mightily with doubts regarding their writing, but whose editors probably had permanent ulcers from trying to "edit" them. Both of them had strengths that were regarded by others (and themselves) as weaknesses. Gellhorn was acknowledged as one of the premier war journalists of the twentieth century, and yet she despaired because she could never write a really good novel. Fisher's prose has been acknowledged as having few peers, and yet those around her kept pushing her to stop writing those "food" books and write novels. In old age, both women held "court" with younger admirers (indeed, this is almost shockingly identical). Gellhorn had her "chaps" and Fisher had her "foodies." And both shared a certain--how shall I put this--oh, hell, I'm just going to say it: both women had a real, bone-deep selfishness that perhaps was the flame to the fire of their art. I don't know. I just know that both of their lives were punctuated with fractured relationships, and both of them had extremely problematic relationships with their children. They were both exceptionally nomadic with a similar schizophrenic need for isolation and community. When they were isolated, they wanted company. When they had company, they longed to be alone. They spent a great deal of their life escaping their life.

Anyway, Reardon does a very fine job of capturing the elusive Mary Frances. We follow her palate from the orchards of Whittier to the cobble-stoned streets of Dijon to the brutal beauty of the California desert to the mustard-dotted fields of the Napa Valley to her last place, a ranch in Sonoma. It's fascinating watching a woman so in tune with the simple beauty of food and her surroundings that she turns the minutia of a simple meal into a verbal feast. Equally fascinating, I shuddered as I read about her yanking her children from this country to the next, refusing to give them the grounded childhood that she had had. It's clear from her letters that she really didn't want children who had child-like needs. She wanted mini-adults to ooh and ahh with her as they traipsed over France. It's a little mind-boggling that she was shocked that both children were often behind grade, because she had no compunction about taking them out of school and shoving them into whatever school she could find for three months here, four months there.

If we have the less than stellar mother, we also have the writer whose turn of phrase leaves me breathless. Reardon does a marvelous job of charting the trajectory of the aimless girl, Mary Frances, who becomes the formidable writer, M.F.K. Fisher. Reardon doesn't excuse Mary Frances, but neither does she hold back from giving Mary Frances her due. The chapters written of her first two marriages are especially fine, creating a solid sense of her growing strength as a writer. Highly recommended read.

Cranky Pants 2011

2012-01-09T08:38:00.000-08:00

Looking back over the books I've read in the last year, it's impossible not to recognize that I come across as, um, slightly cranky. A part of me thinks, I should lighten up, and another part of me says, why should I apologize because another writer hasn't done their job.

There are so many books that I've read lately that needed another six months worth of thought. And this is the truly tragic fallout from the current publishing clime, the publication of books with excellent bones that don't realize their potential. These books need a stern editor, not a marketing director, and yet that seems to be what is driving the publishing industry these days.

I'm not saying that every book needs to be literature, but I am saying that within its own specific niche, most books should be a lot better than what is currently being published. Even a beach read, which is how I categorize my own meager output, should be a damn good beach read. It should fulfill its purpose. Most books aren't about making earth-shattering statements. They are about entertaining us.

I was talking to a co-worker today about Michael Connelly. He doesn't hit it out of the park every single time, but I would never accuse him of being lazy. His plot busts are minimum (there is one in one of his Lincoln lawyer books that made my eyes hit the wall, but generally speaking, he's top notch in the plot department). He also thinks about his characters. THERE he is never sloppy. And he does something in a series that I find rare. He moves his characters forward. Sometimes it's more of a lurch than an arc, but he's not phoning it in and he never writes cliche. This is why I was so dissatisfied with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Every single character was a cliche, with the exception of Lisbeth Salander. And then, damn and blast, Larsson trots out the cliche at the end with a cheesy romance angle.

All I am asking is for simple entertainment. I'm not looking for literature. I'm looking for plot that doesn't make me squint, characterizations that aren't cliche or improbable, and some spark that is all an author's own.

The best books I read this year were mostly non-fiction (another plug for Schiff's Cleopatra, yowzah, that was beautifully written), with a few notable exceptions. The exceptions don't mean that they were perfect. It just means that they were magical enough that the author had me, owned me, and whatever stumbles they made I was willing to forgive them.

I felt that way about two books this year. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson and The Weissmans of Westport by Catherine Schine. The ending in "Last Stand" was far too dramatic in what is essentially a very quiet book, and there is an absurd plot issue in "Westport" that took me to the brink. However, both books say so loudly, "I love this story. I care about these people. They have become part of me and I hope they become part of you." And when you have that passion on the page, then a reader can forgive a lot. That is why cliche is so damning in a novel. Cliche is the universal. It's the phrase that is so ubiquitous that it has no meaning. It's the ultimate in familiar. When a character is nothing more than a bunch of cliches (as I found the character Blomkvist in "Girl") there's no mystery in the character itself. I'm not reading to find out who this character is. I know who he is. I was not surprised by ANYTHING he did as a character in "Girl." That book relies solely on the mystery of who Lisbeth Salander is. THAT's why I kept reading. Larsson clearly loved her enough to give her an identity outside of the cliched characters that populate his novel.

That's what I'm looking for. Authors who care enough about their story so that as readers we can pick ourselves up off the ground when there are any stumbles. Because there's enough magic to ward off the bruises.

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-29T18:08:00.000-08:00

Have people gone mad? It's gotten to the point where I think that I have been transported to another planet. Seriously, what in the hell is matter with people? Two books that I believed had serious, structural flaws have surfaced on a number of Best of 2011 lists, and I just finished the blockbuster best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I hadn't exactly been avoiding this book, but the hype turned me off (shades of Da Vinci Code), so I didn't really leap to purchase a copy. I kinda hoped my mother might read it and then lend it to me. Which didn't happen. Then I saw the movie trailer and I admittedly have a serious jones for Daniel Craig, and although I abhor screen violence toward women (I walked out on Silence of the Lambs three times), I thought, hmmm, the Craig factor might too overpowering to shun the movie. I decided to read the book so that I would have a sense of the plot in case I had to walk out at some point.

This book, despite all its hype and mega-sales is mediocre at best. At. Best.

First of all, although I write fiction, I would never presume that just because I have a proven facility with words, I could present myself as a journalist. It's a little like being a damn fine piano player and then thinking you can play the harp because they both have strings. Larsson's journalistic background undermines the first third of this book. Info dump after info dump after info dump pile on top of each other. Beyond some amusing lines every now and then, the dialogue is interchangeable. All the characters sound the same. The dialogue isn't relieved by any descriptive back story or physical tells. And, in fact, the back story in this novel is handled with a heavy-handed pen. Even worse, the main premise for the protagonist's taking off for the hinterlands of Sweden seems, well, manufactured beyond belief. If he's such a marvelous journalist, why are he and his partner (also, we're told, an amazingly competent journalist) so naive and trapped so easily. I mean, wouldn't you think after twenty years in the business they might check out the veracity of their source so that they wouldn't be the subject of a libel suit?

So, for me the book begins with an implausible premise, especially when the reader is regaled with exactly how good a journalist he is. In fact, he's portrayed as one of the one few moral voices left in financial journalism in Sweden. Except apparently he isn't. The reader is left with the impression that he's either incompetent or immoral. Anyway, it's a device to transport him to a remote location in Sweden to solve a locked room mystery, except this is its sister story, the remote island mystery. The mystery finally begins to reveal itself, which is interspersed with snippets of Salander's story. I have little to say about the mystery because if you've read as many mysteries as I have, then you most likely know the ending by Chapter Four. This book was no exception. Once I got the basic background, I had "solved" the mystery, even if I didn't know how it was done; this is why characterization in these books is key.

Which hello, just not there. Protagonist is a cliche character, the typical extremely attractive man with lots of smarts and a decent heart. His interactions with women are cliche. Even his interactions with Salander are cliche. How refreshing it would have been had these two not become lovers. She is the only character in the book who is not weighed down in cliche, and then damn it to hell, she turns cliche at the end as well.

So what do we have so far? Clumsily interjected back story, paragraph after paragraph of info dumps, pedestrian dialogue, and a majority of characterizations little more than recycled tropes. Let's list another major fail. Setting the majority of the book in a unique location begs for a tremendous sense of place, something that is a cornerstone of what I expect in most successful mysteries. Nope. We strike out on this front as well. I kept hoping that there would be a map at some point because I had such a hard time imagining where these houses were relative to the bridge. Other than being told it was cold (and this is the most glaring weakness of this book, we are told everything), I have only the sketchiest idea of what comprises this island's topography (other than one hill), it's flora (some trees and shrubs), and it's unique identity relative to this story. Other than it being an island and essentially the Vanger compound, it doesn't play into the novel at all. You might say, well, that should be enough. No. It's not. I suggest you read Martin Cruz Smith's Havana. I was sweating while I was reading that book because the descriptions of Cuba and the heat and the unrelenting humidity was such a part of the story. That book couldn't have occurred anywhere else. This book? I really didn't feel it was particularly Swedish, frankly.

Essentially, this book was a lot of soapbox wrapped up in a mystery. It was about exposing the level of violence toward women (as this is not unique to Sweden, it didn't strike me as particularly a reflection of Swedish society so much as a general issue in modern society). It was about exposing the level of support for Hitler by Swedish Nazis in World War II. It was about exposing the failures of the Swedish state to protect its wards. It was briefly about hackers and their world. It was not a successful novel. I struggled to get through the first third--questionable initial premise for the protagonist's trajectory; all this blather about the security agency that had no point--at which point the sexual abuse of Salander occurs, which is such a cheap, cheap shot for getting us into the novel, but I have to admit it worked.

And I felt that way throughout the novel. It was like the trifecta of cheap shots. Rape scene, bring out the Nazis, and how can we possibly forget the tried-and-true serial killer. Yahtzee! I know it's not fair, but I have just finished re-reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by le Carre where you have the most perfect blend of characterizations, back story, and plot. Which was a best seller in its own right. This is how far we have fallen. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is this decade's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Please.

Fads, Let Me List Them

2011-12-12T08:24:00.000-08:00

I generally listen to the news as I grin-and-bear (more bearing than grinning) my daily commute, however, one morning I was so out of it I just left it on the rock&roll station that is my husband's choice of ear food, and I noticed something about current music. I should place this in some context. The rock&roll station he listens to has an eclectic mix of current offerings, classic rock, and some blues thrown in to show how cool they are. Although owned by a huge media conglomerate, it has wisely realized that pre-programmed shows in this market won't work, and it seems that the DJs actually have some choice in what is played. So the other day I'm listening to a Beatles song and the next song up is something "today-ish," which is a nice way of saying I don't know who in the hell is singing.

What struck me throughout my entire drive is that current music and current style of writings are dove-tailing each other. Wildly popular music (and I even include Adele in this although I do adore her voice) is essentially notenotenotenote, different two notes, notenotenotenotenote. I assume this is due to the influence of rap, but there is virtually NO melody. However, this lack of melody is always compensated for by a kick-ass percussion background. I don't know enough about rap to make any sort of intelligent statement about it other than to me, personally, it's more spoken word, with a kick-ass beat to it.

Books these days are more or less the same. Little characterization for the main protags (or in some cases NO characterization--where's the "melody"), however, we do have kick-ass world-building (essentially the percussion of the novel), and the minor characters seem more thought out than the main characters. To me a book doesn't move forward unless the main protagonist is somehow affected by what happens in the book. All the world-building in the world can't save a book for me unless the main character moves.

This is why writing a mystery series is, inherently, limiting. Because aside from solving mysteries, your main protagonist needs to move emotionally, and how many personal epiphanies can one character have? I think you can have five books of epiphanies, and after that you either stop the series or the book becomes basically a soap opera with a mystery included. The mystery in a novel fulfills the same role as world building does in the fantasy novel. It is key, but it's not *key*, if you get my drift.

Fantasy novels are easy to pick on because world building is so integral to their structure, and even as I wade through popular reviews of such books, many of their readers *only* care about the world-building, so maybe the authors are writing to their readers; I don't know. I think a lot of mystery readers really only care about plot. The classic mystery's roots are embedded in Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, who never age and never change. Not that I haven't torn through the entire Christie oeuvre; I have. But in general, such one note protagonists don't work for me. A number of books I've read recently just don't *go* anywhere. Oh, physically they do, as in lots happens, and I can't say they aren't well written, because a lot of them are, but the main character stands still while everything happens around them. It's not a personal journey, which, at heart, I think every book needs to have at its core.

Or if it doesn't, then it's a comment on the character's existential crisis (and I don't usually throw those sorts of terms around because, well, how pretentious, but here I really do mean this). Two writers who pull this off are Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Frankly, most of the books I've read who have a moribund protagonist are *not* using this character as emblematic of modern existential angst, they are just being lazy, but indeed the whole point of Chandler and Hammett's novels *is* the existential centerlessness of Marlowe and Spade. So, yes, it can be done and done beautifully, but it must be part of the whole concept, not because, wow, the world building/plot so shiny, ultimately so hollow.

Time to re-read The Long Goodbye.

M is for Mystery Joins the Ranks

2011-12-04T09:13:00.000-08:00

M is for Mystery--the independent mystery bookstore that has been a bastion for readers and writers of mysteries for over a decade--began its fire sale last week. It now joins the ranks of those small independent bookstores that have closed their doors. This time around it doesn't seem to be a financial blow to the solar plexus as a result of the e-revolution or the discount revolution. Ed Kaufman is retiring. He sent out smoke signals about six months ago that he was ready to hang it up and did anyone want to buy the store. Would that I had that chunk of change. Talk about a dream come true. Sadly, I've got one kidlet still in college and another heading out for college next year and all extra cash (and then some!) is being funneled into tuition dollars. As no one in the mystery community stepped up to the plate, finally he sold the store to someone who is going the used book, antiquarian route.

It was telling that at the joint MWA/SINC Holiday party at the store yesterday the new owner didn't even step up to the mike to say hello to the local mystery community. I knew at least half of the people in the room; most of them were local writers. That the new owner didn't even feel compelled to say hello to us said to me that we won't have a role in his vision for the new store. Well, that's his right, and I'm not trashing him for that. It's just, well, sad. And it's chilling for people like me: writers with a limited market whose limited market happens to be mystery aficionados. The elimination of yet another mystery bookstore (Kate's in Massachusetts--another venerable institution for mystery readers and writers--closed last year) is another lost opportunity for marketing in a market that is shrinking as I type.

And as much I think that the e-revolution is here to stay, I will say unequivocally that browsing the shelves of a bookstore is not the same as browsing the net. Ed was having a 50% off sale, and, um, I went a little wild. I bought a ton of books that I'd actually seen ballyhooed on amazon but wasn't wowed by, but in the store reading a page here, a page there, I was hooked. I bought eight books. Granted, they were 50% off, but even if they had been 50% off on amazon, I STILL wouldn't have bought them. They didn't jump out at me. On a bookshelf, their covers were much brighter and shinier, and I could thumb through the book at random (not read an excerpt that is chosen for me).

That is the big difference here. I like the physical feel of a book, but I also love the ease of picking up an e-reader. Both have pluses as reads. But in terms of sales, I tend to buy lots in stores and when I purchase books online for my Kobo, I buy ONE book. Because browsing the compiled lists touted by amazon or Barnes and Noble is limited. It's always the books from the big publishers that are being pushed, never the small book that could delight. Sometimes you want the blockbuster and sometimes, damn it, you want to be delighted.

Anyway, this is yet another sad footnote in how the world of reading is changing. Thank you, Ed. As a reader I appreciate the love and dedication you put into your store, and as a writer? Ditto.

That OTHER Blog

2011-11-26T14:52:00.001-08:00

Where I talk a little bit about new novel's structure: www.penandprejudice.com.

Book Review: Blue Nights

2011-11-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

I should preface this review by saying that I adore Joan Didion's writing. There really is no one better at cataloguing the social chaos and energy that defines a specific shot of history than her. I grew up in the California of the 1960s and 1970s, and if anyone asks me about those years, I point to her. Like most of her readers, I read with such sadness about the death of her husband and daughter, and finished her book The Year of Magical Thinking with such profound respect; she defined unfathomable grief with words.

Blue Nights—her ode to her daughter, Quintana—is also a well-written book, but when I finished it, I slapped it down on my dining room table with a rare sense of irritation. With most books there is you, the reader, who is, hopefully, at the mercy of the author. The author pulls you into their world. Generally, you don't pull them into yours. When that happens, a book sort of fails. I didn't get pulled into Joan Didion's world. As a parent, I couldn't help but pull her into mine, and the parent in me was snorting in disbelief and sometimes outrage. There is an underlying question throughout the whole book: was she a good enough parent? I can't really answer that question. It's a question that all parents ask themselves frequently, although usually not hand-in-hand with mourning a child's death (and, yes, this is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, bar none). But it's hard not to stare in disbelief when she comments that her daughter was terrified that her father would go first because then Quintana would be under the care and responsibility of her mother. Why wouldn't she be terrified? This is the same woman who felt it was perfectly acceptable to bring her infant to a reporting assignment covering the fall of Saigon. Who thought it appropriate in response to this assignment to go out and buy a bunch of designer clothes. And while this disconnect with reality is a trademark of hers, it might work for her persona as a writer, it fails when we consider her as a parent. As a writer, we might find it privately amusing that she would fly from Honolulu and arrive in Hartford when it was below zero without a sweater. When it’s her kid shivering, then it’s impossible to not judge her. The reader takes a back-seat to the parent.

Didion's detachment has always been her strength. But it's an odd detachment, which is why I think it works so well in her writing. Because it's the detachment of the walking wounded. Someone so battered by reality that detachment is the only way to survive. It's the detachment of someone trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. As a parent (and please don't assume that I think I'm a fantastic parent--merely adequate), I'm listening to her questioning her efficacy as a parent, and I feel like shouting, honey, it's not about you. That's what parenting is. It's not about you. Which seems manifestly unfair because her writing has always been about her and not about her. But you can't carry that sensibility into parenting. I read over these verbal snapshots of her life and marriage, and all I can think of was that Quintana never got to be a child. She’s described as being precocious in this book, but to me it feels like more of a coping mechanism. They may have loved her unquestionably, but the Dunnes went on location, stayed in swanky hotels, wrote their articles, movie scripts, and books, and dragged her along for the ride. She had to become an adult in a child’s body.

So much for the personal issues I had with this book. We come to the writing. The last third of the book is devoted to Didion’s sense that she is losing her ability to write. It's part and parcel of other physical frailties, but although the physical maladies are terrifying, they pale in contrast to the idea that she's losing her truly wonderful way of parsing words. That her style is becoming trite, that an ability to write so clearly about the lack of center is now suffering from not having its own center.
And while I can't say that her writing falls short (the beginning of this book is as masterful a beginning as I've ever read), there is a sense of, um, where's the editor? Her repetition of phrases and concepts that in previous works united a bunch of seemingly disparate events to create a fractured whole, now does seem something of a tic.

Another stylistic choice that seemed to dominate this book was, for want of a better word, product placement. And by that I mean it is never a pair of shoes, a hotel, a sweater; it's Laboutins, the Dorchester, cashmere. Truly, are we supposed to lament that Bendel's is no longer the same? Even people are nothing more than product placement. This actress, this director gave a speech at Quintana's wedding.

Part of the strength of Didion's work written in the 1960s and the 1970s is that the protagonists of her essays were no different than you or I, except that maybe they were part of Manson's family. And although that is a hell of a difference, in her hands it was also not a hell of a difference. A "there but for the grace of God" sensibility dominated. In her current work everyone has a name. A big name. Almost like these larger than life people had no right to up and die. Unlike you and me. Because we don't have names. It's unsettling at first and then becomes annoying. It undercuts the real issue in this book. The loss of her daughter. Does it really matter that she went to school with and had dinner at this restaurant with this Hollywood icon? It doesn't make her passing any more tragic, although there is the hint that she was special because of it. When in reality, she was special because she was so loved.

In the end I certainly would recommend this book because Joan Didion is one of the most thoughtful and fantastic writers of her generation, but Blue Nights doesn't have the strength of The Year of Magical Thinking. I think this is the most personal of her books (for obvious reasons), but it's also one of her weaker books, perhaps the inevitable fall out of the detached finally becoming attached with little to attach to.

Guest Blogger Ann Parker

2011-11-10T09:49:00.001-08:00

Dear Readers: You're in for a real treat today. I'm part of a blog tour for Ann Parker, whose writing I adore. Seriously, there are people like me who can, on occasion, write, and there are people who are artists with words. Ann is one of these writers. I've had the privilege and joy to watch her write her way through three books, and here now is a spotlight on number four. If you like mysteries and you love historicals, Ann Parker is the writer for you.

Eat Well and Thrive… or Not – by Ann Parker

Firstly, I want to thank Claire Johnson for the chance to guest post on Roux Morgue as part of my virtual tour for MERCURY’S RISE, the fourth in my Silver Rush historical mystery series.

Since I write mysteries, people die and my sleuth, Leadville saloon-owner Inez Stannert, must ferret out the criminal and the crime. This latest book in my series takes Inez to Manitou Springs, a fast-rising health resort and tourist destination, where there was a whole lotta dying going on, not all of it (or even most of it) of a nefarious nature.

In 1880, during the time the book takes place, Manitou was famous for its mineral waters. It also had a mild climate, wide open spaces, and beautiful scenery. It had some very high-class (for the West, anyway) hotels, and it had many many physicians. The reason being that Manitou was a “destination resort” for many from the East Coast and Europe who suffered from a variety of ailments, particularly tuberculosis.

The cause of tuberculosis, or consumption as it was popularly called, was still unknown in 1880. Robert Koch, the physician who would discover the bacteria that causes the disease, was still conducting his research in Germany. Even though no one knew for certain what caused this dreaded disease, that didn’t stop physicians from developing their own theories and regimens for “curing” or at least slowing its progress.

Diet, in particular, was seen as an important element in controlling TB. However, some of those diets are pretty alarming by today’s standards: if the tuberculosis didn’t kill you, it seemed that your plugged arteries probably would. For instance, a Fannie Farmer cookbook from 1904 (long after Koch’s discovery), advises a dining schedule that a Hobbit would appreciate: besides breakfast, dinner, and supper, “there should be a luncheon in the morning, another in the afternoon, and still another before retiring.” Fats, in the form of cream, butter, olive oil, bacon, and beef fat were part of the recommended diet. And eggs. Lots of eggs. Preferably raw. Some doctors advised 18 eggs a day. Milk and beef were also staples of the consumptive’s diet (and we’re talking full-fat milk here, cream and all).

Still, eggs, cream, and beef fat would have been far preferable to the “slaughterhouse cure,” that became popular among consumptives in Denver in 1879. This particular cure involved drinking the blood of freshly slaughtered oxen and cows. And if we’re to segue into talking other comestibles taken to forestall the march of tuberculosis, I should mention the patent medicines and nostrums peddled to a desperate public, who lived in fear of the “white plague.” These so-called medicines and tonics contained ingredients such as cod-liver oil, lime, arsenic, chloroform, turpentine, kerosene, the ever-present alcohol, and yes, mercury.

We can all shake our heads in dismay and wonder what people were thinking of back then, to turn to some of these diets and remedies. But we have the virtue of hindsight. What will folks a couple generations from now think of our efforts to tame diseases such as cancer with diet? It would be interesting to know…

-----------BIO-----------

Ann Parker is a California-based science/corporate writer by day and an historical mystery writer by night. Her award-winning Silver Rush series, featuring saloon-owner Inez Stannert, is set in 1880s Colorado, primarily in the silver-mining boomtown of Leadville. The latest in her series, MERCURY’S RISE, was released November 1. Publishers Weekly says, “Parker smoothly mixes the personal dramas and the detection in an installment that’s an easy jumping-on point for newcomers.” Library Journal adds, “Parker’s depth of knowledge coupled with an all-too-human cast leaves us eager to see what Inez will do next. Encore!” Learn more about Ann and her books at http://www.annparker.net

MERCURY’S RISE and the other Silver Rush mysteries are available from independent booksellers, amazon.com, and Barnes and Noble.

Leave a comment on this post to be eligible to win a Silver Rush mystery prize! Winner will be announced later this week. To see the rest of Ann’s virtual tour, check out her Appearances page on her website.

A Farewell

2011-11-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

I took down the rant I put up yesterday because it doesn't serve any purpose other than to paint me as a crank with a grudge. Not that I don't feel strongly about these things, but...enough.

Anyway, on to not necessarily lighter but certainly more important matters. We finally had a wee little send off for my uncle today. He died a few months ago, but my aunt was quite sick herself and it's taken this long for her to bounce back. She and my uncle were good friends with Jessica Mitford, so a funeral was not in the picture! We just had a get together at my cousin's house, with boxes of See's candy (my uncle had something of a sweet tooth) on every surface. I made a cake, and I got to hug a lot of people I don't see that often; people who knew me and my sister as small children and now we're in our fifties. My uncle loved a good party, even better was a party with his family around him. He would have approved. Cheers, Uncle Fred.

amazon's march to the sea

2011-10-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

On the heels of post at that OTHER blog (www.penandprejudice.com) regarding the disconnect between technology and publishers, this morning I picked up the business section of my local paper to read that amazon has made a proprietary relationship with DC comics. Although there seems to be a little backtracking on just how exclusive (initially you couldn't even access DC's publications on a Kindle app), the essential bones are that if you're into graphic novels? Buy a Kindle Fire.

Barnes and Noble responded by pulling all of DC's material from their shelves, because they feel that being dissed in the electronic arena is tantamount to an act of war. I get the sense that DC was surprised at the vehemence of their response, but then B&N are fighting for their lives. The debut of the Kindle Fire is smack down competition to their color Nook, and then in a classic one-two punch, amazon delivered the second blow with this sweetheart deal with DC.

I'm not a graphic novel person, but as I mentioned yesterday, you want to capture the demographic below thirty-five, then you'd better provide some visual candy. Of course, graphic novels are so beyond visual candy, but there is a reason why they and manga are so popular. Visuals, my friends. Visuals. Look at the popularity of tumblr. I moseyed on over there and was immediately struck by the lack of words. Although words are my thing, I can't deny that visuals now seem to be a key aspect of social media. Note the lack of graphics here!

So what's a DC fan to do? Buy a Kindle Fire? This brings us to the issue of torrenting, essentially piracy.

(1) There are people who just don't believe in paying for artistic content period. I suspect that few of them produce artistic content, otherwise they might understand why those of us who are victims of torrenting are a little outraged at this viewpoint, even as we are hopeless to combat it.

(2) Then there are those who think that artists charge too much. This is the push behind cheap e-books. There are many legitimate arguments to be made that the actual printing of a book is NOT the gross amount of the final price. Although it's not insignificant, it certainly doesn't support the notion that most people who want cheap e-books harbor: that readers should get an e-book at something less than a cup of coffee because publishers are now not printing them.

(3) There are people who are poor and who bootleg because it's either that or staring at four blank walls.

(4) Now we come to that elusive group that seems to be responding to DC's decision. Those who are perfectly willing to pay for content--and actually WANT to support artists--provided they feel it's reasonable. They don't want to get ripped off. If they feel they are getting ripped off, then then will pirate with glee.

The material is out there. We all know that. I can Google both of my books and find torrenting sites galore that feature my books. But I try to tell myself that most people want to support me as a no-name author. But if you piss people off (witness the reader outrage when Michael Connelly's publisher decided to protect hardcover sales by making the e-book MORE expensive than the hardcover), then you're alienated a group of people who heretofore had been loyal customers--as opposed to scumbag pirates. And most of these people have laptops. And Internet browsers. And they know how to download.

I think we'll see some serious backtracking here from DC. Because they've pissed off an important segment of their market when there is an alternative market. An alternative market that is FREE.

More frustration in the land of self-publishing

2011-10-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

I've updated my self-publishing blog. Read my thoughts here: www.penandprejudice.com.

I also finished a book last night: Julian Barnes and his Booker Prize winner: "The Sense of an Ending." There is something about intelligent Brits that always makes me feel dumb. I don't feel that way about American writers that I think are brilliant. But a very smart English writer leaves me a little ashamed of my ignorance. In fact, they make me feel ignorant. This book did that. I rant and rave here about how the I.Q. points of most books I pick up have, collectively, dropped about 100 points. This book is not like that at all. Smart. Very smart and beautifully written. I recommend.

It reminds me of two books that I love very much: Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" and McEwan's "On Chesil Beach." There is the same sense of time and an unreliable narrator and epiphany and sadness and personal tragedy and age and defeat, all wrapped up in gorgeous writing.

Signal Boost

2011-10-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

New column on the perils of publishing in the digital age! Check it out: www.penandprejudice.com.

State of Morgue

2011-10-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

What a grueling few months. It seems appropriate to comment in bullet form because, well, that seems to be how my mind is working these days. In short bursts. Because that's indicative of how much time I have.

I have stalled on marketing my romance based on Austen's Pride and Prejudice (my version is called Pen and Prejudice) due to work suckage. Given that my life will not be my own until after the first week in November, my plans of getting this out the door by Christmas is now something of a pipe dream. However, I'm making lists. LISTS! of what I need to do once work has calmed down.
I have not read a good book in ages and then I did. Frankly, I'm not very interested in this period of history--I think you have to be into military history and carnage on a level that makes the Tudors look like pantywaists--but I will say that Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra was delightful. It's another one of those histories that is based on very little actual sources, but she wrings as much as she can out of the paucity of sources and does so in such an engaging, humorous, sure voice that the centuries melt away. I admired very much the way this book was written. I can't vouch for the interpretation of the sources, but I can tell you that Ms. Schiff deserved that Pulitzer. It's so refreshing to read a book where the author can write! Eventually I'll put up a formal review on my Goodreads page, but this is really worth picking up and devouring.
I decorated the house for Halloween today. I love fall. I love the colors. I love the shadows. I love how the sun has a cool heat about it. Hey, I live in California. We had a high of 80 degrees today, and yet in the shade there were hints of chill.
Given the publication of the trade paperback of Roux Morgue this August, I've decided to write another Mary Ryan book. I've been toying with the idea for a few months now. I need to run it by the powers that be at PPP, and at their okay it's going to be full steam ahead.

Hello, trade paperback. How lovely to see you!

2011-09-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! The trade paperback of Roux Morgue has just come out. Nothing more satisfying than walking into my local Barnes and Noble and seeing my book featured on their "New Mysteries" shelf. Wow. Hmmm. Am now considering writing another Mary Ryan book. After flogging Pen and Prejudice, of course.

New Day, New Idea

2011-08-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

So, we've embarked on a little experiment. Check it out. I don't think there's any possibility of failure here. It's about exploring my options in this changing publishing environment.

www.penandprejudice.com

Made a Decision Today: Campaign Week One

2011-08-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

I have a finished book that can't find a home. I worked on it for a year and have been shopping it for nearly eight months. I could say that the market sucks right now and make a lot of excuses about how the demise of Borders and the explosion of e-publishing has changed the submission game. All this is true, but it doesn't change the really salient fact here: it's still on my hard drive and not in your hot little hands.

I believe in this book. It's a Jane Austen pastiche, essentially, a modern take on Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with some crossover with Bridget Jones' Diary meets I Don't Know How She Does It. There's a wee side bit about trying to write and not feed your kids Cheerios for dinner every night, and some meta on writing in general. The book is extremely faithful to the original plot line, except our heroine isn't a 19th-century unmarried woman in a society where marriage is the only game in town and she doesn't have the money or a title to attract suitors. My heroine is a woman who's trying to succeed as a genre writer while raising her kids and working full time. I'd like to think their sense of integrity is the same. Oh, we also have a dishy male suitor who pushes all the wrong buttons, but by the end of the book ends up pushing all the right ones.

So, I'm taking the plunge into self-publishing. I'm done with sending out endless queries. I toyed with sending it directly to smaller romance publishers to market and bypassing the agent route, but this takes an inordinate amount of time, and I feel I'm out of time. Do I want to wait another six months for a response to my submission(s). No, I do not. The market is only going to get worse, not better. I thought I'd use this space as a "travelogue" of sorts, documenting my experiment with the "new" market.

Certainly I can't do worse. If it sits on my hard drive, I won't make ANY sales.

Campaign Week One

1. Read through it one more time for typos.

By the way, the title is Pen and Prejudice.

Book Review: One Day by David Nicholls

2011-08-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I find this book very analogous to "Eat, Pray, Love." I really enjoyed the writing style of the book, but ultimately the book fell apart for me. I assume that this writer is the Nicholas Sparks of Britain. Being British, of course he's much more erudite and funny, but the feel of this book is the same as his American counterpart: high-brow popular romance that you're not too embarrassed to be seen with. Scratch that. I would never read a Nicholas Sparks book in public. I would have no problem reading David Nicholls on the subway. Again, a smart, engaging book that unfortunately is without a heart.

I'm not going to talk about the ending, because it seems to me that by the time I had reached the ending I was up to my eyeballs in disenchantment, but suffice it to say, David, what in the HELL were you thinking? Did you think this would elevate it to literature light? Catapult it out of clever romance into something less cheesy? I'm really curious as to your motivation.

Anyway, this is the story of Emma and Dexter and their twenty-year friendship. It might have been a little more ambitious if Emma had been the wanker and Dexter the decent one, but why quibble at this point. There's a nice plot device where we see these two and where they are in their respective lives every St. Swithin's Day. The major problem is that Dexter is too much of an asshole that Emma's love for him starts to undermine her character. She's presented as someone whose integrity is essentially Dexter's port in a storm, and although she cuts him loose at various points in their friendship, these seem like life-saving maneuvers on her part, not kicking his shallow ass to the curb maneuvers. This continuously undercuts HER characterization. She has a series of her own slightly unethical relationships, which I suppose are supposed to humanize her, but if she's willing to sleep with her boss, then why isn't she willing to compromise herself with Dexter who she's very much in love with? I don't understand.

The reader becomes very invested in these characters as the novel moves forward over the years, although Dexter's marriage is something of a cypher, as is Emma's transformation to best-selling author. All of a sudden Emma is chic just like Dexter suddenly falls in love with an ice maiden. These transitions are jarring, but I sort of went with it, but then as the ending unfolded I really resented them. Rather like eating a cookie that I thought was okay at the time, but then realized that it gave me a stomach ache thirty minutes later.

We do not understand why Emma continues to love Dexter until a series of scenes at the very end of the novel. Again, I don't quite understand the motivation of tacking this on at the very end. Because by this point, we STILL don't like Dexter and that dislike isn't dislodged by the touching scenes at the end. It's a little too little and far too late.

Book Review: The Magician King by Lev Grossman

2011-08-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

Lev Grossman recently wrote an article about being both a writer and a critic, and the potential ethical landmines. I wrestle with this concept a lot. Okay, I'm not a critic. I'm a reader who has opinions about books. He's the book critic for Time, which means he has oodles more cred in this department than I do. Although I continue to rumble the issue around in my mind, the bottom line is, I guess, that I'm a writer and I read. I strive to be the best writer I can, and I also have opinions about the books I read. I think we have to leave it at that. My writing needs to stand on its own terms, separate from how I view other writers' works. Also, inherent in having a foot in both worlds is that if you don't think I am uber critical of my own writing and fully aware of all its faults, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

Anyway, onto the review. Some months back on this blog I reviewed Grossman's book The Magicians. An admitted Harry Potter fanatic, I inhaled this book and reveled in its strengths and forgave many of its weaknesses because the world-building was so fascinating and beautifully written. The moribund characterization of the protagonist, Quentin, was something of a warning bell, but in a well-written book there is often an energy that will carry you along, successfully eliding over the sticky bits, and this was such a book. I ended that review with a bit of a "hmmmm" about Quentin, but all in all, a very enjoyable, fascinating read.

*****SPOILERS*****

In The Magician King we return to Fillory, where Quentin, Janet, Elliott, and Julia reign as monarchs. Monarchs of what I can't say. They essentially do nothing. Their jobs seem nothing more than titles as they faff away their days doing, well, nothing; this becomes very important by the end of the book, IMO. Two competing story lines fill out of the bulk of the book: Quentin's quest to become some sort of hero (why he is compelled to become a hero when he was clearly the hero in the last book is inexplicable--defeating Martin Chatwin wasn't enough?), and the back story of Julia's quest to assume her rightful place as a magician. In a fully successful novel, two competing story lines often ramp up the tension as the reader bounces back and forth from one cliffhanger to another.

Interestingly, although nearly a third of the book is back story (usually a pacing killer), Julia's story dominates this novel completely. She is accessible and sympathetic as a character in all the ways that Quentin is not, although neither character is particularly nice. Quentin began this series as a smart-ass arrogant know-it-all, and he finishes the series to date basically the same. I don't see much of a difference between the Quentin at the end of Book 1 and Quentin at the end of Book 2. In fact, his odd friendship with Benedict feels out of place; shoehorned in as a plot device. There was a lot of tell not show in this book, with Quentin's friendship with Benedict only one example. There was a lot of, well, I don't know why I liked him, but I did. I don't know why I need to travel to the underworld to talk to a kid that I haven't really connected with and who clearly doesn't like me, but I do. I get the sense that Grossman is trying to elevate Quentin's character by these acts of bravery, and yet, IMO, they don't work because Quentin as a character hasn't grown enough to successfully explain his motivations. We are left with a "I must, therefore I do, otherwise the plot won't move forward" type of sensibility.

Julia on the other hand! Wow, I loved her back story: her isolation, her slowly disintegrating relationship with her family, and her choosing magic over her family. THIS was what was missing in the first book with the Brakebills students. How their relationships with their parents were so abysmal that pretty much across the board they were able to dust off these relationships like so much dandruff. Not Julia, her story was beautifully handled. I found myself wanting to skim the "present day" Quentin story to get to Julia's back story because it was so compelling. Her characterization was flawless, which is why I don't get why Quentin is STILL a sarcastic wanker. Clearly, Grossman is capable of writing a complex, fascinating sympathetic character complete with warts and flaws. Unfortunately, it's not his protagonist.

This is one of those unusual situations where the events that surround a main character should change him/her but do not. I think that part of the problem is Quentin's continuous snarky asides; they undercut the tragedy. By the time we reach the end of the book and Quentin faces the ultimate tragedy, there is no sense that Quentin is capable of mourning, because he's not even mourning Alice in this novel. She's become the "She Who Must Not Be Named" character that no one dare mention. Which means that the one avenue whereby we could see a wounded Quentin is cut off.

So we come to the end of the book. I found the last twenty pages inexplicable. I couldn't understand the logic behind them. It just didn't make sense. You banish the one person responsible for saving the magical world because he doesn't have a passport?????????????????????????????????? Excuse me! And everyone around him is like, sorry, buddy, those are the breaks. Catch you on the flip side. The loss of Quentin's crown means there is no place for him in Fillory, except he does BUGGAR ALL, so WTF. It feels like he's merely a placeholder, his crown nothing more than a passport. Clearly these royal roles mean nothing because they are casually handed out like a box of chocolates. Josh. Poppy. You're up! Why couldn't they have created yet another role for him, because, frankly, his role as king seems equally manufactured.

It's obvious that there will be yet another book in this series, which is why Quentin is yet AGAIN in exile from Fillory. I anticipate in Book 3 he will either resurrect Alice or he will meet Alice2. I think that Grossman could have gone a long way in humanizing Quentin if he'd had him faffing about much less and mourning Alice much more. At this point Quentin is pretty much in the same place at the end of Book 2 as he was at the end of Book 1. He hasn't moved that much as a character. He announces he wants to be a hero, the genesis of which is never explained. Why does he want to be a hero? I'm still wondering. To assuage his conscience over Alice's death? To save others because he couldn't save her? I honestly don't know. All I know is that this was an exceptionally clumsy end to a book that had many moments of elegant, punchy writing.

At this point, Grossman's sobriquet as the writer of the adult Harry Potter has even more cred as he begins to share J. K. Rowling's fatal flaw: exceptional world-building at the expense of his characters.

Guest Blogger Camille Minochino!

2011-07-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

So, I'm turning over the reins to someone else for this installment. Camille Minichino is one of the reasons why I'm a published author. She's the sort of person the word "stand-up" comes to mind. Tireless in her support of my writing, I'm only one of a legion of writers who she's championed over the years. But I'll let her speak for herself. She does it better.

Mangia Mangia

Food and crime novels seem a perfect fit. Especially for cozy mysteries.

Action heroes in geopolitical thrillers don't have a lot of time to cook or even to stop for a snack, what with aborting the assassination of a world leader, keeping greater Los Angeles from falling into the Pacific, or saving the world from total nuclear destruction. Imagine a Jack Bauer-like man of action in a cave in a country ending in –stan, pulling a spinach and cheese soufflé out of the oven.

But cozies, or traditional whodunits, are designed for comfort, with nothing too graphic to deal with and justice for all in the end. And nothing says comfort like food, whether it's a special gravy or brownies with icing.

Sophia Loren, nee Scicolone, said, "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."

(I doubt it. Not with that body.)

I express my Italian-ness at dessert time. I'll pick at the pasta, pass on the chicken and veal parm', and double up on panna cotta and gelato.

My first protagonist, Gloria Lamerino of the Periodic Table Mysteries, eats this way and looks more like me than like Sophia. Gloria's fictional diet is like my real diet, with lots of affogato and tiramisu and three kinds of biscotti. Much to my embarrassment, cannoli appear at least seven times in my first novel, "The Hydrogen Murder."

Did you think it was a coincidence that I'm starting my July blog tour for "The Square Root of Murder" on the site of a pastry chef?

Food and drink are the writer's friends, setting-wise. They hit all the senses and immediately establish the ambiance. We feel the textures in a mouthful of endive and bleu cheese, see the array of colors in a multi-bean salad, breathe in the aroma of fresh baked bread, and taste everything. We can hear the bubbles of sparkling water and the sizzle of a steak on the grill. A few food words—coffee and an almond croissant, French toast with thick strawberry syrup—and we've got the reader salivating.

Menu choices are also a giveaway device to identify characters. We build expectations about the person who orders the shrimp salad as a main course vs. the one who craves a burger and fries. Whereas in life, the same person may enjoy both at different times, in fiction, it works better to nail down a food trope.

I did my first protagonist, Gloria Lamerino, a favor by giving her a love of garlic. I hate it, and all my life have had to answer the question, "How can you be Italian and not like garlic?"

In my defense, I've come up with Italian G words that I do love: Galileo, Ghirlandaio, Ghirardelli, Gilda in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, maybe even Garibaldi. (But not Garofalo, though I think she'd be great as Gloria in the movie version I've dreamed up.)

There also seem to be gender roles with regard to food in books and movies. Men make pancakes; women make salad. Women always have a baguette sticking out of the grocery bag; men carry six-packs. Men bite into a donut; women pick off a few molecules of a muffin and utter "Mmm." And of course, with some celebrity exceptions: men are chefs; women cook.

As a reader, I tend to judge characters by what they cook (or not) and what they eat. As a mystery writer, one thing I know: I could never kill a pastry chef.

Camille Minichino is a retired physicist and dessert lover turned writer. Her akas are Margaret Grace (The Miniature Mysteries) and Ada Madison (The Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries). The first chapter of "The Square Root of Murder," debuting July 5, is posted at http://www.minichino.com.

Father's Day: Problematic Day

2011-06-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

My father is now dead. He died exactly how he didn't want to die, by inches, bits, and pieces, as his body kept telling him that he was done. Yet modern medicine ignores the body's telltales signs and keeps coming up with medications and treatments that prolong our lives beyond their "sell" date. When he lost his capacity to swallow, I thought to myself, christ on a bicycle, if that doesn't signal that the body is done, then what does? And yet, doctors also take oaths that demand they do everything to preserve the sanctity of life. I'll let the ethicists debate this one, because, really, at this point I don't have a frigging clue what that means.

Anyway, that's not the point of this piece, which is, the problematic father. My dad was a man of unbelievable strengths and profound weaknesses, and it's hard to think of him without acknowledging the whole: the brilliance tempered with the massive self doubt and hatred; the wit juxtaposed to the caustic jibe; the gentle man whose politics were so right that they made my teeth ache.

But on this day I think I should concentrate on the good. The trips to Tilden with my sister for pony and carousel rides. The Sunday afternoons spent at Oakland's Fairyland. Endless games of pee wee golf at that place on Telegraph Ave. I'm sure all this was unspeakably boring, and yet he weathered through it and I don't remember any complaints. The carousel at Tilden still survives, as does Fairyland. The pee wee golf place got swallowed up years ago by an office building. Some landmarks of my childhood still survive--not many--but enough that I've taken my children to these places and in the process walked in my father's shoes for a bit.

So, yes, I chose to remember those Sundays at Fairyland and Tilden, and hot dogs at Oscars. Good times, Dad. Thanks..

My Hair

2011-06-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have a love/hate relationship with my hair. At one time it was my glory. Truly. I have gobs of it and when I was younger the color is what is known in Victorian novels as "titian." I was extremely vain about it, and damn it all, I had a right to be. At various points in my life I grew it so long that I could sit on it.

As I stare at fifty-five this year, my hair is now the bane of my existence. Mostly because it grows like a frigging weed (always has), and it is now starting go grey. Which in and of itself isn't that much of a tragedy, however, when you already have "spunky" hair, grey hair, which in and of itself is spunky enough (a nice way of saying porcine-like), grey spunky-squared hair is a BITCH.

I must keep it short because the grey has a mind of its own, and if it's any longer than two inches I start looking like a one of the witches from Macbeth. Not a look I want to cultivate.

Unfortunately, whenever I feel blue or insecure or just fidgety I think, wow, that grey is depressing. I should do something about it. You'd think I would learn. The first time I felt this way I had a biggish book event looming, and two nights before I got a case of the wibbles and dyed it. Sigh. Because I have WAY TOO MUCH HAIR, and I didn't cover it nearly enough. I ended up looking calico. That mottling on cats is adorable. On me, not so much. I should have gone to a salon and had them cover it up with something, anything, but I didn't. I asked my daughter to help me apply another coat. Two hands are better than one, right? I ended up with muted calico. Needless to say I wore a beret to that event. In the middle of a northern California fall day. The temp was maybe 85 degrees at seven at night.

But it doesn't stop there. I did it again, the NIGHT BEFORE another event, thinking it was just that particular brand. It wasn't. I had shorter hair by this point, but it was not so much calico as lopsided--lighter on one side. I spent the entire night with my head slightly tilted so that people would suspect the light was wrong, not that this fool woman yet again was playing Revlon roulette.

The last three weeks have been grim for various reasons, and I've been feeling hermitish and blue, and in a fit of insanity, yes, you guessed it, I dyed my hair last night. It's a horrible color. Medium brown, my ass. It's kind of a deep red that probably would look cool on someone twenty-five, but on me it only looks desperate. Even more horrible, it looks REALLY permanent. Like it will take a good six months to grow out.

Sigh and damn.

Clearly, she cannot be taught.

What Every Writer Needs: An Editor

2011-06-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

So. I've been browsing through my book reviews, and still debating whether it's wise to write and review, and I don't want to chuck the writing but I enjoy reviewing, and, oh, crap. What to do, what to do, what to do? While browsing I keep noticing the fatal flaw that dogs nearly all of these books that are good books but fall short of great, and that's the absence of the editor. And by that I mean that these books might have been vetted by a marketing crew, a production crew, and possibly a copyeditor (although even that is becoming rare), but NOT AN EDITOR. Or at least undergoing what I consider a rigorous editorial review.

The classic role of an editor is to browbeat, chastise, sternly lecture, and/or praise a writer into producing the best possible book with the material they have. Being something of a Hemingway and Fitzgerald fanatic, I often reread the letters between them and their editor, Max Perkins, and I think, wow, that is just not happening today. As New York publishing continues to flounder, the traditional editorial system is going by the wayside. You can see it in the writing. There is a lack of focus, a fuzziness. A good editor sees the promise of a whole book and does everything they can to push the author to her or his best writing self. It's having a sense of a book's integrity that is unique to that book.

I'm even talking about schlock. There is a case to be made for decent schlock. I've spent many rainy afternoons curled up on the couch reading decent schlock. It has a place on my bookshelf and rainy afternoons are tailor made for the potboiler. But even a decently written potboiler needs a second eye. Someone who says, wow, the schlock in Chapter 5 is marvelous. But Chapter 8 is largely unadulterated crap so rewrite or remove.

It's a jungle out there. Competition for people's time is fierce. It seems to me that instead of firing the editors, we should be hiring MORE of them. There are so many books that I've read in the last three years that I believe could have been great if handled by an editor with a fearless pen.

Book Review: Popular Crime

2011-05-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

I continue to have mixed feelings about reviewing books because I think I'm basically polluting my own waters by commenting on my fellow writers. But things are changing so quickly in the book-writing world with the advent of e-publishing, that I'm not sure that I will even have a viable writing career unless I take the bull by the horns myself and extract myself from the current publishing model. My latest novel (a pastiche of Pride and Prejudice set in the mystery writing world) is currently been rejected by a number of agents, and I'm seriously now looking to self-publish it. I think it's a fun book and a decent read, but no takers so far. I refuse to let it sit on my hard drive--after all I spent a year of my life working on it-- so as the rejections roll in, I'm now leaning toward publishing it myself.

How in the hell does this relate to book reviews? Well, I'm really curious at what is currently being published, because I know so many authors with a tried and true record of sales who are being dropped by their publishers. I follow what is being published fairly closely to try to get a handle on the market and see if I fit in (um, no), and increasingly I'm in shock at what is hitting the shelves.

To whit. (I love typing that.) Bill James' book Popular Crime."Now I understand he's written something of the bible on baseball and I really do like his style. It's the type of writing that always charms me. Breezy, funny, knows when to turn off the sarcasm and get serious (something I struggle with). I cannot fault him his voice in this book, and I have an admittedly unabashed (and unapologetic!) fascination with crime. This writer even got a spot on Colbert, which is why I bought it.

But. It's not a book. There's no central theme, no overreaching arc that I could point to and say, this is what Bill James' thinks of crime. I know what he thinks of specific crimes, but I don't have much of handle on what he thinks our relationship to crime should be. Seriously, that it was a book at its most sneaky is trying to do. Woo you over to the dark side. This can't woo us because it's too far-reaching and not specific enough.

It would have worked as series of magazine articles. Maybe. It's largely a catalogue of gruesome crimes, with some not-so-veiled criticisms of the legal system, criticisms of the police, a panache of historical commentary, and his opinions on various crimes (did Lizzie Borden do it sort of thing). That's it. There's the throwing out of possible themes but none of them gel into what I would call a central theme that runs through all these anecdotes. And I kept looking for it, something that binds all this together in one package and, well, it's not there. It seems to me that something could be made about popular crime and the media, how it changed over history. People's reading habits. Did technology fuel the interest in violent crime. If yes, how? If no, why not? He tries to get there but he doesn't ever succeed because I think there's too much of him in the books for that to work. Plus, that would have taken some deep wading into sociological issues that I don't think he's interested in exploring. He could have written a book about police departments and the historical evolution of crime fighting. Mistakes that are no longer made. Mistakes that are continuing to be made. And, again, there's hints of this but no real cigar we can smoke. I can think of several directions this book could have gone in, and the principle problem is that it touched on many but refused to dedicate itself to one or even two themes.

As I end up saying nearly every time I write one of these reviews: where is his editor? Once again, we have a very decent writer who doesn't have a lighthouse operator showing him his way. That is what a good editor does. She/he is the beam of light that says, "This is your safe harbor. That idea, that construct, that context is going to smash your writerly efforts on some pretty nasty rocks. Come this way."

Blog Stuff

2011-05-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

So. I have feeds for several blogs and the majority of them are food-centered blogs. (There is one that I absolutely adore, even if it's primarily about men's shoes. It's at times totally irreverent and a tad aging frat boyish and bone-deep charming and sometimes achingly sweet and touching. I'm grateful I don't live in the south because I have a feeling there are tons of men with exactly this swoon-inducing combination of traits--not the aging frat boy part but even in him it has a boyish come hither about it).

And you know what kills me? They can use wonderful pictures of lemons and strawberries and cool plates and wonderful champagne flutes and I write mostly about ideas and it's really hard to find pictures about ideas. You know? So this blog is visually flat--although I'd like to think intellectually as sassy as a lemon. Yet we are a visual culture these days, and I'd like to give this space more punch and I'm stymied;

Stymied, I tell you!

I'm Back to Normal

2011-05-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

I'm generally a very happy person. Glass half-full is my motto at the best of times. However, there was a really dark period in my life, which was exacerbated by moving to the burbs and a bunch of issues that aren't any one's business but me. I can honestly say that I was so clueless regarding my depression that I couldn't even label it depression until my therapist forced me to name it. It took a long time to go away completely, and I didn't even realize that vestiges of it hung on for a good long time; sort of like a prolonged hangover of the psyche.

But I knew that it was finally finished and buried (one hopes forever) by the fact that I'm cooking again. Serious cooking, pouring over magazines and web sites and itching to try new things. I'm also gardening (interestingly that was the first thing to come back), and I've just ordered a slew of sewing patterns. Although I might not seem like it from this blog, I am a revoltingly domestic person and my love of all that went when I became depressed. And that's what is so awful about depression. It cuts you off from you. It's like your soul has been put in locked box and the key is nowhere to be found. You know that you used to cook, garden, and sew, but those are nothing but memories. For the life of you, you can't fathom who that woman was. When you come back from something like that, then you find yourself looking at your depressed self and saying the same thing: who was that poor woman?

Anyway, I've just purchased a slow cooker from Target now that my working ass is full time. The first recipe definitely needed some serious tweaking although the bones are there. The dog has claimed the garden from me, but we have a large yard and there will always be the debris to clean up. And the watering, since the dog ate the wonderful irrigation system my husband toiled over for months. Oh, and I think I'll make myself a cape for when I attend those crazy Harry Potter functions. I'm always decidedly under dressed.

Yes, I'm back. What a long strange trip it's been and I never, ever want to go back.

Wow, Authors Are Caught in the Middle Here

2011-05-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

So, I just finished Michael Connelly's The Fifth Witness. If you like courtroom procedurals, this is your kind of book. I have several friends who are D.A.s, and I like books that delve into the strategy aspect of a trial. Unfortunately, the plot is nearly identical to the first book in the Mickey Haller series, The Lincoln Lawyer, but Connelly is a compelling writer so I think most people will enjoy this if it is a little deja vu-ish in terms of plot. Personally, I didn't think that the characterization was all that swift: (a) the new legal sidekick was boring and her moral dilemma even more boring because this issue was dealt with very effectively, again, in The Lincoln Lawyer, and we seem to be back-tracking in terms of Haller's personal moral ethos; (b) the victim was surprisingly absent in this book, merely a name, and by the end of it we really didn't care that he was dead because he was a scumbag, too; and (c) Haller's client was too much of an enigma. That is what made The Lincoln Lawyer so compelling a read. Louis Roulet was an exceptionally well-drawn predator, and we were practically eating Haller's frustration along with him. This client remains at a distance and to me that's problematic. However, I did stay up until 3:00 am reading it in one fell swoop, and I can't say that about many books these days.

What is most interesting about this book is the review war currently going on at Connelly's amazon page. Readers complaining about e-book pricing are flooding the site with negative reviews because the e-book version is more expensive than the hardcover. Yes, you read that right. And readers are pissed off. Man, are they pissed off. People are heading to libraries, waiting for the paperback, deciding to cross Connelly off their reading list, it goes on and on. The book itself is being lost over the issue of its pricing. Obviously, I don't know how much control Connelly has over the pricing model for his novels. I know that the one-star reviews are overwhelming and while a few of them didn't like the novel, the vast majority of them are complaints about the pricing.

In an era when publishers should be doing anything possible to keep their readers reading, they are alienating the readers who are their future market: those with e-readers. This doesn't make sense to me. The statistics that I've read say that 50% of the market will be electronic in five years. If you piss off the e-reading market, then I can imagine the piracy market will all of a sudden become exceptionally attractive. The only rationale that makes any sense at all is that they want to maximize their hardcover release by making the e-market release too expensive. I would imagine three months from now this will appear as an e-book at about $12.99 or less. But now there's a whole lot of pissed-off readers who aren't going to read a Connelly book no matter how cheap it is or in what format. They consider an e-release as a first-run release, and they don't care about the hardcover market. At this point I think it's a tug of war. The publishers are pushing this pricing for e-books because when most books are e-publications they will be in a position to price it like it was a hardcover; they think they just need to ride this out. Eventually readers won't have a choice.

I don't think it's going to work like that. I think that books are going to be pirated or authors are going to start cutting out the publishing houses and publishing themselves, which is already happening. I would imagine that Michael Connelly and his agent are reading every single one of those negative reviews related to pricing, and if I were him, I wouldn't be too pleased at the way this is coming down.

Birthers and Racism

2011-05-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a very political person, so please bear with me. Those who seek to deny Obama's election to the presidency by virtue of his birth (the charming sobriquet "birthers") are, to me, inexplicable. You don't like his policies? Fine. You don't like his cabinet choices? Okay. You fundamentally disagree with his political outlook? Great. Start throwing your energies into trying to defeat him in 2012. But to try to deny him his right to be president as duly elected in this country--and to my knowledge there is no movement to declare that election fraudulent or questionable, unlike some other elections I could name--you've lost me. And not only that, you've enraged me, because the lack of bonafides of other U.S. presidents hasn't been an issue, obviously, for a number of people who have sat in the Oval Office. How does been president of the Screen Actors Guild or being the owner of a baseball team qualify one for the being President of the United States?

I don't watch much television--the news is about it--but finally one of the more august journalists, Bob Schieffer, labeled what I believe is behind the genesis of this movement: old-fashioned racism. However, there is an interesting article in Salon today that delves into this issue a little more deeply, and, yes, birtherism seems to have its roots in old-fashioned racism, and it's yet another example of how the Civil War and the issues surrounding that conflict still confront us over one hundred years later:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/birthers/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/04/obama_bin_laden_birther

It's Here and Sooner than I Thought

2011-05-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

Check out this link

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/29/BUIO1J9820.DTL

to the S.F. Chronicle regarding Krakauer's new non-fiction book ripping to shreds the mythology surrounding the immensely successful book, "Three Cups of Tea." I'm not going to weigh in on the validity of either book because I haven't read either book. What is fascinating is that Krakauer released his book from Byliner, a no-name e-publisher (although now soon to be a household name in publishing). "60 Minutes" ran a story on Mortenson and "the day after the program aired, 70,000 free PDF versions of "Three Cups of Deceit" were downloaded within 72 hours of its release, according to the company. Six hours after the release of the $2.99 tablet version, available on the Kindle and Apple's iPad, it shot to the top of the Kindle Single list and has led Amazon's overall nonfiction sales ever."

I don't think anyone needs to wonder why Krakauer went with Byliner. First of all, check out the pricing: $2.99. I doubt any mainstream publisher would have agreed to that kind of bargain basement pricing. Sure, it means he has to sell a hell of a lot of downloads to make any money, but he's got the writing cred to pull something like this off. As he has proved. Will a bricks and mortar publisher pick up the paper rights to this book? I'm not sure. Because they'd have to match what is inevitably a sweetheart deal between Krakauer and Byliner in terms of profit sharing. Plus, if you don't have the e-rights, is it worth printing?

This is not to say that Byliner didn't score an incredible coup by signing Krakauer. If I tried to do something like this, it would be pointless. It takes someone of Krakauer's stature and marketability to pull this off. His track record sells him, and I would imagine it took some serious mental crunching to determine the demographics of his readership. I think they probably ran the numbers and realized that 70% of his readership has an e-reading device of some ilk (a number only bound to go up). The exposure on "60 Minutes" was the ultimate coup. All of this was very well timed, and I suspect that Krakauer went with a small publisher because his traditional publisher couldn't get their act together to publish ASAP.

The continuing disarray of mainstream publishing and their head-in-the-sand approach to the whole e-book phenomenon means that e-publishers like Byliner have a real chance of stealing a whole lot of their talent. Of course, a mention on "60 Minutes" is about as good as it gets in terms of free advertising, something not readily available to the fiction writer. But it's the wave of the future, and if I won the lottery, I'd set up an e-publishing house yesterday. Because I love books, and I don't have a lot of respect for what is coming out from New York these days.

This does raise the thorny issue of pricing. Because that sort of pricing demands that you sell a ton of downloads, but authors like Krakauer have that capability. Someone like me, not so much. And if enough authors of Krakauer's stature keep publishing books at $2.99, then there is constant and unrelenting pressure on all of us (publishers and authors alike) to match that pricing. It's like how amazon offered best sellers at $18.00 and all of a sudden people only expected to pay $18.00 for best-sellers, and good-bye independent bookstore, hello amazon and chain stores: capitalism at work.

Clearly, this is a cautionary tale for all mainstream publishers. Scrappy, fearless e-publishers are out there making deals with your writers. They are handing them the lion's share of the profit and harnessing the power of amazon. It's a new day and publishers are hiding under the covers. Get off your butts and stop delaying publication of your manuscripts for over a year. Set up, IMMEDIATELY, your own e-division so that you can publish asap material that is hot and relevant. Some authors will work both in "print" and the "e" medium, but some manuscripts can do very nicely in only "e" versions. What you will lose in print sales you will gain by printing something relevant and CURRENT. Start labeling yourselves as hip, current, on top of what is happening. Stop seeing the e-revolution as the death knell and more of a different cash cow. Krakauer's 75,000 downloads speaks volumes. At least it does to me.

Book Review: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

2011-04-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

I loved this book. The blurbs on the back likens this book to a Jane Austen novel (which publicists tend to do and they are always so far off the mark), but this time they actually got it right. Major Ernest Pettigrew lives in a small English village in Sussex. Retired, widowed, and in danger of fossilizing, he falls in love with a widowed Pakistani shopkeeper named Mrs Ali. That's pretty much the whole story. And yet what Helen Simonson does with this simple plot is really the stuff of Austen. What is so lovely about this book is that this author understands something so key: that a protagonist must move emotionally. She presents an unlikely scenario--this rather hidebound older man who falls in love with a woman who is profoundly divorced from his culture and his class--and makes this transition plausible. Like all satisfying novels, our Major must make some difficult choices, and yet by the end of this book he is more than willing to pay the price for these moral victories.

This novel isn't perfect. I found the ending a tad bit melodramatic. Then I thought of the endings of several Austen novels and damn if they weren't as melodramatic. Having said that, I don't think it works as well here, but it's a slight quibble. And his relationship with his son is, I think, overdone. We find ourselves rooting for the Major so vigorously that we can't imagine how he has produced such a selfish, immature lout of a son. That he also feels that way is immaterial, especially since the Major becomes the moral center of the book. It doesn't quite work that the son is so shallow.

These are tiny quibbles though in the overall wonder of this story. I don't say this about many novels--more's the pity--but I found it enchanting.

The Thin Line

2011-04-03T16:53:00.000-07:00

There's been an interesting discussion on DorothyL, the mystery lst srv, about some readers feeling that the presence of an author's website contains a tacit invitation to engage with the author, and why bother having a website if you don't have any intention of getting up close and personal with your readers, as in responding to their queries and/or emails.

I think that today's artists are caught between a rock and a hard place. There is a heightened degree of intimacy demanded by one's audience these days, and while I'm as addicted to celebrity gossip websites as the next person (I don't read People magazine but I sure scan the headlines), I think that a website is or should be nothing more than advertisement. Hey, I'm going to be here, reading from my book. Want to meet me? Or, my next book is going to be published on this date and it's about this. To me, that is the extent of what a web page should be about. It should inform. You may ask, well, there's usually an email address so isn't that an invitation? I see it more as a professional necessity for those in the industry. And while I answer every single piece of email I receive, I can't imagine if you're a popular author how inundated you'd be with fan-email. You'd have no time to write. Feeding the publicity machine would be your sole job.

Also, and no one talks about this, but you can know far too much about people. I've been to a number of mystery writing conventions and I've met my fair share of authors, and you know? Most of them are wonderful people. Some aren't. And it's colored how I feel about them forever. Some authors have lost me as a reader because now I know them as people and it impacts my enjoyment of their material. Of course, the same thing can happen in reverse. You meet someone who is mediocre on the page, but in person they are adorable, and that author now has a new reader. I'm not that into spy thrillers unless you're John le Carre, but I heard David Balducci speak at Bouchercon last fall and damn if he wasn't a fantastic interview and I think I'll pick up one of his books.

But it usually doesn't work out that way. Given how polarized people are these days, do you really want to know that I'm politically left of center? Probably not. Do I want to know that you're a member of the Tea Party? No, I don't. I'm increasingly feeling that my world of fiction or someone else's world of fiction should not be intruded on by reality. That all you need to know is what is between Chapter 1 and the end.

I think that if an author wants to be close and personal with people that's what Facebook and Twitter is for. I have a Facebook, but I rarely use it, but I do not have a Twitter (and have no intention of signing on). Neither do I have a problem with people contacting by email; in fact, I enjoy it. Email me anytime. But I do wonder about the how faint the lines between artist and audience are becoming. Would I have enjoyed, say, Hemingway's books if I'd known that he was a serial monogamist who became a narcissistic jerk later in life, or cherished every magnificent sentence F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote knowing that he liked to get tanked up and then pick fights with people? Maybe not.

I do know that I know won't support some authors (and artists) who I feel are morally bankrupt. Thirty years ago I wouldn't have known anything about them, and I could have gone on appreciating their art in the embrace of my naivete. Now, it very difficult and sometimes I find impossible to separate the artist from their art. It's really hard to ignore that man pretending to be Oz when the curtain's whipped back.

Ruthlessness

2011-03-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

I've been on a memoir tear lately, having torn through biographies or autobiographies of Muriel Spark, Keith Richards, Anne Sexton, Linda Gray Sexton, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I think with the exception of Keith Richards (what a stand-up person; I like him enormously), all these people come across as extremely ruthless. Perhaps Linda Gray Sexton is less ruthless than the rest of them, but I think anyone who tries to commit suicide has a certain obsession with the "ME." And, yes, I realize that enormous amounts of pain--physical or otherwise--can overwhelm to the point where the "ME" is the only thing that matters. I've been depressed and I've experienced horrific amounts of physical pain to the extent I wanted to hang myself, so, yes, there are times when it really is only about you. However, despite all my mental or physical anguish, I have never and can ever conceive of wanting to commit suicide because I do think that's when the ME becomes, well, ruthless.

With the exception of Keith Richards, I find that I do not like these people because of this very ruthlessness. I even find myself feeling irritated by them; these people are compelling and yet also repelling. A. Sexton is enormously selfish; Plath I find something of a fool (I could see her eventual crisis coming from a mile away); Hughes is nothing more a brute with a brain; and Spark is odious. And yet their art is amazing. I'm not one for Hughes' poetry because the whole shaman/life force/superstition/occult metaphor does not work for me, but I can't deny that he was a phenomenal poet. And Sexton's poetry is similar to Plath's in that here they are in the late 50s, early 60s and realizing what a bum deal it is to be a woman, especially a woman competing in a man's world. It's hard to read about Plath's determination to be the happy homemaker/poet/uber wife, seeing herself as second best to her husband; not only seeing herself as second best but relishing that role. Equally painful is reading how Sexton learned how to mine her craziness for her art, not realizing of course that there's only so much crazy people can take before they are worn out. Hughes and Spark are cut from similar cloth; focused and determined and steely (there's no other word for it) they demanded respect and never let anyone push them around. It's a toss-up who I dislike more, Hughes or Spark. Perhaps Spark because there is no dismissing that Hughes was a brute but he did love deeply (if extremely unwisely). Spark hoarded all her love for God and didn't seem to have much for anyone else.

Anyway, I think the point of all this rambling is that I don't see myself as an artist, although I do see myself as a writer. Clearly I'm not ruthless enough. If I were more like any of the above, I would tell my husband, "Yes, I know that we have children with college tuitions looming and we get our medical benefits from me and we have a mortgage and our parents our aging, but I want to sell this house and move to Ireland and write a big book. I know this means we will have little retirement and our kids will suffer from my selfishness but this is what I need to do. I must do it."

That's what these people did. Their art came first. I push my "art" into the corners of my life that are vacant. An hour here, four hours there. I have been selfish in my life, but not ruthless. Although I won't deny feeling envy for people who are.

Another Day, Another Threat from Amazon

2011-03-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

In this morning's business section in the S.F. Chronicle (yes, I still read newspapers, in fact, we get two), there's a story about the showdown between amazon and California over taxing its affiliates. The Affiliates Program is a nice way for people to make extra money. They put an amazon "counter" on their website and if you buy through them (lots of authors have these on their websites), then you make a little dough from amazon and amazon gets the sales. Except if you buy in California (if it were any other purchase you'd have to pay sales tax), you don't have to pay sales tax because amazon is located in Seattle.

amazon is already embroiled in a similar lawsuit with the state of Texas over this issue. Yesterday, amazon threatened to pull the plug on all their California affiliates, much like they have done in much smaller states. California, as always, is a huge hunk of the pie, and I think they think that this will make their demands even more, ooooh, scary. Except, sometimes capitalism works the way its supposed to. Because no sooner did they issue this smack down (shades of the same aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach they displayed in the Macmillan/amazon dust up last year) when a whole bunch of other retailers said, "Hey, Affiliates, come on over to us. We want you. Nasty old amazon can cut the plug and we will be happy to play with you."

Which to my mind means that amazon's position has just been seriously undermined. Because people do not have a loyalty to amazon. They have a loyalty to their sales. And if amazon gets all nasty and decides to punish their affiliates because California has the nerve to expect sales tax from materials and goods bought in their state, well, then. You have companies like Barnes and Noble and Walmart willing to step in and say, yoo hoo, come on down. WE want you. Essentially, what amazon has done is to make its affiliates friendly fire in their battle to keep from paying sales taxes in states in which they actually sell. If I were an amazon Affiliate, I wouldn't be too happy right now.

This is a good article.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/04/BUCR1I1CKB.DTL&type=business

Books That Changed Me

2011-03-03T19:44:00.000-08:00

Below is a list of books that changed me. That upsided me on the head in the most wonderful way, that said, hey, words? They are magic. They will transform you. Take you places you never thought you would. Make you think. Make you cry. Make you grow up. Make you care.

Jane Austen: all her books, ALL of them.

John Fowles: The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre.

Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bells Tolls (I know it's not his best but there are passages that make me cry at their sheer brilliance).

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night (could anyone create a more lyrical sentence? I don't think so).

J. K. Rowling: the Harry Potter series (not that these books aren't terribly flawed, but I've made so many friends from this world that, yes, this series changed my life).

Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier (what a fascinating book).

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings trilogy (no explanation needed).

Calvin Trillin: About Alice (because, wow, what a lovely marriage).

Raymond Chandler: ALL of his works. The man had a way with metaphor and simile that I think is really unparalleled

Dashiell Hammet: ALL of his novels (although I have to admit the The Maltese Falcon is perhaps the most perfect piece of crime fiction ever written. Except for, perhaps, The Long Goodbye, which is a debate I have with myself constantly. Which is better?)

Vera Caspary: Laura (because, really, a novel with three distinct POV's and so well written, never a slip in voice).

Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night, because I am basically Harriet Vane and there is no man in fiction that I'd rather be married to (and that includes Mr. Darcy). Plus, wow, really smart plots, Dorothy!

Truman Capote: I love his short stories more than his novels, so The Dogs Bark and The Muses Are Heard make this list, although I do love his writing in general.

Gore Vidal: This is problematic for me because I despise his comments regarding the Polanski affair and am not feeling very charitable toward him these days, but his historical series starting with Burr is truly amazing. If you want to understand the U.S., read this series.

So these are my favorites. Yours?

Recipe: The World's Best Poundcake

2011-03-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

Although food looms large in my life (my cookbook collection is obscene), it doesn't seem to loom large here. Let's rectify that. I cut this recipe out of the S.F. Chronicle over thirty years ago, and I have yet to find a better recipe for pound cake. It's frigging perfect.

The World's Best Poundcake

1 c butter (2 sticks) room temp
2 c sugar (I used the superfine baking sugar from C&H)
5 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp nutmeg

1. Butter and flour a bundt pan. Sift flour twice.

2. Cream together butter and sugar until very light and fluffy.

3. Add vanilla to eggs. Add 3 eggs one at a time, bearing at least one minute after each addition. Scrape down bowl. Mix for another minute. Fold in 1/4 cup flour. Mix well.

4. Add remaining 2 eggs, beating well after each addition. This should now have the appearance of whipped cream. Add nutmeg and salt to remaining flour.

5. Stir in flour all at once using a wooden spoon to combine. Mix well until blended but do not overmix. You've just spent ten minutes putting air into the batter, by overmixing it you'll take a bunch of it out.

6. Turn batter into pan. Place in a COLD oven (yes, cold) and turn heat to 350 degrees. Bake 55 minutes or until knife comes out clean.

7. When done, place pan on wire rack for 4 minutes, turn out onto rack to cool.

This cake keeps forever. If I'm serving this to guests, I add a generous spoonful of strawberries and a wee bit of whipped cream, but that's just window dressing. This recipe doesn't need any "props," it's delicious plain.

Myself/My Daughter

2011-02-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

The less said about the Oscars the better. I've never seen a more boring, ill-conceived, poorly written show in my life. Not even Anne Hathaway's charm could save it, because all her charm was sucked out and stomped on by James Franco and his hipster sneer.

Anyway, the highlight of the evening was texting with my daughter back and forth, commenting on how boring the show was and giving thumbs up and down on the gowns. And with the exception of that hideous gown worn by Mandy Moore, whose skirt was threatening to eat her and it was only by using her microphone to beat back all that fabric that she survived the night, we were simpatico on all counts. In fact, we were texting each other identical comments back and forth. I typed, CELINE!!!!! And a half second later CELINE!!!! appeared on my phone. We are clones of each other, probably the most clear cut defense for the genetics trumping environment debate imaginable. It's something we've accepted, because when you're faced with overwhelming evidence, you just have to roll with it.

When daughter was college hunting we stopped by our dear friends' house who live in Pittsburgh. They hadn't seen daughter in years and we weren't in the house more than forty seconds before dear friend said, "Apple doesn't fall far from that tree, does it?" Because, no, it doesn't.

I'm concerned about Mandy Moore, because once she put that microphone down, she was defenseless against all that skirt. Has anyone seen her since?

The Political Landscape

2011-02-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

The political gods giveth and they taketh away. I pick up my newspaper and there's a story on Obama's decision to abandon defense of DOMA by the DOJ, and right next to it is a story about the Wisconsin governor being punked by a newspaper reporter, vowing to break the backs of the unions and, wow, too bad we can't use force to disperse the crowds. WHAT????

There are no words to describe how crazy the political landscape has become with the introduction of the tea partiers into the mix. I imagine Boehner is weeping into his pillow every night because he co-opted their support to get the House and yet now he finds (surprise, surprise) that they are uncontrollable and even more important ungovernable. Why would he think a group of people who believe in only themselves as the rule of law would take kindly to being used as chess pieces in the Repubs battle to dislodge Dems and Obama? Why? What in the two years leading up to that election gave ANY indication that these people would be sheep to your agenda? And now they are proving not to be sheep at all. They voted with the tres liberal Dems to end the war in Afghanistan, they are holding your feet to the flames over the budget, and even better, their extremist agenda will hand the House back to the Dems and locking Obama in for another four years.

Because, you know what, John? They are nuts. They are extremists. They despise government and will do everything in their power to undermine it and push forward their agenda. Ask the Governor of Wisconsin. Sounds like he's a hair's breadth away from firing on the demonstrators. Oh wait, that was the Assistant AG in Indiana who believed we should take these people out. He was fired for that comment, although he's been known for years for his extreme agenda. Sadly, it's only because his big fat mouth went crazy on Twitter and someone actually was able to tie it back to his real person that he was fired. Apparently, being a Nazi supporter doesn't bar you from being the legal representative of the state in Indiana. Cross that state off my list.

John, if all this doesn't sound crazy to you, then God help you.

The shenanigans in Wisconsin are galvanizing labor on a scale unseen in decades. The recent gutting of funding for Planned Parenthood? Way to completely alienate your female voter. WHICH YOU NEED. Because if the Dems are smart they will jettison Biden, throw him the Secretary of State bone, and move Hillary into the VP position for the 2012 election. Right there and then you are toast. PP is not all about abortions, idiots. In fact it's about taking care of women. And as Jon Carroll pointed out in his excellent column in the S.F. Chronicle this morning, it's not the labor unions who gambled with the sub-prime mortgages and sent the country into the worst financial depression since 1929. It was people like the Koch brothers. And by the way. People who can't collective bargain and aren't assured of their health care? All of a sudden Obama's health care plan is going to seem mighty attractive. In fact, you couldn't possibly have orchestrated the demise of Repubs in 2012 any better.

Media glut has its pluses and minuses. We are subjected to crazy people like Beck but we also can see the national impact that electing these extremists has on nation's laws and ethos. It's the only weapon against the massive amounts of money that people like the Koch brothers are funneling into these campaigns. What does it say that the Governor of Wisconsin will not accept a phone call from the Democratic Minority Leader of the Wisconsin Senate but will take a phone call from a Koch brother? I think it says a lot.

So while we champion the inevitable demise of discriminatory practices in regards to marriage between partners, regardless of their sexual stripe, we also cringe when we pick up the newspapers. The events of the last week are the best and the worst examples of what characterizes the American political scene these days.

That Borders Bankruptcy

2011-02-18T09:25:00.000-08:00

Well, not like everyone didn't see that coming.

There's been a lot of interesting chat about this on the Internet. There's some blow back from smaller booksellers who are bitter and say that this is nothing more than the chickens coming home to roost. That they are now the victims of amazon's scorch and burn approach to book selling and how does it feel? I see both sides because a lot of people are now losing their jobs and good luck finding a job in this economy. I also learned something new: that Borders, for all it's big boxishness, was something of a champion for the fiction trade paperback writer. The kind of writer who is kick-ass but needs someone biggish like Borders to help them make their name. Another note, my book critique group meets in a Borders twice a month and that store is closing. We're going to have to find another venue, which isn't the big issue, but we've been meeting there for years and I can't help but think of those employees who I greet every time I walk into that store.

For me it personally sucks because I'm on the verge of trying to shop a book. It's not a mystery but it's about the mystery writing world and being a no name, and although there are autobiographical elements in it, it's NOT autobiographical. It takes Elizabeth Bennett and makes her a writer and takes Mr. Darcy and makes him a publisher, and social comedy ensues. I went into writing this knowing it would be a tough sell, but I had a blast writing it, and it's a fun romp (truly, it's a decent read) and now it will be an impossible sell. Because publishers are already struggling and Borders' survival is questionable even when pared down to the nubs and there is debt. OMG, there's debt. Publishers are now carrying Borders' debt and they are going to even be more loathe to take chances. For all of us writers with books to shop this can't be a more horrible time.

Maybe I should just save myself a lot of energy and angst and self-publish it.

Sigh and damn.

Borders Files for Bankrupcy

2011-02-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

And it's official:

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP747f263940f9488cace69c603433cfda.html

I hate being right sometimes. It was obvious last June when I walked into my local store and saw that they had replaced a ton of book selling space with space selling "stuff." Plus no inventory what so ever.

Book Review: An Object of Beauty

2011-02-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

Given my limited amount of money, I always read a ton of reviews (NOT on amazon) before I buy a book, so it was with some measure of disappointment that I noticed that Steve Martin's latest had a number of very mixed reviews, with the majority of them being negative. I bought it anyway. I loved Shopgirl and found his autobiography riveting, so I plonked down some money for the hardcover.

I find myself agreeing with the majority of these reviewers. I also agree with them on the strength of this book: Martin's keen and acerbic critique of the art market. A well-known art collector, his book soars when the focus shifts from the weak characters to the art-selling market and the forces that determine what sells and why it sells (or not is probably equally important). Martin's love of art and a real vicious cynicism about the art market is what makes this book worth buying. Art is like currency. If you believe a dollar is worth a dollar, then it's worth a dollar. If you look at a second time and you see that it's only paper. Well.

Essentially, this is a non-fiction book with a fiction premise. The non-fiction bits work brilliantly, and the fiction bits are exceptionally problematic. There are glaring similarities to another book that works beautifully that is set in New York with a problematic “heroine” and a passive narrator and that is Breakfast at Tiffany's. I’m surprised that none of the reviews I’ve read have mentioned this. Perhaps Capote’s book works better because it’s a novella and Capote doesn’t give us time to parse out Holly Golightly’s motives. We just accept them because it’s such a whirlwind of a story. Perhaps it works better because we never leave the narrator. Perhaps it works better because Holly Golightly comes to New York to transform herself from a hick farm girl from a Podunk town in the middle of nowhere to, well, Holly Golightly. Lacey Yeager arrives fully formed to realize her ambitions. She doesn’t transform; the art world around her transforms.

Aside from these comparisons, generally speaking if you write a novel then you usually have a dilemma of sorts. A character has an epiphany. Falls in loves. Falls out of love. Kills someone. Falls from grace. A tragedy. Something HAPPENS. Lacey Yeager, the protagonist of An Object of Beauty, faces no dilemmas, suffers no tragedy. And the only person who you could honestly say that she loves is the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. There’s no explanation for why she’s basically nothing more than an ambitious sociopath. The one possible moral dilemma that she faces in the book is eliminated by a quip. I think you can safely say that she basically quips her way through this book. She’s something of a monster and yet everyone loves her?

And I guess that was what Martin was trying to do, have Lacey Yeager be a metaphor for the art market. How art has become nothing more than a commodity. It’s all for sale to the highest bidder. As is she. She’s beautiful in the eye of the beholder. She is loved because she always becomes what the other person wants to see. Ultimately, I think Martin was trying to have her be both a work of art but also emblematic of the art market. Sadly, she’s more art market than art. Heartless, ambitious, mercenary, and without a soul, this construct falls apart. I think that if she had had one failure, one setback that she actually admitted was a setback, one scene where her innocence was lost, it would have salvaged this book. But we start off the book with a Lacey who is without a moral core and twenty years later we have the same woman. She doesn’t move emotionally one bit. The one possible moral dilemma is almost a throwaway plot line, and the opportunity to humanize this character was lost.

As cynical and funny and biting as Steve Martin is about the art world, his love of art does come through here and there. And yet by the end of this book the art is overwhelmed; it has become as soulless as Lacey.

Yes, Times Are Changing

2011-02-10T11:42:00.001-08:00

Powell's lays off 7% of its workforce.

My Thoughts on E-publishing

2011-02-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

This will be a rambling and probably somewhat incoherent post on the e-publishing phenomena. E-books is a separate post, but I note that HP has announced its version of the iPad. The technology is moving so fast that it will be only a matter of time before a majority of our reading material will be online. As an aside I do wonder in light of Egypt's abortive attempt to stop the demonstrations by killing the Internet whether it's wise for a nation to have most of its reading material hooked up to computers (which can be shut down). Of course, Hitler burned books so I guess this is the modern-day equivalent. Kill the power, kill the message. But still it concerns me, especially since with amazon you're technically only renting books from them. They can take back your books at any point, even if you paid for them. Anyway, digressing.

Publishing [and by that I mean New York (NY)] has always been the gatekeeper. I think that this has been a valid point in the past. I'm something of a 1920s, American ex-pat fanatic, and I've read probably far too much on both Hemingway and Fitzgerald to be healthy. This entailed reading a lot of their letters to their editors. There was a reason why it could be years between books. Aside from the boozing and hunting, both men worked at their books. And I mean worked like frigging dogs to get it right. People aren't working at books anymore. And you can tell when a book has been worked on. I'm reading Hillary Mantel's book on Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. She worked five years on this book and it shows.

The concept of gatekeeping is not just blowing hot air. Seriously, if you'd read the first draft of my first book you would have run screaming from the room hunting frantically for mental bleach. Yes, it was that horrible. I worked at it for three years, learned some things, polished it up, and eventually sold it (and no I'm not comparing it to either Hemingway or Fitzgerald, I'm just saying that it became a better book). In this day and age, I could put up that truly horrific first draft on amazon and attempt to sell it to you. So when NY yells into the ether that they are the gatekeepers, protecting you from all that awful writing, they are, in a way, correct. They have been. Until recently. Until the big corporate buyout that reduced the numbers of publishers in NY from something like twenty to something like three. Roughly ten years ago, books ceased to be books and became commodities.

At that point the editors were fired, and the process became less about the book and more about the market. What commodity will get us the most money. Not which book is the best, which book should be published because it says something worth saying, but which book will sell. And now when NY screams that they are the gatekeepers no one is listening because they abdicated that role in search of bigger and better profits. In their zeal to reduce their overhead and produce only one book a year that sells a ton, NY decided to drop a bunch of authors that sold, that made profit, but didn't make enough profit. This is a concept that is totally foreign to me, but then I wasn't a business major. Profit to me is, um, profit. But apparently not!

So now you have all these authors who have a proven track record and now you have the technology that allows them to self-publish. And authors are doing it. Write it and they will come mentality. If you have a readership and publishers are ignoring you, then why not? Because they have readers who want to read them. These writers just don't have publishers who want to publish them. But lo and behold the technology is there and not only there but there at $3.99 or even better $2.99. What a bargain!

I think it gets trickier if you decide that you always wanted to write a book, and, hey, kindle. Because I think of my first draft and how bad it was. I put bad in italics because you have no concept how bad. I think of all these bad novels flooding amazon, and Borders, and no doubt Barnes and Noble, because all of these companies now realize that there is money to be made out of this self-publishing business. And why? Because there is NO money to be made now with the traditional publishing model. If anything will save the box chains it will be the self-publishing market.

I'm standing on the sidelines watching this. I know authors who are now forced to self-publish because NY will no longer publish them. I know people who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag and who now want to publish their stuff and there is no stopping them. I know people who are wonderful writers who see NY as nothing more than a depressing roadblock and just as NY is ignoring them, they are ignoring NY and looking at different publishing models (none of which include NY).

I received money over Christmas and I bought four books with that money. Actual books. Hardcovers! Except for one, which was an annotated version of Persuasion by Jane Austen, and it's the only decent book in the lot. The rest needed a few more turns with an editor. They aren't horrible books, but they aren't good books either. I feel cheated. That editorial process isn't happening now that authors are being pressed to churn out a book a year. It shows. Books have faulty premises or plot busts or just don't hang together well. That's what an editor does. Makes the author step outside of their head into the real world to create a book that works for most people, not just them.

What I see happening? A flood of utter dreck hitting the self-publishing market. Some really good stuff hitting the self-publishing market. Some will get noticed. A lot won't. NY pulling back like whoa on paper publishing and continuing to flog e-books at inflated prices, all while decent authors who have self-published continue to undercut them. NY finally waking up and smelling the coffee and discounting e-books, but ONLY publishing in e-form. I suspect that the majority of mystery will only be available in e-form within five years. The Lee Child's of this world will survive in paper. The rest of us? Doubtful. I see authors forming collectives, using that six degrees of separation business to sell their material to others through a loose association of authors. Those who keep their quality up could do well in this configuration.

Essentially, I think the authors who consistently reach for quality will survive. There are lots of potential models out there. What NY doesn't seem to realize is that people want GOOD books to read. They don't want what some NY marketing department is shoving down their throats. I'm at the point where I've dropped several authors from my list of must-reads because they are now producing mediocre books. And I don't blame them per se. They are reacting to market forces as well. But that doesn't mean as a reader I want to keep supporting them when they aren't keeping up their end of the bargain. And this IS a bargain. You write a good book and I will read it.

The Gap and the State of Me

2011-02-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

Any woman who's been writing and publishing for a bit feels the gender gap pinching, and it's pretty much from the word go. Laura Miller at salon.com has written an interesting piece with lots of links about this gap. I encourage you to check it out:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/02/09/women_literary_publishing

I've finished my third book and can't seem to find a place for it. It was an experiment, and I knew going into it that it might not have a place in the current marketplace. I'm going to shop it for six months and then if it doesn't sell I'll self-publish it. It's a very fun book, with some insight into writing within a genre and trying to carve a writing career out of the rest of one's demanding life. Oh, there's a little romance in there and a huge tribute to Jane Austen. I think it's a niche book, and I think it could be a big niche, but it doesn't seem to be grabbing people.

The fourth book? This relates to the above. I'm struggling with what exactly to write because, yeah, my time is very limited. I'm now working full-time and my evenings and weekends are the only time I have to write. Kids are more or less grown (son is driving), but still. If I spend all day editing engineering I'm brain dead when I get home. I can barely speak, never mind trying to put my own sentences together.

That said, I'm toying with writing a legal thriller. If I do, I"ll write it under a male pseudonym. Because see above. Because, yes, I think there is a bias. My first two books aren't particularly cozy, and, in fact, this is a problem because they are neither "knit" or "grit" but somewhere in the middle, therefore, they appeal to a limited number of readers. But the reality is that I'm branded now as a cooking author, and if I were to write something that was grittier (read, more marketable), I would have a hard slog. Plus I think women do get ignored and marginalized by male readers (and male authors--thank you, big name author who trashed cooking mysteries in your presentation while I was in the audience and had just had lunch with you). So if I do write that thriller I'm thinking about, then I will write it under a male pseud. Because enough. The playing field isn't level. It's biased. I didn't need a bunch of links to tell me that, but it's always nice to have your suspicions confirmed. I think the bar for women writers (at least in mystery) is higher. I just finished a mystery written by someone who is extremely successful and while I generally like his stuff, this is a weak book. I doubt that if a woman had written it, they would have a contract. The weakness is so glaring, so in your face, that it makes you wonder, what the hell?

So. Onward.

The Baking Thing

2011-02-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

So, in a former life I was a pastry chef. Which is how I indirectly became a writer because I quit baking when I had children, which necessitated a move to the burbs for better schools, which meant an astonishing loss of self, which meant I started writing to stop from going crazy, and here I am.

I wasn't a great cook. I was technically competent, and I could run a kitchen, but I didn't have that creative spark that separates the wheat from the chaff. I was just good at what I did but nothing more than that. It did get old at the end. Being twenty-four and working horrendous hours is not the same as thirty-two working horrendous hours. Plus when you're younger your friends tend to be your work friends and I could go out and have fun (people in the food business go out and eat and drink for fun--imagine that!) and work on two hours of sleep. As I aged, I wanted to be in bed by ten because I had to get up at five. There were a lot of things that were great about it, and a lot of things that were horrible, and yet I still miss it, even though I haven't been in a kitchen in over twenty years.

There is a commercial bakery not far from where I currently work. I think it's a Wonder Bread factory (seriously), and depending on how the wind is blowing, some mornings I get out of my car and I'm surrounded by the smell of baking bread. It's like a cape, surrounding me. And I have a wistful moment.

I haven't given up the idea of running a small place. Of course, what I would really like is some gigantic Victorian where it's an extension of my house and people just come and eat. Like they are extended friends. Because that's what I'm looking for. A sense of community and shared love of food.

I had a wild idea the other day. What if one didn't open up a business but just opened up their house. And people sat down and ate what you served (just like you would if someone came to your house for dinner). If they wanted to they could leave some money in a jar. What they thought was fair. And there was no business permits, or health inspectors, or the hoop jumping that is inevitable when you start a business. You just open up your home. Cook it and they will come concept.

::Eyes homes for sale in local paper::

Shall We Blog?

2011-01-27T08:27:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned in the past, I have a toe in the Harry Potter fandom (and, yes, we are talking about a Galaxy Quest type of fascination and wackiness), and part of being in fandom these days is interacting with other fans. And while it can be a fantastic place to meet other like nut cases, there are hierarchies--who is more popular than whom; fandom is a lot like being back in sixth grade. Unfortunately. Just when I'm at the point when I think, oh, this is really beyond the pale, I am done, something happens, some remarkable act of kindness, and I stay. The hierarchy nonsense does bother me to no end, and what is so insidious about it is that the rules are different for different fandoms and even within subsets of cliques the rules are different. Naturally, these are unspoken rules because then it wouldn't be as much fun to exclude people when they make unintentional mistakes.

Digressing, we are. So we come to the issue of blogging. I don't get that many comments from what I write down here, and actually I'm good with that because I loathe, LOATHE, the interface here on blogger. There is no easy way to respond to people, and if Google were listening I would say to you, THIS SUCKS! I'd like more readers, naturally, but you get what you get and if I posted more and had pretty pictures, I'd have more readers. So I tell myself.

Anyway, what this post is truly about (finally, she gets to the point) is that I have stumbled across a blog of a person with whom I don't have much in common, however, said blog is well written and amusing with very pretty pictures, and while our life experiences are polar opposites, from what I can gather we are about the same age, and that often creates a type of bond that transcends a lot of the differences. And this person culls out their responses. Said person only wants responses from certain elite types from a certain strata of life. Because of trolls, all we bloggers have the option of editing which comments appear, and said blogger wants a certain look to said comments. If I were being catty I would say that said blogger cares as much about who comments and what they say as the blog itself, but let's not go there. Whatever the motivation, clearly, my comments don't rate. I find this highly amusing. Not that they aren't germane to the subject of the day, just that I'm a nobody and I have no "currency." It's just like fandom.

Of course, being the sort of pugnacious person that I am, I'm debating whether to comment on every single solitary post said blogger makes, but then that will only cause said blogger to block me. So, I'm going to be stealthy about it and only comment once in a blue moon. Keep said blogger on said toes and wondering. Should I block her or not? Is she a crank? Does she really think that I care about what she thinks? Because then you see I've won. Because then said blogger will devote much more time to thinking about the "unworthiness" of my comments than the more "worthy" comments.

Hmmm, does this sound like a sixth-grade girl? Nah. Machiavelli, perhaps.

Writing and One's Ego

2011-01-24T19:38:00.000-08:00

I have just finished a book by an author that I have previously adored and this, well, this book is thin. I'm not going to review it here because first of all I'm afraid that I'm in danger of appearing a crank who is never satisfied by anything (except that's not true, I adored "The King's Speech). Anyway, as I internally grumbled through this book, wondering why I wasn't more wowed, I came to one of my epiphanies about writing: the balancing act you must do with your ego.

The book in question has far too much ego. There really was such a plethora of the "I" that it left no room for me, the reader. That is always the danger of writing in first person, where you feel you're at a performance, but the artist is only playing for themselves. And yes, there is a certain truth to the notion that you have to write for yourself. But honestly, what we're really talking about is not writing for the market because the second you decide to write for the market, the market you're writing for has changed. If you wrote only for yourself then you wouldn't try to get published, or set up stat counters, or obsessively check your amazon numbers, or any of the above. Not that I've done that, you understand. That was the real strength of Keith Richards' autobiography: he articulated so perfectly that bridge we all strive for between the artist and the audience.

Now Keith Richards is a much, much better guitar player than I am a writer, but I do understand what he means. Every once in a blue moon that happens to me, where the "I" in me becomes a "we." And let's be honest. It's the people with the ego up the ass who tend to succeed as artists. Because they tend to be pugnacious and driven and a little obsessive. Although usually a mass of insecurities, they also have a balls-to-the-wall quality about them that ignores the nagging insecurities that stop most normal people. They really want to reach all those anonymous people. At least I do. I want you to read something and experience it the way that I want you to experience it. In some ways it's all ego and it's also ego less, because when you put your art out there to share, it's about the we. Aren't we having fun? Aren't we both so sad? Aren't we both just in awe with what's happening on the page? It's no fun with just one.

And I think when a book doesn't work is when the artist trips over that line. Where the "I" stays an "I" and doesn't ever turn into the "we." Where that divide between what is in your brain and your heart is never bridged. It's as if you're still standing on one side of the abyss and your audience is on the other side of the abyss, and although you ordered that bridge, it hasn't come yet. But I'm sure that FedEx will deliver it any second now.

Book Review: Life by Keith Richards

2011-01-16T19:40:00.000-08:00

In my day (god, I cringe when I type that) there was a distinct division between those who were Beatles fans (count me among them) and those who were Rolling Stones fans. I also understand there was some competition between the Beach Boys and the Beatles but for heaven's sake, this isn't even worth two seconds of our time. The smack down is completely Beatles versus Stones, with no exceptions.

After having read a cursory review of "Life" by Keith Richards I thought, hmmm, sounds interesting, and put it on my birthday list. Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a fantastic, exhilarating read. This is extremely similar to the Agassi autobiography that I pimped earlier this year in terms of a wonderful read, but the voice in this book outshines even Agassi's compelling voice. In short, this is one of the best books I've read in the last five years. Absolutely.

Okay, we need to spell out some caveats here. I was born in '56, so the musicians that Keith Richards talks about in his book I know. And what could possibly be more endearing to an American than to go "Ahh" when Richards describes his ever-lasting fascination with rock and roll because he heard an Elvis single or a Chuck Berry single?

What stands out in this book is not the drug busts, the somewhat amazing constitution of these guys, the inevitable overdoses and deaths, but Keith Richards as a musician. Yes, a musician. This is a book about a guy who loves to create music. I've been to a few Stones' concerts, I have most of their albums, and like all people I've asked myself the question, when in the hell are the Stones going to pack it up? Aren't they sick of singing "Satisfaction"? You read Richards' book and you understand that this isn't about a grab for the filthy lucre. Yeah, that's part of it, but it's about going on stage and playing Satisfaction and saying that he's never played it the same way twice. And you believe him. I don't think I'll ever approach a concert the same way again.

Also part of what seals this book's place as one of the best reads in a very long time is how he articulates his never-ending quest to create the best music he can create. This is pathetic to admit, but he writes about music the way I feel about writing. Except, sadly, he articulates it much better. He writes perfectly about the triangle between the artist, the art, and the audience, and that high you get when you connect. When the triangle is a perfect isosceles and each point just keeps pinging as your vision is exacted in your art and resonates with your readers (or in his case, his audience).

This has one of the best "voices" I've read. Funny, insightful, honest, irreverent, reverent (when talking of his children and his wife he is especially endearing), and above all so honest that you think, wow, way to lay it out. I don't suppose he has anything to hide, but part of the power of this book is a take it or leave it sensibility. He doesn't make excuses for who he is or what he's shot up. For him it's all about the sound. Part of the real strength of his book is his discussion of how he plays, how he makes the "sound." I put sound in quotes because to him it's as important a factor as "voice" is to me. He's absolutely honest that the Stones are a bunch of white boys who parlayed the Chicago blues sound in a mega-band, and he's equally honest about his reverence for musicians, those both known and unknown. His constant tributes to his fellow musicians is yet another strength of this book. And while I think you need a healthy ego to be an artist, Richards never lets that get in the way. Because, really, it's about the band. Always. It's about making and nailing the sound as a "band."

I walked away from this book thinking that Keith Richards is a hell of a musician and a storyteller.

Part II on Piracy

2011-01-05T10:51:00.000-08:00

So some judicious digging has revealed that these sites that provide illegal downloads are most likely an e-mousetrap, designed to infect your computer with Trojans, Malware, etc. Apparently the gross numbers of hits is not an indication of sales but of trolls using lesser-known authors, probably with the expectation that their publishers don't have the financial or legal muscle to make them remove the material from their website. Indeed, this particular site has a section in their FAQS that stipulates that you can request material to be removed, however, the request must come from the owner of the copyright, which is your publisher.

The word is that the entire ebook isn't generally available, but I'm still as curious as hell. I won't do this on my laptop, but I going to use my old laptop and see if I can't try to download a book just for the hell of it. I still think this raises huge issues regarding sales, royalties, and just how vulnerable authors are. Because what is to stop me from ripping the spines off the books in my sizable library, buying a high-end scanner, scan them, turn them into PDFs, and then sell it for pennies? When I get a cease and desist letter, then I move to another Internet company with a different ISP and then start all over again.

The comments on Joe Scalzi's blog when Macmillan and amazon went head to head revealed to me that not only is there a huge group of readers who want cheap ebooks, they don't care if amazon's business model is based on predatory pricing in a move to capture the ebook market (like they did the book market); plain and simple they wanted cheap ebooks and they didn't care how they got them. And lots of them. I read comment after comment by people who were furious that Macmillan was determined to control the pricing of their product. The argument that creating a false market sets the stage so that publishers and authors were becoming locked into a pricing structure that was economically unsustainable (not to mention affecting their royalties like whoa) meant nothing to these readers. Comments about how they didn't want to pay for the Rolls Royces of the publishers were plentiful enough, and even when people came forward to explain exactly how much money it takes to produce a book even before it leaves the warehouse (much more than you think!) fell on deaf ears. Even more astonishing, they could have cared less that the person whose blog they were commenting on might be a victim of this predatory pricing war (and, indeed, as we know, amazon pulled ALL Macmillan titles--paper and e-titles--for a few days).

Basically, what I gleaned from this discussion was that some entrepreneurial jerk who wants to sell ebooks really cheap has a willing and able market. Based on the discussion on that blog, I don't imagine any of those people would care that a book was pirated.

Please Stop Now

2011-01-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

I had a lovely holiday, thanks. Daughter came home from college for a wee visit, presents were exchanged, I got a lot of books, chocolate was eaten, and my plans for cleaning up garden debris were pointless as we had nothing but rain for two solid weeks, so, hello, slothdom, my old friend. I did very little in two weeks other than re-read le Carre's Smiley/Karla trilogy. Life could be worse. I love those books. The Honourable Schoolboy is the weakest of the three, but then again, le Carre's worst would be my genius so there you are. Unfortunately, upon my return to work I was greeted by a SEA OF ANTS. For PC reasons they can't spray. I am going into work in the morning armed with a can of Raid and basically blasting them with harmful chemicals. For heaven's sake, I work next to what used to be a fertilizer plant (we NEVER drink the water from the taps), so the blowback from a vigorous spraying of Raid is the least of my worries.

So aside from ant invasion, I'm feeling fairly upbeat, thinking about novel no. four, and then on DorothyL today I read about illegal downloading of books. I thought, well, I'm totally small fry, I doubt my books are available for free. WRONGO! In fact, my books have been uploaded several times and with each upload there are over a thousand hits. I wish I could say that I didn't immediately start tallying the profits I have lost due to this, but I did. To add insult to injury, the hardcover of my second book, Roux Morgue is now virtually worthless. Yes, worthless. You can buy used copies on amazon.com for one cent. Three years and countless hours of horrific writer's block later (that book was a bitch to write--not because it's particularly brilliant or anything, just because of other issues in my life--plus that small cancer scare), I find it a not little galling that it's worthless, however, what I find even more stroke-inducing is that it can be downloaded for free. Just because. They can. And some jerk(s) did.

I have sent an email to publisher in the hopes of them getting all lawyer-ish and ugly. Sadly, I think we are at the point where copyright is an arcane term. It's always been that when you sign away your rights to a publisher there was this tacit understanding that they had your wishes sort of at heart because if your book doesn't sell, then their investment is worthless. Now, the second you put a book out there it belongs to everyone for free. Hello electronic age! I guess Google had it right all along. Copyright is now pointless. I wish I felt the same way about royalties. And sure, I write because I love to write, but I would also like to write and have the freedom to one day not squeeze my writing in the left over pockets of my life. And that means getting paid for my efforts. If I'm not getting compensated then it becomes much harder to justify NOT doing all the other things that I put on hold to write.

Traditions

2010-12-12T12:58:00.000-08:00

One of the results of never truly leaving the nest (both sets of parents still live in the Bay Area) is that their traditions become your own. If we had left the Bay Area (at one point we were seriously looking to relocate), then I think we might have established our own traditions, instead of the easy route of purloining those of our parents.

Example, being a December baby, we always got our Christmas tree on my birthday. It's a tradition we continue with today, even though it tends to be inconvenient when my birthday falls during the week. And my husband's parents always made pizzelles during the holidays. My husband and I just finished making our pizzelles this morning. We are up to three batches of seven cups of flour and six eggs each, and no matter what, it always takes about forty cookies before the irons are anywhere near hot enough and seasoned enough. We tend to eat the "duds" and now I have pizzelle cookie bloat, but all for a good cause.

I think of this because this year kid one isn't going to be home to help pick out the tree. Odious classes are keeping her at University until after my birthday, so the tree will be decorated without her. We will put aside her favorite ornaments so that she can put them on the tree herself, but its still sad. And I guess this is what aging is all about. The adopting of traditions, the shedding of traditions as our situations change. My parents now have a fake tree. It's too much for them to pay for and haul a real tree up their front steps. But I don't think this tree is any less beloved despite its distinct lack of any scent. Because despite the plastic and lights, it still signals the return of children, grandchildren, love, hope, and all that good stuff that has always made Christmas my favorite holiday.

Now, if only I could get out my cards and, oi, buy some presents!

Lots Happening in Book World

2010-12-09T08:56:00.000-08:00

Wow, lots happened in the book world this week. Google fired a first volley over the bow of amazon (its only possible competition at this point in the game), and Ackerman, who has a large stake in Borders, just make a bid for Barnes and Noble.

If you want the skinny on Google, Laura Miller over at Salon.com has an ARTICLE about Google's foray into amazon's playground. IMO, they jumped too late and were too clumsy about it. They should have forged an alliance with Sony five years ago and gone mano-e-mano with amazon and Kindle from the get go. Hindsight blahblabblah. Also, I think Google is making a HUGE mistake trying to palm off OCR renditions of books as actual books. Any brief perusal of reviews of e-readers always focuses first on the quality of the read. THAT is what an e-reader is competing against. Even a decent scan is a crappy read, so no. If I were Google, I'd have these in a separate market all together and not even lump them in with the e-book market. They already have deals with a number of publishers (who I suspect are leaping at a chance to bring amazon down a peg or two). Maximize those deals and stop trying to palm off lousy scans as e-books.

My two cents is that both amazon and Google will be bested by technology itself. THAT is actually going to be the biggest competitor for these e-book marketers. Because like the music industry, the bookselling market is now driven by technology. If Google can scan a book and pretend it's selling a book, then what's to stop me from buying a high-end scanner, doing the exact same thing, and charging a dollar for the download? NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And honey, I got a lot of books. It would probably take me a couple of years to scan everything that I have. Being a bookwhore, most of my stock is in hardcover. Ironically, Google's vision of evading paying copyright and scanning everything written under the sun and trying to portray it as the universal library is here. Except it's not in their hands, as they wanted.

I said here months ago that either B&N or Borders was going to go, that the market can't sustain two huge booksellers, and low and behold, Ackerman, who has a large stake in Borders, has just made a bid for B&N, the article is HERE.

This is closely related (if not a casualty of) the e-reader and e-book phenomena, although it doesn't seem so at first glance. The subject of e-readers always elicits cries of frustration from the book owners in this crowd. I don't own an e-reader, but that is largely due to cash flow issues, but I will buy one at some point soon. Because it's the wave of the future. I have acres of books in my house. I have so many books that I have them double shelved and stacked. When I make posts like this I always get posts back on how much people love their books, but that's no longer the issue. Because books are becoming far too expensive to produce and their market share in the entertainment field continues to drop. Mass market is dyingdyingdying, and within the next ten years I figure that a significant portion of book commerce will be electronic. Readers don't have a choice. The market is changing without their participation. They can buy as many books as they want now, but that's not going to save the paper book. I think that there will always be a few books published. The best sellers. The textbooks. Non-fiction. But the rest I think is going electronic because book buying and book selling is a dying business. And when you have a book reader that costs less than a frigging phone, well, then. What that does for the author is a whole other post.

The Dining Problem

2010-11-26T14:23:00.000-08:00

My husband and I have entered a period in our lives where we are transitioning into true adulthood. By that I mean it's obvious that we should no longer benefit from the bounty of our parents, but we should swap out and have them benefit from our bounty. That's slowly happening as the reality of the parental units providing big holiday dinners for lots of people is no longer an option. Pot lucks are becoming the order of the day, which is fine, except I suspect that even hosting these pot lucks is starting to be something of a burden.

I certainly have no objection to hosting large dinners, ahem, former chef you know, but I can't and it's purely down to just not having the space. I live in what I lovingly refer to as "The Box." We did remodel "The Box" a few years ago but that didn't result in any more square footage. It's now a nicer box, but still a box. I don't have a real dining room; it's merely the extension of the living room or a large hall into the kitchen. The longer I live out here, the more I realize that these homes were built in an era where food wasn't important. Where you didn't eat. I'm guessing there was this assumption that you barbecued for twelve months of the year. A tract home built in the 1950s, these houses were put up fast and cheap. And they look it. Or at least ours did. Now we added some nice touches but I still have no real dining room. That's the thing about these cheap tract houses.

And I'm sick of it. I desperately want a dining room. I want to throw dinners where I can add all the leaves of my dining table and not have the table hit my couch. I want the space to dine with many. I want a dedicated room solely dedicated to eating!

There's hope. My husband and I are seriously considering moving from our tract when the last kid is done with school. There are several reasons for this. First of all, we are not suburban people. More than fifteen years have past since we moved here and neither of us feels like we've planted any roots. Second, tiny house, see above. When I mention that we're thinking of moving people assume we're down-sizing. "Oh, moving into something smaller now that the kids are gone." Are they crazy? No bigger, we want much, much bigger.

Aside from my magnificent yard and the margaritas at El Charro, I don't think I will miss anything. Oh, the trees turning. That I will miss. We get fall colors out here and that I will mourn. I love the fall out here, but it doesn't make up for the spring and winter and the truly hated hothothot summer.

In anticipation of moving I've been looking at houses online. Of course, none of the houses I want we can afford, but the one thing I will not budge on is a dining room. I am sick of this wide hallway with a table and chairs in the middle of it. I want a place to put a dining table, where I can extend the leaves, where I can host Thanksgiving and Christmas if need be.

I'm ready to receive that passed baton, but no place to put it.

The amazon Disconnect

2010-11-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

So, husband and I were watching CNN and, of course, Anderson Cooper is still beating that amazon drum, and my husband turns to me and says that he doesn't get it. Why would amazon monkey with the search engine to make it harder for customers to find material with LGBT themes (like Brokeback Mountain, I kid you not!) but turn a blind eye to a manual on how to be a successful pedophile.

Let's assume that their search engine fail of last year wasn't a deliberate nod to conservative market forces. Let's take their explanation at face value. That some poor French programmer eliminated a bunch of keywords by accident. Say this is true. I would still be majorly irritated with them because this doesn't explain why they stalled authors for months on this issue, essentially ignoring requests as to why their books weren't searchable under keywords, but let's just accept this and put it down to horrible customer relations.

We segue to the latest issue. Why would they drag their heels and in a shockingly similar display of dissing their customer base ignore repeated requests by their customers to discontinue these titles? I'll tell you why: this is the difference between books that they make little money on from other publishers and the money they see themselves making on self-published material

Having positioned themselves as THE bookseller in the U.S.--although the latest news is that Google is poised to challenge them; bring it on!--they now see themselves as THE publisher in the U.S. And while this is an admitted boom for the mid-list authors who are getting canned by their publishers, this is also the portal for authors who want to write about topics that are, um, questionable in content. In my opinion, it's why although these books are in flagrant violation of amazon's own stated TOS regarding books they market on their site, amazon has been ignoring customers' complaints. Only now, once caught in CNN's glare, are they removing these books.

That is the link. amazon makes pennies on books they sell through their site (they make up the paltry profit in volume sales), but the money to be made on the self-publishing market has the potential to be huge. Borders is also gearing up for its own self-publishing venture. I doubt that books on how to be a successful pedophile are flying out the door, however, as publishing continues to constrict and drop authors, all those authors who have a small but dedicated readership are self-publishing and flocking to put their books on Kindle. amazon has the infrastructure in place and they own the book selling market (currently). Do the math.

More Amazon Fail!

2010-11-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

If you Google amazon+pedophile, you will bring up the latest in amazon fail. With its new push into self-publishing (get your pedophilia manuals on Kindle!), it does not seem to have a functioning filter as evidenced by the latest PR nightmare where advocates of pedophilia have self-published books on amazon. Advocates for free speech say that writers should have a forum for their material, no matter how disturbing. These are big issues to tackle and this wee little space isn't going to take that one on. What I am taking on is the issue of how amazon continues to absolutely fail in terms of customer relations. As reported by Anderson Cooper last night on CNN, amazon has been deluged for months with customers complaints that they plan on boycotting amazon until these offensive materials are removed. No response. No response to CNN's repeated requests for comments, not even a half-hearted response on free speech.

In a brief article in the Science Christian Monitor today they bring up last year's PR nightmare, the scuttling of LGBT keywords from their search engines, and today's PR mess, and how amazon can't please anyone. Sorry, these aren't the same issues. Last time I looked (at least here in the U.S.), consensual sex between adults is not illegal. Pedophilia is absolutely illegal in all 50 states. I doubt that amazon's continued publication of these titles was related to last summer's search fail, because they refused to even acknowledge that this WAS a policy to limit people's ability to search for LGBT titles. They blamed it on a French programmer. Despite months and months of protests by authors whose noticed that unless you had a title or an author's name, you couldn't search for LGBT books using keywords. The authors whose books were unsearchable using keywords were stalled repeatedly by amazon staff. Which is deja vu, basically, because according to CNN, despite months and months of emails from customers protesting that these titles are basic pedophilia manuals (how to caress children in such a manner that is sexual but legal), amazon once again went mum. It's not hard to imagine amazon would have continued to be mum, except that CNN did a signal boost on this issue.

This is the company that removed keywords from LGBT title searches. This is the company that pulled all Macmillan titles in a smack down with Macmillan over pricing of their ebooks. This is the company that has published manuals on how to be a better pedophile. Every six months they do something that enrages me, and yet as an author they are THE site from which to sell your books. Even used book stores use their rankings to price their books.

They are a monopoly. They are so large and so invasive in the publishing food chain that they feel they are asbestos, and it's only when some equally gigantic monolithic company stands up to them do they respond. Oh, wait. They didn't respond to CNN. Let's just say they react. Because I have yet to hear any sort of response from them regarding what seems like a violation of their own policies regarding questionable book content, and yet the title in question has been removed. Others with similar content remain available.

Sadly, since I already boycott amazon I can't start boycotting them. Darn.

Salute to a Vet

2010-11-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

This is my yearly salute to my step-father. He turned 89 this summer. My own father was sort of made of fail, and this guy stepped up to the plate and basically did every thing right that my father did wrong. He's made my mother exceptionally happy for the last forty years and he deserves kudos for so many things, but today we focus on him being a vet.

Although a pacifist, he found himself joining the RAF in Britain in 1939 as a radio operator. He's still building radios to this day. He was captured in Java in 1940 and managed to survive five years in a Japanese prison camp. He was 75 pounds when the war ended. If you've read King Rat by James Clavell, you know my step-father's story. Although he never met Clavell, they were in Changee prison about the same time. His stories of those years are bone-chilling.

Anyway, Ken, hat's off.

State of Whatever

2010-11-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

So, I think that it's time to face some facts. Book publishing is dying. Publishers are hanging on by their nails, and what dollars they do have are being invested mightily in those authors with a proven track record of sales. No one is taking chances in this market. No one is buying in this market. Authors continue to get dropped by their publishers. Plus, we are in a gray zone as we transition from paper books to e-books. FYI: according to amazon, sales of e-books has now surpassed sales of ALL paper books, including hard covers and soft covers combined. The future is here. How this shakes out is still a mystery to all involved. What I do know is that the big authors will continue to see their books published in paper, and authors like me will find themselves as e-authors.

I might actually do better as an e-author because the investment in an e-book is minimal. You might take a chance on me if you only have to pay $4.99 for the privilege. That's the cost of a large coffee with a double shot of espresso. But that's still an "if." If the big publishers demand that the sale price of e-books remain somewhat on par with the sale price of paper books that will kill authors like me. I doubt that my publisher will take that sort of hardstand because a great deal of their sales are to libraries and library patrons tend to like books. But even that's changing as even libraries are now looking at e-books. If your goal is to get people to read, then having e-books for "rent" could mean endless inventory, albeit in bytes and not shelf space.

What's the new author to do? That author who is trying to break into the biz? I don't know. I've thought about this a lot. I think that author collectives are going to be the name of the game. I did a review here recently on Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries, and he's basically done just that: banded a bunch of authors together that's part literary e-salon and part social salon. He's doing a nice job, and I commend him for it. He seems to always think a little outside the box. I recommend getting his daily letter. It's always got some interesting insight into life in the city or publishing. Anyway, the site it called "The Daily Rumpus" and it's URL is here: http://therumpus.net/. In the top right-hand corner you'll see a link in how to subscribe to the google group for his daily (mostly) email.

Even as I see this as the wave of the future, what is scary is that Elliott already has a fair amount of cred. He's not some newbie author banding together with other newbie authors trying to get people other than their friends and relatives to buy their books. That they basically have to self-publish because no publisher will pick them up. I don't know how you make a presence if you don't already have some presence. The only way I can see doing it is to pick a niche and then cater to that niche (interestingly, Elliott's niche is the SandM scene in S.F., which he uses mercilessly in his writing). But it could be something as simple as writing mysteries that feature dogs. So you go to vets and ask if you can display your book for sale. You contact other authors who write about dogs and as a collective unit you buy space at dog shows and try to sell your books. You work it.

This system involves investment and time (I work pretty much full time and I don't have any money--kid in college), so it probably wouldn't work for me, but that's where I see it going. You have to band together and work your six-degrees-of-separation like crazy. You Facebook. You Twitter. You take cute pictures of dogs and post them. You become a marketing machine with other writers.

Essentially, I think that we will all have to become our own publishers and publicists.

Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. The e-book revolution will mean that I can be published forever, but it doesn't mean that I will have any readers. And that's the rub.

Election Results

2010-11-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

You may argue about various policies and whether we should cut spending or increasing spending or whatever. What I would like to say about the current election results is that this is not my America. Granted, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a melting pot. The U.S. Senate is now largely composed of wealthy white people. My America isn't white and it isn't wealthy. Election result after election result was followed by the amount of dollars funneled into these campaigns by the GOP. THIS HAS TO STOP. The only bright spot in this entire election is that fact that it appears that Meg Whitman did not buy the state of California. Sadly, we can't say that about the rest of America. Your vote is for sale. Apparently.

Voice

2010-11-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

My panel at Bouchercon panel was composed of Poisoned Pen writers, moderated by our editor, Barbara Peters. Fortunately she changed the topic of the Bouchercon panel from the generic "where do you get your ideas" to the topic of voice in writing. Seriously, when someone asks me that question I feel like saying I rough up homeless people and make them spit out mystery plots. Because that old adage that there are no new plots is actually true. It's been thought up before and will be thought up again and what distinguishes your rehash from someone else's rehash is your voice.

Voice is the most critical aspect of a writer's bag of tricks and the most elusive to develop. It's what makes your books written by you. As Barbara said in the panel, you can always fix a train wreck of a plot, but you can't fix a boring voice. Someone can present the most fascinating, relatively novel sets of ideas and it will still never get published if there is the absence of voice or the voice is dull and plodding.

So what is voice? To me there are two critical components to voice. First of all, it's how you, as the author, puts together words. Which sounds simple, except, this is where you put together words so that their style, pitch, rhythm, and jazz has a whole to it in your head. Sadly, this takes a whole lot of time to nail down. Like, um, years. Voice is your unique relationship (as an author) with words. The word "unique" is key here. You shouldn't sound like someone else. I find that when I write in first person my voice tends to be conversational (which is why I like first person narratives), but in third person it's a lot less snarky and more contemplative. Which, I suppose, reflects the salient differences in how different points of view work, but it's more than that. It's my brain working with two separate tools and how MY brain relates to the strengths and weaknesses inherent in those tools. Basically, it's where I finally get to the point where the disconnect between my brain and the page has been minimized to a decent degree.

Now the hard part., You've been writing for a bit, your sense of who you are as a writer is beginning to gel in your head and seemingly on the page, and then you reach the true wild card here: the readers. I liken it to us with our passports in hand. The reading train is in the station, you've bought your ticket, but you're just not sure you want to go on this journey. The first paragraphs are about wooing you to get on the train. This is my world, sit back, relax, we're going on a journey. Voice is when my writing and your internal editor are rattling along on the same train, and oh my, did you see that lion? Wow. That waterfall was something. Ha ha ha ha! Did you see those clowns? We are both seeing the same thing, laughing at the same thing, and in the case of mystery getting curious and terrified at the same thing. And there are no unscheduled stops. That is when my voice works. When we are BOTH on the same journey--orchestrated by yours truly. And that is also key. I'm the conductor, the person shoveling the coal into the engine, the flag person, and the person driving the train. Me.

What happens when my voice as an author fails? You think you're going to Africa and you find this train is bound for Hoboken. You don't finish the book. You're disappointed in the story. The characterization falls apart. The plot is mickey mouse. And yes, these are all structural things, but they do play a major part in voice, because someone with a kick-ass voice will make structural failures somewhat immaterial. Obviously, there is a point where you can only pull the wool over the readers eyes for so long, and then it becomes a case of Oz standing behind that curtain, yelling at you to ignore that man behind the green curtain, but really? Voice is the magic of a book.

Unfortunately, not everyone is going to like your voice. That's a hard thing to accept. The trick is to get most people on board that reading train. There are a few who have seen their fair share of lions, hate clowns, and are allergic to waterfalls, or (and yes, there is this), hate first-person point of view. There are a lot of readers who despise it and it's a book killer for them. I don't get that, but I have to deal with that every time I sit down and type "I."

In essence, voice is what makes the author a Pied Piper, but instead of a haunting melody on a flute, our lure is words. And the cool part about this is that every writer's song is different.

Post on Bouchercon

2010-10-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck at home with a horrible cold, so what better time to post about Bouchercon. These are my personal impressions.

The Positive:

This was a very well run con, with only a few glitches. The absence of a map was quickly remedied, and elevating the Hospitality Suite from some place merely to rest your weary dogs into a vibrant meeting place to network was a stroke of genius. There should be a place other than the bar to congregate, and the Hospitality Suite this go around was fab.

The best panel for my money was the survey commissioned by Sisters in Crime regarding reading and buying habits of mystery readers. There weren't any surprises as far as I was concerned, but it confirmed my own sense of the market. There is a pretty strong divide between the 50+ readers and the 40- readers. Those between 40-50 straddle the market. If you're 50 and older you tend not to buy too much online, you like your whodunit, and you are very loyal to your authors. If you're 40 and under, you like dark, you like suspense, and you're not particularly brand loyal. You are buying more and more off the Internet and you're buying e-books, and you want them cheap.

Location? Well, you can't beat the S.F. Bay Area. It was nice having it at the Hyatt Regency because we could mosey on over to the Ferry Building for snacks or just some fresh air. The hotel rooms were pricey, but that wasn't a problem for me as I BARTed in.

The interviews with the stars of this con--Laurie King and Lee Child--were interesting, but I've seen them interviewed several times before (at previous B'cons, organizers take note that you need some new blood here). These interviews were not so much of a wow as that pleasure you get in listening to intelligent people talk. I'd never seen David Balducci interviewed and, man, is this guy worth listening to. What an excellent interviewee: funny, insightful, and a little brash, I could have listened to him for another hour. He writes CIA thriller stuff, which is not my cup of tea, but after hearing him I'm toying with the idea of reading one of his books. That's what these cons are suppose to do. Expose you to authors you've never read and put a bug in your ear.

The Negative

First and foremost, people need to understand that these conventions are largely fan-based. Which is both a godsend and a problem. Because you need the fans (and people arrive with suitcases of books to be signed by their favorite authors) to generate a majority of the con population. So, in keeping with this dynamic, the panels tend to be geared toward the fans. Which I understand, however, this tends to make the programming for these cons happyhappy, which is a little disconcerting, because publishing is currently undergoing some massive changes that should be addressed and weren't. Bouchercon is THE biggest of the mystery conventions and if we don't talk about these issues here, as the writing community, where are we going to talk about them? So this was irritating to me.

I've been to something like six of these cons and this was my last. Because they don't make financial sense to the small to mid-list author. Although e-books and e-readers have dominated the news for the last year (the smack down between amazon and Macmillan was fascinating), there were no panels devoted to that segment of the market. Because, well, people come to these things to sign books, and I imagine that the booksellers would be fairly peeved had there been a track on e-publishing.

Sadly that IS the big news in the market these days with e-books sales outselling hardcovers and paperbacks combined (per the latest numbers from amazon). Frankly, with authors getting dropped by their publishers (I spoke to two people whose series had been dropped), the e-book is going to be the only thing that keeps them published and available. As more and more authors are getting dropped, more and more authors are now resorting to putting their books up on Kindle or Smashwords. These authors have readers, they just don't have readers in the tens of thousands. And the current publishing model is to throw all your eggs into a few baskets and let the other authors sink or swim. Most of us end up sinking because mid-list is virtually a death sentence. Currently if you can't somehow elevate yourself to being beyond a mid-list author, you are toast.

As if to hammer home this problem, several of us from my publisher (Poisoned Pen Press) had no books to sign. And, yeah, I get that the booksellers don't want to buy books that they can't sell, but this becomes a cycle of disappointment for everyone. As an author I'm encouraged to attend so that I can generate some interest in my series, and yet there are no books for me to sell should I get people interested in my series. And, sure, they can order off of amazon, but isn't that diametrically opposed to what these cons are trying to do. Keep the independents alive?

For someone like me, being small to mid-list it doesn't make sense to attend. Yeah, it was nice to see people I haven't seen in a while, but unless the programming adds a track that informs me about market trends, and unless the book dealers start stocking my books, there's no point in me attending. I can't possibly justify the cost of registration if I don't even sell one book. Several people I talked to felt the same way.

Basically, I had fun, but at this point in my writing career it isn't about having fun. I wish it were.

Computer Woes and Why Apple Is Taking Over the World

2010-10-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

For the last three weeks I have been working off my crappy laptop as the graphics problems on new and shiny laptop still persisted despite replacing both the motherboard and the LCD. I could have taken yet another day off from work to have a tech come to my house, and strangely that didn't appeal! Dell has informed me through a telephone bot that my laptop has been fixed and shipped.

This is the last Dell I will own. I know that Dell was proudly patting themselves on the back when they decided on this business model where they conduct all their business via telephone, email, and/or mail, however, now you have apple and their stores RAKING it in with their various products, and who is laughing now? Stores are designed to seduce people into buying products. Get it? No amount of pretty graphics are going to get me to buy a product. However, I walk into a store and I see it and it's pretty and it works and there is somewhere I can bring it when it doesn't work...

I know there is a group of people who despise Jobs and his arrogance and the whole Mac aura (I'm married to one), however, what is indisputable is that they know how to run a business and they have a product that works. I like my overlords to be competent. It's *incompetent* megalomaniacs that drive me crazy. Oh, FB, that means you. Latest privacy fail? Who is surprised?

To whit, the telephone bot read off my tracking number for FedEx and my fix-it ticket number so quickly that I had to listen to that phone message five times to get all the numbers down correctly. Dell, you've lost me as a future customer. Every single exchange in this process has been cumbersome and irritating and no amount of polite emails from your no doubt beleaguered staff will make a difference.

Still No Bouchercon Post!

2010-10-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

As mentioned earlier, we have a new dog. The previous dog was something of a trial, even before her multiple (and hellishly expensive) illnesses, but she was beloved. Even though my childhood was most peripatetic, we always had dogs. My father even gave me a dog (an act that served to mitigate a host of his sins over the years), but Winnie was and will be, I know, the dog that I will remember best. I wonder if it has less to do with the animal and more to do with the period of your life with that animal. Winnie grew up with my kids, and when I think of her I think of my daughter at eight, an impossibly articulate and sweet child, and my son at four, an impossibly impish and sweet child.

Bear's putting up a good fight though. He's much easier to train, he's smarter, he's more destructive in some ways--incalculable hours and money spent in the garden + 1 puppy = major fail--but he's not Winnie. He tries, but, no it's not the same. But it's good enough.

One aspect of owning a new pup is that "I've been in a crate all night I want out factor." It's a little like baking again, being up way before the sun, but we've compromised at 6:30 am and he's pretty good about that. Those mommy genes, oh how I hate thee. He starts banging at the metal gate to his crate and I can't help but get up. My husband never hears him. I'm not complaining (too much).

This morning I'm up at 6:30 per the usual. The house is quiet except for the snores of my son. The first real rain is soaking the garden. I stare sadly at the flower beds that have been Bearorized and that I haven't had time to clean up. I see myself out there later today trying to create order out of the mud. The bonus of losing that maple last year is now evident, as the ash is beginning to shed its leaves. The maple was a goddamn leaf producing machine that entailed devoting hours and hours to raking, yet I still mourn that tree. What a beautiful tree.

The dining room is cluttered with material from Bouchercon so in addition to the garden I need to recycle what's not important and file what is. I bought four books by an author that had been recommended to me and now I discover I don't like her style. I'm not happy.

I've finished the last of the edits on new book. Although ridiculously pleased with it, I know that marketing it will be a total bitch and that I might end up putting it up on my blog just for the hell of it. I'm stymied what to do next. Young adult are the only thing selling these days, and I have an idea for that... Bouchercon usually hypes me up, but this con was so depressing in so many ways that I'm left a little battered and wondering about my future as an author.

Oh, the rain has stopped. Bear has dragged in a bunch of pine cones. And a gigantic root that used to have flowers attached to it. Sigh.

Get Your Purple On

2010-10-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

I need to write a Bouchercon wrap-up post, but this is more important. I mean this literally. Go into your closet and put on something purple. I could get all meta-ish here about blogging and Internet privacy, but I'm not because the message today should be simple and not cluttered with meta.

GLAAD has designated today as Spirit Day, which was created to honor LGBT youth who feel that life is not worth living due to the hate, bullying, and cruelty they face daily. Your son, your daughter, your niece, your nephew, your next door neighbor's kid, anyone of them could be gay. Or bisexual. Or transsexual.

I got my purple on because I can no longer be silent about this hate mongering, this equating homosexuality with alcoholism, or depravity, or sin, or whatever bizarre and vicious words ignorant people use to defame our LGBT community.

Go to your closet. Now. Deck your ass out in purple for the Tyler Clementis and Matthew Shepards of this world. I think the hate mongers have had more than their fair say. Now it's our turn.

Cranky Pants Away

2010-10-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

So we've been ridiculously cranky here in blogland. Let's talk about the pluses. I'm attending Bouchercon next week, which if you don't know is THE mystery convention of the year. It's in San Francisco this year. I'll be on a panel with fellow Poisoned Pen authors and our wonderful editor, Barbara Peters. If you can't make the 8:30 am panel (no, that's not a typo), then try to catch me in the hallways if you're going. Shout-out to Jeri, yes, lunch on Friday works for me. I usually wear a kimono (a garment meant to hide a multiple of sins).

Also, I haven't talked much about the puppy lately. He's growing. He's chewing. He's basically winning the on-going war against the sprinklers. He now looks like a dog, however, he still acts like a puppy.

Pretty damn cute, eh?

Politics: the Dirtiest Game in Town

2010-10-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

I've been battered by Meg Whitman's negative political ads for the last year, and all I can say is November can't come soon enough. I'm a committed Democrat, so the chances that I would vote for Ms. Whitman are highly unlikely, but I do have some questions that I'd like answered (and these apply to other Republicans who are running in national elections and who also seem to sneer at a system that they are dying to be an integral part of). An actual response as opposed to the canned sound bites would be appreciated. Because I should tell you that the sound bites are no longer working. You're starting to sound like a robot. FYI, you should be very worried. The newspapers of my youth (which never met a Republican they didn't love) endorsed Jerry Brown. The L.A. Times(!) endorsed Jerry Brown.

So first off, I can't help but see spending $120 million of one's own money as nothing more than a power grab. Because you didn't believe in the process of government to ever cast a vote, and yet now you're asking for my vote. I see a profound disconnect there. We should we endorse you to run a system that you've never endorsed? Your apology during the first debate was pretty damn sad. I can see missing one election. Maybe two. But your voting record is abysmal. There's no other word for it. It says that you really didn't care about the system because, hey, you were busy making money. And I will point out that this system that you say is so broken allowed you to amass enough money to comfortably spend $120 million on a political campaign. So what is it? Is the system that you have chosen to sneer at broken or it is working? Your bank account would seem to bear testimony that it's working REALLY well. Let's put it this way. My bank account wouldn't let me wage a political campaign to the tune of millions of dollars.

Second, I really don't get where you talk about your Silicon Valley experience as some sort of general blueprint for success. You keep trotting out the word "manufacturing." I will point out the eBay manufactures nothing. You don't even manufacture the content! You merely provide people with servers and search engines so that they can sell stuff. That's NOT manufacturing. That's, well, selling stuff. Even more ridiculous, you're not even selling your own stuff; you sell other people's stuff. So how can you even begin to talk about manufacturing like you're some expert where the closest you've ever been to manufacturing is, well, hell. You've never been close to manufacturing anything other than your own image.

I didn't want to get into the nanny thing, but needs must. I'm somewhat sympathetic to you up to a point. I actually take as a given that you didn't know. Although we differ dramatically on the issue of immigration, I do believe you that you didn't know. That's where my sympathy ends.

First of all, if you were so desperate to court the Latino vote, then you made a fatal mistake in hiring Pete Wilson as your campaign manager (Mr. Prop 197). To have that man as your chief strategist says all we need to know about you really feel about the immigration issue. If it wasn't all sound bites, then you wouldn't have had him as your second in command. So, yeah, major fail there. Second major fail? You should have used this situation with your nanny to cement yourself as a tough but compassionate person who understands that this is a complex issue. Your strident sound bites on immigration came to bite you in the ass. You know first hand how complex this issue is; you LIVED it. So you tell this woman that you cannot have her employed in your family because you are breaking the law. Then you give her a significant severance package and you hire her a lawyer. Because as you say, she's family. You use this in your campaign as an example of how you understand the issues and how this touches all our lives. Even yours.

This would have been a tremendous bonus to your campaign because there is nothing about your life that is remotely like mine with the exception that we both have two children. THAT'S IT. Your extreme wealth, politics, and values make us polar opposites. That's the burden that enormously wealthy politicians have to carry: that intrinsic lack of empathy for those in need. I knew the minute that George Bush, Sr. didn't know how a supermarket scanner worked that he was toast against Bill Clinton (whatever his faults, he understands what it's like for someone working 9-5). On possibly the one issue that I might have been actually sympathetic to you, you fired this woman so that she wouldn't be burden to you going into a campaign. What naive planet are you on that you didn't think this wouldn't haunt you? Is it because she was so insignificant that you never thought she'd have the wherewithal to challenge your version of events, which, yeah, was nicely played out when you accused her of stealing your mail. In case you didn't know, that's entitlement with a capital "E."

Also, if you don't have any proof that the Brown campaign orchestrated this smear stop saying it. Because if there isn't any proof, you are only digging yourself in deeper and deeper as someone who has a massive sense of entitlement (there's that word again!), who is not beholden to the laws everyone else is, and when you get caught, then you whip out your entitlement to blame someone else. You are not the first high-profile person to be caught with your pants down regarding undocumented workers in a household. Own up to your mistakes, and then people might lighten up or give you a pass on your nonchalance regarding her eligibility documents.

Another bit of unsolicited advice: Pull that ad that says, "I spent one day at the border and the border patrol don't have nearly the resources they need." One day. Wow. One FULL day. Amazing. Now you are an expert. I imagine Jerry Brown in his stint as Attorney General and Governor could dreg up more than just eight hours to study this issue.

Now we come to the real problem, Meg. The very fact that you have spent that much money on a campaign says that you are used to buying your way into situations. It's like someone put the governorship of California up on eBay and you keep upping the bid, determined to win. You have been so immersed in a system where anything can be bought if you keep bidding, that you don't understand that some things cannot or should not be bought. Certainly not by someone who couldn't even get her ass into a voting booth once a year.

So I'm curious. How are you going to get things done in Sacramento should you get there? Buy legislators? Because, FYI, they don't have the war chests you do, and they are VOTED in (by people who vote). This is a concept I know you have trouble with because you keep saying that you're not beholden to anyone. I think everything you have done in this campaign has shown this to be a bald-faced lie.

You are beholden to money and power.

You are the poster child for why we need campaign finance reform. I hope you go down in flames.

Book Review: The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

2010-10-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

This is one of those books that you either love or are irritated by. Its disjointed structure is both its strength and weakness. I loved it, but then I'm partial to memoirs and this story occurs largely in the Bay Area, so there is that connection for me as well. Plus, this author talks about writing on a meta level that few authors ever get into. Plus I had my own crushing experience with writer's block. Plus, hello, I'm a crime fiction author and have a prurient interest in murder, and the Hans Reiser case was front and center news for months. Plus, I'm friends with a couple of Alameda County District Attorneys. I, too, shop at Berkeley Bowl, like Nina Reiser did. So there are a lot of connections here that probably would make me predisposed to like this book, even if it were a mediocre read.

On the surface, this book is about Elliott's crippling writer's block and how a fascination with the murder of Nina Reiser and the people who surrounded her broke that block. The Bay Area is a big place, but it's actually got a small town dynamic to it, and it turns out that at least one key person who the police looked at as a possible suspect (Nina Reiser's ex-boyfriend) was known to Elliott through their mutual participation in the local S&M scene. That's just one of the coincidences that floats in and out of this narrative.

What this book is really about is Elliott coming to terms with his relationship with his father. Elliott's fascination with Hans Reiser and the other people in the ugly interaction between Hans Reiser and his wife is like a knife to old wounds (which if you read the book you will appreciate the choice of words). This is one of those books where you need to go with the flow. The narrative isn't linear, it takes some mental energy to cobble together a coherent sense of his story, but the writing is so spare, honest, and bright that I didn't mind. Some people will mind. There's a fair number of words devoted to his S&M practices, but it's not gratuitous because it's integral to why he deliberately sabotages relationships that are important to him (surely a form of masochism) or cannot seem to accept love unless he has to pay a physical price. Which, yeah, seems pretty much a blueprint for his entire childhood.

One thing that did strike me about this book was that he ended it with an attempt to reconcile with his father (who trashes his son's books on his amazon page). He says at one point, "...I realize that I love him and my relationship with him is the most important relationship in my life." Sadly, I think that's true. It's also the least important relationship in his life.

I liked this book very much.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming...

2010-09-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Enough. Done. Stop it. In the past month I've had three people that I know come down with cancer. I've had two people I know mention that their mothers are being screened for breast cancer. I had breakfast last weekend with a friend who is a cancer survivor. It's getting to the point where I'm afraid to open my email or answer the phone. Of course, avoiding such news isn't going to stop it from happening, but I'm thinking, wow, such wonderful people. And of course, there's always that nagging wee voice. If them, why not you?

::Arranges for mammogram::

Publish or Perish

2010-09-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

So, I've finished my new novel. It's weird and definitely has a specific slant to it. It's not a mystery but it's about the mystery writing world. The criticisms that can be laid at its door are exactly its strengths (in that although it is niche--most definitely--it will really appeal to that niche). I have not submitted it to Poisoned Pen for consideration because (a) it's not a mystery; (b) it was a book I had to write; and (c) it has not gone through their vetting process, which is mandatory [as to why I didn't submit it to vetting process see (a) and (b)]. I would be shocked to the point of perpetual lock-jaw if they liked it. It's not their sort of book, which is not a condemnation of them, so much as a condemnation of my imagination. But not of them.

I have it out to an agent. If she passes on it, I have a couple of other agents I have in mind. But seriously, it's going to be a bitch to market, and I can see people reading it, liking it, and then saying, no, it's not for me. I get that. I have other books to write, so I'm not going to sweat this one out for months and months. If all these agents pass on it, then I will self-publish. Which, yes, is a dirty word, although it's becoming increasingly less dirty as the publishing business starts careening into bankruptcy.

Barnes and Noble has put itself up for sale, and while there's a proxy fight that will probably delay that sale, the fact that it's putting itself up for sale speaks "volumes". Take a look at the inventory levels at your local book chain. Have you noticed that the books that are in high demand (reference books, Spanish for Dummies stuff) are now in the front of the store, and the musty and out of the way corners are now reserved for fiction? Notice how all the "things" have been moved to the front of the store. Gadgets, pens, notebooks, cards, all these things that aren't books but have a whopping profit margin are now in the front of the store. The inventory is non-existent as the staff moves the bookshelves farther and farther impart to give the impression that the stores are full of books, but they are not.

This is the publishing business imploding in front of your very eyes. So imagine what this is doing to the already decimated mid-list author. And the only way authors can fight back from being dumped by their publishers is to self-publish. It's the ONLY way for them to survive. These are decent authors with a dedicated following who want to read them. Of course, their readership isn't in the millions but probably tens of thousands or even one thousand, but they STILL HAVE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO READ THEM. They just don't have publishers who want to publish them.

Enter the eBook and the eReaders and ability to be your own publisher. And people are buying. Spend a week reading the posts from participants on DorothyL and every week there's a thread on where's so and so, I loved his books or her books. Well, I can tell you, nine times out of ten they were dropped by their publisher. But now authors have the ability to publish an eBook or even a trade paperback from lulu.com (ISBN number and everything), and a few of them are saying, yes, I'm going that route.

I might have to go that route. I don't want to, but I spent nine months working on this book. It's fun and a great read, and if you're in the demographic I'm targeting, I guarantee you'll love it. But that doesn't mean that a publisher wants to publish it or that it's even worth their worthwhile financially to publish it. I understand that. But there's nothing stopping me because I've already put in the time that I always put in. It's lemonade out of lemons time.

September 10

2010-09-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

No, that's not a typo. I know you were thinking, ugh, another 9/11 comment. Nope, this is just a personal acknowledgment that it is my father's birthday tomorrow. He's been dead a few years now. Being the victim of some horrible disease that robbed him of his brains, bit by bit, you could say that he's been a dead for a number of years.

He was a difficult man to put it mildlly. To say that our political beliefs were at polar opposites doesn't quite do justice to how differently we viewed the world. I could never understand how someone so intelligent (and his I.Q. was phenomenal) could be so stupid. I imagine he thought the same about me. One of those people of whom people say, "He could whistle birds off a tree," he was also legendary for alienating people with equal ease. You either loved him or you hated him. Whenever I'd go down to the hospital where he worked I was never sure of the reception I was going to get. Either people would glare at me or give me a broad smile when I asked for him. It was never indifference!

I put my daughter on a plane to go back to college yesterday. She barely knew him. By the time she was really aware of people around her, he was little more than a shell, barely talking, barely registering anything. Of course, we didn't know that this was only the beginning of the slide, and that it was going to get a whole hell of a lot worse. But the reality is that had he not gotten ill, it is very unlikely that I'd call him up to tell him that she'd arrived safely (like I'm going to do with my mother this morning). We didn't have that kind of relationship.

That's the thing about death. It ends all the fantasies that you may have. That one day my father and I could discuss politics without getting into a screaming match. That he'd actually call to see if his grandaughter gotten to her destination safely. That, well, you get the picture.

Anyway, Dad, I hope that where ever you are Leonard Bernstein is conducting Beethoven's 9th and there's a prime rib dinner with all the trimmings in front of you. Happy Birthday.

Love Claire

Galloping to, Um, Whatever?

2010-08-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

At the finish line! I've been toiling all summer on new novel. It's not the third in the Mary Ryan series (although I do have a kick-ass idea for the third book), but this is something, um, different(?). Husband is heading off to Burning Man to be wild and crazy--the antidote to his being uber responsible and conscientious the other fifty-one weeks of the year--and I'm finishing this goddamn book.

I'm not sure if other writers have the same peaks and valleys when they write, but these are mine. Around the 20,000-word mark I'm far enough into the story to have spent some significant effort and time, and yet I feel a little unsure. For one thing, I've got another at least 60,000 words to go and that feels so unbelievably daunting. Plus, this is where I start to wonder if I can pull this off. I do liken being a writer to being a magician, and at this point, I've gotten no farther in the trick than opening my hands to show that they are empty. This is probably the most dangerous point in the whole process. Yes, I've spent a goodly number of hours at my keyboard, but I could walk away without too much self-flagellation. I had my typical 20,000-word meltdown with this book, but my critique group said, "Oh noes, keep on going!" Which is one (but certainly not the only) reason why I'm in this critique group.

The next critical point is around the 50,000-word mark. This is generally where I feel euphoric. I've worked out most of the bugs and the world is so beautiful! I tend to do that as I write, revisiting chapters over and over again, so by 50,000 words it's a very solid 50,000 words. Plus, there's only about 25,000-30,000 words to go. Right?

Right, and oh on my god, there are the most painful and awful words. Because this is the point in any book where I have to produce the rabbit out of the hat. It means wrapping up plot points, making sure that *I've* made sure that the novel up to this point is going to serve my ending, and that the entire frigging book makes sense.

I've read many books where the last third is the most deadly. Where a writer has had a fantastic idea and served it well but couldn't quite pull it off, and in the last 30,000 words the entire concept falls apart (and yes, Nick Hornby, I'm looking at you and "Juliet, Naked" and the last book in the Harry Potter series). The rabbit has to appear. And this is where the magic metaphor ends because generally a writer can do all sorts of wonderful things to make you fall in love with a book, but if the end doesn't work, then you've failed as an author. It's like a getting the most fantastic meal and being served a boiled shoe for dessert. No amount of verbal pyrotechnics are going to save you. The ending must work, and while you can often band-aid problems in a book with a great ending, if you have a great book but a lousy ending, then you've lost the reader. IMO.

So we are on the home stretch. I've got maybe another 5,000 words to crank out, assuming that critique group doesn't absolutely loathe the chapters I'm going to submit tomorrow night. Then the first draft is done. And then it's to my agent for vetting and her esteemed opinion.

Then we see.

Book review: Muriel Spark: the Biography by Martin Stannard

2010-08-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

I had a ridiculously long post on this book, and then I hit the wrong key and lost it all. Whenever that happens I take it as a sign that I'm being too long-winded. I understand that Mr. Stannard has written a marvelous book on Evelyn Waugh, and as his biography of Ms. Spark is exceptionally well written, I intend to pick it up. Having said that, I don't this book is well done. Its key flaw is that Mr. Stannard is besotted with Muriel Spark, and his devotion is so marked that it derails the biography. I'm sure that all the facts are in place. Muriel Spark wrote this in 1955 and moved to Italy in this year and got her OBE in that year. Yes, I'm sure all that is very factual. Mr. Stannard is a meticulous writer, but he's not a very honest writer.

Analysis of her books is, naturally, a substantial part of this book, and yet he is so enamoured with her that I don't trust what he has to say about them. Why? Because he repeatedly gives her a pass on her inexcusable behavior. No matter how many times you type that Muriel Spark was an artist and in the passion of exacting that art she was allowed to be dictatorial, rude, vicious, and selfish, it doesn't absolve her of being dictatorial, rude, vicious, and selfish. The woman was a frigging monster of selfishness. I have little time for people who use art as an excuse to be a jerk. She had a long history of cutting people out of her life for the most trivial reasons. The friend who happened to stop by while she was out getting her hair done and earned a dressing down worthy of committing high crimes and treason is just one instance where you as the reader are wondering what in the hell is wrong with this woman? As her fame grew, it seems clear that people were merely props in her rapacious climb to success. At one point the only person she hadn't banished from her sight was her agent. Interestingly, at this point, when she had cut out nearly everyone in her life, her writing became more and more obscure and fantastical. Naturally, she was writing for one person: herself. When she began to emerge from her self-imposed exile from the bores of the world, her novels become more generalized and, no surprise, much more autobiographical. In the last three decades of her life she seems to have found tolerable minions. People who when she said jump, they jumped. And they didn't jump otherwise.

Stannard's refusal to call her on this behavior (and I understand they were, at the very least acquaintances and she offered him access to her papers) mars what is an interesting book. Also, I felt he conveniently elided over her conversion. I never understood why she converted and came away feeling that she only did so as a means of separating her from her fellow Brits and her family. Her Catholicism was quite fluid, and without more in depth analysis, it's hard to see it as anything but a response to Dexedrine-inspired psychotic break.

But let's give credit where credit is due. This is a woman from a working-class neighborhood in Scotland who never went on to university, and yet through sheer brilliance and grit more than held her own with the Oxbridge men of letters of her time. I just wished I'd liked her more, and I wish Stannard hadn't been so wimpy.

Book review: The Tudors

2010-08-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

I was a history major at U.C. Berkeley, and my specific field was English Tudor-era history, so you can imagine that a huge hunk of my bookshelves are devoted to this subject. There is something of an embarrassment of riches on this topic, from J. J. Scarsbrick's definitive biography on Henry VIII to Antonia Fraser's book on Mary, Queen of Scots. I can say with confidence that there isn't a popular history of the Tudors that has been published that I haven't read, and I've read a great number of the academic studies as well. So yeah. I get them, I know them, and I looked at this book sitting on the shelf of my local bookstore and thought, please, do I need to read yet another book on the Tudors?

Yes, I did, as it turns out.

Other reviews that I've read focus on the problem with the scope of this book, with literally half of the content devoted to Henry VIII. Which begs the question, why is it called "The Tudors"? I won't say that it's not a problem. Clearly, Meyer is fascinated with Henry VIII and the men who served him (Woolsey, Cromwell, and More are not your run-of-the-mill bureaucrats), and I think that he very much shortchanged the last fourth of the book, which is devoted to Elizabeth Tudor. I get the sense he was exhausted and gliding over events that really could have used some of his tremendous insight and turn of phrase that makes the first two-thirds of this book so enjoyable.

Because really, when you've read as many books as I have on the Tudors, it's the writing that becomes paramount, and this man can write. He's got an ease and facility for taking fairly complicated events and parsing them down to the bones. His chapters regarding Cromwell's stealth and ever-increasingly fatal attacks on the Catholic church are so well done that it's worth buying this book for those chapters alone.

There are a series of sidebars that I know annoyed some people, but I liked them. They take you out of the "story" to a certain extent, but I didn't mind. For an overview history, you don't NEED to read them, but they are, in and of themselves, interesting. The out-take on exactly what societal functions the Catholic church performed and how the break with Rome and cannibalization of the Church as a way to seriously pump-up Henry's power and coincidentally boost the Crown's coffers is especially well done.

I think that the point of the structure (front-loading the book with so much "Henry") is that Henry VIII so fundamentally changed the nature of kingship--castrating the Catholic Church in the process--that his heirs were not only dealing with the usual problems of a small island nation trying to play with the big boys (Spain and France), but faced the double whammy of trying to establish order in the wake of Henry's determined (some might say maniacal) juggernaut to establish his dynasty, regardless of the cost. And this book explains that cataclysmic upheaval (on all levels of society) very nicely, with Henry's heirs struggling to impose order on a society where all of a sudden the rules have changed.

On my Goodreads page I only gave this four stars because I do think the section on Elizabeth could have benefited with a more rigorous treatment. Having said that, Meyer's writing is engaging, witty, and humorous, with a fresh take on a topic that has been revisited many times in the last twenty years. I found myself smiling and enjoying every word. Highly recommended.

Book Rec: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

2010-08-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

In my other life, I'm something of a Harry Potter fanatic. I know far too much about Harry Potter and that fandom than I'm comfortable admitting. So I picked up what has been labeled the adult "Harry Potter" with a little curiosity. Initially, I thought, well, I have to admit I'm a Harry Potter nut because it will color my review to a ridiculous degree. But having read this book and thought long and hard about it, there are very few similarities, and the similarities that I do see are actually the weaknesses in both books/series.

First of all, there is a fair amount of lip service to a myriad of childhood fantasy books. Pick your poison. Chronicles of Narnia. Yep. Harry Potter. Yep. Hints of Tolkien. Other reviewers who are more into the fantasy realm that I am have listed a number of books that the author slyly acknowledges throughout the novel. The one book I have not seen mentioned is "The Phantom Tollbooth," which I think actually has much more relevance in some ways than any of these books. This is a book about a quest that only the protagonist can realize. Indeed, the inside flap of my copy has a map of the magical land, Fillory, which is so similar to the map in my beat-up paper copy of "The Phantom Tollbooth" that I half expected the protagonist to be named "Milo."

The good. We come out swinging here. Mr. Grossman is by far a much better writer than J. K. Rowling (JKR). He doesn't use excessive world-building to mask an inability or weakness in characterization. To be fair to JKR, not writing for children frees Mr. Grossman up quite a lot, and his book reads true; young men and woman talk like this. I have a kids roughly the same age as these kids, and like my kids they are rude, somewhat irreverent, definitely crude, and yet vulnerable with each other. Plus, setting this novel in a magical college allows him further grit. We have copious amounts of underage sex, drinking, and drug-taking at Brakesbill (the magician college), which pretty much describes my college career. He does not have the albatross that JKR carried around with her for the last five books, which is, who in the hell was her audience? By the end, I don't even think she knew, and it meant that she swung back and forth between both her children's audience and her adult audience, which weakened the series to a near-fatal degree. Mr. Grossman's setting is mature, biting, and all too believable. All the kids that populate this novel have an edge (with the exception of one, and I did have issues with that because that's the one character who becomes the martyr--how convenient).

Basically this is a coming of age novel. Where as Harry Potter had to come to terms with some madman who longed for immortality and thought Harry was the ticket to life-ever lasting, Quentin Coldwater, the protagonist of the Grossman book, is a sullen malcontent, whose magical abilities don't seem to free him from malaise so much as add to it. He loves magic and yet it does not liberate him. Much like Harry Potter, who is strangely untouched by the evil done to him and others, Quentin is untouched by pretty much everything around him. I don't need to like my protagonists and I must admit that Quentin is a compelling narrator, but I'm not sure by the end of the book that I understood what made him tick. He's seemingly asbestos, then he's not, then he is, and at the last are we to assume he's not again?

The magic in this book is appropriately dark and forbidding. And unlike the Harry Potter books where there is a clear line between "good" magic and "bad" magic, here it's a shifting line. As the story progresses in Grossman's book, the choice to use what spells turns out to be a matter of survival than anything else. The brief nod to Quidditch (welters in this book) is pointless. I would have taken it out. Quidditch in Harry Potter played several critical roles (perhaps the most critical was to fake out the reader into thinking that the novels were moving forward), and I think the minor plot points introduced could have been salted in elsewhere.

Where we have Adult Harry Potter Meets the Phantom Tollbooth is Quentin's obsession with the magical world Fillory, the setting of a childrens' book series that ended abruptly with literally no ending. Hark! The magical world in these books is real! No surprises there. I predicted that it would figure prominently in the story no later than twenty pages into this novel. Yet, it's a still a fascinating world (although there were some plot points at the end that left me scratching my head. No one else has commented on these gaffs, but I found myself asking, "Wait a minute. Why was this person killed if this person..." And "Why is **** is a prisoner, if the **** allows the very **** keeping the **** prisoner into the room?")

The one issue that I do have with the Grossman book is a compelling disdain for adults. The parents in this book are completely dismissible and in some cases odious. In fact, the children who go to Brakebills might as well be orphans. While that makes for convenient plot contrivances, it tends to maroon the characters and the choices that they make in many cases don't have consequences emotionally. Don't go home for Christmas. No problem. They won't even know I'm gone. And, of course, as is similar in the Harry Potter books, the adults don't exactly mentor. They use these kids unmercifully to fight the battles they cannot fight (or are too afraid to fight). This absence of adults might have made the book easier to plot, concentrating all evolving drama between the students themselves, but by the end (when all is revealed) it comes off as a plot contrivance, in my opinion. One that bled some of the tension out of the story because these kids aren't making a choice between one world or the other. Perhaps that was the point--Quentin in the end had no choice--but it left me a little irritated.

The ending of this book is appropriately ambiguous, mainly because the protagonist still remains somewhat aloof from the reader. I would say that for me that there was never a sense that Quentin ever wakes up. That the charges leveled against him by his girlfriend, Alice, remain true. He will never, ever, be happy. That does not change by the end of the book, and I wonder as a reader what I'm supposed to derive from this. That by the end of the book, as was the case in the beginning, Quentin seems passive of his own destiny. Someone is putting choices in front of this young man that he can either reject or not, but as a reader I would have thought that his experience would have, at the very least, liberated him from his passivity. In the end, this seems less a coming of age novel so much as an enduring question mark of who this young man is.

Oh, Father, I Hardly Knew Thee and CAKE!

2010-06-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

Father's day is coming up (reminder to self, buy gnome for husband) this Sunday, and since my father is now dead, it has turned into the day for championing my husband, which is cool because he works his butt off and deserves some praise and acknowledgment. Plus, um, he IS a dad. There's a meta post in this, on how we are truly adults when the holidays traditionally meant for our parents become holidays for us, but I really don't want to go there tonight.

In my Internet travels I have run across something that might be extremely appropriate (as we are food obsessed here) and father-ish. Matt has a very interesting site here: http://www.tiepedia.com/tie-blog/49-crafts/155-tie-cake. Please click because even my extensive powers of description are somewhat at a loss to describe how freaking accurate these cakes look. I see that there is one for doctors, which, hey, dad.

This was always a somewhat problematic holiday for me. My sister and I used commiserate on how many HOURS we spent looking for the appropriate card, but, sadly, there really wasn't a card that quite fit. Usually, I ended up getting a blank card with a flower on the front, which, of course, said volumes in and of itself. Anyway, my father did have a sweet tooth and being Scottish loved marzipan, so my dilemma has been solved; a bit late but solved. I could have just baked him a cake and forgotten the dumb card.

So, please, check out Matt's site. It's cool!

The Pitfalls of the Unlikable Protagonist

2010-06-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

So, I just finished another book where I didn't like the protagonist. Again, the writing in this book is glorious, even superb, and yet the book failed me. I relished the previous book by this author, Andre Acimen, whose "Call Me By Your Name" had me weeping throughout the whole thing. Unfortunately, while I see glimpses of similar brilliance in "Eight White Nights," I only see glimpses. And I think the main problem is that I cannot stand the protagonist of this novel, a man without a name, which isn't a problem per se as lots of book use this affectation, and by now it doesn't appear affected so much as expected in novels of a certain ilk. In fact, it's beginning to rank up there with the overwhelming abundance of heart attacks that seem to be populating novels these days. No-named protagonists with dodgy hearts. A new genre. You read it here first.

I'm not going to give anything like a synopsis of this book because that's not the point of "discussion." All you need to know is that glue of this novel is fairly simple: two characters meet at a party and discover that they are soul mates. Unfortunately, this kinship is largely based on taking snarky potshots at other people. No one is immune. The hosts are sneered at, the other guests at the party are ridiculed, and the ex-boyfriend, who is also at this party, is pitied (and ridiculed to the point where this couple have lunch at his grandparents house, and he's such a non-entity that even his grandparents are willing to accept another man in his place). This kinship is cemented in that they speak in a shared "language," which as far as I could tell really just meant that they were equally rude and cruel. Instead of marking these two as "meant for each other," in my opinion, this snark-speak only put the reader at a huge disadvantage. We fall into the same category as the people around them. Out of the loop. Confused. We feel inadequate because they get it and we don't. I will not deny that these characters have an instantaneous rapport that is unique to them, so much so that I found myself wishing I had the Clift Notes.

Of course, there are many successful novels where the protagonists struggle against world at large, and they have to fight it out alone and, dear god, is Frodo going to make it to Mount Doom and destroy the ring? But although Frodo's quest alienated him from the Fellowship, there was never any sense that I, as the reader, was alienated. Nope, I was right there, sitting on Frodo's shoulder, feeling his conflict, his desperation, and his despair.

Within the first fives pages of this novel, the protagonist is passionately in lust with a woman (who is allowed to have a name, which is Clara) whom he meets at a party. Acimen struggles mightily to include the reader in this immediate passion, however, the device he chooses is too limited, therefore, no name's fascination for her remains puzzling--a simple introduction cannot hold up under all the weight that the author demands of it--with the upshot is that there's an immediate distance created between the writer and the reader from the very beginning of the novel. Usually this distance happens in the last third of a book (see my review of Hornby's "Juliet, Naked") because the writer just doesn't know how to finish a book and tacks on an ending that leaves the reader cold. Here, this distance happens immediately, which becomes a sad harbinger for the rest of the novel. These protagonists go in a direction the reader cannot follow, which is the antithesis of what a writer is striving for. As a writer what you want to achieve with your reader is a relationship so profound that as they are reading you want them to smell a woman's perfume when she leaves a room and the toothpaste on a man's breath before he kisses her. And I think that Acimen felt that the lush detail and truly beautiful descriptions of New York in winter would achieve that. It didn't for me.

I read this novel on the heels of a visit to New York, and my hotel was right next to the World Trade Center site, so you'll understand when I say, why in the flying fuck should I care about a bunch of elitist privileged New Yorkers who don't seem to have any visible means of support and whose idea of a good time is to engage in verbal duels at parties? I didn't at all care about them; that's too mundane. I actively disliked them.

And this is the problem with the unlikable protagonist. Because if you make them too "special," as is the case here, make them too unique, then the reader cannot help but feel that the characters are sneering at them as well. That the reader would be cheerfully lumped in with the masses of people who aren't as educated or smart or witty or brilliant in their mean-spirited patter. A successful novel ropes in the reader so that even if you don't want to, you find yourself identifying or at the very least understanding a character so much so that you care what happens to them even if you don't care for them. It's a fine line to walk (one that I admit is way beyond my ability). I wish that Acimen had achieved that balance. As it was, I found myself reading about extremely selfish people who I would never want to meet. I finished the book because the writing was so achingly descriptive, but ultimately it didn't work for me.

I can think of three novelists who have walked this fine and difficult line: one is Nabokov in "Lolita" (Humbert Humbert is odious but you find him compelling); Patrick Suskind and his protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, in "Perfume"; and Muriel Spark with her novel "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." I think these characters are monsters to varying degrees, and yet they are compelling monsters. The characterization is so wonderful that you find yourself captivated by them, empathizing with them even though you scorn yourself for it. As readers we don't want to feel that we are pressing our faces against the glass. We want to be on the other side, no matter how uncomfortable or bizarre the terrain. And we most certainly don't want to be at a party and suspect that the couple in the corner is sneering at what we're wearing and our penchant for cheap vodka.

Food

2010-05-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

So we're having people over tomorrow. An old college friend and his lovely wife are coming for lunch, and I've done the shopping and the smell of ripe apricots in my kitchen is overwhelming. I love having people over to "break bread," as they say. Stupidly, I thought this love of company and food would translate into a career. Somehow, having people over for lunch or dinner seems a lot more enjoyable than baking 278 pumpkin pies. The reality of working in the industry is lots of overtime and stress. Having friends over? Not so stressful. I wish I could have a restaurant where it was relatively close to having people over. Where you served what appealed to you as you strolled through the marketplace. Where lots of conservation filled in the gaps between the starter and the entree. Where dessert was just something you ate and not something you avoided because, oh my, too many calories.

Working in food is nothing like that. But I want that. I want to buy a gigantic Victorian where I'd put long tables in the living room and the dining room and the other room (in Victorians of a certain age there always seems to be a bonus room next to what should be the dining room), and just serve, well, dinner. Where it's about the food, but it's about the conservation and the joy of breaking bread with other people. I saw a newspaper article today about a company that provides cue cards for conversation. Has it gotten to that point where you need a cue card to accompany your pinot? Not in my house.

Book Review: Juliet, Naked

2010-05-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

I'm in a rut, retyping the same sentence over and over again. Where is the editor? Yes, I know that Nick Hornby is a great writer, and I can't dispute that based on this book. This is a beautifully written, badly conceived book, IMO. I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but I found it profoundly misogynistic, and therefore, angry when I finished it.

What do you do when you have a book where all the words are put together in such a marvelous way and yet it doesn't work for you (or me, I guess). The sum is much shittier than the parts!

I think there are two ways to view this book. Either it is unrelentingly cynical, where we are all doomed to be selfish and myopic for the rest of our born days, or it's one of the most sexist novels I've read in a long time. Neither view is particularly appealing.

The good. Well, the writing. Wonderful, witty, insightful, funny, and, I can't disagree, masterful. This novel is written in three distinct POVs--no mean feat. The depiction of fandom is so right on that I thought, hmmmm, what fandom does Nick Hornby belong to? Because I am heavily involved in fandom, and his descriptions definitely had an insider's feel to it. The sense of a worldwide community juxtaposed to the pettiness, the factions, and obsessive-compulsive nature of fans. Being in fandom, it didn't seem bizarre at ALL that someone would make a pilgrimage to a toilet. So yes, that worked for me completely.

The bad. The last third. We have this man (the musician) who is described as a layabout who lives off of women he impregnates. He has children scattered all over the globe that he doesn't seem to care about. Aside from one child (and why this one child is so much better than the others remains a complete mystery), they all irritate the shit out of him. Just because he admits he's an abysmal father doesn't mitigate the fact he is one. And we, the reader, are supposed to give him a pass because he ends up sacrificing his art because of a ten-minute fuck? Sorry. No. No. And can I say no. He does not get a pass. As much as the author would like us to like him (as the female protagonist clearly does), it doesn't wash. I acknowledge his charm for one second, and then I think about all these children he could care less about. And I think, you know, if you had this epiphany in the bathroom, why didn't you invest in condoms and STOP POPULATING THE WORLD WITH CHILDREN YOU ARE AT BEST INDIFFERENT ABOUT?

This is such a male fantasy. This guy is a jerk and yet all these women fall in love with him and bear his children. Not that I want this fantasy where's he's this amazing guy, so therefore, our female protagonist falls in love with him, because how Barbara Cartland of me. No, I want these women to stop falling in love with an asshole. I want them to grow a pair.

And now we get to the real crux of why this book is so sexist. Because the women are idiots. Because they don't use birth control. Because this man has a history of impregnating women and them dumping them. In fact, they have a little club together, Dumpees United, where they can commiserate over what a horrible father this man is. And yet our female protagonist thinks that it's a really good idea to have a relationship and a child with this man.

For the life of me, I don't know why she's so desperate for a child that she doesn't sleep with her old boyfriend. Because, frankly, it doesn't matter. She's leaving one selfish man for an equally selfish man.

I disliked everyone by the end of this book. For their choices, for their lack of choices, for their apathy, for their stupidity, for their shocking lack of self-respect. Not even the beautiful, beautiful writing could save this book for me.

Book Review: Open by Andre Agassi

2010-05-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

Wow. Okay, although I must confess to taking a few tennis lessons in my life and, on occasion, watching Wimbledon, that is the extent of my interest in tennis. I recommended this book as a present for my son, who I am valiantly trying to get to read more. Tennis isn't his game, but I read reviews of this book and thought it might catch his interest. It had caught mine. After seeing it parked on his dresser for nearly six months without having been moved a single inch, I thought, hmmmm, does this live up to the hype? You bet your sweet ass.

First of all, any book that throws down the gauntlet and says, yeah, I know you don't know anything about "fill in the blank," but you're going to learn and you're going to like it has my respect. I feel that way about John McPhee's books. This is solely down to an author's expertise. In any one else's hands the very concept wouldn't get me by the second page. And while Agassi's book is ghostwritten, there is absolutely no denying that it's Andre Agassi's voice on the page. By page 2 this book owned me. Seriously.

I tore through it, relishing every single, fascinating description of the matches that Agassi played. Of course, what sells this book is that these aren't just descriptions of matches. They are Agassi's evaluation of both his mental and physical state and judgments of his opponents' mental and physical state. The psychological aspects of this book were a surprise and a real treat. How a match can turn depending on the mental shift of a player. How to evaluate a player's strengths and turn them into weaknesses. This is all told against the backdrop of what is now a familiar story with prodigy child athletes: abusive, ambitious father, athlete mills (similar to puppy mills), etc. It's a poignant read (ghost written, which Agassi freely admits in an afterword), funny in many places, gripping in others, and fascinating to watch a young man who was certainly swallowed up by the machine of professional sports but didn't, in the end, let them spit him out. I highly recommend this book.

Yes, Irony Abounds

2010-05-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

I wanted to alert people to a new book by Stephen McCauley. It's called "Insignificant Others," and it will be available in June. He hasn't written that many books--we get one about every four years--and I have loved all of them. There are not many authors that I automatically recommend (see previous blog and my growing irritation with publishers and lazy authors), but he's one of them. He never disappoints. His books are funny (really funny), wry, a wee bit sarcastic (I love that in a writer), and always poignant.

It's nice to see a writer move into their skin, to see them starting to flex their writing muscles and, yes, grow as a writer. This doesn't happen any more because authors are churning out books like Model "T" Fords, and if you don't have time to think about your craft, then you don't develop your craft. McCauley has wisely taken his time, or he has lots of money and he doesn't have to tap-dance to a publisher's demands for something that looks like a book, reads like a book, but is nothing but a poor imitation. Regardless, there is a growing confidence and mastery from each book to the next.

His first book was "Object of My Affection" (yes, they made a movie out of it), which was followed by "Easy Way Out." Both are absolutely side-splitting funny, with the hints of the poignancy that really comes to the fore in the latter books. Next was "Man of the House," which I think is his weakest (I say this somewhat in quotes because if I had written it I'd be in ecstasy), but I still enjoyed it. Most decent authors write a "bridge" book. By that I mean a book that is trying to make that leap to the next level. I felt that this was a bridge book for him. I base this on his next release, which was "True Enough." I've talked with other writers who found humor to be a crutch after a while, and I think Mr. McCauley reached the same conclusion. Not to say that "True Enough" isn't funny. It's very funny, but it's less about the funny and more about that poignancy. And then we have "Alternatives to Sex: A Novel." Which. Yeah. Lovely, lovely book.

I've read the synopsis of his new book, and it sounds like all of his other books (even though they are quite distinct from each other--by that I mean all the protagonists are completely distinct--the only thing that unites them is their sexuality). By that I mean, they are about people and relationships and people falling in love and falling out of love and messy friendships and, well, you know. People. No bells and whistles. Just really good writing. How rare is that? Apparently, REALLY, REALLY RARE. I can't wait to read it.

Am I Jaded?

2010-05-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

I've just put down another book that had a stellar beginning and a magnificent promise, and an ending that sucked big time. This is the second time in three weeks that this has happened. What's even more irritating is that this book (and the previous one by a very well-known author) received rave reviews. Both of these books couldn't be farther apart on the genre spectrum but my feeling when I finished both was exactly the same. No. I'm sorry, author, but no. You didn't make it work. You had all the tools, you were in the home stretch, and the last third of your book did not work. I have yet to pick up a book this year that I haven't felt that way about. I think the last book I read that I thought was stellar was Calvin Trillin's "About Alice." But that's a different animal and non-fiction, so I don't think it really counts. Goddammit. WHERE ARE THE EDITORS?

Okay, this is a total shout-out to the publishing industry. You are in free fall. You are watching your audience being siphoned off by other media and you don't know why. I'll tell you one reason. You're publishing books that don't work. I supposed they work well "enough" in your mind, but they are fundamentally weak. Even decent authors are now getting turfed on the editorial process and it shows in their writing. You don't want to take the time to run an author through their paces. Make them fix a book with fatal flaws. And you wonder why your audience is shrinking. You don't care about what you are publishing; why should I care to buy your books?

Oh, Back to X-Ray?

2010-05-04T15:32:00.000-07:00

I had some medical nightmare a few years back, the details of which I won't bore you with, but it entailed getting far too many x-rays and CAT scans. My husband and I used to joke that based on the number of isotopes I've had injected into my arm, we should just cancel PG&E and put a light bulb in my mouth.

Anyhow, medical nightmare was taken care of (much to my delight!) and because I'm the daughter of a doctor and a nurse, I avoid hospitals if I can. My father used to tell me, "Hospitals kills people!" Anyone who reads this who is the child of a medical person knows that short of slicing open an artery you keep your mouth shut. So I fell in my yard a week and a half ago and banged myself up pretty damn good. Falling down a flight of concrete steps will do that to you. I am a terribly clumsy person, some of which I put down to being far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other; it often feels as if my eyes are fighting each other, with me being always the loser. At least I tell myself that's the reason I"m so clumsy (although my daughter's eyesight is perfect and she seems to have inherited the clumsy gene from me, as well as the, "Oh, white shirt, we most definitely need to spill something on that right away" gene).

That morning I was wearing my computer glasses, which in addition to the weird eyes, really screws up my depth perception, and I put one foot where I thought a step was and... Oh. No. Step. Who knows what happened? I think I tumbled head over heels, but no matter. I banged the hell out of my head, and also hurt my elbow, but I didn't know that at the time. Did I seek medical attention? Nope. I had a conference to go to; I was flying out to Portland that afternoon. Once I ascertained that my eyes were tracking properly, I got a bag of ice, drove to work one-handed so I could keep the ice pack in place on my head, and tried not to think about Natasha Richardson. At the airport I gobbled down a ton of aspirin in the stupid attempt to ward off any impending stroke and spent the entire flight watching a lump on my elbow balloon into something awful and painful.

A week and a half later I am having tea with my mother and I mention the lump, and how the back of my head still really hurts. I show my mother the lump (she was an ER nurse for decades). She demands that I get this seen right away (which, if you know my mother, you obey her). By this point my elbow hurts MORE than when I actually did it, and I'm sort of thinking that I might actually have a slight skill fracture on top of all this.

So I make an appointment for that evening and halfway through my interview with the nurse I realize that she thinks I'm a victim of domestic abuse. There's far more typing that I've ever had in any other office visit (and, believe me, at one point I was practically LIVING at the hospital), and I could tell she didn't believe that I fell down a flight of stairs. Because my injuries were completely consistent of someone warding off blows and the force of the blows would have propelled me backwards, hitting my head. Of course, I compounded this situation by sputtering and insisting that I fell down the stairs, and that I was wearing these stupid computer glasses. I suppose that if I were a victim of domestic violence I would be making similar affirmations and protests.

The doc and resident didn't believe me either until about halfway through the exam and then the tone in the room changed . But I suspect my file is now tagged, and I wonder if my husband's file is also tagged. Of course, I'm happy that these protocols exist because if someone is being abused, then we need to have those lifelines out there, but the whole interaction left me weirded out.

I can't remember being in a professional situation where it was obvious that someone thought I was lying. Oh, people have thought I was incompetent, but that's not the same thing. Also, here I am, with the legacy of coming from a medical family, where it's pounded into you that you must be the model patient, and I couldn't help but fail at being a model patient here. Because they thought I was lying. I was failing on all levels.

My arm will most likely be ugly and lumpy for weeks. But no skull fracture.

Wow, there's a lot of tension on DorothyL

2010-04-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

DorothyL is a mystery Listsrv that's been in operation for eons where readers and authors get together to talk about mysteries. By and large it's fun, plus you connect with people who share your interest in killing people. Every now and then thought it goes through a testy phase where people are irritated with each other and there is much flouncing (as much as one can flounce with words, and, surprisingly, you can flounce a lot!).

Someone posted a tongue-in-cheek thing (sort of a MadLib) version of how to write a cozy. Protag greets her postman/doctor/gardener and discovers that his wife/dog/turtle is missing. It went on from there, with a cookie cutter plotline. And yes, there are a lot of cozies out there that would fit that mold nicely. But let's face it, you could do the exact same thing with a police procedural or even a political thriller (aside from John Le Carre they all have that Jason Bourne factor these days). And a number of writers who write cozies were affronted, and a lot of other people (including some who write cozies) said, get a sense of humor.

But I think people are missing the point. I believe you could actually write that story, plucking out the appropriate insert at the appropriate time, and it could be a KILLER story. Because, really, most books aren't that different from each other. Sure, every now and then you'll get a book that blows your socks off in how it eschews convention, but these are rare. My point is that you could write a book using that template and write a very good novel. Because it's not necessarily the destination, but how you drive there. That's the difference between a good writer and a great writer: someone who understand voice, tension, and characterization in service of plot. By this point, if I don't know who did it by the end of the third chapter, I'm convinced I'm suffering from some dreadful brain disease. Because there are very few surprises left in me. Some of this is because I believe (like Nancy Kress, see previous post) that the author makes a promise and that promise should be fulfilled. Unfortunately, in the mystery world that means you know, usually, that Miss Scarlett did it in the library with the candlestick. I think the last book that really surprised me, I mean, knocked my socks off whoa, was Michael Connellly's "Concrete Blonde." What a mofo wonderful book! That was written years ago, which will tell you that, yeah, surprise isn't happening. So the getting there is now so much more important because I know what the "there" is and who will do it.

It's like you're driving to L.A. You can go down 5, you can take 1, or you can do a whole bunch of backroads through dusty, poor rural towns where the WalMart in Fresno is putting all the local shopkeepers out of business. The ending is the same, but the drive?

Writing Stuff and Book Rec

2010-04-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I'll get all meta-y and write about writing. I can stop now, because someone has said it a thousand times better than I ever could. This is an excellent book; I highly recommend it:

"Elements of Writing Fiction - Beginnings, Middles & Ends (Elements of Fiction Writing)" by Nancy Kress

Example on flashbacks: "A writer always pays a price for flashbacks. Any flashback, no matter how well written or interesting, will distance your reader from the action. This is because flashbacks shatter the illusion that the reader is a fly on the wall, witnessing events as they happen, right now. The flashback is not happening right now--it is , by definition, already over."

OMG! YES! Thank you. Of course, she's not saying never use flashbacks, but you pay a price for this technique and it will slow down the action. If you're at a point in your story where you can spend a little tension capital, then it's worth it if it acts as a critical plot dump or characterization dump. She has a great bit on tension and how you can't have every chapter or section be crazy with tension because then it no longer functions as tension. You need peaks and valleys.

This book is filled with a host of wonderful nuggets of how writing works mechanically. Yes, I believe there are people who are gifted writers. They just know how to throw words together. But I also firmly believe that anyone can write a decent story that will satisfy the reader. Writing is a lot about mechanics. It's about thinking REALLY CAREFULLY about how you are saying something.

It took me years to get to the place in my writing where I am now. Most of what she presents in this book I gleaned through trial and error (mostly error, still error). I don't know if this book would have cut out a year or two of frustration, but it's nice to see someone articulate why a paragraph works and why it doesn't. Why I will read the first 1000 words of a book and I will say, okay, this writer has a map, a concept, and I will keep on reading. And why with another author I will say, no, this is someone who is without a map, and I'll put it down never to be picked up again. This is not to say they won't find a map. That's the great thing about writing maps. They aren't proprietary. There isn't a secret "map" store. An idea is the first step in making your own map. A map you'll share. I liken an author to being like big game hunter without all the awful killing of animals bit. I'm leading you into the bush. There's danger and beauty and drama and humor. Hopefully, neither of us will get lost. No worries! Here is my map! Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!

Enough with the heart attacks

2010-04-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Two recents authors (both of whom I adore) have had their protagonists suffer heart attacks. I am now asking for a moratorium on this convention, precisely because I think it IS becoming a convention and it's a wee bit deux et machina for me. I have noticed that both these writers are men, and I'm wondering if this is something men think about. Of course, women think about breast cancer (which to my mind is much more insidious and possibly life threatening, as opposed to a heart attack which is--in most cases although not all--a wake-up call).

So. Yo. Male authors. No more heart attacks. It's becoming cliche.

Cookbooks

2010-03-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

I have a truly disgusting number of cookbooks. I keep hoping that I will find the ULTIMATE cookbook that will address all my needs and wants. As I continue what is becoming something of a pointless search, I keep returning to the tried and true. It's a small and elite group; let me share them with you.

I have basically one thing to say about Martha Stewart: she puts on a good show. Her recipes aren't particularly innovative or unique, but, man, can she orchestrate a photo shoot. If you want ideas about presentation, she's the only game in time. Her books are worth buying solely for the photographs.

The Silver Palate people, books one and two: I use these books constantly. The recipes successfully combine both the classic and innovative (the best of both worlds).

Nancy Silverton's books. All of them. Yes, she's brilliant. Buy them. I don't care what the title is, bread, pastry, sandwiches, whatever; the woman knows what she is doing.

Cucina Fresca by La Place and Kleiman. Where I live it gets hot during the summer. Last summer we had weeks of unrelentingly blazing days where cooking was about as appealing as lighting one's hair on fire. Except the family insists on eating, the sods. Anyway, this is an SUPERB book for summer fare. I use it from May until September and it never disappoints.

Your basic dessert book: she is now out of fashion, but you cannot go wrong with Maida Heatter's books. The recipes are extremely detailed and yet simple; they are geared for the ambitious novice. See Nancy Silverton's dessert books as well .If you're looking for something much more challenging, Rose Levy Barenbaum has a number of books out that are exacting and foolproof. And I mean exacting.

If I had to choose a cuisine that I had to dedicate my life to it would be Italian cuisine (my love for Julia Child notwithstanding). Of course, the Italian answer to Julia is Marcella Hazan (as stern a task master as Julia). I would also recommend three additions: Biba Caggiano books are a delight, Rose Grey and Ruth Rogers' "Italian Two Easy" is good, as is James Beard's "Beard on Pasta." In the hype for the search for the latest "star," he's being eclipsed by others, which is a shame because he was a damn good cook. His "Beard on Pasta" is a no-nonsense basic primer on pasta. The mac and cheese recipe is to die for.

So what are you waiting for? Get cooking!

What cookbooks do you return to again and again?

The Up Side

2010-03-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

My childhood was a series of moves. This was not the fault of my mother, bless her heart, but extenuating circumstances and my father and life. Except for that brief period when my father decided to start anew and moved my mother down to L.A. (and then two weeks later decided that family life was not his baliwick and fled to Alaska; I wish I was making this up, but I'm not), I've spent all my life in the Bay Area.

After my father returned from Alaska (okay, kicked out for practicing medicine without a license, so family legend goes), my parents decide to make one more try. You can imagine how that went. Anyway, my father wasn't a bad man, just a very confused and sad one, and over the years he really tried. That his efforts always failed is immaterial in a way. Until he remarried, my parents occasionally played "married" in that they would take us out for dinner and we would pretend to be a real family. This wasn't as pathetic as it sounds.

My father was born into the wrong class and the wrong time. I can actually see him as the younger, impoverished son of the some earl who went off to the colonies to make his fortune. I have something of a fixation on the British colonial settlement of Kenya and, boy, he'd have fit right in. In reality, he was the son of a clerk and had a fairly impoverished upbringing in Glasgow. I guess you'd call his family the gentile poor. But he was definitely out of place, because he had a tremendous sense of adventure. When I was a kid, we never went out to dinner. We journeyed to dinner, to strange out of the way diners and restaurants in what then was the hinterlands. He loved to drive and a night out with Dad was never less than a thirty-mile jaunt somewhere.

The point of all this is that there is a restaurant near my current house. It's been in business since I've been ten and I'm now fifty-three. And one of the first things we did when we moved out here was to go to this restaurant. And the same woman who was hosting when I was a kid was STILL there. And so was most of the staff. We went there for dinner last night. The old hostess has now retired, but many of the same staff are still there. There's a busboy that has been there since I was a kid.

It's cool to take your kids to a place where you can say, hey, I came here with your grandparents when I was ten. And it's the same. It's like a time warp but not. Like I said. Cool.

A Sad Day

2010-03-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

I usually keep things fairly anonymous here, because, well, real people versus real nuts on the Internet, but having someone like David be anonymous would somehow be a travesty. Because he was the antithesis of "anonymous." Yesterday I attended the funeral of a friend. He was, technically, my husband's friend, an ex-co-worker that he'd kept in touch with, or I should say kept in touch with him. Because that's what David excelled at. Keeping in touch. People meant something to him. Nobody was a "ship in the night."

I'm guessing there were over 250-350 people at his memorial, people standing and overflowing into an adjacent room. That's the kind of person he was. Given he was an architect, it seemed fitting that his memorial be held at Julia Morgan-designed chapel and the reception following at the U.C. Faculty Club (a Maybeck-designed building). This was the second memorial in a month that I've attended at the Faculty Club, and while I love that building, cripes, enough already!

David Lew was only forty-eight when he died; far too young as they say. Man, did he pack it in. While that's very true--and people kept saying that over and over again, like it was supposed to bring all of us solace, like a life spent watching soaps all day and eating Funyuns couldn't be compared to what an action-packed life David lived--it sure didn't offer any solace to either his parents or his wife, I wager. Because people like that leave a void.

He died of pancreatic cancer. My parents are medical types (as is my husband's father) and when David emailed us with his diagnosis, we looked at each other. A year, tops? David managed to eke out a really good two years. While the last six months were total hell, he weathered that like the enormously brave person he was, with humor and guts.

You can't help but personalize these events, and I kept thinking, how in the blue blazes is Sharon, his wife, holding up? Also, there was a wonderful slide show, which people contributed to, and I realized that my husband always takes the pictures. I'm not a camera person. That needs to stop. I need to start taking pictures. Not for the ghoulish purpose of having pictures for his memorial, but to give my husband a place at the various events in our lives. A place he deserves.

As always in these situations (which are happening more and more), I think about the people left behind. His parents must be in hell. If you have children you absolutely know that the worst thing in the whole fucking world would be to bury a child. Slight less but still hellish; burying a younger sibling. David was the much younger sibling of older siblings, and, yeah, talk about voids. There is a sense of natural order here that is being turned on its head. While the thought of my mother dying is enough to send me into suppressed hysterics (if one can have suppressed hysterics), it wouldn't be like losing my sister, whom I expect to pre-decease because, hey, natural order. I couldn't look at his parents and his brothers and sister without wondering if they felt their world was not only about grieving, but also about being profoundly off-kilter. Like the world's axis was off and the sun shutting down kind of off-kilter.

Then we come to David's wife, Sharon. Like all larger than life types who tend to whirly-gig through their days, David needed an anchor, and Sharon was his anchor. As I sat there with my husband, who handed me Kleenex at the appropriate moments (a wee tip; take Kleenex to funerals), I realized that Sharon had no one to hand her Kleenex at funerals. Or someone to hold her hand when it got too overwhelming. And yes, there were lots of people there for her (her sister has obviously been a total rock), but it's not the same. Of course you want someone to travel with and hold your passport when you're putting your shoes back on. And sit across the table from you while you both drink expensive wine in Parisienne brasseries. But it really all boils down to having someone hand you a Kleenex when you need it. THAT someone, not just anyone.

It was a sad day, despite the blue skies after a week of incessant rain, despite the daffodils in full bloom, despite the magnolia trees just starting to bud. A very sad day.

Back to Happier Programming

2010-01-25T10:29:00.001-08:00

I am a Jane Austen fanatic. Her books have given me much pleasure over the years, and I re-read the major works once a year for inspiration, joy, and just plain fun. Is there anyone more odious in fiction than Mrs. Norris? I think not. Is there anyone more delightful than Elizabeth Bennett? Blasphemy! Except if you're talking about Emma Woodhouse, and there we have something of a contest, the best sort of contest, because no matter who wins, they both win! I'm an abuser of exclamation points at the best of times, but when one is talking of Austen, it's torture not to append exclamation marks on the end of nearly every sentence because she's just that flipping marvelous (restrain self).

Given that we only have six full novels to enjoy--again and again--that leaves the fanatics with the various permutations and film adaptations. The latest Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Emma (the first two hours were aired last night) is a total romp and a delight. A delight I tell you!

Not that I haven't admired various adaptations over the years. Clueless was fun. The version with Gwyneth Paltrow was nicely done (of course, Toni Colette can do no wrong in my eyes), but what all previous adaptations never seem to get is how young Emma Woodhouse actually is. There's a girlishness about this Emma that rings so true. She's physically active here, running gaily from room to room, curtsying with a snap, and smiling with boundless energy. You get the sense that much of her meddling is because she has all this energy with no object to bestow it on. What other interpretations seem to miss is that Emma grows up in this novel, and the actress, Romola Garai, gets that. Also, there is a real chemistry between Jonny Lee Miller's interpretation of Mr. Knightley that successfully banishes the uncomfortable aura that always lurks in the corner of this novel where you have a thirty-six-year-old man lusting after a much younger woman. They play this like an old married couple. They snark at each other, endlessly, they argue, they get frustrated with each other, they share private moments in a room full of people. In short, I can't think of another adaptation that plays them so well as a couple.

I've only seen two hours of this, and I can say without hesitation that this is my favorite Emma on the screen.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

2010-01-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

So the Roman Polanski thing. I’ve stated my opinion on this matter in a previous blog, but it’s one of those horrible events that keeps on giving. Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the petition of those in the arts who support Mr. Polanski. There are a number of people who signed that didn’t surprise me (Woody Allen, the founding member of Directors Who Are Moral Scumbags, signed, surprise, surprise), and a number of people who did sign that upsided me on the head in the most profound way (Emma Thompson—who I understand has asked that her name be removed—and Natalie Portman).

The larger issue here is, naturally, can one divorce the immoral and depraved behavior of an artist from his or her art? I’ve read a fair amount on this subject and the high-faluting language about how art is pure and blahblahblah. You know what? Fine. You divorce yourself. I find I cannot.

Case Study No. 1: I wasn’t a fan of Woody Allen’s earlier comedies. I had a boyfriend who found Woody Allen hysterically funny and, insisting that I just hadn’t seen the right Woody Allen film, dragged me kicking and screaming to a Woody Allen marathon. During the course of six hours of pure cinematic hell, I laughed only once. Naturally, since he was guffawing like a madman the whole time, he couldn’t understand my inability to appreciate fourteen-year-old boy humor—go figure—and accused me of not laughing just to prove a point. I snapped back, “Does my face look like I’m suppressing laughter just to prove a point?”

But then we move on to Annie Hall and Manhattan, two films that certainly ranked up there somewhere in my top fifty favs of all time. Little did we know that Manhattan was nothing more than a documentary. Look, I was a teenager when my mother remarried. I know all about the boundaries between a stepfather and his stepchildren, his role as a parent and his role as a husband. This is a potential nuclear winter, and I am overjoyed to say that my stepfather was, in my eyes, practically perfect in every way. So when the Woody Allen/Soon Yi Previn scandal hit the newspapers, I could relate to exactly how wrong Mr. Allen was. How many boundaries he had ignored and trampled on. How can anyone watch Manhattan and not think that this was something of a test run? Where the artist couldn’t help but have his fantasy spill over into his art. The scandal broke shortly after the release of Husbands and Wives, and after we left the movie theater I said to my husband that I thought the relationship between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen was on the rocks. The writing and the cinematography did everything it possibly could to make her not only physically unappealing, but also a first-class shrew and a bitch. So here we have the artist blurring the lines between his fantasy, his anger, and his art. Why am I supposed to grant him a moral pass when he is using that very moral lapse to fuel his imagination?

Case Study No. 2: Okay, I wasn’t as big a Woody Allen fan as I was a Gore Vidal fan. I think he is the finest essayist of the twentieth century. I am extremely left, as is he. I am a huge champion of gay rights, as is he. Burr was a seminal book for me; I’ve reread it repeatedly. Lincoln is at the top of my top ten favorite books ever. His historical series sits in a prominent place on my bookshelf, so that when I walk into that room, his books are the first I see. And he called the Polanski rape victim a whore and, basically, said that all the best directors rape kids. What’s the big deal?

Well, I’ll try to sum it up in a nutshell. Just because you have a predatory society where the adults, who should be protecting the children, have not only abandoned their role but are exploiting them (I include her mother in this category) does not give anyone a moral pass. Plain and simple. It’s like saying the majority of the country are homophobic jerks; what’s the big deal? Clearly, he finds equal rights for homosexuals a big deal (which I do, too), and I find that making apologies for men who rape kids a big deal. Call me irrational.

Case Study No. 3: This just came to my attention and for some reason it hits really hard. I just saw a brief interview with Johnny Depp on YouTube where he comments on the Polanski case. He starts off the interview with a question: “Why now?” This is perfectly legitimate. I’ve asked myself that question repeatedly. Then he goes on to say that it was clearly political and that money had changed hands. Yes, well, I personally think that money has been changing hands for years and I think it was Polanski doling out the bribes. I'm digressing. Depp then comments that Polanski’s elderly and clearly is not a predator… By that point I was so enraged and disappointed that that interview couldn’t end fast enough. I think Johnny Depp has few peers as an actor. In fact, possibly the only people who come close are Robert Downey, Jr. and the late Heath Ledger. I admired him, and now he has ruined that admiration. For good.

I made a personal vow that I wouldn’t financially support anyone who signed that petition or commented in a way that I found reprehensible. If my financial support of their work as artists is the way I show my love for the expression of their craft, the flip side of that is to withhold that financial support. Because I cannot separate the actor, the writer from the man.

I cannot watch Manhattan without thinking, whoa, game plan for seducing your stepdaughter.

I cannot see the books on my shelf without thinking of the man who said that girl was a whore, I’m not wasting my time thinking of her.

I cannot watch that YouTube excerpt and listen to that man saying, well, he’s old, he’s got a wife and kids, he’s not a predator, when in fact Roman Polanski has a history of “mentoring” very young women.

So Johnny Depp asks, "Why now?" I ask him, "You have a ten-year-old girl. How would you feel if that child had been raped and thirty years later her rapist was claiming that it was water under the bridge?"

Writing Meta, No. Whatever

2009-12-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

I was emailing someone the other day about a wee crisis of confidence about my writing, and they scoffed. Because, yes, I'm a decent writer, but not a great writer. My long-term goal is to continuously take it up a notch at a time, so by the time I'm ninety I *will* be a great writer. I honestly believe that. Book by book, chapter by chapter, I will get there. Perhaps a bit of a hopeless dream, but it's my hopeless dream and I'm reaching for it. Anyway, that's not germane to what I want to say today.

This mini-hissy fit was brought on by section in my new book that wasn't working. The words fit together okay, and there was the tee-hees in the the right places, but it didn't work. By that I mean where in the hell was the passion? I don't mean sex on the kitchen floor passion, but an underlying sense that the author feels this down to their bone marrow and you (the reader) should too, by dint of their writing. Now, I'm not writing the sort of book that elicits, in general, that sort of reaction. However, there should be this underlying sense that *I* care about what I'm saying, that my words are making my passion your passion. Even in a beach read there should be a thread of passion running through a book. Otherwise you'll stop reading my book at Chapter 4 and throw it back into your beach bag, slop on some more sunscreen, and rummage around for another book to fill the time. I've failed you. You've walked through that door that says "Exit," and you're about to walk through another writer's door. Crap

Yes, I've said here that you can't please all readers all the time. It's just not possible. I'm always floored when I rave about a book and someone else says, "Meh." It's even worse when I respect that person's opinion and they hate a book I thought was brilliant. For instance (small rec inserted here), I loved Steve Martin's "Shopgirl," and a friend hated it, and I thought, "WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY?"

I'm digressing, as usual. Anyway, I should love what I'm writing because that passion will, guaranteed, translate to the page. That is part of the problem with the current push to make authors churn out a book a year. They are scrambling to find that plot, that idea that can sustain 80,000 words, which is a hell of a lot different than writing 80,000 words because, oh my god, you must hear this. A series is hard enough to pull off, but I can't be the only person for whom the series has become a reader's landmine. The writers are so bored with these characters you can practically hear the yawning as you turn the pages.

So, say I haven't fulfilled my end of the bargain. I've churned out something that I don't particularly care about but fulfills my contractual obligations. That ennui easily translates to the page, and chances are that the next time you (the reader you) want a beach read for that plane ride, you'll buy that author that sated your reading jones the last time: *not* me. Clearly, it behooves me to keep you interested. But beyond even the monetary considerations, read my book because I have a story worth telling--or I should--and I want you to hear it. I feel passionately about these characters and I want to share that passion. That girl A is writing a book and girl B is a better writer and boy A is a jerk but has a nice jaw and boy B is friendly and tall and a little bit clumsy. Park your butt in the chair, the plane seat, down on the beach blanket and listen to me.

There was a girl...

What Kind of Fool Am I?

2009-12-01T12:25:00.001-08:00

Every author that I know Goggles their name to see what the word is about their book. In this technological embarrassment of riches, you can even put the name of your book on alert. You get both the wheat and the chaff. I've gotten alerts where people rave about my book, and I've gotten alerts where people say that it's lousy. In fact, I got one today that said my second book was exactly that. Which, hey, part of the writing gig is that you have to accept (or it will drive you crazy) that you cannot please all readers. There is a certain percentage that you cannot win over. Your style, your voice, your pacing doesn't work for these people. You have to give it up with grace. Plus, let's be honest here; I'm not writing literature. Some people who write in this genre ARE but not me. I'm writing beach reads because that's what I have the time to write. I might be deluding myself that I could write a bigger book if I had time--I do honestly believe that--but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride shit.

Another technological bonus with this reading and writing thing are all these sites devoted to developing connections with other readers. I have a GoodReads page, and a Red Room page, and a couple of others, but mostly I stick to the GoodReads page because I have friends there. It started out as a promo for my books, but since I couldn't figure out how to showcase my books, it's become more of a place for me to gas about books I've read. It's my opinion, nothing more than that. Like above, some books work for me, some don't. I'd like to think that the years I've spent learning how to write have given me some insight into why some books work and other don't, but maybe not. It's my space. Just like this is my space. To write about books I liked and didn't like.

I try to be fair here. I KNOW how it feels to read that your book didn't work for the reader. In fact, I experienced that sense of gloom just today! So when I post a book review here or on GoodReads, I try to be careful and give an honest assessment of why a book worked and why it didn't. For me.

And this is where the foolish part comes in. Because I am both a reader and a writer, I'm vulnerable. Someone could retaliate and go to amazon.com and use their little rating system and kill my ratings. Or be affronted that I didn't write a glowing review about their friend's book so they slammed my book in their blog. Or the author themselves sets up a sock puppet to trash my book. The possibilities for sabotage are endless.

Do I intend to stop posting my opinions on my GoodReads or my blog? Nope. Because I stand behind my words. They are important to me. If I can't write what I want to write here, what's the point? But I'm also aware that I might pay a price for my honesty. Welcome to the new age of writing. The brickbats are to the left.

State of the Book

2009-11-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

I have just hit the 20,000 word mark. At this point you should know if a book is working or not. You've established enough of the story so that the general trajectory is fixed to a point and the characterizations are fairly fleshed out. In other words, you've reached the point where you know if you have a viable concept. Yes, we are cooking with gas, kittens!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you know what I love about writing? It's not static. Just as much as a reader is at the mercy of the writer, the writer is at the mercy of her/his id. Each book I've written has been different, and by that I mean the process has been different. Some of this is due to circumstance, some of it is that my ability to write has improved, but I think it's because every book is a treasure hunt, for the author as well as the reader. That's why it's so cool. The first book was the endless rewrite. Part of that was because it was such a horrible book and HAD to be rewritten to make it into an intelligent whole. The second book was the book that I thought I'd never finish--that little ovarian cancer scare--but also, and I think this is fairly common with a second book, I lost my confidence. I had to get it back paragraph by paragraph. It was extremely painful emotionally, but it's amazing what being told you don't have stage four cancer can do for your productivity! Who cares if it's horrible? I'm here to write it!

This book is an interesting mix. I see a rewrite in front of me (mostly the beginning, always the hardest part for me), but I also have that confidence, that sense, oh, let's just have fun here, shall we? Yeah. I'm having fun.

But mostly, and, obviously, I don't think this is true for everyone, but I'm coming at this as a wreader. At some point you should surprise yourself. That a paragraph or a scene pops out of nowhere and you type away not sure if it's going to work and then it's sit back and go, whoa. It's as if I were channeling that scene not writing it. You sit back, reread it, and then, hopefully, smile and say to yourself: I like that. Don't know where it came from but YOWZAH!

Of course, there's always the YOWZNOES! The snake pit of cliche that dogs every writer. Those phrases that one tends to use to death. I've found that phrase cloud pretty helpful. I now have a list of words and phrases I am not allowed to use.

Some day, I'm going to make a map about the writing process. Sort of like a Candyland for writers (I overuse "sort of" ALL THE TIME). The "cliche" spot where when you land it bumps you back to the "Land of Snores." The "Doldrums" where you can't get out because you're writing but not going any place constructive in the book. It's only when you draw a "Delete last chapter" card that you get free. Wow. I think I have a really good idea here!

See. The Id. So sneaky. So fun.

Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

2009-11-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

Any book that opens with the author having to undergo a hysterectomy has me hooked. I had one and nothing says ma soeur like matching scars.

Aside from the nascent bonding over major surgery, Rhoda Janzen’s memoir of her Mennonite childhood also rings a lot of similar bells. I didn’t grow up Mennonite, but I did grow up the child of immigrants, and I share many of her social disconnects. Ms. Janzen fills this memoir with many references to dishes that are particular to Mennonite culture. My mother’s refrigerator never had a can of Coke in it until she bought a six-pack in response to my children’s request for “soda.” She grew up in dairy country in Ireland where beverages consisted of either milk or booze. Since she wasn’t in the habit of pouring her children a pint, we drank milk at all three meals. I imagine Ms. Janzen can relate. In addition, she has a mother that sounds a lot like my mother. My mother isn’t religious but she might as well be. Ms. Janzen’s mother hands out hugs with jars of strawberry jam; my mother hugs and then knits, whatever, for whomever. And yes, my family have the same sort of inbred discussions that she has at her family table: the obligatory rehashing of old gossip, with a fresh helping of new gossip, what the relatives are up to, what the neighbors are up to, etc.

So much of this memoir I connected with on a fundamental level.

The good: Clearly this writer is smart and adept at writing. I feel the need to say this because, alas (she uses that construction as well; how much we have in common in terms of style is a little creepy), good writing is in short supply these days. She salts info dumps on Mennonite culture throughout this memoir and yet they don’t feel like info dumps. The snippets glide and out of the general story and by the end of the book, by golly, you know a ton about Mennonite culture. This is shockingly hard to do, and I very much appreciated the skill it took to not make it seem like Mennonite 1A. Part of this deft slight of hand is accomplished because she’s damn amusing. Yes, this book is funny, witty, and well written.

The bad: This book scored many points as I chuckled through paragraph after paragraph and yet. It starts off the hysterectomy. The admittedly difficult husband proves to be quite adept at dealing with ensuing medical nightmares, only to abandon her for another man. The joke about her getting dumped by her husband for another guy gets far too much play, especially when we realize three-quarters of the way through the book that this husband had a sexual relationship with another man before they were married. At that point all those previous tee hees about gay.com and “Bob” seem a little hollow.

Post dump she spends her sabbatical with her parents. The disconnect between the humor and the reality in this book creates a gap that the author has trouble filling. We have many pages devoted to lovely and funny family interaction during this sabbatical. (I mean really funny; I snorted milk through my nose reading about the Scrabble game and you can believe that the next time I play Scrabble, I’m going to present lionhairs as a legitimate word). As the memoir progresses, however, the previous humorous asides on the husband cannot hide how toxic this marriage was. I came away wondering, why did you abandon these charming people for that asshole? I don’t believe she ever answers that question successfully. Because it was obvious that while married she must have lived a compartmentalized life, visiting her family without the uber controlling, disapproving, judgmental Nick. I’m reaching here, but I guess the point is that it worked both ways. By marrying him, she escaped the family dynamic that wouldn’t have readily accepted her as the intellectual free spirit that Nick approved (and leeched off of).

As the novels progresses, the ugly truth about her marriage arrives in drips and drabs. By the end of the book we are madly in love with her family, and she finishes the book with the conclusion that she's come “home.” In light of the charming portrayals of her family (even the odd childhood isn’t that odd; I, too, wore weird clothes because my mother didn’t know any differently and bought me weird clothes), by the end of this novel we’re asking ourselves, “What in the hell took you so long?” There is no clear understanding why she hitches her star to this handsome, charming, bi-polar jerk. I found myself looking for clues that she didn’t provide. I suppose it was because he offered an escape. Someone who would support her determined quest that was in flagrant opposition to everything her Mennonite culture championed. It was also someone who reinforced the strict hierarchical, paternal construct she grew up with. I was looking for—and didn’t find—her own epiphany that her parents determining what she wore as a child and teenager in homage to her Mennonite tenets was no different—at least in my eyes—to her husband picking out her wardrobe in homage to his dictates about what was chic.

It is not until the last third of the book do we see how truly grim her marriage was; their relationship and his subsequent flight isn’t really the stuff of humor. I think that there is another story lurking here that isn’t funny at all. A story about a woman who is caught between two worlds destined to collide, the collateral damage a given. Only once is there a scene where her lack of faith and chosen lifestyle is an issue, and that's with brothers that she admits are practical strangers. I think that since faith is such a driving force in her immediate family that less effort might have been paid to the lying about being allergic to raisins versus being an agnostic with a father who she acknowledges is the Mennonite equivalent of the Pope.

She ends this book with the conviction that she’s come home, but I’m not sure that she made a compelling argument as to why she had to leave.

Thanks to Ashley Pattison of Henry Holt and Co. for the ARC.

Miscell Any

2009-10-26T20:03:00.001-07:00

We've just returned from New Orleans. We had a marvelous time, the first real vacation we've had without the children in, well, ever. I love my kids. They are easy going and fun and all around marvelous, and yet, traveling with kids has its givens. My son would have loved the swamp tour but not the four hours on the roads seeing countryside. My daughter would have loved the trip to the plantations, but not so much the menus that were mostly shrimp and if not shrimp then pork and if not pork then crawdads. It was just easier, you know? I do love New Orleans; its food, its architecture. I don't even mind the humidity that makes you feel deliciously lazy.

Restaurant rec: the Green Goddess in New Orleans on 307 Exchange Place. It's been a long time since I've eaten at a restaurant where the chefs cared so much about the food and were still having fun, just like the chef scene in San Francisco when I was cooking. All about pushing those boundaries. Some of the dishes didn't work quite as well as you would hope, while others knocked my frigging socks off, but it's that experimentation that I adored. And to say they didn't work just means that they were only delicious as opposed to orgasmic. That's what this wee place is trying to do. Get you to gasp when you're eating. Highly recommended. We loved it so much we went back twice. Toques off to Chef Chris DeBarr.

I took two books with me on this trip that ended up having tremendous relevance. One, was a book about Joan Root, the filmmaker and conservationist who was murdered in her Kenyan home in 2006, and the second is Annette Gordon-Reed's history on the Hemingses of Monticello. The first book read like a beefed up Vanity Fair article (which indeed it was), but had its own inevitable sense of tragedy that trumped the sensationalistic tone that haunts those sort of articles. Basically, you have a corrupt government and a bunch of white conservationists who are a holdover from the colonial period and the indigenous population who need work and corporations who don't give a rat's ass about the environment, throw in some hardcore thugs, and, unsurprisingly, people get murdered. She was gunned down in her bedroom by someone wielding an AK-47. I was shocked to read that she was just one of a series of people who'd been killed in the lawlessness that has characterized Kenya in the last twenty years. Joan Root joins Dian Fossey and the Adamsons of Born Free fame, all of them murdered.

I'm winding my way through the Gordon-Reed book. It's a little overwritten, but then again I'm betting it's in reaction to her first book, which pretty much ended the debate on whether Jefferson had fathered children by Sally Hemings. I imagine she is writing to deal with those who can't wrap their minds around the fact that Jefferson would actually sleep with a slave woman. I don't have a problem with that because, hello, brilliant though he was, he was pretty morally bankrupt in my book. Please do not tell me it was the time. He kept slaves even though he knew it was immoral, but he couldn't live his life as he envisioned it without slavery. Aside from the global issue, what about sleeping with your wife's half-sister, fathered by your father-in-law... You get the picture.

Anyway, my little commentary aside, Gordon-Reed makes a lot of leaps here, and I understand why (sources being thin on the ground), but what is more fascinating is how the Virginia ruling class actually applied a different set of laws to slaves so that they could maintain this system (as opposed to laws governing the white and free population). It was a bash to fit solution. General law deemed that your status in life was passed down through your father. That wouldn't do at ALL in a slave-owning culture, therefore, they changed the law so that status was passed down through the mother. A simple, yet effective solution. Of course it also gave complete latitude to white men who wanted to bed black women and not have their bi-racial children actually be legitimate heirs. Even when Jefferson was ambassador to France, he never registered his slaves as dictated by French law, because then if they decided to declare themselves free, he would have had to free them. So he didn't. Another charming bash to fit solution to his little slave problem.

So I'm reading these books while in New Orleans. I have lived through my own natural disasters: an earthquake and a firestorm. You live in California, you're going to face one or the other at some point. Fortunately, I wasn't on a freeway when the earthquake hit, and I lived far enough away from the firestorm that I didn't lose my home. I know lots of people who did, who ended up fighting with insurance companies, and getting FEMA loans to rebuild, and who were genuinely scarred but who survived. Four years later I wouldn't say that New Orleans is surviving. Lots and lots of boarded up buildings, even now, with the telltale watermarks on the roofs. The only places that have full parking lots are the Lowes and the Home Depots, yet we saw block after block of foundations. Just foundations. Even now. Occasionally, you'd see that someone had rebuilt, but you had to ask yourself why? Because to either side of them were the outlines of foundations with nothing on top of them. Generally, the areas that were most devastated by the water were inhabited by the poor. The areas that were devastated by the firestorm here in California were populated by upper middle-class types, who knew that if the insurance company jerked you around, you called a lawyer. Houses were rebuilt and FEMA money came through. People were not living in trailers two years down the road.

I picked up the Times Picayune every day we were in New Orleans. On every page there was an article about someone being indicted. Every day. Every page. Obama came through while we were there and I thought, pick up the paper, dude. It's all there. That's why four years down the road you're in St. Bernard's Parish and the water is gone and the bulldozers have moved in but that's about all you can say. The land grab must be imminent. If you don't rebuild, then the property only loses in value every day it sits vacant. And when you have block after block, then, well. People with the checkbooks are waiting. It's going to be pennies on the dollar.

Book Rec and Whining

2009-10-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've started my new book. This is a bit of a departure for me, and I'm having a whole hell of a lot of fun with the concept. It's the first idea in a long time that's actually excited me. I'm up to roughly 13,000 words, and I've made a vow to finish this by Christmas, which isn't impossible, although extremely ambitious.

And then I got derailed for a couple of weeks by what Truman Capote called the mean reds. Because I read a book. One of the most marvelous books I've read in ages. I keep haphazard, barely legible lists (I found a napkin the other day with five book titles on it!) squirreled away in odd places, and this book's title kept cropping up: Call Me by Your Name, by Andre Aciman. It is a stunning read. A coming of age story set in Italy, the protagonist is seventeen-year-old boy named Elio and his lover is a twenty-four-year old academic named Oliver. Note I use the word lover; I don't use it lightly. This book is about falling in love. This book is about falling in love so deeply and completely and totally that it ruins your life in a sense. The bar has been set so high that no one else comes close. I'm sounding like the blurb off the back of a cheap romance novel. He doesn't. Trust me on this. This is best book I've read in couple of years and ranks up there with one of the best books I've read period.

So why the mean reds? Because it’s so beautifully written that it sucked all confidence out of me. Even at the top of my game (I use that term lightly), I couldn’t write like this because it’s not my voice. Truthfully, the author whose voice probably most resembles mine is Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. That’s my voice or what my voice could be and I’m not complaining. But. Mr. Aciman’s voice is one rich sentence after another, evocative yet simple writing, that manages to pack a wow on every page. I will not be that writer. But I can certainly be a better writer. I’m working on that. Even while fully acknowledging that, well, my brain just doesn’t work that way, it still gutted me.

I know a lot of authors who stop reading when they are working on a project. I’ve never been one of them, but, hey, now joining that bandwagon because I’ve lost two weeks here. Frankly, it’s rare when I read a book that silences my own ego. That says quite a lot about me, I know, and another book I would recommend on this subject is Betsy Lerner’s Forest for the Trees. She does a fab job of getting into the writer’s psyche and laying out the ridiculous (and, obviously, as neurotic as hell) pinball mechanism of the writer’s id: rampaging, insufferable egotism going hand in hand with crippling self-doubt. Welcome to my world. Anyway, part of why I’ve never bothered to adhere to that dictum is that I rarely read anything that wows me. And I mean truly wows me. Aciman’s book had me gasping in delight with every page. That just doesn’t happen anymore, so I’ve never felt the need to not read while knee-deep in a book project.

Some of this is because, well, books just aren’t that good anymore. They are rushed through the publishing process, the most important criteria being their sales potential. Being the hot book. Not being the well-written hot book. No, the operative word here is hot. Books aren’t edited anymore, and I’m now convinced they aren’t even copy edited anymore. Spell check and slap a cover on it. That’s about that size of it these days. So books that might have been great with a lot more work are mediocre. I can’t tell you the number of books I’ve read in the last five years that had the bones of great. Another six months of hard work would have propelled that book from okay to decent or from decent to marvelous (and for those who know me, no, I’m not discussing the last Harry Potter book because that’s flat out stroke inducing).

Since mystery is the genre I write in, do we even need to say major plot busts? Do we need to say sloppy construction, contrived endings, half-realized characterizations, and, sigh, on and on. It’s all about sales these days. And while I understand better than most people why book sales are plummeting (I have a fifteen-year-old son and reading is just another word for torture), I also say to you, well, you’re producing schlock. Maybe why your sales are tanking?

Anyway, Mr. Aciman’s book is so far from schlock that I urge you to read it. Other books that wowed me: Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. It’s more accessible than Aciman's book, but if multiple POVs bother you, then this isn’t the book for you (although I thought that part of the power of this book was how well he manipulated the POVs). What a touching, lovely book. Speaking of touching, read Calvin Trilling’s About Alice. This is also about finding true love. He wrote this after his wife had died, so it’s from the other end of the spectrum, at the end of a great love as opposed to the beginning. I loved Alice, too, by the end. Another book that I thought was stunning, certainly along the lines of Aciman’s book, was Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty. I was cooking when AIDS started to devastate the S.F. chef community, so this book packed a punch like you wouldn’t believe, but it doesn’t need that backdrop to be a powerful, gorgeous read. All these books are completely different in style, but they share one thing. They say what they want to say well. Language is a song to them.

Back to writing.

Google and Roman Polanski

2009-10-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

I haven't forgotten about the Mysterious Food crossword puzzle. I've been beset with a horrible virus and for some reason (even though I've eliminated the virus), gmail is giving me terrible trouble. So much trouble that to type a single sentence can take me up to five minutes. I keep running virus scans, etc., but to no avail. Ideas, oh wiser ones?

Roman Polanski. No, I wasn't shocked that Woody Allen came out in support of Mr. Polanski given Mr. Allen's history of seducing minors. Other Hollywood luminaries who signed this petition did shock me. Apparently, if you're rich and famous and connected, then rape is okay. I read one more apologia about how he's suffered and I'm going to scream bloody murder. How he's been in exile. How he was a victim of the Holocaust. How he lost his wife. I grew up in California. I know these facts. You know what? Boo fucking hoo. It does not give him a free pass. I repeat. It does not give him a free pass.

And I say to those people who clamour that he's paid for his crime. How? How did he pay for his crime? His victim had to sue him in a civil trial for reparations. Sue him! Did he fund crisis hotlines for rape victims? Did he crusade for victims of violent crime? Did he lecture on the evils of drugs and alcohol to teenagers? No, he did not. He did none of those things. He went to France, made movies, bought a chalet, drank wine, got married, had a couple of kids of his own, and won an Oscar for his work. In fact, he lived the EXACT SAME LIFE he would have lived had he not attacked that girl. Nothing changed for him. Not a thing.

That can't be said for the kid he raped, now can it?

Could I Possibly Admire This Woman Any More?

2009-09-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Given that I adored Meryl Streep's interpretation of Julia Child in the movie "Julie and Julia," naturally, I rushed out and bought My Life in France. Oh! What a marvelous book! This is one of those books where there really aren't enough exclamation points to do it justice.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Julia Child had quite a persnickety side to her. The recipes had to be right! Her frustrations with Simone Beck were rooted in that intuitive flair that the French chefs that I knew had and with which "Simca" approached their collaboration. Julia thought that all fine and good, but not for a cookbook. The bit on beurre blanc cracked me up. But that sort of dogged pursuit characterized her personality and, I think, was critical to her success. Although she had flair, it wasn't about her flair. It was about you and her cookbook propped open on your kitchen counter. By god you were going to make something that would make your guests grin with pleasure. She guaranteed it. You didn't need flair. You had her looking over your metaphorical shoulder, telling you to add the stock NOW.

Of course, there's lots of description of the food, but the food doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's the people at the table, their friends, the conversations, the ambiance of the restaurant, the collective appreciation of the food and the people eating it, in short, it's the whole enchilada that makes France so magical for her. As much as this book is about her evolution into the persona that became "Julia Child," there isn't a chapter that doesn't include descriptions of people, who they meet, who they like, the people who become their dear, dear friends. The book is as much a paean to her love of food as it is her love for the table and who is sitting around it.

This is certainly why I went into cooking. It was the ambiance around my mother's dining room table that inspired me cook. That wonderful moment when you raise your glass of wine to each other in the most basic spirit of camaraderie. We are breaking bread. Together.

Computers are evil and Canada

2009-09-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

I have wasted an entire week of my life trying to deal with a computer virus on my new laptop. And as much as I hate Microsoft on principle, I've been on the phone with a number (FAR TOO MANY) of extremely helpful phone minions. Depending on the severity of the problem, they keep bumping you up to someone more savvy. But it took hours of phone time on crappy connections, and while I have some facility with accents, a weak connection makes that sort of back and forth difficult. What command? Plus, the entire thing was a PC guilt trip because I really couldn't hear, but I was sure they thought I was being an American xenophobe. Sigh. Is xenophobe a word? You know what I mean.

Anyway, am setting up daughter in new apartment for her second year of college. It's in a kick-ass part of town with lots of, well, everything around her. Kinda funky, but then that's college and I am envious. Living in a semi-dump has its advantages. Life is simpler. No hanging baskets or roses to fret over. No driveways to seal. Meals are haphazard affairs. Not that I don't love my house, my yard, my cats, but all these silent demands for attention tend to overwhelm on occasion. Love the roses, hate the upkeep deal. But then I do love roses and we put up these graceful trellises, and once again it's that no free lunch deal. Trellises+roses=beauty+upkeep.

And let's not even talk about the college issue. I buy lottery tickets on a half-assed basis, and my greatest fantasy is not about buying that chateau in France with my millions. It's about buying time. I would become a full-time student again. I'd start off in landscape architecture (Gertrude Jekyll being an idol of mine) and then? Who knows? I think college is wasted on the young. What I know now? I look at the list of my daughter's classes and I salivate over the possibilities.

I return to the U.S. tomorrow. And book number three. I am up to 9000 words and have a goal of finishing this sucker by Christmas. Ambitious, but not impossible. I have reached a stage in my writing where the process is more intense, but it's neater and cleaner. I write and it takes twice as long to finish a chapter, but it's a chapter where the concept is done. Written in stone. That's why I love writing. It's not static. The process changes the more adept you get. In some ways it's much harder, because I tend to overwrite and then I must go back and parse out all the bullshit writing, but now at least I have goals. How to get there, conversely, has because harder because I am less satisfied with my writing the more I write, but having goals is half the battle. What am I achieving in this chapter? You should always have a goal--actually several goals--in each chapter.

Edit. Winning the lottery would allow me to write full time. Perchance to dream.

Will post answers to crossword puzzle. Got derailed on that because of ugly virus and then getting daughter settled. There really aren't enough hours in the day.

Fun and Games!

2009-08-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Back in the days before Bridge Baron, I was a crossword puzzle freak. Surfing around on the net--god, I love the Internet--I found a plethora of crossword puzzle maker sites. The first person to finish gets a free copy of my book, Roux Morgue. Have fun. It's tricksy!