Franchesca Ramsey wants a word with you.

 Not quite our main subject, but I think you will see the relevance, and sympathize... - Robert Lopresti

 

 

 

How do writers look at success?

Liz Zelvin with Lee Child

I have rubbed shoulders with a few writers whose success can be measured by the traditional yardsticks of fame and fortune: name recognition, sales in the millions, and New York Times bestsellers. (In the case of Lee Child, the shoulder-rubbing is figurative, since in terms of height as well as achievement, Lee's a mountain to my mole hill, even in this 2010 photo, when I was several inches taller than I am now.) For literary novelists, winning a Pulitzer or National Book Award are unassailable marks of success. For mystery writers, becoming an MWA Grand Master or winning an Edgar Award may be equivalent measures. For short story writers, a Pushcart Prize, a story published in The New Yorker, or a cover or lead story in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has cachet. A novel or novella turned into a "major motion picture," aka a movie, or a popular TV series denotes success. Even making a yearly income the writer can live on is what many of the writer's peers would call success.

But what if none of these marks of traditional success comes your way? Can you still call yourself a success as a writer?

There's been a lot of talk on the Short Mystery list recently about the demise of markets and the lack of opportunity to make a living as well as the joys of getting a story accepted, especially in a milestone event eg for the first time or to a prestigious market. This made me think about my own measures of success, since I concluded years ago that both my successes and failures as a writer are genuine and made my peace with them. The failures have nothing to do with my talent or hard work as a writer, seventy plus years into my career. I can reframe them as disappointments, setbacks, or learning experiences, and let them go. The successes, whatever form they take for me, can bring me satisfaction, even joy, if I let them.

Here's an event that felt like success to me last month: my first novel, first published in hardcover by a major publisher 18 years ago, had two new readers on Kindle Unlimited, and other Kindle readers bought two novels, a novella, and one short story in the series, all but the novella originally published before e-books existed. I still have readers! New readers! They read the first novel and want to read the entire series all these years later. The numbers are minuscule and the royalties, especially for Kindle Unlimited, microscopic, but having new readers makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer.

Liz reads at Poets House, NYC

Moving the reader—or an audience—also makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer. My goal has never been fame and fortune in the first place, at least not since I passed my early twenties, when it hadn't happened, and I developed some common sense. I write to say what I have to say and make my readers laugh and cry. Finally, I believe I've succeeded as a writer because I know beyond all doubt that as a result of applying rigorous craft to an innate gift over many decades, I write well. Could I write Shakespeare's plays? No. Could a barrel of monkeys write my short stories? No.

I asked fellow members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society what defines success for them as writers. None of them fall into the rich and famous category, though quite a number of them are well published and winners of multiple prestigious awards.

Jeff Markowitz agrees with me about writing well: "The quality of the work itself may be the best measure of success. It's the one that keeps me in front of my computer, working on the next project."

Josh Pachter, who's been publishing for more than fifty years and had his share of kudos, says, "There's really only one metric by which I measure capital-S Success, and that's Am I having fun?"

Gary Earl Ross says, "After a ceremony honoring one of my old students, she introduced me to friends as her English professor and said she still needed to read my last book. I felt part of something much bigger than myself, the same way I feel when I interact with other writers. We’re rich in the ways that matter most."

Joseph S. Walker's views are similar. "I write because it's fun, it's personally fulfilling, and it's occasionally rewarding. It's the best way I've found of engaging with the world." Success? Joe says it's "having a story published because an editor/publisher liked it and accepted it (and, ideally, paid me for it); to keep writing, and to have the sense that I'm improving; to keep challenging myself to do new things--which takes me past the act of actually writing and into the broader world of being a writer. And finally--yes, knowing that a story has reached readers and, ideally, that they liked it. There are lots of ways in which you can learn that the story you threw out into the world actually meant something to somebody."

In the end, for each of us, success constitutes a unique blend of what writing means to us and what our work means to others.

"At the best of times when I write, when I'm done for the day I feel as if I'm coming out of a trance. It's gratifying." - Terry Shames

"The joy of having something in print—and having a reader tell me that they enjoyed something of mine they’ve read—is more of a high for me than a paycheck. Success also means finishing a story the way I imagined it in my head—that the pacing, voice, characterization and connections are all right and I’ve done my job properly. Even if no one reads a piece I write, I’ll know if it feels right to me." - Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier

"I regard myself as a successful working writer. I'll probably never make a lot of money at this, but I will be leaving a legacy, and a body of work. That gives me satisfaction." - A.L. Sirois

"It's your ability to write something that readers like and enjoy and love and can't put down. It's damned hard to involve readers with your writings to that extent, that they keep thinking about it for days and weeks afterward (or months and years)! - Yoshinori Todo

"I want everything to sell, the new and the old. Last month I sold one of my earliest mysteries and the newest one as well as a fantasy. I keep having new ideas; I’m not just finishing out old series. That is definitely success. I keep tackling new ways of doing things or learning something. That’s success because it means I’m still curious and accepting challenges. - Emily Dunn

"I write because I enjoy it. I like that there are a few people who say to me, "When is the next book coming out?" I am enjoying my life and, to me, that is the most important thing. As an older adult, I have found that those who feel most satisfied with their life - at this stage - are those who are doing, or have done, what they enjoy." - Elena Smith

"When a reader tells me they read and enjoyed my book, it puts me over the moon. I once had a woman I'd not met yet come to a sales event and tell me she came specifically to see me. That made my day far more than the sales did." - Rosalie Spielman

"A girl I met when she was four years old, sitting on her front porch reading, is now 35 and teaches high school language arts. She has influenced thousands of students to read and write. She says it’s all because she met me, because she saw me writing, and because I allowed her to go through my home library and borrow anything, any time she wanted to. Over the years, she’s kept up with every single one of my publications, read them and commented on them. That to me is success." - Bobbi Chukran

"I write almost daily. Love every minute. The pleasure is profound because I do exactly what I want to do. That is my measure of success. I've never been happier." - Wil Emerson

"I once got an email from a woman in Canada who was cleaning out her mother’s house after she died. She said she found a stack of my books. She hadn’t known her mother liked mysteries, and now she was reading them. That email was such a treat. A word of enthusiasm from a stranger once in a while can make all the difference." - Susan Oleksiw

"Writing from the heart, telling a story the way I want to tell it, and receiving positive reader feedback - that's success." - Catherine Dilts

Elizabeth Zelvin writes the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, the Mendoza Family Saga, and the Emerald Love Urban Fantasy Mysteries. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle (2025) is Liz's third poetry collection over fifty years as a published poet.

Picture Imperfect

There's a bit by the comedian Stephen Wright. A friend asks if Wright would like to see a picture of the friend when he was younger, and Wright replies "Every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger."

Which I would paraphrase this way: Time is a bastard.

I hate having my picture taken. Always have. I've never seen a photo of myself that I like. There are probably lots of deep psychological reasons we don't need to get into. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. It's not like there are people clamoring to take my picture on a daily basis.

But there's a part of being an author I didn't anticipate: people do want your picture. Specifically, they want a headshot, usually for promotional purposes--to accompany an interview or publication announcement, for example. This presented me with a dilemma. I certainly wasn't going somebody to take a professional headshot that I wouldn't like any more than what I could do with my own phone. So at the start of my career I just used selfies, of varying quality, when asked for a headshot.

Then, a few years ago, I started using this.

That's our cat, Imogene. Her original name, when we got her from the shelter eleven years ago, was Smudge, but my wife renamed her for a character in a movie she was fond of. She also had a persistent habit of sneaking up behind people (the cat, not my wife), so her full name, thank you very much, became Imogene Smudge Underfoot.

For the first time, I had a headshot I didn't mind using. Imogene blocks enough of my face to make me enigmatic, as opposed to flatly unappealing, but that hardly mattered since everybody would be looking at her anyway, what with her being so darn cute and all. Plus, it seemed appropriate to give her a little credit for my work, since one of her favorite things to do was jump into my lap while I was writing and insist that hands were for petting, not typing. It was part of her basically sociable nature. If she wasn't asleep, she wanted to be where the people were, which is a nice attribute in a pet for a guy who works at home.

Here's what I didn't think about, and, yeah, you probably see where this is going, so this is your chance to jump off while this is still a happy post. 

Imogene had a lot of health issues last year. With the help of a couple of determined and compassionate vets, we got her through that, and she had a great year of being, I believe, happy, comfortable, and very loved. Then, because time is a bastard, the issues came back, and a couple of weeks ago we had to make that most difficult of decisions that every pet owner has to make, sooner or later.

I do wish it had been later. It's an inevitable part of having a pet, of course, and I'll remember the eleven good years we had with her after I've forgotten, or at least dulled, the memory of the stressful final days. I'm sad, but I'll be okay.

But there's that damn picture. And what I never thought about was how I'd feel every time I see it, once she was gone. That photo shows up in a lot of places. It's in the back of my collection Crime Scenes. It's in convention programs and on websites. I'm likely to keep running across it for years.

Sigh. Every picture is of you when you were younger. When you had the best cat ever as your writing partner (a lot of you reading this probably think you have the best cat ever, to which I sez, everybody's wrong sometimes).

So, just a small tribute this month to Imogene Smudge Underfoot. Thanks for indulging me--and if you happen to run across that headshot, raise a glass to her, wouldja?

How to Maintain a Career in Fiction Writing

 Today, I'm combining the wisdom of two authors I much admire, Benjamin Stevenson and John Floyd.

Two nights ago, I hosted/interviewed Australian author Benjamin Stevenson on stage at the Centennial Theatre in Burlington, Canada.  To say I was 'outnumbered' is an understatement:  Benjamin's book "Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone" has sold a million copies!  I don't believe I've sold even half that if you were to combine all my books, short stories, and comedy pieces put together.  (Okay, the newspaper columns had audiences in the millions, but that wasn't fiction.)

It was an electric night on stage with Benjamin, as we both got our start writing standup.  Lots of fun!  But some of the things we talked about have really resonated with me after the event.

Benjamin said it takes him two years to write a book.  (It takes me one year.  I sit in awe of cozy writers who can write three a year, frankly.)  We both agreed on one thing:  We have to be really excited about a book project to sit down, bum in chair, and write every day until that one project is done.

Excited.  I've thought back to my own career as a novelist, and can see that this drives me as well.

I didn't start as a novelist.  I began life as a short story writer.  But when the short story market began to shrink, I started to think about meeting the challenge of writing a novel. 

My first series is still my bestselling individual series.  Rowena Through the Wall was epic fantasy, or what they would call Romantasy these days.  It was featured in USA Today some years ago, and took off (a top 50 Amazon bestseller, all books.)  That series was great fun to write, but once I finished it, it felt that fantasy was kind of done for me.  I looked around for something that would excite me. 

This brings me to John Floyd's column from a few weeks ago, The Old Genre Switcheroo, about moving between genres or subgenres.  I realized that this is what I've been doing.  It's how I've stayed excited, while continuing to write novels.

My next series was The Goddaughter mob caper series.  You can't get more different from dark ages fantasy than that!  A contemporary mob goddaughter in Hamilton doesn't want to be one, but keeps getting dragged back in to bail out her family.  

Totally different genres with different rules.  What they did have in common?  Both series were high comedy.   

When that series ended, I looked around for another genre or subgenre that I could get excited about.  Something that would challenge me, and provide a host of fresh ideas.

Which led to The Pharaoh's Curse Murders (out this week!) and the historical Merry Widow Murder series.  Still humorous, but with the challenge of a 1929 setting and - new for me - classic mystery plotting requirements.

Challenging and therefore exciting, for this writer. 

What does all this prove?  This is what I've learned:

The secret to having a multi-decade career in fiction writing is to be versatile.  Move where the market goes.  Keep yourself fresh by exploring new genres or sub-genres.  

Versatility.  Which begs the question, what's next for this writer, after The Kennel Club Murders, out April 2027?

I'm excited to see.  

Melodie Campbell is the winner of ten awards, including The Derringer and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, for her 21 novels and 60 short stories.  She didn't even steal them.

NOW AVAILABLE AT B&N, AMAZON, CHAPTERS/INDIGO AND INDEPENDENTS! 

 

 

In Cold Blood Revisited

 In 1966, Truman Capote claimed to have invented a new type of writing, the non-fiction novel. The result was his seminal work, In Cold Blood. In it, he depicts the 1959 murder of a prosperous farming family in Kansas. The murder actually happened and baffled authorities for Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The pair met in penitentiary, where a fellow inmate told them stories of working for Herb Clutter, the patriarch of the Clutter family. Specifically, he told them Clutter had a safe in his house holding $10,000. Which was not true as Clutter seldom carried cash.

The pair agreed they would rob the family once they were out of prison. They also agreed they would have to kill the witnesses to cover up their crime. But rather than simply walking in and shooting everyone in their sleep, Hickock raped the oldest daughter first, and the pair tortured Herb Clutter before killing him. The pair then fled to Mexico, pawning what they could take from the home (which did not include $10,000.) Smith had dreams of buying a boat and taking tourists out on deep sea adventures and finding sunken treasure. Hickock, stunted and slightly crippled from a car accident, just wanted to get high and debauch. The pair were cornered in Las Vegas two years later. Both men were hung in 1965.

Despite Capote's claims, In Cold Blood was not the first "non-fiction novel," or more accurately, true crime novel. There were others before it. But Capote's captured enough attention to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It also paved the way for LA District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson Family murders, Helter Skelter. One thing that sets both these books apart is they don't really sensationalize the murders. Hickock and Smith are a pair of career criminals and drifters who might have been at home in Kerouac's On the Road if they were just a bit smarter and more sociable (and less violent. Merry pranksters these two were not.)  Manson doesn't need sensationalized. He and his followers brought their own flair for the theatrics, which actually makes them scarier.

What struck me about the killers in In Cold Blood is they could not articulate their motivations, especially Hickock. He was a violent thug who had vague resentment against anyone who thought they were better than him. Never mind he'd never met or talked to the Clutters before killing them. Smith seems to have trapped himself in the life, hitching his star to a more charismatic and fierce Hickock and constantly regretting it even as he goes along with the next scene. The pair was doomed from the start. The Clutters became collateral damage, as the innocent often are in these cases.

Whittled Away Bit by Bit

My dad has early stage Alzheimer’s. Until recently, I had been helping manage his care without doing a whole lot of reflection on what is going on with my father and how it’s affecting him, and by extension the members of his family — my mom, my brother, my wife, our son, and me.

That all began to change when I turned 61 earlier this month. Nothing like a birthday to cause a thinking, feeling person to stop and take stock of their life, of the world around them, of the situations arising in their daily existence, and how things are going for their loved ones.

One of those situations has been dogging my steps longer than I’d have admitted. But before I get into all that, I want to talk a bit about Nash Bridges.

I remember back in the late ‘90s, one of my guilty pleasures was watching Don Johnson’s wish fulfillment project Nash Bridges on CBS. The title character, portrayed by Johnson himself, had it all: cool job (police inspector/later captain of an elite investigative unit), cool car (an exceedingly rare late ’60s yellow Hemi ’Cuda convertible), cool partner/best friend (played by Cheech Marin — I mean, come on), cool girlfriend (portrayed by Yasmine Bleeth of Baywatch fame), cool penthouse apartment on the top floor of a skyscraper in San Francisco, cool ex-wife, cool relationship with his teenage daughter, and cool clothes.

Cool car. Cool clothes. Cool city. Cool life. The stuff of fiction.

Like I said: wish fulfillment. 

On the show one aspect of Nash’s life that was less than ideal was the fact that his father was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and Nash had just begun to act as his guardian and main caregiver. This is the first time I can recall actively paying attention to a fictional arc about a character with Alzheimer’s. Before this I had seen news pieces about the disease, about dementia, and other aspects of aging that included memory loss, personality changes, mood swings, and confusion.

Nick Bridges was the first fictional character I ever remember watching deal with Alzheimer’s. But his condition was not in any way realistic. If anything, it served as more of a plot convenience than an actual portrayal of the progression of the disease. Nick would seem foggy when it served the plot, then get sharp when that served the plot too. Half the time he just seemed like a crotchety old man with an engaging, salty sense of humor. As portrayed by veteran character actor James Gammon, the character was an awful lot of fun. Kind of like the rest of the show.

So: not just wish fulfillment. Completely delusional wish fulfillment!

I didn’t think much about that at the time. I mean, it was entertainment. Nash Bridges is not a documentary. If you’re looking for clinical accuracy, you’re gonna need to seek it elsewhere. 

And yet for all that, these days I can hardly help but think about it. And that because nowadays I know exactly what the real thing looks like. 

As far back as I can remember, my father had always been the sharpest tack in the room. And by “sharp,” I mean clever. Articulate. Incisive. Precise with his language — and exacting with me on my employment of same.

If I was relating a story, talking about something that had happened to me earlier in the day: a strange interaction with a sales clerk, perhaps, and in the course of so doing, gave a thumbnail of what I said, rather than exactly quoting, my dad would tell me what I ought to have said and how I ought to have said it. He never once stopped to consider that I was giving a thumbnail. It seemed never to occur to him that in all likelihood I had acquitted myself just fine in the moment. He was constantly trying to improve my language, and by extension, me. 

Constantly. 

Exhaustively. 

And exhaustingly.

In a nutshell this is because my father is a textbook narcissist who has always worked hard to keep himself at the center of any conversation. This made for rocky times during my young adult and early adult years.

These days he cannot even really follow a conversation. Most of the time it’s all he can do to muster repeated volleys of the word “What?”, phrased eternally as a question while struggling to keep up.

Ironically, he and I have never gotten along better than we do now.

Unless he happens to be in the grip of a bout of sundowning syndrome. In those instances all bets are usually off.

Without getting too clinical: a person dealing with Alzheimer’s spends their entire day struggling with confusion, disorientation, and memory lapses. They start the morning relatively refreshed after a night’s sleep (good or otherwise). But as the day progresses, the effort of managing their all-encompassing confusion, their endless disorientation, tends to wear on them. They get tired. And when they get tired, the confusion gets worse. And when the confusion gets worse, they get more tired. It’s a vicious cycle. 

So by sundown — or sometime around then — you’ve got someone who has been struggling all day, has reached their limit, and is, for lack of a better term, cranky. They lash out. They can get mean.

In my dad’s case, he can also become pretty incoherent. During one of these episodes, he will invariably key on something, anything someone else says and argue with them about it — in terms that make less and less sense as the dispute progresses. The other invariably finds themself having to defuse the situation. 

My entire family deals with this. And make no mistake: this situation puts significant strain on all of us — my mom, my brother, my wife, our son, and me. I’ll leave it at that, except to say that during this difficult time we have closed ranks, are all pulling together, trying hard to support each other, and to support him.

Sometimes during all of this pulling together, I can’t help but entertain the question of whether my father’s Alzheimer’s is hereditary. I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it — on whether this might be a glimpse of my own potential future. That way lies madness.

What I find myself thinking about far more. What I find myself worrying about. What I find myself sometimes consumed with, is my mother, and the weight she carries daily.

After all, I know that I am struggling with my own emerging impressions of who my father is becoming. But I cannot even imagine what my mom is going through.

I got a glimpse of it the other day. I told her I had broken down crying over what's happening with my dad. She said, "Welcome to my world. I cry every day."

A startling admission coming from my stalwart, stoic mother. No one who knows her would ever think of her as a crier.

Watching the personality of the person she has spent her entire adult life with — sixty-plus years — be whittled away. Be carved down. Be eroded like sandstone by the wind, like granite rock on a headland worn down by the surf and the tide.

All of it a diminishing. A gradual vanishing. My father, and by extension, all of us who love and try to support him, victims of Time.

Babylon Berlin

Okay, now here’s one you can sink your teeth into.  Babylon Berlin, streaming on MHz.

Germany, 1929, the Weimar Republic.  An experiment in social democracy that nobody was ready for, not after the slaughter in the trenches, and the poisonous embarrassments of Versailles.  The great political struggle of the 20^th century is being played out in the streets of proletarian Berlin, as murderous performance art, the reactionaries and revanchists trying to beat back the Bolshevik menace, and in the economic and social exhaustion that comes, the Nazis will step in to pick up the pieces.

This is rich soil to cultivate, and for me, as a political junkie with a side in history, naturally fascinating.  It’s a little Cabaret - without the eye-watering phoniness of Liza Minnelli – and very reminiscent of Philip Kerr’s series of Bernie Gunther novels, but darker and more Gothic than both.  It also happens to be mordantly funny.

The success of the show, I think, is that it’s absolutely convincing in the details; it certainly convinces me.  You land right in the middle of this disturbed environment, a postwar collapse that’s never properly righted itself.  And the sexual license, the drugs, the music (fabulous cameo from Bryan Ferry as a nightclub performer, but who also wrote some of the songs), are all of a piece: the place is crazy wild, and you want your share.  Everybody’s on the make, the mob, the crooked cops, the political outliers and also-rans, the pimps and the whores and the dopers. 

Now, of course, you need somebody to root for, and the show has two engaging leads, as well as a shifting cast of slippery secondaries, some of whom step up to full-frontal villainy, and some who fade.  The violence is abrupt, as are the sudden sexual encounters.  The whole feeling is of fragmentation, that your faith or assumption in a larger social stability, or benefit, is delusional.  (The guys who wrote the show, and exec produce, say one of the things that interests them about it is the fragility of the era.)  Watching the heroine and the hero try to navigate this chaotic house of cards - while they themselves are sometimes trusting of one another, and sometimes suspicious – is what gives the narrative its forward motion.

The show is based on a series of novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, which I’m now interested in, and are available in English translation.  The series, though, changes the chronology.  So far, the first three seasons take place in 1929, the fourth in 1930-31, and the last – the fifth season, yet to be released - in 1932-33, when the Nazis come to power.  And, as odd and ominous as the first three seasons are, the Nazis haven’t even shown up yet, which gives you an idea just how odd and ominous the series really is.  Things are already bad enough.

The producers have also put a lot of time and effort and money into recreating period Berlin, and as somebody who’s actually spent some time there – and considering how much of the city was flattened, during the war – they’ve done a terrific job.  They do use CGI, but it’s pretty seamless.  The famous Alexanderplatz doesn’t really exist the same way it once did – Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hugely successful 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, adapted twice to film – but it looks plenty real here, in all its prewar significance.  

This may be an acquired taste, in that not everybody shares my fascination with the place and the time, but I think it repays your attention.  It’s not a history lesson, or a documentary, although they aren’t fudging the facts - it’s more along the lines of a fevered dream, which seems like an entirely accurate representation.  Berlin, then and now, has always been a state of mind, somewhat hallucinatory.