Books Don't Float – More book humour

My 18^th book launches today.  The Silent Film Star Murders is close to my heart.  I'm pretty sure it's my best book yet.  So I'm anxious to see this baby birthed.  Except – wait minute – there's a hitch.  Which is what this post is all about.  

HOW BOOK BABIES GET BIRTHED  (mine tend to be breech)

I've had 18 books launch, and I still panic every time we get close to launch date.  This is because I'm pretty sure the Literary Gods have a sense of humour, and delight in adding new codicils to Murphy's Law.  

By profession, I'm a marketer and event planner.  We, by definition, are planners.  Over-planners, some would say.  I have lists for my lists.  But think about it.  Marketing plans are developed months before promotion campaigns launch.  In the case of event planning (think of large conferences) we try to plan for every possible contingency - every single thing that could go wrong.  Because for dang sure, something that nobody dreamed about will happen!

It's the same with books.  Want proof?  (If you're looking for a quick way to develop a drinking habit…)

1. WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? 

Launch date for the Silent Film Star Murders (book two in the Merry Widow series) is March 22.  In-warehouse date is Feb. 21.  Promo blogs and other ads have been created and are to go live in US and Can on this weekend.

Publisher has just been informed that Amazon and B&N won't have the books in time because of the frantic increase in shipping (read madhouse) across the border due to - you guessed it - trying to beat the threatened tariffs.  So there's a new launch date.  March 22 in Canada, April 12 in the US.  Which means ALL the promotion comes out in the US before the book is available! <hits head against desk> 

2.  BOOKS DON'T FLOAT

Who-da guessed, but Pandemics really screw with book launches.  One of my books was to launch the very week Ontario shut down due to the pandemic.  It, poor thing, never got the attention it deserved.  But that was small potatoes compared to what happened next.

The entire second printing of Crime Club, due to be here for the Christmas buying season, got dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

Yup, you heard that right.  A container off a monster container ship took a dive with 16 others, into the Pacific, during a storm.  That is one hell of a lot of royalty moolah washed away.

The irony of this post (and yes, I live for irony) is: my current series takes place on the high seas, on an ocean liner in the Roaring 20s!  You'd almost think there was a diabolical plan to my life, Literary Gods.

I hope the fishes like to read. 

The Silent Film Star Murders SHOULD be available April 12 in the US, and March 22 in Canada and elsewhere.  It's traveling by land, I think.  Hope.

What's it all about?

Lady Lucy Revelstoke reboards her 1920s ocean liner for another high society murder mystery on the high seas — with rival film stars, resentful ex-lovers, and renegade snakes!

Available at all the usual suspects.

Music When You Write

© Embassy Pictures

For years, especially on Short Mystery, I've found myself drawn into the whole Music While Writing vs. Complete Silence debate. I haven't for a while, but my latest take is interesting. I've gotten really good at ignoring the television if I work evenings in the living room. However, as I type this now, I'm playing ocean sounds on my streaming app. 

Years ago, the then-spousal unit and I had a roommate who demanded a lot of attention. I, of course, wanted ours to be a couple's home, maybe eventually with a kid. (Spoiler alert: I later became a serial stepdad, but that's a different story.) So I would blast Metallica and Led Zeppelin through headphones to shut her (and the nearby TV) out. The roomie wanted to know how I got anything done playing loud music through the headphones. "I can't hear the rest of the world."

And really, if you have ADHD, diagnosed or not, music gives your wandering brain a place to go to and come back from. As the years went on, however, I liked that wall of sound as I wrote. It was particularly fun when a friend from Ireland started sending me blues CDs and certain members of the crime community latched onto Tom Waits. More recently, I rediscovered Yes (I'd kind of soured on any prog rock not played by Pink Floyd for a few years) and King Crimson. Plus my jazz phase.

When this debate comes up, people tend to center on what their brain wants. Coffee, followed closely by tea, is a given. Some people need calm, but not necessarily quiet. The most common response has been classical or ambient music at low volume. Although one scifi writer I know live-streamed as he wrote the last chapter of a book and played jazz in the background. Not sure I could do the live-streaming part. I've had people who wanted to peer over my shoulder as I write or wanted to read everything before it's finished. That results in a firm "No," followed by something more assertive when they don't take the hint. (Similarly, I hate reading unfinished manuscripts and refuse to do it as an editor.)

Some people want silence. Complete silence. The door is shut, and unless you're the cat (or a well-behaved dog), keep out. I get it. Absolutely no distractions. Also, there's a need to keep anything outside that might influence a story from getting in. Hence writers from Tolstoy to Chuck Wendig have write shacks. (John Scalzi bought a church, but I suspect he still writes at home, based on his blog.)

I'm of the low-volume music school of thought these days. Mind you, I don't listen to loud music as much as I used to. I was once the proud owner of the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on cassette, a Camaro, and an impressive mullet. (1987 or 88. No photographic evidence exists of either the hair or the car. I'm kind of bummed about the car.) Jazz can be played at lower volume, and I got into the jazz habit driving Uber. I could tell whether I'd like a passenger or not based on how they reacted to jazz. (Nearly threw one guy out of the car when he wanted "good music," but couldn't specify what that meant.)

Silence sounds very appealing. No noise other than the ambient noise of a house or the outdoors, maybe, as right this moment for me, the furnace kicking in. Sounds almost like meditation.

I think most of us need a little noise to write. Creatives' minds wander as it is, and music or ambient noise is a benign way to fill up space where the mind might go, "But how will The Bachelor end tonight?"

What Nature Does Best!

I've been subscribing to The New Yorker for years for a variety of reasons, and my latest rant / wonkout is based on an article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in the February 24, 2025 issue called "The End of Children."  (LINK)

It's about the current seemingly universal worries about the current world-wide demographic decline, which is very real.  Basically, almost every country is in the minus growth for population: fewer babies are born than can replace the population as a whole, and a lot of people are freaking out about that. Especially male white conservatives in the Western Industrial Nations seem obssessed with "The Great Replacement Theory":  that this is a nefarious plot to get rid of white people and replace them with black / brown / Asian / Native people.  

But, even if there is such a thing going on, then why is South Korea and Japan's replacement rate worse than ours? And in almost every country, even with added incentives, there's a steady drop in childbearing. So why?  What is going on?  Who is doing this?  Is it sheer modern selfishness (we've all heard the latest gender war where "selfish childless cat ladies" refuse to procreate in a society that needs them to have more children), or is something else going on?  

Well, while I'm waiting for someone to reveal the eugenicist who is in charge of the GRT and how they've kept it secret for so long, I will tell you what shouldn't be a secret to anyone: the biggest eugenicist of all is Mother Nature.  One of the things Nature as always excelled at is Demographic Apocalypse, and she's got all the best tools for mass murder.  

First of all, some statistics: 

CLIMATE IN HISTORY 

Yes, Virginia, things change.  

100,000-18,000 BCE - Last Glacial Maximum (i.e, end of the major Ice Ages)

68,000 BCE - World population cut to around 12,000 people probably due to the Toba Catastrophe, a super-volcanic eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Sumatran volcanoes are dangerous:  we'll run into them again in 1816, when Mt. Tambora exploded and caused a year without a summer.)

Caldera of Mount Tambora

12,700-10,800 BCE - Late Glacial Interstadial, which is a fancy term for a BIG warm up. 

10,800-9,600 BCE - The Younger Dryas; a sudden huge plunge in temperature, along with another major die-off of humans 

7000-3000 BCE - Holocene Climatic Optimum.  A time of wonderful weather, and the Neolithic / Agricultural Revolution and the rise of a few major civilizations. (We'll get into more of that later.)

535-537 CE - Major global climatic catastrophe. No one is sure whether it was a small asteroid / meteorite / volcanic explosion, but historians like the Byzantine Procopius noted that the sun's light was dimmed like the moon, and Chinese scholars described eerie, colorless skies, unseasonable snowfall and mass starvation. There were world-wide famines. It launched the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-560 CE. The weakened populations were further ravaged by the Plague of Justinian (yersinia pestis, i.e., bubonic plague), a deadly pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire and beyond. 

950-1200 CE - Medieval Warm Period (Climatic Optimum).  Wonderful weather, that led to exceptional crops, Viking explorations, the colonization of Greenland, vineyards in England, and Cathedral building all over Europe, as well as the 1st-4th Crusades, the Mongol Invasions and other fun events.  NOTE:  Increased food production and increased wealth often leads to increased war.  We are a quarrelsome lot.  

1200-1300 CE -  Cool Down including another probable volcanic eruption(s) from 1257-58 with heavy rains and extreme famine.

1300-1470 - wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production.  

1470-1560 - Warm Spell (The Renaissance and The Reformation in Europe) 

1590-1850 - the Little Ice Age (including 1816's Tambora explosion redux)

1850 to now -  continuing warm up, much of which was launched and is fueled by the Industrial Revolution.  And for quite a while, we have been in a period of wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production that shows no signs of letting up.

***

One thing I found fascinating in Mr. Lewis-Kraus' article was where he said, with what to me is a faint whiff of distress, 

"In about 1805, we crossed the threshold of a billion people. That had taken the entirety of human history. Our next billion took just a hundred and twenty-three years."

Meanwhile, our population has climbed from 2 billion in 1925 to over 8 billion of us on this planet today. That's 6 billion people in100 years. I don't consider that demographic collapse in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, during that "entirety of human history," humans saw tremendous civilizations of great sophistication, urbanization, with great cuisines, irrigation, flush toilets, waterwheels and windmills, seafaring ships, barges, canoes, massive food production, art, music, dance, sculpture, ceremonies, religions, and fireworks. Also, wars, weapons, gunpowder, and genocide. From ancient empires like China, Egypt, the Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations, as well as ones we're only now discovering underneath the jungles of Amazonia, Indonesia, etc., and on to Classical and Late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the "Age of Enlightenment" - it's pretty amazing (and sometimes horrifying) what you can do with "only" a billion people on the planet.

And on a purely irrelevant, personal matter, I think most people looked better in clothing like this:

 

(Vermeer) or this:

 

(Rembrandt)

than today's casual culture:

So, what are we so afraid of with a demographic decline? Losing all our cheap goods, cell phones, entertainment, transportation, food, and instant gratification? Probably.

Well, as I said before, we struggle to build up civilizations, and Mother Nature slaps us down with regularity.  

Around 66,000,000 BCE, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event caused the mass extinction of three-fourths of all the plant and animal species on earth.  Scientists believe it was a massive asteroid - 6-9 miles wide which slammed into the earth in the Yucatan, creating the Chicxulub crater.  

Meanwhile, there's 2024 YR4, an asteroid about as big as a football field, which is lined up to swing by, visit, or crash into earth around 2032. There's a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and there's always Mount Tambora, Mount Vesuvius, and a whole lot of Iceland, which are all still smoking.  We still haven't figured out a way to undecline our demographic from something like that.  

***

But Mother Nature has another dirty secret up her sleeve:  and it's in our own biology.  Back in June of 1972, Dr. John Calhoun watched as a four year utopian experiment ended in total demographic collapse:  the Universe 25 Experiment.  

He had set up a world in which four mouse couples were given a "veritable rodent Garden of Eden - with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space.

As population density began to peak, population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out.  (LINK)

BTW, Richard Adams, in Watership Down, pointed out that among rabbits, does can and do absorb embryos when hard times come, when there’s insufficient food, or in cases of overcrowding.  Mother Nature, culling the herd from within.  And we are mammals. 

Sounds to me like we're already in Universe 25...  

Comedy is Hard

 

Kenneth Wishnia is no mean author of mysteries, but he also teaches English at Suffolk County Community College in New York.  I am delighted that this semester one of his classes is using as a textbook the anthology I edited, Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking to his class via zoom.  They asked a lot of great questions and - how wonderful! - had clearly read the material.

But I want to talk about one point that came up.  Someone asked which authors had influenced me and that led to me rambling about Donald E. Westlake and how terrible the movies based on his books had turned out.

Ken spoke up in defense of The Hot Rock, which I admit is the best of them, but that got me trying to think of a first-class movie comedy based on a humorous novel.  At first I couldn't come up with any. Eventually I remembered some and realized how few of the novels in question I had read.  So I am going to list what I came up with and invite you to add more.

CATEGORY 1: Read the book and seen the movie.

The Princess Bride.  One of my favorite movies, and it is based on a great book.  Perhaps not surpisingly the screenplay was written by the author of the book, William Goldman.  In As You Wish by Cary Elwes (who played Westley) we learned that on the first day of production they had to stop filming because the sound man was picking up strange noises.  It turned out that Goldman was at the far end of the set praying out loud that director Rob Reiner did not ruin his masterpiece.  Happily his prayer was granted.

American Fiction.  Based on the novel Exposure by Percival Everett.  This is a case where I liked the movie better than the book, possibly because I saw the movie first.  Both are delightful.  

Confess Fletch. Based on Gregory Macdonald's novel.  Don't get me started on the more successful Chevy Chase movie Fletch, because I despise it.

Thank You For Smoking, based on the very funny book by Christopher Buckley.

CATEGORY 2: Seen the movie but haven't read the book.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!  Based on Nathaniel Benchley's The Off-Islanders. By the way, his father was Robert Benchley and his nephew was Peter Benchley.  Quite a talented family.

Bananas. "Elements" of the plot are from Richard P. Powell's novel Don Quixote U.S.A. 

M*A*S*H. Based on the novel by Richard Hooker, alias Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr. and W.C. Heinz. HRH really had been a surgeon in Korea.

Mister Roberts.  Based on the novel by Thomas Heggen.  Heggen's success ruined him.  He couldn't figure out how to write a second book and drowned in a bathtub at age 30 with a heavy dose of barbiturates.

The Devil Wears Prada, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger.

About a Boy, based on the novel by Nick Hornby.

No Time For Sergeants, based on a play by Ira Levin, based on the novel by Mac Hyman.

Our Man in Havana. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, based on his own novel. A few years ago Christopher Hull wrote Our Man Down In Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel. It's interesting but a more accurate subtitle would be: Graham Greene's Experiences in Cuba.

Kind Hearts and Coronets.  "Loosely based" on Roy  Horniman's 1907 novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal.

Bridget Jones' Diary, based on the novel by Helen Fielding.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  Remembered this one at the last moment!  Shane Black had apparently written most of the script when he decided it needed to be a crime story.  He took the detective elements from Brett Halliday's Bodies Are Where You Find Them and wrote/directed a very funny flick.

CATEGORY 3: Haven't read the book or seen the movie, but I've heard they are  good things bout both..

Clueless.  A California high school girl's attempts at good deeds backfire.  Based on  Emma, the only Jane Austen novel I could not get through. 

Breakfast at Tiffany's. Based on Truman Capote's novella.

Election. Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta.

Crazy Rich Asians, based on the novel by Kevin Kwan.  

Mrs. Doubtfire, based on Madame Doubtfire, by Anne Fine.

So, what am I missing? I'm sure you will mention some that make me bang my head in frustration for not thinking of them  Remember, it has to be a good comedy based on a novel.

Should You Be Persistent or Tenacious? What's the Difference?

This is a modified reprint of a column from January 2019. While it is geared toward writers, I think the information could be helpful toward meeting most any goal.

 

I planned to title this column The Power of Persistence. It seemed perfect for January, when so many people make resolutions for the new year. But then I thought, maybe "tenacity" would be a better word than "persistence." I had always treated the words as synonyms, but are they? Maybe, I thought, I should check. It turns out there's an important difference between the two words.

Persistence means trying repeatedly to reach a goal through the same method, figuring eventually you'll succeed. Tenacity means trying to reach a goal through varying methods, learning from each failure and trying different approaches. For anyone striving to achieve a goal, tenacity may be the better approach.

How does this apply to writing? First, let's talk about getting writing done. Everyone has their own method. Some people write every morning before daybreak. Others write at night. Some people write for a set number of hours each day. Others write as long as it takes to meet a daily quota. Some people plot out what they're going to write. Others write by the seat of their pants. 

 

It doesn't matter what your approach is, as long as it works for you. So, does it? Are you getting enough writing done? Enough revision done? Are you making the best use of your time?

I have a friend (and editing client) who used to be a pantser. But she found that after finishing every draft, she had so many loose ends to address and problems to fix, it took her much longer to revise than she'd like. So she started forcing herself to plot before she began writing each book. Not detailed outlines, but she figures out who kills whom, how, and why, what her subplot will be (again, just the basics), and what her theme is. These changes in her approach have enabled her to be so much more productive. She writes faster now, and she needs less time for revision. That's tenacity in action.

Moving on to a finished product, how do you react to rejection? If you have a rejected short story, for instance, after you curse the universe, do you find another venue and send that story out immediately? Or do you reread it and look for ways to improve it? If a story has been rejected several times (there's no shame here; we've all been there), do you keep sending it out anyway or do you put it in a drawer to let it cool off for a few months or until the market has changed or your skills have improved?

If sending a story out a few times without revising after each rejection usually results in a sale for you, great. Then your persistence works, and it means you have more time for other projects. But if you find yourself sending a story out a dozen times without success, then perhaps you should consider a new approach. After a story is rejected, say, three times, maybe you should give it a hard look and see how it can be changed. Maybe you should let it sit in a drawer for a while so when you review it, you'll have a fresh take.

And if you're getting a lot of rejections, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your markets or what you write. I know some writers who started their careers writing science fiction, but it turned out that they were better suited to writing mysteries. Once they let their true selves out on the page, they started making sales. I know a writer who's been working on a novel for years, but she can't seem to finish it. Yet she's had a lot of success with short stories. If she were to decide to only write short stories and let the novel lie fallow, that wouldn't be a failure; it would be tenacity in action: finding what works for her.

I was about to write that the one thing you shouldn't do is give up, but there might be value in letting go. If your goal is to write a novel or short story but you never seem to finish your project, and if the mere thought of working on it feels like drudgery instead of joy, then maybe being a professional writer isn't for you. There's no shame in that. Not every person is suited to every task. 

 

When I was a kid I loved swimming, but I was never going to make a swim team. I wasn't fast enough. Maybe with a lot of practice and other changes I could have gotten there, but I didn't want to take those steps. And that's okay. I enjoyed swimming for the fun of it, and that was enough for me. Maybe writing for yourself, without the pressure of getting to write "The End," is what gives you joy. If so, more power to you. And maybe it turns out you don't want to finish that book or story you started writing. That's okay too, even if you did tell everyone that you were writing it. You're allowed to try things and stop if it turns out they aren't the right fit for you.

But if you believe writing is the right fit, yet you aren't as productive as you'd like, or your sales aren't as good as you want them to be, then be tenacious. Evaluate your approaches to getting writing done, to editing your work, to seeking publication.

 

Maybe you need to revise how you're doing things. Are you writing in the morning but are more alert in the evening? Change when you write. Is your work typically ready to be sent out into the world as soon as you finish? If you get a lot of rejections, maybe it's not. Maybe you need to force yourself to let your work sit for a while after you finish, so you can review it again with fresh eyes before you start submitting. Do you have a contract, but your books aren't selling as well as you'd like? Perhaps you should find someone you trust who can try to help you improve. 

 

No matter how successful you are, there's always something new to learn. The key is to figure out what works for you and keep doing it, and also figure out what isn't working for you and change it.

That, my fellow writers, is my advice for you. Be tenacious. Evaluate what you want, and evaluate your methods for getting there. If your methods aren't working, change them. If in six months your new methods aren't working, change them again. Work hard. Work smart. And be sure to enjoy yourself along the way, because if you're not enjoying writing, why bother doing it?

***

And now a friendly reminder: I'm honored to have two short stories nominated this year for the Agatha Award, "A Matter of Trust" from the anthology Three Strikes--You're Dead! and "The Postman Always Flirts Twice" from the anthology Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy. They, as well as the three other Agatha-nominated stories, can be read online for free. Click here to go to the Malice Domestic website and scroll down to the short story titles. Each one is a link to a pdf of that story.

 

Malice Domestic attendees will be able to vote for the Agatha winners during the convention next month, so this is a great time to sit down with a cup of tea and read all the nominated stories. Enjoy! 

Victim Statement

Victim statements, a presentation of the impact of a crime during a judicial proceeding, became common here late in the 20th century, although other cultures have had similar and earlier versions. One of the more flamboyant examples in art occurs in the latter stages of the trial in Rashomon, the great Kurosawa film about the murder of a traveler and the rape of his wife. 

Unable to determine whether the truth lies with the accused or the wife, the court enlists a medium to question the spirit of the dead man. Unsurprisingly, the ghost's version of a victim statement is also biased, yet this is fair enough, given that the other two have presented their own self-serving narratives.

I began thinking about victim statements while reading Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars. It has some of the same characters as his highly praised There There, but ranges back in time to the later stages of the Indian Wars and the remote ancestors of characters like Lony and Orvid Red Feather.

 The novel begins with the ghastly massacre at Sand Creek, November 1864, when members of the Third Colorado Cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village, killing and mutilating anywhere from a couple of hundred to as many as 600 people, mostly women and children.

The attack was so egregious that several of Chivington's officers had refused to participate, and one testified later at a Congressional hearing highly critical of the Colonel. None of this, however, changed the situation on the Plains. Treaties continued to be made and broken, the buffalo, and even native ponies, continued to be slaughtered, and Cheyenne and Arapahoe land continued to shrink.

Were the plains tribes then doomed to utter extinction by government policy? Not quite. There was an alternative that two of the Wandering Stars Sand Creek survivors wind up experiencing. Taken into US military custody and imprisoned in an old fort in Florida, they undergo the regimen of English language education, military drill, and Christianization that would later be the pattern for the now notorious Indian Schools. 

Their new non-Native names are Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield. They are the male progenitors of the subsequent characters, and as Orange is neither an historian nor a lawyer, their victim statement is in the form of a novel, made up of their stories and the testimony of their descendants, male and female, right down to the twenty-teens.

Orange is an excellent writer, and many of the short narratives are gripping, particularly the historic accounts that will be new to many readers. What is striking is that it is not the brutal events (and Star and Bear Shield see and experience a lot) that cause their families the worst  damage but rather the cultural losses. Besides the near extermination of the buffalo, the key animal in the whole plains ecology and in the Cheyenne economy, these included the loss of ancestral languages, religion, art, diet, even clothing and hairstyles.

The re-education program that intended to "kill the Indian, save the man" was in some ways more devastating that any battle, because it took away identity and substituted something coerced, something the descendants know is not authentic.  Characters like Opal Viola Bear Shield and Orvil and Jacquie Red Feather know that they are missing something vital, and without even the residue of the old ways that sustain Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield, they fill up the void with alcohol and drugs. 

Tommy Orange

The later sections of the novel deal with their struggles with addiction, and more interestingly, how they begin to piece together the remnants of the old culture and adapt what in contemporary society can be useful and meaningful. This is not an easy task. For some, while even the identity of their original tribe is lost, they still remain "other" in the society. Yet they persist. Wandering Stars serves not just as a literary victim statement, but as a testament to survival.

 

The Sad, Sad Time I Turned Detective

Millions of years ago, Mother Nature bit into the upper left corner of Indiana. That chomp became the lower tip of Lake Michigan, a salt-free inland sea with waves and tides. In some places, shores are rocky, but great swaths of sand dunes form the Indiana Dunes State Park and the Indiana Dunes National Park. Generations of families camp and picnic, sunbathe and swim, seek solitude, sail and pedal and paddle, and play in the sand along the lake. In the distance lie islands where Scouts pitch tents and couples find privacy.

That’s where my then newish girlfriend Candy (real name just as sugary) and friends chose to vacation. She was invited by her cousin and cousin’s boyfriend, Nan and Dan. There on an extended August weekend, they’d boat and ski among the islands where they’d sleep for the night.

The plans proved frustrating to me. I mentioned I had a work commitment Friday through Sunday, but I was free other weekends. Nope, said Dan, that’s the date they’d reserved for motorboat rental. Well, damn.

Candy and I had been tacitly exclusive for six weeks. Neither of us were mature enough for marriage material, but she was cute, cuddly, and fun. Her mother liked me and mistook my workaholism for gravitas.

Her eyes limpid, Candy said, “Don’t worry baby. I’ll phone you every evening.”

“No, you can’t,” said Dan. “We’ll be out of range of cell phone towers.”

Candy departed with tears and a big, sloppy kiss. My nape twinged. I felt uneasy.

That weekend, I took hostage an oversized computer and buried myself in work– software that would be shipped to Böblingen, Germany on Monday. I survived on Shandong fish, way too many litres of cola, and not much sleep.

At six Sunday evening, Candy called. “I’m dying for pizza. Can you pick up on your way? I’ll unlatch the door and hop in the shower.”

She stepped out of the bath the moment I arrived. Her tan looked good and she blew a kiss as she towelled off. “Photos on the coffee table,” she said.

I leafed through them. Picture of their packed SUV. Candy and Nan in bikinis, Dan in those long, odd-looking, misnamed shorts. Picture of the boat, picture of the largest picnic basket I’d ever seen. A case of beer, bottle of cheap wine. Shot of Candy struggling on waterskis and another of Nan nailing it. Nan topless. Candy topless.

Okaaay, I’d lived on South Beach, tops optional. I visited piscines (swimming pools) in France, tops optional. I’d strolled through nude gardens in München, clothing optional. Like most guys, I want my girl to be joyful and playful with me, not other dudes, but… We weren’t engaged, so I wouldn’t get worked up.

Next, photo of an island and its beach. Picture of a campfire that wouldn’t light. Shot of Candy, Dan, and Nan standing in the boat, arms around one another’s waists, the three of them… topless. I took a deep breath and turned to a photo of them playing volleyball. Portrait of… wait. I turned back to the trio.

Candy was saying something in the bathroom, but I couldn’t hear the words. Blood surging made my ears sound buried in surf. Try not to judge me. I stood, stiffly, I walked toward the door.

Nan, Dan, Candy: backside of the photo,
so to speak, because of our PG rating

“Hey,” Candy called. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

She glanced at the photos on the table. “What? Just because I tanned topless?”

“Because you deceived.”

I closed the door on her protest, feeling rotten as I left.

Not ten minutes later, Nan phoned. “What’s wrong with you? Candy likes you. She loves you. No need to get jealous.”

“Cheating.”

To Nan’s credit, she didn’t attempt to deny. “How did you know?”

And that’s the question posed by a true event. To salvage something from this disaster, make this misfortune your mystery.

What caught the attention of my fledgling detective skills?

Never Surrender

  

A few weeks ago, something good--and unexpected--happened to me, publishingwise: a story was accepted by one of my favorite markets, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The thrill I got from that acceptance probably doesn't mean a lot unless I tell you this: It was my first acceptance there in three years.

Confession time

EQMM has been a tough market for me, ever since I first started submitting short stories for publication, back in the mid-90s. I like to think I work hard on everything I write, and I try to research the magazines as well as I can, reading a lot in whichever one I submit stories to, and I've had some modest success with most of the mystery markets available to us over the years. But not so much at EQMM.

I've made a total of seven sales to EQ in the thirty-one years I've been submitting stories to them, and while I'm proud of (and grateful for) each of those acceptances, I should also explain that I've received many, many, many rejections from them. In fact, it took me six years of rejections to finally break into EQMM, and that first sale wasn't even a short story--it was a 12-line poem. My next sale there took four more years, and it too was a mystery/crime poem. Since then, I've been luckier in my submissions to them--four short stories in the past ten years, three of which were recognized with awards, plus this latest acceptance--but be aware, that good fortune sits on a scale opposite dozens of rejections.

Advice

My point in telling you all this is to say DON'T QUIT.

Keep on trying, even when you wonder if you'll ever get there. This is one piece of guidance I always tried to emphasize to my students in my short-story classes. As I've said many times, I can't guarantee that you'll sell a story if you submit it, but I can guarantee that you won't sell it if you don't. NOTE: The only times that advice hasn't eventually paid off for me is with Analog and Asimov's--they've never accepted any of my stories, although I've tried often--but that's not quite the same thing. I like reading SF, and writing it too, but it's not my favorite genre. Mystery/crime/suspense is.

So . . . if you're one of those talented writers who have had tons of stories published at EQMM--I'm talking to you, David Dean and Josh Pachter--my hat's off to you and you'll always be my heroes. But if you're someone like me, who has had some difficulty in regularly sneaking past EQ's palace guards . . . keep on trying. Tote that barge, lift that bale. I think that's the key to all this. (Though I do suspect that those jokers Dean and Pachter have some kind of secret handshake that they've never revealed to me.)

Facts

In case you're interested, my published stories at EQMM have averaged around 4000 words and have included mostly non-urban settings, no otherworldly elements, straightforward plots, and truly off-beat main characters: a 75-year-old retired farmer, a teenaged chess addict, a seven-foot-tall female schoolteacher, a self-driving car named Mary Jo, etc. This latest sale was of the same length as the others but was different in a few ways: a suburban setting, an extremely twisty plot, etc.--and was also the only story I've written in a long time that began not with a plot in mind but with a title in mind. For some reason, the title "Me and Jan and the Handyman" popped into my head one day and stayed there. By the way, I have no idea when the story'll actually be published, but it's comforting just to know I have one sitting in the TBP queue.

Questions

What about your own experiences, in submitting stories to markets you admire? Do you have a bucket list? Have you been successful? Did it take a long time for you to "break in"? If so, after your first success at a favorite market, was it easier afterward? Have you been able to publish there regularly? Are there any favorite publications that you're still trying and can't seem to crack? Let me know in the comments section below.

In closing, and in case anybody wants to read that first piece of writing I sold to EQMM--it was a poem called "Never Too Late," and appeared in their August 2000 issue--here it is, in all its "eat your heart out, Robert Frost" glory:

"You're Al Capone?"

He said, "That's right."

"You're dead, I thought."

He said, "Not quite."

"Then you must be--"

"I'm 103."

"So you're retired?"

"That's not for me."

"But how do you--"

"Get by?" he said.

He pulled a gun.

"Hands on your head."

Yes, it's a crazy poem, and poses no threat at all to Mr. Sandburg or Ms. Angelou, but it allowed me to work my way into one of my favorite magazines. So--again--it IS "never too late."

To quote Galaxy Quest (doesn't everybody quote Galaxy Quest?): "Never give up, never surrender." Keep writing, and keep sending work to whatever publications you think are the best.

Good luck to all!

 

The Three-Legged Author Talk

Photo by Joseph Gonzalez on Unsplash

From time to time, we writers are asked to speak about our work. Some of us enjoy it. The rest of us scamper away and hide. The profusion of words we conjure up so easily in our work dry up the moment we step in front of an audience. Even if we have carefully outlined our talk ahead of time, it sounds unconvincing the moment it drops from our lips. 

What are we missing? Heart. Simply put, we are forgetting to give ourselves to the audience. I think if you knew just how easy that is to do, you’d volunteer for such talks.

About a decade ago I was in the audience at a weekend library event on Long Island, New York, where a well-known author was about to give a talk on the occasion of his latest book. As I took my seat, I dug in my pocket for my pen and notebook. I do this every time I’m in an audience, provided there’s enough light to see. Force of habit, I guess, for a former reporter.

Most of the time, I don’t bother taking notes because what I’m hearing is not worth capturing.

The speaker on deck that day was Garth Stein, author of a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller called The Art of Racing in the Rain. You may have read it. It’s heartwarming literary fiction about a golden retriever who dreams of being reincarnated as a human. (In the film version, the dog narrator was voiced by actor Kevin Costner.) Besides the movie, the book has since spawned a middle-grade/YA edition and four children’s picture books.

After the talk, as attendees traipsed out of the auditorium to buy books and have Mr. Stein sign them, I reviewed my notes and realized that he had used a very compelling structure to shape his talk. It was supremely logical, and has stayed with me all these years.

Open With What They Know

Mr. Stein had worked as a director, producer, and screenwriter of documentary films. At the time, he had produced three films, written two plays, written five novels, written one of those picture books, and won an Academy Award for short film. But on that day in the library, it was a safe bet that everyone in the bookish audience had heard of him because of his “dog book”—even if they hadn’t read it!

A lot of writers who are “perhaps best known” for a particular book rail against talking about that one. One writer I know tells people who hire him for speaking engagements that he will only talk about his current book. That’s his ground rule for book clubs too. He doesn’t want to talk about the same book for fifteen years.

Rather than shy away from the dog book, Mr. Stein made it the lede of his 45-minute talk. He told a charming story about how he got the idea, the struggles he had writing it, and at long last his agent’s reaction to the finished work.

“The book is narrated by a dog!” the agent said.

“Yes it is!”

“You can’t do that,” the agent said, enumerating all the reasons why.

Mr. Stein had a momentary crisis of faith, then he canned the agent and found one who believed in his work. A great story, because who can resist the tale of an artist standing by his work? Knowing just how hard it is to find an agent, I was impressed. And of course, it helped immensely that the book hit the bestseller list. It was the perfect squelch to the first agent’s objections.

The Valley of Youthful Dreams

From there, he swiftly recounted how he first dreamed of becoming a writer, and the sacrifices he made to get there. I don’t need to share his story because anyone who writes has plenty of material to work with. In this section, he also described his manner of working, because for some hilarious reason civilians always want to know about a writer’s PROCESS—a word I have come to hate.

“What’s your process?”

“So, what your process like?”

“Tell us about your process.”

Jeez Louise, you would think it was some kind of bewildering mystery.

So…if you are going to give a talk using this structure—which is where this is all going, if that isn’t already obvious—I will tell you right now that the folks in the audience don’t want to hear, “Well, um, I just sit in a chair and make sh*t up until it’s done.”

No way. Romance the heck out of them. Tell as good a story about your writing of a story as the ones you sell to your editors.

Heck, Gay Talese told a reporter once that he hung his typewritten pages on a clothesline in his New York City apartment, using clothespins. Then he read those pages from across the room with a pair of binoculars. He insisted that this was the only way he could develop the requisite distance to judge and edit his work. (No, I am not making this up. I heard a recording of the interview in college.)

If you don’t have a process, steal Talese’s. Or tell people that in between writing short stories, you write earwormy songs about the Ides of March. (See below.) Make yourself adorable. You probably are; you just can’t see it.

Wrap with What’s Hot, What’s New

Mr. Stein wrapped his talk by discussing his latest book. Makes perfect sense, right? That’s the reason he was on tour! Even here, he repeated some of the classic storytelling beats: how he got the idea, the challenges that he knew he would face during the writing, and the ones he didn’t expect. In any good story, there are always hurdles to overcome. Audiences eat that up. Such anecdotes are perfectly acceptable so long as you have triumphed.

Sometimes the triumphs are small ones. My wife and I have written a few books together. Three have been works of nonfiction history. For the entire writing period of that first book, we stopped in the middle of the day, got in the car, and drove to one of those restaurants in town that sell prepared meals. We’d buy a sandwich or salad out of the case, drove right back home, and eat lunch together on the front porch. It was summer. The weather was always beautiful in the Carolina mountains. We were working so hard to meet our deadline, and this was our only way to enjoy the weather. Crumbs swept from our laps, we went back into the office to write for a few more hours. We did that for three months straight, weekends included, until we had a decent first draft. Every time we tell this story, a chorus of awwwwws ripples through the audience.

You don’t have to try very hard. People like a story that makes them fall in love with the writer. If they think they understand you on a personal level, they’ll be moved to try one of your books or they’ll turn to your story first when they pick up an anthology. Hey, it happens every time I hear Lisa Scottoline speak. She’s hilarious, and I want to spend more time with that voice on the page.

Remember the three-legged stool: The thing they know. Your writer’s journey plus process. What’s hot right now.

It’s so easy, you don’t have to obsess about it. You just have to recount things that really happened, and make sure your anecdotes conform to the usual story beats. Up/down, try/fail, culminating with…success. If you show up for the audience, they will show up for you. Your obligatory Q&A session at the end will be a delight.

Years later, when I came across my Stein notes, I realized just how critical each part of this three-legged stool structure was to the overall effect of the talk. If he had omitted one, the stool would have collapsed.

If he had not opened with the dog story, or if he had not spoken of it at all, it would have been thrumming in the back of everyone’s mind. If he had opened with the new book, we’d be panting like dogs to ask him about his hero, Enzo the golden retriever.

Following his big success story with another up/down tale of his writing journey—a story nearly every writer has of trying and failing until something clicks—stoked our sympathy. By the time we got to discussing his latest book, we were all so emotionally invested in his career, we were eager to stick around to learn what happens next. He had coaxed us on a journey of suspense to boot.

At the end of the signing, my wife announced that all of us were going out to lunch at a cute place not far from the library.

“Who’s all of us?”

Well, Mr. Stein, of course. Plus two other writers, my wife, and me. I was only expecting to dine with my wife and our hostess for the weekend, who was, yes, a writer. (No one ever tells me anything.) A publicist from the publishing house came as well, making a party of six, but she left early. Folks, believe me when I tell you that she and I were the only ones at the table who had not been on the bestseller list.

That all changed some years later. But that’s a story for another time. Until then, go forth and tell the world about your work. You’ll kill. I just know it.

See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com

Watch Rob’s video tomorrow on the 2,068th anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination.

Speaking of killing, short story writer and fellow SleuthSayer Robert Lopresti debuted this March-appropriate song this week. Since it refers to a murder, I feel it’s appropriate to include on this blog. I just happened to see the video shortly after he posted it, while I was diligently adhering to my daily procrastination regimen of dog training, gardening, and home repair videos.

Rob reports that he is taking a songwriting class and this video represents a rare case of him doing his assignment. He’s playing an autoharp, which is resting on his lap and goes unseen in this video but appears in others on his YouTube channel. (You might enjoy his album of droll folk songs here.)

Fun fact I learned in high school Latin class: the ides are not always on the 15th of a month. Discuss.

With knives and flowers coming out of hiding, Spring must be just around the corner! Well done, Mr. Lopresti.

Dinner Party Detectives

 Foil Arms and Hog, those wonderful Irish comedians, are investigating a tragedy...

I Was Misinformed (IMDb)

Back when, in what now seems like the Bronze Age, a guy named Col Needham started the Internet Movie Database. He was a movie nerd who lived outside Manchester, UK, and he began by scribbling notes in longhand. When he was fifteen, he got his first computer, a DYI with 256B of memory. (You read that right, 256 bytes.) This was the early 1980’s, so VHS had been introduced. Col didn’t have to go to the movies to see movies, anymore. And he was still taking notes, but now he was storing them on his computer, in a program he’d designed. The online community was primitive and insular, Col and his like-minded movie pals were file-trading on USENET. He eventually wrote a searchable database, and in 1990, he published the software for free. At this point, websites – such as they were – were college-based, or research lab proprietaries, and IMDb launched in July of 1993, at Cardiff University, in Wales. It was one of the first hundred or so websites ever curated for any purpose, anywhere. They went mainstream in 1995.

It’s worth noting that IMDb was all user-based. They were amateurs, and the database was compiled in much the same way - if you think about it – as the Oxford English Dictionary. Ask a select group of people with an odd enthusiasm, or Attention Deficit, to hunt up the earliest use of a word, say, or Robert Redford’s first screen credit (Season 3 of Maverick, 1960). See, makes it look easy.

Thirty years ago – that long ago, and that recent – AOL began sending everybody in Christendom trial CD’s of their dial-up software. Every two weeks, according to a recent article in the Post, traffic to IMDb doubled. And they started taking ads. This was a crazy idea. Nobody understood you could monetize the Web. IMDb now averages 250 million users monthly, one of the fifty most-visited websites in the world. (I hesitate to inform you that it’s owned these days by Amazon.)

Back in 1995, my public library in Provincetown, Mass., didn’t have internet, and I started going up-Cape to Orleans, where you could use their public library to log on to catalogues for print media, and pull up material on the screen at will, whereas before you had to go all the way to Boston, to the big public library on Copley Square, and research magazine and newspaper morgues on microfilm – and you were of course confined to what they had on file, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the papers of record. For me, this was revelation, apotheosis, to have access to this limitless archive. It wasn’t limitless, really, there were probably no more than a couple of thousand gateways, if that, open to public browsing, where you didn’t need academic credentials – and it was an even greater revelation to stumble onto this clunky, user-generated, fan directory. It was a vanity project, or in Col Needham’s frame of reference, an Ed Wood picture, but as far as I was concerned, a wet dream.

This, seriously, is one of those “Let’s put on a show,” moments, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney trying to save the orphanage. Col Needham and his wife Karen, and a few other dedicated goofs, made it happen. God bless.

Here’s the link to the Washington Post article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/02/23/imdb-internet-history-col-needham/?itid=sr_1_1d1d1435-765a-42fa-8ec6-21385c936a6d

Recycling

 

What do you do when things haven’t worked out as you originally planned?

We recycle.

Last week, Black Cat Weekly ran my story, "Fifteen Minutes from Fame." Initially, I'd sent it to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but they passed. Keeping the universe balanced, AHMM ran my story, “The Angler’s Guide to Walleye Ice Fishing,” in the current March/April issue. In 2022, I submitted that story for the Minneapolis Bouchercon anthology. The Minnesota committee ultimately decided it wasn't one they'd include. I got a nice email of decline.

Like every other member of humanity, I never like getting rejected. But like everyone who submits stories, I accept it as part of the process. I try to find the positive. It means I’m producing and sticking myself out there. We can’t win if we don’t play.

And I really like it when a resubmission is accepted. It validates my belief that the story was worthwhile.

We all recycle. Blogs get repurposed. And stories take too much effort to write. We can't be one and done. 

To be clear, I don’t resubmit to the same publication. If an editor says no, I treat it as firm and move on. I don't want to damage my credibility with the small world of publishers by making a few cosmetic changes, giving the story a new title, and running it back in the hope that it'll sneak by this time. (The only exceptions are those rare times when a story is returned with a qualified rejection—the editor’s email told me that the story would likely be accepted if some changes were made.)

But that doesn’t mean that I give up on the other stories either.

Michael, Barb, and other folks who regularly make editorial decisions have discussed on different blogs why stories might get rejected. They've taught me that rejection does not always mean I've written a bad story. They've emphasized the subjective element of acceptance/rejection. I take my editors at face value. Success or failure may turn on factors over which I have no control. If they've accepted a story with a theme like mine recently, my story may not have a chance, regardless of its strength. I may be the victim of poor timing or bad luck.

Or I might have submitted a stinker.

Before recycling a story, I hope I use the rejection as an opportunity for reflection. I’ll reread my submission critically. Should I have ever sent it off to begin with? Assuming I come away from the reread convinced that the story has merit, I will invariably see ways that a rewrite might make it better. 

Occasionally, an editor’s rejection email points out what they didn't like about the story. I incorporate those comments into my review. But even if a rejection supplies no reason, its quick splash of cold water makes it easier to look at the story with an eye toward finding its flaws. After polishing it further, I'm reading to get this story back in the game. 

Before resubmitting, I need to ask whether I’m sending the story to an appropriate publication. I don’t want to throw my work time after time at calls that don't fit. Is this story right for the prompt? If I have to tilt my head and squint to see the connection, I should save the story for another day. If I have a dog story and the call is for a cat anthology, I can’t simply do a ‘find and replace’ and resubmit. I don’t need the rejection, and the editors don’t need the timewasters. As a writer, I need to maintain my credibility as someone who submits serious stories. That doesn’t involve depending on random chance.

I also like to wait before resubmitting. A bit of distance makes my self-examination more effective. It also separates me from the competition. I have no doubt that in the days after the Minneapolis anthology rejections went out, Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock were inundated with stories set in the upper Midwest. The two-year pause before my submission, I believe, let that wave pass. Hitchcock may have recognized it for what it was, but enough time had lapsed for them to be ready for a midwestern story again.  

We can't give up on the stories we've written—well, not most of them. They need to be recycled. Take heart from the words attributed to humorist Stephen Leacock. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it." 

Until next time.

I'm traveling on the day this blog posts. Apologies in advance if I don't respond promptly to replies.