Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
Bringing you the famous and cheeky SBTB blog for romance enthusiasts. If you're into the romance genre, this is where you want to be. If you're not, avoid at all costs to preserve your sanity. Ha ha. We're just kidding. There are some good things happening in the genre. Stay Golden, Horny Girl!
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Aurora Blazing RECOMMENDED: Aurora Blazing by Jessie Mihalik is $1.99! If you’re collecting the series and picked up the third book, this is a great deal. It’s the second book in a sci-fi romance series I love, but you can jump in here without reading the first. I gave it a B+: If you’re part of the “Slow Burn Just Kiss Already Dammit” club, though, you’ll be white-knuckling this one. To save her brother and protect her family’s future, a powerful princess must join forces with a dashing man from her past in this thrilling space adventure, the second novel in the Con…
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B+ D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia Higgins January 25, 2022 · Carina Adores LGBTQIARomance I have been talking about wanting to read D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding for ages! Tara has been very patient with my desperation to read this book. A lesbian rom com about a wedding reality show? Girl, sign me up! Anticipating a book for years usually leads to crushing disappointment, but this book lived up to the hype for me. It’s so good, y’all! Tara, what did you think? Tara: Patient, *snort*. Shana, you kn…
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I follow Vanessa North on Instagram and after she posted a picture of her first completed project of 2022, I had to talk to her about knitting. So of course we also talk about gender, crafting, raising fearless trans teenagers, photography, and writing romance. Plus book recs, as always. LPT: Always Buy Extra Buttons! … Music: purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: You can find Vanessa North at VanessaNorth.com. But you’re here for the Instagram links, right? Here…
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The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba by Chanel Cleeton is $1.99! I’m hoping this sale stays up and isn’t a leftover from yesterday. This one was mentioned in a Hide Your Wallet from last spring. Cleeton’s historical fictions have been recommended a few times on the site. At the end of the nineteenth century, three revolutionary women fight for freedom in New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton’s captivating new novel inspired by real-life events and the true story of a legendary Cuban woman–Evangelina Cisneros–who changed the course…
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One, I hope you’ll enjoy the title I came up for this request. Two, this one came from our own Catherine and Sneezy: Catherine: So Sneezy and I were watching Eurovision 1956 and one thing led to another and now we are wondering about a rec league for smutty closet/wardrobe action… Amanda: I’m sure we’re all curious about what led to this! Sarah: I’m sorry what action? Sneezy: Smut actions! In closets! Sarah: So books with boning inside a closet. A journey to bonetown in the clothes cupboard? Catherine: Say Yes to the Duke by Eloisa James definitely has hot closet action. There’s a Take Me To Narnia scene in one of Celeste Bradley’s Liar’s Club books, too. I can’t…
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January is coming to an end already. And then it’s time for the worst month of the year! At least for New England. There’s just something about the winter in February that just…sucks. In continuing with my theme of giving things I can look forward to each month, February will be finishing my tattoo! I’ll be getting the color and shading done and I’m so stoked to see what the artist has planned. Then in March (fingers crossed), I’m going to Germany to visit my brother. I haven’t seen him in three-ish years. If any of the European Bitchery has suggestions, I’ll be there for two weeks and will have plenty of time to bop around to other places. Enough about me, let’s get i…
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The Highland Fling The Highland Fling by Meghan Quinn is $1.99 at Amazon! This is a contemporary romance with a grumpy Scottish hero. I’ve always been curious about Quinn’s contemporary romances. Would you recommend them? In this steamy tale by USA Today bestselling author Meghan Quinn, an American searching for her purpose escapes to a Scottish town but finds more questions than answers when she meets a brooding yet handsome handyman. Freshly fired from her third job in a row, Bonnie St. James has lost her way. So when she and her best friend stumble upon a “help wa…
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There was no Bachelor last week due to sportsball, but the weirdness is back tonight and Pudding and I are ready. Well, I am anyway. Pudding is currently having an intense meeting with her stuffed animals, possibly warning them that they better be here for the right reasons. Last week Cassidy revealed she had someone she was hooking up with before she went on the show and that she went on the show to make him jealous, all of which Sierra relayed to Clayton. Clayton asks Jesse if it’s possible to rescind Cassidy’s rose. THERE ARE NO RULES HERE CLAYTON. Then Jesse says, “There are no rules.” I TOLD YOU SO. Clayton asks to talk to Cassidy. She denies seeing someone p…
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B- The Donut Trap by Julie Tieu November 2, 2021 · Avon Contemporary RomanceNew AdultRomance Content warningThis is very much a story about the ways your family can hurt you while having the very best intentions in the world. If this is also your story, you might find it hard going. I certainly did. The Donut Trap is a New Adult romance with strong coming of age themes. Jasmine’s parents sacrificed and suffered so that their children would have better lives, but at times, Jasmine feels like she and her brother are …
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Not the Kind of Earl You Marry Not the Kind of Earl You Marry by Kate Pembrooke is $1.99! I mentioned this on a Hide Your Wallet over the summer and it’s the first in a series. Did any of you pick this one up? Fans of Netflix’s Bridgerton series will adore this stunning historical romance debut, where a wary wallflower enters a fake engagement with one of London’s most eligible bachelors. The one woman in London who doesn’t want to marry him is now his fiancée. William Atherton, Earl of Norwood, is as shocked as the rest of London to discover his betrothal via an an…
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This HaBO comes from Michelle. Content warning for the description below: Its a contemporary romance I read around like 2007 or so, and it was pretty recent. A woman is at this fancy government party in a foreign country, I think. I don’t remember what her job was. She has to go to the bathroom. She’s at the sink washing her hands, and all of a sudden a group of terrorists with big guns come storming into the building to hold all the people hostage. She ends up getting shot, I’m pretty sure. Cut to her like 5 years later or something, she’s moved back to her hometown and has opened up a bakery. It turns out that she had been pregnant when she was shot and she had a mis…
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B+ Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon January 11, 2022 · Berkley Romance Show SpoilerTW for depression, ableism, anti-Semitism, microaggressions Weather Girl is a rom-com that manages to stay sweet and funny despite tackling some serious subject matter. I found this book to be charming and relatable, and I especially enjoyed the mature communication between the two leads. Ari Abrams loves being a meteorologist, but hates the constant conflict between her boss (the weather reporter, Torrance Hale), and Torrance’s …
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The Perks of Loving a Wallflower The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley is $2.99! This is book two in The Wynchesters historical romance series. This one has been mentioned a couple times on the site, including a Hide Your Wallet post and Get Rec’d with Amanda. Fans of Bridgerton will love this Regency romp in which a proper Society miss recruits a very improper lady grifter in a quest for vengeance, only to find love instead. As a master of disguise, Thomasina Wynchester can be a polite young lady—or a bawdy old man. Anything to solve the case. Her latest …
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B The Dating Dilemma by Mariah Ankenman January 24, 2022 · Entangled: Amara Contemporary RomanceRomance The Dating Dilemma is a fun, sexy contemporary romantic comedy about learning to ask for the things you need in life. Lexi is on a six month break from dating, because her boyfriends always take advantage of her giving personality. But when a hot fireman turns up to perform a safety inspection at the youth centre where she is the Assistant Director…well, even if one isn’t dating, one can enjoy looki…
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How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days by KM Jackson is $1.99! For some reason, this one isn’t price-matched at Barnes & Noble yet. This is a rom-com road trip with a friends to lovers romance. USA Today bestselling author K.M. Jackson delivers a hilarious road-trip rom-com perfect for fans of Meet Cute and When Harry Met Sally. Bethany Lu Carlisle is devastated when the tabloids report actor Keanu Reeves is about to tie the knot. What?! How could the world’s perfect boyfriend and forever bachelor, Keanu not realize that making …
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Welcome back! Are y’all ready for more recommendations? For those who don’t know, I talk about books a lot in various corners of the book world from working at an independent bookstore to writing freelance book reviews. Here are some titles I recommended to readers in the last couple weeks. Did you get any good recommendations lately? Let me know! A Marvellous Light Granted we ran a review of this one, but I wanted to highlight this one again. I’ve been hand-selling it like crazy and suggesting it to anyone who loves TJ Klune’s newer stuff or Casey McQuiston. Robin Blyth has…
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Uncharted Uncharted by Adriana Anders is $3.82! An odd price, but not bad for a highly anticipated book that released late last summer. Did any of you wind up picking this one up and liking it? Hotshot pilot Leo Eddowes is afraid of nothing and no one. So when she’s asked to evacuate a man from the wilds of Alaska, she doesn’t hesitate. But with enemies in close pursuit and the weather turning sour, what should have been a simple mission quickly shifts to disaster. And there’s only one way out. When Elias Thorne disappeared, he was America’s most wanted. Now he’s sp…
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We’re wrapping up January with our second Whatcha Reading! Let’s talk books! Carrie: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez. ( A | BN | K ) So far I love it, but I’m only about a third of the way through. Elyse: I’m reading Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins. ( A | BN | K ) Sarah: I re-read Written in Red ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au ) and Lake Silence to ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) prepare for Crowbones, which I’m starting next. I’m so excited. SO EXCITED. Sneezy: Re-reading Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. Her books never shy from real adversity, but somehow they’re all a goddamn warm hug. It’s exactly what I need right now. Shana: I love Forbidden! AI’ve been reading Davi…
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The transcript for Podcast 494. Tubthumping with Anxiety, and More New Year’s Wishes! has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article
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Luck Is No Lady Luck Is No Lady by Amy Sandas is $1.99! This is the first book in the Fallen Ladies series and it came out earlier this year. I’m also loving the cover for this one. Many readers mentioned good book noises after finishing this romance, while others felt the romance between the hero and heroine wasn’t very convincing. It has a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads. “You should not have kissed me,” she replied breathlessly. “I do a lot of things I shouldn’t. It does not mean I won’t do them again.” Gently bred Emma Chadwick always assumed she’d live and die the…
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Amanda and I catch up on her “lots of things to look forward to” plan, which now includes things that were done! We talk about anxiety, therapy, angsty books, trimming your own bangs, and we have book and video game recs, plus new year’s wishes from Elyse, Pudding, and Jane B! Do you like angsty books? Are there books that help you feel things cathartically? … Music: purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: …
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The Trouble with Hating You The Trouble with Hating You by Sajni Patel is $2.99! Sajni Patel gets some really great covers. Her newest one was featured on Cover Awe. Have any of you read this one? What’d you think? A laugh-out-loud romantic comedy debut about first impressions, second chances, and finding the love of your life in the most unexpected way. Liya Thakkar is a successful biochemical engineer, takeout enthusiast, and happily single woman. The moment she realizes her parents’ latest dinner party is a setup with the man they want her to marry, she’s out th…
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C+ John Eyre by Mimi Matthews July 20, 2021 · Perfectly Proper Press Science Fiction/Fantasy Y’all know how much I love Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, so it’s no surprise that when someone mentioned a gender-bent version I was intrigued. John Eyre doesn’t match up for me as a version of Jane Eyre, but it is an atmospheric, compelling Gothic – low on heat and character development, but with enough chills to be fun for a stormy winter’s night. John Eyre: A Tale of Darkness and Shadow tells the tale of …
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This is a weird part of January, isn’t it? It’s Very Winter in the northern hemisphere. It’s long after the holidays, and a few weeks away from Valentine’s Day, aka Pink Halloween Candy on sale, and for me, it’s coooooold. Whoo, cold. What about you? How are you doing? What are you looking forward to this weekend, or in the weeks ahead? I have new projects I’m working on, and I have So Many Books to read. I’m also working on another quilt, which is my very quiet Quarantimes hobby that I adore. It’s great: I cut myself a puzzle, assemble it by sewing straight lines, and then, when it’s done, I can hide under it, be warm, and read. My goal is to have 2.5 quilts per mamm…
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Welcome back to Wednesday Links! This is an early edition this week. The site has been having some scheduling issues. If you’ve noticed posts aren’t going live at their usual times, that’s why! It’s a little chilly here in New England. I hope anyone in the path of the winter storm is staying safe and warm. Linus has been doing a lot of yowling about it, proceeded by hours snoozing in the dead center of my bed. Let’s get into the links! A couple of Encanto things today because I watched the movie last week. I definitely think a majority of the family owes Mirabel and Bruno huge apologies. … If you also watched Encanto, here’s some behind the scenes info on how the most…
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Announcing the 2023 Writer Unboxed UnConference Scholarship: How to Apply
We are so pleased to announce this year’s opportunity: The 2023 Writer Unboxed UnConference Scholarship! What does the scholarship winner receive? Not only will this year’s scholarship winner receive a ticket to the 2023 Writer Unboxed UnConference, they will receive contributions we’ve been gathering as a stipend to help cover additional expenses (hotel, meals, etc)–an amount that will be $600 or greater. (The stipend is only available to someone attending the event, and will be presented on our first night in Salem.) If you’d like to contribute to the stipend for this year’s Scholarship winner, there is still time! All donated funds go toward the stipend. Learn more HERE. Who should apply? If you’re interested in an UnConference focused on deep craft and community-centric extras– If something has held you back, but you’re ready to go ALL IN on your work-in-progress– If you have an unrelenting passion for the craft of writing fiction– If you might not otherwise be able to attend this year’s UnConference (11/6/23- 11/10/23 in Salem, MA) but are seriously interested– then we hope you’ll consider applying for this year’s scholarship! What is the process? Please send the following three items to UnConferenceScholarship@WriterUnboxed.com: A response to the questions, “What about your work-in-progress calls you back time and again, despite challenges? What makes you believe that you’re ready to push past barriers and go ALL IN on your manuscript?“ (300 words or less, in the body of the email) A response to the questions, “How specifically do you believe the Writer Unboxed UnConference can help you to achieve your goals?” (150 words or less, in the body of the email) A Word document or PDF attachment showing five consecutive pages of your manuscript What is the deadline? The application deadline for this scholarship is in two weeks: Friday, June 23rd. Write on! [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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The Best Psychological Thrillers of June 2023
June brings with an incredible array of psychological thrillers and novels of suspense, with plenty of horror cross-overs and some delightful summer beach reads. Whether you want to take down the villain, root for the villain, or simply escape the villain with stolen diamonds intact, there’s a book below for you! C. J. Leede, Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) For all those who stan the creepy girls/learned the Wednesday dance, Maeve Fly is a delicious, disturbing treat. Leede’s very-much-antiheroine is a Disney princess by day (one of the Frozen sisters, which makes it even funnier), and a serial killer by night. She has a best friend, a grandmother who understands her, and the kind of beauty that screams innocence. But when her grandmother’s health takes a turn for the worse, and her best friend’s hockey-playing brother comes to town, her perfectly arranged life begins to unravel. Damn, this book is messed up. Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) I just got my advance copy of Clémence Michallon’s much-anticipated new novel and I *can* confirm that it’s worth the hype!! It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book with a pitch-perfect premise, about a man named Aidan, who, after he loses his wife, must downsize. He must move to a new, smaller home with his teenage daughter… and the woman he’s secretly had captive on his property for five years. He is a serial killer, and she is the one woman he has ever spared. Narrated by the three women in his life—his daughter, the woman who falls for his cultivated charms, and the woman whose very existence is the only clue to his vicious true self. This book is fantastic.–OR S. A. Cosby, All The Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) S.A. Cosby does Thomas Harris!! And proves that the serial killer novel is back with his cleverly plotted and socially relevant take on the hunt for a monstrous killer. Cosby goes Southern Gothic with the backstory, focusing on the sins of society and how indifference and prejudice are the true culprits behind the most terrible acts. In true Cosby fashion, the novel manages to touch on all manner of hot button topics. The novel begins with a school shooting, where a white police officer kills the shooter: a Black man who was a former student at the school, and who claims his victim, a popular teacher, was hiding a terrible secret. When the town sheriff, the first Black man elected to the post in the small Southern town, begins to investigate the teacher’s horrific acts, the townspeople are deeply resistant to the truth, and meanwhile, he’s got a showdown coming between right-wingers determined to protect a Confederate monument and the protestors who want it gone. A fast-paced book that will also have you asking deep questions about the nature of faith, All the Sinners Bleed is bound to be one of my favorite books of the year. Andrea Bartz, The Spare Room (Ballantine) A young woman new to Philadelphia starts lockdown with the man who’s just called off her wedding, so naturally she takes up the offer from a friend and her husband who have a spare room…And then things get really interesting. Bartz always brings a healthy portion of social satire and incisive observation to her thrillers. –DM Julia Heaberlin, Night Will Find You (Flatiron) An astrophysicist with psychic powers reluctantly agrees to aid her childhood friend, now in the FBI, with a mysterious case, in this latest from the ever-inventive Julia Heaberlin. I’ve been a fan of Heaberlin’s moody mysteries for a few years now, and Night Will Find You continues to showcase her lyrical storytelling abilities. Rachel Cochran, The Gulf (Harper) Set in 1970s Texas in a conservative town amidst the rise of the feminist movement, The Gulf is one of several thrillers that show that the Third Coast has come into its own. The Gulf follows a young queer woman searching for answers after the murder of a powerful woman she’d admired greatly, but who was hated by most of the men in town—and her own children. A refreshing read and a strong debut from a powerful new voice. Adorah Nworah, House Woman (Unnamed Press) Another Gulf Coast crime novel! This one features a young woman who goes from Lagos to Houston for an arranged marriage. Once she arrives, she finds her soon-to-be-in-laws more controlling, and her husband more indifferent, than she would like; as her conditions deteriorate, and tensions grow, this brutal character study leads to a visceral and shocking ending. Eliza Jane Brazier, Girls and their Horses (Berkley) Horse girls! As a former horse girl, I am obsessed with this fun and twisty read featuring gorgeous manes and dastardly deeds. A nouveau riche family signs their daughter up for posh riding lessons at a barn that plans to use the family as a cash cow. Come for the diabolical intrigue and stay for the vicious infighting. And the horses. Did I mention horses? Ruth Ware, Zero Days (Gallery/Scout) Ruth Ware is quickly becoming a household name, and her new thriller promises to once again combine fast-paced action, unexpected twists, and well developed characters. Zero Days features a married couple who specialize in hacking, break-ins, and whatever other security systems need to be tested. When a job goes wrong, the husband is found dead, and the wife is accused of the murder, she must go on the run while seeking answers about the real killer. Ashley Audrain, The Whispers (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) Ashley Audrain’s delightfully disturbing first novel, The Push, immediately established her as a voice to watch, and The Whispers brings more of Audrain’s cutting observations about motherhood and social mores. When a much-envied mother is witnessed shouting at her child at a neighborhood gathering, the other mothers are shocked; even moreso when that child is found barely alive after falling out of a window soon thereafter. As the boy’s life hangs in the balance, his injury is the catalyst for any number of secrets to rise to the fore. Polly Stewart, The Good Ones (Harper) Stewart’s debut is a powerful novel about a woman, recently returned to her Appalachian hometown, who grows obsessed with a friend’s disappearance twenty years prior, and with other cases of missing women. What emerges is a sprawling tale about a town’s secrets and lingering traumas, as well as one woman’s reckoning with life’s darkest turns. Stewart is a writer to watch. –DM Wendy Heard, You Can Trust Me (Bantam) Summer was raised as a wild child, then abandoned by her irresponsible hippie mother. Growing up rough, she learns how to pick pockets and fend for herself, that is, until she meets Leo, a fiercely free young woman. When Leo heads to a private island with a techie billionaire, then disappears, Summer must use all of her cunning in order to find out what’s happened to her friend. View the full article -
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The Businessman and the Author
Not long ago I was contacted by a businessman named John Kleinheinz. He’d read my novels, and he had a story he wanted to tell me about his life. It was a little time-sensitive, he said, because he’d just become the last living person who knew this particular story. His former business partner has just been killed in a helicopter crash under suspicious circumstances. Of course, helicopters crash a lot, relative to other forms of aerial transportation. If an airplane loses power, the wings still provide lift. Not so in a helicopter. In a helicopter, the second the rotor goes off, you fall like a rock—there’s absolutely nothing keeping you in the air. And because a helicopter’s got a very high center of gravity, with the engine and rotor above the cabin, a falling helicopter tends to tumble. That’s why helicopter crashes tend to be fatal. Even so, John’s former business partner “Petr” had a crash that seemed unusually suspicious. John couldn’t get any details from anyone directly involved. He ended up using back-channels of people he’d met helicopter skiing over the years. Petr, you see, had been killed while helicopter skiing in Alaska. John cobbled together as much data and as many rumors as he could, and—though none of this is official and it should all be taken as unverified, grain-of-salt stuff—this seems to be what happened: The day of the crash, the weather was expected to get bad. Normally, Petr was fastidious about not skiing or helicoptering in bad weather. And, in fact, every other helicopter flying out of this particular heli-ski lodge on this particular day was grounded, because a storm was coming in. Not Petr’s; it went out and stayed out. Apparently, Petr had decided he would finish the day at a lodge other than the one he’d started at. He was using a substitute pilot because his normal pilot called in sick. Per its transponder data, Petr’s helicopter made an unscheduled stop somewhere other than the lodge or a ski-run. Then it ascended to the top of a slope, where it caught either a skid or a rotor blade in the snow and crashed. The helicopter’s six occupants survived this. We know they survived because the five who were killed weren’t killed by trauma, but by suffocation. Apparently, the helicopter rolled down the mountain, filling up with snow as it went, and smothering the people inside. The police weren’t notified until some hours had passed, even though the helicopter’s transponder sounded the alarm the moment the helicopter crashed. By the time the cops arrived, the bodies had been removed, so no forensic investigating was done. There seems to have been one survivor, but he isn’t talking to anyone. Litigation is ongoing. So—that all sounds pretty suspicious. But given the dubious safety record of both the helicopters and the snow-covered, stormy Alaskan mountains, none of this would necessarily make someone suspect foul play. But Petr, you see, wasn’t the first person connected to John’s story to have died under unusual circumstances. The story John wanted to tell was about he and Petr going to Russia in the 90s, during the lawless decade between communism and Putinism. They made some very canny investments, fended off some death threats, and briefly got share-holder control of one Russia’s most powerful, most profitable energy companies. This is an energy company that may or may not have had its natural gas pipeline in the North Sea blown up recently, under suspicious circumstances. People connected to this company, and to its subsidiaries and direct competitors, have been dying at such a prodigious rate that they’ve taken a starring role on a Wikipedia page titled “Suspicious Deaths of Russian Businesspeople.” A quick Google search will give you results like, “Mystery as fifth Russian Gazprom-linked executive found dead in his swimming pool” (The Independent), “At least eight Russian businessmen have died in apparent suicide or accidents in just six months” (CNN), “Here are the Russian oil executives who have died in the past nine months” (The Hill), “A Wave of Mystery Suicides of Russian Gazprom Executives” (Warsaw Institute), “Another Russian Executive with Ties to Gazprom has been found Dead” (Fortune). Et cetera. So John had reason to worry. He had a similar reason for wanting his story fictionalized into a novel, instead of telling it himself non-fictionally. Not everyone involved with John’s story wants to be connected to it in print. I can’t imagine why. But I will add, for the record, that the novel is NOT about Gazprom. It’s fiction. How much or what parts of this fiction are based on real events is a secret that will die with me. A long, long time from now, I hope. When I’m old and gray. So anyway, John happened to have read a couple of my novels and liked them. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, which was “how about flying to the Bahamas on my private jet so I can tell you a really cool story?” Much like Ernie Pyle landing on Omaha beach or George Orwell going to Catalonia, I went to John’s estate in Nassau and listened to what he had to say. By the time he was through, I knew it would make a fantastic novel, but there was one important question I had to ask him: “So, if I write this story, is someone going to murder me?” John shook his head. “No. Definitely not. The Russians never kill Americans. Well, almost never. It’s very unusual. Anyway, I don’t think an American writer’s been killed since —–. Funny, I used to talk to him about this stuff too, when he was covering business in Russia. Have you read ‘The Ghost’? About a writer getting killed? There was a movie. Pierce Brosnan, Ewan McGregor. It was good.” Anyhow, the novel I wrote after our conversation, called The Siberia Job, is out now. I guess this piece is a slightly long-winded way of saying that, if the launch doesn’t go well, I too would like to be played in an eventual movie by a young Ewan McGregor. *** View the full article -
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Six Great Thrillers Featuring Manipulative Mom-Friends at Their Best
Mom-friends. If you are a woman with children, then you’ve probably found yourself in this particular kind of circumstantial friendship. Would you be friends were it not for the same baby-and-me schedule during those long, tedious infant months? Or if your children hadn’t started school at the same year in the same neighborhood, each of them wailing at the drop-off gate for the first three weeks of school? Perhaps not, but this is what makes mom-friends such interesting territory for (cynical) domestic suspense writers like me: these new friendships can look like lifelines on the surface, but underneath there is just enough room to plant the toxicities we love best—lies! envy! revenge!—between mothers who would do just about anything to protect their children, yes, but also their own reputations. Here are some stand-out thrillers featuring manipulative mom-friends at their best: Cutting Teeth by Chandler Baker (publishing July 18) Chandler Baker takes us to a truly wild place in one of this summer’s hottest reads about a group of preschool kids who crave blood (toddler vampires!). When the classroom teacher is found dead, the kids are suspects, but more so are three of their moms, who clamour to prove their innocence to everyone, and to each other. This is a sharp, page-turning, completely original take on the insanity of modern motherhood with mom-friends at the center, and it’s so much fun to read. Dirty Laundry by Disha Bose What group of mom friends is complete these days without a social media influencer in the mix? Bose’s debut, a Good Morning American book club pick, features one such friend who holds the envy of all the others—until she ends up dead in her home. This twisty novel reminiscent of ‘Desperate Housewives’ explores conflict between three mom friends caught in a tangle of envy and judgement, desperate to preserve their reputations and their families. Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena (publishing July 25) In this latest from the long-reigning queen of domestic suspense, a precocious young girl goes missing after school, and while her father was the last to see her alive, it’s the neighborhood moms who are left scrambling to get their families off the growing suspect list, as they each point fingers at each other. Panic grows, tempers fly, and everyone becomes unhinged (bonus points in this one for manipulative children!). The Herd by Emily Edwards Edwards’ debut pits a group of mom friends against each other over the very timely topic of vaccines, after a harmless white lie at a child’s birthday party has catastrophic consequences for everyone. Edwards does a skilled job of pitting mom against mom in a way that will make you see all sides of the story. This book asks big moral questions and the emotional tensions are high—the perfect pick for a book club of mom friends who want to go deep. The Other Mothers by Katherine Faulkner (publishing December 5) This one isn’t out until December, but I just had to include it—it’s well worth the wait! Perfectly described as ‘next-level mum noir’ and ‘grown-up mean girls,’ Faulkner’s sophomore novel begins with new mom and struggling journalist, Tash, joining a local playgroup for her son. She finds herself invited “in” to a posh group of close mom friends that have a connection to a young nanny who died several months prior under mysterious circumstances. Tash can’t help but probe further. But who is really investigating who in this web of new friendships? Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty Safe to say nobody does mom friends and suburban noir like Moriarty, and this list just wouldn’t be complete without mention of Madeline, Celeste and Jane, the three moms at the center of this now-classic schoolyard scandal that turns lethal. Although we’ve probably all read the novel or watched the brilliant HBO adaption, I won’t spoil the ending that’s made this one such a favorite—except to say that it’s the mom-friend-ties-that-bind that win out in the end. *** View the full article -
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Friday Speak Out!: Writing and Me
by Debbie Chein Morris How many hours have I spent agonizing over the wording of something I have written and struggling, striving to make it better? How many sentences have I re-written, how many words have I replaced? Computers are my savior; thesaurus, my best friend. I was born anal-retentive. I must have been, though I don’t recognize the trait in either of my parents or any of my siblings. But how else can I explain why my writing has to be just so. Why else did I spend hours upon hours writing a weekly newsletter to the parents of my kindergarten students outlining what we were doing in class, my co-teacher having zipped off her near-perfect edition in about twenty minutes? Why else do I correct grammatical errors and questionable sentence structure in my personal journals? I know full well that I can never reach the astronomical expectations I have for myself as a writer, yet that compulsion to “get it right,” (whatever that is!) drives me on, like an ant carrying its small bits of food up and around all obstacles that are put in its path. It seems a little ironic that if I think about why I like to write despite how complicated I make it for myself, I come to the conclusion that writing relaxes me. Though I occasionally write for the purpose of remembering (an event or occurrence), most of my writing is emotional. When I write, I separate myself from the rest of my surroundings and enter an almost meditative state. I fall into myself, searching through the complexities of my mind, trying to bring my thoughts up from the abyss and into consciousness, trying to make sense of my feelings of the moment. Like the deep reflections I made in a past journal about whether I should retire, comparing the positives of work with those of life without the responsibilities; or the painstakingly apologetic letter to a friend after inadvertently hurting her feelings. I am compulsive about getting the wording “just right.” Introspective, always deep in thought about something, I think of writing and reflection as partners. As I walk a trail, quietly eat a meal, or just sit idle pondering the various matters that run through my mind, I envision my words on paper. More often than not, I have wished that my thoughts could be transcribed from my head onto paper so that I could always have a record of those musings. For me, writing is an ongoing process. My style changes as I myself change. Books, too, have their influence. What hasn’t changed is the sense of accomplishment I get when I have finally written down all that I want to say, in the way I mean it to read, on that formerly blank piece of paper. * * * photo credit Jamie KilgoreBorn in the Bronx, NY, Ms. Morris lived on Long Island (Plainview) for most of her adult life. The youngest (by five minutes) of four children, family has always been important to her. Married for forty-four years and since widowed, she is mother to three wonderful sons and two amazing daughters-in-law. Ms. Morris worked in the field of early childhood education, receiving master’s degrees from Queens College, Hofstra University, and Bank Street College of Education. Her work included classroom teacher to preschool and kindergarten children and reading teacher to kindergarteners needing extra support. Ms. Morris is retired and loves to take walks in nature, solve NY Times crossword puzzles, and knit blankets for charity. She currently resides in Mt. Kisco, NY, with her new partner.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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566. The Blessings of Comfort Reads with KJ Charles
A | BN | K Recently KJ Charles tweeted about how absolutely devouring the Blessings series by Beverly Jenkins helped “save her sanity during the 2020 lockdown.” So I asked if she’d talk to me about it – and to my surprise this is a popular topic at the moment! She recently did a panel about comfort reading, and I’m really excited to take a look at what makes a comfort read, well, comfy. Plus, we learn what a HFY ending is. And brace yourself, we have a LOT of recs. … Music: purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: You can find KJ Charles on her website, KJCharlesWriter.com, on Twitter and Instagram, and on Facebook at KJCharlesChat. We also mentioned: “Let’s Do It” – Victoria Wood The John Snow Pub If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes. More ways to sponsor: Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?) http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/patreon.png What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast. Thanks for listening! Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher. View the full article -
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Graveyard Shift: Excerpt and Cover Reveal
Thursday night festivities were just beginning to wind down when Tinsel pushed her way through the front door of The Fitzroy Pinnacle. There was a tuckshop window that provided a view into the beer garden out the back and as she’d passed it, she’d seen that even there amongst the fairy lights and creeping vines, the crowd had dissipated. “Babbbbbbe!” her favourite bartender Gee yelled as they spotted her. “I was just about to turn off the frozen margarita machine but could sense in my waters you were around the corner.” The greeting did a lot to ease the discomfort that had been steadily growing until she’d stepped over that threshold. A spicy frozen marg would do even more. Gee was in a variation of their standard uniform: bucket hat, eye catching earrings, tea towel thrown over their shoulder and cute sweater/blouse combo. “Where’s Ray?” she asked, looking around and finding only one indoor table remaining that was occupied with patrons picking over her number one dish, the pulled pork nachos. “It was so quiet, I sent everyone else home,” Gee rxeplied, grabbing one of the cocktail glasses. “I’m doing close by myself.” She slipped behind the bar, taking the stem from them and using her hip to bump Gee aside. “Then close away, don’t let me stop you.” “Ugh, you’re a gem!” They planted a kiss on the side of her cheek as they dashed off, Tinsel only half watching as Gee began swirling around the place like an organised tornado. Cutlery containers were collected, candles were rapidly blown out, tables were wiped, empty glasses were stacked and packed. While they were busy, it meant she had free reign of the music and she quickly queued a handful of Swet Shop Boys bangers to come on after the Madonna track faded away. Until then, she grabbed a slice of lime, used its juice to rim the glass before placing it face down in the Tajin chilli seasoning until there was an even coat lining the glass, poured the last of the frozen margarita mix as it churned from the slushie machine, flipped the switch off and added her original piece of lime as garnish. Tinsel took her usual spot at the end of the bar, hanging her bag on the hook underneath and letting out an audible groan as she took a heroic first sip. “Okay, I can tell your day has been drab if you’re smashing half a marg on the first go,” Gee commented, flying around her as they made their way to the closed kitchen. “If only you knew,” she murmured. Since the clock had ticked over from midnight until now, it felt like Tinsel had been copping kicks to the snatch one after the other. The day had started out horrific and gotten progressively terrible, with her metaphorical vadge all but dust now. Her phone rung and she flinched when she saw it was Zack. Pandora had this motto – never sleep on an argument – yet this was more than an argument. This felt like the end, truthfully, and Tinsel cringed at the thought of all the things she’d slept on in this relationship. Years of it. When it finally stopped ringing, she blocked his number. Eventually she would have to talk to him, but that was beyond low on her priority list. Subterranean, even. She didn’t want to see him and with a start, she realised that eventually when he came home, she didn’t want to be there. Wallowing was the last thing Tinsel needed to do and action made her feel foolishly positive. Downing another gulp of the frozen margarita and licking the chilli powder from her lips, she quickly text Detective James new instructions. She’d meet him at the staff door as the pub was closing up. The dots of a message being written in response were clicked away as she stood up, sculled the last of her drink and rinsed the glass. Slipping it in the dishwasher, Tinsel hit the necessary buttons for a wash cycle and grabbed her stuff. Gee appeared around the corner just as she was passing the kitchen, catching her by surprise and causing a scream. “Fuck!” she yelped. “AAAA!” Gee responded, both grabbing each other and clutching on to their arms for dear life. The panicked breaths turned into uneasy chuckles. “Sorry,” they started. “I didn’t–” “No, I’m sorry. Just very jumpy at the moment.” “How unlike you,” they purred. “Halloween hangover?” “Something like that. Listen, I’m going to call it a night.” “Okay hon, luvya.” They embraced and parted ways, Tinsel taking the internal route through the backroom, past the locked staff door, and up the stairs to her apartment. Heading directly to the bedroom, she pulled an overnight bag from the wardrobe and began throwing supplies into it. Double checking she had enough of everything for a few nights, she tossed in her makeup bag and headed towards the bathroom to grab her toothbrush and a few toiletries. Pandora had a spare room and a never-ending desire to involve herself in Tinsel’s problems, so she would make the most of it for a few days. Finally throwing in her laptop, back-up hard drives, and chargers, she slung the bag over her shoulder and made her way out, flicking off the lights as she went. Cracking open the staff door, she made herself comfortable sitting on top of one of the empty silver kegs that were positioned outside for collection. Resting her back against the wall, Tinsel watched as a loud ding heralded the arrival of a tram that sped past on the main road at the corner. It was the motion that drew her eye and she frowned as she watched the dark figure of someone leaning against the wall of the bottle-o across the street. They were in shadow, so she couldn’t see their face or make out much detail like height or clothing, but it irked her. Now would be a good time to show up hot cop, she thought to herself, pulling out her phone to check on his status. She had just one message from him. STAY INSIDE UNTIL I GET THERE, it read. “Shit,” Tinsel muttered. Looking up, she was the only person down this side street, which peeled off Saint Georges Road and was largely residential besides The Pinny. There were parked cars lining the curb and she watched as a cat skittered across the road only to shimmy under a garage door. Her eyes darted back to the bottle-o, but the person standing there was gone. The neon ‘open’ sign had also switched to ‘closed’, casting the parking lot around it in even thicker darkness. Her decision to wait there for him suddenly felt foolish and she wished Gee was still inside. The darkened windows of the pub told her they were long gone. She had her keys clipped to the belt hoop of her jeans and she reached for them, turning her back to the street as she went to unlock the door behind her and head inside again. Yet her fingers were barely on the cool metal when she heard a thump behind her. Tinsel spun around, pressing her back to the wood of the door. Her eyes scanned the street desperately for the source of the noise. It sounded like weight hitting the bonnet of a car, the noise somewhat metallic and hollow at the same time. There were shadows everywhere, the branches of the banksia trees that lined the footpath blowing softly in the wind and creating even more. It was the fauna that caused her to look up, beyond eyelevel, and that’s what made her breath to catch. A beaten-up car was parked at the top of the street, the first and last spot before you hit the main road. It had been tagged to shit, with slogans and logos spray-painted over every clear inch. The windows were long since smashed and a paper council removal notice fluttered uselessly under the window wipers. It was right next to an overgrown tree, the leaves blocking the glow from the street light overhead. There was another metallic crunch, this sound sharp enough it made her flinch as she stepped away from the pub to get a better view. It sounded like someone trying to key a car door. Or a knife, she thought before she could stop herself. That was bullshit and Tinsel knew it. As if to prove it to herself, she grabbed her phone and hit the flashlight button, which wasn’t exactly a spotlight but would do in a pinch. She shined it towards the car, the beam tracking up towards the roof. The second it shined on a pair of black sneakers, she was already running. She’d barely had a moment to digest the figured dressed all in black crouching on top of the car, hunched over and leaning towards her with intent. Tinsel didn’t need more time than that. The phone had slipped from her hand in panic, but that was the last mistake she’d make. She sprinted down the middle of the street, giving herself as much room as possible as she pummeled the pavement. The thump had repeated, telling her they had jumped down after her and the panting she could hear confirmed it. They were right behind her. Tinsel hadn’t spared much thought for where she was going, she just knew that she had to put distance between her and the cretin on her heels. She didn’t even want to risk banging on a door for help, all the lights inside turned off and the time it might take for someone to wake up and come down to her… she’d be the next Mera Brant. The end of Taplin Street was looming in front of her, however, and she’d have to make a choice. With a start, she realised she was being herded into an even more dangerous situation. Tinsel had been almost at the top of the street and that’s exactly where they’d blocked her path, meaning she was forced away from the main road. At the opposite end was a park, with a bike path that was usually busy during the day but isolated this time of night. The whole space was, actually, with thick bushes and enough distance between the nearest house that it was likely someone might mistake a scream of hers for a fox taking out another neighbourhood cat. It was the kill zone. Tinsel took a sharp left, skidding and sliding across the bonnet of a car as she sprinted down a tight alleyway. A surprised grunt sounded behind her and she felt a spur of energy knowing she had caught her pursuer off guard. She risked a glance over her shoulder, seeing only a darting black mass that was closer than she would have liked. They were faster than her. Yet this was Tinsel’s neighbourhood. She knew every derelict alleyway thanks to years of spilling out of house parties and into them with her friends. If she could just keep running, just keep ignoring the pain in her chest that burned from a shortness of breath, just keep ignoring the overwhelming fear she felt threatening to immobilise her, then she could make it. Take this alleyway west, pop out near Saint Georges Road, sprint along the tram tracks in open space until one came along or a car – didn’t matter which. Until that happened, she’d keep picking her way back towards The Pinny where there was a twenty-four hour BP service station next door that she could run into for help. Tinsel committed to that choice in her mind as the alleyway arched around towards her destination. She could see the clear street in sight, grateful for the Stan Smith sneakers she’d chosen that day instead of something with a heel. As it was, she was still tripping and stumbling on every fourth step, these alleyways largely unchanged since they were first put down and remaining some of the oldest infrastructure in the city. They were cracked, uneven, and it was just as likely you could break a neck as break an ankle if you fell. It was on one of these near misses that she risked another glance back. The alley was empty. There was no one there. The long, dark and grey path stretched behind her like an insidious reptile. She slowed to a halt, slapping a hand over her mouth to quiet her panting. She strained to hear something in the dark, any rustling or footsteps from the shadows she couldn’t fully penetrate visually. Not taking her eyes off the darkness, she patted herself down, looking for the lump of her keys. Shit, she thought. She’d left them in the lock of the fucking door. Tinsel would have felt marginally better if she had her switchblade. Staring at the alleyway, she thought it might have been a trick. She couldn’t be certain, yet maybe they were just out of frame, waiting for her to be dumb enough to retrace her footsteps. Then they could lurch out and end this unseen, her body discarded until someone was unlucky enough to come along. No, she wouldn’t be got that way. She should have charged at the person from the start and taken her chances at trying to make it to the main road. Slowly, quietly, she turned and started jogging towards the alley entrance. She couldn’t see what was waiting for her on either side of the opening, so she put her head down and sprinted, eyes focused on Saint Georges Road up ahead. Tinsel burst out of there in a rush and – BAM! She screamed as she immediately collided with a figure, barreling into a man and knocking both of them over. He gripped her shoulders on the way down, taking the brunt of the fall. Her palms extended outwards, the flesh ripping off as they grazed the concrete. She kicked and punched and hit him as she desperately tried to untangle herself and get away. “TINSEL!” She paused, recognising that voice as hands clutched at her. “Tinsel, it’s me!” She leaned back, arching her body enough so she could see the person beneath her properly. “Detective?” “Hi,” he replied, his bashful smile half cloaked in the low light. “I… uh–” “Are you okay?” “I don’t know,” she admitted, her breaths nearly turning to sobs. “Tinsel?” She looked behind her and down the alleyway. It was still. “Tinsel, what is it?” he repeated, gently shaking her shoulders. His tone was serious, believing, and he stared at her intensely. “Someone was chasing me.” The effect was immediate, with Detective James gently rolling her off him and leaping into position. He drew his gun, angling himself in front of her and towards the mouth of the alley. “I couldn’t see who it was,” Tinsel continued. “It could be som–” He held a finger to his lips. She fell silent, nodding her head to indicate that she understood. They both remained quiet, listening to the sound of the night around them. She was still sitting on the path, her hands stinging and her breath shaky as she tried to bring her heart rate back down, Detective James took one step towards the alley before changing his mind. He spun back around, reaching a hand underneath her arms to help her up while still keeping his gun in the other. “Come on,” he said, gaze remaining fixed on the alley. “Where are we going?” Tinsel asked. “You are going to my car,” Detective James replied. “Where I know you’ll be safe and where I know your exact location.” The Pinnacle was visible over the rooftops of the houses they were passing, the pair of them not having to march far until he was opening the passenger door of a Holden Commodore parked right in front of the staff entrance. “What?” he asked, watching as she hesitated. “My bag, my phone…” Detective James followed her gaze. “Get in the car, lock the doors.” Tinsel didn’t question the directions, doing exactly that as she nervously watched him in the dark. Her eyes darted from his figure, gun drawn and torchlight now held under it, to the space around Detective James that could have held anything or anyone creeping towards him. After a few minutes, he returned to the car unharmed, passing her phone towards her and tossing the overnight bag in the backseat. The vehicle doors slammed and locked behind him in quick succession as he slid into the driver’s seat. He placed his gun up on the dash, where it was still within reach, and clicked off his torch. Detective James’ gaze slid to the steering wheel, where Tinsel had both her hands hovering over the worn covering there. She drew them back, feeling stupid. “I was going to honk if someone came up behind you,” she explained. “It’s silly b–” “It’s not,” he said, cutting her off. “You would have given me a warning.” He reached out and took her hands as she was drawing them back. Gently, he turned over her palms. His fingers examined the deep grazes, careful not to get blood on himself, which was challenging given how much she was shaking. Mercifully, he didn’t comment on that. He just reached across, unclicked the glove compartment and retrieved a tiny first-aid kit that looked like it was contained in a red purse with a white cross on it. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” he questioned. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t think so. Maybe tweaked an ankle, but nothing an ice pack won’t fix.” “You talk,” Detective James began. “And I’ll bandage these. Tell me everything that happened.” Her words came out steady despite how unsteady she felt at her very core. Tinsel only had to pause once, hissing as Detective James tweezed a chunk of gravel from under her skin. The sting of the Betadine to her wounds didn’t exactly help, but by the time her hands were padded and wrapped, she was done. “You didn’t get a good look at the guy on the car?” She closed her eyes, trying to recreate the image in her mind. All she could dredge up was the silhouette of the hunched figure. “I couldn’t even say if it was a guy,” Tinsel admitted. “Did they have the same physique as the person outside the bottle-o?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I really couldn’t tell in either case. I just know they were fast and…” “And what?” “I don’t want to sound hysterical, but it felt like they were waiting for me.” He nodded as if that didn’t sound hysterical at all. Neither said what they were both thinking. They didn’t need to. There wasn’t anyone in custody for Mera Brant’s murder yet and they both knew the killer was still out there. She jumped as there was a loud screech from within the car, a strangled choke escaping Tinsel’s own mouth. It took her a few beats to realise what it was, the sound having come from a police scanner strapped to the dashboard. It was only when human voices began speaking over the transmission, with the same screech punctuating each sentence, that she was able to calm herself properly. “Be chill,” she whispered, placing a hand over her heart. “Be chill.” “This is a decidedly unchill situation,” Detective James muttered, grabbing his police radio. Tinsel spaced out for a moment, his chatter combining with the scanner so that she only picked up key words like “assailant” and “assistance”. The adrenaline had finally worn off and she was left exhausted. When he touched her shoulder, her lids felt heavy as she opened her eyes and refocused on him. “Tinsel?” “Mmmm?” “I’ve got back-up on the way. Whether it was some junkie and you got unlucky or someone with other motives, we’ll get to the bottom of it. Okay?” “Okay,” she nodded. “Until they arrive, I need to go back out there and look for any evidence I can,” he continued, passing her his phone which had the maps app open on their location. “Can you show me exactly where you ran?” She traced the route with her finger, answering the brief questions he had until Detective James seemed happy. “Alright,” he sighed. “I’m going to give you my keys.” His words triggered something in her memory and she leaned forward, looking past him. “My keys.” “What?” Detective James twisted around to see what she was staring at. “I had them in the door when I heard the noise. I didn’t have time to grab them when I ran and they’re still there.” “Leave it with me.” He handed her his own set in the meantime, Tinsel hitting the button on his keyring that locked the doors as he stepped back out into the dark. Switching off the car’s overhead light so she didn’t look like a sitting target, she watched as Detective James examined the area around the staff door and grabbed something metallic. Then he began retracing her steps and moving out of her line of sight. It was excruciating waiting there, her mind unable to help but imagine Detective James moving through the labyrinth of cobblestone alleyways that snaked behind, in, and around most of suburban Melbourne. The torchlight would be the only source of light as no one usually cared whether you could or couldn’t see down there. He would inch past a wheelie bin, unable to see the figure crouched behind it until it was too late. Tinsel exhaled slowly, her nerves entirely shot. There was no point imagining horrors when the ones she was dealing with IRL were just as prescient. __________________________________ From THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT. Used with the permission of the publisher, DATURA. Copyright © 2023 by Maria Lewis. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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Algonkian Retreats and Workshops 2023 - Assignments
1. Story Statement: Unsuspecting teenager Aleks Sultanas, must reunite her ancient bloodline while uncovering a sinister alien plot that intrinsically connects our reality to the dream world and threatens the lives of all conscious beings in the universe. 2. Antagonist/Antagonistic Force: The main antagonist in this trilogy are the Annanuki race, a widespread ruling alien race that have systematically gained control over most conscious beings in the universe on two separate planes of existence ("dream world" and "waking world"). Each novel has its own separate manifestation of the Annanuki, whom, as the trilogy goes on become more and more menacing, powerful and high ranking. The first major protagonist is Aleks’ childhood bully, Petra, who has been harassing her incessantly since the disappearance of her father at a young age. Petra, or “Pete”, and his cronies have been shamelessly bullying Aleks for over a decade when they take it to the next level by trying to eliminate the Sultanas bloodline. This attempt puts Aleks’ grandfather in a coma, nearly kills her, and functions as the first novel's main catalyst. Later in the novel, when Aleks learns that Petra is an Annanuki spy who was sent to Earth to keep an eye on her family, the friction between the two heats up to a boiling point. Petra, and his associates represent the greed and deception that have plagued conscious life for some time now and progressively get more and more sinister as the story develops to the point where one may even compare them to Assef and his goons. 3. Title Options: The Dreamer: Before I Wake Waiting for Waking Lost Diary of a Lucid Dreamer 4. Comparable Titles: Silver Trilogy by Kerstin Gier (2015-2017) The Silver trilogy is similar to my own trilogy in the sense that they both revolve around a young female protagonist who is dealing with consequential lucid dreaming that is intertwined with reality. The Silver trilogy has a more localized plot that deals with mundane teenage conflicts whereas my protagonist is wrapped up in an ancient conflict between good and evil that transcends Earth and implicates the whole Universe. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) Neuromancer is most widely known as being the inspiration for the Matrix trilogy. There are several parallels between my story and Neuromancer starting with the parallels between the "dream world" and the "matrix". When the protagonist in each story unlocks their mind in the matrix/dream world, they are able to completely control their reality. The limit of what they can do is only defined by the limit of their mind. There are also themes of artificial intelligence, free will, and totalitarian control in each story. 5. Log Line: As 14-year-old Aleks Sultanas tries to reunite her family and confront her overactive lucid dreaming, her ancient Greek bloodline is pulled into a battle for the control of all conscious beings in the universe through the capitalization of the dream world. 6. Conflict: Primary Dramatic Conflict: The primary dramatic conflict in this series is the lost connection between the dream world and our waking lives, and how to restore the balance between the two worlds. Secondary Conflicts: Aleks struggles to balance her home and school lives, causing a clash of two worlds in her own day-to-day. She struggles to feel worthy enough to fit in with girls at her private school and struggles to feel unprivileged enough to fit in with her neighbors in the rundown projects that her family can afford to live in. Core Wound: Aleks’ core wound comes from the absence of her father who mysteriously left when she was four years old. The absence of her father forced Aleks and her mother into poverty and they still carry this scar along with them every day. As a child who has been seemingly abandoned, Aleks blames herself for everything and is prone to random mood swings and outbursts of emotion whenever her father is brought up. This wound begins to resolve when her father is reintroduced, however the scar that his absence left will seemingly always be present. 7. Setting: To sketch out all of the worlds, dreams, and places on Earth that Aleks finds herself in would take far too long for the purposes of this exercise. However, the story takes place in a vast setting, ranging from Aleks’ families run-down house in the undesirable south side suburb of Lakeside, to futuristic uptown cityscape, to distant planets with fantastical features. As the story switches back and forth between the waking world and the dream world, so do the settings switch back and forth between futuristic urban areas filled with poverty and filth, to utopian floating castles in the sky. At its base level, this story draws a thematic conflict between nature and society. In this sense, when Aleks is in the world controlled by Annanuki, the environment is defined as dull, lifeless, and grey. Whenever Aleks is at her rebel camp and with her family, the environment is ethereal, decadent, and unique. These two sides of the story work to juxtapose one another and create an easily definable comparison of tone/mood throughout the novel. At first, the distinction between reality and dreams are stark, and so are the differences in their descriptions. The industrial, lifeless city is contrasted by the imaginative world that beckons Aleks; just as the Annunaki are contrasted by the rebels who seek to destroy them. As the story progresses, however, the lines between dream and reality, between fact and fiction, become more and more increasingly blurred. The waking reality that she inhabits becomes more egalitarian and sophisticated while the dream world becomes more complex and complicated as the lines blur. -
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Chefs, Fitness, & More
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake is $2.99! I have several friends who love Blake’s F/F romances and they’ve been featured in Hide Your Wallet before. Have you read any? A clever and steamy queer romantic comedy about taking chances and accepting love—with all its complications—by debut author Ashley Herring Blake. Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls—nothing is there for her but memories of a lonely childhood where she was little more than a burden to her cold and distant stepfamily. Her life is in New York, with her photography career finally gaining steam and her bed never empty. Sure, it’s a different woman every night, but that’s just fine with her. When Delilah’s estranged stepsister, Astrid, pressures her into photographing her wedding with a guilt trip and a five-figure check, Delilah finds herself back in the godforsaken town that she used to call home. She plans to breeze in and out, but then she sees Claire Sutherland, one of Astrid’s stuck-up besties, and decides that maybe there’s some fun (and a little retribution) to be had in Bright Falls, after all. Having raised her eleven-year-old daughter mostly on her own while dealing with her unreliable ex and running a bookstore, Claire Sutherland depends upon a life without surprises. And Delilah Green is an unwelcome surprise…at first. Though they’ve known each other for years, they don’t really know each other—so Claire is unsettled when Delilah figures out exactly what buttons to push. When they’re forced together during a gauntlet of wedding preparations—including a plot to save Astrid from her horrible fiancé—Claire isn’t sure she has the strength to resist Delilah’s charms. Even worse, she’s starting to think she doesn’t want to… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Set on You Set on You by Amy Lea is $1.99! I believe this was Lea’s debut and was pretty buzzy. I’m always iffy on books with a fitness theme, but if you love that trope, we recently did a Rec League! A gym nemesis pushes a fitness influencer to the max in Amy Lea’s steamy debut romantic comedy. Curvy fitness influencer Crystal Chen built her career shattering gym stereotypes and mostly ignoring the trolls. After her recent breakup, she has little stamina left for men, instead finding solace in the gym – her place of power and positivity. Enter firefighter Scott Ritchie, the smug new gym patron who routinely steals her favorite squat rack. Sparks fly as these ultra-competitive foes battle for gym domination. But after a series of escalating jabs, the last thing they expect is to run into each other at their grandparents’ engagement party. In the lead up to their grandparents’ wedding, Crystal discovers there’s a soft heart under Scott’s muscled exterior. Bonding over family, fitness, and cheesy pick-up lines, they just might have found her swolemate. But when a photo of them goes viral, savage internet trolls put their budding relationship to the ultimate test of strength. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Wildwood Whispers Wildwood Whispers by Willa Reece is 99c and a Kindle Daily Deal! I mentioned this one on a previous Hide Your Wallet. It reminded me a bit of one of my favorite books, Garden Spells, but with some darker tones. Have you read this one? A heartwarming novel of hope, fate, and folk magic unfolds when a young woman travels to a sleepy southern town in the Appalachian Mountains to bury her best friend. “Dark, tender, and thought-provoking, Wildwood Whispers is a beautifully woven tale of fantasy, feminism, and mystery set in rural Appalachia.” —Constance Sayers, author of A Witch in Time At the age of eleven, Mel Smith’s life found its purpose when she met Sarah Ross. Ten years later, Sarah’s sudden death threatens to break her. To fulfill a final promise to her best friend, Mel travels to an idyllic small town nestled in the shadows of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet Morgan’s Gap is more than a land of morning mists and deep forest shadows. There are secrets that call to Mel, in the gaze of the gnarled and knowing woman everyone calls Granny, in a salvaged remedy book filled with the magic of simple mountain traditions, and in the connection, she feels to the Ross homestead and the wilderness around it. With every taste of sweet honey and tart blackberries, the wildwood twines further into Mel’s broken heart. But a threat lingers in the woods—one that may have something to do with Sarah’s untimely death and that has now set its sight on Mel. The wildwood is whispering. It has secrets to reveal—if you’re willing to listen… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Dine With Me Dine With Me by Layla Reyne is $1.99! This is an M/M romance with an opposites attract pairing and a road trip. Love me a foodie romance. This is also a standalone! I feel like Reyne’s romances are well-read here at the Bitchery. Do you have a favorite? Life never tasted so good. Miller Sykes’s meteoric rise to award-winning chef is the stuff of culinary dreams, but it’s all crashing down around him. He’s been given a diagnosis that could cost him something even more precious than his life: his sense of taste. Rather than risk the very thing that defines him, Miller embarks on a last tour of his favorite meals while he still can. But there’s a catch: he needs a financial backer to make it happen, and he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s sick. Dr. Clancy Rhodes has two weeks to come to terms with putting aside oncology to work at his father’s thriving plastic surgery practice. When the opportunity to travel with a Michelin-starred chef presents itself, the foodie in him can’t believe it. It doesn’t hurt that Miller’s rugged good looks are exactly Clancy’s cup of joe. As Clancy and Miller travel from coast to coast and indulge in everything from dive bars to the most decadent of culinary experiences, they’re suddenly sharing a lot more than delicious meals. Sparks fly as they bond over their love of flavors and the pressures of great expectations. But when Miller’s health takes a turn for the worse, Clancy must convince him he’s more—so much more—than just his taste buds. And that together, they can win a battle that once seemed hopeless. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Molly
A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We’d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms—me in my office, writing; Molly on the bed in the guest room, working too, so I believed. I’d pass by and see her using her laptop or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone, or sometimes staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn’t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be—it’d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we’d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, though, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me that she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small in my arms. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing still, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she’d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run and hunt for bugs. Molly said no, she didn’t want to go, asked if I’d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see—something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the glass where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached the window, Molly didn’t move toward us, open the window, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I’d made up, Molly’s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended—which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn’t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly staring blankly at the space where I’d just been: a view of a fence obscured only by the lone sapling she’d planted last spring in yearning for the day she wouldn’t have to see the neighbors. *** I corralled the chickens to their coop, came back inside. In Molly’s office, where I had a closet, I sat across from her while changing clothes in preparation for my daily run. Molly spoke calmly, said she’d just finished reading the galley of my next novel and that she liked the way it ended: with the book’s protagonist suspended in a stasis of her memories, forever stuck. I felt surprised to hear she’d finished, given her low spirit and how she’d said she found the novel difficult to read, because it hurt for her to have to see the pain behind my language, how much I’d been carrying around all this time. I told her I was grateful she’d made it through, that I wanted to hear more of what she thought after my run, already anxious to get on with it, in go-mode. My reaction seemed to vex her, causing a little back and forth where we both kept misunderstanding what the other had just said, each at different ends of a conversation. She remained flat on the bed as I kissed her forehead, squeezed her hand, then proceeded through the house, out the front door. Coming down the driveway, I took my phone out to put on music I could run to and saw I’d received an email, sent from Molly, according to the timestamp, just after I had left her in the room. (no subject), read the subject, and in the body, just: I love you, nothing else, besides a Word document she’d attached, titled Folk Physics, which I knew to be the title of the manuscript of poems she’d been working on the last few months. I stopped short in my tracks, surprised to see she’d sent it to me just like that, then and there. Something felt off, too out of nowhere—not like Molly, or perhaps too much like Molly. I turned around at once and went inside. *** During my brief absence, she’d already risen from the bed, up and about for one of only a few times that day. I found her in the kitchen with the lights off, standing as if dazed by my appearance, arms at her sides. She seemed to clench up as I came near, letting me put my arms around her but staying taut, hand on my chest. She hesitated when I asked if she’d finished her manuscript, wondering why she hadn’t mentioned it. Yes, she said quietly, she guessed it was finished, a draft at least but no big deal. I told her I was excited to get to read it either way, that I was proud of her, and squeezed her tightly one more time, then let her go. She seemed to hover there in front of me a moment, waiting mute for what I’d do next. I asked if after my run we could go to Whole Foods, pick up something to make for dinner together, and maybe watch a movie, have a nice night here at home. She said yes, that sounded good, and I said good, I’d see her soon, then one last hug before I left her standing in the kitchen in the dark. *** On my run, I followed my usual route around our neighborhood without much thought. I’d always liked the way the world went narrow in this manner during exercise, as if there could be nothing else to do but the task at hand, one foot in front of the other, counting down without a number. I don’t remember seeing any other people, then or later, though I must have; in retrospect, the smaller details would fade to gray around the corridor of time sent rushing forward in the wake of what awaited just ahead. Near the end of the run, I decided to extend my route, turning around to double back the way I’d just come, adding on an extra half-mile on a path that took me past the entrance to the gardens where Molly and I would often walk in summers. The sidewalks in this part of the neighborhood were cracked and bumpy, requiring specific care not to trip. I pulled my phone out to see how far I’d gone and saw a ping from Twitter telling me that Molly had made a post, just minutes past—a link to a YouTube video of “The Old Revolution” by Leonard Cohen, including her transcription of the song’s opening line: “I finally broke into the prison.” I liked the tweet and thumbed the link immediately, opening the song to let it play, happy to imagine her selecting the closing soundtrack for my run home, just a couple blocks away now. “Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,” Cohen sang, backed by a doomy twang. “You whom I cannot betray.” *** The song was still there with me in my head as I arrived back at our driveway, where looking up from halfway along the path toward the stairs to our front porch, I saw a shape against the door, covering the spy hole—a plain white envelope, affixed with tape. My body seized. From early on in our relationship I’d had visions of Molly picking up and leaving just like that, deciding on a whim and without warning that she preferred to be alone. Running up the steps, already flush with adrenaline, a pounding pulse, I saw my first name, Blake, handwritten in the center of the envelope’s face in Molly’s script. Immediately, I wailed, devoid of language, too much too fast, real and unreal. Inside the envelope, a two-page letter, printed out. I stopped cold on the first lines: Blake, I have decided to leave this world. Then there was nothing but those words—words to which I have no corollary, no distinct definition in that moment, as simple as they seem. Every sentence that I’ve tried to put here to frame the moment feels like a doormat laid on blood, an unstoppable force colliding with an intolerable object in slow motion, beyond the need of being named. Before and after. *** Out of something akin to instinct, I forced my sight along the rest of the letter, not really reading it so much as scanning for a more direct form of information, anything she’d written that might tell me where she was—which, near the end of the second page, I found: I left my body in the nature area where we used to go walking so I could see the sky and trees and hear the birds one last time. Then: I shot myself so it would be over instantly with certainty and no suffering whatsoever. This time when I screamed it was the only word that I could think of: No. I must have sounded like a child jabbed in his guts, squealing. I knew exactly where she meant—I’d run right by it, just minutes before, perhaps a couple hundred yards away. I might have even crossed her path while on the way there had times aligned right, had I known. A sudden frenzy of possible options of what to do next swarmed my brain, none of them quite right, devised in terror. *** At the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and tried to think if I should go inside and get my keys and drive to where she might be, or if I should run there fast as I could, still in my running clothes, already half-exhausted and slick with sweat. Each instant that I didn’t do exactly the right thing felt like the last chance, a window closing. Finally, I took off running at full speed along the sidewalk, shouting her name loud as I could, begging her or me or God or whoever else might be able to hear me: No, please, Molly. Not like this. No matter what I said, there was no answer; no one on the street around me, zero cars. Ahead, the sidewalk seemed to stretch so far beyond me, no matter how fast or hard I ran, as if growing longer with every step; all the houses shaped the same as they were always, full of other people in the midst of their own lives. As I ran, I tried to scan her letter, held out before me with both hands, already wadded up in frantic grip, scanning through fragments of despondent logic that felt impossible to connect with any actual moment in the present as it passed. “Everyone’s life ends, and mine is over now,” she’d written in present tense about the future, which was apparently in the midst of happening right now—or had it already happened? Was there still time? I felt embarrassed, sick to my stomach, to feel my body’s power giving out no matter how hard I tried to maintain the sprint, forced instead at several points to slow down against the burning in my muscles, sucking for air with everything I thought I knew now on the line. *** I couldn’t find her in the fields. The grass was high and muddy, and my running shoes kept getting stuck, sucking half off me, as I worked my way along the path between the unkempt plots of wild grass left overgrown through the winter and the vacant patches where in the spring ahead flowers would bloom Everything felt blurred, moving much faster all around me than I could parse. I was still screaming her name, begging her to answer, to be okay, but my voice just disappeared into the strangling silence. I searched the spots where last summer we’d returned daily to watch a mother duck care for her newborn flock; the bank of reeds where hundreds of frogs would often sing till you got too near; the grown-together pair of trees Molly said she thought would resemble us in our old age someday. I kept calling her number, listening to it ring and ring until the default voicemail recording came back on, asking in an android woman’s voice for me to leave a message. Maybe in the memory on Molly’s phone now there’s a recording of me huffing and howling, just before I really understood that there was no way to go back, that nothing I could say or want or do could reverse what had taken place. *** The longer she failed to turn up, the more I felt a desperate possibility that it wasn’t already too late—that she was out here somewhere, and I could save her, and yet no matter where I turned or how I shouted, nothing changed. I realized I should call 911, holding the phone up to my face while rushing through the mud into the far end of the gardens, clogged with the trees. After what seemed endless ringing, an operator’s voice came on the line, firm and professional, and asked for my emergency. I heard the words come out of my mouth before I thought them: My wife left me a suicide note and I can’t find her. The operator asked me where I was, how they could reach me, and I kept trying to explain, uncertain how to be specific with the location of the gardens, of no immediate address. I can’t find her, I need help, I kept repeating in frustration when I couldn’t seem to get it right, please come and help me. The operator reassured me the police were already on their way, someone would be there very soon. In the meantime, she stayed with me on the line as I hurried through the trees to where the gardens reached their end amid a sort of bog, studded with thickets and obscured patches, brambles, shrubs, so many possible places to end up. Every time I called her name, it felt a little less like her; as if what those syllables had meant to me for so long no longer bore resemblance to itself, and in its place, a widening hole, larger than all else. *** Reaching the end of the bog area, I turned around and started back toward the street. Close to the entrance, along a patch of land where some local group had planted food, I saw two women coming down the slope toward me, one near my age, the other probably her mother. I could see at once they looked concerned, had come down to the area for a reason. “Did you hear a gunshot?” I begged of them in a pinched voice, desperate to hear a different answer than what I thought. Yes, they said, they had—and I felt something deep within me break—ambient anguish so overwhelming I should have fallen to my knees but could no longer remember how. Like having the skin ripped off your head and being asked to run a marathon on live TV where the finish line ends in a lake of burning bile. It’s not that time stands still in such a moment—it’s that there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, and every second lasts forever even as it’s over, as if what you’d once thought must be impossible has become the organizing principle of who you are. With someone else speaking for me now, I asked how long ago they’d heard the gunshot. They said ten minutes. I asked in which direction, and they pointed back the way I’d come. “Are you missing your dog?” the younger woman asked, as I turned to hurry where she’d pointed. “My wife,” I said, over my shoulder, and heard her groan, say, Oh my God. *** I was completely frantic now, even more incensed with the task of finding as the world surrounding bent to blur; all possible locations interlacing in my periphery like abstract glyphs, beneath one of which, somewhere, was Molly’s body. Between my clearer memories of this transition in time’s fabric, huge, wide blank patches, a jagged space in how I’d been that simply no longer exists. I remember moving away from where those women were as through a vortex, past cracks widening within my vision, the sound of my inhale like a black hole. As I hurried back along the gardens’ path again, expecting at any second to come stumbling onto blood, I noticed another form there with me parallel, a man hurrying along the massive drainage pipe that laced the property, trying to help. Back near the far end of the trees, he shouted at me for her phone number so he could call, too, as if she’d answer him instead of me. The only numbers I knew by heart were mine and my mother’s, I realized, stopping to stand there scrolling through my contacts till I found hers, then shouting it across the thickets for anyone to have. Right then, standing in the middle of a forest with my phone out, I felt as far as I have ever felt from salvation; like all the minutiae life is made of was nothing more than illness and detritus, empty gestures, worthless hope. What if I never found her, I imagined, already able to imagine countless variations of the desolation just ahead; what would life be, in this hole, where space-time seemed stretched far beyond the point of breaking, no longer even scrolling forward, but just flapping, tearing skin off, empty space? I could already imagine it just like that—the nature of reality, comprised in violence made so innate you don’t even need to find your loved one’s body to realize, with every passing moment, that you can’t go back, and that what’s ahead is little more than an endless and excruciating blur. I could barely think to lift my feet, but I was moving, through somewhere so far beyond adrenaline it felt like the world had finally actually gone flat, my blood replaced with poison, choking on it, being dragged. Somewhere above me, though, if something was watching, it would have appeared like I was strolling by now, taking care to admire the minor aspects of the terrain, laying my wide eyes on anywhere the weeds and branches might obscure the truth from being found, a secret place that so far only Molly knew the shape of. *** Then I saw. There in the wild grass, just off the path obscured by saplings. Her body on her back facing the sky. Eyes closed. Completely motionless. A handgun clenched between her hands against her chest. Hair pulled up in a bun. Her favorite green coat. Her face blank of expression, already paling. A tiny, darkened wound punched in her chin, near to her throat. A single fly already circling the hole, lurking to feed. I knew at once that she was gone. Something else about me in my brain replaced the rest then, taking me over in that instant, clobbered blank. As if the atmosphere had been ripped off and all the air sucked out around us. Like the world was just a set that’d been abandoned long ago, and I was the only one still down here wandering around. I heard me tell the operator that I’d found her, that she wasn’t breathing. My voice was steady, somehow, already cleaving onto facts. I heard me say that I was not allowed to touch her, right, because this was a crime scene. Because she was without a question dead. My wife was dead. Molly was dead. The operator told me yes. She told me they were having trouble placing my location, but someone would be there soon, so just hang on. I took a step back from Molly’s body, standing over it for just a moment before putting my hands over my face, turning away. I didn’t need to look any longer to see the way it was, now and forever—her image scraped into my brain, drained of all light. I tried to take a knee and instead fell on all fours, no longer screaming but just wailing, for her, for Mom, for God, but choking on it, out of breath, as meanwhile the white-hot silent sun above us burned, an open all-unseeing eye. *** I have no idea how long I lay alone there in the dirt—forever, it would have felt like, but also as if no time at all, as time meant nothing now that there was nothing left to fear. Nothing left, either, to hide me from the blank above, all one long clear pale blue, the surrounding land flat and sandwiched in around me, as in a hole cut through a map. This can’t be real, I kept insisting aloud to no one, simultaneously devastated and enraged, moaning for help and for erasure, anything that could intercede. I felt a sudden buzzing near my right eye, then, the hum of wings and then a landing, and a pinch. I slapped back at the place where I’d been stung, on my right eyelid, inadvertently hitting my own face in place of the bee, already moving on now, having delivered its weird joke. I’d never been stung before but as a child, too young to recall but by my mother’s story of the memory—how I’d stepped on a dead yellow jacket and lost my mind, more scared than hurt. I think I howled then, almost like laughing, pawing at the expectation of a swelling while looking back at Molly’s corpse, as if this was some strange punchline we might share—something just stung me, what the fuck—not yet having felt it sunken in yet that she could no longer respond. “A bee sticks the young king’s hand for the first time,” I’d realize later she’d once written in a poem, as if already having known. “Alone on a slope where apples are rotting / under boughs in a sweet acid smell // and he’d like insects to cover him / for the effect it had on the other children. In rain / minnows feel the pond grow.” *** When the cops arrived, they found me on my stomach, talking to myself. There were two of them, a medic and an officer, and at first they maintained a distance, testing me out, as if I were a criminal or wild animal. Without needing to be asked, I aimed my arm at where Molly’s body was and the officer went to it, the other staying with me, not kneeling down but standing over, asking questions I can’t remember to repeat. Something else was speaking for me now, a part of me that didn’t need the real me to keep going; as if I wasn’t really there, but in a maw. I heard myself call out after the officer to verify what I felt certain I had seen: That she was dead, right? Were they sure? Calmly, clearly, he said yes, simple as that, a legal fact. Was she pregnant? the medic asked, nodding just so when I said no. I could tell they could tell I wasn’t in my right mind when I asked if they could tell where she got the gun from, and if so, would they please be sure to let me know, please? As if there were anything that I could do about it now, or as if at any second someone might come up and tap me on the shoulder, apologize for the confusion, and lead me back to my real life. Instead, by now, other police had begun arriving, masses of them, so it seemed, coming as if out of nowhere to take part in the production, right on cue. Someone put up the yellow CRIME SCENE tape around her body. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to turn my head, to have to remember her there with all the cops huddled above her with their tools. Everybody else around me was all business, working around my open moaning, bawling, barking, with eyes averted, as if at once trying to give me space and do their job. I felt so helpless there in my detainment, never officially told to stay in one place but also knowing that I must, sitting on my ass in the dirt weeping through hubbub, no certain guide but by the law. These people are just at work, I remember thinking, They must feel so thankful they’re not me. What else was there to say? I knew they knew, as best they could, how no consolation could change the fact, and that therefore there was no reason to try to touch me, offer warmth. We were just here to take part today in what the day had produced all on its own—a kind of programmatic existential framework I imagined Molly finding sick satisfaction in, another brutal lesson from the void. *** I wasn’t sure who I could call—for years, my go-to would have been Molly or Mom. The absence of both options doubly underlined the absence of any place to call my own, right then and there. It felt insane, pathetic even, to call our therapist, and so that’s exactly what I did, unable to imagine any other person who’d be the one to force out of my mouth for the first time the awful truth.. Against my ear, my phone felt like a wormhole, sucking my air out as it attached me to the world beyond my reach. Maybe if nobody heard the news, it would undo itself, go back to how it’d been just hours earlier. But our therapist picked up—only my therapist now, no longer ours, I understood, trapped in the midst of the ways words sometimes alter their intentions, right in stride with all the other shifting details of your life—and I heard the words I didn’t want to have to say come flooding out: Hello, it’s me, Blake; I’m very sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call; Molly shot herself today; Molly is dead. I don’t remember what she said, quite; only the texture of the saying, the sound of the voice there on the line held far away, someone who knew us both and understood the impact of those words more than the other people all around me. I could see my body moving and hear the sounds that left my mouth, left with nothing else to do but play the role of my new self. I should call my sister, we concluded, after talking it through, like jumping forward through the hoops of future time arriving, point by point, like any day, though once I’d done that, sharing the news with someone hundreds of miles away, I feared it would become realer somehow, a final terrible seal forced popped. People would know soon, then it’d become gossip, old news, word of mouth. There’d no longer remain any way, then, that I could hold off reality from taking course, filling in around me where I was not. *** I wasn’t allowed to leave the scene. Instead, I was asked to tell and retell my story of what happened over and over, first to one detective, then another, then another, like hellish Matryoshka dolls with badges and guns. I could feel their eyes searching my eyes, reading me as I told the story as best I could. They asked if I’d had any sense that this could happen, which made me feel embarrassed to say yes, trying to explain in so many feeble words Molly’s persona, her personal history, her cryptic poetry. “I like poetry too,” one detective interrupted with a grin, somewhere between considerate and dense, like we weren’t really talking about what we were talking about. I had to hand over Molly’s letter, which I’d been clutching this whole time, messy with mud and crumpled up, now considered evidence. This letter was my last link to her mind, I felt, therefore to any frame that might be found to explicate her reasoning, and now I had to hand it over, following procedure like some suspect on TV. I begged them to be sure to return to me, to not let it end up missing, aware at the same time in my periphery of the handling of the body of my wife, the hunt for facts, none of which could ever change what had just happened, much less whatever might come next. *** I was busy reiterating my story for another detective when across the mud I noticed Matt, one of my oldest friends, running toward me. The look on his face, the sound of his voice, the way he hugged me to him: now there was no mistaking what had occurred, no way to keep it separate from the whole rest of my life. I felt my limbs go limp to be embraced, as all of what had kept me upright no longer needed to hold on. At the same time, still in shock, I felt my body holding back there on the cusp, not letting me implode yet, as somehow the world continued on. I could touch my face and feel it there, part of my body, but who was I, and why, and how? Had what just happened actually happened, or was I living in a hell world, an exact model of how it’d once been with just this one major detail brought to change? Like any second everybody would start laughing, including Molly, who’d get up and come to take me in her arms, without a need for explanation besides to say that she wasn’t really gone. Then they’d roll the sky back, too, and show me everything else I hadn’t known yet about my life, about existence. Instead, I listened in as Matt spoke up on my behalf, asserting that I should be allowed to leave as soon as possible and go home. Hearing him say home, however, reminded me that the word already clearly no longer meant the same as it last had, and in a way, that felt more frightening than standing out here in broad daylight at a crime scene, where at least there was a formal process underway. What choice did I have, though, but to keep going, unless I was ready, willing, and able to die too? Yes, that made sense. Molly was my wife, my love—shouldn’t I go with her, having failed her? Why should I be allowed to survive beyond this day? Already, in thinking back, I felt an undeniable desire that instead of doing the right thing calling the cops, I’d instead taken the gun from Molly’s hands, laid down beside her, and, as if somehow in her honor, doubled down. At my most dire, any other option outside of that, now and for some time, would bear the tint of a pitiful formality, tempered only by conditioning, as if all we really are is just the shadow of what we’re not. *** I didn’t want to get mud all over the inside of Matt’s car. I remained formal and polite even in zombie-mode, relieved at least to have something else to do. Back at our address, I trudged up the same set of concrete steps where I’d only just been standing when I discovered her suicide note taped to the door, a hanging haze there like the fumes after explosion. The front face of our house looked like a facsimile, designed to trick me into believing I existed—a secret feeling shared between me and it alone, as to most anybody else, outside my mind, it was just another piece of property. I imagine that’s how haunting works—only those who know can parse the signal linking the residue of history to how we are, what we’re becoming amid our slow transition, step by step. I sat on the stoop with my head in my hands, trying to remember how to think, or not to think. I was focused, mostly, on her letter, getting it back, so I could read it in full, over and over; as if, like Molly, only work could save me now. Matt volunteered to go back down and ask for information, if I’d be okay on my own, and I told him that was fine, that it might be good for me to have some time alone now, so I could feel the way I felt beyond the reach of other eyes. I was well-accustomed to this aloneness, this want for independence, having already accepted as natural law that no one could ever reach me but myself, the bells and whistles of attention that made most others seem to feel better were for me more a nuisance than a balm. As he drove off, I went inside and closed myself inside the bathroom, walking right past my reflection without looking, not wanting yet to have to see, and past the mostly pastel-colored painting Molly had made in college and hung here, as if for forever, having planned this ending to our story all this time. I stripped my muddy running clothes off and turned the shower on hot and lay face down on the tile beneath the spray. I can’t remember what words I made, only the texture of my voice, mumbling in monotone under my breath as if to anyone who still might hear me from Beyond, the same way that I had once, as a child, tried to comfort myself mimicking Mom’s lullabies. *** When Matt got back, he handed me a brown paper bag containing Molly’s letter and her phone, along with the business card of the investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Center and a second note by Molly found on her body, scrawled on the back side of a small envelope: VOLUNTARY EXIT. I am an organ donor. My husband Blake Butler (my phone number) I took Molly’s letter into my office, closed the glass doors. I knelt on the floor and read it from beginning to end once and then immediately again, trying to find some kernel of her voice there, something alive. These were Molly’s final words, I realized, believing in them as some form of access to her brain—despite how out-of-sync they seemed, like a lost child trying to figure out how to explain her situation to herself while standing front and center in harm’s way. Here was what she had left for me to hear. A widening terror within me renewed itself with every breathless word and hard return, underlined by an undeniable form of failure, hers and mine. If only I had one more chance to hold her, I imagined, to tell her everything she meant to me no matter what. If only I could tear this paper up, as if it alone had been the cause and not the receipt. Any chance to contradict her logic, though, to reach beyond it, had been not only lopped off at the hilt, but imminently infected by the violent silence of the world—including the matted, jagged sunlight pouring in now through the windows, getting all over everything we’d ever had, nowhere to turn but toward the absence. From Molly, to be published by Archway Editions in November 2023. Blake Butler is the author of nine book-length works, including Alice Knott, 300,000,000, Sky Saw, There is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. In 2021, he was long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT. View the full article -
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My First Thriller: D.P. Lyle
Cardiologist Doug “D.P.” Lyle kept telling himself he would write a novel someday—someday when he finally retired. His biggest problem was he loved his career and had no plans to retire. Was this just an excuse not to write? He finally asked himself the age-old cliché: “If not now, when?” Now finally won out when he was about to turn 50 and “someday” became his second career. He wrote. And wrote. For ten years he wrote, enduring 27 drafts. Finally, he completed his novel Stress Fracture. It was his first professionally published novel, although he’d self-published an earlier one. He’d also had several non-fiction books published on forensics topics for writers—he is a doctor, after all. (Poison, anyone?) Lyle is a natural born storyteller from Huntsville, Alabama whose Scots-Irish storytelling chops seeped down through Appalachia. “Down there, if you can’t tell a story, they won’t feed you,” he says. “They just put you behind the barn.” “Swapping lies,” is how he describes it. “I had always wanted to write fiction simply because I had stories I wanted to tell but I was never sure I could.” “I took some classes at the University of California-Irvine and then joined a couple of writing groups and wrote a lot. I also read dozens of books on writing and attended many writers’ conferences where I heard others speak on how they construct stories and write dialogue and create characters, and all the other components of good writing. So, I basically learned from books and from people and from there by simply sitting down and writing. The latter is probably the best teacher.” He began writing at odd times, before going to the office or hospital, or in the evening. “I got the bug and couldn’t quit.” It took him two and a half years to complete his first novel, or so he thought. “I was learning.” A year into his work, he befriended Bay Area book agent Kimberly Cameron at a San Diego State writers conference. “We hit it off and became friends long before we worked together.” When Stress Fracture was completed 18 months later, he sent all 138,000 words to her in a big box. “I thought New York Times best seller list, here I come…She felt differently. ‘There’s a story in here somewhere,’ she said, ‘I just can’t find it.’” She said she would read it again if he would rewrite and pare down. So, he did, and she rejected his second attempt. He rewrote it again and again. “I set it aside for two or three years and kept coming back to it.” He changed the location, title, and protagonist. “The only thing that stayed the same was the bad guy and the real story plot.” The fourth version—now titled Stress Fracture—he sent to Kimberley. It was down to 85,000 words. She called a week later. “I finally produced the book that met her standards.” Even though it had morphed into a much more sophisticated version of his original attempt, “It all started with one story that I would not let go of. I think that’s a lesson.” And, he learned, “It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I just assumed, like everything else in life, if I wanted to do it, I could go do it…Some of it’s very naïve to think you can do anything you want to do…Those are lessons you learn. I assumed if you can tell a story, you can write a story. It’s a whole other kettle of fish…I don’t think it gets easier over time.” In between novels, Lyle has used his medical knowledge to write non-fiction craft books for fiction writers eager to get their murders correct. He answers all types of questions about poison, gun shots, blunt force trauma, and more. His writing brought him to the attention of Hollywood, where he has consulted on numerous crime procedural shows and movies. And yet, he always returns to his love of writing crime fiction. Writing a novel, he says, is like handling a critically ill patient in intensive care with numerous medical issues going on simultaneously. They’re referred to as “circling the drain” because the doctors could lose them at any moment, says Doug. “You have all of these things in the air and must weigh your choices because it will affect organs differently. Writing a novel is the same thing. They all mesh—all of the moving parts. “You can’t mess up one of them—no bad dialogue, bad narration, bad plot, stupid characters. You must get all of these components working together smoothly. You can kill it so easily by ignoring one component. Scribbling out a scene? Most writers can do that in their sleep. But putting it all together is extremely hard.” And just as important, Doug says, is plot sequence. Writers must understand when to release every tidbit of information at the proper time in their story. It sounds simple but realizing when the right moment is to add a certain piece of critical information to a crime novel keeps reader interested and the story moving. It’s difficult. “Novice writers,” he says, “put everything in the first chapter.” “Ain’t no crying here,” he says. “Writing is blood sport.” It’s certainly not for the faint of heart. So, if it’s so tough, why bother? “I mean, what other job could you have where you can grab a cup of coffee and sit down and kill a couple of folks without even getting dressed?” he says. “And you get to play with so many cool imaginary friends.” “I like sitting before the computer screen and making up stuff. And I think that is an important lesson for all writers—you must enjoy the process to be successful. If you don’t like sitting down and putting words on the page and constructing a story, then you should do something else because it will only be frustrating and maddening if you’re not having fun.” “A lot of it was his perseverance…he just kept trying,” says Cameron. And that is the difference between those who get published and those who don’t. ___________________________________ Stress Fracture ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 10 years, two months I wanted to be a writer: Age 40 Experience: Cardiologist Writing Time: 10 years (27 rewrites) Agents Contacted: One Agent Responses: One Agent Search: One Writer’s Conference First Submission to Publisher: 2003 Time to Sell Novel: Two Months First Novel Agent: Kimberley Cameron First Novel Editor: Christy Philliippe First Novel Publisher: Medallion Press Inspiration: James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard Advice to Writers: Writing is an art and a craft. The first draft should be the art and the revisions the craft. Write fast. Edit slowly. Website: www.DPLyleMD.com Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, and Tosca Lee. View the full article -
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DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith (Book Review)
As some of you may know I am currently undertaking a creative writing PhD with the catchy title Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction. This involves reading and watching a lot of climate change fiction (cli-fi) and the Fantasy-Hive have kindly given me space for a (very) occasional series of articles where I can share my thoughts and observations. Climate change fiction is dogged by the conflict between presenting stories about empathetically engaging individual characters and stories which depict global challenges and effective collective responses to them. Nikoleris et all expressed a hopeful conclusion that “Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate change moves from being distant and abstract to close and personal…and [can] create space for personal reflections.” (Nikoleris, Stripple, & Tenngart, 2017, p. 11). However, Admussen in Six Proposals for the reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change (2016) admonished that authors should “retire the portrait of the single soul.” Admussen echoes Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (Ghosh, 2016) who expressed a concern about the capacity of realist fiction, with its focus on individual character development in a familiar real setting, to capture the reach and sweep of climate change; “Similarly at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike” (p. 80). There is then this tension for authors of climate change fiction. On the one hand, they may meet Nikoleris et al’s aims in giving the reader compelling individuals facing complex dilemmas whose plight generates empathy (and so promotes reflection on climate change). On the other hand they may cleave closer to Admussen and Ghosh and try to depict a global problem and a collective response. Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019) falls firmly in the first camp with a very close third person perspective on a young man Jem, usually referred to in the text simply as the Boy. Although Jem inhabits a sprawling rusting farm of wind turbines some 80 miles in radius in the middle of the North Sea, there is a claustrophobic feel to the setting, with its barren uniformity and a cast tiny – almost Beckett-like – in number. Besides Jem – the Boy – we meet only three other characters and one of them is apparently dead. There is the Old Man who shares Jem’s duties and home on a rusting accommodation rig for maintenance workers in the centre of the wind farm. There is the mysterious and well-fed pilot who delivers supplies, in his electric boat, on a rather idiosyncratic schedule, and there is Jem’s father seen briefly in flashback at their moment of parting. Jem came to the rig some years before the present time of the story, contractually obliged as his father’s next of kin, to take on his father’s maintenance duties after his father “reneged” on his contract by disappearing. Compelled, conscripted even, to work alongside his dad’s co-worker – the Old Man – Jem’s life is one of dull drudgery trying to keep decaying machinery functioning. The Boy and the Old Man, like latter day lighthouse keepers, jostle along with a well described mix of companionship and antipathy. When leaving the rig they each stack tins in complex security measures at the doors to their rooms to try and detect any signs of trespass by the co-worker while they were away. The Old Man makes home brew and trawls the relatively shallow seabed for vestiges of the lost neolithic settlements of Doggerland, submerged in a rush at the end of the last ice age. The Boy fishes with a makeshift line that catches only floating plastic and old boots and throws himself with professional pride into the hopeless task of maintaining the dwindling field of still functional wind turbines. In this ambition he is often thwarted by the Old Man’s desire to trade the best spare parts for different kinds of contraband with the pilot of the unreliable supply boat. Smith’s prose flows smoothly with some eye-catching images and lines laced with a dry wit. Reflecting on the perpetual noise of their environment as they take a lift up the shaft of a turbine. There was always the sea, the slow pulse of the blades and generators. And the wind, twisting its coarse fibres through everything. (p. 18). Working in the cramped quarters of a generator nacelle His arms were aching and he could feel the first raw edge of a pulled muscle in his back. (p. 72). Straining to get into a boat in a freezing cold storm His thoughts shrank back to the last warm cavities of his skull. (p. 139). Having discovered a coffee machine and overused it, It turned out that the coffee machine could be made to dispense water too, which the boy only found out after his hands shook so much that he pushed the wrong button. (p. 165). The pilot – in the role of not-quite-stranger coming to town – provides a narrative impetus with a revelation that spikes Jem’s interest in what happened to his father. This sets him on a quest to find out more and maybe make his own escape from this form of indentured servitude. What is unclear is how far the Old Man might be a trustworthy accomplice, or an obstacle to be overcome. That – along with the threatening vagaries of the weather – makes for a brisk page turning story. Besides the personal ambition of escaping and finding out his father’s fate, Jem asks himself relatively few questions about the world in which he finds himself. The climate change elements of Smith’s vision of the future form the backdrop to Jem’s story, rather than the driver of it, with the reader invited to consider the questions Jem doesn’t ask himself. Smith’s future is a dystopian one of a world in decay. The wind farm has grown through a long-forgotten succession of development spurts. The most advanced wind turbines lie furthest from the central maintenance rig, erected in a last burst of expansion that never saw them properly commissioned, so even the seats in their comfortable nacelles are still coated in delivery cellophane. The rig itself was designed for a much larger crew, with empty mess decks and accommodation rooms and a buckled pool table with broken cues the only entertainment. The machinery is failing – the farm’s percentage performance slipping inexorably downwards, losing several percentage points in the course of the story. The Boy and the Old Man have not the tools, nor the spares, nor the range in their electric maintenance boat, to do more than tinker with more local turbines. Yet, they work from duty – or boredom – rather than any sense of external oversight. Provided they stay at their posts, neither their work, nor the failing output of the wind farm seems to attract any attention – or even communication – from the Company that not so much employs them as owns them. Their food comes in tins of homogenised protein and carbohydrate, made in vats not grown in fields as the Old Man explains the supply chain to the Boy (p. 171) in a vision of future nutrition that is far less favourable (and flavoursome) than George Monbiot conceived in Regenesis (2022). The chart that the Boy glimpses aboard the Pilot’s boat shows a land that is losing its battle with rising sea levels “There were flood defences, drainage fields and reinforced beaches now well below the waterline.” The pilot’s pencilled annotations and erasures show “a multitude of floating settlements and trading posts …[and] also faint marks where other settlements had been erased” (p. 67). Although we see next to nothing of the world beyond the wind farm, trade continues – exemplified by the pilot’s bartering for anything of value that the old man and the boy can scavenge. There doesn’t seem to be any government, but there is the Company that acts with the force of law. “It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract…as the only next of kin this duty fell to him.” (p. 33). Capitalism it seems has not only survived the deluge but grown more powerful through it. The legal obligation that binds Jem to fil his father’s place is not only indentured service, but a hereditary one akin to slavery without any mention of pay, or shore leave. The Company has established a corporate hegemony. “In his lifetime the only places to buy anything were the company stores” (p. 47) although that hegemony post-dates the erection of the windfarm and its original more generous maintenance staff. “It was easy to forget that there were things that existed before the Company took over” (p. 47). In tone Doggerland resembles John Lanchester’s bleak novel, The Wall (2019) in which a near future Britain is protected from rising sea levels and the concomitant refugees by an encircling wall which must be patrolled by conscripts while an unelected elite lord it over them. The enigmatic Pilot, garrulous, well-fed, and self-serving illustrates the corruption in a trade system where everyone demands a profit margin. As he tells the Boy, “If I gave everyone everything they needed, there’d be no need to trade anymore, would there?” (p. 219). The pilot also draws a somewhat semantic distinction between the “messiness” of need and the potential hard feelings at unsatisfied needs, as compared to the more desirable idea of “want” which keeps exchanges “businesslike.” Whether it is satisfying need or want, the pilot uses his position to extort from the Boy and the Old man the things that are most precious to them. For the Old Man this means his collection of possibly neolithic artefacts dredged from the submerged seabed. Like Smith’s Doggerland, Rym Kechacha’s Dark River (2020) draws links between the neolithic past and the climate changed and challenged near-future, although Smith’s interludes into the past are more brief observational notes unlike Kechacha’s protagonist driven narrative. However, both Kechacha and Smith touch on the Tsunami that swamped Doggerland in 6200 B.C. with Smith’s nice line about the wave diffracting particular pleasing to my ex-physics teacher’s eye. “There is barely a pause. Just, perhaps, a slight adjustment in direction and flow as the wave bends, folds, then passes on, leaving behind nothing but open sea.” (p. 53). I heard of a phrase used in the American coast guard to upbraid people fretting over the relative minutiae of their everyday lives – it is “The sea doesn’t care.” In his glimpse into the past millennia of the ice age, Smith emphasises the ultimate irrelevance of human activity to natural forces. “It is a simple history – of water turned to ice, returning to water. And, barely noticeable, somewhere in the middle of this cycle, plants and animals and people made this place their home” (p. 54). Emmi Itaranta’s The Memory of Water (2014) explores a similar theme about the transience of human life set against the near eternal endurance of water that we shape and borrow but never master. One reading of Doggerland’s two timelines would be to draw out not just the transience of human life, but the dramatic differences in climate that a few degrees temperature rise can make – turning the original Doggerland from fertile plain, to brackish swamp and then finally submerged Atlantis. There’s a reason flood myths appear in many major mythologies. Like Itaranta – with her emphasis on the persistence of plastic in the “plastic grave” tip site where the protagonists scavenge for useful items – Smith draws attention to the pervasive fields of plastic in Doggerland’s future, not just shoals of plastic bags, but the windfarm elements themselves. “When the whole farm finally got eaten away, the only things left would be its plastic parts – the latches and hooks, clips and cable-ties.” (p. 51). Furthermore, when the Old Man uses a system of rods and T-bar to draw core samples from the seabed, what comes up is not simply soil. “Blue and green sand. He looked closer. They weren’t sand. All of the containers in the room were full of tiny fragments of plastic, sorted and stored according to colour and size” (p. 201). By contrast with the omnipresent plastic the non-human world makes only a brief fleeting appearance as a front of fish course through the farm, though none ever appear on the end of the boy’s fishing line. So Smith’s compelling central narrative of the relationship between the Boy and the Old Man, mediated by a few interventions and asides from the Pilot, depicts a future ruined by corporate control, rising sea levels, plastic pollution and trade which prioritises greed over need. It is a dystopian vision and Jon Raymond author of Denial (2022) observed that dystopian visions “maybe at one time served a purpose, but at this point, have come to seem just like a wish fulfilment fantasy to me, or some sort of death trip” (Raymond, 2022). However, climate change fiction, like climate science itself, can address the problem of the climate crisis on many fronts and in a variety of ways. As Ian McEwan, author of Solar (2010) noted “Fiction hates preachiness…nor does it much like facts and figures…nor do readers like to be hectored” (2007). Smith tells a good story and sets it in a frame that leaves it to the reader to pick up the peripheral context of climate, corporate and environmental catastrophe as well as the proven fragility in humanity’s stewardship of the world. Doggerland neither charts our path into the outrun of the climate crisis, nor offers a route to collectively avoid it. However, it does hold up a disturbing vision of the future that might just make some people stop and think. More importantly, it is also a well written and captivating story – for without that, Cli-Fi is nothing. References Admussen, N. (2016, May-June). Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from criticalflame.org: http://criticalflame.org/six-proposals-for-the-reform-of-literature-in-the-age-of-climate-change/ Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Itaranta, E. (2014). Memory of Water. New York: HarperCollins. Kechacha, R. (2020). Dark River. London: Unsung Stories. Lanchester, J. (2019). The Wall. London: Faber & Faber. McEwan, i. (2010). Solar. New York: Random House. Monbiot, G. (2022). Regenesis. London: Penguin. Nikoleris, A., Stripple, J., & Tenngart, P. (2017). Narrating climate futures: shared socioeconomic pathways and literary fiction. Climatic Change, 307–319. Raymond, J. (2022). Denial. New York: Simon & Schuster. Raymond, J. (2022, July 22). Denial Presents a Compellingly Low-Key Vision of Post-Revolution Portland. (C. Reed, Interviewer) Portland: Portland Monthly. Retrieved August 1, 2022, from https://www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-culture/2022/07/denial-jon-raymond-portland-author-interview Smith, B. (2019). Doggerland. London: 4th Estate. Tomkin, B. (2007, April 20). Ian McEwan: I hang on to hope in a tide of fear. The Independent. Retrieved from enjoyment.indepdendent.co.uk: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2424436.ece The post DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith (Book Review) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article -
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6 Ways Clichés Can Help Your Writing
photo adapted / Horia Varlan Ah, the dreaded cliché. It sneaks into our writing with nary a noise, and yet is received by readers with a resounding clunk. Most writers go to great lengths to avoid them. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, on whose wings Janet Fitch’s debut White Oleander found its well-deserved audience, Fitch said she approached her work like a poet, replacing any combination of words that she’d ever heard before. While this is more effort than many of us are willing to expend, it makes sense from a business perspective. Why should a publisher pay a wordsmith to regurgitate combinations so recognizable that readers are numb to them? We need to do the work of creative writers and come up with word clusters that will snag the reader’s interest and inspire fresh thought. But to sidestep clichés at all costs is to miss out on a handy tool that’s available to all writers. After all, when we need to drive home a nail, will we refuse the hammer just because it is a simple and easily recognized tool? Consider the following arguments in support of the lowly cliché. 1. Clichés are true. Why else would they be overused? Even the claim that “fiction writers make things up to find out what is true” may now be a cliché, but it rings the bell of truth loud and clear. (“Loud and clear”—I’m on a roll!) 2. Clichés make a convenient placeholder while drafting. If your first draft lacks sparkle due to an overuse of clichés, this simply proves their ubiquity: finding clichés conveniently lined up on the nearest shelf, your mind made good use of them while laying down your story. This is smart. Further innovation at this point would impede the story as it flows from mind to virgin page. The time to replace worn-out phrases with more evocative language is in later drafts, as Fitch did, when you’re sure that sentence is needed. If the cliché conveys just the right meaning, try refreshing it with a twist. As you would with any edited prose, demand that your twisted cliché create voice, deepen characterization, and/or further plot. Here’s what Mark Z. Danielewski did to spiff up his prose in an excerpt from the cult classic, House of Leaves. My guess is that this exchange between his narrator and the woman he just met began with inspiration from the Supremes hit, “(Whenever You’re Near) I Hear a Symphony.” (And let’s face it—any song Motown produced in the 60s is probably a cliché today). “Thank you,” I said, thinking I should kneel. “Thank you,” she insisted. Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don’t know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-f***ing-sweet symphony. I don’t know what I’m saying. I know absolutely sh*t about symphonies. I don’t know whether Danielewski wrote this way from the get-go or if it was in revision that he waxed symphonic. But it was entertaining, right? Even out of context, this riff perfectly evokes the effect this woman has had on the protagonist. 3. Clichés provide a recognizable jumping off point for your own creativity. A cliché can create just the right axis for your own creative spin. In House of Leaves, for example, when our narrator meets this woman, she leaves him “reeling.” (Bet you never heard that one before!) But look what Danielewski did with that, by unspooling thoughts from deep within his character’s reeling point of view: And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified. In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, “Who’s this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?” which it turns out I didn’t think at all but accidentally said out loud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now. While trying to ground a character’s reaction in visceral sensations, it pays to throw our creativity into a higher gear. Human biology and physiology offer us a limited palette with which to color those reactions. Heavy sighs, fluttering stomachs, clenched jaws, throbbing temples—the worth of a visceral reaction will be diminished if its clichéd nature threatens reader engagement. Frederik Backman, in his novel My Grandmother Wants to Tell You She’s Sorry, finds fresh ways to spin such reactions that are consistent with his characters’ voices. The woman takes such a deep breath that if you threw a coin into it you’d never hear it hit the bottom. Mum’s sigh as she answers is so deep that it feels as if Elsa’s sheets are ruffled by the draft. Mum sighs and smiles at the same time, as if one emotional expression is trying to swallow the other. 4. Clichéd characterization is a fast track to shame. If your character is afraid of becoming a walking cliché, he will gain our sympathy—you only need set up why. Even now, 20 years since reading Deception on His Mind by Elizabeth George, I remember the way this opening line had me cringing: “To Ian Armstrong, life had begun its current downward slide the moment he’d been made redundant.” The powerful inner conflict at the heart of many a protagonist is born of the desire to fit in with others even while desperately hoping that their individuality matters. This conundrum is so central to our human existence that readers gobble up such stories at every reading level, from P.D. Eastman’s displaced hatchling in the children’s book Are You My Mother to cancer warrior Lucy Grealy’s memoir The Autobiography of a Face, to adult fiction, such as Kim Michele Richardson’s blue-skinned librarian in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. The premise is refreshed through details. 5. Clichés can sketch a quick background. Think a dark tale in the City of Light, sin in the City of Angels, murder and mayhem in the City of Brotherly Love. These backdrops quickly evoke the nature of the conflict to come. Clichéd characters can also provide a backdrop that will make a protagonist pop. An example might be the story of a woman in her 40s who is still trying and discarding jobs and partners while seeking a sense of self, set against the life of her sidekick, the cheerleader who married the high school quarterback and settled in their hometown with two kids and a minivan. The description of the high school power couple may read as jealousy at first, but the cliché will set up the expectation that nothing is ever as easy as this couple makes it seem. 6. Clichés provide a welcome shorthand in a query. How do “friends-to-lovers” romances, “coming-of-age” young adult tales, and “cat and mouse” thrillers still get published? It’s because such tropes, so overused that they are a form of cliché, are easy to latch onto. On the business end, they give publishing professionals a quick grasp of your story’s underpinnings, assuring them it’s the kind of book they can sell; on the consumer end, they assure the reader they have picked up the kind of story that appeals to them. Once you set that expectation, you can share how the perspective of your protagonist adds its own special twist. If you are convinced that your book is “one of a kind” and “never-before encountered,” good luck selling it. The world of traditional publishing, even while looking for the next new thing, bases sales potential, acquisitions, and author advances on what has come before. Which means that debut authors—and experienced authors who stay in the game—must figure out how to build something new on a well-known base. Clichés are here to stay, so best think of them as a playground. You might be looking at the same old array of swings, slides, monkey bars, and merry-go-rounds, but there are an infinite number of ways to play with them. Let’s practice. Whether by indulging in a Danielewski-style rant, adding a Backman enhancement, or sharing your own inimitable style, take one of these clichéd titles from a sixties hit and give it a creative spin. You can’t hurry love I heard it through the grapevine Dancing in the street Ain’t no mountain high enough The tears of a clown I look forward to reading what you come up with! [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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Ivy Pochoda on Women, Violence, and the Power of Crime Stories
Set largely during covid lockdown, Sing Her Down introduces Florida, recently released from prison due to issues with overcrowding, thus finding herself with a second chance at life. Pursued by a woman named Dios, also recently released from the same prison, Florida has to reckon with her own past and what the future might hold in a world that seems to be on fire, the pandemic only intensifying the sense of desperation that permeates Florida’s world. Florida skips parole and travels out of state to find her most prized possession, a car she left behind when she was locked away—only Dios, and Florida’s own true nature, can’t seem to leave Florida alone. Sing Her Down proves Pochoda can occupy any voice, any time, any place, pushing her characters to the type of reckoning that would make Flannery O’Connor proud. Ivy’s brightest gift is her ability to morph into anyone and anything, occupying a different type of person as easily as she might cover any landscape, making her home in any and every fictional universe imaginable. Sing Her Down is Ivy’s most brilliant work yet, and Ms. Pochoda shows no indication of stopping her rise any time soon. Ivy, who found a natural home in crime fiction with Visitation Street, sat down to discuss with me how she fell into crime fiction, a genre which suits her spectacularly well, especially in answering the questions which interest her most, and exploring the people she wants us all to find a part of ourselves in. Matthew Turbeville: Ivy, I’m so excited to interview you for CrimeReads. I have loved your fiction since reading Visitation Street. You have a voice that’s so distinctively yours, much like Megan Abbott, Alafair Burke, and Attica Locke. Which writers have most informed your writing and shaped you most during your formative years? Which books and authors do you continue to turn to for inspiration? Ivy Pochoda: I think the book that inspired me most now is Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan and I are different in age, but he grew up two blocks from where I grew up. When I was first trying to write, I thought you had to write super wild imaginative, made-up books, and I tried to write these super wild books, and then I read Fortress of Solitude. I found out you can write a book about your neighborhood, and you can make it poetic and beautiful, and take the small things that occur to you on a daily basis and turn it into art and fiction. It sort of changed my life. I went from trying to invent crazy, wild stories to writing more closely observed fiction about what was going on outside my window. For me, that was a game-changer. I reread Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson routinely. There are small moments in that book where he has the most poetic and beautiful observations about gritty things and finds the most beauty and joy in the most desperate and down-and-out characters. I look at those two books quite a lot, and at Zadie Smith’s NW. I admire her amazing use of dialogue and language and flexibility with form. I love how she summons that neighborhood in northwest London, which is something I do and something Jonathan clearly does. Also, it’s no secret that I reread Blood Meridian a lot! There are also so many new books I’m inspired by—one example is Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth. I love seeing how she stacks all those stories together into a novel. MT: You write crime fiction, which is such a great match for your gritty voice and your ability to slip into worlds outside your own. Has your fiction always had such a crime fiction slant? What do you feel is so inviting and enticing about crime fiction, and how did you make the move into writing in this genre? IP: It was a complete accident. When I wrote Visitation Street, had been inspired by Fortress of Solitude and wrote about something outside of my window, and at that time I was thinking my book was a combination of this and Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. To my surprise, when it was sold to my publisher, they told me it was crime fiction. I thought I was writing straightforward literature, and my editor asked me, “Well, what did you think was happening? You wrote a book where two girls go missing on page one, and you find out what happens on the last page—that’s a mystery.” Back then, I didn’t know anything about the crime community. I thought I was going to be marginalized and no one is going to respect the writing—not the story, but the writing. I feel like it’s the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me in my writing career. Win awards, write a best-seller, who knows, but the fact that this book moved me into the crime community is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. The people! I went to the Edgar Awards recently, and the love in that room, for everything from cozies to hard crime to procedurals, it’s the most supportive community out there. Obviously, it has some problems. We need to do better with representation and embracing diversity and new voices, but it’s way ahead of where it used to be and other genres. I love crime fiction because people love to read it and it’s not a chore, and people embrace it. It gives you the flexibility to mess around with tone or structure or form, and it’s super fun. It doesn’t necessarily have to be cut and dry murder and white guy PI who solves it! Now we can write about all sorts of things, and the crime doesn’t have to be the center of the story. MT: It really feels like the crime fiction community is a family. IP: It really is. MT: I love the idea that you write fiction that allows women to be as violent as in the fiction of authors like Cormac McCarthy. It helps dispel this notion that women don’t have a certain violence to them, and it steers clear of the only violence from women appearing in movies where actresses like Charlize Theron wear make-up and fat suits in order to play a villain. But even in your novel, characters like Florida change their names to allow themselves to slip in and out of this more chaotic, sometimes sinister world. What is the importance of allowing Florida to move in and out of her own violent persona, and how do you avoid the notion that women who enact their own forms of violence must necessarily become villains? IP: I feel like one of the things that’s in this book, not in Florida but in Dios’ character, is code-switching. Dios is a Latina girl from Queens, who is given a scholarship to a really ritzy predominantly white school, and from there, she has to negate her sense of self, which is not why she’s violent, it’s just something that’s happened to her. It’s funny you bring that up about Florida, because she’s also code-switching. She feels like to be safe and survive in prison, she has to pretend she isn’t that person that she was before she committed these crimes. The secret is she is that person. To survive, she has to dissociate, and she is not able to embrace who she really is and almost allows this persona to be created for her. I’m glad you brought up Monster because we are so able to embrace violent women if they are violent because men have done something to them. We only can understand women’s violence if it’s put through a male gaze or male lens. I wrote my thesis in college on Macbeth and Oresteia, and when Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon or when Lady Macbeth commits various acts of violence, the vocabulary that the playwrights use is very anti-maternalistic—“unsex me now,” “rip this baby from my breast”—there’s no baby! When Clytemnestra is talking about her strength, she is framing it as the nurture has been ripped from her. We can only talk about this by keeping men in the picture or keeping women rebelling against their feminine nature in the picture, and we love Aileen Wuornos’ story because she is a prostitute and she has been raped and men have done this to her. We love stories where women have been attacked or their kids were taken away from them by a man. We forgive violent women if their violence is inspired by some original male violence, but we cannot deal with violent women who are violent under their own sail. It’s infuriating to me. These women exist, but we never tell their stories. MT: One of the most compelling aspects of your writing is your ability to inhabit multiple voices all at once. Reading your work is an amazing experience, where I’m looking to engage with multiple characters who are beyond me, but finding some of myself in every character. When you write, how do you go about tackling the different voices and narrative strands of each character to keep them individual and distinct? IP: Let me tackle that in two parts, because it’s really interesting what you said about identifying with yourself in every character. That’s exactly the point. I want to go back to Visitation Street. When I wrote Visitation Street, there was like all these different characters: a drunk white musician, a Black girl who’s getting in trouble at school, and others. What I thought when creating these voices is how they’re all having a problem or there’s something going on in their lives, and I had to figure out how I would react in those situations. I put a little bit of myself in all of them regardless of race, class, gender. I found something that they were reacting to, like the failed musician—I put some of my own disappointments in there—or the girl who is having issues with her best friend, which is really about me growing up. Identify with yourself in every character, that’s exactly the point. These people are not nonfiction–they are fictional people–and I do like to have a whole cast of characters people can find points of identification with. Someone like Dios, who is both from a disadvantaged background and goes to a ritzy college, is beautiful, violent, well-read and misunderstood. The reader should be able to find one thing they can relate to, whether it’s “I went to a fancy college” or “I am misunderstood” or “people deny me my strength because I’m a woman,” and there are all these things that make up a person. We should have more empathy for people in our lives, so I like to create characters who are fully rounded so we can find points of identification in them. Now, as to the voices. There comes a point in your writing career where you can say, “I can just do it,” and I can just do it. I remember Jennifer Egan talking about A Visit from the Goon Squad, and she said, “I went running and I ran, like, eight miles and I forgot to pick up my kid from school and the whole plot appeared to me,” and I thought, “bitch, you’re lying!” But the voices just come. This book is a little less voice-heavy to me than my other books and these voices change. I was really inspired by Blood Meridian and that open ending, and there’s this distance in this voice, and I sort of wanted to make it Dios’s voice, so that voice just started talking to me one night, and that sounded like an kind of overly educated person who’s a criminal, and I kept listening, thinking of what she would be saying, riffing on Blood Meridian in my head as if a woman was narrating it. When creating voices, I give every character one thing they’re obsessed with. So, Dios is obsessed with Florida and women being denied their own power, and Florida has her obsession about the car and the tree. I circle their voice around their obsession, and I can sort of find them. MT: I remember meeting Jennifer Egan at a literary festival and I remember her saying something along the lines of how she rarely wrote from a woman’s point-of-view because she didn’t want her own self to bleed into her characters—and I love that you do not seem to give a shit about that. IP: It’s funny you say that because Wonder Valley only has one woman in it, and when it came out, I got a lot of pushback on that book. I was in conversation with Megan Abbott, and she asked, “What are you doing next?” My agent was sitting in the front row, and I sort of had These Women in my head, but it wasn’t about women, it was about people surrounding this serial killer. I remember saying, “I’m going to write this book” (and my agent was so worried about the all-male thing in Wonder Valley) “and it’s going to be all these different women’s voices around a serial killer,” and I remember thinking, “Fuck, now I have to do this, and I’m not good at writing women,” and I wasn’t. The women’s voices in Visitation Street are young, they are in their teens, and that I can do that. But with These Women, I remember thinking, we need to go really deep into voice. Like with Jennifer Egan, the characters are going to be inspired by things I’m thinking but I don’t need my character in these voices. And it’s so hard! MT: I remember reading that Toni Morrison often wrestled with characters and their voices, ones who wanted to be heard much more than she wanted to permit them to be present on the page. Do you ever wrestle with characters who may want to take over the page or even over a whole novel? How do you tame the voices that are so commanding for your readers? IP: Julianna’s voice in These Women was the easiest part of that book for me, and I had no problem writing it and could have gone on forever. Dorian’s voice, which opens the book, was really hard, and I kept working on Julianna and writing more of that perspective but had to make it balanced. So, when I can hear somebody like that, I understand her outlook on the world. I knew she wanted to take pictures. I knew she didn’t understand why some art was more valued than other art because she’s wondering why her pictures would never be shown in a museum like Larry Sultan’s work—a photographer who shot behind the scenes of porn shoots. Julianna’s voice was really powerful, and Dios talked a little too much in earlier versions of Sing Her Down. I had to peel it back because the danger with Dios talking too much is that I don’t want to explain her or justify what she is doing. I just want her to do it, so I had to have her talk less so I didn’t get into any explanation or back story of why she’s doing what she’s doing. MT: Do you write all the scenes with certain voices at once, or are you able to go back and forth? IP: I can go back and forth, but I try to write them in complete blocks. Like in These Women, I wrote all those sections fully, and then I went back and edited them, just because I want them to tell their complete story. But with Visitation Street and Wonder Valley, I have alternating shorter chapters, so I can go back and forth. MT: Do you have any specific methods you use to go about writing outside of yourself? IP: I try to find something in each character that is me. When I was writing about Skid Row in Wonder Valley, that’s very much not just inspired by but about the people I worked with in Skid Row. I try to tell their story but not make it mine. I try to respect wherever the story is coming from. I don’t know if that gives me permission to do it. I try to find a story that I feel comfortable telling about my characters, what they are going through, but I’m not speaking to the whole experience of whatever race, culture, community that person comes from. MT: Moving from each of your books to the next, they’re all completely different. When you write a book, you’re truly setting out to write something unique and individual. Are there any rules you have to avoid writing something you’ve done before? Are there characters you want to revisit in future books? IP: I revisit Ren from Visitation Street. He is in Wonder Valley, has a one-second shot in These Women, and he’s the muralist, although is not named, in Sing Her Down. My characters live on. I teach my students that these people don’t end when the book ends–try to think of them existing in the world after the story you’re telling about them concludes–and I think that makes it easier to write the book and they stay alive for me. Jonathan Lethem and I had a conversation about this, and he said, “hell no, when I’m done with a book, these people cease to exist.” I can see it both ways. But my characters—and some of them are dead—live on in me. When I start thinking of a book, it often has something to do with the previous book. Recently, I started writing something that I’m not sure I’m going to use. Blake from Wonder Valley was living in Mexico by himself, and I wrote twenty pages about him. I think I’m going to use it in my new book, but maybe not. One problem I have writing a new book is I often feel like I’m writing my last book, and it takes me a while to get out of that. MT: What do you think is the most important point of writing a novel, especially a crime novel? IP: I think it’s different for different books. I often don’t know the full story of my book when I set out to write it, but I like to think of my books as a three-dimensional panorama, with all these different perspectives looking at a single event. It’s figuring out how to build that sphere, and I like to create a community of characters to see how they interact. For me, that community of characters is the most important thing. MT: When you write, do you start with the crime or the character, the setting or the story? IP: Character and setting for sure. I had no idea what the crime was in this book. Wanted to open with a super violent scene of women being violent in prison and that’s all I knew. And that’s not the crime in the book, it’s just some other act of violence. Then I figured out what it was about. MT: I remember reading that scene and thinking, “Wow, I love this, but oh my gosh.” IP: I thought long and hard about that, but said, “Let’s just go for it.” MT: What are you working on now? What’s next for the great Ivy Pochoda? IP: I’m writing a short story now, then writing a horror novella based on The Bacchae, and I also have an idea for a novel that I hope to start in the new year. I thought I was going to wrap up writing about Los Angeles with this book, but I thought one more. It’s darker, but it’s also a more about love and family and apocalyptic violence. *** View the full article -
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Drinking, Dancing, and Breaking the Law: Nightlife in the Jazz Age
The 1920s was a decade of strict social hierarchies, with huge divides between wealthy elites and poor workers, bias against immigrants, racial segregation, and laws against homosexual activity. But the free-for-all nightlife of the Jazz Age was built around embracing everything naughty, illegal, and new. This meant that at night, many of those strict hierarchies came toppling down. Prohibition was created by the Eighteenth Amendment, and it ended the nationwide production, import, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages… in theory. In reality, it was easier to get a drink during Prohibition than it was after. When liquor was illegal, it was unregulated, and speakeasies served their customers at all hours of the day and night. They were where young and old, rich and poor alike headed to socialize, dance, drink, and flirt. Which one you went to could depend on who you were and how much money you had. The most upscale speakeasies were restaurants and performance halls where politicians, debutants, and movie stars went to see and be seen. Photographers and journalists would attend, chronicling the parties and scandals in newspaper columns. One of the most well-known society journalists of the Jazz Age was Lois Long, who wrote for The New Yorker under the pseudonym “Lipstick.” She would drink, dance, and party at the most fashionable places in New York City, then go straight to the office the next morning to write her columns, which thousands of readers kept up with to either plan or daydream about their own exciting nights out on the town. But not every speakeasy was a glamorous destination for the elite. Many of them were more like the bars of today: places where the wealthy, middle, and working classes could all mingle over a drink. Nightlife in the Jazz Age encouraged mixing across racial lines as well, though American society was otherwise strictly segregated. In major cities like New York and Chicago, some of the most popular spots were known as “Black & Tans.” These nightclubs were usually found in cities’ bohemian and Black neighborhoods, and they as were famous for their racial integration as they were for their innovative cocktails. In the Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper in Chicago, a journalist wrote that, “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations in ten years than the churches, both black and white, have done in ten decades.” (The cocktails themselves became popular as a way to hide the taste of subquality liquor, like Chicago’s infamous “bathtub gin.”) Jazz Age nightlife also got a boost from a thriving queer subculture in America’s major cities. In New York, Greenwich Village and Harlem were known spots for queer nightlife. Some of the biggest public events in Jazz Age New York were the Masquerade and Civic Balls hosted by the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows at Hamilton Lodge in Harlem: annual public drag balls that began in the late 1800s but reached the heights of popularity in the 1920s. The LGBTQ community, some of them traveling in from other parts of the country to participate, didn’t hide themselves at these events. The New York Age often announced the masquerade winners by name and noted that, “Scores of males of pronounced effeminiate [sic] traits gracefully disported themselves in beautiful evening gowns. They might have been mistaken anywhere for fascinating shebas.” Female attendees also were likely to attend in drag, and more than one newspaper characterized masqueraders as belonging to “the third sex.” The Hamilton Lodge balls, as they were often known, weren’t just a gathering spot for the queer community. They became a major part of New York’s social calendar for all classes, orientations, and races. The Odd Fellows were a Black fraternal order, but many newspaper articles written about the Lodge Balls noted that attendees of all races and classes were there “looking for a thrill.” “Color prejudice was thrown to the winds,” noted a writer for The New York Age in 1927. Thousands of people came out for the party; in 1926, The New York Age estimated that 1,500 people attended. By 1933, that estimate had grown to 6,000, and the police and fire officials had to be present to maintain order. For those worried about ending up on the wrong side of the law, private parties were safer than public events or speakeasies. It was legal to finish alcohol that you already owned when Prohibition went into effect, so individuals could claim that they were just sharing their own “provisions” with friends (though this excuse became less believable the longer Prohibition went on). And parents in communities around the country would often host parties and dances for their young people to keep them out of trouble—though, just like today, plenty of teenagers snuck in their own booze. If you were in a major city during Prohibition, though, there was a good chance your nightlife put you on the wrong side of the Eighteenth Amendment. But that was one of the reasons that so many people who participated in that nightlife were willing to mingle across lines of class, community, race, and sexuality. No matter who they were or how much money they had, they all had a few things in common. They enjoyed a night out. They probably liked jazz music and dancing. And they were all willing to break the law to have a good time. *** View the full article -
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Historical Research as Procedural
The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world. In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado’s hallucinatory novella “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU.” We talk about the girls with bells for eyes who haunt Machado’s Benson and the doppelgänger detectives Abler and Henson, whose lack of trauma renders them inhuman. We discuss the way viewers who have survived sexual violence, or those who fear it, speak of finding comfort in the show’s promise of responsive law enforcement while recognizing it as brazen copaganda. We read Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage” and more recent criticism about crime fiction: the old theory of the genius detective as righter of wrongs and restorer of order, and newer interpretations that highlight the conservatism of the form. This is the darker side of the procedural’s temptation: how seductively it can align us as readers or viewers with the moral cleansing the detective promises. My first crime novel, Killingly (coming out in June!), is less a whodunit than a howdunit and a whydunit. It’s a historical novel, set in 1897. In writing it, I found a new way into the joy of investigation that drives the procedural: not to solve a crime, but to puzzle out real facts that bring a mystery to life and fit a story into their constraints. Historical research requires its own procedures. Following a citation to the next source, paging through paper-clip-rusted documents in manila archival folders, constructing careful search queries that drop you into online subcultures you might never have stumbled across otherwise. You bless train lovers who’ve posted old rail timetables, collectors selling period-appropriate Boston police belt buckles on eBay. First you’re the detective, sifting through evidence; then you’re the storyteller, solving the narrative problems that evidence produces. I learned about the missing girl when I was a grad student, working as a research intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a marvel-filled concrete building where UT Austin has turned oil and gas money into a world-class collection of rare books and manuscripts. (For the most delightfully nerdy procedural ever, which presents a funhouse mirror version of the drive to acquire literary treasures, see one of my favorite novels, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.) I didn’t find the girl’s story in a manuscript box; I was doing research for a patron with a genealogical query, skimming desperately through the New York Evening Journal on microfilm. LED TO DEATH BY HER CHILD OF FANCY, a headline blared, and I yanked the dial on the microfilm reader to a halt. A student named Bertha Mellish had disappeared from the campus of Mount Holyoke College in 1897, and three years later, her family’s doctor was giving long, speculative interviews about her fate to a Hearst paper. This was, frankly, too weird not to pursue. I visited Mt. Holyoke’s Special Collections, which holds a small amount of material about Bertha’s disappearance, along with her classmates’ scrapbooks and letters. I’d attended Smith, another women’s college only a few miles away, but I learned quickly how different the schools had been in their early days. Most importantly, the girls at Mt. Holyoke didn’t bring maids with them, which meant the fictional companion I’d begun to imagine for Bertha had to be a student. And she had to have a secret, something that endangered her, as well. Initially, I set myself an impossible task with this book. I created this central fictional character, and I wrote toward an ending that, if it happened, was not documented—but otherwise, I tried to stick to all the known historical facts. It was a kind of constraint. I wanted to set myself problems to solve, as if shifting between multiple perspectives with an active narrator guiding the action wasn’t complex enough. Eventually, I realized I needed to make small adjustments, to stop being so strict about the known timeline. To show how research can feel like detective work, here’s an example of one of those changes. In real life, Bertha’s sister and the family doctor were called to Florida to identify a living girl who might be Bertha. That trip offered plenty of texture and detail, but its length and placement slowed the action too much. I chose to raise the stakes and tighten the pace by having Florence and the Doctor travel a shorter distance to identify a body, instead. Like a detective, I drew a radius around Killingly, the resonantly-named town in Connecticut where Bertha grew up. I needed a train line that ran near water, between two points in New England, and a small town along that train line. Poring over those wonderful old train schedules and Google Maps, I chose Auburn, Massachusetts—perhaps partly because my mom lived in a different Auburn for a time as a kid. To figure out who might escort my characters to see a body, I needed to determine what sort of policing the town had at the time. Skimming through A Historical Sketch of Auburn, Massachusetts, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day with Brief Accounts of Early Settlers and Prominent Citizens, the name “Mellish” startled me awake. Bertha’s father John and his siblings had grown up in a nearby Massachusetts town; I’d forgotten. But I hadn’t known that George Mellish, Bertha’s wealthy uncle, lived in Auburn with his wife for years before moving to New York City. In 1897, the empty house he still owned at the center of town was serving as the town library while a new city hall was constructed. The family connection would make the local authorities solicitous; it would explain why the police of a tiny town across state lines would immediately think of Bertha Mellish when they found a girl floating in a local pond. But I still had to figure out where the good citizens of Auburn would store an unidentified body. I’d learned that the town had a constable or sheriff, likely no dedicated police building, and certainly no police morgue. Here we enter the land of disturbing search terms: things like “nineteenth century America burial practices,” “1890s morgue police,” and “storage for dead bodies 1890s.” That’s how I discovered the suitably grisly concept of the holding tomb. Auburn’s cemetery had one, as did any place, I imagine, where winter would freeze the ground too cold for digging. The dead had to rest somewhere before they could be interred. In pictures online, the holding tomb looks dignified and silent, like a little mausoleum. Heavy stone. You wouldn’t guess it was just a waystation. I think of this novel as New England Gothic, and through historical research, I found exactly the right details to flavor this scene—details I could never have imagined. I put Bertha’s sister and the doctor at its dark doors. I walk them inside to see the body. And afterward they too have to rest somewhere, before catching the train back to Killingly. So for a few hours they sit by a fire in Bertha’s uncle’s empty Auburn house, and they talk about a secret that drives the book—a conversation I’d once drafted to take place on a train back from Florida. It’s much better this way. I solved the narrative problem, and I felt the radiant satisfaction I experience as a reader of procedurals, putting the pieces together alongside the detective. I will almost certainly write a more traditional procedural in the future; I can’t help but love the form. On the classic D&D alignment chart, I’m resolutely lawful good, an orientation that rubs awkwardly against my distress at the profound injustices of our legal system. No matter how much skepticism I’ve learned about the institutions of policing and prosecution, I’m still disposed to find stories of investigation comforting. In a time when the suggestion to “do your own research” has been poisoned by bad-faith misinformation and conspiratorial violence, when any cop show can feel slick with denial about the realities of policing in the US, historical research can offer a crime writer their own experience of investigation. Historical research is freighted with its own profound ethical questions, of course; it’s the opposite of escapism to learn the depths of atrocity that have shaped our cultures, or to trace the heartbreaking surges of resistance to atrocity. But by staying grounded in the real, writers can preserve nuance and build compelling plots. We can engage the past to examine the present. *** View the full article
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