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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 51
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 26
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 91
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read fascinating articles and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side. Also, check out the UMS SFF short story contest. Now taking entries.
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For Write to Pitch and Algonkian event attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 277
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Algonkian Novel Development and Editorial Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information - FAQ, Registration, About
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Forum Statistics
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Total Topics13.5k
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10 New Books Coming Out This Week
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (Viking) “Karla’s Choice is a note-perfect tribute to le Carré. Nick Harkaway has pulled off the remarkable trick of providing the long-term reader with something which is satisfyingly fresh and new, and yet fits seamlessly into the world of Smiley’s Circus in its heyday.” –Mick Herron Delilah S. Dawson, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment (Del Rey) “Steadily mounting mysteries and disturbing revelations at an art commune in this story about a woman’s liberation from an abusive relationship make this another must-read in Dawson’s growing canon of work.” –Chuck Wendig Sydney Graves, The Arizona Triangle (Harper Paperbacks) “This desert noir features complex characters trapped in an ugly, emotional past. The vivid details and beauty of the Arizona landscape are in sharp contrast to the repellent secrets of a killer.” –Library Journal Richard Chizmar, Memorials (Gallery) “Scary and hard to put down. You might be advised not to read it at night.” –Stephen King Hesse Phillips, Lightborne (Pegasus) “Hesse Phillips’ dazzling Lightborne returns us to a world of more moral certainty but considerably more physical danger, telling the story of Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist and spy, with a thrillingly intense sense of period.” –The Financial Times Robert Dugoni, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Thomas and Mercer) “A cunning master class in why you should always trust your lawyer, and what it’ll cost you if you do.” –Kirkus Reviews Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, Mystery in the Title (MIRA) “This small-town cozy combines quirky characters, over-the-top situations, and fading Hollywood glamour in a winning combination.” —Booklist Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness (HarperCollins) “This quirky, trivia-filled look at a touchstone of detective fiction will have Christie fans young and old in heaven.” –Publishers Weekly Eliot Pattison, Freedom’s Ghost (Counterpoint) “Pattison adeptly portrays the panorama of late–1700s Massachusetts, sprinkling in historical characters (e.g., John Hancock, John Adams), British spies, impressment, and more. Multiple plot threads run simultaneously, maintaining suspense as McCallum tracks a sadistic killer .” –Booklist David List, What Are the Odds (Blackstone) “[List’s] energetic depiction of every episode, full of sharp character portraits and droll details, engages interest and keeps the story moving…An outlandish and entertaining comic thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article -
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Danielle Trussoni on Mystery, Thrillers, and the Puzzle of Existence
Readers can be forgiven if they think after reading The Puzzle Box—and its predecessor The Puzzle Master—that Danielle Trussoni is puzzle obsessed. She’s not. What drives her fiction, though, is the same pursuit for understanding how it—meaning life—all fits together. And we’re lucky she’s on that quest, because The Puzzle Box is a wild ride into a high-stakes world of deadly puzzles, ancient secrets and epic sibling rivalry. Nancie Clare You are a memoirist and a novelist; the subjects that you write about center around the search, the odyssey, the quest for secrets, for clues, for solutions and for self. Is that an accurate way of looking at your work before we talk specifically about The Puzzle Box? Danielle Trussoni That’s such an insightful way of looking at my body of work. It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot lately, now that I have seven books that are published. Seeing them all together on the shelf, it’s like “what connects these things?” And this is a roundabout way to say that I started writing because I needed to understand my family. My first book is a memoir about my relationship with my father who was a Vietnam vet. It was all about family secrets and the things that were hidden and who I was and who he was and how trauma and history affected the present. If I look at my novels, are there secrets, history, how they affect the present, uncovering them, and a kind of quest, as you said. And so I think that structures the memoir that I wrote, and it also structures all of my novels. Now, one thing that was really important to me after I wrote that first book was that I didn’t want to write the same book over and over again. I decided after publishing Falling Through the Earth that I was going to write something very, very different, and Angelology was very, very different. But now that you point this out—and when I look at the collection of books that I’ve written and the patterns and archetypes—all of those things were there: historical influences on the present and the quest with a little bit of religious influence because I was raised very Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. In the fifth grade, there was a school shooting where the priest and two other people were murdered. And so that violence, that sort of mixture of religion and violence and growth, became wrapped up in my work. Nancie Clare In your acknowledgements, you give a shout out to Dan Brown, and at one point the central character of both The Puzzle Master and The Puzzle Box, Mike Brink says, “this isn’t a Dan Brown book”, and I agree, they are very much not Dan Brown books. Danielle Trussoni Really not! Nancie Clare At most there’s a similarity to Dan Brown in the quest aspect of the stories: following a trail of clues towards a conclusion, which I guess could be something you could say about all crime fiction. Danielle Trussoni Sure. I thought it was really interesting because when Angelology, my first novel, was published—and that was probably my most widely read book—I would be asked over and over about how Dan Brown influenced me. And at that point, I had never read Dan Brown! There’s all this stuff about angels and demons and the supernatural and various quests and stuff. That was something that really came from, to be quite frank, the Bible, my religious upbringing, and reading lots of 19th century fiction, Wilkie Collins and those kind of detective novels. It’s a little bit of a coincidence that there was any overlap between Angelology and Angels & Demons. I ended up meeting Dan Brown and became a friend of his. I could understand why that comparison was made. But I think while there are similarities in themes and similarities in structure, the tone is so wildly different that the books really can’t be compared. And he’s told me the same thing. We both agree about that. Nancie Clare Puzzles and their solutions—often with high stakes for the person answering the questions—run through mythology. I mean, let’s just talk about Odysseus and The Odyssey and The Iliad, characters are always having to answer questions from the Sphinx or go through a labyrinth—and if they don’t succeed, they’ll die. What is it about these stories: quests with seekers that often have extraordinary skills that is so addictive to humans? Danielle Trussoni I agree, I think there’s something deeply, deeply satisfying about being posed a question, being posed a riddle, and then bringing the reader through it and solving it. And if I even take that one step farther, I think of writing a novel to be that exact setup, right? We have a premise, and we have something that the characters want to know. And the entire novel, through emotional stakes, through relationships, through secrets and through adventures become this wonderful experience of solving it. All fiction has that in common. That’s why I’m drawn to fiction and why I write fiction, and it’s why I’m especially in love with crime fiction and thrillers, because that’s right out on the surface and it’s very clear. And I would just add that that’s what living is, right? We are here without answers. We’re born without any sense of what the larger answer to this existence is. And so being able to condense it and boil it down into a sort of essential question in a novel makes life graspable in some way, in a small way for a couple of hours. That for me is the beauty of fiction in general, not just crime fiction and thrillers, but every kind of reading. I would say that for me, it’s a larger existential question of why I write and why we read. Nancie Clare Let’s talk about your protagonist, Mike Brink, both in the The Puzzle Master, where you introduced him, and the current novel, The Puzzle Box. Mike’s a young man who suffered a traumatic brain injury in high school that led to acquired Savant Syndrome, which is a real thing, rare but real. And in Mike’s case, it manifests as making him a puzzle master extraordinaire. I remember when I read the first book, as appealing as the syndrome might sound—as in like, who wouldn’t want to be a genius—it is a neurodivergent condition and can be devastating for the person who has it. So these two elements—puzzle master and acquired Savant Syndrome—where did they come from and how did they get molded together? Danielle Trussoni In the beginning, Mike Brink was just really smart. I had written a draft of The Puzzle Master, and at one point the character of Jess Price and the cipher that she draws in prison was more prevalent. She was a bigger character than Mike Brink. But when he came into the novel, when I started developing the person who solves that cipher, I realized that this was a huge possibility narratively, to have someone who was something of a genius and could go through the novel and solve it and go deeper into what this mystery was about. I started from a point of not knowing anything about Savant Syndrome or even puzzles. Really, I am not a puzzle expert myself, and I’m not particularly good at them. I like the crossword and I love Wordle, but that’s about it. I started doing a lot of research about genius, and I stumbled across a book by a man named Dr. Treffert who had an institute in Wisconsin where he helped, counseled and worked in various ways with savants. I read about acquired Savant Syndrome, and I was like, this is completely incredible. If the human brain, after having some sort of traumatic brain injury can overcompensate in a way that allows it to do things that it couldn’t do before, what does that say about human consciousness? And it just took me into this whirlwind of questions. And for me, when I hit a point like that with a character, I know that’s a character I want to spend time with. I went back in the novel and revised it and made Brink much more prominent, and I really explored the damage [Savant Syndrome] can do. I think that in The Puzzle Box, it’s even more apparent that Mike is suffering. The idea that, oh, yeah, I would love to be able to have an eidetic memory, and I would like to be able to read a novel in five minutes and remember everything. That seems nice on paper, but the chaos that this character lives with and the need he has for order and stability is really, for me, the most compelling part about that character. Nancie Clare And the compulsion to complete puzzles. Mike acts against his own self-interest; he will put himself in danger to solve a puzzle… Danielle Trussoni Kind of like being a writer! When I started writing, I was very aware that it was not the best career choice, not the most stable, that I may never make a penny doing it. It was just pure addiction and love of the act of writing and of books that brought me into it. Nancie Clare Mike vacillates in how he views his condition: sometimes a gift, sometimes a curse. It makes him ripe for exploitation by people with bad intentions—and not just people, because I want to talk about Jameson Sedge, who manipulated Mike into solving an ancient mystery before Sedge uploaded his consciousness and killed himself at the end of The Puzzle Master. The idea of uploading your consciousness into an external neural network like he did, I don’t even know what the nomenclature would be, makes him a formidable enemy because now Sedge is nowhere in everywhere, and that’s a little like God, Danielle Trussoni Which is the problem with a villain like God. Right? But it’s also the manifestation of one of my biggest fears about technology. I know I am not the only person in the world who’s afraid of what AI can do. Companies have essentially trained their AIs on our books that were pirated without permission and without compensation. And there’s nothing we can really do at this point; it’s very frustrating. And for me, this is my nightmare as a writer—something I love to do and that I’ve dedicated my life to learning how to do well is going to suddenly become irrelevant. I personally don’t think that readers will ever be happy with AI generated books, but still, it’s terrifying. And it’s something that I think about for Jameson Sedge, who’s this sort of godlike and devil figure, he’s the ultimate hero. And for me, my challenge as a writer was how do you limit something, a creature or a person like AI? I don’t know if that makes sense, but there’s nowhere to go with an all-powerful villain. So Jameson does have an arc, and he is going to change in the next book. And even in this book, he is not all powerful… Nancie Clare Jameson no longer has a corporeal presence. He makes that point in at the end of the first book, saying: I have no body, I can’t eat dinner, I can’t drink wine, I can’t be with my girlfriend, but I’m everywhere. Anywhere there’s an electronic surveillance device or a phone, I can be with you. I have to say, that’s my nightmare: being watched and followed. Danielle Trussoni Yeah, me too. It’s terrifying. And we don’t even realize how far it could go, because we rely so heavily on technology. It’s part of every element of our existence. In my imagination, something like Jameson is a really terrifying villain. And having him be the primary force that Mike Brink is up against, makes this a kind of, I don’t want to say epic, but the stakes are very, very high. Nancie Clare This is about… Danielle Trussoni The future. Who can control and destroy all of us? Jameson Sedge is that big. Nancie Clare In The Puzzle Box, Mike Brink is invited to solve a legendary puzzle. Every twelve years since the mid 19th century—in the year of the dragon—an attempt can be made to solve the dragon box puzzle. And the stakes are high because the puzzle box contains deadly booby traps. You’ve really set up this really high stakes, I don’t even want to use the word game, but it is a bit of a game. And where did that come from? How did an Asian tradition filter in? Danielle Trussoni I lived in Japan in my mid-twenties for two and a half years. I was an English language instructor in a high school in rural Japan. I fell in love with Japan quite literally. I learned how to speak Japanese a little bit, and I really immersed myself in the culture. I learned calligraphy. But another element that was really attractive to me then—I am not a Catholic now— was the idea of spirituality without Western religion. I went on Zen retreats, and I did a lot of meditation. I also became fascinated with the history of Japan. After I went back to the United States, I carried that with me—that kind of spirituality stayed with me. It still is with me. It’s very much part of my life. Nancie Clare But it’s not just the puzzle, not just the potential for death in trying to solve this puzzle through booby traps of poison, explosions, losing digits. Mike Brink has adversaries in both the real and virtual worlds. In the virtual world, it’s Jameson Sedge. In the real world, it’s two sisters, Sakura and Ume. Could you talk about them? Because I found them fascinating. I really found that sort of light-dark, ying-yang duality with those two. Danielle Trussoni I love those two. I don’t know if you recall, but Ume has a cameo in The Puzzle Master. She was the one who taught Cam, [Jameson Sedge’s right-hand man] how to fight, and she was Jameson’s head of security. And when I wrote her then I was like, oh, I love this character. I really love her. And when I was writing The Puzzle Box, I knew I wanted her to be a part of it. It all started with Ume; she was the grounding force of that. The idea that she was connected to historical tradition of the Samurai, the onna-bugeisha they’re called, which were female members of Samurai clans. And from that relationship of Ume to her past and her relationship with Sedge came this idea of what would happen if she had a sister who just rejected all of it, who was modern and had her own path in life? I think you’re right when you say that between light and dark. Ume was a character that I loved in The Puzzle Master, and then Sakura became my favorite character in The Puzzle Box. And those two sisters are both very strong in their own ways, and they represent more of more than just light and dark. I think that they represent the idea of a cerebral strength and a physical strength because Ume is very physically powerful and controlled in her body, whereas Sakura is very much in control of her mind. And those two differences are really interesting to me, especially in the world that I created with Mike Brink, where his mind is both this wonderful tool that he can use, but also something that really harms him physically. Nancie Clare You have another female character that I’m intrigued with, and that’s Rachel Appel. She helped Mike with the God puzzle, which is from the Jewish tradition of Kabbala, in The Puzzle Master and she’s back in The Puzzle Box. I find their relationship to be interesting because it’s not romantic, and interesting because Rachel’s a believer in the divine. And Mike strikes me as a non-believer, which doesn’t preclude him from being in touch with the spiritual, of course, but I don’t think he believes in the same way Rachel does. Danielle Trussoni I see Mike and Rachel as empirical and spiritual. Mike puts faith in his brain and his ability to solve things. He’s a graduate of MIT, and his circle of mentors and friends are scientists and statisticians. Rachel, on the other hand, is a scholar and someone who studies the history of religion and religious texts. She very strongly believes that there’s a higher purpose and that things are connected in a spiritual way. Their relationship for me is a kind of Scully-Mulder relationship. It is this nice dichotomy where the two of them genuinely care about each other. And Rachel is a little bit in love with Brink. But she’s also a bit afraid of moving beyond what they have because she sees that Brink might not be able to handle that, and it might not work. I really loved doing the research to create her in The Puzzle Master, because she’s a scholar of biblical texts, and I didn’t know anything about that. So doing the research to understand her and her work was very, very intense. I spoke with a lot of people, I spoke with Kabbala scholars and read many, many books about the things that she would think and say! Nancie Clare Let’s talk a little bit about writers and research and the rabbit holes that they can dive into. You mentioned it earlier when you talked about Mike Brink, where you said you wanted to make him just a really smart dude, and then you started researching. And it is amazing what can happen… Danielle Trussoni Completely! Suddenly your book is something that you had no idea it was going to be. For me there’s a danger that I can get too drawn into the research and too fascinated by certain elements and let it take over. So, it takes some discipline. There were many moments in The Puzzle Box when I could see going off on a different direction, and I didn’t, which is the beauty of writing a thriller, you have a structure that you can go back to, and you’re not going to get pulled into those rabbit holes as deeply. Someone once asked me, “why do you write thrillers?” And I think that that’s why, because that structure and that propulsive movement of the plot really helps me to stay on track, and not just sort of go off on a tangent and find myself with a hundred pages about some ancient riddle that I think is very cool, but other people might not care about. Nancie Clare I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Conundrum, Connie for short, Mike’s dachshund. I got to say, I love when a dog is part of a story, but I have anxiety while I read, because I’m always worried about the dog. Danielle Trussoni I had readers write to me a third of the way through The Puzzle Master and say, if anything happens to the dog, I’m showing up at your house. People are really, really attached to Conundrum. Me too personally. And this is a little bit a fun fact: The Puzzle Master was published last year, and then for my birthday, my husband bought me a dog that is exactly like Conundrum. She’s a rescue. So now there’s a real Conundrum in my life. Nancie Clare The point of the suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader is the tipping point for a thriller. Do you think about that point? How to make sure the reader going to come along on this ride? Danielle Trussoni Totally. I think that I got right up to the edge more in The Puzzle Master with that. And I think that there were some versions of that book where maybe readers would, if I had left it the way it was, would be like: I’m not with you there with all the stuff that happens with the Kabbala and with AI. It took many, many drafts to get to the point where I felt like I was walking that line. This is why I think the research is important, and going down those rabbit holes that hours later, you come up and you’re like, oh my goodness, where am I? It’s having the scaffolding that the research, the historical information and the world building that supports those moments where there’s a kind of flight of fancy that is: whoa, I didn’t see that coming! Having all of that in place allows a writer to do that. And so that’s why I think I take so much care and so much time to do the research. But that said, hopefully, I think The Puzzle Box has fewer moments like that because the premise of the box—and the reason that the box was made—is really what people have to buy into. Nancie Clare I bought it! Is there anything that I missed in our discussion? Is there anything you’d like readers to take away from The Puzzle Box or take away from the story of your characters? What have I missed? Danielle Trussoni I’m thinking about it. I think you covered everything… Nancie Clare That would be a first! Danielle Trussoni One thing that I’m really going for with The Puzzle Box, and that I worked hard to achieve, is that I want readers to feel like they’re on a fun adventure to get lost in. And one of the most gratifying things for me is when a reader writes to me and says, “I’m Googling things, and some of these things are true, and some of these things are not true, and I can’t tell which is which. Did these things happen?” And ability for readers to get lost and to just put aside reality for a while, and the seriousness of life is really enjoyable for me and gratifying. View the full article -
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A Life in Haunted Houses
“Every town has a haunted house.” This is the thesis statement of my new novel, Killer House Party. And I believe it to be true. Not that every town has a house with ghosts, but that every town has a house that is haunted. A house that is infamous or legendary. It evokes a very human fear of the unknown, an abyss that–if it catches your gaze–you may never look away from. A haunted house is a folktale. Its retelling defines a place. You can find a city/town/neighborhood’s deepest fears in the story of its haunted house. Maybe it’s the betrayal of the safety we expect from a home. Or the suffocation of being pinned down to one place. What is the house keeping out? What is it keeping in? Writing a novel about such a well trod trope means being in conversation with every haunted house you’ve ever come across. A haunted house symbolizes different things to different people. A haunted house is only ever a symbol. These are the houses that haunted me, in fiction and in life. These are the ghosts whispering in the walls of my haunted house book. Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski Jan Pieńkowski’s Haunted House (1979) was my first scary story, the foundation of what I came to understand as the horror genre. The book itself appeared in my life with no origin. There was no loving inscription on the first page nor eager cousin watching, waiting for my reaction. In my memory, I read it hiding on the side of a couch with black and white Beetlejuice stripes, heart in my throat. The front cover is the front door (or vice versa, the front door is the front cover), making the act of opening the book a kind of breaking and entering. The prose is in second person, the text casting the reader as a doctor who has been invited into a house of horrors. Eyes follow you from behind paintings. Slime drips down the stairs. The house is full of animals, monsters, and an alien crashes through the bathroom wall. And at the end, you cannot leave. There’s no denouement. No “whew, it was all a dream.” The last thing you hear is your patient screaming for you while you’re trapped in the attic with a huge bat and a box from Transylvania being sawed open from the inside. (Here, the pop up aspect of the book becomes auditory, as the saw truly grinds against the heavy paper box). Closing the book, you find the door has been nailed shut, trapping you inside the story forever. Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R.L. Stine Creating this list is sort of like carbon dating myself. One can look at the pop culture markers of my life and probably guess my age within a year. (Feel free to play along at home! Check my wikipedia to see if you’re correct.) Goosebumps books to me were pure junk food. (I say this with all due respect to Mr. Stine as someone who also tries to write fun, scary books best read in one sitting.) Welcome to Dead House (1992) does what all great middle grade novels must and creates a world in which the children are right from the start and the adults are stodgy, stuck in their ways, and wrong. Josh and Amanda’s family have inherited a creepy old house from a relative no one’s ever heard of. It’s old. It’s brick. It’s definitely haunted. Every new person they meet has the same name as someone in the town cemetery. Nothing weird here! Enjoy your free mansion! Dead House doesn’t have the silly sense of humor typical of Goosebumps, making it feel more sinister like Stine’s Fear Street books for older readers. Josh and Amanda’s dog is murdered. The town is full of ghouls in need of a human sacrifice. And, in the end, as the heroes are getting away, they see another family being brought in to take their place and they do nothing to stop it. Horrifying. The Winchester Mystery House Ah, the Winchester Mystery House. Notable to any Northern California resident for its Grim Reaper billboards (now sanitized to be less threatening). Recognizable outside of the 100 mile advertising radius because of a Helen Mirren film about the mansion’s spooky origin. The Winchester House, as a concept, is a great haunted house story. Sarah Winchester married into a family of gun magnates and was so haunted by everyone their company’s products had killed that she built a big ass mazelike mansion (then called Llanada Villa) in San Jose, California to hide from the ghosts. The house had thousands of short stairs, some leading straight into the ceiling. It had over a hundred small rooms. The front half of the house was boarded up, even while the rest was still being constructed. Except. Well. Anyone who has been tricked into taking the tour of the house can tell you that the answer to most things is that Sarah Winchester was a very rich, very infirm little old lady who built her house in a place with a lot of earthquakes. The many tiny stairs were due to her debilitating arthritis. Part of the house was boarded up because of earthquake damage. Using the house to confuse ghosts wanting to take revenge against her family? It wasn’t even the only house she lived in–she also had a houseboat. Haunted houses are always less interesting when they are explicable. The Zodiac Shack What is a haunted house but a place where a Bad Thing happened? In my hometown of Vacaville, California the local Bad Thing was the Zodiac Killer. (Our state mental hospital also housed Charles Manson. David Fincher was obsessed with us for a few years.) Inactive for twenty years before my birth, the Zodiac Killer was known for killing women and couples in isolated areas of Solano County and then sending ciphers to the local newspapers about it. In my childhood, the name would just get thrown around, associated with otherwise innocuous locations. The lake. The park at the top of a hill. The so-called “zodiac shack” was a house and a barn out on a country road. There were stories about how the Zodiac Killer brought victims there or stored their bodies. It was haunted. It was terrifying. It was titillating. It was a local legend with no basis in fact. The shack (and the barn) were remnants of a local well-off family’s farmhouse, abandoned in the early 20th century. There’s no evidence that the Zodiac Killer ever set foot there. I’m no true crime girlie and this is the only haunted place on my list that I’ve never seen or been to. I drove past it once, flying in a friend’s mom’s convertible in the middle of the night. “That’s the Zodiac Shack,” he said. To me, it was just part of the darkness of the landscape. Shirley Jackson Trio: The Haunting of Hill House/The Sundial/We Have Always Lived in the Castle No one writes a haunting quite like Shirley Jackson. Perhaps it’s because no one understands the act of haunting their own house better than an agoraphobic (she says, from experience). The houses in Jackson’s books (Hill House, Halloran House, the Blackwood Family Estate) are all truly haunted by the same thing as every house in the world: a family. The house is the site of all a family’s woes, their secrets and peculiarities, the things they hide from the outside world. The house is the only witness to the horrors a family perpetrates against each other: the poisoning of the sugar bowl, the push down the stairs, the grief of an orphan who does not miss her abusive parent. Within the house’s walls, a family is an organism that imprints itself on every room even after death. Every house keeps impressions of those who lived inside it before. The floor under the carpet. The handprint in the cement. The ghost in the attic. Echoes and reminders. Every house is a haunted house. *** View the full article -
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Clean
The girl, over those days, ate without a fuss. Maybe she was afraid I would tell on her for staining my apron, for getting flour all over the floor. If I served her chicken, she ate the chicken. If I gave her salmon, she ate the salmon. She still took an hour to eat, and chewed each mouthful a hundred times, but her plate would be left sparkling. I also stopped eating for a while when I was a girl. Did I tell you this story? Just for a couple of weeks, which is precisely how long I lasted at the girls’ boarding school in Ancud. My mama’s employers at the big villa had asked her to move in and work as a live‑in maid, and so she’d come to me and—never one to mince her words—said: There’s no one to look after you or cook for you. The boarding school’s close to my work. She dropped me at the entrance to the school one Sunday evening, and that same night I found I could no longer eat. There was nothing wrong with the food—lentils, beans, stews, chickpeas—but a lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing it. The nuns didn’t know what to do with me. I would take one bite of my morning hallulla bread and butter, and nothing for the rest of the day. They refused to call my mama, to involve her in the histrionics of a lazy, disobedient little madam, as the dining monitor put it when she saw my untouched plate. The Mother Superior tried to convince me that I’d soon get used to life there. The other girls weren’t mean, and besides, my mama had to work, put food on the table, earn her living. She couldn’t leave me alone out there on the land. I don’t remember if the girls were mean or not. I haven’t held on to a single face, to a single name. You can forget what you don’t name, we’ve been through that. I do remember a long, long hall and how, looking down from one end of it to the other, the dining monitor seemed very short, like one of us girls. I also remember the high ceilings in the communal dorm, the creak of the dusty stairs, the empty waste ground on the other side of the windows. I wanted to be gone from that place, to go back to the land with my mama. I didn’t plan it, I promise. It was a rainy lunchtime. I remember it well because on rainy days the huge windows in the dining hall would mist up and more than ever I’d feel I was going to be trapped in that place forever; there was nothing beyond it, no streets, no nature. It had all been swallowed up by the fog and the only thing left was the boarding school floating in a misty hellscape. I joined the line in front of the kitchen, was served a plate of charquicán stew and then looked around for the dining monitor. She was eating with the nuns up on a small wooden platform on the other side of the dining hall. I didn’t even think about it. I walked over there, stopped directly in front of her, and threw my food in her face. And with all my might, a strength I didn’t know I had, I threw the empty plate at the back of the Mother Superior’s head. Don’t work yourselves up, please. I told you: we all have a limit. The Mother Superior fell to the floor, smashing her two front teeth. The dining monitor, meanwhile, still covered in potato and squash, grabbed me by the wrist and with her other hand slapped both of my cheeks. For some reason the canings that followed didn’t hurt. It was as if I were no longer inside my own body, as if I’d already left that place. That afternoon my mama came to collect me, and from the school she led me straight back to the land. There doesn’t seem much point in telling you about the silent journey from An‑cud back to our house. She didn’t look at me the whole time, nor once we arrived. That night she cooked potatoes and pork chops, which I demolished. You silly ass, she said, while I sucked the bones. When my plate was clean, she looked at me and dissolved into laughter. At first it was more of a snicker, as if she couldn’t hold it in, as if her mouth had been taken over by that laugh, but it grew louder and louder until she was doubled over. A whole plate of charquicán in her face! she cried, with her head thrown back and her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. I sat there, frozen to the spot. My mama was really in hysterics now: open‑mouthed, her eyes creased, tears running down the sides of her face. The laughter was catching and soon the pair of us could hardly breathe, two belly laughs in the infinite blackness of the open countryside. Eventually she grew tired and we both stopped laughing. Her face went back to normal; the edges of her mouth turned down. She said, very seriously: Everything has consequences, Lita. You must understand that. The next day, she woke me at daybreak and told me she was going back to her job as a live‑in maid. I was thirteen years old, soon to be fourteen, and I stayed there, out on the land, on my own. Or not exactly on my own. I had the pigs, the kodkods, and the neighbor’s blind horse for company. And every morning there I’d be, battling against the wind to get to the bus stop in time for the bus that would take me to school, and with no mother around to tell me: Put your hat on, Lita. What did I knit you that wool hat for? Little rascal, my mama said just before leaving the house. And then, like a premonition: You’re going to have to learn to look after yourself. __________________________________ From Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2024 by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translation copyright © 2024 by Sophie Hughes . View the full article -
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The Bible as Crime Story
Quick quiz: What’s the first crime committed in the Bible? And no, it’s not Cain murdering his brother Abel out of jealousy, though that definitely ranks up there. The first crime, I would argue, is when Eve gets blamed for violating God’s instructions—and she gets all the blame, even though Adam is equally—and perhaps even more—guilty than she is. The first Letter to Timothy, written in Paul’s name, repeatedly declares that women should keep silent in his Church, and not preach to the men, “For Adam was created first, and Eve afterwards; moreover, it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who, yielding to deception, fell into sin” (1 Timothy: 2:13-14). Right. Let’s subjugate women for the next 2,000 years based on a highly selective reading of a few sentences in Genesis 1-3. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Eve has been charged with the crime of being inferior due to her status of being “created after” and of bringing sin into the world. And yet Exhibit A, chapter 1 of Genesis, clearly states that man and woman were made at the same time, several verses after the creation of “creeping things.” So if coming later in Creation is a sign of inferiority, what do we do with Genesis 1, which places the creation of humans after that of insects? Exhibit B: OK, so we’re going to ignore Genesis 1 and focus exclusively on Genesis 2-3, which is the better-known version, after all, where Adam is made first, and Eve later (from part of his side), but here’s the rub: If you’re going to privilege this version, Eve does not exist yet when God tells Adam not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Life. Adam hears the prohibition directly from God. Eve apparently hears about it from Adam sometime after the fact, but this conversation is not recorded in the pages of the Bible. What does happen, when Eve decides to eat the fruit, is that her husband is apparently standing right there next to her, not saying a word about how maybe this is a bad idea, since God kind of said not to do it. The problem is that two-thirds of the exculpatory evidence in Eve’s favor is in ancient Hebrew. In modern English, we get the weakest third: “So she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, and he ate it” (Gen. 3:6), which certainly suggests that he’s standing nearby. But there is a Hebrew word in the biblical text, which is pronounced something like imahu (my ancient Hebrew is pretty spotty), meaning “with her.” So a more accurate translation would be, “she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate it.” Sure sounds like he’s standing right there, doesn’t it? Most persuasive of all is that the serpent is speaking in plural verbs, which no longer exist in English, but the serpent is clearly talking to more than one person, and there’s only one other human on the planet according to the text, and he’s the one who heard the prohibition straight from God’s mouth, so arguably Adam is the bigger sinner. Yet he gets a pass—not from God, who does punish him, but from Western civilization, for want of a better term. Two thousand years of patriarchy follow, and it’s all based on… um, lies and distortions. Surprisingly, the ultra-Orthodox Artscroll Chumash is the only English translation I’ve ever seen that includes the words “with her” in Gen. 3:6. Another crime occurs in the violent and chaotic era of the Judges, when a completely innocent woman suffers from a man’s mistakes is when Jephthah, a warrior, makes a vow before God that if he is victorious against the Ammonites in battle, “then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return [shall] be offered by me as a burnt offering to the Lord” (Judges 11:31). You know where this is going. Sure enough, when Jephthah returns triumphant, his daughter—his only child—comes out to meet him, making music and dance in celebration, and he laments that she has to die, “For I have uttered a vow to the Lord and I cannot retract” (11:35). Too bad the unnamed daughter is so accepting of her father’s fatal error, agreeing that he can’t go back on his vow, and so she must die. Too bad she doesn’t get to say, “What is this, a Greek myth? Just tell God you meant an animal, not your only begotten child,” since God clearly shows his preference for animal sacrifice over human sacrifice when he sends an angel to stop Abraham from sacrificing his son, Isaac, in Genesis 22. But there you go. The unnamed daughter’s tragic story is there to serve as a general warning to watch what you say when you’re making a vow before God. OK, we’ll remember that. But I want to leave you laughing. Yes, really. So: I once came across a mysterious book in Hebrew, and I brought it to the Hebrew professor at Stony Brook University, who told me it was an anthology of Jewish humor going back to the very beginning. “You’ve got to tell me the first joke,” I said. He turned to the first page and read: “And the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’” Am I my brother’s keeper? If that’s the first joke, that’s a pretty grim sense of humor, there. *** View the full article -
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Whining About Margaret Atwood - Poor Advice From Name Authors
laugh every time I read this: "What’s odd are her first few suggestions about taking pencils on a plane and how to sharpen them and a reminder to bring paper (DUH. For heaven’s sake, are we first graders here?" -
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Writer Ego and the Imaginary Bob
Equal parts ignorance and false optimism. Soooooooooooo true!!! -
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Antagonist - The Novel's Most Important Character?
It always comes back to this element in genre fiction. -
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Writing Hot Sex Scenes - Saints Preserve Us!
The scene is getting hotter by the day. I'm almost a best seller. -
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Make Your Story Stand Out - Get Crazy!
I'm going for broke!!! -
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For Beginners or For Avoidance?
You hear this type of thing a lot and it doesn't square with reality.
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