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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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Conclave is Excellent, Praise the Lord
Conclave, Edward Berger’s taut new papal thriller, is excellent. And before I continue with this review, I want to dwell on and draw your attention to the descriptor “papal thriller.” Because that’s what this movie is, and that earned points from me before the movie even began. Maybe it’s because I attended Catholic school in my youth and so now feel an urge to attend any tale interrogating ecclesiastical dynamics, or maybe it’s simply that the conceit of “intrigue at the Vatican” is too singular not to find appealing, but if I’m being honest, I’ll admit that I was always going to like Conclave. But I’m here to report now that I was also impressed by Conclave. Based on the novel of the same by Robert Harris and screenwritten by Peter Straughan, Conclave is the story of Dean-Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes, never better, and that’s saying something), the Vatican official charged with organizing a papal conclave to elect a new pope, following the death of the previous Holy Father. A papal conclave is a secluded assembly of all the cardinals in the Catholic Church, who remain together, casting ballots for a new leader, until a majority has been reached. Cardinal Lawrence is a meticulous manager (competent to such a degree that it seems to have worn him down), the perfect manager for an event so punctilious and ritualized and sacred as a papal conclave. But, once all the cardinals have been sequestered together and political schmoozing begins in earnest, Cardinal Lawrence finds himself not only in charge of the proceedings, but also finding out what really happened to the previous Holy Father, whose death has seemed to become more and more mysterious. Thus, Conclave is a detective story, but more than that, it is a mystery. It is about a man who, in his vocation to and service of the Church, has lived for a long time accepting the sense of mystery in his life, but who suddenly finds that everything around him is a mystery: the political motivations of his colleagues, the secret ambitions of his friends, and even the Church’s ability to carry out the work of God. In a world of whispers and gossip and secrets and rumors and pleas and deals, Cardinal Lawrence becomes the only man asking questions. Conclave is about faith, but it doesn’t turn all of this into a metaphor about the existence of God, which, while that would be fine, is certainly refreshing; the film is subtle and clever, more invested in questions about human nature than the divine: being able to trust one’s associates and friends, being able to know, truly, what rests in their hearts. Cardinal Lawrence’s work grows more challenging when a new, extremely inscrutable figure arrives at the Vatican, shortly before the sequestering begins: a Mexican cardinal, Father Benitez, who has served as the Archbishop of Kabul and who had been made a Cardinal only very recently, before the previous Holy Father had died. No one at the Vatican knows about this appointment, just as no one at the Vatican knows what happened in the deceased Pope’s final meeting with another Cardinal, Tremblay (John Lithgow), whom, it is suspected, may have been sacked by the Pope himself just before his final breaths. Lawrence’s work of uncovering the truth is self-motivated (both because of his general fastidiousness and his nagging personal need to find explanations in the world of unfulfilled questions in which he lives), and it’s an extremely difficult task, especially because all of the information circulates in wispy, insubstantial ways: whispers, echoes, muffled conversations overheard from down the hall. The film’s sonic language (paired with its breathtaking mise-en-scene of cavernous, baroque marble architecture; echo chambers upon echo chambers) is one of murmured speech and susurrous ambient noises, punctuated only by the occasional jarring yell or the nondiegetic and ominous grunt of a cello. Every artistic fiber of the film works together to create a sense of this strange world, stone-cold and repressed and rigorous and grand just as much as it is extraordinarily fragile, impressionable, and feeble. I frequently lament that color has been drained from the movies, but this is not the case for Conclave; director of photography Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography delivers the film in rich reds, greens, creams, and teals as much as a Titian painting. If ever a film’s visuals were worthy of an “amen,” it’s Conclave‘s. Conclave, the literary progenitor of which was published in 2016, can’t help but feel like a resonant and very clear political allegory—not merely for American politics (Harris, the novel’s author, is English), but for the general state of the world. (It’s worth saying, though, that its release date so close to the United States Election Day feels very deliberate.) But Conclave is about the twenty-first century world. It feels only somewhat about the real Vatican, whose current pontificate, Pope Francis, is certainly the most progressive pope in modern history. But Conclave instead uses its setting to critique both the growing threats of fascism in modern culture and the longstanding and historic fascisms of the Church itself (ones that no real-life Pope, no matter how progressive, can undo). Both of these ills are inhabited by one character, Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a brash Italian priest hungry to ascend the papacy; he’s an misogynist, an Islamophobie, and in all other ways extraordinarily conservative: he wants to repeal measures from the Vatican II council that took place from 1962-1965 (the legendary update to church doctrine that modernized the church in numerous ways, including allowing mass to be spoken in languages other than Latin). He’s basically the Donald Trump of the Catholic Church, armed with his own Project 2025, and numerous Cardinals, from Lawrence to his good friend and papal candidate Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), know that it will be a devastating blow to progress, freedom, and fairness in the world, if he becomes pope. Another rival, Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) from Nigeria, is militant in his condemnation of homosexuality; but some think this isn’t a bad concession considering the positive optics of electing the first African Pope. Bellini, on the other hand, is running on a platform of liberal values—including expanding the role of women in the church, a notion that terrifies many of the cardinals but seems like it might slightly gratify Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), one of the hardworking nuns who oversee the maintenance of Vatican City. Sister Agnes is a minor player in this film, but her presence is extremely weighty. She serves to remind the audience of the ultimate patriarchy of the Church; the film carefully reveals how the nuns in the Vatican are essentially servants to the men, expected to be silent and clean and cook and do everything for the priests. Conclave has a secret, tongue-in-cheek feminism about it that expands as the film goes on to make a neat little case for Catholicism’s ultimate institutional fear of women (some dramatic irony, given what the audience already know about Christianity’s systemic fetishization of the Madonna), Throughout, Conclave is a striking, stunning undertaking, a bold screenplay handled with great understatement and care, and delivered via a series of perfectly calibrated performances. May audiences flock to it, in theaters, and remember it come Oscar season. Let us pray. View the full article -
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The Tortured Artists Department: 5 Horror Books Featuring Creatives
I was a visual artist long before I was a writer, but I was always haunted. By the ghost of my beloved childhood cat, who sometimes ran past me down the hall long after she’d passed on. By the scent of cigarettes that sometimes drifted into the house we’d inherited from my grandparents after my grandmother, a lifelong smoker, died. By the ghosts that seemed to live in my own mind, the many fears of clowns and aliens and monsters I conjured lying awake at night. I was telling stories to myself, and then I was telling my stories with paint and clay. My next book, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, is about a similarly haunted artist—one who discovers a dark secret. Sarah Carpenter is a potter who abandoned her medium for the wrong man and now seeks to escape that abusive relationship by running away to a remote artists’ retreat in the north Georgia mountains. She hopes to reconnect with her muse in a beautiful valley surrounded by likeminded artists, watched over by the sprawling old resort hotel once beloved by America’s high society. But when Sarah accidentally discovers a body while digging a pit kiln, things start to go wrong. Sarah—and her fellow artists—connect with something long dead, a voice desperate to be heard. As it turns out, artists are tuned into another frequency. We often say our ideas come from some other place, but we don’t necessarily want to know where. That’s why artists are such a ripe community for horror stories. We open ourselves up to possibility and welcome whatever clambers inside. First of all, let’s remember that writers are artists, too. In Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays, a successful Hollywood screenwriter is finally on the cusp of making it big at the Oscars when the studio bigwigs force him to do the most predictable and soul-killing thing: kill off his gay characters to suit the algorithm. When he refuses, horrifying monsters from his own creations begin to stalk him, breaking the line between reality and fiction. Since the protagonist is a writer and the book is in first person point of view, the reader is treated to beautiful, thoughtful moments where Misha considers the relationship between the writer and story and how past trauma always finds a way in. But some artists are not so self-aware. In Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester, an artist mother and her teen daughter are both caught up in the cycle of the same serial killer, known only as the Cur because his victims are found with bite-riddled thighs. While the daughter struggles with the opposing urges to fit in and act out, her mother creates beautiful but eerie sculptures while in a trancelike state—artworks somehow related to the tragedies in her past that she can’t quite remember. Personally, as someone who has painted with my own blood, I’m always here for the admixture of female rage and art. Speaking of female rage, I recently had the opportunity to interview Lilliam Rivera here on CrimeReads, as we both wrote books that merge fashion with horror. We discussed my recent novella, Guillotine, and Rivera’s novel. Tiny Threads, which follows a hopeful fashion executive as she moves from New Jersey to Vernon, California, to pursue her dream job with a world-renowned designer. But behind Vernon’s flashy, bougie façade lies the stink of a slaughterhouse—and years of abuse and exploitation. As Lilliam’s protagonist, Samara, tries to connect with both the bigwig design team and the reserved, ignored women who sew the garments, she’s torn between her future and the past, reality and insanity, fashion and poverty. Samara is an artist of words and the descendant of a seamstress struggling to find her own voice, and she, too, is driven mad by her own repressed darkness. So that’s clay, screenplays, sculpture, and fashion, but there’s something to be said for actors and the fact that their art requires them to hide behind a mask. In If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, our cast of characters is embroiled in the works of Shakespeare at a small and selective conservatory. Each character has a roll to play that fits neatly into the company: the villain, the hero, the tyrant, the temptress, the ingenue, and the two leftovers forced to play sidekicks and bit parts. But when some of the roles are switched for a Halloween rendition of Macbeth, all hell breaks loose and someone ends up dead. The mystery behind this violence is as intricate and curious as Rio’s language, which draws from the poetry of Shakespeare to immerse the reader in a haunting dark academia world akin to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m a sucker for a book with a skull on the cover. In these stories, and in life, art and horror go hand in hand because… well, lots of art springs from the darker emotions. Fear, anxiety, anger, pain. Art allows us to find the order in that chaos, to create an evidence board more beautiful than a bunch of red string and pushpins and see all the available data laid bare, exposed to the light. Through art, we work through our thoughts and give them shape and depth. Through art, we find a path forward. Through art, we find the light. But when you open a window to let in the sun, anything might crawl inside. There’s a reason Aristotle said, “There is no great genius without some madness.” Artists are ripe for horror because they are already accustomed to living in a world of imagination and story, to seeing and hearing things other people miss entirely, to existing on another plane. And because of that openness, that sixth sense, they are uniquely vulnerable to haunting, stalking, and torture. On the page. Not literally. Please do not torture your local artist. Honestly, we do it to ourselves. *** View the full article -
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Patricia Cornwell on What’s to Come for Her Iconic Character, Kay Scarpetta
Scarpetta has a secret. Thirty-four years and twenty-seven books after Patricia Cornwell first introduced medical examiner Kay Scarpetta in Postmortem, she’s still discovering the vestiges of her character’s past—and sharing them with a legion of eager readers around the world who’ve bought more than 100 million copies of her novels. “It gives us a richness,” Cornwell says, “because it gives us an opportunity to explore more things about her background.” In Identity Unknown (October 8, 2024; Grand Central Publishing), Scarpetta is called to a truly baffling crime scene, the victim a long-ago lover with whom she once spent an amorous summer in Rome. “How would she deal with it when this person who is found dead … is somebody she once had a very intense romantic relationship with at the very beginning of her career?” Cornwell muses. “That is what she’s confronted with when she sees his body.” This premise has its origins in the author’s own past. After covering the crime beat (among other things) for the Charlotte Observer, Cornwell took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she worked as both a technical writer and computer analyst. “Back in those days, when I was in that environment, one of the things that always struck me as incredibly poignant and almost unimaginable was when a body came through and it was somebody you knew,” she says. This happened to Cornwell herself in the mid-80s. She heard a radio report about a homicide cop who committed suicide only to discover upon her arrival at work that it was the detective she used to do weekend ride-alongs with as a volunteer police officer. “I’ll never forget looking at him and seeing that teeny, tiny bullet hole in his chest that caused so much devastation for everybody around him,” Cornwell recalls. “But even harder than that is the medical examiner who is going to do the autopsy of someone that they had a relationship with.” This is just what Scarpetta faces in Identity Unknown—though the circumstances of the victim’s death can’t be confused for anything but murder. Astrophysicist Sal Giordano—known as the ET Whisperer for his interest in the paranormal—is found dead in an abandoned Wizard of Oz amusement park, his broken body splayed along the yellow brick road that traverses an apple orchard. “I’ve always thought that the whole notion of The Wizard of Oz is such a wonderful metaphor,” Cornwell says, crediting its enduring popularity, in part, to L. Frank Baum’s having tapped into something bigger than the story itself. “To me, it’s very much like finding yourself landing on this planet and wondering … Why are we here? Who are we?” The peculiarities of the crime scene lead Scarpetta down a similar path of pondering. Giordano’s skin is inexplicably tinted red, and he is surrounded by a crop circle made of petals. According to Scarpetta’s niece, high-tech, helicopter-piloting Lucy Farinelli, his body was dropped out of the sky by a UAP—or an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (more commonly known as a UFO). The implications are … otherworldly. “I wasn’t all that interested in UFOs or the possibility of an extraterrestrial community or non-human intelligence that might be here on this planet with us,” Cornwell says, noting that her curiosity was only piqued when she began researching the Captain Chase novels (Quantum and Spin) at NASA in 2017. “But the more I started looking into things, the more I started to wonder.” Her interest led her to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where pathology specimens are kept (including a piece of Abraham Lincoln’s skull as well as the bullet that killed him). After being granted entry into a private storage area, Cornwell noticed a file drawer that was taped shut and labeled with warnings not to open. It was marked: Roswell. The curator attempted to pass it off as a joke; Cornwell wasn’t convinced. “I have never forgotten that. And I have Scarpetta going through something similar,” Cornwell says of her character’s long-ago discovery of a Roswell file, albeit at Langley Air Force Base (where Scarpetta is summoned to perform Giordano’s autopsy). “She’s in a top-secret area where we see some very unusual things. And all I can say is, I had a lot of fun with that scene.” Less fun for Scarpetta is her command performance before an audience that includes members of the CIA, Military, and Secret Service, as well as Lucy, Scarpetta’s husband, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, and her longtime investigator, Pete Marino. It’s an unenviable task made more so by the fact that her personal life is exposed to professional probing. “They get into the relationship Scarpetta had with the victim,” Cornwell notes. “They have to, partly to make sure that she is objective.” And objectivity is more important than ever given the high stakes of Identity Unknown. As chief medical examiner, Scarpetta mustn’t allow emotion to cloud her judgment; rather, her opinions are supposed to be rendered solely on what the scientific evidence tells her. But Giordano’s death coupled with that of seven-year-old Luna Briley—whose short life ended with a bullet through the head, reported by her prominent parents as accidentally self-inflicted—has her in a tailspin. Ryder and Piper Briley are billionaires who use their money to garner power and wield influence. They also happen to own the shuttered amusement park where Giordano’s body was found, suggesting a link between the cases. Not surprisingly, Scarpetta wants them put under the proverbial microscope and exposed to the same scrutiny as the victim(s)—even as they use every resource at their disposal (not to mention intimidation and harassment) to have the case closed. “She might judge people about being willfully cruel or being willfully dishonest or taking advantage. It’s really about the abuse of power,” Cornwell says. “And she would judge you mostly on your intentions and on your heart because she knows that’s what matters to her. Scarpetta could not live with being unkind, and that’s what makes her wonderful. It’s also what gets her into trouble.” That trouble has only grown larger in scale since Cornwell relaunched the series with 2021’s Autopsy after a five-year hiatus. That book introduced the idea of postmortem examinations performed in space while its follow-up, Livid, explored modern weaponry such as so-called microwave guns. But last year’s Unnatural Death moved into more speculative territory with an inquiry into the Bigfoot phenomenon while Identity Uknown grapples with things that are truly out of this world. “I often think, if you want to know the truth about who we are, look at what we’re doing,” Cornwell says, citing efforts to preserve DNA samples of animals and plants in portable data banks—a theoretical repopulation project commonly known as Noah’s Ark. “If we are thinking of having interplanetary travel … if we are considering creating communities on the moon and Mars … then what makes you think that hasn’t been done somewhere else?” Of course, Cornwell also sees evidence of ethereal, mind-boggling creation—such as the “infinitely meticulous” ladybug or dragonfly—all around her. “Nature is masterfully designed, and we’re learning from it,” she marvels, giving the example of how researchers studied the flight capabilities of falcons in the development of aircraft such as stealth bombers. “That tells me there’s something beyond us, and I find that exciting and hopeful.” It’s this exhilaration at life’s infinite possibilities—especially amid the devastation of COVID and the senselessness of human carnage—that drew Cornwell back to the familiarity of Scarpetta. “Trust me, if I didn’t believe in something greater … I wouldn’t have the courage to sit down and do this all the time because I’d find life hopeless,” she says. “But I don’t find life hopeless. Part of what I’m trying to tell you in these stories is that we can do better than this. We can be better than this.” But this transcension to betterness requires a willingness to look both beyond and behind us; after all, where there is hurt (or haunt), there can also be healing. It’s a notion the author will continue to examine through Scarpetta’s wise, wonderous eyes. “The big thing that I’m curious about right now is the whole subject of ghosts,” Cornwell teases. “I’ve been doing some very interesting research, and you just may see something rather haunted in the next book. That’s what’s got me full of wonder.” And therein may lie the secret to Cornwell’s longevity—and Scarpetta’s: “Always have a seeking mind.” *** Note: Scarpetta—having been under option for television and/or film since her inception—will finally make her small screen debut in a series for Amazon’s Prime Video, which recently picked up the project for two seasons. Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis will co-star and executive produce. “I’m very, very pleased about it, and I’m honored and thrilled by the talent that has been attached to it,” says Cornwell. “What I’ll tell my readers—and this is very important—is that you should not expect that this is going to be what you imagine from having read a Scarpetta book … You’re going to see other things about the characters that will be new and different. And I think it’s going to be a really good time.” –Author photo by Patrick Ecclesine View the full article -
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Terrifying Literary Horror Set In Beautiful, Familiar Places
It’s morning. The sky is clear blue, piercing even. The sun is bright warming everything it settles on. Gentle breezes blow tree branches, twist leaves that will soon change from green, to red, to brown before falling into piles to the ground. They will scatter at the first hint of rain. Form slick patches that cover slugs and snails and secrets. It is Autumn, and things are changing day by day but for now the stream flows, the birds sing, and the smoke gently curls up into the sky. Somewhere, a rooster crows, an alarm clock sings, an engine roars. Neighbours wake up to the smell of rain, the cloudless sky, the chattering of squirrels. Windows are open, doors unlocked, guards down. By nightfall, fox scream, crows call. Doors lock. In a small town, everyone knows everyone else’s secrets. They know who harbours them, who is filled with guilt, and more than anything, they know better than to keep their doors unlocked. There’s nothing like a good place where bad things happen. Rural towns, big cities, suburbs, villages, and places in between, have inspired writers around the world to write about some truly sinister things. No space is safe from ghosts, murders, secrets, injustice, corruption, and other hauntings. Writers of literary horror have proven that there’s something deliciously unsettling about the places we call home. Some of the scariest literary horror is set in places, real or imagined, that we recognize. These might be sleepy towns tucked away in the middle of nowhere, places with their own form of law and their own way of holding grudges. Or, metropolitan hubs with modern shopping malls, crumbling houses, and overflowing cemeteries. They could be seaside towns, buried cities, or places with miles and miles full of nothing but green grass and shallow graves. We recognize these places because they are a lot like home. There are schools, churches, police stations, cemeteries, office buildings, abandoned warehouses, and busy thoroughfares. They are places characters go to remember, places characters go to forget, and places where everyday characters discover something unsettling beneath the surface. Monsters under the bed, skeletons in closets, ghosts in attics, evil in plain sight, literary horror can be inspired by the stuff of nightmares. But it can also be inspired by fear, prejudice, and injustice. News and history make compelling fictions. Literary horror takes us deeper into the places we’re afraid of. It unpeels travesties of the past and forces a sort of reckoning. One person’s history is another one’s horror. In literary horror, places like haunted houses can pop up anywhere and across any time. Literary horror reminds us that no place is without secrets—no place like home. Let’s hope they’re right. If you’d like to read about some interesting places of literary horror, here’s a sample to dig into: Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is set in an un-named, rural American town stuck in the middle of nowhere and seemingly stuck in the past. They have no technology to speak of and seemingly no use for it. They are cut off from the world around them and if you ask them, that suits them just fine. This small town smack-dab in the middle of nowhere has some unsettling traditions. Each year, amidst much fanfare, the town holds a lottery. Everyone over a certain age must draw. Families draw together, wives with their husband’s families. Children old enough to draw for their family when the father is otherwise predisposed. Everyone has a job to fill. It’s an obligation that doesn’t seem to bother anyone until their name is called. The citizens may not remember all of the rules, but they never forget the stones that mark the tradition. The story reminds me of the ways people turn against one another when fortunes change. Tananarive Due, Ghost Summer: Stories Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer Short Stories is set in the rural town of Gracetown, Florida where ordinary and extraordinary horrors await visitors and town folks alike. This collection weaves through the community in chilling detail with stories as wide, rich and haunting as horror itself. One of my favorite stories in the collection includes a possessed toddler, a local myth, and a twist. The lush setting of Gracetown is deeply disturbing, complex, and brimming with secrets, skeletons, and the occasional ghost. Tananarive Due, The Reformatory Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is set in the Dozier School for Boys, an American reformatory school, where boys are sent to be “reformed” and many never make it home. This award-winning book is a testament to the children forced into a system that was designed to crush their spirits and their souls. It is a reminder of America’s violent past and the systems it birthed. Twelve-year old Robert Stephens Jr is like any other little boy. He wants shoes that fit, to protect his sister, and although he tries to keep it to himself, he really misses his mother. Robert just wants to Set in the Jim Crow Era, this heartbreaking literary horror weaves historical terrors with contemporary ones creating a vivid, compelling story set in a truly horrifying location. Sarah Moss, Summerwater Sarah Moss’ Summerwater, is not quite horror but this novel is certainly disturbing. It all takes place in a lush, vivid setting where evil comes in an unexpected form. A variety of strangers find themselves at a holiday park in Scotland. They are each stuck in the rain that keeps on falling and to some extent, in their own relationships. Summerwater encourages readers to consider who we are when we are in the woods, when the terror starts, and who is responsible for it. Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele: this anthology features a variety of imaginative terrors inspired by the “Sunken Places” (a personalized place filled with bespoke horrors) as imagined by 19 Black American authors. The stories are “raw imaginings of our deepest dreads and desires.” Whether about violent police, murdering husbands, grandmothers, siblings, cousins, strangers, or other monsters, each piece, regardless of where or when it is set, immerses readers into a chilling landscape that is so close to the world we live in that the things that go bump in the night are not the only things to worry about. *** View the full article -
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The Best Psychological Thrillers of October 2024
October may be spooky season, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a psychological thriller or three to fill the evenings! Here are five new suspenseful novels that kept the pages turning, and me guessing, and all of us distracted from the real-world suspense of the descending apocalypse ahem, election. Jason Rekulak, The Last One at the Wedding (Flatiron) Jason Rekulak’s sophomore thriller follows an estranged father attending his daughter’s wedding to a shady tech billionaire. Something’s off with her soon-to-be-husband and his creepy family, but those familiar with them aren’t giving up any secrets, and if he pushes too hard, the father of the bride could lose his relationship with his daughter for good. Suspensefully told, and disturbingly realistic. Emma C. Wells, This Girl’s a Killer (Poisoned Pen) What if Dexter was set in Louisiana, and instead of featuring a dude who specializes in now-debunked junk science, it’s about a female pharmaceutical rep? So yeah: she’s got access to a wide pool of ne’er-do-wells who won’t be missed, and a whole lot of drugs with which to pick ’em off. I hope that it gets really meta and she kills some nasty insurance claim deniers. Fingers crossed. Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel (Celadon) Fans of Korelitz’s literary thriller The Plot will (manuscript theft! identity theft! murder most foul! soup!) get excited for the sequel: The Sequel, in which a certain author’s widow decides to write her own book—and discovers that she’s not the only one who knows a few secrets after all. Fun. –Emily Temple, Lit Hub Managing Editor Alia Trabucco Zerán, Clean translated by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead) A housemaid in prison narrates her tale of woe as a confession in this visceral exploration of class, privilege, and humanity. It is clear from the beginning that something terrible has happened to her employers’ young daughter, but we must wait for a complex story to unravel before learning exactly the nature of the tragedy. Heartbreaking, furious, and a modern masterpiece. Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley) Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity. View the full article -
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Snowed in and SOL: Six Chilly ‘And Then There Were None’ Inspired Thrillers Perfect for Winter
It all started with Agatha Christie’s iconic And Then There Were None—the isolation trope closed circle mystery was born, and mystery-lovers have been hooked ever since. In my humble opinion, there can never be too many closed circle mystery/isolation trope stories like Christie’s! I can read book after book and never be satiated. It’s a formula that hits every time—a group is stuck in an isolated location, an extreme weather event or another reason why they can’t leave arises, a ticking clock puts pressure on the situation, and then everything is thrown into chaos by a grisly death—but was it an accident…or murder? There are only so many solutions in an isolation plot, and if it is murder, the culprit may be a mysterious outsider, someone sitting right in front of the stranded, or be one of them. The fun is in finding out which. There’s a reason it’s a classic. It’s a fast-paced, sticky plot best supported by a dynamic cast of characters with complex psychology, messy interpersonal relationships, secrets, and numerous potential motives. It takes a true sociopath to trap people in an isolated location and bump them off one by one, and part of the thrill as a reader is the guessing game of “which one of these people is secretly a monster?” My latest young adult thriller, The Bitter End, is And Then There Were None with a Gossip Girl flair that was inspired by my love of this trope and a desire to challenge myself to write one for teens. Plus, I’m a girl who loves (and misses—as someone living in Southern California) weather, so a snowstorm obstacle was a no brainer. I adore a good, chilly thriller, don’t you? There’s nothing better as the days grow shorter than curling up by a crackling fire with a shiver-inducing book… though frankly, I like to read snowbound thrillers year-round! So as you too begin to pile on the sweaters, here are just a few wintry page-turners from my shelves that served as inspiration or even just a vibe check for The Bitter End, and are sure to make for cozy—or at least chilling—fireside reading this winter. One by One By Ruth Ware This book is a chef’s kiss for the snowy isolation trope: a group of co-workers from a tech startup come for a retreat at a ski chalet in the French Alps, and everyone it seems has a secret—or beef—with one another. They all love-to-hate the company’s enigmatic co-founder, who goes missing during a ski outing on the first day. Then a blizzard hits and one by one they start dying. The snowstorm in the lap of luxury vibes are immaculate in this one, with a heart-pounding ending you won’t forget. I’ve read this one not once, but twice, and there may be an homage or two to it in The Bitter End! An Unwanted Guest By Shari Lapena Part of the thrill of this subgenre is the formula—knowing what’s coming, but delighting in how the author introduces variables—setting, cast, storms—to bring home a pulse-pounding reading experience. An Unwanted Guest plays off a multi-POV cast stranded in an isolated hotel during a winter storm, where everyone is a stranger to one another—or are they? Every beat hits where you want it with a delicious reveal of who everyone is and whom they might want to kill. Plus, the cold weather complications are especially evocative in this one. Shiver By Allie Reynolds Not every book that scratches this sub-genre itch sits slasher adjacent! People aren’t picked off at intervals in Shiver, but the book’s multi-timeline format creates its own unique escalation of tension, so by the time the body falls, you are chomping at the bit. Shiver volleys between a reunion between old snowboarding friends at a ski resort in the off-season and the last time the friends were all together, ten years ago before one of their own mysteriously disappeared. So often isolation trope mysteries hinge on sins of the past, something I love and drew on myself, and Shiver is no exception, executing the idea very well! It’s a feat where the past timeline is as intriguing, if not more so, than the present one. Rock, Paper, Scissors By Alice Feeney And sometimes all you need is two against the elements… and possibly someone who lured them there to exact revenge. Rock Paper Scissors is a whirlwind dual-timeline thriller split between a wife’s letters to her beloved husband on each successive anniversary, showing the ins and outs of their complicated relationship, and a big anniversary trip to a remote rental in the Scottish Highlands…in the midst of a snowstorm (as is the theme!). The trick is, the husband has difficulty recognizing faces, so how can he be sure who he’s on this trip with? Or maybe it’s whoever invited them to this mysterious house with the axe to grind. Only half of this one hits the snowy isolation trope, but it hits it hard! Alice Feeney is masterful with the final page twist, as well, which absolutely inspired me with The Bitter End. Breathless By Amy McCullough Okay, but what if instead of a ski chalet or a remote cabin, you’re stranded on a literal mountain peak? Taking place in the intense and brutal world of high-altitude mountaineering, Breathless sets its action on an 8,000 meter peak, inspired by the author’s own similar (though luckily less thriller-esque) climb. I’m fascinated by the mountaineering world and had read over twenty books on the subject before picking up this thriller—and it nails it! A group of ruthless, ambitious climbers jockey for fame and fortune above 25,000 feet where they have the benefit of perfect deniability—after all people die on mountains all the time, and it’s easy to lose your mind from oxygen deprivation. And it can be easy to get away with murder… Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer I know what you’re thinking: That’s not a thriller? Into Thin Air is non-fiction! But some of the best true stories are, in effect, thrillers, and this book appeals for many of the same reasons the fictional ones on this list do. It features a cast of characters (who happen to be real people) who are ambitious, driven, and assembled in an extreme, remote location when disaster strikes. There’s no killer, per se—except the mountain itself—and there’s no mystery to solve… but you will be left pondering the what-ifs, the why-dun-its, and the was-it-worth-its, and turning pages as quickly as all the best thrillers. Into Thin Air is a must-read for thriller fans of this trope who may not otherwise venture outside of fiction. *** View the full article -
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It Takes a Village (To Solve a Murder)
Sherlock Holmes has Watson, Nero Wolfe has Archie Goodwin, Nancy Drew has Georgia…every detective needs a sidekick. In the Miranda Abbott mystery series, our sleuth has Andrew Nguyen, her level-headed, faithful, and often exasperated personal assistant who follows her from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood to the wildly eccentric (and totally fictional) town of Happy Rock, Oregon. The setting was created to be the antithesis of Miranda’s past life in Los Angeles as the titular star of the (also fictional) network television series “Pastor Fran Investigates,” a show we imagined as a cross of “Murder She Wrote,” “The Father Dowling Mysteries,” and “Charlie’s Angels.” As in, Miranda Abbott played a traveling youth pastor who wandered from town to town solving murders and often ended up wearing a red bikini. If that sounds outlandish, let us all remember “BJ & the Bear,” a show about a truckdriver whose partner was a monkey, which was a slightly less ridiculous premise than the crime-fighting “Manimal,” who was a college professor who could shape-shift into different animals. The town of Happy Rock is populated with an assortment of supporting characters: Atticus Lawson, a lawyer (in fact the only lawyer in town) with a debilitating fear of public speaking; Tanvir Singh, chairman of the local chamber of commerce and the proprietor of Singh’s Hardware and Bait Store; Mabel and Myrtle, the interchangeable partners who run the Cozy Café; Bea Maracle, who owns the local bed and breakfast, Bea’s B&B… So where did they come from? Well, some of them are structural. They are required by the story. In the first book, “I Only Read Murder,” Miranda arrives in town because a postcard from her long-estranged husband summons her for what she erroneously believes is an offer of reconciliation. So, we created Edgar Abbott, along with his bookstore. If Miranda was going to channel her inner “Pastor Fran” crime-solver then local law-enforcement was needed. Hence Chief of Police (of a three-person detachment) Ned Buckley. We also decided that Happy Rock needed a newspaper, the Weekly Picayune, which meant we had to come up with a reporter. Done. Enter Scoop Bannister. We also wanted to play with expectations a bit. Often in a comedic Whodunnit, the local police are portrayed as just a bit thick, bumblers, really, who get in the way of the amateur detective. Not our cop. Ned Buckley may be mild-mannered, and generally genial, but he’s also an excellent investigator. Scoop Bannister, despite her profession, is not cynical or the least bit hard-boiled, but has somehow managed to keep her innate naivete despite also being a shrewd journalist. And Edgar? The grumpier we write him; the more readers seem to be rooting for him and Miranda to get back together. Which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise. Then there are the characters who may (just maybe) seem to have probably (or possibly) been drawn from our actual lives. For example, the upcoming third Miranda Abbott Mystery, “Killer on the First Page,” takes place during a writer’s festival hosted by Miranda and Edgar. Readers may assume that some of the characters introduced are based on Will’s experiences at the multitudinous book events he has participated in. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, one of the authors appearing in the (again, fictional) First Annual Happy Rock Mystery Writers Festival is Lawrence Block. Will has never met him. And the harried publicist who may or may not be a suspect? Not at all based on anyone Will has ever encountered. The second book, “Mystery in the Title,” involves a Movie of the Week shooting in Happy Rock. Again, a reader might think that one or two of the characters depicted are based on real people Ian has dealt with during a lengthy career in film and television. Absolutely not. Not that we can’t understand why someone might leap to those sorts of ridiculous assumptions. For example, in the first book there is a character named Graham Penty, who attended a conservatory Acting school and now teaches drama at the local high school. But he has absolutely nothing in common with Alan Penty, who attended the same conservatory Acting school as Ian and who now teaches high school drama. The first names are completely different. We did have another character in “I Only Read Murder” that we were, regretfully, unable to keep in subsequent stories since this character (who we’re not going to identify) was a suspect and having them appear in later books could kind of ruin a really, really good plot twist. Someone reading the series in a different order than written could figure out that this particular character could not actually be the killer in the first book, since they appear in the subsequent one. It’s a shame really, since we really like this character and are contemplating featuring them in a stand-alone novel (or “spin-off,” to use a term Miranda Abbott would employ) down the road, but we assure you the character in question is not based on any actual person, living or dead. *** View the full article -
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How Writing a Novel Helped One Writer Capture a Changing Dublin
I’ve lived in Dublin for many years, an innocent abroad, a fish out of water. It’s my home, but it’s never been home home. Like for every immigrant, home home is a mixture of fantasy, history and old geography. A shining memory of childhood hard to discern through the lens of reality, no matter where you’re standing. The country you live in is never really your own. And the country you came from doesn’t stay the same without you. Writing a novel set in Dublin, I couldn’t pull up the home home of a native—I had to write from the perspective of a new arrival. A re-incarnation of the rube I was so long ago. I remember the first time I came into Dublin city centre almost exactly thirty years ago. I was staying with a host family in south Dublin, in a suburb I later learned was ridiculously posh. It didn’t look fancy to me at the time, but I’d kill for the property now. On the way into the city, we passed through Ballsbridge, where the U.S. Embassy still stands out like a space fortress, a huge gold eagle stretched above the door. The Dad of the family, I can’t remember his name, gestured at the crosswalk and made some kind of crack about Jack and Jill heading into work. The daughter next to him, whose name and short skirt I stole for my novel, said something about how you could always spot an American. “How?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. A few days later I was talking about this with another American and we cornered a guy who was waiting for the same professor we were (who never turned up, by the way). “Can you spot an American?” we asked. When he said he could we quizzed him and finally he claimed it was my friend’s bag. Which he’d bought in Dublin. When my host family dropped me off at Trinity to try to find accommodation, I could not get over how gorgeous everyone in Dublin was. I remember thinking I would spend the year abroad alone, a wallflower among roses. Irish people are seldom ranked high on the international physical attractiveness lists (number two in sexy accents, though), but I was hooked from the start. I remember a drunken Frenchman (his father was big in cous cous, his friend told me, earnestly, hopefully) who tried to explain to me, an American, what was special about Irish women. “Thin,” he said, “but with big bits. Big bits, yes?” The accompanying hand signals left no room for misunderstanding, but I didn’t correct his vocabulary. I wasn’t in the big bits business, if you know what I mean. That first year in Dublin, Irish people would ask me, “Why are you here?” They understood the power of tourism, the green dollar, but not why anyone would choose to live in Dublin, with its dirty streets and old dreams. My one room flat was on the same street Leopold Bloom lived on, and nobody cared. Everyone my age had U.S. visas on the brain and siblings who couldn’t come home ‘from America’ because they didn’t have the paperwork to get back. The idea of someone choosing Dublin over New York, Boston or Chicago was ludicrous to them. By the time I’d fallen in love with an Irishman and settled on Dublin as my home a few years later, the Celtic Tiger was stretching its long legs across the country. By the time I’d fallen in love with an Irishman and settled on Dublin as my home a few years later, the Celtic Tiger was stretching its long legs across the country. House prices started to skyrocket, and every conversation was about property: Who had gotten a foot on the ladder? Why was it so hard to get a decent builder? We grabbed a house like it was the last bit of floating timber in the wake of the Titanic, missing the fact that there was a guy with five buses and a 24 hour transit business living next door. Dublin was flooded with new money and wore it like a mink coat that needed tailoring. Then came the financial crash, and the International Monetary Fund bailout, and the ghost housing estates, and the public sector pay cuts. Irish people seemed to do a long, slow exhale. Sure, it was a disaster, but it was familiar. Nobody had to pretend to be fancy anymore, and everyone started talking about visas again. While I raised my kids, Ireland raised itself. Again. Slowly, slowly, economic recovery and direct foreign investment repaved the streets and finished the houses. Multinational companies tipped their caps to low corporate tax and the Irish exchequer welcomed them in. Every scrap of waste land in the unposh place I live is being zoned for high density housing, and recently I overheard my adult son say he’d never be able to afford a home here. Plus a change. And this is the Ireland my young American protagonist enters. Nobody asks him why he’s here, or doubts his desire to stay in Dublin. In Ireland. Who wouldn’t want to stay? I had to put on his shoes and walk the streets I’ve been missing since responsible adulthood and persistent motherhood took over. With the exception of one sad loss to Covid, the list of pubs he drinks in are the pubs I loved. Where I drank, and talked about books, and flirted with stupid Frenchmen and smart Irishmen. And it was so, so good to be back. The upholstery a little nicer, the mirrors behind the bars a little shinier, and the bathrooms much improved. Like me, a good few years older, but dressing with a bit more care. And in case you’re wondering, while Irish people remain gorgeous, the experience of a confident and multicultural Dublin is even more beautiful. I’m not pretending to be the only American writing in Ireland. There are, as the Irish would say, ‘a rake’ of them. From the historic J.P Dunleavy to the poetic Alice Lyons, Americans have been ‘coming home’ to Ireland or making their home in Ireland since the founding of the state. Writing about Ireland. Writing about the Irish experience. Writing about the complexity of the Irish character. And I read them and feel yes, yes, that’s familiar. I know these characters. My fast first draft happened in 2019, with my poor main character tripping around Dublin aimlessly. The much slower second draft emerged in 2021, and he had the bit between his teeth. And in my ‘rest’ period (as the actors say), searching for an agent, longing for a publisher, I started reading again. I don’t know how I got my hands on it, but somehow the peerless Tana French’s The Searcher landed in my hands. And there it finally was, an American flailing around Irish culture. Being an American. Making all the mistakes. Sticking out like a sore thumb. All done with the mastery of a great storyteller by a woman who knows what it is like to be American-Irish rather than Irish-American. And it felt more than familiar. It felt like home home. *** View the full article -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - December
Hi! Here are my answers to the exercises! THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Katerina must rescue her kidnapped brother and avoid being caught by the king THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT King Vladimir, the current King of Reih, is the antagonist. King Vladimir’s goal is to conquer the entire continent of Veseria because he believes if a country does not conquer then it becomes easily conquerable. He is a calm, manipulative, and calculating man. He understands people’s motivations very well and uses them to his advantage. He is like a snake waiting to strike, patient and observant, then lethal. He grew up the black swan of the family, the heir to a great and honorable king. In an attempt to live up to his father’s image, he became an ambitious and cruel teenager, finding control through fear and manipulation to be more successful than honor and kindness. He was then ostracized by his father because of his dark ambition, disinherited, and exiled. However, ten years later he returned with an army, slaughtered his family, and took Reih. After his success, he was then told by the gods that one child would be his greatest weapon or his downfall, Katerina. He recognized Katerina as the child and instated her as his personal assassin and spy. He uses both fear and manipulation to control her and keep her loyal. CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE The House of Hands The King’s Hand The King’s Shadow DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Mary E. Pearson Both the Remnant Chronicles and the Dance of Thieves Series are similar in the way they handle the politics of a kingdom. The protagonist, a young woman with little interest in politics, suddenly finds her way to the front of it all, whether it's due to orders from her sovereign or fleeing her responsibilities as princess. Sarah J. Mass SJM’s Throne of Glass series is similar in setting, a medieval-esque continent in the midst of division. The protagonist is a young woman raised as an assassin, similar to my protagonist, and spends much of the series working through the trauma of her past and forging towards a better version of herself. The antagonist is a corrupt king, trying to take control of the continent, much like my own antagonist. CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT After her brother is kidnapped and she fails to save him, Katerina deserts her position as the King's assassin and makes the dangerous trek across the continent to find him. OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS To find her brother, Katerina must leave everything she’s ever known behind and step into a world she’s never experienced before. Behind the castle walls, she’s been able to push away thinking about the consequences of her assassinations and missions, disconnecting herself from her actions. However, her journey across the continent forces her to confront the devastation she had a role in unleashing across the continent and opens up the well of guilt, anger, and sadness she’s been pushing down for years. For example, there is one scene where she meets a girl her age forced to flee Dalaria, a country under the king’s control, after her village is burned to the ground on the king’s orders. Katerina realizes that she could have easily been assigned to burn this girl’s village herself back when she served the king and knows she would have followed through on the order to protect herself. She then has to grapple with the guilt of that realization, resulting in a panic attack. The secondary conflict is a romantic conflict. When Katerina meets Azrin, a forger’s apprentice, in the city on her way to escaping, she is guarded and on-edge. She only lets him accompany her on her journey north after he saves her life. She is very wary to trust him at first due to her past experiences with men. He seems to be the complete opposite, very open and very trusting. She doesn’t want to trust him by revealing her identity and he grows frustrated with her unwillingness to open up and tell him who she is. The conflict then increases after she learns her father was the one that killed his parents. This secret she is keeping keeps her from acting on her romantic feelings for him and she inevitably shuts him out. In the end, he discovers the truth and leaves her near the end of the journey, feeling betrayed and hurt by her lies, and she is once again alone. One specific scenario in the book is when she steals a pair of horses from her father’s men and refuses to tell Azrin where she found them. He then begs her to let him in and says he would understand no matter who she is. She grows defensive and invalidates his own hardships in life by saying he could never understand and that he would leave the second he knew the truth. Azrin then tells her that if she keeps herself so guarded all the time, she will eventually end up alone. THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING Fahviel - Fahviel is a bustling medieval-esque city. It’s the capital of the country of Reih and the largest city in the country. It’s split into three districts, the Crown, where the royalty and wealthy live, the Working District, where the working class resides, and finally the Crag, the slums of the city. Fahviel was once the largest and most illustrious city on the continent, but the recent war has since driven away most of its travelers and increased the wealth gap substantially. The city used to be a melting pot of different cultures, festivals, and traditions from all across the continent, however, as King Vladimir continues to conquer the continent, much of these cultures and festivities have been outlawed in the city. Once the gem of the Western World, Fahviel has now fallen to the corrupt politicians and the rats. The House of Hands - The House of Hands is a large manor in the heart of a Fahviel’s Crown district that houses the king’s elite army, the Hands. The manor is a tall, slender, ebony house with a large gold balcony engraved with the House’s emblem. Inside the House lives a few hundred of the country's most dangerous and powerful assassins, spies, engineers, and soldiers. The members eat, train, and sleep in the House. It’s a place teeming with competition, ruthlessness, and action. Cazik’s Eye - Cazik’s Eye is a small stretch of streets in the Crag that have become home to Fahviel’s darker dealings. Along these streets, you’ll find brothels, gambling houses, and any other illegal business or service one might’ve needed in medieval times. Cazik’s Eye, named after the trickster god, Cazik, is run by several different crimelords. The crimelords govern themselves and keep the debauchery from leaking into the rest of the city, so the king chooses to turn a blind eye. However, travelers unlucky enough to accidentally find themselves in Cazik’s Eye are likely to lose their valuables, if they are lucky enough to even get out. Havenshire - Havenshire is the second largest city in Fahviel, however it is far below it in size and splendor. It’s located in the northern part of the country and has, since the war, become a refugee city for those fleeing from Dalarian. That being said, the people of Reih who live in Havenshire hardly enjoy the new influx of foreigners and are often hostile towards people from other parts of the continent. Chestwood - Chestwood is a small Reihian mining town near the border of Reih and Dalaria. It’s a peaceful, quiet town, full of friendly and trusting people, quite the contrary to Fahviel. It’s snow-covered most of the year because of its proximity to the Stag Mountains. It’s the last town before the dangerous mountain terrain of western Dalaria. Dalaria - Dalaria is a peaceful, northern country that has recently been conquered by the Kingdom of Reih. Its people are spiritual and passive people, who rely heavily on community and tradition. There are several different regions of Dalaria, including the coastal region, the Icelands, the Stag Mountains, and the Tundra. Each part of Dalaria has its own version of traditions and type of people/community. There have been several uprisings from the Dalarian people over the years since King Vladimir conquered the country and even a structured rebellion that has been forming. King Vladimir has been retaliating in recent months by having his soldiers burn every village with ties to the rebellion. Because of this, many of the Dalarian people remained split on whether or not they support the rebellion, and it has led to communities and even families being torn apart over the conflict. The Stag Mountains and Agar Peak - The Stag Mountain Range is the largest mountain range on the continent. It has treacherous, rocky, and icy terrain that remains covered in snow nearly year-round. Most of the communities who lived in these mountains have since left due to harsh weather and superstition. Agar Peak is the tallest peak in this mountain range and is said to be home to the gods. The legend of Agar Peak says it once used to be a popular pilgrimage site for Dalarians, but once the gods disappeared however, the peak became hostile and haunted. The Dalarians have heard stories of men going mad at the base of the peak and having horrible, terrifying visions. Therefore, this area is heavily avoided. Because the area is abandoned, there are several ruins of old villages and pilgrimage sites that once existed around the peak. Drugaur - Drugar is an abandoned village in the heart of the Stag Mountains near Agar Peak. It is an ancient village made of entirely black stone with a large, tall castle embedded into the mountain side. It is the current site of the rebellion. The castle has a dark and violent history that is uncovered throughout the series. -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - December
Title: Go Bleep Your Self-Help – A Little Book to Remind You That You’re Already (Mostly) Perfect Genre: Narrative Non-Fiction / Irreverent Self-Help / Body Mind Spirit #1 THE STORY STATEMENT Multiple unaddressed childhood traumas have led the reader to a life of anxiety, depression, addiction, and unhappiness. The reader has tried and failed, over and over again, to address these issues with conventional therapy, pharmaceuticals, and popular self-help. Now, the shadowy doppelganger of the reader, the You character in the book, joins a charming and devious author –J. Stewart Dixon– on a cross-country adventure where You encounter four distinct, wise, healing, and avant-garde teachers: an artsy neuroscientist, a rebellious college student, a burned-out army nurse, and a sage but dangerous tour boat captain. Each teacher challenges you with unique inner and outer adventures, experiences, techniques, and exercises, all of which help you to overcome your core traumatic wounds and rediscover your most authentic, happiest self again. #2 THE ANTAGONIST FORCE The primary antagonistic force throughout Go Bleep Your Self-Help is fear itself, represented by a formless, ambiguous entity known by the You character (in dreams, anxiety attacks, and visions) as the “ice shadow.” The ice shadow prevents, avoids, denies, and distracts you from meeting your deepest childhood traumas. The ice shadow prevents, avoids, denies, and distracts you from releasing your story and identity as a depressed, addicted, wounded, unloved, and unworthy person. The ice shadow prevents, avoids, denies, and distracts you from realizing your deepest, aware self. In the end, you meet the ice shadow, and its true nature is revealed. The ice shadow is only defeated when you come to one very paradoxical, sobering, mindful, and self-aware realization: The ice shadow is both the very thing preventing you and the very thing inviting you– to grow, heal, and change. Traditional, dualistic, Cartesian models of dealing with the ice shadow – like talk therapy, pharmaceuticals, or self-help –never stood a chance. The ice shadow is a manifestation of our deepest, darkest fears masked over and hidden by…ego. #3 BREAKOUT TITLE Go Bleep Your Self-Help – A Little Book to Remind You That You’re Already (Mostly) Perfect #4 GENRE AND COMPARABLES Genre: Narrative Non-Fiction / Irreverent Self-Help / Body, Mind, Spirit Comparable Books: 1. Spirituality for Badasses, Book 1 and 2 ––2021, 2023, J. Stewart Dixon My self-published book series, Spirituality for Badasses has won seven indie publishing awards and sold almost 50,000 copies. It was written using the same style and format that will be used in Go Bleep Your Self Help. 2. The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck ––2016, Mark Manson HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, published The Subtle Art in 2016. It is humorous, healing, insightful, and unreserved in its irreverent approach. It has also sold over 10 million copies. 3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ––1974, Robert M. Pirsig A classic in the Mind / Body / Spirit genre, Zen and the Art is the closest, heart and soul comparable to Go Bleep Your Self-Help. Both use the Socratic method, gestalt, insight, and mindfulness to draw philosophical conclusions about life, and both take the reader on a healing, cross-country road trip. Robert, of course, drove a 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle. I drive a 2019 green, 4-door Jeep Wrangler. #5 THE HOOK- CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT Multiple unaddressed childhood traumas have led the reader to a life of anxiety, depression, addiction, and unhappiness. The reader has tried and failed, over and over again, to address these issues with conventional therapy, pharmaceuticals, and popular self-help. Now, the shadowy doppelganger of the reader, the You character in the book, must embark upon a dubious, risky adventure to find true healing and happiness. #6 PRIMARY AND SECONDARY CONFLICTS Primary Internal Conflict of Main You Character: The main You character has experienced four traumatic events that have dictated his/her life, mental health, and destiny: 1. Age 21: Incarceration and rehabilitation for two years in a penitentiary for heroin use, possession, and intent to distribute. 2. Age 19: Joined the US Army and then quickly kicked out for mental health issues, followed by a year of heroin abuse. 3. Age 15: Experienced and survived a school mass shooting where only brother was killed. 4. Age 7: Witnessed a violent fight between parents, which ended with hospitalization from hypothermia. Story-Plot-Narrative Scenario: Each of the above traumatic incidents serves as a triggering mechanism for the main You character throughout the narrative plot. Each of the four secondary characters (Neuroscientist, College Student, Army Nurse, Boat Captain) provides challenges, tension, lessons and resolutions as the You character does the difficult work of revealing, meeting and healing these core wounds. One example: The You character meets Dr. David Vanderhoff, a neuroscientist/artist from Panama City, Florida, who volunteers his time helping incarcerated drug addicts at a nearby jail. He invites the You character and J. Stewart to attend a class. You attend, and the painful years of your own incarceration and addiction are triggered. You reluctantly begin to view these past experiences in a new light. Secondary Internal Conflict of Main You Character: 1. Inner turmoil, doubt, and trust issues with the author-guide character J. Stewart Dixon. 2. Conflict with his language, methodology, values, approach, and style. 3. Conflict with sketchy and dangerous situations he places you in. 4. Conflict with his mission: to get you to meet your deepest fears. Story-Plot-Narrative Scenario: J. Stewart Dixon, the iconoclastic, irreverent, wise, author-guide character in Go Bleep Your Self Help, is a hard pill for the main You character to swallow. J. Stewart serves as a mentor, best friend, Zen master, and drill sergeant- all rolled into one. He is an unrepentant master of the art of tough love. The You character resists, confronts, challenges, and bemoans J. Stewart every step of the way…until the end of course, when you have the epiphany that everything this wild, Zen-clown just put you through was for your ultimate healing and benefit. One example: J. Stewart introduces you to Seo-Yeon Lee, a Korean-American ex-army nurse who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She provides arduous, two-day, emotional-psychological reset treks for burned-out medical professionals to the top of nearby Ha Ling Mountain. You reluctantly join J. on one such expedition, which turns out to be more dangerous than anticipated. The experience pisses you off and triggers a deflating and humiliating experience you had while in the army. You live through it, are challenged to reflect deeply, and ultimately, are grateful. #7 LOCATION SETTINGS Go Bleep Your Self Help has four major parts with four primary location settings. They are as follows: Part One: The Neuroscientist and the Edge of the Known Universe Panama City, Florida: · Beach home of Dr. David Vanderhoff, a neuroscientist/artist/documentary film-maker Tallassee, Florida: Dr. Vanderhoff’s work locations: · The Tallahassee Federal Detention Center · Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Hospital, Department of Neuroscience · The Challenger Learning Center (NASA) and IMAX Theater The two central Florida locations symbolize the two-sided paradox at the heart of Go Bleep Your Self Help. On the one hand, the work locations of Dr. Vanderhoff in Tallahassee, Florida, serve as hard neuroscientific evidence for the book’s main thesis – that an immense, positive reservoir of mental health healing is available through mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness, and knowing thyself. On the other hand, Dr. Vanderhoff’s beautiful, artsy beachfront home in Panama City symbolizes the inherent beauty and mystery contained within mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness, and knowing thyself. These locations set the tone for the rest of the adventure. Part Two: The Iconoclast and The Flight of the New Shephard The University of Texas- Austin: • Home of Marseille (Mars) David, a highly intelligent, lonely, slightly depressed, and strangely lucky student who refuses to pay or register for class. The Guadalupe Mountains, West Texas: • Home of Blue Origin Space Flights, Launch Site One and the Astronaut Village The two Texas locations support the same inherent paradox found in mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness, and knowing thyself. The University of Austin represents conventional learning, dry academic training, and heartless healing (talk therapy, pharmaceuticals, and traditional self-help). The Blue Origin Space Flight Center in the Guadalupe Mountains (which Marseille has won a free flight for two) represents the synchronistic good fortune of thinking outside the box and embracing life authentically in the moment. Part Three: The Nurse and the Expedition to the Top of Ha Ling Mountain Calgary, Alberta, Canada: · Home of Seo-Yeon Lee, a Korean-American ex-army nurse. · Location of The Canadian Mindfulness Research Center Ha Ling Mountain Peak- One hour outside of Calgary · Hiking expedition destination where a snowstorm engulfs all involved and creates a setting ripe for tension, challenge, and learning. The Calgary, Canada locations serve as a caldron for the main character's internal conflicts. The Canadian Mindfulness Research Center is a softball arena where the main character is prepped for the challenge to come. The Ha Ling Mountain Peak is the heart of the challenge. Things go very wrong, and hard lessons are learned. Part Four: The Captain and the Calamity at Orcas Island Seattle, Washington: · Home of Sail Boat, Tour Captain, Issac Hjelmsgaard · Bell Harbor Marina on the Puget Sound, his workplace location Orca Island, Straight of Georgia- Four hours from Seattle · Sailboat destination where a storm capsizes the boat and all struggle to survive The Seattle, Washington, locations serve as the final heated caldron for the deepest, darkest internal conflict of the main You character. The captain’s rough and grimy workplace serves as an unconventional location where the main You character is confronted with the most brutal truths about mindful, self-aware, and know thyself healing. The Orcas Island location is a "Jonah and the Whale" final test for the You character, where the deepest core wound is met and healed. -
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Lee Child on writing short stories
You know Jack Reacher. Now meet twenty more heroes and heavies from the brilliant mind of legendary crime author Lee Child, in this new collection published by The Mysterious Press. These twenty intriguing, thrilling, and rapid-fire fictions are intimate portraits of humanity at its best and worst, sure to please new and longtime fans of Child and to illuminate a side of the author’s work unknown to Reacher devotees. Featuring a colorful new introduction from the author, the collection stands as the first book written entirely by Child in four years. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with Child to talk about deadlines, inspirations, and becoming a short story writer (or really, having been a short story writer all along.) This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. Olivia Rutigliano: Mr. Child, it’s lovely to meet you. Congratulations on the release of your new novel. Lee Child: Thank you very much. OR: Would you like to say a little bit about the process of releasing this? The book is a departure from what you normally do… LC: Yeah, it’s a collection of short stories, and it is with Mysterious Press. I’ve known Otto for a long, long time, but we rarely had a professional association to this degree, and it was only because of Otto, really, that I’m doing it, that because I’m a novel writer, that’s how I conceive of my current phase of my career. And you get asked to do short stories, and that took me totally by surprise. I did not know that that was part of the landscape. You publish a novel, inevitably, somebody wants a short story, and then another person… and you end up doing, I mean, I don’t know… I’ve probably done 50 or 60, I’m really not sure, over the years, but I’ve never really considered it my main line of work, and that’s made me very not nervous about it, but just somehow they’re off to the side. They’re not my thing. I’ve been doing radio interviews about it, and I’ve been saying to the radio interviewers, ‘I’m sure it happens in your life. You know you’re a radio star, and I’m sure you get asked to open a supermarket, or do emceeing at a charity auction or something of that nature. And I’m sure you do it great, but you don’t think of that as your main job.’ And that’s sort of how I relate to short stories. So I had this strange mental thing going on where I thought, ‘well, they’re sort of secret there. Nobody knows about them. They’re off to the side.’ Do I really want to say, ‘Hey, I’ve written these short stories?’ But Otto said, and there’s one thing about Otto is that he’s honest, brutally… so if he thought they were crap, he’d say they were crap. If they were worth publishing, he would say so. And he did so. That really is what convinced me that it was a reliable third party opinion, that this was worth doing. So I did it. OR: Now, were all of the stories in this collection newly written for the collection? Or were they assembled from the, you know, past few years that you’ve been doing this? LC: Yeah, they were the detritus, you know, [from] 20 plus years really. I mean, some of them are literally 20 years old! OR: That’s wonderful! LC: Yeah, and they’ve been here and there. The title of the volume is Safe Enough which is one of the titles of one of the stories, and you know, that was actually published by an academic publisher in Denmark in a textbook about how to write English! So they show up in odd places around the world, in odd circumstances, but generally speaking, tomorrow, you know, you do them as a favor. One of them, Safe Enough, originally was written for MWA when Harlan Coben was a guest editor of the MWA anthology that year. I think it was like 2004 or something. And so he says to me, ‘would you write a story?’ And I’m like, ‘what’s the theme?’ And he tells me, and then I do short stories always the same, which is, I always put it off until, literally the night before deadline, and do it in one sitting. OR: Oh my gosh! LC: Because they’re short, yeah. And so I remember doing that with that particular one… and many, many others. And… you know, sure, that’s kind of lazy and procrastinating and so on, but it actually gives it a an energy that I find doing them is the most attractive thing, as opposed to doing a novel, because you’re very aware with a novel that it’s a long slog, months and months, and you’re always aware that whatever you’re doing today there is masses ahead of you, and to a certain degree that affects what you do today, because you’re sort of subliminally planning. You know, I never actually say anything so specific for myself, but it’s a bit like saying, ‘oh well, I’ve got to save something for chapter 20 sort of thing, sure.’ Whereas with a short story in one sitting, it just you can just blast through it with absolutely no inhibition, no restraint, no sense that you’re going to be working on. Is for weeks or months, you just do it. And I felt for me that gives it a real energy. About half of the stories that are probably Reacher stories, but the ones that aren’t Reacher stories are liberations. You know, I can be a different character. I can be at a different time of history, a different nationality, be a weak person or a failure instead of, you know, Superman, right? And so it is attractive, it’s liberating! But I never really thought much of it, partly because I have, like I say in the introduction to the book, I have this strange old showbiz attitude that they’re not earning any money, therefore nobody is seeing them. That is an inevitable connection in my head, and so I’m doing these secret things that nobody’s going to see so I can do what I want to do. So have fun with it. Right? It’s liberating, indeed, to quote your word. Is there a particular story in the collection that’s your favorite, or one that you hope, if anyone flips open to the you know, table of contents, they’ll they’ll read. It’s kind of the other way around. There’s one in particular that was written for IGW. They had an anthology something to do with romance or something. And so the title of that story is, “I Heard a Romantic Story,” and I think it is basically a 2500 word paragraph because I was high as a kite. OR: Oh, my God, that’s hysterical. LC: I’m kind of hoping that’s not the first one [in the collection]. OR: Yeah, sure. That’s very funny, though. LC: Other ones were, were fine, a lot more sensible and Safe Enough was a good story. I remember I just really got into that through the through the characters. And there was one called “The Snake Eater by the Numbers.” I think that there was, it was for a very specific anthology where the conceit of the book was, it was more or less like a serial novel covering a couple of census actually. And the idea was, there was this charm bracelet that somehow got passed from story to story, and sometimes with charms added or subtracted. And I was a late substitute for that. I was nothing to do with that volume at all. And then the somebody dropped out, so I got this panicked phone call from from the person putting it together, who said, ‘Can you do this story?’ And it’s got to be about a charm bracelet, and it’s got to be found in a police station in north of London, and then it’s got to end up inside somebody’s stomach. Okay, what a set of parameters! It was super specific. Zero deadline, needed it within a day or two. And I was listening on the phone or rehearsing how to say no, no, because I just couldn’t, I couldn’t think of anything. But then all of a sudden, I suddenly saw in my head how I could do that. And then I was really enthusiastic about it, because it was about London. Normally my entire output is a British person writing as if I was American, which is actually great for me, because it means every single word concept thought has to be, you know, thought about considered, because it is a projection. And I always felt writing about England would be… I would be go, going between invention and familiarity all the time in a way that might be not so easy so, but I was very happy to be writing about London. Never done that before, so I enjoyed doing that one. I mean, all of them, I enjoyed doing. But I now I feel like, Oh, my God, you know this is you realize that your bathroom does not have any curtains, and suddenly people are watching you from across. OR: That’s a wonderful analogy. Well, I’ll ask you one final question before sending you off. Are there any particular short stories or short story writers who you drew on for inspiration throughout this 20 year process of occasionally writing stories? OR just short stories? OR short story writers that you find yourself returning to or wishing you emulated more? LC: What I figure is the really great ones that I’ve read have have something that I can’t do. They have this short story thing within the short, short span of the story. They have this great reveal of great switch or pull the rug out from under you and I. Not sure that I can really ever do that to me. They feel like extremely, very, very, very short novels. And I think that I’m somehow not seeing what great short story writers do. I mean, some I’ve read, I read one short story once in a porn magazine back when I was a teenager, which was, you know how porn mags work… people are like, “I only buy it for the articles!” Well, that’s not true… I was buying it for the picture. But I found there was a short story on one of them, because they tried to be sort of literally or… OR: Elevated, somehow? LC: Exactly! Trying to be. And it was a great story. It had a supernatural conceit, which was that a guy has a jacket on and he puts his hand in his pocket and finds a shilling that he didn’t know was there, so he puts it on his desk, puts his hand back in his pocket, and there’s another shilling. Every time he puts his hand in his pocket. That’s the supernatural conceit. But from that point on, it becomes hyperrealistic. He gets he needs massage therapy because he’s going like this all the time. [Here, Lee shoves his hand back and forth into his pocket.] and he’s carrying big bags of coins to the bank. And I thought that was a great story. There was a Ruth Rendell story I liked a lot about this guy who was going to go and see his girlfriend, so he sort of potted around in the morning and then got on a bus, and then he changed his mind, because he was a bit mad at her, and went back home. And meanwhile, she’d been murdered, and everything he’d done that morning, as a sort of mirror image, made him look totally guilty. And I thought that that was neatly done. So I’ve read lots of great ones, but I would never put myself in that category. And if people don’t like them, I can blame Otto! I’m always happy to do that. OR: That’s a wonderful note to end on. ___________________________________ Safe Enough: And Other Stories, by Lee Child, published by The Mysterious Press View the full article
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