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11-12-24 Update Hello, Here's a safe google doc link to the book proposal and first fifty pages of Go Bleep Your Self-Help. I’ve been making improvements to it daily, based on the homework and reading assignments here. Thanks! – J. 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 and BOOK PITCH 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, at rock bottom and willing to risk everything, the shadowy doppelganger of the reader, the You character in the book, reluctantly joins the charming and devious doppelganger of author J. Stewart Dixon on a high-stakes, calamitous, cross-country adventure, where four distinct, wise, healing, avant-garde teachers are encountered: 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 a unique set of inner and outer adventures, experiences, and exercises, all of which help you overcome your core traumatic wounds and rediscover your most authentic, happiest self again. A prequel to author J. Stewart’s Dixon’s multi-award winning, 2000 reviewed, Amazon best-selling book series Spirituality for Badasses, Go Bleep Your Self-Help delivers light-hearted, counterintuitive, soul-soothing, anti-advice that’s easy to read and hard to forget. There’s a reason why author J. Stewart Dixon has thousands of reviews, fans, and a pile of book awards. You’re about to find out for yourself… #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 Revised / Updated 11-12-24 Genre: Narrative Non-Fiction / Irreverent Self-Help / Body, Mind, Spirit Comparable Non-Fiction Books Last 5 Years: Spirituality for Badasses: How to Find Inner Peace and Happiness Without Losing Your Cool, Book 1, 2 & The Workbook 2021, 2022, 2023 / J. Stewart Dixon / PIE Publishing · Nearly 50,000 copies sold · Winner of 7 Indie Book Awards · 1760 Amazon & 290 Goodreads reviews · My self-published book series, Spirituality for Badasses, was written using the same style and format that will be used in Go Bleep Your Self-Help. How to do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal From Your Past and Create Your Self 2021 / Nicole LePera / Harper · 1 Million + copies sold · 15,446 Amazon reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. The Mountain is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery 2020 / Brianna Wiest / Thought Catalog Books · 3 Million + copies sold · 20,036 Amazon reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones 2018 / James Clear / Avery-Penguin Random House · 20 Million + copies sold · 134,301 Amazon reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help is the humorous, self-aware, anti-venom to books similar to this one, which promote positivity, discipline, habit creation, motivation, laws, self-control and effort. Such books are helpful to a few, but forgettable to most. Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy 2024 / Whitney Goodman / Penguin Random House · 346 Amazon and 4,181 Goodreads reviews · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. Comparable Irreverent Self-Help Books Last 10 Years: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life 2016 / Mark Manson / HarperOne · 10 Million + copies sold · 148,361 Amazon reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don't Have with People You Don't Like Doing Things You Don't Want to Do 2015 / Sarah Knight / Hatchette Book Group · 3 Million + copies sold · 7,771 Amazon and 38,997 Goodreads reviews · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life 2013 / Jen Sincero / Hatchette Book Group · 5 Million + copies sold · 46,720 Amazon and 264,401 Goodreads reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. Unf*ck Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life 2017 / Gary John Bishop / HarperOne · 2 Million + copies sold · 26,508 Amazon and 75,143 Goodreads reviews · #1 NYT Bestseller · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. Let That Sh*t Go: Find Peace of Mind and Happiness in Your Everyday 2018 / Nina Purewal, Kate Petriw / Harper Collins · 810 Amazon and 2224 Goodreads reviews · Go Bleep Your Self-Help addresses similar topics but utilizes a combination of irreverent, humorous, narrative fiction story-telling and narrative nonfiction guidance instead. #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 (on 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.

Seeking the Pearl of the Orient What would have impressed Wallis Simpson on her arrival in Shanghai, as it did most visitors, was its modernity. In 1924, the International Settlement (largely run by the British) and the adjacent French Concession were significantly more developed than Canton, while few would disagree that the laissez-faire society of treaty port Shanghai was more fun than the stuffy and snobbish colonial milieu of Hong Kong. It was a city of vast department stores, neon lights, its traffic jammed with imported American automobiles, and a cacophony of noise blaring from new radio stations, gramophones, and dance halls. The streets were thronged with foreigners and smartly dressed westernized Chinese alongside the city’s merchants, rickshaw pullers, and beggars. Aldous Huxley visited at around the same time as Wallis and remarked, “In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank richly clotted life.” A walled town of traders and fishermen, Shanghai had been forcibly opened as a treaty port, or foreign concession, after the First Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century. Its economy and population boomed. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Shanghai had become notorious for its freebooting attitude to capitalism and embrace of the modern in all its forms. From her initial arrival at the Bund Terminal, looking out of her window at the Palace, exploring just a few blocks around her hotel, Wallis would have encountered the bustling life of the city, teeming with itinerant vendors, Western businessmen, fashionably clad Chinese women, European and Chinese policemen patrolling together, off-duty soldiers and sailors of a dozen nations looking for fun, country bumpkins come to town with big dreams and high hopes. Shanghai’s pivotal role as an entrepôt—sending out the products of China’s vast hinterlands to the world, receiving imports from every continent—was obvious just looking at the constant stream of barges, junks, and steamers on the Whangpoo. She could see the cotton mills and silk filatures that stretched for miles along the banks of the Whangpoo in Hongkew almost back as far as the Yangtze through the northern semi-industrial areas of Tilanchao (Tilanqiao) and Shanghai’s most easterly district, Yangtszepoo (Yangpu). And along with goods came new technologies and foreign cultures. Western ideas took hold fast in Shanghai. Almost simultaneously, the Shanghai Securities & Commodities Exchange started operations in 1921, and a group of like-minded Chinese met clandestinely in a French Concession school to establish the Chinese Communist Party. Wallis could not possibly have missed the polyglot and multicultural nature of the city—Europeans and Americans, Russian émigrés from Bolshevism and Baghdadi Jewish merchants, Sikh coppers in the settlement and Annamese flics in Frenchtown. North of Soochow Creek, a “Little Tokyo” district had emerged as large numbers of Japanese (the largest non-Chinese community in Shanghai) arrived. The European and American foreigners termed themselves “Shanghailanders” and were not shy to show their assumed superiority. The Chinese who settled became Shanghainese, developing their own distinctive dialect, cuisine, and aesthetic—hai-pai—a brazen and vibrant East-meets-West culture. Not everybody took to Shanghai, finding it vulgar and brash. The British writer Harold Acton, resident for many years in Peking, recorded his first visits to Shanghai in his book Memoirs of an Aesthete. Acton, a dedicated Pekingophile, didn’t think much of Shanghailander society: Thirty years—sometimes more—without troubling to learn the language, and these “Old China Hands” pickled in alcohol considered themselves supreme authorities on the country and the people . . . They were inveterate grumblers. A traveler fresh from Europe who, instead of sozzling, went about sober with his eyes open, was plain “green”; his views worthless. And in among all this cacophony of diverse Shanghai humanity were Americans. The journalist Edgar Snow, fleeing the onset of the Depression in America for what he hoped would be an opportunity to prove himself a talented writer in China, wrote extensively of his fellow countrymen and -women: Shanghai, to a noticeable extent, has become Americanized. There, in the most polyglot city in Asia, the roving American finds all the comforts of home: Clara Bow and Buddy Rogers, the radio and jazz bands, cocktails and correspondence schools, night clubs and cabarets, neon lights and skyscrapers, chewing gum and Buicks, wide trousers and long skirts, Methodist evangelists and the Salvation Army. And there, too, he finds such peculiarly American institutions as Navy Wives, shot-gun weddings, Girl Scouts, Spanish-American War veterans, a board of censors, daylight hold-ups, immaculate barbershops, a Short Story Club, wheat cakes, and a Chamber of Commerce… The fact is that nobody in Shanghai worries himself very much about SinoAmerican understanding. Both the Chinese and Americans are too busy making money.” Mary and Wallis thus joined approximately thirty thousand other foreigners in a city of three million Chinese—one of the five largest conurbations in the world and the most densely populated of any major global metropolis. In the International Settlement in 1924, two thousand American citizens were registered as residents, with about another thousand or so in the adjacent French Concession. That compared to nearly six thousand Brits, three thousand Russian émigrés, and fourteen thousand Japanese. DISAPPOINTMENT Wallis arrived in Shanghai determined to divorce Win. Win appears to have been apologetic for his behavior. He actually came to see her off on the liner from Hong Kong. She wrote in The Heart Has Its Reasons: “As he said good-bye at the gangway, his parting words were: ‘Pensacola, Coronado, Washington, and now Hong Kong— we’ve come a long way, only to lose what we began with.’” Win had also agreed to provide her with a monthly sum of money, what was called an allotment, of (a not ungenerous) $225. Despite the abuse and violence in their marriage, in later life, Wallis would reminisce quite fondly of Win. But she had planned her escape and the possible divorce route of the US court in Shanghai. She sailed out of Hong Kong Harbour for Shanghai. She would only ever see Win once more in his lifetime. Despite her family’s continuing distaste for separations, Wallis knew that she had to get a divorce. She had originally tried in Paris, but it had proved too difficult and too costly, while her family talked her out of it. A divorce in British Hong Kong was impossible; certainly nothing could be done in Chinese Canton. But rumor had it that she might be able to succeed in Shanghai. As a treaty port, Shanghai had special exemptions. Shanghailanders were not subject to Chinese law and justice, answering only to their own national courts—the so-called system of extraterritoriality. The Europeans had run their own courts to settle business disputes and contested estates, and to control their errant citizens since the late nineteenth century. But America had only just got its legal act together in Shanghai. In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt, alarmed at the number of American citizens who’d moved to Shanghai to become casino operators and brothel madams, legislated for the creation of the United States Court for China at Shanghai. It was not before time either. Shanghai, at the turn of the century (and then an influx after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), had been infested with so many American prostitutes that the term American girl had become popular slang across Asia for white women of dubious virtue. Roosevelt was outraged on behalf of the nation. While the Shanghai International Settlement authorities might not always wish to prosecute an American for running a bordello, an opium den, or a casino, extraterritoriality could go both ways. If it was illegal in America, then they could be prosecuted for it in China. Extrality would become a tool of conviction rather than a way to slip through the grip of the law. And so he acted. The court was presided over by American judges and had the power to send the guilty to the hangman or alternatively to the harsh Bilibid Prison in the Philippines or back home to McNeil Island Corrections Center in Puget Sound. Additionally, the court could deal with all manner of everyday estates, wills, contractual issues, and (so Wallis had been led to believe in Hong Kong) divorce cases. However, it transpired that the American court could not in fact divorce the Spencers. It could grant divorces for adultery, desertion, cruelty, or nonsupport, but it required two years’ residence in China (not counting British Hong Kong). Wallis’s plans of making a permanent legal break with Win in Shanghai were dashed. The Shanghai-based American lawyer Norwood Allman had seen others turn up in the hope of obtaining “quicky” separations. He advised that anyone requiring a “hurry-up” divorce would do better to head home to Nevada, Oklahoma, or Arkansas to make arrangements. This strange, extraterritorial legal situation in Shanghai has confused many Wallis biographers over the years, leading to some falsehoods. For instance, Joe Bryan and Charles J. V. Murphy’s 1979 biography, The Windsor Story, claimed that Wallis couldn’t afford the cost of the divorce charged by the “International Court.” ___________________________________ From Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson by Paul French. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. View the full article

I’ve always loved stories about thieves who rely on their wits. When I was writing Safecracker, I thought of my hero, Grantchester “Duke” Ducaine, a little bit like he was MacGyver if MacGyver had been a third-generation crook. Duke and his sister were trained to within an inch of their lives to be the best thieves in the world, but as Duke would say, his sister’s more classical, he’s a little more jazz. The set pieces were fun to write because Duke’s an artist, not just a technician. Like a jazz musician, he sees what can be, the space in-between, the improvisation: among other things, in the first book in the series, Duke makes thermite out of a bucket of rusty bolts and aluminum foil and uses a ketchup packet to figure out the combination on a digital lock. Sure, Duke can handle a gun, but anybody can point a pistol at somebody’s face! I wanted a character who could think — or talk — his way through a heist. I still remember my dad playing The Sting on our VCR back when VCRs were still a thing, and my delight at watching Newman and Redford always a step ahead even when it looked like they were two steps behind. But as a lifelong reader, when I was writing Safecracker, I turned to books for inspiration. David W. Maurer’s The Big Con Maurer was a professor of linguistics, and even though the book was published in 1940 and is, in some ways, a historical artifact, Maurer’s attention to language means the book still feels alive today. Sure, grifters are running versions of the same cons in 2024 as they were in 1924, but Maurer spent years cultivating sources within the community of swindlers so that he got inside access. Much of the charm of the Big Con is when Maurer’s cast of characters explain moves like the “cackle-bladder” or how to “sew a man up,” but there’s also something delightfully entertaining about having con men let you behind the curtain. Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight My first exposure to Leonard was through the silver screen, but when I started reading his novels, that’s when I really understood how much of his work is about smart people being dumb and dumb people being smart. In Out of Sight, Jack Foley is as clever as they come. After breaking out of prison, he robs a bank by convincing a bank teller that another customer — who has nothing to do with Foley and is completely innocent — is carrying a bomb in a briefcase. And yet, he’s not smart enough to steer clear of U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco. I’ve joked that Safecracker is a bit like if Out of Sight and the Ocean’s Eleven had a baby, not just because of the heists, but because of the how much the criminals involved enjoy themselves. Lucy Sante’s Low Life If you’re interested in history on the margins, Sante’s Low Life is an excellent peek at the fringes of New York City from the 1840s through WWI. Again, like Maurer’s book, as you read through Low Life, you can see how some of the stories and movies that we love were inspired by the real criminal underclass, but Sante’s deep dive into the city and corruption — sex and drugs and con artists and crooked cops are only part of it — gives a rich sense of how swindlers and rogues shaped not just New York, but the American imagination. A.J. Liebling’s The Telephone Booth Indian Like Maurer’s The Big Con, Liebling’s The Telephone Booth Indian is a marker of a bygone era. Reading Liebling’s interview with wrestling promoter Jack Pfefer, when Pfefer bemoans that he’s not doing anything wrong — “A honest man can sell a fake diamond if he says it is a fake diamond, ain’t it?” — is just as entertaining as Liebling’s account of Maxwell C. Bimberg, who was known as Count de Pennies, try to work a hustle involving the bulk purchase of five hundred “racing” cockroaches from a burned-down bar. It’s worth noting that Sante introduces both Maurer and Liebling’s works, and between those three books, you’ve got a good sense of the history of criminals and con artists in America. Donald Westlake’s The Hot Rock The only thing more entertaining than watching a crook who’s good at his job, is watching a crook who’s great at his job… but who has the worst luck of any man alive. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a screwball caper, but this is the first of Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, and they are all equally delightful, not because of how the criminals succeed, but because of all the ways things go wrong. The only law Dortmunder should really be afraid of is Murphey’s Law (anything that can go wrong will go wrong). Richard Stark’s The Hunter The Parker series is the other side of the Dortmunder coin, written by Donald Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. Where Dortmunder is a funny, wry, and charming character, in The Hunter, the main character Parker, has a cold brutality to him. He’s a master blueprinter, planning heists and orchestrating all the moving pieces, fast on his feet, but he never hesitates to attack. He’s like a shark: violently efficient. But even if the main character in my novel Safecracker is somebody who’d be a lot more fun to hang out with than Parker, one of the things Duke and Paker have in common is that they both understand that it’s the attention to details that make the difference between being a free man or getting locked away for life. Steve Hamilton’s The Lock Artist Hamilton’s novel has a different vibe than all these other books. It’s less of a story about heists and being a career criminal, and more of a close study of a young man who learns how to unlock everything … except his own trauma. But it’s important to me because it was one of the books that inspired me to write Safecracker. Hamilton’s attention to detail — he taught himself how to pick locks as part of the writing process — make the book crackle with life. *** View the full article

By 10:30 on that summer night in 1972, the party at the remote woodland campsite had run out of steam. Beer cans littered the ground. Garbage bins overflowed with discarded food, greasy paper plates, plastic cups, and other refuse. Every now and then, the faint stench of overused pit toilets drifted across the clearing. About half of the twenty-five men and women staying there had gone to bed, but those awake were in good spirits. They were young, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-six, and all but one came from central Florida, around Clearwater. Two days of hard driving had brought them here, to Yancey County, deep in the North Carolina mountains, a place so different from their hometown that it seemed like another planet. Surrounded by some the highest peaks in eastern America, their seven vehicles (six cars and a Volkswagen van) sat parked in a grassy field, flanked on all sides by tall hemlocks, yellow birches, large leafy oaks, and giant poplars. The South Toe River, a clear, cold, boulder-strewn stream, flowed right past their campsite. Local people called the place Briar Bottom. It was the week of July 4, pinnacle of the tourist season, and it had been tough to find a place to stay. Fortunately, they made a new friend at a local store who told them about Briar Bottom and agreed to meet them there. The Florida kids had to drive their vehicles across a shallow ford in the river, unload in the field, and carry their gear into the woods to make camp. Even then, they were not alone. Several families, a couple of college students, and three men from Orlando, Florida, had already parked vans in the meadow or set up tents among the trees along the river. But the place was beautiful, everything they had hoped for when they left Clearwater, and they settled in for the night. That afternoon, three of the guys drove to Asheville and returned with seventeen six-packs of Budweiser and two bottles of Jack Daniels. They already had a stash of marijuana and some mild hallucinogens, all brought from home in anticipation of the week’s activities. Once the alcohol arrived, someone set a couple of speakers atop the van and cranked up a tape player. Out in the open field, kids danced and flirted, shouting or singing along when a favorite tune came up on the tape deck. In a group that large, people tended to hang around those they knew best, congregating in small clusters, talking, laughing, smoking, drinking—just getting off on the beer, the dope, the mountains, and each other. Stanley Altland, the twenty-year-old who had organized the trip, enjoyed a good outdoor party as much as anyone, but he took it easy that night. He drank a couple of beers and had a hit or two off the joints his friends passed around, but mostly he just wandered about, chatting with the others. He ate supper with David Satterwhite, the boy from North Carolina who had guided them to Briar Bottom. An experienced camper, Satterwhite had his own van, a motorcycle, and a big white dog. Stan also spent time with Kim Burns, a tall, attractive eighteen-year-old woman from Clearwater he had begun dating a few weeks earlier. Altland had shoulder-length blonde hair, a scruffy beard, and wore round, wire-rimmed glasses to correct severe astigmatism. He frequently dressed in bib overalls and old work boots purchased from secondhand stores. Most of the Clearwater kids thought he was the walking definition of “cool,” a much-coveted youth descriptor in 1972. For Stan, being cool was more than a matter of style. He believed that young people like him—those others derisively labeled “hippies”—were pointing the way to a better world. Back home, he and his business partners had recently opened Clearwater’s first health-food store. Stan hoped it would one day become a “true community center” and a vehicle for “cultural, economic, and political change.” He invited local artists, craftspeople, and filmmakers to display their work there. His friends loved the place. An hour or so after dark, Altland walked over to the VW van to talk with his pal Phil Lokey. Phil also wore wire-rimmed “hippie” glasses and had a beard and long dark hair that he often pulled back behind his ears. He and Stan had once been roommates, but several months earlier, Phil had moved to the Bungalows, a string of rundown, two-bedroom dwellings on the outskirts of Clearwater. The Bungalows had a well-deserved reputation as a hippie hangout, where the tenants threw raucous weekend parties. Several other residents had joined the outing to North Carolina, including Kevin Shea, Max Johnson, Ron Olson, and Gary Graham, four more twenty-year olds with well-worn clothes and shoulder-length locks. Eighteen-year-old Sue Cello, who described herself as “a Catholic school girl with a mouth to match,” had also come along. Over the course of the evening, Kevin Shea partook liberally of the beer and pot, found a stick, and announced that he was off to the woods to hunt rattlesnakes. Max Johnson and several women left for a night hike up a nearby hillside, carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels. Sue Cello joined a few others around a small campfire at the edge of the woods. Ron Olson and Gary Graham headed for their tents. It was that kind of mellow, do-your-own-thing night. Most of those present thought it better to get too stoned than too drunk, much cooler to toke up with friends around the fire than end up puking in the bushes or sitting alone in a car sorting out the kaleidoscopic images brought on by heavier drugs. But if hard drinking or stoned snake-hunting happened to be your trip, no one would stand in your way. On July 3, 1972, the prevailing party ethic—to the extent that one existed—might well be summed up by that famous line from Bob Dylan, “Either be groovy or leave, man.” By 11:00, temperatures dipped into the low sixties at Briar Bottom, sending more campers to their tents and sleeping bags. Heavy dew covered the ground, and anyone who strayed from the fire could see their breath in the thick, humid air. Filmy clouds drifted across a half moon. Stan Altland left the van and found a place to stretch out under a small tree. Kim Burns decided to join him, at least for a while if the bugs were not too bad. Phil Lokey walked out to his car to retrieve his bedroll. Eight or nine others lingered around the campfire. They had turned off the music and were talking quietly, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes. Sue Cello was still there, along with David Satterwhite and his dog. Donald Porter, whom everyone called “Poonie,” was at the firepit, too. A twenty-six-year-old Vietnam veteran recently turned beach hippie, he was a regular at Bungalow parties. With his long hair pulled into a ponytail that stretched well down his back, Poonie was the likeable “old man” of the group. Just as a few of those at the fire began to doze, two of the girls glimpsed some flickering lights on the other side of the river, near the ford. Headlights from vehicles on the access road? Maybe some late-arriving campers looking for a site. They would have fun negotiating that rocky streambed in the dark. Max Johnson was too sleepy to care. Returning from the night hike, he spread a sleeping bag on the ground and crawled inside. Somewhere nearby, Kevin Shea, still in search of venomous reptiles, howled like a wolf. As Phil Lokey walked back from his car, he saw two pickup trucks with their headlights off drive quickly across the river and pull into the parking area. Seven men jumped out. Even in the dark, Phil could tell they were heavily armed. They moved through the trees “like a SWAT team,” and he heard them racking shotguns as they advanced on the Clearwater campsite. “What the hell . . . ?” For a second, Lokey thought maybe he should make a break for it, just run as fast as he could into the forest. But he could not make himself move. At the campfire, Satterwhite’s dog growled, waking its sleeping owner. Without warning, five of the armed men came out of the woods and surrounded the group at the firepit. Caught completely off guard, the half-inebriated, half-stoned, drowsy campers tried to make sense of the abrupt turn of events. It seemed crazy, dreamlike, surreal. The men looked to be in their thirties or forties, with short hair, dressed mostly in civilian clothes. One, who wore yellowish-brown attire, appeared to be in charge. He mumbled something like “What’s the problem?” or “Do you have a problem?” or “What’s the trouble here?” No one could be sure exactly what he said. But one thing was certain. The men all had pistols and three of them wielded short-barreled, 12-gauge shotguns. Without identifying themselves, the armed visitors fanned out around the camp, turning on flashlights, beating on tents, kicking at those asleep on the ground, and poking them with nightsticks. The good vibes from earlier in the evening instantly evaporated. Max Johnson and several others crawled from their sleeping bags, weak-kneed, shaking uncontrollably from the latenight chill and sudden anxiety. As one of the group later recalled, “We were scared to death. We didn’t know what was happening, but we figured some kind of bad shit was about to go down.” Thirty yards away, the other two men, both carrying sawed-off shotguns, confronted Phil Lokey. They said nothing, but as Phil noted, “you didn’t have to be a genius to tell they were cops of some sort, and we were about to get busted.” He asked the man closest to him, “Sir, could you please tell me what’s going on?” He grabbed Lokey, slapped handcuffs on him, and said, “I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on.” Then he stuck his shotgun in Phil’s back and marched him toward the campfire. Unbeknownst to the campers, the men rousting them were—at least for that night—duly sworn agents of the Yancey County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Kermit Banks, the man in buff-colored clothing, led the raiding party. The posse included his brother Robert, four deputies, and a town cop from Burnsville, the Yancey County seat. On the sheriff’s orders, the lawmen began rounding up all the campers so that they could be searched. Robert Banks shoved Poonie Porter against a big tree. Two deputies found Kevin Shea at the edge of the woods. They took his snake stick and made him stand next to Porter. A moment later, someone kicked Kim Burns “in the back of the neck.” She and Stan Altland scrambled to their feet to see what was going on. Stan put his hands in the air and urged everyone else to do likewise, imploring his friends to “just be cool” and “do what they say.” Then he appealed to the cops, “Hey, man, we’re harmless. We don’t want to hassle with you.” It made no difference. Using nightsticks to keep the campers in line, the lawmen began frisking both men and women, collecting pocketknives, key chains, even hairpins. They asked repeatedly about drugs but found nothing except a bottle of prescription medicine one of the women had in her pocket. They took it. Waiting to be searched, Phil Lokey glanced back toward the fire and saw Sheriff Banks in a heated argument with David Satterwhite. From twenty feet away, Lokey could not hear what either man said, but he could tell that “Banks was really pissed off, mad as hell.” Apparently when the sheriff asked Satterwhite to get up so he could be searched, the young man did not move. Instead, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and added, “My dad and I camp here all the time.” According to Satterwhite, Banks told him to “put that God damned dog up” or he would shoot it. The young man tethered the canine to a tree and pointedly asked, “Don’t I have any rights?” Banks allegedly responded “No, you don’t” and turned his shotgun on the youth. Satterwhite then asked the sheriff “to please put that gun away” and twice pushed the weapon aside. Phil Lokey strained to get a better view. He could not believe that this skinny North Carolina teenager would argue with an angry sheriff holding a loaded 12-gauge. At that point a deputy struck Phil with a shotgun and told him to “stand up straight.” The same officer frisked Stan Altland and Kim Burns and sent them over to stand near Poonie Porter and Kevin Shea. What happened next would be disputed for years, but according to the eyewitnesses from Clearwater, Sheriff Banks stuck his shotgun in Satterwhite’s stomach and told him to get up against the big tree. Perhaps thinking the young man did not move fast enough, the sheriff reportedly raised the gun and, with a slashing motion, struck Satterwhite on his left arm with the butt of the weapon. The 12-gauge went off with a deafening roar, echoing across the quiet campground like a thunderclap. As the campers tell it, Stan Altland was standing eighteen feet away when nine pellets of double-aught buckshot, each as large as a .32 caliber bullet and capable of penetrating a car door, slammed into the left side of his chest and neck. The impact lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward. Unable to regain his footing, he gasped and stammered “Oh my God! Somebody help me!” as he slumped to the ground. Two women near Stan felt his blood splatter onto their clothes. Others screamed, “Jesus! No! No! No!” as Poonie Porter and Max Johnson rushed to Altland’s side. Porter tore off Stan’s shirt, wadded it into a ball, and held it tightly on the wound, trying to stanch the blood now streaming onto the ground. Poonie had seen plenty of gunshot victims in Vietnam, and he could tell Stan was badly hurt. About “a third of his neck and chest had been blown away.” Stan tried to speak, but only gurgled and coughed up blood. Kim Burns dropped to one knee and held his hand. Sue Cello stood nearby, screaming and crying. Poonie put his head to Altland’s chest and listened for a heartbeat. He heard nothing. Stan’s eyes flickered briefly and became fixed in his head. Three bystanders saw smoke rising from the sheriff’s gun as he pulled another shell from his pocket and reloaded his weapon. Apparently in shock, the deputies all stared in silence as Altland’s blood pooled on a patch of dark-green moss beneath the tree. As Lokey described it, “The cops just flipped out. They had no idea what to do.” After what seemed like three minutes, the sheriff told Poonie, Max, and the others to get away from Stan. Banks instructed all the campers to sit down, telling them that Altland would get no help until they did. Still handcuffed, Phil thought, “They were going to shoot us all and bury us in the woods. I thought I was dead.” He fought off a wave of nausea and felt faint, but as he started to pass out, he fell against another camper and never lost consciousness. Instead, he watched helplessly as Stan lay on the ground for what seemed like another fifteen minutes, blood seeping ever more slowly from what was left of his chest and neck. Finally, a Forest Service ranger who had been waiting near the river ford drove up in one of the pickup trucks. Banks and three of his men wrapped Altland in a blanket, dragged him across the ground, and dumped him into the truck bed. The remaining campers, who just minutes earlier had been asleep or relaxing around the fire, looked on in horror as the vehicle rolled away with their friend. Sue Cello could no longer contain herself. Red-faced, wiping away tears, she screamed at the lawmen, “You shot him! Fuck you, you bastards!” Kim Burns and several others just wailed in utter despair. Poonie Porter later called it “the sickest scene I’ve seen since Vietnam.” No one who witnessed it would ever be the same. ___________________________________ From Death in Briar Bottom: The True Story of Hippies, Mountain Lawmen, and the Search for Justice in the Early 1970s by Timothy Silver. Copyright © 2024 by Timothy Silver. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. View the full article

My favorite detectives are involved studying their surrounding world as much as they are involved in solving crimes. Think of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Miss Marple in her garden. James Lee Burke in Montana. Think of Jim Hall or Carl Hiaasen in South Florida. I am drawn to detectives as naturalists, and I think I came by this preference honestly. My mother loved to read. She read crime novels by the hundreds. Often one or two books a week. She also read mainstream novels and often read to me: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy boys or Nancy Drew. They all had the sharp minds of scientists and sleuths. My mother loved these books, and she wanted me to love them too. My father also loved reading, but he favored history and spy thrillers. He loved the James Bond books and he wanted me to read history as well, but The Federalist Papers didn’t take me into the dream world of what I had actually experienced in my life. I’ve always loved wandering in nature. We lived on a big piece of property north of Seattle surrounded by woods. We had a large garden, an orchard, a berry patch and fields of grass. There was an old English gardener named Harry who forbade us from picking flowers to bring inside. My mother was afraid to confront him on this and she would send me up into the woods to pick wildflowers for the house. There was a muddy trail which went down a ravine past a bluff of light gray clay where one time I believed I saw the fresh track of a black bear. It frightened me a great deal but I dreamed I was a character in a novel. I kept candy bars and a pocketknife in my flimsy backpack when I went flower picking and when I saw the bear track I wished my dad would have let me carry a gun to protect me from danger but he wouldn’t. Reality was scary, but crime stories helped. In 1963 I fantasized that I had managed to save President Kennedy’s life. I dreamed of being a national hero, girls loved me and other boys wanted to be my friend. I drove a sportscar, I solved crimes in my imagination but in reality I didn’t do well in school and my parents worried about me. I couldn’t spell and was a slow reader. I went to special classes which embarrassed me. My father read me stories from Greek and Roman mythology, which was fun. But he worried I was developmentally slow—I wandered in the woods and tried to read the tracks in the mud carefully. I imagined learning to fly using a pair of eagle wings, which spared me from melting if I got to close to the sun. I struggled with mathematics, I had a hard time learning another language. My parents worried about me. We moved to New York City which seemed like a bad place for a dreamy boy who liked to wander around looking for bear tracks. My dad knew some cowboys and mountain men who ran a pack outfit in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state and he turned me over to them. I became a wrangler and a guide in the wilderness. I sometimes rode a horse six or seven hours at a time, up long trails into the hills. My dreams of bears in the woods fused into my reality. Later I married a beautiful woman who became a prominent marine biologist. We moved to Alaska. I worked in the woods continuing my dreamy life. Then I was offered a job with a bright young attorney, and I became a criminal defense investigator. I had been a cowboy and then a private eye in Alaska. Books fed my fantasies and I continued to merge my reality into my fantasies. But working in real life crime was not like the novels, for the people who were accused of committing crime were often strange and complex. There were very few mysteries to solve or damsels in destress. The reality about crime is that there are many more people than we expect who simply have very little impulse control. People simply took what they wanted and were unapologetic. Although in the thirty years of my career as a private investigator I did run into a few factual mysteries and I was able to shed some light on them, mostly my clients ran straight into the brick wall of their own guilt. It was hard but I got to see a life of people who were not near as lucky as I had been and I started writing stories about them and their disappointments and dreams. I gave them Cecil Younger, an alcoholic hero. A dreamy boy who himself was banging his head against the real world, and I came to believe that reality is more often than not a disappointment compared to the visions I continued to have in the wilderness. Wild country could be scary. This was why my mother spent most of her time reading Ngaio Marsh, or John D. MacDonald. Crime stories presented a reality of romance, swordplay and of moral rectitude which was much better than a world where presidents were killed or bears might rush out of the brush. I actually lived the life of a kind of an investigator and naturalist. There were always wildflowers in the woods and big animal tracks in the clay … all these things were real. But nothing I did ever seemed heroic. I never saw much moral rectitude. My life was a hybrid between the beauty I found in nature, and the disappointment in how my fantasies came up short. One time in my thirties I even had to kill an attacking brown bear. When a sow came charging from the brush I killed her with the gun I was carrying. While I was relieved that I survived, the reality of the dead bear lying at my feet haunts me to this day. Reality was not as satisfying to me as my little boy’s dream life where I walked in the woods without a gun. This was why I became a writer. In my own books I was able to combine my love of the world I experienced in nature while creating the fictional dream of a hero’s adventure. My thirteenth novel, Big Breath In (out November 12) is a standalone and it tells the story of a woman much like my wife who is a scientist and falls back into her life as a sleuth. In it I brought my wife a bouquet of wildflowers from the woods. In it I openly declare my love for the fusion of crime and the naturalist’s vision to pay homage to my parents’ obsession literature. Think of the world surrounding Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, then think of a dyslexic boy, smitten by books reading bear tracks in the woods. As strange as it might seem, this is where my life of crime began and where it continues to this day. *** View the full article

I have to say these exercises in developing the important aspects of our manuscripts has been eye opening--and so very helpful!

1.) STORY STATEMENT A detective-turned-food-truck chef reluctantly returns to her hometown to bury her brother and finally sell the family home, but then is launched into not only finding her ex-fiancé’s killer, but battle a corrupt sheriff who plans to filch her family home by any means necessary, including murder. 2.) ANTAGONIST Former teenage bully, and now corrupt sheriff, Billy Dawson, previously known as Dragon by his former schoolmates in Hickory Oak Springs wants to see his dying town revitalized. Unlike his father—the man who likes his town just the way it is. No outsiders. No people he can’t control. Billy, heir apparent to the fortune left by the town founders, an only child raised by a domineering father, grew up without his mother. He’d been groomed to expect that his heritage and his badge—unrealistically—allowed him indisputable power and respect. Because of his corrupt business dealings, his wife left him for another man. Embittered and set on a path of destruction, he drinks heavily. He continued his quest to bring the near extinct town out of poverty. So, he challenged any industrial business to build their operation there. For free. The only land available, though, belonged to the Bannister family. So, he tried to strongarm Charles Bannister into selling the farm before the man mysteriously died. When Bannister’s sister Joanna returns to bury him, Billy assumes she will sell the property. Only she refuses. This catapults Billy into a spiral of irreversible revenge. By any means. Including murder. 3.) CREATE A BREAK-OUT TITLE: - The Revenge of a Killer (Working Title) - Deadly Revenge - Revenge: Murder in The Missouri Hills 4.) LIST TWO COMPARABLES: Comp #1 - A Season of Revenge: The Mound City Serial Murder File by PJ Dunn In one respect, like retired Detective Mac O’Hara who returns to his city hometown to solve a murder in early 19th century, modern day detective-turned-chef, Joanna Bannister only returns to her small hometown to bury her brother and sell their family home. Her plans to return to her city life are thwarted by a murder, followed by another, along with a corrupt sheriff set on revenge for a perceived past wrong, and who plans to destroy what she holds dear, no matter the means. Even murder. Comp #2 - The Hammer by Scott Shepard Like the NYPD protagonist in The Hammer, the protagonist in my novel is a retired NYPD, but a detective-turned-chef. The setting too is set in a fictional town in the Midwest. Unlike the NY detective, she stayed in NY. Her career change afforded her a better life for he—and the stepdaughter she inherited after the death Joanna’s husband. Her life was upended when she receives notice of her brother’s untimely death, but soon finds herself in the midst of one murder, and then another before she can bury him, sell what’s left of her family home and return to the life she built. In the midst of all, she encounters an old enemy—a corrupt sheriff—who is set on revenge. Like the NYPD protagonist, she is forced like the protagonist in The Hammer to make not only life-and-death decisions, but consider options that may be better for her and her stepdaughter in the long run. 5.) WRITE A HOOK LINE A retired detective-turned-chef who returns to her hometown to bury her only surviving relative, finds the body of her ex-fiancé on the roadside and is determined to not only to find the killer, but fight a corrupt sheriff to save her childhood home. 6.) PROTAGONIST INNER CONFLICT: Joanna Bannister’s strict upbringing by her dominating parents, who expected her to stay home and work on the family farm and force her marriage to a hometown boy, abandons her family and the man she left at the altar and flees to NYC where she makes a new life as a NYC detective-turned-chef—full of her own mistakes—and live her life according to Joanna. After receiving a message that her brother and only living relative has died unexpectedly, she is fearful to return home and is filled with guilt and self-reproach for not having squared things with her parents and the man she deserted fifteen years earlier. Her intention is to bury her brother, sell the last connection to her childhood—her family home—and leave it behind like she’d done before. Only when she encounters the dead body of her ex-fiancé on the roadside and meets an old nemesis who now is the corrupt sheriff, her desire to return to the life she built is interrupted. With the help of the new and attractive deputy, she agrees to assist in solving the murders, and thereafter, return home only after the sale of the property. But as her relationship with the deputy grows, the murders are solved, and finds herself in a fight to save her home, she begins to heal and second guess her decision to return to the city life. - PROTAGONIST SECONDARY CONFLICT: Joanna never intended to be a mother, but when she married a man who already had custody of his one-year-old daughter, she tried—unlike her mother—to be what she imagined a good mother should be. At first, with the help of a nanny, hired with her husband’s insistence, Joanna settled into her new role. She did become a detective, but unexpectedly found a love of cooking from the housekeeper in their home. She’d even begun to like the child. Finally, loving her. But the girl was spoiled by her father, and as she grew into her teenage years, she and Joanna butted heads. Then, on a deathbed promise to her husband, she promised to raise her spoiled, defiant teenage stepdaughter. Not a job she’d signed up for. 7.) SET THE SCENE: The setting is in a fictional small, rural Missouri community, far from the life the protagonist created for herself in NYC. The town, actually unincorporated, is bordered by rolling hills on layers of sandstone. The area, ripe with hickory and oaks wraps around the valley farms filled with corn, hay, and beans. The main livelihood of its residents. A fictitious artesian well at one time had been a draw for visitors, along with the still-in-business, Wayfair Diner, for their fine southern food. The town, Hickory Oak Springs, was named as such due to the abundance of hickory, oaks, and several artesian wells, which provided supplemental income to farmers for firewood, construction materials sales, and tool handles. But with the population moving away in search of a better life, the town is dying.

1. Story Statement Kathleen Madison wants to bubble wrap her teenage children. After her husband Michael dies in a car accident, she must set her own grief aside as she alone parents her kids through their loss. When rumors of Michael’s infidelity surface, she must keep the story out of the press to protect her kids from scandal. She must decide she is strong enough to live alone for the first time in her life. But she must also learn that going it alone isn’t brave, and asking for help isn’t admitting defeat. Finally, when a past love returns to her life, asking for a second chance, she must recover her self confidence and decide she is worthy of love and happiness. 2. Antagonist His own political career over, former Governor Mike Madison has hitched onto his son’s coattails and plans to ride them all the way to the White House. But when his son Michael dies in a tragic accident, Mike sees his lifestyle slipping away. Without his son in the U.S. Senate, he will lose access, and access is power. His solution is to manipulate his grieving daughter-in-law. Convince her that his son was never faithful. That the pregnant staffer who died in the accident was actually Michael’s lover, and that Michael planned to leave Kathleen and her children. Mike tells Kathleen the only way to keep the press from running the story is to give them a better one: Kathleen running for Michael’s senate seat. When Kathleen declines, prioritizing caring for her children, Mike sets into motion a course of events that bring pain and scrutiny on Kathleen and the children. But when Mike’s lies are discovered, he loses his home, his money, and his marriage. 3. Title ideas EVERY DAY WITHOUT YOU AFTERCARE 4. Comps Evvie Blake Starts Over by Linda Holmes The Last Love Note by Emma Grey Everything After by Jill Santopolo Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell 5. Logline As she works through her grief after the death of her husband, a middle-aged mother must recover her self-confidence to believe she is worthy of a second chance at love and happiness. 6. Conflicts 1) Kathleen’s first love, Ethan, broke up with her the same day she found out her mother was dying, twenty-five years ago. He was also her best friend, and her emotions over the loss of her mother are forever entwined with her feeling that Ethan abandoned her. It left her feeling unworthy. Until six months later, when she met Michael. Michael made her feel like she was enough. She was his entire universe. When Michael—now a U.S. senator—dies, his father tells Kathleen that Michael was involved in multiple affairs and planned to leave her for another woman, with whom he was having a baby. This causes an emotional regression for Kathleen. If Michael was never actually faithful, then her old assumption must be true: Kathleen is unworthy of love. Kathleen desperately wants this rumor to be false—not only because it would devastate her children, but also because she wants to believe she is worthy of love—and capable of recognizing love when it’s real. She wants to believe she can be the center of someone else’s universe. In the end, Kathleen finds a note from Michael that makes it clear his father has been lying. Kathleen finds the strength to confront her manipulative father-in-law, rather than cower and remain in the background of her life. 2) Ethan, Kathleen’s first love, returns to her life after Michael’s death, asking for a second chance. Kathleen doesn’t trust Ethan. Moreover, Ethan is famous now, and Kathleen worries that dating him would increase the chances her children are the focus of tabloid reporters. Her primary concern is protecting her children, particularly from the press. In the end, Kathleen learns that the breakup with Ethan, twenty-five years earlier, was based on a misunderstanding. He never intended to break up with her, he regrets that he wasn’t there for her when she lost her mom, and her feelings of abandonment and unworthiness were misplaced. 7. Setting Kathleen and her children live in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. They live in a residential neighborhood with estate lots, so they are acres away from their neighbors. Kathleen has embraced a quiet life in the shadows of her U.S. senator husband and has raised her children in the same community where she grew up. Kathleen’s family lives nearby and is integral to her healing. Her father remarried after her mother died, and his second wife is a retired clinical social worker. She ultimately convinces Kathleen to seek therapy to help her deal with her grief. Continuing to live in the home she shared with Michael is difficult for Kathleen. Especially after her daughter moves away to college. The house seems emptier with each change. And she sees Michael everywhere. But it is equally difficult to imagine living somewhere else. The setting—the familiarity of her hometown and the proximity to her family—limits Kathleen at a point when she might consider moving away. At the end of the story, Kathleen’s dad makes sure she understands he would never want her to stay in Kansas City just for him, and he encourages her to prioritize her own happiness, even if that means pursuing a new life somewhere else. Kathleen’s oldest child, Anna, moves away to college during the first half of the novel. She attends school at New York University, 1,000 miles away from Kathleen, but in the same city where Ethan lives. When Kathleen and her son, Will, visit Anna, they cross paths with Ethan. In fact, Anna and Will use Anna’s proximity (and Ethan’s kind offer to be an emergency contact in the city) to push Kathleen and Ethan together. In the epilogue, we see that Will has moved to North Carolina for college and Kathleen has moved to New Jersey—near Anna, but not so close she is smothering her. She’s also near Ethan, but with enough space to be self sufficient before she commits to a life shared with someone else. Kathleen’s life in Kansas City is not small, per se, but it isn’t bold in the way it could be. Her move to New Jersey shows her own journey to be closer to the spotlight.

11-11-24 read em both- great stuff

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jacquie Pham, Those Opulent Days (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Pham debuts with a memorable and disturbing historical set in French-occupied Vietnam…Pham’s prose is lyrical, and her evocation of the period immersive…this is a tense and unique dispatch from a key period in Vietnamese history.” –Publishers Weekly Mia P. Manansala, Guilt and Ginataan (Berkley) “The plot has satisfying twists to go along with the mouth-watering food.” –Booklist Marie Tierney, Deadly Animals (Henry Holt) “A fast-paced, brilliantly plotted mystery … As the book progresses, the stakes become higher and danger creeps closer to Ava and John, leading to a dramatic conclusion. With Deadly Animals, Tierney has created an exceptional heroine.” –BookPage Celeste Connally, All’s Fair in Love and Treachery (Minotaur) “Although its haute ton setting nods at Bridgerton, Lady Petra’s story owes more to Sex and the City… A light and lively romp.” –Kirkus Reviews Austin Duffy, Cross (Melville House) “A tremendous novel, powerful and compelling, written with great gritty authenticity.” –William Boyd Graham Brown, Clive Cussler’s Desolation Code (Putnam) “Kurt Austin and the NUMA crew face swarms of deadly bio-hacked sea locusts, a runaway AI system, and a sinister cult in the latest novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series created by the ‘grand master of adventure,’ Clive Cussler.” –Bookreporter.com John Straley, Big Breath In (Soho Crime) “[An] elegiac standalone. . . Straley seamlessly interweaves heart-pumping action, fascinating insights on whales’ social behavior, and poignant flashbacks to Delphine’s life before she got sick . . . It’s potent stuff.” –Publishers Weekly Carin Gerhardsen, The Saint (Mysterious Press) “This gripping procedural . . . offers smart investigation and a disturbing mystery, but the absorbing shifts in the VCU detectives’ relationships are Gerhardsen’s most impressive feat.” –Booklist Paul French, Her Lotus Year (St. Martin’s) “Lush and spicy… [French] strikingly renders an oft-fetishized time and place, countering the familiar mythologizing of both the Roaring Twenties, with its Eurocentric literary obsessions, and the path of China from dynastic to communist rule.” –Kirkus Reviews Timothy Silver, Death in Briar Bottom (UNC Press) “Thoroughly researched . . . . An intriguing perspective on a lesser-known case. This book proves that history can repeat itself in unexpected ways, and not everyone is eager to revisit the past.” –Library Journal View the full article

Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Northern England. Once the powerhouse of the British Empire’s steel manufacturing – hardly a house or hotel in the British Empire didn’t have knives and forks stamped with the “Sheffield Steel” logo. It still exists, but late twentieth century deindustrialisation has seen the city fall on harder times and have to look for new industries. Perhaps the worst of the loss of manufacturing (coal and manufacturing as well as steel) is behind Sheffield now but it’s still a tough town, as its crime writing reflects…. Let’s start with the 12-book DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) Matilda Darke series, a dozen procedurals set in and around Sheffield. Darke heads the region’s ‘Murder Investigation Team”. A great series, but perhaps we should pick out several that really take you deeper into Sheffield? Book five in the series, The Murder House (2020), begins the morning after a wedding reception at a suburban home in Sheffield. The bride’s entire family are stabbed to death in a frenzied attack more violent than anything DCI Matilda Darke could ever have imagined. Or perhaps book seven in the series, Time is Running Out (2021), with a lone gunman is on a deadly rampage around Sheffield. It will turn out to be a near fatal investigation for Darke. There’s also book eleven in the series, Below Ground (2023), with a body found in an abandoned car on the outskirts of Sheffield, a suspect who resides in the nearby Supermax Wakefield Prison WJ Willans has written the first in a Sheffield set series featuring Inspector Jack Wolf. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (2017) starts with a kidnapped woman being repeatedly drugged. She eventually manages to escape and seeks help. Detective inspector Wolf of Sheffield’s South Yorkshire Police is assigned the case and is determined to find out who did this and why the young woman is still being threatened. In Wolf’s Bane (2022) teenagers are dying on the streets of Sheffield and no one knows why. Jack Wolf and his team are brought in to investigate and solve the murders. Danuta Reah is a prolific writer who often returns to her hometown of Sheffield for inspiration and standalone novels. If there’s a Queen of Sheffield crime then it’s Danuta Reah. In Bleak Water (2011) the new gleaming city centre contrast with the old industrial Sheffield canal – overgrown, run-down and deserted. Except for a small, innovative gallery housed in one of the local; abandoned warehouses – the perfect site for an exhibition reworking Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death. Then a young woman’s body is found in the canal and Elisa Eliot, the gallery’s curator, is drawn into the investigation. In Silent Playgrounds (2009) what should be a straightforward investigation leads DI Steve McCarthy into a web of lies and evasions after kids go missing in a suburban Sheffield park where the city meets the countryside. Also by Danuta Reah, Night Angels (2011) is a psychological suspense novel of set in Sheffield and the nearby city of Hull. One winter’s night, Gemma, a young research worker is driving to Sheffield across the Snake Pass, an often-treacherous road running from Manchester to Sheffield. As a game, she pretends that the black BMW she keeps seeing is following her. And then, on the loneliest stretch of the road, without explanation, her car breaks down. She is never seen again. Meanwhile over in Hull, the body of a woman is discovered battered to death in a hotel bathroom; the only clue to her identity is a card bearing the name of an escort agency notorious for its suspected trafficking in Eastern European women. Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan sees a connection and concludes there may be a serial killer on the loose. And one last book from Danuta Reah (told you she was the queen of Sheffield crime!), Only Darkness (2010). Debbie Sykes is a young college lecturer in Sheffield whose ordered life is about to be changed forever. One stormy winter’s night, waiting for the late train home, Debbie is acutely aware of being alone – the woman who usually shares her evening vigil is not there. Vulnerability turns to fear, though, when she turns to see a sinister figure looming between her and the safety of the street. The next day, she hears that the missing woman has been found murdered by the man they call the Strangler, a brutal killer who dumps his victims on isolated stretches of railway track. Debbie is scared and only Rob Neave, ex-policeman and college security officer, seems to take her seriously. A couple of true crime books that feature Sheffield with noting. Margaret Drinkall’s Murder and Crime Sheffield (2012) looks at a number of notorious Victorian-era crimes in Sheffield, an industrial city where so many were anonymous and rarely missed as people flocked into the factories and lives of poverty and meanness. Meanwhile, Birmingham may have the Peaky Blinders, but Sheffield had gangs that could give them a run for their money. JP Bean’s The Sheffield Gang Wars (1981) is a classic of English true crime while Ben W Johnson’s Sheffield’s Most Notorious Gangs (2018) reworks many of the same tales. The Mooney Gang, the Park Brigade and others were composed of young men who came back from World War One – damaged, looking for excitement and not wanting to simply walk back into the grim factories. It was a time when it looked like the gangs would roam free, the police powerless to stop them. But the British state decided that one of the Empire’s most important industrial cities could not simply be left to the control of gangs. And then of course there’s a myriad of books about Peter Sutcliffe, the notorious “Yorkshire Ripper” of the 1970s convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. After his reign of terror across Manchester and Yorkshire he was finally arrested in Sheffield by South Yorkshire Police for driving a car with false number plates in January 1981. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent life sentences. Naturally Sutcliffe’s horrific crimes have inspired a raft of fiction and non-fiction books. The best known and most obsessively read (and adapted for TV by Britain’s Channel 4) is David Peace’s Red Riding quartet comprises the novels Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002). The series, set largely in the northern English cities of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester fictionalizes the investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper (Yorkshire traditionally divided into three areas known as the Ridings – Sheffield is in the West Riding). And finally, a real treat of a psychological thriller – Russ Thomas’s Nighthawking (2021). The body of a young woman is found in Sheffield’s Botanical Gardens. DS Adam Tyler determines that she’s been there for months and would have gone undiscovered for years – except someone returned in the dead of night to dig her up. Tyler’s investigation draws him into the secretive world of nighthawkers: treasure-hunters who operate under cover of darkness, seeking the lost and valuable. Sheffield may not today be the powerhouse of Empire industry it once was but neither is it the grim deindustrialised city it became in the 1970s and 1980s as industry closed, moved away and the British mining industry collapsed. Today Sheffield is seen as a pretty leafy city, close to motorways connecting the country but only a short drive into glorious countryside. Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday means the city has two top football clubs, as well as a couple of major universities. But that doesn’t mean it’s all cosy and good news in Sheffield and the city still has a great crime writing tradition. View the full article