Murder She Writes

I went into the bathroom a little while ago, saw my reflection in the mirror and damn near swallowed my tongue from gasping so hard. Needless to say, I’m a pretty pathetic sight right now. Here’s a visual….

Ball cap over hair that should have been washed two days ago, dark circles and deep lines around the eyes, and pasty skin with that too-much-caffeine sheen. Gross ain’t it?

Over the last 5 days, I’ve had a total of 10 hours sleep, and that’s no exaggeration. The rest of those 110 hours have been spent writing, teaching classes on writing in San Diego, more writing, doing radio and tv interviews on writing, more writing, then throw on top of that heap the deadline from hell, and you wind up with the beauty queen I mentioned above. I swear, I don’t know of any other business that allows for such large quantities of self-imposed abuse. Nor do I know any other industry workers who would be stupid enough to take on that kind of abuse. Yet, writers do it to themselves again and again. What’s up with that? Is it a genetic problem? A self-esteem problem? Or do we just harbor some latent masochistic tendencies?

I found the answer to that question in my daughters.

I love and treasure my children more than life itself. And with that love comes a powerful desire to do whatever I can for them whenever possible. No sacrifice is too great when it comes to them. I think many writers carry the same powerful love for words. In that way, we’re different from the rest of the world’s workers. That love gives us the desire and strength to go above and beyond the call of duty time and time again. In that respect, we’re either very, very fortunate, or truly cursed.

Right now, with the memory of my gross reflection still vivid in my mind, I’d call it a fifty-fifty split between fortunate and cursed. I’m just hoping that when this road smoothes out…and it will, eventually… so will my face!

“There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”–Brendan Behan

I have to remind myself of the above quote quite often, because my work is controversial. And anytime your work is controversial, your going to get hatemail. A few days ago, I received this email:

Message: I am writing this [the following text in quotes] on behalf of my grandmother, Joy B. Dearden.

”I purchased ’Behind Closed Doors’ on Monday. Finished the book on Tuesday. I SHREDDED it Tuesday night. It went to the county dump Wenesday.”

I personally find your warped veiw of mormons disturbing and immature. You are not doing yourself any form of justice by making a religion look twisted and perturbed by weaving lies into the minds of people that don’t know any better.

Simply because of one experience you had does not mean that the entire church revolves around scandal.

I personally don’t find comfort in the religon of the LDS church, but that dosen’t mean that I bash and destroy it via written text in such a disgusting manner.

Here’s hoping that someday you can write something other that hogwash.

Now you might think I responded angrily to this email, but I did not. This is not my first rodeo, nor is this my first nasty email. And the writer of this email–and her grandmother–somehow TOTALLY missed the point of the book. The writer possibly because she did not actually READ the book, and just decided I was lying, twisting facts, and bashing Mormonism, because this is not a “faith promoting” LDS book. That aside, I didn’t see the point of explaining that. I’ve tried that before, and it never works. So this was my response.

“I’m a ‘glass-is-half-full’ kind of girl, so I’m just happy to read that your grandmother FINISHED the book before she shredded it. Thanks for writing.”

And that’s all I wrote. I see no point in arguing. This person didn’t have a valid complaint, anyway. Her comments to me were totally off base, and it was obvious that she was making some pretty large assumptions.

I just read a review of my book tonight, in which the reviewer said:

Once again, Natalie takes a critical look at the Mormon Church and its position on women’s roles in the family, but she has tempered her criticism with understanding and compassion, and none of that gets in the way of a really fine mystery. Her ability to create well-rounded and all-too-human characters makes Natalie Collins an author I read with greedy anticipation!

Now THIS is comment is correct. It is a critical look. I cannot deny that. I truly believe there is both good and bad Mormonism, and I write about it from MY viewpoint. That isn’t always what people want to hear, but they get plenty of the “faith promoting” stuff from other Utah Mormon authors. They don’t need to hear it from me, too.

Let’s face it, suspense fiction is only successful when it is suspenseful and intense, and that doesn’t really involve kitties and puppies and bunny slippers. I can make my suspense fiction REALISTIC by delving into areas with which I am familiar. And that just happens to be Mormon Utah.

All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly–and the truly evil.

All a person has to do is pick up a Utah paper and you will see that we have it here, too. Mormons kill. Mormons lie. Mormons steal. Not ALL Mormons, of course. But the fact that Mormons are PEOPLE is an unescapable truth.

I realize that I write my books from my point of view, as a dissident Mormon. (FYI, I tried to have my name removed from the Church records, and failed. They put it back on, added my maiden name as well, and gave me a son named Robert that must be a spirit child, because I cannot find him and have no memory of giving birth to him. My children like to blame “Robert” for all the things that go wrong in our house.) And I believe that MY point of view is just as valid as anyone else’s.

That said, I understand that many will not like what I have to say. In the past, I would have assumed that meant they would not READ the book. Grandma Joy’s actions changed all that.

She read and shred. Go Grandma! As one of my regular blog readers pointed out, that is one less book out there (one that was already paid for) that could be loaned out, which could be a economic plus.

And shredding a book is a passionate response. Again, she read the whole thing before her actions. It evoked something in her, positive or negative. It affected her.

What more can you ask?

Sorry I’m late! I’m switching to DSL (if all goes well) and the phone company is switching over a phone line for me today on my computer. Evidently they disconnected my computer phone line early this morning, but won’t be out until later today to change the jack to the new line. So I’m going to string a line to the phone jack in the kitchen—I’ll have to do it a little later.

So I’m going to talk about change and growth.

Yesterday I was strangely depressed. My husband went out for the day, which I normally have no problem with. My youngest son was at work and my other two sons no longer live at home. In fact, middle son just moved out three weeks ago. He’s adjusting very well to living with his brother and two other guys. Now you all probably figured this out right away. But I couldn’t figure out why I was depressed. I have a bit of a loner in my personality. I’m rarely lonely.

Yesterday I was. I couldn’t even bring myself to call my sister and see if she wanted to go get coffee or hang. Because deep down I knew that if she was busy I’d have been devastated. Which was just plain weird. I mean I’m not a crier; I’m not emotional on most days. I’m pretty good with my own company. But even my characters were making me emotional yesterday. I drifted through the day trying to work, reading a little bit running errands and unable to settle into anything in a decent way. I couldn’t even write a blog.

When my husband came home, I rushed out in the garage to tell him I was crabby. He looked surprised, but was sweet to me which frustrated me more (poor guy). We talked about different things including how much he misses racing (radio control car racing) with out boys.

BINGO the light went on. There it was. Damn, I missed the kids. I missed being needed by the kids. I missed being important to my kids. They are my identity—I’m my kids’ mom and I love it. I’ve been fighting the feeling for three weeks. It makes my furious actually because I strongly believe a parent’s job is to raise our kids to be strong and independent. And I have pushed them to grow when they weren’t sure they wanted to. But this week, not one of my kids needed me. It hurt. And that made me angry at myself so I refused to admit it.

And you know what’s ironic? My hero in my current book is going through the same thing with his feelings. He’s denying them. The feelings are making him angry. My guy is alpha, but not an ass, he doesn’t need to prove his manhood by treating the heroine badly (that is another blog, all the things that a true alpha is NOT). He’s just struggling with himself, and holding onto the truth he has known as opposed to accepting change. Because change is scary. Just like I am resisted acknowledging my own feelings on change, he’s doing the same. Ivy, the heroine is in the shower trying to deal with her grief over a murder and some self-truths she just discover. Luke goes in and refuses to leave her alone. He literally tells her “Your tears make me bleed inside and I don’t know what the BLEEP I’m supposed to do about that.”

Oh man, I so relate to that scene. I have no idea where Luke’s words came from. I never even intended to write that scene, I had another one in mind. But that’s the scene that came out. Luke had something he needed to say, to acknowledge and I finally just got out of his way.
No maybe I need to get out of my own way and admit that change is hard on me. I won’t turn into a clinging mom, and my kids will understand that I want them to be happy and independent. Just as I am encouraging my youngest son, the one who is a senior in high school to grow and head into adulthood with confidence. I am lucky to have a really good relationship with my kids. Letting them go hurts, but they do still need me, just in a different way. I certainly needed my mom right up until the day she died. But with change and growth comes a little pain. I just need to accept it, and give myself a little time to figure out my changing role as a mom of adult sons.

Now for a different moment. I was telling my husband last night that I didn’t like a climax scene I wrote on Saturday. He nodded, “That’s part of why you’re crabby today. You’ll figure it out.” And then we talked about the scene for a few minutes and moved onto something else.

He gets me. He always has. Hard to be depressed for too long when I really am a very lucky woman.

What about you guys? What’s changing in your life?

(oops, sorry, I forgot to post this at 3 a.m. this morning before I finshed writing for the night)

As most of you know I write erotic romance for Pocket. I also have two non erotic historicals slated for release in ’08. Amongst the literary world, romance gets no respect. Amongst the romance community erotic romance gets no respect. Someone said on a blog they didn’t understand how anyone writing erotic romance could use their real name. Why not? I’m not ashamed of what I write. I happen to love a hot steamy love story. And while I will admit that as far as true erotic romance goes, my erotic romance is not nearly as complicated (for the lack of a better word) as some erotic romances out there (I write love between two consenting heterosexual human adults) my stories are sexier (sexier in the realm of sexual content) than the average romance.

On another blog someone commented on how they didn’t like gratuitous sex in erotic romances. I don’t either. I can’t force my protags between the sheets, they have to go there in their time, not mine. Non erotic romance writers sniff and say, “If that’s what I have to do to sell or get another contract, I’ll find a day job.” Go for it, but don’t dis me for what I enjoy to write. And don’t dis those who like to read it.

The plot part of my stories is suspense driven. Sexy suspense. Hot steamy suspense. Always with the romance. Always with a HEA. Not always the traditional HEA where the hero and heroine meet at the altar. But they are committed to each other at the end of the story.

I pulled out a romantic suspense I wrote a few years ago, one that is in the process of being completely rewritten and sold as a straight romantic suspense. It has strong characters and a very strong suspenseful plot, but as with the first version, this version is sexy, very sexy. The tension between the two protags melts the pages. And while the plot is bigger and there is more character development that goes on in this romantic suspense, the heat factor is just as high as any of my erotic suspenses. In fact, in my estimation it’s hotter. Hotter because I have more room to build tension. More room to get deeper into the character’s heads. That is why this book will hit the shelves as a straight romantic suspense and not erotic suspense. There are variations of romance in romantic suspense. In some books the story could not stand without the romance. In others the plot stands and the romance is secondary. Same with historicals, fantasies and paranormals.

Two questions: What constitutes a romance to you and what do you consider an erotic romance? Don’t be shy. Inquiring minds want to know.

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I’ll admit, I was surprised when I was asked for an author blurb. This is basically a one or two-sentence endorsement of the book which may go on the front cover or on an inside page.

First, though my debut trilogy did well, I’m hardly a household name among suspense lovers like, oh, Robb, Coben, Connelly, King, Koontz, Gardner, Gerritsen, Hoag and many others. Second, and most important, who am I to judge whether a book is good or not? What if I love it and one of my readers hates it and gets mad at me? What if I hate it and the author gets mad at me?

I also have a hard time saying no to anything so I agreed to read too many manuscripts last year, which made reading them more a chore than a pleasure. But as the year wore on and I faced tighter and tighter deadlines, I started turning down requests to read. And feeling bad about it. (But that’s my problem. Sigh.)

I also read a book I didn’t care for, not because it was poorly written–it was fine–but because I didn’t like the story. But some people will love it. It’s not like it was bad . . . I ended up sweating and stressing about this for two weeks before declining to give a quote. Then I told myself I’d never read another manuscript again. Obviously, that didn’t last.

I also had several people ask for a quote based on just the first couple chapters of material. Again, I didn’t feel comfortable doing that though I have heard that many authors do it. They have their comfort level, and I have mine. I can accept that someone won’t love the same books I do. I can accept that I can’t read everything I’m asked. But I can’t endorse a book I haven’t read in its entirety.

My lightbulb moment occurred when I was speaking to my associate publisher at a conference. I lamented about how many books I’d agreed to read, and that I didn’t love one of them, and she related a story. She’d sent a book to one of the house’s top authors thinking that he’d love it. He didn’t and refused to endorse it. “It’s your name,” she told me. “Don’t endorse something you don’t like.”

Then I went through a bout of just refusing to read anything, even if I had the time, because I was afraid I wouldn’t like something and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Then I had to decline to read because I honestly didn’t have the time.

Anyway, I can’t read everything. I know that. My deadlines have to come first. I’ve heard of authors who have said they’ll read the first five manuscripts to come by their desk in a year. I don’t want to be that stringent, but I do understand where that rule came from!

The truth is, I don’t even know how effective an author blurb is. I don’t make it a habit of picking up books with quotes, though I have been known to do it. But every new author wants one, and I was tickled with Mariah Stewart gave THE PREY an endorsement. So I go ’round and ’round on this.

Anyway, if you see my name on a book I didn’t write, I genuinely liked the book. You may or may not like the book, and that’s okay. Taste is subjective. Just like some editors didn’t like THE PREY and some loved it. Some agents rejected it and some requested it.

Now I want to know the truth: have you ever bought a book because an author (as opposed to a friend) gave the book an endorsement? Did it factor into your decision to pick up the book in the first place (and then maybe buy it or put it down based on the book summary or first pages?) How much weight do you put on author endorsements?

Undoubtedly, you have had the experience of picking up a novel at the end of the day, telling yourself you’ll read a chapter before going to sleep, and then …

A surprised glance at the clock. It’s five in the morning! Huh? What happened? You had taken no notice of time passing, not here in the real world. Instead, your time became the time of the novel. As you read, your body occupied space in RealityLand–but you, the thinking, feeling, imagining, real you, were literally somewhere else. You were walking the suburban streets or city alleys, the forest paths or sandy beaches of a fictional world, as you shared the adventures and thoughts and emotions of that world’s people, people you had come to know and care about. The late John Gardner, a fine writer and teacher of writing, called fiction a “waking dream.” When you sleep and dream, you experience the dream as real. And when you enter the waking dream of a well-written short story or novel, it is just as real.

So how does a writer do that?

In my opinion, it’s reality’s “What Is,” not imagination’s “What If?” that transforms a suspense premise into a suspense story. It takes reality, heaps of it, to create and populate a story realm that keeps readers at the edge of their seat. It takes settings that have the reality of Lincoln, Nebraska; Tucson, Arizona; or Church Point, Louisiana. It takes breathing, thinking, feeling, story folks who are as real as your Uncle Alphonse, who always gets drunk and sentimental at family reunions; as real as Mr. Sonnier, your high school English teacher who nearly flunked you for not handing in your term paper on “Washington Irving’s Use of the Comma in Rip Van Winkle”; as real as your first puppy-love paramour or your last meaningful-relationship partner.

Good fiction, by definition, is credible. It is a lie that can be believed. Readers should be able to say of a contemporary or mainstream work of fiction, “Yes, given these circumstances, this could really happen.” Readers should able to say that of a western, romance, mystery, suspense, you-name-it work of fiction.

And readers must be able to say of a story of the supernatural, the paranormal, or a killer-thriller, “Given these circumstances, this could really happen”–if they are to enter into and be held by a waking dream. The key to credibility in fiction is setting and character. Your readers, after all, are already meeting you more than halfway, as they implicitly agree, “I want to be held captive by your words–and so I choose to willingly suspend disbelief in order to accept your imaginative premise. A manacle-rattling, saber-waving, or ice-cream cone licking ghost, a werewolf, a pantyhose-wearing serial killer, a sleuth with Tourette’s, okay, I’ll go with that. I’ll stretch my credulity that far. . . ”

But that’s it! With one such leap of imagination/acceptance of the incredible, readers have given you all you have a right to expect. That means everything else in your waking dream must be true to life so that readers are never saying, “Uh-uh, I’m being lied to.”
What’s “everything else”?

Everything else = setting and characters. (Okay, fiction has setting, characters, and plot! Correct. But if your principal characters respond to their problem/conflict situations in credible ways, plot happens almost automatically.)

How do you make settings real? Bring out the old chestnut: Write about what you know.
It’s hardly a surprise that Robert McCammon’s evocative and frightening-as-hell novel, Mystery Walk, is set in Dixie. A graduate of the University of Alabama, living in Birmingham, Alabama, McCammon knows the territory.

J.N. Williamson often chooses Indianapolis, Indiana, as the setting for his fictive frights. Indianapolis born, -Indianapolis-dwelling, sure to get all worked up over the Indy 500, Williamson knows Indianapolis and depicts it so you know it, too.

A Maine native, Stephen King has lived in Castle Rock and ‘Salem’s Lot–even if those towns have other names on the Auto Club map.

I’ve lived in Lafayette, Louisiana all my life, know the rhythm of its people, the language, the scents, the sounds, the sights as well as I know the crows-feet around my eyes.
You can understand, then, how I came up with a town called Windham for the setting of my last novel, A House Divided. You know why my protagonists love Mardi Gras and why they interact the way they do with others in that small community. Here’s a small passage to show what I mean…

“Laisser les bon temps rouler!” Less than a block away, the Courir’s capitaine sat astride a chestnut gelding, waving a white flag. His command to “let the good times roll!” detonated a maelstrom of drunken whoops from the hundreds of riders behind him. Horses sauntered; revelers in bright colored tunics and capuchons sang and danced in their saddles, a Budweiser in each hand. Thousands of Mardi Gras beads in every shape and color sparkled in the afternoon sun as they were tossed to the onlookers lining both sides of the street.

To write that, I employed zero imagination. Instead, I relied on memory and knowledge, and found words to let my readers see what I see during a Courir de Mardi Gras.

Wait….is that a protest I hear? “But I live in North Nowhere, Kansas, three churches, four taverns, and a trailer park. Our big cultural event is the annual VFW show when the guys dress up as women…. How’s a fictionalized North Nowhere to grab and keep readers’ interest?”

Hey, North Nowhere is interesting–if you set out to discover the interest. For instance, there are all sorts of “local color” events in Crete that grab me: The eclectic Old Town Restaurant adds something new to a menu that already offers Mexican burritos, Chinese egg rolls, Italian ravioli, and Greek dolmaches; Crete Hardware has a sign, “Thanks for your patronage for the past 30 years,” not because the store is going out of business or anything, but just to say, “Thanks”; the high school’s cheerleaders slow traffic at the Main-and-Exchange intersection (the town’s only stoplight), by holding a “Sucker Day” to raise money for new uniforms.

Granted, reality-based settings are prosaic and commonplace, but the very ordinariness of such settings can still work for you.

Readers are familiar with the ordinary; they live there. Readers relate to the ordinary without your having to work at establishing that relationship. And thus readers will find your settings credible.

Then, if you have an ominous, thickly atmospheric setting, the phosphorescent-fog-shrouded swamp, the torture chamber of a crumbling castle, the burial ground of a Satanic church, you will be hard pressed to spring a surprise on your readers, who anticipate an awful or nasty occurrence in such a foreboding place.

But…

Summer. A few minutes past sunrise. Birchwood Lane, a quiet suburban street. Mailbox on the comer. A parkway tom up to repair a broken sewer file. A squirrel zips up a tree, fleeing a gray tomcat …

Ho-hum, hum-drum … until something sinuous, gleaming with slime, slithers from the mailbox’s “In” slot …

Or . . .

The squirrel, safe on a limb, chatters defiance at the cat below … then, from the thick leaves behind the squirrel, an arm shoots out and a knobby-knuckled hand encircles the squirrel’s neck and…..

It’s the intrusion of the extraordinary, the appalling unusual into the lives of ordinary, credible, for-real characters that makes for compelling suspense and those much sought after waking dreams.

Just rambling today…

The first week in January was quiet.

The second week it started: “You never call, you can’t go to lunch, you’re working too hard and a day off would do you good, or you’re working so hard you should take a break and talk to me now for an hour or….”

Guilt. Love it and gee thanks. It really helps when I’ve gotten slammed up against a deadline because of things like family deaths, my son’s broken foot, a couple family emergency surgeries…etc. Last year was good in many ways, but it was stressful too and through it all I wrote.

Then I got slammed up against a deadline. I have to go to my cave. I have to LIVE this book to get it done.

But I can handle those people. The people I really want to talk about? Those who are friends. The kind of friends that just take your breath away and make you grateful every damned day.

I have a friends Marianne Donley. This last week I sent her an email that had a couple frantic lines about my book buried in other stuff. She shot an email right back. “Send me your book.” She took my 300 pages of garbage with her on VACATION, read it in hours and sent back a critique WHILE ON VACTAION! Then she spent another day email-plotting with me. All the while dealing with her own life issues and career deadlines.

Oh yeah, my friends are amazing, incredible, fantastic people and they define the true meaning of friendship.

Thank you Marianne!

I have many other friends who have done similar things for me. I cherish them all. Most of them are from my local RWA chapter, women I’ve bonded with and who have been there for me both before and after I published. Then there are friends like Natalie and the other MSW gals that I initially met on the Internet. They all make me strive to be a better friend myself.

So yeah, I’ve gone to my cave, but it’s not a lonely place. My friends are only a phone call or email away. And I hope they all know that I’d drop everything to be there for them if they need me.

Anything you guys want to ramble about today?

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. . . is the new title of my novella for Pocket. Yeah!!! Maureen, you win!!! Email me your snail mail address and I’ll send out a $20 gift certificate to Borders (unless you’d prefer something else.)

And Carolyn, you get an early copy of SPEAK NO EVIL, but I haven’t heard from you.

My email is allison @ allisonbrennan.com (without the spaces).

I’m really excited!! I was partial to ETERNAL EVIL, but hands down, DELIVER US FROM EVIL was my agent’s favorite.

Now off to finish the story . . .

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