Murder She Writes

By hubby

And so it was, on that Hallows Eve
That she toiled and plotted and did so weave
A new tail of sorts with hero’s abound
And heroines in turmoil with sensitive mounds

Though dark and damp the outer landscape
She did not fear those with horns and cape
Nor those of reviews or critical take
For it takes many among us, the world to make

And so she worked on in a fever pitch
How to make woman both love and bitch
With a man so hard yet tender of touch
She gave it her all, the old one, two punch

All through the night the door did ring
Ghouls and goblins and the strangest of beings
All with their bags and begging faces
“Give us more we’ve to visit other places”

Her time divided she did work on
For this new series demanded her bond
A group of renegades formerly law
Deeply entrenched both hook, tooth and claw

Men of steel and fire with resolve
And the troubled women who help them solve
The mysteries of corruption as well as flesh
Meaty plots of action and sex she’ll masterfully mesh

For this is the goal of one so possessed
On a Hallows Eve with a deadline stressed
Strange noises in the night give no distraction
Pages to write, completed but just a fraction

Late at night an offer of soul
To one so tired near ready to fold
She contemplates with weary eyes
The contract of blood and fiery lies

Then tosses it aside and to the floor
And ushers the creature to the door
“Be off with you, demon bother me no more!
For I am a writer and it is my chore!”

What are you doing tonight?

Karin*

1  1

After wrapping up my copyedits on SUDDEN DEATH at 1:30 a.m., I moseyed on over to Murder She Writes to write my blog for this morning. I had a vague idea of writing about copy edits (no surprise there) but after reading Deborah’s post, I had a much better (I hope) idea. At least, it grabbed me enough and I no longer remember what I thought I’d write about!

Deb talked about hating synopses. I hate them to. Who likes them? Well, I think there’s something wrong with you . . . ha ha, just kidding.

I don’t write a synopsis until I have to. I mean really have to, like, “Sales needs this today for a meeting . . . ” kind of have to. And even then, I have problems.

Take the FBI Trilogy. SUDDEN DEATH? No problem. The book was 80% written at the time then needed the synop, so I wrote it . . . and an ending I thought was going to happen. Well, that ending DIDN’T happen, but fortunately they don’t put the climax on the back cover copy.

FATAL SECRETS? I thought this one would be the no brainer. Matt Elliott, a secondary character in PLAYING DEAD and SUDDEN DEATH was the hero. I adore him. He was also the hero of the short story I wrote for the KILLER YEAR antho. He was a reluctant candidate for Attorney General and someone tries to assassinate him. I could totally picture the opening chapter because I’d written something like it long ago in a book that never sold . . . but this was a completely different story. The heroine was an FBI Agent. I wrote a two page rough synopsis. I instantly knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what . . .

. . . so I wrote the two pager on CUTTING EDGE. This story I only had a premise . . . someone killing those involved in cutting edge technology. (I got the idea after reading a story about a biotech genius coming up with ways in save salmon . . . I didn’t understand the technology, but did think that some people might not like it, and what if one of those was a psychopath . . . ?) Anyway, I didn’t know the characters, so I sat back and pictured the opening scene. A fire at a state-of-the-art laboratory. They’d have security, right? Sure . . . who does security in Sacramento? Rogan-Caruso . . . was this J.T.’s book? No . . . not J.T. (If you’ve read PLAYING DEAD, you know who JT is . . . he’s also in SUDDEN DEATH. Yum.) But one of them . . . I picked Duke Rogan, the middle Rogan brother. He just jumped out at me and said yeah, it was my security system, but it didn’t fail, so you’ll have to change that. My security systems don’t fail.

I sent off the synopses. That night, I couldn’t sleep. Something was wrong. It was FATAL SECRETS. I knew it, and now I knew way. Matt’s heroine was wrong, the storyline was wrong, and WHAM! I knew then that my NEXT trilogy, the first book would be Matt’s. And the heroine? No one else would do. It’s JT Caruso’s sister, an international photojournalist who disappears on assignment . . . and Matt and JT go to find her.

But that story wouldn’t fit for this trilogy, which needed an FBI agent as one of the main characters (hence, the Sacramento FBI Trilogy tag . . . ) So I emailed my editor and said, stop, FATAL SECRETS isn’t going to work. Give me a day or two, I’ll have something.

What popped into my head was a story that had been simmering for awhile. I’ve wanted to write a story about human trafficking. But it’s been done a lot recently, I needed something a little different . . . and then I came up with it. My heroine is an ICE Agent who had been sold as a child, and escaped, leading police to the bad guys, then adopted by an American law enforcement family. The hero, an FBI Agent. What was the connection? . . . what if the hero was investigating the bad guy for tax evasion, ala Eliot Ness. And the heroine for human trafficking. And their respective sting operations collided and Wham! Instant conflict. It worked, and I was going to write a story I’ve wanted to write for awhile.

I wrote up the synopsis, happy, and even got the back cover copy and was thrilled with it (it sounded so much better than what I had! I could hardly believe they pulled out a story that sounds this good from the crappy two-pager I wrote . . .

By this time, I had finished SUDDEN DEATH, revisions and all, and started FATAL SECRETS. I had a great opening scene pictured, and started writing, and within five pages I knew I had the wrong hero.

See, characters are people too. Once I pictured Sam Callahan, he became real to me. He had a personality and attitude that I couldn’t change. He’s laid back, happy-go-lucky, and very smart. He’s from a large, happy family. He doesn’t have issues. He’s a cross between Patrick Kincaid and Will Hooper. Fun, happy, dedicated, and a bit of a ladies man.

Sonia Knight is a hot-head. She’s driven, dedicated, and a work-a-holic. She is in it for one reason: save the kids. She’ll do anything–break rules, argue, lie, fight, plead–to save the girls being imported for nefarious purposes. She’s also smart and brave and has a soft-spot for kids. But other people? If you’re not part of the solution–and listen to her–you’re part of the problem.

Sonia Knight would eat Sam alive. There was no connection. I couldn’t even MAKE it happen. I couldn’t change either character.

I banged my head on the desk . . . and Dean walked in.

Dean Hooper, Will’s brother. He’s mentioned briefly in the past as an FBI Agent who Hans is impressed with. But that’s it. I had a name, and I had admiration from one of the top FBI guys in my books. I could do anything . . . and he became sort of an Eliot Ness meets Quinn Peterson (my hero from THE HUNT.) Dean is a mathematical genius and a leader in white collar crimes, a high ranking agent out of Quantico. He’s been tracking Xavier Jones for two years, and moved to Sacramento to work with the white collar crimes team (led by Sam Callahan) to finally take Jones down. As soon as he stepped out of the black SUV, I knew. He was the hero. Sorry, Sam. I hope you get a book someday . . . though I’m not 100% certain you’re going to survive this one.

So there it is, a sneak peak at my absurd and quite erratic process of . . . what? Pre-writing? I think my muse is psychotic, and does this to me to keep me on my toes.

Yet, I can see my characters and know that if I saw them on the street, I’d know them. Some writers do that for me, too. JD Robb’s Roarke and Eve Dallas . . . I would KNOW them if I met them. In fact, all her characters in that series totally pop for me. Peabody? McNab? Dr. Mira? Sommerset? Mavis? I know them all. Even Trina is a real, defined person in my mind, someone I’d recognize.

That’s what makes characters come alive for me, when they are three-dimensional. I could no more change Sam Callahan’s character than I could change one of my children.

What characters come alive for you? Who becomes real, someone you just know you’d recognize if you met them in person?

1  1

I’m a one purse at a time kind of woman. In other words, I don’t have a handbag to go with every outfit. The ones I get are typically multifunctional and fit just about any occasion. Well, except formal affairs. For those, I rummage through the forty plus bags in my sister’s closet and borrow one. Anyway, a few years ago I figured it was time for a purse makeover. I bought a small one, hoping to keep the ‘stuff’ I usually carry around to a minimum. Bad idea. In a matter of two weeks, the doggone thing was overflowing, and one of the straps broke in the middle of a grocery store, spilling mentionable and unmentionable contents all over the floor. It was a classic case of shoving ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. I should have left well enough alone.

I view synopses the same way. Here you have a perfectly good book, and someone wants you to cram all those words, feelings, characters, and plots, into a five page summary. Argg! I hate ‘em! It’s tough enough sweating through each chapter of a book, wanting to make every scene as vivid and three dimensional as possible. How in the hell is anyone supposed to create the same effect in five short pages?

The bottom line is—you can’t. But what you can create, if the synopsis is done correctly, is intrigue. Or so I’m told. Mine have a tendency to read like a crack-addict’s steno notes. Short blasts of info that have little sequential order or logic. When I’m writing a book, I’ll do one major rewrite, then a polish before sending it off to my editor. For a synopsis, I have to do fifty-seven gazillion rewrites for it to even start making sense. Why do you think that is? I’m supposed to be a writer for heaven’s sake. You’d think I’d be able to handle a few measly pages.

Maybe it’s a psychological thing. An underlying, suppressed abhorrence for shoving ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag, spawned from the memory of that busted purse—tampons rolling across aisle 5, right up to the Frosted Flakes and that guy with the wobbly-wheeled grocery cart. Rolaids, an empty bottle of antibiotics, hair scrungies, six-year-old gas receipts, a three-year-old slice of Doublemint gum—out of the wrapper—and enough change to support Laundromats all across America, all of it tumbling over, under, and around bins, baskets, and curious onlookers.

Uh, yeah, that’s gotta be it . . .

1  1

When I first started attempting to break into publishing, I did a lot of research. Mainly about who was buying what and who was doing it the most often. I didn’t care what genre I broke into—as long as I made the break. I felt as a writer, I could write anything. At the time, ten years ago, it appeared that romantic comedy was the hot ticket. So I dived in with both feet. I had been writing since I was a kid, some comedy—I fancied myself a sitcom writer before I’d even heard of the term—but mostly I wrote very dark stories about very desperate people. Still, I was convinced that the key to becoming a published author was the basic supply and demand scenario. The strategy worked. I penned a romantic comedy, Up Close, that Hilary Sares of Kensington wanted for their Precious Gems imprint. Yay! I had made it.

But the romantic comedy wasn’t enough to keep the beast inside me at bay. I needed to write those other stories. You know, those dark, creepy ones. Eventually I became an author for Harlequin’s Intrigue line where I honed my skills as a romantic suspense author. Still, in time, the beast roared for me to try something new, to do more. I ended up doing a few Harlequin Americans, a more family-driven story with a mystery element. Then the Bombshell line came into being and I couldn’t wait to create women’s action/adventure stories. I even wrote a Harlequin Next and a couple of the NASCAR romances. I love creating characters and writing their stories so this was just so exciting and so wonderful. The beast was happy and well fed.

But I noticed something as these different types of stories were published, the readers and reviewers seemed to prefer my suspense stories, the darker and the grittier the better. Admittedly, those were the stories that came most naturally for me. But, was I a failure since my success or the accolades in each genre was not equal? No, of course not. When readers purchased a Debra Webb book, did they prefer a certain kind of story? I decided the answer to that question was yes—at least to a degree. I had heard all the talk about branding and that seemed to confirm my suspicions. With some trepidation, I moved forward with the decision. Debra Webb would strictly be a suspense author.

That’s what I am pleased to write for St. Martin’s Press and for my Colby Agency series at Harlequin Intrigue. Suspense with a dose of romance. Occasionally the stories are called mysteries or thrillers, but the line between those three (suspense/mystery/thriller) is, I think, quite blurred. I am very happy with my decision. Suspense is my first love.

Still, occasionally the beast roars and I long to write a paranormal/supernatural thriller or a chick lit type suspense. Usually this occurs when I watch True Blood or a beloved old episode of Sex in the City. Many, many authors write in more than one genre and are very successful at both. As a reader, do you prefer a certain kind of story from an author? Does that author’s name evoke a certain expectation? (Beyond a darned good story, of course.) Is it ever really possible for an author to be as good at one genre as another?

1  1

Growing up, I begged my mom to let me be Samantha from Bewitched. I was the youngest of four kids, and a “surprise” at that. My parents were wonderful and loving, but frankly, they were tired of the whole kid thing, and totally past stuff like finding just the right Halloween costume. But one year, I nagged my mom until she bought me a boxed Bewitched costume. Do you all remember those pressed plastic masks with the piece of elastic across the back? And then the plastic jumpsuit thing that was supposed to look like your favorite superhero?

Or in my case, my favorite super heroine?

That was NOT the costume I wanted (although I never told my mom that). I wanted that long black dress Samantha wore when she was up in the clouds with her mother and other assorted witches.

But hey, I got a lot of candy and in those days, candy made up for everything!

Many years later, I met a really cool guy, except that he only wore ONE Halloween costume—doctor scrubs. And this was BEFORE doctor scrubs became hip. I believe we still have those scrubs, because you never know when a costume emergency might arise.

So the new boyfriend and I get invited to a Halloween party. And I think—awesome! I am not going in some stupid store bought costume, or a throw-together thing. For the first time in my life, I went to a real costume shop. I actually got a pretty cool costume, although to this day I’m not sure what I was supposed to be. Sort of a cross between Jeanie and the Chiquita Banana girl, I suppose. It was fine…

But that’s not my favorite.

The next year was another party. This one was one week before our wedding. We had a lot to do, and I decided, hey, I’ll just go as a witch.

For some reason, being a witch seems to come easy to me, LOL!

I bought a wig of long black hair, bought some black material and whipped up a dress with flowing sleeves and high slits in the long skirt. Although I’m not sure those slits weren’t planned—I can’t actually sew well and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t using a pattern. I just…winged it. (Hmm, that’s kind of how I write my books too!)

That costume was a HIT. Everyone thought I was Elvira AND/OR a witch. I believe there was some serious debate about that question…all in fun. We partied the night away, drinking, dancing, laughing…it was a blast. The next week, my husband and I got married, and then for many years, my husband kept a blown up picture of me from that night in the garage over his work bench. All the neighbors wondered if he was crazy hanging a picture of another woman there.

They were always surprised to find out it was me. Then once they knew it was me, they were surprised they hadn’t seen it.

What’s interesting is that the costume wasn’t perfect, it had many flaws. I was certainly not a hot babe, I never was. I’m average looking. But that night, I was someone else, and everyone around me bought into my “character.” It really wasn’t the costume, but the FANTASY that made the night so much fun.

And that is what is so compelling about writing stories—I get to keep living the fantasy. Of course, now I’m writing about witches, almost coming full circle from those days of watching BEWITCHED and wanting so much to believe. As a writer, I know it’s called suspending disbelief, but then, when I was six years old, I simply chose to believe in magic.

So now it’s your turn to share—what was (or is) your favorite Halloween costume? And tell me, do you think candy still makes up for life’s disappointments?

1  1

My dad informed me tonight that he is buying a golf cart. I think I might borrow it to drive to work, although the cost of gas is much lower than it was a month or so ago, when one needed to mortgage the house and sell the children just to fill the tank.

My dad is retired, so he’s not buying the golf cart as a means of transportation. He doesn’t play golf, either, especially now his Parkinson’s is taking a toll on his health. He says he thinks it would be fun to have a golf cart, and give the grandkids rides. My 16-year-old and 14-year-old would like to DRIVE the golf cart, but rides? Nah. But my sister has little ones (five and two), and I’m pretty sure that is why he is buying it. He lives to entertain them. But in these crazy economic times, it might not be that bad of an idea. We could take to the golf cart to the grocery store. It would sure cost a lot less. Maybe we could have a golf cart car pool for dance? Hmmm. Nah, that wouldn’t work.

I know that my daughter’s dance studio is tightening their belts, too, so to speak, and paring down from the proposed six competitions to four competitions. Everybody is in the crunch, with companies going belly up, people losing jobs and homes, and frankly, right now we are in a HUGE financial mess.

So how does this affect writers? Well, I would suspect it will make an already tight market even tighter. Anyone who has ever tried to sell a book to a large mainstream publisher knows how very, very hard this really is. And with the economic crunch, it isn’t going to get easier, only harder.

It will also affect the already-pubbed, as they fight for even smaller advertising and promotional budgets, smaller advances, and less publisher support.

That’s actually pretty depressing to think about, but here at MurderSheWrites.com, we are being proactive. We are using one of the very best forms of publicity, available to all authors, published or not. It’s called blogging. I am a huge proponent of this form of PR, and advise everyone who wants to be published to set up a blog, and start building your readership. Heck, people have even SOLD books based on hugely popular blogs.

I use, an example, a blog that I always read. Dooce is written by Heather Armstrong, and she is a brilliant and scathingly funny woman who writes about daily life in Utah. I actually was pointed in her blog’s direction by readers who live nowhere NEAR Utah, and yet her appeal is universal. She is one of the so-called “mommy bloggers,” but I think of her more as a “real life blogger.” Not reality-show type blogging, but the real deal, family life, warts, dogs that eat poop, and all.

Heather brings humor and focus to events that strike many of us. She has dealt with her own bout with extreme postpartum depression, and chronicled it for everyone to read. She is shockingly honest and real, and sometimes her posts even make me cringe a little bit, because I know she is just “baring it all,” when I am loathe to do anything remotely similar.

She has chronicled her daughter’s life, and each month she writes a letter to Leta. They are sometimes funny, often poignant and even heartbreaking. Heather has built a readership that is huge and through her blog she ended up with a book deal. One that went a bit sour, there, for a while, and involved lawsuits and publishing ugliness, among other things.

But the blog she writes now supports her, her husband, and their daughter. And frankly? She’s earned it. As I mentioned, she is very, very funny, and a great writer.

So, blogs can work. Do they always work? No. There’s probably an old graveyard for blogs somewhere on the Internet, maybe kind of like my friend Tim’s blog. His first post started out with, “Hey, I am writing this blog because my friend Natalie says I need to do it.” I think he wrote a few other sentences, and maybe wrote some nasty things about his ex-wife, and then the blog died.

I suspect a lot of them do. And still others are faithfully attended to, and updated regularly, and have absolutely no readers. Sad, but true. But there are a few things you can do to ensure you will, at least, have a few readers.

1. Have a platform. This is important in every aspect of writing a book, and blogging is no different. What is your platform. What is your theme? If you are just going to ramble every week, well, you probably won’t build an audience, unless you ramble brilliantly and with great wit.

2. Have your blog professionally designed. Yes, I know there are templates, and they are pretty nice. I understand that, but please consider that the fact YOU have access to it means that so does everybody ELSE on the Internet who decides to blog. You need a nice, clean, attractive design that speaks of your platform and pulls people in.

3. Be aware that once you make yourself public, you WILL attract some crazies. (See my blog post from two weeks ago, re: security on the Internet. Please.)

4. Keep the blog regularly updated, written clearly, and add as much content as possible. Pictures are wonderful. Videos intriguing. Keep it fresh.

5. You don’t have to stick to one theme, but all your themes should have something in common. And you need to find something that will keep your readers coming back.

6. Use lots of links. The more links, the better. If you refer to other blogs and sites, they will come to see what the links are leading to, etc., etc. It’s very, very useful.

7. Create a blog roll, and suggest you trade links with others.

So, those are some of my feelings and suggestions about promotion and blogging. Anyone have some other ones to add?

1  1

One of the questions I’ve been asked that I tend to both thoroughly enjoy but used to completely dread at the same time is the, “What is your writing schedule like?” question. I enjoy hearing about others’ methods, their daily habits, because I’m always interested in how people do this crazy thing we call writing. I mean seriously, we sit in a room and make up stories and hope that somewhere along the line, people will pay their hard-earned money to hear about things that we totally made up. Is that not nuts?

The dread part of that equation, however, was because for a long time, I kept looking around, waiting for the writing fraud police to come along and say, “Now look here, missy, you’re supposed to be doing that writing this this way, on a schedule, X number of words a day.”

One day, along about the time I was working on the first book in the Bobbie Faye series, I came across the quote that ended up freeing me. I printed it out and taped it to the top of my monitor, where I would see it every day. It’s attributed to W. Somerset Maugham, and the quote is, “There are only three ways to write the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

For me, the moment I tried to tell myself that I had to write a certain number of words a day or a certain number of pages, I might as well decide to also become a fighter pilot or an NBA basketball player or a Sherpa. Forcing myself into a certain number of pages or words a day was about as likely as any of those possibilities.

That doesn’t mean, however, that setting word-count or page count schedules won’t work for others. It just wouldn’t work for me, and that was okay.

For my process, I needed flexibility. I needed to allow for the freedom to have days–maybe longer–where I just daydreamed. Or binge-read. Or watched movies until I could feel them humming beneath my skin. I would be writing along, having a good idea of the story and the structure, of what came next, and then I would find myself suddenly stopped and craving reading. It would be weird, because I’d race through book after book, and I’d revisit old favorites and I wouldn’t know why. Why these books, why now, when I have to get the project done? Sometimes I have to take a break and get out of the office for other activities (and sometimes, there’s no choice, I must leave the office to participate in the world) and all of those times of stopping and starting have the potential to look like a writer isn’t writing and could look negative… when they’re not. They’re just the opposite. They are the recharging moments, the places where we’ll witness the friction of lives rubbing together in all its permutations, the time to step outside how we see the world and research how others see it. Sometimes I break just because I know there are certain facts necessary and it’s time now for research because that information is going to inform the rest of the story, and possibly shape it in a way I hadn’t predicted. So for my process, I have a general story (characters, conflict, goals, desires, structure), but I also depend on the magic of the combination that I’ll find when I give myself those breaks to read something I may not have normally read right them.

It took me a little while to not feel embarrassed over the time taken to have fun with my family or sit and daydream or read, or cram in movies in a weekend. [It is difficult to convince the kids that you really are writing when you're reading a book, because you were just reading another book yesterday and when are you going to be done?]  And finally, I acknowledged my subconscious was looking to try to tell me something. It was looking for a way to communicate, and sometimes it would be the simple look of a character on screen to another, or the phrase in someone’s book and the epiphany would thunder over me, lightening striking, illuminating whatever it was in my own story that I was groping toward. Suddenly, the moment of what it was my subconscious was trying to communicate would be clear, and so very different from whatever it was I’d been reading and watching, it was hard to see the connection. I couldn’t have actively, consciously, moved from point A in my story to point B, if I hadn’t given myself that flexibility. There was some combination of practice, skill, and openness that gave me that moment. If I’d been clamping down on the schedule, I’m not sure I’d have been open to that moment. I’m not sure I’d e able to be a writer with any other system.

Deadlines, however, don’t go away just because a writer doesn’t like to schedule a certain number of pages a day, and they still have to be met. In order to accomplish that, I look more at setting goals for myself, rather than schedules. (My husband laughs every time I run shrieking from the word “outline” and yet put up a “structure” of my story on my whiteboard. He stands there looking at it and says, “This sure does look an awful lot like an outline, to which I say, “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.” I am mature that way.)

It probably sounds like splitting hairs, then, but that’s precisely the point. As a writer, I get to characterize what works for me and define it however I want, and no one gets to say, “That’s not how it’s done.” I set goals: write the conflict between X and Y today. I don’t know how many pages that might be–could be two, could end up being ten. With practice, I have a pretty decent idea going into a scene just how complex it is, and, knowing that, about how long that scene ought to take, but I don’t try to pre-determine that length. If that particular conflict is simple, I’ll set another goal for the next conflict, the next scene and at some point, I’ll feel jazzed, and thoroughly sated.

I do try to keep in mind how long I have to write the whole thing. I’m aware that if I read a lot somewhere in the middle, I’m chewing up days I need for writing and I don’t want to miss those deadlines, so I’ll set bigger goals for subsequent days. The key is, I need to give myself permission for flexibility, or I freeze up.

Life is just never all that simple, anyway–schedules are almost always interrupted, and I think writers can inadvertently throw themselves into a tailspin (i.e., writer’s block) by being too self-critical about their own creative process. If you’re the kind of person who thrives on having 500 (or 5000) words a day, and that gets your creative juices flowing? That’s wonderful. If you’re the kind of person who’s more sporadic, and you give yourself permission to be, and you get your goals done? That’s wonderful, too.

Pursuing writing is giving yourself permission to dream, and dreams die if we put them in a choke hold.

So how about you? There’s no wrong answer, and this applies to any sort of dream you’re pursuing… do you prefer concrete schedules or are you more creative with flexibility? Do those schedules feel reassuring? Does flexibility feel like an abyss from which you’d never escape or where you’d never make progress? I’m curious, what works for you?

1  1

Thanks to a good friend and most excellent storyteller, Gayle Lynds, I took off with a group for a writers tour of the CIA at Langley, Virginia. I don’t know what I expected. A small, gloomy building where everyone wore a trench coat? And underground bunker. A huge building behind a regular old door, Something out of Men in Black? Not exactly. But with our group of ten writers, many of us down for Bouchercon in Baltimore, we headed out with a great driver in a small van. We’d sent ahead our license numbers and SSNs. There was an outer building where we did stop for name tags, and we were then shuttled over to the new and old buildings.

On the one hand, it felt like visiting a small mall. People were everywhere. Going here, going there. But one of my fellows asked our guide, “How many people work here?” It seemed innocuous enough, but the answer was, “I can’t tell you that.” Hm. Of course, there are covert agents and overt agents. How many, of course, we don’t know.

Our first real stop is a small museum that traces the history of espionage. I’m assuming–and since I see other groups being led around–that the CIA has planned this for visitors. But the little museum–surrounded by offices and folks just at work going to and fro–is intriguing. There are guns–hidden in everything from umbrellas to wallets–miniature cameras, binoculars, and more are displayed. Very neat stuff–the stuff of spy stories! Then, onward to lunch. At the food court. Yes, the CIA has a food court. And a Starbucks! Go figure.

We headed in for speech by the CIA historian. That speech ended with a look at the movies–and what the historian liked, and what he didn’t like. He was really indignant about those flicks that make the CIA look like an evil organization that allows its members to hide their dirty secrets. Hey, I get it. Pick on my kids, and I’m ready to take you down. So what is true, and what isn’t? They certainly can’t tell us that. They do answer one question for me. “Say,” I ask, “that you’re an agent operating in another country. You’re not caught as an agent, but you do get in major trouble for a car accident or the like. What then?”

“Whatever, happens, happens,” I’m told. And it’s serious, of course, so I know, when you sign up, if you’re caught, you’re on your own. A goner. Obviously, I guess. That’s why it’s secret.

Now, we did frequently get the answer, “I can’t tell you that.”

However, never once did we get, “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

We did learn that the CIA folks often date other CIA folks.Much easier than trying to hedge an explanation of your day job when you’re at Harry’s Bar. It often makes for better marriages. “Hey, hon, I’m off to the middle east to spy,” is probably much more believable when you do work for the government, the same as your partner. Obviously, our tour hostess and hosts were “overt” agents. Her degree was in publicity and marketing, and she was charming, and people do know where she works. I’m thinking that if any of our covert agents were walking around, they weren’t wearing name tags that identified their positions.

I left fascinated, newly impressed, and newly confused. But I’m still in awe. One amazing fact stands out in my mind.

Even at the CIA, there’s a Starbucks.

I’m grateful for the tour.

1  1