Murder She Writes

Last night I was considering what I should talk about today.  Plotting, creating large casts of characters, or narrowing the focus of a story.  These were the things on my mind.  But then I wandered off onto another subject–my current situation.  I recently turned in the final story on my contract for which I received revision notes yesterday.  I was so excited when I received the notes–I know that’s weird but it’s true.  My editor had only a few suggestions and they were absolutely right on target.  I’m diving into the revisions today.  After that it’s a waiting game.  Time to negotiate a new contract.  So, you see, I should be very anxious and worried right now.  Yet, last night, all I could think about was how thankful I am.

My new wonderful agent has the project I hope my editor will love and want me to write on this next contract.  But she might hate it.  Also I’m fully aware of the not-so-good condition of the economy.  This is really not a good time to be in negotiations.  The renovations on my 110 year old house are far from finished.  My yard is a virtual mud hole since we had two huge dump truck loads of dirt delievered to fill and level the yard. We only have one working shower and the downstairs floor is still plywood.  Oh, and let’s not forget that in two weeks it will be April 15th.  Ugh.  Why am I thankful?  There must be something wrong with me.

The last 18 months were very unkind to my family in many ways.  It started with an accident that almost stole the life of my baby girl.  Then there was the sale of the house that I had considered my dream home.  The move to Maine in the dead of winter.  And the search and discovery of our new home–a very old, very dilapidated house in a not so good neighborhood that turned into a nightmare rehab.  Oh, and I can’t leave out the bit of housekeeping I had to do professionally–finding a new agent.  Looking back, I’m certain I should have been on medication during this time.  But the fact of the matter is that all during that horrific period, I got to do this thing that makes me so very happy.  I got to write my stories.

As my daughter healed and we survived the coldest weather this southern girl has ever experienced and we found the new house and began its rescue, I got to write!  I am so very thankful every day that I am able to do this.  That there are actually people out there who want to read my stories!  It’s amazing and I am a very lucky girl.  No matter the frustrations (like bad reviews and the scary economy), I love what I do.  I’ve written stories (and still have them!) since I was nine years old.  I’ve had a lot of jobs, but none that reflected the true me.  I can’t separate the writing from who I am–because this IS who I am.  Soon the house will be finished.  The coal dust, old worn out windows, damaged floors, lack of bathrooms, and peeling paint will be just a memory.  The neighborhood is evolving and will go on the national registry of historic places later this year.  For now, it’s still very colorful and eclectic and I kind of like being a part of it.  I think maybe I fit in quite well.  My baby girl is in nursing school.  And a lovely young couple are enjoying the home I once believed to be my dream home.

I realized last night that this is my dream life.  The insanity of saving this old house and this neighborhood.  Watching my youngest bloom into a woman.  And writing the books.  I am so very, very thankful for every minute of this life.

I’d love to hear what you’re thankful for.  All too often we go through the days just getting the job done without stopping to smell the roses so to speak.  So take a deep breath and savor the sweetness of life!

Note to Roberta Harwell—you won an autographed copy of BLOOD MAGIC! Please email your mailing address to me at Jenapodaca@aol.com

I’m not a big shopper. I don’t understand the phrase, “Want to go shopping?” I mean…what? Shopping? Why would I WANT to go shopping?

Shopping is an exercise in humiliation. Don’t believe me? Then either you are a five-foot-eight beanpole and under the age of 25, or you have never actually gone into a dressing room.

Florescent lights and three way mirrors…don’t tell me there isn’t a hell! I’ve seen it! I’ve been there! Mirrors and ugly lighting must be hell.

I’d rather get a review from Mrs. Giggles. Just saying…

So the other day I was shopping…not for me, for the husband. I accidentally walked by the women’s clothes and I thought, hmm, I need some jeans. I mean jeans are depressing enough, but I can handle jeans. I’m here, so I’ll look, but somehow, I ran right smack into cute little summer dresses. Okay. I. Am. Not. Afraid. I will try them on.

Surprise! The dress fit! Then I turned around.

OMG! While I’ve been keeping my butt in the chair and writing like a fiend, my body must have gotten bored and invited a friend or two to move in!!! And let me tell you, these are some seriously unattractive friends!

Darn it, these two dresses are exactly the kind of dresses I like to wear! They are my style!

I bought two of them.

Why? I don’t know! Am I trying to stay young? Am I stupid? My husband says the dresses look “fine” and that just gave me nightmares.

He used to say I looked hot. Or sexy. Or stuff I can’t even write here.

Those two dresses are hanging in my closet, with the tags, mocking me. Tormenting me. Whispering evil things like, “Go back to the gym!”

“But the gym burned down!” I explain. It’s true! And it’s an excellent excuse!

“Join another gym.”

“But I have books to write!” I whined.

“Then take us back to the store, loser.”

See? I’m telling you shopping is an exercise in humiliation…and the humiliation followed me home!

Sigh…I think I’m going to go back to the gym. Maybe.

What about you all? Do you love to shop? Hate to shop? Wonder if I am really as insane as my blogs make me sound?

(YIKES, sorry I’m late…)

A few days ago, there was a big hullaballoo in my neighborhood, which is normally a pretty quiet place. We’re spread out against the backdrop of a wilderness park area where there is plenty of wildlife–from beavers to raccoons to opossums to deer. 

The deer, it turns out, had decided to jump a fence into someone’s backyard and munch on the flowers there. The family watched them from their living room, enjoying the sight of so many deer milling around… until one of the deer decided to stick its neck through the fence to munch on flowers in the neighbor’s yard. And got stuck.

The fire department had to come cut the fence apart in order to set the deer free.

Lots of fire departments apparently got into the act. (It was a very slow Sunday.) The deer was set free, the fence slated for repair. I have no idea how they’ll keep the deer from getting back into the yard and starting the process all over again, now that the deer have found good munchies. Deer are not terribly bright when it comes to putting themselves in danger for munchies, or else the entire salt-lick industry would’ve gone belly up a while ago.

A couple of years ago, when I first sold Bobbie Faye, I wrote late at night, every night, and on that first night of the sale, I was a bit terrified because there wasn’t a book done, yet. I had to finish it, and my adrenaline may have been on overdrive a wee bit, because I kept hearing a noise up in the attic and it sounded like some critter was up there erecting a stadium for playing their own version of football… and instead of my first thought being, “Critter… alive… wake husband…,” I thought, “I am going to go up there and see what the hell that thing is.” Actually, if I were telling the truth, it was more like, “That &^*#* animal is &$*# keeping me from focusing and I’m going to go up there and give it a piece of my mind.” Clearly, I have very few mind-parts working well enough to share, but I have never let that stop me in the past, and so I marched up that ladder in my pjs and no shoes, and when I got up there, I was determined to have words. So at three in the freaking morning, I am straddling ductwork and crawling over electrical conduit, tip-toeing rafter-to-rafter, when I get about half-way across the attic and my brain kicks in gear and says, “Hey, stupid, if you corner a live animal up here, odds are he’s not going to exactly have a quiet discourse on the perils of driving a writer batty… he’s probably going to have TEETH and GRRRRR and RUN AT YOU and you’re BALANCED ON THE RAFTERS ON YOUR TOES, YOU IDIOT and you could FALL THROUGH and BREAK YOUR NECK and could you just SEE the headlines for the next day? ‘NEW AUTHOR COMMITS SUICIDE BY JUMPING THROUGH ATTIC… PRESSURE TOO GREAT.’ ”

There were some seriously pissed off noises coming from the dark corner of that attic and I just skedaddled my ass back down that ladder and woke my husband up with hysterical, “MRRRWWAARRRs and GRRRRS and ATTIC,” and he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Okay,” and fell promptly back to sleep. 

I would’ve killed him, except I needed him to get the animal out of the attic, first.

It is very hard to fall asleep while staring up at the ceiling overhead, aware that there are still noises coming from up there, like a condo being completely furnished by tap-dancing bears, and no one will WAKE UP AND BELIEVE YOU. Of course, by the next morning, the tap-dancing whahoozie was all quiet and shit and my husband thought I might’ve been just a wee bit over stressed from the new sale and was, perhaps, hallucinating. Or that it had been the wind. (The wind is a favorite excuse around here. “How did that stain get on the carpet?” “The wind.”) I had to threaten to get a professional in here to get the critter out before my husband agreed to put a humane cage up there to catch the critter. (If there is one thing a man in the deep south will not admit to, it is an inability to catch critters in his own house. I don’t know why.) 

My husband borrowed a cage; he agreed to get the bigger cage, even though he was convinced I’d simply heard a squirrel scampering across the top of the roof, if there’d been an animal at all. I pointed out that it wasn’t a squirrel, because squirrels aren’t nocturnal and this was at three a.m. Sure enough, that night, we heard a loud banging sound as something got trapped in the cage and my husband told me to “go look at the squirrel you caught.” I poked my head up in the attic, saw what we had in the cage and hurried back down the ladder.

A raccoon. A very very pissed off, how-dare-I-stop-him raccoon, whose fury nearly melted the bars of the cage. 

My husband brought “The Wind” down and agreed that yes, it was not just a tiny little runt of a critter, but a BIG one. It was all fur and teeth and claws and hissing when I tried to give it some water and it didn’t exactly accept my apologies. My husband agreed that he would take it to the wilderness across the river and set it free over there so that it didn’t end up trapped again or getting hurt. 

I was quite proud of myself.

And then, when I went to the master bathroom at the back of the house, I heard noises again. I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t just stepped into my own story about a sort of crazy southern-fried woman, when I realized the noises were coming from the shower. When I opened that door, and it was empty, I realized… no, not in the shower, but above the shower. My husband couldn’t hear them at all, and I think he only went up there to shut me up because I was going to talk about those noises forever, and he knew it. So up he goes… and then he calls for a box… and rummages and rummages and rummages and then down he came with…

Four raccoon babies.

Whose mother we had set free in woods several miles away.

They were about palm-sized, like these:

(Not my photo, but they were almost exactly this size.)

Mine didn’t even have their eyes open yet. [I named them Eeeny, Meany, Miny, and Mo.]

Let me tell you, I learned real fast just exactly how to bottle feed four baby raccoons, and I can still recall the wonder of watching their eyes open the first time, or the first time they got to play on grass in the backyard. It took me a couple of weeks to find them room at a raccoon adoption location–there are people who have large yards who are set up specifically to integrate animal rescues like these back into the wild. Meanwhile, they bonded with me as “mom” and would immediately come running to me if they sensed me or heard me coming toward their box.

It was very very hard to hand them over to the rescue woman a couple of weeks later, but I knew I couldn’t keep them here–vets won’t vaccinate raccoons and you can’t have them spayed or neutered and four raccoons all having babies… would not have worked in my backyard. (Though I had to think about that for a while to accept it.)

What amazed me about the raccoons was how fast they adapted to me as “mom.” They never knew anything else, really, and that worked for them. They still got fed, they played, they bonded with each other, but they seemed perfectly happy to have a human giving them a bottle rather than nursing from some furry creature.

Which brings me to publishing. (I’ll wait while you recover from the whiplash….)

One of the things discussed at the PASIC conference this past weekend was how the Kindle and Sony e-reader are becoming more prominent and are changing some of the buying habits of the general public. There was an estimate that in a couple of years, there will be a million e-readers of some sort out there in the public’s hands, and that doesn’t include applications for phones like the iPhone. Amazon’s market share is increasing, and while it grew slowly in the past, it’s growing exponentially now, so there’s an anticipation of it capturing a larger market share. (There was an assertion that Amazon will be selling instead of other booksellers, not in addition to, which means the same number of books, but a shift in power of who’s selling.)

There was another assertion made that I disagreed with, and that was that people who are purchasing online are not “browsing.” They are going straight to whatever it was they wanted to purchase, buying that item, and then logging off. So “online” purchasing eliminated the impulse buying that going into a bookstore would net. I disagreed with this because I do browse the online stores. I actually find them easier to browse than a lot of bookstores because I can put in keywords and subject matter and things which I wouldn’t have necessarily seen in the store will pop up there for my perusal. I’ve purchased dozens of books this way.

My question, then, was this: Given the growing popularity of the e-reader, isn’t it logical to suppose that in the very near future, all college and high-school kids will be downloading their texts and workbooks and study guides and assigned novels… to their e-readers, which will be much much easier to carry around than the backpacks which weigh a ton now? And, given that as inevitable, wouldn’t it be logical to assume that those kids coming up in middle school and grade school will get to a point where holding a book is a foreign thing–they’ll have grown accustomed to having their books (many of them) in the palm of their hands. They’ll be smart and savvy about how to find things online, between their e-readers and their iPhones and their laptops–and they’ll probably make the majority of their reading purchases from downloadable files. And, given that, what is the publishing industry going to do to target that whole new crop of readers with their books? Targeted marketing? Implanted suggestions, like blog ads we have today?

There wasn’t a satisfactory answer, and I got the distinct impression that the publishing industry is thinking that if this happens, it’s years down the line. I don’t think they’re thinking about the current exponential growth of technology. (“Twittering” was a brand new thing to several of the editors there…) 

More important, what are the publishers going to do to cultivate these new readers and keep them interested in reading? The popularity of books like TWILIGHT and EVERMORE and, of course, HARRY POTTER, demonstrates that this group will read in large numbers, but it’s short-sighted not to grant that they will also be mostly reading online in a few years. They’re spending their entire lives online right now, reading tons of material–from blogs to surfing the internet. Sure, it’s smaller bites than a novel, but what generation do you remember in the past which has done as much reading as the one we have coming up now?

Just like the baby raccoons adapted to me as their mom–and didn’t even seem to mind–so, too, will the next couple of generations adapt to e-reading as their primary source for material, and if the publishing industry as it stands does not adapt now and start thinking about marketing to that audience and cultivating more of that audience, someone else will. Whether that means Amazon creates a publishing arm or someone else does as the need will become more and more obvious, the future will change how we get our material out to the new audiences. 

We’d better adapt… 

So how about you? Have you used an e-reader, ever? Purchased online? Is this something you’re doing more of now? And what about the kids around you? Do they like reading on their computers?

And CONGRATULATIONS to our own RITA NOMINEES!! Allison and Rocki are nominated in the ROMANTIC SUSPENSE category…. YAY!!!!!!

1  1

Sorry for the additional post, everyone, but thought this was important enough to send….

It turns out published authors can apply to get payments from Google,
which is settling a class-action lawsuit involving copyright infringement
from its program to digitize all U.S. books.

You can apply for payment for any book published on or before
Jan. 5, 2009. You have to log onto a Web site (www.googlebookssettlement.com http://www.googlebookssettlement.com/ and register your books. We’re not talking about a huge amount of money, maybe $60 to $100 per book written (not per numbers sold). But money is money.

If someone wants to opt out of the settlement, so they can sue Google themselves, all they need to do is to notify the Settlement Administrator by May 5. Otherwise, all you have to do is register your book, as above.

It isn’t unusual for me to get at least 100 emails a day, but last Friday beat that average by a mile. In a little over 10 hours I received 365 emails, 223 of them from well-meaning friends and relatives, warning me to stay away from all Walmarts for at least 24 hours. Rumor had it that a gang initiation shooting was planned. Some claimed the initiation demanded that the inductee shoot a woman and child. Others said the requirement was to shoot two women, and they swore they’d heard about the gang plan from “Uncle Roy”, who served on a local police force.

Instinct tried telling me it was a hoax, but that little voice became increasingly hard to listen to as the volume of emails grew. By that evening, I was so tired of hearing about it that I wanted to purposely go to a Walmart, meet up with this so-called gang, and tell them to go get a life. Geez!

The following morning, as suspected, the local and national news reported that the gang shooting warning was indeed a hoax. From all reports, in a matter of one day, text messages and emails about the initiation had made its way across dang near every state in the Union. Evidently a lot of people got caught up in the rumor, even 911 operators. A handful of them were fired for forwarding the message to friends and family because they feared the rumor to be true. A couple even elaborated on the ‘facts’, claiming they’d heard about the threat from their supervisor.

Oddly enough, news reporters revealed that this gang shooting at a Walmart threat had been an annual occurrence since 1996. It was an urban legend that simply refused to go away.
That bit of information got me to wondering….

Was one person responsible for cranking up the rumor each year? If so, who? A disgruntled employee? An independent business owner who lost his or her shop when the big W moved into town? With all the tracking, tracing, bugging technology available today, it’s hard to believe that the culprit’s identity is still unknown. And even more mind-boggling to me is why, after thirteen years, are people still falling for the same story? Granted, it was the first time I’d ever heard of it…or was it? We’re bombarded with so much negative hype everyday that it’s hard to keep track of what happened when or who’s threatening whom, where.

Overall, you have to admit that it’s kind of cool that folks are watching out for each other in some small way. Maybe the forwarded emails were much ado about nothing. But wouldn’t it be nice if forewarning spread that quickly about REAL issues—a jump in gas prices—bank failures—job layoffs? Maybe one day . . . hopefully.

So ‘fess up—did you get warnings to stay away from Walmart, and if so, did you believe them?

This past week about seventy or so authors descended on New York City for the PASIC conference (Published Authors Special Interest Chapter of RWA), a can’t-miss event that takes place every other year. In addition to affording us the opportunity to meet with our publishers (I taped a video interview for the new Simon & Schuster web site; will post a link here when it goes up!) and connect with our agents, this gathering also brings together industry luminaries who offer insights, advice, and opinions about the State of the Romance Publishing Industry. During these few days, there is a lot of discussion, laughter, commiseration, eating, drinking, whining and wining going on. And some sightseeing! Toni and I stopped to pretend we are Rockettes on our way out of the theater, when in reality we are simply headed back to the hotel after a memorable dinner with Allison and our agent.

It wasn’t all wine and limoncellos, however. Of course, the topic du jour of the industry discussion panels was the impact of the economy on books in general, and romance in particular. Authors may feel differently, but the wide consensus among those who publish, edit, promote, and represent romance novels and novelists is that our books are “recession friendly” if not “recession proof.” Yes, book sales – like car, home, widget, and soap sales – are down as wallets get clamped close. Yes, fewer outlets are selling far less books, giving a boost to brand name authors and squeezing the midlist more than ever. But, expert after pundit after editor after publisher reiterated that romance as a genre offers a greatly needed and highly affordable escape from reality. Moreover, romance readers, they reminded us, are voracious and loyal. Publisher/author/general really sharp and funny guy Lou Aronica of The Story Plant drew the comparison to the shopper who goes to the grocery story to fulfill her “must have to survive list” which might include a staple like chicken. To a dedicated romance reader, our books are on that list; we are her chicken.

To that I say, bawk, bawk, baaawwwk and hallelujah.

The audience is not just loyal and hungry, they are, according to Lou and many others, “targetable” via the internet. Time after time we were counseled to increase our presence on blogs (industry and our own), twitter (a resounding buzzword this past weekend), Facebook, Myspace and other cyber strongholds where we can brand ourselves with the reading public and reach romance readers directly. But this begs a question that I asked almost everyone. Given the finite number of hours in a day/week/year, is it more advantageous for a writer to use those hours creating a presence in cyberspace or writing another book?

The answers were not all the same. Some said book (all but one of the editors). Some said blog (the publicists, the publishers, many agents). Some, naturally, said both (but only one editor said this). All said whatever they said rather emphatically. Even among authors there is dissension on the matter. Loosely and unscientifically, my poll seemed to show that the paranormal/urban fantasy/YA authors felt the internet had a direct impact on sales, whereas those who wrote more traditional romance, i.e. romantic suspense, straight contemporary, and category romance disagreed. Perhaps its a matter of the age and mindset of the audience? So what’s a busy author to do?

This question plagues me. I have just started twittering, have a lackluster presence on Myspace, and haven’t ever been to Facebook. (I know, I know. Get. With. The. Program.) I do my level best to visit this and a few other blogs daily, and twice a month devote more than a few hours to writing something to post here that will inspire, educate, amuse, and entertain MSW readers. Of course I maintain a web site and update it monthly. Okay, almost monthly. But a “presence” the likes of which they refer to…not so much.

Neglecting to build a name brand on the internet through every possible portal to the romance reader, according to many who spoke to us in New York, is a huge strategic marketing error. And they were convincing, I tell you. My notebook contained a single action item, circled, underlined, and decorated with a few emphatic exclamation points: Create a Facebook page, stat!!! (And, luckily, I have this teenage son, and he likes money.)

But the fact remains that I want to write three books every year – three books I am proud to have published and confident will please readers. It takes about four months of full time writing for me to produce that book. Three times four…well even this blonde can do that math. Okay, I realize there are nights, weekends, holidays, and wee hours that can be given to blogging and tweeting and booking my face all over the web. But I have a family and a life, both of which fill my creative well and fuel my personal happiness. Writing much faster isn’t an option…as the other truth that came out of our meetings is irrefutable: every single book gets harder as we set the bar for ourselves higher. I refuse to compromise on quality. What good is it to reach a few thousand more readers if the book they pick up is forgettable?

So I ask you, writers…if you had to choose (and, honestly, you do have to choose!) would you write one more book or heavily increase your internet presence? And I ask you readers…would you rather read more fiction from your favorite author or get a daily dose of what they are thinking and doing when they are not writing?

I await your answers! In the meantime, I’ll twitter a little, stop by some blogs, tackle that Facebook challenge…but mostly I’ll be writing my next book. Guess that tells you where I stand on this debate!

…you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” – Stephen King, On Writing

For the last couple of years, I’ve really struggled with reading. I used to read a book a day, but last year, I managed to read less than a dozen. I tried to figure out what the problem was. Was it the books themselves that caused my reading slump? Had the quality diminished? Why did so few books hold my interest? Did I have ADD? Was my internal editor too damn loud? I wondered if it was the stress of my crazy schedule that prevented me from connecting to the stories I read. I felt guilty every time I took a reading break, which is hardly conducive to getting lost in a book.

Simultaneously, my writing became a struggle, too. While I’ve managed to remain somewhat productive, the ease with which I used to write deserted me. Making my daily page count grew tougher and tougher, until I finally had to lower my expectations so that I didn’t disappoint myself all the time. I began to wonder if I’d reached a total burnout point and even contemplated stepping back from my career altogether; an odd and distressing mental state to be in considering the multiple new series I’m launching this year.

So I started this year with a reading goal — 52 books, one for every week of the year. I figured that was doable. I’m a really fast reader, thanks to a power reading course I took (and enjoyed). I’m happy to report that I’m ahead of my goal so far. And somewhere along the way, I got my reading mojo back. I can easily get lost in a book again. I’ve had all-nighters, and I’ve shed tears. I’ve laughed, and felt my heart race.

Ah, the joy of reading! How I’ve missed it. How my writing has missed it!

So what screwed it all up to begin with?

I’m still testing out the theory, but I think reading for me is habitual. I have to get in the groove and actively work to stay there. I have to make time, every day to read. Because if I don’t, it becomes my habit to not read. It’s happened to me before. From the age of 17-27, I didn’t read for pleasure at all. Seriously. I gave all my books away. I had none. Not one. It wasn’t until I was a SAHM that I started reading again. And remembering my dream of wanting to be a published author. And sitting at my keyboard to write several books over that first year.

My productivity has a direct correlation to how much I read. All those times I felt like I couldn’t afford to take time to read a book, I really couldn’t afford not to. I know that now. And hopefully knowing is half the battle. Hopefully, I’ll stay conscious of my need to read and make it happen, come hell or high water.

For you writers out there who’ve lessened their time for reading, have you found that it affects your writing? And for the ARC of EVE OF DARKNESS that I offered up on my last blog… Greta, you won it.

I apologize for getting this up late this weekend–I’ve been sick.

And now, the winner of an autographed copy of BLOOD MAGIC (drawn from Mondays comments) is:

ROBERTA HARWELL

Congratulations Roberta! Email me at Jenapodaca@aol.com with your mailing address.