Somehow, I got corralled into cooking hamburger (taco meat) for 50 people, and I’m still not entirely sure how it happened. One minute they were passing around a signup sheet, and I happened to get it last, and the next minute, I’d been cornered. There was nothing LEFT but meat, so I said, “Okay, sure, I’ll bring some meat.” Somehow, that turned into me cooking ALL the meat and people giving me money.

As you can tell, I haven’t really mastered the art of being a government worker. If I’d done it properly, I would have handed two dollars to someone and they would have MAGICALLY appeared the day of the Taco Potluck with a great big vat of cooked taco meat. But no, I still have a lot to learn, and thus, I ended up doing the cooking.

Now, I’m not really a fan of hamburger, and the whole cooking process makes me a little nauseated, so this has been a chore. Besides the fact that I had to cook a GAZILLION pounds, and it has taken me about two hours. You can’t cook taco meat halfway, you know. There’s that whole e-coli thing. And then there’s the seasoning. I KNOW how to season two pounds of meat. How does one season a GAZILLION pounds? And how does one know when it is properly seasoned?

God forbid I might have to taste it, because after two hours of cooking it, all I want to do is throw it out the freaking window! Or feed it to the dog. He would, of course, eat it all, and then roll over and DIE, because he is not the smartest dog in the world (he thinks the doorbell is for him EVERY time it rings. Even though it never, never is.). A gazillion pounds is a lot of meat for a little shih tzu.

I have entertained calling in sick tomorrow, because that is a very “government-like” thing to do, and it would be pretty freaking ass funny, except I would never be able to show my face at work again. These people take their potlucks and treat days seriously.

I would be stoned. I mean literally stoned, like the old days “stoned to death” with rocks. Not stoned like the lady who sits across from me worshiping Jim Morrison, and putting voodoo spells on everyone who pisses her off (all of us, on different days). That, my friends, is a whole DIFFERENT kind of stoned.

While I was cooking this hamburger, and plotting my immediate conversion to vegetarianism–because let me tell you, hamburger meat is disgusting–I started thinking about how easy it would be to poison people. I mean, think about it. How many picnics, potlucks, parties, banquets, soirees, etc., are held EVERY single day? BY very trusting people! I mean, when was the last time you got ready for the Superbowl, thinking, “You know, I better take my own food, because I believe it’s entirely possible Helen is going to try to kill me off so she can marry my husband, and become the mistress of my household.”

Let’s face it, we don’t think about it.

I think we got a wakeup call not too long ago when the infamous Dominos video was posted on Youtube.

I promise, I have not done anything disgusting to this taco meat.

But let’s face it. It would be pretty easy to do, if I wanted to do so.

Sometimes we get too meticulous in our plotting and thinking, when it would really be very, very easy to just poison the taco meat for the work potluck.

Hmm. I think I just scared myself…. I wonder if Voodoo Lady is bringing anything…..

I no longer know my own name. I can’t remember things I could have told you a year ago. I have no idea where my keys are. Okay, that last one is constant, but the others….

This book I am writing has turned me into a complete blathering idiot. I refuse to accept anything else as the reason. It can’t be that I am getting older and can no longer multitask. I used to be able to do SO many things at once, it was astounding. Now it’s astounding if I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I seriously have to write everything down, something I never used to have to do. The problem with this is I can’t remember where I wrote it.

This memory issue is happening with everything in my life, and not just with writing. But my writing has also been affected.

I used to be able to hold a plot in my head for weeks, craft it, fine tune words and sentences when no computer was near, and then REMEMBER them when I was finally back at the computer. Now, I have brilliant thoughts and ideas that I either HAVE to write down, or they are gone. Poof!

I do remember that I have HAD a brilliant idea. I just can’t remember what it was!

The doctor claims I do not have a brain tumor or early onset Alzheimer’s. He chuckles softly, in a way that makes me want to HURT him, and assures me it is just part of the aging process.

Aging process? I am 46, not 146! Although you wouldn’t know it from my memory.

I am not adapting well to this new aspect of my personality. I need to find some tricks and ways to keep myself in line, and I’m thinking a day planner would work great, except I’m fairly certain I would LOSE it, so it wouldn’t be all that helpful.

I honestly have never had issues with my memory, or multitasking, like I am having now.

I realize I may never be able to multitask again, but I would like to remember to BLOG when it’s my turn to blog at Murdershewrites.com!

I know one part of my problem is my life. I am very busy, but who isn’t? Still, as a single mom, with two teenage daughters, working a full time job as well as writing, I am finding it hard to make everything fit nicely together. So, I am reaching out to you guys for some tips. Have any of you experienced these issues, and if so, how have you worked around them?

Happy Friday the 13th! I swear, this is the second one I’ve blogged on. Good thing I’m not superstitious.

I’m not going to talk about Friday the 13th, because I already did that about a month ago. Instead, I thought I would talk about some of the quotes that inspire me. Being a word person, I LOVE quotes. Being a rather sardonic, cheeky, humor-loving person, I love quotes with a kick of sass in them.

For example, Dorothy Parker tickles my funny bone. For years, I used this snippet of her poetry as my personal mantra.

One Perfect Rose

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet —
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret:
`My fragile leaves,’ it said, `his heart enclose’.
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Irony. You gotta love it. Parker had a knife-sharp wit and wasn’t afraid to let people see and know her scorn. I would say, however, that she was equally hard on herself. She attempted suicide at least three times and drank and partied excessively.

From 1917 to 1920 Parker worked for Vanity Fair. Frank Crowinshield, the managing editor of the magazine, recalled that she had “the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery.”

If Dorothy Parker attempted to slash you to ribbons with her words, she was almost always successful. Of actress Joan Crawford, who was trying to improve herself after marrying Franchot Tone, she coined the infamous phrase, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”

Parker was also famous for the saying “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Her extremely cutting wit, however, didn’t seem to give her joy. Consider, for example, this poem.

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smell awful;
You might as well live.

Yet despite what might seem to be unhappiness, Parker had a HUGE impact on the writing world. She was there at the beginning of The New Yorker Magazine, and while there employed her usual repartee to make things interesting.

At 28 West 44th Street is the spot where The New Yorker was published from the Depression right up until the George Bush years. It is a fairly plain looking building that for decades leased several floors to the magazine. In this building everyone associated with the magazine had to come by.

When publisher Harold Ross launched the magazine in 1925 from his Hell’s Kitchen house, he relied on his friends from the Algonquin Round Table for support. He edited the magazine up until his death in 1951. By then, Dorothy Parker’s association with the magazine was long over.

The famous story of Parker and Ross is often repeated about her terrible work habits. He spotted her in a speakeasy in the middle of the day, not at the office. “Someone else was using the pencil,” she told him.

She also helped formed the Screenwriters Guild, with Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. She worked as a screenwriter, and also had a hand in writing plays. Today, of course, she is most know for her social commentary in the form of poetry.

For some reason, today her poem about never receiving one perfect limousine just kept running through my head, so I thought I’d share a little bit about Dorothy Parker with you today.

Now, don’t go walking under any ladders. And look out for that black cat!

I’m deeply enmeshed in my latest book for St. Martin’s, and when I write, I usually plumb deep in the depths of my soul for real emotion. The most important of these emotions, at least as far as I am concern, is fear. Because that is what drives a suspense book at the end.

Even if it is not the subject at hand, I reach into those fears and use them to make my words and dialogue real. So what scares me?

1. Spiders. Terrified. Have to call Chatter Child to kill them, because Dancing Daughter is ALSO terrified.

2. Heights. I have really tried to conquer this one, but put me on a narrow mountain road that drops off, and you’ve got white-knuckled, no-speaking, white-faced entertainment. Should you be entertained by someone else’s terror that is.

3. Telephone calls that start with “Mom, something terrible has happened!” I should note that Chatter Child is of the dramatic persuasion, so I have already had one or more of these types of phone calls, none of which ended up being she had driven the car off a mountain road, had an encounter with a man-eating spider, or ran over some unsuspecting little children (can you say “16” and “driver’s license”), but when I am trying to tap into the terror mode, this one STILL gets me.

So these three things scare me the most, as well as some events that have happened in my past.

When I was six-years-old, I was held at gunpoint by a man who threatened to kill me, my sister and our two friends if we didn’t take our clothes off. The sound of his rifle as he shot it in the air, to prove how serious he was, has stayed in my memory all these years, and in fact I used it as the opening for WIVES AND SISTERS, although only the “memory” is part of that scene, and the rest is fictional.

The reason I use this method is not because I am a weenie-butt scaredy cat, but because I think to make something REAL, you have to feel it. And to feel it, you have to know it.

Most people LIKE to be scared, hence the immense popularity of scary movies and, let’s be honest, suspense and horror books. We like tension. With tension comes adrenaline, a drug our body manufactures. I obviously share this addiction to adrenaline, because I LOVE suspense fiction. Put me on the edge of my seat, make me unable to put down your book, and I am in for the ride.

Just don’t call me and say, “Mom, something terrible has happened!” That one is a little too scary for me.

But I know I have succeeded in writing a tense, emotion-filled scene if I feel tense and filled with emotion. And to do that, I have to tap in to what I know.

The most recent book I read that had me on the edge of my seat was BLOOD MEMORY by Greg Iles. It started out a little slow, at least for me, but then it picked up, grabbed you by the throat and NEVER let go through the end. And it’s a BIG book. But the terror was VERY real and very palpable in that book.

Now, it’s first person, present tense, and written by a MAN! But it’s first person, present tense and narrated by a woman. So it’s quite a feat. It’s also about repressed memories, a highly controversial subject, which just manages to add to the fear. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a tense, suspenseful, excellent read.

And I found myself wondering how Iles managed to create so much FEAR and tension. Did he put himself in that state first, or is he just a suspense genius?

I read a Tess Gerritsen book once where there is a “chase” scene of sorts, and the tension is so high, I felt myself actually gripping the pages of the book so tightly that my fingers were white. That’s the kind of tension a suspense books needs.

Which leads me to my questions for you:

1. If you write, how do you make your scenes real? Do you call on your own fears to help you create the tension?

2. As a reader, what really SCARES you in a book?