C.S. Harris's Blog, page 20

When Karma Bites

I don't really believe in karma. I'd like to, but I don't. Yet sometimes...

Today was quite lively in my neighborhood. Remember the crazy lady who lives across the street? Remember the nasty neighbor who did this to my Bradford pear tree?


Well, this afternoon I walked out into my front yard to move my sprinkler, only to discover the crazy lady standing in the driveway next door and fighting with my nasty neighbor. This lady is seriously crazy--and scary. She lit into the guy to the point that he retreated into his car and locked the doors, while the crazy lady yelled obscenities at him and banged her fists on his roof. Now, normally the crazy lady is not one of my favorite people, but I had to restrain myself from shouting, "You go, girl!"

Of course, then someone down the street called the cops, and because I was a witness...

And I'm supposed to be writing a book through all this? Can I just say, I actually live in what is considered a "nice" neighborhood?

Careful, Or You'll End Up in My Novel

Sooner or later, we all have one: the proverbial neighbor from hell. 


The rest of my neighbors are pleasant, even if some are a bit peculiar. One lady seems to be bipolar and has substance abuse and anger control issues, but I have never called the cops on her (someone obviously does, though, because they’re always coming to cart her off). Another of my neighbors used to be Aaron Broussard, the Jefferson Parish president who had fifteen minutes of fame during Katrina. He was always nice, but I say “was” because he’s now in a federal pen. One next-door neighbor is a very affable, extremely buff black FBI agent with an impressive collection of automatic weapons, whose presence is rather comforting during hurricanes. But then there’s the jerk on the other side…

Once, after Katrina, he called the cops on me when I stopped his workmen from moving his fence posts another foot inside my property line (they were already six inches on my property, but he managed to pull that off before I bought the house). Another time he sprayed Round Up on the gardens of the houses that border his back yard. And just this past weekend, when I wasn’t home, he sent men with chainsaws to lop the tops off four of my small trees and seriously butcher my Bradford pear tree (he doesn’t like things that grow because the wind carries leaves and petals into his pool). Yes, I could call the cops on him because we’re not talking branches hanging over the property line but limbs that were on my own property and the tops of the trunks of trees growing in my front yard. But the trees are already ruined, and while I used to be a rather scrappy person, I’ve mellowed enough these days to realize that fighting with people only introduces disharmony and aggravation into my own life.

Besides, I have a way to get back at him that is open to few: I intend to put him in one of my books—maybe even more than one—and it will not be a flattering portrayal.

I have in the past put an ex-husband in one of my books, and killed him. One of my daughter’s old boyfriends has been an endless source of inspiration for a number of characters with borderline traits. An annoying woman from our local RWA chapter is making an appearance in the book I’m writing now. There’s a reason Steve gave me this sweatshirt for Christmas one year:

Of course, I also put people I like in my books, or at least bits of them. Both Hendon in the Sebastian series and the Colonel in the Tobie and Jax books have aspects of Steve in them. My two daughters inspired the little girls in one of my historical romances (and yes, they recognized themselves when they grew old enough to read it). It’s something all authors do, consciously or subconsciously. Sue Grafton once told me that she turned her daydreams of killing her ex-husband into A is for Alibi .

In you-know-who's case, I’ll change enough that he won’t be able to sue me on the off chance he should read my book(s). But I will have endless fun with him. And quietly laughing at him is much more pleasant—and productive—than getting angry, and much safer than trying to get revenge. However, the next time he lets his pool get nasty, I am definitely calling code enforcement.

Copyedits and Cover Flats, Oh My!

Two milestones last week brought the publication of Why Kings Confess a little bit closer: the mailman delivered two cover flats (evidently they are so pleased with the cover they decided to produce them early this time, to make use of them). And then the copyedited version of the manuscript popped up in my email inbox.

For reasons known only to the Powers that Be, they made the cover darker than the version I saw. But while I liked it better lighter, I'm still very happy with it. The print is a nice metallic silver (in the photo, it shows up best in my name, but the title is the same).



The copyedits took most of last week to read through, since I always go over the manuscript very carefully. This is essentially my last chance to change anything (they get really, really cranky if you try to change things at the page proof stage). And since I'm coming at the story with fairly fresh eyes after not having read it for six months, I sometimes see things I didn't notice before.


I must say, I do miss the good old days when copyeditors made their changes on the printed manuscript, and I could sit down with the manuscript pages in hand and read. Now it's all done electronically with Track Changes adding color-coded bubbles in the margins, and I need to either read it on my computer or print it off in an itty-bitty font in order to get those bubbles in there.



Life was also complicated last week by the death of our refrigerator. Barely seven years old, it's been problematic ever since we bought it while rebuilding after Katrina (there's a reason appliances purchased after Katrina are known around here as "Katrina Klunkers"). So we decided not to fix it again. This new one is huge (they no longer make them the size of our old one) and includes a giant, shallow drawer across the bottom of the fridge part for pizzas! Seriously. Every French door style refrigerator we looked at had one. Do people eat that many giant pizzas that they need a special drawer for them? At least this one doesn't have a dispenser for coke and beer cans built in the door, the way so many of them did.

I'm now looking at my other Katrina Klunkers--specifically the dishwasher and washing machine--and thinking I ought to look into replacing them BEFORE they die. The infuriating thing is, these were not cheap appliances. If you want to see me go read in the face, just whisper, "LG..."

Can I Just Say, I Really Hate This Time of Year?

Ah, it's that time again. Time to stockpile water, get the generator serviced, make sure the shutters close, count cat carries and little noses, make sure the car is always full of gas, and lay in fresh batteries and a supply of canned food we'll never eat unless forced by circumstances I try not to think about.

Despite some of the computer projections, Tropical Storm Chantal is not really expected to hit us. But it does serve as a wake up call, if one were needed. Chantal is the third named storm of this season. Normally, the third named storm doesn't form until the middle of August, rather than the 8th of July. Previous years when this happened included 2005 (think Katrina) and 2008 (Gustav). This does not bode well for those of us who live along the coast and have anxiety issues.

Some incidents in our lives we never really recover from, and for me, Katrina falls into that category. I simply don't want to go through that ever again.

WHY KINGS CONFESS: the Cover!

An observant reader (thanks, Ali!) alerted me to the fact that the cover of Why Kings Confess is already up on Amazon. I queried my editor (it was news to her, too!) and so, without further ado, here's the new cover:


You can click on the picture to enlarge it, if you want to see it better.

I'm happy with it. The guy doesn't look like my image of Sebastian (he actually reminds me a lot of Sean Bean in the Sharpe series, whom I always found incredibly sexy), but I love his dynamism and energy and that edge of danger and purposefulness. And I think the cover itself is very striking. Perhaps those of you who don't like to think of Sebastian looking like this can simply decide it's a picture of some other random Regency guy!

And since Amazon also has the cover copy (can you tell I'm feeling a bit late to my own party?), I'll post that, too:

The gruesome murder of a young French physician draws aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his pregnant wife, Hero, into a dangerous, decades-old mystery as a wrenching piece of Sebastian’s past puts him to the ultimate test.

Regency England, January 1813: When a badly injured Frenchwoman is found beside the mutilated body of Dr. Damion Pelletan in one of London’s worst slums, Sebastian finds himself caught in a high-stakes tangle of murder and revenge. Although the woman, Alexi Sauvage, has no memory of the attack, Sebastian knows her all too well from an incident in his past—an act of wartime brutality and betrayal that nearly destroyed him.

As the search for the killer leads Sebastian into a treacherous web of duplicity, he discovers that Pelletan was part of a secret delegation sent by Napoleon to investigate the possibility of peace with Britain. Despite his powerful father-in-law’s warnings, Sebastian plunges deep into the mystery of the “Lost Dauphin,” the boy prince who disappeared in the darkest days of the French Revolution, and soon finds himself at lethal odds with the Dauphin’s sister—the imperious, ruthless daughter of Marie Antoinette—who is determined to retake the French crown at any cost.

With the murderer striking ever closer, Sebastian must battle new fears about Hero’s health and that of their soon-to-be born child. When he realizes the key to their survival may lie in the hands of an old enemy, he must finally face the truth about his own guilt in a past he has found too terrible to consider.... 

So what do y'all think of the cover? Love it? Hate it? Can live with it? The most important factor for me is, Will it attract new readers? And I think it will do that nicely. 

Back to Writing

Life has been getting in the way of writing a lot lately. First, a huge chunk of my time went to helping my daughter get ready to move (and fixing up her furniture, as discussed in the previous post). Then I went over to San Antonio for a week to help her get settled in. Then, just to complicate things, the day after I came home, I smashed my right hand so badly I could neither type nor hold a pen. Talk about frustrating!


But I've now picked up where I left off with Who Buries the Dead, which will be book # 10 in the Sebastian St. Cyr series for those keeping track. All that time away enabled me to come back and look at the manuscript with fresh eyes, so that I immediately spotted solutions to a few niggling little things that had been bothering me. I wouldn't exactly describe the last few weeks as a vacation, but it has certainly been a break, and I hope that will prove to be a good thing.


While we were gone, one of my climbing roses invaded the screened in second-floor gallery where our two cats with "elimination issues" (fondly known as the P Cats) live. I plan to cut it off even though they're not toxic to cats, but in the meantime, Whiskies has really been enjoying it!

Candy's Furniture Repair Shop

I wouldn't exactly call furniture restoration one of my "hobbies," because people are supposed to enjoy their hobbies and I don't actually like working on furniture. It's too nerve wracking; something can always go suddenly, horribly wrong--and frequently does.


But I still seem to find myself doing an awful lot of it. It all started after Katrina, when I had a house full of lovely, ruined old furniture and quickly realized that our flood insurance was not going to begin to stretch to get it all professionally put to rights. Fortunately, we had a friend who worked restoring furniture for area museums and plantations, and he walked through the house with me, telling me what to do--or at least try--with each item (he also told me to just "throw away" one of my favorite pieces, but I didn't listen to that part). The fact that everything was already essentially destroyed gave me the courage to forge ahead. But once it was all finished, I put away my hide glue pot and shellac flakes and artists colors (I quickly realized I needed to mix my own stains) with a sigh of relief and said, "Never again."


Then my younger daughter moved into an apartment and thought that old map case we had in the storeroom would make a nice coffee table....


She also took the hutch that was in the spare bedroom, which meant I had to fix up my dad's old gun cabinet and fit it out with shelves to take its place.




Now my older daughter is moving off to Texas with a few items that really could use some tender loving care before she leaves.



My partner in all this is Steve, who very obligingly routs missing pieces of trim and cuts shelves and translates my sketches for coffee table legs into reality and does all sorts of other things that are utterly beyond me, and with nary a complaint. But I swear, when this round is all over, I am quitting. I really am. Once I fix up that old cedar chest....

Favorite Children's Mysteries

My all-time, hands-down favorite mystery story as a child was this one:


Originally written in French by Paul Berna, it's about a gang of poor French street urchins who get tangled up in a dangerous heist. I read this book over and over again, for years. I also read Trixie Beldon and Nancy Drew and The Bobbsey Twins, but they were never in quite the same league as The Horse Without a Head.

Another favorite was Emile and the Detectives. 



I don't know what it says about me, but this one was originally written in German. It was, to quote Wiki, "the only one of [Kastner's] pre-1945 works to escape Nazi censorship... The most unusual aspect of the novel, compared to existing children's literature at the time, was that it was realistically set in a contemporary Berlin peopled with some fairly rough characters, not in a sanitized fantasy world; also that it refrained from obvious moralizing, letting the characters' deeds speak for themselves."

So, what was your favorite mystery as a kid?

And H/T to my friend Laura Joh Rowland, whose recent Facebook post inspired this journey down memory lane. Her favorite as a child was Mystery of the Green Cat, by Phyllis Whitney. Somehow I missed that one.

A Huge Improvement

The new, revised cover for Why Kings Confess landed in my email inbox this morning, and while I'm not allowed to post it online yet, I can tell you it's a huge, HUGE improvement!

I am extremely grateful to all the folks at NAL who listened to my complaints and tried so hard to come up with something not just better, but extraordinary. I'm anxious to hear everyone's reactions to it once all the legalities are in place and I'm given the go-ahead to show it.

Of course, since y'all will never be able to see the original, you won't be able to appreciate just how much better this one is. But whereas, before, I wanted to weep, I'm now almost giddy.

And if you're wondering why there's a turtle at the top of this post, it's because I spotted him in my garden yesterday, just ambling along enjoying himself.

A Rose Named St. Cyr

Last summer, I decided that I could not--positively could not--acquire any more roses; my yard is full, full, full. Except, how could I resist a rose named St. Cyr?


It's a Pierre de St. Cyr, and dates back to 1838. A Bourbon bred by Plantier, it's deliciously fragrant and is said to grow only 3-5 feet high, although roses in New Orleans can often reach heights unheard of in other places (which is why it's still in a pot, while I learn its habits). I snapped these pictures with my phone about a month ago, the first time it bloomed for me;  it's now doubled in size and is covered with blossoms, but it's pouring outside today, so the old photos will have to do.


Of course, since I bought a rose for its name, I couldn't really complain when Steve bought a White Pearl in Red Dragon's Mouth, simply because he was so taken with the name. Which just goes to show that roses, like books, can sell on the bases of their names/titles alone.