Meg Benjamin's Blog, page 2

Jane Haddam

I learned about Jane Haddam’s death in the way I’d guess she’d want her readers to learn about it: while reading her last book, One Of Our Own. Her sons added an afterward to let her fans know what had happened. I was sad for the rest of the day.

Haddam, aka Orania Papazoglu, was the creator of the Gregor Demarkian mystery series, thirty novels featuring the aforementioned Gregor and a fairly constant cast of supporting characters. Demarkian is a former FBI agent, the creator of the Behavioral Science Unit, who retires to tend to his dying wife. He becomes a private investigator, although he’s never licensed and never advertises. People find him through his contacts with the police and the FBI, and he only undertakes cases with the approval of the police involved (who are usually very, very happy to see him).

Most of the mysteries are complex and involve a variety of suspects doing a variety of things. Haddam was particularly unimpressed by wealthy and powerful people, and even if they’re not the murderers, they’re frequently guilty of some related crimes. She’s also a master at characterization. The books usually begin with a series of vignettes introducing characters who’ll be important once the mystery gets going. Some are awful and some aren’t, but they’re all interesting, and they pull you effectively into the story.

One major element of almost all the books is Kavanaugh Street, where Gregor lives. It’s an Armenian-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, full of those supporting characters that make the books come alive. There’s the café where everyone, including Gregor and Bennis, have most of their meals. There’s the Armenian grocery. There’s Father Tibor’s church. There are the recurrent minor character vignettes, like the Very Old Ladies who always dress in black and seem to serve as a kind of Greek chorus in the background.

And then there are the major supporting characters, who show up in almost every book. There’s Father Tibor, an Armenian Orthodox priest who’s Gregor’s best friend and occasional conscience or philosophical sparring partner. There’s John Henry Jackman, who was the head of homicide at a Main Line police department in book 1 (Not a Creature Was Stirring) and a US Senator from Pennsylvania in One Of Our Own. There are Lida and Hannah and Donna who pop in with food and advice, and who occasionally have major storylines of their own (poor Donna, may I say).

And most of all, there’s Bennis Hannaford. Bennis is a suspect in the first book (her father is the victim) and she and Gregor enter a long, long courtship that spreads over a lot of the books. Bennis pursues Gregor, who’s still grieving over the death of his wife and oblivious to her interest. Bennis has affairs with various men, including Jackman, and Gregor begins to realize maybe he’s interested. Bennis disappears for a couple of books, and Gregor is frantic. Bennis returns and finally, finally the two get together. Bennis and Gregor get married in a surprisingly large wedding. And then, well, they’re married for the rest of the series. As a romance reader and writer, I loved that long romance with its ultimate payoff. Gregor and Bennis were perfect.

And now it’s over. And I’m sad. At least I appreciate Haddam leaving me with the lovely absurd image of Gregor and Bennis taking their foster son to Disney World. I would love to have seen that. But I’ve got to grateful for what I have: thirty exceptional mysteries. They’re not all flawless (Somebody Else’s Music remains my favorite, though), but they’re consistently well written. So thank you, Jane Haddam. And, gentle reader, if you’re a fan of murder mysteries, pick up a copy of Not a Creature Was Stirring. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Plague Writing

It’s been a year now since the pandemic descended upon us. As a retired person, I was in the enviable position of being able to go into lockdown without too much trouble. I live in a state where most people are decent about observing public safety rules and, although I suffer from cabin fever as much as the next guy, I’ve been able to stay home with my hubs. I’ve also been able to get a fair amount of writing done, which I’m hoping to get out for people to see fairly soon (Konigsburg returns!). But like a lot of other writers I’ve been struggling with a central dilemma: do you write about what we’re all going through or do you stick with the “before times” (and hopefully the “after times”)?

There are all sorts of possibilities involved in writing about the pandemic, of course. You could do a mystery where someone was murdered during a Zoom meeting, for example. I like this idea, although at the moment I haven’t figured out how it could happen. You could do a contemporary romance in which a bunch of incompatible people are quarantined together, which is a variation on the “incompatible people trapped by the weather” trope. You could do a thriller in which a heroine living in a remote location must rescue a wounded hero from the bad guys, with the added wrinkle of keeping the two of them safe from infection.

But the problem with all writing that includes the pandemic is that we don’t—as yet—know how this is all going to play out. And you run the risk of writing a book which becomes almost immediately outdated. Think of where we were last year at this time when many of us believed the pandemic would be over shortly. I remember telling my kids that we were cancelling our April trip to see them, but we’d surely reschedule in May. If only that had been true! If I’d started a novel based on that premise (the tough pandemic that passed on by summer), I’d have been revising and probably junking the whole thing by July.

So the books I’ve been writing take place in a kind of fantasy space where there is no pandemic and life is going on as usual. This feels a little uncomfortable to me, I admit. For all the people who swear they want escape rather than realism, I worry that ignoring current events will lead us to another kind of obsolescence. Will there come a time when people want to see their lives reflected in what they read, complete with toilet paper shortages and vaccine lines?

This is an unprecedented time, and it’s hard to know which way to go. But one thing I can promise you: I’ll keep writing. One way or another, the stories get told.

Points of View

Most romances are written in third person. It’s not a requirement, mind you. There are first person romances, some of them classics (Jane Eyre springs to mind). But using third person allows you to use multiple points of view, switching back and forth between hero and heroine, for example, with the villain thrown in sometimes for a little variety. First person tends to be somewhat hermetic, locking the reader into a form of deliberate tunnel vision. Since romance delights in showing what both partners in a relationship feel, third person frequently works best.

Mysteries and thrillers, in contrast, use first person more often. It gives mystery writers the opportunity to play games with narrators, including the ultimate unreliable narrator, the murderer himself. And since mysteries can benefit from having a limited point of view (more opportunities to overlook vital evidence and to be deluded by preconceptions, for example), first person can work well.

But things start to get murky when authors want to introduce more than one point of view. If getting one voice right is tricky (and it is), getting more than one right is a real balancing act. Still, both romance and mystery writers have found interesting ways to experiment with multiple narrators—as well as some familiar ways to fail.

One mystery example is Margaret Maron’s Long Upon the Land, part of Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. The series began as simple first person, all narrated by Deborah. But at a certain point, Maron decided to add another point of view through Deborah’s husband, Dwight. Rather than having two first person narrators, however, she writes Dwight’s chapters in third person and Deborah’s in first. Long Upon the Land also adds another third person point of view, a series of flashbacks showing the love affair between Deborah’s parents. The great advantage of using both first and third person comes in making a clean demarcation between points of view: if the chapter is in first person, you know it’s Deborah; if it’s third, it’s either Dwight or a flashback. Maron succeeds in making these three voices distinct and readable. Judith Merkle Riley does something similar in her historical romance Serpent Garden. The heroine narrates her sections, with an engagingly quirky, first person voice. The sections focusing on the hero or the various supernatural characters are written in third person, switching the point of view from the heroine’s more limited, sometimes confused perspective to a deliberately omniscient overview.

Using more than one first person narrator is also possible, although a great deal trickier. Linda Fairstein’s Devil’s Bridge uses two first person narrators, the heroine, Alex Cooper, and the hero, Mike Chapman. Unfortunately, Devil’s Bridge illustrates all the problems that come with that technique, chiefly that these two voices, supposedly from two very different people, sound remarkably similar. We know that we’re reading Mike’s narration because Alex is missing for most of the book, but it might as well be Alex. There’s nothing distinctive about the voice—when Mike makes references to Alex’s Porthault sheets and Chanel perfume I found myself wondering why a tough NYC detective would know or care what brands his girlfriend uses. The answer, I’m afraid, is that both Alex and Fairstein care, not Mike.

So what choice is best? Hard to say since it depends a great deal on the skill of the author involved. To me, multiple first person narrators are tough, but I can see the attraction. The main thing is all these point of view choices have to arise from the story. In the wrong hands, both first and third person can be clunky. In the right hands, they can sing.

My Top Ten

A few years ago, Entertainment Weekly hit a new level on the hubris meter: they listed the 100 best in a variety of entertainment categories, movies, television, plays, music, and books (and therein lies another blog post). Predictably, I disagree with a lot of their choices, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. Everybody has their own hundred best. There is no ultimate list, no matter what Entertainment Weekly says. So in  the interests of screwing with the Establishment, I’ve come up with my own ten best movies list—not twenty-five, not fifty, not a hundred. I make no promises that it’s final, and I should point out that it’s my list rather than the list. I say this to forestall any complaints from Citizen Kane/Gone With the Wind/Titanic proponents. Y’all undoubtedly would have different choices on your list.

1. Casablanca. The ultimate “movie movie”. If you’ve never seen it (and I didn’t until I was in college), you owe it to yourself to check it out. Crisp dialog, twisting plot, and a great hero. And yeah, I know I’ve called it the ultimate guy romance in the past, but that still doesn’t ruin it for me. It just works on most of the levels movies are supposed to work on.

2. Goodfellas. The movie that made me love Martin Scorsese. Yes, it’s violent—very, very violent. But it’s full of exuberance and energy and bouncy film technique, with possibly the best use of soundtrack songs ever. It’s a spectacularly well-made movie, with the longest panning shot I know (don’t tell me Touch of Evil; Scorsese does it better).

3. The Silence of the Lambs. You may remember this as another ultra violent movie, but you’d be wrong. There’s really only one very violent scene, and it’s absolutely necessary for the plot. The rest of the movie is all about dread, and it’s maybe the most fearful movie ever made. Plus it has a wonderful performance from Jodie Foster, one that simultaneously emphasizes her vulnerability and her strength.

4. Julie and Julia. Nora Ephron’s best as far as I’m concerned. About food and love and female accomplishment. And Meryl Streep is sublime as Julia Child.

5. Bullitt. Why I love Steve McQueen. The plot is so twisty that Robert Vaughn (who played one of the villains) said he didn’t understand it even after they finished making it, but this is the ultimate hero movie. Just relax and watch McQueen be McQueen.

6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid/The Sting. Don’t make me choose—I just can’t. Newman and Redford were the ultimate buddies who made “buddy movies” possible, and none of the others ever touched these two. Plus both movies are shot beautifully by George Roy Hill—I live nearby some of the settings for Butch Cassidy and Hill did a marvelous job.

7. Nashville. There were a lot of Robert Altman movies I revered and some I didn’t like much, but Nashville sums up his multi-character, overlapping plot structure better than any other. And the underlying message about politics and entertainment still holds up today if you can ignore the seventies fashions and hairdos.

8. Some Like It Hot. Go ahead—watch it without laughing. I dare you. That slumber party scene on the train may be sexist as hell, but it’s also freakin’ hilarious. Billy Wilder’s greatest (and yeah, I’m including Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity).

9. Singing in the Rain. Tart, fast, funny and the ideal musical. Yes, I know Gene Kelly wasn’t as nice as he seems to be on screen. So what? It’s still great.

10. North By Northwest. Hitchcock fanatics may prefer Vertigo. But this one has humor and thrills and iconic scenes (the crop duster, the chase across Mt. Rushmore). And Cary Grant playing a weaselly advertising man who’s redeemed by chaos.

Valentine’s Day

The woman in line ahead of me at the grocery store was talking to the clerk. “It’s not a real holiday,” she said. “It’s all about marketing.”

“Oh, I know,” the clerk said. “My husband and I never give each other anything.”

“And the cards,” the customer said. “They’re ridiculous. And so expensive.”

“I agree,” the clerk said. “I just print something up on the computer.”

“And all this emphasis on candy and chocolate and all the things we shouldn’t be eating these days. Awful.”

“Just awful.”

The customer grabbed her bag and headed for the door after a quick nod of thanks to the clerk. And I put my box of French chocolate truffles and Valentine card on the conveyor belt. Sigh.

Look, I know there’s a certain logic to what the customer and the clerk were saying. I get annoyed too over the number of holidays that seem to have mandatory gifts attached. But here’s the thing—I’m a romance writer. The idea of a holiday dedicated to love strikes me as lovely.

Think about it. Most holidays are dedicated to somewhat solemn events, even though we may turn them into more lighthearted celebrations on our own (Easter egg hunts, anyone?). But Valentine’s Day is all about telling somebody you care. Yes, it’s sort of depressing if you’re between relationships, but even then there are usually people in your life you care about enough to reach out to. It’s good to have at least one holiday where you’re thinking about love and everything that goes along with it, particularly in a time like this when it’s all too easy to forget about hearts and flowers.

So yeah, I bought chocolate truffles. And a sort of schmaltzy Valentine’s card. But my hubs and I have been married for a long time. I’m glad I’ve got a day to remind him why we’re still together.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all. Read a romance and eat a truffle for me.

Billion Dollar Babies

Billionaires are in. If you go to Amazon and search for “billionaire” and “romance,” you’ll find a hundred pages of titles. Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the most prominent of these books, but there are lots of others, and the trend has been around for years. I remember reading Christina Dodd’s Just the Way You Are in 2003, and it was far from the first. It goes without saying that these billionaires are all young, handsome, and darkly attractive—although they usually require the transformative power of love to become decent people.

And it also goes without saying that this whole trend is based on extremely shaky foundations. Even a cursory reading of the news turns up billionaires who mistreat their employees to enrich themselves farther, who engage in fraud to enrich themselves farther, and who are just generally jerks. And the idea of the physically attractive billionaire is easily exploded (see: Trump, Donald; Murdock, Rupert; Adelson, Sheldon; etc. ).

Moreover, romance is the only pop fiction genre that seems to have this love affair with the very rich. In thrillers and mysteries, the reclusive billionaire is more likely to be the villain than the hero. And the vicious global conglomerate is a long-standing tradition in science fiction.

So why do we hang onto this convention when it’s so obviously a serious distortion of reality? One answer, of course, is that we’re in the fantasy business here. Most of us probably know that the very rich aren’t famed for the charm and grace, but we really wish they were. In the more ideal romantic society, money would only be found with the honorable. Moreover, we also cling to another fantasy: that wealth doesn’t buy love. The billionaire hero in most of these books has to be schooled by the poor but honest heroine. And once he’s found this noncommercial love, he becomes that ideal super-rich guy who uses his money for good. Sometimes you really wish a man like Richard DeVos would read a few romances. Then again, he’d probably find them comic.

Still, I’ve managed to avoid the whole billionaire hero business in my own writing. A couple of my heroines, Docia Kent Toleffson and Deirdre Brandenburg, were wealthy (and a fat lot of good it did them), and the hero of Wild Love, Colin Brooks, is a former billionaire now reduced to being a janitor. But like other writers, I usually reserve rich guys for villains. Then again, I write contemporary romance, where middle class heroes and heroines are a long-standing tradition. If I were writing regencies, for example, I’d probably be churning out honorable dukes with the best of them.

Like I said, we’re in the fantasy business. Just as long as we don’t let fantasy shade into our view of the real.

English Teacher vs. Author

You see this meme repeatedly on Facebook—a Venn diagram showing the small intersection between what the author meant and what the English teacher thinks the author meant. Usually it’s posted by an author who’s convinced that English teachers are evil witches distorting an author’s true meaning. English teachers, say the authors, should just stick to grammar and leave literature alone.

I’ve got a sort of unique perspective here since I’m an author and a retired English teacher. I’ve taught literature and I’ve taught grammar, and I’ve enjoyed both. Moreover, I agree with the poet Donald Hall who once said that a lot of people go into teaching English because they love to read and want to talk about books (Hall thought that was a problem, but I’m not sure I agree). I’ve also encountered the same kind of hostility toward interpretation that you get in that meme.

But here’s the thing: the meme implies that there’s only one meaning in a book, and it’s the meaning put there by the author. On the other side of that idea is reading theory, which holds that the meaning of a book rests with the reader, and that it changes with each person who opens the book. As a teacher, author, and reader, I’d say the truth lies somewhere between those two poles. Reading isn’t anarchy—some readings clearly have more validity than others. But authors don’t always see what readers see, and a work that can only be understood one way can be tiresome to read.

But what about those totally weird interpretations English teachers come up with? That goes back to the whole multiple meanings idea. Like other readers, English teachers come to books with a particular point of view. Some English teachers like to look at history (e.g., what was going on in Shakespeare’s England when he wrote King Lear?). Some prefer cultural criticism (e.g., how does nineteenth century colonialism inform Joseph Conrad’s work?). Some are feminists or psychologists or close readers who delight in language. Their interpretations seem weird only if you assume that there’s only one way to read—a meaning the author built in originally.

I’ve occasionally had people claim that reading that arrives at an interpretation other than the author’s “ruins” a book. One of my husband’s relatives once accused me of spoiling Huck Finn by suggesting it was a lot more than a “simple children’s book.” A quick aside: Huck Finn includes child abuse, racism and murder, along with some shocking violence. I wouldn’t suggest giving it to a child unless that child is beyond the age of nightmares.

As an English teacher, I felt honor bound to push my students into looking beyond their kneejerk reactions to a book. That doesn’t “ruin” the book. That makes it richer.

In reality, English teachers can be authors’ friends. They’re sort of “super-readers”: people who love books and language, and who want to pass that love on to others. When they press students to go beyond their initial impressions of a book, they’re pressing them to think about what they’re reading. To pay attention to features like characterization and language, along with plot. Students who come out of a good English teacher’s class are more likely to be people who love to read. They’re not our enemies, folks, they’re our allies.

Alphas Good and Bad

I’m on record as not liking some kinds of alpha heroes: heroes whose main qualifications are big muscles, membership in some elite military group and thinly disguised misogyny just don’t do it for me. But I think a lot depends on how alphas are defined. And I recently had a chance to take a look at alphas in a historical sense.

In my constant search for quarantine entertainment, I picked up one of those big omnibus DVD collections. This one featured all the Ocean’s films including the very first one with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Now I loved Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen (could have done without Ocean’s Twelve, but that’s the way it goes). And I’d seen the original Ocean’s 11 several years ago, but I’d mostly forgotten it. However, I think the comparison between the two versions of the same basic set-up says a lot about what’s happened to our concept of alpha males over the past thirty or forty years.

To begin with, I’d argue that Frank and Dean (and Peter and Joey and Sammy, et al.) were definitely alpha in their day, although a different kind of alpha from John Wayne or Clark Gable. They represent the type I think of as the “frat boy alpha.” The Rat Pack were, after all, the definition of cool in the fifties and early sixties—the “in crowd.” To me, that’s alpha. Ocean’s 11 was the first of the Rat Pack movies they made. The eleven men in this first film aren’t professional crooks; they’re a former WWII platoon at loose ends and looking for excitement. And while they wait for their plan to fall into place, they have a great time in Las Vegas, with the obligatory booze, gambling, and, yes, “broads.” The women in this movie are basically either accessories or bitches. Angie Dickinson plays Sinatra’s wife, but she doesn’t have the integral role that Julia Roberts has in the remake. Instead she basically sits at home and wishes she could still have a relationship with her former husband. There’s another woman, an estranged girlfriend, who tries to make trouble, but Angie tells her off good and proper. Then she goes back to pining.

In terms of the movie’s attitude toward women, the most significant line may be a joke from Dean Martin. He fantasizes about becoming a member of the Presidential Cabinet (this was close to the 1960 election involving Peter Lawford’s then-brother-in-law JFK). His first act, he says, would be to repeal the constitutional amendments giving women the vote and outlawing slavery. Then he’d turn all the women into slaves. Everybody laughs, of course (and I picture some woman watching this movie when it first came out and gritting her teeth while her boyfriend guffaws).

So what you’ve got here are, basically, jerks. Guys who think robbing casinos would be a gas and who think women are basically inflatable dolls who need to stay out of the way. Groovy. I can’t say I’m too upset when things in the film don’t work out for them.

Now let us turn to the more recent Ocean’s Eleven. I must admit, going in, that I love George Clooney, but that’s beside the point. The guys in the remake are professional thieves and con men, taking on the casinos because 1) they can make a lot of money that way and 2) they can put one over on slimy Terry Benedict who owns the casinos in question. There’s something about their calm professionalism that’s really sexy (even if it is a bit, well, anti-social). The crime they plan is insanely complex, but it doesn’t involve holding anybody at gunpoint (Frank and company do that). It’s more reminiscent of The Sting than of your average bank robbery. And Clooney, far from being a player, is hopelessly in love with his ex-wife whom he ultimately wins back from the evil casino owner.

The attitude in Ocean’s Eleven is completely different from Ocean’s 11. Clooney is affable rather than snide, professional rather than creepily thrill-seeking, and so besotted with Tess that he apparently hasn’t even considered the possibility of loving anyone else. Now that’s cool!

If you’re willing to accept Clooney and the guys (or at least Brad Pitt and possibly Matt Damon) as alphas, I’d have to say bring ‘em on! But if we’re still stuck with the Rat Pack version of what an alpha is supposed to be, uber-cool and vaguely hostile, I’m afraid my objections to alpha obsession still stand.

Animal Planet: Brand New Me

All of my Konigsburg books include animals. I’m not sure how this happened, it just did. Starting with a diabolic cat and a sweet-natured Chihuahua in Venus In Blue Jeans, I had a greyhound in Wedding Bell Blues, a mostly coon hound puppy in Be My Baby, and a largely Maine coon cat in Long Time Gone.

When I got to Brand New Me, I knew I’d have to have a pet to keep the tradition going, but I wasn’t sure what animal to use. My older son had just gotten a part-Papillion puppy and I toyed with that idea. But it came across as too similar to Senor Pepe from Venus In Blue Jeans. I could have done another cat, but I’d just done one in Long Time Gone, and I wasn’t sure I could come up with one that differed a lot from Arthur (I’m coping with a couple of part-Maine coon cats myself, and that tends to color my outlook). At lunch with the DH and my younger son one day, I grumped about how hard it was to come up with the right pet.

“Why not an iguana?” my son tossed out. Why not indeed?

Now, mind you, I’ve never owned an iguana. I’ve never known anyone personally who’s owned an iguana. I’ve never even been closer to an iguana than the other side of a zoo enclosure. Still, it seemed like a neat idea, and a nice departure from dogs and cats.

First of all I had to find out what it takes to have an iguana as a pet, and apparently it takes quite a bit! They need an even seventy-degree temperature year round, which means they can’t live outside in the Texas Hill Country, where temperatures soar in the summer and there’s occasional snow in the winter. So my hypothetical iguana had to live in a cage of some kind in her owner’s house (her owner, by the way, is my hero, Tom Ames). Then there’s the food question. It turns out iguanas are herbivores, which meant Tom didn’t need to run around catching flies for her (fortunately, since he had other things on his agenda). Finally, there was the question of how much interaction iguanas have with their owners. While there are some YouTube videos of owners carrying their iguanas around on their shoulders and treating them sort of like parrots, the general consensus is that iguanas are not exactly cuddly. In fact, on the Web you’re find several pics of stitched-up iguana bites that testified to the virtues of leaving your iguana in peace.

Having established my iguana in residence and figured out what its cage looked like (courtesy of several iguana cage images I found online), I had to figure out what to do with her after that. All my pets have had roles to play in the plot. Senor Pepe, the Chihuahua, helped to rescue the heroine. Olive, the greyhound, made the hero feel at home in Konigsburg. Sweetie, the coon hound, was attacked by the villain. And Arthur, the Maine coon cat, demonstrated the inadvisability of tripping on a Maine coon cat’s tail.

It took me a while, but I finally figured out how my iguana would fit into the plot—trust me, she does. Her name is Doris, by the way.

And here’s a brief introduction to Doris:

The living room was cool and dark, the light of the setting sun reflected through the side windows. Tom stepped inside and turned on a lamp. From somewhere nearby, Deirdre heard an odd scratching sound, like insects running across a wall. She glanced around the room with a quick shiver.

One corner had its own light. As she moved closer, Deirdre realized it was actually a cabinet, only not exactly. The walls were made of plywood on three sides. The front was something transparent—glass or Plexiglas. She could see a couple of shelves inside, with what looked like tree limbs propped against them. Ivy hung around the edges and bright lights illuminated the sides.

Tom stepped beside her. “So this is who I wanted you to meet. The friend I live with.”

She shivered again. “I don’t see anybody.”

“She’s hiding.” He stepped closer to the cabinet. “Come on Doris, come out and meet the nice lady.”

More scratching sounded from the upper part of the cabinet. Then a large lizard emerged from the shelter of the shelves. Her body looked like it was covered in tiny polka dots that Deirdre assumed were scales. Her head was a deep green that shaded off down her body into moss and brown, ending with a long striped tail. Small spikes ran down the edge of her spine from head to tail. Her long toes were tipped in curving claws, the origin of the scratching sound as she edged carefully down the branch that angled closest to the door.

Deirdre licked her lips. She had no intention of getting any closer. In fact, she wondered if she could possibly move back a bit without being insulting.

He turned toward her, grinning slightly. “Don’t worry. She’s not free range. She stays in here most of the time, although I give her a shoulder ride every now and then.”

The lizard, Doris, raised her head, setting her wattles trembling, and regarded him with black peppercorn eyes. For a moment, Deirdre thought she looked almost affectionate. Probably projection.

“Have you had her a long time?”

He shrugged. “A few months. A customer owned her—she belonged to his girlfriend who took off and left her. He was getting ready to take her out and let her loose someplace in the hills. That struck me as a really lousy idea for everybody involved, especially Doris, so I said I’d take her off his hands.”

“Did you build her…enclosure?”

He grinned again. “It’s a cage. And no, she came with it. Don’t know if the girlfriend built it or if she inherited it like I did.”

Deirdre inched closer. Doris stayed on her branch, watching her carefully, as if she’d head back up to the shelves in an instant if Deirdre started to pose a threat. “What does she eat?”

“Iguana chow.”

Deirdre narrowed her eyes.

“Iguanas are herbivores. She gets alfalfa and other greens, like kale. And she’s very big on nopal. Probably reminds her of home.”

“Cheaper than a carnivore.”

“Yeah, the most expensive thing about her is temperature control. She can’t get too cold or too warm, which pretty much means she has to live inside, at least in Texas.” He gestured toward the lights. “Those help. And there’s a heater.”

“And she’s a female?”

He shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. Supposedly males have bigger pores on their rear thighs, but I didn’t particularly want to hoist Doris up to find out.”

“So you just decided she was a she?”

“Hey, I’ve got a fifty percent chance of being right.”

Blurbing

If I were given a choice between writing a synopsis and writing a blurb (and believe me, that’s a horrible choice), I’d go with the synopsis. Synopses are basically summaries, and most of us have some experience with summarizing. You’ve got three or four pages for the whole thing, and your main job is to pick out the major incidents of the plot without getting too bogged down in detail. And, of course, you have to make the prose flow without constantly saying And then. They’re not fun to write, but I can usually knock one out in a couple of hours.

Away

Blurbs, on the other hand, suck.

Blurbs are the copy found on the back of print books or at the front of ebooks. They’re also the copy that shows up in ads for the book and on Web pages. While you have three or four pages for synopses, you’ve got three or four paragraphs (at most) for the blurb. And the language has to be sort of “peppy.”

Basically, you’re writing ad copy, and for those of us who have never been in the advertising or marketing business, the process can be excruciating. My first impulse is always to overdo the peppiness. I use many, many exclamation marks!!!!! I may use italics with abandon. If I’m blurbing a paranormal romance, I emphasize danger, danger, danger. And if it’s contemporary romance I usually go for hot, hot, hot.

After I’ve read over the first draft and started to groan, I settle down and try again. This time I try to think about what’s really going on in the book. What’s the real reason a person might enjoy reading it?

The extreme brevity of the blurb means I’m never able to include everything that happens in the book, but I try to suggest the major themes, or at least some of them. Chances are, though, I’ll end up leaving out something crucial just because I have to.

Sometimes publishers rewrite blurbs for better or worse. Back in the Samhain days, they had a blurb writer who was worth her weight in gold. But smaller presses like Soul Mate rely on their authors to come up with the blurbs, for better or worse. So when I wrote the blurbs for my Folk trilogy, I could pretty much know they were going up on Amazon word for word.

When I did the blurb for book 1 in my Folk Trilogy, Away, I wanted readers to know about my main characters, Grim and Annie. And I wanted to set up the basic conflict in the book. Annie’s urgently searching for answers: why did her brother disappear, and why has he come back now? Grim actually has some information that could help, but he’s sworn to secrecy. Yet as the situation becomes more perilous for both of them, he finds that he has to break his vows and tell Annie what’s going on around her. It’s a lot more than she can take in, but in the end their relationship makes them both stronger. Here’s my blurb.

His job is keeping secrets, but she needs the truth.

Grim Morrigan, Guardian of the Ward and part-time private detective, polices the Folk, the clans of fairies who live in the foothills outside Denver. But his main job is concealing their true nature from the mortals around them.

Enter mortal Annie Duran, who hires him to look for her brother Richard, missing and presumed dead for ten years. Annie has seen Richard in the parking lot of the nightclub where she works. Now she wants answers, and Grim’s supposed to find them.

The quest for Richard ensnares both Grim and Annie in a sinister conspiracy involving kidnapped women and outlaw magic. But they also discover their own overwhelming attraction to each other. When Annie herself disappears, Grim’s need for answers becomes even more urgent. With the help of a dissolute prince and a motley crew of unlikely fairies, Grim confronts a rebellion among the Folk. And it may take more than just magic and luck to save both Annie and Grim this time.